Annette Richards and David Yearsley - Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung - Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Longtime colleagues who have written extensively on the Bach family, music culture and aesthetics of the long eighteenth century, and keyboard cultures across the centuries, Annette Richards and David Yearsley, are professors of musicology at Cornell University in New York. Their current project is a new history of the organ for Cambridge University Press that explores the ways the instrument stands at the intersection of technology, aesthetics, material histories, global networks, political and social histories. 

For centuries the pinnacle of technological advance as well as the focus of the highest level of musical art, the organ is a complex, distinctly varied, always changing, cultural phenomenon. Our study aims to trace not only the history of the instrument and its makers, but also its players and listeners, its devotees and even its detractors. In these next three months in Berlin we look forward to exploring the amazing resources at the SIM. Alongside the library holdings and the expertise of our colleagues, the museum’s instruments offer the historian unprecedented insight into the intersection of technological innovation, material history, and utopian thinking. Some of our questions include: How do material and political histories intersect with musical ones? What is the specific position of the organ within German cultural, and organological, history? How can we think beyond traditional histories of the organ, to formulate new ideas with regard to sound, space, and technology?

• SIM Research Colloquium: Towards a New History of the Organ

• Prof. Dr Annette Richards, Department of Music, Cornell University

• Prof. Dr David Yearsley, Department of Music, Cornell University