Annette Richards

Biography

Annette Richards is an organist, writer, and teacher specializing in historical keyboard instruments and music of the 17th-19th centuries, but ranging far beyond in her research and playing. Recent performances include explorations of Neapolitan music around 1600, American organ culture c. 1940, and the music of 19th-century English lady organists. Her main writing project at the moment is a book on music and the history of touch, but she is also working on an essay on the Hammond organ, Bach, and the mid-20th-century American family. Annette’s recordings include the complete works of Melchior Schildt (on the LoQ label) played on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark, and a recording of music from the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, recorded on the new German baroque-style organ at Cornell. Her most recent book The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle, which grew out of her work reconstructing the extraordinary portrait collection of C. P. E. Bach, came out in 2022 from University of Chicago Press. She has long collaborated with David Yearsley, with whom she won first prize at the Bruges Early Music Festival in the competion for organ duo, and with whom she has edited the organ music of C. P. E. Bach for the C. P. E. Bach: Complete Works edition. Other prizes and awards include third prize at the Dublin International Organ Competion, a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, fellowships at the Getty Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, and from the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin. Annette is the founding director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, and directed the Wesaield Center from 2009-2019. She is the Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell.