Photo - Simon Wheeler for Cornell University

Annette Richards specialises in historical keyboard culture of the 17th-19th centuries, but ranges far beyond in her research and playing. In recent recital programs she has explored Neapolitan music around 1600, American organ culture c. 1940, 17th-century musical representations of Nature, and 18th-century repertoire for multiple keyboard instruments. She has recorded the Complete Works of Melchior Schildt (Loft label) on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark; and works from the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, recorded on Cornell’s Schnitger-style organ by Munetaka Yokota and GOArt.

Laureate of international organ competitions at Dublin and Bruges, she was a student of Jacques van Oortmerssen at the Sweelinck Conservatorium, Amsterdam and of Kimberly Marshall and Robert Bates at Stanford University, California. She is the author of The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago, 2022), and of The Free Fantasia and the Picturesque  (Cambridge, 2004), and she has published widely on C. P. E. Bach and 18th-century music culture. Annette is the founding director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards. She serves as Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell.