Between Old Worlds and New: Keyboard Encounters, c. 1700–1900
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Thursday, March 9 to Saturday, March 11, 2023
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Conference Performers and Speakers
Critically acclaimed as a “musician’s pianist,” Matthew Bengtson offers an unusually diverse repertoire, ranging from William Byrd to numerous contemporary composers with whom he actively collaborates. He has performed concerts as both soloist and collaborator across the US and in Europe, and has been heard on NPR’s “Performance Today” and XM Satellite Radio’s “Classical Confidential.” His recordings can be heard on the Albany, Arabesque, Griffin Renaissance, IBS Classical, Navona, and Musica Omnia, and Roméo record labels.
Mr. Bengtson is lauded as one of the most persuasive advocates of the music of Scriabin and Szymanowski. On his complete Scriabin Piano Sonatas, the American Record Guide writes: “Big-boned pianism, rich tonal colors, and dazzling technique are on display here. Has Scriabin ever been played better?” Mr. Bengtson enjoys an active relationship with Roberto Sierra, of whose music he has given numerous premieres, including his formidable 12 Estudios rítmicos y sonoros, recently recorded on the IBS Classical label in Auditorio Manuel de Falla in Granada, Spain.
Renowned as a writer and music educator, Mr. Bengtson is author of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) entitled “Exploring Piano Literature: the Piano Sonata,” available on Coursera, and is co-author of The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore, available from Rowman and Littlefield Press. He is Associate Professor of Piano Literature at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance, where he teaches piano, fortepiano, and courses and seminars in piano repertoire and history, and on the faculty of the University of Michigan Early Keyboard Institute (UMEKI).
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Paul Bertagnolli is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music. His publications have appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the American Liszt Society, 19th-Century Music, the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, numerous edited collections, and North American and European conference proceedings. Much of his scholarship focuses on the reception and performance histories of nineteenth-century program music, including Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems and Edward MacDowell’s piano sonatas. Investigations of the autographs of these and other works by composers such as C. Hubert H. Parry and Augusta Holmès have taken him to archives, libraries, and private estates throughout the United States, Canada, and Western and Eastern Europe. His own photographs of some of these rare documents have illustrated his articles and monographs. In 2007, Ashgate published his book, Prometheus in Music: Representations of the Myth in the Romantic Era, which ranges from Beethoven’s ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus (1801), to Fauré’s monumental Prométhée (1900), an open-air operatic pageant. His latest book, Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music: The Forging of an American Composer, reassesses programmaticism in the celebrated composer’s early keyboard music and is under contract with Taylor & Francis.
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Anthony Bonamici is an American pianist originally from Livonia, Michigan. He attended the Moscow Conservatory, St. Petersburg Conservatory, the Mannes School of Music in New York City, and the University of Connecticut, where he is currently completing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance. Anthony holds graduate degrees in both piano performance and music composition and has studied historical performance practice on both the harpsichord and fortepiano. His teachers include the renowned American pianist Richard Goode, the prolific Russian composer and protégé of Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Tishchenko, pianists Naum Shtarkman, Yuri Airapetyan, Elena Shishko, Dr. Angelina Gadeliya, John Perry, and Dr. Audrey Axinn.
Anthony has collaborated with musicians from the Mariinsky Theater, Helikon Opera, Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, Russian Early Music Ensemble, Barocco Concertato, The Moscow Virtuosi, and Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra, and has performed at the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, Mariinsky theater, Moscow Conservatory, Carnegie Hall, and the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City.
From 2007 until his return to the United States in 2016, Anthony taught undergraduate and graduate piano performance and chamber music at the Russian State Pedagogical University named after A. I. Herzen in Saint Petersburg, Russia. At the same time, he oversaw his business, the “Bonamici Clavecins” workshop. For ten years, his workshop built, sold, restored, and maintained harpsichords and other early keyboard instruments. Bonamici harpsichords are now owned by many professional musical institutions from Oslo to Vladivostok.
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Jean Bernard Cerin is a multifaceted artist and scholar who produces and performs in projects ranging from film, recital, oratorio, traditional storytelling, opera, and folk music. Last season, he directed and starred in the documentary, Lisette (2022), which made its premiere at the Berkeley Early Music Festival in California. His crossover piano-vocal duo, Kuwento Mizik, released its freshman album, Lua Nova, in August 2022. This program of folk songs and pop tunes from around the world celebrates the interweaving communities and musical cultures that have shaped the duo’s ongoing collaboration.
Praised for his “burnished tone and focused phrasing,” Jean Bernard performs extensively with leading early music ensembles across the United States. This season, he returns to Philadelphia to perform Bach’s Peasant Cantata with Choral Arts Philadelphia and soprano Julianne Baird. He also makes his Cleveland debut in a Bach-inspired Advent program with Les Delices.
On the operatic stage, Jean Bernard has portrayed villains, buffoons, and heroes with the Aspen Opera Theater Center, Brevard’s Janiec Opera Company, Center City Opera Theater in Philadelphia, and Opera Philadelphia, among others. This season, he makes his debut with Opera Ithaca and Raylynmor opera, singing John Styx in a co-production of Orpheus in the Underworld. Past roles include Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Papageno as well as Benjamin Britten’s Tarquinius from The Rape of Lucretia.
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A native of Taiwan, Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music (Historical Musicology) and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Humanities at Princeton University. Under the guidance of Wendy Heller, Dr. Chen is currently working on her dissertation, “Musica Experientia/Experimentum: Acoustics, Aesthetics, and Artisanal Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century,” which explores the intersection between science, music, and aesthetics involving instrument making, sensory experience, and the development of acoustical theory. For this project, Dr. Chen has spent a total four months working as an apprentice at Zuckermann Harpsichords International—the last harpsichord manufacturing factory in the United States—in Stonington, Connecticut. In addition, she just finished building her first harpsichord from a Troubadour Virginal Kit.
Prior to her current appointments at St. Joseph’s University and the University of Delaware, Dr. Chen taught at Delaware State University, where she also introduced a pilot program of an HBCU early-music access project in collaboration with Early Music America. Outside of academia, Dr. Chen has an active performing career as a solo harpsichordist. Dr. Chen is a recipient of the 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts and a featured soloist of the Emerging Artist Showcase by Early Music America at the Bloomington Early Music Festival. Dr. Chen holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Harpsichord Performance from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
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Dr. Janie Cole (Ph.D. University of London) is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music and most recently Research Officer for East Africa on UCT’s Mellon-funded project, “Re-Centring AfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700-1500 AD” (http://www.afroasia.uct.ac.za). Her specialty research areas are in musical culture in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia and transcultural encounters with Latin Europe and the early-modern Indian Ocean world; Italian music, poetry and theatrical spectacle in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods; and twentiethth-century South African music, protest and prisoner resistance during the anti-apartheid struggle. She is the author of two scholarly books, A Muse of Music in Early Baroque Florence: the Poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Florence, 2007) and Music, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy, 2 vols. (Florence, 2011), together with numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.
Dr. Cole was awarded her doctorate jointly in Music and Italian from the University of London (Royal Holloway College, 2000). She is the founder of the Kukutana Ensemble (with master musicians from Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa and India), which develops musical performances rooted in indigenous East African music and its historical links to the sound- and visual-scapes of a pre-colonial Indian Ocean World (eighth to seventeenth centuries), with the première of a sixteenth-century slave story, Gabriel’s Odyssey, in 2021. She is co-directing an educational film, We Are Not Afraid: Music and Resistance in the Apartheid Jails, with award-winning South African filmmaker, Shameela Seedat, and is building a digital archive of women’s struggle testimonies and music from the apartheid prisons in collaboration with University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections funded by the Schlettwein Foundation. She is the Founder/Executive Director of Music Beyond Borders, a platform for public musicology, engaged scholarship and innovative digital humanities projects (http://www.musicbeyondborders.net).
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Widely admired for his stylish playing and conducting, Matthew Dirst recently recorded his own reconstructions of several organ concertos by J. S. Bach, which Choir & Organ enthusiastically recommends as a “lively and imaginative CD.” Early Music America celebrated his solo recording of harpsichord works by François and Armand-Louis Couperin as a “stylish, tasteful, and technically commanding performance… expressive and brilliant playing.” His conducting has also garnered critical praise, with the Washington Post noting his “ear for detail and up-to-date ideas about performing Bach,” while the Dallas Morning News enthused that he led “a performance as irresistibly lively as it was stylish.” As Artistic Director of Ars Lyrica Houston, Dirst leads a period-instrument ensemble with several acclaimed recordings, one of which—the world premiere recording of Johann Adolph Hasse’s Marc Antonio e Cleopatra—was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2011 for Best Opera.
Dirst holds the Ph.D. in Musicology from Stanford University and the prix de virtuosité in both organ and harpsichord from the Conservatoire National de Reuil-Malmaison, France, where he spent two years as a Fulbright scholar. Equally active as a scholar, he serves currently as Professor of Music at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. He is the author of Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023), and the editor of Bach and the Organ (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
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Duo Amadeae was formed in 2014 by sister pianists Esther and Sun-A Park. The sisters have broad musical interests, frequently moving between different classical forms, including concerti, chamber music, and solo pieces. Winners of the 2016 Chicago International Duo Piano Competition, Duo Amadeae has performed around the world at venues including Lincoln Center in New York City, Het Concertgebouw in the Netherlands, the Slovak Philharmonic in Slovakia, the National Concert Hall in Ireland, the Tel Aviv Museum of Arts in Israel, the Sendai Cultural Center in Japan, and the Miguel Delibes Cultural Center in Spain. Both Esther and Sun-A have received international recognition in competitions, including first prizes at the 52nd and 61st Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition, and top prizes at the 5th International Sendai Music Competition, the Jose Roca Piano Competition, the 58th Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition, the Paderewski Internatonal Piano Competition, and the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition. Duo Amadeae is passionate about nurturing the next generation of pianists and has given masterclasses and workshops at the Yale College, Chicago Duo Institute, and the East Tennessee State University’s Pre-College Department. The duo is scheduled to perform upcoming concerts at Columbus State University, University of Central Florida, and in South Korea.
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Hailed as a "superb harpsichordist’ by the Kansas City Star, Christina Scott Edelen brings a depth of experience, knowledge, and virtuosity to keyboard performance and teaching. On harpsichord, organ, clavichord, and fortepiano, Christina has performed as soloist and in numerous ensembles, concert series, and festivals throughout Europe and America, including the Early Music Festivals of Berkeley and Boston, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Houston Grand Opera. She studied at the Indiana University Early Music Institute and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and was a finalist at the Bodky International Competition. Christina is a popular teacher and lecturer and has served on the faculties of Baylor University and the University of Houston. She holds a Ph.D. in seventeenth-century English musical philosophy.
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Federico Ercoli trained at the Conservatorio “G. Verdi” in Milan, where he first studied in Maestro Annibale Rebaudengo’s studio, then with Professor Silvia Limongelli. Already a winner of several national competitions, in June 2016 he was awarded the First Prize at the Concorso Pianistico Internazionale “Andrea Baldi” in Bologna and in 2018 he was among the winners of the Ibla Grand Prize, an honor thanks to which he was given the opportunity to perform at the Recital Hall of the V. Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, at the KIOI Hall in Tokyo, and at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2017, he was chosen as the sole representative of the Milan Conservatory at the International Music Festival in Kyoto, Japan. In 2021, he took part in the first modern performance of the oratorio, The Garden of Olivet, by Giovanni Bottesini, playing the symphonic transcription for piano. Federico has also an M.A. musicology degree from Università degli Studi di Pavia, Cremona Department, with a thesis exploring new perspectives on staging Wagner. He is currently pursuing a doctorate under the guidance of Alexander Kobrin at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
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Even though Elaine Funaro is “regarded as one of the leading performers of new music for harpsichord” (Classical Music: The Essential Listening Companion), her first love was playing Scarlatti on the piano. So, as a bookend to her long harpsichord career, she is re-discovering her Italian roots by performing Italian composers on a copy of the first piano that was built in Italy.
Funaro was the first president of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA) and longtime Artistic Director of Aliénor, the American-based international competition for new harpsichord music. She started her harpsichord studies at the Conservatorio Cherubini in Florence. Following her graduation from Oberlin and the New England Conservatory, her advanced studies took her to the Amsterdam’s Sweelinck Conservatory. Her teachers have included Ton Koopman, John Gibbons, Lisa Crawford, and the late Gustav Leonhardt.
She has premiered pieces on five continents including concerts in Amsterdam, Boston, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Sydney, and Tokyo. She recently recorded a music video of early Italian piano sonatas at the Smithsonian. Funaro has recorded for Arabesque, Centaur, Gasparo, Wildboar, and Classic Concert. Her CDs are presently being performed on radio stations around the world.
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Patricia García Gil’s career has given rise to a considerable number of concert tours throughout the world. The press has given her performances such descriptions as “set apart by consummate musicianship, confident technique and elegant interpretation that manifested itself across the wide range of repertoire on her program,” “tremendous energy and precision,” “clean, sensitive playing,” and “originality, genius, mastery, virtuosity, interaction with the listeners.” Recent highlights include prizes at Juventudes Musicales of Spain, Romantic Fortepiano Mario Calado, Premio Crescendo for the best performance of Mozart, Premio Ferrari, Paris Music Competition, EMA Summer Scholarship, EMA Emerging Artist, and Xixón Early Music Competitions.
Patricia is also an actor who helps create shows that combine music, painting, and theatre. With her repertoire choices and research, she strives for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility by enhancing the profiles of underrecognized female composers and reaching out to audiences who tend to connect rarely if at all with classical music performance. She is a teaching assistant, Minerva Scholar, and D.M.A. student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Willis. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America and the Emerging Professional Leadership Council of Early Music America.
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Scott Hankins found a passion for historic keyboard instruments taking lessons on the McNulty piano after Walter at the University of Michigan. He went on to build instruments on his own, learn from leading American instrument builders, and attend the Piano Technology program at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. He is now the technician at Cornell University, caring for the diverse collection of instruments and contributing to the research environment around these instruments.
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Michael Koenig is currently in his second year pursuing an inter-disciplinary doctorate in Music and Global History at the University of Oxford (UK). His thesis, "British pipe organs and organ playing as symbols of shared identity, economic power and technological prowess across the British World and beyond, c. 1850-1950," is supervised by Prof. Laura Tunbridge (Music) and Prof. Andrew Thompson (Global History). Michael holds MA degrees in Organ Performance and Music Pedagogy from Vienna University of Music. He has published in leading German-speaking journals on the role of the harmonium as an orchestral and ensemble instrument. Extended work as a visiting organ teacher and recitalist in Nigeria and Kenya shifted Michael’s academic interests to the study of cross-cultural encounters. Thus, before coming to Oxford, he completed M.A. degrees in African Studies (Copenhagen University, 2018) and World History and Cultures (King’s College London, 2020).
Michael Koenig is a prize-winning Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, currently serving as the main chapel organist at Exeter College, Oxford. He, furthermore, is actively involved in expanding the international outreach of the American Guild of Organists (AGO) after having directed the AGO National Committee on the New Organist from 2018 to 2020.
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Marcos Krieger is Associate Professor of Music at Susquehanna University [ELCA] in Selinsgrove, PA, where he is also the music director for Weber Chapel. He started his musical training in Brazil and, after studies in Germany, relocated to the United States. Upon concluding his doctoral work with Bach scholars Quentin Faulkner and George Ritchie, he expanded his training and repertoire with post-graduate studies in Spain, Italy, and Holland. In addition to his organ and harpsichord recitals in Europe and the Americas, he has been active as a researcher of early Italian and Iberian keyboard treatises and repertoire. His publications have addressed A. Werckmeister's organ treatises, M. R. Coelho's Flores de Musica, Basso Continuo notation practices in Northern Italy, and the keyboard sonatas of C. Seixas, as well as the musical practices of the native Xerente nation of Northern Brazil, where he was raised. He is now serving his second term as a board member of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America.
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Mike Cheng-Yu Lee is one of a new generation of pianists who is at home performing on pianos that span the early-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. Awarded Second Prize and Audience Prize at the 2011 Westfield International Fortepiano Competition, his performances have garnered attention for the fresh perspectives they bring to familiar repertoire. For his debut recital in Australia, he received a rare five-star review in Limelight magazine: “Try as one might, it was hard to avoid cliché responses like ‘stunning’, even ‘electrifying’.”
Mike regularly collaborates with both modern and period performers and ensembles. He has appeared as soloist with the New World Symphony at the invitation of Michael Tilson Thomas and collaborated with musicians from the Formosa, Juilliard, and Aizuri quartets, among others. He is regularly invited to guest teach and perform at some of the most prominent music schools around the world, including the Royal Academy of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, Eastman School of Music, the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. In 2015-17 he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University–Bloomington.
Mike studied at the Yale School of Music and holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Cornell University with a dissertation that was awarded the Donald J. Grout Memorial Dissertation Prize. His teachers include Malcolm Bilson, Boris Berman, Michael Friedmann, and the renowned Haydn scholar James Webster.
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Joyce Lindorff has performed throughout the US, Europe and Asia. She was based in China for seven years, where she held two Fulbright Professorships and is Honorary Professor at Shanghai and China Conservatories. Joyce earned a D.M.A. at Juilliard as a pupil of Albert Fuller and holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence and the University of Southern California. She received solo recitalist awards from the Pro Musicis Foundation and NEA. After freelancing in New York for many years, she began her teaching career at Cornell and is now at Temple University. Joyce’s harpsichord recordings include the complete Rossignolo of Poglietti; complete sonatas of Pedrini, with baroque violinist Nancy Wilson; and “La Raphaèle––The Art of François Couperin.” Her research on Chinese/Western exchange is published in Grove and widely cited Early Music articles. Last year her Chinese-language Baroque Keyboard Performance Practice Anthology was published in Beijing.
Joyce’s recent focus on English harpsichords in early American life took her to Edinburgh, London and Oxford to study original leather plectra and led to two Research Fellowships at Mount Vernon. She was an Invited Scholar at Colonial Williamsburg, where her Harpsichord Miscellany CD was produced by John Watson. Joyce is currently preparing an edition of Nelly Custis’s keyboard music.
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Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley. Born in Norwich, in the UK, he was educated at his local comprehensive school, and went on to study music history and the piano at Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music, and Cornell University. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2007. His publications include the books Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy. Nicholas Mathew's published work has mostly focused on music and politics, broadly understood: the place of music in political institutions, the role of music in public life, the relation of cultural production to economic structures, and the ways in which music produces social attachments and collective identity––as well as issues of political appropriation, subversion, musical trashiness, and political kitsch. His most recent work concerns the deep history of music and political economy: the historical complicity of aesthetic and economic discourses in European and colonial centers in the long eighteenth century. Much of this involves the music, career, and global dispersion of Joseph Haydn.
Mathew sits on the editorial board of the interdisciplinary journal, Representations, as well as the boards of the Journal of Musicology and Eighteenth-Century Music. Together with James Davies, he is founding editor of the book series, New Material Histories of Music, at the University of Chicago Press. Mathew is also a pianist, responsible for the Berkeley music department’s magnificent collection of nineteenth-century pianos.
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Gabriel Merrill-Steskal is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in piano performance at the University of Michigan, where he studies with Logan Skelton. An avid performer and collaborator on both modern and period pianos, he recently won second prize at the 1st SFZP International Fortepiano Competition and studies fortepiano with Matthew Bengtson. Before completing two master’s degrees at the University of Michigan (in piano performance and fortepiano performance), he graduated summa cum laude from Whitman College, where he studied piano with David Hyun-Su Kim. At Whitman, he completed a double major in music and chemistry, receiving honors in both majors and the Campbell Award for outstanding senior recital. He has also studied with Malcolm Bilson and Norman Krieger, and he was a fellow in residence at the 2022 Gilmore Piano Festival.
In addition to performance activities as a soloist and chamber musician, Gabriel is an active teacher and scholar. He is currently a Graduate Student Instructor at the University of Michigan, teaching class piano and private lessons to undergraduate students. His most recent research project involves studying prolongational aspects of folk-based pitch structures in Bartók’s music. Aside from all things piano, he enjoys spending time outside running and rock climbing.
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Charles Metz studied piano at Penn State University, beginning his harpsichord studies through private lessons with the legendary Igor Kipnis. In the process of earning a Ph.D. in Historical Performance Practice at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, he studied with Trevor Pinnock. More recently, Charles has worked with Webb Wiggins and Lisa Crawford at the Oberlin Conservatory. Charles has performed across the country with concerts in Chicago, IL, Saratoga, NY, Bennington, VT, and Louisville, KY. He has performed solo recitals at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and Oberlin Conservatory. He has appeared with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Ars Antigua Chicago, and the Newberry Consort of Chicago. Performances also include masterclasses at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Penn State University in State College, PA. As an early keyboard specialist, he is currently performing on his historic Italian virginal, harpsichords, and fortepianos. He released a CD with Navona Records, William Tisdale: Music for Virginal, in February 2021. Dr. Metz also obtained a doctorate in Optometry and worked for twenty years in his own private practice and Clarkson Eyecare in St. Louis before retiring. In addition to his performing activity, he serves on the Board of Directors of Chamber Music Society of St. Louis and The Newberry Consort.
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Bonny Hough Miller has taught music history and piano for universities in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, and Salzburg, Austria. In addition, she is a seasoned pianist and collaborator who served as head accompanist at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music summer-study program in Salzburg, Austria, for more than a decade. Miller is a recipient of the Janet Levy Award for Independent Scholars from the American Musicological Society. Her 2020 publication, Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America, is the first comprehensive biography of any American woman musician born before the Civil War. Augusta Browne received a publication subvention from the AMS, as well as Honorable Mention for the Society’s 2021 H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award for outstanding work based on the musical press. Miller has published articles in Journal of the Society for American Music, Notes, Journal of Singing, Piano Quarterly, Fontes Artis Musicae, Periodica Musica, and Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. Her essays also appear in Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (2017) and Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (1994). More of her writing is available at www.bonnymillermusic.com
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Robin Morace holds degrees in performance and composition from SUNY Fredonia, where he studied piano with Fr. Sean Duggan, and is a recent graduate of the doctoral program at UNC Greensboro, where he studied modern piano and historical keyboard instruments with Andrew Willis. He has taken summer courses at the Académie de Musique Tibor Varga, the Prague Conservatory, and the Orford Academy, has played in historical piano masterclasses for Malcolm Bilson, David Breitman, Bart van Oort, Jacques Ogg, and Pierre Goy, and has participated in the Chopin Institute’s International Master Course, working with Alexei Lubimov and Tobias Koch on nineteenth-century pianos. He has given performances and lecture-recitals on a wide variety of historical keyboard instruments, including prior encounters with the instruments of the Sigal Music Museum.
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While completing a piano performance M.M. in Lincoln, Nebraska, Stephanie Schmidt
discovered the artistic joys of performing on historical keyboards––and has continued to "look back" ever since. Though progressing towards a traditional piano D.M.A. at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, she spends a great deal of time practicing and performing on old and interesting pianos from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. Highlights of this journey include two solo performances at Sigal Music Museum (2018), in addition to shared performances at the Blandwood House in Greensboro (2019) and the Piano Performance Museum in Hunter, NY (2021, 2022). Stephanie has presented and performed at historical keyboard conferences since 2015, using these opportunities to bring attention to domestically scaled and uniquely voiced pianofortes.
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Thomas Strange has an extensive background in materials science and has authored fifty-eight patents and numerous scientific papers over the last four decades. Following his degrees in physics at the University of South Carolina, he entered the field of medical device electronic components in 1993. His team created the Power Technologies Group for Abbott Laboratories. Strange is the author of “John Geib & Sons, Organ Builders and Pianoforte Makers”, and co-authored “Facing South, Keyboard Instruments in the Early Carolinas” and “Jacob Kirkman, Harpsichord Maker to Her Majesty.” With a small group of partners, he founded the Carolina Music Museum in Greenville, SC, in 2016. Following a major gift from the Marlowe Sigal estate, this became the Sigal Music Museum in 2019, where Strange serves as Curator and Artistic Director.
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Starting piano lessons at the age of six, Charlotte Tang is pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree under the tutelage of James Parker and the late Marietta Orlov at the University of Toronto, with the generous support of the Dina and Hosie Austin Graduate Piano Fellowship and the Nour Private Wealth Award. Before relocating to Canada, she had the privilege to study with Jeffrey Cohen at the Manhattan School of Music and Roberto Plano at Indiana University. Besides the modern piano, Charlotte enjoys playing other keyboard instruments. She has worked with Elisabeth Wright on historical piano and harpsichord, with a special interest in works by Schubert and Schumann.
Charlotte has attended prestigious music festivals and benefited from masterclasses and coachings by Anton Nel, Douglas Humpherys, André Laplante, Logan Skelton, John Perry, Marina Lomazov and Ian Hobson, among others. She has brought exciting performances to concert venues in Italy, Spain, Croatia, Canada, the United States and Hong Kong.
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John Watson is a leading expert on the conservation of musical instruments, having enjoyed a distinguished career as conservator of instruments and mechanical arts and associate curator of musical instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He has also been a maker of reproduction keyboard instruments, with thirty-two instruments bearing his name. He recently completed a replica of the Longman and Broderip harpsichord at Mount Vernon that George Washington purchased for the use of his step-granddaughter Nelly Custis. This replica allows the sound of a historically significant instrument to be heard again without risking damage to the irreplaceable original. John Watson is the author of two books, including Artifacts in Use: The Paradox of Restoration and the Conservation of Organs (2010) and Changing Keys: Keyboard Instruments for America, 1700-1830 (2013), a catalog detailing thirty-eight keyboard instruments in Colonial Williamsburg’s collection.
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Pianist and harmoniumist Artis Wodehouse has devoted her career to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the New York Times as “saviour of the old and neglected,” she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, Gershwin Plays Gershwin, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums and two antique pianos, an English Tomkison square from 1823 and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from nineteenth and early-twentieth century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Her recording, Arthur Bird Music for the American Harmonium, was released in 2016 on the Raven label. Wodehouse has a B.M. from the Manhattan School of Music, an M.M. from Yale and a D.M.A from Stanford.