Westfield 40th Anniversary Celebration and Conference
Blending Past and Present:
Collections and Collectors
October 23–26, 2019
| Main Page |
Concerts
| Lectures |
|
|
Schedule of Events
[posted as of October 17, 2019 – subject to updates]Wednesday, October 23
On your way to Oberlin, visit the Riemenschneider Bach Institute at Baldwin Wallace University, Conservatory of Music. They are offering an open house for Westfield Center conference attendees, featuring many of their rare holdings of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, and Schumann editions, and historical keyboard instruction treatises. Light refreshments served. See description and contact info at the bottom of this page.
Warner Concert Hall or Bibbins Hall with John Cavanaugh, Executive Director |
Fairchild Chapel of 17th Century Keyboard Music Erica Johnson, organ
|
Thursday, October 24
Stull Recital Hall Christina Fuhrmann and Dylan Sanzenbacher, harpsichord, piano - A Well-Tempered Collection Kulas Recital Hall Matthew Bengtson, harpsichord and piano - Chromaticists and Alkan
the Conservatory Library and Special Collections Deborah Campana, Conservatory Librarian Visit display of items from Special Collections
|
Stull Recital Hall Builder/Restorer/Technician and Performer/Player Roundtable Anne Acker, chair with Stephen Birkett, David Breitman, Robert Murphy, John Phillips, and Allan Winkler Kulas Recital Hall Susan Youens, with Thomas Meglioranza and David Breitman performing Dichterliebe - The Betty Oser Collection of Robert Schumann’s Songs at the University of Notre Dame
|
Friday, October 25
|
Stull Recital Hall Collectors and Collections Kenneth Slowik, chair with Karen Flint, Tilman Skowroneck, and John Watson Stull Recital Hall John McKean - Keyboard Pedagogy as Curated Collection: The Curious Case of Augsburg Wegweiser Jacob Fuhrman - Curating a Repertoire of Congregational Song: Some Keyboard Accompaniments to the Genevan Psalter Anne Laver - Alexandre Guilmant, William C. Carl and the Beginnings of an Early Music Movement in America
|
Saturday, October 26
|
Pre-Conference -
The Riemenschneider Bach Institute (RBI) at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio is delighted to welcome the Westfield Center conference to the Northeast Ohio region. Located just forty minutes from Oberlin, we are within easy striking distance for conference attendees. The RBI is a renowned research center that includes over 30,000 items and offers broad research opportunities. In addition to the central collection of Bach-oriented manuscripts, books, archival materials, and scores, the RBI holds many additional rare items, including archives related to Alfred Riemenschneider and the Bach Festival, the Emmy Martin collection of first-edition scores, the opera-oriented Tom Villella collection of books, archival materials, and memorabilia, and the Jack Lee collection, which is concentrated in musical theater and popular song.
The RBI holds many items of interest to keyboard historians. Our collection of manuscript copies and rare first-editions of the Well-Tempered Clavier is one of the largest in the world, we have rare editions of keyboard works by not only Bach but also Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, the Schumanns, and others, we own several historical keyboard instruction treatises, and we have a rich archive of photographs, programs, correspondence, and notes related to Albert Riemenschneider as an organist. On Wednesday, October 23, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. we will offer an open house for Westfield Center conference attendees featuring many of these rare items. Light refreshments will be served. We are located in Room 160 of the Boesel Musical Arts Building, 49 Seminary St, Berea, OH 44017, approximately 10 mins. south of Cleveland Hopkins Airport and 24 miles from Oberlin. Throughout the conference, we will also be available for individual research appointments. Please contact us at bachinst@bw.edu
The Frederick R. Selch Collection
by James O'Leary, Associate Professor of Musicology
“Look what I found—an original, handwritten letter from Dragonetti, one of the most important instrument makers of the eighteenth century. I didn’t know we had it; it just fell out of a book,” chuckled curator Barbara Lambert in 2013. “This collection keeps on giving.”
And so it does. In 2011, Patricia Bakwin Selch left her late husband Frederick’s collection of instruments, art, music, and books to Oberlin College. All told it amounts to over 700 instruments, 9,000 rare books, thousands of playbills, posters, letters, illustrations, and other ephemera, and dozens of artworks. The range of objects is stunning. From a first-edition of Marin Mersenne’s 1636 Harmonie Universelle, which combined the study of instruments and acoustics with cosmology; to a first edition of William Billings’s eighteenth-century American hymns; to a very large sampling of rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American church basses, the collection provides unique insight into past musical lives for researchers and students. But even beyond the individual objects, the archive preserves Selch’s unique way of looking at the broader musical world. As a collector, he saw unexpected connections between objects that, at first, might seem completely unrelated. For example, he traveled to Mexico to collect local violins, strung with guitar strings, because their current shape may have been influenced by New England missionaries over a century ago, the latter of which he also had in his collection. Such objects represent a dazzling cultural and social network that spans vast distances in space and time.
The collection still inspires this level of insight today. The archive has become a hub for interdisciplinary studies in American culture at Oberlin. Each year, the Selch Center for the Study of American Culture brings internationally renowned scholars to campus to discuss their research. It also elects student fellows who are writing theses about American culture. In the classroom, in the archive, and even in between pages of a book, the Selch Collection continues to give to Oberlin and to its students.
Post-Conference -
With the arrival of Paul Fritts & Company’s Opus 42 in 2019, First Lutheran Church, Lorain, Ohio again has a world-class pipe organ. In 2014 an arson fire tragically destroyed John Brombaugh’s Opus 4, which was groundbreaking in its use of historic European building principles, including the pipe scaling, construction and voicing techniques, unequal temperament, flexible wind, and hammered metal pipework. The new Fritts organ continues this legacy while incorporating the developments of the last five decades, and is only the second American organ to be built entirely with sand-cast metal for the pipes. The new organ has 37 stops distributed over 2 manuals and pedal, suspended key action and a freestanding case. It is housed in the new church building, which has a generous three-second reverberation time and features bas-relief artwork fashioned from copper pipes salvaged from the Brombaugh organ.