Annette Richards is Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell, and the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is a performer and scholar with a specialty in eighteenth-century music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature, and visual culture. She is founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives, a yearbook dedicated to historical performance and keyboard culture, but her scholarly work extends far beyond the organ and its music. She is particularly interested in the music and music aesthetics of mid- to late-eighteenth-century Germany, and especially C. P. E. Bach. Her book The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge, 2001) explores the intersections between musical fantasy and the landscape garden in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music across German-speaking Europe and England.

She is editor of C. P. E Bach Studies (Cambridge, 2006) and rediscovered and reconstructed that composer’s extraordinary collection of musical portraits, published by the Packard Humanities Institute in 2012.  With David Yearsley she has edited the complete organ works of C. P. E. Bach for the C. P. E. Bach: Complete Works edition. Recent topics she has written on include portraiture and the invention of music history, Handel and charity, graveyard poetry and musical approaches to death in the later eighteenth century, and the glass harmonica and virgin warriors around 1800.

Made possible by support from the
William E. Valente Endowment in Music.