On Monday, March 27, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, William Cowdery will present Johann Sebastian Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, BWV 988, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. The concert is free and open to the public.
Cowdery will perform the work on a harpsichord built by Willard Martin of Bethlehem, Pa., in 1983; the instrument is based on a typical French Baroque double-manual harpsichord.
Bach published his "Air with Sundry Variations" around 1740 as the fourth and last of his series of Clavier-Übungen or "Keyboard Exercises." According to an early biography by Johann Forkel, Bach wrote the work for a patron and admirer, Baron von Keyserlinck, Russian ambassador to the Saxon court in nearby Dresden, Germany. Keyserlinck wanted music for his young protégé harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play during sleepless nights. The story goes that Keyserlinck ever after referred to the pieces as "his" variations and paid Bach handsomely for them: a golden goblet filled with 100 louis d'or.
Cowdery is a senior lecturer at Cornell and musical director and organist of the First Congregational Church. He has taught at Ithaca College, Colgate University and Keuka College as performer, musicologist and theorist.
Cowdery holds a Ph.D. from Cornell for a dissertation on the early cantatas of J.S. Bach. He has written articles in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1996), and he co-edited The Compleat Mozart with Cornell Professor Neal Zaslaw.
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