C.P.E. Bach Conference and Festival is Feb. 6 and 12-14

The second son of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) was one of the most famous and most highly respected composers in Germany, if not the whole of Europe, in the late 18th century. Considered the "German Orpheus," he composed often extremely personal music that was widely played and discussed, and his own performances on clavichord and fortepiano were highly sought after. But despite C.P.E. Bach's renown as the greatest original genius of his age, his music is not very well known today, and much of it is rarely performed.

With the first concert a week earlier (this Saturday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m. in Anabel Taylor chapel, featuring David Yearsley, organ and fortepiano; Rebecca Maurer and Geoffrey Govier, fortepiano; Brian Brooks, violin; and Rebecca Plack, soprano), Cornell presents the C.P.E. Bach Conference and Concert Festival Friday through Sunday, Feb. 12-14. Organized by Annette Richards, assistant professor and university organist, the festival is sponsored by Department of Music, Institute for German Cultural Studies, Society for the Humanities, Department of German Studies, Cornell Council for the Arts, and the University Lectures Committee and is free and open to the public.

The conference, held entirely in Barnes Hall Auditorium, will re-examine the North German literary and artistic culture within which C.P.E. Bach's music was conceived. Topics include Bach's relation to contemporary poetic and aesthetic theory (the sublime); music as social/cultural practice in late 18th-century Hamburg (including the clavichord cult and the pursuit of musical solitude); related aspects of visual culture; and the extraordinary, if ambiguous status of improvisation and fantasia in contemporary reception of Bach's late music.

Four concerts and three smaller-scale performances will take place in conjunction with the conference. Highlights of these include a clavichord recital by David Yearsley, performing Bach's late rondos and fantasias (Friday, Feb. 12, 3 p.m. in Barnes Hall); a large-scale concert including two symphonies, a flute concerto and the very beautiful and little-known choral work Klopstocks Morgengesang am Schöp-fungsfeste given by the Rochester-based period instrument ensemble The Publick Musick (Saturday, Feb. 13, 8 p.m. in Sage Chapel); and a chamber concert (Sunday, Feb. 14, 3 p.m. in the A.D. White House), also given by The Publick Musick. (Concert listings will be in next week's Chronicle.)

The keynote address for the conference will be given Feb. 12 by Christopher Hogwood, distinguished harpsichordist, clavichord player, conductor, musicologist, writer and broadcaster, who will talk on "Faces and Fantasies: 'Original-genius' in the cross-currents of European aesthetic thinking." He will be in residence at Cornell for the whole weekend and will take part in a special panel and master class devoted to the clavichord Sunday, Feb. 14.

Also speaking on the keynote afternoon will be Cornell alumna Elaine Sisman, professor of music at Columbia University, who will present a paper on "Melancholy, the Enlightenment and C.P.E. Bach." Other distinguished speakers at the conference include Richard Kramer, CUNY Graduate School; James Webster, Cornell; Richard Will, University of Washington; and Tobias Plebuch, Stanford University.