Keyboard Energies

About This Event

How might keyboard instruments be apprehended as interfaces and archives as well as material and historical assemblages? What are the sources and sinks of the energy that they consume and produce? And how might the answers to these questions help us to sustain keyboard culture into an uncertain future? Our two-day symposium will address these questions by way of the remarkable history of keyboard instruments, experimentation, and electricity across 20th-century New York State. By way of papers, performances, and multi-disciplinary conversation, “Keyboard Energies” will address the means by which keyboard culture has been powered in New York State since Niagara Falls started generating electricity in 1882. Performances will include a multi-keyboard extravaganza at which electrified clavichords and pianos will be heard alongside their acoustic predecessors as well as the oscillators of the Minimoog synthesizer (designed and manufactured in Trumansburg).

Featured Guests

• Roger Moseley, Cornell University
• Annette Richards, Cornell University
• Morton Wan, Hobart & William Smith
• Kirsten Paige, North Caroline State University
• Daniel Walden, Yale University
• Darren Mueller, Eastman School of Music
• Deirdre Loughridge, Northeastern University
• James Davies, University of California, Berkeley
• Fanny Gribenski, Columbia University
• Anna Steppler, Peterhouse College, Cambridge University
• David Irving, Institució Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona
• Todd Cowen, Cornell University
• Annie Laver, Syracuse University
• Nathan Laube, Eastman School of Music
• David Yearsley, Cornell University
• Gary Versace, Eastman School of Music
• Owen Marshall, Cornell University

Co-sponsors

• Society for the Humanities
• Rural Humanities Initiative