Annette Richards - Biography#

Annette Richards studied English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College Oxford from 1984 to 1987. She went on for the Dutch degree of an Uitvoerend Musicus in organ performance at Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam which she obtained in 1991. From 1987 to 1995 she was a graduate student at Stanford University (M.A. in Music, 1989; Ph.D. in Musicology, 1995). In her final Ph.D. year, she secured a position at Cornell where she has taught, researched and, as University Organist, performed ever since (Assistant Professor 1995 - 2001; Associate Professor 2001 - 2007; Full Professor 2007 - 2018; Given Foundation Professor of the Humanities 2018 - present). From 2008 - 2018 she served as the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, and in 2017 she found the Center for Historical Keyboard Studies at Cornell. Richards has been recognized internationally, throughout her academic discipline and beyond, as a distinguished expert in the fields of 18th-century Music, Aesthetics, and Criticism, especially in Germany, of Interdisciplinary Research into Music and Visual Culture, as well as of Keyboard Studies, particularly Organ Performance and History. As a scholar, she received numerous prestigious awards, i.a., the Ingolf Dahl Award of the American Musicological Society (1994), a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship (2004), a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation (2003 - 2005) and a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellowship at Stanford Humanities Center (2018). As a performer, she won the First prize of the International Organ Competition for positiv organ duo at the Bruges Early Music Festival (1994). Annette Richards is author of the acclaimed monograph The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (CUP 2001) as well as of numerous scholarly articles. Two monographs are currently under way (both to be published by Chicago UP): Music on the Dark Side of 1800, and The Gallery of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle.