The Stanford Department of Music is hosting a three-day symposium to explore the vivid styles of performance heard on the earliest acoustic recordings and player piano rolls, styles that began to vanish with the First World War and were considered almost scandalous after the Second. This will be a forum for experiment and dialogue, and the focus will be practical: what might these traces of vintage styles mean to performers, composers and listeners today?
April 7, 2007
Welcome! On behalf of the Stanford University Department of Music, we would like to welcome you to our online home for the
2007 Stanford Music Symposium entitled Reactions to the Record: Perspectives on Historic Performance, to be held at Campbell
Recital Hall in Stanford's Braun Music Center. There is much excitement around this unique event. Read on for the latest news!
Concerts: We invite you to view our concert programs for Thursday, April 19th and Friday, April 20th, which include performances
by Malcolm Bilson and the St. Lawrence String Quartet among many others.
Saturday April 21st Demonstration and Films: Our updated schedule includes a unique opportunity to experience the one-of-a-kind
Duo-Dextra pianola (reproducing piano). We will hear – and see! – performances by some of the great early twentieth-century
recording artists who made Duo-Art and Ampico piano rolls, including Ravel, Granados, and Rachmaninoff. Jerry McBride,
curator of the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, will describe the history of recorded sound with demonstrations of some of the
finest early victrolas and cylinder players in the Archive's collection. We'll also screen rare film footage of historic performances by
Josef Hofmann, George Gershwin, Emanuel Feuermann and others.
Concerts of the future? Don't miss our preview of a soon-to-be-released Glenn Gould Sony Classical CD of a "re-performance" of
his 1955 Goldberg Variations. This fascinating project undertaken by Zenph Studios has been getting a lot of press recently. We'll
discuss its many intriguing ramifications.
We are especially pleased to announce that the Symposium will be recorded by Chicago's WFMT Radio Network, one of the world's
most renowned sources for fine arts radio programming, for international distribution as a two-hour radio special.
Also, please note a small change in the start time for Friday evening's banquet.