In her work as a music historian and keyboard player, Annette Richards draws on her training in English literature, art history, musicology, and musical performance. Musical and visual aesthetics and criticism are of particular interest to her, as is music in literature, and changing attitudes and approaches to performance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her book on the musical picturesque explores the intersections between musical fantasy and the landscape garden in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music culture, ranging across German-speaking Europe to England; other topics on which she has written include Mozart and musical automata, the German keyboard song and solitude, and Haydn and the grotesque. Current projects include the organ works volume for the new complete edition of the music of C. P. E. Bach with David Yearsley, and essays on the musical portrait and portrait collections in the later eighteenth century and on the character piece and French genre painting in 1750s Berlin. Her larger project is a book that expands on her work on death, fantasy, and the grotesque to explore the dark hermeneutics of musical life in the age of European enlightenment and revolution -- Music and the Gothic on the Dark Side of 1800.

As a performer Annette Richards specializes in music of the Italian and North German Baroque, and has played concerts on numerous historic and modern instruments in Europe and the United States. She also regularly performs music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has won prizes in international competitions including the 1992 Dublin International Organ Competition and first prize for organ duo with David Yearsley at the Bruges Early Music Festival in 1994. Her CD Melchior Schildt and the North German Organ Art was recorded on the historic organ at Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark.

Ms. Richards has won numerous honors, including the Giballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center (1993-94), a fellowship at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica (1994-95), and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell (1998-99). In 2002 she was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to explore further the role of the visual arts in German and English music around 1800, and in 2004-05 she was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin.

At Cornell Ms. Richards teaches courses on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music aesthetics and criticism; intersections between music and visual culture; music and the uncanny; the undergraduate history survey; music of the Baroque; and the organ and its musical culture, as well as organ performance. She has organized several conferences and concert festivals at the university, including "German Orpheus: C. P. E. Bach and North German Music Culture" (1998) and "British Modernism" (2003).

Photo: Nicola Kountoupes, Cornell University Photography