Historical Piano Summer Academy

Historical Piano Summer Academy 2018

Call January 4, 2018

Call for applications

We proudly invite you to our first Historical Piano Summer Academy to be held at the Orpheus Institute, July 3 – 12, 2018. In collaboration with Pianos Maene, Ruiselede (Belgium) Directed by Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute and McGill University) and Erin Helyard (University of Melbourne).

Are you a pianist currently enrolled in a Master’s or Doctoral degree? Does your artistic research raise vexing questions about historical pianos? Are you craving hands-on experience on a certain type of instrument?

This ten-day academy puts at your disposal an impressive collection of nine historical pianos of English, French, and Viennese design, from the period 1780–1840, either newly built or restored. You will be able to experiment with them, practice on them, share your questions and findings, and receive feedback from fellow participants and instructors. You will also join a performance experiment, entitled Concours révolutionnaire. Putting in focus a newly built 1803 Erard piano en forme de clavecin, we will imagine and rehearse what it meant to be an ambitious piano student in the early years of the Paris Conservatoire. Hoping to win that prestigious premier prix, each of us will prepare and perform a “prize winning” sonata.

This event is part of the Research Cluster, Declassifying the Classics, led by Prof. Tom Beghin at the Orpheus Institute.

HISTORICAL PIANO SUMMER ACADEMY

July 3 - 12, 2018 at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent (BE)

Directed by Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute and McGill University) and Erin Helyard (Melbourne University)

With as special guests: Frédéric de La Grandville (Université de Reims) and Jeanne Roudet (Université-Paris, Sorbonne)

The ten-day course has two components: your own artistic research project, as it relates to any of the pianos that we can make available (see the list below), and a collective Concours révolutionnaire around the 1803 Erard piano.

1. Your artistic research project

Did Viennese piano design cater to an overwhelmingly female market of keyboard players?  How different were French playing techniques from English ones?  Was Mozart a “Walter” or “Stein” type of pianist?

Historically informed performance of late 18th-century and early 19th-century piano repertoire requires sensitivity and knowledge of three distinct historical schools of pianism and pianos: English, French, and Viennese.  Any of the following pianos—all built or restored by Chris Maene—will be put to your disposal for practicing, coaching, and performing:

  1. Andreas Stein, 1786 (German, FF–f3)
  2. Ignaz Kober, 1788 (square, Viennese, FF–f3)
  3. Anton Walter, ca. 1790 (Viennese, FF–g3)
  4. Longman, Clementi, and Co., 1798 (English, FF–c4)
  5. Erard Frères, 1803 (French, FF–c4; copied after the original belonging to Beethoven)
  6. Nannette Streicher, 1816 (Viennese, FF–f4)
  7. John Broadwood & Sons, 1817 (English, CC–c4; copied after the original belonging to Beethoven)
  8. Gottlieb Hafner, ca. 1830 (Viennese, FF–g4)
  9. Erard, 1836 (French, CC­–g4)

During your ten days at Orpheus, expect to be coached on at least one piece of your choice, to give a presentation on your ongoing research, and to participate in a formal concert.

Declassifying the Classics

2. Concours révolutionnaire

Who of us does not recall that the third sonata (in C) from Clementi’s Opus 33 had such prestige that it was solemnly banned from the concours at the Conservatoire because it always made the person who played it win the prize.
Le pianiste, 1833
This sonata was played by his pupil F. Kalkbrenner who obtained the premier prix.
Title page of Louis Adam’s Sonata Op. 8 No. 3 (1801)

The notion of a “prize-winning sonata” may be bizarre to us now, but in the first decade of the Paris Conservatoire, an institution that made professional performance its core educational business, the confusion would have been both novel and unavoidable. Judges at the concours or audience members at the exercises d’élèves would have wondered: which or who dazzles us more, the accomplished performer or the flashy composition?  That it was sometimes the teacher who wrote the exam piece, to show off the prowess of the student he had trained, would have added to the ambiguity.

At the Orpheus Institute, a project is underway to study the implications of Beethoven’s 1803 Erard piano from a variety of perspectives.  In this workshop, we’d like to test one of our running hypotheses: that, by ordering a French piano and writing as the first piece on it his grand “Waldstein” Sonata Op. 53, Beethoven deliberately catered to a new Conservatoire reality—that of the young star-pianist and his equally ambitious, freshly appointed professor.  How would Beethoven’s sonata have fared among those early war-horse pieces that garnered laurels in the Conservatoire annals?

We ask you:

  • To mark your top-three choices from the following eight pieces:
  1. John Baptist Cramer, Sonata in F Major, Op. 7 No. 3
  2. Muzio Clementi, Sonata in C Major, Op. 33 No. 3
  3. Louis Adam, Sonata in C Major, Op. 8 No. 2
  4. Ferdinand Hérold, Sonata in C Minor, Op. 1
  5. Louis Adam, Air du bon Roi Dagobert avec douze Variations précéde d’un prélude ou introduction
  6. Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Fantasy in E-flat Major, Op. 18
  7. Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann, Sonata in F Major, Op. 5
  8. Hélène de Montgeroult, Sonata in G Minor, Op. 2 No. 1
  • Before the start of the workshop, to prepare your assigned “prize-winning” piece up to professional performing level (memorization is not necessary).
  • During the workshop, to be coached and perform the work on our 1803 Erard.
  • To agree in advance to be recorded and videotaped, both during the workshop and during your final public performance, for possible online publishing.  (After the public performance, there will be an opportunity for re-takes.)
  • Just like the students back then, we will adopt Louis Adam’s Méthode de piano du Conservatoire (1804) as our official textbook.

Note: the concours element in this exercise is tongue-in-cheek only.  We’re interested in the historically new idea of a professional performance exam.  There is no prize to win.  (Or, to put it another way: everyone wins.)

Application process

Application process

If you’d like to take part of this special workshop, please send the following to summeracademy@orpheusinstituut.be by March 2, 2018 (5 pm Belgian time):

  • A link to a video featuring a recent performance.
  • A letter of intent (max. two pages), including your rationale for participating and a brief outline of your research project.
  • A copy of your CV.

Maximum number of participants: eight.

Cost: a € 250 registration fee.  Accommodation in private residential rooms in the centre of Ghent can be available at € 100/150 per week. Eight free lunches will be provided, as well as two evening dinners

A more detailed schedule will be sent upon acceptance. The schedule will include seminars by distinguished guests and a visit to Chris Maene’s historical keyboard workshop in Ruiselede, Belgium.

​Erin Helyard - bio

Erin Helyard

Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring conductor, a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano, and a lucid scholar who is passionate about promoting discourse between musicology and performance.  Erin graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal. He completed his Masters in fortepiano performance and a PhD in Musicology with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal.  He was named the Westfield Concert Scholar (Cornell) on fortepiano for 2009-2010 and from 2003 to 2012 Erin was a central member of the award-winning Ensemble Caprice (Montreal).  Helyard is particularly active in reviving in both score and performance neglected seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera.  As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney) he has forged new standards of excellence in historically-informed performance.  Erin duets in nineteenth-century repertoire on historical pianos with renowned Alkan exponent Stephanie McCallum and is a frequent guest conductor of the Australian Haydn Ensemble, performing keyboard concertos of Mozart, Haydn, and C. P. E. Bach.  He recently released a solo album of Handel and Babell on a restored 1773 Kirckman harpsichord.  He currently has in preparation a book manuscript focussing on Clementi, capitalism, and the female music market and has published on pedalling and historical performance practice.  He is Senior Lecturer in Historical Performance and Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and appears by kind courtesy of that institution.