Westminster Early Music Series Opens with “In Pursuit of Refinement – Musick in Colonial and Early Federal America”
The 2005-06 Westminster Early Music Series will open Saturday, October 15 with a program entitled “In Pursuit of Refinement – Musick in Colonial and Early Federal America.” Presented by The Practitioners of Musick: Eugene Roan and John Burkhalter, the performance will begin at 8:00 p.m. in Bristol Chapel on the campus of Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton. There will be a pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m.
Roan will perform on cabinet organ, spinet and harpsichord, and Burkhalter will play English flutes. A highlight of the program will be the performance of works from the recently discovered Neff manuscript that was compiled about 1790 in the area of Lancaster, Pa. It is a personal collection of keyboard music suitable for harpsichord, and the square or grand forte-piano and chamber or cabinet organ.
By 1790 Lancaster had become the home of people with considerable wealth and cultivation, such as Dr. Christian Neff, who built an imposing red-brick Georgian house there in 1785. Franklin College had been established in 1787, and there were a number of prominent artisans active in the city, including a maker of square pianos and a pipe-organ builder. A clock maker named Hoff occasionally made clocks with a musical apparatus and played the German-flute; and a portrait painter named Jacob Eichholtz also decorated musical instruments made in the town. Scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller has seen the Neff manuscript, now owned by The Practitioners of Musick , and has stated that “further study of the 244 pieces found in the Neff manuscript will shed considerable light on an area of early Federal music history in America.”
The program will also include music from the archives of Thomas Jefferson’s family at Monticello, one of the most extensive still in existence from the Colonial and early Federal periods in America. Considerably more of the collection might have remained intact if a servant of one of Jefferson’s descendants had not lighted a parlor fireplace with used sheets of old music, instead of discarded newspapers, as he had been instructed.
Jefferson, who was himself an accomplished violinist, described music as the “favorite passion of my soul.” His wife and two daughters were favorably acknowledged for their proficiency at the harpsichord. The Monticello music collection was primarily acquired and designed for the use of immediate family members and invited musical guests. At the age of 74 Jefferson wrote “music furnishes a delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day, and lasts through life.”
Eugene Roan is professor emeritus and former chair of the piano, organ and harpsichord department at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, where he has taught since 1956. Mr. Roan has lectured and performed extensively in the United States and has taught at the Royal School of Church Music. A graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and Westminster Choir College, he has also studied at the School of Sacred Music of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His teachers were Alexander McCurdy and Alec Wyton.
John Burkhalter, essentially self-taught, studied the performance of early music at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with Daniel Pinkham and the performance of Baroque music at Harvard University with noted Dutch recorder virtuoso Frans Bruggen. He has composed and prepared music for documentary film, video and audio projects produced by PBS (WNET-13), NJN, the Newark Museum, The Walters Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, Encyclopedia Britannica, The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology among others. He has lectured extensively on the ancient musical cultures of the Americas, most notable at the Chrysler Museum of Art, The Cultural Centre of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Colombia to The United Nations, Yale, Princeton, pre-Columbian Society of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, and Dumbarton Oaks. Mr. Burkhalter also has served as a musical consultant for the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
Westminster is located at Hamilton Avenue and Walnut Lane in Princeton. Admission for this performance is $20 for adults and $15 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased by calling the Westminster box office weekdays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. at 609-921-2663 or at the door.
