Barwick Colloquium: Roger Moseley

"Resonant Artifacts: The Romantic Piano and Its Afterlives"

What happens when music returns, and what changes in the process? A score, a piano, or a recording may promise access to the musical past, yet each demands acts of interpretation that both construct and transform what becomes audible. Offering an overview of my current book project, this talk explores how the Romantic piano re-presents music through the interplay of notation, instrumental mechanisms, bodily techniques, and technologies of recreation.

Beginning with an early recording of Schubert, I trace musical identities through contrasting circumstances of transmission and realization: the emergence of latent voices in performances of Chopin, the redistribution of musical work through Schumannian arrangements, and the possibilities of reflection and transformation in Brahms. The talk concludes by introducing my Variations on a Fictional Theme in G minor for Four Hands and Conrad Graf Piano. In the book’s final chapter, this newly composed work is framed as an encounter with incomplete materials, remembered music, and literary fiction. The ensuing performance with Federico Ercoli will extend this inquiry into collaborative practice. Together, talk and performance consider how musical afterlives take shape through the decisions of those who read, play, listen, and (re)compose, and how historical understanding and creative misreading can become resources for making music today.

Afterimages: Recollections of a Musical Journey

Federico Ercoli and Roger Moseley, piano
Piano by Rod Regier (2000) after Conrad Graf (1824), from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Waldszenen, op. 82, no. 1, “Eintritt”
Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, no. 2, “Innig”
Six Studies in Canonic Form, op. 56, no. 1 in C major
(arr. Georges Bizet)

Clara Schumann (1819–1896)
Three Romances, op. 21, no. 1 in A minor

Robert Schumann
Six Studies in Canonic Form, op. 56, no. 2 in A minor
(arr. Bizet)
Waldszenen, op. 82: No. 7, “Vogel als Prophet”
Gesänge der Frühe, op. 133, no. 1 in D major

Roger Moseley (b. 1974)
Variations on a Fictional Theme in G minor for Four Hands and Conrad Graf Piano (2026)

Robert Schumann
Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, no. 14, “Zart und singend”
Six Studies in Canonic Form, op. 56, no. 4 in A-flat major
(arr. Bizet)

Symphonic Études, op. 13: Fifth Posthumous Variation

Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6: No. 17, “Wie aus der Ferne”
Waldszenen, op. 82: No. 9, “Abschied”

The program will be performed as a continuous sequence, without intermission.

About the Speaker

Roger Moseley is Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University, where he directs the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity. A musicologist, pianist, and artistic researcher, Moseley explores how instruments and media shape musical thought, experience, and imagination. His work brings historical scholarship into dialogue with performance, improvisation, composition, and media theory. He holds a doctorate in music history and literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in collaborative piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

Moseley's first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (University of California Press, 2016), received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award in 2017. His other publications address figures ranging from Mozart to Chopin and Brahms and subjects including historical improvisation, media archaeology, and digital games. 

Moseley performs on historical pianos as well as electronic and digital keyboards. At Cornell, his research and teaching draw on the Center for Historical Keyboards’ instruments to investigate matters of touch, technique, listening, and historical imagination. He also co-directs the Chamber Music Collective, a summer program devoted to collaborative performance informed by historical instruments and performance practices.

Moseley's current book project, Resonant Artifacts, follows the Romantic piano’s musical afterlives through studies of Schubert, Chopin, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional musician Johannes Kreisler. The book asks how music becomes and remains recognizable across changing instruments, bodies, inscriptions, and circumstances while tracing how acts of preservation become acts of transformation. These questions inform his Variations on a Fictional Theme in G minor for Four Hands and Conrad Graf Piano, which he will perform with Federico Ercoli following the colloquium on the CCHK’s 1824 Graf replica, built by Rod Regier in 2000.