Roger Moseley

Overview

As a scholar, performer, and director of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity and the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, I am committed to bringing thought and practice together. The Milstein Program supports interdisciplinary inquiry into technology, media, design, and humanistic imagination, while the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards provides a laboratory for exploring the histories and futures of musical instruments. Together, these roles inform my broader interest in how technologies both old and new mediate cultural experience.

Research Focus

Through my research, teaching, advising, and program leadership, I explore how media, instruments, and interfaces shape musical thought, touch, memory, and play. My work brings historical musicology into dialogue with media studies, performance, artistic research, and the material histories of technology, from early modern keyboard cultures and nineteenth-century pianos to digital games and contemporary media.

I am especially interested in the cultural techniques through which music becomes playable, repeatable, transmissible, and memorable: notation, instruments, mechanisms, bodies, recordings, interfaces, and listening. My first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, asks how keyboards have made music playable, whereas my current book project, Resonant Artifacts: The Romantic Piano and the Forging of Musical Memory, asks how pianos have made music memorable.

Resonant Artifacts explores the Romantic piano as a medium through which musical memory is forged rather than merely preserved. It argues that while notation, arrangement, performance, pedagogy, instruments, and recordings promise to make music present again, they can only do so by producing artifacts: aliases, echoes, distortions, fragments, gestures, and inflections through which the past returns as it is remade in the present.

The book takes shape around Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Johanna Kinkel, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional composer Johannes Kreisler. It treats these figures not as isolated monuments, but as points of convergence within a wider ecology of mediation that includes performance, teaching, editing, arrangement, instrument making, criticism, recording, and recollection. The book treats the Romantic piano not as a single standardized instrument or repertorial category, but as a historically unstable family of mechanisms, materials, techniques, repertories, and fantasies through which music became durable.

Methodologically, Resonant Artifacts brings historical musicology into dialogue with sound studies, media archaeology, historical performance, and artistic research. It grows out of my work as director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity: the former provides a collection of historical instruments through which questions of touch, resonance, and musical memory can be tested in practice, while the latter fosters interdisciplinary reflection on the relationships among technology, media, design, and humanistic inquiry. 

My first book, Keys to Play, traces a genealogy of musical digitality under the rubrics of improvisation, performance, and recreation. Described by readers as “wonderfully allusive and erudite,” “a virtuosic boss run,” and “an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play,” Keys to Play received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career. Published under a Creative Commons license by the University of California Press, the book includes recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet, Louis Couperin, and others, performed by me alongside my Cornell colleagues Malcolm Bilson, Ariana Kim, Shin Hwang, and Matthew Hall. Keys to Play is available as a free download in a variety of formats here.

My other publications include essays on musical performance in the nineteenth century and improvisation in the eighteenth century, Mozart, Guitar Hero, media archaeology in relation to historically informed performance, audiovisual correspondences in digital games, Brahms and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the cultural techniques through which music becomes playable, memorable, and transmissible.

Performance

As a historical keyboardist, I perform regularly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments and replicas as well as electric pianos and synthesizers. At the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, performance is inseparable from research and teaching: the instruments serve not only as vehicles for repertory, but as media through which questions of touch, resonance, technique, notation, listening, and historical imagination can be explored in practice.

I am a faculty member of the Chamber Music Collective, an intensive summer program for advanced students using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments and techniques. Recent performances include songs by Chao Yuen-Ren, Schubert, and Liszt with tenor Stephen Ng on an 1878 Blüthner; Schubert’s “Erlkönig” with Cornell and CMC colleague Jean Bernard Cerin on an 1823 Graf; Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor with CMC colleagues Lucy Russell and Keiran Campbell on an 1843 Pleyel; sonatas for fortepiano and violin by Mozart and Beethoven with Ariana Kim at Paesaggi Musicali Toscani on a 1795 Walter replica; and music by C. P. E. Bach, Rita Strohl, Katherine Heyman, Cécile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, Debussy, Fauré, and Franck as part of the CCHK’s ongoing Salon Project.

My performance of Mozart’s Keyboard Concerto in F major, K. 459, on an 1800 Schantz replica with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Chris Younghoon Kim, can be viewed here. I devised my own cadenzas for the concerto, which features prominently in Keys to Play. A recording of the 1854 version of Brahms’s Piano Trio in B major, op. 8, performed on the CCHK’s 1857 Streicher with violinist Rebecca Anderson and cellist John Haines-Eitzen, is available here. My article “Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler, and the Piano Trio in B, op. 8,” which considers the earlier and later versions of the piece and their relation to each other, won the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize in 2008.

Teaching

I teach undergraduate courses in music history, culture, theory, materials, techniques, performance, media, and play. Courses I have recently taught include Music and Digital Gameplay, Introduction to Western Art Music, Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination with Judith Peraino, and Thinking Media, an interdisciplinary course featuring guest faculty from across the university.

My teaching also reflects my role as director of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, where I work with students and faculty across the university to explore how technological systems shape human experience, imagination, and cultural practice. 

My graduate seminars have focused on ludomusicology, historical keyboard cultures and techniques, nineteenth-century music and its technological mediation, improvisation, virtuosity, performance practice, and the music of Schubert. Beyond the Department of Music, I have co-taught the interdisciplinary seminar Thinking Media Studies with Nick Salvato.

I have worked closely with graduate students on dissertations and publications on topics ranging from embodiment in nineteenth-century keyboard music, technologies of musical stenography, representations of the devil on the Parisian stage, and Czerny’s transcriptions of Beethoven to Yamaha’s Vocaloid Keyboard. Articles that originated as papers written by graduate students in my seminars have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, and Keyboard Perspectives.