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The American organist, harpsicordist, pianofortist., musicologist and music pedagogue, David Gaynor Yearsley, obtained his A.B. degree in American History from Harvard University (1983-1987); and his his Ph.D. in Musicology from Stanford University (1994). He studied organ with Edward Hansen, Christa Rakich, William Porter, Harald Vogel and Kimberly Marshall. He has won numerous prizes in international organ competitions: in 1992 he won the First Prize at the International Schnitger Organ Competition, held at the famous historical organs of Norden, Groningen and Alkmaar; in 1994 he won the First Prize at the International Organ Competition in Bruges, as part of the Musica Antiqua Festival; The same year he also won the First Prize in Bruges, together with Annette Richards for duos on positive organ. He is The only musician ever to win all the major prizes at the Bruges Early Music Festival.
David Yearsley is Professor at Cornell Cornell University in Ithaca, New York since 1997, At Cornell, he continues to pursue his interests in the teaching, history, literature and performance of music. His research area is 17th and 18th century music. His musicological work investigates literary, social, and theological contexts for music and music making, and while he focuses on J.S. Bach, he has written on topics ranging from music and death to musical invention, from organology and performance to musical representations of public spaces in film, from musical travelers to the joys of the keyboard duet. At Cornell he has taught courses on J.S. Bach and George Frideric Handel, surveys of Western Art Music, keyboard performance, the organ, music journalism, film music, and music theory.
David Yearsley 's first book, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge, 2002) explodes long-held notions about the status of counterpoint in the mid-18th century, and illuminates unexpected areas of the musical culture into which J.S. Bach's most obsessive and complicated musical creations were released. Bach’s Feet: the Organ Pedals in European Culture (Cambridge, 2012) presents a new interpretation of the significance of the oldest and richest of European instruments - the organ - by investigating the German origins of the uniquely independent use of the feet in music-making. Delving into a range of musical, literary, and visual sources, Bach’s Feet pursues the wide-ranging cultural importance of this physically demanding art, from the blind German organists of the 15th century, through the central contribution of J.S. Bach's music and legacy, to the newly-pedaling organists of the British Empire, and the sinister visions of Nazi propagandists.
His monograph Love, Death and Minuets: the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebooks Reconsidered is forthcoming. In providing a range of literary, social, historical, and musical perspectives on the cherished musical manuscripts of J.S. Bach's second wife, herself a gifted professional musician, this study radically revises our understanding of women in music in 18th-century Lutheran German and within the Bach family. His current scholarly project has the working title Bach Laughs, and is a study of the composer as musical humorist.
Also a committed journalist, David Yearsley has been music critic for the Anderson Valley Advertiser since 1990; his weekly column can be read each Friday at counterpunch.org. A collection of his feuilletons, Bach and Taxes and Other Matters of Life and Death is in the works.
David Yearsley performs a lot, gives seminars and master-classes.He continues to pursue an active career as a performer on keyboards historical and modern. A long-time member of the pioneering synthesizer ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, his recordings are available on the Musica Omnia and Loft labels. He was a member of the jury at the international organ competition in Bruges in 2003 and 2006. |
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David Yearsley's studies appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music and in Music and Letters. He has written many articles in The Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music, in: Notes (1998)
Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach, in: Notes (2001)
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, New perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge, 2002)
Princes of War and Peace and their Most Humble, Most Obedient Court Composer, in: Contact, Volume 1 Political Theology: The Border in Question
Bach's Feet: the Organ Pedals in European Culture (Cambridge, 2012). |
