 George BarthGeorge Barth taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for eleven years, earned graduate degrees at Cornell University (where he studied with pianist Malcolm Bilson), taught for a year at the University of Washington in Seattle, and in 1987 joined the faculty at Stanford University where, as a senior Professor, he holds the Billie Bennett Achilles Directorship of Keyboard Programs. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in performance, analysis, and music history, and offers private instruction in piano and chamber music. His special interests include historic recordings, and the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Ives and Bartók. Some of his projects explore relationships between music and language, as for example his CD-ROM Understanding Beethoven: The Mind of the Master, and his book The Pianist as Orator, which was hailed as “a breakthrough in…a new breed of inquiry that combines historical sophistication, a broad intellectual perspective, and practical implications for performance.” His recordings on period instruments include Schubert’s Winterreise with mezzo-soprano Miriam Abramowitsch (Music & Arts) and the Beethoven Cello Sonatas with cellist Stephen Harrison of the Ives Quartet (Alliance). His essays have been published in The Revised New Grove Dictionary, Early Music, Hungarian Quarterly, Music & Letters, Early Keyboard Studies Newsletter, Music Library Association Notes and Humanities. Dr. Barth has appeared in recital, as soloist with orchestra, and as lecturer throughout the United States and in Canada and Central Europe, including engagements by the Canadian Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, Humanities West, the San Francisco Early Music Society, Composers, Inc., The Kitchen, the Juilliard School, Merkin Recital Hall, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Longy School in Cambridge, St. Paul’s Ordway Theater, and academies in Budapest, Leipzig and Berlin. In March of 2008 he collaborated with Joseph Horowitz on “The Stravinsky Project” for Stanford Lively Arts, and with pianist Kumaran Arul, offered a reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos as a rebuttal of Stravinsky’s polemics. In the same month he presented his most recent research on early recordings of the Beethoven Sonatas at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. During the autumn of 2008 he and Arul co-taught a Stanford seminar in early recordings and musical style, which featured guest residencies by pianists Claude Frank and Malcolm Bilson, and historian and Brahms specialist Walter Frisch. In January of 2009, the two co-produced the second highly acclaimed Reactions to the Record symposium, during which Charles Rosen, Will Crutchfield, and other eminent scholars and performers from the United States and abroad explored the rich legacy of early sound recording. His most recent essay, on Carl Czerny (in Reassessing Carl Czerny, for the Eastman Studies in Music series) discusses why it is that people rather than musical scores have remained the “primary vessel” of the classic tradition. In response to his lifelong fascination with the inspired rewriting of the great composer-pianists, Dr. Barth encourages his students to study the arts of variation, transcription and improvisation. His advanced students learn to ornament eighteenth-century music; to transform piano concertos, string solos and organ works into piano solos; and to rescore improvisatory passages in late-19th- and 20th-century music using examples from composers’ manuscripts and historical recordings. Photographer: Gary Grimaldi
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