Tilman Skowroneck co-author of award-winning book

Between 2015 and 2021, Tilman Skowroneck, senior lecturer at the Academy of Music and Drama, was part of the research cluster “Declassifying the Classics” at the Orpheus Institute in Gent, Belgium. His special focus was on Beethoven and his “foreign” pianos.

The project’s most recent book, Beethoven’s French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration (University of Chicago Press, 2022), has now received the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize for 2024 from the American Musical Instrument Society.

The jury writes that the book is:
“… engagingly written and superbly illustrated. At the heart of this book is the story […] of Beethoven’s complicated relationship to his 1803 Erard Frères piano and [the] project to replicate the instrument. Bringing together meticulous attention to organological detail with musical insights gleaned from the instrument, Beethoven’s French Piano opens our ears anew to the early nineteenth-century piano."