Professor Joyce Lindorff

Joyce Lindorff is a harpsichord performer, scholar and educator with a focus on early keyboard performance practice and history. Currently a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Music, she is on sabbatical from Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is Professor of Keyboard Studies.

Joyce Lindorff has performed to rave reviews throughout the US, Europe and Asia. Based in China for seven years, she held two Fulbright Professorships and is Honorary Professor at the Shanghai and China Conservatories. Joyce earned a DMA at Juilliard under the supervision of Barry S. Brook and Albert Fuller and holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence (BA) and University of Southern California (MM). After freelancing in New York for many years, she began her teaching career at Cornell University, as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.

Joyce’s recent focus on English harpsichords in early America took her to Edinburgh, London and Oxford to study original leather plectra and led to two Research Fellowships at the Washington Library in Mount Vernon. She has also been an Invited Scholar at Colonial Williamsburg, where her Harpsichord Miscellany CD was produced by historical keyboard curator John Watson.

During her years in Shanghai and Hong Kong Joyce produced a landmark study of the harpsichord in China during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Her publications include articles and reviews in Early Music, Revue de musicologie, Rivista italiana di musicologia, Early Keyboard Journal, New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers and Grove Music Online. In Cambridge her research is focused on the writings of Nicolò Pasquali, a composer, conductor and teacher active in 18th-century London, Dublin and Edinburgh, and preparing a modern edition of his keyboard treatises, Thorough-bass Made Easy and The Art of Fingering the Harpsichord. She looks forward very much to being involved in performance activities as well.

Joyce is accompanied by her husband, journalist Dave Lindorff. Winner of 7 Project Censored and an Izzie Award, he writes for Counterpunch, The Nation, Salon, and London Review of Books. His recent book, “Spy for No Country,” and coproduced film, “A Compassionate Spy,” are about Cambridge physicist Theodore Hall.