Joan Benson (1925-2020)
Read More:
Joan Benson: Clavichord Champion, published by Early Music America in April 2018
2019 Review of The Joan Benson Collection: Clavichord and Fortepiano
The Joan Benson Clavichord Award, launched in 2021, is an annual award for a current outstanding American clavichord artist, teacher, researcher, composer, clavichord maker or organizer of clavichord symposiums, master classes or sessions for children. The intention is to show the significance of soft, tender tones through the clavichord. The awardee will have awakened a vivid appreciation for this delicate keyboard instrument and shown its unique ability to express music through delicate, dynamic-rich, highly-nuanced sounds.
The distinguished keyboardist Joan Benson died on January 1, 2020, aged 94. She studied with Percy Grainger at Interlochen before traveling to Europe, where she worked with Edwin Fischer and Olivier Messiaen. In the second half of her life, she taught at Stanford and the University of Oregon and was one of the early proponents of the works of C.P.E. Bach.
A voluntary selection committee nominated by Joan Benson will choose the recipient of the Joan Benson Clavichord Award. Their decision is final.
Previous Recipients
2024: Paul Irvin
2023: Alissa Duryee
2022: Carol lei Breckenridge
2021: Anna Maria McElwain
2025 Recipient: Joel Speerstra
A Graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory (BA, BM) and the New England Conservatory of Music (MM), Joel Speerstra teaches and researches the organ and related keyboard instruments at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. He is also active as an instrument builder, performer, and musicologist. His doctoral project led to a reconstruction of the Gerstenberg pedal clavichord and a book published by Rochester University Press: Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: an Organist’s Guide. Through the Organ Research Workshop at The University of Gothenburg, he has led process reconstructions of numerous historical clavichords. His research on the pedal clavichord has been awarded a national prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and in 2025 he was also elected a new member of the Academy. He is currently one of three principal investigators in the European Research Council-sponsored Synergy project REM@KE (reconstructing embodied musical knowledge at the keyboard), the first of its kind to be awarded to music research. He is the recipient of the 2025 Early Music America Joan Benson Clavichord Award.
I write to accept– with genuine surprise and heartfelt gratitude to the committee – your nomination for the 2025 Joan Benson Clavichord Award. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting her myself, she was a close colleague of my mentor in Edinburgh, John Barnes, a guiding light to my generation, and one of the most important forces that shaped our enthusiasm for the instrument. I have always been grateful for her gifts as a performer and her enthusiastic and steadfast championship of the clavichord.
I first met the clavichord while working on a small research project on the Renaissance clavichord as a freshman at Oberlin in 1984. But I had to travel to Europe on a Watson Foundation scholarship in 1989 to meet the historical clavichords, where I studied clavichord building with John Barnes in Edinburgh and clavichord playing with Harald Vogel in Bremen. John was essential to the reconstruction of the Gerstenberg pedal clavichord in Leipzig that was central to my dissertation and further research work on the clavichord at University of Gothenburg. John we lost far too soon, but Harald Vogel is still a mentor and an inspiration for the clavichord world. Thanks to these two guiding lights, the clavichord has been the most important instrument in my daily musical practice as a builder, player, teacher, and performer. Thank you for focusing national and international attention on this instrument. May it once again be, as Bach’s cousin Walther says, “the first grammar” for all keyboard players!
– Joel Speerstra
