Dr. Annett C. Richter, a native of Halle, Germany, has taught courses in music history, music iconography, and aural skills at Concordia College. Prior to coming to Concordia, she worked at Minnesota State University Moorhead and at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she taught courses in music history, music appreciation, American music, and writing about music. She has also served on the faculty at the North Dakota State University where she offered courses in music history and music bibliography and launched a four-semester sequence for doctoral students on all aspects of writing a doctoral thesis.
As a musicologist, Dr. Richter has explored interdisciplinary topics of music iconography, intersections between music and painting, and, more broadly speaking, interrelationships among music, art, society, culture, and place. Her research has focused on 16th- and 19th-century England and Scotland as well as on 19th- and 20th-century America. She has delivered conference papers nationally and internationally at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Renaissance Society of America, the College Music Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, the Missouri Folklore Society, the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, as well as at conferences in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Her articles have appeared in Musicological Explorations and in the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities. In her dissertation (2008), she investigated Missouri artist and folklorist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and his connection to music. Combining the analysis of Benton’s visual art, music transcriptions, sound recordings, and sources documenting his multi-faceted life as a musical collector and performer on harmonica, she has shown that this artist brought together members of diverse musical cultures and created, in various locations throughout his career, his own unique musical practices in flux. More recently, Richter was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship from the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for her continued work on Benton. Her article on Benton and his connection to music has appeared in Grove Music Online, and her essay on this artist’s musical work in Kansas City in the 1930s and 1940s is forthcoming in the Festschrift Music, My Rampart: Essays in Honor of Michael J. Budds (Routledge). In 2020, Dr. Richter was chosen by the Missouri Humanities Council and the State Historical Society of Missouri for presenting public lectures on Benton as musical folklorist as a part of their 2021-2023 “Show Me Missouri” Speakers’ Bureau Program. More recently, she has been investigating the music iconography and various layers of meaning in self-portraits by female painters from Renaissance Italy who have depicted themselves at keyboard instruments. Dr. Richter has also presented guest lectures in art history courses at Concordia College on various intersections among music, painting, and architecture.
As a musician, Dr. Richter has been active as lutenist and guitarist in Minneapolis-St. Paul and in Fargo-Moorhead. As lutenist, she has appeared in concert with sopranos Linh Kauffman, Candace Magner, Dawn Sonntag, and Kim Sueoka, lutenists Richard Griffith, Philip Rukavina, and Tom Walker, as well as with the early music ensemble Consortium Carissimi in Minneapolis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqadtBVfmiI).
As a guitarist, she has presented solo and duo recitals for the Minnesota Guitar Society Local Artist Series in the Twin Cities. She serves as Vice President of the Minnesota Guitar Society and has conducted interviews with internationally renowned artists, including women guitarists Bokyung Byun (Korea), Andrea Caballero (Spain), Antigoni Goni (Greece), and Berta Rojas (Paraguay); lutenist Lucas Harris (U.S./Canada); as well as Grammy Award winner and ukulele and slack key guitar player Daniel Ho (Hawaii/L.A.). These have appeared in the Society’s newsletter Guitarist and in Classical Guitar Magazine online.
https://classicalguitarmagazine.com/rising-guitar-star-an-exclusive-interview-with-bokyung-byun/
https://www.mnguitar.org/international-guitar-artists-2122/2021/7/29/daniel-ho-and-dani-joy-herreid
Dr. Richter has judged auditions for the Minnesota Guitar Society Youth Guitarathon as well as for the Schubert Club and the Minnesota Music Teachers Association Classical Guitar Annual Scholarship Competitions. She also served as juror for the 2010 St. Joseph (Missouri) International Guitar Festival & Competition, founded and directed by guitarist Anthony Glise. She is the recipient of the Artist Quick Start Grant from the Lake Region Arts Council of Minnesota for her collaborative work as a lutenist with Minneapolis-based soprano Linh Kauffman in preparation for a recital of early 17th-century music for voice and lute in 2022.
Dr. Richter holds master’s degrees in musicology and in guitar performance from the University of Minnesota and the equivalents of a B.A. and M.A. in British and American Studies from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she was awarded the Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a Graduate School Dissertation Research Grant, as well as a Research Assistance Grant from the Sinfonia Educational Foundation. As a guitarist, she studied with Petra Burmann, Ursula Klein, and Peter Gollnast in Germany, and with Jeffrey Van and Todd Green in the United States. Dr. Richter has a long-standing interest in traditional Irish music and has played flute in Irish music sessions in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and Ireland. While completing her dissertation, she worked as assistant editor for the Austrian History Yearbook at the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota.
When she is not teaching, researching, writing, or traveling to rehearsals, Dr. Richter freelances as an editor of scholarly writing, tutors German, and enjoys taking students to local art museums. She has also served as Artistic Evaluator for the Minnesota State Arts Board and is active as a visual artist. Most recently, she has worked with alcohol inks, inspired by the work of composer, musician, and multimedia artist Jo Verdis. Richter’s painting Follow the Light was shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the Foot in the Door 5: A Virtual Exhibition (2020/2021), an exhibition of works by Minnesota artists (https://collections.artsmia.org/exhibitions/2760/foot-in-the-door/search/keywords:follow%20the%20light).
In 2021, Follow the Light was selected by The Arts Partnership in Fargo for the Virtual Catalog to Fill Blank Spaces project. This painting was subsequently chosen by Fargo-Moorhead’s Tri-College University and will be installed as public art on the southeast corner of Concordia’s campus in Spring 2022. Richter’s first art exhibition of a series of her alcohol ink paintings, all created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is currently on view at the Twenty Below Coffee Co. in Fargo.