Western Early Keyboard Association

Carol lei Breckenridge specializes in eighteenth-century music on period keyboards. With early study and degrees in modern piano, in the 1980’s she began to acquire historic keyboard copies of fortepiano, harpsichord, and clavichord, in order to discover how they illuminate repertoire of their time. 

Degrees in piano performance (B.M., M.M., D.M.A.) have been augmented with a 1997-98 Fellowship at Cornell University, studying fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson, as well as studies on harpsichord with Edward Parmentier and Joan Benson on clavichord. 

In 2022, Carol lei was honored to become the recipient of Early Music America’s Joan Benson Clavichord Award. In November 2022, Carol lei received her newly completed Silbermann piano by Kerstin Schwarz of Zerbst, Germany, copied from the 1749 Silbermann in Nuremberg, ideal for the music of the Bach family and also Iberian composers. A video of the Silbermann was recorded by Paul Hanau in March, 2023, with Kerstin Schwarz, builder, and Carol lei playing some sample pieces, and is published on WEKA’s YouTube channel, along with other videos by Carol lei for WEKA (“Haydn and Keyboards of His Time” and “Introduction to the Clavichord”). Audio recordings of Carol lei’s keyboards can be found at Soundcloud.com.