Faculty News 2021

Associate Professor Andrew Hicks has been appointed Director of Cornell's Medieval Studies Program and continues to serve as the House Professor and Dean of Hans Bethe House, a residential community in Cornell's West Campus. He recently published chapters in Powers: A History (Oxford University Press, 2021), Brill's Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brill, 2022), and Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (a special issue of Glossator, 2022), and has chapters forthcoming in Bloomsbury's New Cultural History of Western Music and the Cambridge History of Rhetoric. Over the past year, he presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society, and at an international symposium on "Musical Sources and Theories from Ancient Greece to the Ottoman Period," amid zooming around for other lectures and workshops (at Fordham and the Max Planck Institute, inter alia). He has been appointed co-editor of the Guillelmi de Conchis Opera omnia (Brepols) and has joined the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum. He continues to co-edit the Journal of Musicology. 

Violinist and Associate Professor Ariana Kim spent seven months on sabbatical studying, performing, and teaching in South Korea. Based at the National Gugak Center in Seoul, she took a deep dive into learning the gayageum, an ancient traditional Korean zither-style plucked harp. Ariana presented a series of solo and chamber music master classes at Seoul National University, performed as a guest artist at the Changwon International Music Festival outside of Busan, and was joined by pianist Hyojung Huh in two recitals at the National Praum Instrument Museum. She was also delighted to fall into a volunteer group who helped to lead weekly mountain hikes for people who are blind, co-fostered a Jindo puppy, and trad climbed more than 10,000 feet of fabulous granite. Returning to Cornell in January of this year, Ariana has begun a new role as Director of Undergraduate Studies and is thrilled to be back with her brilliant students. Upcoming projects include the editing of her second solo album, curating a performance for Liquid Music in Minneapolis, a residency with her NYC ensemble The Knights at the 92Y, and three on-campus collaborative recitals, one of which will feature a preview performance of a new piece she composed for violin and gayageum. 

In 2021, Senior Lecturer Annie Lewandowski premiered her multi-media project Siren – Listening to Another Species on Earth to audiences on Martha’s Vineyard, followed by installations at Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art, the K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics Gala, Invisible Dog Arts Center in Brooklyn, and, in early 2022, at MASS MoCA. Siren explores humpback whale song in a true meeting of intelligences – humpback whale, human, and artificial – in collaboration with artist and coder Kyle McDonald and scenic designer Amy Rubin. After much COVID-related postponement, Lewandowski hosted the Whale Listening Project at Cornell in September. This four-day event celebrated the beauty and conservation legacy of Songs of the Humpback Whale on its fiftieth anniversary. It included talks by record co-producers Roger and Katy Payne; a panel on Hawaiian humpback whales with whale biologists Chris Gabriele and Adam Frankel and artists McDonald and Lewandowski; a whale song workshop with Katy Payne and vocalist Daniela Gesundheit; and the installation of Siren. All in-person events were sold out; over 800 people participated virtually. Powerdove (Lewandowski and French multi-instrumentalist Thomas Bonvalet) released their tenth record, Machination, in June 2021 on the French record label Murailles Music. 

Despite becoming chair of the Department of Music in January 2021, Professor Alejandro L. Madrid maintained a busy schedule of guest lectures and publishing. He presented his work at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Florida, UCLA, Université de Montréal, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and as a keynote speaker at the Societat Catalana de Musicologia. He was invited as a panelist for the prestigious NYU/AMS Lecture. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) invited him to coordinate the 20th-21st century portion of its six-month long seminar “500 Years of Music in Mexico,” a unique and influential event that reflected on the development and meaning of musical practices in the country since the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1521. He published articles in the Spanish journal Anuario Musical and the Revista Argentina de Musicología —where he edited a special issue about the place and role of music biography as a genre in twenty-first-century Latin American musicology—; and co-wrote (with Josh Kun) a chapter in Carol Oja and Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s edited volume Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century. He also joined the editorial board of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Especially noteworthy is the publication of Professor Madrid’s sixth monograph, Tania León’s Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life, as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Music in American Life series. 

Paul Merrill, Associate Professor of the Practice and Herbert Gussman Director of CU Jazz spent winter break recording a full-length release with Peter Chwazik and Simon Bjarning. The trio explores new sonic contexts with unique instruments, such as Chwazik’s nine-string bass, Merrill’s quarter-tone trumpets, and Bjarning’s labyrinth of electro-acoustic percussion. The group made its debut at the 2021 ReSounds Festival and the recent recording will be available on streaming platforms later this spring. Merrill answered the challenge of pandemic music-making by networking audio with Dante technology. Musicians can rehearse or record from separate rooms with near-zero latency, effectively converting Lincoln Hall into a rather large, multi-use recording studio. He continues to advise co-curricular projects and enjoys working with students outside the classroom. Of note is the university-wide band competition, Big Red Icon, Slope Day’s next top band, a collaborative effort with student orgs Jazz+, the Cornell Concert Commission, and the Slope Day Programming Board. The winning band(s) are provided an opportunity to play at Slope Day events.  

Marianthi Papalexandri Alexandri continues to demonstrate her artistic excellence and commitment to cutting-edge research with significant awards such as the Aurelie Nemours Prize, Fondation Aurélie Nemours-Institut de France; the Cornell Biennial Award, and exhibitions of new sound sculptures, installations, and premieres at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, the Wasserkirche of Zurich, the ReSounds Festival at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, the Suginami Koaido Hall in Tokyo, and the Klangwerkstatt Festival Berlin. The percussion duo Hidden Mother premiered Papalexandri’s Human and Machine N1, N2, and N3 in August 2021 as part of a portrait concert at the Kalv Festival, Sweden, supported by the Swedish Arts Council. Ensemble Container and Switch Ensemble performed her motor and sound panel duo online. Papalexandri gave talks at the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland; the University of Glasgow’s Research Colloquia in Music; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium; Plataforma Bogotá Instituto Distrital de las Artes; and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Philosophy. Papalexandri is currently working on commissioned projects for the Ensemble Container, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Tacet (i), and is preparing solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise René, Paris; Festival Kortrij, Belgium; the Fondation Aurélie Nemours-Institut de France; and the Standing Pine Gallery in Nagoya, Japan.