Don Randel, Emeritus Professor of Musicology, received a Bachelor’s degree (1962), a Master of Fine Arts degree (1964), and a Ph.D. degree (1967) from Princeton University. He was a member of the faculty of the Department of Fine Arts at Syracuse University prior to coming to Cornell in 1968. Randel held the Given Foundation Professorship of Musicology at Cornell; his specialty was the music of the Middle Ages. However, Randel’s research interests were quite broad, including Mozarabic chant and music and culture of the Renaissance, as well as other subjects closely and distantly related (Arabic music theory, Panamanian music, salsa, jazz avant-gardism). His musical range is no more succinctly on display than in his editorship of encyclopedias, including the Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986; 4th ed., 2003), Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996), and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1999), a trio of works that have become standard references in the field. In 1991, while chairman of the Department of Music, he accepted the position of Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
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Graduate Student News 2020-21 Music
Faculty News 2020-21 Music
Graduate Student News 2019 Music
Violinist Sonya Monosoff was a pioneer in the period instrument movement, having been a member of Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica in its early years. Probably the first person in the United States to use the baroque violin in concert, she was the first to record the “Mystery” Sonatas and the Eight Sonatas of 1681 of Heinrich Biber. Her recording of Bach Sonatas with harpsichordist James Weaver won a Stereo Review “Best Record of the Year” award.
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A member of the Cornell music faculty for fifty years, from 1955 until his retirement in 2005, John Hsu is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Music, Emeritus. Through the years, he taught lessons in cello and viola da gamba, and courses in music theory, music history and performance practice; conducted the Cornell Collegium Musicum, the Sage Chapel Choir, the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, and the Cornell Symphony Orchestra; and was cellist of the Amadé Trio, Cornell’s resident ensemble. He was Chairman of the Department of Music 1966–71. He was a Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities in 1971–72, and was named the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in 1976. He founded the Cornell Summer Viol Program in 1970, which from 1972 to 1996 was the longest continuing summer music program devoted to the study of the French solo viola da gamba performing tradition.
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From 1980 until his retirement in 2011, Martin Hatch initiated and taught courses in music and musical traditions of Africa and Asia, elementary music theory, the history of American music, and ethnomusicology, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in Cornell University’s Department of Music and Department of Asian Studies. In keeping with the principle that scholarship is inextricably linked with “practice” and teaching, he founded the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble (Indonesian music) in 1972 and, in 2001, the Cornell Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Music Ensemble, and was instrumental in the founding of the Cornell Steel Band and samba ensemble.
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Malcolm Bilson has been in the forefront of the period-instrument movement for over thirty years. A member of the Cornell Music Department since 1968, he began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the “mainstream” repertory. In addition to an extensive career as a soloist and chamber player, Bilson has toured with the English Baroque Soloists with John Eliot Gardiner, the Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood, the Philharmonia Baroque under Nicholas McGegan, Tafelmusik of Toronto, Concerto Köln and other early and modern instrument orchestras around the world. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bard College and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Michael Sparhuber is the Director of Percussion in Cornell’s Music Department, where he leads the Cornell Percussion Ensemble. He is a 2012 graduate of theCurtisInstitute of Music, where he studied with Don Liuzzi, Robert Van Sice, and Alan Abel. As a performer, he has worked with conductors Simon Rattle and Alan Gilbert, and GRAMMY-winning ensembles including EighthBlackbirdand The Crossing.
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David Borden (born December 25, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American composer of minimalist music.
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