Benjamin D. Piekut

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph,Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. Situated at the intersection of free jazz, the Cagean avant-garde, Fluxus, radical politics, and popular music, the book portrays New York experimentalism in the 1960s as a series of conflicts, struggles, and exclusions. In 2019, he publishedHenry Cow: The World Is a Problem(Duke). A collective biography of the British rock band Henry Cow (1968–78), the book investigated how such vernacular musicians recast older questions of avant-garde politics in a space defined by the commodity form, the commercial marketplace, and an aural-tactile mode of reception and transmission. Excerpts of The World Is a Problem ran in Literary Huband Point of Departure, and reviews appeared in The Wire (UK), Nexos (MX), the Free Jazz Collective,Tribune, and theLos Angeles Review of Books, in addition to scholarly journals. The book was translated into Japanese in 2023.

Anna Steppler

Anna Steppler was awarded a Ph.D. in Musicology (December 2022) at Cornell for her dissertation “Michael Praetorius, the Organ, and the Possibilities of Instrumental Music,” which uses the music and theoretical writings of Praetorius to argue for the organ’s pivotal role in the establishment of instrumental music’s inherent theological and cultural value in early-seventeenth century Lutheran courtly circles. From London, U.K., she holds a first-class degree in Music from Merton College, Oxford, where she was organ scholar from 2010-2013, and a Masters degree on the Organ from Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden, where she was awarded the Carl Larsson Scholarship for Music. She has presented at conferences in the US and Europe, and has articles published and forthcoming in The Organ Yearbook and the Journal of Musicology. She is an active recitalist and organist, serving as organist and director of music for the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Cornell, and St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Ithaca.

Max Smith

Theodora Serbanescu-Martin

Theodora is a PhD Candidate in Musicology and a pianist. Her interdisciplinary interests cover the nineteenth century and beyond, and extend to pianism and other performance traditions; the long history of human sexuality, medicine, and gender; Romantic and fin-de-siècle European literature; media theory and the digital humanities; and pop scholarship. Within the nineteenth century, Theodora is interested in the way that broader Romantic ideologies reflected a tensioned relationship between…

Daniel Sabzghabaei

Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei (دانیال رضا سبزقبایی) is a creator who is interested in looking at time through different lenses: unpacking notions of tradition, exploring memories of those past, and investigating nostalgic frameworks that lean forward. His music has been commissioned and presented by organizations including: the GRAMMY winning New York Youth Symphony, JACK Quartet, National Sawdust, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Proton Bern, loadbang, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Intimacy of Creativity Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, TAK Ensemble, Beth Morrison Projects, the New York Festival of Song, bassist Robert Black, the Banff Centre, Contemporaneous, Guerilla Opera, the Moab Music Festival, Chorus Austin, the Young New Yorkers Chorus, Pro Coro Canada, The Esoterics, OPERA America, and VocalEssence among others. Daniel recently completed his doctorate at Cornell, where his dissertation focused on Persian Choral Music. Outside of music and interdisciplinary projects, Daniel also translates Persian poetry. Daniel is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Department of Music at Cornell University. https://danielsabzghabaei.com/

Michael Plagerman

Pursuant to his goals in professional church music, Michael Plagerman has interests in the repertoire and practice of sacred literature for the organ and choir through the last two centuries as well as the theory and performance practice traditions of 19th and 20th century France. An advocate for the musical education of congregations, Michael has sought to encourage participatory music making in the church through the organization of a number of concerts, choral workshops, and other…

Samantha Heinle

Samantha is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology with a secondary field in German studies. Her interdisciplinary research revolves around the intersection of music and literature in Austro-German works of the 19th and 20th centuries, including music-text relations, Literaturoper, and music in literature, and engages with aesthetics, critical theory, and media theory. She is currently writing her dissertation on questions of communicability in three musical adaptations of texts by Franz Kafka: Ernst…

Fred Cruz Nowell

Fred Cruz Nowell is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at Cornell University and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His research focuses on the intellectual history of art and other sense-objects, from the late-19th century to the present. His work brings together three fields, which are often separated today due to modern disciplinary divides: the history of music theory (HoT), religious studies, and Modern and Contemporary art. His dissertation, “On the Art of Spiritual Harmony”: Esoteric Music Theory in Early-20th Century Modern Art, bridges this gap by examining how three mystical modern artists, (Hilma af Klint, Vasily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp), integrated occult musical doctrines into their explicitly “esoteric” and religio-philosophical art. This work is supervised by Prof. Andrew J. Hicks. Before pursuing doctoral study, Fred was a University Fellow in the department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. He frequently collaborates on curatorial projects and has contributed to an array of exhibition essays and didactics, including the curatorial texts for Wu Tsang: Anthem (2018) at the Guggenheim Museum and the film program for the 14th Istanbul Biennal: SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought-Forms, among others.

Carlota Aguilar-Gonzalez

Carlota Aguilar González (she, her/they, them) is a current Ph.D. student in Musicology. Originally from south Spain, they developed a Hispanic border identity tied by the boundaries of the Atlantic ocean and the sounds of the Canary Islands and Andalucía. They completed their classical training in music studies with a Bachelor´s degree in Viola Performance from the Conservatorio Superior Rafael Orozco in Córdoba, Spain, continuing an itinerary that departed from the western canon to arrive at…

Judith A. Peraino

Judith Peraino's research in the areas of both medieval song and rock music concerns the intersection of subject formation, social identity, and musical expression. She is the author of two books: Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (2006), which investigates how music has been used throughout history to call into question norms of gender and sexuality; and Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (2011), which investigates how the music of medieval Occitan and French “courtly love” songs encodes the self-conscious complexity of subjectivity expressed in the lyrics. Her publications on rock music and constructions of gender and sexuality include articles on Blondie, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Mick Jagger, and early synthpop.

Juliana May Pepinsky

Juliana May Pepinsky is a lecturer and flute instructor at Cornell University where she leads the flute class. She received a Master of Music degree from Yale University and a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory. After completing her graduate degree, Juliana was an active flute teacher and classroom instructor of music theory and history at several colleges in Connecticut. While in Connecticut, she also played with the New Britain Symphony, the Waterbury Symphony, and numerous chamber groups. She has also been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Metro State College, and Regis University. In September of 2003, she performed on the inaugural concert of Zankel Hall, the new concert space at Carnegie Hall, under composer John Adams. Since arriving in Ithaca in 2008, Juliana has performed regularly at Cornell, especially on new music programs. She also plays with the Fingerlakes Flutes, a professional ensemble based in Ithaca. Her teachers include Michel Debost, Ransom Wilson, and Anne Diener Zentner.

Daniel Hawkins

Daniel Hawkins is a second-year musicology PhD student specializing in ethnomusicology. His research revolves around themes of participation and power, and includes interestes in sound and civic space, concepts of traditional music, theorizing whiteness, decolonization studies, and indigenous resistance camps. He has pursued ethnographic work in Flatbush (Brooklyn), Wet'suwet'en territory, and midcoast Maine, and presented his work at the Society for Ethnomusicology and the International…

Jihyun Kim

Jihyun Kim's music has appeared in the prestigious venues around the world, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, Seiji Ozawa Hall, Harris Hall in Aspen, DiMenna Center, Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence Italy, and Seoul Arts Center in Korea.
Jihyun’s works were performed by eminent ensembles such as American Composers Orchestra, Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Cornell Symphony Orchestra, Cornell Festival Orchestra, Tanglewood New Fromm Players, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, JACK Quartet, PUBLIQuartet, Asciano Quartet, Switch Ensemble, Karien Ensemble, and Chanticleer LAB Choir, and were featured in the Underwood New Music Reading, Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Mayfest, USF New Music Festival, Midwest Composers Symposium, Korean Music Expo.
Jihyun has been selected as the winner of the Consortium Commission from American Composers Orchestra/Alabama Symphony/American Youth Symphony, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, the League of Composers/ISCM Composers Competition, the American Prize in Orchestral music, the Libby Larsen Prize, PUBLIQ Access, Florence String Quartet Call for Scores, the 32nd Chang-ak Composition Competition, the Otto R. Stahl Memorial Award/ Russell Distinguished Teaching Award from Cornell University, and received honorable mentions from Red Note New Music Composition Competition, TEMPO New Music Ensemble Call for Scores, among many others.
Jihyun recently joined Washington State University as Lecturer in Composition.

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri (b. 1974) is a Greek-born composer and sound artist working in Ithaca, New York and Zurich Switzerland. Papalexandri’s works interweave the borderlines of sound art, musical composition, visual objects and performance and explore the factors that link these art forms. The world of sound and the visual appearance of her works are in continuous interaction, while being uncompromisingly precise, pure and economical in their means.

Sean Peters

Sean Peters is pursuing a Ph.D. in Musicology at Cornell University, specializing in Ethnomusicology. He holds a B.A. in Music (magna cum laude) from Texas Woman’s University where he was a member of the music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda. He is studying in pursuit of the Master of Arts degree in Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of North Texas where his thesis "Listening in the Living Room: The Pursuit of Authentic Spaces and Sounds in Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk…

Piyawat Louilarpprasert

“Young and gifted, meet the rebel Thai composer taking music to unheard heights”
(Described by CNN News World Report,Karla Cripps)

Sergio Cote Barco

Sergio Cote studied composition in Bogota, Colombia (2006-2011) in the Javeriana University with Guillermo Gaviria and Carlos Julio Ramirez. In 2015 he undertook his Master's degree in composition at the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester, UK, under the tutelage of David Horne and Adam Gorb. He has had additional lessons with Magnus Lindberg, Brian Ferneyhough, Javier Torres-Maldonado, and Pierluigi Billone. His music has been performed and commissioned worldwide by ensembles such as…

Jonathan Schakel

Jonathan Schakel is a DMA candidate in performance practice at Cornell University, where he works with Annette Richards and David Yearsley.  He holds a master’s degree in organ and early music from Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA, where he studied organ and harpsichord with Peter Sykes.  He has pursued further studies with Lorenzo Ghielmi, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, and Olivier Latry, and has participated in the summer organ academies in Smarano, Italy; in Haarlem, the Netherlands; and…

John Rowehl

John Rowehl is Associate Director of Choral Music at Cornell University and a doctoral student in the Performance Practice program within Cornell’s Department of Music. He has conducted the Chorale and the Cornell Chamber Singers since 2010. Prior to that, he worked with the Cornell University Glee Club, as Assistant Conductor beginning in 2002, and in the following decade conducted the ensemble at such venues as Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center, as well as on international tours to…

Shin Hwang

Shin Hwang, a prize-winner of the 1st International Westfield Fortepiano Competition, is a versatile keyboardist who has won recognition in both modern and historical performance. After completing his Masters degree at the University of Michigan with Penelope Crawford and Arthur Greene, he received the prestigious Fulbright Grant to study in the Netherlands at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. In 2011, he was invited to perform at the United States Library of Congress for the American…

David Friend

David Friend is a pianist specializing in contemporary and experimental repertoire. His playing has been called “astonishingly compelling” by the Washington Post and the New York Times has heralded him as “[one] of the finest, busiest pianists active in New York’s contemporary-classical scene.” He has performed new and experimental music around the world, including at major venues such as Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Festival Hall (London), the Chan Centre (Vancouver), and the National Centre for…

Maxwell Williams

I am a PhD candidate in musicology with a minor field in Africana studies. Before coming to Cornell, I received a B.A. in music from the University of Southampton, England where I completed a dissertation on intersections between punctuation form and schema theory in Mozart’s symphonic minuets, and was awarded the Lyttel Prize and the Edward Wood Memorial Prize for academic performance. My current research centers on questions of aesthetics and Blackness in hip-hop and musics of the African…

Morton Wan

I am a PhD candidate in musicology at Cornell University. My research broadly concerns the entwinement of music and political economy in history. I am currently completing my dissertation—a musical history of the world’s first modern financial meltdown in 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble. It examines the reciprocal influences between the speculative crisis and contemporaneous musical practice and discourse, arguing that European musical life provides a vital framework for understanding the advent of modern financial capitalism both through and as cultural history.

Annalise Smith

Annalise is a doctoral candidate in historical musicology, supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada. She holds a diploma in vocal performance, and has degrees in musicology from the University of Calgary (2008) and the University of Victoria (2011). Her dissertation focuses on late eighteenth-century French opera, particularly the operas of Christoph Gluck, the genre norms of operatic practice, and the politics and culture of the theatre before the French…

Aya Saiki

Originally from Japan, Aya received her BMus (Hons) in music and MMus in historical musicology from King’s College London. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines Tōru Takemitsu’s use of magnetic tape between 1955 and 1969 as a window into a web of aesthetics, techniques, technology, and individuals in the overlapping spaces between avant-garde, modernism, and mass culture in postwar Japan. Her other areas of interest include musical analysis (particularly text-music…