Faculty News 2019

Assistant Professor Catherine Appert published her monograph In Hip Hop Time: Music, Memory, and Social Change in Urban Senegal in late 2018 on Oxford University Press. Her second article published in Ethnomusicology, “Engendering Musical Ethnography,” won an honorable mention for the Marcia Herndon Award for exceptional work in the ethnomusicology of sexuality and gender. In addition to giving an invited talk at the University of Chicago musicology colloquium, she presented on her second book project at the annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US branch. Supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the West African Research Association, she will continue conducting fieldwork for that project this summer, working with reggae musicians and sound system deejays in Senegal. Appert was also recently quoted in an LA Times article on the influence of contemporary African pop music in US hip hop. 

For Associate Professor Kevin Ernste, 2018-2019 saw the release of three new CDs and a video album. The first, Draw the Strings Tight by guitarist Ken Meyer, includes his piece Roses Don’t Need Perfume for solo guitar and electronics, as well as recording engineer credits for the album. A second release, Music in the American Wild, was the culmination of a 2016 US National Parks Centenary commissioning project, including a double-CD and video album made from natural footage gathered during the 2016-2017 US performance tour. The audio and video discs include Ernste’s work, Interregnum for chamber ensemble and bowls of water. A final CD (CAGE | Bertoia) with improvising ensemble CAGE (co-founded by Ernste in 2011) features music made on the collection of Bertoia Sculptures at the H.F. Johnson Museum of Art. This unique disc includes performing, recording, and mastering credits for Ernste. Professor Ernste expects two further discs in 2019-2020, one featuring his newest piece, Chorale for chamber ensemble and live electronics, based on the music of former colleague Steven Stucky, as well as Hyperorgan, featuring organist Randall Harlow (University of Iowa), recorded by Ernste in the Summer of 2018 on the Baroque organ in Cornell’s Anabel Taylor Chapel. Ernste continues to host large-scale artistic projects at Cornell, as with this year’s invitation of Luciano Chessa and his Orchestra of Futurist Intoners (a Performa commission), including a 3-hour performance and exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art in October, 2018. The event drew an audience of 900 visitors and combined student compositions and improvised pieces with Italian Futurist poetry and manifestos delivered via megaphone. This Fall, Ernste and several other music faculty will bring carillonist Tiffany Ng (University of Michigan) for performances and a recording on the Cornell Chimes.

Arthur Groos gave the keynote address (“Japan in Madama Butterfly / Madama Butterfly in Japan”) at an international Japan Studies conference in Tel Aviv on December 20.

Professor Rebecca Harris-Warrick’s continued collaborations with colleagues in Europe found expression this year in publications, conference presentations, and public talks. In June 2018 she and dancer Hubert Hazebroucq gave a lecture-demonstration in Paris at the international conference Repenser la Musique en France à l’Epoque Baroque (Rethinking Music in France during the Baroque Era) that questioned received notions about the categorization of dance types; the presentation generated a good deal of discussion across the conference. In August she presented research about staging practices at an academic conference on Rameau held during the Utrecht Early Music Festival (Netherlands) and also gave an overview of her research for the general public. In November she gave an invited talk at the conference Music Theatre in Motion: Reflections on Dance in Opera, sponsored by Opera Flanders in Ghent (Belgium), as well as a seminar on research methodologies for graduate students in dance studies at the University of Nice (France). In June 2019 she will give two presentations at the Boston Early Music Festival—a pre-concert talk and a lecture-demonstration with two baroque dancers that continues research she presented in 2017 at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, plus a research presentation at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference in Paris. She is co-editing the book La Danse française et son rayonnement (1600-1800), to be published in Paris by Classiques Garnier, she continues her work on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and she has contributed several articles to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Royale de Musique sous l’Ancien Régime, to be published later this year. An article about her from CornellResearch may be found online.

After an engaging and productive semester as the Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History at the American Academy in Berlin in the spring of 2018, which allowed him the opportunity to lecture across Europe (at the University of Cambridge, Université Paris-Diderot, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Associate Professor Andrew Hicks has enjoyed his return to Ithaca. He has published chapters in the Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being (Routledge), The Music Road: Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India (Oxford University Press), and A Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism (Brill), all of which draw on research from his next book project, The Broken Harp: Listening Otherwise in Classical Persian Literature. His first book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos, won both the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award and the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar book award. He gave colloquium talks for the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Columbia University; was an invited panelist at “Ars Antiqua III: Music and Culture in Europe, c.1150–c.1330” (Lucca, Italy); and gave a keynote address, “Hypomnema, Commentarius, Sharḥ, Zhuan: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Commentary,” for a conference at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. He recently accepted the co-editorship, with Elaine Kelly, of the Journal of Musicology and continues to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Medieval Latin and as the music series editor for TEAMS Medieval Institute Publications.  

Violinist Ariana Kim, now in her seventh year, earned her place as a newly tenured Associate Professor here at Cornell. In addition to a Grammy nomination for her quartet’s album Blueprinting, this year brought about two new co-artistic directorships: the Paesaggi Musicali Toscani festival in Italy which takes place in Siena each summer, and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, a beloved series in the Twin Cities now entering its 20th year. The Aizuri Quartet recently completed a run of performances premiering Michi Wiancko’s first opera, Murasaki’s Moon at the MET Museum, and will perform their final concert in mid-June featuring the midwest premiere of Evan Premo’s Deeply Known. Ariana has been broadening her work in the realm of world folk tradition, studying Hindustani and Carnatic violin traditions and bringing back her bluegrass and old-time fiddle roots of her childhood here in Ithaca. The upcoming year will see a Brahms sonata cycle at the University of Minnesota with pianist Kyung Kim as well as three Beethoven concerto performances in celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.

Senior Lecturer Annie Lewandowski received a grant from the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future for a new collaboration with bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne and the Hawai’i Marine Mammal Consortium exploring the effects of anthropogenic noise on humpback whale song. She was awarded a Cornell Council for the Arts grant to present this material in April 2020. Annie recently initiated a new collaboration with Google Creative Lab, where she is serving as a consultant in their development of AI that recognizes patterns in humpback whale song. During a week-long tour of England and Scotland in August/September, Annie’s band Powerdove performed and were interviewed live on BBC Radio Three’s “Late Junction.” Powerdove were guests of the Performing and Media Arts Department in March for a collaboration with Jumay Chu and Locally Grown Dance. Annie’s Euripidean song cycle Bitter Banquet was staged at the Franklin Stage Company in July, and the studio recording of Bitter Banquet was released on Fo’c’sle Records in December. Accompanying record release concerts took place in San Francisco with Fred Frith, Theresa Wong, and David Yearsley, and in New York with the new music ensemble Yarn/Wire. Bertoia, the new record by CAGE (with Kevin Ernste and Chris Miller), was released on Weighter Records in January.

Professor Alejandro L. Madrid’s year began with an invitation as visiting scholar and lecturer at Universidad Alberto Hurtado’s Instituto de Música in Santiago de Chile, where he presented his work on music biography theory based on his current project about Cuban-American composer Tania León, and supervised a project about transnational flows between German and Chilean modernist music scenes. Additionally, he was invited as the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the Royal Music Association, hosted by the University of Bristol, and the conference “Decentering the Nation. Music, Mexicanidad and Globalization” at the University of Connecticut. He presented lectures at the University of California-San Diego and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and was invited to join research initiatives hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California-Riverside. In collaboration with the Momenta Quartet, Madrid presented a lecture-recital about Mexican composer Julián Carrillo’s string quartets at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC. Furthermore, he also presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory and was invited to lead sessions and workshops at the pre-conferences of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Besides continuing his work as the editor of Oxford University Press’ award winning series "Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music," Madrid joined Cambridge University Press’ journal Twentieth-Century Music as co-editor. He was also invited as a member of the editorial board of Música e Investigación, the peer-reviewed journal published by Argentina’s Instituto Nacional de Musicología “Carlos Vega.” Finally, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Musicological Society as Director-at-Large; and was invited to join the Graduate Field of Cornell University’s Romance Studies Department.

Associate Professor Roger Moseley’s article “Chopin’s Aliases” was published in Nineteenth-Century Music and he presented his research on Schubert, digital games, music notation, and audiovisual synchronization at Duke University, Northwestern University, the University of Hong Kong, and the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS). He continues to work on his second monograph Romantic Artifacts while preparing essays for The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music and Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Music: The Age of Industry. Performances included Mozart’s Sonata for Keyboard Duet, K. 497, with Shin Hwang and Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire with soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon. As a CIVIC Media Fellow at Cornell, Moseley devised and taught “Thinking Media,” a new interdisciplinary course featuring guest faculty from across the campus. He served on the program committee for the 2019 annual meeting of the AMS and was elected to Cornell’s Humanities Council. In July 2019, he will serve as interim chair of the Department of Music.

Assistant Professor Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri received a grant by the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation to premiere Generator/Operator, commissioned by the Austrian contemporary chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien, presented in February at the ECLAT Festival, Stuttgart, and in May at the Wiener Konzerthaus and the Internationales Musikfest | Hamburg, Elbphilharmonie. She also received a commission grant by the ProHelvetia Swiss Art Council to premiere Solo for Motors and Wind Resonators, a performative sound installation, in March at the Festival Archipel in Geneva, where she was also invited as a featured sound artist, and presented a solo exhibition of her sound sculpture modular | n°2 – speaking of membranes, currently on view at the Mario Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin. In April, her sound specific composition Square commissioned by Onassis Center in cooperation with ZKM (Center of Art Media Karlsruhe), co- funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe Program, was recorded by the dissonArt ensemble. She was also nominated artist in residence at the Fluxum Foundation for Composes in Geneva and the Instrument Inventors Initiative organization in the Hague. This summer she is looking forward to exhibit a large-scale performative installation at the Kunstmuseum of Basel, commissioned by the Festival ZeitRäume, supported by the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation. Here at Cornell, Papalexandri’s sound installation Contact Points supported by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) was exhibited in October at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in parallel with the 2018 Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) Biennial. Together with Dr. Sophia Efstathiou, NTNU, and with the support of the Society for the Humanities, Cornell, Papalexandri developed workshops on Ethics, Improvisation and Sound, piloted with participants in the spring 2019 course, Shaping Sound. This May, Papalexandri and roboticist and mechanical engineer Assistant Professor Guy Hoffman were awarded a NYC Visioning initiative grant to investigate Human and Machine Improvisation in Action.

Judith Peraino published the essay “Taking Notae on King and Cleric: The Social Worlds of Song in the Chansonnier de Noailles,” in Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (June 2019); and presented at the SXSW Conference and Music Festival in Austin, TX on “The Politics of Punk in the Era of Trump” (March 2019). She has two articles forthcoming in Fall 2019: “I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes” is forthcoming in in The Journal of Musicology; and “Pussy Riot: Punk on Trial” in The Oxford Handbook of Punk Music.

Associate Professor Benjamin Piekut published an article on the organization Music for Socialism in Twentieth-century Music, and has co-edited a special issue of Third Text on amateurism with Julia Bryan-Wilson. His book, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, will be published by Duke University Press in September 2019. He also co-curated the Time:Spans 2019 festival of contemporary music in New York City, which will take place in August. He is excited to teach a new course—on postwar music and sound—in the music history sequence this fall, and has begun work on a new book on music, dance, performance, and video in the 1960s and 70s.

Postdoctoral Associate Leila Tayeb’s entry, “Libya: Modern and Contemporary Performance Practice,” was published in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, edited by Janet Sturman. She presented work at conferences of the Middle East Studies Association, African Studies Association, University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre, and the Portuguese Center for Humanities. She worked on the editorial collective of Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies, which will release its inaugural issue this fall.

While checking nearly 1,000 pages of proofs in German for his new edition of the Köchel Catalogue of Mozart’s Works, Neal Zaslaw, the Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, is currently researching 18th-century Italian music. He is an active member of the board of the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung (Salzburg), is general editor of the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era, and serves on the editorial boards of the new complete editions of the music of Francesco Geminiani and of Giuseppe Tartini. Two articles published in 2019 are: “Boccherini’s Symphonies: Generic and Historiographical Puzzles” and “Adagio de Mr. Tartini. Varié de plusieurs façons différentes, très utiles aux personnes qui veulent apprende à faire des traits sous chaque note de l’harmonie.” Zaslaw recently gave guest lectures and master classes on Mozart’s chamber music at the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory.