Faculty News 2020-21

Associate Professor Catherine Appert spent the 2019-20 academic year as a faculty fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities. Her article "Ethnomusicology Beyond #MeToo: Listening for the Violences of the Field," co-authored with Sidra Lawrence, was published in the spring 2020 issue of Ethnomusicology, and her invited essay "Of Melody, Markets, and Mobilization: A History of Hip-Hop in Dakar, Senegal" appeared in Hip-Hop en Français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. She organized a roundtable, "Being and Becoming Black: Theorizing Performance and Belonging between Africa and its Diasporas" for the annual meeting of the African Studies Association. Funded by a fellowship from the West African Research Association, Appert spent the summer of 2019 conducting research in Dakar for an article on the diasporic movements of trap and Afrobeats. While there, she presented her 2018 monograph to local scholars, students, and members of the hip hop community in a talk titled “Dans le rythme du rap, à l’époque du rap: Histoire et esthétique du hip hop à Dakar," hosted by the West African Research Center; the talk and following Q&A with rapper Simon was covered in Senegal's premier newspaper, Le Soleil.

Since Covid began, Professor Xak Bjerken has been working with saxophonist Steven Banks, winner of the Young Concert Artists audition, performing virtual concerts that include three new works by Carlos Simon, Saad Hadad, and Steven himself. Their concert in Merkin Hall in New York City will be streamed starting March 10 (noted here). In addition, Xak has been recording videos for the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, and with the help of Columbia University, unearthing unpublished works by composer Ulysses Kay. And finally, his album of three piano concertos written for him by Elizabeth Ogonek, Stephen Hartke, and Jesse Jones, entitled The Oberlin Concerti, will be released by Naxos on May 1.

In the past year, Lucy Fitz Gibbon (interim director of the vocal program) and Ryan McCullough (DMA ’20, visiting lecturer) released two albums with Albany Records: Descent/Return, which was recorded at Cornell and features the music of John Harbison and James Primosch, and Beauty Intolerable, a 2-CD set that contains performances of the collected vocal works of Sheila Silver by artists also including Dawn Upshaw and Stephanie Blythe. Additionally, they were featured on PBS Great Performances’ Now Hear This: The Schubert Generation. Their pandemic concert recordings include important modern premieres of Yiddish song cycles by Joel Engel and Moses Milner; a recital, “Out of Silence,” featuring music by women and/or Black composers; a Schubertiade pairing of Schubert and Amy Williams for concerts curated by Shai Wosner; a lecture-recital with Mackenzie Pierce (PhD ’19) on postwar Polish music for the conference “Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”; and a forthcoming premiere of works by composers including Loren Loiacono (DMA ’19) for Kettle Corn New Music. Their 2019 film of Anna Lindemann’s art-science theatrical work exploring the eusocial behavior of Eciton burchellii, The Colony, received Honorable Mention in the 2020 Imagine Science Film Festival.

Arthur Groos, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, emeritus, was the recipient of a Festschrift,“Diz vliegende bîspel”: Ambiguity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, edited by Marian E. Polhill and Alexander Sager (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2020).

Rebecca Harris-Warrick will be retiring from Cornell in June and is happy that, for her last two courses, she is sharing the same space with the students, even if everyone is masked and several feet apart in an enormous room. They have collectively discovered that classroom discussions may be a challenge under the circumstances, but they are still possible. Covid permitting, she will make her formal farewell to teaching at Cornell by producing another eighteenth-century opera in the spring of 2022. In the meantime, her research life continues; in recent months she has published articles in the Dictionnaire de l’Opéra de Paris sous l’Ancien Régime (Classiques Garnier), L’Histoire de l’Opéra en France (Fayard), Journal of the Music Library Association, and the Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera. She remains active on several editorial boards in the US, France, and Germany, and is particularly engaged in the critical edition of the complete works of Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Associate Professor Andrew Hicks has given several keynote lectures since his last newsletter report. The second half of 2019 found him in Toronto, Canada, to deliver the Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture at the Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto); in Berkeley, CA, to herald a new partnership between the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States; and in Southampton, UK, to address the Society for Music Analysis Summer School. His 2020 lecture tour was cancelled, but he did squeeze in a visit to Stony Brook University for a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Kepler's Harmonices Mundi, just before the pandemic. He has articles recently published or forthcoming this year in the Journal of Medieval Latin, Powers: A History (Oxford University Press), Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, Bloomsbury's New Cultural History of Western Music, and Brill's Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism. He continues to co-edit the Journal of Musicology, among other editorial endeavors, and is the House Professor and Dean of Hans Bethe House, a residential community in Cornell's West Campus Housing System. 

With 2020 looking entirely different from any other on record, Ariana Kim embraced the silver linings of being fortunate to stay healthy. From building a bouldering gym in her parents’ garage, to sewing more than 500 masks for family, friends, and healthcare workers, cooking with abandon, creating a plexiglass wall for her office to make in-person teaching safer, and spending tons of time outdoors rock climbing, there were so many things for which to be grateful. As most performing artists faced a near daily existential crisis about what it means to be a musician at this moment, Ariana also leaned into online recitals, outdoor “drive-in” concerts, and discovering more about music tech than she had ever imagined she would. In September, she put forth an important piece honoring George Floyd and the countless other victims of police brutality. Together with composer Steve Heitzeg and writer-narrators Lou Bellamy and Sarah Bellamy, Ariana created a multimedia piece scored for solo violin and spoken word, set to video and photo imagery of the street art and demonstrations in Minneapolis. It is with great excitement (and a little anxiety) that Ariana will spend the next year on sabbatical from Cornell living and working in Seoul, South Korea. 

In 2020, Senior Lecturer Annie Lewandowski received a commission from Media Art Xploration (MAX) to create a large-scale piece exploring the creative minds of humpback whales in collaboration with code artist Kyle McDonald. Lewandowski and McDonald’s piece will integrate human and machine learning perspectives, which they will discuss with Curator of General Ecology at London’s Serpentine Galleries Lucia Pietroiusti at the upcoming MAX Forum on March 14. Performances in New York City and San Francisco are slated for Fall 2021. Due to Covid, Lewandowski’s band Powerdove has delayed the release of their record Machination on Murailles Music to April 2021. Machination features a collection of eight new songs by Lewandowski and long-time collaborator Thomas Bonvalet, recorded in France in Fall 2019. Tour dates to follow in later 2021. Also delayed by Covid is the Whale Listening Project, a series of events at Cornell organized by Lewandowski celebrating the legacy of Katy and Roger Payne on the fiftieth anniversary of their co-produced recording “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” Look for a Fall 2021 date announced soon.

Alejandro L. Madrid was invited as a keynote speaker for two international conferences: "Transnational Soundscapes: Literary and Sonic Cultures across the Americas and Iberia," hosted by Duke University's Department of Romance Languages, and "Music and Society in the Americas," hosted by Universität Bern. He also presented lectures at UC Berkeley, Western University, Yale University, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In the fall of 2020, Madrid had two books published in Spanish, En busca de Julián Carrillo y el Sonido 13, by Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado from Santiago de Chile; and Danzón. Diálogos de música y baile por la cuenca del Caribe (co-authored with Robin Moore), by Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, Mexico. He started a three-year term as co-editor of the journal Twentieth-Century Music and continues to serve as Editor in Chief of Oxford University Press's award-winning series Currents in Iberian and Latin American Music. In January 2021 he was appointed chair of the Department of Music.

udith Peraino published the article “I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes” in The Journal of Musicology (October 2019), which detailed her discovery of a tape of unknown songs created by Lou Reed for Andy Warhol. This article led to news stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone among other media outlets, and earned the 2020 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2020 Philip Brett Award from the LGBT Study Group of the AMS. In the first few months of 2020, before the campus shut down due to the pandemic, Peraino co-curated the exhibition Electrifying Music: The Life and Legacy of Robert Moog, and co-organized the opening festival When Machines Rock: A Celebration of Robert Moog and Electronic Music, featuring electronic music pioneers Gary Numan, Suzanne Ciani, and Suzi Analogue. In December 2020, Peraino was awarded a twelve-month fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on her book Popism in Stereo: A Musical Guide to the Warhol Seventies.

In early 2020, Benjamin Piekut began curating a series of columns on music and sound for the website of the Italian magazine Flash Art, where he serves as a contributing editor. His feature on performance artist Anne Imhof appears in this spring’s print issue. With Julia Bryan-Wilson, he co-edited a special issue of Third Text on the subject of amateurism, and they also co-wrote an introductory essay on the topic. Finally, his dialogue with Tamara Levitz about the afterword to his Henry Cow book appeared in the ASAP/J website over the summer. Otherwise, he has been working on his Spanish, playing chess, and reading novels.

With an Italian colleague, David Rosen organized the international conference Giacomo Puccini, “Il trittico, 1919–2019: Fonti, drammaturgia, messinscena (sources, dramaturgy, staging),” in the summer of 2019 in Lucca, Italy. Rosen presented a paper on the staging manual (disposizione scenica) for Il tabarro. At the 2019 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston, he read “Or piango, or canto: Rinuccini, Monteverdi, and a Pair of Petrarch Sonnets”, a paper that developed from Carol Rosen’s discovery of a Petrarch quotation in the revised ending of Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

In remarkably challenging circumstances, James Spinazzola spent the year constantly rethinking and reinventing his approach to making music with the Cornell Wind Symphony. The ensemble has continued to flourish through a path-breaking collection of in-person and remote rehearsals, performances, and guest lectures; and has found unique opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the Wind Symphony began the fall rehearsing in a tent on the Arts Quad. These rehearsals culminated in a performance for a live audience featuring George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Professor Xak Bjerken. Also in the fall, the Wind Symphony continued its longstanding partnership with musical organizations in Haiti through a series of video lectures. The globally recognized Haitian band RAM presented five sessions on Haitian Vodou drumming, Rara, and Mizik Rasin (roots music). Noted civil engineer Michael Gay (father of best-selling author Roxane Gay) spoke about his experiences as a Haitian-American. A.D. White Professor-at-Large Wynton Marsalis concluded the lecture series with a discussion about his first piece for wind band, which the Wind Symphony is scheduled to premiere in November 2021. Unwilling to abandon the prospect of live ensemble rehearsals, the Wind Symphony has pioneered synchronous ensemble performance over the Internet. Two members of the ensemble, Alex Coy (ECE, ’21) and James Parker (CS, ’21) have co-written a new software application called Live Rehearsal, which unites low-latency audio communication with encryption security and a user-friendly interface. Currently, the 44-member group is using Live Rehearsal to make music in unprecedented fashion. Each rehearsal positions the conductor and brass section in one room, the percussion section in another, and 20 woodwind players in individual rooms throughout Lincoln Hall. All students participate equally through bidirectional audio connections, and one-way video monitoring enables them to respond to nonverbal conducting gestures.

Amidst the teaching (in-person and on Zoom) and cloistered writing of his book Bach Laughs, David Yearsley has been presenting virtual organ recitals available through the website of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards. Among these offerings, presented on Anabel Taylor Chapel's world-famous baroque-style organ, was February's "Handel's Feet." More informally still, his impromptu take on the alma mater done in the early days of the pandemic last Spring was enjoyed by many in Ithaca and beyond.