Faculty News 2023

Pianist Xak Bjerken writes, “This summer, I am traveling to perform at the American Academy in Rome and at the Skaneateles Festival. This past year, I toured nationally with saxophonist Steven Banks, performed in several recitals with Dawn Upshaw, hosted Gil Kalish, and co-directed our largest Mayfest ever. I also chaired the search committee that resulted in the hiring of Gabriela Gómez Estévez, our new assistant professor and director of orchestras at Cornell.”

Since her retirement in July 2021, Rebecca Harris-Warrick has been very busy. The comedic operatic mash-up she produced in Bailey Hall in March 2022, with a mixture of Cornell and professional performers, has been posted on YouTube. To see it, just enter its title, "The Pleasures of the Quarrel"; the video comes complete with subtitles. Since then she has collaborated on editing a new volume of the complete works of J-B Lully, taught in the early music program at Juilliard, given webinars and pre-concert talks for Opera Lafayette (a collaboration that continues into the next year), co-edited a book just published in France, presented new research on 18th-century court opera at a conference in Versailles, and, at the Boston Early Music Festival in June 2023, participated in a symposium on women composers and choreographers as well as giving pre-opera talks for this year’s fully-staged production of Desmarest’s Circé, which was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1694. She is often to be found in one of Cornell’s libraries, where she continues to revel in the treasures of the collections, old and new.

Associate Professor Andrew Hicks continues to serve as Director of Cornell's Medieval Studies Program and as House Professor and Dean of Hans Bethe House, a residential community in Cornell's West Campus. He has chapters forthcoming in Bloomsbury's New Cultural History of Western Music and the Cambridge History of Rhetoric. Over the past year he has lectured at Cambridge, Yale, and Athens (Greece), and has upcoming lectures in Hamburg, Kloster Neustift, Rome, and Oslo (inter alia). He is coeditor of the Journal of Musicology and the Guillelmi de Conchis Opera omnia (Brepols), and serves on the editorial boards of Music Theory Spectrum and the Journal of Medieval Latin.

This season brought many extraordinary musical moments to Ariana Kim’s calendar, from the world premiere of Laura Schwendinger's double violin concerto Nightingales with the Dubuque and Madison Symphonies, to a performance of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante with Milano Classica in Tuscany, and a Cornell debut with her bluegrass band, String Theory. Ariana began a multi-year appointment serving as a host of "This is Minnesota Orchestra," a live PBS broadcast of Minnesota Orchestra performances for which she conducts musicological research, creates content, and serves as the in-person and on-camera host for the concert. She served on the jury of the Chicago International Competition and presented guest master classes at the University of Toronto, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin. A fourth and final performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the Bay Area brought her 2020 pandemic postponements to a close. She concluded her on-campus performances with recitals featuring the music of Scotland and a Proust-inspired program of late 19th century French violin sonatas. This summer will be filled with album editing for her upcoming solo record which explores improvisation through the lens of Mozart and Beethoven with Roger Moseley, and world folk music with percussionist Shane Shanahan.

In May 2023, Senior Lecturer Annie Lewandowski was awarded a grant from the Atkinson Center for Sustainability Academic Venture Fund for Saved by the Whales: Science, Art, and Public Outreach. Her multi-year project employs a diverse team of scientists and artists to research how humpback whale songs – a critical component of the species’ mating system – were affected by a severe marine heat wave that swept the northeastern Pacific Ocean from late 2013-2016. Following completion of the research, the team will re-engage the public’s curiosity with the songs of humpback whales against the threat of climate change through multiple and diverse media. Over Spring Break 2023, Lewandowski’s students from MUSIC 1213: Music on the Brain Field Study expanded on their studies in humpback whale vocalizations through a community-engaged exploration of anthropogenic impact. Working with a small and dedicated team of artists, conservationists, and volunteers, 11 Cornell undergraduates, 2 graduate TAs, and Lewandowski cleaned up 8 tons – 15,750 pounds – of ghost gear (abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear) from Cuttyhunk, Massachusetts. A forthcoming website will showcase student creative projects, which draw from students’ reckoning with the scale of the ghost gear problem. Check the music department website for details.

Christopher J. Miller’s book Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music co-edited with Andrew McGraw, was published in 2022 by Cornell University Press. Based on the 2018 conference of the same name, the book's nineteen chapters reflect and further the significantly expanded scope of Indonesian music studies. In March 2023, Miller organized a klenengan (a gamelan gathering) that brought together some of the leading practitioners, Javanese and American-born, present in the United States. Miller is currently co-editing with Gavin Lee a special issue on Global Musical Modernisms for the journal Twentieth-Century Music.

During the 2022-2023 season, composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s music was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Lakes Area Music Festival (Minnesota), Gävle Symphony Orchestra (Sweden), EnSRQ (Sarasota), Chamber Music and Composers’ Forum of the East (New York), and Cornell’s Ensemble X. Her chamber work Microludes and her orchestral pieces Starling Variations and Moondog all received premieres this year. She also had great fun leading the Stucky Memorial Residency with loadbang, discussing orchestral music with the graduate composition students in her orchestration seminar, and introducing her undergraduate students to the wonders of composing!

Associate Professor Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri received a CHF 24,000 award from the Canton of Zurich for her sound installation Resonators N3. Commissioned by the Werkschau 2022 annual art competition, it was exhibited at the Museum Haus Konstruktive (Zurich) in September 2022. Additionally, Papalexandri and her long-term collaborator Pe Lang were commissioned by the Canton of Zurich to create two large-scale, permanent, site-specific installations, LED No. 7 and LED No. 8. These installations were developed with SAM Architects Studio for the laboratory building at Campus Irchel, University of Zurich. Solo exhibitions took place at the Multipleart (Zurich) while two-person exhibitions took place at the Tokyo International Art Fair, Art Salon (Zurich), Geneva International Art Fair, Galerie Denise René (Paris), and Standing Pine Gallery (Japan). Portrait concerts were given by percussion duo Hidden Mother (Konserthuset, Stockholm) and Tacet(i) Ensemble (Cornell / Spectrum, NYC). In winter 2023, Speak Percussion gave the Australian premiere of Duo for Motors and Sound Panels (Melbourne, Australia), while Curious Chamber Players performed Contact at Tage für Zusammenkünfte (Essen, Germany) and Cinnober Theater (Gothenburg, Sweden). Papalexandri lectured at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the Department of Philosophy, Cornell Tech Learning Spaces, MakerLABs, and the University of Huddersfield.

Judith Peraino spent 2022 on 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. Her article “I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes” in the Journal of Musicology (October 2019), was featured in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts exhibition "Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars," on display from June 9, 2022–March 4, 2023.

Professor Benjamin Piekut published an article (in Contemporary Music Review) on John Cage’s turn to practice and improvisation in the 1960s, and he saw three new editions of his books appear over the course of the academic year: a Japanese translation of Henry Cow (Getsuyosha) and paperback editions of both volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. In April, he spent a pleasant week in Vilnius, where he gave two talks, one on the prehistory of sound art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and a second on Black music’s institutional critique at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Later that month, he was the keynote speaker at a fun conference on music and language hosted by graduate students in the English and Music departments at SUNY Buffalo. Last August, he served as a faculty member of the Escuela de Invierno, an interdisciplinary program in contemporary opera hosted by AtlanticX and Fundación Williams (Buenos Aires), and he looks forward to participating again this “winter.” Finally, he had a great time teaching his undergraduate course, You Have Terrible Taste in Music, last fall, and puzzling with graduate students over the concept of Postmusic in the spring.

Steve Pond writes, “I gave the keynote speech, "Listening to Fusion, Hearing History” at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, on the state of fusion and its implications for jazz history. Given the proliferation of fused and mashed-up genres in jazz clubs today, the conference's theme of rethinking genre seems especially relevant. I’m currently turning my talk into an academic article, and will be teaching a new course, “Eclectic Jazz” next year. Besides these fun things, I’ve been playing head-spinning mashups of mid-century jazz, and various Brazilian and Afro-Cuban musics with the band MAQ, as well as leading Cornell’s Brazilian ensemble, Deixa Sambar."

James Spinazzola writes, “The Barbara & Richard T. Silver Wind Symphony recently celebrated the conclusion of an exciting year of music-making with performances at the 155th Cornell Commencement ceremonies. The 2022-2023 season included the premiere performances of Catherine Likhuta’s A Place That Is Yours (viola and chamber winds), John Berners’s All of Roses: Five Songs on Texts by D.H. Lawrence (soprano and chamber winds), and Spool by DMA candidate Josh Biggs (wind ensemble). The Wind Symphony also collaborated with guest composer Adam Gorb; soloists John Haines-Eitzen, Thomas Feng, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Victoria Miskolczy, Matthew Murchison, and Alex Shuhan; guest conductor Bradley Ethington; and Yamatai, Cornell’s taiko drumming group.”