Graduate Student News 2019

During his first year, Thomas Cressy (Musicology) presented: “Baroque Music's Arrival in Japan: New Information from the Sources of the Foreign Settlements” (The Organ in the Global Baroque, Cornell University), “Hotaru no Hikari (Light of the Fireflies)': the Japanese uses and the reception history of 'Auld Lang Syne” (Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow), and was honored to be part of a distinguished panel for “Intercultural and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Bach's St. Matthew Passion” (UMass Amherst). Publications this year: Electrified Voices book review in Current Musicology, the article ‘Bach in early Shōwa period Japan (1926-1945)’ in Intercultural Music Studies, a translation of Tanaka Shōhei’s ‘Incentive for the Idea of Just Intonation’ for Routledge, and a book chapter on Japanese ritual and religion. He was awarded an EAP language study grant to study Chinese in Beijing over the summer, and was also invited to the Central Conservatory of Music as a guest lecturer.

In addition to completing his first year at Cornell University and all the activities related therein, Miles Jefferson Friday (Composition) spent the year attending IRCAM's Manifeste Academy, the Red Note Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Splice Institute, Grafenegg Festival (Ink Still Wet), and the Bangkok New Music and Arts Symposium. At these festivals Miles had premiers by the Fifth House Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Tonkunstler Orchestra, and the Tacet(i) Ensemble, worked with Ensemble Intercontemporain, and studied with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Marko Nikodijevic, and Kyong Mee Choi.

This past year, Jordan Musser (Musicology), while on a Sage fellowship, presented two conference papers, the first at the biennial meeting of the North American British Music Studies Association (Utah State), and the second at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (San Antonio, TX). He submitted two articles for review, both of which were accepted for publication. The first, “Carl Czerny’s Mechanical Reproductions,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (Summer 2019), and the second, “The Avant-Garde Is in the Audience: On the Popular Avant-Gardism of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dub Poetry,” will appear in Twentieth-Century Music (Fall 2019). Additional highlights span several guest teaching engagements, and performing and recording with the Latin band, Palonegro. Next year, he will teach a first-year writing seminar at Cornell, titled “Sound Writing: Music and Media,” and an upper-level course on punk music and culture at Syracuse University, simply called “Punk.”

Sergio Ospina Romero (Musicology) published the article "Ghosts in the Machines and Other Tales around a 'Marvelous Invention': Player-Pianos in Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century," in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (72.1, Spring 2019). Sergio's Latin Band, Palonegro, released its first CD: the album Two Minutes Apart (available in iTunes, Spotify, and many more places!). Sergio also completed and defended his dissertation, and was conferred the Ph.D in May. He accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Musicology at Indiana University, starting in 2021. In the meantime he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá (Colombia). 

This year, Charles Peck (Composition) has been named a winner of composition competitions with the Columbus Symphony, the New Music Miami ISCM Festival, the Foundation for Modern Music, Iceberg New Music, F-Plus Trio, Quartet Nouveau, Delirium Musicum, and the Forest Collective. He was also awarded a commission from the Barlow Endowment for Music and had his music performed by Contemporaneous, Sandbox Percussion, the Network for New Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Catchfire Collective, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, and the Society for New Music All-Stars, among others. Peck's work has been featured at a number of festivals including CULTIVATE at the Copland House, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Charles Ives Concert Series, the TUTTI Festival, and the SCI Conference at Indiana University.

Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei (Composition) saw a number of interesting projects come to fruition. In the Fall, his wind ensemble work ThruDimension was performed by the Indiana University Symphonic Band (Eric Smedley, cond.) at the 2018 SCI National Student Conference, and his men’s chorus+tuba work Father Mapple’s Whaling Hymn premiered by the College of Central Florida Men’s Chorus. The semester concluded with the premiere of Daniel’s multimedia scene for the International Contemporary Ensemble Dinner for Three which was included in the Cornell Council for the Arts 2018 Biennial in an evening of new works called Sound/Stage at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. In the Winter, Daniel was selected for the Choral Art Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada, a tuition-free arts residency which brings together composers, conductors, and choirs to explore new paths in the choral art. While in Banff, Daniel collaborated with Alberta’s leading choral ensemble Pro Choro Canada on the premiere of two new works: Ode to Abadan and Zemestun. In March, Daniel’s 2017 New York Festival of Song commission At The Door saw a reprise on NYFOS’ Mainstage season on a concert entitled Hyphenated–Americans at Merkin Hall inside of the Kaufman Music Center. The Spring saw the premiere of his new wind ensemble work Hommage à Khaleqi, commissioned by the Cornell University Wind Ensemble, and two performances of his scene for mezzo on an unfinished Oscar Wilde text The Seduction of Honorius by the Hartford Opera Theater. This summer, Daniel will be a featured composer on three festivals, collaborating on three different works: his string orchestra work May 29 – June 29 will be performed at the VI Encontro Internacional de Cordas in Limeira, Brazil by festival faculty and participants, his chamber work At any rate – I. ATLP will be performed by TACETi ensemble at the Thailand New Music and Art Symposium 2019, and his viola and mezzo duet ...under this blue of my land will round out a program at the 2019 Moab Music Festival. Next Fall and Spring, Daniel will be collaborating with the Eurasia Festival on concerts in Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. as one of four Emerging Artists.

This spring, Theodora Serbanescu-Martin (Musicology) presented two papers, the first, “Recomposing Brahms’s Op. 116 Capriccios: “Hidden” Virtuosity, Brahmsian Lateness, and the Aesthetic of Impossibility” at the International Conference “The Intellectual Worlds of Johannes Brahms” in Irvine, California, and the second, “A Modernist Romanticism? Evaluating the Decline of Rhythmic Flexibility in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Performances of Virtuosic Brahms and Liszt” at the 4th annual HPI conference, “Historical Performance: Theory, Practice, Interdisciplinarity,” in Bloomington, Indiana. Next semester, Theodora will be competing in the first round of the 12th International Liszt Competition Utrecht. She will also be in charge of organizing and leading her conference "Performing Clara Schumann,” which will take an interdisciplinary angle to celebrating one of the greatest nineteenth-century female virtuosos on her bicentennial.

During the 2018-19, Richard Valitutto (Performance Practice) was busy with performances and recording projects across the US and in Eastern Europe. In December 2018, he presented solo and duo programs in Skopje, Macedonia (Macedonia Philharmonic) and Belgrade, Serbia (Spectrum East) with saxophonist Dave Wilson. They premiered their collaborative concept-album SLANT, the studio recording of which was released in May 2019 on the pfMENTUM label. In March 2019, he performed other specially curated solo programs featuring new work premieres with Music for a Great Space (Greensboro NC), Dilijan Chamber Music (Los Angeles CA), and a solo set in April 2019 with Convergences Music (Brooklyn NY) garnering him a concert preview in The New Yorker, in which he was dubbed “a keyboard superstar”. As an ensemble member, in January 2019 he performed with Wild Up at the Theatre at Ace Hotel LA for Nadia Sirota’s new interview/concert podcast Living Music Live, as well as with Monday Evening Concerts (LA) for Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla—which the San Francisco Classical Voice described as “played with ferocious love”. In February 2019 he rejoined Wild Up for a one-week residency at UNC-Chapel Hill, performing two concert programs and a series of creative workshops. His premiere recording of Jeffrey Holmes’s piano trio Oscularum Infame was also released on MicroFest Records in May 2019. Richard rounded out his season with two performances on June 1, 2019 at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 12-hour new music festival “Noon to Midnight”, where he performed Philip Glass’s seminal Glassworks with Monday Evening Concerts and premiered a new septet by composer Andrew Greenwald with Wild Up.

This year, Morton Wan (Musicology) delivered talks on topics ranging from the keyboard in Sino-European diplomacy in the eighteenth century, to Charles Burney’s doctoral music, to Mozart’s fugue and Enlightened automata at conferences including the AMS-NYSSL chapter meeting, the annual conference of the Canadian University Music Society, and The Organ in the Global Baroque (Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies). His report on the Westfield Center conference is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Music, and he will be presenting more of his work at AMS Boston this fall. Besides his continued commitment towards performing on keyboard instruments historical and modern, Morton directed the Cornell Baroque Orchestra in a performance of Handel’s cantata Aminta e Fillide in May. He was also awarded the Brettschneider Oxford Exchange Grant from the Einaudi Center for International Studies to conduct archival research based out of New College at the University of Oxford during 2019-20.

We congratulate the graduates of the class of 2019:

Canbekir Bilir D.M.A. Composition

David Friend D.M.A. Composition

Lauren Loiacono D.M.A. Composition

Jillian Marshall Ph.D. Musicology

Carlos Ramirez Ph.D. Musicology

Barry Sharp D.M.A. Composition

Mackenzie Pierce Ph.D. Musicology

Sergio Ospina Romero Ph.D. Musicology

Andrew Zhou D.M.A. Performance Practice