Graduate Student News 2020-21

In 2020 Carlota Aguilar González (musicology) was invited to be part of Project Spectrum, a graduate student-led coalition that advocates toward equity, diversity, accessibility, and inclusion in U.S. American and Canadian music academia. In November, Project Spectrum organized the pre-conference symposium for the AMS/SMT 2020 Joint Annual Meeting, entitled Diversifying Music Academia: Building the Coalition. For more info visit: https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/event-diversifying-music-academia-building-the-coalition  

Laura Cetilia (Composition). During fall/winter in her first year of the DMA program at Cornell, Laura's work was performed by HereNowHear (NYC), Verdant Vibes (Providence), and Taceti Ensemble (Bangkok). This spring she looks forward to performances by Wet Ink (Chicago/NYC), Israeli Chamber Project (Tel Aviv), and Thread Ensemble (Boston). In May she will be one of 90 artists selected by Alvin Lucier to contribute their version of I am Sitting in a Room for his 90th birthday celebration in a 24+ hour stream, hosted by ISSUE Project Room.

In December 2020, Sergio Cote Barco (composition) released the album pink noises(s) in prime numbers with Edition Wandelweiser Records. In November, two of his recently commissioned pieces—para flautas, ruido(s) y tonos puros and n, for mixed chamber ensemble, sine tones, and two loudspeakers—were premiered at the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo in Bogotá, Colombia, by Ensamble Ul Música Mixta and Ensamble La Sociedad. n, for mixed chamber ensemble sine tones, and two loudspeakers also received its Thai premiere during the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium in December 2020. As part of the Noise-Drone duo La Era del Ruido, Sergio played at Hudson Basilica 24 Hour Drone Online version, and, with performer Valeria Barnier, he premiered spaces 3 for bluetooth speakers and noises(s) at the Gallery Estudio 74, Bogotá. In summer 2020, Sergio gave a lecture to the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra of Colombia titled Imagination: Different Realities, Possible Worlds. Sergio was invited to collaborate with EMCA, the contemporary music ensemble of the District University of Bogotá, leading improvisations and co-creating the piece archivo de pensamientos, palabras y sonidos (archive of thoughts, words, and sounds), which will be released as a box edition during 2021.     

Frederick Cruz Nowell’s (musicology) interview with artists Dora Budor, Devin Kenny, and Cecilia Bengolea will be published in the forthcoming volume of Intersubjectivities, Vol. 3: Relative Intimacies (MIT Press, 2021), edited by Emily Watlington and Lou Cantor. He also co-curated an international group exhibition of contemporary art at TANK Shanghai with X Zhu-Nowell, titled More, More, More (July 16, 2020–January 31, 2021). Art Asia Pacific called this exhibition “a timely reminder of experiences beyond our isolated realities.” It featured works by Laure Prouvost, Ad Minoliti, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sophia Al-Maria, Cheng Xinyi, Allison Janae Hamilton, Art Labor, Claudia Comte, Dora Budor, Wong Kit Yi, Cecilia Bengolea, Zhao Yao, Jesse Darling, Hao Liang, Huang He, Irena Haiduk, Brook Hsu, Devin Kenny, Mire Lee, Ghislaine Leung, Jota Mombaça, Mountain River Jump!, Lisa Naftolin with Alex Mcleod, Victoria Sin, Jenna Sutela, Tan Jing, Cecilia Vicuña, Zhang Ruyi, Chelsea Culprit, and Nicole Wermers. He led several exhibition tours and artists talks as a part of the exhibition’s public programming and edited the exhibition catalog, published in English and Chinese.

John Eagle's (composition) work canal(s) for quartet and electronics was selected for HEAR NOW's 10th anniversary festival last April. The live event was cancelled due to the pandemic, but the piece will be recorded with the Brightwork Ensemble and released later this year as part of a virtual festival. His piece still life #2: Olallie Creek was selected for the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium; he presented the work in a video performance with Emily Call in December. His collaborative performance installation piece Sound House is scheduled for a new presentation at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles in November 2021.

Thomas Feng (keyboard studies) moved to Ithaca and started the first year of his DMA in the fall. Since then, he has finished a commission for two short piano pieces responding to short stories by Ray Bradbury that he will premiere this June in New York City; he is also set to perform in an ensemble of pianists at the TIME:SPANS Festival in New York this August.

During the Fall of 2020 and Spring of 2021 Miles Friday (composition) had new installations and chamber works premiered at the University of Pittsburgh Music and Movement Conference, the precept.concept.percept Symposium (Amsterdam), the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the Twisted Spruce Guitar & Composition Symposium, where he was awarded first place in their composition competition. Additionally, Miles had a premiere of a new work by the AIR Contemporary Music Collective in Beijing and looks forward to spring and summer premieres of new works by the GAMEnsemble as part of the Saint Petersburg International New Music Festival, Yarn/Wire and Wet Ink as part of our DMA CCCP organization, Ensemble Suono Giallo as part of the ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week (Citta di Castello, Italy), and collaborating across disciplines with robotics and the International Contemporary Ensemble as part of the Human and Machine, Improvisation in Action project headed by professors Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and Guy Hoffman.

Piyawat Louilarpprasert (composition) was awarded and commissioned by the British Council: UK-SEA Connection Through Culture 2021. He is a director/curator of a virtual festival: "Resilience, Distance, Connection in Isolation Space from Afar." The festival is an exchanged collaboration between UK and Thailand that included Dr. Scott Wilson (University of Birmingham), composers/sound artists from the Birmingham Electro-Acoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and TACETi ensemble (Thailand). Featured works are curated with a diversity of forms, such as sound archives, virtual concerts, telematic performances as well as online workshops and discussion.

Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei (composition) was awarded an IDEA Opera Grant from OPERA America for 2019–2020, supporting workshops of his new monodrama The Veil this December. He also won an award from the Robert Black Foundation, supporting a new site-specific solo bass work for the 2021 Moab Festival, and First Prize from the Institute for Choral Creativity's inaugural Composition Competition for his a cappella work Goli az dast beraft. Daniel received commissions from the Young New Yorkers Chorus, White Snake Projects, Guerilla Opera as part of their Emergence Fellowship program, and National Sawdust for the JACK Quartet through their New Works Commissions. This summer, Daniel will be a Fellow for Copland House's CULTIVATE program, and will finish his residency with the Banff Centre's Opera in the 21st Century program, culminating in the premiere of a new work commissioned by the Banff Centre.

Jonathan Schakel (keyboard studies) recently gave a solo recital at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been named artistic director of Zephyrus, an early music vocal ensemble in Charlottesville, Virginia.

richard valitutto (keyboard studies) organized, presented, and performed in Ithaca Sounding 2020, a four-day festival in late January 2020 celebrating the keyboard music of five local composers spanning the past century. In March 2020, his debut solo album nocturnes & lullabies was released to critical acclaim. In Fall 2020, he completed his Admission-to-Candidacy exams. His virtual performance activities at Cornell that semester included an October recital for the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards’ (CCHK) conference Beethoven and Pianos: Off the Beaten Path, and his solo degree recital in December featuring music by George Walker, Julius Eastman, and Linda Catlin Smith. On the heels of a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance with the Los Angeles-based ensemble Wild Up, in January 2021 richard presented a 10-hour YouTube livestream concert from his apartment as part of their annual winter music festival darkness sounding. That performance (notably featuring his dog Dingo as supernumerary) was reviewed by Alex Ross for The New Yorker. In February 2021, his essay discussing his experience researching and performing Julius Eastman’s music was posted on the CCHK’s website.

Morton Wan (musicology) is currently writing his dissertation on music (especially Handel’s) and the rise of financial capitalism in the eighteenth century. He presented a paper on music and early economic bubbles at the virtual conference “Financing Music in Europe from the 18th to the Early 20th Century,” organized by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini. A snapshot of that project can be seen here and an extended version will appear in a new monograph on financing music under Brepols’s “Speculum Musicae” series. As a 2020–21 Don M. Randel Teaching and Research Fellow, Morton is currently leading a course "Music and Money.” He was also awarded the Kanner Fellowship in British Studies from UCLA’s Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and is looking forward to resuming his archival research when better days return.

We congratulate our recent graduates with the following degrees conferred:

PhD 2021

Elizabeth Lyon

DMA 2020 performance

Shin Hwang

Ryan McCullough

DMA 2020 composition

Corey Keating

PhD 2020

Dietmar Friesenegger

David Miller

Jordan Musser

Annalise Smith

Maxwell Williams

DMA 2019 performance

David Friend

Andrew Zhou

DMA 2019 composition

Canbekir Bilir

Loren Loiacono

Barry Sharp

PhD 2019

Matthew Hall

Ji Young Kim

Sergio Ospina Romero

Mackenzie Pierce

Carlos Ramirez