Graduate Student News 2023

In 2023, Michele Cheng (Composition) concluded her two-year JACK Studio residency (2020-2022) with a world premiere of Jaack, a musical puppet theatre project commissioned by the JACK Quartet. As an artist-scholar, she was an invited panelist on Identities for the Decolonial Love symposium hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. She was also a presenter on Puppetry and Music at the Sound Genres symposium hosted by the University of Victoria and an invited panelist for this year’s New Music Gathering’s assembled discussion on Cyber Identities. This summer she will join Ensemble Evolution, an intensive co-directed by International Contemporary Ensemble, Fay Victor, and Rebekah Heller.

John Eagle (Composition) was awarded a Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship (2023-24) to complete his dissertation surrounding the work of James Tenney titled “Form/Formal: Shifting Grounds for Musical Experience and the Art of the Algorithm.” He was a featured artist at Heidi Duckler Dance’s Ebb and Flow Festival in LA in September and at the IntAct Festival in Bangkok in December. In April, he presented his composition dissertation project—a weeklong exhibition of his performance installation steady state / transient flows featuring the water-driven instruments he has built and was joined by performers Emily Call and Ford Fourqurean. A sound film of his piece transient flows for his hydro-clarinet was released by Music For Your Inbox in January. A film version of his collaborative piece Sound House (with co-creators Janie Geiser and Cassia Streb) was released in November. His new concert length piece for piano and stones, erosion and growth, was recorded by Jack Yarbrough and will be released by Sawyer Editions this summer.

Seare Farhat (Composition) recently received distinguished honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Scholarship) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI Student Composer Award). This summer, Seare will workshop a newly commissioned work from the Copland House Ensemble through the Copland House CULTIVATE initiative, which will be premiered on the final performance (June 13) of ACO’s SONiC Festival in NYC. In August, Seare’s string quartet, …ka spoojmai shwa poh hala ke…, will receive its US premiere with the JACK Quartet on the TIME:SPANS festival at the DiMenna Center in NYC.

Thomas Feng (Keyboard Studies) writes, “I passed my A-exams in September, finished my required coursework in May, and am now officially ABD. My principal research about the Ethiopian nun and composer, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, has picked up much momentum; I gave a lecture-recital about her in December, traveled to her home in Jerusalem to play for her funeral and carry out further research at the end of March, and was even quoted in a New Yorker article about her in April. I have continued performing new music, including a brand-new concerto, Spool, by our very own Josh Biggs (with the Cornell Wind Symphony), a cat-themed recital in fall, a performance with Ensemble X in winter, and a program of four premieres (by composer friends spanning both coasts) in spring. To support these endeavors, I have received generous grants from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, and the Graduate School (in addition to department Grout funding). I am deeply grateful to have received the Blackmore Prize for performance, as well as a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts, the latter of which will support a proposed two-day festival surrounding Emahoy, prospectively this coming winter, at Cornell.

Miles Friday (Composition) was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Digital Music at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Miles also completed his doctorate and dissertation, “Boundary Conditions: Maryanne Amacher and the Instrumentalization of the Environment, Loudspeaker, and Ear.” The past year also included awards and performances from ASCAP/SEAMUS, the Ardia Shorts International Film Festival, the Boston Guitar Festival, the International Computer Music Conference, the New York City Electro-acoustic Music Festival, and more.

Samantha Heinle (Music and Sound Studies) finished up her degree this May and will be headed to South Bend, IN in August to begin a postdoctoral fellowship in the music department at Notre Dame.

Rachel Horner (Music and Sound Studies) received the Manon Michels Einaudi Grant through the Institute for European Studies to support her ongoing dissertation work on the use of regional language in the Falles Festival of València, Spain. She plans to use this funding toward her upcoming fieldwork in València and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where a Valencian diasporic community also celebrates Falles. This year, Rachel has presented parts of her work in graduate student conferences and regional conferences both nationally and internationally. In addition to research, Rachel has spent the year teaching a first-year writing seminar entitled “On Display: Carnival, Festival, and Ritual.” She earned two prizes for her work in this course through the Knight Institute, the Gertrude Spencer Prize (which recognizes collaboration with a student toward the completion of a final assignment) and the John S. Knight Award for Writing Exercises and Handouts. Lastly, Rachel has continued her writing center work this year, having been a peer writing tutor with the Graduate Writing Service in the fall and the Associate Director of the Cornell Writing Centers this spring. She will serve as a graduate co-facilitator for the Knight Institute’s Writing Together at Home program this summer.

Addi Liu (Music and Sound Studies) is working on a project titled “‘Manner true artists do not approve of’: Reappraising Violin Bows Holds in Seventeenth-Century Iconography,” which was presented as a lecture recital at the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music's annual conference (Cleveland, 2023), and will be presented in a paper version at the Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Geneva, 2023). He is also working on another hand-related project which conceptualizes different pathways of laying out musical data on the Guidonian hand and hand mnemonics in Europe and China. A paper version was presented at the Instruments of Global Music Theory symposium hosted by Princeton University (2023).

Alex Nik Pasqualini (Music and Sound Studies) just completed their fourth year and was recently awarded a Don. M. Randel Teaching Fellowship (2023-2024) to design and teach the course, “Punk Rock Feminism Rules: Riot Grrrl, Community Building, and the Archive,” to be offered in Spring 2024. The theme and aims of this course come from Alex’s broader dissertation, in which they use case studies from the 1960s-1990s to exemplify the importance of music, playing pretend, fakery, and lies in what they call a practice of dyke-feminist-camp which helped to build networks of lifesaving gender-expansive communities. Alex has just wrapped up a year of collaboration in a working group focused on “virtual worlds” through the media studies program and they look forward to being part of an upcoming dissertation writing group funded by the society for the humanities. Otherwise, Alex is looking forward to acting as the Music Grad Association’s incoming PhD Liaison, as well as the co-president of the QGrads student organization, and expanding their work in a new role at Cornell’s LGBT Resource Center.

In 2022, Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei (Composition) won first prize in the Lake George Music Festival Composition Competition, the American Viola Society’s Maurice Gardner Competition, and Grand Prize in the GRAMMY-winning New York Youth Symphony’s First Music Commission, which led to the premiere of his new work outside(inside)out at Carnegie Hall this May. Daniel also completed commissions for bassist Robert Black & the Moab Music Festival, loadbang, Chorus Austin, and TACET(i). In the 2023-24 season, Daniel will see a number of projects come to fruition: this May the Civic Orchestra of Chicago Fellows will perform a concert at Symphony Space, featuring his work At any rate II, the American Composers Orchestra will premiere his work Hommage à Khaleqi through their annual EarShot program as part of the SONiC Festival, the Duisburg Philharmonic will premiere his work Gar atash barad beh peikaram through their Transcultural Scholarship, Songe d’Orient ensemble will perform some of his vocal music in Paris, the Handel Choir of Baltimore will premiere a new commission in spring 2024 as the winner of their Emerging Composer Competition, and the Cornell Glee Club will premiere his new work Omid this Fall. Daniel also recently completed his doctorate.

Benjamin P. Skoronski (Music and Sound Studies) presented a paper at the 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, held August 22–26 in Athens, Greece. This paper was the result of extensive archival research hailing from Vienna, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Nic Vigilante (Music and Sound Studies) was selected as a member of the inaugural cohort of fellows for the Mellon / ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, which will fund a year of fieldwork and professional development in Los Angeles for their dissertation project. Nic was also awarded a research fellowship for the summer of 2023 by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Dissertation Proposal Development Program. This spring, Nic presented their research at the 10th Annual North American Conference on Video Game Music; the Ludomusicology Study Group of the American Musicological Society’s Co-Op Scholarship: Collaboration in Music, Games, and Play conference; Yale University’s Mixed Realities: Ethnographic Approaches to the Virtual conference; and the annual meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

We congratulate our recent graduates with the following degrees conferred: