Dear Friends of Music,
Many things have happened since the last time I had a chance to write to you at the outset of my term as Chair of the Department of Music. We lived through a second year of incredible challenges brought to us by COVID-19 and its variants. Nevertheless, the return to in-person teaching and music-making last Fall — thanks to the safety restrictions in place and the moving resilience and solidarity of our staff, students, and faculty — was a very welcome change to the many months of isolation that had prevented us from enjoying the intellectual conversations, artistic partnerships, and even trivial chit-chat that many of us had taken for granted before the pandemic. The slow attempt to move beyond these terrible and dreadful years has been a sobering reminder of the importance of personal touch — in literal and metaphorical ways —, human interaction, and art and music as sources of collective well-being in our everyday lives.
However, rather than dwelling on the difficulties we have confronted, I wish to focus these lines on commending the achievements of our extraordinary community, from inspiring awards and honors to exciting new works and publications, and from the retirement of esteemed colleagues to the welcoming of new ones. Some of these highlights include:
- Professor Roberto Sierra received a Latin Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition and was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Professor Catherine Appert received the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Marcia Herndon Prize; Professor Judith Peraino received Cornell University’s Stephan and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award; and Lee Kimura Tyson received the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch’s David Sanjek Prize.
- Professors Xak Bjerken and Elizabeth Ogonek were awarded one of the College of Arts and Sciences’ New Frontier Grants for their project “Cornell ReSounds”; and Lucy Fitz Gibbon (with collaborator Martha Guth from Ithaca College) received a National Endowment for the Arts award for the project “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight.”
- Annie Lewandowski organized and presented the symposium “The Whale Listening Project”; and Xak Bjerken and Elizabeth Ogonek presented the festival “Cornell ReSounds.”
- Professors Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Roberto Sierra retired from Cornell after 34 and 29 years of teaching at the Department of Music respectively.
- Professor Elizabeth Ogonek joined us as assistant professor of composition in fall 2021.
- We were honored with the visits to our campus of two Pulitzer-Prize winning artists, Tania León and Wynton Marsalis.
- Professor Xak Bjerken released his new album, The Oberlin Concertos (which features music by Professor Elizabeth Ogonek); additionally, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave the American premiere of Ogonek’s new orchestral work, Cloudline; and Professor Gail Holst-Warhaft published her new book Nisiotika: Music, Dances, and Bittersweet Songs of the Aegean Islands.
It is humbling for me to reflect on the scale of my colleagues’ achievements in these dire days. They make me proud to be a member of such a special community of wonderful artists and thinkers. Their excellence, spirit, and strength should be an inspiration for us all to continue working hard and with optimism through the end of this pandemic.
I will be on a sabbatical leave next year and would like to thank Professor Benjamin Piekut, who has accepted to serve as Interim Chair next academic year. The Department could not stay in better hands.
Sincerely,
Alejandro L. Madrid
