Department Homepage
The College of Arts & Sciences
Professor Judith Peraino has been awarded Cornell University's Stephan and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. The Russell Distinguished Teaching Award is intended for professorial faculty, lecturers, senior lecturers and teaching assistants who have demonstrated their devotion to teaching, where teaching is understood to include...
Emily Hurwitz, a senior double-majoring in music and psychology, recently published an article with Professor Carol Krumhansl entitled "Shifting Listening Niches: Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic," in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. As part of the Music Cognition Laboratory, they studied how the music listening habits of undergraduate...
The Utah Symphony is performing Roberto Sierra's Sinfonietta April 8-10, in one of their first weeks back after resuming in-person concerts on March 25. The piece was premiered in February 2020 by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under conductor Domingo Hindoyan.
A statement from Professor Alejandro L. Madrid, Chair of the Department of Music:Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff Colleagues, The Department of Music at Cornell University stands in solidarity with Asian and Asian American students, faculty, and staff across campus. We strongly condemn the rise of acts of racism and violence against Asians and...
Dear Friends of Music,One year ago the Department of Music hosted “When Machines Rock: A Celebration of Robert Moog and Electronic Music”, a magnificent exhibition and a series of concerts and talks co-curated by Judith Peraino, Trevor Pinch, and Roger Moseley in early March 2020. It was a huge success, attracting overflow crowds to Klarman Hall...
Please visit our Giving Day landing page on March 11 to contribute! Cornell’s composers, performers, and music scholars shape the character of musical life in every corner of our campus, with an impact that continues far into the wider world. We provide opportunities for study and performance under the guidance of distinguished faculty, as part of...
The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra announced its 21-22 concert season, the first under new music director Andreas Delfs. The programming will include the world premiere of a new Violin Concerto by Roberto Sierra, commissioned by the RPO. More information is available online.
Throughout the Fall 2020 semester, the students and faculty of the music department have shown remarkable resilience and creativity in order to continue their musical activities. The circumstances of the pandemic required innovation and adaptation, but the results allowed students to stay connected with each other and with audiences onscreen. Many...
Professor Judith Peraino has been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for her book project Popism in Stereo: A Musical Guide to the Warhol Seventies. This fellowship will provide Professor Peraino with a year’s support to focus exclusively on the project.Professor Peraino's fellowship is part of $32.8...
A.D. White Professor-at-Large Wynton Marsalis talks with James Spinazzola (Barbara & Richard T. Silver ’50, MD ’53 Assistant Professor of Music) about developing an individual musical style; practice habits; playing, interpreting, and composing the blues; studying African rhythms while composing Congo Square (2006); and composing his first...
As part of their work this semester, the Improvisation Ensemble, led by Annie Lewandowski, has released a recording of Cornelius Cardew’s The Tiger’s Mind, a piece with a text score in which the musicians play the different characters, interacting with each other musically. The recording was available through Jan. 6 and has expired. The...
On December 17, the Murcia Orchestra conducted by Manuel Hernández-Silva with Pacho Flores, trumpet, gave the Spanish premiere of “Salseando” Roberto Sierra's concerto for trumpet and orchestra. The performance received a rave review from the prestigious Spanish publication Scherzo, with critic Jose Antonio Canton remarking that "the enthusiastic...
Stephen Spinelli and Tamara Acosta, founders of the ONEcomposer initiative, were quoted in a Philadelphia Inquirer article. ONEcomposer will collaborate with the Philadelphia Orchestra next semester for a presentation of Florence Price's piano concerto, plus there are two remaining events to view this December: an interview with soprano Karen...
Professor Judith Peraino has been awarded a double accolade at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society: her article “I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes” received both the H. Colin Slim Award (“for a musicological article of exceptional merit published in any language and in any...
The Oxford University Press Blog has published Professor Judith Peraino's essay “The Politics of Punk in the Era of Trump.” "Punk has been claimed by the left and the right on the political spectrum to describe different visions of populism."The essay is available to read online.
The Music Department is pleased to announce that Dawn Upshaw has been chosen as a 2020-2026 A. D. White Professor-at-Large. Not just the first vocalist awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a five-time GRAMMY award winner, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Founding Artistic Director of Bard College-Conservatory’s Graduate...
Congratulations to Dr. Dietmar Friesenegger for receiving the Ph.D. in musicology with an outstanding dissertation, Voices among Cultures in the Eastern European Borderlands: Music in Czernowitz (1862–1914). Dr. Friesenegger’s study investigates one the most diverse cities in the contested lands of Eastern Europe, exploring the role of music in...
Roberto Sierra's Clarinet Sonata is featured on NPR Classical's weekly playlist, which this week spotlights recent, vibrant music with roots in Peru, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and Puerto Rico. The playlist updates each Thursday, and is available for streaming online.
A new recording of Roberto Sierra's Fantasía Cromática for organ, performed by Randall Harlow, has been released on Innova Records. The work was written to inaugurate Cornell's meantone Italian organ by Augustinus Vicedomini (1746) and it was premiered by Annette Richards. The new recording is available on Spotify.
Last fall, Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Ryan McCullough were invited to participate in the filming of an episode of a PBS show about Schubert. Great Performances' "Now Hear This," hosted by violinist and conductor Scott Yoo and now in its second season, takes audiences on a tour of Western classical music history, introducing composers in unique ways....
Pianist Alfredo Ovalles will perform the Polish premiere of Roberto Sierra's Piezas Intimas for piano at the famed Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music on September 20.A new commerical recording by Bokyung Byun of Sierra's Sonata for Guitar has been released and is available on Spotify.
Professor Annette Richards has been elected a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea after her nomination earlier this year and a rigorous peer review of her work that recognized her "outstanding achievements as a scholar." The Academia Europaea is the only continent-wide Academy with individual membership from Council of Europe states and from...
Dr. Maxwell Lewis Williams successfully defended and submitted his doctoral dissertation in Spring 2020 under the supervision of Professors Catherine M. Appert, Benjamin Piekut, Steven Pond, and Fumi Okiji (UC Berkeley). Titled “Hipness, Hybridity, and ‘Neo-Bohemian’ Hip-Hop: Rethinking Existence in the African Diaspora,” his dissertation reads...
In July 2020, Dr. Jordan Musser completed and submitted his doctoral dissertation, which he had successfully defended earlier in the spring. Titled “Managing the Crisis: Music, Neo-liberalism, and the Popular Avant-Garde in Britain, 1975–84,” the project offers a critical and historical study of the ways in which popular music, avant-garde...
Interim Director of the Vocal Program Lucy Fitz Gibbon normally has a summer packed full of concerts, but this year has been anything but typical, as many arts organizations cancelled or postponed musical activities. However, Fitz Gibbon worked creatively to keep performances happening in new and imaginative ways, and she plans to do the same for...