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Musicians around the world are celebrating Beethoven’s 250th birthday this year, and Cornell’s music department is no exception. The “I Heart Beethoven” Festival, taking place on the Cornell campus February 13-16, features explorations of his piano works corresponding to the musical ideas of fugues, variations, and improvisation.At the Midday...
Associate Professor Benjamin Piekut’s Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem was among Duke University Press’s five bestselling titles in 2019. The book details the flood of experimental music discourse and practice into popular culture in the late 1960s by way of the British rock band and several of its associates, including Slapp Happy, Faust, Robert...
Mark Gotham (Active Learning Initiative Postdoctoral Associate in Computational Music Theory Pedagogy) is part of a team recruited by Deutsche Telekom to create an artificial intelligence-driven realization of Ludwig van Beethoven's unfinished 10th symphony. The project focuses on one of the core questions of relevance to artificial intelligence,...
DMA composer Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei and his librettist colleagues have been awarded the highly competitive IDEA Opera Grant by Opera America for their monodrama The Veil. IDEA Opera Grants are the most recent addition to OPERA America’s grant programs designed to increase the depth and breadth of the contemporary American opera repertoire and are...
CALL for PAPERSBeyond Beethoven, 2020–1770Conference and Concert FestivalSeptember 17–20, 2020 Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, this conference and concert festival explores keyboard culture around the edges of, in the shadows below, on the distant horizon from the monument that is “Beethoven.” To what extent is...
IS20202Ithaca Sounding 2020January 30 – February 2, 2020Cornell University: Johnson Museum, Barnes Hall, Lincoln HallIthaca College: Hockett HallBuffalo Street Books Ithaca Sounding 2020 is a multi-day, multi-venue festival and symposium celebrating, exploring, and questioning the traditions of modernist and experimental concert music by...
Professor Judith Peraino's discovery of unreleased Lou Reed songs continues to generate press. In an article for Rolling Stone, Will Hermes writes"The story of the “Philosophy Songs” tape came to light this fall when Cornell professor Judith Peraino published an essay called “I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies...
Richard Valitutto, a Sage Fellow in Cornell University’s Keyboard Studies DMA program, has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in his capacity as pianist for the LA-based ensemble Wild Up. Richard plays on all 18 tracks of the album Cerrone: The Pieces that Fall to Earth on New Amsterdam Records. ...
Two concertos composed by Professor Roberto Sierra will receive prominent performances in 2020. Sierra's new trumpet concerto, titled Salseando, will receive its world premiere with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, one of its co-commissioners, on January 9, 2020. The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, the other co-commissioner, will then perform the...
Michael Plagerman's lecture-recital at 8pm on 11/25 in Sage Chapel will explore ideologies of performance practice and attitudes toward music of the past. Plagerman writes:The process of adaptation to non-period instruments is central to the art of organ playing. Because organs vary from instrument to instrument it is necessary to alter...
Professor Alejandro Madrid has been elected to the Society for Ethnomusicology’s board of directors as First Vice President. The main duties of the office are to oversee all publications of the Society, coordinate liaisons to other professional societies, and chair board meetings in the absence of the President. The announcement was made during...
On November 22 at 8pm in Barnes Hall, Richard Valitutto presents the music of Helmut Lachenmann, Clara Schumann, Ramón Lazkano, Rebecca Saunders, Linda Catlin Smith, and Francis Poulenc in a program entitled "thought and desire." Of his program Richard writes,When considering what are perceived to be two (or more) disparate elements or states,...
Over the next two weekends the Cornell music department and the Center for Historical Keyboards present a rare sonorous feast of minimalist music on original instruments.In celebration of its 50th birthday this year, the pioneering synthesizer trio Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Ensemble will go analogue, presenting David Borden’s...
To celebrate the bicentennial of Clara Schumann (née Wieck)’s birth, the conference “Performing Clara Schumann: Keyboard Legacies and Feminine Identities in the Long Romantic Tradition,” November 16–17, will present myriad interpretive opportunities for understanding the historical, cultural, and aesthetic milieu surrounding the virtuosa’s life...
The Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards is welcoming pianists from Eastman and Ithaca College to experience "what a piano can be" at the Piano Parloar at 726 University Ave. On October 19, five young pianists from the studio of Alvin Chow at Eastman joined professor emeritus Malcolm Bilson for a hands-on introduction to the instruments. Prof...
Assistant Professor Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri's new performative installation was premiered live by ensemble dissonArt, in a concert at the Port of Thessaloniki, as part of the 54th Dimitria Festival on October 16. Titled Square, the work is written for a specific urban location in Thessaloniki. Square was commissioned by Onassis Center -...
Professor Roberto Sierra's String Quartet No. 3 will receive its world premiere on October 16 in New York City. The piece will be performed by the Momenta Quartet, for whom the work is composed and dedicated. String Quartet No. 3 takes its place in a program titled Night Dances, defined by Momenta violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron as "Dreamy and...
Assistant Professor Marianthi Papalexandri has been nominated for a residency at the Instrument Inventors Institution in The Hague, Netherlands. Over the last 11 years, Papalexandri has developed a variety of new mechanical electro-acoustic instruments. During her residency at the Instrument Inventors Institution, Papalexandri will be working...
New Meets Old: Collaborative ConfrontationsTo celebrate the opening of “726,” the September 6-7 celebrations offer a broad survey of all of the instruments in the collection. Concerts, demonstrations, talks, and lecture-recitals take place at Barnes Hall, Anabel Taylor and Sage Chapels, and at 726 University Ave. All events are free and open to...
Composer Christopher Rouse, a Cornell alumni (D.M.A. Composition '78) and Pulitzer Prize winner, passed away on September 21 at the age of 70. While at Cornell, Rouse studied with Karel Husa; Rouse would go on to teach at the University of Michigan and the Eastman School of Music. Rouse received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Composition for his...
From Thursday, October 3 to Saturday, October 5 fortepianist and Cornell alumnus Mike Cheng-Yu Lee will be in residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, joined by colleagues Wayne Lee (violin) and Clancy Newman (cello). The trio's residency will encompass two concerts featuring the "Bartolozzi" trios of Joseph Haydn, an open house...
Assistant Professor Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri will have a new kinetic sound instrumental sculpture titled Untitled VII premiered and exhibited at the Festival ZeitRäume / Biennale for New Music and Architecture in the Kunstmuseum Basel on September 15, 2019. Papalexandri’s sculpture was created in collaboration with artist Pe Lang and is...
Papalexandri’s sound kinetic sculptures modular | nº 3, created in collaboration with Pe Lang, recently exhibited at Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin, and the Music 21Festival / Galleria Robert Drees in Hannover from September 6-9. The sculptures will also be on view at the Foundation Palazzo Contarini Del Bovolo in Venice, from September 14 to November...
The Cornell University Music Department is pleased to share the following interview with Malcolm Bilson, Frederick J. Whiton Professor Emeritus of Music, which has recently been made public. Speaking with Associate Professor Roger Moseley in April 2017, Bilson discusses, among other accomplishments, his early work and career that led to his...