Search | Department of Music

Annette Richards

As a professor of music and University Organist at Cornell University, I am a scholar and performer. I am particularly interested in intersections between music and visual culture, and in the ways European music was heard, experienced, and understood from the 17th to 19th centuries.As a concert organistI play and teach on recital series and at festivals and academies in North America and Europe. My repertoire stretches from the earliest music for the organ to works composed just yesterday, and I perform on original instruments from all periods of the organ’s long history.

/annette-richards

Mark Mahoney

MarkMahoneyis a Ph.D. candidate in Music and Sound Studies. His scholarly interests revolve around experimental music, broadly conceived, and its intersection with critical theory, sound studies, and a range of interdisciplinary approaches. His research has explored the contested legacies of high modernism, the relationship between political and aesthetic transgression in various 20th-century avant-gardes, and the institutional history of ethno/musicology and music studies more generally. Mark is an avid student of jazz, improvised and creative music, and has presented on the music and reception histories of Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. He has contributed music criticism to numerous publications, includingCacophony Magazine,Dusted Magazine, andThe Walker Art Center Reader.

/mark-mahoney

Laura Cetilia

Providence-based cellist and electronic musician Laura Cetilia is a performer, composer, educator, and presenter. As a daughter of mixed heritage (second generation Mexican-American), she is at home with in-betweeness, moving with ease through genres and practices as she did with cultures and languages growing up on the Eastside of Los Angeles. As a composer, her music has been described as “unorthodox loveliness” by the Boston Globe and and her solo album, “Used, Broken, and Unwanted” was…

/laura-cetilia

Thomas Feng

Thomas Feng is a pianist, composer, and musicologist.

/thomas-feng

Nic Vigilante

Nic Vigilante is a PhD Candidate in Music & Sound Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, where their ethnographic research revolves around questions of performance, virtuality, liveness, and queer Asian American aesthetics. Nic works across ethnomusicology, Asian American studies, gender studies, media studies, performance studies, and the digital humanities to study the performative and affective aspects of spaces outside of “real life.” Their three main areas of focus are queer Asian American nightlife in Los Angeles; music in virtual worlds; and the role of sound and music in esports.

/nic-vigilante

Clara Valenzuela

Clara Valenzuela is a first-year PhD student in the Musicology program. Her primary reason for studying musicology is to explore the social and political dimensions of music. Prior to her arrival at Cornell, Clara received a B.A. in Choral Music from the University of Southern California with a minor in Political Thought.

/clara-valenzuela

Alex Pasqualini

Alex Pasqualini is a current Ph.D. student in Music & Sound Studies. Their research is focused on the intersections of popular music, activism, and queer community building, with a recent focus on the 1990s queer-feminist-punk music of riot grrrl and queercore. Coming from Southwestern Ontario, Alex completed their bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Arts in Musicology with the collaborative Sexual Diversity Studies program from the University of…

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Rachel Horner

Rachel Horner (she/her) is a PhD candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University. She holds an MA in musicology and a BM in vocal music education and Spanish from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Rachel’s research investigates the intersections between sound, language, and identity, especially in the context of Spanish and Latin American cultural festivals. Her dissertation project builds on six years of ethnographic fieldwork with musicians, pyrotechnicians, festival participants, and other cultural stakeholders in the Falles Festival of València, Spain. It centers three core domains of sound—language, noise, and music—to reveal how sound acts as a mode of preservation despite its rapid disappearance, generating an intangible archive of behaviors, feelings, and beliefs within and beyond the festival. Rachel is editorial assistant of the quarterly journal American Music and is the assistant director of Cornell Writing Centers.

/rachel-horner

Cibele Moura

Cibele Moura is a doctoral candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University. Much of her current research examines the power struggles at the intersection of popular music-making, listening practices, and knowledge production in Latin America. Her dissertation, titled “Listening to the Obscene: The Sexual Politics of Music and Sound in Latin America,” interrogates obscenity as a category of racialized sexual politics in Latin American sonic cultures. It demonstrates how the politics of obscenity have shaped the reception of so-called vulgar music both within and outside Black and mestizo working-class communities, beginning with the Mexican Inquisition’s prohibition of songs in the mid-eighteenth century and continuingwith the criminalization of Brazilian funk in contemporary news media. This project has received awards and financial support from various institutions, including the Society for American Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. She recently co-edited and co-translated of A luta pelo nacional popular na Bolívia(Editora da PUCRS, 2024), which introduces the heterodox Marxist work of one of Bolivia’s foremost political theorists, René Zavaleta Mercado, to Lusophone audiences.

/cibele-moura

Richard Valitutto

Richard Valitutto is a Grammy-nominated piano soloist, chamber musician, vocal accompanist, and composing/improvising creative with an active performance schedule that spans both coasts of the U.S., across the country, and abroad. Described as a “vivid soloist,” “vigorously virtuosic,” “quietly dazzling,” and “all around go-to new music specialist” (LA Times), his soloistic charisma and flexible collaborative artistry have distinguished him for his tenacity in bringing dynamic life to scores in…

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Rafael Torralvo

Rafael Torralvo is a violinist and scholar currently pursuing a PhD degree in musicology at Cornell University. Born in Brazil and educated in the United States, Rafael holds a BM and a MM degree in violin performance from James Madison University and West Chester University of Pennsylvania, respectively. He is also an alumnus from the Frost School of Music, at the University of Miami, where he received a MM degree in musicology.
Rafael employs an interdisciplinary approach to his scholarly…

/rafael-torralvo

Steven Pond

Steve Pond’s scholarly interests center on jazz and musics of the African Diaspora generally. His articles and reviews have appeared inEthnomusicologyand the Music Library Association’s journal,Notes. His book,Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2005 and republished as a paperback in 2010. The book was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize for best monograph in popular music studies by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (United States chapter). His work generally focuses on historiography, especially as it relates to issues of authenticity and authority, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other identity frameworks, particularly as these issues. A central consideration is the politics of genre classification.

/steven-pond

Benjamin D. Piekut

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph,Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. Situated at the intersection of free jazz, the Cagean avant-garde, Fluxus, radical politics, and popular music, the book portrays New York experimentalism in the 1960s as a series of conflicts, struggles, and exclusions. In 2019, he publishedHenry Cow: The World Is a Problem(Duke). A collective biography of the British rock band Henry Cow (1968–78), the book investigated how young musicians recast older questions of avant-garde politics in a space defined by the commodity form, the commercial marketplace, and vernacular modes of reception and transmission. Excerpts of The World Is a Problem ran in Literary Huband Point of Departure, and reviews appeared in The Wire (UK), Nexos (MX), the Free Jazz Collective,Tribune, and theLos Angeles Review of Books, in addition to scholarly journals. The book was translated into Japanese in 2023.

/benjamin-d-piekut

Theodora Serbanescu-Martin

Theodora is a PhD Candidate in Musicology and a pianist. Her interdisciplinary interests cover the nineteenth century and beyond, and extend to pianism and other performance traditions; the long history of human sexuality, medicine, and gender; Romantic and fin-de-siècle European literature; media theory and the digital humanities; and pop scholarship. Within the nineteenth century, Theodora is interested in the way that broader Romantic ideologies reflected a tensioned relationship between…

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Frederick Cruz Nowell

Frederick Cruz Nowell is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at Cornell University and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

/frederick-cruz-nowell

Carlota Aguilar-Gonzalez

Carlota Aguilar González (she, her/they, them) is a current Ph.D. student in Musicology. Originally from south Spain, they developed a Hispanic border identity tied by the boundaries of the Atlantic ocean and the sounds of the Canary Islands and Andalucía. They completed their classical training in music studies with a Bachelor´s degree in Viola Performance from the Conservatorio Superior Rafael Orozco in Córdoba, Spain, continuing an itinerary that departed from the western canon to arrive at…

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Judith A. Peraino

Judith Peraino's research in the areas of both medieval song and rock music concerns the intersection of subject formation, social identity, and musical expression. She is the author of two books: Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (2006), which investigates how music has been used throughout history to call into question norms of gender and sexuality; and Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (2011), which investigates how the music of medieval Occitan and French “courtly love” songs encodes the self-conscious complexity of subjectivity expressed in the lyrics.

/judith-peraino

Juliana May Pepinsky

Juliana May Pepinsky is a lecturer and flute instructor at Cornell University where she leads the flute class. She received a Master of Music degree from Yale University and a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory. After completing her graduate degree, Juliana was an active flute teacher and classroom instructor of music theory and history at several colleges in Connecticut. While in Connecticut, she also played with the New Britain Symphony, the Waterbury Symphony, and numerous chamber groups. She has also been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Metro State College, and Regis University. In September of 2003, she performed on the inaugural concert of Zankel Hall, the new concert space at Carnegie Hall, under composer John Adams. Since arriving in Ithaca in 2008, Juliana has performed regularly at Cornell, especially on new music programs. She also plays with the Fingerlakes Flutes, a professional ensemble based in Ithaca. Her teachers include Michel Debost, Ransom Wilson, and Anne Diener Zentner.

/juliana-may-pepinsky

Jihyun Kim

Jihyun Kim's music has appeared in the prestigious venues around the world, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, Seiji Ozawa Hall, Harris Hall in Aspen, DiMenna Center, Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence Italy, and Seoul Arts Center in Korea.
Jihyun’s works were performed by eminent ensembles such as American Composers Orchestra, Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Cornell Symphony Orchestra, Cornell Festival Orchestra, Tanglewood New Fromm Players, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, JACK Quartet, PUBLIQuartet, Asciano Quartet, Switch Ensemble, Karien Ensemble, and Chanticleer LAB Choir, and were featured in the Underwood New Music Reading, Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Mayfest, USF New Music Festival, Midwest Composers Symposium, Korean Music Expo.
Jihyun has been selected as the winner of the Consortium Commission from American Composers Orchestra/Alabama Symphony/American Youth Symphony, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, the League of Composers/ISCM Composers Competition, the American Prize in Orchestral music, the Libby Larsen Prize, PUBLIQ Access, Florence String Quartet Call for Scores, the 32nd Chang-ak Composition Competition, the Otto R. Stahl Memorial Award/ Russell Distinguished Teaching Award from Cornell University, and received honorable mentions from Red Note New Music Composition Competition, TEMPO New Music Ensemble Call for Scores, among many others.
Jihyun recently joined Washington State University as Lecturer in Composition.

/jihyun-kim

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri

Papalexandri (b. 1974) is a composer and sound artist based in Switzerland and the United States. Interweaving the borderlines between sound and visual objects, Papalexandri creates works of simplicity, elegance, and personal charisma. She is especially interested in how resonant surfaces and friction work and how physical materials can be arranged to act like living things.

/marianthi-papalexandri-alexandri

Sean Peters

Sean Peters is pursuing a Ph.D. in Musicology at Cornell University, specializing in Ethnomusicology. He holds a B.A. in Music (magna cum laude) from Texas Woman’s University where he was a member of the music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda. He is studying in pursuit of the Master of Arts degree in Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of North Texas where his thesis "Listening in the Living Room: The Pursuit of Authentic Spaces and Sounds in Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk…

/sean-peters

Piyawat Louilarpprasert

“Young and gifted, meet the rebel Thai composer taking music to unheard heights”
(Described by CNN News World Report,Karla Cripps)

/piyawat-louilarpprasert

Sierra wins Latin Grammy for guitar sonata

Composer Roberto Sierra won for “Music from Cuba and Spain, Sierra: Sonata para Guitarra.”

Roger Moseley

As director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, as a scholar, and as a performer, I focus on intersections and overlaps between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways both can be played. Through my research and teaching, I am committed to bringing thought and practice together by reflecting on the mechanics, dynamics, and consequences of musical acts. In particular, I investigate how the concept of play can sharpen our awareness of music’s joys and risks while addressing the underlying question of how materials, processes, interfaces, and media make both music and play conceivable as such.

/roger-moseley