Program News 2018

Program News 2018 Music

Undergraduate Student News 2018

Undergraduate Student News 2018 Music

Dissertation Archive

Dissertation Archive Music
Lewandowski presents Siren at MASS MoCA

Project celebrates the beauty of humpback whale songs

“The Whale Listening Project,” which runs Sept. 23-26, is a four-day immersion in the beauty of whale song and a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the best-selling 1970 album, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” co-produced by pioneering bioacoustics researchers Roger Payne, Ph.D. ’61, and Katy Payne ’59, a retired research associate with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program.

man dancing

Festival takes listeners on musical pilgrimage around Arts Quad

The Resounds Festival kicks off a yearlong project focused on innovation in acoustic instruments and includes installations at the Johnson Museum and concerts each day beginning at 4 p.m. that take listeners on a pilgrimage to various locations around the Arts Quad.

Roberto Sierra

Sierra symphony highlights Caribbean culture

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will launch its 2021-22 season on Oct. 14 with the world premiere of “Symphony No. 6,” composed by Roberto Sierra, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Tania Leon with a score looking into the distance

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León visits Cornell

The Cornell Department of Music welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León to campus November 18-19. Born in Havana, Cuba, León is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. In 2021, her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music....

Roberto Sierra at piano

Sierra symphony premiered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

Professor Roberto Sierra's Symphony No. 6 received its world premiere on October 26, 2021, in a performance by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, under the direction of Domingo Hindoyan. The performance was then broadcast by BBC Radio 3, which is available to stream on-demand through November 26. 

Piyawat Louilarpprasert

Louilarpprasert commissioned for 100th celebration of Donaueschinger Musiktage

Piyawat Louilarpprasert's work Ohm-Na-Mo (โอม นะ โม) was recently premiered as a part of the 100th celebration of the Donaueschinger Musiktage festival in Germany. Louilarpprasert, a graduate student in composition, was commissioned by the Südwestrundfunk (SWR), along with four other composers; the resulting piece was a 70-minute collective...

Klarman Hall

Gail Holst-Warhaft


Gail Holst-Warhaft, Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Classics, Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies. She is also Director of the Mediterranean Studies Initiative (Spring 2004-) and Faculty Associate of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. Her areas of interest include Modern Greek Literature and Music, Greek Literature from Antiquity to the Present, Translation, water and culture. She is also a poet, translator, and musician. Author of The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Harvard UP, 2000), Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Hakkert 1980), Penelope's Confession (poems, 2007). Co-editor of Losing Paradise: the Water Crisis in the Mediterranean (Ashgate, 2010) and The Classical Moment.

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Klarman Hall

Neal Zaslaw

Neal Zaslaw has taught at Cornell since 1970, where he continues to expound the history of Western music from the 9th to the 21st century. He is the author of more than seventy-five articles on baroque music, historical performance practices, Mozart, and the history of the orchestra. His books include Köchel-Verzeichnis: Thematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von W. A. Mozart, begründet von Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (Neuausgabe 2023); (with John Spitzer) The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650-1815 (2004);Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation (1996);The Mozart Repertory: A Guide for Musicians, Programmers and Researchers (1991);W. A. Mozart: Portfolio of a Genius (1991);The Compleat Mozart: A Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1990);Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (1989); andThe Classical Era from the 1740s to the End of the 18th Century (1989).

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Klarman Hall

David Yearsley

David Yearsley was educated at Harvard College and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Musicology in 1994. At Cornell he continues to pursue his interests in the teaching, history, literature and performance of music. His musicological work investigates literary, social, and theological contexts for music and music making, and while he focuses on J. S. Bach, he has written on topics ranging from music and death to musical invention, from organology and performance to musical representations of public spaces in film, from musical travelers to the joys of the keyboard duet. At Cornell he has taught courses on Bach and Handel, surveys of Western Art Music, keyboard performance, the organ, music journalism, film music, and music theory.

/david-yearsley
Klarman Hall

Miri Yampolsky

Miri Yampolsky

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Klarman Hall

Stephen Spinelli

Stephen Spinelli is the assistant director of choral programs at Cornell University, where he conducts the Chorale and the Chamber Singers, and serves as the assistant director for the Glee Club and the Chorus. He also directs the choir at the First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca. Under his direction the Cornell Chorale (www.cornellchorale.com) has tripled its student participation, and has performed the Vivaldi Gloria, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms in the last year alone, collaborating with the Cornell Percussion Ensemble, Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Orchestra along the way. The Cornell Chamber Singers (www.cuchambersingers.com) continue to present ambitious programs that challenge programmatic norms. Recent performances have featured the American premieres of Agazzari’s Eumelio and Roman Palester’s The Vistula. The Chamber Singers are frequently invited to perform as guest artists on local concert performance series, including Ensemble X, MayFest, and Music at Grace (Elmira, NY). In August of 2018, the Chamber Singers travelled to Maui, Hawaii, for a cultural exchange as guests of the Maui Chamber Orchestra. In August of 2019, the Chamber Singers completed a residency on the island of Nantucket, where they highlighted the influence of the African-American spiritual at Nantucket's historic African Meeting House.

As a performer, Stephen has sung with some of the country’s leading contemporary music vocal ensembles. As a tenor with The Crossing, he premiered works by eminent composers, including Eriks Ešenvalds, Lewis Spratlan, Gabriel Jackson, Ted Hearne, and Gavin Bryars. He performed on five albums with The Crossing, including the 2018 GRAMMY Award-winning recording of Bryars’ The Fifth Century. He has also performed with the genre-bending vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, for whom he  assisted in the production of their GRAMMY Award-winning debut album, which yielded the Pulitzer Prize-winning recording of Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices, as well as their GRAMMY-nominated sophomore album, Render. 

Stephen holds degrees from Williams College (BA, music), where he also recorded sixteen All-American finishes as an NCAA swimmer, and Temple University (MM, conducting), and Northwestern University (DMA, choral conducting), where he wrote his dissertation on the lost concerto-arias of the seventeenth-century Thomaskantor, Johann Schelle as a doctor of musical arts candidate Northwestern University.
 

/stephen-spinelli
Klarman Hall

Roberto Sierra

For the past three decades Roberto Sierra’s works have been performed by orchestras, ensembles and festivals in the Americas and Europe. Sierra came to prominence in 1987, when hisfirst major orchestral composition, Júbilo, was performed at Carnegie Hall bythe Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Major commissions and performances include: the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Atlanta Symphony,Houston Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, San AntonioSymphony, and Phoenix Symphony, as well as by the American ComposersOrchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BuffaloPhilharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra (Zurich),National Orchestra of Barcelona, Symphony Orchestra of Galicia, the KronosQuartet, Continuum, Germany’s Radio Orchestras from Saarland andFrankfurt, England’s BBC Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, andat Wolf Trap, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Schleswig-HolsteinFestival, Festival Casals, France’s Festival de Lille, and others.

/roberto-sierra
Klarman Hall

Lee Kimura Tyson

Lee Kimura Tyson holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Cornell University, with a minor focus in LGBT Studies, and an M.M. in Musicology from the University of Texas at Austin, with a Portfolio in Women's and Gender Studies. Their research on popular music in U.S. and online contexts focuses on the roles of music, voice, and digital media in formations of gender, race, and authenticity, particularly concerning trans and non-binary vocal expression. Tyson has presented their work at annual meetings for the American Musicological Society, American Anthropological Association, Society for Ethnomusicology, International Association for the Study of Popular Music--U.S. Chapter, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. Their research on experimental pop artist SOPHIE received the David Sanjek Award from IASPM-U.S.

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