Search | Department of Music

Elizabeth Lyon

Elizabeth Lyon is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology and is currently completing a dissertation entitled, Theorizing Music as Spiritual Practice: Perspectives from Augustine to Tinctoris.Her research centers on the history of musical thought, theory, and practice within medieval theological and philosophical contexts, particularly ways in which music theory intersects with medieval psychological frameworks for volition and affect. As a cellist and music director, she performs and teaches a wide range of Western art and sacred music, from new music to medieval office chants, in both university and community settings. She maintains an active career as both a baroque and modern cellist and has lectured and conducted workshops on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance practice. Her research has been published inGreek and Roman Musical Studiesand theInternational Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, and her music criticism can be found inThe Hudson Review.

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Michele Cheng

Michele Cheng, a 1.5 generation Taiwanese American, is an interdisciplinary composer who intertwines diverse media such as music, experimental theatre, and puppetry to engage with social issues and cultural identities. Through a journalistic approach to interview and research, she develops creative work that shines light on underrepresented individuals and their narratives.

Her works have been performed at CCRMA (Stanford, US), ICMC (Santiago, CL), ISSTA (IE), SICMF (Seoul, KR), Sonorities (…

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Maria Alejandra Bulla Clavijo

María Bulla is a music maker interested in the creation of flexible performance situations that allow individuals to experience art in a personal way. From the construction of miniature objects to oversized scores, instrumental pieces and field recordings, she attempts to create experiences in which music becomes part of everyday situations. María holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá D.C., Colombia), and a MFA in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts.

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Nathan Mondry

A professional organist, harpsichordist and fortepianist with international recognition as an improviser and composer, Nathan Mondry is a first-year D.M.A. student in the Keyboard Studies program at Cornell University. After completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance at the University of Michigan, Nathan earned a Master’s Degree in Harpsichord Performance and an Artist Diploma in Organ Performance at McGill University, followed by a Master’s Degree in Historical Improvisation at the…

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Annette Richards

Annette Richards is Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell, and the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is a performer and scholar with a specialty in 18th-century music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature and visual culture. She is founding editor ofKeyboard Perspectives, a yearbook dedicated to historical performance and keyboard culture, but her scholarly work extends far beyond the organ and its music. She is particularly interested in the music and music aesthetics of mid- to late-18th century Germany, and especially C. P. E. Bach. Her bookThe Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque(Cambridge, 2001) explores the intersections between musical fantasy and the landscape garden in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music across German-speaking Europe and England.

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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.

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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…

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Cheryl Tan

Cheryl Tan graduated from the University of Oxford in 2018 with a First Class Honours in Music, where she also won academic scholarships for her performance in the University examinations, the University-wide Joan Conway Scholarship for Advanced Performance Studies, and was appointed as the Organ Scholar of St. Hugh’s College. Supported by an Entrance Scholarship, Cheryl completed her Master’s degree in Piano Performance with Distinction at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama under the…

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Thomas Feng

Thomas Feng is a pianist, composer, and musicologist.

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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.

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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.

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John Eagle

John Eagle is a composer and musician active in a variety of performance, installation, and interdisciplinary contexts. His work often operates within ecological frameworks involving extendedinstrumental systems. These works explore microtonal harmonic intonation and tuning practices as environmental processes.

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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.

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Joshua Biggs

Josh Biggs (b. 22 September 1993) is a composer from Cape Town, South Africa, with recent electroacoustic and chamber work focusing on the relationship between gesture and affect.
Biggs has studied with Lewis Nielson, Aaron Helgeson, Tom Lopez, and Jesse Jones, and holds a BMus in Composition from Oberlin Conservatory, (2017). In August 2019, Biggs will begin their DMA in Composition at Cornell University, under the guidance of Kevin Ernste, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, and Roberto Sierra…

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Han Xu

Han Xu 许瀚 (b 1989, Beijing China) is a composer, sound artist, and improviser who has gained a great deal of inspiration from Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist Philosophy.
Han Xu is currently a doctoral student at Cornell University, where he studied with Marianthi Papaleandri-Alexandri, Kevin Ernste, and Trevor J. Pinch. In 2008, he began studying music at the Communication University of China in Beijing and, in 2017, he finished a music masters degree in composition (graduating with distinction…

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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.

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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…

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Thomas Cressy

Thomas is currently exploring the academic intersection between anthropology, social theory, and musicology – with a focus on indexicality, affordance theory, atmosphere, and ethnographic approaches to music. His field site for his work has been Japan for the past five years, where he has been researching the Japanese reception and social conceptions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music in particular. He has also conducted historical and archival work on the music of the foreign trading settlements…

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Miles Friday

Born in Seattle, WA., Miles Jefferson Friday is currently pursuing a DMA in music composition at Cornell University. Miles holds a MA in composition from the Eastman School of Music where he studied primarily with Oliver Schneller, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and David Liptak and a BM from the Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music. While at Eastman Miles served as the instructor for ‘Notation & Calligraphy’ and ‘the Basics of Orchestration’, was a staff member and lab instructor at the…

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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.

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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.

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Anna Steppler

Anna Steppler was awarded a Ph.D. in Musicology (December 2022) at Cornell for her dissertation “Michael Praetorius, the Organ, and the Possibilities of Instrumental Music,” which uses the music and theoretical writings of Praetorius to argue for the organ’s pivotal role in the establishment of instrumental music’s inherent theological and cultural value in early-seventeenth century Lutheran courtly circles. From London, U.K., she holds a first-class degree in Music from Merton College, Oxford, where she was organ scholar from 2010-2013, and a Masters degree on the Organ from Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden, where she was awarded the Carl Larsson Scholarship for Music. She has presented at conferences in the US and Europe, and has articles published and forthcoming in The Organ Yearbook and the Journal of Musicology. She is an active recitalist and organist, serving as organist and director of music for the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Cornell, and St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Ithaca.

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