Max Smith

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…

Daniel Sabzghabaei

Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei (دانیال رضا سبزقبایی) is a creator who is interested in looking at time through different lenses: unpacking notions of tradition, exploring memories of those past, and investigating nostalgic frameworks that lean forward. His music has been commissioned and presented by organizations including: the GRAMMY winning New York Youth Symphony, JACK Quartet, National Sawdust, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Proton Bern, loadbang, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Intimacy of Creativity Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, TAK Ensemble, Beth Morrison Projects, the New York Festival of Song, bassist Robert Black, the Banff Centre, Contemporaneous, Guerilla Opera, the Moab Music Festival, Chorus Austin, the Young New Yorkers Chorus, Pro Coro Canada, The Esoterics, OPERA America, and VocalEssence among others. Daniel recently completed his doctorate at Cornell, where his dissertation focused on Persian Choral Music. Outside of music and interdisciplinary projects, Daniel also translates Persian poetry. Daniel is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Department of Music at Cornell University. https://danielsabzghabaei.com/

Michael Plagerman

Pursuant to his goals in professional church music, Michael Plagerman has interests in the repertoire and practice of sacred literature for the organ and choir through the last two centuries as well as the theory and performance practice traditions of 19th and 20th century France. An advocate for the musical education of congregations, Michael has sought to encourage participatory music making in the church through the organization of a number of concerts, choral workshops, and other…

Samantha Heinle

Samantha is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology with a secondary field in German studies. Her interdisciplinary research revolves around the intersection of music and literature in Austro-German works of the 19th and 20th centuries, including music-text relations, Literaturoper, and music in literature, and engages with aesthetics, critical theory, and media theory. She is currently writing her dissertation on questions of communicability in three musical adaptations of texts by Franz Kafka: Ernst…

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.

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…

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.

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.

Daniel Hawkins

Daniel Hawkins is a second-year musicology PhD student specializing in ethnomusicology. His research revolves around themes of participation and power, and includes interestes in sound and civic space, concepts of traditional music, theorizing whiteness, decolonization studies, and indigenous resistance camps. He has pursued ethnographic work in Flatbush (Brooklyn), Wet'suwet'en territory, and midcoast Maine, and presented his work at the Society for Ethnomusicology and the International…

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.

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.

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…

Piyawat Louilarpprasert

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

Sergio Cote Barco

Sergio Cote studied composition in Bogota, Colombia (2006-2011) in the Javeriana University with Guillermo Gaviria and Carlos Julio Ramirez. In 2015 he undertook his Master's degree in composition at the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester, UK, under the tutelage of David Horne and Adam Gorb. He has had additional lessons with Magnus Lindberg, Brian Ferneyhough, Javier Torres-Maldonado, and Pierluigi Billone. His music has been performed and commissioned worldwide by ensembles such as…

Jonathan Schakel

Jonathan Schakel is a DMA candidate in performance practice at Cornell University, where he works with Annette Richards and David Yearsley.  He holds a master’s degree in organ and early music from Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA, where he studied organ and harpsichord with Peter Sykes.  He has pursued further studies with Lorenzo Ghielmi, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, and Olivier Latry, and has participated in the summer organ academies in Smarano, Italy; in Haarlem, the Netherlands; and…

John Rowehl

John Rowehl is Associate Director of Choral Music at Cornell University and a doctoral student in the Performance Practice program within Cornell’s Department of Music. He has conducted the Chorale and the Cornell Chamber Singers since 2010. Prior to that, he worked with the Cornell University Glee Club, as Assistant Conductor beginning in 2002, and in the following decade conducted the ensemble at such venues as Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center, as well as on international tours to…

Shin Hwang

Shin Hwang, a prize-winner of the 1st International Westfield Fortepiano Competition, is a versatile keyboardist who has won recognition in both modern and historical performance. After completing his Masters degree at the University of Michigan with Penelope Crawford and Arthur Greene, he received the prestigious Fulbright Grant to study in the Netherlands at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. In 2011, he was invited to perform at the United States Library of Congress for the American…

David Friend

David Friend is a pianist specializing in contemporary and experimental repertoire. His playing has been called “astonishingly compelling” by the Washington Post and the New York Times has heralded him as “[one] of the finest, busiest pianists active in New York’s contemporary-classical scene.” He has performed new and experimental music around the world, including at major venues such as Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Festival Hall (London), the Chan Centre (Vancouver), and the National Centre for…

Maxwell Williams

I am a PhD candidate in musicology with a minor field in Africana studies. Before coming to Cornell, I received a B.A. in music from the University of Southampton, England where I completed a dissertation on intersections between punctuation form and schema theory in Mozart’s symphonic minuets, and was awarded the Lyttel Prize and the Edward Wood Memorial Prize for academic performance. My current research centers on questions of aesthetics and Blackness in hip-hop and musics of the African…

Morton Wan

I am a cultural historian of political economy and music, and a performer on keyboard instruments, both historical and modern. My current research portfolio comprises two main areas: one examines how eighteenth-century music registers and refracts the value regimes of early financial markets; the other traces how keyboard instruments were drawn into the circuits of trade that have come to define the geopolitical architecture of modern global capitalism.

Annalise Smith

Annalise is a doctoral candidate in historical musicology, supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada. She holds a diploma in vocal performance, and has degrees in musicology from the University of Calgary (2008) and the University of Victoria (2011). Her dissertation focuses on late eighteenth-century French opera, particularly the operas of Christoph Gluck, the genre norms of operatic practice, and the politics and culture of the theatre before the French…

Aya Saiki

Originally from Japan, Aya received her BMus (Hons) in music and MMus in historical musicology from King’s College London. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines Tōru Takemitsu’s use of magnetic tape between 1955 and 1969 as a window into a web of aesthetics, techniques, technology, and individuals in the overlapping spaces between avant-garde, modernism, and mass culture in postwar Japan. Her other areas of interest include musical analysis (particularly text-music…

Monica Roundy

Working in the middle of notational, generic, linguistic, iconographic, and codicological traces, Monica Roundy’s current research project pursues the places—physical, cultural, hermeneutic—of music written in non-liturgical sources of English provenance in the thirteenth century. The fragmentary and scattered manuscripts invite recuperative thought and imaginative re-membering with an ear toward realization in scholarship and performance; these entwined pursuits in turn nourish broader…

Nicole Reisnour

Nicole Reisnour is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology with a minor concentration in socio-cultural anthropology. Her dissertation, Sounding the Immaterial: Ethics, Mediation, and the Politics of Religion in Post-Authoritarian Bali, explores the efforts of contemporary Balinese Hindus to live ethically amidst competing ideals of devout Hindu selfhood. Focusing on the mediatory practices that bind Balinese Hindus to invisible beings, and on state-sponsored efforts to reconfigure the ethical…