Cornell University is set to dazzle music enthusiasts with its upcoming Cornell Concert Series, an eclectic blend of traditional rhythms, contemporary innovation, and cross-cultural harmonies. The series promises an invigorating lineup, featuring the heart-thumping beats of Yamato The Drummers of Japan, the impeccable technique of pianist Jonathan Biss, the genre-defying sounds of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, the griot-inspired melodies of Sona Jobarteh, and the vocal virtuosity of Roomful of Teeth. Each performance offers a unique musical journey, celebrating the richness of global sounds and the boundless potential of artistic expression.

Cornell Concert Series: A Symphony of Global Beats and Virtuosity

The Cornell Concert Series promises a season of music that is as diverse as it is captivating. From the pulsating rhythms of Yamato, the Drummers of Japan, to the intricate piano performances by Jonathan Biss, and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah's innovative 'Stretch Music', the series offers a rich tapestry of sound. Joining the lineup are Sona Jobarteh, preserving West African traditions, and Roomful of Teeth, redefining vocal music's boundaries. These events celebrate musical innovation while honoring deep-rooted traditions, offering audiences an unforgettable experience.

Cornell Concert Series: A Musical Journey Across Cultures and Styles

Cornell University Department of Music is set to host an extraordinary concert series featuring trailblazers Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Sona Jobarteh, and Roomful of Teeth. These events promise to break the barriers of musical genres, with performances that highlight the innovative spirit in jazz, the rich heritage of West African griot traditions, and the groundbreaking reimagination of choral music. Each artist and group brings their unique voice and legacy to the stage, making this concert series an unmissable experience for music enthusiasts.

Cornell Concert Series: A Sonic Exploration with Chief Adjuah, Sona Jobarteh, and Roomful of Teeth

Roomful of Teeth is a GRAMMY-winning vocal project dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. Earning awards and accolades for both performances and compositions, the group has been hailed as “fiercely beautiful” (NPR), “impressive” (The New York Times), and “revolutionizing choral music” (The New Yorker). Through study with masters from vocal traditions the world over, the multi-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges new repertoire without borders. Exploring a bold sonic palette of speech, sighs, whispers, throat singing, and more, Roomful of Teeth is one of the most impressive and in-demand vocal groups on the planet.

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Cornell Concert Series presents: Roomful of Teeth

Cornell University

Preserving her musical past, Sona Jobarteh innovates to support a more humanitarian future. The spirit of her musical work stands on the mighty shoulders of the West African griot tradition; she is a living archive of the Gambian people. Her singing and kora playing, while fronting her band, spring directly from this heritage. Sona Jobarteh has performed live to audiences from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and Symphony Space in New York to London’s Barbican, Cologne’s Philharmonie, and the Seine Musicale in Paris. Hailed as “mould-breaking” (Songlines Magazine), Sona Jobarteh is “a griot for a new generation” (BBC World Service).

Cornell Concert Series presents: Sona Jobarteh

Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah [formerly Christian Scott] is a two-time Edison Award-winning, six-time GRAMMY-nominated, Doris Duke Award in the Arts awardee. He creates as a sonic architect, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, designer of innovative technologies, and musical instruments. Chief is widely recognized as the progenitor of “Stretch Music,” a jazz-rooted, genre-blind musical form that attempts to “stretch” jazz’s rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic conventions to encompass multiple musical forms, languages, and cultures, prompting NPR to consider him as “ushering in a new era of jazz.” Bringing his five-piece band to the Bailey Hall stage, “jazz’s young style God” (JazzTimes) will deliver a performance to remember.

Cornell Concert Series presents: Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott)

Praised as “a superb pianist and also an eloquent and insightful music writer” ( The Boston Globe) with “impeccable taste and a formidable technique” (The New Yorker), Biss has appeared internationally as a soloist with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, as well as the London Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, among many other ensembles. Biss is a teacher, musical thinker, and performer whose repertoire ranges from the core canon to contemporary commissions. Here at Cornell, he will be performing works by Franz Schubert and Tyshawn Sorey.

Cornell Concert Series presents: Jonathan Biss

Yamato is described as the “epitome of the Japanese spirit,” bringing new life to the traditional Japanese taiko and wadaiko drums by paying respect to their rich history, and exploring contemporary drumming styles. Audiences around the world have been exhilarated by the heart-thumping rhythm, thunderous sounds, and explosive beats as the Yamato drummers display their remarkable physical strength and trademark infectious energy with drums that weigh up to half a ton. For the players of Yamato, every encounter with their listeners is a unique and precious experience; their goal is to send audiences home after each performance with a new vitality and passion for life.

Cornell Concert Series presents: YAMATO The Drummers of Japan

The GRAMMY-nominated Danish String Quartet continues to assert its preeminence among the world’s finest string quartets. Celebrated for their “intense blend, extreme dynamic variation (in which they seem glued together), perfect intonation even on harmonics, and constant vitality and flow” (Gramophone) and renowned for the palpable joy they exude in music-making, the Danish String Quartet has become one of today’s most in- demand classical quartets, performing to sold-out concert halls around the world. The Danish Quartet’s inventive and intriguing programming and repertoire choices have captivated audiences. At Cornell, they will be performing works by Caroline Shaw, Haydn, Shostakovich, and a selection of their original compositions and traditional folk tunes.

Cornell Concert Series presents: Danish String Quartet

Seth Cluett is an internationally recognized composer and artist whose quiet, patient music explores the territory between the senses, with a compelling attention to perception. His work is driven by themes of ecological collapse and resilience, often expressed through materials found in nature. Cluett's “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Cluett is on the composition faculty at Columbia University, where he is Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program. Since 2017 he has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs.

Composers Forum: Seth Cluett

Cornell University Department of Music

Music is labor. While Marx reminds us that all commodities embody the labor behind their production (Marx 1867), recording and especially reperforming technologies also mediate the labor of performing musicians. The production and consumption of such mediated labor are inseparable from dynamics of race and class, as a media archeology of the player piano demonstrates. These instrument-machines were marketed to the white middle class as labor-saving devices that would take over the domestic work of music-making in the home. In the case of race rolls, the player piano mediates the labor of Black pianists within the white bourgeois parlor room.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Benjamin Skoronski and Moira de Kok

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 of Keyboard 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 book The 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.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Annette Richards, “Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis”

Ute Wassermann is one of the most outstanding contemporary vocal phenomena. She combines composition, improvisation and performance art to create her own form of Gesamtkunst, in which environmentally relevant themes play an essential role. For many years she has toured the world as an improviser and performer of contemporary music. In the last decade she has been increasingly realising audiovisual voice performances / installations and compositions for soloists and ensembles. She has received commissions by Ryogoku Art Festival Japan, WDR, University of Amsterdam, Poetica Sonora Mexico City, Casa de Lago UNAM Mexico City, Transart Festival Bolzano, maulwerker, Distractfold Ensemble, Ruhrtriennale, and MaerzMusik.

Composers Forum: Ute Wassermann, "Expanding the Voice"

Abstract: First held in 1958, the Inter-American Music Festival (IAMF, 1958-1986) was organized under the sponsorship of the Organization of American States “to promote closer relations and understanding among the American republics by recognizing and stimulating the development of music of the Americas.” Hosted in Washington, D.C. every two or three years, the IAMF presented classical music by composers from the region in an effort to foster Pan-American solidarity through classical music. However, the concert programming and the subsequent musical criticism shows that in spite of organizers’ claims to “promote closer relations and understanding,” US critics characterized the works by Latin American composers with essentializing terms, such as ‘exotic’, highlighting the differences between US and Latin American composers. By examining the careers of Latin American composers after their participation in the IAMF we can surmise that the individuals who benefited the most from the IAMF’s exposure by and large composed in musical styles that avoided overtly nationalistic music idioms. Instead of celebrating difference and national pride, the IAMF rewarded composers who abandoned nationalistic tendencies over a more cosmopolitan approach that was promoted by certain US composers and critics at the time. Furthermore, the content of the concert programs reflected and reinforced existing Cold War political tensions, rather than serve as a bridge for mutual understanding. Additionally, the IAMF must be considered in relation to other music festivals of the region, in particular the Latin American Music Festivals of Caracas, Venezuela, that preceded the IAMF in 1954 and 1957 and which continues to this day. Tracing the connections between these two festivals reveals that the aesthetic tendencies that favored so-called universal compositional techniques were not entirely the product of the US music establishment, but rather a combination of European and North American trends along with emerging preferences among Latin American composers and critics in the 1950s.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Marysol Quevedo, “Music of the Hemisphere: the Inter-American Music Festival, Cold War Cultural Diplomacy, and ‘Universal’ Musical Aesthetics”

Kuwento Mizik, a crossover classical duo featuring baritone Jean Bernard Cerin and pianist Veena K. Kulkarni-Rankin takes listeners around the world in a program of Haitian, Filipino, and American music. At the center of this journey, listeners will hear “Allah’s favorite Butterfly,” & “Tezen,” two traditional folktales adapted by Kuwento Mizik for piano and storyteller.

Krik! Krak: Tales from Haiti & The Philippines

¡Viva el mariachi! The historic tradition of mariachi music has its roots in places like Guadalajara and Mexico City, but as the ever-evolving genre spread, it reached Chicago and birthed Mariachi Herencia de México. The twice Latin GRAMMY-nominated band has issued five chart-topping albums and performed across the North American continent. The young, virtuosic band brings us an explosion of colors and sounds in their program, Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa), which combines mariachi roots with vibrant percussion traditions from Spanish Harlem. Simultaneously honoring the past, celebrating the present, and creating the future of mariachi music, Mariachi Herencia de México presents an electrifying and unforgettable night of Mexican music and culture.

Cornell Concert Series presents: Mariachi Herencia de México

Midday Music in Lincoln: Hannah Soren, cello, performs solo works by Luigi Dallapiccola, Forrest Moody (premiere), and is joined by Jack Yarbrough (piano) for Salvatore Sciarrino's Melencolia I.

Midday Music in Lincoln: CU Music

Sage Chapel

Abstract: Throughout its approximately fifty-year history as a vehicle for punk cultural production, the cassette tape remains a powerful signifier of anti-commercialism for punks. However, while punks may inscribe significance into the medium of the cassette tape, histories of recording and playback media often group technologies into a single genealogy, extending from the phonograph in the 19th century to filesharing formats in the 21st century in what musicologists Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray termed the "phonographic regime." In their work, Bohlman and McMurray offer tape as a refutation of the phonographic regime, arguing for an understanding of how recording and playback media shape our world by evaluating each technology's unique material affordances. My dissertation explores what the unique material affordances of the cassette tape made/make possible, examining the cassette as a medium for writing and remembering histories and the role of the cassette tape in developing and disseminating local scenes across the history of punk. To that end, I explore four case studies, tracking punk's development from its first wave in New York City in the 1970s to the midwest emo revival of the late 2000s. The four case studies I discuss explore the cassette tape's use by members of punk scenes as a type of sonic memoir, do-it-yourself history tool, object of nostalgia, and physical artifact in an increasingly digitized world. Through these case studies, I aim to illustrate the significance of the cassette tape and other recording and playback media as a means of shaping what is possible and how we relate to, and through, sound.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Sean Peters, "Life in Plastic (It's Fantastic): The Significance of the Cassette Tape to Punk Rock in Four Stories"

Smithsonian Academy Orchestra: Kenneth Slowik brings the SAO to Cornell for a program of Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Haydn’s Piano Concerto in G Major, featuring the CCHK’s Postdoctoral Artist-in-Residence Patricia García Gil.

Smithsonian Academy Orchestra featuring Patricia García Gil

Every afternoon from March 1 to 19, a barrage of fireworks fills the plaza outside the City Hall of València, Spain, with cloudbursts of colorful smoke and a cacophony of thunderous blasts. This pyrotechnic display, the mascletà, is named for the firecrackers (masclets) that bring it to life. Because it happens at midday, creative manipulation of explosive sound takes precedence over visual appeal and becomes the determining factor of a successful mascletà. The mascletà is a defining feature of the Valencian soundscape, cultivating and communicating sonic cultural identification for members of the Valencian Community. More than merely an ephemeral component of this sonic identity, the mascletà’s sociocultural valences also manifest in the built environment that supports its continued vitality. The architects of recent renovations to City Hall Plaza even assured that the trees now populating the square would not ‘disrupt’ the annual display. Despite its fleeting nature, then, the mascletà continues to influence València’s residents and visitors through and beyond its own sonic articulation. As I explore in this paper, this staying power in a collective aural memory allows the mascletà to reproduce the archive of beliefs, behaviors, and feelings that inform it. While the rhythms and timbres of individual mascletaes differ, as an essential component of València’s “sound space” (Llop i Bayo 2004), the mascletà develops an aural–tactile poetics that draws listeners closer through repeated resoundings (Chávez 2017). The mascletà reverberates within and between its listeners to generate a deeply felt sense of sonic belonging through explosive noise.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Rachel Horner and Nic Vigilante

“Ancient and Modern, c. 1773.” Music by Stanley, Purcell, Frescobaldi, Bach, and Scheidemann.

Midday Music for Organ: Annette Richards

Anabel Taylor Hall

Laura Cetilia's DMA dissertation recital will include works for strings, voice, electronics, and more. “counterglow” for string quartet and “half-diminished returns” for two basses and two cellos are among the compositions to be featured.

Laura Cetilia's DMA dissertation recital

Cornell Wind Symphony, James Spinazzola, conductor. In the opening concert of the 2024-2025 season, the Wind Symphony celebrates the 125th anniversary of Duke Ellington's birth with James Spinazzola's new arrangement of A Tone Parallel to Harlem and Omar Thomas's Come Sunday. Flutist Juliana Pepinsky will be on hand for Lowell Liebermann's stunning Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, and the Wind Symphony will mark one month before the U.S. presidential election with Percy Grainger's Marching Song of Democracy.

Cornell Wind Symphony

Ithaca High School

Cornell Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra. Gabriela Gómez Estévez, conductor. The Chamber Orchestra performs Ives’ The Unanswered Question, Shaw’s Entr’acte, and Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C Major featuring soloist John Haines-Eitzen. The Symphony Orchestra performs Nabors’ Onward, and Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Cornell Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra

Hailing from Nashville, TN, Ambre Dromgoole is an assistant professor of Africana religions and music in the Africana Studies & Research Center at Cornell University. Her work centers the composition, perception, and projections of Black sacred soundings across different social contexts, the ways that gender is (re)constituted in these spaces, and the artistic innovation that occurs outside the purview of traditionally recognized social, educational, and ecclesial institutions. She received her B.A. in Religion and Musical Studies from Oberlin College and Conservatory in 2015, her M.A. from Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music in 2017, and her PhD from Yale University in 2023. Her current book project There’s a Heaven Somewhere: A Sonic History of Black Womanhood is the first of its kind to document the twentieth century history of itinerant women gospel musicians as a collective, paying particular attention to their musical trainings as girls in Afro- Protestant contexts as well as their formation in the entertainment industry. It asks what the combined lived experiences, sonic performances, and working-class consciousness of missionaries turned gospel blues progenitors can reveal about Black cultural hybridity, legibility, plurality, and music education and practice.

Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Ambre Dromgoole, “American Requiem”?: Beyoncé's Hyper-Sensory Technologies of Feeling

Ensemble X performs Andy Akiho’s LigNEouS 1, Black for two bass clarinets by Cornell grad Marc Mellits, two movements from Toy Store by Juri Seo, and the US Premiere of Samuel Adams’ Lighthouse.

Ensemble X

Join the Cornell Chorus and Glee Club for an evening of song exploring the various homes in our lives: those earthly and celestial, homes we create and homes we preserve, homes we find by choice or by chance. Music will span four centuries of choral singing across the globe, in six languages and many differing vocal styles. The concert will include a performance of the Chorus and Glee Club's recent commission, "Seek, Home," by composer Yi-Ning Lo, and will culminate with some Cornell songs to celebrate our home here on the hill. After the concert, please join us for a display of fireworks at Schoellkopf Field. $ Tickets at cornelltickets.com. Advance tickets are $8 for students and $15 for public. Tickets at the door are $10 for students and $17 for public.

Cornell Chorus and Glee Club Homecoming Concert

Midday Music for Organ: David Yearsley. “The World-Famous Organist, J. S. Bach.” 

Midday Music for Organ: David Yearsley

The Sierra Duo (John Haines-Eitzen, cello and Matthew Bengtson, piano) performs Beethoven’s 7 Variations in E-flat Major (on "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen" from Mozart's The Magic Flute) followed by an epic cello and piano sonata by visiting composer Allen McCullough inspired by themes by Brahms, Ravel, and Bruckner.

The Sierra Duo: CU Music

Guest organist Balint Karosi. The Eclectic Baroque Organ. A program of major works including Weckmann, “Es Ist das Heil,” Ligeti, “Hungarian Rock,” Danksagmüller, “Circuli,” and J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582.

Balint Karosi, guest organist: CU Music

Midday Music in Lincoln: lucky crumbs (James Parker and María Bulla) plays "little songs for big churches," a set of sacred music for non-sacred places

Midday Music, 9/19, lucky crumbs: CU Music

Pierpaolo Polzonetti is a Professor of music at the University of California, Davis. He specializes in music and food, opera, jazz, and Cuban popular music. He is the author of Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet (University of Chicago Press, 2021, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Tartini e la musica secondo natura (Lucca: LIM, 2001, reprinted 2022). His latest article, "Cuban Sound Recipes: Gastronomic References in Cuban Popular Music (1913-2023)," is being published by the Revista de Música Latinoamericana/Latin American Music Review, 45/2 (2024) and his recent research has been supported by the Díaz-Ayala Library Travel Grant conferred by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI), the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, and Florida International University Libraries.

Cornell University Department of Music

Apr 24, 2025

Cornell Concert Series presents: Roomful of Teeth

Mar 21, 2025

Cornell Concert Series presents: Sona Jobarteh

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Cornell University Department of Music