Michael Small (D.M.A. Composition, 2017) is looking forward to a busy summer as a teaching fellow at the Bowdoin International Music Festival where he will be mentoring a group of undergrad and grad composition students as well as having a few of his own works featured. In August, he will be in Granada, Spain for the premiere of his new work Jali, for Oboe and String Quartet at the International Double Reed Society conference. His tribute to Steven Stucky, Debussy Window will soon appear on Gloria Cheng’s forthcoming release on Bridge Records. He is also proud to continue work on his podcast, Composers’ Notes, presenting portraits of today’s composers aimed at general and specialist listeners. More info at michaelsmallcomposer.com.
Evan Cortens (Ph.D. Musicology, 2014) was recently promoted to Manager of Academic Initiatives at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His article on C. P. E. Bach's Hamburg vocal ensemble was published in Bach Perspectives 11 (Illinois, 2017) and he was elected to the position of Secretary-Treasurer for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music last November.
Amanda Lalonde (Ph.D. Musicology, 2014) began a three-year term at the University of Saskatchewan, published "Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism" in 19th Century Music, and was awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her project on Music and Romantic Prophecy. She and her husband Shaun welcomed son Andreas Hector Lalonde last July.
Sean Shepherd (D.M.A. Composition, 2014) premiered Express Abstractionism with the Boston Symphony and Andris Nelsons in February, and will open the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra's season in August. In addition to his work with Carnegie Hall's National Youth Orchestra Apprentice Composer Program in July, his music will appear at the Cabrillo, Grant Park (as part of the League of American Orchestras National Conference), Grand Teton, and Tanglewood festivals this summer.
Zachary Wadsworth (D.M.A. Music Composition, 2012) has just been named the first composer-in-residence with Chor Leoni in Vancouver. He will compose several commissions over the course of 2018-19, while on sabbatical from Williams College, where he is an Assistant Professor.
Balázs Mikusi (Ph.D. 2010) joined the Board of RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) as a co-opted member. He edited a Hungarian translation of Carl Goldmark’s memoires (Emlékek életemből, Budapest 2017) and revised an older essay (originally conceived at Cornell for James Webster’s Haydn seminar) for publication in the journal Haydn-Studien.
Norbert Palej’s (D.M.A. Composition, 2008) violin concerto, “In Memoriam Steven Stucky,” received its North American premier on December 8, 2017. It was performed by the Sinfonia Toronto, conducted by Nurhan Arman, with Janusz Wawrowski as the soloist, at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto. The world premiere took place at the Festiwal Muzyczne Przestrzenie (Musical Spaces Festival) in Poland, a few months earlier. A short excerpt from the Canadian premiere has been posted on YouTube. Norbert is currently teaching at the University of Toronto.
Carrie McLain Madsen (M.A. Musicology, 2006) remarried and went back to school for an MS in Counseling after graduating from Cornell. She is now a licensed professional counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina and currently works with college students. She continues to sing in church choirs and semi-professional ensembles. She will always remember Lincoln Hall fondly, with special affection for her mentors Neal Zaslaw, Becky Harris-Warrick, and David Yearsley.
Robert Paterson (D.M.A. Composition, 2004) was recently awarded the Delaware Symphony’s 2018 Alfred I. duPont Composers Award, “given to a distinguished American composer or conductor who has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary classical music.” The Delaware Symphony will perform Dark Mountains, which will also be performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the fall of 2018. Paterson’s new opera, Three Way, received its world premiere with the Nashville Opera to rave reviews; it will additionally be performed at BAM and by Opera Orlando and Shreveport Opera. Paterson recently founded the brand new Mostly Modern Festival, an annual summer festival that will host over 125 performers, conductors and composers from around the world. The festival will take place at the Zankel Performing Arts Center on the campus of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Nancy November (Ph.D. Musicology, 2003) is pleased to announce her new book, Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven’s Vienna. November’s work examines the context in which string quartets were created during this time, including the interactions between composers, critics, listeners, performers, publishers, and patrons.
Christopher Hopkins (D.M.A. Composition, 1992) completed a three-year term as Director for the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. During a research leave for 2016-2017 he was an artist-in-residence at the Copland House, Djerassi, and the Anni and Joseph Albers Foundation. He received a Big XII Faculty Fellowship for 2018 and is currently at work on a grant-supported digital humanities project to develop software that analyzes chord color symmetries in twentieth-century music.
Anna Weesner (D.M.A. Composition, 1995) is pleased to share that she has won the 2018 Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jim Cassaro (M.A. Musicology, 1993) was promoted to Librarian IV in 2016 in the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, and concurrently to full professor in the Music Dept. as a member of the musicology faculty. He recently published the entry on Gaetano Donizetti in Oxford Bibliographies Online. In the spring of 2018, he taught a course on Music and Queer Identity, the first class of its kind to focus on this topic at PITT. In spring 2019, he is slated to teach a seminar on opera and the supernatural.
Richard Will (Ph.D. Musicology, 1993) is finishing a book on the audio and video recording legacy of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where, in August, he will begin a three-year term as the Chair of the Department of Drama.
Carl Blake (D.M.A. Historical Piano Performance, 1988) has recently taken part in a number of San Francisco Noontime Concerts, including performances of Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet Op. 67 and Edward Elgar’s Op. 84 Piano Quintet. Blake received Fulbright Scholar Awards (1999 and 2006) to perform and teach at the national schools of music in Honduras (Central America). He continues to make annual trips to Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula to perform and give master classes.
Leonard J. Lehrman (D.M.A. 1977) has recently completed his 11th opera, The Triangle Fire, which had 6 performances in New Jersey and New York during 2016 and 2017. He also recently conducted his 46th performance with the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus, which he founded in 1988. He became the first composer to win the Long Island Creative Individual Artist Grant, commissioning The Last Word for the Long Island Baroque Ensemble, which will premiere at Hofstra University in the fall of 2018. In 2015, he honored the centennial of his Cornell teacher, Robert Palmer.
Undergraduate Alumni News
Patrick Braga (2017) spent his year after graduation working in Ithaca with local real estate company Visum Development Group, writing his new opera The Death of Cacambo, and performing with the Cornell Chamber Singers. Starting in the fall he will begin the Master in Urban Planning program at Harvard University, where he hopes to continue making music through both singing and composition.
Riley Owens (2017) has been working since graduation as a Production/Support Coordinator for Output, Inc. (CEO/Founder Gregg Lehrman, '02). With Gregg's guidance Owens will be working part-time at Output to pursue music with bandmate Luke. They will be releasing their first record in July.
Thomas Collum (2014) is pursuing a career as a professional concert violinist, teacher, and instrument collector. He performs in a variety of capacities, including full solo/chamber recitals, with the DuBois Orchestra, and on streets and restaurants for fun. He is currently preparing repertoire for a small recital series next season with his pianist, Xuan He. Collum has also been brought on to organize musicians for and to perform in a season-long (2019-2020) chamber series through the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival. More at thomascollum.com or on Instagram @thomascollumviolin.
Harris Karsch (2014) has been a software engineer at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area since graduation, working on search quality. He's still playing the cello as a member of multiple community orchestras and chamber groups, and has also recently started dabbling as a violist, playing vertically on his new alto violin.
Olivia Moore Nicoletti (2012), an alumna of the Cornell Chorus, has sung with The Choral Society of Grace Church New York, the Choral Arts Society of Washington under former CU Chorus conductor, Scott Tucker, and most recently, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. She traveled with CASW for a two-week tour to China in 2015, collaborating with the Qingdao Symphony Orchestra on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
Minerva Ho (2010) has been performing with community orchestras in the New York City area since 2013. Ho performs with the Chelsea Symphony and during a January 2017 concert, discovered that her stand partner, Kristine Cangcuesta, was not just another Cornell alum, but a fellow CSO alum!
Tim Sommers (2010) has continued to produce and write music for a variety of major label artists such as Hailey Steinfeld, Grace Vanderwall, Marc E. Bassy, Madison Beer and more. Among these was Hailee Steinfeld's platinum hit "Most Girls", a song he cowrote with writing partner and fellow Cornell Alumni Jeremy Dussolliet (ILR ‘09). Sommers continues to write, produce and independently release music with his band Airplane Man, who will be releasing their debut album this summer.
Tyler Herman (2009) has been pursuing a career in theatre in the Washington, DC area. He also co-wrote (including all music) and directed the musical comedy The Good Devil (in spite of himself) in 2016 with Avant Bard in Arlington, VA. He is a founding company member of Faction of Fools Theatre Company in DC. Tyler has also taught acting and writing for high schools and colleges. Recently he received his MFA in Acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep. Currently Tyler is starting in the world premiere of comedy Trayf, at Theater J in DC, and is will marry his beautiful, talented fiancée, Sarah, in November.
Jack Reep (2009) first worked as a cruise ship guitarist after graduation, before returning to his native NYC area to work in psych research during the day and pursue music projects at night in NYC. Soon after, Reep returned to school at Rutgers University for a pre-med post-bac, and he is presently finishing his first year at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, NJ. Throughout his post-bac, Reep found himself gigging regularly around New Jersey, usually in jazz guitar trios. Now in medical school, he is gigging less regularly, but is becoming more focused on original composition/arrangement. Reep is fascinated by the similarities between medicine and music and how his experiences in both seem to influence each other.
Brin Rosenthal (2009) and husband Tom Weber (Mechanical Engineering ‘09) moved to San Diego a few years ago, and are all the more appreciative of the weather for having endured four Ithaca winters. Brin is a Bioinformatics Scientist at UC San Diego, studying genomic networks and their application to systems biology and precision medicine. Tom is a Project Engineer at General Atomics. They recently joined a community orchestra (the Greater San Diego Music Coterie), and have been thoroughly enjoying getting back to music and performing, while reminiscing about the many long happy hours spent practicing in Lincoln and performing in Bailey.
Tanger “Tanya” Simms (2009) joined the US Department of Defense, where she has worked for the past six years. She performs frequently in the DC metro area, and formed two local chamber music groups with public servants with an equal passion for music. She has competed in amateur piano and chamber competitions in Paris and DC, where her group won first place at the Misbin Memorial Chamber Music Competition with a fun piece by Stravinsky. She has thoroughly enjoyed having a “day job” and a “very serious musical hobby” and has many to thank at Cornell for allowing her passion and commitment to music to be able to thrive and grow.
Amy Siu (2000) and her husband adopted a one-year-old girl in 2017. In 2018, she became a Computer Science professor in the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany.
Seth Kibel (1996) continues to perform and tour throughout the Mid-Atlantic and beyond. 2017 saw two album releases -- "Songs of Snark & Despair," an album of darkly comedic political commentary, and "Tiny Planet," a collaboration with world music percussionist Tom Teasley. Read more at sethkibel.com.
Michael Eames (1989) is based in Los Angeles and is gearing up to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his music publishing company PEN Music Group, Inc. in 2019. Michael has been the President of the Association Of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) since 2015 and serves on the Independent Publisher Advisory Council to the DC-based National Music Publishers Association (NMPA). He also co-authored a 2016 book published by Hal Leonard entitled FIVE STAR MUSIC MAKEOVER and currently co-teaches the Intro to Music Publishing class at UCLA Extension and its video counterpart soon to be released by Hal Leonard.
Nanette McGuinness (1980) toured Madrid this fall with contemporary chamber group Ensemble for These Times’ "Guernica" Project, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Picasso masterpiece and the bombing of Gernika. Read more at nanette.biz.
Kenn Gartner (1960) has been invited, a number of times, to perform at the Chengdu Conservatory in Chengdu, China. He has also performed at Cornell, most recently in 2015. Gartner performed a Liszt premier – his arrangement of Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstuck – around the world. Read more at about.me/kenngartner
Patricia Hurley (1959) was a band director for 38 years and has since fallen into the perfect job. She started a New Horizons Band at the Community Music School that she had founded in 1983, and has continued to nurture senior musicians for the past nine years (Motto: "Your best is good enough"). They rehearse twice a week and perform often at retirement homes, churches, and senior centers, a truly fulfilling and enjoyable occupation. Hurley continues to perform on trumpet with local choral and opera organizations in her area. She attended the performance of the Cornell Wind Symphony at the CBDNA Conference at Yale and was blown over by the quality of the performance!
Katy Boynton Payne (1959) started learning to make violins as a student of Ithaca luthier Dylan Race three years ago. She completed her first instrument and is into the second one. She loves this new rhythmic, sweet-smelling amateur life! Her eight grandchildren, ages five through twenty-five, all play string instruments at varying levels of competence as do their parents. Earlier, starting in 1969, Payne spent some years studying humpback whale songs, which are now providing inspiration for two Cornell composers. On October 19, Annie Lewandowski’s new composition integrating whales’ voices with the Cornell Chimes will be performed from the top of McGraw Tower to resound across the campus!
