Archive: Arts & Entertainment

As part of the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, the Department of Music presents concerts with unconventional instruments and out-of-the-ordinary settings. On Friday, October 19 at 6:00 pm in the McGraw Tower, composer Annie Lewandowski presents her new piece "Cetus: Life After Life", combining music for the Cornell Chimes played by Sarah Hennies with samples of whale song from bioacoustics research. Recorded from 1969-1988, Katy and Roger Payne's groundbreaking humpback whale recording spectrograms examined musical patterns of pitch, duration, and rhythm to identify the development of specific whale songs across time. Samples of these recordings will project from speakers in McGraw Tower while percussionist Hennies performs on the Chimes.

On Saturday, October 20 at 2:00 pm, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum hosts "Music in the Museum: New Instruments of the Future Past": featuring CAGE (Cornell Avant-Garde Ensemble: Kevin Ernste, Annie Lewandowski, Christopher J. Miller) and The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners, with Luciano Chessa conducting. The program includes classic and new works composed for Chessa's reconstructed orchestra of intonarumori alongside newly constructed experimental instruments as well as improvised pieces by Cornell's Music Improvisation Ensemble. The intonarumori are experimental acoustic instruments originally created in the early 20th century.

The concert is held in conjunction with Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri's Biennial sound installation, Contact Points, which will run in the museum's new wing throughout the day. Contact Points is a kinetic installation that produces sounds when certain motor-driven flexible 'tentacles' come in contact with fixed metallic pins, striking different tones.

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