Ithaca Sounding 2020 is a multi-day, multi-venue festival and symposium celebrating, exploring, and questioning the traditions of modernist and experimental concert music by Ithacans past and present. It features keyboard works by composers Julius Eastman, Sarah Hennies, Robert Palmer, Ann Silsbee, and David Borden. Connecting and mediating the themes of music in the academy, marginalized art, improvisational performance practice, and queer experimentalism, this interdisciplinary series of events probes the creative and personal histories of some of Ithaca’s most renowned musical personae with concerts, workshops, talks, presentations, and readings.

Featured presenters include musicologists Sara Haefeli (Ithaca College), Ellie Hisama (Columbia), and Matthew Mendez (Yale). Featured performers include the acclaimed New York City pianists Joseph Kubera, Adam Tendler, and Cornell alumnus David Friend, the Ithacan composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies, and festival coordinator and pianist Richard Valitutto, a DMA performance practice student in the Cornell Music Department.

Thursday, January 30
12:30-1:15pm | Concert 1: Midday Music: In Search of Robert Palmer
(B20 Lincoln Hall, Cornell)
4:30-6pm | Workshop: Decolonizing the Curriculum
(124 Lincoln Hall, Cornell)
7-8pm | Concert 2: Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract
(Johnson Museum Lobby, Cornell)

Friday, January 31
10am-12pm | Panel: Listening Locally: Intersectionality and Contemporary Music
(124 Lincoln Hall, Cornell)
5-6:30pm | Lecture: A Persistent Obsession with Identity
(Iger Lecture Hall, Whalen Center for Music, Ithaca College)
8pm | Concert 3: Letters, Stories, and Journeys for 1 & 2 Pianos
(Barnes Hall, Cornell)

Saturday, February 1
10am-12pm | Lecture: Julius Eastman’s Heterological Perspectives and Queer Practices
(B21 Lincoln Hall, Cornell)
2-3pm | Concert 4: That Which is Fundamental
(B20 Lincoln Hall, Cornell)
7pm | Concert 5: Festival Finale | Julius Eastman: Joy Boy / Femenine (preconcert lecture at 6pm)
(Hockett Hall, Whalen Center for Music , Ithaca College)

Sunday, February 2
12-2pm | Reading: Poems and Memoirs by Musicians (who also Write)
(Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca)