The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/music/)
“It is an honor to be able to have a piece played for the whole campus, but I think it more feels like I’m deeply connected to the larger musical culture on campus,” Drake Eshleman ’20 told The Sun.
If you were one of the students drawn to Ho Plaza by the mysterious sounds generated from atop of McGraw Tower on Sunday, rest assured that our beloved chime bells are not malfunctioning. Instead, it was the rehearsal for a chimes and whale song duet.
“His impact as a professional in corporate America and on the music industry are well known,” Prof. Riché Richardson, African American literature, told The Sun.
The small a cappella ensemble brought their big guns right away, with each member speaking in rhythm, creating a wall of chatter that in an instant, gave way to raucous polyphonic vocals. After a few iterations, rhythmic spoken word became interspersed with small vocal phrases. The piece was chugging along and it was clear that Roomful of Teeth had a very important message to share with the audience that evening. Roomful of Teeth, the Grammy-winning vocal octet, visited Bailey Hall on Friday night to kick off the Cornell Concert Series 2018-2019 season. The group was founded in 2009 with a goal to explore the expressive potential of the human voice.
Michael Mazza, one of the founders and organizers of the event, said he hopes that “people will take what they get from the experience and take it back to wherever they go.”
I’m in the twilight of my days as a columnist for The Sun. I know that, typically, columnists will close out their time with parting words of advice to incoming first-years or graduating seniors. But, although I’ve done that in the past weeks, the fact of the matter is that I don’t have much advice to impart. Or, at least, much advice that you haven’t already heard hundreds of times, and will hear a hundred more times. Go to office hours, try out something new on campus, make sure to wear sunblock on Slope Day, etc.
Last week, Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music. This was the first time that a non-classical, non-jazz work was awarded the prize. I love Kendrick Lamar and I thoroughly enjoy Damn., but nevertheless, my reactions to this decision are mixed. Not, of course, about whether Kendrick Lamar’s work is deserving of such acclaim; indeed, the musical complexity and poetic mastery present on Damn., as well as earlier albums like To Pimp a Butterfly, warrant the utmost critical respect.
When the universe wants to tell you something, it will tell you a few times. I take the same attitude with phone calls. Unless you call a few times or leave a voicemail, I’m not calling back. Late last night, when I was falling asleep to an episode of S-Town, I realized that I’ve been learning the same lesson for about a year. I will graduate in almost exactly a month, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of despair I feel about that fact.
Two Cornell professors and three alumni were awarded Guggenheim fellowships this year for work in a diverse range of fields.
The Touchtones all-female a capella group will be releasing its third E.P., or extended play, on Spotify by the end of this semester, just in time for the group’s 35th anniversary.