RandaLL Harlow
musical artist and scholar
RandaLL Harlow
musical artist and scholar
Concert organist and interdisciplinary musicologist Randall Harlow has long dodged conventional expectations. As a performer, he eschewed the competition circuit, choosing instead to explore the outer reaches of the organ repertoire, from avant-garde contemporary and electro-acoustic compositions and works by underrepresented composers to chamber music, concertos, and transcriptions. Performances have taken him across the United States, as well as to France, Germany, Greenland, Russia and cathedrals in England. His research weaves together interdisciplinary threads from 4E cognition, semiotics, performance studies, anthropology, ethnography, and science and technology studies (STS), theorizing deep gesture as the catalyst for the dynamic networking of cognitive and social dimensions of music performance, listening and discourse. He also is a leading theorist within the growing hyperorgan community, active at the forefront of new organ technologies and artistic practices shaping a more just and diverse future for acoustic music.
Performer
Performer
A specialist in contemporary music, Randall Harlow was the first organist to be awarded a coveted New Music USA Project, in support of his CD album, ORGANON NOVUS, released on Innova Records September 25, 2020. The most comprehensive recording ever produced of contemporary American organ music, the 3-disc album features twenty world premiere recordings of works by major American composers, from Samuel Adler, David Lang, and Alvin Lucier, to Shulamit Ran, Christian Wolff and John Zorn. He performed many of these works in a series of concerts at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford Universities. His numerous firsts include the North American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Himmelfahrt, the First Hour of KLANG; world premieres of solo works by John Anthony Lennon and Shulamit Ran; and premieres of works for organ with live-electronics by Steve Everett and Rene Uijlenhoet. Also an avid performer with orchestra, he gave the North American premieres of concertos by Petr Eben, Tilo Medek, and Giles Swayne and performs the organ concertos of Lou Harrison and Chen Yi. He gave the world premiere of the first and only Barlow Prize commission for organ,
Exodus by Aaron Travers, and was recently a guest artist of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition, in which capacity he premiered works for organ and electronics by University of Chicago composers at Rockefeller Chapel. In another pair of concerts dedicated to new music, he premiered new works by faculty and students at the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University and extemporized on mechanical Baroque organs with the Cornell Avant Garde Ensemble (CAGE). He is also the first organist to transcribe for the organ Franz Liszt's legendary Transcendental Etudes, recording the work for his debut CD, TRANSCENDANTE, released on the Pro Organo label. His third album, DREAMS OF DHARMA, the first part of a planned triptych inspired by the American beat writers of the 1950s, features a deep-listening improvisation exploring microtones and live sampling on mechanical Baroque organ, navigating the liminal realm between sound and noise. His upcoming fourth album, SONATA QUASI COLTRANE, will explore affordances for expressive touch on the Orgelpark hyperorgan.
Scholar
Scholar
As a scholar Randall Harlow's interests range from empirical performance-cognition research to hyper-acoustic instruments and performance technology. Weaving together interdisciplinary threads from 4E cognition, semiotics, STS, and performance and critical studies, his research theorizes deep gesture as the catalyst for the dynamic networking of cognitive and social dimensions of music performance, listening and discourse. His research also shapes his artistic production through the aesthetic-epistemic practice of Artistic Research. His article, “Ecologies of Practice in Musical Performance” was recently published in a special Ecologies issue of the ethnomusicology journal, MUSICultures. He was named a 2019-20 Fulbright Global Scholar, a fellowship that took him to McGill University in Montreal and the Orgelpark in Amsterdam to lead a team of artists and researchers to develop a new type of intercontinental hyper-acoustic musical instrument: the GLOBAL HYPERORGAN. He was also awarded a Diesterweg Fellowship at the University of Siegen, German, where he served as a guest professor researching hyperorgan technology in theory and practice. He is a frequent speaker at the annual Orgelpark International Symposium, and has presented at conferences at Cornell,
Harvard, and Oxford Universities, the national conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (AMS/SEM/SMT), the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), Performance Studies Network (PSN), Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture in Portugal, Göteborg International Organ Academy in Sweden (GOArt), the Westfield Center, and Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative Festival (EROI).
Randall Harlow is currently Associate Professor of Organ and Music Theory at the University of Northern Iowa. He previously served for a year on faculty at Cornell University. He has taught at two Pipe Organ Encounters and has chaired the American Guild of Organists' national Committee on New Music. Randall Harlow holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music, the Master of Music degree from Emory University, and Performer Diploma and Bachelor of Music degrees from Indiana University. His organ teachers have included Hans Davidsson, Jonathan Biggers, Todd Wilson, Timothy Albrecht, and Christopher Young, as well as William Porter in improvisation