Randall Harlow

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, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and cathedrals in England. His research weaves together interdisciplinary threads from 4E cognition, semiotics, performance studies, anthropology, ethnography, science and technology studies (STS), and posthuman philosophy, 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.

Charting an early course in his career as a specialist in contemporary music, Randall Harlow was the first organist to be awarded a coveted New Music USA Project and Aaron Copland Fund grant, in support of his album, ORGANON NOVUS (Innova). 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.

He 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. He premiered the groundbreaking work, Aulos by Kevin Ernste, an intercontinental ‘Global Hyperorgan’ composition connecting organs in Los and Angeles and Amsterdam. Following his early virtuoso albums, including ORGANON NOVUS and the first transcription of Franz Liszt's legendary Transcendental Etudes, TRANSCENDANTE (Pro Organo), his recent artistic projects aim to upend prevailing conceptions of pipe organ performativity. His third album, DREAMS OF DHARMA, the first part of a 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. The second album in the triptych, SONATA QUASI COLTRANE, takes inspiration from the artistic practices of John Coltrane for extemporizations on the Orgelpark hyperorgan while the third album, HOLY!, combines organ repertoire and archival recordings by beat writers.

As a scholar Randall Harlow's interests range from empirical performance-cognition research, with a focus on gesture and ecological theories, to hyper-acoustic instruments and performance technologies. His article, “Ecologies of Practice in Musical Performance” was published in a special issue of the ethnomusicology journal, MUSICultures. He was awarded a 2019-20 Fulbright Global Scholar Award for his Global Hyperorgan project, with residencies at CIRRMT at McGill University and the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. 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, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), Performance Studies Network (PSN), Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture in Portugal, International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus), Music And/As Practice, Göteborg International Organ Academy in Sweden (GOArt), the Westfield Center, and Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative Festival (EROI). As a central figure in the international ‘hyperorgan’ movement, he has published on the subject for New Interfaces for Music Expression (NIME), the British Institute of Organ Studies Journal (BIOS) and The American Organist Magazine. He is currently co-editing an issue of Contemporary Music Review dedicated to hyperorgan and is a co-editor of the forthcoming definitive book and multimedia exhibition, Hyperorgan Art: musics, kinships, worldings.

Randall Harlow holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music, following previous degrees at Emory and Indiana Universities, and served for a year on faculty at Cornell University.  His organ teachers have included Hans Davidsson, Timothy Albrecht and Christopher Young, and William Porter in improvisation. Randall Harlow is currently Professor of Organ and Music Theory at the University of Northern Iowa.