Senior wins Marshall Scholarship to study music in London

Dorian Komanoff Bandy '10 has won a 2010 Marshall Scholarship to study Baroque violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The scholarship provides two years of support at a British university for study in any field.

Bandy, a College Scholar and a Hunter Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholar, studies musicology and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. His honors thesis in progress is "Music and Poetry in the Lieder of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann."

The Los Angeles native performs locally with Les Petits Violons and has performed across the United States and Europe as a conductor, Baroque violinist, violist, harpsichordist, organist and fortepianist. He will direct Les Petits Violons in a Midday Music program of Antonio Vivaldi's music, Dec. 3 at 12:30 p.m. in B20 Lincoln Hall.

Bandy discovered his passion for Baroque instruments at Cornell.

"I've always loved Baroque music and was always interested in historical performance, but I'd never in my life been in a room with six Baroque violins and four fortepianos, a harpsichord and an organ," he said. "Having access to those instruments has opened up a new world to me. Being familiar with the Baroque instruments has really given me the language to express the musical ideas that I wanted to, in a way that I never could on their modern counterparts."

In November 2008, Bandy organized, co-directed and conducted a fully staged, historically informed production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" at Cornell's Risley Hall. He also hired the orchestra, an international cast and director, and raised funds for the production. The project was the culmination of three years of research, including study in Europe and immersion in 18th-century acting practices.

He counts among his faculty mentors Cornell musicologists Annette Richards, James Webster, David Yearsley and Neal Zaslaw; and fortepianist Malcolm Bilson.

"The reason I applied here was Neal Zaslaw and Malcolm Bilson," Bandy said. "I wanted to learn from them. My real love and my focus has always been Mozart, and Zaslaw is the leading Mozart scholar in the world. I didn't come as a violist, I came as a frustrated violist, hoping to back away from performing and instead study Mozart as a musicologist and theorist. I believe now that everything is and should be interrelated."

Bandy won the Cornell Council on the Arts' 2009-10 Undergraduate Artist Award in June, and performed a "Haydn Project" concert on campus with Les Petits Violons in October, applying his research and period performance practices. His previous honors include the Ellen Gussman Adelson Award for Excellence in Music in 2007-08 and 2008-09.

Bandy keeps a busy performance and rehearsal schedule and is proficient in German, French and Italian; he also reads Latin. He has tutored Boynton Middle School students in math, and enjoys chess, cooking, art and film. He is one of seven student co-editors on a critical edition of Schroeter's Piano Concertos op. 3, to be published in 2010; and will present and conduct Jean-Jacques Rousseau's little-known 18th-century opera "The Cunning Man" at Cornell in March.

Stephen Linderman '10 and Harin Song '10 were also Marshall Scholarship finalists this year. Cornell has produced 29 Marshall scholars; the most recent was Michael Barany '08 in 2007.

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Joe Schwartz