A performer-scholar following a unique path, 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. A specialist in contemporary music, Harlow's numerous premieres include the Barlow Prize commission Exodus by Aaron Travers, and the North American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt, the First Hour of KLANG. His albums include TRANSCENDANTE (ProOrgano), featuring the first organ transcription of Franz Liszt's complete Transcendental Etudes, and ORGANON NOVUS (Innova), a triple-disc anthology of recent American organ music, the latter earning coveted grants from New Music USA and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. A third, upcoming album is a deep-listening extemporization on the Cornell Baroque Organ, while a fourth features hyperorgan improvisations inspired by John Coltrane.
An active scholar of interdisciplinary musicology, his research has been published in the journals MUSICultures and Keyboard Perspectives, and he has presented at conferences at Cornell, Harvard and Oxford Universities, AMS-SEM-SMT national conference, International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), Performance Studies Network (PSN), Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Göteborg International Organ Academy (GOArt), Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI), Westfield Center and the AGO National Convention, among others. He has been a keynote speaker on multiple occasions at the annual international symposia at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam and completed the first comprehensive study of the pipe organs of Greenland.
He was recently awarded a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship with residencies at McGill University (CIRMMT) and the Orgelpark to launch the Global Hyperorgan project, a network of pipe organs spanning the globe affording a new kind of creative space for real-time acoustic musicking over vast geographic distances. Harlow holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music and earlier degrees from Indiana and Emory Universities, having studied with Hans Davidsson, Todd Wilson, Jonathan Biggers, Timothy Albrecht, Christopher Young, and William Porter in improvisation. Randall Harlow is Associate Professor of Organ and Music Theory at the University of Northern Iowa. www.randallharlow.net