While there is no stereotypical member of Contrapunkt, Cornell’s main outlet for undergraduate composition, Zach Romeo ’10 seems to embody the group strengths. As the group likes to stress, he is an engineer — which should be an anomaly in a group of music majors. However, it isn’t, as Contrapunkt boasts several engineers as well as members from other non-musical majors such as the AEM program. His pieces for piano draw heavily on improvisation, solely because Romeo likes to improvise. Most importantly, Contrapunkt’s upcoming free concert at Barnes Hall this Sunday is Romeo’s first public appearance with his work. Contrapunkt has given him the opportunity to showcase his original work for the first time during his Cornell career.

To not enjoy the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg is to know without a doubt that you just do not like classical music. The orchestra, which is one of Austria’s leading symphony orchestras and was founded in 1841, treated Cornell’s Bailey Hall to a mesmerizing, even glamorous concert on Friday. The musicians emitted an energetic spark and a glittering aura of perfection that not even the New York Philharmonic can match. The concert paid true homage to composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn in an unusually captivating and thrilling manner.

Pop radio is brainwashing the ears of America. I don’t care how many times you’ve heard it; the music heard on the radio and advertised as mainstream is, more often than not, a dirtied reflection of only the tiniest, most insignificant percentile of actual musical output. Regardless of our inability to change the airwaves, however, it’s easy to stop plugging your ears with the synthesized plastic of music’s darkest dregs.

Loquacious in personality and modest despite his numerous achievements, Ian Goldin ’12 has experimented with nearly every musical instrument designed, plays in the Percussion Ensemble, sings in the Cornell University Glee Club and is a member of The Hangovers. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also recently been elected Musical Director of The Hangovers, a rare honor for a freshman. As he begins by quipping “Ian Goldin needs a haircut; make sure you put that in!” this “Superhero” talks about his interests in music and what it means to be a member of The Hangovers.

Sun: Ian Goldin the Superhero. Tell me how you got that title?

On Sunday afternoon, the iO String Quartet — a New York City-based ensemble whose self-proclaimed interest is in “finding a common aesthetic vision between the works of the past and the works of today” — played to a near-capacity crowd in Barnes Hall, following their week-long residency here at Cornell. The iO Quartet was formed in 2005, and is comprised of four enterprising musicians with degrees from prestigious music schools — Christina McGann, violin, Stephen Miahky, violin, Elizabeth Weisser, viola and Christopher Gross, cello. Since its inception, the group has played around the world, presided as the 2006-08 Billy Joel Graduate String Quartet in Residence at SUNY Purchase, won several awards and undertaken the “iO: inside Out Chamber Music” concert series.

A self-confessed “music nerd”, Adrianne Ngam ’13 loves to find humor in every little thing she does, be it playing doo-wop beats on the cello or designing a soaring skyscraper, and considers music more personal than professional. Sitting across a table in The Green Dragon, every architect’s favorite hangout spot, this winner of the fifth annual Cornell Concerto Competition and guest performer at the Cornell Symphony Orchestra’s recent concert talks about her passion, her profession and their confluence.

Sun: What was it about the cello that attracted you?

The Shanghai Quartet visited Bailey Hall on Saturday for a riveting performance that had some of the rough-and-tumble feel of a rock concert. To open the performance, the quartet took on Mozart’s String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, setting an elegant yet chipper tone for the concert. They dallied with the first movement’s lightsome runs with a tempered gusto. In the Andante that followed, however, the quartet attacked a dark counterpoint, allowing it to well up with an unexpectedly inward melancholy. When the counterpoint motif came back, they erupted in a startling, hall-reverberating crescendo that brilliantly shattered the remaining façade of delicate composure the piece had initially created.

The Juilliard String Quartet, the granddaddy of American string quartets, played an all-Haydn program in Bailey Hall on Sunday. To hear such a vaunted group whose renown is based on their precise, graceful style perform the works of a composer who is the epitome of precise, graceful classical music is less to hear an interpretation per se than to feel definitively transported. How does one measure the standard itself, as if one sought to niggle with the canonic metric rule locked in its bank vault in Paris?