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 that aim to confront the urgent environmental and socio-political challenges of our time.  
 

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, performance studies and posthuman critique, 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 paradigm for intercontinental hyper-acoustic musicking: 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, 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 is currently Professor of Organ and Music Theory at the University of Northern Iowa. He previously served for a year on faculty at Cornell University. He 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 Jacobs School of Music.  His organ teachers have included Hans Davidsson, Jonathan Biggers, Todd Wilson, Timothy Albrecht, and Christopher Young, as well as William Porter in improvisation