Malachai Bandy

A native of Los Angeles, Bandy has amassed a professional performance record on some twenty instruments spanning over 800 years of music history. He completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology as a Provost Fellow and Oakley Endowed Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, with the dissertation, “Number, Structure, and Mathematical Theology in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Basso Ostinato Psalm Settings” (2022). Before pursuing doctoral studies at USC, Bandy graduated cum laude with Distinction in Research and Creative Work from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music with degrees in double bass and music history. His current scholarly projects concern musical expressions of occult philosophy and number symbolism in the North-German Baroque, as well as viola da gamba technique, repertoire and iconography. He has presented his work at national and international conferences, including annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and at special-topics conferences handling Esotericism in Music (Nazareth College, 2020) and Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (University of Sheffield, UK, 2019). In 2019 he received both the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Irene Alm Memorial Prize and the AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter’s Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology.

A sought-after live and studio musician in the greater Los Angeles area, Bandy enjoys a vibrant performing career on a multitude of historical instruments, primarily the viola da gamba, violone and Renaissance double-reeds. He has performed in recent years with American and European ensembles including The Orpheon Consort, Ars Lyrica Houston, Voices of Music, Queens Baroque, and Bach Collegium San Diego, with local solo and ensemble appearances with Ciaramella, Tesserae Baroque, Musica Angelica, and the Los Angeles Opera and Master Chorale. As a recording artist, Bandy is a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s scores to the films 10 Cloverfield Lane (yaylı tanbur) and Welcome Home (viol), the television shows Outlander (viol), The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (yaylı tanbur, viol), Foundation (viol), The Witcher (viol, nyckelharpa), and the Emmy-winning title theme for DaVinci's Demons (viol), as well as various video games including League of Legends (nyckelharpa, viol), Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge (various), God of War (nyckelharpa) and others.

As an enthusiastic educator of youth, conservatory and college students, and adult amateurs alike, Bandy maintains a private viol studio, regularly conducts meetings for the Southern California Recorder Society and Orange County Recorder Society and serves on rotational faculty for the San Francisco Early Music Society’s summer Medieval-Renaissance and Recorder workshops. He is a proud board member of SoCal Viols, Southern California’s new chapter of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (VdGSA), whom he has represented as faculty at regional viol workshops including Viols West (San Luis Obispo, CA) and ViolSphere 2 (Oracle, AZ). Bandy is thrilled to bring these educational and early-music interests into alignment with his research and performance pursuits at Pomona College, as he joins the full-time faculty as Assistant Professor of Music in Music History in fall 2022.