March Talks in Palma de Mallorca March 21, Antoni Pizà will give a talk on disability in music at Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sant Sebastià, followed by a special performance by Víctor Uris of Harmònica Coixa Blues Band. Uris a Palma de Mallorca native and self-taught blues musician who has been called “one of the most pure and original bluesmen in Europe.” Watch him perform with his band below: 7:30 pm Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sant Sebastià Palma de Mallorca, Spain The next week, Pizà will give another talk at the beautiful historical palazzo Can Balaguer, on the opera El rejoj de Lucerna by Pere Miquel Marqués. The opera is being performed at Teatre Principal on April 7th and 8th. 8 pm Can Balaguer Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Stream Newly Discovered Spanish Chamber Music, Feb 21 As we announced last fall, Fundación Juan March Madrid will present a concert of newly rediscovered chamber works by Tomás Bretón (1850–1923) and Conrado del Campo (1878–1953). The Bretón work featured on the program is his Quinteto con piano (1905), which is one of several works discovered and prepared in a new edition by María Luísa Martínez and Foundation for Iberian Music director, Antoni Pizà. If you are not in Madrid, you’re in luck! The concert will be streamed live on the Juan March website. Visit the event page shortly before the start time, 7:30 pm Madrid time (1:30 pm EST), to begin the audio stream. Archived audio will also be available after the event, here. You can view the program, with an essay by Pizà, here (PDF). Fundación Juan March Castelló, 77. Madrid Salón de actos. 19:30 h.
Modern Flamenco at Instituto Cervantes This coming Monday, February 12, see our resident flamencologist K. Meira Goldberg perform at Instituto Cervantes NY with José Moreno. Goldberg will be performing her original program Raíz, which she recently debuted at La Nacional. About Raíz: Inspired by the work of great Spanish artists such as García Lorca or Camarón and by cultural traditions such as cante jondo, African rhythms and Jewish rituals, R A Í Z seeks to create a ceremony of immersion in the rites of flamenco. The performance emerges from the poetic and transgressive realism of arte povera: a return to simple objects and messages, a stage where traces of nature and the industrial come alive. The Crone embodies the strength of instability. She enacts rejection and rebellion, memory and faith, feasting and solitude. Her pilgrimage maps a homeland containing many forces in tension. This contemporary quejío, opens spaces and sensations where wings may find ground and roots take flight. Tickets: $20 ($15 ICNY members) 7:00 PM February 12 Galeria, Instituto Cervantes 211-215 East 49th Street, NYC
Weaponizing Flamenco: Roundtable Discussion March 22, as a part of Flamenco Festival NYC, the Foundation for Iberian Music will host a roundtable discussion at City Center. Weaponizing Flamenco: Embodied Voices for Social Change Contemporary flamenco artists are questioning stereotypes that tie flamenco to the past and are seeking an interdisciplinary dialogue with artists and cultural workers of other genres. Politics have entered the expressive palette of many young flamenco artists, including influential guitarist Juan José Suarez “El Paquete” and stunning vocalist Naike Ponce, whose new album is a lyric elegy to women. Please join these artists in a conversation with a panel of brilliant New York-based dance artists and scholars, including dance-maker Arielle Rosales, Tunisian protest singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi, and tap historian Constance Valis Hill, about making work attentive to the roar of battle and the stories of love and community that shake and wake audiences to envision a future of different possibilities. This round table, curated and moderated by K. Meira Goldberg and the Foundation for Iberian Music, will explore some of the intricacies of these issues. Afterward, why not join Naike and Paquete at Joe’s Pub, for their Flamenco Festival performance? For tickets and more information, visit the FF NYC event page. Admission: free 6:30 pm March 22 City Center, Studio 4 131 W 55th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues) New York, NY 10019
Pepe Habichuela at the Graduate Center As a part of Flamenco Festival NYC, on March 23rd, the Foundation for Iberian Music and the Graduate Center’s Live@365 will present Musical Dynasties: A Conversation with the Habichuela Clan. Flamenco is cultivated in musical legacies across generations. Join in a conversation with two scions of a legendary musical lineage who are also Grammy-nominated musical innovators: the renowned Pepe Habichuela, patriarch of the Habichuela family of guitarists from Granada, Spain, and his son Josemi Carmona, of Ketama and Barbería del Sur. Also joining, from another dynasty, is renowned Latin jazz artist Arturo O’Farrill. The artists will speak with K. Meira Goldberg, author of Flamenco on the Global Stage and Sonidos Negros, and scholar-in-residence at the Foundation. Admission: Free Reservations required. 7:00 pm March 23 Proshansky Auditorium The Graduate Center
Conference Announcement – Spain’s Anxieties of Influence: Performing Otherness in Flamenco Spain’s Anxieties of Influence: Performing Otherness in Flamenco An international conference to be held in New York at the Graduate Center, CUNY, by The Foundation of Iberian Music October 16 – 17, 2018 Spain’s Anxieties of Influence: Performing Otherness in Flamenco is an international symposium to be held on October 16 at the CUNY Graduate Center exploring flamenco as embodying narratives of difference and Otherness. Conference details will be announced by spring, 2018. The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots is a performance festival to be held on October 17 at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a showcase of flamenco artists of color whose work is on the forefront of the power of the body to question, to disrupt outmoded discourses of “authenticity,” and to work instead to relocate flamenco within a vibrant intersection of art as a celebration of diversity and agency against racism. The centerpiece of the day will be a screening of Miguel Ángel Rosales’s documentary Gurumbé: Canciones de tu memoria negra (2016)—a revelatory contribution to the contemporary discourse on race in Spain—along with a performance by Yinka Esi Graves, and a conversation of the artists with renowned dance historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild.
Conference Announcement: Transatlantic Rhythms in Music, Song, and Dance Natives, Africans, Roma, and Europeans: Transatlantic Rhythms in Music, Song, and Dance Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos: Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile An international conference in Veracruz, Veracruz, México Abril 11 – 13, 2019 The Foundation for Iberian Music at the CUNY Graduate Center, partnering with the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California Riverside, and the Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura in Veracruz will convene an international conference on the circulation of transatlantic rhythms. We encourage all scholars in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, dance, theater, gender, race and ethnicity, diaspora, and immigration studies to submit proposals by spring of 2018. We will issue a formal call for papers in January. This our third conference in a series on transatlantic musical legacies, after this year’s Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance at UC Riverside, and our inaugural conference at the Graduate Center in 2015, The Global Reach of the Fandango. (Selected papers are available from The Global Reach of the Fandango in English, from Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP), and in each paper’s original language, from Música oral del Sur. Selected papers from the UC Riverside zapateados conference are forthcoming in Spanish from Diagonal and in English from CSP.) (Image: “El Fandangoe,” Samuel E. Chamberlain, 1847. In the collection of San Jacinto Museum of History.)
Civilizing the Monster: Romantic Longings in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” Friday, 8 December 2017, 5:30-7:30, at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Martin Segal Theatre, 1st floor. Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel began as a late-night parlor game with her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron’s doctor John Polidori, centering on who could write the best horror tale. Since then, Shelley’s novel has been adapted to stage and film and has generated innumerable interpretations. The story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein and his ill-conceived effort to create a human-like monster has been read as a parable of science gone awry, a critique of Romanticism, a contribution to the tradition of “female gothic,” an autobiographical narrative of tormented creation (Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary), a Miltonic tale of “God-like” man, and as an allegory of overreaching industrial ambition. Mary Shelley’s mythic text will be discussed through its many interpretations and its distinct language and style, addressing its repercussion on several disciplines. Dreamlike and nightmarish scenarios, represented in works by Romantic composers from Schubert to Strauss, will be examined in connection with similar literary techniques in Frankenstein and in reference to the several attempts by the Creature to humanize and civilize himself. Prof. Nancy Yousef Professor of English at The Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY James Melo ERC Musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, CUNY Graduate Center FREE ADMISSION Presented by the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in partnership with the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in connection with ERC theatrical concert, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For more information on ERC theatrical concerts, visit http:\\www.romanticcentury.org
Newly Rediscovered Quintets: A Concert February 21 in 2018, Fundación Juan March will hold a concert at their Madrid location as a part of this season’s Aula de (Re)estrenos’s series, to re-premiere some recently rediscovered works by Tomás Bretón and Conrado del Campo. The Foundation for Iberian Music’s director, Antoni Pizà, and guest scholar María Luísa Martínez are responsible for bringing the Bretón work on the program to light. They discovered the work, among several other Bretón quintets, and prepared a critical edition, which is forthcoming on ICCMU Press. Pizà and Martínez also wrote the program notes for this concert.
CFP: “Iberian Musical Crossroads Through the Ages” (Barcelona) The Brook Center’s Research Center for Music Iconography (RCMI) is putting on a conference at Barcelona’s Societat Catalana de Musicologia in October of 2018. The conference, Iberian Musical Crossroads Through the Ages: Images of Music Making in their Trans-cultural Exchange “will examine visual sources documenting transborder and transcultural transmission of musical ideas between the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the world.” Spain’s many historical “explorations and migrations created a fertile framework for a rich exchange of musical ideas, sounds, forms, rhythms, dances, and instruments.” Paper proposals will be accepted through April 2, 2018. You may view the full CFP on the conference’s page. SOCIETAT CATALANA DE MUSICOLOGIA & INSTITUT D’ESTUDIS CATALANS Barcelona, 17–19 October 2018 ∗∗∗ In related news, RCMI’s director, Zdravko Blazekovic, will be presenting this coming October in Athens at Repertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale’s annual conference, which will be held Oct 5–7. View the program here.