New Work, Concerts, Awards from Our Commissions Roster This week, we are proud to have news for not one, not two, but three of our past Composer’s Commission recipients! Benet Casablancas (2012) has the New York premiere of his work Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom upcoming March 24. The work will be performed by Ear Heart Music Ensemble at Brooklyn’s fabulous new music space, the Roulette Theater. (Tickets: $20 adult/$15 student.) While he is in town for this auspicious occasion, Casablancas will be giving talks at the Manhattan School of Music and at the CUNY Graduate Center. The lecture at the Manhattan School of Music will be held on March 23 (time and location TBD); he will speak at the Graduate Center as a guest of the school’s Composer’s Forum on March 25 at 10 am (room 3491). Second, we would like to congratulate Composers Now, which is founded and directed by 2011 Commission recipient Tania León, on receiving major grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. This “transformative” grant will allow Composers Now to expand its current programs, which include a NYC-based music festival and composer residencies, and allows for the possibility of creating new initiatives. You can read the full press release here. (The 2015 festival is already underway and has daily events through the end of February. so if you’re in the NYC area, don’t forget to check their calendar!) Finally, Miguel Ángel Roig-Francolí (2010) just premiered his newest symphony, Three Astral Poems, on January 15th. The work consists of three movements, each a symphonic poem that explores a constellation named for a figure in classical mythology. It was performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Balearic Islands, with Sergio Alapont, at the Auditorium de Palma Mallorca (Spain). Watch the whole premiere on YouTube! Diaro de Mallorca reviewed the concert, giving it 3.5 stars. (Non-subscribers can read the review at Roig-Francolí’s Facebook page.)
Fandango conference papers to appear in Musica oral del sur Andalusian music journal Música oral del sur will be publishing a special issue devoted to our upcoming conference, “Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance.” The issue will feature a selection of paper from the conference in English and in Spanish and will be available in print and online. The issue is co-sponsored by Foundation for Iberian Music with Junta de Andalucía and the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía. Música oral del sur was founded in 1995 as an interdisciplinary forum for issues of oral music traditions. It is published by the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía, whose objective is to preserve and diffuse Andalusia’s musical heritage. The Center and its publications often work in collaboration with other institutions, such as the University of Granada, Instituto Nacional de la Juventud, and, of course, the Foundation for Iberian Music!
Fandango Conference Registration Now Open Registration is now open for the Foundation for Iberian Music’s upcoming conference, “Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance.” To register, please e-mail fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com, with “Conference Registration” in the subject line. Payments may be made by check or money order, to the Foundation for Iberian Music, at: The Foundation for Iberian Music The Graduate Center 365 5th Ave New York, NY 10016 Registration Fee Two day: $100 / $50 (students) Single day: $50 / $25 (student) We are in the final stages of preparation, and the final program will soon be announced! The conference will feature around 50 speakers, including: keynote speaker, eminent scholar Elisabeth LeGuin, presenting on Tonadilla and Fandango; Craig Russel, presenting on the fandango in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; and the Graduate Center’s own Peter Manuel, who will grapple with the formal features that can be found throughout fandango’s trans-Atlantic constellation of genres. Lastly, the conference needs volunteers! Registration fees will be waived for volunteers. Contact Meira at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com by February 17th to inquire. Please note “volunteer” in the subject line.
2014 Composer’s Commission Recipient Announced The Foundation for Iberian Music is delighted to announce that Javier Arias Bal is the recipient of the 2014 Composer’s Commission! Arias teaches music and composition at the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, a founding member of the contemporary music group Música Presente, and co-producer of the recent documentary on Tanzanian music, Africa: The Beat. He will be composing a work for Spanish avant-garde flutist Julián Elvira, who performs on a modified flute of his own invention, the Pronomos flute. The premiere will be held at the Graduate Center’s Segal Theater on June 22, 2015. Please stay posted for further announcements.
New Composer’s Commissions Videos Online If you were unable to attend the last two premiers of the Foundation for Iberian Music’s Composer’s Commissions, fear not! The internet is here for you. Our online archives have been updated. Primero, the 2013 commission, Albert Guinovart’s Skyshadows, is up on YouTube. Segundo, the 2012 commission, Benet Casablancas’s, Dance, Song and Celebration: Homage to Xavier Montsalvatge, is also on YouTube. (We also have video of one other work from the Montsalvatge centenary concert, Richard Gerhard’s Libra.) Por último, we have done some housekeeping in the archive of commissions. All works for which there is an audio or video recording are linked. To listen, click on the linked titles, and they will take you to the relevant entry in the audio archive, or to a post with a direct link to the audio/video. For even more, have a look through our audio archive, which is now better organized. Here, you can find past discussions, concerts, resident artist recitals, interviews with director Antoni Pizà, and so on, going back to 2005.
2015: The Year of Surinach 2015 is the centennial of Catalan composer Carlos Suriñach’s birth, and the Foundation for Iberian Music is excited to begin planning celebrations of his life and work. Suriñach studied composition at home in Barcelona and both composition and conducting at several academies in Germany (including a stint with Richard Strauss). After a few years conducting the Barcelona PO, he permanently emigrated to the United States in 1951, where he established himself as a popular figure in contemporary ballet. (His 1963 ballet The Feast of Ashes, composed for the Joffrey Ballet, was performed more than 500 times that year alone!) He has particular ties to NYC as a composer for the illustrious Martha Graham Dance Company. For the Company, he wrote three works: Embattled Garden (1958), Acrobats of God (1960) and The Owl and the Pussycat (1978). Suriñach’s music demonstrates both his Catalan origins and his German training; his early works are more quintessentially Spanish (to borrow from our director, Antoni Piza’s, entry on Surinach for the New Grove Dictionary), but his mature works skillfully blend German neo-classicism with flamenco inspired sonorities and rhythms. We hope that you will join us throughout the year as we finalize events!
Advance buzz for El Greco: el viaje musical Spanish early music group the Capella de Ministrers have landed in NYC for a week of concerts, beginning at the Hispanic Society on Thursday and continuing through Saturday in a series co-sponsored by the Foundation, at the Metropolitan Museum. The Capella will be performing works from their recent recording of music from the places central to El Greco’s life, El viaje musical, to celebrate El Greco’s 400th anniversary. Press is beginning to roll in from both sides of the pond. Barcelona’s La Vanguardia writes about the Capella and the Foundation in today’s issue, and NY El Diaro also has an article. Digital daily Núvol will also be covering the concerts later this week. (UPDATE: Article here) For more information on the upcoming concerts, please see the Vanguardia article, or our previous post.
Antoni Pizà on Ona Mediterránia to Discuss Book, Guerau Spanish baroque enthusiasts will be pleased to learn that the Foundation director, Antoni Pizà’s, book on the composer Francesc Guerau has recently been reissued, with a beautiful new cover. Francesc Guerau: i el seu temps is available once more from its original publisher, Edicions Documenta Balear. It is available through Amazon.com. Pizà was recently a guest on Cotíledonia, a podcast from Catalonian radio Ona Mediterránia, to promote the reissue and discuss Guerau. You can listen to the broadcast (October 11, 2014) online. (The interview begins at the 42nd minute.)
El Greco in New York The Foundation is co-sponsoring a concert with the Metropolitan Museum to commemorate the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death. Renowned early music ensemble Capella de Ministrers will present a program from their release “El Greco, El Viaje Musical,” which celebrates music iconic to the important places in El Greco’s life. The concert will be held in the Museum’s 16th century patio from the Andalusian castle, Vélez Blanco. This intimate venue mirrors the palatial residences of El Greco in Rome and Toledo, where generous patronage allowed the artist to enjoy salaried musicians nightly at his dinners. The concert coincides with the Museum’s forthcoming exhibit “El Greco in New York,” which opened last week. There will be two performances: Dec 12, 7 pm Dec 13, 7 pm Tickets are $85 and extremely limited. (Please contact the Met Box Office at 212-570-3949 to reserve.) The Foundation will have a limited number of complimentary tickets available to students and faculty. Please contact Antoni Piza for availability. Click photo to hear the Capella’s album trailer
Further Casablancas Excitement As we announced last week, Song, Dance, and Celebration, the Foundation for Iberian Music’s commission from Benet Casablancas, will soon have its Canadian premiere. This week, we have more good news for Casablancas fans, in NYC and abroad. Firstly, the Croatian ensemble Cantus, who are performing this week with the Canadian Sinfoniettia, will also be taking the show home to Zagreb, for the work’s Croatian premiere, and finally, to Barcelona, for—you guessed it—its Spanish premiere! We are very excited to see Song, Dance, and Celebration travel the world. Tickets for the Zagreb concert will be available through Lisinsky Hall, so please watch their events page for more information. The Barcelona concert is May 21, 2015, and tickets are now available through L’Auditori. There are many other Casablancas works being performed around the world, so check out his publisher’s website for a full list of upcoming events. One of them is right here in Brooklyn, March 24, at the hip Boerum Hill performing arts space, Roulette. Local ensemble Ear Heart Music will be playing Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom (which will also be featured on the Barcelona program), to a backdrop of original animation by Jeanne Stern.