Lecture-Recital with Pianist Joseph Smith The Fall semester is nearly upon us! Coming up September 8th is the not-to-be-missed premiere of the Foundation’s 2013 Composer Commission with Albert Guinovart, but this is only the beginning of a year of great programming. Please join us on October 27th for a lecture-recital with pianist Joseph Smith. Mr. Smith is known for bringing neglected works to light. He regularly performs, writes, and lectures. He has edited eleven piano anthologies, recorded ten albums, and written for numerous publications. His show “Joseph Smith’s Piano Bench” aired for two years, as a monthly feature of NPR’s Performance Today. The New York Times has called his playing “eloquent,” and author Stuart Issacoff calls him “a walking encyclopedia of the piano” in his book, The Natural History of the Piano. For this lecture, Mr. Smith will be performing piano works of Latin-America and exploring the links between Western classical and vernacular Latin-American traditions, such as tango and milonga. As an apertif, please enjoy this video of Mr. Smith performing Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, Op. 9, No. 2 (“with too many authentic ornaments”), and this excerpt from a previous lecture-recital, featuring “Te quiero tanto,” which he will be performing on the upcoming program. The lecture will take place on October 27, 2014 at CCNY, 11 am. The event is free to attend. No reservation required. City College of New York Shephard Hall Room 95 160 Convent Ave New York, NY 10031
Keynote Speaker for “The Global Reach of the Fandango” Announced We are pleased to announce that Dr. Elisabeth Le Guin will be joining us as the keynote speaker for our upcoming Spring 2015 conference, Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and Gypsies: the Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance. Dr. Le Guin is a Professor of Musicology at UCLA. She is most recently the author of The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain, which has been described as “a wonderfully rich picture of place, genre, and period that encompasses questions of comedy, song, historiography, nationalism, gender, the practicalities of performance, and the disadvantages of an overarching theory.” From the publisher: The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the musical, theatrical, and social worlds that the tonadilla brought together and traces the lasting influence this genre has had on the historiography of Spanish music. The tonadillas’ careful constructions of musical populism provide a window onto the tensions among Enlightenment modernity, folkloric nationalism, and the politics of representation; their diverse, engaging, and cosmopolitan music is an invitation to reexamine tired old ideas of musical “Spanishness.” Perhaps most radically of all, their satirical stance urges us to embrace the labile, paratextual nature of comic performance as central to the construction of history.
NPR’s Brooke Gladstone to join David Harrington Earlier, we announced that the 2014 entry in the Lloyd and Constance Old Lectures on 21st-Century Music will be a conversation with Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington. “Who will be conversing with Mr. Harringon?” you may have wondered. In answer to that question, we are pleased to announce that Brooke Gladstone, editor and host of NPR’s On the Media, will be joining Mr. Harrington. Ms. Gladstone is an expert media analyst who has received several major awards for journalism. In addition to her decades of work with NPR, she is the author of The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (2011). She has interviewed the Kronos Quartet on numerous occasions, and she wrote the liner notes for their 1994 release Night Prayers, as well as for the their 40th anniversary box set, the Kronos Explorer Series.
Composer’s Commission 2013 July 8, 2014: The Foundation is excited to announce that the 2013 composer’s commission has been awarded to Albert Guinovart. A Catalan pianist and composer, Guinovart studied at the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona. He is currently teaching composition at ESMUC (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya), a position he has held since 2002. In 2014, he was inducted into the Catalan Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Guinovart’s music has been performed around the world and has been featured in several films. He recently released a recording of his works on Sony Classical (link in Spanish). Please join us at the Instituto Cervantes on September 8 for the premiere of Guinovart’s new work, Skyshadows. The program, which explores creative exchanges between Spain and New York City, will include several of Guinovart’s past works along with the works of Frederic Mompou and Enrique Granados. Click photo below for a video of Skyshadows The commission will also be performed at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond (VA) on September 10.
CFP: The Global Reach of the Fandango THE CALL FOR PAPERS IS NOW CLOSED SPANIARDS, INDIANS, AFRICANS AND GYPSIES: THE GLOBAL REACH OF THE FANDANGO IN MUSIC, SONG, AND DANCE CALL FOR PAPERS The Foundation for Iberian Music at The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a conference on the global reach of the fandango at CUNY’s Segal Theater on April 17, 2015. In The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, Serge Gruzinski notes “the difficulty we experience even ‘seeing’ mestizo phenomena, much less analyzing them.” The fandango emerged in the early eighteenth century as a popular dance and music craze across Spain and the Americas. While in parts of Latin America the term “fandango” came to refer to any festive social dance event, over the course of that century in both Spain and the Americas a broad family of interrelated fandango music and dance genres evolved that went on to constitute important parts of regional expressive culture. This fandango family comprised genres as diverse as the Cuban peasant punto, the salon and concert fandangos of Mozart and Scarlatti, and—last but not least—the Andalusian fandango subgenres that became core components of flamenco. The fandango world itself became a conduit for the creative interaction and syncretism of music, dance, and people of diverse Spanish, Afro-Latin, Gitano, and perhaps even Amerindian origin. As such, the fandango family evolved as a quintessential mestizaje, a mélange of people, imagery, music and dance from America, Europe, and Africa. Emerging from the maelstrom of the Atlantic slave trade with its cataclysmic remaking of the Western world, the fandango in its diverse but often interrelated forms was nurtured in the ports of Cádiz, Veracruz, Sao Paolo and Havana, and went on to proliferate throughout Europe and the Americas. Widely dispersed in terms of geography, class, and cultural reference, the fandango’s many faces reflect a diversity of exchange across what was once the Spanish Empire. This conference proposes to bring these cousins together, and to wonder how one form can shed light on another. The Foundation invites interested scholars, graduate students, and practitioners including musicians and dancers to propose presentations on all subjects related to the fandango. Although we are not limited to them, we expect to gain special insight into the following topics: 1. What is the full array of the fandango? Can we track the great flows, effusions, migrations, and transformations of culture through a close examination of the local and specific histories of the fandango? 2. What are some of the shared formal features—musical, choreographic, or lyric—that can be discerned in the diverse constituents of the ‘fandango’ family in Spain and the Americas? How does our recognition of these features enhance our understanding of historical connections between these places? 3. How has the fandango participated in the elaboration of various national identities? 4. How may we read, as Terence Cave has described, the performance of mestizaje and the negotiations of hegemonic gender codes in intermediate forms like the minuet afandangado, or a fandango on eggs? 5. What is the genealogy of the fandango’s stringed instruments, instrumental and vocal techniques, rhythm, verse, melodic structures, improvisational syntax? 6. What are the political economies of fandango performances—how do local, cross-class, and transnational economic transactions activate the process of mestizaje? 7. What are the politics of representation of the various fandangos? How, as Elisabeth Le Guin, Antonio García de León Griego, and Roger Bartra observe, do the fandangos of the Enlightenment shed light on musical populism and folkloric nationalism as armaments in the great emancipatory struggles of the 18th and 19th centuries? 8. How do fandango music and dance embody memory? How do they collapse past and present, creating performances that simultaneously echo the magical or sacred practices of their ancestors and appeal to a commercial audience? 9. What does the resurgence in interest in the fandango in Chicano communities across the U.S. as well as in Mexico have to do with the process of decolonialization? Paper presentations will be 20 minutes, with 10 minutes of discussion. We also welcome workshop-style presentations incorporating dance, music, and song. Please send a title and a 150-200 word abstract to K. Meira Goldberg at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com by Nov 1, 2014. There is a conference registration fee of $100.
Granados Centenary Performance A major highlight of the Granados Centenary celebrations will be the performance in New York of the long-lost masterpiece Cant de les estrelles (Song of the Stars) by Voices of Ascension, directed by Dennis Keene, with pianist Douglas Riva. Cant de les estrelles was premiered by the Orfeó Català, Barcelona in March, 1911 and the work was repeated in a private concert in June of that year. Although recognized as a masterpiece it was never again performed and the manuscript was though lost until it was recovered in 2006. Dennis Keene directed Voices of Ascension in the first performance in almost 100 years in 2007 with pianist Douglas Riva, the first pianist to perform the work after Granados himself. The concert was recorded by Naxos and the CD was nominated for a Grammy award.
Granados: the Growing Board of Advisors June 10, 2014: The advisors list for the Enrique Granados Centenary continues to grow with the addition of Jorge de Persia, Arturo Reverter, and Ángel Gil-Ordoñez. Jorge de Persia is a musicologist, professor, and music critic. Formerly the director of the director of the Archivo Manuel de Falla in Granada, he is the author of numerous books, including publications on de Falla and his music. Arturo Reverter is one of the most distinguished music critics in Spain; he was a founder of the important music magazine, Scherzo. Ángel Gil-Ordoñez is the director of the PostClassical Music Ensemble, and is often featured as a guest conductor with the Perspectives Ensemble, artist-in-residence at the Foundation. He has been awarded the Royal Order of Queen Isabella by the King of Spain—the country’s highest civilian designation. The Foundation is excited to have three such distinguished individuals on the advisory board. Update June 12, 2014: Helen Glaisher-Hernández has also joined the international board of advisors. In addition to being a performing pianist, Helen is a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, conducting research on postcolonial identity in Latin American classical music. Helen is also the chairwoman and artistic director of ILAMS, where she works to promote the classical music of Iberia. Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge, researching postcolonial identity in Latin American Classical Music – See more at: http://brookcenter.gc.cuny.edu/enrique-granados-centenary-and-anniversary/#sthash.ZIwGOG35.dpuf á Helen Glaisher-Hernández Helen Glaisher-Hernández Helen Glaisher-Hernández Helen Glaisher-Hernández Helen Glaisher-Hernández
Perspectives Ensemble’s Album Review June 3, 2014: Joshua Rosemblum, writing for Opera News, recently wrote a glowing review of Perspectives Ensemble’s new album. The album is a recording of works by Xavier Montsalvatge, based on a 2012 concert organized by the Foundation in celebration of the composer’s centenary. Conducted by Angel Gil-Ordoñez, the Perspectives Ensemble is ensemble-in-residence at the Foundation. See the review below: This disc won me over in its first twenty seconds — the skittering, playfully dissonant opening passage of Xavier Montsalvatge’s Folia Daliniana for four solo winds, strings, and percussion. Montsalvatge (1912-2002), a vital and under-appreciated Spanish Catalan composer, proceeds in this bracing fourteen-minute piece to define himself as something of a Spanish Poulenc: colorful, ingratiating and exuberant, if less given to sentimentality and more willing to flirt with atonality. Composed for the closing ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the lush Madrigal Sobre un Tema Popular that follows is based on the lovely and familiar “El cant dels ocells” (“Song of the Birds”), a traditional Catalan Christmas carol. Mezzo Sasha Cooke unleashes seamless, beautifully shaped tones that float alluringly on the shimmering string accompaniment of the Perspectives Ensemble, conducted with sensitivity by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Cooke also deftly negotiates the more scintillating and challenging Cinco Invocaciones al Crucificado (1969) for mezzo, three flutes, five percussionists, harp, piano, celeste, and string bass. Using texts from the sixth, thirteenth, and fifteenth centuries for these five depictions of the Passion tale, Montsalvatge uses a modernist yet evocative and accessible language to conjure the mystery and the pain of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. Clangorous percussion and disjointed rhythmic groupings provide an arresting backdrop to the momentous, often painfully observed declamations of the opening “De passione Christi.” The second movement, “Pianto della madonna,” has a gentle lilt and pungently beautiful harmonies within a transparent texture of piano, harp, and flutes. Cooke’s sound, an appealing combination of light in weight but dark in color, is especially well suited for this intimate lamentation. Later, in the bleaker, more expansive and free-ranging “Lamentacion” of the fourth movement, Cooke appropriately adds texture to her voice on such searing lines as “now you are a blade/that pierces me with untold pain,” but she maintains suitable neo-classical restraint. The final movement, celebratory and uplifting, yet still unusual in harmony and instrumental coloring, imagines how joyous it would have been to have lived in the time of Christ. Cooke’s brightened, forward placement of her sound for this movement is an effective contrast. The disc also includes the rhapsodic, shape-shifting Serenata a Lydia de Cadaques, composed for Jean-Pierre Rampal. Flutist Sato Moughalian (also the artistic director of Perspectives Ensemble), plays brilliantly, especially in the pictorial, three-minute cadenza that opens the piece. Violinist Tim Fain plunges into the Shostakovich-like beginning of Concertino 1 + 13 with bite and alacrity. The extraordinary second movement features an angular yet languorous and insidious melody that consists entirely of trilled notes, creating the sound of some otherworldly instrument. Montsalvatge’s music has that distinctive stamp of cohesive, self-assured originality that defines composers of the first rank. This disc, with its unusual, intriguing repertoire and outstanding performances, deserves a wide hearing.
Prestigious Scholars Join the International Granados Committee May 6, 2014: The Foundation is excited to announce that two new scholars have been added to the International Board of Advisors for the Granados Centenary and Anniversary. Emilio Casares Rodicio is a Spanish musicologist, professor, and director of the Complutense Institute of Musical Studies (Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales). Alvaro Torrente is one of the world’s foremost experts on Spanish baroque music, especially the villancico genre. Both are professors at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Rodicio and Torrente are joining William Aaron Clark, Miriam Perandones Lozando, John Watson Milton, Marry Ann Newman, Mònica Pagès, Douglas Riva, Anna Tonna, and Antoni Pizà, Paulo Pinamonti, Mustsumi Fukushima, and Patricia Caicedo. More details are sure to follow.
“Strings Attached”: A Conversation with Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington October 22, 2014: Innovative violinist David Harrington, founder of the visionary ensemble the Kronos Quartet, will be the speaker of the 2014 Lloyd and Constance Old Lectures on 21st-Century Music. This series of talks and debates by major cultural figures addresses the changing consumption, creation, context, and valuations of today’s music. The event will also feature a live performance of music selected by Harrington. Harrington was inspired to form Kronos in 1973 after hearing a performance of Black Angels, an avante-garde piece by George Crumb. The new group quickly expanded into unconventional territory, performing renditions of songs by jazz artists, such as Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk, rock artists like Jimi Hendrix, as well as repertoire from past masters and contemporary composers. The group has worked closely with several prominent composers, including Terry Riley, Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, and Philip Glass, and has received numerous awards for their recordings and performances. Click here to view a recording of the talk!