The Foundation for Iberian Music presents a lecture by Grayson Wagstaff

The Big Sombrero, Dead Professors, and Local Chant from Salamanca to Mexico City

Friday, March 5th, 6:00 P.M, room 3491
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue – New York, NY 1001

Professor Grayson Wagstaff examines an account of a ceremony in Salamanca c. 1900 of a unique ritual (with a “big sombrero”) in honor of deceased professors. He builds a hypothesis that this death ritual may be connected to local chant traditions in Salamanca and perhaps to Morales’ beautiful Circumdederunt me, the first European work identified by name in a performance in Mexico. The liturgy and chant in Salamanca were important sources for the new churches in Colonial “New Spain,” now Mexico.

Presented by the Foundation for Iberian Music, along with the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages and the Ph.D.-D.M.A. Program in Music

Grayson Wagstaff is Professor and Chair of Musicology in the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, The Catholic University of America (and Dean as of June 1, 2010), and serves as director of the Latin American Center for the Graduate Study of Music. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin (1995) where he worked closely with the late Robert J. Snow and holds an undergraduate degree (BM) in music performance and education from James Madison University.

Prof. Wagstaff is a widely published author on topics dealing with late-Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music in Spain and music in early Colonial Mexico; his interests include sacred music, specifically Requiem traditions, Marian devotions, the services of Holy Week, and local chant repertories. His book Matins for the Dead in Sixteenth-Century Colonial Mexico appeared in 2007. He has contributed articles and reviews to such journals as The Musical Quarterly, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Heterofonía, Notes, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, Inter-American Music Review, the Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music, as well as the recent collection Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Influences, Reception.

Wagstaff has also developed interests in a number of topics in twentieth-century music. He recently gave a keynote lecture on the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and works commissioned by the Library of Congress. Another lecture focused on the music of Desi Arnaz (I Love Lucy) and his popularization of Caribbean sounds in American television.

Finally, Professor Wagstaff is active in a number of programs in arts education, and he has given lectures at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as for organizations such as Washington National Opera, Washington Performing Arts Society, Maryland Presents, and Smithsonian Associates.