31 October, 2011:  The Foundation for Iberian Music presents the book release and panel discussion of the Susan Boynton’s new publication Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain.  The event will feature guest speakers Walter Clark, Don Michael Randel, and Suzanne Ryan as well as introductory remarks by Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie and Antoni Pizà.

Monday October 31, 2011

Skylight Room, 6:30 pm

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Ave & 34th St

Reception to follow.

Silent Music examines the role of music and liturgy in the eighteenth-century vision of Spanish identity. This book is the first analysis of the Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel’s (1719-1762) research on medieval liturgy and music. With the calligrapher Fracisco Xavier Santiago y Palomares (1728-1796), Burriel worked in Toledo Cathedral for the Royal Commission on the Archives. Burriel’s transcriptions of manuscripts, canon law, literature, and liturgy were part of an effort to write a new ecclesiastical history of Spain. Boynton provides a unique perspective on an Enlightenment historian’s work and the impact of medieval liturgical music on Spain in the eighteenth century. The book demonstrates that music and notation played an important and previously unknown role in Burriel’s research and thought and in the career of Palomares.

Susan Boynton is associate professor of music at Columbia University. Her research interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, manuscript studies, monastic education, music in the Iberian Peninsula, and music and childhood. Her first book, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006), won the 2007 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. She has coedited volumes on Cluny, on music and childhood, on young singers before 1700, and on the Bible in the Middle Ages.

Walter Clark is a professor of music at the University of California Riverside and the founder and director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music (UCR). His academic work covers Renaissance and Romanticism, Spanish opera and contemporary popular music of Latin America. He has published numerous encyclopedic entries, text books, journal articles and monographs and is the series editor for Oxford University Press’s Currents in Iberian and Latin American Music

Don Michael Randel is the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was professor of music at Cornell University as well as the President of Chicago University. In addition to editing The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986) his research includes studies of the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music, and fifteenth-century French music and poetry.

Suzanne Ryan is the Music Editor for academic and professional books at Oxford University Press. Under her editorship, the series Currents in Iberian and Latin American Music has published many invaluable studies that seek to encompass the immensely diverse music across the Spanish-speaking world.