Posts in Category:
Events

The Invention of Race in Medieval Spain

Our distinguished colleague Dr. K. Meira Goldberg has delivered a lecture entitled “Genética y historia: negritud y alteridad” (“Genetics and history: blackness and otherness”) as part of the University of Granada’s recent Flamenco MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Dr. Goldberg’s lecture can be viewed here (in Spanish only). A text version is also available here.

Dr. Goldberg, “La Meira,” is a flamenco dancer, choreographer, teacher and scholar. She has co-edited many scholarly volumes with Antoini Pizà, is the author of several seminal books on race and the transatlantic circulation of music and dance, especially as it pertains to the Iberian world. 

The Flamenco MOOC is presented “on the occasion of the Centenary of the Cante Jondo Contest held in Granada in 1922” and “intends to analyze the artistic and cultural phenomenon of flamenco in its entire field of action and production, from a transversal, critical and at the same time informative, accessible perspective. to anyone interested in approaching and learning about this transnational art with deep and multiple roots.”

Rediscovery and New Publication: Bretón’s Piano Quintet in G Major

Antoni Pizà and María Luisa Martínez of the Foundation for Iberian Music have just published their edition of the Piano Quintet in G Major by Tomás Bretón (1850–1923).  This ambitious chamber piece had been lost for almost a century.  Its existence was actually known because the composer based his Symphony No. 3 in G Major on the original chamber piece. After its composition it was performed only once, almost a century ago, and then the original autograph manuscript resurfaced in our team’s researches.  In 2018, it was performed with great success at Fundación Juan March in Madrid and now a beautiful critical edition has just been published by Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales . It is the hope of the editors that a new second life will start for this superb chamber work.

Discover more about Tomás Bretón by exploring our other posts about the composer here.

Unpublished Rossini Letters Discovered

Unpublished Rossini Letters Discovered:  New Research at the Foundation for Iberian Music

María Luisa Martínez and Antoni Pizà have uncovered some new autograph letters by Gioachino Rossini.  It is a well-known fact that Rossini was an avid letter writer, and it does not come as a surprise that some new items in his prolific correspondence turn out here and there.  The letters reveal a mature composer complaining about his health, but also a young mind conducting business as usual and keeping up with his social and professional circles.  In one of these autograph letters, he announces exultantly to his friend Francisco Frontera de Valldemosa that he has been named member of the prestigious Institut de France.  In another, he mentions Rosina Zapater, a young singer.  In all cases, Rossini conveys with naturalness his open personality and his strong ties with Spanish musicians and especially the Spanish monarchs, declaring himself a “slave” to the Spanish queen.  The letters will soon be published in Pizà and Marinez’s upcoming edition of La Veuve andalouse.

 

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Queering Chopin: Research at the Brook Center’s Foundation for Iberian Music

Antoni Pizà has recently edited a compilation on Chopin’s sexuality for ITAMAR of the Universitat de València (see pp. 421ff).

The dossier presents four essays.  Pizà argues in “Love is a Pink Cake or Queering Chopin’s in Times of Homophobia” that Chopin’s heterosexuality has gone unquestioned for too long with terrible consequences.  Moritz Weber analyzes in “Chopins Männer” the misleading translations of the composer’s letters, especially as they refer to his love life.  Joan Estrany examines the composer’s intimate life as depicted in film in “Chopin y los Sand, amor a cuatro bandas.  Aproximación a la esfera privada de Fryderyk Chopin a partir de la película Pragnienie Miłośc”.  Finally, Javier Albo’s “¿Es gay la música de Chopin?  Aspectos de la recepción de la música de Chopin en el siglo XIX” examines the role of women and the “feminine” in the contruction and dissemination of Chopin’s music.

The articles highlight the right to know whether Chopin was gay and contextualize this inquiry in a very long and pervasive historiographical tradition, essentially two hundred years long, dedicated to examining Chopin sexual orientation, on the one hand, and on the other the more recent tradition of queering western classical music composers. The main point is not to demonstrate categorically that Chopin was “gay” (a relative, modern identity marker in any case) but rather to highlight the perversive discourses that have presented him as unequivocally heterosexual.

After Antoni Pizà published an essay of Chopin’s sexuality in 2010, the controversy really took off in the winter of 2020 when Moritz Weber presented a two-part radio documentary on the mistranslation of the composer’s letters.

This radio documentary was picked up by many important media outlets including CNN, El mundo, The Guardian, Le Figaro, etc., causing a small succès de scandale. See these links.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/europe/chopin-sexuality-poland-lgbtq-debate-scli-intl/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/25/chopins-interest-in-men-airbrushed-from-history-programme-claims

https://www.elmundo.es/loc/celebrities/2020/12/08/5fc93397fdddffc6248b462c.html

https://www.corriere.it/esteri/20_novembre_26/chopin-era-gay-ma-lettere-che-scriveva-polacco-uomini-sono-state-tradotte-femminile-6a13e724-2fe1-11eb-a612-c98d07fbf341.shtml

https://www.lefigaro.fr/musique/lumiere-sur-la-passion-entre-chopin-et-george-sand-20210131

https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/music/classicalmusic/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-1.9345220?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=iOS_Native

https://voi.id/en/lifestyle/21449/misteri-surat-cinta-gay-komposer-frederic-chopin-yang-timbulkan-perdebatan

https://www.welt.de/kultur/klassik/plus220820920/Frederic-Chopin-Der-schmutzige-Traum-den-ich-von-Dir-hatte.html

“La veuve andalouse”: New Research from the Brook Center’s Foundation for Iberian Music

Antoni Pizà and Maria Luisa Martínez have prepared a facsimile edition of “La Veuve andalouse” by Gioachino Rossini (Kassel:  Reichenberger, 2022).  Last fall, on 21 November 2022, the Fundación Juan March of Madrid presented this song in this new edition in their prestigious concert series “Rossini en España.”

Pizà and Martínez were also interviewed on Spanish National Radio and Television, click here to hear and see the interview.

Also on 11 November 2022 Pizà and Martínez lectured on their edition at the Real Conservatorio de Música de Madrid.  See here photos of the event.

Research at the Foundation for Iberian Music

Work première (2018)

Publication (2022)

  • Queering Chopin, special issue of Itamar: Revista de investigación musical

    Volume (2021)

Responses in Music to Climate Change

 

International conference to be held via Zoom, 4-8 October 2021

Registration now open

Conference schedule

Full program

Selected bibliography, discography, and webography about music and climate change

The deleterious effects of anthropogenic climate change continue to shape music making in a post-industrial, global society. Indigenous communities—those typically least responsible for the carbon emissions that have contributed to global warming—face the elimination or depletion of natural resources necessary for their musical practices and traditions. Composers of art music, many compelled to bear witness to our current times and bring awareness to threatened ecosystems, draw sound material from endangered environmental sources. Popular music, too, continues to respond through concerts, songs that thematize the environment, and celebrity endorsements for protection measures. Across all forms of music making, discourses of preservation, sustainability, visibility, and action are pervasive.

This conference collects and shares research on music’s place within the Anthropocene from a wide range of perspectives. Originally scheduled for April 2020, the current reimagining of this event is itself an environmental response and testament to human perseverance in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The arrival of COVID-19 presents an important context within which to confront climate change issues, and this context will be directly addressed here, in Responses in Music to Climate Change. 

We are excited to feature the following:

Photo by Steven Feld




A keynote address by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld




A pre-recorded presentation by composer John Luther Adams

Photo by Molly Sheridan
Photo by Gabriel Majou




A live interview with composer Christopher Tin

 

Adaptations: Confronting Climate Change Amid COVID-19

A roundtable discussion with scholars Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), Denise von Glahn (Florida State University), and Holly Watkins (University of Rochester)

 

Sound Art, COVID, and the First Mediterranean Conference on Music and Science

With COVID raging on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars and musicians are finding ways to continue their activities.  ZOOM has become an indispensable tool for our work, whether in the classroom, the e-concert hall, or its use in professional conferences.

Ferrer-Molina

At the end of November 2020, organized by Fundació Assemblea de Ciutadans i Ciutadanes del Mediterrani (FACM), a group of scholars and artists in both music and the sciences gathered via Zoom to present their work under the aegis of the I Congrès Mediterrani Música I Ciència.

One of the highlights of the conference was the intervention of Ferrer-Molina with a sound installation titled CONCIERTO PARA TRENES DE METRO Y BANDA, which includes an intervention in the Alameda train station in Valencia (Spain) for fifty-two players within the “natural” environment of train sounds.

Ferrer-Molina has participated in many events at the Foundation for Iberian Music, including the 2017 Sound Art Festival with Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, Isaac Diego García and others.

Miguel Álvarez-Fernández

Álvarez-Fernández and Ferrer-Molina were also guests at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Composers Forum, to discuss their music.  As described by Antoni Pizà, the curator of the event, their creative work inhabits the margins between experimental music and sound art. It explores conceptual art, performance, experimental video, and other possibilities for developing the audience’s relationship with sound. They engage with these questions involving intersections through concert pieces, sound installations, sculptures, curatorial projects and many other manifestations.

Moving forward a different kind of musical experience, of special interest was the intervention of guitarist Mirza Redžepagić, which explored some similarities between Bosnian traditional music and flamenco.

The two-day event is on two different posts on YouTube corresponding to the first and second sessions.

Also, check out the web of the Fundació Assemblea de Ciutadans i Ciutadanes del Mediterrani (FACM).  About the conference they state:  “The Mediterranean Congress “Music and Science” aims to be an annual event that brings together different personalities of music and science in the Mediterranean area in order to share aspects that year after year have affected the interrelation between music and music. science.  In its first edition, on November 27 and 28, 2020, in online format, the central theme of the Mediterranean Congress “Music and Science” is the use of ICT in the Covid scenario, while the pandemic situation has forced the science and music, disciplines that require intense teamwork, to transfer a large part from its work to the internet.  Organized by the ACM Foundation in collaboration with Mostra Viva del Mediterrani and the ACM circle of Sarajevo.”

In the end, nowadays it all seems to be circling back to COVID and its consequences.

Sonoridad.es | Sound Landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula

Sonoridad.es | Sound Landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula

La Señorita Blanco

Curated by our colleague Daniel Valtueña, Sonoridad.es is a program of artistic residences accompanying the creative process of two artists:  Isabel Do Diego [isabeldodiego.com]  and  La Señorita Blanco [lasenoritablanco.me] during the next two academic courses. Please read the complete information here [kjcc.org].

Isabel Do Diego

On Thursday October 29 at 2:30 pm EST we’ll open the project with the round table Sonoridad.es: Listening to the Iberian Landscape [kjcc.org]which will be broadcast live through the KJCC [facebook.com] Facebook page,as well as from the Youtube channel [youtube.com].

Read full information here:  Sonoridad.es 1029