Ricard Viñes (1875-1943) is mostly known as the pianist of the French impressionists. He premiered works by Debussy Ravel, among many others. The Foundation for Iberian Music dedicated a lecture and symposium to him in 2010. You may listen to the event here

Now, the New York Philharmonic celebrates the 150 anniversary of Viñes’s friend, Maurice Ravel, which is also Viñes’s 150 anniversary. Click this link for more information. Philharmonic Events

David Geffen Hall has mounted a show at its lobby showing, among many other things Viñes’s Diary. This document, among other things, testifies to the authorship of Sémiramis, a Ravel composition premiered now by the Philharmonic that, for a long time, was considered spurious. Interestingly enough, CUNY professor Arbie Orenstein has determined Sémiramis’s authorship based on Viñes’s Diary. There will also be many more events around Viñes, Ravel, and Sémiramis at Albertine and The Morgan Library. Click this link, again, for more information. Philharmonic Events

T h e  F o u n d a t i o n   f o r  I b e r i a n  M u s i c at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, The Office of Public Programs, CUNY Graduate Center, The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, In Collaboration with Flamenco Festival New York

PRESENT

Federico García Lorca, Flamenco, and the Harlem Renaissance
An International Symposium
Wed, Mar 5 5:30-6:30pm  – Skylight Room
CUNY Graduate Center – 365 5th Avenue at 34th St
Free; reservations required – gc.cuny.edu/public-programs

Before our evening concert with Kiki Morente and Carlos de Jacoba, join Sybil Cooksey, José Javier León, Noël Valis, and moderator K. Meira Goldberg for a free panel discussion about Lorca’s legacy, almost 90 years after his assassination during the Spanish Civil War. A queer poet who drew inspiration from (and continues to inspire) flamenco, rooted in Gitano (Kalé, Spanish Roma, or so-called “Gypsy”) culture, Lorca was also deeply impacted by the Black artists he encountered during his stay in New York at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Still influential today is Lorca’s concept of duende, a dark and mysterious aesthetic power, which expresses a kind of tragic ecstasy for singer, dancer, and audience.

Featuring: Sybil Cooksey, assistant professor at New York University and author of the forthcoming book, The Objective I: Black Life Writing and Inauthenticity in Post-Negrophilia Paris; K. Meira Goldberg, scholar-in-residence at the Foundation for Iberian Music, a flamenco performer and choreographer, and author of the award-winning monograph, Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco; José Javier León, a professor at Centro de Lenguas Modernas de la Universidad de Granada and author of numerous books related to Lorca, including Finding Duende: Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion; and Noël Valis, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University and author of the award-winning book, Lorca After Life.

Miquel À. Múrcia (Ontinyent, Valencia 1982) has been awarded the Foundation for Iberian Music’s Composer’s Commission 2024. His Obra per a piano finds inspiration in the immigration from Valencia, Spain, to New York, in the early twentieth century. He discusses his sources in the following magazine article.

Miquel Àngel Murcia, el valenciano que ha ‘emigrado’ a Nueva York a través de la música _ Valencia Plaza

Miquel Àngel Múrcia’s background includes a a PhD in History. Considered a “great exponent of the electroacoustic in Europe” thanks to his enormous and incipient electroacoustic music, audiovisual, chamber music, and ensemble premieres in recent years in several European countries. He has received commissions from many countries and, among his many works premiered the most outstanding are the ones for the “Magritte Museum” in Belgium during the period 2009–2010. He has also premiered at many leading festivals, such as the SIMA FountCourt (France, Dijon), in 2011 and at the “Talent Festival” part of the prestigious Berlinale (Berlin). He has actively taken part in the 17th, 18th and 19th (2010-2012) “Meeting Point International Festivals” and his music has been included in the regular program of Phonos Barcelona, and Carnegie Ensemble Contemporary (USA 2012). Moreover, he is working to reissue a critical study of the romantic musical composer Josep Melcior Gomis. He is part of the Spanish Association of Electronic Music.

During the Spring semester 2025, Pilar Serrano Betored will be a Visiting Research Scholar at the Foundation for Iberian Music / Barry S. Brook Center. Dr. Serrano’s research focuses on women guitarists’ role in flamenco in Spain and the Americas.

The working title of her research is “Women Guitarists: Towards A New Gender Identity in Contemporary Flamenco Guitar.” She hopes to analyze the musical practice of flamenco guitar by women in the contemporary American and Spanish music scene from the critical perspective of gender studies. Moreover, she will conduct fieldwork on women flamenco guitarists currently active in NYC and the USA. She intends to study from a theoretical and musicological perspective the transatlantic circulation of flamenco music, its ideologies, and instrumental practices between Spain and the Americas, drawing on the existing literature on current music and gender. To this end she will conduct structured interviews with female flamenco guitarists who have developed a professional career in the American and Spanish context, covering their training, professional trajectory, and musical practices from the point of view of gender. She will also compile sound recordings of the guitar practices of these performers and will elaborate a selection of flamenco guitar musical scores composed by these performers intended for edition and publication. This will aim to create a repertoire of flamenco guitar music composed entirely of women.

Workshop: Brazilian Music Approach: Rhythms and Analysis
NOVEMBER 5, 2024 3:00-9:00 PM | ELEBASH RECITAL HALL, GRADUATE CENTER CUNY

Led by pianist, composer, arranger, music producer and educator Flávio Silva, the goal of this workshop is to introduce listeners and performers to principle Brazilian rhythms and styles associated with them, as well as an exploration of groups, composers and musicians.

Silva is a pianist, composer, arranger, music producer and educator. The goal of this workshop is to introduce listeners and performers to principle Brazilian rhythms and styles associated with them, as well as an exploration of groups, composers and musicians who were important for the consolidation of each of those rhythms. The workshop will be followed by a concert.

Topics:
The concepts of time signature (2/4 vs 4/4).
Clave.
Rhythmic timeline.
Brazilian music characteristics.
Most common Brazilian rhythms figures.
Syncopation in the Brazilian music genre.
Most common patterns played in a specific genre or style.

Rhythms covered:
-Samba
-Sambolero – João Donato
Samba-Jazz
-Bossa Nova
-Partido Alto

Personal experience of each of the trio members:
-Flávio Silva (Piano)
-Tiago Rosback (Drums)
-Daniel Castro (Double/Electric Bass) See less

Antoni Pizà, Director of the Foundation for Iberian Music, presented a paper at the 23rd International Conference of the Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) in collaboration with the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (mdw) [Vienna, 29-31 Aug 2024].

The conference was entitled Laughing your staves off: irony, satire, and parody in visual representations and narratives of music

Antoni Pizà’s paper, “Mocking Gambara: Balzac’s use of musical instruments as attributes of madness” examines Balzac’s novella Gambara (1837). The book recounts the story of a young aristocrat who, while trying to pursue a woman, meets her husband, a composer and instrument maker “suspect of being insane.” Paolo Gambara is by all accounts either a genius the world might one day acknowledge or, conversely, a wacky, failed artist. The text presents instances that could support both interpretations. As the story advances, however, it becomes clear that Gambara is, by far, a ludicrous charlatan, who in addition to his “mastery” (possibly ironical) of intricate music theory terminology, has also invented a preposterous musical instrument, the panharmonicon. In Balzac’s narrative, instruments, and especially the panharmonicon, are attributes that help characterize the madness, absurdity, and derangement of Gambara. Instruments are also signifiers of failure, demise, and social descent. Gambara, indeed, ends up impoverished and working as a busker on the streets of Paris playing a modest guitar.

Balzac’s choice of instrument to create a parody of a mad and failed genius, the panharmonicon, is rather baffling. The real Panharmonikon was a mechanical instrument, which included a broad palette of orchestral timbers, and it was intended for serious, even “scientific,” purposes, not as a ludicrous contraption, as Balzac presents it in Gambara. Invented by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772–1838), Beethoven wrote for it the original Wellington’s Victory, op. 91 (1813). Paralleling Gambara’s ironic deployment of music theory verbiage, Balzac’s panharmonicon is a satirical version of Mälzel’s original Panharmonikon. An early engraving illustrating Gambara depicts it as a comical keyboard instrument, which at times doubles as a bed and perhaps a coffin. Both instruments, the real and the fictional, Mälzel’s and Gambara’s, however, have in common their celebratory attitude of parody and satire through cacophony, loudness, madness, and nonsense.

 Rossini’s song La Veuve Andalouse edited by Antoni Pizà and María Luisa Martínez both of the Foundation for Iberian Music has been recently reviewed by Revista de Musicología (Sociedad Española de musicología) and Música, Revista del Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid.  See below:

03 NUMERO 30 RCSMM web DEF

MoralesVillar-ROSSINIOFFENBACHEN-2024