Vancouver New Music Festival 2011 Focuses on Xenakis Oct 20-22, 2011: This year’s Vancouver New Music Festival will focus on Iannis Xenakis. The festival features three nights of concerts devoted to Xenakis, with performances by New York’s JACK Quartet, Montreal-based clarinetist and improviser Lori Freedman, Vancouver’s Fringe Percussion, and more. Sharon Kanach, director of the Xenakis Project of the Americas, and Xenakis scholar James Harley will provide an introduction to each night’s concerts. In addition, XPA is partnering with the Canadian Music Centre to bring the exhibition “Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary” to Vancouver from September 30 to October 18. For more information, please visit the Vancouver New Music Festival website.
Call for papers: “Xenakis’ Electroacoustic Music,” Université Paris 8 May 23-25, 2012: Xenakis’ electroacoustic works are relatively few in his whole production, but they are very important. Indeed, most of them – from Diamorphoses through to S.709: Concret PH, Bohor, Persepolis, Polytope de Cluny, La Légende d’Eer, Mycènes alpha, Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède, Gendy3… – punctuate the history of electroacoustic music as masterpieces full of originality and innovation. Besides, Xenakis worked both on musique concrète and with electronic music techniques, covering both fields of what is called electroacoustic music. Moreover, his polytopes, where technology plays a major role, are pioneer realizations in the history of multimedia art. As they are composed at important moments of Xenakis’ evolution, these electroacoustic works can also be analyzed to understand the various aspects of his musical, theoretical, aesthetic and interdisciplinary thought: research on noise, granular theory, experimentations on spatialization, inter-artistic realizations… It is also important to notice the fact that these works have a strong relationship with his instrumental music (for instance, there are many affinities between La Légende d’Eer and the orchestral work Jonchaies). This symposium wishes to gather researchers from all around the world – well-known specialists of Xenakis’ music or young researchers –, to analyze his electroacoustic music. Proposals of papers should include an abstract of 600 to 1000 words (additional to a bibliography) and a short CV. They should be sent before the 1th of January 2012 to Makis.Solomos@univ-paris8.fr . For complete details, please see the attached PDF document: CallXenakis .
The New York Andalus Ensemble Concert 16 November 2011: The New York Andalus Ensemble performs a free concert at the CUNY Graduate Center in the beautiful Elebash Recital Hall. The ensemble performs music from the historical traditions in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and the Iberian Peninsula. Directed by Rachid Halihal, coordinated by Samuel R. Thomas (Ph.D Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center), and co-sponsored by the Foundation for Iberian Music, the New York Andalus Ensemble is open to the public and has an extremely diverse membership. This large ensemble includes a choir of vocalists and a multitude of instrumentalists, combining irreverent songs of love with songs of deep spirituality. More information to follow. The New York Andalus Ensemble November 16, 2011 — 7:30pm Elebash Recital Hall 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016
Mompou Seminar Fall 2011: Music as a Cultural Weapon 24 September 2011: The Foundation for Iberian Music and the Mompou Chair present the 2011 Fall Seminar “Music as a Cultural Weapon: Fighting for Ethnic Identities in Spain from Cançó to Rock and Rap (1960-2010).” Professor Sílvia Martínez from la Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (la ESMUC) and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona will lead an interactive seminar with discussions, lecture, and listening examples. September 24, 2011 10 am – 4 pm Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 Room 3491 Free and open to the public Breakfast and lunch provided The seminar examines the relationship between popular music and ethnic identity through the historical example of Catalonians in Spain. By comparing two historical moments – the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1990s – the seminar aims to highlight the ways groups use musical expression as a way of transmitting a sense of belonging. Particular to this example, the Catalan language is an important element for the Catalonian identity and is central to the seminar’s discussion of the sociopolitical movements of the time. This case presents a model for studying the relationship between musical expressions, socio-economic conditions of a musical scene, and the potential of consolidation of an ethnic identity, which can be compared with other American and international cases. Some topics to be covered in the seminar: • Many musical bands share stages and audiences although their messages are inconsistent and incompatible with each other • The songs’ language (Catalan, Spanish or English) is a more defining element for genre than strict musical features • Although radical musical genres (heavy metal, rap) exist, bands refuse to be constrained by genre definitions • There is a certain lack of lyric-based song genres (rap, ballads, flamenco song) Readings: Cohen, Sara. “Sounding out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 20/4 (1995), 434-446. Eriksen, Thomas. “Ethnicity versus Nationalism.” Journal of Peace Research 28/3 (1991), 263-278. Fouce, Héctor. “Emociones en lugar de soluciones. Música popular, intelectuales y cambio político en la España de la Transición .” TRANS 12 (2008). Van Lew, Maria. “The Scent of Catalan Rock: Els Pets’ Ideology and the Rock and Roll Industry.” Popular Music. 12/3 (1993), 245-261. For reservations to the seminar: emmy.williamson@gmail.com
The Travels of Tirant Lo Blanch: Music and Chivalric Splendor 20 October, 2011: The Foundation for Iberian Music, as part of its Mompou Chair events, presents “The Travels of Tirant Lo Blanch” a concert by the Capella de Ministrers sponsored by Institut Ramon Llull. The concert is part of the music series Music in Midtown at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition, Conductor Carles Magraner and the Capella de Ministrers will perform “Tirant Lo Blanch” as a special concert for patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 19. Tirant Lo Blanch (Tirant the White) is a novel by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell published in 1490. Martorell’s romance is an epic about a knight who helps protect the Byzantine Empire from the invading the Ottoman Turks. Miguel de Cervantes cites this book as the most important piece of literature that influenced him to write Don Quixote. ”Es la novela total. Novela de caballerías fantastica, histórica, social, erótica, psicológica: todas esas cosas a la vez y ninguna de ellas exclusivamente.” “It is the whole novel. It’s a fantastic, social, erotic, psychological tale of chivalry: all of those things at the same time and none of these exclusively.” –Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize 2010). More information to follow. Thursday 20 October, 2011 Elebash Recital Hall, 1 pm The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 For tickets and more information, click here or call 212-868-4444. This concert is supported by the Institut Ramon Llull and is part of the Catalan Days Festival
Silent Music: Book Release and Panel Discussion 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.
Listen to the NYC Andalus Ensemble 12 July, 2011: The New York City Al-Andalus Ensemble has been practicing and learning music from the Ala-Andalusit repertoire under the direstion of Rachid Halihal over the past semester. Now some recordings of their performance and practice are available to listen to on the Foundation for Iberian Music’s Audio Archive. To listen to two songs from the ensemble, click here.
The Foundation for Iberian Music Presents Inside the Music The Foundation for Iberian Music presents a new series called Inside the Music. This is a new series of interactive seminars in which composers are invited to explain, analyze, and describe their music through close listening. The series is geared to doctoral students in music and aims at creating a dialogue between them, on the one hand, and the composers and their music, on the other. By leading a seminar about their own music, composers engage with students on a more intimate level resulting in a deeper understanding of a musical piece. The seminar will include selected readings, guided listening of recordings, and live performances. All Inside the Music events will be free and open to the public and will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Audio Archive: New Music by Joan Valent In April the Foundation for Iberian Music presented a concert of New Music by Joan Valent. The audio recording for the concert are now available for listening in the Audio Archive. The concert’s program to accompany the audio recording is also available online. To listen to the concert, click here.