Claire Chase Performing at The Kitchen December 1-2 In further Lloyd Old and Constance Old lecture alumni news, Claire Chase, who moderated our Fall 2013 lecture with the one and only Phillip Glass, is returning to The Kitchen for two nights in December. Chase is a MacArthur Fellow and an international force in modern flute music and performance. At her upcoming concert, she will be premiering five new works—including poems by Paul Griffith set for small choir by Richard Beaudoin. (Paul Griffith—remember him?) You won’t want to miss this diverse and exciting program. Visit the Kitchen’s website for further details. It may seem impossible to think about December already, but tickets for these nights are likely to sell out quickly, so buy early. They go on sale August 15 at 2pm for the low price of $15.
Paul Griffith Featured in Music & Literature Music & Literature, a journal for modern arts, has dedicated a portion of its current issue (volume 7) to author, music critic, and librettist Paul Griffith. Paul Griffith was a speaker in 2013 at our annual Lloyd Old and Constance Old lecture series, which features critics, scholars, and artists who are dedicated to modern music and to our engagement with it as a society. The issue features two extensive new interviews with Griffith and a substantial selection of his writing, nearly all of which is previously unpublished. You can purchase the issue directly from Music & Literature for only $20. Did you miss Griffith’s lecture for Music in 21st-Century Society? Watch it here!
The Many Dangers of Music: A Discussion with Richard Taruskin and Prof. Scott Burnham Music in 21st-Century Society: Richard Taruskin: The Many Dangers of Music The 2016 Lloyd Old and Constance Old Lecture Wednesday, December 7 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall Richard Taruskin, America’s public musicologist, applies his broad cultural analysis, wit, and humor to 21st-century classical music. As in his acclaimed book The Danger of Music, he provokes debate, asking, what is the artist’s relationship, and obligation, to society? He is the author of the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music and a regular contributor to the New York Times. Taruskin’s talk will be followed by a discussion with GC professor Scott Burham, with a musical interlude by pianist Adam Kent. Music in 21st-Century Society lectures are always free, but reservations are recommended in order to guarantee admission. Lectures usually fill to capacity. Reserve your tickets here. Update (December 6): Tickets for the lecture are fully booked, but there will be an overflow room that can seat up to 70 additional people. Both ticket holders and those without reservations who are hoping to get in are advised to arrive early.
Granados Celebration Date Changes, Cant de les estrelles Performances We have a few date announcements and changes concerning our ongoing Granados Celebration. To start, we have a date for the closing celebration in NYC, a performance of Cant de les estrelles by Voices of Ascension. The concert will be February 9, 2017, at 8 pm, at the Church of the Ascension (5th Ave and 10th St). The Voices of Ascension write, Discover the warmth of Iberian music in this program of Catalunya’s most famous composers Pau (Pablo) Casals and Enric Granados as well as evocative works by Manuel Oltra, Manuel Blancafort and Enric Morera. Granados’ long-lost masterpiece Song of the Stars is comparable to a virtuoso piano concerto with chorus and organ, gloriously combining Romantic-Modernista poetry with post-Wagnerian harmonies. VoA gives its second performance of Granados’ Cant de les estrelles following the North American premiere and GRAMMY-nominated recording in 2007. This performance is presented in collaboration with the CUNY Graduate Center Enrique Granados Centenary Celebration and features pianist and Granados scholar Douglas Riva. The centenary celebrations are being sponsored by the Foundation for Iberian Music, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. There has also been a small change to the Cant de les estrelles performance scheduled for March in Albuquerque, NM, with Polyphony: Voices of New Mexico. The concert will be on March 24, 2017 at the Cathedral of St. John. We will have a few side-events in the days surrounding this concert, so please look back for those announcements! Finally, events that had been tentatively scheduled for the UK are, regrettably, not proceeding. There are currently no UK dates set.
2017: Spaniards, Natives, Africans, and Gypsies: Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance The Foundation for Iberian Music is delighted to announce a west coast sequel to last year’s fandango conference, “Spaniards, Natives, Africans, and Gypsies: Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance.” This conference—which, as you can see, focuses on malagueñas and zapateados—will be held at University of California, Riverside, April 6 and 7, 2017. It is being co-sponsored by the Foundation for Iberian Music and UC’s own Center for Iberian and Latin American Music. The conference is accepting submissions until Dec 1! Read the full CFP here. Please e-mail K. Meira Goldberg with any questions at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com.
Announcing the 2016 Music in 21st Century Society Lecture We are delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Lloyd Old and Constance Old lecture is renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin, with a response from Scott Burnham. The lecture will also feature, as ever, a musical guest, performing works related to the lecture’s topic. Richard Taruskin is a prolific musicologist at UC Berkeley, specializing in Russian music (especially of the modernist variety) and Early Modern music. He is the author of the six volume Oxford History of Western Music, On Russian Music, The Danger of Music: And Other Anti-Utopian Essays, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, Text and Act, to name only a selection of his monographs, as well as innumerable articles and reviews. He writes extensively for both academic and lay audiences and has received many prizes for his writing, including the Noah Greenberg Prize (1978), The Alfred Einstein Award (1980), the Dent Medal (1987), the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1988, 2005), and the 1997 and 2006 Kinkeldey Prizes. Scott Burnham is a full time musicology and music theory faculty member at Princeton University and a current visiting professor at the Graduate Center. His areas of focus include the history of tonal theory, problems in criticism and analysis, and music of the Common Practice era. His monograph, Beethoven Hero, won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory in 1996. He has published extensively on Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, often tackling issues of aesthetics and poetic meaning. The lecture will be December 7, 2016, at Elebash Recital Hall. Please stay posted for further details.
Spring Andalus Ensemble Concert, June 16! The New York Andalus Ensemble, a resident artist at the Foundation for Iberian Music, is having their spring concert next Thursday, June 16! The concert is at 7:00 at the Graduate Center’s Elebash Recital Hall. Tickets are $15.50 ($12 students/seniors). Reserve online or pay cash at the door. NYAE’s wonderful performances of new and old music from Al-Andalus frequently sell out, so be sure to come early. This time, there’s an added incentive: NYAE’s friend, Davis Baron Nahmias, will be holding a free tasting for his distillery, Nahmias et Fils. Nahmias et Fils is the only distillery in the US that produces mahia, a Moroccan spirit made from figs. Finally, the we’d like to congratulate the NYAE’s director, Samuel Thomas, on his recent invitation to lecture at the Library of Congress, while the Ensemble was in DC to perform at the Washington Jewish Music Festival. You can also watch a video of a past NYAE concert at that link (and there’s always more at the ensemble’s YouTube channel, as well as the Foundation’s).
The Art of Flamenco The Foundation for Iberian Music has co-organized an upcoming flamenco lecture and performance at the Clark Museum. The performance, which will be on Sunday, June 12 at 3 pm, features the great Belén Maya, who will be dancing along with guitarist José Luis Rodríguez. Maya is daughter of the internationally renowned flamenco dancer Mario Maya, and she has served as principal dancer of his New York based dance company, Mario Maya Flamenco. She represented the “new generation” of flamenco in Carlos Saura’s film Flamenco (1995). Rodríguez has been named as on of the 20 best flamenco guitarists in Spain (Felix Grande, Agenda Flamenca, 1995) and he has received numerous prizes for his playing. He is aksi co-founder of Nu Flamenco Collaborative, a US-based foundation dedicated to promoting all forms of flamenco. Tickets are $25 ($22 members).
More Granados Press The Foundation for Iberian Music’s ongoing Granados Celebration is continuing to receive a lot of press attention, both in New York-based newspapers and magazines and in Spain! We have had many local performances during the past several months. Douglas Riva has one remaining NYC concert, 7 pm, May 12th, at the Hispanic Society of America (free admission). This is our last upcoming event in NYC for a little while, but stay tuned, because there is more to come. In the meanwhile, Granados Celebration events continue to take place around the world. (Click the above link to view some of the international schedule.) Some of our recent press clippings (click images to view full PDFs): Ara, 28 April El Diario, 28 April El Diario, 27 April Ritmo, 19 April