Catalan Music at the Oscars Although not up for nomination itself, music by a Catalan composer, Joan Valent, had a good year at the Academy Awards. Valent contributed two original theme songs to the soundtrack for this year’s Oscar darling Birdman. Birdman was nominated almost across the board and took the top honors of Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. Not bad! The film’s original score, too, is a great moment in the spotlight for Latin composers, even if not Spanish. The score was recorded by Grammy award winning Mexican-American jazz dummer, Antonio Sanchez, who based his score on improvised material, to match the quirky, spontaneous character of the film. You can get Valent’s Birdman songs, “Birdman Blind” and “Bebirdman” on the original motion picture soundtrack in your preferred format. Sanchez’s OST is available separately.
World Premiere from Anna Cazurra Upcoming in NYC Anna Cazurra, who was awarded the Foundation for Iberian Music’s Composer Commission in 2007 (click to hear the concert), will give the world premiere of her latest work, Gran Tango, in New York City in June. Saturday, June 6th, 2015 at 3:00 p.m Broadway Presbyterian Church 114th Street and Broadway The work, Gran Tango, is for string orchestra, and will be performed under the direction of Laurine Celeste Fox, who has also worked with the Foundation on a previous Composer’s Commission concert. She is currently the executive directory of the Symphony of the City of New York. The program will include a selection of canonical Spanish works, such as Turina’s Rapsodia Sinfónica, the Preludio of Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4. and selections from de Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas (which will be sung by soprano Amaya Arberas, accompanied by Martin Söderberg). We hope you will join us to celebrate new work and support our esteemed colleagues!
Brook Center and IAML/IMS 2015 joint congress: Music Research in the Digital Age The Brook Center is supporting and participating in Music Research in the Digital Age, the upcoming joint congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) and the International Musicological Society (IMS). The conference will take place at The Juilliard School, 21-26 June 2015. Events during the conference in which Brook Center projects and staff members are involved include the following: “Music Reference session”, session chaired by Tina Frühauf, RILM “Educational activity of librarians in the digital age”, session chaired by Jonathan Greenberg, https://www.rilm.org/ “Music in Gotham”, paper by John Graziano and Ruth Henderson, Music in Gotham “Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale”, session and papers by Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie and Zdravko Blažeković, RILM IAML General Assembly, chaired by Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, director of Brook Center and president of IAML “A comparative study of the ethnomusicological research in English and Chinese scholarship, analyzing the indexing data of the RILM abstracts of music literature”, paper by Yun Fan, RILM, and Glenn Henshaw “Music history in the present: Publishing a music encyclopedia on the Web with TEI”, paper by Jonathan Greenberg, RILM Business Meeting for RILM National Committees, session chaired by Zdravko Blažeković and Richard Brown, RILM “The organological work of Franjo Ksaver Kuhac and his 1882 classification of sound sources”, paper by Zdravko Blažeković, RILM “Making resources on‐line: Technology and software”, session chaired by Ardal Powell, RILM “Barry S. Brook: A Tribute”, session chaired by Allan Atlas, Center for the Study of Free Reed Instruments “RILM and the Brook Center: Barry Brook’s Sense of Scale”, paper by Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, Brook Center “This, That, and Gulden’s (pas Dijon) Mustard”, paper by Allan Atlas “The early years of research on music iconography in the United States: Barry S. Brook and the Research Center for Music Iconography at The Graduate Center, City University of New York”, paper by Zdravko Blažeković, Research Center for Music Iconography Circle Line Cruise Reception in honor of RILM’s 50th Anniversary RILM Exhibit, Joseph Orchard and Maria Rose, RILM Click here for the conference program. Click here for the conference website. Click here for the registration form.
Free Gran Fandango Performance Concluding the first night of the upcoming fandango conference, we have a special treat! At 7 pm, April 17, in the Graduate Center’s Segal Theater, Radio Jarocho will perform a Gran Fandango. This performance is free and open to the public, so even if you are unable to join us for the conference paper sessions, please drop in for music and dance! Radio Jarocho is an acclaimed NYC-based band that specializes in their own modern twist on son jarocho. Check out this fandango performance from September 2012 at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center! (Click photo to go to video.)
Fandango Conference Saturday Venue & Party All interested attendees for our upcoming conference, “The Global Reach of the Fandango” (April 17-18), please be advised that there is a new venue for Saturday, the 18th. All papers on Saturday will now be hosted at Alegrias Theater at La Nacional (239 W. 14th St, between 7th and 8th Aves). (Friday papers are held at the Graduate Center’s Segal Theater.) This new larger venue gives us the opportunity for an exciting reception/after party! Alegrias is a theater specializing in flamenco, and all attendees are invited to remain after the conference for a film and live performance. The conference will conclude at 4 pm. After, Alegrias will show the Vicente Perez film Flamenco de Raiz, a documentary which traces the social history of flamenco from the streets to the renowned flamenco academy Amor de Dios. (Watch a trailer here!) Afterward, we hope you will stay for Alegrias’s weekly flamenco performance. Please note that the performance is held separately by the venue and has no official relation to the conference, so it will have a separate cover charge. The film and flamenco performance are open to the public, so any friends who are unable to attend the conference are welcome to join the evening’s festivities. (Please e-mail Meira Goldberg at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com to RSVP.)
Partnership with the Early Music Morella Festival The Foundation for Iberian Music is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Early Music Morella Festival for medieval and Renaissance music. The festival, which will be held July 19-23 in the medieval town of Morella, Castellón (Spain), was founded by the early music group Capella de Ministrers. The Capella recently presented a concert series here in NYC, co-sponsored by the Foundation for Iberian Music, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit, “El Greco in New York.” The Capella and the Foundation have previously collaborated on several occasions to present concerts and workshops in New York. (click the photo to view the full festival poster/schedule) The festival offers courses with a stellar faculty in early music vocal and instrumental performance, as well as dance, in addition to a full schedule of concerts, lectures and other activities (which are free to all attending students). The Foundation and the Capella would like to encourage students to apply to the festival. Admission fees range from 150-200 € and accommodations are as low as 5 € a day. It’s a great opportunity to take advantage of the newly improved Euro exchange rate!
New Book on Flamenco K. Meira Goldberg, currently a visiting scholar at the Foundation for Iberian Music, has a new book on flamenco that is now available from McFarland! The book is called Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical, and Theoretical Perspectives, and it is co-edited with Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum and Michelle Heffner Hayes. Flamenco on the Global Stage features a collection of new essays that address the popular narrative of flamenco’s history and challenge its stereotypes. Bennahum is an associate professor of dance at UC Santa Barbara. and she has previously collaborated with the Foundation in expert panel discussion on the flamenco in film (in conjunction with 100 Years of Flamenco in New York, an exhibit she co-curated with Goldberg) and Carlos Surinach’s work in modern dance. She is the author of two books on Wesleyan University Press, Carmen, a Gypsy Geography, and Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina:” Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde. Hayes is a professor of dance at the University of Kansas. She is the author of a previous book with McFarland, Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance, and has worked with or advocated for many national dance companies and initiatives, including commissioning new work from NYC’s Tango Mujer (an all female tango company). Goldberg, of course, is a visiting scholar and she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and FIT. She is heading the organizing committee for the upcoming conference, “Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance,” to be held April 17-18 at the Graduate Center’s Segal Theater. Several of the book’s contributors will be presenting at this conference, including Claudia Jeschke, Nancy Heller, and Kiko Mora, John Mora, and Brook Zern, as well as Goldberg herself, so please come and say hello!
New Work, Concerts, Awards from Our Commissions Roster This week, we are proud to have news for not one, not two, but three of our past Composer’s Commission recipients! Benet Casablancas (2012) has the New York premiere of his work Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom upcoming March 24. The work will be performed by Ear Heart Music Ensemble at Brooklyn’s fabulous new music space, the Roulette Theater. (Tickets: $20 adult/$15 student.) While he is in town for this auspicious occasion, Casablancas will be giving talks at the Manhattan School of Music and at the CUNY Graduate Center. The lecture at the Manhattan School of Music will be held on March 23 (time and location TBD); he will speak at the Graduate Center as a guest of the school’s Composer’s Forum on March 25 at 10 am (room 3491). Second, we would like to congratulate Composers Now, which is founded and directed by 2011 Commission recipient Tania León, on receiving major grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. This “transformative” grant will allow Composers Now to expand its current programs, which include a NYC-based music festival and composer residencies, and allows for the possibility of creating new initiatives. You can read the full press release here. (The 2015 festival is already underway and has daily events through the end of February. so if you’re in the NYC area, don’t forget to check their calendar!) Finally, Miguel Ángel Roig-Francolí (2010) just premiered his newest symphony, Three Astral Poems, on January 15th. The work consists of three movements, each a symphonic poem that explores a constellation named for a figure in classical mythology. It was performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Balearic Islands, with Sergio Alapont, at the Auditorium de Palma Mallorca (Spain). Watch the whole premiere on YouTube! Diaro de Mallorca reviewed the concert, giving it 3.5 stars. (Non-subscribers can read the review at Roig-Francolí’s Facebook page.)
Fandango conference papers to appear in Musica oral del sur Andalusian music journal Música oral del sur will be publishing a special issue devoted to our upcoming conference, “Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance.” The issue will feature a selection of paper from the conference in English and in Spanish and will be available in print and online. The issue is co-sponsored by Foundation for Iberian Music with Junta de Andalucía and the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía. Música oral del sur was founded in 1995 as an interdisciplinary forum for issues of oral music traditions. It is published by the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía, whose objective is to preserve and diffuse Andalusia’s musical heritage. The Center and its publications often work in collaboration with other institutions, such as the University of Granada, Instituto Nacional de la Juventud, and, of course, the Foundation for Iberian Music!