When Barcelona was “absolument moderne”: The Schoenberg / Gerhard Correspondence Shows the Impact of Musical Modernism in Catalonia and Elsewhere Schoenberg’s home in Barcelona Like Paris and Berlin, interwar Barcelona (c.1920-1936) was a cauldron of international modernist creativity: Schoenberg composed Moses und Aron, Webern conducted the Pau Casals Workers’ Orchestra, and Alban Berg premiered his Violin Concerto. This powerful momentum shaped a generation of composers (Robert Gerhard, especially, but also Joaquim Homs, and, later on, Benet Casablancas, who was awarded the 2012 Foundation for Iberian Music’s Composer’s Commission, among others) and inspired the work of a generation of visual artists and literary minds (Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa, and J.E. Cirlot, among others). In Barcelona in the thirties, as Rimbaud asserted in a different context: “Il faut être absolument moderne.” In 2006, the Foundation for Iberian Music dedicated a series to “Schoenberg in Barcelona.” The composer’s daughter, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, unable to attend, send us a kind note that read: As you can well imagine, Barcelona has a special significance for me. During my father’s stay there, he not only gave birth to the second act of his opera Moses und Aron, but my mother gave birth to their first child, a girl to whom my father wanted to give the most popular name in Barcelona: Nuria. I think the fact that he wanted that name for me shows how much he felt at home in that beautiful city. My father’s contract with the Akademie der Künste in Berlin allowed him a six-months’ composing leave, which he spent in warmer cities, since he suffered from asthma and could not endure the cold German winter. Invited by pupil and friend Roberto Gerhard to spend the winter months in Catalonia, my parents prolonged their sojourn until the beginning of June, when my father had to return to Berlin to take up his duties again as Professor of the masterclass in composition. He did not wish to return to Berlin and had asked friends to try and find a music patron who could assure him a salary so he could stay in Barcelona, but to no avail. And it was not only the warm weather which had attracted him, I am sure it was also the warm welcome he had received there by his old and new friends. In the ’80s my daughter and I were invited to attend the premiere of Moses und Aron in Barcelona. I will never forget the superb hospitality shown us and the great impression that the city and its people made on me. I am really sorry that I cannot be with you all to take part in your event. I hope to be able to collaborate with the Foundation in the near future. I think I got carried away thinking about Barcelona. All the best, Nuria The history of the friendship between Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Robert Garhard (1896-1970) dates back to 1923, when the Catalan composer wrote to Schoenberg requesting the possibility of taking composition lessons with him. In his request letter, he included the score of two recent works, Dos apunts (Two Sketches for Piano) and Set Haikus (Seven Haikus for chamber ensemble and voice). After an interview, Schoenberg accepted him as a student; shortly after, Gerhard became his assistant. While in Vienna, Gerhard met his future wife Leopoldina (“Poldi”) Feichtegger and became friends with Berg and Webern. In 1925, Schoenberg took over Busoni’s class at the Preussische Akademie der Künste and Gerhard followed him there as his student and assistant until 1928. Also in 1925 and after an invitation by Gerhard, Schoenberg visited Barcelona to conduct his Pierrot Lunaire. Autograph ms., Klawierstueke, op. 33b, composed in Barcelona Because Berlin’s anti-Semitic atmosphere, during the period 1931-32, Schoenberg and his wife moved to Barcelona as the guests of the Gerhards. There, enjoying its moderate winter weather, Schoenberg composed most of Moses und Aron. That season, Gerhard arranged for Schoenberg and Webern to conduct the Casals Orchestra. In 1936 the 16th ISCM festival was held in Barcelona and Gerhard, organized the premiere of Berg’s Violin Concerto. As a tribute to Barcelona and to Gerhard’s hospitality, the Schoenbergs named their daughter Nuria (a typical Catalan name). She was born in Barcelona in 1932 and married the Italian composer Luigi Nono. A friend and collaborator of Miró, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, and Dalí, Gerhard’s music “displayed an increasingly radical exploratory outlook and until his death contributed energetically to the development of serial and electronic composition, and to timbral and textural innovation” (New Grove). To be sure, Gerhard learned from Schoenberg “clarity and concision of form, intricate contrapuntal working, textural variety and a unified harmonic idiom” (New Grove). Here are some useful, albeit random, dates to understand Schoenberg’s relationship with Barcelona: 1913 Casals performs Schoenberg’s arrangement of the Concerto for Cello by Georg Matthias Monn (1717-50) 1923 Robert Gerhard sends Two Sketches for piano to Schoenberg and becomes his student in Vienna and, later, Berlin 1925 Festival Arnold Schoenberg in Barcelona and other Catalan towns; Pierrot Lunaire, Kammersymphonie, a selection of songs and other compositions are performed 1931 Schoenberg arrives in Barcelona in October. Settles in a modernista sunny house 1932 Writes Moses und Aron and Klavierstück Op. 33b. Nuria Schoenberg (later Nono) is born in Barcelona and is baptized by musicologist and priest Higini Anglès. Anton Webern conducts Verklärtenacht and Acht Lieder Op. 6, among other compositions 1933 Casals and Schoenberg plan future concerts in Barcelona, including an arrangement for cello and orchestra of the Monn keyboard concerto 1936 Alban Berg premieres his Violin Concerto in Barcelona; Erwartung is also performed 1956 Tàpies, Brossa, Cirlot and other members of Dau al Set place a plaque at the Schoenberg’s former residence in Barcelona 1985 The Gran Teatre del Liceu’s premières Moses und Aron To complete the picture of that special moment in music history, just recently, professor Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina Sobrino has just published an extremely valuable book. Her work—actually several multilingual volumes—contains the complete correspondence between Schoenberg and his student Robert Gerhard (including that of their wives). There are a total of eighty-two letters, postcards, telegrams, and other similar items. Most of them are in German and some in English; but one item is in French and another in Catalan. Professor Ortiz-de-Urbina has transcribed, edited, and translated all the items for one volume into English and for a second volume into Catalan all published by the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya. There is also a different edition in German put out by Peter Lang. (In total there are three books.) Professor Ortiz-de-Urbina is a Gerhard specialist, a musicologist, and a polyglot who, without her absolute mastery of all these languages as well as her profound knowledge of the pertinent musicological literature, would not have been able to produce these singularly important volumes. These letters are not only relevant for musicologists interested in Schoenberg and Gerhard’s studies, but also for the general, educated reader who wants to understand—and even enjoy learning about—that special moment when those two creative minds met and spoke frankly in the intimate mode of the missive, closer to the personal diary than to the theoretical treatise. It is clear, additionally, that Schoenberg had a powerful impact on later Catalan artists such as idiosyncratic, multidisciplinary Joan Brosa, painter Antoni Tàpies, and the poet J.E Cirlot, who wrote apropos of Schoenberg’s stay in Barcelona these beautiful lines: Two fragments by J.E. Cirlot I … Era un hombre Lejano. Su triste matemática juntaba Ceniza y pensamientos. J.E. Cirlot, In memoriam II … En tus doce sonidos se levanta Un candelabro nuevo, zodiacal, Vencido el candelabro planetario. Permuta lo que ora, lo que canta, Inspiración del centro cenital, Música del sistema necesario. J.E. Cirlot, Homenaje a Schönberg And just to finish, the following valuable sources, Gerhard’s testimony and an early review, might help us understand Schoenberg’s experience in Barcelona as well as the early reception of his music: Robert Gerhard in a BBC radio interview He [Schoenberg] loved his window…. He had his table right against the window. And he lifted his eyes up from the score Moses and Aron, which, as you know, he finished the second act in Barcelona in that room—this signed at the end “Barcelona, 10th of March, 1932.” When he lifted his eyes from the score, what he saw was that fantastic panorama. It was a smallish room. It had a small upright piano, a table perhaps, a sofa, and a few armchairs and that was all. And Mrs. Schoenberg and my wife sat at the back of the room chatting lustily, you know, with quite without the slightest regard for that man composing there on the window because Schoenberg insisted. He wanted them to talk loud. He hated to hear somebody whispering. I’m sure he listened with a kind of a… with a quarter of his ear, and when something came up that was gossipy, you know, he joined the ladies. He jumped up and joined the ladies and mixed in the conversation. When he had enough, he went back to his table, sat down, and was concentrated the next instant, deeply concentrated, completely oblivious, deaf to the latest conversation. A 1925 Catalan concert review No fue menor la expectación motivada por el anuncio de la sesión que en 29 de abril de 1929 se dedicó a Arnold Schönberg, compositor vienés, de procedimientos atonales ultramodernos, en abierta rebelión contra todo lo establecido, de una originalidad rayana en la extravagancia y cuya música (…) suena en los oídos de los no iniciados como una caótica confusión de ritmos y disonancias, provocando en todos los públicos, sin excluir el de Barcelona, apasionadas discusiones, no siempre mantenidas dentro de los límites de la corrección y el mutuo respeto.
For Better or Worse (better, mostly), We Are All Immersed in the Digital Humanities For better or worse, we are all now immersed in the Digital Humanities. Forget the Parisian cafés and the endless conversations, legs crossed, cigarette-holding, cuddling a glass of Pernod with melting ice cubes, current intellectual debates take place in front of screens of all sizes, devices of all makes, smartphones, computers, tablets, and through platforms of immense interactive capabilities. First, there was a budding idea and perhaps a question (what can new technologies do for the traditional arts and humanities?) from which, in the last decade, there has been many responses. It is worth mentioning here, the pioneer role of Barry S. Brook, the founder of the doctoral programs in music at the CUNY Graduate Center. In the 1960s, he saw the enormous possibilities of the application of computers to musical scholarship. Many of his initiatives (see his biography) involved the creation of massive data banks and its availability on digital formats from everywhere in the world. This spirit of making information available to sans frontiers scholars continues to this day to be the lightning rod of the Brook Center and its constituents, including the Foundation for Iberian Music. Think of RILM Abstracts , Ridim, RCMI, Music in Gotham, and the Eighteenth-Century Symphony Archive, just to mention a few of the digital initiatives based at the Brook Center. They all employ the talent, knowledge, and endless energy of CUNY students, researchers, and faculty. The Graduate Center still continues to be at the avantgarde of the digital world, with a program specifically created for the digital humanities. The CUNY Center for the Humanities offers free online access to a diversity of conversations with preeminent thought leaders, and The Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York has several wonderful online and freely accessible archives. Just recently, The Graduate Center received a $375,000 NEH for a project headed by professor Matthew K. Gold called “Manifold in the Classroom: Digital Publishing for Open Pedagogy.” One of its results it will be an open-access publishing platform created by CUNY’s GC Digital Lab called Manifold. In the last decades, digital Iberian musical scholarship has given great strides. A few years ago, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas created a Fondo de Música Tradicional (Traditional Music Holding) an enormous data base. The project is directed by Dr. Emilio Ros-Fábregas, a CUNY alumnus and former faculty member, as well as an early researcher at the Brook Center. In addition, Dr. Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, one of the main researchers working on the project, was recently also a scholar in residence at the Foundation for Iberian Music. Of course, many music publications have in recent years moved to online platforms. With the Instituto Cervantes Observatorio at Harvard University we published the proceedings of our 2019 Joaquín Rodigo conference. We also published the proceedings of several conferences in Música Oral del Sur, and its editor in chief, Reynaldo Fernández-Manzano has lectured here at the Foundation in several occasions. Another eminent colleague, Walter A. Clack has visited us in many occasions as a lecturer and conference presenter. He is the founder of the e-journal Diagonal an incredible platform for digital publishing based at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music. Catching up with the new reality of online work, many scholarly societies such as the Renaissance Society of America and the American Society for Theatre Research have modified membership fees, especially for contingent faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students, to a “pay what you can.” And many performing arts organizations, such as Danspace Project offer a blend of performance and community dialogue online. Finally, online digital resources such as the Biblioteca Digital Hispanica from the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Gallica from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Oxford Cantigas de Santa María Database , and of course the New York Public Library are more important than ever to scholars whose travel to archives is limited due to COVID. We at the Foundation for Iberian Music, having created the Fandango Project, a series of conferences and publications that started out in New York but has since branched out to Los Angeles and Veracruz, México, and in 2022 to Africa, are in the initial planning stages of a Digital Fandango Project, an online resource that will connect scholars to scholarship and to each other. Stand by for more news! It is the beginning of a new semester, and we are all struggling with online teaching, COVID19 has propelled us to relearn it effectively. As scholars, we are also impelled to embrace the digital humanities in our own research and its dissemination. The challenges, needless to say, are enormous, but the possibilities are also immense. As humanists, we’re wise to keep a dab of skepticism around all this newness—critical thinking is what we teach our undergraduates, in the end. We, however, would be absolute fools if did not take advantage of this opportunity to partake in the transformation of the humanities in this new digital era. And, as far as of Paris and our longed-for Pernods, as they say, we will always have Paris.
“Just thinking”—Itamar, a publication from Valencia, thrives on its in-betweenness “Just thinking”—Itamar, a publication from Valencia, thrives on its in-betweenness For those who still don’t know it, Itamar: Revista de Investigación Musical / Territorios para el Arte is a publication based at the Universitat de València. Under its coeditors, Jesús Alcolea Banegas, Rosa Iniesta Masmano, and Rosa Mª Rodríguez Hernández, the publication honors its title and subtitles because it provides a space—a freethinking “palm tree island”—for broadminded thought, a territory where no discipline or methodology dominates; a place that fosters “la pensée complexe,” as one of its honorary founders, the eminent Edgar Morin, could have said. To be sure, Itamar celebrates its “in-betweenness,” as Homi K. Bhabha critical theorist would say, a space between spaces in an imaginary landscape of academic work. You may see it for yourselves in the table of contents of the current issue. Itamar’s latest issue has just come out and, among many other articles, Antoni Pizà publishes a think piece on the possible consolation of music and the arts. Why do some people tend to rely on the arts to find balance in their emotional lives? Pizà has published several other essays in Itamar. In 2009 he wrote about fragments and unfinished artworks and specifically Schubert’s Reliquie, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840. He also published in 2010 an essay on Chopin’s sexual life, a widely downloaded essay, if only for its title. We are all grateful that Itamar exists and provides a needed editorial space for open-minded scholarship and writerly creativity. We’re all Robinson Crusoe now, sitting on an imaginary Itamar, a deserted palm-tree island, scratching our heads and thinking—just thinking.
Baltasar Samper and Early Jazz in Barcelona In the early 2000’s, pianist and scholar Joan Moll gave Antoni Pizà a clump of yellowish loose old quartos in a modest supermarket plastic bag containing some autograph manuscripts by composer and scholar Baltasar Samper (Palma de Mallorca 1888 – Mexico, DF 1966). The collection included three lectures on jazz presented in Barcelona in 1935. There was also the text of a pre-concert lecture from the 1920’s on Ravel, some notes in French pertaining to his ethnographic fieldwork, and some handwritten copies of Shakespeare sonnets translated into Catalan by Magí Morera i Galícia in 1912. Moll, a Samper pioneer performer and scholar, hoped Pizà would edit and publish these materials. Quite a few years passed and in 2019 Pizà and musicologist Francesc Vicens finally prepared these papers for publication. Modeling his talks on the ideas of French critic Hugues Panassié, in his lectures, Samper discusses the jazz canon up to 1935. His track selection might or might not surprise you. Armstrong, of course, has a prominent role, but Valaida Snow is without a doubt undeservedly underappreciated nowadays and she might surprise some present-day jazz aficionados. You might want to check out the book’s soundtrack on this YouTube playlist and judge for yourself. This volume, published by Lleonard Muntaner, has received an enormous amount of attention and it has been reviewed in many publications both in print and online and both for the general reader as well as for a scholarly readership on both sides of the Atlantic. The reviews include: Serra d’Or, Felanitx, La Lectora, Cent per cent, Sonograma, Doce Notas, Diagonal, Codalario, Ultima Hora, Bellver / Diario de Mallorca, and a couple of radio programs in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca. With beautiful cover art by famous photographer, guitarist, and true early-jazz insider Charles Peterson, and permission kindly granted by his son, eminent jazz critic and writer Don Peterson, the latest addition to this list of reviews is by Benjamin R. Fraser, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona, a Tete Montoliu’s scholar, and author of many books on Iberian culture. He writes in Catalan Review that “the consequences of this book extend beyond a purely biographical interest” and that the introduction is “a dense essay of clear transnational and transatlantic applicability.” Although Samper lived the peripatetic, difficult existence of many exiles, finally settling in Mexico, where he died, his artistic reputation and intellectual standing seems to grow nonstop from the foundational, pioneer studies by Josep Massot i Muntaner, the early recordings of Joan Moll, to this pertinent contribution on jazz, as well as the initiatives and studies by younger scholars such as Amadeu Corbera. We’re grateful Samper is getting all this attention. He deserves it.
Literes in the Americas The Museum of Music of Barcelona recently held a concert featuring Spanish music from the Americas, which included a performance of a rare Literes cantata. The cantata, Cantada al Infantisimo, was found at Antigua Guatemala Cathedral and transcribed by Anna Cazurra and Antoni Pizà. The concert was directed by Marta Alamajano, a baroque soprano who herself is known for her interpretations of Literes. The entire program was comprised of baroque music, including works by Durón, Sumaya and Salazar. You can view the full program and notes here (PDF). And don’t forget, next month the Teatre Principal of Palma de Mallorca will be performing the new production of Literes’ Los Elementos, for which Antoni Pizà served as a consultant. Pizà will also be giving a pre-concert lecture at the Caixa Forum, by the theater. Click the link above for full details.
25 April 2019: Florence Gétreau to present public lecture at the Graduate Center The Brook Center is delighted to present FLORENCE GÉTREAU, in a lecture entitled MUSICIANS IN PORTRAITS: ARCHAEOLOGY OF A GENRE, CODES OF REPRESENTATION, SYMBOLIC AND SOCIAL MEANINGS. GÉTREAU is the renowned musicologist, art historian, and author of the award-winning book, Voir la musique. Thursday, 25 April 2019, at 6:30 o’clock The Martin E. Segal Theatre The Graduate Center The City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Free and open to the public (This event was streamed live on the internet.) The event began with the presentation of the inaugural Claire Brook Award to Florence Gétreau for her book Voir la musique (Paris: Éditions Citadelles & Mazenod, 2017). Her lecture, described below, will follow. Considering that a portrait is the representation of a specific person, and not a “figure of character”, the lecture will be devoted to paintings (and sometimes graphic art representations) of identified musicians. The first visual evidence of renowned musicians (instrumentalists, singers, composers, theoreticians, cantors, and sometimes persons who have several such functions) comes from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a variety of media, from miniatures in codex to figurative tombstones. The production of medals, woodcuts, and painted panels during the sixteenth century spawned a tradition of representing the professional musician as a figure “acting”, sometimes with other persons, in a typical environment (chapel, court and official setting) or framed alone as a bust or face. Since the Renaissance, individual portraits on canvas have expressed the social status of musicians with codes of representation and often with contextual attributes and elements. Selected from different Western countries and times, they present famous municipal or street musicians, court and ecclesiastic musicians, instrumentalists and virtuosi, singers on stage in their famous roles, but also “à la ville”, composers with their emblems and inspired attitudes, concert masters and conductors in action. In addition to professional musicians, amateurs range from princes and other royal amateurs to aristocrats and bourgeois practitioners, with special focus on female painters making music. Portraits of especially famous music personalities will be presented as case studies to demonstrate each of these categories (the castrato Farinelli, the virtuoso Liszt, the composers Lassus, Rameau or Berlioz). Group portraits support an understanding of the context in which musicians were acting together (in court bodies like chapels or chamber ensembles) but also in domestic companies. Artists’ colonies and communities were also sometimes portrayed as a manifesto. Historiated portraits, self-portraits, caricatures, as well as “deconstructed” effigies (in the twentieth century, for example) are good opportunities to develop the symbolic vocabulary used by painters across the centuries to emphasize the peculiarity of musicians in portrait. FLORENCE GÉTREAU is director emeritus of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). For thirty years she has been a curator at the Musée Instrumental du Conservatoire de Paris and the Musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires, chef de projet of the Musée de la Musique, and she served as director of the Institut de recherche sur le patrimoine musical en France (2004–2013). She has authored or edited numerous publications on makers and cultural contexts of French musical instruments as well as their conservation and access, on the sociology of music, and on music iconography. She is the founding editor of the journal Musique • Images • Instruments and has frequently curated exhibitions, most recently “Wine and Music: Harmony and Dissonance” (Cité du Vin, Bordeaux). Elected to the Academia Europaea in 2010, Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, she is the recipient of the Anthony Baines prize and the Curt Sachs Award of the American Musical Instruments Society. She is Past President of the Société française de musicologie (2011–2015), and current member of the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. THE CLAIRE BROOK AWARD, established in April 2018 by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (The Graduate Center of The City University of New York), honors an outstanding monograph, dissertation, edited collection, or exhibition catalogue on a designated topic related to the current work of the Brook Center. CLAIRE BROOK (1925–2012) was vice president and music editor of W.W. Norton & Co. in New York, in a distinguished lineage that included Paul Henry Lang, Nathan Broder, and David Hamilton. She sponsored the publication of dozens of books in Norton’s series “Books that Live in Music,” including seminal works on the music of Africa, jazz, and contemporary music, as well as editions of Joseph Machlis’s The Enjoyment of Music and Donald Jay Grout’s A History of Western Music that have kept them at the forefront of music textbooks ever since. In 1999 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, by the New England Conservatory. After retirement from Norton, she served for a number of years as Executive Editor of Pendragon Press. Claire left a generous bequest to the Brook Center that has supported many of its activities over the years. It is in her honor that this award has been established.
The (Little) Consolations of Art Antoni Pizà has a new essay published in The Objective, entitled “La (poca) consolación del arte.” In this essay he discusses Thomas Bernhard’s novel Old Masters, as well as Rochberg’s third string quartet and works of Philip Guston and how they explore questions of art’s usefulness in times of personal tragedy.
Announcing “The Body Questions” Keynote Speaker, Agnes Kamya The Foundation for Iberian Music is pleased to announce that Dr. Agnes Kamya will be the keynote speaker of the upcoming conference, “The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots.” Agnes Nasozi Kamya is a social anthropologist and screenwriter from Uganda. She went to school in Uganda and Kenya in East Africa before finally settling in the United Kingdom. In 1997, Agnes completed a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering at Imperial College in London. After completing an MA and then a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of London in 2008, she returned to Uganda and worked as Senior Researcher at the Makerere University. During that time, inspired by her anthropological work, she wrote the screenplay for her sister Caroline’s feature film “Imani’. Imani means ‘faith’ in Swahili. The film opened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010 and is the most awarded Ugandan feature film to date. Agnes Kamya (standing, left) with the Uganda Flamenco Project In 2011 Agnes was headhunted for the prestigious Binger writer’s lab in Amsterdam to work on her second original screenplay “Hot Comb”. Soon after she moved to Seville, Spain to follow her dream to learn flamenco and has never really left. After taking classes with some of the best dancer teachers in Spain, Agnes returned to Uganda and founded the Uganda Flamenco Project to plant the seed of this wonderful art in her native land. Agnes was invited to conduct master classes and presentations all over Spain about her work on women, cinema, representation and flamenco which now come together in her documentary project in development entitled, “In Search of African Duende.” Since 2015 Agnes has been a member of the AfricaInEs research group at the University of Granada, Spain and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Alongside her academic work she is translating her flamenco dance mentor Virginia Di Domenicantonio, “La India’s ground breaking book “El Flamenco mi Inspiración” from Spanish into English. She plans to revive the Uganda Flamenco Project, dormant since 2016, at the Department of Dance and Drama where it will have a permanent home. Dr. Kamya will be speaking at the symposium on October 16th.
Música Antiga Festival Highlights Happy Tuesday, everyone! We have returned from our summer holiday and we’re looking forward to beginning a new academic year. As we reported in the spring, Antoni Pizà was the keynote speaker at this year’s early music festival of the cozy coastal town of Colònia de Sant Pere (Mallorca). The 7th annual festival, which ran July 18–29, featured a wide variety of programming, including book presentations, lectures, experimental dance, film screenings, concerts, and a day-long symposium. Among the festival performers was Luis Antonio González (CSIC), a keyboardist and musicologist who gave a lecture recital of harpsichord works at the Graduate Center and who participated in several of the Foundation’s conferences. Click here to view this year’s program. Pizà’s keynote address, and the focus of the symposium, was on the musical heritage of the Balearic Islands. There was also a special performance of works by Literes (Lliteres), who himself is a part of Mallorca’s musical history. The program included cantatas from Guatemala’s Cathedral, which were transcribed by Pizà and Anna Cazurra, with additional works by Conti and Telemann. The Literes cantatas were also performed in Minorca.