UA News

The Saturday evening show and symposium capstone features a free concert performance of "Los Maitines de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción."

The UA School of Music presents its Second International Symposium on Latin American Music next week. The theme of the 2009 Symposium is "Exploring Exchange: Church and Theatre, Iberia and the Americas, Past and Present."

The UA and Tucson communities are welcome to experience the second in a series of symposia dedicated to the promotion, publication and performance of Latin American music. The symposium takes its inspiration from the vast repertory of outstanding choral music in Spanish, Portuguese and native languages from the region.

Expanding on the inaugural symposium hosted by the UA in 2007, this year's symposium explores processes of exchange between genres, venues, nations and eras.

The two-day event begins Friday Jan. 23, at 9 a.m. with a full day's agenda and continues on Saturday. Both days are filled with sessions on music exploration.

Registration for the complete symposium, including lectures and concerts, is $60, and $25 for students. Friday evening concert tickets can be purchased individually. There also is a free performance on Saturday evening.

Each day, the symposium program includes lectures, presentations, roundtable discussions and performances featuring musicians and scholars from Brazil, Spain, Canada, and across the United States.

Two distinguished keynote speakers will start each day's program of events.

On Friday morning the renowned Venezuelan-American musicologist, conductor and composer Alejandro Planchart, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will speak on the choral movement in Venezuela during the twentieth century. His presentation will include a review of Venezuela's celebrated "sistema musical," a program better known in the United States for training young instrumentalists than for its equally impressive choral division. A protégé of Venezuela's "sistema musical," Gustavo Dudamel, recently was appointed musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

On Saturday morning Mexican musicologist Maria Luisa Vilar Payá, dean of the School of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, will discuss the musical composition "Funesta" by Marcela Rodríguez and her contemporary reinterpretations of the cultural and religious icon Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Payá has been a catalyst for the development of Mexican musicology and is a member of the prestigious Sistema Nacional de Investigadores.

Special evening performances scheduled for each night of the symposium include a zarzuela performance and a choral concert.

The Friday evening show will premiere a bilingual production of Mexico's most famous comic zarzuela, "Chin Chun Chan."

Tickets for the concert are $9, $7 for UA employees and seniors 55+ and $5 for students.  

The "Chin Chun Chan" plot turns on a case of mistaken identity and parodies cultural stereotypes, social manners and aspiration in conveying the paradoxes of an emerging cosmopolitan identity in Mexico in 1904. For this production the music by Spanish-born Mexican composer Luis G. Jorda has been re-orchestrated by Bryan Guillory and Tim Warren. The songs, performed in Spanish, will have instrumental accompaniment.

The spoken drama, written by Rafael Medina and José F. Elizondo, will be performed in an English translation of the original Spanish prepared especially for this production by Professor Janet Sturman and students in the UA School of Music's ethnomusicology program. The cast features more than 30 professional and amateur performers drawn from departments the UA campus and the Tucson community. "Chin Chun Chan" will be presented in the Stevie Eller Dance Theater at 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at the door or in advance from the Fine Arts Box Office.

The Saturday evening show and symposium capstone features a free concert performance of "Los Maitines de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción" by the Mexican composer Ignacio de Jerusalem, performed by the Arizona Choir and members of the Arizona Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bruce Chamberlain.

The score for this operatically inspired composition was painstakingly reconstructed for contemporary performance by UA alumna Sherrill Blodget, an assistant professor of music and director of choral activities at Castleton College, Vermont. The concert will take place in the Stevie Eller Dance Theater Saturday, Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

The Second International Symposium on Latin American Choral Music is a collaborative effort sponsored by the UA School of Music and School of Dance with cooperation from the Center for Latin American Studies, the department of Spanish and Portuguese and the department of history.