“Euterpe at Play / Euterpe Comediante”: a genre-bending exploration of musical responses to Spanish Golden Age lyric poetry.
A hundred years before Shakespeare shook the English stage, and for a hundred years after, poets and playwrights were writing and presenting comedias (tragic and comic plays in Spanish) to rapt audiences in Spain and the Américas. Our event is an exploration of the lyric side of this magnificent repertory, still very little known in the English-speaking world. Euterpe presides over this concert because she is the Muse of lyric poetry.
Much of the original music for the comedias was never written down. Over Fall Quarter 2018, UCLA students will work with community members, scholars, and renowned artists in several traditions to recuperate and reimagine how the songs and lyric passages from the comedias might sound.
On the afternoon of 29 November, we will present a symposium featuring Álvaro Torrente, professor at the Universidad complutense de Madrid; Barbara Fuchs, professor in the UCLA Departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese, and director of The Comedia in Translation and Performance Working Group; and Elisabeth Le Guin, professor of Musicology at UCLA.
At 6:00pm that same night, the UCLA Early Music Ensemble will present a concert featuring Spanish Renaissance music original to the comedias, side by side with creative re-imaginings of songs and scenes through Mexican son jarocho and original hip hop stylings. The concert will feature guitarist Eloy Cruz, professor at Mexico’s Escuela nacional de música, and members of Son del Centro, a son jarocho activist group from Santa Ana, CA. In preparation for the concert, EME members will work with the chicana/Australian hip-hop sensation Maya Jupiter, and viola da gamba virtuoso Niccolo Seligmann.
Mexican player and scholar of historical plucked instruments (lute, vihuela, Baroque guitars, folk guitars), student of Guillermo Flores (guitar), Isabelle Villey (vihuela). Mr. Cruz has collaborated with chamber groups in Spain and the United States, and is a founding member of La Fontegara and Tembembe Ensamble Continuo, two of the premiere early music groups in Mexico. His recordings include music from the 16th-21st centuries, on the Erato, Urtext, Meridian, Sony, and Alia Vox labels. His publications include the book “La Casa de los Once Muertos. Historia y repertorio de la Guitarra.” He is a professor of guitar and chamber music in the Escuela Nacional de Música at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City, and has given master classes and special courses in Costa Rica, Uruguay, Colombia and the USA. In 2011 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.
Born in La Paz, Mexico to a Mexican Father and Turkish Mother, Maya grew up in Sydney, Australia. It was in Sydney’s Western Suburbs where she first fell in love with Hip Hop.
Maya’s love of writing rhymes helped her express her fear, pain, joy, and hope as a teenager and later on, she realized the power music held in using it as a tool to make a positive difference in her community.
It is with this ideal that she co-founded Artivist Entertainment, an entertainment company committed to creating and supporting art and music that inspires positive social change alongside Quetzal Flores, Veronica Gonzales, Alberto Lopez and Aloe Blacc.
http://www.mayajupiter.com/#about
Son del Centro is the performance wing of the son jarocho workshop at El Centro Cultural de México in Santa Ana, CA. The group maintains the centuries-old tradition of son jarocho — music for plucked strings, dancers, and singers from the Veracruz region of Mexico — while exploring its new potentials as a music of social activism and artistic fusion. https://www.facebook.com/sondelcentrocultural/
Made possible by the David and Irmgard Dobrow Fund. Classical music was a passion of the Dobrows, who established a generous endowment at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music to make programs like this possible. We are proud to celebrate this program as part of the 2017-2018 Dobrow Series.
Co-sponsored by The UCLA Center for Musical Humanities.
