MUSIC FROM THE AMERICAS CONCERT SERIES
MARCH 27th, 2019
6:00 PM Keller Hall
THE ARDITTI QUARTET
Elliott Carter, String Quartet No 5
Hilda Paredes, Hacia una bitácora capilar
Conlon Nancarrow, String Quartet No.3
José Luis Hurtado, Ten thousand suns
The Arditti Quartet has established itself as one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles dedicated to contemporary music.
It enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history.
The quartet has recorded for more than 20 other CD labels and together this CD collection is the most extensive available of quartet literature in the last 40 years. To name just a few, Berio, Cage, Carter, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Nono, Rihm, the complete chamber music of Xenakis and Stockhausen’s infamous Helicopter Quartet.
Over the past 30 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) and 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle). In 2004 they were awarded the ‘Coup de Coeur’ prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music. The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for ‘lifetime achievement’ in music. They remain to this day, the only ensemble ever to receive it.
The complete archive of the Arditti quartet is housed in the Sacher Foundation in Basle, Switzerland
Dr. Kristina Jacobsen, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, releases book
The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (University of North Carolina Press), examines cultural intimacy and generational nostalgia on the Navajo (Diné) Nation (click here for brief interviews in English and Italian about her research).
Spain the ‘Eternal Maja’: Goya, Majismo, and the Reinvention of Spanish National Identity in Granados’s Goyescas.
This talk will explore the influence of artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) on one of the greatest masterpieces of Spanish music, the Goyescas suite for solo piano by Enrique Granados (1867-1916).
‘Sol y Sombra’: Music in Images in the Arts of New Spain presented by Ray Hernández-Durán
Scenes depicting musicians performing are found in a range of colonial art forms. Here, I briefly explore religious music from the 16th century through an examination of mission design and manuscript illuminations, and secular or profane music from the 18th century represented in genre paintings, domestic spaces, and biombos.