On April 22nd, KUNM Music Director invited this semester’s members of the UNM Honky Tonk Ensemble, an ensemble that teaches students how to play in a band and that emphasizes the style of classic country music from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, to come into KUNM’s Studio A to do a studio session of songs they’ve performed over the course of the semester. Students and community members in the Ensemble performed their songs, and then did an interview, afterward, together with ensemble founder and co-facilitator, UNM Music faculty member Dr. Kristina Jacobsen. Here, they discussed their experiences learning to more deeply appreciate this genre of working-class verbal art through the performance of it, describing their experiences learning to sing, and play, in a “country” style throughout the course of the semester.” This show will be featured in hour-long broadcast on KUNM’s “Ear to the Ground” on Saturday 5/11 from 7-8 pm, and will be streamable through on their two-week archive after it airs, as well as on the KUNM Studio Sessions page. This semester’s ensemble includes: Seirra McDowell-Nardine, Nathan Lesiak, Aubrie Powell, Eric Schaller, and co-facilitator Alex McMahon. The Ensemble is open to UNM students, staff, and Albuquerque musicians, and begins again in August 2019. Please contact Kristina Jacobsen (kmj23@unm.edu) or Paula Corbin-Swalin (pcswalin@unm.edu) for more information.
Dr. José Luis Hurtado awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Composer and pianist José Luis Hurtado, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music in the College of Fine Arts, is one of the 2020 winners of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.