During the spring of 2015, Drs. Kristin Ditlow and Karola Obermüller began planning the first installments of a contemporary music exchange. This exchange would bring American contemporary music to Germany, and likewise sponsor performances of contemporary German music in New Mexico.
The project quickly expanded to include Professors Eric Lau and Scott Ney, with performances in Nürnberg and Darmstadt and master classes in Würzburg.
darabq1summer2015 from Kristin Ditlow on Vimeo.
The program included compositions by Volker Blumenthaler, professor for composition and theory at Nuremberg Hochschule für Musik, Cord Meijering, director of Akademie für Tonkunst, Darmstadt; UNM Music Faculty Karola Obermüller, Jose-Luis Hurtado, Peter Gilbert, and Richard Hermann; and noted composers Olivier Messiaen, Lori Laitman, Milton Babbitt, and James Beale.
The Nürnberg performance was hosted by Monika Teepe and Volker Blumenthaler while the Würzburg Hochschule für Musik hosted master classes for percussion and saxophone. The Akademie für Tonkunst, Darmstadt, was the host for the Darmstadt solo “klavierabend.”
Future performances and exchanges are being planned for the coming season.
Different Rivers: Sardinian Hill Country and the DIY Ethos of River of Gennargentu
In the summer of 2014, the Bluesman “River of Gennargentu” released, on his SoundCloud page, three songs of hill country blues, sung in English and played with a technique like those of historical Delta blues artists, recorded in low-quality sound. Within a few months, the web page collected dozens of comments from users who were amazed by this new “discovery” and demanded the real artist’s origin, as-yet-not-specified.
Decolonizing Strategies in Ethnomusicology, Teaching, and Performance
Perspectives from the US Southwest and Latin America featuring performances by J.D. Robb Trust. This symposium consists of an initial roundtable centered on decolonizing strategies in ethnomusicology followed by two shorter sessions: the first focusing on decolonizing pedagogies and the second on performance and activism.
2018-19 New Mexico Winds and Brass All State Etudes
Featuring the UNM Winds and Brass faculty