The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music and the College of Fine Arts welcomes Leonora Saavedra to Zimmerman’s Library Water Room for her lecture on Thursday, March 3rd at 2:00pm, “Musicology and the Exhausted Nation.”
In the 1990s, Rogers Brubaker decried the new popularity of nationalism as an academic topic within musicology, where “analytical primitivism has been introduced through the highly selective appropriation of the historical and social scientific literature on nationalism.” Was Brubaker’s criticism warranted? Taking the case of Mexico as a test ground, this talk will take stock of some of the results of musicology’s brief infatuation with nationalism, and address the gains made as well as the opportunities lost.
Leonora Saavedra is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California Riverside. Her research centers upon Mexican music of the late-19th and 20th centuries, exoticism, nationalism and modernism, and the relations between Mexico and the United States. Recent publications include “Carlose Chávez’s Polysemic Style: Constructing the National, Seeking the Cosmopolitan” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2015) and “El nuevo pasado mexicano: estrategias de representación en Atzimba de Ricardo Castro” (Resonancias, 2014). She is the editor of Carlos Chávez and His World (Princeton University Press, 2015).
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.