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. Kristina Jacobsen awarded The Fulbright Con Il Sud Award for Teaching and Research
Dr. Jacobsen, was recently awarded the Fulbright Con Il Sud Award for Teaching and Research to support her upcoming research during her sabbatical year on the Italian island of Sardinia [Sardigna].
Heterophony: Texture, Technique, and Social Commentary
This lecture is in two parts: the first draws from my research on the 1960s jazz avant-garde and musicians’ interests in heterophonic musical textures. For the second part, I perform original music that utilizes heterophony and “noise” in a solo electronic and improvised format.
The Gay West: From Drug Store Cowboys to Rodeo Queens
The masculine ideal represented by the American cowboy is variously interpreted by spectators, dancers, musicians, and contestants at gay rodeos and country western dances across the U.S. Examining embodied gender practices within these communities, this talk articulates the sonic, social, and geographical spaces of the gay American West.