CILAM faculty continue to distinguish themselves. Prof. Jonathan Ritter has begun a five-year term as Chair of the Music Department, and Prof. Leonora Saavedra has generously agreed to continue serving as Graduate Advisor into the 2023-24 academic year.
Prof. Xóchitl C. Chávez’s book La Guelaguetza: Oaxacan Migrant Festivals and the Making of Transborder Indigeneity is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She maintains an active research agenda and public-facing-oriented collaborations in the US and Mexico. She is part of a team of music scholars from the University of Colorado, Boulder, including Dr. Susan Thomas and Dr. Austin Okgibo, on a project entitled “Soundscapes of the People: A Musical Ethnography of Pueblo, Colorado” and supported by an Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research Grant from the NEH.
Dr. Chávez continues her longstanding collaboration with the National Museum of the American Latino, now as part of the Digital Collections & Metadata Working Group and Advisory Committee.
This year 2023, Dr. Chávez has been invited to share her research at several respected institutions, such as Indiana University (Folklore and Ethnomusicology), Yale (Institute of Sacred Music), Northwestern University (Latino and Latin American Studies), and upcoming collaborative symposium organized between Dartmouth University and the University of Houston, with a focus on sharing musical works by Mexican Indigenous Composers to public school music educators.
Prof. Rogério Budasz gave several high-profile talks last year. These included the following:
Vienna, Austria: Opening keynote at the international conference 200 Years of Don Giovanni in Brazil: The “Opera of all Operas” debut beyond Europe on 20 September 1821 in Rio de Janeiro and its Cultural-Political Context title: “Between Natural and Proper: Refashioning Opera in Brazil c1750-1830”
http://www.donjuanarchiv.at/veranstaltungen/don-juan-days/don-juan-days-2022.html
Manaus, Brazil: Opening keynote at the 7th International Symposium of Ibero-American Musictitle: “Music, melodramas, and tableaux-vivants in Brazilian theaters c1810-1850” in August 2022.
https://sites.google.com/uea.edu.br/xislaviisimiba/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQCZCDd1Hs0Athens, Greece: three presentations at the 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, Athens, in August 2022.
Roundtable “Lyric Crossroads in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Operatic Scenes and Migrations” roundtable “IMS Roundtable 4: Music in the Circum-Atlantic Colonial World” paper “The Other Isauras: Enslaved Women as Culture Bearers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
In July 2023, he will be in Lisbon, Portugal, giving the opening keynote address at the 5th Transnational Opera Studies Conference TOSC@Lisboa. Title: “Opera and Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
Prof. Walter Aaron Clark’s most recent book, Joaquín Rodrigo: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2021) won the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award from the Music Library Association for the best book-length bibliography or research tool published in 2021. An expansive biography of the composer, co-authored with Javier Suárez-Pajares, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in New York. It will be the first complete biography of Rodrigo in English, and the most thorough and up-to-date such volume in any language.
The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music, as well as the Music Department at large, is very proud of the recent accomplishments of its graduates.
Jacqueline Avila (Ph.D. in Musicology) was for several years a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and in the fall of 2022, she began her appointment as a tenured associate professor of musicology at the University of Texas, Austin, a very prestigious appointment, especially for someone who specializes in Mexican music. Her book, Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity in Mexico’s Época de Oro, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, in its Music and Media Series.
Daniel Castro Pantoja (Ph.D. in Musicology) was offered and accepted an appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor of musicology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His current book project examines the perceived relationship between music, sound, and populism in Colombian state politics during the early twentieth century.
Bernard Gordillo (Ph.D. in Musicology) will be a 2023–24 UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, mentored by Benjamin Madley (Department of History, the host department) and Raymond Knapp (Department of Musicology). He will also be part of a cohort of Fellows at the Chicano Studies Research Center. His research project will focus on sound colonization in California, undertaken in consultation with California Indian scholars, leaders, and community members.
Hermann Hudde (Ph.D. in Musicology) has spent the academic year 2022-23 teaching courses at Scripps College, La Sierra University, and UCLA. Both Scripps and UCLA have invited him back for next year. In addition, he has been recruited for the Academy – Cambridge Centre for International Research (CCIR) / Knowledge Network (cambridge-research.org). This is a part-time position as an instructor, and he will be teaching musicology/ethnomusicology courses!
Alessio Olivieri (Ph.D. in Musicology) was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor of musicology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in August 2022, and he is doing an excellent job there. He continues his research into the impact of Italian verismo on Spanish opera around 1900.