Musical Theater and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain and America

—a conference organized by Elisabeth Le Guin, University of California, Los Angeles

Mirror-like, the musical theater of the Spanish and South American eighteenth century reflects the complexity and resourcefulness of the interlocking societies in which it thrived. As the old roles—nobility and commoner, colonizer and colonized—shifted and radically reconfigured themselves, new notions of human identity arose, finding myriad representations in the unstable signifiers of music-theatrical meaning.

Scholars from Spain and North America will convene for two days to examine and discuss the musical theater of the ‘Siglo de luces’ on both sides of the Atlantic, rich in genres both serious and comic: opera, zarzuela, intermedio, villancico, and tonadilla. The conference will include a performance of a 1779 tonadilla by Blas de Laserna, Las músicas.

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the UCLA International Institute, the UCLA Council on Research, and the UCLA Department of Musicology.

Program

Comic Music Drama 1
Chair: Susana Hernéndez Aracio, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Álvaro Torrente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Royal Holloway, University of London
“Italian Intermezzi in the Spanish Court under Farinelli”

Raymond Knapp, University of California, Los Angeles
“Cervantes, Voltaire, and the Reflexive Idealism of the American Musical”
José Máximo Leza, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain
“Elusive Identities: Italian Comic Opera meets ‘Zarzuela’ in Eighteenth-Century Madrid”

Serious Music Drama
Chair: Louise Stein, University of Michigan

Craig Russell, California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo
“Sumaya’s Partenope (1711): Mexican Theatricality and European Inspiration”

Bernardo Illari, University of North Texas
“Cuzco’s New Glory: Opera and the Criollo Identities in Colonial Peru”

William John Summers, Dartmouth College
“Role Playing or Playing the Role in Historic Manila: Spanish and ‘Filipino’ Dramatic Events in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”

Comic Music Drama II
Chair: Elisabeth Le Guin, University of California, Los Angeles

John Koegel, California State University, Fullerton
“Musical Theater in Nineteenth-Century Mexico”

Germán Labrador López de Azcona, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
“Musical Hybridization and Musical Identity in Eighteenth-Century Comic Theater”

Margaret Cayward, University of California, Davis
“The Spanish Tonadilla and Musical Life in Mission-Era California”

Audience Workshop and Performance

Blas de Laserna (1751–1816)
Tonadilla a solo, Las músicas, 1779?

Director: Elisabeth Le Guin, UCLA
Soprano: Pamela Murray

Roundtable Discussion
Moderator: Elisabeth Le Guin, University of California, Los Angeles