New UMD Woodwind-Making Course Combines Music, Engineering Skills
Professor of Clarinet Robert Dilutis partners with A. James Clark School of Engineering's Ted Baker for a course where students use technology to create instruments.
RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES
Our faculty and students engage in research and creative work that ranges from performances at the Kennedy Center to masterclasses in local schools, and from international conferences to community-centered workshops. Our scholarship results in recordings, articles, books and editions that reveal music’s beauty and complexity.
As individuals and in teams, our faculty perform across the globe, provide new research frameworks, engage students, explore archives and more. As performers, educators, composers and scholars, we create new knowledge and contribute to UMD's research enterprise.
Bolero Trios, Mestizo Panpipe Ensembles and Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution: Urban La Paz Musicians and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement
Fernando Rios's article is published in Ethnomusicology.
Author/Lead: Fernando Rios
Dates:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Juxtaposing two contrasting yet contemporaneous urban La Paz musical trends, this essay discusses how Bolivians localized the internationally fashionable bolero trio style and folklorized the mestizo panpipe tradition in the twelve-year period following the 1952 Revolution. My main goal is to provide a nuanced perspective on how Bolivian musical practices and their receptions connected with the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario; Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) government’s nation-building project at a time of momentous political, economic and social change. As I document, mainstream urban La Paz musical tastes rarely adhered to MNR nationalist ideology in a straightforward or predictable manner, in part because the specific type of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) that Bolivian state officials envisioned and promoted largely failed to earn widespread citizen approval. This study also reveals that the MNR era’s most popular form of national music was an ineffective conduit for inclusive Bolivian nation-building.
“La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular Music in France and Its Impact on Nueva Canción
Fernando Rios's article is published in Latin American Music Review.
Author/Lead: Fernando Rios
Dates:
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Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publisher: University of Texas Press
This article chronicles the early history of Andean folkloric-popular music in France and discusses its impact on the Nueva Canción movement's emergence in 1960s Chile and reception in post-1973 Europe. I explain that Argentine artists from Buenos Aires introduced highland Andean instruments and genres into Paris's artistic milieu, where Andean music became associated with leftism well before the arrival of exiled Nueva Canción artists. This article not only documents yet another instance of nonindigenous (mis)representations of Amerindian musical traditions, but also reveals an early moment in the politicization of non-Western music for European mass markets that has been overlooked in World Beat scholarship. I argue that this case study lends credence to Thomas Turino's general observation (2003) that transnational musical processes usually viewed by scholars as cross-cultural interactions between the local and the global can be often conceptualized more accurately as phenomena occurring within the same cosmopolitan cultural formation. Rounding out this essay are some closing thoughts and a brief postlude.