SYMPOSIUM: Catalan Culture
Monday, April 28 / 9:30 AM – 2:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
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Composing in the Key of Identity
Salvador Brotons (Vancouver Symphony Orchestra)
McCune Conference Room / 9:45 AM
In the history of western music, often it can be seen that a composer’s music is a direct reflection of the geographical territory where he had been born or brought up. Lately however, in contemporary music written in the last 40 years, there has been a noticeable internationalization of musical styles, and progressively we have more and more difficulty identifying a composer with a specific nationality. Brotons will discuss the great number of Catalan composers who have excaped this trend, imprinting a patina of Catalanism in their works: freshness, brightness, strength, lyricism, nostalgia.
Delenda est Catalonia: The Unwelcome Memory
Joan Ramon Resina (Iberian Studies Center, Stanford Univ.)
McCune Conference Room / 1:30 PM
In the 1980s, the Spanish Civil War seemed remote and the Franco dictatorship anecdotal to a point that some historians disputed its fascist nature. When discussion of historical memory picked up in the 1990s, it became evident that such processes encourage selective forgetting, in line with Renan’s crucial condition for the formation and maintenance of national consciousness. Largest among the muted or entirely forgotten motivations of the military coup against the Republic is the nationalist attempt to destroy Catalonia. The pervasive “disremembering” of this defining aspect of Spanish politics in the twentieth century proves the extent to which the nationalist forces (of the right and the left) succeeded in achieving their goal.
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the Music Department, the Institut Ramon Lull – Barcelona, and the IHC.
