In collaboration with the Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón, Music of the Americas presents the U.S. premiere of Mexican composer Mario Lavista’s Maithuna, after the eponymous poem of Octavio Paz, as well as his Salmo for soprano and double bass, and other works.
Program
Game (1973)
Laura Cocks, Katie Cox, Anne Dearth, Isabel Gleicher, Alice Jones, Aawa White, flutes
Dusk (1980)
Evan Runyon, contrabass
Salmo (2006, ed. 2007)
Sarah Brailey, soprano, four crotales and Evan Runyon, contrabass
Maithuna (2016) *US premiere
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Sarah Brailey, sopranos; Luthien Brackett, Kirsten Sollek, altos
Tickets:
Música para mi vecino for string quartet by Mario Lavista
Octavio Paz reads "Maithuna"
Where: Americas Society
When: May 22, 7 pm
About Mario Lavista
Mario Lavista is one of the most important Latin American composers of his generation. He was born on April 3, 1943, in Mexico City. He studied composition with Carlos Chávez and Héctor Quintanar and musical analysis with Rodolfo Halffter at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música. In 1967, he received a scholarship to study with Jean-Étienne Marie at the Schola Cantorum (Paris) and attended new music seminars with Henri Pousseur. In 1969, he participated in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seminars in Cologne and in international summer courses in Darmstadt. In 1970, he founded the Quanta improvisation group, which focused on creation and spontaneous interpretation, as well as the relationship between live performance and electroacoustic music. In 1991, he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in ine Arts and the Mozart Medal (Mexico), and in 1998 was inducted into the Colegio Nacional.
He is an honorary member of the Seminario de Cultural Mexicano, and has taught courses and seminars at universities throughout North America and as part of the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea. He is currently head of analysis and twentieth-century musical language at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and directs the magazine Pauta, Cuadernos de teoría y crítica musical. He composed music for the films Cabeza de Vaca and Vivir Mata.
About Octavio Paz
Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998), thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, came into early contact with literature. Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic oeuvre is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger wrote that, for Paz, "The revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz published a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary, and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics, and culture.