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On September 29, 1927, Cuban soprano Rita Montaner walked onto the stage of Havana's Teatro Regina, her features obscured under a mask of blackened glycerin and her body clad in the tight pants, boots, and riding jacket of a coachman. Standing alongside a gilded carriage and a live horse, the blackfaced, cross-dressed actress sang the premiere of Eliseo Grenet's tango-congo, "Ay Mama Ines." The crowd went wild. Montaner's performance cemented "Ay Mama Ines" as one of the classics in the Cuban repertoire, but more importantly, the premiere heralded the birth of the Cuban zarzuela, a new genre of music theater that over the next fifteen years transformed popular entertainment on the island. Cu...
Once the most popular form of Spanish entertainment short of the bullfight, the zarzuela boasts a long history of bridging the categories of classical and popular art. It is neither opera nor serious drama, yet it requires both trained singers and good actors. The content is neither purely folkloric nor high art; it is too popular for some and too classical for others. In Zarzuela, Janet L. Sturman assesses the political as well as the musical significance of this chameleon of music-drama. Sturman traces the zarzuela's colorful history from its seventeenth-century origins as a Spanish court entertainment to its adaptation in Spain's colonial outposts in the New World. She examines Cuba's piv...
It has been said that zarzuela means to Spain what operetta means to Vienna, Offenbach to Paris, Gilbert and Sullivan to London, and the musical to Broadway. Zarzuela is Spain's unique contribution to lyric theatre, a mixture of spoken and sung drama with a complex history extending over four centuries. The Zarzuela Companion is a comprehensive guide to zarzuela's most popular and romantic works written after 1850, with chapters devoted to the major Spanish zarzuela composers, writers and singers. Complete synopses of all sixty works selected are delivered at the level of detail necessary for non-Spanish speakers to follow along with ease. The book also features special sections on the history of the genre, and on the parallel Catalan and Cuban zarzuela traditions. A foreword by Plácido Domingo, a selected discography with current catalog reference numbers, a brief bilingual bibliography and glossary of Spanish terms make this book indispensable for the newcomer and aficionado alike.
"Severino Reyes (1861-1942), writer and dramatist, wrote the libretto to a total of twenty zarzuelas in which he worked closely with composers ranging from Fulgencio Tolentino (1870-1940) to Antonio Molina (1894-1980). Unfortunately, only eleven of these works have extant music today. Nevertheless, they present a good cross section of musical theory and practice in the Philippines early in the twentieth century"--Page 4 of cover.
In the last few years, digitizations and reissues of historical recordings of Spanish zarzuela - from wax cylinders in the 1890s to long-play records in the 1950s - have revealed a range of contrasting vocal performance styles. By focusing on portamento, this Element sets the foundations for a contextually sensitive history of vocal performance practices in zarzuela. It takes stock of technological changes and shifts in commercial strategies and listening habits to reveal what the recorded evidence tells us about the historical development of portamento practices and considers how these findings can allow us to reconstruct the expressive code of zarzuela as it was performed in the late nineteenth century and how it transformed itself throughout the next half century. These transformations are contextualized alongside other changes, including the make-up of audiences, the discourses about the genre's connection to national identity and the influence of other musical-theatrical genres and languages.
This reference includes: entries on all styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Near East; descriptions of instruments and their historical background; and articles reflecting the contemporary beat, including pop, jazz and rock.
From the exhilarating impact of Isaac Albeniz at the beginning of the century to today's complex and adventurous avant-garde, this complete interpretive history introduces twentieth-century Spanish music to English-speaking readers. With graceful authority, Tomas Marco, award-winning composer, critic, and bright light of Spanish music since the 1960s, covers the entire spectrum of composers and their works: trends and movements, critical and popular reception, national institutions, influences from Europe and beyond, and the effect of such historic events as the Spanish Civil War and the death of Franco. Marco's penetrating aesthetic critiques are threaded throughout each phase of this rich ...
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