held in conjunction with the LACMA-UCLA Symposium and Exhibition ” Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World” (November 6, 2011–January 29, 2012) 

Not only persons and goods traversed the Atlantic Triangle during the Spanish colonial period, so also did songs and dances: an immaterial, potent, ever-present currency of human connection. Our short program explores one fascinating current in the enormous Atlantic circulation ofcanciones bailados that flows between 1500 and the present: the adoption, adaptation and still-ongoing transformation of Spanish Renaissance dance-songs in the son jarocho repertory of the Veracruz region of México. Members of the UCLA Early Music Ensemble will perform villancicos (songs in peasant style) from sixteenth-century Spain; each villancico will be answered (a contestado) with its 2011 Alta California version, by members of Son del Centro, a son jarocho collective from Santa Ana, California. The amazing commonality between versions is audible, even after 400 years. What does this tell us about the durability of ‘immaterial’ media?

This event is hosted by the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Department of Musicology.

Registration form and full program on the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies website.