Happy Holidays to all…with great music!
Categories: art, art and religion, cht art work, Uncategorized • Tags: angel, angel art
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Sharing my notes about Robert Kyr’s Paradiso
In 2015, I visited my colleague, Associate Professor of Liturgical Studies Michael Driscoll, for a casual conversation in his office at the University of Notre Dame. I was struck by a new book on his desk. It was a volume edited by Notre Dame’s Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Dante Studies Vittorio Montemaggi, titled Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry. It immediately sparked in me a curiosity to find if the Commedia could become […]
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Bernstein’s birthday and his legacy
Today Google has a charming and ingenious homage to Leonard Bernstein, with cartoons of him in action. It is a good occasion to ponder the role of artists in our society–who gets to leave a mark in the culture, and is it always the one who eschews popular taste and sentiment for high academic complexity…or vice versa. I say, great music is not in the style… https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=O8fQyb6tkdk
Categories: art and paradox, conducting, contemporary music, context affects perception, context and perception, music composition, new conductor, Uncategorized • Tags: high and low, Leonard Bernstein
Mozart’s Magic Flute has an alter ego…
In the ongoing production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Teatro Nacional Sucre of Quito, Ecuador, the opera takes a new garb in my transcription for an orchestra of Andean instruments, following the foundational concept of 2008 by the music director of the Orquesta de Instrumentos Andinos, Segundo Condor, who died without completing it. The process enjoyed wonderful assistance by artists affiliated to the Teatro and the Orquesta, Tadashi Maeda and Leonardo Cárdenas, among others. The paradigm of the […]
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1968 and its impact…remembering a great conference
Last weekend, April 26-28, I was fortunate to participate as an invited presenter on Arvo Pärt in the conference “1968 in Europe and Latin America”, organized by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. Brilliantly designed by Professor James McAdams, somehow the conference helped me understand the direction of my life and the values I hold. It was amazing to trade insights with a fantastic roster of speakers and engage in a conversation about Hans Werner Henze with […]
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Artists and Parallel Universes…
It was only a matter of time that the brilliant music writer of the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, would address the musical treatment of leitmotifs in John Williams’ music for the Star Wars movies. Perhaps there is more than just a musical homage of a living composer to the grand master of the Gesamtkünstwerk; it may reveal Star Wars as a “total work of art”, collectively created under the vision of George Lucas. Just like Wagner’s serialized mythology in his Ring operas […]
Categories: art and ritual, context and perception, gesamtkünstwerk, Uncategorized • Tags: space opera, Star Wars, Wagner's Ring Cycle
Happy 2018!
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A beautiful way of describing the sacred purpose of art…
Historian Jaqui Shine pays a beautiful homage to both her mother and artist Mark Rothko in her meditation about Rothko’s site-specific painting installation named Rothko Chapel. She distills in surprising ways a description about art connecting with the sacred. Rothko’s visual work is so powerful that it spilled inspiration upon a musical work, composer Morton Feldman’s piece for chorus and instruments carrying the same name. I had the privilege of conducting it with Notre Dame Vocale and Ensemble ND at […]
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A composer and his way of praying
This lecture was given by Arvo Pärt during commencement at St Vladimir’s Seminary in 2014. He shared thoughts from his musical diaries. It begins with a most powerful question: Have you thanked God for this failure already? Food for thought, because we always must ask the question, what is Art for? http://www.ccwatershed.org/blog/2017/jul/6/most-sensitive-musical-instrument/
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Carmen-Helena Téllez 