Latin American Music Center celebrates 50 years

IU’s campus has been home to Latin American music for 50 years and has one of the largest collections of this genre of music in the country. From Oct. 19 to 23, members of the Latin American Music Center and Latin American music community worldwide came to IU to celebrate the anniversary.

Composer and musicologist Juan Orrego-Salas founded the center in 1961. The center’s website explains that Orrego-Salas wanted to make “available to scholars and performers the most complete library of art music from the region in existence.”

Since then, directors of the center, including current Director Carmen Helena Tellez, have been very active in expanding the library of Latin American music.

Graduate students Marysol Quevedo, Daniel Stein and Yuriria Rodriguez worked 40-hour weeks, compared to their usual 20- to 25-hour weeks, in preparation for the 50th anniversary conference.

“(The LAMC) has given me the opportunity to do things I otherwise wouldn’t have encountered until later in my career,” Quevedo said.

Under the direction of Tellez, the three graduate students worked together on the planning and administrative side of the conference. Tasks ranged from contacting performers to making nametags for the various events.

“With the 50th anniversary, we have all discovered a lot of (administrative) things that we are good at,” Stein said.

The center also released two CDs on Oct. 20. One features violinist Colin Sorgi playing 20th-century Latin American music. Sorgi won the center’s competition last spring and, as a result, the center paid to have his CD produced.

The second CD features music by El Taller, the Latin American Popular Music Ensemble on campus in which both Stein and Rodriguez perform. The group had a concert Oct. 22 as one of the final events of the conference. Although the CDs were pre-released during the conference, they will officially be released Nov. 3.

Other events included performances by percussionist Michael Spiro and pianist Jovino Santos Neto. In addition to the concerts, there were also speakers throughout the weekend, including Alejandro Madrid, a professor from the University of Illinois Chicago, who gave a speech titled “Singing Blackness Across Borders.”

This topic coincided with the main focus of the conference, which was examining the musical interactions between the United States and Latin America.

Although the conference is over, there are many more opportunities for students to get involved with the group. Upcoming events from center throughout the year include the annual Valentine’s Day concert. Grammy Award nominees in Latin American music are invited to perform and help coach IU music students through their works.

The center has planned another competition this spring for students looking to have a Latin American music CD production paid for by the center. All students are welcome to compete and more information and rules will be posted on the center’s website http://music.indiana.edu/lamc/home/ as the competition nears.