Reiteration of diversity: Minimal Music and American opera of the XNUMXth century, es un conference cycle en español of three sessions for all those who wish to learn more about the history of the most recent opera and specifically the Minimal Music XNUMXth century American This course precedes the April premiere of John Adams' opera nixons in china at the Royal Theatre.

Throughout the three sessions We will constantly use specific audiovisual examples that allow us to listen to and visualize the most characteristic features of this musical movement, as well as its specific crystallization in two emblematic operas by two of its most outstanding composers: Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Nixon in China by John Adams.

Minimal music can be considered the first genuinely American trend in classical music of the 1960th century, a musical reaction to the post-serial crisis existing in Europe at that time and to the irruption of the indefinable figure of John Cage: minimal music postulated a new avant-garde concept to through a drastic simplification of the internal structures of music and its references to the outside world. As a musical trend, it began to develop imperceptibly from the late sixties, in the context of Postmodernity, to later encompass a broad domain of musical composition and become one of the most significant currents of the postwar period; It evolved in parallel to Minimal Art in the plastic arts, a variant of abstract art that spread internationally, with a great presence from XNUMX on in the United States and Great Britain.

Minimal music works largely through sections of simple diatonic scales, used as rhythmic-melodic patterns, which cause a hypnotic and meditative effect through endless repetition and minimal variations. The reduction of the sound material and its permanent variation raises a questioning of the usual parameters of music and invites a less structured listening and with a different awareness of nuances.

Instructor: Gabriel Menéndez Torrellas, PhD

Gabriel Menéndez is a Doctor of Aesthetics and Philosophy. He holds the Magister Artium in Musicology and Art History from the Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), in whose Faculty of Musicology he was a professor. Since 2013 he has directed the Opera and Musicology Seminar at the CEU San Pablo University in Madrid, where he is a professor of Opera History. Since 2008, he has been regularly teaching opera courses and other monographic courses at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

[More information]

Program: