The University Contemporary Art Museum (MUAC) will open its first-ever Contemporary Music Cycle with a concert by the Túumben Paax vocal ensemble on Saturday, Aug. 27. The seven concerts in the cycle, which will take place on Saturday afternoons between Aug. 27 and Nov. 19, intend to fill what the organizers see as a gap in Mexico’s contemporary music culture.
“There’s a lack of spaces for contemporary music in Mexico,” said MUAC general director of visual arts Graciela de la Torre at a press conference Wednesday. “We hope to fill that gap and give the public more access to contemporary music.”
MUAC music director Fernando Saint Martin de Maria y Campos hopes that the cycle will play a significant role in promoting a culture of contemporary music in Mexico.
“The goal of the cycle is to create a permanent space for contemporary music,” said Saint Martin de Maria y Campos. “That means both a space for the revision or exposition of the different artistic manifestations in music since the second half of the 20th century, and also a space for performing the works of living composers, especially Mexicans.”
Some of the best-known and accomplished Mexican contemporary music ensembles, including Túumben Paax, ÓNIX Ensamble, Ensamble Siqueiros and Ensamble Liminar will perform contemporary works by Mexican and international composers at the seven concerts. On Saturday, Nov. 5, the world-renowned Polish Penderecki String Quartet will perform a relatively new (2008) piece by their namesake, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as a piece by the U.S. post-minimalist composer John Adams.
Demonstrating the flexibility of the category of “contemporary” in music, the cycle’s program includes pieces composed in the first half of the 20th century, such as Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” debuted in 1941, as well as pieces composed in the second half of 2016.
“We’ve scheduled a lot of works from more or less the second half of the 20th century,” said Saint Martin de Maria y Campos. “A lot of people would say that’s not contemporary if sixty or seventy years have passed since it was debuted. But it’s important to remember that music is always evolving, and we need to see the antecedents to understand how today’s composers got to where they are.”
At the first concert, on Saturday, Aug. 27 at 12:30 p.m., the Túumben Paax vocal ensemble will perform a selection of contemporary choral works. Túumben Paax, whose name means “new music” in the Mayan language, is a women’s chamber choir that performs and records new music, especially by Mexican composers. They recently drew attention with the debut of the opera “Marea Roja” by Berlin-based Mexican composer Diana Syrse. On Saturday, their eclectic program includes Syrse’s “Tierra de maíz,” music from the pioneering Hungarian modernists Lajos Bárdos and Zoltan Kodály and pieces by several other contemporary Mexican composers on the vanguard of new choral music, including Juan Angelus Pichardo, Cesare Valentini, Arturo Valenzuela, German Romero and Jorge Córdoba.
The final concert, on Saturday, Nov. 19, will feature debuts of new chamber works written by Pablo Martínez Teutli, Odín Zamorano and Eduardo Ángel Aguilar, music composition students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who received the Cátedra Extraordinaria Arturo Márquez scholarship. The scholarship winners spend a year producing pieces of orchestral and chamber music. These pieces — many of which have still not been completed — qualify as “contemporary” by any metric.
The concerts will take place at 12:30 p.m. on every other Saturday from Aug. 27 to Nov. 19
A detailed schedule can be found here
Tickets cost 50 pesos ($2.70) and can be purchased at MUAC ticket counters on the day of the concert
