Schedule:

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm: Blattner Lecture Series Lecture With Carol Hess: Classical Music Of The Americas at Hanna Boys Center
In late September 2023, the U.S. State Department launched the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, a bipartisan project that aims to establish an international music mentorship program and other activities. Days later, the war in the Middle East broke out, leaving many to wonder what, if anything, music can do to promote world peace.

The State Department is no stranger to these questions. During World War II and the Cold War, the government sponsored a healthy number of musical exchanges between composers and performers from throughout the Americas. The idea was to learn about one another’s music but also to encourage amity, initially against Nazism and then communism. Nearly all the composers on this evening’s program were in some way touched by these programs. Carol A. Hess, a musicologist, is an expert on the highs and lows of U.S.-Latin American musical exchange. She will not only illuminate these fascinating scores, but explain their little-known role in cultural diplomacy. All Blattner Series Lectures are free with purchase of concert ticket.

4:00 pm - 6:00 pm: The Americas at Hanna Boys Center
Aaron Copland made four highly publicized government-sponsored trips to Latin America between 1941 and 1963. During these visits, he shared contemporary American concert music with Latin American audiences, including his own violin sonata, heard on tonight’s program. Back home, he drew US attention to the composers and musicians he met in Latin America, such as Heitor Villa-Lobos of Brazil and Silvestre Revueltas and Manuel Ponce of Mexico, all whom Copland knew personally and whose works are also featured. Another contemporary of Copland was the Black American composer William Grant Still, whose Panamanian Dances were inspired by a collection of Latin American folk songs. The history of Pan-American musical exchange predates Copland. This program also includes music by pianist-composer Edward MacDowell, an American student of the Venezuelan pianist and composer Teresa Carreño, and composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who traveled extensively throughout Latin America. UC Davis musicology professor Carol Hess will speak before the concert about musical diplomacy and cultural exchange in the Americas.

Program:
Aaron Copland - Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942–43)
Heitor Villa-Lobos - Saudades das Selvas Brasileiras (1927) | . No.1
Manuel M. Ponce Cuellar - Cuatro Danzas Mexicanas (1941) | No. 1 and No. 2
Silvestre Revueltas - "Canto a una muchacha negra" (words: Langston Hughes), voice and piano (1938)
Copland - Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950)
Teresa Carreño - Deux esquisses italiennes | I.  Venise. Rêverie-barcarolle
Edward MacDowell - Selections from Woodland Sketches, Op.51;  Sea Pieces, Op.55; From an Old Garden, Op.26
Rebecca Helferich Clarke - Viola Sonata (1919)
Louis Moreau Gottschalk - Le banjo, Op.15 (1854)
William Grant Still - Danzas de Panama for String Quartet (1948) | II and IV

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