As performers, and in particular as a conductor, we musicians try to approach the essential idea that supports the composition; however, there are composers like Beethoven who lead us on a perhaps romantic adventure, but which, for some of us, is inevitable: to seek to understand the soul of the composer, to enter, so to […]
We are nearly three years since the beginning of the pandemic, globally we experienced dramatic episodes, and so far this year, the effects of the lack of coexistence are less devastating. In critical moments, people were forced to live in isolation, and in this perspective music proved to be as much of a shelter and […]
The path of metamodern man is narrow, hence his anguish. Barely more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we observe that history, far from having come to an end, continues with vitality. There are ideological factors, such as the extreme forms of Islamism, whose apogee has again become visible in […]
To explore art is to explore man During the pandemic, what I have referred to as “metamodernity” began, a new era in which man begins to feel convinced that he inhabits an unknown environment that does not distinguish between the material and the immaterial, where “tangible reality” and “virtual reality” will have a similar […]
Man is ready for the “virtual age” that art has always offered him. “One can see in this decadence of narratives an effect of the rise of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has put the accent on the means of action rather than on its ends.” The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard In […]
Are the Internet and social media the new spell? For centuries the thematic of the potion that spells love between two young people was approached by different literatures. From medieval literature to “La Celestina” by Fernando de Rojas (1465-1541) in the Spanish 16th century, through the magic drink of Tristan and Isolde, which is remembered […]
In June 2014 I visited the Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra for the Arts (OSSLA) for the second time as guest conductor. The first occasion had taken place two years earlier, in 2012, just over a decade after its founding. Today it has celebrated its twentieth anniversary. In the 2014 program, the splendid “Concerto for Orchestra” was […]
Happiness is elusive, when we want to hold it we lose it As the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) noted in his book “Love and the West” (1939): “Happiness is an Eurydice: we lose it when we want to grasp it”. For him, “any happiness that one wants to feel, that one wants to […]
There are probably few people who are aware of the challenges involved when it comes to training orchestra conductors in a country like Mexico. To many people it might be as strange as a mathematical equation. A few months ago I was invited to write the prologue for an academic work that in turn studies […]
As Samuel Máynez Champión (Mexico, 1963) points out, the work by Antonio Solís y Rivadeneyra (1610-1686), “Historia de la conquista de México, población y progresos de la América septentrional”,(History of the conquest of Mexico, population and progress of North America.), known as “Nueva España” was translated into Tuscan in 1699, in a Florentine edition by […]
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