Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music session, led by Jake Schumacher and hosted by O'Neil's.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes). Visiting musicians from throughout the US and the world will occasionally stop by for a few tunes.

Musicians with some experience in playing Irish music are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, music, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.

Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music session, led by Jake Schumacher and hosted by O'Neil's.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes). Visiting musicians from throughout the US and the world will occasionally stop by for a few tunes.

Musicians with some experience in playing Irish music are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, music, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.

Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music session, led by Jake Schumacher and hosted by O'Neil's.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes). Visiting musicians from throughout the US and the world will occasionally stop by for a few tunes.

Musicians with some experience in playing Irish music are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, music, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.

Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music session, led by Jake Schumacher and hosted by O'Neil's.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes). Visiting musicians from throughout the US and the world will occasionally stop by for a few tunes.

Musicians with some experience in playing Irish music are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, music, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.

Sandunga will be playing at The Iron Post, Saturday, April 20, 6:00-9:00.

Sandunga se va a presentar en el Iron Post, sábado, 20 de abril, 6:00-9:00.

Sandunga draws its inspiration from the Cuban musical traditions of son, guajira son, and trova/ bolero. With its historic roots in the interweaving of African and Iberian rhythms and melodies, the Cuban son remains today a vibrant musical and dance form across the island and throughout the Americas.

Sandunga consists of Julián Norato (guitar), William Hope (Cuban tres and laúd), Tina Hope, (claves and guacharaca), Eduardo Herrera (bass), Adam Walton (congas), and Andy Miller (bongó and maracas).

Vishtèn

This show is in collaboration with the CU Folk & Roots Festival. Tickets will be handled through the Folk & Roots web site.

For the past decade Acadian powerhouse trio Vishtèn have acted as Francophone musical ambassadors throughout the world. The Canadian trio has dazzled audiences with their fiery blend of traditional French songs and original instrumentals that fuse Celtic and Acadian genres with a modern sensibility of rock influence.

Hailing from Prince Edward Island's Evangeline area and from the most remote reaches of Quebec - the windswept Magdalen Islands - twin sisters Emmanuelle and Pastelle LeBlanc join musical forces with Pascal Miousse to form a sophisticated sonic signature combing tight sibling harmonies, layered foot percussion, virtuoso acoustic and electric instrumentation create an expansive sound that would be difficult to reproduce, in sheer complexity, by a quintet. Their trademark blend of fiddle, guitar, accordion, harmonium, whistles, piano, bodhrán, jaw harp, moog, electric guitar and percussive dance make for a unique tour de force of traditional and contemporary sounds.

After touring extensively on three continents, the name Vishtèn is now synonymous with Acadian music worldwide. In addition to releasing four albums and performing at thousands of international festivals - from the Vancouver Olympics to to France's Interceltique de Lorient - their music has been showcased on American television (ESPN) and the Japanese film, Finding Anne.

www.vishten.net

Guitarist/singer Matt Heaton and Irish flute player/singer Shannon Heaton have been making music together since their first meeting in 1992. They met in Chicago via romance, albeit someone else's, when Shannon needed a guitar player to play for a wedding gig that never ended up happening. Despite the loss of the gig, Matt & Shannon gained a musical—and eventually romantic—partnership.

Together, they built up their traditional Irish music skills on Irish flute and guitar in the Chicago sessions (learning from John Williams, Liz Carroll, Brendan McKinney, Denis Cahill, and Kevin Henry). When they began bringing in singing, they focused on their favorite aspects of both Irish and American traditions, ending up with new songs that sound traditional, alongside centuries-old ballads with fresh new melodies.

For years, the two worked as active side players for several Celtic music luminaries, including Robbie O'Connell, Aoife Clancy, Boys of the Lough, Emily Smith, Eamonn Coyne, and Halali. And during a three-year “sabbatical” in Boulder, CO, Matt and Shannon formed the band Siucra with Colorado singer Beth Leachman and later, Vermont fiddler Sam Amidon, putting out three acclaimed recordings.

In 2003, the Heatons began focusing their creative energies on their duo, coming up with ways to create a full and varied sound with just two people. They put out their first duo album, “dearga” in Oct 2003. It was a mix of traditional tunes and original compositions, with three vocal numbers. Dirty Linen called it “ a fine mix of reels and jigs with a dynamic rhythmic tension, and an infectious spirit and vitality that translates into bright, uplifting music that will make you smile.”

Scott Alarik of The Boston Globe called "Blue Skies Above", the Heatons’ March 2006 release, “masterful and inventive, their arrangements city-smart and spacious.” This, their second CD, contained more singing and tackled a wide range of subjects: lovers lost at sea, a conversation with death, the summer harvest in Nebraska, a twentieth century disaster, and learning to ride a bicycle. The CD’s title comes from Shannon’s self-penned last verse of the traditional song “The Blackbird”, highlighting the Heatons’ style of merging traditional and original lyrics and melodies.

Their third duo release “Fine Winter’s Night” (Nov 2007) is not your run-of-the-mill Christmas release. Matt and Shannon present a banquet of songs dating from the 12th to the 21st century, their convivial blend of voices — supplemented by ever-tasteful and adept accompaniment on guitar, bouzouki and Irish flutes — gives "Fine Winter's Night" a sound that is simultaneously homegrown, refined and timeless. The music on “Fine Winter’s Night” ranges across a spectrum of moods and emotions much like the holiday season itself: a mix of poignancy, jubilance and reflection.

Matt and Shannon Heaton make traditional music relevant to American audiences. They embrace the solid Irish roots in their music, play the heck out of their instruments, and aren't afraid to step out and sing from their American musical and social experiences. "We're out to get everything we can out of two musicians. The more we put into it, the more we get out of it--and so, we think, do our audiences."

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Lecture Series
and the University of Illinois Musicology Division
Presents

Susan Thomas, Associate Professor of Musicology and Women's Studies, University of Georgia

TUESDAY, APRIL 16
2:00 PM
101 International Studies Building

From Havana's Stages to the Silver Screen: A Reconsideration of the Cuban Zarzuela's 'Death by Film'

The Cuban zarzuela flourished for a brief period of time, from the late 1920’s to the early 1940’s. Providing the Western hemisphere with some of its best-loved melodies, the zarzuela developed musical and dramatic codes for representing both hegemonic power and social marginality. Composers took preexisting racialized theatrical types and created a phenomenon that was as pedagogical as it was entertaining, instructing Cuba’s growing bourgeoisie about the need for social and racial stability. The zarzuela trafficked in desire, supporting a white supremacist ideology while simultaneously advocating the consumption of blackness, a strategy that it shared with the larger afrocubanismo movement (Moore, 1997). Blackness also served as a subversive signifier, however, and the performative codes of the musical stage created an ambivalent tension through which black bodies—and the sounds they produced—could critique existing power structures (see Moore,1997; Lane, 2005, Thomas, 2009). Several scholars, including myself, have blamed the zarzuela’s truncated lifespan the rise of cinema, which offered lower admission prices and greater theatrical realism. In my talk, I problematize this earlier view by suggesting that rather than replacing the zarzuela, the emerging Cuban and Mexican film industries absorbed and transformed it, appropriating its plots, performance practices, composers, technical designers, and the performers themselves. Additionally, one of the zarzuela’s most powerfully emblematic representations of difference, the use of blackface, was enthusiastically adapted to the screen—often rubbed onto the very same bodies who had popularized the practice on the Cuban stage.
This transformation is examined through Lecuona’s 1930 zarzuela, María la O and the eponymous 1948 Cuban-Mexican co-production starring Rita Montaner, for whom the zarzuela’s title role was created. The film’s negotiation of its borrowed content is instructive in understanding how the radicalized codes of the zarzuela were reworked to speak to larger Latin American audience. I suggest that in removing specific cultural markers, filmmakers effectively excised any sense of subversive ambivalence from their original source material, engaging in a “flattening out” of radicalized discourse and performance practice that mirrored trends emanating from the U.S. and Europe.

Dr. Susan Thomas, Associate Professor of Musicology and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia, received her Ph.D. in musicology from Brandeis University in 2002 and earned masters degrees from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory. Her research interests include music and gender, Cuban and Latin American music, transnationalism and migration, embodiment and performativity, music and race relations, and opera studies. Her book, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2008), received the Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society (AMS), 2011 and the Pauline Alderman Book Award for feminist research from the International Association of Women in Music. Other recently published articles and chapters include "Did Nobody Pass the Girls the Guitar? Queer Appropriations in Contemporary Cuban Popular Song," Journal of Popular Music 18/2 (2006), “Musical Cartographies of the Transnational City: Mapping Havana in Song,” Latin American Music Review 31/2 (2010); and chapters in Cuba Transnational, Fernández, ed. (2005), De la zarzuela al cine: Los medios de comunicación populares y su traducción de la voz marginal, ed. by Doppelbauer and Sartingen (2010), and “Music, Conquest, and Colonization” in W.W. Norton’s Musics of Latin America, ed. by Robin Moore, among others. Currently, she is preparing a book manuscript on the transnationalization of contemporary Cuban music.

Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music
session led by Jake Schumacher.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs,
reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish
instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes
and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes).

Musicians with some experience in playing Irishmusic are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.

Champaign-Urbana's longest-running weekly Irish traditional music
session led by Jake Schumacher.

The session focuses on the traditional dance music of Ireland--jigs,
reels, hornpipes, waltzes and much more--played on authentic Irish
instruments including fiddle, button accordion, concertina, pipes
and tenor banjo. Throughout the evening occasional songs are sung, stories are told, and often dancing starts during the second hour (sets, polkas and waltzes).

Musicians with some experience in playing Irishmusic are welcome, and those with an interest in learning to play Irish music are encouraged to come and listen, as well as all who enjoy Irish and Irish-American culture, food and drink. For more information, contact Jake Schumacher at boscapod@gmail.com.