Westminster Early Music Series Continues with Baroque Music from New Spain and Peru
The Westminster Early Music Series will continue on Sunday, March 13 with a program entitled The Vice-Royalties of New Spain & Peru: 1650-1750 presented by The Practitioners of Musick: Eugene Roan, organ and harpsichord, and John Burkhalter, recorder. The performance will begin at 4:00 p.m. in Bristol Chapel on the campus of Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton. There will not be a pre-concert talk at 3:15 p.m. as originally scheduled.
They will be joined by the vocal ensemble Fuma Sacra, directed by Andrew Megill, and the Germantown Dancers Colonial Assembly in a performance of rarely heard sacred and secular Baroque works drawn from various colonial period archives from Mexico, Central America and South America.
The musically diverse program includes masterworks by such composers as Francisco Lopez Capillas and Manuel de Zumaya, both of whom were born in Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, and held significant appointments at important cathedrals in Mexico. The program also includes works by Guatemalan composer Manuel de Quiros and his student Raphael Antonio Castellanos. The concert will feature motets, compositions for chamber organ, and solos for harpsichord by Domenico Zipoli, a Jesuit who left his native Italy in 1717 for Paraguay.
The concert also pays tribute to the remarkable scholarship of Robert M. Stevenson, a pioneer in the study of music from colonial New Spain and Peru. Professor emeritus of musicology at UCLA, Dr. Stevenson began working in this field in the late 1940's, while he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he received a Master degree in theology. From 1946 until 1949, he was on the faculty of Westminster Choir College. During his years in Princeton, Professor Stevenson published an account of 16th century music from the cathedral in Mexico City, thus laying the groundwork for subsequent studies and editions of colonial music. While on the faculty at UCLA, Dr. Stevenson was the first to identify critical documents that led to a reconstruction of the history of cathedral and secular music from the Vice-Royalties of New Spain and Peru.
Eugene Roan is professor emeritus and former chair of the piano, organ and harpsichord department at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, where he has taught since 1956. Mr. Roan has lectured and performed extensively in the United States and has taught at the Royal School of Church Music. A graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and Westminster Choir College, he has also studied at the School of Sacred Music of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His teachers were Alexander McCurdy and Alec Wyton.
John Burkhalter, essentially self-taught, studied the performance of early music at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with Daniel Pinkham and the performance of Baroque music at Harvard University with noted Dutch recorder virtuoso Frans Bruggen. He has composed and prepared music for documentary film, video and audio projects produced by PBS (WNET-13), NJN, the Newark Museum, The Walters Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, Encyclopedia Britannica, The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology among others. He has lectured extensively on the ancient musical cultures of the Americas, most notable at the Chrysler Museum of Art, The Cultural Centre of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Colombia to The United Nations, Yale, Princeton, pre-Columbian Society of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, and Dumbarton Oaks. Mr. Burkhalter also has served as a musical consultant for the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
Tickets for this performance are $20 for adults and $15 for students/seniors. They may be reserved by calling the Westminster box office, which is at 609-921-2663 and is open weekdays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., or at the door. Westminster Choir College of Rider University is located at 101 Walnut Lane in Princeton.
