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I recently attended the conference of the Spanish Society of Ethnomusicologists (SIBE – don’t ask me what it stands for) at the Music Conservatory in Salamanca, Spain, where I gave a comunicación on ‘Issues of Identity in Spanish Popular Music’. This is a theme I’ve been inching towards at hispanists’ conferences over the past few years, but it was the first time I’ve attempted it at anything musicological, let alone ethno. A fascinating experience. When I got there, I found that the anglophone participation was less than I had been expecting, so I decided to do the talk in Spanish – so, as you can see, the presentation ended up in Spanish as well.
If you want to see what I got up to, I’ve put a report up on my personal blog Micalet. It’s a bit multimedia, and comes in several chunks – here are the links:
1) impressions of the conference – in fairly general and personal terms
2) a version of the presentation, complete with music and video clips, as used in my talk
3) photos of a concert at the Conservatory by what I’m calling a ‘kitchen percussion’ group, Mayalde, and others of what the Spanish call a jam session (NB not una sesión de mermelada – why not?) at a local club with multi-wind instrumentalist Javier Paxariño, which I also tried recording; I also put together a couple of videos with the photos and music clips from these two sessions: Paxariño, Mayalde
4) the (few) photos I took in the conference itself are on Picasa, as is the ‘official’ album for the conference
5) finally, some impressions of the city of Salamanca
6) and a Salamanca quiz, for the keen of eye
I’ll comment later on some of the issues encountered in putting the multimedia bits together, for anyone who’s interested.
A couple of weeks later I was off to another conference, in foreign parts again (Liverpool and Bangor), on Issues of Identity in Galicia (NW Spain), where I did a spot on ‘Identity in Galician Popular Music’, this time in English. I’ll put that presentation up shortly.
The Daily Post 