Manipulating Culture after the Conquest: The First Operas in the New World
Speaker:
Chad Gasta
30 Oct 2014
8:00 PM
Sun Room, Memorial Union
Chad Gasta, a professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State, will discuss the discovery of the first operas in the New World and their importance as examples of cross-cultural collaboration between Europeans and Indians. The presentation will include musical accompaniment and vocal performance by faculty from the Department of Music. Gasta is the author of a recent book on the subject, Transatlantic Arias: Early Opera in Spain and the New World. He directs Iowa State's International Studies Program and is co-director of the Languages and Cultures for Professions Program. College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Lecture Series.
In the former Jesuit Missions of South America, over 15,000 sheet of music were discovered including one opera written by an unknown indigenous composer in the local Chiquitano language and staged and performed by Indian singers and musicians. Gasta’s presentation describes how early opera embodies the cohabitation and cross-cultural collaborative spaces shared by Europeans and Indians in the development and consolidation of opera, challenging what has been assumed about Spain’s one-way dominance in all its colonies.
Chad Gasta has been honored with many college and university awards for teaching and service. In addition to numerous articles on early modern Spanish and New World literature and culture, he is the author of [i]Imperial Stagings: Empire and Ideology in Transatlantic Theater of Early Modern Spain and the New World[/i] (North Carolina University Press, 2013) and a critical edition of [i]Lazarillo de Tormes[/i] (Waveland Press, 2013), and co-editor of [i]Hispanic Essays in Honor of Robert L. Fiore[/i] (Juan de la Cuesta, 2009).