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An obscure collection of Latin jazz and Salsa music forms the backdrop for an intriguing project undertaken by the Community of Scholars program this semester.
George Torres, associate professor of music, is leading four students, who examined score preparations, texts, performance practice, and cultural significance. The results will be presented in a symposium 4:15 p.m. April 27, in the Gendebien room of Skillman Library.
The Lafayette Jazz Ensemble along with Arturo O’Farrill, the Pesky Artist in Residence for 2005-2006, will present its spring program, half of which will explore the musical discoveries made in the Community of Scholars study, 8 p.m. May 1, in Williams Center for the Arts auditorium. Admission is free.
Torres found the works while combing through the Library of Congress. The orchestral compositions were uncatalogued and in disarray, yet contained a body of music so exquisite that he felt compelled to bring it all to life through performance.
The process has been enlightening in many ways for Torres.
“To me it’s been great,” Torres says. “This project has not only helped me sustain my research, but it’s also been helpful in learning about how people learn about new things. We’ve taken a new approach, a new direction in how we’re looking at these things. I’m learning things.”
Working side by side with Torres are Jessica Bigness ’07 (East Stroudsburg, Pa.); Chris Jacoby ’07 (Madison, N.J.); Brad Maurer ’07 (Loveland, Ohio); and Emmett Jusino ’08 (Freeport, N.Y.). While there is only one music major in the bunch, all are motivated by a lifelong love of music and a dedication to seeing this project through to its fruition.
Bigness, an economics major with a music minor, is taking on the cultural issues involved with the music, focusing specifically on the mambo craze and a mixture of modern jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms called CuBop. The melding of the musical forms led to important social changes that Bigness is examining.
“Dance became a really important aspect of the social movement during the 1940s and 1950s,” she says. “It was a chance for people of different races to come together and learn how to dance. Social barriers kind of fell apart during this time. They all had a common interest, a common goal, which was to go out and have a good time and learn how to dance.”
Jacoby, who has not declared a major yet but is leaning toward engineering with a minor in music, is charged with combining the different scores and transferring them to digital programs. Since bands were smaller half a century ago, he modified the parts to fit the components and styles of today’s jazz bands.
Jacoby holds a lifelong passion for music that manifested itself in the various instruments he plays, including piano, mandolin, guitar and trumpet. The Community of Scholars project allowed him to add one more important achievement to his personal repertoire.
“I’ve written down some scores before, but this is the first time I’ll actually be able to have written out an entire score and actually see it performed by an entire band,” he says.
For his part, Maurer, a neuroscience major, is examining Latin American poetry in selected boleros (a popular Cuban song and dance type) in order to analyze songs within a broader cultural context. This will aid in understanding the literary style from which these works developed.
“The means of how we interpret romantic texts has changed,” Torres says. “It might not mean the same to us now as it did then. We have to be careful as to how we subject those texts to criticism.”
Finally, Jusino is examining the performance practice of the music. Torres stresses the importance of an historically informed approach to executing these pieces in the correct manner of performance practice. Jusino, a double major in economics and music, will serve as the practical consultant who will bring the Lafayette Jazz Ensemble an interpretation of the music within an historic context.
“It’s a little bit different from what I thought it was going to be,” Jusino says of his experience with the project. “It’s interesting especially to find out that there’s so much stuff they didn’t write in that you just have to infer.”
Torres says the collaborative learning process has been extremely useful for everyone involved and one of the great things about the Lafayette learning experience.
“What it’s done for their study of music in particular is it has made them specialists outside their areas of specialization, which is great as far as I’m concerned and very much in the spirit of liberal arts,” he says. “I think collaborative research is a good thing.”
The Andrew M. Mellon Foundation has awarded Lafayette a $200,000 grant to provide even more opportunities for students to participate in research projects led by faculty in the humanities and social sciences. The grant has established Community of Scholars, in which faculty research an academic topic with a team of students.
Community of Scholars is part of Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, which provides stipends to more than 160 students each year for research with faculty in all divisions of the College. Many of these students share their work through articles in academic journals and/or conference presentations.