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BRAZIL: The Gaze / O Olhar - Twelve Faces in the Red Sertão / Doze Rostos no Sertão Vermelho
Twelve photographs from the northeastern sertão of Brazil — Paraíba and Pernambuco, 2018. Taken by documentary filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley during a journey in search of the region's living musical traditions: forró, birimbau, cavaquinho, samba de roda. A meditation on the gaze, the road, and the faces that stay with you long after the names are gone.
19 hours ago2 min read


Andante: A Musician's Footsteps — The Life and Work of Alberto Soriano.
Review: Andante: Los pasos de un músico. Vida y obra de Alberto Soriano. By Mireya Soriano Editorial Milenio. Spain, 2021.
1 day ago4 min read


Jota Urondo, un cocinero impertinente. A Film by Mariana Erijimovich and Juan Villegas.
Aged beef. Kimchi. Gnocchi with chitterlings. The menu at Urondo Bar does not court trends, nor does it apologize for its stubbornness. It simply is — rooted, specific, unapologetically itself. And that, it turns out, is a political act.
2 days ago2 min read


The Lakota Music Project: A Circle Big Enough for Reconciliation
The Lakota Music Project — a collaboration between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and Lakota and Dakota musicians that is unlike anything else in American cultural life. This is not a guest-spot model, where an indigenous artist appears on stage for a movement and then disappears.
3 days ago4 min read


Michael Slon: Twenty-Five Years Celebration. Old Cabell Hall, University of Virginia
The evening was organized around the idea of America — its founding ideals, its contradictions, its music — and it unfolded with the kind of architectural clarity that only a conductor of long experience can bring to a program. Slon has spent a quarter century building something at UVA that is difficult to name and easy to feel: a choral culture in which students sing not just with technical accomplishment but with genuine understanding of what the music means and where it co
3 days ago2 min read


The Founding Father of American Symphony Nobody Ordered
Douglas Shadle’s recent essay in the New York Times, “It Wasn’t Easy Being a Founding Father of the American Symphony,” presents itself as an act of historical recovery. But the logic of the argument does not hold. And once you begin to trace where it fails, a different picture emerges — one in which the desire to find American origins has led to a fundamental misreading of who Bristow was and what his work actually represents.
5 days ago14 min read


Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Come Alive in a New Production Off-Broadway.
Fanny: A Fantasy in G, Tim McGillicuddy’s new play presented by Off-Brand Opera at the Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York, tells the story of Fanny Mendelssohn — composer, woman, Jew, sister of Felix — and her lifelong struggle to claim her voice in a world not yet prepared to welcome it. McGillicuddy neither sensationalizes nor reaches for false modern parallels. He simply shows what happened, in a parlor, at a piano, over the course of a life. That discipline is the play’s gr
6 days ago7 min read
Vision of Spain: In Documentary Mode. With Soriano, Montes-Bradley and Villalobos in the Rearview Mirror.
There is a room in the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a different story of Spain. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain.
Apr 27 min read


Leon Botstein: On America, Identity, and the Music Nobody Plays
The documentary filmmaker patiently waited for months until the fog of the Epstein's files dissipated to grab an opportunity to seat next to Leon Botstein to discuss what matters to his film on George Bristow. Now, al last, Leon Botstein perspective is part of Live and Music in the Age of Bristow, Montes-Bradley's documentary on 19th Century Music in America.
Apr 114 min read


So Long George Frederick Bristow
I intended to make a biography. The working title was simply George Bristow, and the plan was straightforward: rescue a forgotten American composer from the obscurity into which history had carelessly dropped him, and let audiences discover what they had been missing.
Mar 284 min read


Instruments of a Nation: A Timely Exhibition
Of Thee I Sing traces the country's musical identity through the instruments that shaped it — from Native American traditions and the colonial period through the waves of immigrant innovation that defined the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Mar 272 min read


Ana María Shua y los orígenes de un proyecto continental
A partir de una carta escrita por Ana María Shua en 2002 en apoyo al proyecto Perfiles, este ensayo recorre el origen de una iniciativa que, con el tiempo, se expandió hasta convertirse en un cuerpo de obra documental de alcance continental. Desde Argentina hacia las Américas, el Heritage Film Project explora la memoria cultural a través de artistas, escritores y creadores cuyas historias revelan los vínculos profundos entre identidad, migración y creación.
Mar 254 min read


Carlos María Ocantos: How the Gay Argentine Writer Was Erased from Literary History
This research provides the first comprehensive documentation of systematic homophobic erasure in early 20th-century Latin American letters. Using diplomatic archives, the study reveals how Carlos María Ocantos (1860-1949), despite publishing 37 volumes and earning Royal Spanish Academy recognition, was deliberately excluded from Argentine literary canon due to his sexuality."
Mar 2410 min read


Shakespeare Can't Swim!
That stroke Paul Mescal cuts through the water with in Hamnet has a remarkable history. It traces back to Buenos Aires, where a young English boy first watched local children swim with an overarm technique in the 1860s — knowledge that would eventually cross the Pacific and become the modern freestyle. One of the most quietly powerful moments in an Oscar-worthy performance, carrying centuries of borrowed, forgotten expertise.
Mar 164 min read


Understanding Cuba’s History Through Its Stained Glass
The global success of Buena Vista Social Club revealed the extraordinary power of Cuban music to captivate audiences around the world. Yet Cuba's cultural identity extends far beyond its musical traditions. CUBA: Through the Looking Glass seeks to expand that conversation by exploring the island's contributions to the visual and decorative arts, where architecture, craftsmanship, and color play an equally compelling role.
Mar 155 min read


The National Library in Buenos Aires Honors Alberto Laiseca
More than twenty years after it was made, the work Alberto Laiseca and I created together is receiving a new moment of recognition. My documentary Deliciosas Perversiones Polimorfas will be screened at the Auditorio Jorge Luis Borges of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires, as part of the exhibition “Laiseca, el iniciado.”
Mar 112 min read


Piazzolla, Amelita, my Mother and Me.
Astor Piazzolla changed the way we felt about Buenos Aires, not just tango, but the city itself.
Mar 42 min read


Tango, Vice, and Life After Midnight in Buenos Aires and New York.
In Tango After Midnight: Music, Vice, and Memory in Buenos Aires and New York, I reflect on growing up near the legendary tango club Caño 14 and draw unexpected parallels with nineteenth-century New York. From smoky tango dives in Buenos Aires to the saloons and dance halls of the Lower East Side, music after midnight shaped cultural identity in both cities. Classically trained musicians moved between elite institutions and shadowy nightlife, blurring the boundaries between h
Feb 273 min read
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