Lyceum Concert Series Features World-Renowned Ethnomusicologist

by Lauren Venegas, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805

The Baylor University School of Music will continue the Lyceum Concert Series with a lecture by musicologist Dr. Brenda Romero at 4:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, in the Meadows Recital Hall in the Glennis McCrary Music Building on the Baylor campus.
Romero is an associate professor and coordinator of ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her research specialty is the folk music of the native peoples of New Mexico. She has worked extensively on the pantomimed Matachines music and dance and other New Mexican folk music genres that reflect both Spanish and Indian origins. Since 1998, she has extended her fieldwork and research on Matachines to Mexico and in January 2007 to Colombia, and has published various articles on the subject.
Romero has appeared on regional television productions as performer and narrator, including a 2008 PBS special on John Donald Robb, who collected most of the songs she sings. She also provided English translations and research notes for the 1987 Elektra recording Canciones de Mi Padre by Linda Ronstadt.
In 2000, she was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship to conduct field research on the Matachines music and dance in Mexico. She received the 2005 Society for American Music's "Sight and Sound" award, a subvention toward the production of her 2008 CD, Canciones de mis patrias: Songs of My Homelands, Early New Mexican Folk Songs.
"Dr. Romero's lecture will introduce the audience to some little-known folk traditions of the southwestern United States, as well as northern Mexico," said Richard Veit, concert and promotions manager for the Baylor School of Music. "Students will be exposed to a style of music that they, most likely, have never heard before, so it should be a learning experience in its purest sense."

Veit said The Lyceum Concert Series was initiated at Baylor in 1976, and since 1980 it has been funded annually through the generosity of the Meadows Foundation of Dallas. "The focus of the Lyceum Concert Series is on education," said Veit.

All events are free and open to the public.

For more information about the Lyceum Concert Series, call the Baylor School of Music at (254) 710-4200.