La Jornada: They will celebrate 160 years of the National Conservatory of Music with Carmina Burana

The National Conservatory of Music (CNM) will celebrate its 160 years tomorrow with Carmina Buranaby Carl Orff, performed by the Clarinet Orchestra and the Institution’s Choir in the Silvestre Revueltas auditorium.

The celebration will extend throughout the rest of the year with artistic and academic activities dedicated to reviewing the trajectory of the team and showing the evolution that musical training has followed in Mexico.

For Gladys Zamora, director of the CNM, the anniversary also represents an opportunity to reflect on the present and future of artistic education, she stated in an interview with The Day.

“The National Conservatory of Music is the school with the greatest tradition of training artists, musicians, performers, teachers and composers in our country. One of its virtues has been to dialogue with that tradition.

“Our students know the artistic history of the country, but they also respond to a moment that requires interdisciplinary artists, familiar with technological tools and the diverse musical scenes of Mexico.”

The anniversary programming responds to that same vision: opening the doors of the campus to share the daily work that is done in the classrooms and the repertoires with which the students prepare. One of its purposes will be to show how new generations learn.

“We want the public to know the history of the Conservatory, but also how our students learn, what repertoires they work with and the plurality with which they are being trained today.”

The recovery of the Mexican repertoire will be another of the axes of the celebration. For the director, the current moment is no longer about rescuing forgotten names, but about returning these works to musical life.

“More than talking about forgotten musicians, we are in a moment in which the Mexican repertoire is being rescued, recognized and reinterpreted. There is a very important effort to edit these works, remove them from the archives and put them back on stage.”

Along these lines, there will be activities dedicated to Guadalupe Olmedo, the first female composer to graduate from the campus, and Alba Herrera y Ogazón, pioneer of Mexican musicology and author of the first history of music written in the country.

“Their names no longer only appear in concerts or programs; they are also part of our professors’ classes. Even the outdoor auditorium is named after Conservatory Women to make that genealogy visible.”

Founded in 1866 at the initiative of the Mexican Philharmonic Society, the CNM was the first national institution where women could obtain a professional degree in music. Among its teachers and graduates are Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Manuel M. Ponce and José Pablo Moncayo.

Among other events, there will be a colloquium on the sonic history of the campus, activities with the Center for Experimentation and Production of Contemporary Music, the participation of the Tambuco ensemble with a concert and an operatic production developed together with the Higher School of Music, the National School of Theater Art and the Conservatory itself.

The choice of Carmina Burana It responds to the interest of bringing the Conservatory closer to people who do not frequent concert music.

“It is a work that invites people to come to the Conservatory. We want people who may have never visited this space to come and see it.”

The main challenge, he considered, is to respond to an increasingly broad professional scope without losing sight of the identity of the team.

“Our students will find a much more diverse artistic field than that of previous generations. The challenge is to know our sonic history and allow that tradition to dialogue with the present.”

The commemorative concert will be held tomorrow at 5 p.m. in the Silvestre Revueltas auditorium, located in the CNM, at Presidente Masaryk 582, Polanco neighborhood. Admission will be free.