Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article aims to analyze the relationship between the versatile Valencian musician Eduardo López-Chavarri Marco (1871-1970) and the Iturbi brothers: Amparo (1898-1969) and José (1895-1980), Valencian pianists of great international renown in the first half of the 20th century. The main content of this work is based on Chavarri’s correspondence, focusing on the letters sent by José and Amparo. Thanks to these materials we obtain the information and, above all, the type of relationship established between the Iturbi brothers and Chavarri in the period from 1911 to 1965. Letters from other correspondents of Chavarri and some writings of the composer himself are also used, which broaden the panorama of such interaction. After the study is carried out, a double relationship is observed: a positive influence of Chavarri towards the brothers and, later on, of Amparo and José towards the Valencian composer. In addition, it is an interaction that covers various fields, due to the polyhedral character of the figure of Chavarri.

This article studies the forms of representation of jazz as an African-American tradition. Specifically, it focuses on its socio-cultural and political implications, based on the figure of Louis Armstrong as a representative of the kind face of classic jazz. Jazz was a marginal musical genre in its early days, and it acquired a prominent mainstream presence through its integration into the cultural industries, raising questions about the ways in which it is represented. First, we address the multidimensional nature of music in relation to a dynamic notion of the imaginary. Furthermore, we investigate the politics of representation employed in popular music through classic jazz, considering ethnic or racial identity and the notions of pose and cut. Furthermore, we carry out a socio-semiotic analysis of High Society (Charles Walters, 1956), a Hollywood musical in which Armstrong plays himself.

The main aim of the present work is to examine in depth the work that catapulted the artistic life of the Ontinyent composer Rafael Martínez Valls (1895-1946): the zarzuela Cançó d’amor i de guerra (1926). The aim is not to provide an analytical work on it, but to relate historical, musical and biographical data that help us understand, to a certain extent, how this work achieved fame. To this end, we have examined both the libretto and the scores of this zarzuela and, to a lesser extent, of others –such as Legió d’honor– with similar themes. We have also studied various interviews, reviews and publications in the press of the time, and compiled information on his life and musical career. Finally, we have reflected on how all this influenced the creation of Cançó d’amor i de guerra.

The present work intends to show the intersemiotic narrative dialogue between Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Cervantes’ Don Quixote from an intertextual, transmedial and historically determined perspective. Falla’s opera is a lyrical-scenic adaptation of an episode from Don Quixote. Just like we find in Don Quixote different quotations and allusions to other literary works, we also find in Falla’s opera quotations from the Spanish musical tradition of Don Quixote’s time, together with quotations from earlier times. These quotations accomplish different functions. Among them, we consider particularly interesting the composer’s intent to adapt not only the content of  Cervantes’ story, but also his writing style, his literary strategies. In that respect, Falla’s opera proves to be a privileged object of study of narrative rewriting and adaptation across media.

This research article analyzes how the 2008 financial crisis is represented in the Greek cinema of the so-called Greek Weird Wave. It includes films such as Dogtooth (Kynódontas, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009), Alps (Alpeis, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011), Wasted Youth (Wasted Youth, Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel, 2011), Boy Eating The Bird’s Food (To agori troei to fagito tou pouliou, Ektoras Lygizos, 2012), The Lobster (The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) and Amerika Square (Plateia Amerikis, Yannis Sakaridis, 2016) framed in the period between the years 2009-2016 (i.e., in the midst of the economic recession). For this purpose, starting from textual analysis and focusing especially on three of the most representative films such as Amerika Square, Wasted Youth and Dogtooth, we analyze the various counter-hegemonic narratives constructed by the Greek film industry, narratives that we consider transgressive in relation to the multiple crises that are projected on screen.

Frank Zappa stays in the edge of 20th century as a giant in the History of Music, surpassing step by step a prejudice that places him in the ambient of popular music merchandising. Zappa is a serious composer and a thinker that is able to process his own time, by making a rather elaborate and unique artistic proposal. This work focuses on the singularities of his music in its own context.

During her Spanish tour at the beginning of 1911, Wanda Landowska played a recital in Valencia, where she also had the opportunity to meet the young José Iturbi, who was to become her disciple from that moment. This paper starts from this pedagogical encounter and, through a reflection based on the theoretical principles that guided instrumental interpretation in the mid-eighteenth century and the hemerographic analysis of some of the Valencian newspapers of the time, analyzes two performative proposals of the Sonata K27 by Domenico Scarlatti from two historical audiovisual recordings of both artists.

Introducción al Dossier.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a sort of reagent (in the photographic sense) that, from a communication point of view, has positivized the image of a viral nature that is not that of the coronavirus, but that of the Internet and the digital media system itself.

This paper discusses informational and interpretative aspects of large-scale crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and Climate Change. Laypeople might have difficulties interpreting information about «how a vaccine or the climate works» or «why a specific medication is safe and some particular research results are reliable» once this type of information requires some basic cognitive tools like statistical reasoning. This paper introduces the concept of adaptational lag to explain the general interpretative difficulties involved in abstract and scientific topics, which are basic in the modern complex world, particularly in large-scale crises. Statistics is a recent cultural cognitive development whose learning process in the individual mind is costly and, in many aspects, problematic due to cognitive bias and the automatic and intuitive mode of thinking. In comparative terms, the human mind is prewired to language. Humans are adapted on a genetic level to acquire language. From an adaptational perspective, statistical reasoning is a very different type of cognitive acquisition. In order to establish the concept of adaptational lag on some important contemporary scientific frameworks about the human mind, this article presents a brief comparative study of three cognitive acquisitions: (a) language, (b) written systems, (c) statistics and statistical reasoning. In the case of the human language faculty, the analysis is based on the theoretical framework developed by psychologist Michael Tomasello. In the case of the human capacity to write and read symbols, the analysis is based on the empirical and experimental work developed by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. Finally, the analysis of the difficulties faced by the human mind in dealing with statistical reasoning is based on the «dual process theory» proposed by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The present article argues that the major crises in the Anthropocene – the COVID-19 pandemic and the Climate Change are only two of them – will demand considerable reformation in the modern world epistemic institutions (universities, schools, and press media) to overcome the adaptational lag.