FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 22, 2014
The IU Jacobs School of Music’s Latin American Music Center staff.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – The Latin American Music Center at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music has received the university's 2014 Latino Faculty and Staff Council Distinguished Group/Event Award for its events and concert series in the 2013-14 academic year.
The Latino Faculty and Staff Council Latino Awards recognize important contributions by Indiana University undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff. Through these awards, the council wishes to distinguish and empower individuals whose efforts have contributed to a positive campus environment in tandem with helping support retention of Latinos at IU. The awards are also meant to highlight exemplary academic and professional work.
The Latin American Music Center will accept the award for Distinguished Group/Event for its participation in service, mentoring and promoting diversity initiatives that have enhanced and supported Latinos on campus. The award also recognizes individuals, groups or events that have developed awareness/programs in the area of culture, arts, health, economy, language or education.
"The LAMC team is quite honored to receive this important recognition, which we accept with great enthusiasm and humility," said Erick Carballo, interim director of the center. "We have had an extremely productive year and are quite satisfied with both the continuation of well-established activities that the Bloomington community has come to expect and look forward to, and the introduction of new ones that have had a very warm welcome."
Some of the center's events include the Salón Latino–Chamber Music Series, focusing on chamber music from Latin America and initiated in 2012 during Carballo's tenure, and the Annual Latin Valentine Concert. In its fifth edition, this year's Valentine concert introduced Bloomington audiences to Latin American zarzuela—a staged musical theater genre of Spanish origin that found a receptive audience worldwide during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Other offerings include the Latin American Music Recording Competition, offered every spring and leading to a concert and a professionally produced CD recorded by the winner, and the Latin American Music Center Guitar Ensemble, featured every semester since the early 2000s with the Latin American Popular Music Ensemble and as an independent group.
In addition, the center’s Guest Lecture Series offers presentations from distinguished performers and scholars who come to visit the center, such as Fulbright Scholar and pianist Cristina Capperlli-Gerling, singer and guitarist Tomás Lozano, early music scholar David Castelo and Mexican guitar octect Sicarú.
The Latin American Music Center team will receive the award on Friday, April 25, at Oliver Winery.