Students of Dr. Luke Ellard and Dr. Anthony Taylor

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, a free concert of works by Hispanic and Latin American composers on Friday, September 15 at 7:30 pm in Tew Recital Hall. After the concert, the audience will be invited to take part in a Salsa workshop! If you would like to participate, send a short clip of your art to Angelita or Patricia by September 8. 

Salsa music’s soneos are improvisatory spaces in which lead singers (soneros) perform impressive feats of vocal pyrotechnics in cyclic alteration with a choral refrain. This paper develops a set of tools for interpreting soneos, inviting analysts to examine the sung stories of salsa music as a multivalent tapestry woven of sound, language, and gesture. Centering venerated soneros like Benny More, Celia Cruz, and Ismael River, Dr. Mitchell explores standard ways of manipulating vocal styles, melodic shapes, rhythmic gestures, and ensemble relationships on the fly during a soneo improvisation. These techniques combine with the cyclic repetition schemes and linear intensification processes scripted by the arrangement, giving rise to unique energetic shapes, which an analyst may then bring into expressive dialogue with the song’s gestural and linguistic media.