By Carlos Fernandez
In a program entitled Songs of Love and War, Zorzal Music Ensemble will present Latin American, Spanish and Sephardic music on Saturday, April 5, 2014 at 7:00 pm at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church located at 177 Princeton-Hightstown Road in Princeton Junction, New Jersey. Admission is free; free-will offerings will be accepted.
Zorzal features a vocal quintet, recorders, guitar, violoncello, and Latin American, Middle Eastern, and African percussion. Performers include Artistic Director Lynn Gumert and local musicians Kate Chen, Carlos Fernandez, Megan Helvering, Doug Helvering, Fumi Horike, Hana Speldova, and Janet Walker.
The program features music from the Middle Ages to the present that address slavery, conquest, and resistance. The first half of the program includes Spanish and Sephardic (Iberian-origin Jewish) songs from the wars in Spain between the Spanish and Moors. The second half focuses on the Spanish conquest of the New World and the capture of the last Inca, Atahualpa, and on the struggles against dictatorships in the latter half of the 20th century in various Latin American countries.
According to Artistic Director Lynn Gumert, “The songs express a range of emotions, from yearning for peace to the sorrows of abandonment and coming to hope for the future. Although many of the texts are somber, much of the music is lively. The pieces from Peru, which were transcribed from oral tradition over 200 years ago, sound remarkably like today’s Andean folk music.”
The concert will also feature songs from the New Song movement, which developed as part of social and political activism in Latin America beginning in the 1960s. According to ethnomusicologist and guitarist Carlos Fernández, “these songs allow us to explore the continuity in musical styles heard in Latin American music through the ages, as well as the evolution of a social awakening among popular artists in Latin America during the late twentieth century.”
For more information, please contact: 609-490-0196.

