November 25th, 2009
Ulloa to perform at Texas State

Juanita Ulloa, world renowned vocalist, will perform at Texas State.

BY HAP MANSFIELD
SCENE EDITOR

Juanita Ulloa, the internationally known singer/composer and faculty member at Texas State, will perform in the concert, “Latina American Tapestry” on Dec. 4. The performance will be at the music building recital hall on the campus.

Ulloa will perform classical and folk songs from Latin America and Spain, highlighting rarely heard songs from Mexico, Spain, Chile, and Peru.  She is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Latin American music and Hispanic vocal styles.

“At the School of Music, we are able to bring together an amazing collection of songs in a ‘tapestry-like’ repertoire,” said Ulloa. “We are excited to share for the first time in the United States, through Texas State.”

Ulloa’s commitment to the traditional forms of mariachi/ranchera music are tempered by her desire to give women a chance to stretch their talents out in the genre.  Notoriously male dominated mariachi music is slowly assenting. It is becoming less rare to see women actively involved in the singing and writing of mariachi music.  In fact, the pop singer Linda Ronstadt came from a family full of mariachi musicians and her singing cadences and tones are taken from the form.

Ulloa spent more than eight years singing traditional opera around the world but seems magnetically drawn to her musical heritage. It is for this reason that she is often referred to as  the “High Priestess of Operachi,” as she blends both opera and mariachi into a moving technique for singing traditional music.

In addition to her CD emphasizing the “operachi” form, “Mujeres y Mariachi” (Women and Mariachi), she has another release emphasizing women composers,  “Mujeres” (Women). Realizing that music is one of the easiest things to remember, she also broke new ground by releasing “Canta Conmigo” (Sing with me) and “Canta me son” (sing my song). These are not only fun for children and families to sing along with but also teach a fair amount of Spanish and proper pronunciation in addition to introducing the mariachi/ranchera form. The CDs have won a number of awards from parenting organizations, the most recent being the Disney iParenting Media Award.

Ulloa, who received a bachelor’s degree in Music from Yale, studied at California-Berkeley for her masters and did some post graduate training at the conservatory in Nice, France.  In addition to teaching music at Texas State, she is also a  professor of Hispanic vocal music and ethnomusiclogy at San Antonio’s Northwest Vista College.

Tickets for the event are $5 general admission, $3 for students. More information is available at www.juanitamusic.com or email Ulloa at jul2@txstate.edu.