CO-SPONSORED EVENT | Documentary Screening: “A Whole Note”
Michigan Theater (main screening room), 603 E Liberty Street
The opening event of the annual U-M Organ Conference will be a free Michigan Theater screening followed by a live Q&A with the filmmakers on arts entrepreneurship for the carillon & organ, providing SMTD students and the greater community with access to a powerful Portuguese feminist story about family entrepreneurship, institution building, and arts access, all for the love of music. Reserving a seat in advance is recommended.
“Por Quem Os Sinos Tocam” (A Whole Note) is a feature-length film by director Pedro Ramalho Marques, presented in association with the University of Michigan’s Organ Conference “Time Play: Inventing Future Sounds and Scholarship in the Historical Keyboard Realm. The story of the Elias family in Portugal, owners of the largest traveling carillon in the world.
Sisters Ana and Sara Elias dream of building their own mobile carillon, so they can play tower bells without the constraints of the bell tower. They just don’t know how to broach the idea with their father. But Alberto has a plan to make his daughters’ dream come true. Today, they own LVSITANVS, the largest mobile carillon in the world, which they take on a freight truck from one concert to the next. Dreams can be real, heavy, tiring and…very expensive. The Elias family is on the road, but Sara needs to get back to her professorial duties in Canada. Alberto and Ana will continue with LVSITANVS, against all odds, in search of bringing the “heavenly sound of bells to all.”
Followed by a live audience Q&A on “Doing and Researching Arts Entrepreneurship” with Sara Elias, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Victoria, and Ana Elias, Director of the International Center of the Carillon and Organ in Portugal, chaired by Melissa Coppola. This event is supported in part through the School of Music, Theatre & Dance EXCEL Lab and the U-M Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG).
In Portuguese with English subtitles.