Today – April 4 – at 2pm, local time, in the heart of Southern Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, in Bernal City, Quilmes, Argentina:

Mañana jueves 4, a las 14 hs, nos visitará Jim Schaeffer, director emérito del Center for Contemporary Opera, para compartir un panorama de la nueva ópera, contarnos de sus experiencias y conocer la producción local. La charla es abierta, en el aula 25, de la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, en la Licenciatura en composición con medios electroacústicos. Para aprovechar!

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Jim Schaeffer has served as the Center for Contemporary Opera’s General and Artistic Director since October 2008. Prior to that, from 2005-2008, he was director of Long Leaf Opera in … North Carolina, the country’s only opera company dedicated to fully staged operas originally written in English. Between the two companies, Schaeffer produced and/or developed ninety operas, the overwhelming majority by living American composers.

A retired Air Force senior officer, Schaeffer served in a variety of flying, logistics and command assignments while on active duty, including command of the largest supply-chain organization in the USAF. His final assignment was as the NATO liaison officer during the siege of Sarajevo where he conveyed NATO’s positions to the warring factions and the United Nations. Following retirement, he entered the electronics industry and was senior partner of Trouvere, Inc. of Cambridge, MA, and president of Spectron Electronics, Los Angeles. He was also on the Board of Directors of Sonus Research and Design, Providence, RI and the Duke Tower Hotel, Durham, N.C.

Schaeffer holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Texas and a Master of Arts in Human Resource Development from Webster University, St. Louis. He was a principal bassoonist of the orchestras of Virginia Beach, Montgomery, Alabama and Cambridge, England. His compositions have been performed at the American Dance Festival among other venues. For nineteen years, Schaeffer was an adjunct professor at North Carolina Wesleyan College in the departments of business and philosophy.

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About the Center for Contemporary Opera

For more than three decades, the CCO has been the leading opera company devoted exclusively to the development and production of modern operas, seen in both the United States and abroad producing a remarkable body of work including staging some 59 contemporary operas including more than 15 premieres as well as 55 operas in development.

Founded in 1982 by Richard Marshall and Robert Ward, CCO continues its mission to produce and develop new opera and music-theater works; revive rarely seen American operas written after World War II; promote an interest in new operatic and music-theater culture among the public; and to produce contemporary opera outside of the United States. The Center for Contemporary Opera has also produced seven commercial recordings, and seven European performances – the most recent in December 2016 of a Louis Andriessen double bill of Odysseus’ Women and Anaïs Nin staged in Amsterdam

(reprinted from a FB post by Patricia Martinez)