BIO

Angelina Tallaj is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at The Graduate Center of CUNY where she is the recipient of the MAGNET fellowship. Ms. Tallaj has presented her research on Dominican music at many conferences, and her publications include “‘A Country That Ain’t Really Belong To Me’: Dominicanyorks, Identity and Popular Music.” She has been featured on the radio series Hip Deep, was an Artist/Scholar in residence at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, and was invited to speak at El Museo del Barrio and Baruch College. She is also a concert pianist who has recorded and performed throughout the United States and Latin America.

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Every August 10th, about 800,000 pilgrims begin a five-day pilgrimage to the Basilica of the Virgin of Altagracia in Higüey, Dominican Republic. In this paper, I will show some interesting aspects of this pilgrimage’s economy that, while not unique to this pilgrimage, become much more tangible because of the presence of bulls as alms. I will continue, through the study of the music making and ritual, to show the role that music (and especially improvisation) plays in the social and devotional aspects of this pilgrimage. By examining the complex web of assumptions and expressions that contains the acts of music production, we can gain some insight into the significance of the pilgrimage as a whole.

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