Lecturer Jaume Ayats, elected member of the National Council for Culture and Arts

Jaume Ayats i Abeyà, ethnomusicology lecturer at the UAB, was recently elected by the Parliament of Catalonia as one of the seven full members of the National Council of Culture and the Arts (CoNCA), for a duration of five years. In addition to Jaume Ayats, journalist and cultural critic Tania Adam also became a member of the council, and together they will be taking over from Edmon Colomer and Miriam Porté, who stepped down for professional reasons. The candidatures of the new councillors of the CoNCA, presented by the president of the Catalan government, were accepted by absolute majority.

Jaume Ayats i Abeyà is musician and teaches ethnomusicology at the UAB. He earned his PhD in Art History, with a specialisation in Musicology, from the UAB, and holds a BA in Catalan Philology from the UB. He is also a violin teacher at the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona and was director of the Barcelona Museum of Music from 2012 to 2020.

He also attended classes on ethnomusicology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the expression of sounds created by crowds in urban Europe and has conducted research into Catalan oral music with the Folkloric Research Group of Osona. He has worked as an orchestra instumentalist (with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia, and the Vallès Symphony Orchestra). 

He commissioned the exhibition on voices of the Mediterrean, Veus de la Mediterrània, at the Museum of the Mediterranean, and is author alongside Joaquim Rabaseda of the documentary Veus i sons de la Mediterrània. He directs research projects conducted by the group "Les músiques en les societats contemporànies" (MUSC) at the UAB and collaborates in courses offered by the Catalonia College of Music, ESMUC. He also sings with the music band La Nova Euterpe.

From March to June 2018 he was visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he taught the subject Catalan Multipart Singing in Modern and Contemporary History: from Religious Brotherhoods to Taverns and Choir Societies, while he occupied the Chair Joan Coromines.

Support and promotion of artistic and cultural creations

The CoNCA was created to participate in the design of policies providing support to artistic and cultural creations and to promote these creations; to offer assessment to the Catalan government in terms of cultural politics; to promote dialogue between the world of creation in the cultural and artistic sectors and the government's administrations and, when necessary, to act as a mediator; to assess cultural facilities and public funding in matters of artistic and cultural creations through audits which are based on the promotion of culture and its social return; and to guarantee the presence and protection of the native languages of Catalonia and Aran, and equal opportunities between men and women in the field of artistic and cultural creations.