Maria Torres Melgares

Program Coordinator

(she/her)

Maria Torres Melgares has earned acclaim for her performances marked by "enticing passion and melancholic yearning" (Tuesday Musicale). A Spanish saxophonist deeply rooted in her Hispanic heritage, she thrives in musical endeavors that connect cultures and nationalities. Her debut album, recorded in July 2023 with her chamber group Flieben Duo, is the core of the upcoming documentary "Transatlantic Connection," recorded by DeCara Films, narrating her musical journey and the process of her CD recording.

As a soloist, she has collaborated with The Cleveland Orchestra as well as performed with the Long Island Concert Orchestra, Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra, Symphonic Band of the Police of Public Security of Portugal, the String Orchestra of the University of Iowa, the New World Symphony, and the ICC String Orchestra. She has received over twenty international prizes in solo and chamber music competitions, including the 1st Prize in the Solo Collegiate Competition of the North American Saxophone Alliance 2024, the prize AIE from ACIMC Competition 2023, 1st Prize in the Vandoren Emerging Artists Competition 2022, 1st Prize in the VIII "Concurso Internacional de Saxofone Vitor Santos" (Portugal, 2021), and 1st Prize of the 94th Concours International Léopold Bellan (France, 2020), among others.

Currently based in Iowa City, Maria serves as the saxophone teaching assistant instructor at the University of Iowa, where she is also pursuing her Doctorate in Musical Arts in saxophone performance, chamber music entrepreneurship, and recording engineering, supported by the Güell Foundation. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a Master of Music degree in saxophone performance and certificates in Arts Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Previously, she earned her Bachelor’s Degree at the Conservatory of Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, with the support of the Fundació de Música Ferrer-Salat.

Authored by Maria Torres Melgares

The Texture of Memory: Pervin Saket's Project to Preserve Parsi Heritage

Monday, October 27, 2025

Imagine a small boat on large, dark sea. Imagine families of refugees, with small children and smaller bundles of belongings. Imagine them braving storms and starvation and shipwreck. It sounds like something from yesterday’s news report, but this historical exodus took place between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, when Arab Muslims conquered the once-expansive Persian Zoroastrian empire. Faced with religious persecution, groups of Zoroastrians escaped in boats and landed on the shores of Gujarat in India. Pervin Saket’s project as an Obermann International Fellow focuses on this community, her community, in modern-day India. Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, is now practiced by only a handful of people, and that too is threatened by extinction. Saket says, “In the version I learned on my grandmother’s lap, the Parsis (literally “people of Pars or Persia”) were taken to the local king when they washed up on the shores of Gujarat. Suspicious of the foreigners, he showed them a bowl of milk filled to the brim, to indicate his land was full. The Parsi leader responded by sprinkling a few grains of sugar on the milk. I suspect that the king had a fondness for good metaphors."

From the Hank Lab to the Streets of Romania: A Conversation with Patricia Marga

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

In a nation confronting one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in Europe, the simple act of crossing the street is a critical public health challenge. This issue is the driving force behind the work of Patricia Marga, a PhD student in public health from Romania. She's on a mission to tackle this crisis by exploring how virtual reality can be harnessed to study and improve pedestrian safety for the most vulnerable: elderly citizens crossing busy city streets and children navigating crowded school zones. Her pursuit of research methods on injury prevention brought her to the University of Iowa this fall as an Obermann International Fellow.

A Language in Motion: Jordan Gigout and Dance Notation

Monday, October 20, 2025

How do you write down a dance? To capture the body’s expressions, scholars have long turned to Kinetography Laban, a system for recording and analyzing movement that uses abstract symbols to define the direction of movement and the parts of the body that perform it, among other parameters. But what happens when that language of symbols is itself a historical artifact, reflecting the biases of its time? Can a system built on a specific vision of the body ever truly capture the full diversity of human movement, or does it inevitably shape what it records? This is the critical and creative realm of Jordan Gigout, a dancer and dance-notation scholar from Essen, Germany. His research explores how this historical language for movement can continue to evolve and inspire new ways of thinking about choreography today. This fall, we welcomed him as an Obermann International Fellow.

maria-torresmelgares@uiowa.edu

319-335-4034