LECTURES

Presented by the festival artists, MIGF lectures provide students and all community members opportunities to expand their understanding of a variety of musical subjects. Each lecture is free and open to public.

In the first lecture of the festival, Amanda Kaya will present Authenticity and Social Media. In an age where everyone is curating the ideal online image, how do you stay genuine? Through her own experiences navigating the digital landscape, Amanda explores what it means to find your real voice in a world built on filters, trends, and algorithms. As she explores authenticity, she’ll share practical strategies for building a social media presence that reflects who you truly are and connect you to wider audiences.

In his lecture The Guitar as a Composition Tool, guitarist-composer Federico Bonacossa will explore how the guitar can serve not only as a performance instrument but also as a sandbox for composers. Participants will be guided through methods of generating, shaping, and notating ideas. We will also discuss how to transcribe and adapt guitar-based sketches for other instruments and ensembles. Topics will include idiomatic writing, harmonic expansion, and practical approaches to transforming fretboard-based ideas into flexible material suitable for a wide variety of instrumental combinations.

Virtuoso guitarist and composer Luis Zea will present a lecture on “Practical Harmony for Classical Guitarists” to help students develop certain practical skills that can enrich their musical understanding.

Bansuri virtuoso and composer Deepak Ram will lecture on the Indian Raga and Tala. He will demonstrate various kinds of traditional melodic and rhythmic modes and how they are associated with different emotional moods and times of the day. He will also discuss how to use them in improvisations.

Guitarist, composer, and pedagogue Dr. Mesut Özgen will present a lecture on Designing Technical Training Programs. In this lecture, Dr. Özgen will discuss the bio-mechanical principals of guitar technique and how to design short- and long-term training programs for guitarists based on exercise physiology.

Early music specialist Liamna Pestana‘s lecture The Lost-Link Guitar: Bridging the Baroque and Romantic Eras explores the six-course guitar as the true “classical-romantic” instrument—the missing link between the baroque guitar and the 19th-century romantic guitar. Often overlooked in guitar history, the six-course guitar carried forward techniques and traditions from the baroque while shaping the aesthetics that would inspire classical and romantic repertoire. Through historical context, and repertoire examples, this presentation reveals how the six-course guitar not only connected eras but also influenced composers in Europe and across the Atlantic.

Download the 2026 MIGF Schedule of Events

Download the  2026 MIGF Program Book

2026 MIGF Festival Pass is available to attend all festival events at a single reduced price:

$100 general, $70 senior/FIU faculty, staff, & alumni, $30 student
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