Alejo Carpentier was also a music scholar and music critic, author of works that sparked the birth of a new literature in Latin America, such as The Kingdom of This World or The Century of Enlightenment. The result is this La Música en Cuba, written in 1946 and surprisingly hitherto unpublished in Spain, from which the publishing house Libros del Kultrum successfully rescued it.
The author sets out to tell how the history of music in Cuba developed until the middle of the 20th century, starting with the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Carpentier traces the historical evolution of Cuban music without neglecting the most important political events such as Cuban independence and revolution. Always try to place the phenomenon of music in its historical setting, never losing sight of the social, economic or demographic factor that is so essential to understanding the evolution of music and sound folklore in a country that has undergone multiple migrations.
In Music in Cuba, Carpentier examines and explores both the evolution of cultured music and the most popular music that has brought the island musical fame: habanera, guaracha, rumba, conga, danzón and finally. has; It also examines some dances such as contradanza and comparison that contribute to giving it rhythm and visualizing it.
Carpentier patiently studied the cathedral archives (mainly Santiago and Havana), the chapter records of churches and town halls, church cabinets, handwritten documents, private libraries, antique bookstores.
In 1582 in Santiago de Cuba there was a small orchestra of two to five players, a Sevillian cello player named Pascual de Ochoa, and two free Dominican black women, sisters Micaela and Teodora Ginés. From its beginning, music in the 16th century ruled out racial discrimination and enjoyed mixing blacks and whites. Theodora was famous for her songs, and one of the Son de Má Teodora came to us.
Esteban Salas y Castro, the first Cuban composer whose work reached us in the 18th century, worked in Cuba.
In the 19th century, Carpentier says: “Music was a highly respected profession for blacks because they placed themselves at the top of their chances of climbing the social ladder.” Blacks and whites made the same compositions, but the blacks added a liveliness, an “emphasis, something without writing, something uplifting.” But in the first half of the century black white music made music and enriched it with a sense of rhythm. We will have to wait until the end of the century for the ancestral music of Africa, hidden in the barracks, in the minds of slaves and freedmen, to come out of the esoteric and infiltrate into dance.
Finally a regret and a hope. Lamentation is the “enormous damage” of world fashion to Cuban popular music when local writers yielded to New York or Paris’ demands for less complex rhythms and a more commercial style, and orchestras like Xavier’s Cugat were responsible for a spillover. large scale.
But fortunately there is a town, and hope it is, a town “resistant to foreign influences who continue to participate in dances where they are invited to pull out the sweet potato as the firewood crumbles.” The suburban and town’s Creole continues to produce music, their folklore more alive than ever.
Source: Informacion
