Music of Cuba
The music of Cuba, including its instruments, performance, and dance, comprises a large set of unique traditions influenced mostly by west African and European music. Due to the syncretic nature of most of its genres, Cuban music is often considered one of the richest and most influential regional music in the world. For instance, the son cubano merges an adapted Spanish guitar, melody, harmony, and lyrical traditions with Afro-Cuban percussion and rhythms. Almost nothing remains of the original native traditions, since the native population was exterminated in the 16th century.
Since the 19th century, Cuban music has been hugely popular and influential throughout the world. It has been perhaps the most popular form of regional music since the introduction of recording technology. Cuban music has contributed to the development of a wide variety of genres and musical styles around the globe, most notably in Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. Examples include rhumba, Afro-Cuban jazz, salsa, soukous, many West African re-adaptations of Afro-Cuban music, Spanish fusion genres, and a wide variety of genres in Latin America.
Overview
Large numbers of enslaved Africans and European, mostly Spanish, immigrants came to Cuba and brought their own forms of music to the island. European dances and folk musics included zapateo, fandango, paso doble and retambico. Later, northern European forms like minuet, gavotte, mazurka, contradanza, and the waltz appeared among urban whites. There was also an immigration of Chinese indentured laborers later in the 19th century.Fernando Ortiz, the first great Cuban folklorist, described Cuba's musical innovations as arising from the interplay between enslaved Africans settled on large sugar plantations and Spaniards from different regions such as Andalusia and Canary Islands. The enslaved Africans and their descendants made many percussion instruments and preserved rhythms they had known in their homeland. The most important instruments were the drums, of which, there were originally about fifty different types; today only the bongos, congas and batá drums are regularly seen. Also important are the claves, two short hardwood batons, and the cajón, a wooden box, originally made from crates. Claves are still used often, and wooden boxes were widely used during periods when the drum was banned. In addition, there are other percussion instruments in use for African-origin religious ceremonies. Chinese immigrants contributed the corneta china, a Chinese reed instrument still played in the comparsas, or carnival groups, of Santiago de Cuba.
The great instrumental contribution of the Spanish was their guitar, but even more important was the tradition of European musical notation and techniques of musical composition. Hernando de la Parra's archives give some of our earliest available information on Cuban music. He reported instruments including the clarinet, violin and vihuela. There were few professional musicians at the time, and fewer still of their songs survive. One of the earliest is Ma Teodora, supposed to be related to a freed slave, Teodora Ginés of Santiago de Cuba, who was famous for her compositions. The piece is said to be similar to 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century Spanish popular songs and dances.
Cuban music has its principal roots in Spain and West Africa, but over time has been influenced by diverse genres from different countries. Important among these are France, and the United States.
Cuban music has been immensely influential in other countries. It contributed not only to the development of jazz and salsa, but also to the Argentine tango, Ghanaian high-life, West African Afrobeat, Dominican Bachata and Merengue, Colombian Cumbia and Spanish Nuevo flamenco and to the Arabo-Cuban music developed by Michel Elefteriades in the 1990s.
The African beliefs and practices certainly influenced Cuba's music. Polyrhythmic percussion is an inherent part of African music, as the melody is part of European music. Also, in African tradition, percussion is always joined to song and dance, and a particular social setting. The result of the meeting of European and African cultures is that most Cuban popular music is creolized. This creolization of Cuban life has been happening for a long time, and by the 20th century, elements of African belief, music, and dance were well integrated into popular and folk forms.
Classical music
18th and 19th centuries
Among internationally heralded composers of the "serious" genre can be counted the Baroque composer Esteban Salas y Castro, who spent much of his life teaching and writing music for the Church. He was followed in the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba by the priest Juan París. París was an exceptionally industrious man and an important composer. He encouraged continuous and diverse musical events.p181 Aside from rural music and Afro-Cuban folk music, the most popular kind of urban Creole dance music in the 19th century was the contradanza, which commenced as a local form of the English country dance and the derivative French contredanse and Spanish contradanza. While many contradanzas were written for dance, from the mid-century several were written as light-classical parlor pieces for piano. The first distinguished composer in this style was Manuel Saumell, who is sometimes accordingly hailed as the father of Cuban creole musical development. According to Helio Orovio, "After Saumell's visionary work, all that was left to do was to develop his innovations, all of which profoundly influenced the history of Cuban nationalist musical movements."In the hands of his successor, Ignacio Cervantes Kavanagh, the piano idiom related to the contradanza achieved even greater sophistication. Cervantes was called by Aaron Copland a "Cuban Chopin" because of his Chopinesque piano compositions. Cervantes' reputation today rests almost solely upon his famous forty-one Danzas Cubanas, which Carpentier said, "occupy the place that the Norwegian Dances of Grieg or the Slavic Dances of Dvořák occupy in the music of their respective countries". Cervantes' never-finished opera, Maledetto, is forgotten.
In the 1840s, the habanera emerged as a languid vocal song using the contradanza rhythm. The habanera went on to become popular in Spain and elsewhere. The Cuban contradanza/danza was also an important influence on the Puerto Rican danza, which went on to enjoy its own dynamic and distinctive career lasting through the 1930s. In Cuba, in the 1880s the contradanza/danza gave birth to the danzón, which effectively superseded it in popularity.
Laureano Fuentes came from a family of musicians and wrote the first opera to be composed on the island, La Hija de Jefté. This was later lengthened and staged under the title Seila. His numerous works spanned all genres. Gaspar Villate produced abundant and wide-ranging work, all centered on opera.p239 José White, a mulatto of a Spanish father and an Afrocuban mother, was a composer and a violinist of international merit. He learned to play sixteen instruments, and lived, variously, in Cuba, Latin America, and Paris. His most famous work is La Bella Cubana, a habanera.
During the middle years of the 19th century, a young American musician Louis Moreau Gottschalk came to Cuba. Gottschalk's father was a Jewish businessman from London, and his mother a white creole of French Catholic background. Gottschalk was brought up mostly by his black grandmother and nurse Sally, both from Saint-Domingue. He was a piano prodigy who had listened to the music and seen the dancing in Congo Square, New Orleans from childhood. His period in Cuba lasted from 1853 to 1862, with visits to Puerto Rico and Martinique squeezed in. He composed many creolized pieces, such as the habanera Bamboula, Op. 2 , the title referring to a bass Afro-Caribbean drum; El cocoye, a version of a rhythmic melody already present in Cuba; the contradanza Ojos criollos and a version of María de la O, which refers to a Cuban mulatto singer. These numbers made use of typical Cuban rhythmic patterns. At one of his farewell concerts he played his Adiós a Cuba to huge applause and shouts of 'bravo!' Unfortunately, his score for the work has not survived. In February 1860 Gottschalk produced a huge work, La nuit des tropiques, in Havana. The work used about 250 musicians and a choir of 200 singers plus a tumba francesa group from Santiago de Cuba. He produced another huge concert the following year, with new material. These shows probably dwarfed anything seen in the island before or since, and no doubt were unforgettable for those who attended.p147
20th-century classical and art music
Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th a number of composers excel within the Cuban music panorama. They cultivated genres such as the popular song and the concert lied, dance music, the zarzuela and the vernacular theatre, as well as symphonic music. Noteworthy are Hubert de Blanck, José Mauri, Manuel Mauri, José Marín Varona, Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Jorge Anckermann, Luis Casas Romero, Mario Valdés Costa, and others.The work of José Marín Varona links the Cuban musical activity from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In 1896, the composer included in his zarzuela "El Brujo" the first Cuban guajira which has been historically documented.
About this piece, composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes said: "The honest critique of a not very far day will bestow the author of the immortal guajira of "El Brujo" the honor to which he is undoubtedly entitled at any time".
Gonzalo Roig was a major force in the first half of the century. A composer and orchestral director, he qualified in piano, violin and composition theory. In 1922 he was one of the founders of the National Symphony Orchestra, which he conducted. In 1927 he was appointed Director of the Havana School of Music. As a composer he specialized in the zarzuela, a musical theatre form, very popular up to World War II. In 1931 he co-founded a bufo company at the Teatro Martí in Havana. He was the composer of the most well-known Cuban zarzuela, Cecilia Valdés, based on the famous 19th-century novel about a Cuban mulata. It was premiered in 1932. He founded various organizations and wrote frequently on musical topics.
One of the greatest Cuban pianist/composers of the 20th century was Ernesto Lecuona. Lecuona composed over six hundred pieces, mostly in the Cuban vein, and was a pianist of exceptional quality. He was a prolific composer of songs and music for stage and film. His works consisted of zarzuela, Afro-Cuban and Cuban rhythms, suites and many songs that became Latin standards. They include "Siboney", "Malagueña" and "The Breeze And I". In 1942 his great hit "Always in my heart" was nominated for an Oscar for Best Song; it lost to "White Christmas". The Ernesto Lecuona Symphonic Orchestra performed the premiere of Lecuona's Black Rhapsody in the Cuban Liberation Day Concert at Carnegie Hall on 10 October 1943.
Although their music is rarely played today, Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla were Cuba's symphonic revolutionaries during the first half of the 20th century. They both played a part in Afrocubanismo: the movement in black-themed Cuban culture with origins in the 1920s, and extensively analysed by Fernando Ortiz.
Roldan, born in Paris to a Cuban mulatta and a Spanish father, came to Cuba in 1919 and became the concert-master of the new Orquesta Sinfónica de La Habana in 1922. There he met Caturla, at sixteen a second violin. Roldan's compositions included Overture on Cuban themes, and two ballets: La Rebambaramba and El milagro de Anaquille. There followed a series of Ritmicas and Poema negra and Tres toques . In Motivos de son he wrote eight pieces for voice and instruments based on the poet Nicolás Guillén's set of poems with the same title. His last composition was two Piezas infantiles for piano. Roldan died at 38 of a disfiguring facial cancer.
After his student days, Caturla lived all his life in the small central town of Remedios, where he became a lawyer to support his growing family. His Tres danzas cubanas for symphony orchestra was first performed in Spain in 1929. Bembe was premiered in Havana the same year. His Obertura cubana won first prize in a national contest in 1938. Caturla was murdered at 34 by a young gambler.
Founded in 1942 under the guidance of José Ardévol, a Catalan composer established in Cuba since 1930, the "Grupo de Renovación Musical" served as a platform for a group of young composers to develop a proactive movement with the purpose of improving and literally renovating the quality of the Cuban musical environment. During its existence from 1942 to 1948, the group organized numerous concerts at the Havana Lyceum in order to present their avant-garde compositions to the general public and fostered within its members the development of many future conductors, art critics, performers and professors. They also started a process of investigation and reevaluation of the Cuban music in general, discovering the outstanding work of Carlo Borbolla and promoting the compositions of Saumell, Cervantes, Caturla and Roldán. The "Grupo de Renovación Musical" included the following composers: Hilario González, Harold Gramatges, Julián Orbón, Juan Antonio Cámara, Serafín Pro, Virginia Fleites, Gisela Hernández, Enrique Aparicio Bellver, Argeliers León, Dolores Torres and Edgardo Martín. Other contemporary Cuban composers that were little or no related at all to the "Groupo de Renovación Musical" were: Aurelio de la Vega, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, Alfredo Diez Nieto and Natalio Galán.
Although, in Cuba, many composers have written both classical and popular creole types of music, the distinction became clearer after 1960, when the regime frowned on popular music and closed most of the night-club venues, whilst providing financial support for classical music rather than creole forms. From then on, most musicians have kept their careers on one side of the invisible line or the other. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, a new crop of classical musicians came onto the scene. The most important of these is guitarist Leo Brouwer, who have made significant contributions to the technique and repertoire of the modern classical guitar, and has been the director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba. His directorship in the early 1970s of the "Grupo de Experimentacion Sonora del ICAIC" was instrumental in the formation and consolidation of the Nueva trova movement.
Other important composers from the early post-revolution period that began in 1959 were: Carlos Fariñas and Juan Blanco, a pioneer of "concrete" and "electroacoustic music" in Cuba.
Closely following the early post-revolution generation, a group of young composers started to attract the attention of the public that attended classical music concerts. Most of them had obtained degrees in reputable Schools outside the country thanks to scholarships granted by the government, like Sergio Fernández Barroso, that received a post-graduate degree from the Superior Academy of Music in Prague, and Roberto Valera, who studied with Witold Rudziński and Andrzej Dobrowolski in Poland. Three other composers belong to this group: Calixto Alvarez, Carlos Malcolm and Héctor Angulo.
In 1962, the North American composer Federico Smith arrives in Havana. He embraced the Cuban nation as his own country and became one of the most accomplished musicians living and working in Cuba at that time. He remained in Cuba until his death, and made an important contribution to the Cuban musical patrimony.
During the early 1970s, a group of musicians and composers, most of them graduated from the National School of Arts and the Havana Conservatory, gathered around an organization recently created by the government as the junior section of UNEAC, the Brigada Hermanos Saíz. Some of its member were composers Juan Piñera, Flores Chaviano, Armando Rodríguez Ruidíaz, Danilo Avilés, Magaly Ruiz, Efraín Amador Piñero and José Loyola. Other contemporary composers less involved with the organization were José María Vitier, Julio Roloff, and Jorge López Marín.
After the Cuban Revolution, many future Cuban composers emigrated at a very young age and developed most of their careers outside the country. Within this group are the composers Tania León, Orlando Jacinto García, Armando Tranquilino, Odaline de la Martinez, José Raul Bernardo, Jorge Martín and Raul Murciano.