Music in Cuba

By Alejo Carpentier

Book Overview

In the wake of the Buena Vista Social Club, the world has rediscovered the rich musical tradition of Cuba. A unique combination of popular and elite influences, the music of this island nation has fascinated since the golden age of the son -- that New World aural collision of Africa and Europe that made Cuban music the rage in Paris, New York, and Mexico beginning in the 1920s.Originally published in 1946 and never before available in an English translation, Music in Cuba is not only the best and most extensive study of Cuban musical history, it is a work of literature in its own right. Drawing on such primary documents as obscure church circulars, dog-eared musical scores pulled from attics, and the records of the Spanish colonial authorities, Music in Cuba sweeps panoramically from the sixteenth into the twentieth century. Carpentier covers European-style elite Cuban music as well as the popular rural Spanish folk and urban Afro-Cuban music. In a substantial introduction based on extensive original research, Timothy Brennan explores Carpentier's career prior to the writing of his novels. Looking especially at Carpentier's work as a music reviewer, radio producer, and musical theorist, Brennan suggests new ways of thinking about the role of Latin American artists in Europe between the wars and about the central place of radio and music-club cultures in the European avant-gardes.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816632294
• ISBN13: 9780816632299
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Library Journal has it wrong?

Just some comments about the misleading Library Journal excerpt. I don't know Ms. Bonnie Jo Dopp, from Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park, but she has to check her facts: 1) Carpentier was not "Franco-Cuban", but Cuban. He did not publish any original books in French, and all of his novels are centered around Latin American themes. His father was French (an architect working in Havana), but his mother was Russian, and he was born probably in Switzerland and definitively grown in Havana; 2) He was not a "musician", although he was very well versed in music, played musical instruments (at least the piano) and used novel audio effects in some radio shows; 3) He was not a "political thinker", whatever that might mean; 4) He did not exile himself from Cuba after Castro's revolution, but labored for Castro's government as the "cultural attache" in Castro's embassy in Paris, and continued holding a home in Havana and publishing in the island, as well as being a prominent member of the Castro-oriented Union of Artists and Writers and the Asamblea del Poder Popular, communist Cuba's mock parliament.

Highbrow, lowbrow, or just plain cool?

A pivotal look at the development of Latin American popular music, novelist Alejo Carpentier's historical tract was originally published in 1946, and came out of raging, decades-long intellectual debates about the nature of Cuban and Latin American culture. This is the first English translation of this work and includes a lengthy introductory essay by the editor, explaining the author's role in the Cuban intelligensia... "Music In Cuba" was an attempt to settle some of the controversies about the "legitimacy" of Cuban music, and to resolve the apparent differences between tony, Europhilic art music and the grittier rural style that came to dominate the island's popular imagination. It's an intellectual, somewhat egghead-y book, but rich in cultural depth... The new foreward is also very valuable, giving proper context to Carpentier and his work, and a sense of the academic and philosophical life of Cubans abroad and at home in the early 20th Century.