Abstract
This article focuses on the “classical” music tradition of Cuba. One could argue for other terms, such as art, concert, or elite, but interviews and conversations with Cuban composers and musicologists show that this is the most commonly used term by Cubans working within classical music circles. Most of the scholarship on Cuban music has centered on popular and traditional genres and musicians, largely ignoring the classical music tradition. One exception has been the scholarly interest in Afrocubanismo, an artistic movement during the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated Afro-Cuban aspects of Cuban culture. However, research and publication in other areas and time periods have lagged further behind. Cuban scholars have chronicled the lives and work of the most prominent contemporary composers, such as Leo Brouwer, Harold Gramatges, and Argeliers León. The discipline of musicology did not flourish in Cuba until after the 1959 revolution, when Argeliers León, acting as director of the music section at Casa de las Américas, began conducting research and training other scholars in the methodology of ethnomusicology and musicology. Since then, Cuban scholars have conducted musicological research, much of which has been ethnographic, dealing with traditional and popular musics. But there has always been a concern with contemporary music, particularly in biographical essays and monographs. Since the 1990s a younger generation of Cuban scholars have been preoccupied with colonial music, conducting research at the Santiago Cathedral, the Basilica of Saint Francis in Havana, and other major religious institutions, discovering forgotten or ignored composers from the colonial period and many of their works, and editing them for modern editions, recordings, and performances. One final consideration in this article is the definition of “classical” music and what genres and composers are left out of this category. The boundaries in Cuban music, and in most Latin American music, between classical and popular are often blurred. For the purpose of this article we will consider some “light,” classical entertainment as part of the classical tradition, since the individuals involved in this realm of music making were mostly classically trained musicians.