The rhythmic component of afrocubanismo in the art music of Cuba.(Report)

Afrocubanismo was an aesthetic trend in art music, focusing on the recognition, assimilation, and validation of African cultural features present in Cuban society. The new ethos found expression in the works of the Grupo Minorista, a seminal group of composers with an emergent ethnic sensibility, whose production reflected neonationalistic musical concerns that emphasized the manipulation of timbral-rhythmic elements in a modern harmonic vocabulary. In this regard, afrocubanismo provided a transition from nationalism to cosmopolitanism in Cuban art music, forging the representation of race and class at the intersection of art-popular and rural-urban music dichotomies. These experiments marked a significant juncture in the evolution of the Cuban concert repertoire, becoming a discursive site for the negotiation of national identities.

The path to a new Cuban art music was charted by the pioneering ethnographic studies of Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), who revalidated the island's African legacy and reinterpreted the concept of cubanidad (Cubanness). (1) In response to the political turbulence and financial decline surrounding the Gerardo Machado administration (1924-1933), strong nationalist sentiment ushered an intellectual and artistic movement committed to cultural reconstruction. A new generation of progressive thinkers, journalists, and artists in Havana established the Grupo Minorista ([Artistic] Minority Group) in 1923, whose goal was to explore the roots of cubanidad to forge an inclusive cultural identity with a sense of "modernity" (Roldan 1980, 9). Drawing inspiration from Ortiz's work, the group recognized the significant contribution of West African traditions to the integration of Cuban popular culture and to the formation of the postcolonial identity. In denouncing the doctrine of racism that inhibited Afro-Cubans' just participation in national culture, the minoristas asserted a modernist, decolonized revision of Cuban cultural history. (2) Ironically, white and black middle-class society did not readily embrace this cultural revision (Moore 1997, 210). Well aware of Cuba's ambivalent attitudes toward its African heritage, the circle nonetheless voiced its commitment to class and public reform predicated on the equitable representation of the island's multiethnic cultures. The minoristas thus challenged the conventional concepts of collective identity to promote a more inclusive concept of nationhood.

As an aesthetic complement to Ortiz's research and the sociological concerns of the circle, an artistic movement emerged called afrocubanismo, which addressed the cultural continuities of Cuba's African heritage. (3) Partly derived from the literary school of Negrismo (black-aesthetics)--spearheaded by Cuba's national poet Nicolas Guillen Batista (1902-1989) (4)--the movement embraced Afro-Cuban themes as the focus of a distinct criollo (5) identity. This Africanist reading of Cuban cultural history especially acknowledged the various influences of African epistemology in art and folklore, as well as the significance of syncretic religious performances as vehicles of resistance to postcolonial hegemony (Apter 1992, 223-224; 1991, 254-255). (6) Minorista poets, visual artists, and musicians sought to produce socially relevant art that projected positive, black cultural values. Reimaging the past by reaffirming an African heritage in a society that often denied its value, the vanguard transformed the era's conventional aesthetic sensibilities. The movement not only sparked a period of prolific artistic production, but more important, it symbolically reintegrated the disfranchised into the nation. Challenging the dominant conceptions of cubanidad within a modern construct of race and nationhood, afrocubanismo validated the black presence in Cuban cultural identity and underscored the interpenetration of cultural forms.

The musical manifestation of afrocubanismo found its voice in a postimpressionist school of nationalist composers, whose active cultivation of African musico-cultural traditions forged a modern symbolic language of expression. The movement is generally recognized as commencing with the premiere of Amadeo Roldan's (1900-1939) Obertura sobre temas cubanos in 1925, which ushered a new stylistic period and symphonic interest in Cuban art music. (7) The encapsulation of an Afro-Iberian national identity in concert music drew inspiration from social dances and vernacular idioms, powerful vehicles in their function as primary identity markers. Through the historical processes of syncretism and transculturation, (8) sub-Saharan traits compatible with Cuba's dominant Spanish culture became essential for defining an autochthonous music language. This musical syncretism was accentuated in such genres as the rumba, the guaracha, the son, and other hybrid expressions that Ortiz called "mulatto music." (9) Consequently, white middle- and upper-class assimilated musical elements of popular strata of Cuban society and stylized them within the framework of afrocubanismo as a means toward "inclusive nationalism" (Turino 2003, 202). As suggested by Odilio Urfe (1984, 181), incorporation of vernacular references within elite art music compositions characterizes periods of social unrest, wherein elements of the oppressed culture filter into the dominant society.

The previous phase of nationalist composition, in the late nineteenth century, defined itself in Iberian cultural terms, as exemplified by the danzas of Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905) and the contradanzas of Manuel Saumell Robredo (1817-1870). Compositions emphasized the theme of guajirismo (Spanish peasantry) and Hispanic stylistic influences, particularly in melodic and harmonic structures, while Africanist elements were considerably subdued. In contrast, early twentieth-century nationalism in Cuba was loosely bound to a socio-political ideology and had less to do with folklorism for its own sake. Its focus, rather, was on affirming a national culture and its African influence through a cultivated compositional approach that made full use of all the expressive means of music. While afrocubanismo certainly exploited dance rhythms, composers also explored elements such as ritualistic drumming practices, in preference to the Iberian-derived sources used by the earlier nationalists. Consequently, the creolization of music was demonstrated by the thematic shift from nineteenth-century to postcolonial artistic nationalism, which ran a course from Hispanicism to the cultural hybridity of afrocubanismo. (10) The switch between two topical currents, in oversimplified terms referred to as the "white" and "black" nationalistic phases in Cuba (Leon 1991), parallels the twentieth-century currents in Latin-American nationalism with its "shift from exclusion to inclusion of the masses" (Miller 1995, 39).

Afrocubanismo found expression through the overt nationalism of Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963) and Gonzalo Roig (1890-1970), and the brothers Eliseo Grenet (1893-1950) and Emilo Grenet (1908-1941) as well as the more cosmopolitan approach of minorista members Amadeo Roldan, Gilberto Valdes (1905-1971), and Alejandro Garcia Caturla (1906-1940). The language of afrocubanismo articulated by these sets of composers contrasts in several respects. While Lecuona had already fused Spanish melody and African rhythms in his forty-seven Danzas Cubanas for solo piano (1912-1935), (11) his music is more in keeping with the tonal Romantic idiom and thus precedes Caturla and Roldan stylistically, irrespective of composition date. Working predominantly within the spheres of salon music and zarzuela, (12) both Lecuona and Roig helped refine the public's musical tastes with works that were accessible, appealing, and not too abstract but nonetheless garnering the dubious label of "semiclassical" in their tendency to mediate between popular and art music. Despite the inevitable mercantilization of middlebrow artists straddling populism and elitism, these composers (and to some extent Valdes) were occasionally regarded as purveyors of exotica. On the other hand, the manipulations of Africanist elements are considerably more organic in the rigorous procedures of minorista composers, who remained rather obscure and inaccessible for most Cubans. (13) Although their point of departure was the impressionism of Ravel and deFalla and the folklorism of Stravinsky, they sought solutions that were unequivocally Cuban in character but more universal in scope. Roldan expressed this compositional intention: "As an American composer, my ideals are, foremost, to create essentially American art, completely independent from the European, a Continental art that is ours, worthy of being universally accepted, not by the means of exoticism ... but because of its intrinsic value" (in Henriquez and Pinero Diaz 2001, 18). (14)

The composers' claims of "universalization" did not necessarily represent an attempt to "whiten" or legitimize Afrocuban music for middleclass consumption, since the movement was progressively toward rather than away from blackness. Forging a brand of chamber, ballet, and symphonic music partially predicated on a commitment to social reform, their work symbolically gave voice to historically suppressed expression in the modernist language of their day. (15) To define a more inclusive representation of national culture, afrocubanista compositions aimed to obscure racial hierarchies within a society polarized by race and class.