Content area
Full Text
CHARLES W. WHITE. Alejandro Garcia Caturla. A Cuban Composer in the Twentieth Century. Lanham, Maryland, & Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003. 263 pp., music CD, illustrations.
Cuban composer Alejandro Garcia Caturla was certainly the most original musical talent of his generation. As one of the few composers of classical music who joined the Afro-Cuban movement of the 1920s and 1930s, he competed with his fellow composer Amadeo Roldán for setting to music Motives de son by Nicolás Guillén (Roldán won that competition), and Alejo Carpentier and Emilio Ballagas wrote lyrics and librettos for him. By recounting his life and analyzing his complete works, Charles White has put Caturla back on the map of Latin American musical culture. Caturla, Roldán, the Mexican Carlos Chávez and Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos among others, had shaped that map in the 1920s and 1930s, when they created a Latin American musical idiom midway between national folklore and European classical music that was all too soon substituted in the public ear by the commercially more successful, purely popular music. Little has been known about the personal context of Caturla's composing, nor did we know much about the performance and reception of his musical works. White's book offers a comprehensive overview that finally gives access to a more contextualized interpretation of Caturla's music.
Caturla was brought to Afro-Cuban culture not only by his intimate relationship with a woman of color, but also during his university studies by contact with the Minorista-group, among them Alejo Carpentier and José Zacharías Tallet. Inspired by Fernando Ortiz's ethnological work, this movement attempted to awaken a new nationalist ethos in art based on a fusion of Afro-Cuban practices and music with...