La música en Cuba

For a long time out of print overseas, and without ever seeing the light of day in Spain, this work is of inestimable value for listening to the prodigies that Cuban music has been illuminating throughout its history -for being, among many other things worthy of praise (and also highly controversial), the first treatise on the subject. From the barely perceptible traces of the aboriginal musical substratum -on which colonial sacred music was based, without excessive mercy- to the happy mix between European popular music and the different traditions of African roots, we are offered an instructive journey through the insular vicissitudes of this artistic discipline, since the friars, hustlers and slavers set foot in the largest of the Antilles, until the beginning of its diffusion and recognition in the middle of the last century; stopping at the gates of the ecstatic discharges that the Afro-descendant and Creole orchestras and ensembles would perform in order to reclaim their little piece of glory in such a polyhedral musical paradise. It could be affirmed, then, that at the gates of two revolutions that were going to shake the foundations of the island: the musical one and the political one. Both revolutions to which the future of the author of this pioneering work was no stranger.