En la esencia de los estilos y otros ensayos (review)

Abstract

Alejo Carpentier said "Julián Orbón is the most unique and promising figure of the new Cuban school" when the composer was nineteen (Carpenter 1946, 336). At twenty-eight years of age, Orbón's Tres versiones sinfónicas (1953) won an award from a jury that consisted of Kleiber, Adolfo [End Page 150] Salazar, Varèse, and Villa-Lobos. Orbón (1925-91) was the musical prodigy and genius of the Orígenes generation that also published a Cuban literary magazine of the same name from 1944 to 1956, and included the likes of José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz, and Angel Gaztelu. In this collection of essays—three of the nine (plus one interview) are from Orígenes—Orbón exhibits all the traits of the "movement": a refined, often poetic use of language, an ability to evoke what Lezama called "las eras imaginarias" or the "súbito," and a passionate phenomenological perspective imbued with Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, and Zambrano, filtered through an unorthodox Catholicism. But despite the influences, Orbón's analyses are never derivative, they bear his unique thought. His wide-ranging interests stretch from the Cancionero de palacio to Schönberg, passing through Wagner, El cancionero de Pedrell, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Carlos Chávez, as well as a long essay on José Martí.