<i>Los contrapunteos de la Música Cubana</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Los contrapunteos de la Música Cubana Robin Moore Cristóbal díaz Ayala. Los contrapunteos de la Música Cubana. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2006. ISBN 1-881748-48-0. 323 pp. Los Contrapunteos is the latest publication in a long series by Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, an established authority on Cuban music. It is intended for a general readership. In addition to having read widely on many topics, Díaz Ayala is a specialist in recorded sound history and has working knowledge of a wider selection of Cuban music on LPs and CDs than perhaps anyone else. Los Contrapunteos represents a break of sorts with his earlier publications. Most have centered either around the documentation of music making by year or genre, or on the compilation of discographies. The current volume, divided into fourteen chapters, is organized entirely around thematic dualisms that capture some of the dynamics contributing to the development of Cuban music through time. The book uses as an organizing element the concept of counterpoint. It is an apt metaphor since it has both musical connotations and makes reference to the famous writings of lawyer and author Fernando Ortiz. Ortiz, in his Cuban Counterpoint, framed Cuban culture and history in terms of the symbolic relationship between sugar and tobacco, blackness and whiteness. The first three chapters are among the longest in the collection, ranging from 40 to 50 pages. Díaz Ayala organizes the first around concepts of national music and foreign music. He describes indigenous song and dance, the many Spanish forms contributing to later Cuban traditions, Chinese traditions, countless influences from North America, film music as a sphere of mediation between the local and imported, and other imported genres such as the contradanza, whose precise origins are in dispute. Later, he discusses the creolization of traditions, their alteration in accordance with Cuban and/or foreign tastes. Chapter 2 contrasts ritual and profane music. The author analyzes some of the ways that music has been used universally in ritual, such as in religious and military contexts, and continues by describing various military and religious genres associated with Cuba. Examples range in time from the earliest days of colonization through the present. The essay devotes attention both to European — and African-derived religions, considering their noncommercial forms and the ways they have influenced secular music more broadly. Later sections discuss slave songs, work songs, and children’s songs. [End Page 268] Chapter 3 considers interactions between “black music” and “white music.” The author examines life during the era of slavery, focusing on early plantation celebrations, African processional music, and the development of distinct musical repertoires corresponding to prominent African ethnic groups on the island. The commentary on slave dances, based on nineteenth-century diaries and travel accounts, is especially useful and unique. Díaz Ayala documents the rise of more clearly syncretic forms toward the end of the century as well, such as rumba, reinado traditions, the danzón, and eventually the bolero. The essay ends by blurring the boundaries of black and white music even further by focusing on concert music by García Caturla and Roldán, zarzuelas with black and mulatto protagonists, “rumbera” musical cinema, and so forth. It contains useful data on racial tensions in the mid-twentieth century music industry, on bias in the pre-revolutionary recording industry against folkloric drumming, and on the lives of Afro-Cuban drummers within Cuba and abroad. Chapter 4, much shorter than those preceding it, considers rural and urban music. It provides a summary of the history of punto, its height of popularity during the colony, its changing instrumentation in the early twentieth century, and its recorded history. The author notes that punto lyrics provide interesting insights into contemporary political events. Later sections describe the various ways in which punto has fused with modern dance traditions, and mentions música guajira artists who have emerged since 1959. The following three chapters are also relatively short. Chapter 5 examines differences between coastal and interior traditions, noting the prominence of African-influenced genres in low-lying areas throughout the Caribbean and beyond. Chapter 6 distinguishes formally trained from empirical musicians, analyzing...