Description
Considered the most innovative composer of the first half of the 20th century in Cuba and a pioneer of the Latin American music of his time (White, 2003), Alejandro García Caturla (1906-1940) represents a leading figure of the so-called Afro-Cuban art music. The iconoclastic language of his work positions his work within a framework of staunch modernism and experimentation, in line with the modernist ideo-aesthetic premises wielded by the progressive intelligentsia (“Grupo Minorista”) of republican (post-colonial) Havana in the 1920s. After sailing the Atlantic-Mediterranean waters twice (1928 and 1929), Paris, epicenter of the artistic movement that highlighted “black” and “primitivist” art (Moore, 1997), opens to the incipient Cuban composer the longed-for doors of its avant-garde circuits, with the premieres at the Salle Gaveau of his Dos poemas afrocubanos, with text by Carpentier, and Bembé, as well as the publication of several of his works by Editions Maurice Senart. Unlike the “colonialist” appropriation of African art by the Parisian artistic and intellectual orbits, which emerged in its most commercial and popular version in the city's nightlife circuits, the Afro-Cubanism of the young Garcia Caturla - “force of nature” according to his fleeting mentor, Boulanger (Henriquez and Gonzalez, 1986)- hails for an art where the black cultural universe stands as an irrecusable expression of the Caribbean, the American and the universal. His epistemic disobedience to the then core of European modernity, as well as to the episteme of the Europeanizing Havana elites, raises a question of substantial interest for this communication: Is the Afro-Cubanist music of García Caturla, a young white man of suigeneris academic training, a rupturist proposal of “de-Westernization” (Mignolo, 2015) and “Afrotopia” (Sarr, 2016) that evidences the fertilization of new aesthetic, sonorous and identity paradigms in 20th century art music?
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