Institutionalization and Fissures in the Cuban Classical Music Landscape

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on several musical events in the 1970s that reflects artists’ struggles to adapt to the shifting political and cultural landscape in Cuba. It opens with a discussion of Roberto Valera’s Devenir and Harold Gramatges’s La muerte del guerrillero, both premiered by the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba in 1970. Increasing political and economic pressures—on Havana from Moscow and, consequently, from Havana to all intranational cultural institutions—placed multiple and sometimes competing demands on artists. There was also a proliferation of festivals, encuentros, and jornadas intended to celebrate regional and international musical cooperation, much like the political and economic agreements forged by the Cuban state with other socialist nations. Some institutions jumped on the opportunity to cultivate foreign ties, as demonstrated in 1972 at the Casa de las Américas’s Encuentro de Música Latinoamericana, while some individuals continued to experiment through works for piano, exemplified in this chapter through analyses of Leo Brouwer’s Sonata pian e forte and Harold Gramatges’s Móvil I. Most notably, the decade began with a five-year period of artistic censorship and persecution known as the quinquenio gris (the five-year grey period), which affected all areas of cultural production in Cuba through increased centralization, institutionalization, and, according to some critics, even sovietization. However, in the second half of the decade a process of rectification on the part of a new Ministry of Culture and increased dissemination of new music by Cuban composers through an LP series by the EGREM titled Contemporáneos.