Books & Books and the FIU Cuban Research Institute present…

AN EVENING WITH MARYSOL QUEVEDO

discussing

Cuban Music Counterpoints: Vanguardia Musical in Global Networks

(Oxford University Press USA, $137.50)

Saturday, November 4th, 6:00 PM | Books & Books, Coral Gables

RSVP HERE FOR FREE

Books & Books and the FIU Cuban Research Center are delighted to present an evening with Marysol Quevedo discussing her new book: Cuban Music Counterpoints: Vanguardia Musical in Global Networks (Oxford University Press USA, $137.50)

This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event so make sure to stay after the talk for a book signing! Please RSVP only if you intend to join us.

About the Book:

Cuban Music Counterpoints maps the intellectual and artistic networks Cuban composers forged between 1940 and 1991 by exploring moments–concerts, festivals, recordings–that shed light on how they negotiated aesthetic and political agendas at local and international levels. Beginning with the modernist neoclassicism of the Grupo de Renovaci n Musical in the 1940s and its Pan Americanist backdrop, the book moves through the more turbulent 1950s, when a more politically engaged organization, the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, promoted contemporary socially engaged art of Cuba and the Americas. Their activities set the stage for the post-1959 Revolutionary period of aesthetic and political experimentation in the 1960s, subsequent institutionalization of the 1970s, and the pluralist global turn of the 1980s.

Through musical analysis, reception history, and historical contextualization, various case studies demonstrate that, due to music’s polyvalent capacities, composers were able to experiment aesthetically with a much higher degree of freedom than their Cuban counterparts in other artistic fields–such as literature and visual arts–as well as their counterparts in other socialist countries, such as East Germany and the Soviet Union. Three key terms–innovation, revolution, and vanguardia–serve as anchors for exploring how composers tied the post-revolutionary present and future to the pre-revolutionary past. The aesthetic and political concepts of cuban a (Cubanness), national identity versus cosmopolitanism and universalism, modernism, Pan-Americanism, internationalism, socialism, and the revolution, guide our understandings of how Cuban composers created meaning and connected their work to vast local and global networks of art music production. This book sheds light not only on the classical music scene in Cuba, but also the international classical music network with which Cuban composers engaged during this time

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Marysol Quevedo, a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. in musicology with a minor in ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Her research interests include art music in Cuba before and after the 1959 Revolution and more broadly the relationship between music composition and performance, national identity, and politics in Latin American music scenes. Quevedo’s chapter, “Experimental Music and the Avant-Garde in Post-1959 Cuba: Revolutionary Music for the Revolution,” was published in 2018 in Experimentalism in Practice: Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press). Her article “The Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba and its Role in the Cuban Revolution’s Cultural Project” was published in the journal Cuban Studies in the spring of 2019. She has written several entries for the second edition of the Dictionary of American Music and is a contributor to Oxford Annotated Bibliographies.

In the fall of 2012, Quevedo conducted archival research at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami, thanks to a generous dissertation research fellowship provided by the CHC. She is also an active member of the Latin American and Caribbean Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. She currently serves as one of the editors of the AMS’s online publication Musicology Now.