Alejandro García Caturla

Composer. Cultivator of Afro-Cuban music in the symphonic genre.

He was born in Remedios, Las Villas. He began his music studies in 1914 with Fernando Estrems, and in 1915 continued them at the Academia de María Montalbán in the specialties of solfege, music theory, and piano; he learned violin with América Pando Ruiz; in 1924 he began his singing classes in La Habana with the Italians Tina Farelli and Arturo Bovi, and those of harmony, counterpoint, and fugue with Spanish composer and orchestra director Pedro Sanjuán.

In 1921 he made his first appearance as a pianist, an occasion in which he performed the Pathétique sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven; that same year he was a silent film pianist and was part of the Jazz-Band of Remedios. He was second violin in 1922 in the Orquesta Sinfónica de La Habana conducted by Gonzalo Roig; that year he enrolled in Civil Law at the Universidad de La Habana; in 1923 he worked as a pianist in the cinemas Méndez, Universal, Oriente, Norma, Strand, Tosca, Dora, Santa Catalina, and Campoamor in the capital; at the same time, he organized the Jazzband Caribe at the Universidad de La Habana, with which he performed in 1924 on the radio station PWX, at the Hotel Miramar, and at the cinema Trianón.

That same year he appeared for the first time as a singer with the students from the classes of Tina Farelli and Arturo Bovi and conducted the orchestra of the cinema Mundial; he performed at the Third Concierto Típico Cubano held at the theater Payret in La Habana his Cuban song Mi amor aquel; he sang with José de Castro the duet from the first act of the opera La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli. In 1926 he appeared as a singer at the cinema Neptuno in La Habana; in 1927 he conducted the Orquesta de Cámara that he had previously organized at the theater Miguel Bru in Remedios; that year he graduated as a Doctor in Civil Law and was appointed deputy municipal judge of Placetas.

In 1928, the year he appeared as a pianist at the theater La Caridad in Santa Clara, he traveled to Paris, where he received classes in counterpoint and fugue from the French pedagogue and composer Nadia Boulanger, and attended performances of the Russian Ballet and the Spanish Ballet. There he met, through Alejo Carpentier, Georges Sadoul, Louis Aragón, and Robert Desnos, and the composer Edgar Varèse. The publishing house Maurice Senart published for him Danza lucumí and Danza del tambor. Upon his return to Cuba, he presented in Caibarién the Spanish composer Joaquín Turina, who would give a lecture on nineteenth-century music; also Caturla was a member of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Compositores, and from then on he maintained correspondence with the North American composer Henry Cowell, who would become the promoter of his work abroad.

In 1929 García Caturla traveled again to Europe, this time in the company of composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, as delegates to the Festival Ibero-Americano de Barcelona, in which his Tres danzas cubanas premiered, under the direction of Catalan orchestra director Mario Mateo. In this city he met musicologist Adolfo Salazar, and the composers Rodolfo and Ernesto Halffter, pianist José Cubiles, and orchestra director Bartolomé Pérez Casas. From Barcelona he moved again to Paris, where he arrived accompanied by Mexican composer Manuel M. Ponce; Caturla premiered at the piano in the Sala Gaveau Dos poemas afrocubanos, with text by Alejo Carpentier, and shortly after, but without his presence, Bembé premiered, conducted by Marius François Gaillard. Subsequently, North American orchestra director Nicolás Slonimsky conducted Bembé, Tres danzas cubanas, Fanfarrias para despertar espíritus apolillados, and Primera suite cubana.

In 1932 Caturla founded the Orquesta Sinfónica de Caibarién, in which he made known works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, Henry Cowell, and Manuel de Falla, in addition to his own.

María Muñoz de Quevedo disseminated his choral works; Amadeo Roldán with the Filarmónica, and José Ardévol with the Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana, did so with some of his works for these ensembles; and orchestra director Richard Klatovsky premiered Tres danzas cubanas in 1939 with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Berlín.

Caturla was never a musician of "fashion," because his personality was too sturdy. He did not attend private chapels nor did he yield to the good artistic news that arrived from Berlin or Moscow. In music he was a solitary figure and a unique case in his country. Caturla's works emerge with their own character and distinguished personality. Some seem themes of madrigal or profane polyphony: such is their transparency and purity.

The continuous use of brass instruments is characteristic in his orchestration, as is the doubling of these instruments and the use of typical percussion. All his rhythms are obstinate, and at times frenzied. A terrible ancestral force, which was like an inner demon of Caturla, always led him to Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies, and this music acquired in his symphonic works a power of seduction and a character of pagan mystery. He handled Black themes with the same skill that Bach handled fugal themes, and they were so much his own within the work that we can barely distinguish between an authentic lucumí song and a theme of his pure invention.

In Caturla's music, order is violence and force, a freedom that could be barbaric and primitive if it did not have limits in his author's own sensual capacity. With such virtues or anti-virtues must Caturla's music be judged: harmonic analysis, the rules of counterpoint, and composition formulas are of little or no value in measuring this music. Behind a Cuban melody or an African song, the most terrible dissonances are lurking, within anarchic forms that obey no tonal plan nor fit within the frameworks of classical or modern composition.

From the beginning, Caturla had a very particular way of feeling the island's folklore. Impervious to Hispanic tradition—Manuel de Falla exerted no influence on him—he studied with passionate interest the production of Cuban composers of the nineteenth century, having a true love for Manuel Saumell and Ignacio Cervantes. He was powerfully attracted to that music, made of a slow fusion of classical elements, French themes, remembrances of tonadilla, with Negroid rhythms forged in America. His last work, an admirable Berceuse campesina for piano, is a reflection of these preoccupations. In a composition of surprising stylistic unity, he achieved a melodic and rhythmic synthesis of the rural and the Black—rural theme, Black rhythm—through a process of total assimilation of two types of sensibility brought together. Since the rural, due to its monotony and invariability, could not provide him with rich material, he constructed his own melody, open over two octaves, absolutely unsingable, and which has, nevertheless, a surprising perfume of authenticity; without observing the meter or rhythm of the son, he achieved a miraculous balance between two genres of music that never endured even the slightest fusion over several centuries of coexistence.

This final success explains all his music. Caturla never took a folk genre separately. When he composed La Rumba, he did not want a rhythmic movement for orchestra, any rumba, which could be the first of a series: he thought of La Rumba, of the spirit of the rumba, of all the rumbas heard in Cuba since the arrival of the first Blacks.

Caturla was editor-in-chief of the magazine Musicalia; director, with his brother Othón, of the biweekly magazine Atalaya and of the newspaper Los Minoristas, both of Remedios. His works have been performed by orchestra directors Pedro Sanjuán, Gonzalo Roig, Agustín Jiménez Crespo, Ernesto Halffter, Nicolás Slonimsky, Leopold Stokowsky, Anton von Webern, Carlos Chávez, and Erich Kleiber; violinist Diego Bonilla; sopranos Carmela Valdés Gayol and Doris Barr; contralto Radiana Pazmer; and pianists Héctor Ruiz Díaz and Paul Nordeoff.

Since 1927 Caturla had carried out his work as a judge in parallel with music. In 1929 he was appointed Municipal Judge of Caibarién and also Eminent and Distinguished Son by the City Council of Remedios. In 1933, Municipal Judge of Ranchuelos. He presented the Proyecto Laredo Bru on the new penal code and took office as Municipal Judge of Palma Soriano.

In 1936 he completed a bill project on the creation of third-class correctional courts; the trial took place against persons and entities dedicated to illegal gambling, whom he condemned; he fined the North American administrator of the central Miranda; and was assaulted at his home, although he emerged unharmed.

In 1937 he took office as municipal judge in Quemado de Güines. In 1938 he took office as Judge of Instruction of Remedios. In 1939 he formed a Chamber in the Audiencia de Santa Clara as an interim Magistrate.

In 1940, prisoners from the jail in Santa Clara demanded his intervention against the abuses of its director and called him "the just judge." The Audiencia de Santa Clara accepted his ruling on the non-punishability of juvenile offenders. He conducted inspection visits to the courts in the region.

He wrote to the Minister of National Defense requesting guarantees for his life and that of his family, as his death was being planned by members of the army and police of that district. He sent a telegram to the Tribunal Supremo denouncing the threat of death against his person. When he returned to Remedios on November 12, he was shot to death by an escort of the jail in that city, to whom he had filed a case for referral to the Audiencia de Las Villas.

On November 13, 1940, his funeral took place, in which the bands of Remedios, Caibarién, and Vueltas participated.

Works
No quiere juego con tu marido (Cuban Dance no. 1), 1924
La viciosa (Cuban Dance no. 2), 1924
La número tres (Cuban Dance no. 3), 1924
Cuentos musicales. Children's Scenes, 1925
Danza del Tambor
Danza Lucumí
Three Preludes, 1925
Three Cuban Dances, 1927
Cuban Overture, 1928
Comparsa (to Fernando Ortiz), 1930
Prelude Homage to Changó, 1936
Berceuse to Put a Little Black Child to Sleep, 1937
Berceuse Campesina, 1938

Opera
Manita en el suelo, libretto by Alejo Carpentier

Source: EnCaribe.org