Amadeo Roldán Gardes

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Composer. Initiator of modern symphonic art in Cuba. First Cuban musician who incorporated Afro-Cuban instruments into the symphonic orchestra.

He was born in Paris on July 12, 1900. Roldán later adopted Cuban citizenship, which was his maternal citizenship.

In 1908 he entered the Conservatory of Music and Recitation in Madrid, where he studied solfège with Pablo Hernández, and from 1909 onwards, violin with Agustín Soler and Antonio Fernández Bordas. In 1913 he began his harmony studies with Conrado del Campo and later continued them with Benito García de la Parra. From 1917 to 1919, he was a composition student of Conrado del Campo.

That same year, 1917, he joined the Philharmonic Orchestra of Madrid as first violin, conducted by Benito Pérez Casas, and from 1918 onwards he made several tours through different cities in Spain.

In 1919 he moved to Cuba, where he completed his training with Spanish composer and orchestra conductor Pedro Sanjuán Nortes. In 1921 he joined the Chamber Music Society as viola, directed by pianist Alberto Falcón, and in 1922, the Symphonic Orchestra of Havana.

The following year he entered as a professor at the Iranzo Conservatory; in 1924 he began working as concertmaster violin of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana, from which he became assistant conductor in 1925, and was elected secretary of the Musical Solidarity Society of Havana.

In 1926 he organized, with Alejo Carpentier and Alberto Roldán, the New Music concerts that were held at the Falcón Hall, where works by Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Erick Satie, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and Igor Stravinsky were introduced for the first time in Cuba.

In 1927 he performed with the Havana Quartet, of which he was founder and first violin, at the lectures offered by Spanish composer Joaquín Turina at the Hispano-Cuban Culture Society.

On April 3, 1929, accompanied at the piano by Turina, he performed at the Teatro Martí; and on September 11 of the same year he conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana for the first time.

He became assistant conductor of the Iranzo Conservatory. In 1930 he was accepted as a member of the Pan-American Association of Composers, and was appointed director of the West Indies Section.

In 1931, together with César Pérez Sentenat, he founded the Normal School of Music of Havana. In 1932, also with Pérez Sentenat, he organized the "La Obra Musical" concerts, in which works by authors such as Blas Serrano, Mateo Ferrer and Joaquín Nin Castellanos were performed for the first time in Cuba. That same year Roldán performed for the first time as principal conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana and the Philharmonic Conservatory was founded, of which he was a professor of harmony and composition.

In 1933 he premiered Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana and the Havana Chorus directed by María Muñoz, in which Luisa de Lepa Ves, soprano; Elisa Vázquez, contralto; Sinforiano Galán, tenor; and Alberto Márquez, baritone performed as soloists.

In 1934 he resigned from the direction of the Normal School of Music of Havana, and remained only as a violin professor; he was elected director of the Philharmonic Conservatory.

In 1935 he conducted the ballet Coppelia at the Auditorium theater, with Alicia Alonso in the role of Swanilda. In 1936 he offered a course in musical appreciation at the Lyceum Society and was elected director of the Municipal Conservatory of Havana, a position he resigned from in 1938.

On June 17, 1938 he conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana for the last time and died the following year.

Amadeo Roldán was the initiator of modern symphonic art in Cuba, the first Cuban musician who incorporated Afro-Cuban instruments, not as simple accompaniment, but as a protagonistic and constructive element of the musical work. He was the first to graphically represent the rhythms proper to those percussion instruments with all their technical possibilities.

With Roldán, the Cuban musical panorama opened to the world, and important relations and exchanges were established with foreign composers and conductors.

The Overture on Cuban Themes and other works of his constituted the most important event in Cuban musical history up to that day of the twentieth century, by its projection and implications. Although all the musicians of the Island, without exception, had admitted the value of popular expressions, nourishing their entire work with them, or at least a portion, the "black" well exploited already by the authors of the Antecedents of Cuban bufo theater, had not yet appeared in the symphonic work.

The most singular thing was that Roldán, in sketching his Overture, turned by instinct towards a type of folkloric expression captured several times in the nineteenth century: the oriental Cocoyé, already stylized by some authors such as Juan Casamitjana, Pablo Desvernine and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The musician, upon opening the cycle of his true work, upon beginning to find himself, collected a tradition that linked him directly with the first attempt made in Cuba to bring "the black" to a serious score (The Cocoyé of Casamitjana).

But, beyond its polemical sense, Roldán's Overture is considered today as a document that situates the beginnings of a career. A passage must be cited, for having constituted, in 1925, a sensational innovation: the one that prepares the coda and appears entrusted to the battery alone, with mobilization of several Afro-Cuban instruments. Those measures enclosed an entire declaration of principles.

The Three Small Poems (Oriental, Pregón, Fiesta negra) were premiered in 1926, and immediately passed to the music stands of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. In the Oriental, themes of the Cocoyé were used again, but stripped of elements that detracted from their mischief and grace in the previous work. The Pregón, inspired by an authentic street cry, with its atmosphere of drowsiness and heat, still recalled Roldán's impressionist manner. In the Fiesta negra, on the other hand, the musician began to speculate with themes that he no longer considered as poetic values, of color, of atmosphere, but as musical factors.

The initial theme was a cell that grew and developed horizontally, with a systematic multiplication of values within the measure, until the final chords. This Fiesta negra was the first fully achieved work of Amadeo Roldán.

In this stage of his production, the musician rarely resorted to the folkloric document (except for the Pregón) and directly captured the teeming popular life of Havana of 1830, on the day of the Epiphany celebration.

La rebambaramba remained the most famous of his scores, having been performed in Mexico, in Paris, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Los Angeles and in Bogotá. After finishing La rebambaramba, the musician wanted to write, as a complement, a ballet that would evoke the modern rural life of Cuba. On a text by Alejo Carpentier, he composed El milagro de Anaquillé, choreographic mystery in a single scene (1929). The musical action that develops in the shadow of a sugar mill, begins with an exploitation of the peasant—décima and zapateo—before moving to an elaborate work on the ritual themes of the initiatory ceremonies of the ñáñigos. The black-bottom, which accompanies the dance of the Americans, owners of the mill, serves as a bridge between "the white" and "the black" of Cuba, in this case, perfectly delimited.

When premiered, the score provoked a certain scandal for its harshness. Nothing in it suggests wanting to caress or conquer by seduction. Harmonically, it is one of Roldán's most robust scores. Everything is angular and linear. There may be, in this ballet, a certain influence from the later Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring and after Pulcinella. But the color—that steel color, without flattery, without evanescence or soft gradations, which is that of his mature orchestra—belongs entirely to him.

After having worked with the large orchestra, Roldán, from 1930 onwards, found himself increasingly solicited by the problems of sonority, balance and construction posed by reduced ensembles. He had already written his Danza negra, on a famous poem by Palés Matos. Now he was initiating his series of Rítmicas.

In these works a certain evolution is evident over earlier scores. Roldán, following the inevitable path for all who work within a nationalist orbit, divested himself of the true folkloric document (so still current in La rebambaramba, in the finale of the Milagro de Anaquillé), to find, within himself, motifs of Afro-Cuban character. The rhythm has ceased to be textual: it is rather his own vision of known cells—a recreation. Roldán works from there in depth, seeking more than a folklore. In the two last Rítmicas he achieves, with the consciousness of the cultured artist, work parallel to that of the batá drums, moved by instinct. More than rhythms, he produces rhythmic modes—entire phrases that interweave and complete, originating periods and sequences.

With the Three Touches (of march, of rite, of dance), written in 1931 for chamber orchestra, he brought to the sonic plane a series of preoccupations that had led him, until now, to grant primary importance to the percussive forces (battery or instruments used as battery) of his previous works. Here—without being eliminated—the action of the battery is much less direct and constant. It intervenes in certain passages as a constructive element, used in all its possibilities and techniques, but without playing a capital role. The touch is now produced by all the instruments present, establishing a sum of the factors that characterize the genres of mestizo and Afro-Cuban music, although placing them in an absolutely personal sonic scope. The Three Touches constitute undoubtedly, in this order of ideas, the greatest synthesis effort accomplished by Amadeo Roldán, approaching, in spirit, certain Choros of Villa Lobos.

After writing Curujey (1931), on a poem by Nicolás Guillén, Roldán saw his Motivos de son published in New York in 1934, with text by the same poet. Eight songs for voice and eleven instruments comprises this suite, in which the lyrical expressions of black song are explored thoroughly. Here, despite elaborate instrumental work, the melody retains all its rights. Angular melody, broken, often subjected to the tonal characteristics of the genre, but where the black is already, for Roldán, a language of his own; projected from inside outward. Of very difficult interpretation, these Motivos are among the musician's most personal scores. In vain would we search in them for a manifest influence, a borrowed harmonic stratagem. They constitute, up to now, a unique attempt in the history of Cuban music up to that moment, for the type of sonic and expressive problem they came to solve.

His ideals were above all to achieve an essentially American art, entirely independent of the European, a continental American art, worthy of being accepted universally, not for the wealth of exoticism it may contain but for its intrinsic importance, for its value in itself as a work of art, for the contribution that ours makes to universal art.

New art, new procedures, American art, American procedures, sensibility, forms, new means of expression, but inspired by the fullest and most sincere artistic feeling, music, art, emotion above all, modernity, contemporaneity in sensibility and language. He believed in studying, developing, and vivifying the folklore of our countries, not with the purpose of building works of a purely local or national character, but with universalizing ends. Every effort should tend toward constant attention to the contemporary artistic movement, technically and aesthetically considered, but with a reverse end, that is, with the purpose of avoiding in American art everything that may be a symptom of Europeanization.

Amadeo Roldán died in Havana. Upon dying, in full creative capacity, he left a rich and unquestionable musical legacy.

Source: EnCaribe