Joaquín Nin Castellanos

Cuban composer, pianist and musicologist, born Spanish, since Cuba was then part of Spain, of Spanish parents; his father was the writer Joaquín Nin i Tudó.

He studied in Paris, as a student of Moritz Moszkowski and later studied composition with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum of Paris, where he later taught from 1905 to 1908. He was the father of the renowned writer Anaïs Nin.

His compositions are not very numerous and have a strong Spanish nationalist influence, although he also composed several pieces of Cuban dances.

As a pianist, he performed with great passion the works of the old keyboard composers, especially from the 18th century, and traveled throughout Europe as a performer, spreading that music. He also published books of Spanish songs and polemical essays.

He married Rosa Culmell, an opera singer from whom he later divorced. From this union three children were born: Thorvald Nin, who dedicated himself to business, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, who was also a composer, and the writer Anaïs Nin, who became the most famous of his children, due to the publication of her famous Diaries.

He was a friend of Maurice Ravel and one of the witnesses to the genesis of Bolero in 1928. He was a member of the Spanish Academy and received the Legion of Honor in France.

In Spain he began his research on the ancient music of that country, whose results are the editions, by Max Eschig Publishing House, of:
Sixteen old sonatas by Spanish authors, 1925.
Seven old Spanish lyrical songs, and Seven old Spanish picaresque songs, 1926.

Seventeen old sonatas and pieces by Spanish authors, 1928.
Ten pieces by José Herrando, 1937.

The publication of these scores was very important for the knowledge of Spanish music from the 17th and early 19th centuries. Nin Castellanos engaged in a polemic with harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, in which he maintained that old Spanish music should be performed on the piano, while Landowska asserted that the harpsichord was the natural instrument for its performance.

About his influences, Tomás Marco would say:
"his music is clearly nationalist with a historicist nuance derived from his interest in Spanish Baroque and a notable influence of French impressionism. There are in it no approaches to theater or symphonism, but a preference for chamber, vocal and piano music [...]. In the garden of Lindajara 1927, for violin and piano, it captures some traces of Alhambra romanticism alongside an evocative nationalism of constant and rapid court style, through the high peaks of pure art".

While Georges Jean-Aubry believed that:
"his love for French culture and for the expression of our race, has made him familiar with our works of the present and the past. It is rare to find in our time a similar consciousness, without weaknesses, and, we can say, even without hesitation.

This merit is magnified because the dignity of his spirit knows no rigidity, and knows how to preserve, at all times, an attractive charm of sincere simplicity. No spirit is more distant from pedantry and dogmas that give their bearers only the illusory right to underestimate their rivals and their time. A freshness of feeling, and his whole life is directed by the imperative of beauty".

Nin Castellanos wrote with the same depth with which he composed his music; in his book Pro-Arte, he expressed the ideas he handled in his time:
"The constant repetition of the same works is a considerable obstacle that our artists oppose to public education, and gives rise to inevitable and perpetual technical rivalries, which serve nothing but to satisfy personal interests in which petulant triviality takes the place of Ideal [...]. One of our greatest concerns should be in the composition of programs, because they reveal our culture and because they show our tendencies, our intentions and even part of our ideals [...].

Let us give our programs a reason for being, an orientation that justifies their existence, an intelligent principle that governs their development in all its phases, if we want its action to be truly useful and lasting [...]. [...] we do not speak to boast of our talent nor to show our qualities. This talent and these qualities must exist".

Another of his books stated:
"Half of a musician's life should be devoted to Literature, to Poetry, to Painting, to the knowledge of the Sciences, to the study of Art in all its aspects, to the contemplation of nature [...] even if he wrote some fewer pages or took a few more years to achieve fame [...].»

All of Nin Castellanos's life was governed by these principles. Furthermore, in the introductory study of Twenty Spanish Popular Songs, the composer expressed:

"Life and death, love and hate, joy and sadness, work, war, games, prayer, everything has served the Spanish people to sing and to dance. People sing and dance in Spain everywhere: in the fields, in the cities, in the plazas, in the narrow streets, in the courtyards, in the gardens, in the taverns and even, sometimes, in the temple itself.

In Castile, in Andalusia, in Catalonia, popular songs are harvested by the hundreds, by the thousands, forming something like a fundamental and permanent chord of an ardent lyrical life, in which are combined, marvelously, a way of thinking and feeling that, in the end, always manifests itself by singing. Popular song is, we might say, the moving tonic of the spirituality of the Spanish people [...].

Our first intention when working with these songs was to save them from oblivion and offer them to musical life. [...] Once we admitted the need to remove these songs from the land where they were born, and to embrace them with instrumental dress to action and life, it seemed to us a better procedure to try to surround them with an atmosphere and a musical environment essentially evocative of the place and moment in which they were born. They are not, therefore, harmonizations, we repeat, but stylizations, or, if you will, of all the times and regions of Spain.»

He gave lectures and offered piano recitals in:
Spain
France
Germany
England
Belgium
Denmark
Holland
Austria
Hungary
Czechoslovakia
Switzerland
Argentina
Brazil
Uruguay
Cuba

For his dedication to musical art, Nin Castellanos received numerous decorations.

Works
Lute Quartet
Castilian Song, Minuet in old style.

Piano
Chain of Waltzes, Danse iberienne, Message to Claude Debussy and Three Impressions.

Violin and piano
Dialogue in the Garden of Lindajara, Spanish Suite, Twenty Spanish Popular Songs.

Posthumous Tributes
Joaquín Nin appears as a character in the novel The Island of Infinite Loves (Grijalbo, 2006), by Cuban writer Daína Chaviano.