Cecilio Tieles Ferrer, with a prize that deserves itself

May 15, 2024

It has long been known that Cecilio Tieles Ferrer is an eminent pianist. That achievement, founded on his talent and vocation, on his dedication to art, was solidified by rigorous training acquired in Paris and Moscow, based on his cultural and family environment. His condition as a Cuban was strengthened from his home, where music was relevant united to patriotic and social concerns.

Both he and his brother, violinist Evelio Tieles Ferrer, equally eminent, are the fruit of these conjunctions: the father, a dentist by profession, was a violinist and composer, and along with musical education would transmit to his sons the example of the patriot who directed his ideals through communist affiliation. Add something that is no minor fact: the ethnic component of someone who, by virtue of being mestizo, with even enslaved ancestors, was an example of the complete blend that Nicolás Guillén coined to characterize the Cuban nation.

As for Cecilio particularly, the subject of these present notes, to what was already known about him as a pianist—and teacher of the instrument—has been added for several lustrous years now an important investigative contribution about the music of Cuba and, along that path, of its culture. It is not a fortuitous fact, but an organic derivation of the weight that music and dance have had for that culture since its forging.

Among his sources of inquiry, which by their number and solidity vouch for the seriousness of his work, figures the novel Cecilia Valdés, a rich fresco of Cuban society of its time. Its author, Cirilo Villaverde, held, and Tieles cites: "dance is a people, we say, and there is no other like the danza that portrays more vividly the character, the habits, the social and political state of Cubans, nor one that is in more harmony with the climate of the Island."

Among the valuable contributions Tieles has made to the subject are those he has made about pianist and composer Nicolás Ruiz Espadero (1832-1890). The significance of that extraordinary musician is now known better, and more justly, thanks to the fruits of his compatriot's inquiries: the compilation of his scores, several publications about his work—including two books—and phonographic recordings of it with performances by Tieles himself. In his capacity for discernment, he would disagree with someone as distinguished as Alejo Carpentier and his essay Music in Cuba; and would embrace José Martí's intuitions about the author of works such as Song of the Slave.

Delving into the production and biography of Ruiz Espadero led Tieles to seek antecedents that proved to be representative of the ethnic fusion proper to Cuban nationality and culture. And in that search, he owes first-rate revelations about the work of Black and mulatto composers who from the eighteenth century marked the formation of Cuban music. Condensed in a book and three records for which he performed at the piano works by these authors, these revelations earned him the Research Prize in the most recent Cubadisco convocation, a contest of already long trajectory and value in the country's cultural panorama.
This book is part of the results that validate the Research Prize awarded to the author.

Just as the proliferation of prizes in various areas often raises concerns, it is pleasing to salute prizes that award themselves, because they serve to recognize works that deserve it in the highest degree. Such is the case of the one awarded to Tieles at Cubadisco. And the laureate's own vocation for service moved him—on a path where he has staged successive performances—to gift the public last Friday the 3rd (in the Argeliers León hall, at 13 between 15 and 17, El Vedado) a concert based on works he recorded for the aforementioned records. It was part of the rich artistic programming being carried out not only in Havana and would merit being enjoyed by a large public.
The awarded records.

The program for that afternoon was formed basically by works of several of the Black or mulatto musicians who defined Cuban musical heritage. From Ulpiano Estrada (1777-1847), who excelled as an orchestra conductor with large repertoires, through Tomás Buelta y Flores (1798-1851), José Julián Jiménez (1823-1898) and Juan Nicasio (?-?) to the one who seems to have achieved the greatest presence in collective memory, José White (1836-1918).

He reserved the closing for Ernesto Lecuona, who—just as Ruiz Espadero neither—is not ethnically situated in the African heritage, though such delimitations tend to be difficult and deceptive in general, and particularly in a society like Cuba's. But in different aspects of his work, the author of the Spanish Suite also drew from that heritage.

The pieces performed by Tieles confirm the significance of the contradanza, and the decisive role that musicians with ostensibly African ancestors, though mestizo, had in it, which is common in Cuba. In its foundation, Tieles clarifies the nuances demanded by that ancestral trace, and the determining factor of his conclusions lies in the conviction—documented—that those musicians were Cuban.

He has on his side lights such as those contributed by Fernando Ortiz. The recognized sage who in the early twentieth century began his approach to the subject of Afro-Cuban culture by linking it with the underworld, later made fundamental contributions to the knowledge of the Afro-Cuban ingredients—a topic of great space in his work—of Cuban culture, and founded in 1926 the Hispano-Cuban Institution of Culture, which he presided over.

Ortiz knew, thoroughly and in an integrating and integral manner, what Cuba and its culture were. When in 1942 the Club Atenas, of the "Black race," granted him, a great "white" intellectual, the condition of Honorary Member, he thanked the just honor with a speech titled For the Cuban Integration of Whites and Blacks.

These were, without doubt, the principal elements of that integration, but one cannot ignore, among other possible contributions, those of the aboriginal population, which was neither physically nor culturally completely annihilated, and those of those waves of Chinese introduced into Cuba in forms of slavery similar to that suffered by workers brought by force from Africa.

But, when it comes to slavery, it would be erroneous to forget that not a few workers of Spanish origin suffered in Cuba modes of exploitation that brought them close to the condition of slaves, if they did not introduce them fully into it. And Ortiz drew a core lesson against segregations of all types that today can continue to cause ravages and enforce injustices.

One of the sources of misunderstandings is linked to a fact: while the monstrous crimes of slavery are condemned with full justification, it tends to be presented as the fruit of the confrontation of oppressive "whites" on one side, and oppressed "Blacks" on the other. That is a simplification far distant from reality, despite the fact that said confrontation was visible in the foreground and obviously.

What is desired and must be the greeting to a prize that deserves applause leaves no room for disquisitions to which Tieles has made primordial contributions, which he recalled in his agreeable comments during the recent concert. But it is worth pointing out, be it only in passing, that the undesirable aftermath of the simplification has not ceased.

With this, the fact is obscured that slavery, although it had ostensible "racial" masks—let us start by recalling that there are no races in humanity—was basically the expression of a system: the capitalism that was settling in our America and the Caribbean without having sufficient vernacular labor. One of the sequels alluded to has consisted in silencing or veiling particularities of the Black and mulatto community, and the great contributions of its members to Cuban culture, far beyond what could unjustly be ghettoized as Afro-Cuban.

In his lecture "On Cuban Music and Havana Society," Tieles states: "It is known that without the Black man there would be no Cuban music. Of the arts, music is the one that earliest showed the fusion of Black and white, one of the distinctive features of Cubanness. We could place the appearance of characteristic rhythms of Cuban music in the last third of the eighteenth century, different from Spanish ones. That music was the Habanera contradanza that flourished, later, with vocal habanera, the first Cuban musical genre that achieved international diffusion."

Tieles introduces clarifications of interest in his texts. He does so, in the cited one, with respect to the word Black, which frequently "is used with a very encompassing sense and therefore ambiguous," without overlooking the pejorative. And at various moments he takes care to clarify that the weight of the contradanza created in Havana did not prevent it from also having relevant creative spaces in other cities of the country.

In the boost experienced by music in Cuba, the disdain with which the Spanish, above all through Bourbon influence, could perceive their own music—they preferred that created in other European squares—and the capitalist pragmatism that would move them to choose for themselves occupations associated with greater dividends would intervene. But the fact is, Tieles affirms, that "the Habanera contradanza, and its vocal variant, the habanera, emerges in Havana in the second half of the eighteenth century created by Creole Black and mulatto musicians who could already be considered Cuban."

By peculiarities, which it is not possible to comment on here, of the colonial regime implanted by Spain, a reality emerged that Tieles describes with words from Manuel Moreno Fraginals: "The exceptional Cuban historical process of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had formed a Black and mulatto middle class of respectable economic level, owners even of sugar mills and slaves." Even members of it integrated the Spanish Army, in which they could hold the rank of colonel.

Hence, Tieles explains in another of his texts—a lecture about José Antonio Aponte—"by the late eighteenth century there was already a stratum of Black and mulatto Havanese with sufficient solvency to acquire culture and knowledge comparable to those of white Creoles. The high artistic and technical quality of Black musicians of the late eighteenth century was due to the fact that they were in conditions to purchase instruments, for example, pianofortes—of which nothing is said—that cost as much as a slave, as recorded in El papel periódico de la Havana."

Thus, "the Black Havanese musicians, painters, writers or sculptors of the late eighteenth century were creating one of the most original cultures in America, one of whose fruits is the Habanera contradanza that gives way to vocal habanera that conquered the world."

About the rebellious José Antonio Aponte he writes: "He, along with others, confirms the existence of a Black and mulatto intelligentsia of which only their petty-bourgeois condition is mentioned. That intelligentsia is Cuban and defends Cubanness. It is contradictory to recognize their liberating and independence action and not emphasize their Cubanness, but their Africanness. As if they were mutually exclusive." It is no accident that in 1844 some of the musicians studied by Tieles were caught up in accusations associated with what was called the Ladder Conspiracy.

It is hard to put a brake on the praise that deserves, along with Cecilio Tieles Ferrer the pianist, the scholar of Cuban culture, the musicologist whose texts must be consulted by those who propose to have an increasingly clear knowledge of that culture and its roots, of its significance and reach, not only in music.