World Premiere of Negro Bembón by Yalil Guerra for the 120th Anniversary of Nicolás Guillén

May 13, 2022

The commemoration of the 120th anniversary of Nicolás Guillén's birth, next July 10, had an anticipation of the highest artistic caliber with the world premiere in Buenos Aires of Negro bembón, an instrumental work by Cuban Yalil Guerra, performed by the Orquesta Estable del Teatro Argentino, under the direction of Brazilian André Dos Santos, at the Centro Cultural Kirchner.

Guerra, a guitarist and composer who has developed an intense career between California and Cuba in recent years and earned the Cubadisco Prize 2021 for the production Cuba: the legacy, with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, succeeded in recreating Guillén's poetics through sound procedures that take into account both the rhythmic character of the text and the identity context reflected by the verses.

In the ternary structure of the piece – three successive movements fast-slow-fast – one can see the assimilation of the son syncopation and the expressiveness of the bolero. Regarding this, Guerra commented: "What attracted me to the poem was the way the poet handled language, cutting certain words, trying to transmit a way of being, speaking and living, which in his time vindicated the African presence in Cuban culture. Based on that concept, I decided to use a six-tone scale to create a different melodic sonority and push the limits of tonality."

Negro bembón was published in 1930 at the head of the notebook Motivos de son, an authentic revolution in island lyric poetry at the time. Shortly after, Cuban composer Eliseo Grenet set the poem to music in a creation that became fashionable in Paris, as was recorded in the chronicles of the young Alejo Carpentier.

The premiere of Guerra's score took place amid the excitement generated by the dedication of Havana at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and as part of a program devoted to Latin American authors, among whom were Argentines Alberto Williams, Claudia Montero and Celia Torrá, Brazilian Joao Guilherme Ripper and Mexican Federico Ibarra.

Director Dos Santos stated that "it is always a pleasure to discover new music, to share it with the public and an honor when we premiere it. With this feeling we premiered Negro bembón, which leads us to a better knowledge of Guerra's work and Cuban art, which in the case of Guillén, exalted the values of the Black peoples of Cuba and the continent."