Teacher María Teresa Linares turns one hundred years old

August 14, 2020

By Miguel Barnet

There was any date I could have overlooked except this one. María Teresa Linares Savio turns one hundred years old this August 14th. And what a hundred years so prolific, what a centennial so crowned with scientific achievements and discoveries so important for Cuban popular music.

María Teresa, or Teté, as her disciples and friends affectionately call her, began her career at the Coral Society of Havana, directed by María Muñoz de Quevedo, and there she met the person who was her life companion and intellectual companion, the founder of Cuban ethnomusicology, Argeliers León. She pointed him out among other young people for his elegant bearing and his incisive gaze. It was love, according to what she confesses, at first sight. Both inspired each other mutually and shared common interests for more than half a century.

It was in the environment of the Musical Conservatory, a breeding ground for creativity, where both found their path as pedagogues and musicologists. The Conservatory was, according to what she always told me, the place where the path of light for their lives began for the singular couple.

Music as a warm cloth enveloped them forever. When I look from a distance at this couple of eternal lovers, cases come to mind like Hortensia Pichardo and Fernando Portuondo, Sarah Ysalgué and Salvador Massip or Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz, all held by the profound love that wrapped them, uniting their feelings with their professional vocations. Such a complement of interests is not a matter of play, it unites more than a single romantic passion. They were invested with that halo that encircles the head of the chosen ones. And they were, in fact, chosen to found chairs of musicology and ethnology in our country.

I had the high privilege of being a student of both since I began working with Argeliers León at the National Library, then at the National Theater and in 1962 at the first Institute created by the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore.

With Argeliers we were nourished by anthropological methodology, by Africanist studies, by the work of Fernando Ortiz and by a strict discipline for scientific life. Teté, or María Teresa, delighted us with her practical classes in popular music, both of African and Hispanic origin and, above all, with the variants of the Cuban punto, country melodies, zapateado, the décima, the songs of habanera key and the antiphonal choirs of the Regla de Ocha, arará and conga.

With her we learned to enjoy María Cervantes, Bola de Nieve and Celina González, among many icons of Cuban music. Teté's classes at the Institute were delicious balms that formed our taste and refined our ear. I remember, as if it were today, the day she told me that my relative Nilo Menéndez Barnet had given his song Aquellos ojos verdes, a classic, to María Cervantes in 1930. I felt the pride of knowing myself to be heir, at least in my taste for Cuban song, to a great composer and pianist whose remains I laid to rest in the Colón Cemetery in 1987 in the company of Esther Borja, the Hermanos Romay duo, José Loyola and María Teresa Linares.

Teté and Argeliers always had a life very committed to musicological studies and their dissemination. They were exemplary teachers in the conservatories of the capital without ceasing to engage in research and fieldwork that always motivated them so much. Both knew that what we call base music, that is to say original music, was the ferment of the rich arsenal of Cuban popular music. Teté Linares demonstrated, through her copious investigative work, how the process of transculturation of musical genres and modalities would come to form part of our music, acquiring a new physiognomy. And she affirmed that the plucked string, guitar, lute, tiple or bandurria is perhaps the most important element of the Hispanic heritage, just as the drum is of the African.

In the work 'Music between Cuba and Spain' written jointly with Faustino Núñez, both authors traced a passionate journey through the history of musical ties between both countries, united by an umbilical cord that from the conquest-colonization of the New World, served to transmit what was being gestated on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Profound, thorough, she investigated in history and its musical examples. María Teresa analyzed the habanera with sharp and penetrating optics and its transatlantic destiny, as well as the guaracha and its popular roots in the street and vernacular theater.

Since her guajira mother sang her a melody in the cradle, little Teté was inclined to the study of Cuban music and its antecedents. Her entire life is marked by that initiatory spell.

She worked tirelessly alongside Argeliers at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, then she created invaluable collections for Egrem, of recordings made in situ with the bearers and the only resource of her talent, her sensitivity and the perfect pitch that privileged her.

Among those productions stand out Old Afro-Cuban Songs, Spanish-Cuban Songbook, Traditional Cuban Song, the anthology of Afro-Cuban music and that of the Cuban Punto. She also compiled the Benny Moré collection and records dedicated to figures such as Sindo Garay, the Trío Matamoros, María Teresa Vera, Ñico Saquito, Joseíto Fernández, Barbarito Diez, Bola de Nieve and Celina González, among many others.

For a time she was at the head of the Museum of Music where she contributed her experience to its growth and organization, and inaugurated the room of the Fernando Ortiz collection of musical instruments.

On September 21, 1995, the Fernando Ortiz Foundation was created, which is celebrating 25 years of life. When Armando Hart appointed me at its head, the first question he asked me was who would accompany me in such a responsible endeavor and without hesitation I told him that María Teresa Linares, who is still its vice president today.

From that day on, María Teresa performed her task like a young woman embracing a coveted position. At the Foundation she has been tutor and guide to everyone, and she herself, approaching 90 years of age, carried out fieldwork research in the eastern mountains, gathering voices and work songs of cowboys, muleteers and peasants. Her spirit and her energy have been and will be for everyone a model of total dedication to the study of Cuban folklore and music.