María Teresa Linares, eternal in her legacy

March 4, 2020

María Teresa Linares is an inseparable part of our culture.

For the second time, the Musicology Prize and XI International Colloquium that begin this Monday at Casa de las Américas are dedicated to Dr. María Teresa Linares. The first was in 2010, on the 90th birthday of this outstanding Cuban intellectual.

Now, just as her parents did, she has managed to reach one hundred years of life, and the event once again pays tribute to the woman who, together with her husband, Dr. Argeliers León, laid the theoretical foundations of Cuban musicology and was the initiator of studies in this field of knowledge that the sponsoring institution of the competition has been developing since its origins.

It would truly be difficult, if not impossible, to try to cover in few pages the extensive, profound, and valuable work that for more than half a century she has carried out as a researcher, educator, advisor, recording producer; at the helm of the National Museum of Music, of the Music Department of the Recording and Musical Editions Company (EGREM) or as vice president of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation.

All of this, perhaps, could be summed up in the fact that she has been deserving of the most important recognitions granted in the country, including the titles of Heroine of Labor of the Republic of Cuba and Doctor Honoris Causa in Art Sciences; the Félix Varela Order, the National Prizes for Music, Cultural Research and Community Culture; the Fernando Ortiz International Research Prize and the condition of Member of Merit of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, UNEAC.

What such distinctions do not fully demonstrate is the affable manner and humility that has characterized this woman, whom her numerous students affectionately call Teté, as if doing justice to the warm smile with which she embraced them or because she never ceased to be the young woman from the Coral Society of Havana who fell in love for the first and only time with that young composer, alongside whom she built a family and a scientific discipline.

With Casa de las Américas, Dr. María Teresa Linares has maintained a very close bond, and particularly with the Musicology Prize, of whose jury she was a member in its first and seventh editions; as well as with the Música Bulletin, to which she collaborated from the first issues and now shares the tribute of the event, on the 50th anniversary of the publication.

The transcendence of the work she leaves us, reassessed this week at that institution, will undoubtedly surpass the happy centennial of its author. An inseparable part of our culture, the research she conducted on the traditional popular genres of our music helped us know ourselves better as a country. That is, they are arguments that will strengthen forever the foundations of our identity as a nation.