Amadeo Roldán: For a truly autochthonous American Art

"As an American musician my ideals are, above all, to achieve an essentially American art in a whole independent from the European one, an art of ours, continental, worthy of being universally accepted," Amadeo Roldan said in an article he titled The Artistic Position of the American Composer.

The Cuban orchestra conductor, composer and pianist called on American musicians, owners of such varied and rhythmic bases as their countries have, to make an autochthonous American art.

Born in Paris on July 12, 1900 to a Cuban mother and Spanish father, Amadeo Roldán learned to play the piano at a very young age and later on received violin, composition and harmony lessons in Europe. Together with Alejandro García Caturla, had the merit of having pioneered symphonic art in Cuba and being the first musician in the Island to incorporate Afro-Cuban instruments to a symphonic orchestra.

At the age of 19 he returned to Cuba, where the difficult economic situation forced him to work in cabarets, cafes, restaurants, cinemas and teach violin, viola, guitar and other subjects for a living. At that time he composed so-called "youth works", which covered the symphonic, chamber, voice and piano genres.

Researcher Ramón Guerra Díaz holds that Roldán reached his creative peak with the suite Motivos del Son, based on poems by Nicolás Guillén, a work of difficult interpretation due to the degree of elaboration of black singing.

He was director of the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 1927, hosted together with novelist Alejo Carpentier the concerts of the so-called New Music, where works by Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and Igor Stravinski were presented for the first time in Cuba. They both brought the popular masses closer to the great works of the universal music of the time.

Carpentier recalls that the last time he saw Roldán, he asked him to write texts for choral masses. "His next work would be a cantata for orchestra, soloist and choral ensemble, about man’s trades. One of the songs involved the blacksmith talking to the iron and the anvil, the beekeeper to the beehives, and the fisherman to the fish trap. His illness prevented him from completing this work," said the author of Explosion in a Cathedral.

Despite the cancer that he suffered from since 1932, Roldan kept teaching, directing and creating until his death in Havana on March 2, 1939.