The Latin Sound

Figures

Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), baroque novelist extraordinaire, wrote a book on Cuban music that people have been ripping off for years. Music in Cuba, Carpentier’s nonfiction masterpiece, has long been ignored in this country—untranslated, virtually unknown. But who would have expected such a book from Cuba’s premier twentieth-century novelist, the inventor of so-called magical realism, the consummate stylist and bard of the Americas? Honored by many of his contemporaries as the greatest author of the century, he was always—in his own mind, at least—primarily a music critic.

Carpentier got around. An accomplished pianist and librettist, a critic and promoter of experimental musicians like Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, he seemed to know everyone in Europe. In Cuba, he was known for knowing them. He spent the twenties and thirties in Paris as a political refugee from the Machado dictatorship in Cuba, writing opera and concert reviews for Havana and Caracas newspapers. When the Cuban revolution erupted in 1959, he was made director of the state publishing houses; he remains one of the few authors read in “great books” classes to have held a government position.

Until Music in Cuba, however, Alejo Carpentier was primarily a journalist and radio producer, the author of a few poems and a failed novel, better known as a Parisian hanger-on than a writer of substance. The book was an accident of sorts—the idea occurred to him after an unplanned trip to Haiti in 1943—but Music in Cuba was also a watershed. Writing it compelled Carpentier to ask questions and explore things that, in turn, created the Carpentier we know today. Set in the Haiti of the French Revolution, The Kingdom of This World (1949) sets the tone for Carpentier’s later novels, and it follows directly from Music in Cuba.

Music in Cuba is a contradictory book, at once a guide to Cuban classical music and a prophecy of American and European dance crazes to come. Tension defines Carpentier the man as much as Carpentier the novelist. His fictional works, at once majestic and honorably old-fashioned, have about them something venerable and antique, like a marble column or a cloud of incense in a Gothic cathedral. It’s a bit of a surprise to read Music in Cuba and discover Carpentier the enfant terrible—race rebel, avant gardist, chronicler of the street in the language of slang. This Cuban effete with a French name took popular music seriously long before his contemporaries did. To read Carpentier’s book is to realize that Adorno’s grandiose pessimism about popular music was challenged by Marxist intellectuals from the start.

Music in Cuba was an event. Inspired by Marxism, surrealism, and Latin American modernism, it makes an emphatic declaration of Cuba’s leading role in the field of popular music. Carpentier set out to chart a “secret history of the twentieth century” through an exploration of the Latin sound—a musical culture with Cuban roots that was, and is, everywhere. But like all the worlds that slavery made, it hovers like an indistinct echo, a sort of “background music” simultaneously highbrow and low, rarefied and pop. Here in the United States, it lingers in the songs of Doris Day (“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”); lies hidden in the rhythmic shifts of Cole Porter; leaps out from time to time on Broadway (Jean Simmons in the Havana of Guys and Dolls); and finds its way onto television (on The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson plays salsa with Tito Puente at the Chez Guevara).

It may finally be time to give Carpentier’s book its due. Latin music is once again sweeping through Hollywood, luring stars out to clubs and spawning films starring Marisa Tomei and Andy Garcia (no longer playing Italians). The aging musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club have become American celebrities—without knowing English. Earlier booms had been heralded by Rudolph Valentino’s tango in the twenties, Damaso Pérez Prado’s mambo in the forties and fifties, and Frank Sinatra’s bossa nova in the early sixties. (Sinatra...