Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies

8. Experimental Music and Revolution: Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC

180 Experimental Music and Revolution Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC Tamara Levitz In 1969 Alfred Guevara—director of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC, Institute for Cinematographic Arts and Industries)—met with guitarist-composer Leo Brouwer to discuss the formation of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (GESI, Group for Sound Experimentation)—a collective that would compose music for films, documentaries, and newscasts produced by the ICAIC. Guevara hoped with this project to establish in Cuban cinema the type of experimental musical tradition he had witnessed in the Tropicália movement on a recent trip funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to a conference, Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (New Latin American Cinema), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.1 Brouwer cast his net widely in forming the GESI: he asked for help from his friend Sergio Vitier—a composer-guitarist and member of the Cuban government’s official jazz ensemble, the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna—who gathered together a crew of excellent jazz musicians that included bass player Eduardo Ramos, flautist Genaro García Caturla, and saxophonist, flugelhornist , and recorder player Leonardo Acosta. The latter brought with him drummer Leoginaldo Pimentel and jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador, both of whom had played together in a rock group at the Escuela Nacional de Arte with the electric guitarist Pablo Menéndez—a teenager from the United States who also soon joined the GESI.2 Haydée Santamaría from the Casa de las Américas provided a further link to singer-songwriters Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, and Noel Nicola. During his three years Experimental Music and Revolution • 181 as leader of the group, Brouwer offered these diverse musicians intensive music classes and organized jam sessions during which they composed for dozens of documentaries, films, and newscasts. Between 1972 and 1974 a series of events that included the founding of the Movimiento de la Nueva Trova (Movement of New Song), Brouwer’s departure, Eduardo Ramos’s assumption of the directorship, and the arrival of Sara González and other new musicians led the GESI in many new directions.3 They reunited for a celebrated concert at the Teatro Amadeo Roldán in Havana in 1976, only to disband in 1978.4 Guevara formed the GESI at a moment of extreme tension in the global history of experimental music. Mao Tse-tung had launched his Cultural Revolution in May 1966, and a student revolt and general strikes had taken place in France two years later, in May 1968—preceded and followed by protests, strikes, and uprisings around the world. That year Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the United States, the Viet Cong had launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnamese and US forces, and Alexander Dubček had initiated a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that lasted until Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded in August. These events had contributed to a resurgence of vigorous debate about cultural politics in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Although experimental musicians in these regions had operated discursively within the context of Cold War politics since the late 1940s, the events of 1968 heightened their sense that they would have to take a stance on the divisive political crises.5 In spite of the tremendous relevance of Cuban music within the global Cold War context of the 1960s, the GESI has received no attention in the English-speaking musicological world and is rarely if ever mentioned in most histories of experimental music published in North America and the United Kingdom. This neglect may have to do with the fact that scholars and concert promoters have tended to associate experimentalism with traditions specific to the United States, leading to the invention of the popular but possibly misleading notion of an “American experimental tradition .”6 Following Michael Nyman, scholars traditionally have identified experimentalism rather narrowly with the work of John Cage and defined it in opposition to the European avant-garde.7 North American scholars who may have wanted to explore the GESI within this narrowly circumscribed intellectual context have faced the practical difficulties of obtaining recordings, films, and information. But even when these obstacles are not present, Cuban classical, avant-garde, and experimental music traditions have remained off the radar in North American musicology. 182 • tomorrow is the question Music before Revolution By introducing...