Music in Cuba

Rating:
Summary: Highbrow, lowbrow, or just plain cool?
Review: A pivotal look at the development of Latin American popular music, novelist Alejo Carpentier's historical tract was originally published in 1946, and came out of raging, decades-long intellectual debates about the nature of Cuban and Latin American culture. This is the first English translation of this work and includes a lengthy introductory essay by the editor, explaining the author's role in the Cuban intelligensia... "Music In Cuba" was an attempt to settle some of the controversies about the "legitimacy" of Cuban music, and to resolve the apparent differences between tony, Europhilic art music and the grittier rural style that came to dominate the island's popular imagination. It's an intellectual, somewhat egghead-y book, but rich in cultural depth... The new foreward is also very valuable, giving proper context to Carpentier and his work, and a sense of the academic and philosophical life of Cubans abroad and at home in the early 20th Century.