The Guajira between Cuba and Spain

The study of the movements and transformations of musical forms across time, space, and social contexts, although long a basic consideration of music history, has acquired fresh significance and analytical thrust in recent decades. Both the interest in such studies and their theoretical orientations have been enhanced by the emergence of globalization studies and the fresh appreciation of the ways that musical forms can be rearticulated and resignified as they move between different places, periods, and social strata. In this article I attempt to schematize some of the formal continuities and changes involved in a particularly complex set of interrelated genres, which can be seen to constitute various efflorescences, or adaptations, of Cuban campesino music, or what could be called the guajira complex of musical forms. In the intricate world of circular musical exchanges between Old and New Worlds, those between Cuba and Spain have particular historical depth and richness. Among these interactions, especially outstanding in their fertility and abundance are the musics in one way or another inspired by música guajira, or music of guajiros, a Cuban term for small farmers of predominantly Hispanic descent. At the generative core of this complex of genres lies the puntocubano, which, in its most characteristic and relevant forms, comprises certain distinctive ways of singing verses, predominantly in the ten-line décima form, with standardized melodic and accompanimental patterns. These patterns appear to have coalesced from Spanish-derived elements by the nineteenth century and have since continued to flourish in their particular milieus. In the latter 1800s the punto inspired a Spanish popular-song genre called guajira, which flourished, in different forms, in zarzuela theater and in commercial flamenco contexts, constituting a major cante de ida y vuelta, or song-form of the "departure and return," that is, [End Page 137] between Spain and the New World. Around the turn of the century, a parallel although distinct urban song-form, also called guajira, emerged in Cuban music theater. In the 1930s, as this early theatrical guajira declined in popularity, a thoroughly distinct and more durable form of guajira emerged in Cuba, with other striking parallels in Spain. Taken retrospectively, this set of genres, together with their historical forerunners in Spain, constitutes a musical family of considerable variety and complexity. Fortunately for analytical purposes, the guajira complex has not been neglected by scholars. The collaborative two-volume work La música entre Cuba y España (1998, 1999) by Cuban scholars María Teresa Linares and Victoria Eli, with Faustino Nuñez and María de los Ángeles Alfonso Rodríguez, constitutes one important study, which covers certain aspects of the guajira complex. The evolution of the Cuban punto is further explored in Linares's El punto cubano (1999) and Natalio Galán's little-known but remarkable Cuba y sus sones (1983). For their part, peninsular scholars Romualdo Molina and Miguel Espín have documented with great erudition the development of the guajira as a flamenco cante, or song-type(1991). Meanwhile, the various Spanish and Cuban contributors to Maximiano Trapero's edited volumes on the décima (1994, 2001) shed much light on the evolution of the punto and, in particular, its relation to Canary Island forms. Although the present author cannot pretend to improve upon such writings, much may nevertheless remain to be said on the subject of the guajira family. Some of these works (especially those of Linares, León, and Trapero) are collectors' items, and almost all are marked by a paucity of musical analyses and transcriptions. More formidable a challenge is the way that the guajira complex constitutes a musical entity of unwieldy dimensions and complications, and yet one whose internal interrelationships do invite some sort of organizational scheme. It is such an over-arching perspective, with an emphasis on formal continuities and discontinuities, that this essay hopes to present. In the process I endeavor to suggest

Aesthetics · Art · Folk song · Linguistics · Literature · Melody · Musical · Repertoire · Singing · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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