Writing Music History: Where Is “history” heard?

The point of departure for this essay is a question that arises whenever the history of music is narrated as a lineage of works and composers: what kinds of experiences, institutions, and bodily or sensory conditions have already been presupposed by such narratives? Music history is often understood as a discipline that traces the emergence of works and the transformation of styles. Yet behind such narratives lies a more fundamental set of questions: where sound was produced, by whom it was sustained, and under what institutional and practical frameworks it came to be recognized as music. Music history is therefore not only an account of stylistic change but also a record of how sound was placed within specific settings and experienced as music under particular historical conditions.¹

What becomes visible through this perspective is that distinctions such as music and non-music, art and everyday life, or orthodox and non-orthodox are not given differences but historically contingent structures formed under specific institutional arrangements. Music does not first exist as a completed work or style; rather, it emerges under conditions shaped by institutions, spaces, practices, and techniques, and is repeatedly experienced as a historical reality. This essay adopts the position that such processes should be understood not as a fixed system but as a movement in which boundaries are continually reorganized.²

Methodologically, this essay draws on boundary-oriented modes of thought articulated by the Japanese historian Yoshihiko Amino and the anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi. Amino’s concept of “muen” (non-relation) does not refer simply to practices outside institutions, but to states that engage multiple institutions without being fully absorbed by any single one. Yamaguchi’s notion of the periphery likewise does not denote a subordinate margin but a dynamic space where heterogeneous orders intersect and new meanings are generated. In this essay, “muen” (non-relation) designates situations in which music exists within institutions yet cannot be fully interpreted according to their internal logic, thereby unsettling fixed boundaries.³

To describe how such non-related states were perceived and experienced historically, this essay employs three auxiliary concepts: fracture, displacement, and excess. Fracture refers to discontinuities between institutional norms and concrete practices; displacement to shifts in temporal perception or bodily rhythm; and excess to sonic or sensory effects that cannot be fully accounted for by institutional frameworks or notation yet persist nonetheless. These concepts are not mutually exclusive but serve as different lenses through which the non-related condition of musical practice can be apprehended.⁴

This attention to the formation and disturbance of boundaries resonates with Michel Foucault’s analyses of discourse and institutional arrangements, Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural practice and embodiment, and Bruno Latour’s depiction of networks linking human and non-human actors. The aim here, however, is not to foreground theory as an abstract explanatory apparatus, but to use these perspectives as tools for entering concrete practices—music education, ecclesiastical institutions, notation, and performance conventions—in order to examine how authority and legitimacy were organized and how experiences resistant to institutional capture nonetheless emerged.⁵

Such a perspective allows discussions of colonialism and cultural mixture in Cuban art music to be grounded not at the level of abstraction but in the concrete domains of sound, institutions, and bodies. The work of Edward Said on imperial representation, Homi K. Bhabha on the “third space” of cultural production, and Walter Mignolo on the coloniality of knowledge all illuminate how cultural hierarchies were formed through practices that often appeared neutral, such as education or notation. Studies of cultural mixture by Serge Gruzinski and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla further clarify that hybridity is not mere blending but a dynamic process through which new cultural forms emerge amid asymmetrical power relations.⁶

A particularly important contribution to this line of thought is made by the Colombian ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier. In Aurality, Ochoa argues that sound practices do not merely accompany historical processes but configure the very conditions under which history is sensed, narrated, and inhabited.⁷ This essay adopts that insight, treating music not as the outcome of history but as a site where institutional arrangements, cultural hierarchies, and their associated displacements and excesses become experientially concrete.

On this basis, the essay examines the history of Cuban art music from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. By focusing on this span, it becomes possible to trace how art music, while supported by state and religious institutions, continuously carried within itself experiences and practices that resisted full institutional integration. Sound does not become history in a single place. Crossing the boundaries between inside and outside, center and periphery, music has repeatedly been experienced as history in multiple, heterogeneous ways. To attend to these sites of generation is to reopen the question of how music history might be written at all.⁸

1. The Emergence of Institutionally Affiliated Art Music: Sixteenth-Century Cuban Cathedrals

The history of Cuban art music begins not with a lineage of composers and works but with the formation of spaces in which music was organized as a repetitive practice under institutional authority. The earliest such site was the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba in the mid-sixteenth century. This cathedral functioned not merely as a religious building but as a space where time was segmented, bodies were gathered, and sonic experience was ordered under the liturgical system.⁹

Santiago de Cuba, located in eastern Cuba, served as the center of the island’s second Catholic diocese. After the initial diocese was established in Baracoa in 1518 and transferred to Santiago in 1522, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption was constructed under papal authority. With it emerged the first and largest capilla de música on the island, indicating that music was conceived not as an occasional embellishment but as an institutionalized and continuous practice within the religious system.¹⁰

Catholic liturgy in the colonial context depended not only on clerical speech but also on musical practices such as chant and hymnody. Liturgical music was arranged according to the ecclesiastical calendar and functioned to mark ritual progression and temporal order audibly. Before becoming an object of aesthetic appreciation, music here operated as a practical support for institutional continuity, sustaining authority at the level of sensory experience.¹¹

At the same time, Santiago de Cuba was a colonial port city and a hub of Caribbean trade. European administrative and religious structures coexisted with African diasporic cultures and the residual presence of Indigenous traditions. The cathedral was not isolated from this layered environment but acted as an institutional center where multiple social elements converged. Musical practice, too, unfolded within this complex social field.¹²

A central figure in the early formation of cathedral music was Miguel Velásquez (c.1511–?), a mestizo musician born in Santiago de Cuba. After studying organ and Gregorian chant in Seville and Alcalá de Henares, Velásquez returned to Cuba in 1544 and became the cathedral’s first appointed organist. His position marked the institutionalization of musical labor within the ecclesiastical framework.¹³

Velásquez organized a choir consisting of household servants and oversaw music-accompanied worship. Music was not a private activity but a structured component of liturgical repetition within institutional space. The works attributed to him—likely motets and villancicos for the Christmas season—were modest in scale and designed to function within the temporal structure of the liturgy rather than as autonomous artworks.¹⁴

Velásquez’s responsibilities extended beyond performance to vocal training and instruction, underscoring that music at this stage existed as an integrated institutional practice in which composition, performance, and education were not yet separated. By the late sixteenth century, the introduction of violins, violas, and even military instruments such as the pífano altered the sonic profile of cathedral music, adding layers without stabilizing a fixed form.¹⁵

Despite these developments, cathedral music remained fragile. After Velásquez’s death, musical leadership was inconsistent, and sustained practice depended heavily on individual circumstances. The formal reorganization of the music chapel in 1682 reaffirmed music’s institutional necessity but did not eliminate its structural instability. Thus, from its inception, Cuban art music emerged as an institutionally affiliated practice marked by both continuity and vulnerability—a duality that would persist throughout its history.¹⁶

2. Institutional Stabilization and Multilayered Cultural Formation: The Expansion of Experience in the Age of Salas and París

By the eighteenth century, art music in Cuba began to move away from the chronic instability that had characterized the seventeenth century and toward a more sustained mode of practice. This shift did not result from the completion of institutional structures—music chapels already existed—but from gradual efforts to secure conditions under which music could continue to sound with relative regularity despite persistent shortages of personnel and resources. Stability, in this context, did not signify institutional perfection but rather a fragile equilibrium maintained through continuous adjustment and improvisation.¹⁷

One of the most significant figures in this process was Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803), a composer and violinist born in Havana. From an early age, Salas participated in cathedral music as a choir member, receiving training that crossed the boundaries between performance, composition, and theory, alongside instruction in theology and canon law. What emerged through this formation was not a conception of music as an autonomous art, but a set of practical and intellectual competencies required to sustain musical practice within an institutional framework.¹⁸

In 1764, Salas was appointed maestro de capilla at the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba. In this role, he composed a continuous repertory of music aligned with the liturgical calendar. His output included Mass settings such as Misa a cuatro voces, motets, psalm settings, and villancicos for the Christmas season. Most of these works were modest in scale, typically lasting only a few minutes, and were scored for choir with basso continuo and, in some cases, simple instrumental accompaniment. Their primary function was not to present music as an autonomous aesthetic object but to integrate it into the temporal structure of the liturgy.¹⁹

Salas’s use of Spanish-language villancicos alongside Latin liturgical music should be understood not merely as a stylistic choice but as a decision bound to questions of auditory proximity and reception. Clear rhythmic articulation and accented text addressed not only performers but also listeners, shaping bodily attention and perceptual focus. In this way, music exceeded its ritual function and emerged as a mode of experience that actively engaged the senses of those present.²⁰

The small ensemble organized under Salas further altered the conditions of musical experience. With violins at its core and occasional additions of wind instruments, the sonic density of cathedral music increased. Yet these instrumental resources were not deployed for independent concert works; rather, they served to modulate the intensity and texture of sound within the liturgical framework. Musical expansion thus remained internal to institutional practice rather than marking a departure from it.²¹

Despite the relative continuity achieved under Salas, the sustainability of cathedral music was never guaranteed. The recruitment of performers, maintenance of instruments, and preservation of manuscripts depended heavily on individual effort. The institution functioned less as a self-regulating mechanism than as a structure continuously upheld by personal labor. Stability, where it existed, was provisional.²²

After Salas’s death, leadership passed to Juan París (1759–1845), who served as maestro de capilla for approximately four decades beginning in 1805. París’s long tenure suggests a degree of institutional continuity, yet it also underscores the extent to which musical practice depended on specific individuals rather than impersonal structures.²³

París’s compositions expanded in scale and instrumentation, incorporating strings, winds, and percussion, and often extending beyond the durations typical of Salas’s works. While grounded in European formal models, these pieces were adapted flexibly to local performance conditions. What mattered most was not formal refinement in the abstract but the feasibility of realization within the available musical environment.²⁴

París was also deeply involved in musical education, contributing to the training of future church musicians. Although religious ritual remained the primary context for performance, the social base of musical participation gradually widened. Music ceased to be reducible to a single institutional function, even as it remained anchored within ecclesiastical structures. This expansion, however, was uneven, shaped by regional differences and fluctuating human resources.²⁵

In the era of Salas and París, Cuban art music achieved a degree of institutional durability while simultaneously altering the conditions under which it was heard and embodied. Repetition sustained institutional order, yet changes in instrumentation and sonic density introduced new modes of listening and bodily engagement. This uneven expansion laid the groundwork for the spatial and functional reconfigurations that would characterize the nineteenth century.²⁶

3. The Expansion of Musical Placement and Attempts at Connection: The Mobility of Art Music in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

With the advent of the nineteenth century, art music in Cuba began to undergo a gradual shift away from a configuration centered almost exclusively on the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba. This transformation was not the result of political independence or institutional rupture. Cuba remained under Spanish colonial rule, and ecclesiastical institutions continued to serve as the primary foundation for art music. What changed was not the existence of the institution itself, but the range of contexts in which music associated with it could be experienced.²⁷

What emerged during this period was not a decline of institutional authority but a process in which musical practices supported by the institution exceeded the spatial and functional limits originally presupposed for them. Art music continued to belong to the church, yet it increasingly circulated through educational settings, domestic performance, and semi-private forms of listening. In doing so, it came to inhabit multiple placements simultaneously, each with distinct conditions of perception and engagement.²⁸

A figure who exemplifies this reconfiguration is Manuel Saumell (1817–1870), a composer and organist active primarily in Havana. While Saumell remained involved in church music, he also composed a substantial body of small-scale works for keyboard. His career illustrates how art music could remain institutionally anchored while gradually seeping into other domains of practice.²⁹

Among Saumell’s most representative works are his piano danzas (for example, La Tedezco, date unknown). These pieces are brief, typically lasting only a few minutes, and require neither large ensembles nor specialized performance apparatus. Their modest scale made them suitable for domestic settings and pedagogical contexts, placing music under conditions markedly different from those of the cathedral.³⁰

Formally, the danza draws on European dance models, yet its phrasing and rhythmic organization exhibit subtle displacements and delays. While the metric pulse remains clear, cadences do not always align symmetrically, generating a temporal elasticity that draws attention to bodily movement and timing. The music proceeds according to notated structures, but it leaves room—however slight—for variation in performance and listening.³¹

In the contexts where these danzas were experienced, music did not function as a support for ritual progression. Rather, it was sounded in situations where performers and listeners occupied close physical proximity. Musical time was no longer synchronized with institutional schedules but unfolded within more flexible, individualized temporal frameworks.³²

This does not mean that Saumell’s music constituted an autonomous cultural sphere outside institutional control. Saumell himself continued to move among roles as composer, performer, and educator, maintaining ties to church music throughout his career. The danza cannot be assigned exclusively to either institutional or private practice; it emerged instead within the displacement between these domains.³³

Another significant contemporary figure was Nicolás Ruiz Espadero (1832–1890), who likewise exemplifies the shifting placement of art music. Espadero composed primarily short piano pieces intended for performance in intimate, indoor environments. Their duration and scale presupposed attentive listening rather than collective ritual participation.³⁴

Espadero’s works are characterized by lyrical restraint and introspective affect rather than outwardly festive expression. Melodic lines unfold quietly, avoiding strong contrasts or dramatic climaxes. Music here is constituted less through communal sharing than through individual acts of performance and listening.³⁵

In such settings, art music did not serve to demonstrate institutional legitimacy directly. Instead, the quality of the musical experience depended heavily on the performer’s sensitivity and the listener’s concentration. Art music thus began to distance itself from collective ritual order, leaning toward more private modes of auditory engagement.³⁶

Yet Espadero’s music was not detached from institutional frameworks. His pedagogical activities and aesthetic evaluation remained bound to church music traditions and to norms of compositional technique regarded as legitimate. Rather than escaping the institution, his music existed alongside it, maintaining a measured distance.³⁷

A different but related trajectory can be observed in the work of Laureano Fuentes Matons (1825–1898), who was deeply involved in both ecclesiastical music and secular compositional activity. Fuentes participated in cathedral practice while also composing larger-scale vocal and instrumental works intended for broader performance contexts.³⁸

Fuentes’s career demonstrates how art music remained rooted in religious institutions even as its practical realization ceased to be confined to a single site. Music performed in the cathedral and music experienced in educational or concert-like settings operated under distinct conditions, even when produced by the same composer.³⁹

In this way, nineteenth-century Cuban art music expanded its placement without relinquishing institutional affiliation. Music continued to belong to the church while being situated in diverse environments and unfolding within different temporal regimes. The resulting displacements rendered the meaning of art music increasingly unstable, producing a persistent gap between institutionally conferred legitimacy and lived musical experience. It was this gap that quietly prepared the conditions under which, in the early twentieth century, art music would begin to interrogate its own premises.⁴⁰

4. When the Periphery Comes to the Foreground: Reconfigurations Within Composition in the Early Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, Cuban art music entered a phase in which the premises of its own placement—previously perceived as relatively stable—began to be questioned from within. Over the course of the nineteenth century, art music had expanded its range of settings while remaining institutionally grounded in the church and in educational frameworks. Yet this expansion did not resolve the question of what art music was or where it properly belonged. A persistent distance remained between institutionally sanctioned legitimacy and the lived experience of musical sound.⁴¹

At this point, what became increasingly evident was that the very question of where art music belonged could no longer be taken for granted. Although still supported by institutions, the music produced within them began to resist full assimilation into established systems of value and meaning. Art music came to occupy a position in which it simultaneously depended upon institutional frameworks and quietly destabilized their assumptions.⁴²

This transformation should not be understood simply as the result of new stylistic influences or the introduction of external materials. Rather, what emerged was a process in which the long-standing premises of art music—its institutional affiliation, its criteria of legitimacy, and the boundary between music and non-music—were taken up explicitly within the act of composition itself. Musical works began to ask, through their internal organization, what counted as inside or outside the domain of art music.⁴³

Two composers who exemplify this internal reconfiguration are Amadeo Roldán (1900–1939) and Alejandro García Caturla (1906–1940). Neither abandoned European compositional techniques or formal procedures. Instead, both worked within those frameworks while drawing elements previously relegated to the periphery—bodily rhythm, temporal irregularity, and sonic density—into the center of musical construction.⁴⁴

Roldán’s Rítmicas (1930) offers a particularly clear instance of this shift. Although conceived for a conventional orchestral ensemble, the work places percussion at the forefront, making pulse and repetition central structural principles. What matters here is not the quotation of specific folk materials, but the elevation of bodily rhythm and sustained repetition—formerly treated as secondary—to a position that determines the overall temporal logic of the piece.⁴⁵

Rather than dismantling formal coherence, the music subtly displaces the homogeneous sense of time presupposed by traditional orchestral forms. The work does not progress toward resolution so much as persist through layers of repetition and overlap, maintaining a continuous state of tension for the listener. The resulting disjunction is not resolved but remains audible as sound.⁴⁶

A comparable tendency appears in Caturla’s works, though articulated through different compositional strategies. In pieces such as Tres danzas cubanas (1929) and Bembé (1928), melodic and harmonic frameworks are preserved, yet the placement of pulse and repetition resists linear organization. Musical flow is repeatedly interrupted or redirected, producing sensations of friction rather than closure.⁴⁷

These effects are not presented as clearly defined thematic materials. Instead, they emerge in performance and listening as experiential tensions—moments in which expectation is unsettled and time feels uneven. What is foregrounded is not a concept to be analyzed but a condition to be felt.⁴⁸

Importantly, this does not amount to a symmetrical integration of institutional art music with practices located outside it. The asymmetry remains intact; extra-institutional sonic practices are not simply absorbed into the canon of art music. Rather, art music itself begins to assume responsibility for the peripheral elements it has long held at a distance, incorporating them without neutralizing their disruptive force. As a result, fissures, displacements, and excesses are not resolved but rendered audible within the musical structure.⁴⁹

This reconfiguration does not signal a liberation of art music from institutional frameworks. Educational institutions, orchestras, and cultural administrations continued to provide essential support. What changed was that music produced within these structures could no longer be fully justified by institutional legitimacy alone. Art music now occupied a position from which it could reflect critically on its own conditions of existence.⁵⁰

Thus, in early twentieth-century Cuba, the foregrounding of the periphery made visible—and audible—the latent fissures between institution and practice. These fissures did not lead to synthesis or resolution; instead, they persisted as tensions sustained within musical form. Art music once again revealed itself not as a completed system, but as an activity that remained poised on the boundary.⁵¹

This experience would soon be carried beyond composition itself, shaping how music came to be understood, interpreted, and written about. The displacements exposed within musical works became conditions that could no longer be ignored at the level of thought and discourse, preparing the ground for new ways of speaking about art music.⁵²

5. Art Music in Discourse: The Interventions of Carpentier, Ortiz, and León

As the twentieth century progressed, the internal reconfigurations taking place within Cuban art music increasingly demanded articulation at the level of language and thought. The transformations observed in composition and performance could no longer be adequately understood through existing frameworks that treated art music either as an extension of ecclesiastical tradition or as a derivative reception of European forms. What came to the foreground was the necessity of rethinking how music itself should be narrated, conceptualized, and situated within history.⁵³

One of the earliest and most influential responses to this challenge came from the literary and intellectual work of Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980). Trained in composition as well as active as a novelist and critic, Carpentier approached Cuban music not as a closed repertory of styles but as a historical process shaped by colonial rule, religious institutions, urban life, and embodied experience. In La música en Cuba (1946), he resisted binary distinctions between “imported” and “native” music, instead tracing how musical practices emerged through overlapping spaces of performance and listening.⁵⁴

In Carpentier’s account, art music is never treated as an autonomous aesthetic sphere. Sacred music performed in cathedrals, piano pieces played in salons, and sounds accompanying festivals and processions coexist within the same historical field. These practices are not hierarchically ordered but understood as mutually constitutive. Rather than asking whether European forms were faithfully transplanted, Carpentier focused on where music sounded, how it was heard, and what kinds of temporal and bodily experiences it produced. Art music, in this sense, becomes not a reflection of culture but a site in which culture itself is continually formed.⁵⁵

A related but distinct perspective emerges in the work of Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), whose anthropological and sociological writings provided a powerful conceptual vocabulary for understanding cultural transformation in Cuba. In texts such as Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940), Ortiz introduced the notion of “transculturation” to describe processes that are neither simple mixture nor harmonious synthesis, but asymmetrical transformations shaped by power, displacement, and continuity.⁵⁶

Although Ortiz did not address art music as a primary object of study, his framework has profound implications for its interpretation. The institutional practices that sustained art music—church liturgy, conservatory education, formal composition—were always surrounded by other temporalities and bodily regimes that could not be fully absorbed. Art music neither wholly incorporated nor fully excluded these practices; instead, it maintained a productive distance from them. Ortiz’s concept allows this distance to be understood not as a deficiency, but as a structural condition of cultural life.⁵⁷

The task of bringing such insights directly into musicological discourse was undertaken most systematically by Argeliers León (1918–1991). Active as a composer, researcher, and educator, León sought to reconceptualize Cuban music as a complex system of overlapping cultural processes rather than a linear stylistic tradition. In works such as Del canto y el tiempo, he emphasized that musical forms do not evolve uniformly but emerge through the interaction of practices operating at different historical speeds.⁵⁸

Central to León’s approach is the idea of “generic complexes,” which rejects the notion of stable genres in favor of mutable configurations shaped by performance context, social function, and historical circumstance. Music, for León, is not an object that can be fixed through analysis alone, but a practice that continually shifts as it moves between institutions, bodies, and everyday life. Art music thus appears simultaneously as a bearer of order and as a site where that order is unsettled.⁵⁹

What unites the interventions of Carpentier, Ortiz, and León is their refusal to treat Cuban art music as a self-contained tradition. Their writings do not import abstract theory from outside, but emerge from sustained engagement with the historical conditions under which Cuban music was produced, heard, and transmitted. The accumulation of practices described in earlier sections—cathedral music in the colonial period, the expansion of musical settings in the nineteenth century, and compositional reconfigurations in the early twentieth century—returns here at the level of discourse.⁶⁰

Art music, when articulated through these perspectives, is no longer understood as a repository of exemplary works. It becomes a language for questioning how cultural authority is constructed, how boundaries are drawn and redrawn, and how experiences that resist classification continue to shape musical meaning. The writings of Carpentier, Ortiz, and León thus provide conceptual tools for grasping art music as a process situated between institutional affiliation and “muen” (non-relation), between center and periphery.⁶¹

Through this discursive shift, art music ceases to converge toward a single center. Instead, it is perceived as a constellation of practices and experiences through which different forms of “Cubanness” are articulated at different moments. Music mediates between institutions, bodies, urban spaces, and ritual practices, generating meanings that remain provisional and contingent. The transformation of discourse itself becomes a historical index of the boundary-making processes that have shaped Cuban art music.⁶²

History Heard at the Boundary:Toward an Unfinished Music History

What this essay has traced is not a linear narrative of development in Cuban art music, nor a teleological account culminating in stylistic maturity. Rather, it has sought to follow the shifting conditions under which art music emerged, where it was situated, how it was heard, and in what ways it was endowed with meaning. Music did not exist as a completed cultural form prior to history; it became historical through the overlapping of institutions, bodies, temporalities, and modes of listening.⁶³

As discussed in Section 1, Cuban art music first took shape in the sixteenth century within the restricted framework of ecclesiastical institutions. Its early formation was precarious, dependent on fragile networks of personnel and resources, and characterized by discontinuity rather than stability. At the same time, other sonic practices—organized according to entirely different principles—coexisted beyond the cathedral without being easily integrated. This configuration is better understood not as a lack of mixture, but as the coexistence of parallel circuits that maintained distance from one another.⁶⁴

Section 2 examined how, from the late eighteenth century onward, cathedral music gradually acquired a degree of continuity through the work of figures such as Esteban Salas and Juan París. Yet institutionalization did not yield closure. The persistence of art music relied on constant adjustment, improvisation, and personal labor, revealing that affiliation with institutional authority and structural instability were intertwined from the outset. Art music was never fully sealed into a self-sufficient system.⁶⁵

In Section 3, the nineteenth century appeared as a period in which the spatial and experiential placement of art music expanded beyond the cathedral into educational and domestic settings. While remaining institutionally anchored, music came to be heard under increasingly heterogeneous conditions. The legitimacy conferred by institutions no longer coincided neatly with musical experience. This divergence did not produce liberation or rupture, but a displacement—an uneven reconfiguration of where and how art music could exist.⁶⁶

Section 4 focused on the early twentieth century, when this latent tension became audible within composition itself. In the works of Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla, bodily rhythms and temporalities previously relegated to the margins entered the internal logic of art music. These elements were not synthesized into harmony, but introduced as friction, imbalance, and unresolved pressure. Art music thus began to reflect critically on its own premises while remaining institutionally embedded.⁶⁷

Section 5 turned to the discursive level, where these experiences were articulated in language. The writings of Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, and Argeliers León reframed art music not as a closed canon but as a historically contingent practice situated between affiliation and “muen” (non-relation). Their interventions demonstrated that music is neither external to institutions nor fully contained by them; it operates as a medium through which historical realities are sensed, negotiated, and contested.⁶⁸

Across these trajectories, a consistent pattern emerges: Cuban art music never crystallized into a completed system. Instead, it persisted in a state of partial openness—attached to institutions yet never fully absorbed by them, shaped by norms yet continuously unsettled by experiences that exceeded those norms. This distance should not be interpreted as lack or immaturity. Rather, it functioned as a generative space in which meanings could be reconfigured and histories could remain mobile.⁶⁹

From this perspective, writing music history cannot be reduced to cataloging works or tracing stylistic succession. It also entails asking where music was heard, under what conditions of listening, and along which boundaries its meanings were produced. Sound may resonate at the center of institutional order, or linger at its edges; it may circulate without clear affiliation, occupying states of partial detachment or “non-belonging.” These modalities are not peripheral to history—they are among its formative forces.⁷⁰

This essay does not claim to exhaust these dynamics, nor does it propose a definitive theoretical model. It should instead be understood as an experiment in writing music history as a process of becoming—one that unfolds at the intersection of boundaries and “muen” (non-relation). Cuban art music provides a particularly rich terrain for such an inquiry, precisely because its history resists closure.⁷¹

The place where sound becomes history is never singular. It shifts across institutions, bodies, and listening practices, generating multiple and sometimes incompatible temporalities. Attending to this plurality—listening for history at its boundaries—offers a point of departure for rethinking not only Cuban art music, but the writing of music history itself.⁷²

Endnotes
1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
3. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4. Yoshihiko Amino, Muen, Kugai, Raku: Nihon chūsei no jiyū to heiwa (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1978).
5. Masao Yamaguchi, Bunka to ryōgisei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1975).
6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
8. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
9. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo (Mexico City: SEP, 1987).
11. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
12. Ibid., 2–3.
13. Peter Manuel, Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
14. Ibid., 45–47.
15. Leonardo Acosta, Música y descolonización (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982).
16. Ibid., 21–24.
17. Esteban Salas y Castro, Misa a cuatro voces, manuscript sources, Archivo de la Catedral de Santiago de Cuba.
18. Miriam Escudero, “La música sacra en Santiago de Cuba en el siglo XVIII,” Revista Musical Chilena 61, no. 208 (2007): 35–56.
19. Zoila Lapique, La música colonial cubana (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1979).
20. Ibid., 88–94.
21. Juan París, selected sacred works, Archivo Nacional de Cuba.
22. Balaguer, La música en la catedral de Santiago de Cuba (Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, 1964).
23. Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
24. Ibid., 12–15.
25. Manuel Saumell, Danzas para piano, ed. Zoila Lapique (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1980).
26. Ibid., introduction.
27. Natalio Galán, Cuba y sus sones (Madrid: Editorial Júcar, 1983).
28. Ibid., 54–57.
29. Nicolás Ruiz Espadero, selected piano works, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí.
30. Leonardo Acosta, “Espadero y el piano cubano,” Boletín Música 12 (1984): 9–18.
31. Laureano Fuentes Matons, sacred and secular works, Archivo de la Catedral de Santiago de Cuba.
32. Zoila Lapique, Música y músicos de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1986).
33. Amadeo Roldán, Rítmicas (Paris: Editions Max Eschig, 1930).
34. Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 23–27.
35. Alejandro García Caturla, Tres danzas cubanas (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1929).
36. Alejandro García Caturla, Bembé (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1928).
37. Ibid.
38. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 78–83.
39. Alejo Carpentier, La música en Cuba (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946).
40. Ibid., 5–9.
41. Ibid., 112–118.
42. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Havana: Jesús Montero, 1940).
43. Ibid., xv–xviii.
44. Ibid.
45. Bronislaw Malinowski, preface to Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano, ix–x.
46. Argeliers León, Del canto y el tiempo (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984).
47. Ibid., 14–20.
48. Argeliers León, “La música y la identidad cultural cubana,” Boletín Música 5 (1971): 3–15.
49. Ibid.
50. Moore, Music and Revolution, 101–105.
51. Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 198–203.
52. Ibid.
53. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72–95.
54. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 131–140.
55. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 63–86.
56. Yamaguchi, Bunka to ryōgisei, 44–51.
57. Amino, Muen, Kugai, Raku, 102–109.
58. Said, Orientalism, 25–28.
59. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 54–56.
60. Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, 1–10.
61. Bonfil Batalla, México profundo, 17–22.
62. Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 7–8.
63. See Introduction, notes 1–12.
64. See Section 1, notes 13–20.
65. See Section 2, notes 21–24.
66. See Section 3, notes 25–32.
67. See Section 4, notes 33–38.
68. See Section 5, notes 39–50.
69. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 169–172.
70. Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 210–215.
71. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 145–149.
72. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 193–195.

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