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Art Music and Transterritoriality: Reflections on Cuban Migrations to Europe during the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2020

IVÁN CÉSAR MORALES FLORES  and
MALENA KUSS
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Abstract

The fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–91) had a profound impact on economic, socio-political, and cultural conditions in Cuba during the 1990s. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’. Increasing dire economic conditions on the island led to many changes that impoverished cultural life, including the relocation of composers in Europe, the United States, and other countries in the Americas. The situations encountered by composers who migrated to Europe varied, depending on generational differences and on the dynamics of the socio-political and cultural powers to which each of them were exposed in their new reception contexts. Whether adopting an uncontested identification with the new cultural milieu or resorting to discursive strategies of appropriation and de/re-territorialized negotiation, this text centres on the compositional journeys of four Cuban composers who settled in different European cities: Leo Brouwer (Córdoba, Spain); Eduardo Morales-Caso (Madrid); Keyla Orozco (Amsterdam); and Louis Aguirre (Aalborg, Denmark). Each case represents an invaluable experience of aesthetic reconstruction in a new creative territory that, by its own transterritoriality, has in turn enriched the sonic map of the Caribbean island.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: Musical Trajectories between Latin America and Europe, 1970–2000 , October 2020 , pp. 291 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Research conducted under the Project I+D+i: Música en conflicto en España y Latinoamérica: Entre la hegemonía y la transgresión (siglos XX y XXI) / Musics in conflict, Spain and Latin America: Between hegemony and transgression (20th and 21st centuries), HAR2015-64285-C2-1-P.

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