Music in Cuba.

• Author: Holston, Mark

Music in Cuba, by Alejo Carpentier. Edited and with an introduction by Timothy Brennan. Trans., Alan West-Duran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Originally published in Spanish in 1946, this seminal book has long been considered the definitive work on the history of Cuban music from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Carpentier, the celebrated author of many important works of fiction, passed away in 1980. His eclectic background included training as a classical pianist and work as a correspondent in Paris during the 1920s for Havana-based publications.

The first-ever English translation of the book arrives at a time of growing interest in traditional Cuban music. Carpentier observed a similar phenomenon himself in 1922, when he reported from France, "There is nothing more contemporary, nothing more now in Paris these days than the abrupt and unexpected triumph of Cuban music."

Given that Carpentier's research was done before the emergence in the mid-twentieth century of such popular styles as mambo and cha-cha, the book provides detailed information on the time-tested ingredients essential to the music with which...