The Musical Collaborations of Alejo Carpentier: Afrocubanism and the Quest for Spiritual Renewal

The importance of music in Alejo Carpentier’s writings, both fictional and critical, has long been recognized, yet the deeper significance of his musical friendships and collaborations during the years of his creative apprenticeship in Havana and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s has received little attention. While it is well known that Carpentier was closely involved in the musical, as well as literary, circles of the avant-garde during his eleven-year residence in Paris, the implications of his friendships with the composers Edgard Varèse, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Marius-François Gaillard and Darius Milhaud deserve closer consideration. Even before his departure from Havana in 1928, Carpentier had revealed a commitment to new music, not only in his early critical writings but in his friendships and collaborations with his Cuban compatriots Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro Garcı́a Caturla, composers whose work he later helped promote in Paris. Carpentier’s friendship with all of these composers was cemented by a creative kinship; they shared mutual enthusiasms for the aboriginal basis of the Americas and engaged in a common quest for spiritual and artistic renewal through connecting with the ancient past. Carpentier drew much from music, certainly, but the composers with whom he worked were also touched by his own search for a creative identity. By investigating Carpentier’s musical friendships and collaborations against a background of his music criticism, it is the objective of this essay to consider the path which led Carpentier to draw on music as one of the defining metaphors of his literary writings. Carpentier’s music criticism of the interwar period, much of which is preserved in the two volumes comprising the Crónicas , goes beyond mere