“DEL FOLKLORISMO MUSICAL” DE ALEJO CARPENTIER: SOBRE EL ENSAYO Y SUS GRIETAS.

The following reflection aims to bring into the spotlight one of Alejo Carpentier's lesser‐known musical essays: “Del folklorismo musical”. Published along with other writings in the 1966 volume Tientos y diferencias, Carpentier's essay is a brief piece of just fifteen pages which nevertheless manages to lay out with real clarity the central ideas around which the author's theoretical proposal revolves. Due to its conciseness and the depth of its insight, it succeeds in synthesizing the key ideas of other less accessible texts, such as La música en Cuba, and furthermore reveals the limitations and aporias that Carpentier left unresolved in his attempt to redirect the anthropology of Fernando Ortiz and the musical theories of Sánchez de Fuentes towards a less essentialist musicology. Throughout this piece I will trace the course of this process to show that the path taken by Carpentier was hopelessly aporetic, perhaps because he unconsciously assumed the register of his forerunners or, perhaps, because he had not, deep down, rid himself of the assumptions about what it means to be Cuban that first found expression within the Grupo Minorista at the end of the 1920s in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]