Amadeo Roldán Gardes

1900 - 1939

About

Amadeo Roldán Gardes is a Cuban composer, violinist, conductor and teacher. He studied the violin with Bordas at the Madrid Conservatory (graduating in 1916), won the Sarasate Prize and began a career as a performer. Then he had composition lessons with del Campo in Madrid and with Pedro Sanjuán. In 1921 he settled in Havana, where he was until his death a most active and influential figure in musical life, stimulating the rather dormant cultural activities of the city during the 1920s and 1930s. He was successively appointed leader (1924), assistant conductor (1925) and conductor and music director (1932) of the Havana PO. In 1927 he founded the Havana String Quartet, which, like the Havana PO, presented many concerts of contemporary music, then almost unknown in Cuba. Roldán was professor of composition at the Havana Municipal Conservatory and its director from 1935 until his death; after the Castro revolution it was renamed the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory.

Together with Caturla, Roldán brought to Cuban art music a much-needed imaginativeness, seriousness of purpose and technical accomplishment. His polished compositions use the rhythms of Afro-Cuban music, and he was the first to bring into the concert hall the forceful elements of black Cuban folklore (tango conga, conga, comparsa, son and rumba), which he deployed in a refined, partly Impressionist, partly dissonant, Stravinskian style. He became the figurehead and the guiding spirit for a younger generation of Cuban composers, united by common artistic ideals and aspirations. A mulatto himself, he thoroughly assimilated the mestizo features of Cuban music, and his works are often imbued with Afro-Cuban mythology. He was something of an intellectual, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s he associated with young Cuban painters and writers, some of whom established the Grupo de Avance, which led a renovation of Cuban artistic life. A close relationship with Carpentier produced a series of remarkable works, most importantly the ballet La rebambaramba. Other major compositions include Rítmicas V and VI (1930), which, with Varèse’s Ionisation, were among the first Western works for percussion ensemble.

Related Information

https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000023705?rskey=YX3MbJ&result=1

Works by Amadeo Roldán Gardes