Music of Cuba in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Internationally heralded composer of the serious genre can be counted as the Baroque singer Esteban Salsa y Castro from 1725 to 1803 who spent much of his life teaching and writing of music for the church, he also followed the Cathedral of Santiago de Juan by the priest Juan Paris from 1759 to 1845. Also Paris was a remarkably industrious man and an important singer; he encouraged continuous and different musical activities. Apart from the rural musical and Afro-Cuban folk music, and the most famous kind of urban creole dance music in the 19^th century was the contradanza, which started as a local form of the English country dance and the copied French contredanse and Spanish contradanza. Though several contradanzas were written for dance, from the mid- century were several were written as light-classical parlour pieces for piano. The first prominent singer in this style was Manuel Samuel (from 1818 to 1870), who is sometimes accordingly lived as the father of Cuba creole musical creator.

source of picture: www.richardrosenberg.net 

In the hands of his successor, Ignacio Cervantes Kawanagh, the piano idiom related to the contradanza achieved even greater complexity, Cervantes was known by Aaron Copland a Cuban Chopin because of his Chopinesque piano composition, Cervantes name today depend almost solely upon the forty-one Danzas Cubans, which Carpentire said occupy the place of Norwegian Dances of Grieg or the Slavic Dances of Dvorak occupy in the musics of their different countries.

Laureano Funtes from 1825 to 1898 came from a family of a musician and wrote the first opera to be composed on the Island, La hija de jefte (jefte’s daughter), it was later strong and staged under the title Seila, his several works crossed the entire genre, Gaspar Vilate from 1851 to 1891 produced many and wide ranging works all which centred on the opera. Jose White from 1836 to 1918 a mulatto of a Spanish father and an Afro-Cuban mother that was a singer and a violinist of the international award, he learnt to play the sixteen instruments and lived in Cuba, Latin American and Paris.

During the middle years of the 19^th century a young American musician that came from Havana; Louis Moreau Gottschalk from 1829 to 1869 whose father was a Jewish businessman from London, and also his mother a white creole of French Catholic background, Gottschalk was brought up mainly by his grandmother and nurse Sally which  both are from Dominique.