Cervantes writes his Cuban danzas

1875-01-01 · 1875

Ignacio Cervantes was Cuba’s leading concert musician of the 1800s. Between 1875 and 1895 he published twenty-one Danzas for piano: short Cuban dances that follow the old contradanza shape without copying folk tunes. 1875 is also the year Spain sent him into exile in the United States. “Composed between 1875 and 1895, Cervantes’s twenty-one published Danzas occupy, in Cuba’s music, the same place that Grieg’s Norwegian Dances, or Dvorak’s Slavic Dances do in the music of their respective countries.” — Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist and music historian, Music in Cuba, trans. Alan West-Durán, ed. Timothy Brennan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 211–212.

Genres: Contradanza, Música clásica