Arsenio Rodriguez: A black Cuban musician in the dance music milieus of Havana, New York City, and Los Angeles.
Item
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Title
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Arsenio Rodriguez: A black Cuban musician in the dance music milieus of Havana, New York City, and Los Angeles.
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Identifier
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AAI3083665
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identifier
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3083665
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Creator
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Garcia, David Fernando.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Peter Manuel
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Dance | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Biography
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Abstract
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This dissertation documents and examines the music, career, and life of Arsenio Rodriguez (1911--1970), a prolific black composer and innovator of Cuban popular dance music. Although musicians and historians have recognized Rodriguez's importance to the development of mambo and salsa, little has been written on the exact nature of his musical contribution. This study focuses on the emergence and popularization of his son montuno style and its accompanying dance style among Havana's black working class in the 1940s, his music's role in the formation of mambo and early salsa in addition to pachanga and boogaloo in New York City, and his struggling performance career in New York's and Los Angeles's ethnically diverse Latin dance music settings in the 1950s and 1960s.;The data collected derives from over 80 interviews conducted with more than 50 of Rodriguez's family members, former band members, and other contemporaries, in addition to his recorded repertory, newspapers and magazines, musician's union records and local government documents, as well as documents from record companies and publishing companies and databases. Through extensive musical analysis and historical and social documentation, this study shows that Rodriguez's son montuno style was defined by principles and procedures characteristic of African performance and emerged in the distinct historical and social context of Havana, whose social relations both contributed to its identification as a "black" style and accounted for the racial discourse through which this was expressed. It also shows that the trajectory of his style and musical career as well as his experience as a black Cuban immigrant in New York City and Los Angeles were shaped by the condition of displacement, whereby he, his music, and style were subject to different aesthetic codes, dance forms, and forms of group identification. Finally, this dissertation redresses Rodriguez's (dis)placement in Cuban and Latin dance music historiography, whereby recognition of his significance is limited to the 1940s in Cuba and ignores both the coexistence of his music with mambo, pachanga, boogaloo, and early salsa and the complex social relations that shaped the trajectories of his career, music, and these styles as well as the dance music milieus of Havana, New York City, and Los Angeles.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
