Alejandro L. Madrid

Following the danzón demonstrates the active cultural connections between Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and South America. Their work blurs the lines between borders. In Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance, Alejandro Madrid and Robin Moore write, “The danzón is best conceived as a particular kind of music and dance that exists within unique cultural webs of production, circulation, and signification.” Thus, while the dance was of Cuban origins, each culture transformed it to suit their own needs as it crossed borders. This expands Guirdy, Scott, Reid-Vazquez and others’ conception of Cuba’s place in relation to the gulf by including nearly the entire Western Hemisphere.
Circularity, and the paths it entails, plays a key role in linking Cuba to the larger Western Hemisphere. Though Moore and Madrid cite “circum-Caribbean dialogues” in their title, I would argue that this book goes the farthest of any work we’ve read thus far in situating Cuba within a hemispherical model. While Scott’s Degrees of Freedom discussed larger global trends in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, she focused on one family, whereas Moore and Madrid focus on multiple sources and patterns from around the “West.”
Moore and Madrid demonstrate that the danzón was a dynamic process by tracing changes in the music and movements as it moved across borders. Their continued use of comparative musical staves shows how musicians adopted elements from each other’s work and incorporated them into their own cultural milieu. Further, Moore and Madrid described how these staves represent the music only as it appeared for piano rather than as a living work full of improvisations as musicians played it. This work is only possible through a cross-disciplinary approach. Moore and Madrid blend musicology, history, anthropology, and more to form their argument.… (meer)