On Wed. May 13th the Minnesota Orchestra flew to Havana for its first visit to the island since 1930. The 17 December 2015 announcement by President Obama and Raul Castro on the changes in Cuba-U.S. relations has brought an onslaught of U.S. to Cuba travel, as travel restrictions have eased and the bureaucratic procedure for planning trips from the U.S. to Cuba have become less cumbersome. Much of the travel to Cuba from the U.S. involves cultural activities, such as museum visits and attending artistic performances, or, as in the case of the MnOrch’s visit, bringing cultural representatives from the U.S. to Cuba.
The Minnesota Orchestra timed the trip to coincide with CubaDisco, May 15-24, the Cuban recording industry’s annual awards ceremony. Every year CubaDisco centers on a particular theme, and this year’s theme is “Música sinfónica coral.” To fit the theme, the Minnesota Orchestra chose to offer a first concert consisting of works by Beethoven, including the Fantasy in C minor for piano, chorus, and orchestra (Choral Fantasy) in collaboration with Cuban pianist Frank Fernández and the Cuban Coro Nacional. Several news outlets [see here, here, here, and here] have covered the MnOrch’s Cuba Tour, all in a very positive light. The coverage has focused on music’s potential for bridging cultural and political gaps, and pointing out the MnOrch’s administration’s accomplishment in the great feat of planning for such a trip, especially when taking into account its recent dicey history (when the orchestra went on an sixteen-month strike). These same articles have retold the forgotten history of the orchestra’s Cuban tour in 1929 and 1930, which at the time was called the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. The Beethoven concert was a reminder of that initial 1929 visit, when the MSO performed the Eroica Symphony, also included in the May 2015 concert.
But travel of musicians from the U.S. to Cuba is not as novel or groundbreaking as it might seem. Several U.S universities have long-standing agreements to send students to the University of Havana and other institutions in Cuba with a particular focus on music. The University of Alabama, for example has had an academic exchange program with universities throughout Havana, and several members of U. of Alabama’s school of music have travelled to Cuba to offer master classes and recitals. Several universities have academic agreements with Casa de las Américas and the Colegio San Gerónimo for U.S. students to take courses in Havana. Individual musicians and scholars doing research and furthering their musical knowledge have been traveling to Cuba for decades, patiently parsing through the bureaucratic procedures to obtain travel permits and visas from the U.S. and Cuban governments. Several other U.S. ensembles have traveled to Cuba, including the Milwaukee Orchestra in 1999 and the Florida Orchestra in 2013. We also seem to have forgotten that prior to 1959 Cuban composers and musicians maintained lively contact and dialogue with their U.S. counterparts, holding recitals and concerts consisting exclusively of works by living U.S. and Cuban composers, promoting each other’s works in their respective countries.
Much of the recent travels of U.S. artists to Cuba have been presented in the U.S. media as a triumph of free speech and the free market, as opening up Cubans to an until-now unknown world, as though Cubans have been living in a cultural blockade. This version of the story, and with particular concern to classical music, ignores the lively musical exchanges Cuba has had throughout the last five-plus decades with musicians and composers from Latin American and Eastern European countries. One exception in the media coverage addresses the tour from a historical perspective connecting it her recently published research on the U.S.’s use of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. The Minnesota Orchestra’s tour is groundbreaking in that it was the first of its kind undertaken by a U.S. symphony since December 2014 when President Obama eased travel restrictions to Cuba, but its concert programming reflects the cultural conservativism rampant in most U.S. orchestral ensembles.
The concert programming was safe, as Pedro de la Hoz, music critic for Granma, noted in his review of the orchestra’s visit. The two programs consisted of usual crowd pleasers; the first concert included Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Choral Fantasy, and Third Symphony, with the second concert consisting of Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla’s Obertura Cubana, Bernstein’s West Side Story Suite, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette.
This is not unique of a Cuban concert tour, but reflects the general trend in U.S. symphonic programming, which consists of old standards, with rare premieres, and even rarer second performances of new pieces.
Most of the media coverage of the MnOrch’s Cuba trip has deemed the visit a significant accomplishment in light of the sixteen-month strike two years ago, and for an orchestra that has had disagreements between the musicians and the administrators, this tour should be highly praised as a comeback. Yet some of the reports have pointed out that although the MnOrch’s concerts in Cuba performed in sold out venues, attendance to MnOrch concerts at home has continued to decrease. As much as the Cuba tour should be heralded a triumph, the MnOrch still has a lot of work to do to attract a strong and steady audience base at home.
If the objective of these trips is cultural diplomacy, of bridging the cultural and political gaps, wouldn’t it be more daring to perform new music by U.S. composers?
Wouldn’t it say to Cuban audiences “we promote and support U.S. artists and creative endeavors” if the orchestra performed some pieces by living U.S. composers? And even more daring, wouldn’t playing newer pieces by Cuban composers show an even greater commitment to not just exporting U.S. cultural production, but to also show that the conversation is not one sided? Such an approach to programming would open the floor to a dialogue, showing that U.S. musicians are interested in current music trends in Cuba and inviting Cuban artists to discuss what is important to them artistically. Yet, it is difficult to expect such a concert and engagement when the tour was planned in less than five months, and when these types of conversations don’t even seem to be taking place with composers at home (i.e. in the U.S.).
In 2012 the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba toured the U.S. for the first time, and their concert programming also revealed a rather conservative approach, consisting of works by U.S. composer Aaron Copland and Cuban crowd pleaser Ernesto Lecuona, as well as nineteenth-century standards by Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert. When one considers that in 2012 U.S.-Cuba relations had improved, granted not to the same degree as in the last five months, it is not surprising that the OSN programmed a series of concerts for their U.S. tour that did not risk distancing concert goers.
If anything, the OSN 2012 and MnOrch 2015 tours have much in common and reveal a concern with NOT ruffling any feathers or taking any artistic risks; playing it safe, so to speak. This may be a sign that although U.S. and Cuban musicians are eager and willing to resume musical exchanges, as they had been taking place throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s, all parties are still cautious with the improving relations.
This choice in concert programming shows that rather than risk offending the most conservative concert goers, the music directors of both the MnOrch and the OSN prefer to stick to the meat and potatoes, or should I say pernil y malanga, that audiences will not find objectionable.
The Minnesota Orchestra’s concerts in Cuba are indeed a significant step toward improving and reopening musical exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba, yet I wonder what message does performing music from the conservative Euro-American orchestral canon send to Cuban audiences not only about the state of U.S. orchestras as institutions, but also of the type of musical exchanges to expect in the future.
Program, courtesy of William Tilford