The Rhythmic Component of Afrocubanismo in the Art Music of Cuba

Afrocubanismo was an aesthetic trend in art music, focusing on the recognition, assimilation, and validation of African cultural features pre sent in Cuban society. The new ethos found expression in the works of the Grupo Minorista, a seminal group of composers with an emergent ethnic sensibility, whose production reflected neonationalistic musical concerns that emphasized the manipulation of timbral-rhythmic elements in a modern harmonic vocabulary. In this regard, afrocubanismo provided a transition from nationalism to cosmopolitanism in Cuban art music, forg ing the representation of race and class at the intersection of art-popular and rural-urban music dichotomies. These experiments marked a signif icant juncture in the evolution of the Cuban concert repertoire, becoming a discursive site for the negotiation of national identities.