Amadeo Roldán

Who was Amadeo Roldán?

Amadeo Roldán y Gardes was a Cuban composer and violinist. Roldán was born in Paris to a Cuban mulatta and a Spanish father. It was his mother, the pianist Albertina Gardes, who initiated her children to music.

Roldán came to Cuba in 1919 after studying music theory and violin at the Madrid Conservatory, graduating in 1916. He became the concert-master of the new Orquesta Sinfonica de La Habana in 1922. In the mid-1920s he was appointed concert-master of the Orquesta Filarmonica of Havana and founded the Havana String Quartet.

During this period, Roldán, one of the leaders of the Afrocubanismo movement, wrote the first symphonic pieces to incorporate Afro-Cuban percussion instruments. The fifth and sixth of his Rítmicas appear to be the first works in the Western classical music tradition scored for percussion alone. Roldán's best known composition is the 1928 ballet La Rebambaramba, described by a critic of the era as "a multicolored musicorama...depicting an Afro-Cuban fiesta in a gorgeous display of Caribbean melorhythms, with the participation of a multifarious fauna of native percussion effects, including a polydental glissando on the jawbone of an ass."