Amadeo Roldán

Amadeo Roldán y Gardes (Paris, 12 June 1900 – Havana, 7 March 1939) 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 (his sister María Teresa was a mezzo-soprano and his brother Alberto a cellist). Roldán came to Cuba in 1919 after studying music theory and violin at the Madrid Conservatory, graduating in 1916. He became the concertmaster (leader of the first-violin section) of the new Orquesta Sinfónica de la Habana in 1922. In the mid-1920s he was appointed concertmaster of the Orquesta Filarmónica of Havana (he would assume the position of conductor in 1932) 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. 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, inc