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Thursday, May 15, 2025
- Door Open and Reception | Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion |Second Floor | 6:00 p.m.
- Program | Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion | Second Floor | 6:30 p.m.
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KEYNOTE FEATURING
J. Lorand Matory, Ph.D. - Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke UniversityWITH
David Font-Navarrete, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor in the Department Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College
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Join us for the keynote presentation, “Beyond the Archive: The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, circa 1956” by Dr. J. Lorand Matory with comments from Dr. David Font-Navarrete.
In the mid-1950s, Lydia Cabrera and Josefina Tarafa recorded hours of Afro-Cuban ritual music in Matanzas and Havana, Cuba. The result was “Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba” (Music of the African Cults in Cuba), a boxed set of phonograph LPs printed in Cuba and distributed privately in a single limited edition circa 1956. The collection consists of 14 LP discs containing over 11 hours of audio recordings, along with liner notes and photos. Given its scope and quality, “Música de los cultos” is arguably the single most robust multimedia archive of Afro-Cuban sacred music traditions in the mid-20th century.
It remains unclear in which year the recordings were made, when the discs were pressed, and how many copies of the boxed set were produced, and only a few institutions hold complete physical editions of the original LP boxed set in their repositories. The audio recordings—the only ones Cabrera produced in her long career—are saturated by the musical and linguistic virtuosity of priest-artists for which Cabrera became an archival medium, and the sounds themselves are arguably the pinnacle of her life-long efforts to produce “material for specialists which has not passed through the dangerous filter of interpretation” (2023).
The compilation of a new digital edition of “Música de los cultos” is available for the first time as a complete and annotated archival collection at the University Libraries’ Cuban Heritage Collection, which is the official repository of the Lydia Cabrera Papers.
The program will conclude with a question and answer session with the audience.
This keynote presentation is part of a symposium that explores vital 21st-century insights on a unique document of Afro-Cuban sacred music traditions and offers novel perspectives on the Cabrera Papers’ multifaceted scope and significance. On May 14, a private collaborative research workshop will bring together scholars, priests, and artists for a critical dialogue.
This event is co-sponsored by the University of Miami’s Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Joseph Carter Memorial Fund.
