Music in the work of Nicolás Guillén

La Música en la Obra de Nicolás Guillén deals with the musical properties of the Cuban author's poetry concentrating on the evolution of his lyric poetry in counterpoint and coherence with the musical history of the island. The work displays so many virtues and is so full in lines of development that it is difficult to establish any of them as its main merit. The handling and arrangement of the sources as well as the harmonization between the sample of poems selected for the analysis and the analysis itself are among the most successful aspects of the work. Beyond that the text allows us to immerse ourselves in the complexity contradictions and beauty of the island culture understanding in greater depth the roots of these tensions and solutions throughout the period from the discovery to the 20th century. The sections of analysis of the texts and the intentional choice of musicology as an instrument for the interpretation of the poems greatly illuminates the reading of the poems while allowing the main hypothesis of the work to be followed with great care so that the rhetorical deployment of the text gives practically no room for discussion. - Ricardo Martínez-Gamboa.