Variations: Hurston and Carpentier’s Caribbean Counterpoint

Abstract

While Los pasos perdidos explores, Concierto barroco discovers. Finally released from his longing to deliver the provenance of each chord and every rhythmic structure, Carpentier composes a brief and relatively lighthearted version of music in the Americas in a work of fiction that provides as complete a statement of the complex relationship between music of Europe and the Americas as anything else he has written. “Don’t give me any fucking History when it comes to the subject of theater,” exclaims Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi in Concierto barroco. “What matters here is poetic illusion” ¹ (193). One of Vivaldi’s interlocutors, the Afro-Cuban musician Filomeno, submits his own case for the utility of theatrical illusion and its capacity to take spectators to otherwise impossible destinations. “Thanks to theater we can go back in time and live, something impossible for our present embodiment, in times forever gone” ² (198). As imaginative as Carpentier makes this seem, this move away from the chronological details of music history actually makes a convincing case for the author’s main point; although Concierto barroco takes readers back in time to an eighteenth-century jam session that at first glance seems impossible, the colonization of America influenced music, as well as literature and plastic arts, in Europe just as it did in the colonies.