Cuban Music Institute

Street 15 No.452 corner F, Vedado, Revolution Square, Havana, Cuba, zip code 10 400
Tel. (53-7) 832 3503 - 06

www.dcubamusica.cult.cu

The Cuban Music Institute was created on March 11, 1989, by Resolution No. 33 of the Minister of Culture. On March 11 itself, Resolution 36 regulated the system of care for musicians, which was made up of three national institutions: National Center of Popular Music, National Center of Concert Music and National Philharmonic, in addition to 16 provincial music centers and one municipal center on the Isle of Youth. It has an Advisory Council made up of personalities from the different genres and styles of Cuban music and is presided over by Master Digna Guerra, National Music Award winner.

Currently, the following institutions are subordinated to it:

• National Center of Concert Music: It attends to the interpretation, promotion, creation and development of concert music and its artists in the country.
• National Center of Popular Music: It preserves the artistic talent, mainly of Trova and Jazz, as well as some personalities of the traditional and dance music; it favors its development and guarantees its national and international promotion.
• National Philharmonic of Cuba. It is a cultural institution constituted by the National Symphonic Orchestra, an outstanding artistic unit of the artistic catalogue of our country, whose mission and function is the performance of the symphonic repertoire of Cuban and foreign authors in its main headquarters, Amadeo Roldán Theater, and in other national and international spaces where they perform.
• Amadeo Roldan Theater. Its essential mission is to promote and spread the best national and international values of concert music and other musical expressions, being at the same time a national reference center in the promotion of young talents, contributing to the strengthening of the artistic culture of the population. It is currently undergoing repairs.
• Center for Research and Development of Cuban Music: It provides scientific and methodological advice on everything concerning the historical and social research of Cuban music, and promotes and stimulates knowledge, research, development and general information about music as one of the fundamental values of the national culture.
• National Music Museum. Its mission is to collect, preserve, study and disseminate Cuba's musical heritage of all times. In this sense, it plays a leading role for the institutions that make up the music system.
• Cuban Agency for Music Author Right. Its mission is to effectively guarantee the protection and defense of the moral and patrimonial interests of the authors and other rights holders, as well as to encourage creativity, promotion and publicity of the works of the authors it represents.
• Industry of Musical Instruments "Fernando Ortiz". Its mission is the production of stringed musical instruments, percussion and accessories, to ensure the development of artistic education, the movements of Cultural Houses and the professional movement of the country.
• Cuban Rap Agency. Its mission is to contribute in a decisive way to the development of the rap genre in the country and to promote the most representative artistic units of its catalogue in the national and international scenarios, contributing to the consolidation of models that, due to their characteristics, are an expression of the values of the Cuban culture.
• Cuban Rock Agency. Its mission is to make a decisive contribution to the development of the rock genre in the country and to promote and market the most representative artistic units in its catalogue on the national and international stages, contributing to the consolidation of models that, because of their characteristics, are an expression of the values of Cuban culture.
• Record Label and Music Publishing House "Producciones Colibrí ". It has the mission of creating a cultural space of excellence for the promotion and national and international commercialization of the best values of the Cuban music in diverse phonographic supports, on the base of the integral management of its contents and creators.

These institutions enjoy autonomy for their operation within the framework of their competence, respond to the policy outlined by the Institute and are accountable to the President of the Institute, to whom they are subordinate.

As part of the policy in response to the mission entrusted to this institution, the Ministry of Culture in its Board of Directors approved its strategic projections until 2030, which were structured in General Strategies and 10 development programs aimed at ensuring the vitality of our musical culture and its balanced development in all regions of the country, as part of strengthening our cultural identity.

One of the programs that has obtained more results during these years has been the PROGRAM OF RESCUE, PLASMATION AND DIFFUSION OF THE CUBAN MUSICAL HERITAGE, directed by the Musicologist and National Prize of Music Jesus Gomez Cairo from the National Museum of the Music.
This program began in 2004 and its fundamental objective is to save and rescue masterpieces of the tangible and intangible musical heritage of Cuban culture; to preserve them by applying the technical and scientific principles of conservation and restoration for their public exhibition and to promote their knowledge; to translate them into editions of phonograms, scores, books and other audiovisual media for their dissemination and socialization.

Musical Heritage:

It consists of the musical works that are paradigmatic of the various cultures of all times, the musical genres and styles that they comprise, the musical thought of their emblematic creators and creators and their histories.

They are also the musical-cultural goods, material and spiritual, whose usufruct, either by creation or by appropriation, identifies a community, nation or region, in its historical evolution and social projection.

Its exponents are artistic and cultural treasures that acquire a high value and great significance in any of the spheres of creation of music: be it folklore, popular professional and so-called cultured or academic.

Thus, musical heritage may include musical works, artists who are living human treasures, musical instruments of high technical or historical value, handwritten scores and some editions of great compositions, original documents attesting to the history of music, highly significant musical recordings and even certain types of players of those recordings, because of their technological and historical value.

The concept of musical heritage includes both past and present historical heritage.

Main results:

• Creation of the paper restoration office, which was achieved thanks to the implementation of a collaboration project with the European Union (EU) and the strong participation of the Valencian Institute for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Assets, and the NGO Piti Fajardo, also from Valencia, Spain. This allows us to have state-of-the-art technology and specialists trained in it. Since its inauguration in 2013 until the present, 546 documents with 825 documents/sheets, of significant patrimonial value belonging to our museum, to Rodrigo Prats Music Museum of Sagua la Grande and Alejandro García Caturla Music Museum of Remedios and to Argeliers León Music Documentation Center of Pinar del Río and Rafael Inciarte Music Documentation Center of Guantánamo, have been restored. In addition, we have collaborated in this sense with other similar institutions outside the music system.
• The same has happened with the nitrogen disinfection chamber, a technology that guarantees the total disinfection of the patrimonial goods without any collateral damage for its supports, which also provides services to other institutions that have requested it: National Cuban Library (Collection of rare and valuable books), Office of the Historian of Havana, goods preserved in the Office of Commander Che Guevara (MININT), among others.
• With regard to the restoration of the movable property, hard work is being done in order to have all those that will be exhibited when the museum's exhibition rooms are reopened. Of these we have already reached the figure of 535 restored properties (musical instruments of diverse typologies including large pianos, musical reproducers, works of plastic arts, scenic costumes of great artists, furniture, lamps and lanterns of style), which include properties of the Argeliers León Centre in Pinar del Río and Alejandro García Caturla House Museum in Remedios. In this work a good rhythm is maintained that we need to continue in the next stage.
• On the other hand, the library and archive carried out the quantification of all its collections, which reached the figure of 307 374 documents of varied dimensions, formats, sizes and contents, which is very useful to guarantee a good processing of these goods.
• The databases corresponding to the Departments of Museology and Library and Archives have already been completed, although they sometimes present technical difficulties that temporarily delay their effectiveness.
• With regard to the Publishing Seal, we must highlight the annual participation in the International Book Fair of Havana, as an integrated system of all the music institutions under the control of Cuban Music Institute.
• The diffusion work and heritage socialization has been maintained through the systematic participation in more than 10 annual events, among which the International Workshop on Heritage Musical, organized by and from the Museum, VI Colloquium and International Congress of Musicology, organized by Casa de las Americas, Pablo Hernández Balaguer Symposium, Cubadisco Fair Symposium, Matamoros Son Festival, Pepe Sánchez Trova Festival and many others.
• During this period, the declaration of Tres, Rumba and Son as musical heritage of the nation was worked on and achieved.
• In our presentation room, around 10 to 12 activities are carried out every month with the active presence of the public and our workers, in which emblematic manifestations of the musical heritage in all its spheres are shown, as well as colloquiums, conferences and open classes. During this period, the spaces "The composer and his work" and "Music and its protagonists" were created, where creators, artists, researchers and others talk about their artistic work. These interventions are recorded and filmed and the first book with these materials is being prepared. To date, 63 editions have been made with the approval of the witnesses and the general public.
• The Center of Information and Musical Documentation Argeliers León from Pinar del Río was reopened after a total restoration of its building, and in Santiago de Cuba, as part of the activities for the 500 years of the city, the Pablo Hernández Balaguer Music Museum was inaugurated.