Silvio Rodríguez

Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez (born November 29, 1946 in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba ) is one of the most famous Cuban songwriters of Nueva Trova music and a former member of the Cuban parliament. His poetic songs have been known and widespread in Spanish-speaking countries since the 1970s and have also been interpreted by other famous singers.

2004 in Buenos Aires

origin

Silvio Rodríguez comes from a village in a very fertile area in the province of Havana in Cuba . Tobacco is mainly grown in this area . He is the son of a farming family. His grandfather was a tobacco worker and known to the Cuban poet and freedom fighter José Martí . His father, Víctor Dagoberto Rodríguez Ortega, was a farmer with a socialist-liberal attitude. His mother, Argelia Domínguez León, was a hairdresser. Variously Silvio has derived his enthusiasm for music from his mother, who all day boleros , sones and danzones from Santiago de Cuba has sung. On a few occasions she has also helped her son with his artistic work.

Career

He has lived in Havana since he was six. He started writing poetry at the age of seven. Since 1955 he took piano lessons. In 1961 he participated as a schoolboy in the national literacy campaign in the rural regions of Cuba. In the same year he joined the newly formed student militia. In 1962, at the age of fifteen, he introduced himself to the youth magazine Mella as a cartoonist and immediately received his first commissions.

Photograph by Silvio Rodríguez in 1962, taken by Virgilio Martínez for the weekly Mella .

In 1964 he was called up for military service, which he began in the westernmost tip of Cuba. While working for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR), Silvio Rodríguez met Esteban Baños, who gave him further lessons on the guitar, which has since become his most important musical instrument. He spent the last year of his military service with Verde Olivo , the FAR magazine then headed by Luis Pavón . He continued to write and composed a few pieces. His first public appearance was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. Together with Luis López he sang and presented himself at two amateur festivals of the revolutionary forces. In March 1967 he completed his military service. On June 13th of the same year he had his first appearance on the television program Música y Estrellas, according to his own definition the beginning of his professional musician career. As early as November 1967 he hosted the television program Mientras tanto , in which both established artists of different genres and new talents were presented. After he had praised the music of the Beatles, who had been rejected by the Castro government , his broadcast was canceled in the spring of 1968 and Rodríguez was dismissed as an employee of the state broadcaster.

The work under Leo Brouwer in the group for sound experiments ( Grupo de Experimentación Sonora ) of the Cuban Film Institute ICAIC was decisive for his development . There he met other songwriters and published his first songs and records.

The first independent record with songs by Silvio Rodríguez was released in 1975 with the title Días y Flores (Days and Flowers) after eight years of work as an artist and hundreds of songs he had composed during that time. In 1978 it was distributed by the record label Plans in the Federal Republic of Germany . In 1996 Frank Viehweg published a CD entitled Der Sture , on which he performed his own adaptations of Silvio's songs to the original melodies.

Since May 2010 Rodríguez has been running his own blog with the title "Segunda Cita". Also in 2010 he started the ongoing concert series “Conciertos en los barrios”, in which well-known musicians perform free of charge in disadvantaged residential areas - initially on the outskirts of Havana, later also in other cities in Cuba.

Positions

In March 2010, Rodríguez said at a press conference in Havana on the launch of his album Segunda Cita , Cuba "cry out for the review of a bunch of things, of concepts, even of institutions", that the revolution must overcome its "R", move on to evolution and itself so renew. He very much hoped that his unofficial information was correct that such a full review (by the government) was taking place. Two days later a cartoon appeared in the Granma in which Rodríguez put the following sentences in his mouth: “Yes ... I used to sing for the poor of the world. That was before I got rich from protest songs. "

In September 2011 there was the publicly announced and much discussed break in the Cuban cultural scene between the two most prominent representatives and co-founders of Nueva Trova, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés . Milanés had expressed himself critical of the political situation in Cuba in interviews on the sidelines of a concert tour in Miami, whereupon Rodríguez attacked him sharply on his blog, suggesting, among other things, that Milanés had expressed the criticism for financial reasons in order to sell more tickets for his concert tour. Milanés responded by stating that he would never forgive Rodríguez, who was once his brother, for the “twofold betrayal” that his public “lies and perversions” represented about himself.

In September 2013, Rodríguez mediated a cultural-political scandal that had been triggered by comments made by the musician Roberto Carcassés critical of the government during a live broadcast of a major concert on Cuban television. After the state authorities had banned Carcassé from appearing for an indefinite period, Rodríguez first demonstratively announced the musician's performance at his next two concerts, before announcing on his blog a day later that the official ban had been lifted after talks with Carcassés in the Ministry of Culture had been.

Discography

• 1975: Días y Flores
• 1978: Al final de este viaje
• 1978: Mujeres
• 1980: Rabo de Nube
• 1982: Unicornio
• 1984: Tríptico (album for the 25th anniversary of the revolution, is sold as three separate albums Tríptico Vol. 1, 2 and 3)
• 1986: Causas y Azares
• 1988: Oh Melancolía
• 1992: Silvio Rodríguez en Chile
• 1992: Silvio
• 1994: Rodríguez
• 1996: Domínguez
• 1998: Descartes
• 1999: Mariposas
• 2002: Expedición
• 2003: Cita con Ángeles
• 2006: Érase que se era
• 2010: Segunda Cita
• 2015: Amoríos

The above discography corresponds to the one that Silvio Rodríguez himself published on his homepage.

In addition to these "official" albums, there are a number of collaborations, singles, live albums and compilations.

See also

• Cuban music

Web links

• Literature by and about Silvio Rodríguez in the catalog of the German National Library
• Zurrón del Aprendiz - personal website of Silvio Rodríguez (Spanish)
• Segunda Cita - personal blog of Silvio Rodríguez (Spanish)
• Silvio Rodríguez Article in the Cuban web encyclopedia EcuRed (Spanish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biografía on Rodríguez's private website Zurrón del Aprendiz , accessed on September 23, 2013 (Spanish)
2. ↑ Julieta García Ríos: Virgilio en Ojalá . In: Juventud Rebelde from January 5, 2013, accessed on September 23, 2013 (Spanish)
3. ↑ Cartoon drawn by Rodríguez from 1962 with texts by Norberto Fuentes , from Mella , accessed via Segunda Cita on September 23, 2013 (Spanish)
4. ↑ 3 preguntas a Silvio Rodríguez, in: La Joven Cuba of April 30, 2014, accessed on July 7, 2014 (Spanish)
5. ↑ Silvio Rodríguez: Uno no es ni famoso, ni exitoso, ni ningún oso, in: Cubadebate from June 18, 2014, accessed on June 23, 2014 (Spanish)
6. ↑ La época, la música, lo humano , interview with the magazine Revolución y Cultura from September 2000, on the website Zurrón del Aprendiz by Silvio Rodríguez, accessed on October 16, 2017 (Spanish)
7. ↑ Nelson P. Valdés: Cuba, los Beatles y el contexto histórico, in: Cubadebate of May 6, 2016, accessed on October 16, 2017 (Spanish)
8. ^ Blog Segunda Cita , accessed June 27, 2011 (Spanish).
9. ↑ Dalia Reyes Perera: Silvio Rodríguez: “Yo cambio, todos cambiamos” . In: A lo cubano from October 22, 2012, accessed on September 23, 2013 (Spanish)
10. ↑ Silvio Rodríguez reclama cambios en Cuba . In: El País of March 28, 2010, accessed September 30, 2011 (Spanish)
11. ↑ La Opinión Gráfica . ( Memento of April 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: Granma of March 30, 2010, accessed on September 30, 2011 (Spanish)
12. ^ Cuba: al rojo vivo polémica entre Silvio Rodríguez y Pablo Milanés . In: Nuevo Herald, September 8, 2011, accessed September 21, 2011 (Spanish)
13. ↑ Silvio Rodríguez: Puntualizando . In his blog Segunda Cita from September 17, 2013 (Spanish)
14. ↑ Cuba is apparently lifting sanctions against jazz musicians ( memento of the original from January 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Thüringer Allgemeine from September 18, 2013
15. ↑ Archived copy