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Speaker(s): Charles Kronengold (èצӰÏñ–Music)

Alejo Carpentier’s 1974 novella Concierto Barroco makes erudite and witty use of the concerto as a site of exchange among African, European and Mestizo cultural practices. Toward the end of his career, at a moment of intense neo-colonialism and economic crisis, Carpentier produces a radical mode of political and aesthetic self-critique by generating a swirl of competing forces, in which crucial events can fail to happen, people might well not matter, music could mean everything or nothing, and the only certainty is a kind of stubborn materiality.