Violinist Amelia Febles Díaz: Classical Music in Cuba
Amelia Febles Díaz. Photo by @sarabiastudio
Cuba is famous for its life-affirming, rhythmically irresistible music and dances. But the small island in the Caribbean also has a remarkable classical music and ballet culture. Amelia Febles Díaz is a young violinist from Cuba who is now studying in Lübeck, Germany. TWoA talked to Amelia about her classical music training in Cuba and about participating in “Mozart y Mambo,” an inspiring project created by French horn player Sarah Willis of the Berlin Philharmonic that brings together Mozart and Cuban dances.
Matanzas: The Athens of Cuba
Amelia is originally from Matanzas, a city located on the Bay of Matanzas famous for its beach, but also for its poets and rich cultural life. Called alternatively the “Venice of Cuba” because of the bridges crossing the three rivers traversing the city, or the “Athens of Cuba” because of its famous poets, Matanzas is also the home of some of Cuba’s unique dances, the danzón and the rumba.
As a little girl, Amelia discovered her future profession with a simple act - she opened her window: “I live opposite the music school, so when I opened the window, I would hear the trumpets and the violins playing. I was so interested: what is this place? My mom says since I was very small, I wanted to play the violin and go to Brazil. It was a very spontaneous kid’s thing because in my family I have no artists.” She says with a smile: “I’m really the ‘black sheep’ artist of the family. But I think it was this physical closeness to the school where I could hear and see these funny looking instruments. I was interested.”
Cuban Classical Music Education
The structure of Cuba’s classical music and ballet education was heavily influenced by the Russian, or Soviet system of training musicians and dancers: in 1959, Fidel Castro lead a revolution against Cuba’s military dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a one-party communist state that rules over the island until the present day. More than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba is one of the last remaining authoritarian communist regimes.
Children training to become classical musicians go through a long, selective, state-funded education: every year, music schools combining music education with academic studies audition children at the age of seven. Those who pass the three rounds of the audition enrol at music school, studying a very full program of academic and music classes for the next seven years.
Amelia was lucky because she lived opposite the music school. But about half of her classmates came from out of town, staying at the school’s boarding school Monday through Friday and going home only for the weekends: “I was lucky. It’s hard for a child at seven to be away five days a week from the family.” At age fourteen, students must pass another test to continue at the music school until their graduation. At eighteen, graduating students can either start working or apply to study music at the university level in Havana.
Cuban Happiness
Compared to regular Cuban teenagers, the life of Cuban music students is very busy. There is little free time, but Amelia feels that Cuban music students hugely benefit from the Caribbean island’s love for life: “Cuba is really a happy place. As a country, we have many, many problems. But somehow, we find a way to be happy and that’s the case also for adolescent music students. I did not have a lot of free time, but I have the best memories of my childhood at the school. We played a lot, we screamed a lot: we are very loud, we run around the school. The best friendships were made at this time. We are also lucky because most of us study together from seven years old. So, my whole life has been with the same people. We shared the struggles with the instrument, we shared the inspiration, we shared videos of the beautiful Janine Jansen playing violin. My best friendships are from this time. We spread to every part of the world, but we keep contact.”
Advice to Her Younger Self
What advice would Amelia give to her younger self? “Study more. No, not study more: take more advantage of the time. I didn’t. I wasn’t very conscious of time and that, as a musician, it would be better to pay more attention to some details earlier than struggling with them later. It’s like plumbing: when you have a problem, a little leak, it’s better to fix it when it's a leak, not when it’s a huge problem. But speaking not as a musician - because I’m a musician, but first, I’m a person - I would say: cherish this time. It’s the most special time in your life: you have happiness, you don’t have responsibilities. It’s the perfect time: you have freedom, friendships, it’s the best. So, as a musician: be in touch with your instrument, know that if you fix things now, you will have less problems later, but as a teenager in general: this is the best time of your life. So just cherish it, be happy.”
Cuban Ballet Students and Music Students: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Cuba is also famous for its ballet tradition, so TWoA was curious whether the music students have any contact with the ballet students. As it turns out, Amelia’s school was a school for classical music, ballet and contemporary dance, and the visual and plastic arts. The musicians start at the school at age seven, the dancers join at age nine, and the visual and plastic artists around age fourteen. The musicians would study their academic subjects in the morning and music in the afternoon, the dancers would study dance in the mornings and their academic subjects in the afternoon: “But we had a lot of connection. The dancers were in the same hallways, and we would see them at general school activities. Of course, the ballet girls are the most refined, and we, the musicians - I don’t know, we had our own characteristic groups, but there was no real separation.” Amelia felt that there was a strong connection between the musicians and the dancers, while the visual and plastic artists formed a different group, maybe because they joined later or because their art form seemed more abstract while the dancers and musicians were very focused on their daily practice.
Cuban Classical Music Education: Not Enough Cuban Music!
Surprisingly, Cuban music does not feature in the formal education of Cuban classical music students. Amelia feels this is a mistake: “This is one thing I would change about the music education in Cuba. Sometimes we look to European music as our god because it is really something to look up to. When we start the school, we have no real connection to our own music as a student. We study Mozart, we study Bach, we study Beethoven, we study every important European composer and then we neglect a little bit our own culture, which is huge. And we have to pay more attention. This is one of the regrets I have. The teachers used to say: if you want to be a classical musician, you cannot play Cuban music. I was disciplined enough that I listened to them. And the guys in my course who were not so disciplined, who didn’t listen and played with Cuban groups, they improvised, they became, I have to say, better musicians because they were versatile. You have to aspire to be versatile.”
For Amelia, being a musician is not about taking one little piece of the gigantic musical puzzle and playing it perfectly. It’s about getting to know different types of music, learning how they affect you and how you can play them for the public. Above all, it is about your own culture: “I think for me, when I got in touch with Cuban music, when I played it with my violin, when I joined the European culture of violin playing and my Cuban music, I became a better musician. I enjoyed it a lot. I think, if a Cuban musician has something to offer to the world, it is the amazingness of our culture. Play your music and transmit what makes you unique, what makes your culture unique, what makes your country unique.”
Sarah Willis and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra: Mozart y Mambo
As a member of the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, Amelia has been part of a collaboration that has captivated the hearts, ears, and feet of listeners all over the world: in 2017, Sarah Willis, a renowned French horn player of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, visited Cuba for the first time. Willis already loved Cuban popular music and had been dancing salsa for many years, but she was intrigued by the vibrant classical music culture she discovered on the island. She started working on the project Mozart y Mambo with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, a chamber orchestra of young Cuban classical musicians run by conductor José Antonio Méndez Padrón. The first album combining classical solo pieces for French horn with Cuban music was published in 2020 and became number one in the classical charts in the UK, Germany and the USA. A second album was published in 2022 (both albums are available as CD or to stream).
Amelia and her fellow musicians at first couldn’t believe what was happening: “Sometimes I think, this is so bizarre, Sarah Willis from the Berliner Philharmoniker, this is huge! But Sarah is so close to us nowadays that you think – ah, ok, Sarah! It’s like she’s your bigger sister. But I remember, when she got to Cuba, it was like: SARAH WILLIS, from the BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER. And then she wanted to meet the orchestra, and we were like: what?!? And then she wanted to make a CD because Sarah is this person who is always – she has so much energy, her character fits so well with Cuba and Cuban music and the orchestra. It was a perfect connection: she likes to dance, she likes adventure, new things, she likes to work with young, unknown people. It was a match made in heaven.”
Isolated from the World: “She reminded us that we matter”
The project has brought enormous joy to the orchestra, the Cuban public, and listeners all over the world. After the success of the first Mozart y Mambo album, Sarah Willis commissioned six young Cuban composers to write original dances for solo horn, strings and percussion for the second album. The main oboe, clarinet and bassoon players of the Berlin Philharmonic joined Sarah Willis for the recording: “We recorded the CD in old Havana, from 2am to 4am because it’s the time where it’s not noisy. So, the people were there from 2am to 4am, the oboe players of Havana were there in the rehearsal, just watching. Because we are so alone in our little island, we sometimes feel so forgotten by the world. And then she reminded us that we matter, that people want to go to Cuba not just to go to the beach, but to share music with us. It was so important for us. The project with Sarah is right now the fire for the orchestra, I think.”
Difficult Decisions
In autumn 2022, Amelia and her partner, a trumpet player with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, took the difficult decision to move halfway across the globe to the northern German city of Lübeck to study for a Bachelor of Music. Cuba’s grim political and economic situation makes it difficult for young people to imagine a future. The island remains isolated from the world: “Staying in Cuba is as hard a choice as leaving. I am at a point in my life where I have to make some choices if I want to have a family, if I want to have a better life, if I want to have a better future. I’ve been in Germany many times. I really love the culture. I’ve always said, if I wanted to leave, I wanted to live somewhere I love, somewhere where I can play my music and live from it and learn even more, so what better place to become a violinist and a teacher than here in Germany. I’m really excited to be here and to see what the future holds for us in Germany.”
New Year’s Eve in Cuba
TWoA asked Amelia about Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Cuba: “It’s very hot!” And it is all about spending time with the family. Amelia’s eyes lit up describing Cuba’s traditional New Year’s dish: congri con cerdo asado, a strongly seasoned pork dish served with congri (rice and beans), yuca roots, and mojo, a sauce made with lemon or sour oranges: “In Cuba, you have to have congri con cerdo asado. In some parts of Cuba, they make a show of this, they put the pork inside the ground, it’s a whole tradition. My mouth is watering thinking of this. Food is something you miss a lot.”
Congri con cerdo asado