- Series: Refiguring American Music
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 3, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0822354586
- ISBN-13: 978-0822354581
Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the
intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between
the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a
powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic
examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a
knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude
definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music
and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method
invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban
music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge
in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's
engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the
seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt
of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the
1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.
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