Book contents
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Alejo Carpentier’s Life and Works
- Chapter 1Introduction
- Part IThe Making of the Author
- Part IIThe Polymath
- Chapter 9Alejo Carpentier on Modern Architecture
- Chapter 10African Ballast
- Chapter 11Carpentier’s Guide to Opera
- Chapter 12Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos
- Chapter 13Carpentier and Latin American Art Music
- Chapter 14Carpentier’s Early Musical Collaborations and the Quest for Creative Identity
- Chapter 15Carpentier’s Early Music Criticism
- Chapter 16Alejo Carpentier’s Radio Broadcasts
- Part IIIThe Writer of Fiction
- Part IVThe Cuban Revolution
- Part VEnvisioning the Americas
- Part VICarpentier for Debate
- Index
- References
Chapter 16 - Alejo Carpentier’s Radio Broadcasts
Toward a Poetics of Sound
from Part II - The Polymath
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2026
Book contents
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Alejo Carpentier’s Life and Works
- Chapter 1Introduction
- Part IThe Making of the Author
- Part IIThe Polymath
- Chapter 9Alejo Carpentier on Modern Architecture
- Chapter 10African Ballast
- Chapter 11Carpentier’s Guide to Opera
- Chapter 12Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos
- Chapter 13Carpentier and Latin American Art Music
- Chapter 14Carpentier’s Early Musical Collaborations and the Quest for Creative Identity
- Chapter 15Carpentier’s Early Music Criticism
- Chapter 16Alejo Carpentier’s Radio Broadcasts
- Part IIIThe Writer of Fiction
- Part IVThe Cuban Revolution
- Part VEnvisioning the Americas
- Part VICarpentier for Debate
- Index
- References
Summary
Carpentier worked in radio broadcasting for more than twenty years, during the golden age of radio in the 1930s through the 1950s. He was a pioneer in thinking about the wireless reproduction of sound and music and worked collaboratively with many noted musicians and writers of his time. This chapter charts Carpentier’s poetics of sound as he formulated it in his articles on radio and radio scripts. It also studies two soundscapes that would appear in Carpentier’s posthumous memoir Recuento de moradas, and in his novel Concierto barroco. The chapter concludes by saying that the intermedial mingling, in his fiction of visual and soundscapes lent to Carpentier’s realist aesthetics a unique quality of verisimilitude.
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- Alejo Carpentier in Context , pp. 196 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
References
Works Cited
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