Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/25/2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
JFSB B192
Category(ies)
This week, the Humanities Center welcomes Alejandro Madrid from Harvard University as our colloquium speaker on Thursday, September 25 at 3:00 PM in the EIZ Theater (B192 JFSB). His presentation will explore how Silvio Rodríguez’s 1975 album Días y flores continues to resonate poetically, politically, and historically—from Cold War Cuba to the present day. We hope you’ll join us.
Title: “Silvio Rodríguez’s Días y flores: A Microhistory of a Utopia at the End of History”
Silvio Rodríguez (b. 1946, Santiago de los Baños, Cuba) is one of the most famous and influential Latin American songwriters of the second part of the twentieth century. His songs punctuate the soundtrack in the lives of many generations of Ibero-Americans who found in them spiritual refuge, moral revitalization, and political expression. His first commercial album, Días y flores (Days and Flowers), released in 1975, stands as a symbol of an exceptionally creative moment in Cuba and a politically convulsive period in world history. This lecture takes an in-depth examination of three songs from Días y flores (“Esta canción” [“This Song”], “El mayor” [“The Major”], and “Sueño con serpientes” [“Dream with Serpents”]) and the world surrounding their production and recording as points of entry into understanding the desires and aspirations of generations of youngsters around the world who unabashedly embraced the album and made Silvio into an international star. By framing the discussion of the album around the idea of history and its end —as proposed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama— and the moral, ethical and political implications in embracing or rejecting such an understanding of human events I examine how the political ideas that made Días y flores relevant in 1975 may be transformed and made meaningful anew at a time when the teleological understanding of history that made them important during the Cold War is no longer valid, and at a moment in which the revolutionary Cuban experiment seems to also have reached its expiration date.
About our guest:
Alejandro L. Madrid is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. He is the author of more than a dozen books and has received several prestigious national and international awards, including the Humboldt-Forschungspreis, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, given by the Royal Musical Association for “outstanding contributions to musicology,” and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize; as well as top prizes from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the ASCAP Foundation, and the Society for Ethnomusicology among others.
Madrid is editor of the series Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music at Oxford University Press and is frequently invited as an expert commentator for national and international media outlets, including BBC-3, New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence-France, etc. He was also musical advisor to renowned Welsh director Peter Greenaway for the film Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015). Madrid’s latest book, The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening (Duke U Press) has been recently released. He is currently working on a book about the album Días y flores by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, and collaborates with the Momenta Quartet in the recording project of Mexican microtonal maverick Julián Carrillo’s complete string quartets for the Naxos label.
After earning a Ph.D. in musicology and comparative cultural studies from the Ohio State University in 2003, Madrid has held professorships at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Cornell University. He is currently chair of the Department of Music at Harvard University where he is also the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music.
