Between 1930 and 1959, the Lyceum & Lawn Tennis Club, a women’s organization in Vedado, Havana, hosted numerous concerts organized by the Sociedad Orquesta de Música de Cámara de La Habana (SOMC), including a 1941 concert by Aaron Copland. They also hosted new music concerts sponsored by the Pan American Association of Composers and the Grupo de Renovación Musical. By focusing on María Muñoz de Quevedo and Gisela Hernández, I show how Lyceum members enacted a social and cultural mission that overlapped with the modernist values of local composers and musicians as well as with Pan Americanist ideals of mutual understanding through cultural exchange.

Biography

Dr. Marysol Quevedo is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and the author of Cuban Music Counterpoints: Vanguardia Musical in Global Networks (2023). Her research interests include art music in Cuba before and after the 1959 Revolution, cultural diplomacy and art music networks during the Cold War, and the intersection of gender, race, and national identity in contemporary art music. Other publications include “Exchanges: Modernist Approaches across Oceans and Borders,” “Music in Cuban Revolutionary Cinema,” and “Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba.” She serves as Director-at-Large on the Board of the American Musicological Society.