Amadeo Roldán

It was his mother, the pianist Albertina Gardes, who initiated her children to music (his sister María Teresa was a mezzo-soprano and his brother Alberto a cellist).

[1] Roldán's best-known composition[2] is the 1928 ballet La Rebambaramba, described by a critic of the era as "a multicolored musicorama ... depicting an Afro-Cuban fiesta in a gorgeous display of Caribbean melorhythms, with the participation of a multifarious fauna of native percussion effects, including a polydental glissando on the jawbone of an ass.

The fifth and sixth of his Rítmicas, composed around the same time as Edgard Varèse's Ionisation, were among the first works in the Western classical music tradition scored for percussion ensemble alone.

[3] In Motivos de son (1934) he wrote eight pieces for voice and instruments based on the poet Nicolas Guillen's set of poems with the same title.

His work was regularly featured in concerts sponsored by the Pan-American Association of Composers, founded by Henry Cowell, including the inaugural, March 1929 performance in New York.