“You can take a girl out of Cuba, but you can’t take Cuba out of a girl” - Odaline de la Martinez finds her voice as a composer

Odaline de la Martinez (Photo: Malcolm Crowther)

Born in Cuba, and brought up in the USA, and based in the UK, in this guest posting composer and founder of Lontano Ensemble, Odaline de la Martinez talks about finding her voice as composer. 

On Friday 21 November, her Canciones will be performed by pianist Nigel Foster, soprano Ana Beard Fernandez and percussionist Gillian McDonagh as part of the London Song Festival's concert, Songs by Latin American Women Composers. Canciones was commissioned and premiered by Janis Kelly and Simon Limbrick with Timothy Barrett at the Wigmore Hall in May 1983.

I always knew I wanted to be a composer and a conductor but everyone, apart from my family, said that women couldn’t be conductors, so in my mind, I put it off. Ever since I was a child, I was always beating rhythms and dancing for any guests who entered the house. Our home in Cuba was in a town with a large Afro Cuban population, and the sound of Afro-Cuban drumming was very present. I went to sleep many nights to this hypnotic soundtrack, which instilled in me a love of rhythm. Rhythm gives life and energy to music and is my own life-blood.

After the Bay of Pigs, my parents sent my sister and me aged 11 to stay with an aunt in Kansas and later Arizona with the idea of returning when things had settled down. Then our parents joined us in the US and we ended up moving to New Orleans, another city where music is everywhere.

One of my first pieces was for voice and guitar written in Spanish and I quickly realised that in Spanish, it didn’t stand a chance of winning any competitions, so I quickly translated it into English and won several competitions in Arizona. Later in New Orleans, my high school asked me to write various hymns and anthems. When I went to Tulane University in New Orleans, it was initially to study maths and music but half way through, I was told I had to make a decision between the disciplines and of course music won.

When I won a Marshall Scholarship to come and to study in London, I thought that the Afro-Cuban flavour in my music was probably not going to be accepted at the Academy, so I started to write modern music. I had written a Misa Breve Afro Cubana and decided to temper the Afro-Cuban style in the first movement and make it more acceptable. I probably should have been stronger in my convictions and truer to myself, but it was only later that I found my voice. Anyway, I’ve restored the original first movement to the Misa Breve.

And so, I found myself becoming a conductor, founding Lontano Ensemble while at the Academy, where initially I was the pianist. Then I asked John Carewe whether I could try conducting and he encouraged me. I quickly realised that we needed to establish Lontano to promote the unheard voices of women composers and the music of Latin America, in particular Villa Lobos and Ginastera, whose music was very much connected to the cultures of Latin America. Ginastera abandoned tonality in favour of serialism. And yet, in my mind his best work is Cantata for Magic America for 14 percussionists and soprano, a combination of serialism with wonderful pre-Columbian texts. Shortly after in 1992, we set up a record label to record this music to create an archive of recordings and Lorelt was founded.

In 2006, we started the London Festival of American Music because so many American composers, beyond Glass, Adams and Reich, never get heard this side of the Atlantic but most of all to show the diversity in geography, style and gender and the most recent festivals have shown a spotlight on African-American composers. This coincided with me rediscovering my roots and composing an opera Imoinda, a story of love and slavery in collaboration with writer Joan Anim Addo. It’s a trilogy and in Plantation, Act III there is a section called “Bembe” where the drums and dancers go crazy.

There is so much Afro-Cuban culture which still needs to be discovered and recognised, including the music of Amadeo Roldan, whose mother was a black Cuban, and whose father was Spanish. The family moved to Cuba when he was 16. He then discovered Afro-Cuban music and went crazy for it. Though he has not been an influence on my music, the fact that he was interested in African music, inspired me.

My two sets of songs Four Afro-Cuban Poems and Three Afro-Cuban Poems are based on the Caribbean poems Motivos de Son by Nicolas Guillen, who was a black journalist and was very interested in Afro-Caribbean culture, strongly influenced by his meeting in 1939 with African American poet Langston Hughes. His poems mirror the rhythm of Afro-Cuban speech, which even in Spanish, put an emphasis on rhythm in different part of the word and certain consonants are swallowed up when spoken.

Conducting so much contemporary music has really helped me to understand orchestration and how to balance between an orchestra, choir and soloists and also how to notate so that others can understand the music. And while my musical soul is very much rooted in Cuba, Bach and Crumb remain my biggest musical inspirations.

Thankfully a lot has changed since I became the first woman to conduct at the BBC Proms in 1984 and Smyth’s opera The Wreckers in 1994. Smyth’s music and many other women composers’ music have now entered the mainstream. Now I hope that Afro-Caribbean music will achieve a similar prominence – we just need all musicians to play in 5/8 time!

• Odaline della Martinez will receive an International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement from Tulane University at a Gala in New Orleans on 18 April 2026.
• Her Canciones will be performed by pianist Nigel Foster, soprano Ana Beard Fernandez and percussionist Gillian McDonagh on Friday 21 November at the London Song Festival at Hinde Street Church, W1.