You Only Think You Don’t Like Classical Music

Enrique Fernandez is the new classical music critic of the Miami Herald. This is a tricky job, since South Florida lost its symphony orchestra a year ago, its classical radio station this year, and shows very little interest in the form at all. And after all, when serious music is rejected by the community, isn’t that reason enough to just let it die a quiet death? Not a chance, says the critic: “What [we love] best in [our] native traditions is, indeed, classical. Classical in its strict rules, like the rumba of the Afro-Cubans from the province of Matanzas, polyrhythms of a Bachian or Mozartian complexity. Or classical because it was infused with European classicism, like the woodwinds and strings of the danzón — a genre that would lead to the mambo and the cha-cha-chá.”