Among internationally heralded composers of the "serious" genre can be counted the Baroque composer Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803), who spent much of his life teaching and writing music for the Church. He was followed in the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba by the priest Juan París (1759–1845). París was an exceptionally industrious man and an important composer. He encouraged continuous and diverse musical events. Aside from rural music and Afro-Cuban folk music, the most popular kind of urban Creole dance music in the 19th century was the contradanza, which commenced as a local form of the English country dance and the derivative French contredanse and Spanish contradanza. While many contradanzas were written for dance, from the mid-century several were written as light-classical parlor pieces for piano. The first distinguished composer in this style was Manuel Saumell (1818–1870), who is sometimes accordingly hailed as the father of Cuban creole musical development. According to Helio Orovio, "After Saumell's visionary work, all that was left to do was to develop his innovations, all of which profoundly influenced the history of Cuban nationalist musical movements."

In the hands of his successor, Ignacio Cervantes Kavanagh, the piano idiom related to the contradanza achieved even greater sophistication. Cervantes was called by Aaron Copland a "Cuban Chopin" because of his Chopinesque piano compositions. Cervantes' reputation today rests almost solely upon his famous forty-one Danzas Cubanas, which Carpentier said, "occupy the place that the Norwegian Dances of Grieg or the Slavic Dances of Dvořák occupy in the music of their respective countries". Cervantes' never-finished opera, Maledetto, is forgotten.

In the 1840s, the habanera emerged as a languid vocal song using the contradanza rhythm. (Non-Cubans sometimes called Cuban contradanzas "habaneras.") The habanera went on to become popular in Spain and elsewhere. The Cuban contradanza/danza was also an important influence on the Puerto Rican danza, which went on to enjoy its own dynamic and distinctive career lasting through the 1930s. In Cuba, in the 1880s the contradanza/danza gave birth to the danzón, which effectively superseded it in popularity.

Laureano Fuentes (1825–1898) came from a family of musicians and wrote the first opera to be composed on the island, La Hija de Jefté (Jefte's daughter). This was later lengthened and staged under the title Seila. His numerous works spanned all genres. Gaspar Villate (1851–1891) produced abundant and wide-ranging work, all centered on opera. José White (1836–1918), a mulatto of a Spanish father and an Afrocuban mother, was a composer and a violinist of international merit. He learned to play sixteen instruments, and lived, variously, in Cuba, Latin America, and Paris. His most famous work is La Bella Cubana, a habanera.

During the middle years of the 19th century, a young American musician Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) came to Cuba. Gottschalk's father was a Jewish businessman from London, and his mother a white creole of French Catholic background. Gottschalk was brought up mostly by his black grandmother and nurse Sally, both from Saint-Domingue. He was a piano prodigy who had listened to the music and seen the dancing in Congo Square,

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Throughout the years, the Cuban nation has developed a wealth of musicological material created by numerous investigators and experts on this subject. The work of some authors who provided information about the music in Cuba during the 19th century was usually included in chronicles covering a more general subject. The first investigations and studies specifically dedicated to the musical art and practice did not appear in Cuba until the beginning of the 20th century.

Some important personalities that have contributed to musicological studies in Cuba are Fernando Ortiz, Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Emilio Grenet, Alejo Carpentier, Argeliers León, Maria Teresa Linares, Pablo Hernández Balaguer, Alberto Muguercia and Zoila Lapique.

A second generation of musicologists formed after the Cuban revolution of 1959 include Zoila Gómez, Victoria Elí, Alberto Alén Pérez, Rolando Antonio Pérez Fernández and Leonardo Acosta.

Most recently, a group of young Cuban musicologists have earned a well deserved reputation within the international academic field, due to their solid investigative work. Some of the most prominent members of this group are Miriam Escudero Suástegui, Liliana González Moreno, Iván César Morales Flores and Pablo Alejandro Suárez Marrero.

The first popular music played in Cuba after the Spanish conquest was brought by the Spanish conquerors themselves, and was most likely borrowed from the Spanish popular music in vogue during the 16th century. From the 16th to the 18th century some danceable songs that emerged in Spain were associated with Hispanic America, or considered to have originated in America. Some of these songs with picturesque names such as Sarabande, Chaconne, Zambapalo, Retambico and Gurumbé, among others, shared a common trait, its characteristic rhythm called Hemiola or Sesquiáltera (in Spain).

This rhythm has been described as the alternation or superposition of a duple meter and a triple meter ( 8 + 4), and its utilization was widespread in the Spanish territory since at least the 13th century, where it appears in one of the Cantigas de Santa María (Como poden per sas culpas).

Hemiola or Sesquiáltera is also a typical rhythm within the African musical traditions, both from the North of the Continent as from the South. Therefore, it is quite probable that the original song-dances brought by the Spanish to America already included elements from the African culture with which the enslaved Africans that arrived to the Island were familiar; and they further utilized them in order to create new creole genres.

The well known Son de la Ma Teodora, an ancient Cuban song, as well as the first Cuban autochthonous genres, Punto and Zapateo, show the Sesquiáltera rhythm on their accompaniment, which greatly associate those genres to the Spanish song-dances from the 16th to the 18th centuries.