Music of Puerto Rico

Early music

Music culture in Puerto Rico during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is poorly documented. Certainly it included Spanish church music, military band music, and diverse genres of dance music cultivated by the jíbaros (peasants, of mixed race) and enslaved Africans and their descendants. While these later never constituted more than 11% of the island's population, they contributed some of the island's most dynamic musical features becoming distinct indeed.

In the 19th century Puerto Rican music begins to emerge into historical daylight, with notated genres like danza being naturally better documented than folk genres like jíbaro music and bomba y plena.

The African people of the island used drums made of carved hardwood covered with untreated rawhide on one side, commonly made from goatskin. A popular word derived from creole to describe this drum was shukbwa, that literally means 'trunk of tree'

Folk music

If the term "folk music" is taken to mean music genres that have flourished without elite support, and have evolved independently of the commercial mass media, the realm of Puerto Rican folk music would comprise the primarily Hispanic-derived jíbaro music, the Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, and the essentially "creole" plena. As these three genres evolved in Puerto Rico and are unique to that island, they occupy a respected place in island culture, even if they are not currently as popular as contemporary musics like salsa or reggaeton.

Jíbaro music

A Tiple Requinto (1880) from Puerto Rico

Jíbaros are small farmers of primarily Hispanic descent who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Puerto Rican population until the mid-twentieth century. They are traditionally recognized as romantic icons of land cultivation, hard working, self-sufficient, hospitable, and with an innate love of song and dance.^[1] Their instruments^[2] were relatives of the Spanish vihuela, especially the cuatro—which evolved from four single strings to five pairs of double strings —^[3] and the lesser known tiple.^[4] A typical jíbaro group nowadays might feature a cuatro, guitar, and percussion instrument such as the güiro scraper and/or bongo. Lyrics to jíbaro music are generally in the décima form, consisting of ten octosyllabic lines in the rhyme scheme abba, accddc. Décima form derives from 16th century Spain. Although it has largely died out in that country (except the Canaries), it took root in various places in Latin America—especially Cuba and Puerto Rico—where it is sung in diverse styles. A sung décima might be pre-composed, derived from a publication by some literati, or ideally, improvised on the spot, especially in the form of a “controversia” in which two singer-poets trade witty insults or argue on some topic. In between the décimas, lively improvisations can be played on the cuatro. This music form is also known as "típica" as well as "trópica".

The décimas are sung to stock melodies, with standardized cuatro accompaniment patterns. About twenty such song-types are in common use. These are grouped into two broad categories, viz., seis (e.g., seis fajardeño, seis chorreao) and aguinaldo (e.g., aguinaldo orocoveño, aguinaldo cayeyano). Traditionally, the seis could accompany dancing, but this tradition has largely died out except in tourist shows and festivals. The aguinaldo is most characteristically sung during the Christmas season, when groups of revelers (parrandas) go from house to house, singing jíbaro songs and partying. The aguinaldo texts are generally not about Christmas, and also unlike Anglo-American Christmas carols, they are generally sung by a solo with the other revelers singing chorus. In general, Christmas season is a time when traditional music—both seis and aguinaldo—is most likely to be heard. Fortunately, many groups of Puerto Ricans are dedicated to preserving traditional music by continued practice.

Jíbaro music came to be marketed on commercial recordings in the twentieth century, and singer-poets like Ramito (Flor Morales Ramos, 1915–90) are well documented. However, jíbaros themselves were becoming an endangered species, as agribusiness and urbanization have drastically reduced the numbers of small farmers on the island. Many jíbaro songs dealt accordingly with the vicissitudes of migration to New York. Jíbaro music has in general declined accordingly, although it retains its place in local culture, especially around Christmas time and special social gatherings, and there are many cuatro players, some of whom have cultivated prodigious virtuosity.

Plena

Puerto Rican Güiro

Around 1900 plena emerged as a humble proletarian folk genre in the lower-class, largely Afro-Puerto Rican urban neighborhoods in San Juan, Ponce, and elsewhere. Plena subsequently came to occupy its niche in island music culture. In its quintessential form, plena is an informal, unpretentious, simple folk-song genre, in which alternating verses and refrains are sung to the accompaniment of round, often homemade frame drums called panderetas (like tambourines without jingles), perhaps supplemented by accordion, guitar, or whatever other instruments might be handy. An advantage of the percussion arrangement is its portability, contributing to the plena's spontaneous appearance at social gatherings. Other instruments commonly heard in plena music are the cuatro, the maracas, and accordions.

The plena rhythm is a simple duple pattern, although a lead pandereta player might add lively syncopations. Plena melodies tend to have an unpretentious, "folksy" simplicity. Some early plena verses commented on barrio anecdotes, such as "Cortarón a Elena" (They stabbed Elena) or "Allí vienen las maquinas" (Here come the firetrucks). Many had a decidedly irreverent and satirical flavor, such as "Llegó el obispo" mocking a visiting bishop. Some plenas, such as "Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres" and "Santa María," are familiar throughout the island. In 1935 the essayist Tomás Blanco celebrated plena—rather than the outdated and elitist danza—as an expression of the island's fundamentally creole, Taino or mulatto racial and cultural character. Plenas are still commonly performed in various contexts; a group of friends attending a parade or festival may bring a few panderetas and burst into song, or new words will be fitted to the familiar tunes by protesting students or striking workers which has long been a regular form of protest from occupation and slavery. While enthusiasts might on occasion dance to a plena, plena is not characteristically oriented toward dance.

In the 1920s–30s plenas came to be commercially recorded, especially by Manuel "El Canario" Jimenez, who performed old and new songs, supplementing the traditional instruments with piano and horn arrangements. In the 1940s Cesar Concepción popularized a big-band version of plena, lending the genre a new prestige, to some extent at the expense of its proletarian vigor and sauciness. In the 1950s a newly envigorated plena emerged as performed by the smaller band of Rafael Cortijo and vocalist Ismael "Maelo" Rivera, attaining unprecedented popularity and modernizing the plena while recapturing its earthy vitality. Many of Cortijo's plenas present colorful and evocative vignettes of barrio life and lent a new sort of recognition to the dynamic contribution of Afro-Puerto Ricans to the island's culture (and especially music). This period represented the apogee of plena's popularity as a commercial popular music. Unfortunately, Rivera spent much of the 1960s in prison, and the group never regained its former vigor. Nevertheless, the extraordinary massive turnout for Cortijo's funeral in 1981 reflected the beloved singer's enduring popularity. By then, however, plena's popularity had been replaced by that of salsa, although some revivalist groups, such as Plena Libre, continue to perform in their own lively fashion, while "street" plena is also heard on various occasions.

Danza

External audio

You may listen to Graciela Rivera's interpretation of Fernández Juncos' version of "La Borinqueña"" here.

You may listen to Luciano Quiñones piano interpretation of Tavárez's "Margarita"here

You may listen to Luciano Quiñones piano interpretation of Morel Campos' "No me toques" here

Manuel Gregorio Tavárez

By the late 1700s the country dance (French contredanse, Spanish contradanza) had come to thrive as a popular recreational dance, both in courtly and festive vernacular forms, throughout much of Europe, replacing dances such as the minuet. By 1800 a creolized form of the genre, called contradanza, was thriving in Cuba, and the genre also appears to have been extant, in similar vernacular forms, in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and elsewhere, although documentation is scanty. By the 1850s, the Cuban contradanza—increasingly referred to as danza—was flourishing both as a salon piano piece, or as a dance-band item to accompany social dancing, in a style evolving from collective figure dancing (like a square dance) to independent couples dancing ballroom-style (like a waltz, but in duple rather than ternary rhythm). According to local chroniclers, in 1845 a ship arrived from Havana, bearing, among other things, a party of youths who popularized a new style of contradanza/danza, confusingly called "merengue." This style subsequently became wildly popular in Puerto Rico, to the extent that in 1848 it was banned by the priggish Spanish governor Juan de la Pezuela. This prohibition, however, does not seem to have had much lasting effect, and the newly invigorated genre—now more commonly referred to as "danza"—went on to flourish in distinctly local forms. As in Cuba, these forms included the musics played by dance ensembles as well as sophisticated light-classical items for solo piano (some of which could subsequently be interpreted by dance bands). The danza as a solo piano idiom reached its greatest heights in the music of Manuel Gregorio Tavárez (1843–83), whose compositions have a grace and grandeur closely resembling the music of Chopin, his model. Achieving greater popularity were the numerous danzas of his follower, Juan Morel Campos (1857–96), a bandleader and extraordinarily prolific composer who, like Tavárez, died in his youthful prime (but not before having composed over 300 danzas). By Morel Campos' time, the Puerto Rican danza had evolved into a form quite distinct from that of its Cuban (not to mention European) counterparts. Particularly distinctive was its form consisting of an initial paseo, followed by two or three sections (sometimes called "merengues"), which might feature an arpeggio-laden "obbligato" melody played on the tuba-like bombardino (euphonium). Many danzas achieved island-wide popularity, including the piece "La Borinqueña", which is the national anthem of Puerto Rico. Like other Caribbean creole genres such as the Cuban danzón, the danzas featured the insistent ostinato called "cinquillo" (roughly, ONE-two-THREE-FOUR-five-SIX-SEVEN-eight, repeated).

The danza remained vital until the 1920s, but after that decade its appeal came to be limited to the Hispanophilic elite. The danzas of Morel Campos, Tavárez, José Quintón, and a few others are still performed and heard on various occasions, and a few more recent composers have penned their own idiosyncratic forms of danzas, but the genre is no longer a popular social dance idiom. During the first part of dancing danza, to the steady tempo of the music, the couples promenade around the room; during the second, with a lively rhythm, they dance in a closed ballroom position and the orchestra would begin by leading dancers in a "paseo," an elegant walk around the ballroom, giving gentlemen the opportunity to show off their lady's grace and beauty. This romantic introduction ended with a salute by the gentlemen and a curtsey from the ladies in reply. Then, the orchestra would strike up and the couples would dance freely around the ballroom to the rhythm of the music.^[6]

Puerto Rican pop

Much music in Puerto Rico falls outside the standard categories of "Latin music" and is better regarded as constituting varieties of "Latin world pop." This category includes, for example, Ricky Martin (who had a #1 Hot 100 hit in the U.S. with "Livin' La Vida Loca" in 1999), the boy-band Menudo (with its changing personnel), Los Chicos, Las Cheris, AJ Davila, Salsa Kids and Chayanne. Famous singers include the Despacito singer Luis Fonsi. Above all, singer and virtuoso guitarist Jose Feliciano born in Lares, Puerto Rico, became a world pop star in 1968 when his latin-soul version of "Light My Fire" and the LP Feliciano! became great successes in the American and international rankings and allowed Feliciano to be the first Puerto Rican to win Grammy awards that year.

External audio

You may listen to José Feliciano's "Light My Fire" here.

Reggaeton

Puerto Rico is perhaps the single biggest center for production of reggaeton. The roots of reggaeton lie in the 1980s "reggae en español" of the Panamanian artist El General and certain songs by Puerto Rican rapper Vico C. In the early 1990s reggaeton coalesced as a more definitive genre, using the "Dem Bow" riddim derived from a Shabba Ranks song by that name, and further resembling Jamaican dancehall in its verses sung in simple tunes and stentorian style, and its emphasis—via lyrics, videos, and artist personas—on partying, dancing, boasting, "bling," and sexuality rather than weighty social commentary. While reggaeton may have commenced as a Spanish-language version of Jamaican dancehall, in the hands of performers like Tego Calderón, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar and others, it soon acquired its own distinctive flavor and today might be considered the most popular dance music in the Spanish Caribbean, surpassing even salsa.

Bolero

The bolero originally derived from Cuba, but by the 1920s it was being both enjoyed as well as composed and performed by Puerto Ricans, including such outstanding figures as Rafael Hernández and Pedro Flores. There are no distinctively "Puerto Rican" features—such as singing "lelolai" or playing the cuatro—in their boleros, but it would be pointless to go on regarding the bolero solely as a "Cuban" genre; it is, of course, a Cuban genre, but since the 1920s it has also been an international genre, including a Puerto Rican one. The main differences are found in the musical arrangements and subject matter.

Merengue

In the 1990s the most popular dance music in the island was merengue, as performed by visiting Dominican bands and a few locals such as Olga Tañon. Similar disagreements have been voiced about local rock bands, such as Fiel a la Vega, Puya, and Konfrontazion, that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, and which continue to be very popular. The choreography of the ballroom merengue is a basic side two-step, but with a difficult twist of the hip to the right, which makes it somewhat hard to perform. The two dance partners get into a vals, or waltz-like position. The couple then side steps, which is known as a paso de la empalizada or "stick-fence step," followed by either a clockwise or counter-clockwise turn. During all of the dance steps of the ballroom merengue, the couple never separates. The second kind of merengue is called the Figure Meringue or Merengue de Figura, and the performing couple makes individual turns without releasing the hands of the partner and still keeping the rhythm of the beat.^[7]

Guaracha and salsa

The timbales of Tito Puente on exhibit in the Musical Instruments Museum in Phoenix, AZ

Salsa is another genre whose form derived from the Cuban\Puerto Rican melding of genre, especially Cuban dance music of the 1950s—but which in the 1960s-70s became an international genre, cultivated with special zeal and excellence in Puerto Rico, and by New York Puerto Ricans. Forms such as the Charanga was hugely popular to Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans, indeed, rescued this music, which had been stagnating and isolated in Cuba itself in the 1960s, giving it new life, new social significance, and many new stylistic innovations. Salsa is the name acquired by the modernized form of Cuban/Puerto Rican-style dance music that was cultivated and rearticulated from the latter 1960s by Puerto Ricans in New York and, subsequently, in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. While salsa soon became an international genre, thriving in Colombia, Venezuela, and elsewhere, New York and Puerto Rico have remained its epicenters. Particularly prominent in the island itself were El Gran Combo, Sonora Ponceña, and Willie Rosario, as well as the more pop-oriented "salsa romántica" stars of the 1980s-90s. (For further information see the entry on "salsa music.")

Other popular Nuyorican and Puerto Rican exposers of these genres have been Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez (guaracha and bolero singer), pianists Eddie Palmieri, Richie Ray and Papo Lucca, conguero Ray Barreto, trombonist and singer Willie Colón, and singers La India, Andy Montañez, Bobby Cruz, Cheo Feliciano, Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Ismael Rivera, Tito Nieves, Pete El Conde Rodríguez and Gilberto Santa Rosa.

Historical influences on dance

Dance has been influenced by the different cultures of the Taíno natives, the Spaniards and the African slaves. Since pre-Colombian times, dance has always been part of the culture of Puerto Rico and has evolved according to the social and demographic changes. The earliest dances documented by the early historians were the Taíno areyto dances that were chanted by a chorus, set to music, and led by a guide. They practiced storytelling while the guide indicated which steps and songs to repeat until the story was finished. Dances of European origin also became popular among the country folk and the settlers of the central part of the island. These dances rapidly got unique features of rhythm, instrumentation, interpretation, and even fashion.

As the population of the Taíno dwindled down, Spanish, African and, from 1898 on, North American dances appeared on the island and took root and developed in the mountains, on the coast, and in urban centers.^[8]

After the island was taken over by Spain, the music and dance of Puerto Rico consisted of a combination of the harmonious musical styles that are borrowed from Spanish, African, and other European cultures, creating Puerto Rico's signature style of Latin dance.^[9]

Salsa

Salsa is a Spanish word that means sauce. It refers to the mixture of different rhythms composed of different Latin, African and Caribbean dances. Salsa is said to be first created around the 1960s and became popular to the non-Latino world drastically. The salsa dance is similar to the mambo dance.^[10]

Salsa dancing is structured in six step patterns phrased on 8 counts of the music. The 8 different steps include 6 moves with 2 pauses. The pattern of the dance is 1,2,3 and pause for 4, move for 5,6,7 and pause for 8. The basic steps are: (1) the forward and backward: in this step consist of two rock steps going in and out of the moves. The second step is known as the basic side dance step, it is similar to the first step except for this step, the moves are towards the side. The side to side feels and turns are of the significant aspects of the salsa dance.^[11]

Cha Cha Chá

The Cha Cha Chá dance is known to be one of the funniest ballroom dances which does not consume a lot of time. It has a lot of flirty and sharp moves. Before you start the dance, you need to know how to count the Cha Cha Chá. The following are the first basic steps: (1) count the Cha Cha Chá in “rock step, triple step and then rock step”. (2) You will eventually count to three “1,2,3 Cha Cha Chá” which brings us to the 3 full beats and 2 half beat of the dance. The second category is known as the Cha Cha Chá side basic. This step is the most often used basic move of the dance. It is pretty similar to the previous one except for this step you have to do the triple step to the side rather than in place, and this introduces us to the third stage which is known as “underarm in Cha Cha Chá”. This step teaches how to do lady’s underarm turn to the right. Base on the previous step, guys might not struggle but the ladies might because ladies have to know the exact turning spot in order to do this. Overall, the dance is named of the scraping sounds produced by the feet of the dancers.^[12]