increasingly urbanized, middle- and upper-class, and often lighter-skinned audi-
ences. Simultaneously, groups such as Los Corraleros de Majagual blended some
of the elements of folkloric cumbia with those of military wind bands from coastal
savanna towns, appealing to a darker-skinned, working-class audience. The reper-
toire of all these groups fell under the umbrella term música tropical, which also
included porro , fandango, bullerengue, and paseos, to name a few, and was promoted abroad through an active touring circuit that brought música tropical to other
Latin American countries, just as it brought Cuban son , Mexican rancheras , and Argentine tango to Colombia. Also important in the diffusion of cumbia was a nascent recording industry, led by labels like Discos Fuentes. It was not long before
locally accented cumbias sprouted throughout Latin America, making it ubiquitous
yet uniquely local.
In Mexico, cumbia found several interpreters, from Mike Laure’s guitar-infused
covers of Colombian standards to Beto Villa’s orquesta tejana. Conjunto musi-
cians from the border, long familiar with the accordion, added cumbia to their reper-
toire of waltzes, polkas, and corridos . In all these different settings cumbia became a marker of class, the music of marginalized urban poor and U.S.-bound migrants.
It also continued a process that had begun in Colombia of stripping down cumbia
to a more rhythmically straightforward music, emphasizing the three-strike pat-
tern usually played by the maraca or the scraper, and adding drum kit, keyboards,
134 | Cumbia
and electric bass. Artists such as Selena, Los Tigres del Norte, Banda El Recodo,
and Celso Piña represent the variety of cumbia styles found just along the border.
In Peru, cumbia was taken up in the late 1960s by indigenous migrants from
the highlands bound for the rapidly urbanizing poor neighborhoods of Lima and
other cities. Combining música tropical with the quintessentially Andean huayno
rhythm, and adding garage-band style guitars with effect pedals and organs proved
to be a successful formula that captured people’s indigenous roots and urbane aspi-
rations. Called cumbia amazónica or chicha, it became a symbol of cultural hybrid-
ity and the working class. Similarly in Argentina, cumbia, which first arrived in
the 1940s and 1950s and had long been popular with the working class, developed
a local flavor of synthesized low-fidelity sounds. As the Argentine economy col-
lapsed in 2002, cumbia villera, a style that fermented in the Buenos Aires slums,
became an antiestablishment voice critical of the government.
Paradoxically, while cumbia was finding success abroad, its popularity in Co-
lombia was waning. The salsa boom of the 1970s hit Colombia hard and replaced
cumbia as the preferred dance genre. In the 1980s and 1990s, vallenato , a related accordion-based genre from the coast made inroads in the interior of the country,
crossing race and class boundaries, leaving cumbia as a style from a bygone era.
However, the nationwide popularity of vallenato allowed the coast to become a
symbol of the nation, leaving open the door for a 21st-century cumbia resurgence.
DJs and musicians in Colombia and other major cities around the world are remix-
ing the many different sounds of música tropical with hip-hop and other electronic
dance genres, referencing both the traditional and modern, the local and global, and
creating a new, cosmopolitan cumbia sound.
Further Reading
L’Hoeste, Héctor Férnandez. “All Cumbias, the Cumbia.” In Imagining Our Americas , edited by Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, 338–64. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007.
Wade, Peter. Music, Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Juan C. Agudelo
D
Danza
Danza is an urban 19th-century Caribbean derivative of contra dances introduced
from Europe in the late 18th century. The family of contra dances included qua-
drilles, rigaudons, and lancers, as well as Spanish contradanzas that were rooted on the longways style of the English country dance. This latter type, reported in
Spain around 1711, is the one considered to be the most common (albeit not exclu-
sive) tableau for the emergence of danza in the Caribbean. The early longways style
consisted of two duple-metered eight-bar sections of melodies played to a similar
recurring dance format of men and women in two lines, initially facing each other
and later evolving into figures prescribed by a dance caller, or bastonero.
Urban dance orchestras in the Caribbean consisted primarily of lower-class
military-band members, or musicians of African ancestry who slowly, but surely,
converted contradanzas into a Creole genre known as contradanza del país. As local white upper-class patrons entered the dance arena to the stately and dignified
melodies of the opening bars, they were exposed, or ambushed, in the latter section
to voluptuous Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The first reported example of local con-
tradanzas took place in San Pascual Bailón, Cuba, in 1803, containing elements
like the so-called habanera (as a rhythmic pattern) in march-like melodies com-
mon in military repertoires.
Frequently, composers drew their melodic styles from the Italian arias performed
in opera productions, sponsored mainly by local merchants and the buoyant sugar-
cane industry. With the influence of European Romanticism, contradanza del país
emerged in the 1840s as a way for dancers to reject the authoritarian caller and the
longways system in favor of the independent couple, a modality observed today in
slow, moderate, and fast dances of urban contemporary societies. Events like the
Paris Revolt of 1848 inspired local writers to adopt Creole contradanza as an em-
blem of an antimonarchic Caribbean, free from the chains imposed by Spain and
Roman Catholicism. Perhaps not coincidentally, these danzas seldom featured the
Andalusian cadences associated with peninsular Spanish music.
Variants of contra dance existed with similar or different names in countries
like danza, Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles, Venezuela, Colombia, the Domini-
can Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Curazao, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. When-
ever these distinctive versions were performed in Europe, peninsular Spaniards
referred to them indistinctly as danza antillana (Antillean danza ). The popularity
135
136 | Danza
and significance of the Antillean danza is documented in “La Borinquena,” a suave
and romantic danza that became Puerto Rico’s national anthem.
The Puerto Rican Danza
In order of relevance, the versions of danza from Puerto Rico and Cuba are consid-
ered to be the most representative, yet they are dissimilar to each other due to factors
such as demography and migration. In Cuba, the contradanza featured the binary
patterns of the habanera and was renamed danza, and later called danza cubana. In Puerto Rico, by the 1840s, contradanza was known as merengue and it consistently combined the binary rhythms associated with the Cuban danza with a 2/4 time signature embracing triplets more suitable to 6/8 or 3/4 measures, a likely contribution
of immigrants from Venezuela. Another way in which Cuban danza is distinct from
the danza of Puerto Rico is that Cuban danza is invariably comprised of only two
>
parts: the prima and the segunda, which are repeated ad infinitum in the dance con-
text, perhaps with ornaments or improvised variations. Puerto Rican danzas similarly
display a two-part structure with a different analytic nomenclature, that is, a first part
called paseo followed by a section called merengue. But by contrast to the Cuban
segunda, merengue evolved into a multipart form generally consisting of three 16-bar
melodic sections, concluding with the theme of the introduction. This expansion
helps explains why the entire genre was also known as merengue.
In 1849, Governor Juan de la Pezuela issued a decree banning merengue in
Puerto Rico. Dance organizers, musicians, and the public responded by camou-
flaging the expression under the name upa and later as danza. By the mid-1850s,
Spanish military bands included danzas in regular nightly outdoor concerts known
as retretas, occasions for bandleaders to show their instrumental expertise through
obbligato arrangements of popular arias and cavatinas. The mid-low register of
euphonium obbligato (known popularly as contracanto de bombardino ) along the
entire merengue section is among the most characteristic elements of Puerto Rican
danzas. This subordinate line was adopted as left-hand countermelodies in petit
salon danzas that became popular among local elite dilettante ladies. “Un viaje a
Bayamón” (“A trip to Bayamón,” 1867) by Manuel G. Tavárez reveals the use of
low-register melodies much like euphonium-third-section solos.
San Juan and Ponce: Two Schools of Danza
By 1870, two schools of danza were discernible through differences that arose out
of formal, rhythmic, and stylistic developments. In San Juan, danza kept its ties
with the old Spanish contradanzas while maintaining the prominence of accom-
panying habanera rhythms in short and equidistant phrases with boisterous and
lighter themes reflected from suggestive titles, such as “Zabaleta, Rabo de puerco”
and “Ay, yo quiero comer mondongo.”
Danza | 137
After moving from his native San Juan to the southern city of Ponce, Manuel
Tavárez (1843–1882) set the foundations for a freer cosmopolitan, romantic danza
that reaffirmed its Afro-Caribbean profile. Tavárez, who was educated in Paris,
is credited for strengthening this French piano tradition. His danzas consisted of
enlarged melodic phrases, with triplet and quintuplet figures evenly inscribed in
scores like his danza, “Margarita” (1870). Local performers transformed these left-
hand obbligato figures into alternating African-related uneven patterns of 3-3-2 and
2-1-2-1-2, resulting in the voluptuous languidness characteristic of the slow danza
romántica for piano. Another of Tavarez’s contributions is the occasional use of
distant tonalities, as in his danza “Un recuerdito” (“A little souvenir,” ca. 1877).
This style of playing that developed in Ponce is best represented by Tavarez’ pupil,
Juan Morel Campos.
Morel Campos, Juan
Juan Morel Campos (1857–1896) is considered one of the most prolifi c danza
composers in the Caribbean. Most of his estimated 300 danzas were written
for dance ensembles that combined military-band and string-ensemble for-
mats. But Campos extended his resume to include roles as conductor and
arranger for a traveling Cuban minstrel, an Italian opera, and several Spanish
zarzuela companies.
He was a protege who could play various musical instruments and impro-
vise when some of his instruments were unavailable in remote cities. Cam-
pos was able to endow danza with melodic and harmonic sophistication, while
still maintaining “that austere, provincial, sober and defi ant” character of the
music from his native city of Ponce. Traces of Italian cantabile are also clear in
the danzas he composed in the 1880s, such as “Alma Sublime” (“Sublime Soul”),
“Tormento” (“Torment”), and “Infl uencia del Arte” (“Infl uence of Art”).
Piano reductions of Campos’s danzas became widely acclaimed in world
concert halls and were played along side petit piano compositions by Chopin,
Schumman, Liszt, and others. These danzas were later recorded in the 1940s
by Jesús María Sanromá.
Further Reading
Thompson, Donald. Music in Puerto Rico: A Reader’s Anthology. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Edgardo Díaz Díaz
138 | Danza
The Prodigy of Juan Morel Campos
Danza is said to have reached its highest musical level with Juan Morel Campos
(1857–1896), who was also the most prolific composer in the region. Most of
his estimated 300 danzas were written for dance ensembles combining military-
band and string-ensemble formats. Eventually, orchestras in Puerto Rico drew on
Morel Campos’s classical ( danza ) ensemble to standardize a format consisting
of flutes, clarinets, violins, euphonium, trumpets, a bass, a güiro, and timbal . An euphonium player (or bombardinista ), Morel Campos established the tradition of
double-euphonium contracanto (in thirds and sixths) along with bombardinista
Domingo Cruz (“Cocolía”), whose malabarisms and speeches on this instrument
predated, by decades, the era of jazz improvisations. Morel Campos was also a
noted orchestra conductor, working in South America and the Caribbean, and ar-
ranged music for traveling Cuban minstrel, Italian opera, and Spanish zarzuela
companies. He played multiple instruments, had significant improvisational skills,
and readily rearranged music for ensembles lacking the full complement of in-
struments required, in particular for opera scores. Morel Campos was trained by
French-educated Tavárez, and by Spanish-trained Antonio Egipciaco but his work
adapting Giusseppe Verdi’s latest opera scores for local performances provided
him with a unique foundation and understanding of orchestration. Morel Campos,
with this fluidity, flourished as a composer. He gave more freedom to the standard
paseo-merengue structure of the danza, and endowed it with melodic and harmonic
sophistication even as it maintained the austere, provincial, sober, and defiant char-
acter of his native city of Ponce. Traces of Italian cantabile are clear in Morel
Campos’ danzas composed in the 1880s, like “Alma Sublime” (“Sublime Soul”),
“Tormento” (“ Torment ”), and “Influencia del Arte” (“Influence of Art”). His danza
“Felices Días” (“Merry Days,” 1894) is considered a masterpiece and still popularly
played today. While these works also show marked contrasts in tonal harmony, the
influence of chromaticism is observed especially in danzas like “Noche deliciosa”
(“Delicious Night”). In the hands of pianists like Julio Arteaga, Gonzalo Nuñez,
Anita Otero, and Elisa Tavárez, piano reductions of danzas by Morel Campos be-
came widely acclaimed in world concert halls, along with similar salon piano com-
positions by Chopin, Schumman, Liszt, and others. Pianist Jesús María Sanromá
recorded these danzas in the 1940s under RCA Red Seal, a label then exclusively
reserved for classical music.
Danza in the 20th Century
Despite the increasing presence of the Cuban danzón in Puerto Rico, the early
years of t
he 20th century saw danza maintaining its standing as the most popu-
lar genre in all aspects of socioartistic life in Puerto Rico. In Ponce, the legacy of
Danza | 139
Morel Campos was continued by Juan Ríos Ovalle, Jaime Pericás, and Arturo Pas-
arell, while in the capital, this expression inspired compositions by Braulio Dueño
Colón and Julián Andino. In between these two schools was Angel Mislán, whose
danza “Tú y Yo” (1882) is considered to predate the modern one-tile bolero .
While these composers are said to have merely recreated the form that was at
its peak during Morel Campos’s career, it is José Ignacio Quintón (1881–1925)
who maintained—and closed—Danza’s creative cycle by enlivening it with jíbaro
(peasant) music in French-Impressionist chord progressions. By the mid-1930s, the
introduction of the bolero and other Cuban forms in the main social venues led to
the decline of danza as a living symbol of collective Puerto Rican aspirations, but
in the 1970s, a period of renaissance in local mass culture, the danza regained luster
as a popular and patriotic genre. The most representative is Antonio Cabán Vale’s
“Verde Luz,” a piece that is required as a part of family parties and social gatherings.
Danza as Merengue in the Dominican Republic
In the Dominican Republic, newspapers, chronicles, and other documents report
early contradanza derivates such as the tumba dominicana overlapping with the
intrusive merengue first introduced by itinerant musicians and military bands
from Puerto Rico in 1854. In the Dominican Republic, then, the terms danza and
merengue have always been terms that indicated a single musical expression intro-
duced by military bands from Puerto Rico. Between 1869 and 1892, several Puerto
Rican musicians abandoned their regiments and remained in Santo Domingo,
adding their names to the list of Dominican composers who promoted the danza
in urban dance halls. Peasant musicians joined the military bands and brought
band instruments and danza -related styles, like the contracanto de bombardino,
to typical conjuntos . This contracanto was later adopted by saxophonists among
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 26