Latin America.

Term applied to those areas of Central and South America where Spanish, Portuguese and French are spoken. The countries constituting Latin America and the Caribbean present cultural and musical traits mainly derived from their tri-ethnic cultural heritage. The expression of that heritage, however, is not homogeneous in the various countries and regions, but is dependent on various factors, such as the ethno-history of a specific country and the dynamics of its cultural history in contemporary times. Thus, in a number of cases, one strain of that heritage has predominated over the other two. In fact, many parts of what is called Latin America are virtually devoid of any Latin cultural elements. Until recently, some lowland Amerindian cultures, for example, and some Amerindian groups of the Andean highlands and Central America had remained relatively untouched by European or mestizo traditions. In other cases the prevailing cultural influences have been more sub-Saharan African than European. Thus the study of folk and traditional music in individual countries or territories is bound to be somewhat artificial, although there are common cultural traits in very large geographical areas and among ethnic groups with similar historical developments.

The systematic search for origins along the lines of the tri-ethnic heritage in Latin American and Caribbean musical expressions has had dubious benefit in relation to the configuration of contemporary societies. The general tendency in Europe and North America to view Latin America as a monolithic cultural area has often resulted in simplistic and reductionist generalizations of traditional musics of Latin America. The actual diversity of the musics of the Latin American continent has become clearer since the 1960s as a result of more extensive field research carried out by scholars from Latin America, Europe and North America. And yet, for some areas, not enough empirical knowledge of the vast music corpora of the continent has been accumulated to allow meaningful cross-cultural comparisons among music cultures that share a common ethno-history but have developed different expressions, as, for example, in the case of Afro-Caribbean communities of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Western Colombia and north-eastern Brazil. One could argue that the prominent social stratification which typifies Latin America's social organization elucidates to a large extent musical expressions that function as symbols of class identity. This stratification provides the keystone to account for the various musical performative practices to be found in both rural and urban areas of the continent. And yet the lines of demarcation of such stratification can be blurred when one considers the thorny issue of self-identity of social groups vis à vis other groups and nations. Identity is frequently a process of negotiation resulting in various strategies of expression, including music.

Throughout the area the tri-ethnic heritage results in fundamentally mestizo (culturally and racially mixed) musical traditions whose nature varies according to the degree of prevalence of any one of the three sources. For the sake of clarity we refer to Iberian-American and Afro-Hispanic or Afro-American traditions, although the boundaries and borders of such traditions at the end of the 20th century reveal many more complexities. Indeed the old categories tend to fade away as people increasingly share the same space, frequently relying on several existing traditions while creating new ones. It should be borne in mind, therefore, that a great deal of fluidity prevails in most regions of Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of social stratification, ethnicities, regionalism, religions and generations. Because of their essential mestizo character, the musics of Latin America cut across ethnic and sometimes social lines. Moreover, the consequence of this fluidity has precipitated musical change in the whole continent, only a portion of which we seem to be aware of at the beginning of the 21st century.

The folk, traditional and popular musics of the region present therefore a very complex picture that can only be ascertained at the culture-specific level. Here, however, only an overview can be presented: for more detailed discussion, see entries on the individual countries.

I. Indigenous music

II. Iberian and mestizo folk music

III. Afro-American Music

IV. Urban popular music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAROLINA ROBERTSON (I), GERARD BÉHAGUE (II–IV)

Latin America

I. Indigenous music

The indigenous cultures of Latin America are neither obsolete nor waning in musical richness. Many Amerindian communities, though threatened by acculturation, development and hegemonic political programmes have managed to conserve their intrinsic character while incorporating new musical ideas and instruments. Linguists have differed over the number of indigenous languages found in the Americas. Depending on the classificatory methods used, South America alone has been estimated to have between 73 (Brinton) and 117 distinct languages (Loukotka, 1968). In his classic study, Loukotka lists over 2000 dialects from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego. This linguistic diversity is reflected in an equally complex soundscape in which Amerindian, African, European and criollo musical traditions intermingle in instrumentation, concept, context and musical structures (see Americas, §II).

A few groups have managed to keep their distance from encroaching urban, Eurocentric influences. Nestled in remote mountain areas or dense rainforests, people like the Kogi of Colombia or the Lacandón of the Mexico-Guatemala border have preserved the integrity of their pre-Columbian musical traditions. But even the Kogi and Lacandón are keenly aware of their neighbours, and sometimes ‘borrow’ repertories from other communities. The fluidity of form and concept in indigenous cultures defies belaboured definitions and categories, which attempt to differentiate ‘pure’ from ‘acculturated’ forms; ‘Indian’ from ‘mestizo’; and rural folk from urban popular idioms. The contemporary musical panorama reflects change as a dynamic reality of peoples who have lived with conquest for 500 years.

The complexity and dynamism of this continually changing heritage are rooted in ancient times. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs or Mexicas of central Mexico turned the flourishing metropolis of Tenochtitlan into a centre for ritual, science and the performing arts. They took many ideas from the people they conquered and created a system of schools (cuicacalli) in which knowledge could be transmitted. In the high Andes, the Inca aristocracy propagated their hegemonic statecraft, their elaborate ceremonial calendar, their sophisticated approaches to agriculture and road building and their musical ideas about the interrelationships of hocket and melody throughout their vast empire. Urbanization, ethnic enclaves caused by mass migrations, acculturation through conquest and syncretism were important variables in pre-Columbian musical life, just as they are today.

These parallels are mentioned to underline certain areas of continuity between pre- and post-conquest musical traditions. They are in no way meant to minimize the systematic genocide of an indigenous population that in the 15th century equalled that of Europe, including Russia (Dobyns). The survival of Amerindian musics despite this onslaught points to the tenacity and strength of many notions of sound and cosmology nourished by a rich past. The emphasis of ethnomusicology on the ‘ethnographic present’ tends to obscure the fact that the present is but a small microcosm of human patterns that have cycled through many historical permutations.

1. Historical patterns.

2. Contemporary performance traditions.

3. History, context and performing practice.

Latin America, §I: Indigenous Music

1. Historical patterns.

Many documents that would have provided a more coherent understanding of the indigenous musical past were systematically destroyed by zealous missionaries in the 15th and 16th centuries; yet, as Eric Wolf aptly points out, the Indians of the Americas are not ‘people without a history’. A few enlightened priests, such as Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Durán and Bartolomé de las Casas (1951) carefully recorded the cultural patterns and contributions of the people of the Americas. Through their efforts, and the testaments of Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Fernando de Alva Ixtlixóchitl, Domingo Francisco Antón Muñón Chimalpain Cuauhtlehuanitzin, ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui and other native writers of Mexico and Peru, we can discern historical patterns that continue to inform indigenous music-making (for compilations of early indigenous chroniclers see Cornejo Polar, León Portilla and Wachtel). The richest footprints of the indigenous past are embedded in oral histories and performance traditions which persist to this day. Together, these written and oral histories point out several patterns that illuminate our later discussion of contemporary traditions.

The names of historical indigenous cultures most recognized today are Aztec, Maya and Inca. These peoples, located in central Mexico, Central America and highland Peru, were all empire builders who extended their governments, their scientific achievements, and their philosophies and theologies through trade and conquest. But even the Aztec, Maya and Inca recognized that their kingdoms were built on the achievements of earlier cultures. The Aztecs invoked the deeds of the Toltecs who had preceded them. Though they destroyed many of the records of the Toltecs to rewrite history in their own image, the Aztecs/Mexicans acknowledged artists, poets and composers of great worth with the greatest of compliments: ‘You are a true Toltec!’. Likewise, the Quechua-speaking Incas perfected their understanding of ceramics, acoustics, poetry, ritual and statecraft through what they had inherited from earlier Nasca, Moche and Tairona cultures. Thus the evidence for indigenous musical cultures of the Americas begins at least 3000 years ago, with the emergence of cultures that fashioned stone and clay into sound-producing instruments which have survived decay and can be studied by contemporary archaeomusicologists. We can also assume that musical sounds and instruments were brought across the Bering Strait from Asia in migrations which began 40,000 to 70,000 years ago.

Archaeological studies show great sophistication in acoustical thinking and in instrument-building technologies among pre-Columbian peoples. Studies by Martí, Nyberg, Olsen (1986, 1988), Silva Sifuentes, Rawcliffe and many other scholars show several notable characteristics in early American music: instruments were usually built by specialists who combined their knowledge of acoustics, ceramic techniques, metallurgy, mathematics and ritual purpose into a vast array of experiments with timbre, form and tonal distribution. Tonal organization seems more important here than tonal range. Thus, the Tairona and Nasca peoples of the Andes experimented with multiphones, creating aerophones that could produce more than one pitch at a time. They also created wind instruments that used combination frequencies to produce sharp-edged sounds called beat frequencies (Benade, 1960). These acoustical properties are characteristic of aerophones fashioned in the shape of snakes, jaguars or other animals with supernatural associations. Thus, the peculiar acoustical combinations gave the gods a distinct ‘voice’ which could be invoked in ritual contexts.

In both Mexico and the Andes, multiphonics were sometimes coupled in aerophones with multiple chambers. Ancient wind instruments from Veracruz contained chambers within chambers, all blown through the same aperture. An increase in air shifted resonance deeper and deeper into the flute or ocarina, producing a jump in pitch as well as a shift in resonance location. These pitch-jump whistles are unique to the pre-Columbian world and are one more example of sophisticated acoustical engineering. Duct flutes excavated in Mexico, Ecuador and Peru may have as many as four interconnected chambers, two blowholes and myriad combinations of partials and overtones. As Susan Rawcliffe (1988, p.58) summarizes:

What is remarkable about these pre-Columbian flutes is their diversity of form, timbre and partials, and tunings. Perhaps these instruments were meant to be played alone or accompanied by unpitched instruments. Perhaps ensemble pitch was organized around single related tones. Perhaps melodic contour or timbre was valued more than pitch or the kind of tonal organization we think of as scales. Certainly pitch relationships were organized in ways that challenge the ‘scientific’ acoustical principles developed by Europeans.

Archaeomusicologists of the Andes disagree as to whether the clay globular flutes of ancient times were played in ensembles (Olsen, 1988; Stevenson). Iconographic representations of musicians and instruments in pre-Columbian Andean ceramics imply that instruments were grouped into families and served specific purposes. Thus, performing practices were unique to each instrumental grouping, determined primarily by ritual context, supernatural association and social and hierarchical functions. Raft pipes (panpipes) in the early pottery traditions of South America are always depicted in pairs, with one raft pipe tied to its mate by a rope or string. This pairing implies that these instruments were used, as they are today, to create interlocking parts. In this style of performance, each instrument is equipped with only half the tones needed to complete a melodic idea. In the contemporary panpipe traditions of Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and northern Chile and Argentina, sicuri or zampoña players are paired into ira and arca parts, and interweave their notes to form a complete melody (analogous to the hocket technique in Europe).

Pre-Columbian traditions lead us into a view of performance that links the ways in which we must study the musics of both the past and the present. First, musical traditions cannot be extricated from a larger panoply of performance that often includes dramatization, text, dance and symbolic gesture, costume and body ornamentation and representations through all of these devices of larger views of the cosmos referenced in the microcosm of performance. Second, the phenomenon we usually call text creates multiple levels of communication. For example, the ancient hymn to the rain god Tlaloc found in the Madrid Codex compiled by Sahagún inflects a discourse that was chanted as a four-way dialogue between a congregation, priests, a sacrificial victim and the rain god. Although the goal of the ritual and its chants is the exchange of precious human blood for the nourishment of rain, it also contains a subtext central to 15th-century Nahuatl thought: just as plants nourish the human body, the sacrificed body becomes the food of plants, thus reversing or inverting the food chain and ‘loaning’ the sacrificial victim to the organic world of plants so that the cycle of life may always be renewed. This notion of transmogrification is evident in the opening stanza of the hymn as translated by Willard Gingerich (1977, p.79):


Ahvia! Mexico teutlaneviloc
amapanitlan nauhcampa
ye moquetzquetl
ye kena ichocayan.


(Ahuia! Mexico seeks a loan of the god;
paper-flag places in the four directions;
men stand forth;
finally the time of its weeping.)

The ancient hymn, which focusses on the ‘loan’ of a human life for renewed life on the planet, reflects a continued concern with the importance of sacrifice in the maintenance of balance in the cosmos. The pictographic texts of the Aztec and Maya and the oral traditions of the Andes outline a web of intricate relationships between aspects of creation. The interconnectedness of the universe is activated and maintained through intricate rituals involving music, dance and dramatic texts. Among the texts that survived the onslaught of Spain are the Popol Vuh, the Chilam Balam and Rabinal Achi of the Maya; and the vast collections of songs left behind by Aztec poet-composers. Inca literature was equally rich, and included plays as the Apu Ollantay and the wealth of epic songs known as the Cantares históricos. Many song forms, such as the harawi, were designated for performance on specific occasions and were divided into female (sung) and male (instrumental) genres (Harrison; Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska). Among the Aztecs, Maya and Inca words were given so much ceremonial power that specialized priesthoods were developed to interpret sacred texts.

The great poet-composers of the Aztec world drew on the images of myth, ritual, nature and warfare to create a vast literature. Nezahualcóyotl (1402–72), Axayácatl (father of Montecuhzoma II) and the other great sages and composers of Mexico were known as tlamatinime, a title indicating that they embodied the highest notions of aesthetics and were masters of ‘flowers and song’, the metaphor for artful composition. The cuicapicque, who specifically composed songs for public rituals, were later folded into the service of the conquering Catholic Church, and continued to receive privileged treatment well into the 16th century. Like their amauta counterparts in Peru, who composed in the imperial runasimi and other Andean languages, the sages of Mexico documented the deeds of heroes and mused about the nature of Creation. The tlamatinime drew on theological tenets developed by the Toltecs, problematizing the nature of gods and men. Thus, in the Cantares mexicanos manuscript (Cantares mexicanos, MS, n.d., f.62r), an anonymous poet sings:


Where is the place of light,
for He who gives life hides Himself?

And also in reference to the notion of Ometéotl, the god of duality inherited from the Toltecs (Cantares mexicanos, MS, n.d., f.35v):


Where shall I go?
Oh, where shall I go?
The path of the god of duality.
Is your home in the place of the dead?
In the interior of the heavens?
Or only here on earth
is the abode of the dead?

The recreation of myths and cosmic forces through ritual enactment conflated time and space, giving humans access to ancestral and supernatural realms. The vehicle that opened the gates between these co-existing realities was performance, wherein music, poetry and dance commingled to open doors to other domains of experience.

All of these symbolic performances enact a relational world, i.e. a world in which music and dance embody the connections between various elements of creation. Thus music, or the act of performance, references the relation of humans to non-humans, of humans to other life forms, of humans to geographic and mythical places, of humans to ancestors, of humans to their past, of individuals and groups to community and of humans to their emotions. These emphases provide the framework for our discussion of contemporary Amerindian traditions.

Latin America, §I: Indigenous Music

2. Contemporary performance traditions.

A great deal of confusion has been engendered by scholarly attempts to classify peoples of the Americas into what are rather artificial groupings: indio, mestizo, criollo, acculturated, unacculturated. Usually, these categories are based on assumptions about racial purity, intermarriage, cultural contact as a purely post-colonial phenomenon and other fictions imposed by outsiders. Many so-called mestizo, or mixed-blood communities identify with the music of the indios. Many indio communities listen to rock and roll, cumbias and Mexican rancheras on the radio and at their public gatherings. Mass media, migration and an increased awareness of the politics of representation have created a musical continuum in many villages that stuns and confounds colonialist analytical categories. To further muddle our discussion, communities in Peru and Mexico often proclaim themselves as mestizo or indio, and structure their public festivals according to their conceptions of these terms. But even these self-designations are rooted in a concern with the relational world, for they describe an affinity with larger patterns of authority and cultural hegemony. Indio has usually signalled location at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; mestizo indicates a broader access to the Euro-focussed metropolis, as well as the pervasive influence of the Spanish language; criollo identifies the speaker with a culture of European origins and New World permutations. These are linguistic, economic, racial and cultural distinctions that negate the complexity of how traditions have been perpetuated and transmitted in Latin America. As used in Peru, Bolivia and parts of Mexico, mestizo refers not so much to racial phenotype as it does to the presence of bilingualism, styles of clothing and speech and socioeconomic status.

(i) Bridging cultural spaces through performance.

(ii) Myth, ritual and performance.

Latin America, §I, 2: Indigenous Music: Contemporary performance traditions

(i) Bridging cultural spaces through performance.

In his research among Aymara-speaking musicians in the Lake Titicaca region of Peru, Thomas Turino shows how music reflects the fluid nature of culture and identity. The people of Conima, a town situated 12,500 feet above sea level, organize their social and religious life around religious fiestas that merge Catholicism with pre-Columbian agricultural rites. Sicus, or raft pipes (panpipes), vertical duct flutes or pinkillus (or pincullos), pitu transverse flutes, drums called cajas, chants, dances and specific costumes punctuate fiestas that embody the social stratifications and spiritual dynamics of the community. In the annual Fiesta de la Candelaria (Candlemas Feast) celebrated on 2 February, the symbolism of the church is merged with the celebration of corn and of the ‘birth of the potato’, crops that are the main sources of sustenance in this region. Plant fertility and courtship are interwoven in songs, dances and instrumental pieces played on cajas and pinkillus.

The human and spiritual relationships traced in ritual contexts carry over into all genres of Conimeño music, creating an ethos of social interdependence that is reflected in the structure of siku, or panpipe melodies. Sikus are divided into two rows of tubes, known as ira and arca. In some communities, the division of a siku into two separate but interdependent sections played by two musicians is equated with male (ira) and female (arca) (Baumann; Grebe, 1980). Adjoining pitches are alternated between the ira and arca rows, resulting in melodies such as the one shown in ex.1.

Conimeños put great emphasis on competition and originality. Thus, each performance of this piece will expand its possibilities within an aesthetic that stresses repetition and contrast within a minimal body of musical information. Tonal materials rely on two basic scale formations: a six-note pattern with flattened third and seventh and a natural minor scale.

Just as important as its distinctive style is the significance of this style of music as a reflection of changing national attitudes towards indigenous peoples. In the past, Conimeños who immigrated to the sprawling coastal city of Lima might have been shunned because of their musical styles and cultural ways; but today the sound of panpipes has become emblematic of the rise of indigenous rights in the Andes. In fact, hybrid forms of panpipe music which adjust intonation to European notions of pitch have come to evoke Andean culture throughout Europe and the Americas. While shifting from regional voices of the disenfranchised to national symbols of ‘Andeanness’, the idiosyncratic musical idioms of Peruvian communities have been appropriated and glossed into a larger web of commodities and cultural representations (Fairley). This itinerary illustrates the way a tradition can navigate the complex waters of indio, mestizo and national identities.

The importance of performance as a way of enacting human relationships is also evident among the contemporary Suyá of Amazonian Brazil. Anthony Seeger (1979) has shown that Suyá men compose akia songs as badges of individual identity that bridge the social and physical space between the men’s hut in the centre of the village and each man’s natal household. Men in a village group sing their individual songs at the same time, shouting their message so that their sisters and mothers can hear their distinctive voices and styles above those of other performers. The akia repertory uses the village as a resounding space in which complex kinship ties are enacted in performances that are simultaneous yet conceptually independent. Although each rendition exhibits new aspects of composition, ex.2 illustrates how three men executed their songs in the same village performance space in 1976.

Akia songs emphasize the individuality of each male composer/performer. Stylistic characteristics reflect this intention through a strained, loud, almost shouted sound begun by each man in the highest part of his vocal range. Melodies terrace downwards, and need not begin or end on any particular pitch (this is true of many other indigenous singing styles as well).

Akia are intended as idiosyncratic statements of individuality that link each performer acoustically to the women who raised him. In contrast, the ngere repertory among the Suyá has a fixed tempo, a flat melodic contour, and purposefully unison, blended vocal style. In ngere performances men, sometimes joined by women, perform as part of their moiety or name-based ceremonial group. Texts conceal the secret of a supernatural entity associated with the moiety. This animal or plant protector is also the source of the song. Seeger (1987), in collaboration with Roseman, has demonstrated that ngere songs make noticeable and measurable rises in pitch during the execution of the song. In ex.3, numbered pitches indicate significant jumps in pitch location. For example, the number 3 indicates B minus 39 cents; and the number 4 indicates F plus 35 cents.

Although pitch stability is important in Western analyses of sound, it is neither named nor critiqued by the Suyá. The rising pitch phenomenon is absorbed as part of the natural path of the song. Seeger’s analysis of the issue of rising pitch in ngere is noteworthy, for it signals that, as among the Conimeños of Peru, an aesthetic quite distinct from the tenets and priorities of Western music criticism is at play. In fact, the ideas that inform many indigenous musical systems can seldom be depicted accurately through conventional staff notation.

The examples examined thus far emphasize originality and repetition, the relationship of the individual to the kin or name group and the relationship of the community to the spirit world. One of the most remarkable examples of performing human-supernatural relationships through specific musical structures comes from the Tepehua and Otomí Indians of Mexico. In a landmark article published in 1967, Charles Boilès demonstrated that in ritual contexts, Tepehua violinists articulate intervallic relationships that generate specific text associations. He called these violin melodies ‘Tepehua thought-songs’, for their textual references hold startling lexical specificity. Using extensive analysis of Otomí linguistics, poetics structures and field research, Boilès was able to translate the semantic signals of the Halakiltunti ceremonies used in healing illnesses, securing rain and restoring harmony in community life. Ex.4 illustrates a text generated by intervals holding this semantic code:

Textual translation of violin intervals:


There was the thought,

Which thought it had been,
Yet it still is.

Hardly had it been born
When there existed lads and lasses.

Even though they were not Old Ones,
In this manner they grasped the way.

Thus were they given the thought;
Thus was the life given them by their fathers.

When the music begins,

It refers to when the thought entered.
It wants to say it is happy.

Yonder it has to grasp the music
Because it knows where it is.

Now it knows where to come in,
For when it arrived where were its fathers,
It greeted them.

Boilès asserted that all traditional Tepehua could hear these violin melodies and easily translate them into words. Intervallic relationships in indigenous performance are rarely this specific. Meanings associated with texts are usually much more abstract. In the vocal genre known as tayil among the Mapuche of Andean Argentina, the combination of melodic contours with non-lexical texts is used to identify particular lineages. Texts of short, repeated syllables carry abstract references to the totemic association of each lineage. The Mapuche word for sheep is ufisha, but the sung ritual signature of ufisha kimpeñ, the sheep lineage, is we-ke. Thus, the phonemes ‘we, we-ke’ identify the shared lineage soul of families who constitute the sheep kin group. Examples of three distinct lineage chants can be seen in ex.5.

The melodic contour and signature syllables that characterize each totemically centred tayil constitute a sonic pathway to the ancestors and creator beings. This repertory can only be performed by women, whose ability to give birth gives them a direct channel to the dimension of ancestral time called takuifí or alüalüntu. In ritual contexts, women perform or ‘pull forth’ this chant for their fathers, husbands, sons or kinswomen. As in the case of the Suyá akia, each performance is considered an independent sonic event, even when it occurs simultaneously with other performances of the same chant. Thus, each woman begins her rendition on her own pitch and may not try to link her performance rhythmically or tonally to the chanting of her kinswomen.

Each tayil consists of four phrases that act as ‘conjugations’ of the chant into four dimensions of time and space: the first phrase connects the intention of the woman who is performing to the heart of the person she is performing for. The second phrase pulls the lineage soul out of the recipient of the chant, bringing that shared soul into sacralized space. The third phrase catapults the lineage soul into the domain of sacred ancestral time. The entry of the chant into this dimension is marked by a specific pitch and timbre referred to as chempralitún, the pivotal sound that engenders transformation. The fourth phrase brings the transformed or re-energized soul back into the present and safely places it back in the body of its owner (Robertson).

The Tarahumara of western Mexico also use sound to bridge spatio-temporal domains. Arturo Salinas has demonstrated that the large, double-headed frame drums of the Tarahumara are used across vast geographic spaces to create an experience of concentric sonic layering (A. Salinas Sound layering in Tarahumara Drumming, unpublished manuscript, Washington, 1988). When Tarahumara peoples gather in a central location for celebratory purposes, they begin their drumming performances at the periphery of each village. Drummers pound their instruments for hours as they slowly approach the central fiesta space. The effect on the celebrants is of layers of rhythm and timbre which circle in on the nexus of celebration. Each village brings a distinct rhythm into prominence. The intention of the performers is not necessarily to articulate specific rhythms, but rather to create patterned layers of sound that weave a sonic tapestry as village kin groups converge. The end result, moving through these concentric circles of sound, is an experience of sound that mirrors Tarahumara village organization.

Not all performance happens in public or in large social contexts. As in other parts of the world, parents sing lullabies to their children, lone shepherds play their flutes for their flocks, and travellers compose nostalgic songs and improvisations that link them to home and family. But even in these instances of isolated solo performance, individuals rely on the musical patterns that mark them as members of a social group, for even the explorations of isolated composers are directly linked to an indelible cultural identity and soundscape.

Latin America, §I, 2: Indigenous Music: Contemporary performance traditions

(ii) Myth, ritual and performance.

All of these examples imply that indigenous musical traditions are anchored to theories of sound, time and space and to more complex theories of what sound is, how it can be structured and how it can be used to articulate community values and beliefs. In turn, these theories of what music is and what it does are rooted in rich oral traditions that link performance to myth and ritual.

One of the oldest belief systems of the Americas is linked to the jaguar (Hill, 1993; Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1975; Robertson, 1998). Beginning about 1300 bce, the Olmecs of eastern Mexico fashioned stone into gigantic representations of their jaguar god. In the oral traditions of the Baniwa of the north-western Amazon the jaguar Yaperikuli gives birth to the primordial hero, Kuai. The voice of the jaguar is contained in the resonant bass voice of wooden trumpets. Furthermore, Wright asserts that ‘whenever the jaguar-song occurs in myth or shaman-song, it indicates a transformation – Ipadámawa – is being made’ (1981, p.82). In creation myths, the female jaguar brings fire to the world, thus signalling a transformational moment in history when the hearth becomes the nexus of villages and kin groups.

In many initiation rites, the novice must face his or her own terror of encountering the ancestral jaguar. Among the Barasana of Colombia, male initiates are warned of the power of the he trumpets, which contain the terrifying voice of the jaguar ancestor. As they are played during the ritual, these instruments come to life and pass the life-giving breath of the ancestor into the initiate. Passing through fear and being touched by the fierce life force of the archetypal jaguar brings the initiates into full membership in the community.

Initiation rituals are frequently representations of the tension between genders. Among many peoples of the lowland rainforests, male social control is enacted, sanctioned and maintained through rituals that exclude women and separate them from contact with the sacred flutes performed by men (Basso; Murphy). Given their shape, construction and male symbolic association, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have assumed these instruments to be phallic objects that assert male primacy. However, myths prevalent among the Mundurucú, Kalapalo, Mehinaku, Trumaí and neighbouring groups narrate that women used to be the owners of the flutes. Through abuses of power and sexual privilege, women lost ownership of the flutes and must now be controlled by men. Ellen Basso, one of the few women to do research in this region, tells us that during certain times of the month, Kalapalo male elders hide these instruments in the rafters of the men’s house because the flutes are ‘menstruating’. This fact implies that the flutes are not (or not only) a representation of the phallus, but rather an embodiment of the birth canal and of a kind of female power coveted by men.

The complexity and multivalence of ritual symbols and performance defy reductionistic interpretations. Such is the case in the Baile de moros y cristianos, the dance of Moors and Christians; another ritual of broad distribution in the Americas. Versions of this 15th-century dance–drama, linked to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, can be found wherever Spain extended her empire. From New Mexico to Bolivia, this representation of the triumph of ‘good’ (Christianity) over ‘evil’ (Islam) is known variously as ‘Las Moritas’, ‘Los Santiagos’, ‘Los Alchileos’, ‘Los Matachines’ and other names (Warman Gryj). Spanish chroniclers of the 16th century tell us that the dance was first performed in Cotzacoalcos to honour Hernán Cortés. Predictably, Mexican versions of this drama incorporate the mistress of Cortés as a central figure of conquest. Known as Malinalli in Nahuatl, her native tongue; as Doña Marina to the Spaniards; and as La Malinche to her mestizo descendants, this woman played a key role in the initial encounter between Spaniard and Amerindian. She was a gifted translator and linguist, a political mediator and a respected cacique (chief). Ironically, her liaison with Cortés identifies her to some as a betrayer of the Amerindian. The breadth of her identity parallels the breadth of musical and instrumental traditions in which this dance repertory is played. In Mexico alone, Moros y cristianos instrumentation can range from harp and guitar to chirimía (shawm) and huehuetl or teponaztli drums; from fiddle and rattle to marimbas. The rattles and wooden drums are pre-Columbian in origin. The marimba is believed by some to be an indigenous instrument and by others to be an African import. The shawm and string instruments were introduced by Spanish conquerors and missionaries. Again, the multiple origins and associations of these instruments signal the complex cultural intricacies and variations wrought by conquest. Today these types of dramatic performances are perpetuated throughout Latin America by cofradías, or religious brotherhoods centring on a patron saint (see Moreno Chá; Uribe-Echevarría; Verger). The proliferation and diffusion of cofradías is on the rise, and continually expands to include new costumes, dances and songs. This form of popular religiosity, born originally of indigenous attempts to assimilate and ‘convert’ Catholicism to local beliefs, has attracted people of all social classes who are willing to dance or sing for the saints in exchange for supernatural intervention.

The most broadly distributed and musically diverse category of indigenous performance regards healing the body and spirit through sound. Healing is facilitated by the ability of a shaman (an anthropological term of Siberian origin) to mediate between the human and spirit worlds. This ancient role is linked to music in pre-Columbian ceramics from the Recuay, Wari and Chincha periods of Peru, where the healer is shown playing flutes, panpipes and drums. Detailed descriptions and transcriptions of healing songs among the Mapuche of Chile, the Warao of Venezuela and the Mazatec of Mexico are provided by Balada (1981), Grebe (1980) and Olsen (1996). These authors demonstrate that the details of performance, ranging from rattle and drum rhythms to the timbre and structure of songs, are relevant to the curing process. In his analysis of a Mariusa healing ceremony in Venezuela, Briggs (The Effectiveness of Poetics, unpublished manuscript, Briggs, 1991, cited in Olsen, 1996, p.190) delineates the relationship of the ceremonial rattle to actual healing procedures conducted by the wisiratu, or shaman, for a sick child:

… The slow tempo rattling enables the kareko in the rattle – who are the shaman’s helpers – to establish contact with the kureko aurohi ‘the fevers of the stones’, in the child, and this part of each section is referred to as dokotebuyaha ‘starting up the song’. The fast tempo rattling that follows is termed hebu nayaha ‘spanking the hebu’. Here the shaman either leans forward or crouches above the patient so that the rattle is directly over his body. With the increase in tempo and the intensity of movement, the revolutions become more ellipsoidal than circular, with rapid downthrusts constituting the blows to the hebu. This ‘spanking’ loosens the hebu’s grip on the child, paving the way for its extraction.

Specific tones, timbres and rhythms, sometimes combined with hallucinogens, also serve to establish and regulate the shaman and patient’s state of consciousness, and move the ceremony through successive stages in which the malady may be diagnosed, treated and transformed with the aid of the spirit world.

Indigenous communities are not static cultural entities. They continue to be permeated by internal and external changes that often modify or nullify ancient practices or even generate new genres of performance. In highland communities of Peru, the ancient ceremony honouring the sun, Intip Raymin, was incorporated into Corpus Christi celebrations. In recent times, Peruvians have reinvented a version of what they now call Inti Raimi, an elaborate pageant of pseudo-Inca characters played by criollos for the benefit of tourist audiences. But many traditionally rooted historical dramas have re-emerged in the 20th century as statements of Amerindian identity.

Among the Chamula of southern Mexico, Passion cults in which ritual players impersonate Jesus Christ constitute a central part of village life. The theme of the fiesta is not really Jesus of Nazareth but 500 years of resistance to external authority structures. In particular, the people of Chamula (a village in the state of Chiapas) commemorate the Caste War of 1867–70. This rebellion originated in Chamula. The indigenous leaders of this war exhorted their followers to reject the Catholic Church. On Good Friday of 1868 they crucified a young boy named Domingo Gómez Checheb so that he could be worshipped as the Indian Christ of Chamula. According to Bricker (1973, p.89), ‘There is abundant evidence that the Christ whom the Passion impersonates is the Indian Christ rather than the Ladino [Spanish-speaking] Saviour’. The focus on ‘Indianness’ is further marked by the playing of drums and cane flutes of pre-Columbian origin.

Luis Millones has documented a play popular in the Carhuamayo area of Peru that depicts the life, uprising, defeat and execution of Atahualpa (on 29 October 1532), the last Inca to lead an uprising against the Spanish invaders. The play ‘The Death of Atahualpa’ conflates the image of Santa Rosa de Lima, patron saint of many Andean communities, with the concept of Pachamama, the pre-Hispanic Earth Mother. The story is staged with elaborate costumes, songs and dances executed by the Inca Atahualpa and his entourage of warriors, priests and Coyas (royal consorts of the Inca). In a heightened dramatic moment, the invading conqueror, Francisco Pizarro, stealthily penetrates the formation of royal women dancing to the sound of drums and panpipes, draws his dagger and slits the throat of the lead Coya. Chicha (corn liquor), a symbol of life-sustaining wira energy, flows from the throat of the massacred ancestral mother to the ground. In this moment the course of history is forever changed and historical drama and ritual become one in the narrative of a people.

Latin America, §I: Indigenous Music

3. History, context and performing practice.

In pre-Columbian times, repertories, instruments and ideas were traded over vast geographies. Both Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, chroniclers of the Inca empire, asserted that the panpipes we have come to associate with the descendants of the Incas were actually imported from other lands. These instruments, which seem to have originated somewhere in the central Andes some 7000 years ago (Pérez de Arce) were traded out of the Peruvian area and then returned to their general place of origin many centuries later. Through trade and imperial expansion, the Incas redistributed this instrument as far north as Panama and as far south as Patagonia. The conch-shell trumpet (Strombus galeatus) was also traded from the Caribbean Sea into the Andes. It is possible that the scale patterns, rhythms, dance styles and spiritual practices were also exported through the routes created by commerce. This would explain the wide distribution of various kinds of pentatonic scales, for example.

Today musical ideas are more commonly traded by radio and television. It is not uncommon for the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina to listen to Mexican mariachi music on the radio and imitate the ranchera falsetto style at their social gatherings. In Peru, composers of huaynos may reach a relative who is hiding from the authorities by performing their compositions at independent radio stations and folding hidden political messages into their Quechua and Aymara texts.

From Mexico to Bolivia, instruments are seen as belonging to ‘families’. This kinship between instruments may be determined by their mode of production or by associations provided by contexts. Among the Aymara of Bolivia, one characteristic that marks Amerindian identity in performance is that panpipes should only be played with other panpipes, tarkas with tarkas, kenas with kenas; or, at least, when all these wind instruments are combined in one performance they should not be mixed with string instruments. Mixing winds with guitar or the armadillo-backed charango is a practice that identifies a genre and its performers as mestizo. This does not mean that traditional Aymara performing groups cannot perform a wide variety of styles, but instrumental combinations do signal cultural associations and socioeconomic variables.

Tonal organization among indigenous peoples defies the facile categories devised by scholars to describe how we, as Westerners, might apprehend performance. Pentatonic scales are common in the Americas; but in early ethnomusicology (Aretz, 1952; Izikowitz, 1934; Vega, 1946) scholars tended to reduce the music of a community to the particular scale that had caught their fancy. Thus, cultures that used many different scales became characterized by the tonal patterns of a single genre, a reductionistic practice that haunts us to this day. The key questions that have yet to be answered satisfactorily by ethnomusicology are, ‘How many systems of musical organization co-exist within one performance region? How are tone, rhythm and timbre perceived by the members of a particular culture? How does music interface with other ways of knowing the universe?’. Until we are able to decode the subtleties of time and tune as heard and used by indigenous people we will only be describing ourselves.

Regardless of how disparate or unusual indigenous tunings of musical structures may sound to the European ear, performance is always intentional and carries embedded assumptions about the nature of sound, the efficacy of form and the purpose of making music. McCosker has demonstrated that among the San Blas Cuna of Panama even lullabies, which are improvised to both comfort and educate children, follow a specific and predictable format. An example of the melodic characteristics of one of these lullabies is given in ex.6.

Intentionality of construction and inflection are important in indigenous approaches to tonal organization. In the archaeological heritage of central Chile we find pifilca flutes that were carved in stone or wood with a double bore that narrowed in the middle and flared at the ends. The resulting timbre created a shrill sense of dissonance that could be magnified by playing several of these flutes at once (Pérez de Arce). As in the timbre of Bolivian tarkas, the voice of the pifilca is meant to draw the attention of ancestors and supernaturals to the ritual ground. Among contemporary Araucanian Indians pifilcas are often made out of mountain bamboo. The same effect is achieved by cutting the stalks to specific lengths, pairing them and tuning them with water so that they generate shrill tones less than a major 2nd apart.

Rituals change; repertories change. It is true that many aspects of Amerindian life and performing practice have been altered, repressed and even rendered extinct by encroaching national and ladino interests. In Brazil, the fragility of rainforest cultures equals the fragility of rapidly disappearing ecosystems. But the survival of Amerindian cultures over 500 years of struggle attests to their tenacity and depth. Among the Aztecs, Maya and Inca of pre-conquest times, music education played a central part in socialization, empire building and ritual coherence. Linda O’Brien has shown that among the contemporary Tzutuhil-Maya of Atitlán, Guatemala, music continues to be a central vehicle for enculturation. Performance is at the core of traditions that the Tzutuhil speak of as ‘the heart and centre of the world’, the ‘ancient source of power and contentment’ and the ‘roots of life’ (1976, p.384). Music is an essential key for understanding the world of the indigenous peoples of Latin America; for we find that both before and long after European presence, theirs is a sonic universe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Latin America, §I, 3: Indigenous Music: History, context and performing practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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C. Robertson: “Pulling the Ancestors”: Performance Practice and Praxis in Mapuche Ordering’, EthM, xxiii (1979), 395–416

A. Seeger: What Can We Learn When They Sing? Vocal Genres of the Suya Indians of Central Brazil’, EthM, xxiii (1979), 373–94

M.E. Grebe: Relaciones entre música y cultura: el kultrún y su simbolismo’, Revista INIDEF, iv (1970–80), 7–25

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M.E. Grebe: Generation Models, Symbolic Structures, and Acculturation in the Panpipe Music of the Aimara of Tarapaca, Chile (diss., Queen’s U. of Belfast, 1980)

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M.P. Baumann: Music of the Indios in Bolivia's Andean Highlands (Survey)’, World of Music, xxiv.2 (1982), 80–96

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J.D. Hill: Keepers of the Sacred Chants: the Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society (Tucson, AZ, 1993)

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Latin America

II. Iberian and mestizo folk music

The Spanish and Portuguese presence in the western hemisphere for over five centuries obviously resulted in various forms of retention and transformation of music and dance expressions of Iberian origin. Latin American and Spanish Caribbean countries retained not only Iberian traditions in songs and dances but also developed genres of their own emanating from those traditions generally referred to as criollo (originally meaning ‘born in the New World’ of Iberian origin). Particularly significant was the widespread retention of the old Iberian romancero or ballad repertory in all of Spanish and Portuguese America, the adoption and adaptation of Iberian musical instruments (especially string instruments), of dance genres, and of specific style and performance characteristics. Concurrently, the contact of Europeans with Amerindian cultures created musical traditions that exhibit varying combinations of elements of corresponding origin. The hybridization of these traditions is clearly not homogeneous in the various countries and territories, since it depends on numerous factors such as the nature and structure of native cultures, the relative degree of acculturation, the level of native resistance to the process of colonialization and the relative importance attributed to a given region by the colonizers. Thus, the degree to which a single culture predominates, whether Iberian, Amerindian or African, varies greatly among nations, and, within nations, among regions.

1. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

2. South America.

Latin America, §II: Iberian and mestizo folk music

1. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

The existence of a fairly sophisticated musical system by high Amerindian cultures of the Aztecs and Mayas in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is demonstrated by archaeological evidence, the testimony of early Spanish missionaries in the form of detailed chronicles, and the study of Mexican codices and Amerindian language lexicons. At the time of the conquest in 1521, the Aztecs in central Mexico ruled over a large confederation of peoples; and their empire extended to present-day El Salvador. From their own domination of older Amerindian cultures, they inherited numerous ideas of instrument making and performance techniques.

The early missionaries in Mexico and Central America tried hard to suppress the native Amerindian musical culture. While they did not entirely succeed, as a result of their effective work much of the folk music of the Hispanic tradition found its way into the culture of almost all Mexican and Central American Amerindian groups. For example, obvious traces of Gregorian chant intonation and of old European modal melodies can be found in the shamanic chanting and singing performance of the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca, Mexico. Moreover, songs of the Otomí Indians of north-east Mexico follow the characteristic triplet figurations of Spanish folksong and have elements of major tonality emphasizing tonic and third, as shown by the studies of Vicente Mendoza, a well-known authority on Mexican traditional music. Other Otomí songs give even greater evidence of European influence in their parallel 3rds and 6ths. Concurrently, these songs retain traditional Amerindian traits, such as small range and short melodies with but a few tones. Regardless of the origins of the varied elements of their musical expressions, contemporary Amerindian groups have fully assimilated them as integral parts of their cultures.

Despite its strong Amerindian roots, Mexican and Central American folk music derives substantially from its Spanish heritage. This Hispanic domination is not only the result of the early missionary work in the area but also of the Amerindians’ highly praised aptitude to learn and assimilate European music, a fact made possible by the existence of strong indigenous musical traditions in pre-Columbian times. Contemporary mestizo music exhibits a variety of scales, but the classic European major and minor modes predominate, especially in the various regional sones and other song types. Iberian folk polyphony (parallel 3rds and 6ths) as well as hemiola rhythmic structure constitute conspicuous traits of Mexican and Central American folk music in both instrumental and vocal performances. Likewise, Spanish popular literary forms (décima, copla) are the most frequently found in folksongs of the area.

Several membranophones, idiophones and aerophones of pre-Columbian origin are still in use in contemporary Mexico and Central America. The huehuetl single-headed drum is still played in central, southern and south-eastern Mexico. The teponaztli slit drum is even more widespread, as is its Mayan counterpart, the tun or tunkul, in Guatemala. Turtle-shell rasps continue to accompany sones in the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Whistle flutes, vertical flutes with varying numbers of finger-holes and panpipes are found throughout the area. The African-derived marimba is especially popular in Oaxaca, Chiapas and from Guatemala to Costa Rica in various forms. Despite the numerous attempts in Guatemala to prove the pre-Columbian origin of the marimba, there is no definite archaeological evidence to indicate that the original marimba de tecomates (i.e. of calabash resonators tuned to a diatonic scale) is of Amerindian provenance, despite the popularity of the instrument among Amerindians since the 18th century. The Guatemalan marimba was probably introduced in the early colonial period by African slaves, since it is remarkably similar to African xylophones, not only in its actual construction but in the particular buzzing sound resulting from a vibrating membrane attached to a circle of wax around an opening at the bottom of the resonators. All other folk instruments are derived or adapted from European instruments. Particularly significant are string instruments, including the standard violin, diatonic harp (the largest one of 35 strings), and a large number of instruments relating to the Spanish vihuela and guitar families, among them the standard guitar, the vihuela (five-string with convex shape), jarana or guitarra de golpe (five-string small guitar), requinto (six-string guitar somewhat smaller than the classic guitar), cuatro, guitarra huapanguera (eight strings in five courses), guitarrón (large five-string bass guitar), bajo sexto (six courses of double strings), mandolin and psaltery. The accordion (primarily the diatonic, button type) is the principal instrument of the northern conjuntos (or ensembles) but also appears as far south as Chiapas. The tradition of the brass band, developed in both Amerindian and mestizo communities, has proliferated everywhere. This is in part due to military service and military band traditions and constitutes a matter of civic pride in all communities.

The major genre of mestizo folk music in Mexico is the son which, despite its many regional differences, can be defined as music associated with dance, with specific literary form and verse contents and with specific regional instrumental ensembles. Although primarily an instrumental genre, the son includes singing as a rule, in alternating instrumental (‘música’) and vocal (‘verso’) sections. The main secular vocal genres of Mexican mestizo folk music are the corrido and the canción. Related to the Spanish romance, the corrido is the main ballad of Mexico, Central America and some of the Spanish Caribbean countries. Set in the usual copla (four-line stanza of octosyllabic lines) or décima form (ten-line verse), the corrido (also designated as romance, historia, tragedia, bola, mañanitas, versos etc.) exhibits a general melodic structure of one or two symmetrical and isometric phrases, repeated as often as the text demands it (the length varies from six to 78 stanzas), in typical strophic form. Corridos deal with a wide array of subjects, from old chivalry and love stories to historical events and figures (particularly significant is the corrido repertory of the Mexican Revolution of 1910), to local current events and sociopolitical protest. The corrido singer or corridista follows certain general formulae in telling the story: calling the audience’s attention, statement of the place and date of the event to be narrated and the name of the main character of the story; presentation of the main parts of the story; message; farewell of the main character and the corridista. A corrido is performed by one or two voices, with the accompaniment of guitar, violin and guitar, accordion or harp. With the increased popularity of conjuntos norteños (northern ensembles consisting of accordion, bajo sexto and double bass) and mariachis (developed in the state of Jalisco and consisting of male voices, violins, guitars, vihuelas, jaranas, guitarrón and trumpets), corridos written by popular composers such as José Alfredo Jiménez (1926–72) are sung by a solo voice with the support of an orchestra, in Mariachi or norteño style.

Although the term canción is applied generically to any song, it is more specifically understood as a Mexican mestizo song of lyric expression, outside any dance context (with a few exceptions, such as the polka songs of northern Mexico and the waltz songs of Tehuantepec). The wide range of sources of this lyric expression explains the great diversity of the genre, but many of the characteristics of 19th-century Italian opera and musical comedy have exerted profound influence on the canción, such as long, expanded melodic phrases and operatic vocal style of performance. Vicente Mendoza has classified the canción according to the following criteria: the metre of the versification, the musical structure, the geographical features which it describes, the area of the country in which it is sung, the character of the tune, the age or occupation of the users and the rhythm of the accompaniment expressed in terms of European dance forms. The canción appears both in rural and urban contexts. Numerous songs of the canción romántica mexicana (Mexican romantic song) type, written by such venerated composers of popular music as Agustín Lara, Tata Nacho and Guty Cárdenas, have won such lasting recognition that they are part of the repertory of the whole mestizo population. Among the songs of the northern region of Mexico (canciones norteñas) are rancheras, extremely popular sentimental songs with march-, polka- or waltz-influenced accompaniment in varying tempos. An affected performance style (ringing vocal production, contrasting dynamics) is particularly appropriate for conveying the melodramatic character of many rancheras.

Numerous dramatic dances of Iberian origin, such as the dance of Christians and Moors, illustrate the integration of indigenous and mestizo Christian and musical practices in Mexico and Central America. In Mexico the tradition of the concheros is especially symbolic of that integration. Also known as danzantes de la conquista (‘dancers of the conquest’), corporaciones de danza Azteca or chichimeca (‘corporations of Aztec dance or chichimeca’), they supposedly represent defeated Amerindians who converted to Catholicism and became active soldiers of spiritual conquest in the 16th century. Contemporary concheros consider themselves the descendants of the ancient Mexicans, marking their identity through Amerindian dress, elaborate feather headdresses, use of teponaztli and huehuetl, and observance of some ritual elements which could be pre-Hispanic. Their main melodic and harmonic instrument is the concha, a guitar of five courses of double strings made from an armadillo shell, from which their name derives. Mandolins are also added to the ensemble. They wear large jingles (huesos) made of seed shells around their ankles. They organize themselves as a sort of spiritual army, with military titles, but their musical instruments are their weapons, their rituals entirely musical and choreographic. The two principal ceremonies are the velación, private rite to Catholic saints and to the spirits of ancestor-concheros (known as ánimas conquistadoras or ‘conquest souls’) and the danza itself. The latter is a public ceremony, performed at least four times a year, in four major sanctuaries, of which those of Chalma and Villa de Guadalupe are the most important. The greeting, offering and praise songs follow a familiar Hispanic-mestizo style, in call and response, with the choral answers in characteristic parallel 3rds and 6ths; popular Catholic hymns and alabanzas (praise hymns) are the main genres. Strictly instrumental music (mandolins, conchas, huehuetl, teponaztli) accompany the public dance. Since the 1970s, the danza azteca and the conchero groups have spread throughout the south-western United States, from Texas to California, as a strong key symbol of Mexican-American identity.

The ‘Spanish’ Caribbean, composed of the islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, demonstrate more their Hispanic than their African heritage, although the contribution of the latter to mestizo folk music is considerable. Hispanic-related genres among the Cuban guajiros (rural farmers) of the eastern provinces and the interior of the country, include the song types décima guajira, guajira and punto, all exhibiting the same main stylistic peculiarities as most Iberian-mestizo folk music throughout Latin America. The décima represents the improvised song text, frequently in controversias, poetic-singing contests. As a song and dance, the punto is found not only in Cuba but in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama. Among Puerto Rican jíbaros (peasants) the prevailing genre is the seis whose Spanish character comes not only from the use of the décima espinela in its song text but also from the frequent harmonies based on the ‘Andalucian cadence’ (a descending conjunct motion of the roots of alternating major and minor triads) and a specific tense vocal style associated with cante hondo or flamenco music. The typical accompanying ensemble of the seis includes a guitar, a tiple (small guitar of five courses of single or double strings), a bordonúa (large six-string guitar) and the Puerto Rican cuatro (a guitar-like instrument with five courses of double strings).

The impact of African culture on Caribbean music is so pre-eminent that the most important genres of song and dance music belong properly to the Afro-Caribbean tradition (see §III below).

Latin America, §II: Iberian and mestizo folk music

2. South America.

(i) Songs.

(ii) Dances, autos and dramatic dances.

Latin America, §II, 2: Iberian and mestizo folk music: South America

(i) Songs.

Because song functions in conjunction with dancing in a very high proportion of repertories, there are relatively few independent song genres in South American folk music. Throughout the continent one finds several song types derived from the old Spanish romance, the typical ballad dating to the early Renaissance, based on the décima (ten-line verse) form or four-line stanzas with octosyllabic lines (the copla poetic structure, with rhyme schemes of ABCB, known as rima romancera). Under different local names, romances have been preserved, sometimes in their original form (e.g. in the Chocó province of Colombia) and sometimes with significant variations which reveal the characteristic feeling and world view of the mestizos of a given region. Improvised coplas of a narrative nature frequently replace the romance as the ballad genre (although they are derived from it), especially in Mexico, Colombia, the Andean countries and Argentina. Typically, romances and coplas describe, in an epic lyrical manner, famous historical events of a region, the feats of a folk hero or episodes of daily life. Apart from their poetic and musical value, they often provide significant sociological data, expressed for the most part in metaphorical language. Ex.7 shows two versions of a traditional romance known in Lima, Peru. Entitled La esposa difunta o la aparición, its origin has been traced to 16th-century Spain. The regular two- and four-bar phrases and their isometric structure are characteristic of Spanish folksong. Literary versions of the same romance have been collected from New Mexico, California, Mexico and Nicaragua to the Spanish Caribbean, Venezuela, Ecuador and several provinces of Argentina, confirming the wide diffusion of the romance tradition.

Other folksongs, such as the Argentine and Chilean tonadas and tonos, have maintained other old Spanish literary forms. The glosa and the décima are, respectively, a quatrain which sets the basic subject or story and a development of the basic subject in a stanza of ten octosyllabic lines. This structure is found in Chilean, Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian décimas, Argentine estilos and cifras, and in many other genres, such as the guabina of Colombia or the romances and xácaras of Luso-Brazilian folk music. The classical rhyme scheme of the Spanish décima, abbaaccddc, known as décima espinela (after Vicente Espinel who first introduced it in the 16th century), prevails in most of the folksong types mentioned.

Actual Iberian folk melodies extant in Spain and Portugal, however, are very rare in Latin America. Children’s songs (particularly round-play songs and lullabies) seem to be the notable exceptions, for many of them remain basically the same in both areas. The problem of determining the sources of Iberian tunes in Latin American folk music is generally unsolved. But we can say with some certainty that the tunes sung in Latin America are for the most part not simply imports from Spain and Portugal, although the texts more frequently are. They are more usually songs composed in Latin America in the styles brought from Europe, or those brought from Europe centuries ago but so changed by oral tradition that their European relatives can no longer be recognized. It should also be considered that perhaps the European tunes have themselves undergone change. This situation is not paralleled among the minority groups living in South America, including Germans, East Europeans and Italians, for although they have preserved many songs brought from Europe, they have not created much new material in corresponding styles.

An extensive study by Grebe in 1967 of the Chilean verso (also known as canto a lo poeta), a traditional type of sung poetry, has conclusively shown stylistic similarities with Spanish medieval and Renaissance genres such as cantigas and villancicos, especially regarding modality, cadential practices and both strict and free metrical and rhythmic styles. The poetas or cantores perform versos accompanying themselves with a guitar or more commonly the guitarrón (not to be confused with the Mexican instrument of the same name), an older type of guitar of 25 strings, 21 of them grouped in five courses, the remaining four (sympathetic) strings directly attached in pairs to the table of the soundbox on each side of the neck. The accompaniment alternates mostly between tonic and dominant chords. Quite apart from their poetry, which ranges from biblical stories to Spanish historical and legendary accounts of the Middle Ages, the musical behaviour and customs of the folk cantores reveal striking similarities to the Spanish medieval juglar and other European types of troubadour.

Archaic musical elements are also found in the cantoria (generic term for poetic singing of a predominantly narrative nature) of north-east Brazil, as well as in some folk melody types associated with the desafio (challenge), used in singing contests, with frequently improvised texts consisting of questions and answers performed by two singers, often in antiphonal structure with instrumental interludes (by a viola, a Portuguese folk guitar of five courses of double strings) between the vocal sections. The most common literary form of desafio in Brazil is the six-line heptasyllabic stanza, common in Portuguese folk poetry. One of the most popular song types associated with the desafio is the embolada, found throughout Brazil’s hinterland but originally from the north-east. Mostly improvised, it is declamatory in character and presents a typical refrain in addition to the six-line stanza. As in many Brazilian songs, the refrain makes use of alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in a syncopated melodic line with many repeated tones and an unusually fast tempo. The text of the embolada, based on stereotyped models, comments on local customs and criticizes figures and events of the community in a very humorous, satirical and provocative manner.

Song genres similar to the desafio and forming part of the song-duel tradition of southern Europe are widely used elsewhere in South America, such as the contrapunto and cifra in Argentina and Uruguay, the payas in Chile and porfías in Venezuela.

Lyrical love songs abound in South American folk music. Generically known as tonadas in the Spanish-speaking countries and toadas in Brazil, they appear, typically, in four-, five-, or ten-line stanzas, sometimes incorporating a refrain. The Argentine estilo will serve as an example. According to Isabel Aretz (1952), the estilo is a well-defined lyrical song genre made up of two melodic ideas, the ‘theme’, properly speaking, and somewhat faster strain known as alegre. The overall form of the song is ternary, ABA. The text of the estilo is generally set in quatrains or in décimas. The estilo is also common in Uruguay. Ex.8 illustrates the characteristics of the genre: guitar accompaniment (both picked and strummed styles), vocal duet in parallel 3rds and the theme and alegre sections.

A fairly important body of folksongs in South America comes from folk and popular religious customs accompanying the liturgical calendar of the Catholic church. Here too the repertory exhibits a close relationship with the Iberian peninsula. The hymns and songs of praise brought over by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries are variously known as alabados, alabanzas, salves (hymns of praise) in Spanish, and cantigas de romarias (songs of pilgrimage) in Portuguese. Most of them are predominantly modal and follow the traditional pattern of folk hymn singing, i.e. alternation of the estribillo (the refrain), performed by the chorus and the copla (stanza), performed by one or two soloists. In the Chocó province of Colombia, inhabited mostly by black Colombians, alabados, romances and salves are performed antiphonally at various wakes for an adult or a child to pay tribute to the dead person; the text is improvised and frequently alludes to the life story of that person. In responsorial style, these songs maintain an archaic character through the modal structures of the solo lines and polyphonic choral responses in parallel 4ths and 5ths. Many religious folksongs are associated with the Christmas season. Thus the traditional Spanish villancico has developed into many folksong types, known as aguinaldo, adoración, coplas de Navidad, esquinazo and others in the various countries. While most of them obviously relate to their Spanish counterpart, they also show many mestizo or criollo characteristics. For example, the Venezuelan villancicos and aguinaldos are in 2/4, 6/8 or 3/4 metres, with regular phrases of two- and four-bar lengths, major and minor mode or bi-modality, melodies in parallel 3rds with a range not exceeding a 6th, almost total absence of modulation and chromaticism and syllabic setting of the text. All are features occurring in the Hispanic-American Christmas repertory. But most aguinaldos differ from the Spanish villancico in their complex rhythmic accompaniment, provided by an ensemble consisting of cuatro (a small four-string guitar, different from the Puerto Rican instrument of the same name) and various percussion instruments, based on the alternation of binary and ternary rhythmic figures common in mestizo dances such as the merengue and the guasá. The melodies of the Venezuelan aguinaldos tend also to be more syncopated than those of the Spanish villancico. Ex.9 shows some of the features of the aguinaldo.

Work songs also constitute an important part of the South American folksong repertory. The various genres of work song naturally reflect the predominant agricultural labour in the rural areas. The Spanish zafra song refers to the olive harvest in Spain, and the same term is generally used for the sugar cane harvest in the Caribbean and for any type of agricultural work in the Atlantic coastal area of Colombia. The copla forms the most common basis for the texts of the Colombian zafras, although interjections, typical cries (gritos), the addition of syllables at the beginning and ending of verses and the occasional insertion of new verses give the performances an improvisatory character. In the same area of Colombia, cattle-herding songs known as vaquerías are performed in responsorial fashion between several vaqueros walking or riding in front and at the rear of the herd. According to List (B1983), the terms zafra and vaquería refer in the strictest sense to singing styles rather than to song genres. The two are similar in their rather free form, which is made up of various improvised combinations of melodic patterns, and in the style of vocal production, which favours a very high tessitura. A comparable type of herding song is the Brazilian aboio de gado performed by vaqueiros in south-central and north-east Brazil. It is stylistically different from its Portuguese counterpart in that it involves non-lexical syllables, has no recurrent pulse, and is sometimes sung in parallel 3rds in the highest tessitura with long sustained tones and vocal glissandi. Another type of Brazilian work song, the aboio da roça, functions in general agricultural labour contexts and emphasizes a rhythmic pulse matching the pace and rhythm of the corresponding labour.

Latin America, §II, 2: Iberian and mestizo folk music: South America

(ii) Dances, autos and dramatic dances.

South America enjoys a well-known distinction in the category of secular folk and popular dances, many of which originated in the Iberian peninsula and retain significant traits specific to much Spanish folkdancing (zapateado shoe tapping, finger snapping, use of scarf or handkerchief). This is the case of the Argentine chacarera, whose name is derived from chacra meaning ‘farm’ (from the Quechua Indian chagra ‘cornfield’). The chacarera was probably created by the farmers of the pampas, the plains of the province of Buenos Aires. Musically, the Spanish ancestry is also evident in the use of hemiola rhythm (alternating 6/8 and 3/4 metres) in the instrumental introduction. Another important criolla (i.e. native but of Hispanic origin) dance widespread throughout the Argentine countryside is the gato, from which other dances are derived. Its dance figures include shoe-tapping steps performed by women who, like female flamenco dancers, lift their long skirts to show agile foot movements. Male dancers perform another very familiar figure known as escobillado (or escobilleo), a very fast movement consisting of swinging one foot after the other while scraping the ground. Rhythmically, the most characteristic formula of the gato alternates 6/8 and 3/4 metres (the hemiola rhythm again).

The zamba is one of the many Argentine couple-dances. A danza de pañuelo (scarf dance) also found in Peru, Chile and Ecuador, it involves a symbolic code in use and function of the scarf. The history of the zamba is rather obscure. A late colonial Peruvian criolla dance known as zamacueca (or zambacueca) was introduced into Argentina during the first half of the 19th century. Out of this dance emerged the zamba, on the one hand, and the cueca on the other. The latter has become one of the most familiar dances of Bolivia and Chile. In Peru and the western provinces of Argentina the name chilena was used to designate the Chilean cueca. As a result of the Pacific war (1879) between Peru and Chile, in Peru the chilena became the marinera. Thus, the names zamba, cueca, chilena, and marinera have acquired specific meanings in the various countries. Although they are all flirtation dances and share the same basic rhythmic organization (with 6/8 and 3/4 metres), they differ in melodic types, tempos and instrumental accompaniment. The Chilean cueca presents a more complex poetic and musical structure: two musical phrases are set to a text made up of three elements, i.e. a cuarteta (quatrain), a seguidilla (seven lines) and a pareado (two lines). In actual performance, a number of extemporized stock verbal interjections (muletillas) may be added at will in any of the three basic components.

Among the main social dances of the Andes is the huayno (commonly called huayño in Bolivia), popular among Amerindians and mestizos from north-west Argentina to Ecuador, where it is known as sanjuanito (a term that could be derived from use of the diminutive huaynito rather than San Juan). Originally an Amerindian dance, the huayno has been adopted by mestizos as their own and continues to be very relevant in contemporary societies. Huayno music can be strictly instrumental or both vocal and instrumental. Vocal Amerindian huaynos are generally sung in the native languages (Quechua and Aymara), although lyrics in both Spanish and Quechua are not uncommon. Aymara huaynos tend to be strictly instrumental, performed by sicuri bands (panpipes) or pincullo (vertical flute) or tarka (duct flute) ensembles. In lively tempo, the huayno appears most of the time in duple metre and in binary form, consisting of two phrases of equal length (frequently isometric) repeated ad libitum. Versions alternating triple and duple metre (or compound duple), or simply alternating binary and ternary divisions in a single metre, are fairly frequent. Ex.10 shows one of the most typical versions of the huayno, from the Cuzco area, with a standard descending anhemi-pentatonic tune (mode E–C–B–A–F), with common syncopated lines and the usual cadential falling minor 3rd.

Especially in the Andean region of South America it is difficult in many contexts of music-making to differentiate the musical features of Amerindian origin from those of the European tradition, as the elements of the two cultures combined to form inseparable units. While mestizo culture and society have been dominant (and hegemonic), mestizo music and dance have incorporated more of the Amerindian heritage of the area than any other region of South America and European-derived elements have been ‘Andeanized’ to a great extent. European string instruments (violin, guitar, harp and mandolin), for example, are performed in a uniquely Amerindian manner and represent an important aspect of Amerindian aesthetic systems. Mestizo, criollo and Amerindian genres are often integrated in actual performance, for example the yaravi (a song type of pre-Columbian origin) often precedes the huayno, while the huayno and marinera frequently form a logical pair.

Many Brazilian folkdances and corresponding musical genres exhibit considerable European retentions. For example, many of the round-dance types used in the fandangos of southern Brazil are popular rural revelries in which regional dances, such as the tirana, tatu, balaio, recortado, chimarrita and many others are performed. Thus fandango was transformed in Brazil into a generic term, which suggests that the Spanish dance of the same name was once popular there, as it was in Portugal. The numerous designations of these dances derive from their song texts. The singing, in which stanza and refrain alternate and which is always in parallel 3rds and 6ths, is the responsibility of the viola players. In the coastal area of the southern states, the fiddle is common, and in Rio Grande do Sul the accordion has become a popular accompanying instrument of the fandango dances.

The transfer of the Roman Catholic religion to South America has generated a series of more or less complex autos (folk religious plays with dance and music) and popular dramatizations of the Christian liturgical festivities, such as the Nativity and the journey of the Magi, the Lent and Easter cycle, and the Holy Cross, as well as the commemoration of saints’ days. Many of these dramatic dances resulted at first from the Iberian catechetical theatre and became true rituals as cycles of syncretic religious feasts. Among these feasts Carnival has remained the most popular. Syncretism with Amerindian and African belief systems and practices is often present. In Brazil, for example, the central subject of many dramatic dances is always religious. Conversion and resurrection as symbolic rites of passage are the main themes of such dances as congada, marujada, moçambique, quilombo, caiapó and cabocolinhos, among others. In the catechization process, the medieval crusades represented in the Iberian peninsula as dances of Christians and Moors (Danza de Moros y Cristianos) were incorporated in similar dances in Hispanic America, where the native infidels became the ‘Moors’.

In Paraguay, northern Argentina and Brazil, the Jesuits in particular were responsible for diffusing many of these dances and for giving them unity and uniformity. Indeed, the congada, for example, known all over Brazil, combines elements of the popular religious theatre of the peninsula with Afro-Brazilian traditions and customs, such as the coronation of black kings during the slave period. But in spite of its name and the fact that blacks participate in it in large numbers, the history of the dance suggests that it is not of African origin, but simply a remembrance of and inspiration from the Chanson de Roland (the well-known medieval French chanson de geste) wisely turned to the advantage of the catechist-missionary. The songs accompanying the cortège, which is led by the main characters (including Roland himself and Charlemagne), show typical traits of Portuguese folksongs. A number of dramatic dances also refer to the great maritime exploration of Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries, but always in conjunction with their civilizing mission of converting the native populations of the conquered territories.

In the Andean area, on the other hand, many indigenous dances of Aymara and Quechua Amerindian origin, including pantomime dances, have become traditional for celebrating Catholic religious feasts. Particularly widespread are the numerous festivals honouring patron saints in various cities, towns and villages. These patronal fiestas involve Amerindians and mestizos in various combinations of pre-Columbian and Spanish traditions of dances and songs. Numerous other dramatic dances are reminiscent of events from the Conquest period or of the glory of the past, such as the well-known Baile del Inca, reminding one of the last Inca leader Atahualpa’s cruel death.

Latin America

III. Afro-American Music

The sub-Saharan African presence in the cultural history of Latin America and the Caribbean has been deeply significant not only in the preservation of African diasporic cultural expressions, under slavery conditions, but also in the creation of sui generis cultural traditions resulting from the absorption of imposed foreign cultural values and, through this process, in the strongly influential contribution to various aspects of mestizo expressive culture thoughout Latin America. Despite centuries of oppression and racial discrimination, Latin Americans of African descent have been integrated and acculturated to such a large extent that the general acceptance of what constitutes, ethnically and culturally, an Afro-American in the Latin American context is not as unequivocal as in North America. As a result, the definition of ‘black’ music becomes extremely complex, for, with the exception of a few important religious contexts of music making in which African musical elements and functions are strongly preserved, Afro-Iberian and Afro-Caribbean music represent another significant phase of mestizo culture. In many areas, acculturation of African peoples has affected other ethnic groups or the wide range of mestizo groups. In such cases we are confronted with ethnically diverse groups with a remarkably homogeneous ‘black’ culture. Race alone, therefore, cannot be considered a sole criterion for identifying Afro-Iberian musical styles, and while Africanisms are stressed here, it should always be borne in mind that Afro-Iberian music cuts across ethnic lines.

1. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

2. South America.

Latin America, §III: Afro-American Music

1. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

The African contribution to Mexican folk music has been traditionally neglected or minimized. Only in the 1980s did Mexico begin to recognize the ‘third root’ (tercera raíz) of its traditional music and the Caribbean affinity of some of its expressions. Mexican scholars began then to search for the specific elements of what they called the ‘Afro-mestizo’ traditions of mostly the Gulf Coast (Huasteca region, the southern portion of Veracruz and the state of Tabasco) and the Pacific coastal area in Jalisco, the ‘tierra caliente’ (hot land) of Michoacán and Guerrero, and of the ‘Costa Chica’ (small coast) of Guerrero and Oaxaca states. The music of the Afro-mestizo communities of the Costa Chica reveals the most obvious African-related percussion practice, as seen in the sones de artesa and sones de diablos. In addition, the complex rhythmic structures of the son jarocho, the jarabe, the chilena, gusto and zapateo have been assigned some African influence, mostly in relation to the frequency of the hemiola pattern and the reliance on percussive effects, even with string instruments such as the harp and jaranas.

In Guatemala, Honduras and Belize the Garífuna, who are descendents of maroons and Caribs from St. Vincent, retain a remarkably African-like musical tradition in their main dances and instruments, such as the drum garaon performing the rhythm and dance known as punta or culeado, urbanized and modernized as the punta rock. A genre of ritual song, the dugu, also constitutes a significant aspect of Garífuna culture in Honduras. Nicaragua and Costa Rica have low percentages of black population (mostly along the Atlantic coast, around Bluefields and Limón, respectively), most of it with close historical and cultural ties to the British Caribbean (Jamaica and Trinidad). Thus some of the musical expressions of that population are related to Jamaican spiritual baptists, calypso and Carnival celebration. In Panama a large number of people of African descent (both slaves during the Colonial period and Caribbean blacks) play an important role in contemporary folk music. This African musical heritage is best expressed in the mimetic dance–theatre known as los congos, performing congadas, coming from a black colonial tradition, and also in the types of drums accompanying most Panamanian folk dances and in their dancing style (Afro-Hispanic sensual choreography), including the national dance, the tamborito, and the well-known Afro-Panamanian and Afro-Colombian cumbia.

In the Caribbean predominantly West African religions have been retained with considerable transformation in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad. It is in the sacred contexts of Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodou, Jamaican Kumina, and Trinidadian Shango music that traditional African elements are most strongly preserved. These Afro-Caribbean religions recognize the African Yoruba (orishás) and Fon (voduns) deities (or some local reinterpretations of them) and are based on a belief system and on practices essentially African. Varying degrees of syncretism, however, are found almost everywhere. Most religious groups show features of Christian beliefs, although not necessarily a recognition of a Christian god or saint. Often, as a result of socio-historical accommodation to the conditions of slavery, a Catholic saint has been assimilated into the personality of an African deity, or, more likely, the saint served originally to camouflage the African god. The equivalence of saints and deities is not uniform throughout the area. As developed in these countries, these African religions are monotheistic (the recognition of a supreme God), animistic in nature, and involve a pantheon of major and lesser deities, each of which is worshipped with characteristic ceremonies, songs and drum rhythms. The ritual performance activities are almost always rendered liturgically meaningful through songs which correspond to the various myths involving the deities. The most obvious African features prevailing in these activities include the offerings to the god (with the ritual use of blood through animal sacrifices), initiatory rites, ritual dancing with a highly symbolic choreography, personification of the deities through spirit possession, and divinatory practices, among others.

The most important Afro-Cuban religions include the Lucumí (derived from the Yoruba of Nigeria), the Kimbisa or Mayombé (from the Congo area) and the Abakuá (combining beliefs of the other cults; its members are referred to as ñáñigos). Various societies such as the Regla de Ocha (Santería), Regla de Palo Monte, and Regla Arará, among others, present complex corpora of ritual elements in which music and dance are fully integrated. Lucumí music typically is made up of responsorial singing (the solo lines often performed by the cult leader or the master drummer), with monophonic choral responses, accompanied by drums and bells. The Yoruba sacred batá drums (double-headed with each head of a different size) are played with bare hands, as in Nigeria, in a battery of three: the largest (iyá, i.e. ‘mother’) played by the master drummer with frequent improvisations, the medium-sized (itótele) and smallest (okónkolo) drums performing a set rhythmic pattern with slight variants (ex.11). Cycles of songs are performed in a prescribed ritual order, according to specific liturgical functions, and the texts of the songs appear mostly in the Yoruba and various Congo languages.

Among the Haitian cult groups are the Vodou or Rada religion (from the Arada-Nago family), the Pétro group (Congo-Guinée family) and other lesser family groups. The Vodou religious group is entirely based on the Fon religion of the ancient kingdom of Abomey and Alada in present-day Benin, but with a number of mythical reinterpretations and the development of a religious language based on Creole, including the names of the deities (lwa) which, nevertheless, retain the same general attributes of the African voduns. The practices of initiation, mandatory offerings to the deities, ritual dancing and songs as integral parts of the spirit possession phenomenon are also observed in Haitian traditional religions.

The Afro-Dominican folk music tradition has been deliberately neglected in the Dominican Republic as a result of a prevailing strong Hispanocentric ideology in that country. But the African presence is evidenced in certain collective worksongs and through the use of the palos and atabales (long drums), mostly associated with the rituals of religious brotherhoods (cofradías), such as the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit of Villa Mella and that of St. John the Baptist of Baní. In addition, the music of the gagá groups (the Lenten carnivalesque vodou-related societies) originally from Haiti (known there as rarás) is considered a bonafide Haitian-Dominican expression. Likewise, Dominican vodú or espiritismo has gradually gained popularity since the 1980s. The main genre of traditional secular dance music, the folk merengue (especially the Cibao regional variant called perico ripiao), reveals a number of Afro-Dominican musical and dance features, as do other mestizo genres.

The countries of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago preserve various aspects of Afro-Caribbean religious music: non-Christian groups in the case of the Shango religion in Trinidad and of the Kumina and Rastafarians in Jamaica; Christian groups as in the Spiritual Baptists or ‘Shouters’ of Trinidad and the Pukkomina, Spiritual Baptists and Revival Zions of Jamaica. Specific types of songs, drum music and performance practices show traditional African elements in the non-Christian religions, and harmonized choruses and Anglo-American hymnody among the Christian groups. All, however, tend to follow a predominantly overlapping responsorial practice. The music of the Revivalist groups is very similar to black Protestant music of the southern USA, combining various types of traditional hymnody with an important body of 19th century gospel hymns. The influence of the latter in Jamaica is such that the hymns are referred to as ‘sankeys’ from Ira D. Sankey, the American evangelist singer and lead musician associated with the revivalist group of Dwight L. Moody.

In the area of secular music Caribbean songs and dances owe much to the Afro-Caribbean heritage. Afro-Cuban genres (with European and African roots) such as the son, guaracha, and rumba reveal a sub-Saharan African conception of rhythmic organization in which timbric contrast (in both voices and instruments) has great significance. In the son, for example, so central in Cuban and Caribbean music at large, the various instruments (especially bongos, tres guitar, marímbula [rumba box], claves, maracas and tumbadora) present various rhythmic cells, known as tumbaos, forming cross-rhythmic and polyrhythmic textures, with much freedom and exciting variants. Improvisation is paramount in the rumba (existing in three different choreographic forms: guaguancó, yambú and columbia) in which the highest-pitched drum (quinto) is free to improvise at will, establishing a sort of dialogue with the improvising solo voice and a form of challenge with the male dancer, while the tumbadora and the palitos (sticks on woodblock) establish a contrast with regular mostly unchanging patterns, paralleling the set harmonized choral responses. The son summarizes in many different ways the basic elements and qualities of Afro-Cuban and, by extension, Afro-Caribbean music. Other closely related styles and genres, such as the nengón, changüi, guaracha and hybrids (guaguancó-son, bolero-son, etc.), attest to the centrality of the Cuban son. Even the pan-Hispanic genre of popular music that emerged in the late 1960s, salsa, owes a great deal to the son (see §IV).

Afro-Puerto Rican folk music traditions developed originally in the southern coast of the island in and around Ponce. The bailes de bomba and the plena are the genres with the strongest Afro-Caribbean connection. Bomba designates a dance and its music dating back to the times of slavery and the generic drums (barrel-like single-headed cylindrical instruments) used in it. Besides the various sizes of bomba drums, other instruments participate in the dance performance, especially the burlador (the largest drum functioning as the main improviser), the requinto (a smaller drum), wooden sticks (the cuás), claves and maracas. The bailes de bomba (bomba dances) were performed in the sugar cane fields and might have had some religious relationship, but in contemporary times they animate various secular social ‘fiesta’ occasions. The bomba involves responsorial singing in which the soloist may improvise songtexts. As a brief narrative song, the plena has emerged since the 1920s as a major genre of Puerto Rican working class identity, frequently commenting in critical and satirical terms on local socio-political issues. Its connection to Afro-Puerto Rican musical tradition is due mainly to Afro-Caribbean related rhythms and dance character, as well as the use of conga drums, bongos, the pandereta (hand drums) of Spanish origin but performed sui generis, and melodic instruments such as the Puerto Rican cuatro.

A number of song and dance genres are associated with Carnival celebration throughout the Caribbean. In Cuba, the Santiago Carnival is especially noteworthy, with its percussion groups (descargas) and the various parading dance and musical comparsas. In Trinidad, calypso song, calypso tent and steel drum ensembles have all been associated with Carnival celebration (see §IV).

Latin America, §III: Afro-American Music

2. South America.

Afro-American music in South America is found in various forms primarily in Suriname, the Guyanas, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and secondarily in smaller enclaves in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay. The relationship of music expressions and black ethnicity and identity is by no means homogeneous in South America. As opposed to many Caribbean countries, with very few exceptions, black communities in South America are mostly minorities, despite the varying regional distribution of the black population. In most cases, they are marginalized and often adopt the ideology of négritude as the essence of their cultural, sometimes class, identity. At the same time, many black communities also share in and contribute to the Iberian-American mestizo expressions, so that they exhibit a truly unique form of expression, thereby transcending ethnic origin in favour of regional or national integration.

As in the Caribbean, it is in the sacred and secular ritual music repertories that the more black African stylistic elements are found. African religions (generically known as candomblé in Bahia) are retained in Brazil and the songs, rhythmic patterns and percussion improvisation of the most traditional groups follow, by and large, West African styles and functions, especially Yoruba and Fon religious practices as transferred and developed in that country. Such styles include anhemitonic pentatonic and hexatonic descending melodies, percussion accompaniment, and responsorial performing practices, with monophonic choral responses and African-related vocal production. Although the styles are strongly African the repertories are most likely of local elaboration. Cycles of songs are performed in a fairly well-established ritual order, as invocations and offerings to the gods (Yoruba orixás, Fon voduns). Songtexts appear in various languages, from Yoruba (Nagô), Fon and various Congo languages to Portuguese, and, among some groups, a combination of these. Typically, songtexts refer to the various myths associated with the deities, as reinterpreted in Brazil. Music fulfils primarily a sacralizing function and as such is totally integrated within the liturgical precepts of the Afro-Brazilian religions. The latter represent a focal point of resistance to the dominating culture and serve as an important symbolic source of Afro-Brazilian identity in contemporary times.

The rhythmic structure of candomblé music reveals a typically African sense of rhythm whereby regular motoric unchangeable parts are contrasted with improvised parts. Ritual drumming occurs as an accompaniment to song performances and solo (ex.12). Specific rhythmic patterns are associated with specific gods, such as alujá for Xangô, the god of thunder and fire, bravum for Ogum, the warrior deity and god of metal tools, aguerê for Oxossi, the hunting god, and igbim for Oxalá, the god of creation. To each rhythm corresponds a given choreography also associated with a specific god. The type of interlocking rhythmic organization so common in traditional West African and Afro-Cuban religious music does not prevail in Brazil. However, the African type of hemiola is quite frequent. Cone-shaped, single-headed drums, known in Bahia as atabaques, are played in a battery of three different sizes. The largest drum, called rum, is played with a stick and a bare hand by the master drummer who, through his improvisations, controls the ritual dance. The middle-sized drum, the rumpi, and the smallest drum, the , played with sticks in Gêge-Nagô music, perform standard, unchanging patterns. The agogô (cowbell), played with a metal stick, completes the accompanying ensemble. As drums constitute a very significant symbol of communication with the 0rixás, they go through a sort of ‘baptism’ ceremony before they can be used in ritual contexts. The sacred role of drummers (alabês) is recognized by means of a confirmation ceremony. Their primary function is to call the gods, hence to bring about spirit possession of the initiates, but they themselves never fall into a trance while drumming.

Since the 1950s Brazilian music has gained a greater following as a result of the popularity across the country of the umbanda religion, a combination of candomblé beliefs, popular Catholicism, spiritualism, and Kardecism. Umbanda music displays stylistic changes that illustrate the effective penetration of national values into strong regional and urban cultural settings. Indeed umbanda music responds to a deliberate attempt to cater to all segments of urban society, especially the lower middle-class. And it does so by relying on a nationally omnipresent and familiar style, namely the folk-urban type of dance music most readily associated with the samba. In contradistinction to the traditional candomblés, umbanda music repertory is in constant elaboration, albeit stylistically restricted. But this stylistic limitation appears the most effective in attracting worshippers from the whole gamut of the social strata. In effect, it seems that caboclo and umbanda religions and their expressive means (mostly music and dance) may have been the most important factor for the cultural and regional integration of Brazil in the last three decades of the 20th century.

Among the secular ritual contexts of music-making the Afro-Bahian game–dance known as capoeira is considered by some to come from Angola, by others to have been the creation of black Brazilians during slavery. Most probably capoeira is a local elaboration of some African model. From a game–fight believed to have been practised by slaves during resting periods in the fields, it developed into a sort of martial art with subtle choreographic movements and rules, a well-defined musical repertory of songs and accompanimental rhythms. Although capoeira originated in Bahia, it extended to other major coastal cities, especially since the 1940s, and became a main martial art taught in military schools. The traditional dance is known as capoeira Angola, which gives a linguistic justification to believers of the Angolese origin. The choreographic development involves a series of figures known as golpes, of which the ginga (swaying motion) is fundamental, performed by couples of male dancers–fighters (capoeiristas) simulating various attack and defence motions, using the feet only and turning head over heels, among other types of figures. The synchronization of movements between the attack of one dancer and the defence of the other (and vice-versa) is remarkable. The game of capoeira is accompanied by an ensemble of musical bows (berimbau de barriga), tambourine (pandeiro), cowbell (agogô), and at least one drum, and the singing follows a responsorial practice. As the main instrument the berimbau has a calabash resonator and is played with a wooden stick together with a basket rattle (caxixi). By using a coin as a bridge, the bow can produce two distinct pitches (generally a second apart), but the simultaneous performance of several bows of different sizes allows multi-part and harmonic textures. Specific rhythmic patterns, known as toques, include the São Bento grande, São Bento pequeno, Iúna, Santa Maria, Angola, and cavalaria among others, with specific functions and references to the dance. They differ mostly in tempo rather than in actual rhythmic structure.

Capoeira songs (some 139 have been collected) constitute a rich source of Afro-Bahían expressive culture relating to slavery time, to local language and poetics. With the exception of the song of the hymn of the capoeira and to ladainhas (litanies), the capoeira song repertory borrows a great deal from other corpora, such as children’s game songs of the ciranda genre. Other songs invoke religious themes and figures, such as Santa Maria, mãe de Deus (St. Mary, mother of God).

Traditionally capoeira has been taught and practiced in academias (academies) whose leaders are referred to as mestres (masters). Among the numerous mestres of the history of capoeira none has enjoyed as much fame as Mestre Bimba who developed a new form called capoeira regional, adding a number of dance figures resembling some of the strokes of other martial arts.

Other South American countries with significant Afro-Hispanic musical traditions are Venezuela and Colombia. Afro-Venezuelan music is found mostly in the central coastal area of the Federal District, the Barlovento and Guarenas-Guatire region in the state of Miranda and portions of the state of Aragua. Drum ensembles and various forms and genres are clearly related to a black African ancestry. In Barlovento especially, the main types of drums known as mina, redondo, tambora and furruco (a friction drum) form part of the various ensembles associated with a number of celebrations, such as the fiestas of San Juan. In addition, ensembles of quitiplás (bamboo stamping tubes), accompany dances and songs performed on social occasions unrelated to ritual festivities.

The black and mestizo populations of Colombia are located primarily in the Atlantic and Pacific coastal regions. Costeño musical cultures in both areas combine elements of the tri-ethnic heritage, with a very significant African contribution. For example, in Palenque de San Basilio on the northern coast the funeral songs performed in responsorial fashion at wakes and burials of members of the Cabildo Lumbalú (studied by List, B1983) not only contain a large number of words of probable Bantu origin but are accompanied by African-related drums. Likewise, the conjunto de gaitas, one of the most important traditional ensembles of the region, includes drums easily connected to African instruments in both physical properties, timbres, and performance practices. The cumbia, one of the well-known dance-song genres of the area, exhibits a polyrhythmic organization. In the Pacific lowlands, the currulao or marimba dance (studied by Whitten, B1974) represents a secular ritual in which a symbolic confrontation of power between men and women is enacted musically: the men performing the marimba, the drums (cununos and bombos), with the glosador (leading male vocalist), all in competition with the female singers (respondedoras) who shake guasás, or rattles. The resulting texture (numerous ostinati in a dense polyrhythm) and performance characteristics (responsorial, use of falsetto and hocket techniques) represent one of the most traditional African sounding musics to be found in the Americas. This genre is also known in the Afro-Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas where the African marimba also predominates. Outside of Esmeraldas the only other region where Afro-Ecuadorian music is found is the Chota valley where contemporary black musicians cultivate mostly the bomba, in addition to the urban popular genres of the day.

The black presence in Peru and Bolivia has been culturally and demographically less significant than that of the Ameirndian. However, from the beginning of the Spanish conquest, Peru was an important centre of black slavery with corresponding significance in the development of mestizo culture, primarily along the coastal areas. Black culture, nevertheless, had little national impact until the 1950s, when a revival and reconstruction of the African heritage in Afro-Peruvian music were initiated by local intellectuals of African ancestry. Typical musical genres, such as the festejo, socabón and agua de nieve, were rightfully claimed as Afro-Peruvian. Thereafter, a number of Afro-Peruvian performing groups appeared and had real impact on Peru’s urban culture. In Bolivia, the rediscovery of Afro-Bolivian music and culture is even more recent and affects a number of trends in contemporary popular music.

The African contribution to Argentine and Uruguayan musical life has also been minimized, despite the early recognition by such writers as Vicente Rossi (D1926) and Lauro Ayesterán (D1953) of the black impact on the musical life of the Río de la Plata region. Although practically extinct by the end of the 19th century, the well-known dance, candombe, was revived at various times in the 20th century in both Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

Finally, the presence and contribution of blacks (both slaves and free blacks) in colonial art–music of Latin America and the Caribbean need to be acknowledged. Whether composers or performers, the numerous black musicians retained in the annals of the music histories obviously did not and could not cultivate particular musical styles that related in any way to sub-Saharan Africa. The system of cofradías and hermandades/irmandades(confraternities and brotherhoods) inherited from the Iberian peninsula and implanted in Hispanic America and Brazil thoughout the colonial period helped in preserving some aspects of black identity. Musically, the only genre performed in churches that retains some aspect of that identity was the villancico to pseudo-black dialects cultivated in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Even cathedral chapelmasters from Mexico to Bolivia were fond of this type of villancico known as negro, guineo, negrilla and negrito. The late and post-Colonial periods actually saw a large number of very significant black composers and performers, such as some of the figures of the Minas Gerais (Brazil) and Venezuelan church-music composers of the late 18th century, and the prolific and creative figure of José Maurício Nunes García, active in Rio de Janeiro. The Cuban composer-violinist José White and his contemporary Brindis de Salas, and the Argentine pianist-composer-conductor Zenón Rolón are some of the examples of successful black musicians of the 19th century.

Latin America

IV. Urban popular music

1. Historical overview.

2. Specific genres.

Latin America, §IV: Popular music

1. Historical overview.

The expression ‘urban popular music’ refers essentially to the music produced in major cities for a predominantly urban population of consumers. It is disseminated through various formats, from sheet music to commercial recordings, from radio or television programmes to video tapes and is therefore closely related to various forms of mass media. In Spanish and Portuguese, música popular has meant traditionally music of the people, including what folklorists and ethnomusicologists designate as folk and traditional music as well as urban music. The semantic differentiation between folk and popular music began to appear most prominently in the 1950s, when folklore musical or simply folklore became common and música popular gradually came to be understood in the modern sense of pop/commercial music. Recognizing that the term ‘popular’ can have multiple meanings, Carlos Vega (A1966) later opted for ‘mesomusic’ which he defined as follows:

Mesomusic is the aggregate of musical traditions (melodies with or without words) functionally designed for recreation, for social dancing, for the theatre, for ceremonies, public acts, classrooms, games etc. adopted or accepted by listeners of [the] culturally modern nations. During recent centuries, improvements in communication have favoured the dissemination of mesomusic to such a degree that today the only exceptions to its influence are the more or less primitive aborigines and the national groups that have not yet completed their process of modernization. But, since mesomusic is not an exclusively Western music rather a ‘common music’ of mankind, there can exist eccentric foci with dispersal over wide areas of the world. Mesomusic, then, coexists in the minds of urban groups along with fine-art music, and participates in the life of rural groups along with folk music.

In effect, this definition is only useful at the most general level of functionality and fails to consider the specific attributes of the makers and consumers of ‘mesomusic’. In addition, it tends to be too inclusive, admitting all species or genres that are deemed outside the art music, folk music or traditional music repertories. In its basic conceptualization, however, ‘mesomusic’ is the equivalent of the contemporary use of urban pop music.

Repertories, genres and behaviours associated with urban popular music generally reflect the social stratification of a particular urban area, whether social strata are defined along socio-economic, generational or ethnic lines, although such relationships are not to be thought of as a one-to-one correspondence. Additionally, certain Latin American and Caribbean popular music movements, genres and styles have emerged from socio-political participation and criticism, thereby reflecting certain ideological positions of specific social groups. The pervasiveness of mass media since the 1970s has extended the consumption of popular music outside urban areas. It is quite clear, therefore, that popular music cuts across the traditional dichotomy of urban–rural and its corresponding social strata differentiation. But for that reason, it is not to be thought of as always and only representing the ‘middle’ or ‘neutral’ level of a given stratification.

The socio-aesthetic significance of popular music for Latin American and Caribbean people has been recognized by only a few. The Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier acknowledged the strong identity marker inherent in popular music:

Habanera, Argentine tango, rumba, guaracha, bolero, Brazilian samba invaded the world with their rhythms, their typical instruments, and their rich percussion arsenal nowadays incorporated by right to the battery of symphonic ensembles. And now musics from Mexico, Venezuela and the Andes (and a renewed tango in sound and style) are heard everywhere, with their bandoneones, guitars, kenas of very old ancestry, llanera harps … All music due to the inventiveness of semicultivated, popular, populachero (common, vulgar) musicians, or however they might be called by certain clerical verses, well versed in the arts of harmony, counterpoint and fugue. But musics that have been much more useful, quite frankly, for the strengthening of a national accent of our own, than certain ‘symphonies’ on indigenous themes, inumerous orchestral ‘rhapsodies’ with strong folk background, symphonic poems of ‘vernacular inspiration’ (almost always terribly impressionist …), that remain only as documents, reference titles, milestones of local history, in the archives of conservatories … For there is something evident: Latin American music must be accepted en bloc, in and of itself, recognizing that its most original expressions can just as well come from the street as from the academies. In the past, peasant musicians, instrumentalists from the slums, obscure guitarists, movie-theatre pianists (such as those in Rio de Janeiro who caused Darius Milhaud's admiration), are the ones that gave to this music its identity cards, its presence and style. And there rests the essential difference, in our opinion, between European music history and that of Latin America, where, in still recent periods, a good local song could result in a stronger aesthetic enrichment than a moderately successful symphony that added nothing to the universal symphonic repertory (Carpentier, A1977, pp.17–18).

Without dismissing, however, the value and place of art music in Latin America, Carpentier advocated an integrated view of all traditions, with particular importance assigned to popular music. Vega also stated that ‘mesomusic is the most important music in the world; not the greatest, from a Western point of view, but the most important’ (A1966, p.9), in the sense of its overwhelming place in music consumption and in national economies.

Urban popular music has been studied in Latin America by folklorists and sociologists from their respective disciplinary vantage points, generally to illustrate other domains of popular culture. Other social scientists of a materialistic philosophical persuasion have tended to relate popular music trends to specific ideologies and social struggles. These approaches have certainly contributed to the understanding of certain aspects of popular music phenomena, but they have failed, for the most part, to elucidate fully the processes of creation and consumption and ultimately the meanings of specific musics. Music tends to be viewed as a product rather than as a cultural practice; thus the potential relationships of music as a sound phenomenon and as a vehicle of cultural communication are generally neglected.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Latin American music historians have given some attention to the popular music of their countries. This was usually only in conjunction with parallel folk music genres, or in dealing with the sources of musical nationalism drawn upon by art music composers. Such treatment was justified in the early 20th century because the majority of popular music forms were urban renditions of folk music songs and dance genres, with the development of sui generis types appearing at a later period. Musicologists for the most part have ignored popular music because of their perception of its limited aesthetic value and as a result of historical musicology's ‘élitist idealism’ (Shepherd, A1982, p.148). Only since the 1960s has popular music been considered worthy of serious study. The amount and quality of scholarly study remains uneven, however, among the various Latin American and Caribbean regions and among the traditions of popular music.

Historical and sociological data relating to popular music trends and productions in Latin America are very incomplete. Systematic compilation of sheet music collections, a major anthology of popular music and a comprehensive gathering of historical documents dealing with early recordings and music broadcasts do not exist. Similarly lacking is a holistic musicological analysis of the extensive repertories produced in the various republics since about 1850, the approximate time at which urban music had developed a distinctive, relatively cohesive identity. In the 20th century bibliographical tools providing precise figures to measure the popularity of specific pieces at a given time among specific segments of society were not thoroughly developed. Information provided for U.S. popular music by, for example, Your Hit Parade broadcasts (1935–58) and Billboard weekly charts from 1940 does not exist in Latin America. The study of the historical development of popular music is of necessity sketchy and can only stress those areas for which reliable data exist.

It was not until the latter part of the 19th century that major urban areas in Latin America and the Caribbean developed what can be called in retrospect urban popular music markets. At first, such markets relied primarily on the growing urban middle class whose members consumed music produced through the music sheet format propagating the most fashionable dance music and song genres of a particular period. In general terms, this music stemmed from two major sources: the urbanization of folk and dance forms, on the one hand, and on the other, the direct influence of light theatrical musical genres cultivated in most Latin American cities since at least the early part of the 19th century. At that time, popular music developed primarily as an upper-class activity involving semi-popular theatrical genres and salon music and as a parallel to art music traditions. It is difficult, however, to attempt to trace a homogenous, unbroken tradition of urban music because of insufficient documentary sources. Independence at first and, later, the abolition of slavery facilitated the interaction between urban and rural areas, although, with the few exceptions of the largest cities, the interpenetration of folk and urban cultures remained quite dynamic in many cities and towns well into the 1940s. In general, the first characteristic popular music genres emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century. Since that time, the most obvious process of urbanization has consisted in urban renditions (with specific instrumental groups and special types of arrangements) of folk music genres. Thus, performing characteristics rather than the structural contents of urban popular forms represented at that time the distinguishing features of that music.

In the 20th century the gradual influence of North American Tin Pan Alley and other popular genres had clear repercussions in the hybrid forms that developed in the 1920s and 30s, such as the rumba-fox, the Inca-fox and samba-fox. The big band era of jazz of the 1930s and 40s also left a lasting imprint on the performing media of many classical Latin American urban popular forms. From the 1950s Cuban, Puerto Rican and Brazilian musicians, in particular, developed Latin expressions of jazz, and the period of the 1960s to the 90s saw adaptations of rock and roll and rock music often fused with some aspects of local folk-urban traditions, which gave rise to substantial innovations in various types of rock nacional. At the same time, folk music in urban contexts has gained wide recognition and acceptance largely through the emergence of the peña setting in the 1960s, the point of departure for a new style often associated with political movements of the time, which within a short period took on a pan-Ibero-American character.

The impact of 20th-century media, at first through radio and the recording industry, then through television (beginning in earnest in the 1960s) and videotape (in the 1970s and 80s), was as important for the development of Latin American popular music as in other major regions of the world. While urbanization of rural areas was facilitated by mediated popular music expressions it did not prevent existing diversification. Indeed, the adoption of internationally fashionable popular music genres and styles created new forms but as a rule did not replace the most familiar national genres, whether boleros, canciones, sones, valses, guarachas, rumbas, cuecas, huaynos, tangos or sambas. Clearly these have their own stylistic historical development associated with specific periods, countries, composers–musicians and ensemble groups. The appearance of the long-playing disc in the early 1950s had interesting and long-lasting effects on popular music, the most notorious being the reworking of earlier recorded compositions, for example, the expansion of old compositions (limited to three-minute recordings in the 1930s) by the Brazilian Pixinguinha and his band Velha Guarda. Television and later videotape recordings actually facilitated the creation of mass-mediated performing genres, motivating huge popular music festivals in most major Latin American and Caribbean cities from the late 1960s. Latin America was swift to adopt the newest technologies in sound production and reproduction. Electric and electronic musical instruments were not only an integral part of the various trends and figures of rock nacional (with international festivals such as two huge events of ‘Rock in Rio’ in 1985 and 1991), but became integrated alongside more traditional acoustic instruments.

It hardly seems an exaggeration to view popular music as the ultimate vehicle of symbolism of national identity, mediated by radio and television. Regardless of the size and geographical complexity of a specific country, radio penetrated virtually everywhere by the 1940s and 50s and television by the 60s, thus cutting across regionalism, however strongly present. Certain trends of popular music came to be perceived by the majority of the population as true syntheses of various regional musical styles, thereby transcending the provincial boundaries and acquiring an image of unified national identity. For example, the corridos composed by the Mexican José Alfredo Jiménez (1926–72) combine the ballad tradition with Mariachi accompaniment and arrangements, and ranchera-like performing singing style. Thus, the commercial music industry in its desire to win and control national markets promoted systematically any music genre and style that had the potential of transcending regional and social-class boundaries. On the international level, the industry promoted whatever stereotypical images existed at a specific time, conveying through international markets preconceived ideas of the exoticism of Latin American musics. Not surprisingly the multinational recording companies operating in most Latin American countries contributed substantially to the exploitation of local popular musicians through the imposition of specific arrangements and performing styles thought to be most marketable, even though such styles frequently misrepresented the real expressions of local popular music. In addition, the impact of the North American and western European record producers on numerous occasions had rather negative effects on Latin American composers and musicians living in those areas, in that they were forced to make aesthetic concessions in order to sell their products in those markets.

From a socio-political perspective, various innovative aspects and trends in Latin American popular music since the 1960s have been considered by some Latin Americans as reflecting a new era of musical neo-colonialism. The cultivation of modernistic pop music currents by Latin American musicians was seen as a yielding to the tendencies and characteristics of imported technology and mass-produced musical items. This has been interpreted by some commentators as a renouncement of the basic values of the musicians' original culture, thus becoming, directly or indirectly, artistic agents of international capitalism. The adoption and adaptation of internationalized pop music styles has been perceived, therefore, as part of an anti-nationalist process. Moreover, considering that no more than 10% of Latin American populations have the means of becoming regular consumers of the products of mass culture, it was thought that modernizing popular music could alienate poor majorities. In his study of the mechanisms of music colonization, the Cuban writer Leonardo Acosta equates music merchandizing of Latin American popular products with cultural colonialism:

It is worth pointing out that, although the diffusion of our popular music was a positive fact, reflecting to a great extent its creativity, aesthetic quality and rhythmic and sound vitality, the fact of its appropriation by the Yanqiu music enterprises for many years also had negative consequences, such as the distortion and commercialization of this music, and the falsification of its most authentic values (A1982, p.54).

He singles out Xavier Cugat as the ‘pioneer in the spoliation and distortion’ of Latin American music and its characteristics in favour of a commercial music with ‘tropical flavour’.

The model of modernity with its commercial concessions to the international markets came primarily from the United States where ‘Latin’ popular music has been produced by American recording companies and the Hollywood film industry since the 1920s. This domination of the commercial promotion of the international entertainment industry has been interpreted by some as the result of the political and economic dependency of Latin American countries which have consequently followed the market economy of their dominators. In the specific case of Brazilian popular music, José Ramos Tinhorão expressed his view of the situation as follows:

Thus, while for the pride of the colonized middle class, the multinational (recording industry) was in the process of internationalizing the sounds of Brazil from its headquarters (much in the same manner that bankers were internationalizing the result of the labour of millions of Brazilians, through the collection of a debt of 120 billion dollars), the most humble social strata, heirs of a cultural continuum of almost five centuries, continued to play their bombos vigorously in the traditional metre of 2/4, waiting for their turn in History, perhaps in the 21st century (D1990, p.276).

Although there is justifiable ground for this type of interpretation, one should not forget or minimize the importance of the process of integration of international pop music in certain local popular cultural movements. However, rather than a mere copy of original models, the ‘modernizing’ and innovative trends of Latin American and Caribbean popular musics, jazz, rock, reggae, funk, heavy metal, new wave and other genres have become perfectly legitimate expressions of creative artists who reflect the values of the specific segments of urban society with which they are associated. The results of their creative efforts reveal assimilation and transformation of imported styles into their own musical sensibility to which they add their own, different meanings. In addition, it must be recognized that the major urban areas of Latin America have not only been a natural part of the international scene but have contributed to it in their own unique ways. Elements of confrontation between the national and international popular styles have forced specific and deliberate choices, but such choices have been made by popular musicians according to their perception of their own aesthetic and ideological needs of a particular moment. One such need has been the collective identity of the new class structure of the industrialized urban world since the 1960s, especially among international youth movements as sub-cultures for which certain genres and styles of North American and British popular music of the 1960s (Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among others) became a sort of lingua franca, transcending nationalities. Latin American urban areas have gone through this process of development in much the same manner as industrialized societies. In those areas, there can be no doubt that the classic distinction between First and Third Worlds hardly applies in terms of the mechanisms of musical production and socio-economic patterns of consumption, although the obvious different meanings assigned to that lingua franca in these respective worlds remain.

Concurrently, the establishment of international commercial music markets did not prevent Latin American countries from developing their own local popular music with little or no influence from international trends. In effect, various musical expressions emerging since the 1920s correspond to various strata of a particular urban society at a particular time. This is why one finds not one but many popular musics in the major cities of Latin America and the Caribbean. These musics, however, have generally enough in common to create a sense of regional or national identity. In addition, they frequently function in a large number of social contexts which intersect the boundaries of various social groups. The function of popular music as a facilitator of national integration explains, to a great extent, the process of urbanization in Latin America and the Caribbean of mestizo folksong and folkdance genres. In numerous cases, it was because most people shared a common knowledge, enjoyment and consumption of such genres that they appeared suitable to urban popular composers as natural sources of national music. Thus, almost all major folk music genres have at one time or another been used as the very foundation of national popular music. These include the son in Mexico and Guatemala; the son and rumba in Cuba; the bambuco, vallenato and cumbia in Colombia; the joropo in Venezuela; the huayno/huayño and the cueca/marinera complexes, and the saya in the Andean countries; the zamba, chacarera, gato in Argentina; and the samba of Brazil.

Latin America, §IV: Popular music

2. Specific genres.

(i) Transformation of 19th-century European popular music.

The pervasive European 19th-century salon music tradition left a strong imprint on Latin American urban popular music and provided an important source for numerous popular genres of the early 20th century. Fashionable European and other foreign genres of popular music have always been present in major cities in which some segments of society tended to emulate their European counterparts. The main 19th-century ballroom dances such as the waltz, mazurka, polka, schottishe and contredanse were readily adopted in all cities and with time underwent the process of ‘creolization’, that is, transformation into local, national genres. The waltz, particularly, served as a forerunner to a large number of popular dances on the whole continent, each with different names: pasillo or vals del país in Colombia and Ecuador; vals criollo or peruano in Peru; vals melopeya in Venezuela; vals mexicano in Mexico; and other similar, hybrid types such as the Brazilian valsa-choro. Likewise, the polka originated several native genres of popular music, from the Mexican polka in the conjunto norteño tradition, to the Brazilian polka-tango and polka-choro of the late 19th century. Similarly, the prevailing romantic character of many popular song types originated within the same canción tradition, its gentility happily combined with the criollo traditions of Latin American cities. The canción and chanzoneta/cançoneta complex was at first cultivated in the popular, lyrical spectacles of the genres of musical comedy, operetta and zarzuela. This important source of sentimental song of popular appeal has generally been neglected but the connections are everywhere evident. Several such songs have also been combined with slow dance types, thereby creating unique blends and genres, such as the Cuban and Mexican bolero, the Argentine tango-canción and the Brazilian samba-canção and sambolero. The romantic, sentimental song tradition which has its origins in the Italian operatic tradition of the early 19th century provided the basis of development of popular musical genres which transcended, in general, the stereotypes of their European sources and acquired their own innately local character. Perhaps more than any other, these song genres have contributed to the development of truly national popular musics.

(ii) The urbanization of the huayno.

The urbanization process of traditional music in the Andean area is perhaps best reflected in the dance-song known as huayno in Peru and Chile, huayño in Bolivia and sanjuanito in Ecuador. Present in both Amerindian, peasant and mestizo communities, although with considerable differences, the Peruvian huayno and the Bolivian huayño developed in the 20th century as the respective national folkdance music par excellence. In Peru especially, the migratory movement of people towards Lima and other coastal cities which grew to unprecedented proportions in the early 1950s facilitated the urbanization process of several folk music genres. In a relatively short time a social basis which could support an urban market for highland music was created, part of a general socio-cultural phenomenon which has been referred to as the ‘Andeanization’ of Lima. In his study of a commercial catalogue of Peruvian 78 r.p.m. records, José María Arguedas (C1967) discovered that by 1953 almost 160 titles of popular highland music records had been issued in Lima, with music from the Mantaro valley most in evidence. The demand continued to increase so that by 1967, 3000 titles of highland Andean music had been issued in Lima. Among these titles, huayno pieces seem to have predominated. Lima had by that time a number of provincial migrant composers specializing in highland music through which they not only expressed traditional topics associated with huaynos (including glorification of provincial towns and villages and love subjects) but also themes of social concern and conflict of particular relevance to the migrant population. A number of social clubs for weekend get-togethers favoured the interaction of highland migrants through music and dance. Although at first it was the original migrant population and its descendants which made up the market, the popularity of the huayno gradually extended to other sections of urban society. The mass media fulfilled an important role in this diffusion, especially when several Lima radio stations, particularly Radio Agricultura, began to broadcast popular highland music regularly. In the process of its urbanization, the huayno went through a number of transformations, affecting not only the traditional instrumentation of performing groups but also vocal styles. As such, the urban huayno came to be referred to as the urban, mestizo huayno. While the majority of such urban huayno melodies retain their predominant pentatonic structure, a few of their traditional syncopated patterns and cadential formulas, their harmonic support tended to be provided by guitars, accordion and occasional brass instruments, rather than the traditional kena, harp and charango.

In the 1960s the Colombian cumbia, first performed in the highlands in band arrangements, began to gain popularity in Peruvian cities. This popularity extended to the whole of the country through radio programmes and commercial recordings. The new style of Peruvian cumbia came to be known as chicha (according to some after the name of the homemade, fermented beer-like, alcoholic beverage known throughout the Andes among Amerindian and mestizo communities). Three sub-styles of chicha have been identified in Peru: the chicha criolla popular (without any national influence); the chicha chola (highland Amerindian-influenced); and the chicha selvática (from the jungle area). The first is performed by Limeño musicians without any trace of local adaptation. The second sub-type, also known as cumbia andina, cumbia folk or tropical andino, appears strongly associated with the Andean mestizo huayno. Among numerous groups specializing in this type of chicha are the Shapis, Alegría, Chacalón and Nueva Crema, all active in the capital city. The chicha selvática, also known as cumbión, in a faster tempo than the other sub-styles, is performed by groups such as the Mirlos, who came originally from the Amazonian area. The mass media have also had a significant impact on popular bands of Peruvian cumbia, with the introduction of a variety of foreign musical genres such as rock and roll and various Afro-Caribbean dance types. Most of these bands include two or three electric guitars, an electric bass, electric organ, conga drums, bongos and bells, all supporting the vocal soloist. Curiously but significantly, chicha music is enjoyed by the most underprivileged segments of urban society, while the Andean cumbia finds its followers among the younger generations of highland migrant workers. Indeed, the mestizo huayno provides a certain continuity with the highland version, while the cumbia rhythm links the identity of its consumers with the youth of the Andes at large.

(iii) Popular music and political identities.

A number of specific occasions and events involve a kind of popular music-making which has a highly symbolic function in terms of social relationships. In this respect, Carnival, a democratic event which celebrates not only social solidarity but also social contradictions and antagonisms, is particularly important in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a result, Carnival and other festivals of popular culture frequently display specific power relations. On such occasions, music, especially musical styles, performing media and venues, often serve as effective markers of the identity of the social groups involved. In Brazil, for example, especially in Rio and Bahia, despite the assumed symbolic elimination of social barriers in daily life during the Carnival period, people have very different experiences of Carnival, depending on their socio-economic class, race, gender and even sexual preference. Following Mikhail Bakhtin's view of the carnivalesque, anthropologist Roberto da Matta has stressed that Carnival provides an opportunity for the forging of new social relations in a multicultural and multiracial society by its lessening of firm identities and its inversion of social and political order. While at a general level, Carnival may indeed appear as a ritual of social integration, at more specific levels, it serves as the vehicle of self-expression of traditionally marginalized groups. Moreover, the symbolic dichotomy casa/rua (‘home/street’) perceived by da Matta operates during Carnival in semi-private clubs and public spaces respectively. In these symbolic spaces contrasting types of activities and relationships occur, the club recreating the privacy of a home shared with relatives and friends, as opposed to the street in which impersonal forces dominate. While the predominant music genres, the Carnival samba and march, function in both contexts, the performing media and the general music behaviour of participants set them apart. The club orchestras present more polished renditions of the fashionable samba pieces of the season while de-emphasizing the heavier percussion of the street blocos (spontaneous groupings of musicians and merrymakers). Even the street musical performances differ between the northern poorer districts and those of the more affluent southern areas of Rio de Janeiro. In the latter, streets are cordoned off to mark a specific territory and identity of the local residents, while the tendency in the former is to leave an open space for anyone to participate.

In Cuba and Chile the 1960s and 70s movements of nueva trova and nueva canción respectively illustrate the involvement of musicians with specific sociopolitical movements, ideologies and events, while pursuing independent careers.

(iv) The salsa phenomenon.

No other popular music since the 1970s has become as strong an identity symbol for Hispanic-American and Latino populations throughout the continent as salsa music. Although the basic model for salsa was the Cuban son, the new genre developed at first in New York City among Latino communities, made up primarily of Puerto Ricans, Cubans and to a lesser degree Dominicans and other West Indians. The term salsa (‘sauce’) thus designates a hybrid genre of dance music and song in which one can find echoes of Caribbean musical forms and styles, aspects of which bear affinity with the Cuban son, such as the Puerto Rican plena, the Dominican merengue, the Haitian meringue and later cadans, and the Trinidadian calypso and soca. At first, it was the music of the barrios (urban ghettos) of New York Caribbean migrants but it extended to other major Caribbean, Venezuelan and Colombian cities and because the musical expression of an urban-industrial working class. The main features of salsa music stress many elements of Afro-Caribbean music, such as responsorial performing practice, polyrhythmic organization around various ostinatos (similar to the son's tumbaos) and some improvisation, and combination of percussion (conga drums, bongos, timbal, cencerro or cowbell, clave and güiro) with double bass (or electric bass), guitar (tres) and brass instruments (trumpets and trombone). Salsa song lyrics in the Spanish language cover a wide array of subjects, from unrequited love to overt socio-political topics of concern to the Latino urban poor in general. In the 1980s the songs of Rubén Blades, the Panamanian star resident of the USA, had a particular appeal as they carried a strong political or existential message reflective of and resonant with the culture of the barrio. In essence, salsa in the 1970s and 80s provided an effective model of nationalistic and vindicative expression of marginalized social groups, and in the 90s enjoyed widespread popularity throughout the continent and the world.

Latin America

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