(II)Country in the Greater Antilles associated with the USA, with Commonwealth status from 1952. The first contact of Europeans with the Caribbean island was in 1493 during Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to America. Colonization by Spain began in 1508, and the seat of government became established at San Juan, now the island’s largest city and the centre of commercial and cultural life.
DONALD THOMPSON/R (I), (II)
During the first three centuries of Puerto Rican history, musical life centred on the church and the military garrison. Early records are scarce because many ecclesiastical archives and other sources of information were destroyed in fires, hurricanes, sackings and sieges. Early in the 16th century an organist and a chantre were requested for the cathedral, whose construction had begun in 1511. At the end of the 16th century the cathedral, described as being as beautiful as any in England, possessed a fine organ. Capitulary Acts of 1660 indicate that the permanent musical staff of the cathedral consisted of an organist and a sochantre, but in 1672 two new posts were created, maestro de capilla and cantor. From 1698 until 1756 there is no record of specific nominations to posts in cathedral music. However, from 1756, records show a succession of organists, maestros de capilla and other musicians attached to the church. These musicians, including both clerics and laymen, provided the first regular music instruction in Puerto Rico.
Secular music before the 19th century was connected mainly with public celebrations. Among these were events of religious significance, but mounted at the expense of secular authority: Corpus Christi and the celebration of the patron saints of Spain, of the Spanish West Indies, and of Puerto Rico. In addition, fiestas reales were organized on occasions connected with accessions of Spanish monarchs and with other significant events in the Spanish world. The accession of Fernando VI in 1746 was marked by processions, balls, comedias and other festivities extending over a period of nine days, and similar events occurred in 1789 on Carlos IV’s accession to the throne. During the 18th and 19th centuries, military musicians were important figures in the colony’s musical life. Attached to Spanish units serving in the Antilles, these musicians also performed for balls and other civil celebrations and provided the nucleus of orchestras formed for opera and concerts. They were among the first teachers of wind instruments in Puerto Rico, and many remained after completion of their military service as teachers, performers and founders of musical families.
Construction of the island’s first permanent theatre began in 1824; the building, still in use as the San Juan Municipal Theatre, was officially inaugurated in 1832. A philharmonic society was formed by a group of professionals and amateur musicians. Among the goals of this society (many of which were realized) were the establishment of a music academy, the organization of an orchestra, and the presentation of locally mounted operas and zarzuelas.
One of Puerto Rico’s first native composers was Felipe Gutiérrez Espinosa (1825–99). He wrote the first opera on a Puerto Rican subject, Guarionex (?1856), as well as two other operas, a zarzuela and a large quantity of religious music. Concerts by visiting artists began in 1827 with a series of three recitals by the pianist Eduard Edelman and the cellist Henry Femy. The British tenor William Pearman visited Puerto Rico in 1832, giving the first documented musical performances in the San Juan Municipal Theatre. Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Adelina Patti spent a year touring Puerto Rico in 1857–8, during the period when San Juan and Ponce, the island’s second-largest city, were becoming regular stops in the itineraries of touring Italian opera companies. Short works of light lyric theatre, including tonadillas and sainetes, were regularly presented by theatrical companies, and the first complete opera (Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia) was given by a visiting Italian company in 1835.
19th-century Puerto Rican art music includes symphonic fantasias and overtures, religious music, instrumental chamber music and a considerable amount of piano music. An important species of piano music, cultivated well into the 20th century, is the Puerto Rican danza. Originally a social figure dance, the danza became a highly stylized form of concert music in the hands of such skilled native composers as Manuel Tavárez (1842–83), Juan Morel Campos (1857–96) and Braulio Dueño Colón (1854–1934). A generation of composers was active during the first half of the 20th century, but economic depression, complicated by the island’s change of sovereignty from Spain to the USA in 1898, caused the decline or collapse of traditional agencies of musical patronage. Among these composers, whose production was limited almost entirely to chamber music, piano music and songs, were José I. Quintón (1881–1925), José Enrique Pedreira (1904–59) and Augusto Rodríguez (1904–93).
During the 1940s and 50s the insular government created a number of new educational and cultural agencies, and as a result music began to regain its traditional importance. A Division of Community Education was created in 1946 and soon began to commission film scores from young Puerto Rican composers. A government-owned radio station began operation in 1949, expanding into television in 1958. In 1955 an Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was created, and a newly organized Puerto Rico SO was established in 1958. These government branches engage performers and commission new works either directly or through grants to such groups as ballet and theatre companies.
Most of the art music composed during the 1950s displays the deliberate use of folk elements in a conscious attempt to create a distinctive Puerto Rican music. Since 1960, however, composers have taken a much more eclectic view, embracing styles and techniques ranging from post-Romantic to serial, aleatory and mixed-media expression. Composers active in Puerto Rico in recent decades have included Jack Delano (1914–97), Héctor Campos-Parsi (1922–98), Amaury Veray (1922–95), Luis A. Ramírez (1923–95), Ignacio Morales Nieva (b 1928), Rafael Aponte-Ledée (b 1938), Luis M. Alvarez (b 1939), Francis Schwartz (b 1940), Ernesto Cordero (b 1946), William Ortiz (b 1947) and Raymond Torres Santos (b 1958).
Music education in Puerto Rico is administered through two governmental programmes and by numerous private academies. One government programme was created in 1947 to provide every elementary school child with an understanding of the basic elements of music. The second programme is a network of junior conservatories, the Free Schools of Music, which offer specialized instruction for children aiming to become professional musicians. Further technical instruction is given at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music, established in 1960. University studies in music are conducted, and academic degrees granted in recognition of higher musical studies, at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, San Germán, at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ponce. All of these institutions employ as instructors Puerto Rican composers and performers, many of whom have undertaken advanced studies in the USA or Europe.
The Puerto Rico Casals Festival was established in 1957 under governmental auspices and with the musical direction of Pablo Casals, who had made Puerto Rico his home. The annual three-week festival, taking place in the Performing Arts Center in metropolitan San Juan in June, has presented such ensembles as the National SO of Washington DC, the Detroit SO, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the New York PO, with the Puerto Rico SO as the resident anchor. Soloists and chamber ensembles have been of the same high calibre, but more recently the conservative programming of the festival has been altered to incorporate contemporary works, including those of island composers. Recent festival directors have included Odón Alonso and Penderecki.
F. Callejo y Ferrer: Música y músicos puertorriqueños (San Juan, 1915, 2/1971)
E. Pasarell: Orígenes y desarrollo de la afición teatral en Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1951–67, 2/1969)
M.L. Muñoz: La música en Puerto Rico: panorama histórico-cultural (Sharon, CT, 1966)
R. Fitzmaurice: Music Education in Puerto Rico: a Historical Survey with Guidelines for an Exemplary Program (diss., Florida State U., 1970)
R. Stevenson: ‘Music in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, Cathedral to 1900’, Inter-American Music Review, i (1978), 73–95
A. Villarini: A Study of Selected Puerto Rican Danzas for the Piano (diss., New York U., 1979)
A.F. Thompson: Puerto Rican Newspapers and Journals of the Spanish Colonial Period as Source Materials for Musicological Research (diss., Florida State U., 1980)
R. Stevenson: ‘Caribbean Music History: a Selective Annotated Bibliography with Musical Supplement’, Inter-American Music Review, iv/1 (1981–2), 1–112
D. Thompson: ‘Nineteenth-Century Musical Life in Puerto Rico’, Die Musikkulturen Lateinamerikas im 19. Jahrhandert, ed. R. Günther (Regensburg, 1982), 327–31
C. Dower: Puerto Rican Music following the Spanish-American War, 1898: the Aftermath of the Spanish American War and its Influence on the Musical Culture of Puerto Rico (Lanham, MD 1983)
D. Mendoza de Arce: ‘Music in the Constitutions of the Diocese of Puerto Rico (1604)’, LAMR, ix/2 (1988), 233–40
D. Thompson: ‘Music in Puerto Rican Public Ceremony: Fiestas Reales, Fiestas Patronales, Ferias and Exposiciones: a Chronological List of Official Reports and Similar Documents, 1746–1897’ Inter-American Music Review, x/2 (1988–9), 135–41
K. Degláns and L.E. Pabón Roca, eds.: Catálogo de música clásica contemporánea en Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1989)
D. Mendoza de Arce: ‘Panorama of the Music in the Cathedral of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1749–1857’, LAMR, x/1 (1989), 53–68
A. López Cantos: Fiestas y juegos en Puerto Rico (siglo XVIII) (San Juan, 1990)
D. Thompson: ‘El joven Tavárez: nuevos documentos y nuevas perspectivas’, Revista del Centro de estudios avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, no.11 (1990), 64–74
J. Montalvo: ‘Un capítulo de la música electrónica’, Revista Universidad de América, iii/2 (1991), 24–36
D. Thompson and A.F. Thompson, eds.: Music and Dance in Puerto Rico From the Age of Columbus to Modern Times: an Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen and London, 1991)
A. Matilla Jimeno: De música, ed. Alfredo Matilla Rivas (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1992)
D. Thompson and F. Schwartz: Concert Life in Puerto Rico 1957–1992: Views and Reviews (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1998)
Until the 20th century, interest in Puerto Rican folklore and customs was expressed principally through travellers’ descriptions and the introduction of folk themes in 19th-century Puerto Rican costumbrista literature; precise knowledge of the island’s traditional music from the 16th to 19th centuries is therefore slender.
The predominant elements in the traditional music of Puerto Rico have been traced to Spain and West Africa; Spanish settlement and colonization began in 1508, while West African influence is due to the direct importation of African slave labourers until the 19th century and the introduction of black Americans at various periods. The indigenous Arawak Indian contribution is minimal; so rapid was the Spanish domination of the island’s indigenous population that within a few generations of the Conquest scarcely a trace of Arawak influence could be noted in Puerto Rican life.
Early descriptions of the musical and ceremonial use of Arawak implements are limited to gourd rattles and to the bastón, an ornamented stick struck heavily against the ground. The areito (a ceremonial dance) was practised throughout the Greater Antilles by pre-Columbian inhabitants and performed on a wide variety of occasions, involving instruments and antiphonal chanting. Attempts to reconstruct Arawak music and chant on the basis of the few extant descriptions or through supposed vestiges in the traditional music of later periods have been fruitless.
African influences have been strong, particularly in the coastal regions. Several Puerto Rican traditional music customs clearly display indebtedness to African antecedents, although they have by no means remained unaffected by contact with Spanish music and the Spanish language. Among the most important of these forms are the bomba, the plena and the baquiné.
The bomba, which some writers have associated with the Cuban conga and with the more generalized Antillean bamboula, is practised in Puerto Rico’s coastal lowlands. This dance is characterized by the use of drums as accompanying instruments, by responsorial singing, and by individuals or couples spontaneously dancing within a circle of participants. Song texts may be improvised by a leader and repeated by the chorus of participants, or they may consist of traditional texts in which leader and chorus sing alternating stanzas.
Many other names of dances associated with the bomba and presumably of African origin have been noted. Among these are the bamulé, belén, candungo, candungué, cucalambé, cuembé (quembé), cunya, curiquinqué, gracimá, guateque, holandés, kalindá, leró, mariandá, mariangola, sicá and yubá.
Another form showing marked African influence is the plena. The Puerto Rican plena is a short narrative song that describes, often with sharply satirical intent, an individual or an event. While somewhat similar in function to the Spanish romance (ballad) and the Mexican corrido, the characteristic plena differs from these in its brevity and its marked use of African-derived rhythms (ex.1), patterns of vocal usage and dance.
The earliest documented performances of the plena date from the first decade of the 20th century. It has been suggested, however, that the style (if not the name) of the plena was current in Puerto Rico half a century before. The first known performances are attributed to English-speaking Afro-Caribbean immigrants from the Virgin Islands and St Christopher, who had settled in Ponce on Puerto Rico’s southern coast. The earliest accompanying instruments appear to have been the tambourine and güiro with guitar or concertina. The heavy striking of the tambourine, on the beat in binary metre, is believed to have been extremely important in establishing the definitive style of the plena which developed in the 1920s.
The characteristic form of the plena consists of the alternation of stanzas and refrains (either improvised or composed) by soloist and chorus. Many plenas have become classics of popular traditional music, and have become known throughout Puerto Rico and abroad. Among these is the following text, which refers satirically to the arrival in Ponce of a newly appointed Roman Catholic bishop:
Mamita
llegó el obispo,
llegó el obispo de Roma.
Mamita, si tú lo vieras
que cosa linda que cosa mona!
Baquiné is the communal vigil over the body of a dead child during the night preceding Christian burial. As the child is presumed to have died without sin, the occasion is more one of rejoicing than one of grief. However, songs of consolation are sung to the bereaved parents, and occasionally African deities are invoked in order to repel an evil spirit:
Huye,
huye pronto
maligno adversario
en la sombra va el niño
libre de tu mano.
Babacó y Ogún
le tienden los brazos,
Yeyemá y Changó
deshojan un ramo.
In contrast to the African-related traditional music of Puerto Rico’s coastal lowlands, many of the songs and dances from the interior mountains are strongly derived from Spanish sources. Here, many folksong species are based on the Spanish décima, a ten-line stanza of octosyllabic or hexasyllabic structure.
The most important form practised in the interior is the seis. As dance music, the seis is in simple binary metre, richly syncopated and frequently overlaid with triplet figurations in melody or accompaniment (ex.2). Formerly certain types of seis were performed by couples in two opposite rows. More than 80 types of seis have been identified, distinguishable by tempo, rhythmic figuration, melody type or choreography. Many are named after the style of dance-steps associated with them, for example the seis enojao, seis chorreao and seis zapateao. Others are named after a town or region, such as seis de Comerío or seis de oriente; still others bear the names of musicians who popularized them, such as seis de Andino and seis de Villarín.
As accompaniment to song, the seis is closely associated with décima texts. The improvisation of décimas on family social occasions and during community festivities is fundamental to Puerto Rican traditional custom. In a seis de controversia two singers may engage in a contest, improvising décimas according to a subject and rhyme established by the contest judge. Subjects for improvisation cover a wide range, from praise of an individual or the celebration of an event to themes of love or popular religion.
The repertory of Puerto Rican bailes de garabato, or popular folkdances, also includes the vals criollo, the mazurca and the polca, all modifications of the corresponding 19th-century European social dances.
Religious music in Puerto Rico centres on the aguinaldo and the villancico, both descendants of the 16th-century Spanish villancico. In modern popular usage the two names are almost interchangeable and refer to a specific repertory of well-known songs whose texts deal with the Christmas cycle. The most common themes are the Nativity, the Three Kings and praise of the Virgin or Child. The melodies are usually in simple or compound binary metre; the rhythmic syncopation that many aguinaldos or villancicos display may be the result of African influence, although this has not been fully investigated.
The Cruz de mayo or Fiesta de Cruz, a popular religious festivity involving a great deal of music, enjoyed a revival during the 1960s and early 1970s after several decades of decline. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary in early May, the Cruz de mayo consists of nine consecutive evenings of fiesta. This festival, a form of the traditional Roman Catholic Novena, formerly took place within homes or private patios, but has become a public event sponsored by civic and fraternal groups. The music performed consists of a traditional cycle of songs (19 in one local usage) concerning the Cross, the Virgin, the month of May and the Holy Family. Rhythms, tempos and forms are based on such traditional species as the waltz and march. The traditional group of accompanying instruments (conjunto típico) consists of guitar, cuatro and güiro, although in some localities this orchestra is expanded to include flutes and violins or instruments associated with popular commercial music. The cycle ends with social dancing and general festivity.
Another traditional religious activity, the rosario cantao (sung rosary), also involves music of Spanish derivation. It is a family or neighbourhood observance arranged for the purpose of redeeming a vow made to a saint. The event lasts all night, and is divided into periods of singing (tercios) and relaxation, the latter consisting of games, stories and banter. After the final tercio, at daybreak, a dance begins which may last until noon.
Traditional instruments include drums of various types, the modern representatives of a continuous tradition of African music in the Caribbean. The isolated use of musical bows has also been observed. The marímbula, an Antillean modification of the African Lamellophone, serves as a bass instrument during many popular festivities involving music. Maracas and güiros, descendants of pre-Columbian Arawak instruments, appear in most types of Puerto Rican folk and popular music.
The construction and playing of plucked-string fretted instruments have also been cultivated. Guitar construction, tuning and playing technique follow Spanish usage, but a number of other instruments, unique to Puerto Rico or with counterparts in other regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, have evolved. Among these is the cuatro (see illustration), descended from the Spanish vihuela and used widely in popular genres. The modern cuatro is made of indigenous woods and exists in a wide variety of shapes while retaining the plectrum technique of the ancestral vihuela de peñola. Formerly, the cuatro had four double courses of strings tuned in 4ths (e–a–d'–g'). At the end of the 19th century a fifth single or double course was added below, giving the pitch B.
The tiple
and tres are smaller instruments of the same general type as the cuatro.
The four or five single-string courses of the tiple have had no
standardized tuning; there have been as many as 16 generally accepted
arrangements. The tres has three single strings, tuned b–g'–d''.
Other plucked instruments that have been used in traditional music are the
flat-backed laúd español and the bordonúa; the latter, which has
become rare, has five courses of strings, tuned A–d–f
–b–e'.
GEWM, ii (‘Puerto Rico’, H. Vega Drouet)
M. Alonso: El gíbaro (Barcelona, 1849, 5/1971)
J.A. Mason: ‘Porto Rican Folklore: Decimas, Christmas Carols, Nursery Rhymes, and Other Songs’, Journal of American Folklore, xxxi (1918), 289–450
M. Cadilla de Martínez: La poesia popular en Puerto Rico (Madrid, 1933)
F. López Cruz: El aguinaldo y el villancico en el folklore puertorriqueño (San Juan, 1956)
F. López Cruz: La música folklórica de Puerto Rico (Sharon, CT, 1967)
C. Marrero: Tierra y folklore (San Juan, 1967)
C. Rosa-Nieves: Voz folklórica de Puerto Rico (Sharon, CT, 1967)
M.J. Canino Salgado: La copla y el romance popular en la tradición oral de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1968)
J. McCoy: The Bomba and Aguinaldo of Puerto Rico as they have Evolved from Indigenous, African and European Cultures (diss., Florida State U., 1968)
L.M. Alvarez: Bibliography on Puerto Rican Folklore (MS, Folklore Institute, Indiana U., 1969)
H. Vega Drouet: Some Musical Forms of African Descendants in Puerto Rico: Bomba, Plena, and Rosario Francés (diss., Hunter College, NY, 1969)
P. Escabí, ed.: Estudio etnográfico de la cultura popular de Puerto Rico: Morovis: vista parcial del folklore de Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, 1971)
D. Thompson: ‘The Marímbula, an Afro-Caribbean Sanza’, YIAMR, vii (1971), 103–16
M.E. Davis: ‘The Social Organization of a Musical Event: the Fiesta de Cruz in San Juan, Puerto Rico’, EthM, xvi (1972), 38–62
H. Vega Drouet: A Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Probable African Origins of the Bomba, including the Festivities of Loíza Aldea (diss., Wesleyan U., 1979)
D. Thompson: Music Research in Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1998)
D. and A. Thompson: Music and Dance in Puerto Rico from the Age of Columbus to Modern Times: An Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ and London, 1991)
V.W. Boggs, ed.: Salsiology (New York, 1992) [incl. J. Duany: ‘Popular music in Puerto Rico: Toward an Anthropology of Salsa’, 71–89; J. Flores: ‘Bumbum and the Beginnings of la plena’, 62–7]
D. Thompson: ‘The Cronistas de Indias Revisited: Historical Reports, Archeological Evidence and Literary and Artistic Traces of Indigenous Music and Dance in the Greater Antilles at the Time of the Conquista’, LAMR, xiv/2 (1993), 181–201