(Sp. República Dominicana).
Country in the West Indies. It occupies the eastern two-thirds of the Greater Antillean island of Hispaniola (La Española), today shared with Haiti. Hispaniola was called ‘Quisqueya’ by the original Amerindian inhabitants, the Taínos (subgroup of Arawak, one of the four major language families of the greater Amazon region), who numbered at least one million at the time of European contact in 1492. The island became the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo and thus the first European colony in the New World (1492). The modern Dominican Republic reflects its cultural heritage. Its vernacular musical culture is of Spanish and West and Central African heritage.
MARTHA ELLEN DAVIS (I–III), PAUL AUSTERLITZ (IV)
The Taínos were virtually decimated by disease, warfare and suicide within the first 40 years of conquest. African slaves were introduced as a substitute labour force as early as 1502. However, the island was abondoned by Spain after the exhaustion of gold and the discovery of greater riches on the mainland (Mexico, 1519; Peru, 1532). This allowed the French to wrest away the western third in 1697 and to establish the colony of Saint-Domingue. The Dominican Republic and Haiti thus shared a single heritage for the 200 years following the conquest but have since diverged politically, radically and culturally, including musically.
While Santo Domingo languished, underpopulated and impoverished, the French developed Saint-Domingue through sugarcane cultivation. Approximately one million Africans were introduced into Saint Domingue during the 17th century for this purpose. In 1804 the African slaves won their independence, establishing the second republic in the New World (the first being the USA.). They gave their new republic the Taíno name of ‘Haïtí’ (mountainous land). In an effort to rid the entire island of European colonial domination, Haiti then occupied Santo Domingo from 1822 to 1844. Santo Domingo called on Spain to oust the Haitians, establishing the Dominican Republic. Dominicans still celebrate independence not from Spain but from Haiti, on February 27th. Spain reoccupied from 1861 until 1865, when independence was again restored.
The Haitian occupation is an historical marker; fear of another invasion underlies cultural policy and national identity, symbolized by music. Racial and cultural dimensions of national identity affirm ‘hispanidad’ – a Hispanic identity, in juxtaposition with Haiti, self-designated as a ‘black republic’. Nonetheless, despite significant differences, there are also musical similarities and mutual influences, accelerated in the late 20th century by the sizeable Haitian population residing in the Dominican Republic and the impact of Haitian popular music. Despite a continued fear of Haitian encroachment, the two foreign occupations of the 20th century were by the USA (1916–22 and 1965). The Dominican Republic has increasingly close ties with the USA, due to current emigration, especially to New York City, where the Dominican sector of upper Manhattan constitutes the largest Dominican community outside the Republic.
The island of Hispaniola was the site of Santo Domingo, the first Spanish colony in the Americas. The first sung mass in the New World took place there on 6 January 1494, at La Isabela on the north coast. Nueva Isabela (now the capital city, Santo Domingo) was established on the south coast in about 1496. Three trumpeters arrived in 1509; the 1512 authorization for the cathedral provided for a singer and an organist. Other cathedrals and churches also appointed musicians, such as a singer at the cathedral in La Vega in 1537. Early in the 16th century public entertainments were given by performers called juglares, both male and female, a tradition of medieval origin. Tremendous celebrations of the colony’s patron saint, Our Lady of Mercy, took place in the capital in the early 17th century; patron saint celebrations still bring together both sacred and secular, art and traditional music.
The colony rapidly became impoverished as accessible gold deposits were exhausted and riches were discovered on the mainland in the early 16th century. In 1586 Francis Drake partly destroyed the capital and burnt the church archives, undoubtedly including musical scores. The church and colony suffered poverty from this period until the mid-19th century. The establishment of an independent Dominican Republic, following liberation from Haiti (which occupied Santo Domingo 1822–44) and the restoration of independence after a second period of Spanish rule (1861–5), led to a flourishing of musical arts, despite chronic political and economic instability. The musicians of this period, though lacking technical training, started composing in a national idiom. Juan Bautista Alfonseca (1810–75), the father of the national school, introduced the merengue and mangulina folkdance rhythms into the ballroom.
From the time of independence, foreigners such as the Catalan musician Rafael Ildefonso Arté and Andrés Requena of Spain taught music, established music academies and founded and conducted orchestras and bands. Leading musicians included Alfonseca, José Reyes (1835–1905), who composed the national anthem, and José María Arredondo (1840–1924). Church music again declined in the late 19th century but concert and salon music flourished, stimulated by resident foreign teachers and conductors and visiting troupes from Cuba and Puerto Rico giving opera, zarzuela and variety shows. The most musically active towns were Santo Domingo, Santiago de los Caballeros, Puerto Plata, San Francisco de Macorís and San Pedro de Macorís (the former three remained so to the end of the 20th century). Bands, chamber orchestras and music schools continued to be established in urban areas, where concerts and veladas (soirées in homes and social clubs) were frequent. The Sunday evening retreta or municipal band concert was a tradition in most towns, and in some still continues.
The band – military, municipal and dance – has played a central role in Dominican musical culture: not only as a medium for the training of musicians and the development of a national musical literature, but also as a conduit for social mobility; as a point of interface between art and traditional musics; and as an arm of political control, used first by European colonists and then by the independent governments in power. Most of the notable composers of the 19th century through the mid-20th were bandleaders, including Requena’s student Pablo Claudio (1855–99), who dominated Dominican music after Alfonseca. The main figures of the modern national school, who used folk music as a basis for their compositions, were José de Jesús Ravelo (1876–1951), Juan Francisco García (‘Don Pancho’; 1892–1974), Esteban PeÃa-Morell (1897–1938), Luis Emilio Mena (1895–1964), Rafael Ignacio (1897–1984), José Dolores Cerón (‘Loló’; 1897–1969), Enrique Mejía Arredondo (1901–51), Luis Rivera (1901–86) and Ramón Díaz (1901–76). Enrique de Marchena-Dujarric (1908–88) was impressionistic rather than nationalistic, Julio Alberto Hernández (b 1900) a composer of salon music and Luis Alberti (1906–76) renowned for dance music.
Many of these composers were encouraged by the Spanish composer Enrique Casal y Chapí, who in 1941 became conductor of the new national symphony orchestra. Although Chapí believed that a national school need not be based on traditional music, his students, notably Manuel Simó (1916–88) and Ninón Lapeiretta (1907–89), did tap traditional sources, as does Bienvenido Bustamante (b 1921) and Manuel Marino MiniÃo (b 1930). But Simó, and others including Margarita Luna (b 1921), have also used the 12-note system and aleatory procedures. Younger composers include Miguel Pichardo-Vicioso (b 1939) and José Antonio Molina (b 1960). Unlike the late 20th-century composers of some other Latin American countries, those of the Dominican Republic have tended to express nationalism in popular music of various genres rather than in art music: notable are the songwriter Juan Luis Guerra (b 1957), the Latin jazz composer and pianist Michel Camilo and the traditionally-based composer and guitarist Luis Díaz (or Días; b 1952). By the end of the 20th century the geographical focus for young composers had shifted to the expatriate community in New York.
Dominican Republic, §III: Popular music
Although Taíno musical culture was largely vocal, instruments included clay, bone (and perhaps cane) flutes, hand (and possibly ankle) rattles, and, most importantly, a wooden slit-drum (hollowed-log idiophone), the mayohuacán; in addition, the conch-shell was played for signalling.
The mayohuacán accompanied the areíto (areyto) ritual, also documented among the Taínos of Borínquen (Puerto Rico) and Cuba. Combining descriptions from various sources, the areíto was a large-scale ceremonial music and dance event, lasting hours or days. It was held to celebrate marriage or victory, as a funerary memorial, to pay homage, and perhaps for recreation. The areíto was performed by up to 300 dancer–singers (single sex or mixed) assembled in linear, circular or arch formation and with arms linked or hands held. They were led by a soloist, whose vocal phrases (commemorating ancestors' deeds) were repeated by the dancing chorus at a higher or lower pitch.
Few observable retentions of Taíno culture remain in Dominican music, except possibly the use of the scraper and shaker. Elements of musical style are difficult to detect; it is possible that they exist in the Dominican western area of San Juan de la Maguana, where religious retentions may be perceived.
Dominican Republic, §III: Popular music
The Dominican traditional musical genres of most notable Hispanic heritage in the rural sector are vocal and unaccompanied. These include the most archaic religious songs and some secular genres. Sacred song of folk Catholicism for saints' celebrations or death rituals includes the (partially) sung rosary (with its French counterpart, the cantique, in the Haitian enclave of Tesón, Samaná); altar and processional songs (most notably the ‘Salve de la Virgen’, set to many different melodies, some from archaic Catholic liturgy); other religious songs generically called versos; and songs for children's wakes (baquiní, a Yoruba term) such as the almost-extinct mediatuna of the Cibao region. Secular genres include lullabies (ex.1); Spanish ballads or romances (ex.2); children's songs and games; work songs (of the melismatic, antiphonal and unmetred variety); and various improvisatory verbal genres performed as sung conversations or debates within the context of agricultural labour (e.g. the chuin of Baní), or for religious or social commentary or courtship in a festive context, even at the periphery of a wake (e.g. the décima, a ten-line improvised poetic form with an ABBAACCDDC rhyming scheme), or as ritual, such as the tonadas de toros (bull songs; see §4) of the brotherhoods associated with the immense pilgrimage networks of the east. Generally speaking, improvisatory verbal dexterity in song is not nearly as prominent as elsewhere in the Hispanic Caribbean (e.g. Puerto Rico or Cuba). Furthermore, the décima is more significant as a sung, rather than spoken, poetic structure, and if sung, is unaccompanied; however, its social function is similar to elsewhere in the Hispanic Caribbean.
Aside from the literate music of the elite (see §II) European influence exists in the urban milieu in the realms of popular song (see §IV) and brass and wind band music. The band was an important element of European colonization and after independence has served to define identity and build patriotism in the new republic. The municipal music schools (Academias de Música), founded in the mid-20th century under Generalísimo Rafael Trujillo (in power from 1930 to 1961), and the municipal bands for which they train (as well as the military bands), have provided musical literacy and social or military ascendance for the musicians involved, as well as being the means of training orchestral musicians, conductors and composers. The repertories of municipal bands include arrangements of art music as well as marches and creole dance music (see §4).
Dance band musicians have served as the conduits of rural genres into the dancehalls of the urban elite and also for the transmission of urban fashions in dance (often of overseas origin) into rural areas, where they are sometimes preserved long after their popularity has faded in urban contexts. In the late 1700s and early 1800s the European contredanse and quadrille were in vogue, followed in the mid-1800s by the central European waltz, mazurka and polka. In the late 1800s creole ballroom dances, the danzón of Cuba and the danza of Puerto Rico became fashionable, and are still danced on occasion. By the 1920s, after the first US occupation, dances such as the one-step, two-step and fox-trot became popular, followed by the orchestrated merengue in the 1920s (see §IV, below).
Both popular songs and social-dance ensembles were accompanied mainly by Spanish-derived string instruments, including the now archaic tiple (treble guitar), tres (traditionally triangular or guitar-shaped, but now only the latter, with three double courses) and the six-string guitar. Around 1880 these were largely replaced in rural dance ensembles in the North by the button accordion, brought into Puerto Plata by trade with the Germans.
Another domain of European musical influence is Protestant religious song. The hymnody of Protestant black American and British West Indies enclaves was largely Wesleyan Methodist and Anglican respectively, with the later addition of African Methodist Episcopal. In Samaná, ‘Sankeys’ (Moody-Sankey hymns) were sung in English for the dead until the 1980s, with African-influenced performance practices such as anticipation of the beat. These hymns are now sung in Spanish, as is the other main hymnody of protestant church services, constituted by hymnals published in the neighbouring US territory of Puerto Rico. Spirituals (in Samaná, called ‘anthems’) are sung after services and formerly accompanied agricultural labour. The lifting of restrictions following the death of Trujillo has allowed increasing proselytism by American-based Protestant sects, which often have already established bases in Puerto Rico. Most notable musically are the charismatic Pentecostal sects, whose hymns are transmitted orally and accompanied with guitars and drum kits, often electronically amplified.
Dominican Republic, §III: Popular music
The first Africans in Hispaniola, as early as 1502, were in fact Christian Africans (ladinos) from Spain, where they had been resident throughout the 1400s. Africans began entering directly from the African continent in the years after 1510, initially from Senegambia and later from further southwards (eventually Angola) when the slave trade ceased with the Haitian occupation in 1822. While the larger number of Africans from individual ethnic groups has allowed the continuity of certain culture-specific African practices in Haiti, the smaller numbers of Africans in the Dominican Republic has necessitated consolidation and mixture of cultural traits. The constellations of African ethnic influences also differs somewhat between the two countries, with West African (notably Dahomeyan) more prominent in Haiti, and Central African (Bantu) important in the Dominican Republic (although present in both).
Secular genres with significant African influence include: plenas (group work songs) of the metred, call-and-response type (ex.3), including plenas de hacha (tree-cutting songs), plenas de hoyar (digging songs) and plenas de majar (pounding songs); and stories about animals, with their sung responses. The most important sacred and semi-sacred African-influenced music is that of the palos or atabales (long drums; fig.1) associated with Afro-Dominican brotherhoods (cofradías) and their patron saints' festivals and members' death rituals; personally sponsored saints' festivals (velaciones, velorios de santo); and sometimes Vodú ceremonies (the Dominican counterpart of Haitian Vodoun, African-derived extra-official religious societies focussed on healing and characterized by spirit possession of mediums by deities). Another religious genre is the non-liturgical salve, ‘Africanized’ by its adaptation to a call-and-response structure and polyrhythmic accompaniment with hand-drums and other small membranophones (see below).
African influences are also found in the music of the 20th-century British West Indies and Haitian enclaves: the Afro-British fife-and-drum ensembles used to accompany mummer ensembles (momís, guloyas) in San Pedro de Macorís; and the Haitian-Dominican gagá music (from the Haitian rará) of Lenten season religious societies, which exist in almost every sugarcane community associated with sugar mills throughout the country. Gagá is sung in Haitian Créole (or in Spanish in some locales) and accompanied by an ensemble of petro drums, several one-tone bamboo trumpets (called vaccines in Créole and bambúes or fotutos in Spanish) played in hocket, and other sorts of trumpets as well as idiophones. Both the momís and the Haitian gagá ensembles include street processions with similarly carnivalesque multicoloured skirted male participants, performing acrobatic routines which are intended to entice monetary and alcoholic contributions. However, gagá groups are also religious societies with an element of secrecy based on the leader's seven-year pact with the patron deity. Within a sugarcane mill region there is competition, sometimes violent, between certain gagá ensembles when they meet on the road during Easter week.
Musical instruments themselves which are African-derived or African-influenced include the palos or atabales long drums, mentioned above, whose sound, for brotherhood members, represents the voice of their patron saint. Palos are made of hollowed-out logs, and vary regionally in nickname, size, number included in the ensemble (two or three), number of heads, the type of head fixture (tacked, laced or hoop-and-laced) and the number and type of accompanying idiophones (of African or Taíno-African origin): one or more shakers (maracas), one to three metal scrapers (güiras or guayos), and/or a stick beaten on the drum body (catá, maraca; ex.4).
There are several musically unique Afro-Dominican enclaves. These include the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit in Villa Mella and its congos dance and drums (laced double-headed in a set of two, one large and one small, accompanied by a clave-like idiophone called canoíta); and the Brotherhood of St John the Baptist in Baní in Peravia, with its sarandunga dance and music, played on three squat, laced double-headed drums called tambores, held between the knees to accompany the dance, or under the arm in procession or at the altar and accompanied by güiro. Both congos and tambores drums are palos variants, and as such are always played by the hands, accompany singing, with the larger or largest drum as the master drum and its player as the head of the ensemble and usually the lead singer within a call-and-response structure. Palos-type drums also always accompany the drum dance (baile de palos), which is a couple dance symbolizing ritual pursuit and possibly derived from the colonial calenda dance.
Other African-derived instruments include the gayumba, a single-string ground bow of Central African origin (the counterpart of the Haitian tambour maringouin) used for entertainment and dance, which was once ubiquitous and is now practically in disuse. An adapted African instrument introduced with the popularization of Cuban son in the 1930s (largely through the recording industry) is the marímba (marímbula in Cuba and Puerto Rico), a giant-sized African lamellophone often used as a bass instrument with traditional merengue (merengue típico cibaeño or ‘perico ripiao’) bands (see §IV below).
Dominican Republic, §III: Popular music
As a creole musical culture, genres and styles of multiple origins may coexist without merging within a single musical event or even musical genre. Such is the case of the saint's festival, a night-long event of individual sponsorship, initially undertaken in payment for divine healing, then repeated annually. The saint's festival includes European-derived sacred salve at the altar and African-influenced drum–dance (except in the central Cibao region) temporally interspersed or spatially separated outside in a roofed patio. Additionally, if the festival is a nightly stop on a pilgrimage in the eastern region, it may include the unaccompanied, improvisatory tonadas de toros (bull songs) of pilgrimage-associated brotherhoods. The event may also add secular social dance, likewise temporally or spatially separated from the more sacred ritual components, in another site on the homestead or later in the morning, after the obligation of the religious vow has been completed.
Salve altar music still retains its Spanish variant, the antiphonal ‘Salve de la Virgen’, rendered obligatorily after each of three rosaries in a night-long festival. In the east and central-southern regions, these are followed by many non-liturgical pieces of call-and-response structure with interspersed secular text (salves con versos in the east), or, in the central-southern region (ex.5), the sacred text is totally replaced by improvised secular quatrains by the vocal soloist interspersed with a fixed response by others. Polyrhythmic accompaniment is provided by hand-drums (panderos), a small vertical drum (mongó) and in San Cristóbal and Baní, also other small drums (called salve con panderos). In the salve of Baní (an unusual coexistence of European and African elements in a single piece) women standing in a line in front of the altar sing the antiphonal ‘Salve de la Virgen’ text while men, at the rear of the chapel, provide polyrhythmic accompaniment on an assortment of small drums.
The smaller membranophones of the Dominican Republic are associated not only with the non-liturgical salve, but characteristically represent the key instrument in rural social dance ensembles throughout the country, likewise instrumentally and musically hybrid. There are several local creole rural dances still enjoyed. The pan-Caribbean juba dance (from colonial times) is called priprí in the central-southern and eastern regions, and is characterized by the horizontal, heel-dampened balsié drum played with the button accordion, güira and marimba. The 19th-century mangulina dance form of the southwest is in 7/8 time; it is played after the carabiné dance form and before the valse or danza (depending on the region) by an ensemble comprising a knee-held vertical drum, also called balsié, with a large tambourine (pandero), accordion or (less usually) strings, and güira (guayo; ex.6). The merengue and its variants are also performed: they include a type of merengue redondo, in which the embraced couple gyrates on an axis, as if tracing the circumference of a circle; the merengue redondo variant of Samaná; and the now widely extended merengue típico cibaeño or perico ripiao of Cibao (ex.7), which forms the basis of the orchestrated commercial merengue (see §IV below).
Dominican Republic, §III: Popular music
New creations arise in many domains, including street music: examples are the urban carnivals of many locales and the Christmas parrandas (door-to-door raucous processions). In the Dominican Republic and Dominican expatriate enclaves in New York and other US cities on the eastern seaboard, the traditional merengue coexists as a sub-species with the continually evolving commercial, orchestrated merengue. The traditional merengue of Cibao has become ubiquitous as a symbol of folkdance, edging many other regional genres into virtual extinction (fig.3). At the same time, in the heart of the capital and the town of Villa Mella just to the north, Afro-Dominicans maintain the Cuban-derived son, which is the basis of the now-commercialized genre of bachata, a term now taken as a genre but originally meaning a noisy dance party accompanied by the steel-string guitar.
The major recent socio-economic development affecting music has been the rural-to-urban migration which, in some 25 years, has changed the rural/urban ratio from 60/40% to 40/60% or larger, if the million or so expatriate Dominicans residing in urban locales of the USA (primarily upper Manhattan, New York City) are included. The New York artistic environment has not only promoted commercial merengue, but at the same time also provided freedom of expression and support for Dominican musicians. Figures such as Tony Vicioso emphasize Afro-Dominican traditional music to balance the emphasis on Hispanic heritage, even claiming Haitian-derived gagá as a new Dominican traditional music genre – a controversial position which can invoke police intervention within the Dominican Republic. Composer-musician Luis Díaz honours Taíno as well as African musical heritage and addresses socio-cultural injustice through a uniquely hybrid style nourished by the rock-influenced soundscape of New York. Within commercialized traditional music and commercial dance music and song, especially within the New York expatriate community, women have become increasingly significant, such as Fefita la Grande, accordionist and singer of traditional merengue, and Milly Quezada of the popular, orchestrated merengue band Milly y los Vecinos.
F. de Nolasco: La música en Santo Domingo y otros ensayos (Ciudad Trujillo, 1939)
J. Francisco Garcia: ‘Formas de la música folklórica dominicana’, Boletín del folklore dominicano, i (1946), 10–14
E. Garrido: Versiones dominicanas de romances españoles (Ciudad Trujillo, 1946)
F. de Nolasco: ‘El carabiné’, Boletín del folklore dominicano, i (1946), 19–24
J. Garcia: ‘Las fiestas de Santa Cruz’, Boletín del folklore dominicano, ii (1947), 26–32
E. Garrido: ‘El aguinaldo’, Boletín del folklore dominicano, ii (1947), 3–25
E. Garrido: ‘El folklore del niño dominicano’, Boletín del folklore dominicano, ii (1947), 54–64
F. de Nolasco: Vibraciones en el tiempo (Ciudad Trujillo, 1948)
J.M. Coopersmith: Música y músicos de la República Dominicana (Washington DC, 1949/R)
E. Garrido de Boggs: Folklore infantil de Santo Domingo (Madrid, 1955/R)
F. de Nolasco: Santo Domingo en el folklore universal (Ciudad Trujillo, 1956)
E. Garrido de Boggs: ‘Panorama del folklore dominicano’, Folklore américas, xxi/1–2 (1961), 1–23
I. Aretz and L.F. Ramón y Rivera: ‘Reseña de un viaje a la República Dominicana’, Boletín del Instituto de folklore, iv (1963), 157–211
J.A. Hernández: Música tradicional dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1969)
E. Rodríguez Demorizi: Música y baile en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo, 1971)
L. Alberti: De música y orquestas bailables dominicanas, 1910–1959 (Santo Domingo, 1975)
F. Lizardo: Danzas y bailes folklóricos dominicanos (Santo Domingo, 1975)
M.E. Davies: Afro-Dominican Religious Brotherhoods: Structure, Ritual and Music (Ann Arbor, 1976)
F. Franklin, ed.: Enciclopedia dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1976 3/1986–8)
M.E. Davies: ‘Aspectos de la influencia africana en la música tradicional dominicana’, Boletín del Museo del Hombre Dominicano, no.13 (1980), 255–92
M.E. Davies: ‘La cultural musical religiosa de los “americanos” de Samaná’, Boletín del Museo del Hombre Dominicano, no.15 (1980), 127–69
M.E. Davies: Voces del purgatorio: estudio de la salve dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1981)
B. Jorge: La música dominicana: siglos XIX–XX (Santo Domingo, 1982)
D. Pacini Hernández: Music of Marginality: Social Identity and Class in Dominican Bachata (Ann Arbor, 1989)
M.E. Davies: ‘Music and Black Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic’, Music and Black Ethnicity in the Caribbean and South America, ed. G. Béhague (Miami, 1994), 119–55
A. Incháustegui: El album de Eduardo Brito (Santo Domingo, 1994)
A. Incháustegui: Por amor al arte: notas sobre música, compositores e intépretes dominicanos (Santo Domingo, 1995)
B. Jorge: El canto de tradición oral de República Dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1996)
P. Austerlitz: Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia, 1997)
A. Incháustegui and B. Delgado Malagón: Vida musical en Santo Domingo (1940–1965) (Santo Domingo, 1998)
Singers of the Cibao, Original Music OML 403CC (c1970)
Caribbean Island Music: Songs and Dance of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, Nonesuch H-72047 (c1973)
Music from the Dominican Republic, Folkways FE 4281 to FE 4284 (1976–8)
Rara in Haiti/Gagá in the Dominican Republic, Folkways FE 4531 (1978); reissued as Caribbean Revels: Haitian Rara and Dominican Gaga, Smithsonian Folkways SF 40402 (1991)
Afro-Dominican Music from San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic, Folkways FE 4285 (1983)
Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity, ROUN1130 (1997)
Root Music/Música raíz, Fundación Cultural Bayahonda (1997)
Merengues from the Dominican Republic, Lyrichord LLST 7351 (n.d.)
Merengue and bachata are the major genres of Dominican mass-mediated, or popular, music, while merengue is by far the country's best-known musical type and an important national symbol. Dating from 1854, the earliest documents referring to Dominican merengue describe it as a ballroom dance related to the pan-Caribbean danza, a variant of the European-derived contredanse. Merengue was danced by independent couples (instead of groups) and was marked by Afro-Caribbean rhythmic inflections. Salon merengue was not confined to the Dominican Republic in this period; local variants were performed in Haiti, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Autochthonous forms of merengue are still performed in Haiti and Venezuela, as well as in Colombia, but these variants never achieved the prominence that Dominican merengue eventually attained; in Puerto Rico, merengue was subsumed into the danza.
After a period of popularity in Dominican ballrooms in the mid-19th century, merengue was rejected by local élites because of its dance style, which was considered lascivious, and because of its African influences. The Afro-Dominican masses, however, adopted merengue, infusing it with even more Africanisms, such as interlocking percussion rhythms and motion of the dancers’ hips. Rural merengue variants with various instrumentations developed in several areas of the Dominican Republic, and some of these are still performed (especially pri-prí, or merengue palo echao, which is popular in the town of Villa Mella). Only the Cibao region's variant, however, became prominent. During the early 20th century merengue típico cibaeño (‘Cibao-style folk merengue’), performed on the tambora (double-headed drum), the güira (metal scraper), the button accordion and (often) the alto saxophone, emerged as the top social dance in Cibao's countryside and barrios (lower-class urban neighbourhoods). Two types of merengue típico cibaeño were current (and both are still performed): a three-part sectional form and a one-part form called the pambiche.
The United States occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. During and after the occupation, North American musics became popular, but local forms were simultaneously embraced by nationalists. In the early 1930s Luis Alberti and other Cibao dance band leaders straddled these competing trends and combined merengue with jazz-inflected North American social dancing at élite social clubs.
Rafael Trujillo became dictator of the Dominican Republic in 1930. Although Trujillo was himself partly of African descent, he excluded explicit links to Africa from officially sanctioned national culture. In 1936 Trujillo brought Luis Alberti's band, renamed Orquesta Presidente Trujillo, to the capital city to play big band arrangements of merengue at high society balls. All of the country's dance bands were required to perform newly composed merengues praising the dictator, and this national music became a staple of radio broadcasts. Trujillo was attracted to merengue because of the syncretic nature of the music: in spite of its Afro-Caribbean style, its European elements set it apart from the neo-African ritual repertory that proliferates in the Dominican Republic.
After Trujillo's fall in 1960 the country opened up to external influences as never before. Bandleader Johnny Ventura and arranger Luis Pérez incorporated salsa elements and rock-and-roll performance style into an exuberant, faster merengue, abandoning big band instrumentation in favour of a smaller conjunto (‘combo’) format consisting of tambora, güira, piano, bass, singers and two to six wind instruments. In the ensuing decades, merengue continued to incorporate elements ranging from Spanish romantic baladas to rap. It also gained a high profile in the growing Dominican diaspora and became popular among non-Dominicans, even usurping salsa as the favoured Latin-Caribbean dance by the 1980s. Bandleaders Wilfrido Vargas and Juan Luis Guerra led the way in the ‘internationalization of merengue’, as Dominicans called the music's boom.
In spite of urbanization, accordion-based merengue remained important at the end of the 20th century. While rural groups and those playing for tourists preserved the traditional style, groups in the Cibao region's principal city, Santiago de los Caballeros, developed a new form of accordion-based merengue that added conga drums and electric bass to the traditional line-up of accordion, saxophone, tambora and güira. Allied with both tradition and modernity, Dominicans sometimes call this music merengue típico moderno (‘modern folk merengue’).
Beginning in the 1970s, bachata emerged as a distinct genre. Several musical types, including the Cuban bolero-son and merengue, are performed within the rubric of bachata, which is marked by its distinct guitar-based instrumentation (versus the accordion or wind instrument texture of most merengue) and vernacular lyrics that comment frankly on working-class life. Bachata employs a tight, nasal vocal quality, one or two guitars, electric bass, maracas or güira, and bongó (for bolero-son) or tambora (for merengue).
Spearheaded by the group Convite, a Dominican brand of nueva canción (‘new song’) emerged in the 1970s. This musical movement blended rural Afro-Dominican ritual forms such as gagá and palos with pop and jazz while challenging traditional, Eurocentric notions of Dominican identity. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the new millennium, bandleaders such as José Duluc and Tony Vicioso followed this trend, undertaking innovative collaborative musical ventures with rural musicians. This movement, however, sorely lacked recording opportunities due to conspicuous disinterest on the part of the music industry, which continued to promote merengue.
J.A. Hernández: Música tradicional dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1969)
L.F. Alberti: De música y orquestas bailables dominicanas, 1910–1959 (Santo Domingo, 1975)
L.M. Brito Ureña: El merengue y la realidad existencial del hombre dominicano (Santo Domingo, 1987)
A. Incháustegui: El disco en al República Dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1988)
J. del Castillo and M.A.García Arévalo: Antología del merengue/Anthology of the Merengue (Santo Domingo, 1989)
D. Pacini Hernández: ‘Merengue: Race, Class, Tradition, Identity’, Americas: an Anthology, ed. M.B. Rosenberg, A. Douglas Kincaid and K. Logan (New York, 1992), 167–72
J. Duany: ‘Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: an Anthropological Analysis of the Dominican Merengue’, Music and Black Ethnicity in the Caribbean and South America, ed. G. Béhague (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), 65–90
D. Pacini Hernández: Bachata: a Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Philadelphia, 1995)
P. Austerlitz: Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia, 1997)
P. Austerlitz: ‘The Jazz Tinge in Dominican Music’, BMRJ, Vol.18, nos1/2 (1998), 1–19