Cuban Music

Despite its relatively small size, Cuba has made some of the most important and influential contributions to world music of any country in the world. Its musical fingers have grasped to the United States, Europe, and beyond. In Africa, Cuban music invaded in the 1930s and even today the fall-out is evident in many popular forms throughout the continent. With a unique history and vibrant culture, Cuba holds an opportunity for a fascinating musical exploration.

Slave labor on a large scale came late to Cuba. Spain colonized the country in the early sixteenth century, but until the late eighteenth century Cuba remained relatively undeveloped, and its modest economy was based largely on tobacco and cattle farming. The Spanish established sugar plantations in Santo Domingo as early as 1516, and the Portuguese started to ship sugar from Brazil by 1526. The British began cultivating sugar in Guyana and Jamaica by the mid-seventeenth century. But sugar was not planted extensively in Cuba until the late eighteenth century. This led to a massive importation of enslaved West Africans as laborers; it is estimated that 400,000 slaves were brought into Cuba between 1835 and 1864.

Other slave communities of the Caribbean had time to evolve their own cultures and customs over many generations, but the slaves who came to Cuba in that brief, 30-year period retained much of their West African cultural identities, which they preserved through the establishment of cabildos. These mutual aid associations and social clubs were created by and for members of particular African national groups, and within the cabildos, West Africans spoke their own languages, kept to their old customs, and made their own music. After emancipation in 1886, the cabildos were ordered to register with local church authorities and to adopt the name of a Catholic saint. They effectively became church organizations and were told that if they ever dissolved, their property would be transferred to the Catholic Church.

Development of Cuban Ceremonial Music

Through the cabildos, Catholicism was fused with the religious beliefs and practices of the Afro-Cuban population. The result was the fiery ceremonial music and dance known as santería. This explosive form arose out of the union of Spanish Roman Catholicism and the sacred music and dance of their West African forebears, such as the Yoruba. In Cuba, Yoruba speakers, who encompassed several groups and subgroups from modern-day Nigeria and Benin, became known as Lucumí, after a Yoruba phrase, oloku mi, meaning "my friend." Batá drumming and call-and-response vocal styles predominate in santería. Batá are deep, double-headed, hourglass-shaped drums that are played in sets of three. A "mother" drum "converses" with the other two drums in complex rhythm patterns. The sacred music of santería has never had commercial popularity, but it was, and still is, of central importance to the development of Cuban music.

Rumba

The rumba is the extension of santería into popular, secular music and dance. Incorporating the musical structures and polyrhythms of santería, rumba added claves (sticks that are struck together to establish the central rhythm and to "call the steps") and pallitos or cáscara (shells or wooden blocks that are beaten with sticks). Rumba first developed as a folk form in the provinces of Havana and Matanzas, and boxes, cans, and bottles often provided the percussion. Rumba exists in many variants, and new forms are still emerging. The yambú, the guaguancó, and the columbia are the best known. The yambú and the guaguancó are both couple dances; the rhythms of the yambú are slow and sinuous, while the guaguancó is quick and festive. The columbia, with its fast, fiendishly complex rhythms, is a male solo performance dance.

Conga

Another form of music that developed out of the cabildos is the comparsa, or conga (from Konga, a term referring to enslaved people from a diverse group of nations in Africa). No person of African heritage was allowed to participate in the merry, European Christian celebration right before the season of Lent, called Carnaval, until after the three Wars of Independence (1868-1898). Groups of Afro-Cuban musicians from the cabildos were allowed to perform what were called tango congo each year at the Christian holiday called Feast of the Epiphany (usually January 6, commemorating the story of the Three Kings' arrival and presentation of gifts to the baby Jesus). Each cabildo had its own characteristic themes, rhythms, and costumes, and the improvised instruments often included stave-drums made from long strips of wood, tire-rims, frying pans and bells, trumpets and other brass instruments. Later, during the nineteenth century, a strident double reed instrument known as the corneta china was introduced by Chinese servants. Tango congo became a popular form of street music in the early twentieth century, and salon congos, performed by dance bands, became popular in Cuba and abroad during the 1930s. The growing popularity of Cuba as a vacation and gambling resort led to the adoption of Afro-Cuban rhythms and styles in American cities, and then in Europe.

Instruments

Looking back to when Spanish settlers first came to Cuba in the early sixteenth century, we find that they encountered Amerindian peoples, known as the Ciboney and the Arawak. Little is known of their musical heritage because the indigenous people were repressed and decimated. But it is known that they played long slit-drums (mayohuacán), conch-shell horns (guamos or comos), flutes, and wooden rattles-these rattles have survived in the form of maracas. The Spanish introduced their own musical forms, dances, and instruments. The earliest Cuban forms to evolve were the punto and the décima. Both are kinds of música guajira (music of rural Hispanic farmers), and they were played on traditional Spanish instruments like the guitar, the laúd and the bandurria (larger and smaller forms of lute, respectively, from the Spanish folk tradition), maracas, and the tres (a small-bodied Cuban guitar variant with three pairs of strings). Punto refers to instrumental and accompanying music, while décima refers to a form of song that evolved out of a ten-line poetic form that originated in medieval Spain. In décima the lines were frequently improvised, and artists competed with each other when they performed, somewhat like modern rappers, spurring each other on to greater and greater feats of invention.

The Spanish also brought romantic and lyric ballads to Cuba, and over centuries of colonization, they introduced many forms of music and dance (Spanish folk styles, as well as gavottes, minuets, quadrilles, and waltzes) into Cuba. These gradually fused with developing Cuban styles. Between 1791 and 1803, nearby Haiti was undergoing revolution, and a wave of Haitian refugees arrived in Cuba. They brought with them the cinquillo, a syncopated form using a characteristic five-beat pattern. This was quickly taken up and as it mixed with Spanish folk and ballroom styles, it became the contradanza. Highly controversial in its time and regarded as lascivious in its use of African rhythms and percussion, the contradanza became widely popular in both town and country.

Contradanza and Danzón

In the second half of the nineteenth century, contradanza developed into the danzón, first among the black and mulatto middle class of the Matanzas province, and then throughout the island. The danzón, a rondo form with complex syncopation and tricky and sensual dance steps, is generally regarded as the first real national music and dance of Cuba. It is the music most closely associated with the three Wars of Independence, fought with Spain between 1868 and 1898, which left Cuba a protectorate of the United States from 1898 to1902, and fully independent thereafter. Danzón was often performed by larger orchestras incorporating clarinets, cornets, trombones, bassoons, and tubas, as well as enhanced Afro-Cuban percussion, including the güiro (a gourd scraper) and the timbal (a conical drum played with the hand, or hand and light stick). The danzonete and chachachá of the twentieth century are fusions of the danzón with influences from son, another of the other great Cuban musical forms.

Son and Salsa

Cuban son, and the many forms of salsa that have evolved from it, are among the most vigorous and influential popular musical forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Together these forms represent the fullest musical flowering of the Afro-Cuban and Hispanic traditions. Son is hard to define precisely since the word embraces a vast number of musical classifications, including son montuno, changüí, sucu-sucu, guaracha, conjunto, and mambo. Structurally, both son and salsa tend to be in duple meter, based on European harmonic patterns, and alternating between verse and chorus sections. Short instrumental breaks, typically on trumpet, cornet, or tres, are often improvised, and the final section, the montuno, builds and quickens to a climax involving an instrumental chorus 'answering' an improvising singer or instrumentalist. Rhythm sections of traditional acoustic sones employ guitar, tres, maracas, claves, bongos, güiro, and botija (jug bass), marímbula (large thumb piano) or string bass, while modern son and salsa bands often use electric guitars, basses, and keyboards. The emphasis on the fourth beat of the bar, laid down by the bongo, and the uniquely Cuban bass stress on the second half of the second beat and the fourth beat (known as an "anticipated bass") is both characteristic of son and fundamental to the development of modern salsa.

Salsa is hard to define and even harder not to recognize. Structurally it is identical to son, but it is freer, looser, and more dynamic. As a dance, salsa makes six steps across eight beats like the mambo but uses fast turns and flourishes that the mambo does not. Literally salsa means "sauce," and traditionally it is the word called out by musicians or dancers who want more fire in the music: Salsa is hot. During the 1970s and 1980s, salsa spread through the world's Hispanic communities. From there it exploded into the larger international community to become some of the best-loved and most-danced-to music on the planet.