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Wednesday, December 28, 2005 at 7 pm
Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 7 pm

Latin music and los voces de las Amerícas

by Alex Acuña

To speak of “Latin music” as a single thing is as misleading as naming a stew after one ingredient. It is to forget that the flavor of the stew comes from all of the things in it. It is the same with Latin music. It is truly a mix of many ancient cultures native to Mexico, Central and South America, as well as several cultures brought from the far side of the world during the past three centuries.

Percussion instruments of many kinds, flutes of bone and reed, conch trumpets, and song have all had important roles in the lives and celebrations of the people of the Americas since long before the Europeans found their way to the “New World.” In the Aztec civilization, the percussionists were honored as shamans. The Mayans believed that making music was an important part of maintaining the harmony of the cosmos. For the Guarano peoples of the Orinoco River Delta, the ability to sing magical songs was literally essential to life itself. Throughout the western hemisphere, the music of the native cultures formed the basis for important household and community celebrations, some of which survive to this day.

To this indigenous mix, the arrival of the Europeans brought new instruments, a new religion, and new traditions. These new elements also contributed to the hybridization of Latin music. While the ships' officers brought the instruments and music of the Spanish and Portuguese courts and the Church brought the music of its liturgies, many of the ships' crews also brought the guitars and rhythms of mountain and street music which reflected the Gypsy and Moorish influences of Flamenco.

In the centuries that followed, the Church's worship and other transplanted European traditions began to incorporate indigenous elements and instruments. Similarly, many of the native New World cultures began to incorporate European instruments like guitars, harps, and violins as well as European dance forms like the polka and the waltz into their own customs and celebrations.

Perhaps the element we most associate with Latin music, however, did not come from either the native peoples of Mexico, Central and South America or from the European colonists. Instead, it came from the African people brought by the Europeans to the New World. But, like the Americas, Africa is a large continent with many different cultures. The natives of each of those cultures brought their own sounds and traditions with them.

Most of the people imported by the Spanish to Cuba and the western Caribbean region were from the Congo region (now Nigeria). They brought with them the two-headed batá drums used in Santaría rituals. They also brought with them the skin-covered log drums known as yuka and played in non-religious settings, often in sets of three drums of different sizes. The descendents of these drums, like the congas, form the basis of the complex and joyous rhythms in the music of Cuba and other Caribbean cultures, like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Portuguese colonists, on the other hand, brought to the New World Africans from the Cameroon/Senegal area. They brought with them single-headed drums like the repenique and the candombe of Uruguay that are generally played with one empty hand and one stick in a call-and-response pattern. This tradition, which took hold in Brazil and Uruguay, developed into the simpler but syncopated rhythms that we hear in the samba of Brazil.

Tonight's program incorporates much of the great variety that makes up Latin music. You will hear some of the sounds that have made several types of dancing very popular in the United States: Salsa, a direct descendent of the Dominican merengue; the cha cha, created in Havana to add “regular steps” to the propulsive rhythms of Cuba; and the tango, born in the back streets of Buenos Aires in the early part of the 20th century and now popular around the world.

You will also hear less familiar forms. In Arrurù Arrurù and Apùrate Niña you will hear two variants on the Chilean cueca and it Peruvian cousin the marinera. You will hear the huapango rhythm of the Huestec region of Mexico in Zumba Que Zumba. El Pequeño Tambilero is, appropriately, built on the percussive guanguancó and rumba clave forms. De las Montañas Venimos offers a contrast between the almost stately bomba in the melody and the more free-flowing charanga of the rhythm section.

The familiar Los Peces en el Río brings us the less familiar olodum of the Bahia region of Brazil.

There will also be some surprises. But whether you can put a name to a particular rhythm or not, you will discover, or be reminded, why musicians and audiences around the world have found Latin music. We play it and listen to it because we love it. It doesn't matter where you come from: you can't help catching the happiness that makes you dance.

Alex can be reached at www.alexacuna.net.

Download a guide to the season: chorale-seasonguide0506.pdf, 1.1MB