Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History, Vol.

2, 2007
(University of Texas Press, ed. Malena Kuss).

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF AFRICANS

AND THEIR DESCENDANTS IN THE
NEW WORLD

ARGELIERS LE6N

Africans and African music in the New World-Essential characteristics of American

music of African origin-Migratory movements and musical developments-Africa's
presence in the music of the Americas: Timbre; Rhythm-Conclusions

THE FIRST AFRICANS were brought to the Americas
at the threshold of the sixteenth century, just as Spain
was initiating the colonization of these lands, first
discovered in 1492, while consolidating its definitive
domination of peninsular territories by the seizure of
the last Moorish strongholds. By this time, the slave
trade already existed between Europe and various
locations in sub-Saharan Africa.
The invading Arabs and European merchants and
traders who reached beyond the difficult barrier of the
Sahara desert found Africa to be a complex mosaic.
Highly intricate migration patterns always had affected
that continent. Its environmental and ecological
diversity gave rise to many different types of modes
of subsistence, and to a variety of social and cultural
responses. Given these circumstances, the first lot
of Africans introduced by the slave trade to the islands
of Hispaniola and Cuba, and later to continental
areas-where they were further dispersed-had little
to offer in new lands that must have appeared
dramatically foreign to both the African slaves and
the conquering Spaniards. During this initial period,
both colonizers and slaves must have experienced
a sense of marked social disruption. The reduced
number of Africans, their very condition as slaves, and
their differences in place of origin, ethnic group, and
even age (a key social criterion in Africa since age is
correlated with different levels of social responsibility),
must have reduced their possible cultural contribution
to a minimum.
The African presence in the Americas, particularly
in the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and
Puerto Rico) and Brazil, increased substantially
between the second half of the eighteenth and the mid-
nineteenth centuries. An increase in demand for more
"pieces" (slaves) had broadened the commercial
dimension of the slave trade and given rise to changes
in its organization, while attracting the participation of
other European maritime powers. At the same time, the
African chiefdoms were incrementally becoming
organic units in a vast network of domination they
created to harness the widely different degrees of
dispersion to which the various human groups had
been subjected. This, in tum, anchored more securely
their cultural traditions and generated a more precise
definition of their hierarchies and belief systems,
enhancing particular forms of class stratification.
Dramatic changes were also in store for the Americas,
as a growing demand for products, especially sugar,
eventually would substitute slave labor with wage labor.
 AFRICANS AND AFRICAN MUSIC
IN THE NEW WORLD
Slavery was abolished in the Americas between I822
and 1888 (Santo Domingo, I822; Chile, I823; Federation
of Central America, I824; Mexico, 1829; Uruguay,
I846; Colombia, 1850; Ecuador, I852; Argentina, I853;
Venezuela and Peru, 1854; Paraguay, 1870; Puerto Rico,
I873; Cuba, I886; and Brazil, I888). Long before then,
an increasing population of freedmen resulted from
complex and drawn-out procedures, such as the
coartaci6n (partial sums that slaves paid to their masters
for their freedom) or service in armies waging wars of
independence in exchange for freedom. It was within
this freed sector of the population, with a majority made
up of Africans born in the New World and mestizos (of
mixed parents), that a movement to take possession
of cultural traditions that had been cast in the mold
of the dominant (Hispanic) culture took place. This
phenomenon was manifested in the American presence
of lay religious festivities that assumed a totally secular
nature, at least among those Africans and their
descendants who were marginalized to the peripheries
of urban centers. They were joined by a considerable
number of whites who had been relegated to the most
exploited social groups. This process also became
intensified by the neocolonialist penetration that
peoples from this part of the world have endured since
the end of the nineteenth century. Music in particular
(songs and instruments), as well as dances (and
secondarily ritual dress) were the powerful expressions
of traditional popular culture, anchored mostly in the
multiple forms and variants of some among the most
tenacious African religions. These expressions played
an extremely important social role among populations
of African descent, which were already an integral part
of the cultural profile of the Americas.
Although African cultures were not "moved" to the
Americas as integral wholes, we cannot consider their
cultural products as mere fragments or shreds, ripped
out of their original cultures and inserted as parts of the
quilt of another culture that, unfolding independently
of African influence, then would become "tainted" with
dissectable African traits and sown with afronegnsmos
more or less detectable and just as easily removed, as if
it were possible to "cleanse" this hypothetical culture
of its black African influence to allow-by simplistic
opposition-"whiteness" to shine through. Thus, the
African presence cannot be viewed either as a catalogue
of rhythmic figures and formulas or as a repertoire of
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 2
melodic gestures and patterns. It would be even more
contrived to try to single out scales of this or that type as
contributed by Africans, or think it possible to detect
the minimum number of African components in
urban folk musics. On the contrary, it is necessary to
view African influences in a more general sense, as
implicit modes of being too deeply embedded to be
obliterated by the alienation imposed by the system of
slavery, as it developed in our America.
For the European colonizer, the new lands must
have provided an opportunity to satisfy unfettered
personal interests, ambitions, and tastes. As these
visions were so personal, even their collective
structures were destined to defend the extreme
individualism etched in the consciousness of the
European Renaissance. Africans, instead, from time
immemorial, were involved in various forms of
exchange, mutual aid, and collaboration, functioning
as part of organic groups. While this was perhaps
momentarily altered by the socioeconomic alienation
and hostility fostered by the slave trade, the innate
African view of society, the basis of African social
consciousness, is a group image, an image of collective
action and participation. This stood in radical
opposition to the individualism of the European
colonizer, which at times reached inconceivable
extremes. The sense of social collectivity allowed
Africans and their descendants to be in and remain
within their cultural expressions, to situate themselves
in their time and space. Based on "togetherness," these
enduring expressions fostered their union with place,
nature, and with one another.
Within this group-oriented perception of being,
. music provided the most decisive mechanism for
masses of slaves to identify with the new land and with
their fellow humans. The musical language that
Africans recreated in the New World only retained and
transmitted categorical models, which, by analogy with
language, we could call syntactical and discursive (or
rhetorical), despite dramatic disruptions in their
cultural trajectories.
Africans also incorporated functional elements,
similarly affected by disruptive circumstances. These
ranged from the dress that slaves were permitted to
wear and the housing assigned to them, to their
languages, which underwent changes and shocks at the
outset of colonization, and even to their food. As far as
music was concerned, syntactical and rhetorical models
were inserted into very different conditions from those
in their natural habitat, and had to be adapted to the
resources of a new material culture (such as the raw
materials used to build instruments, for instance).
Consistent with this mechanism of cultural insertion
into a socioeconomic milieu in formation that was
highly unstable, the African presence in the music of
the Americas cannot P9ssibly be approached from the
viewpoint of discernible roots, for it is much more
than stereotypical rhythmic formulas or the
introduction of certain instruments-such as claves,
tumbadoras, or maracas-into an ensemble made up,
for instance, of flute or clarinet, trombone, old
ophicleide, and two violins.
ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF
AMERICAN MUSIC OF AFRICAN ORIGIN
We must remember that no African cultures were
"moved" to the Americas as integral wholes. Nor did
Europeans transport their cultures intact. The arrival of
Africans, as well as Spaniards and colonizers from
other empires or countries, took place at many different
times and in varying demographic distributions over
the course of several centuries.
In the presence of musics perceived today as
characteristically American, the contribution of
Africans and their descendants (both slaves and
freedmen) is clearly discernible in a very general way,
molded as it were by the African presence. Practically
everyone sings and dances, and many whites of various
origins participate in the dancing. The relatively smaller
number of instrumental performers is commensurate
with the degree to which instruments are associated
with ritual, since the playing of some drums requires
initiation rites, and their construction might call for
special consecratory practices-from the selection of
the tree chosen for its wood through the final stages
of construction and the first moment they are made
to sound (see Victoria Eli Rodriguez, "Guiros and
Bata Drums: Two Instrumental Groups of Cuban
Santeria," in this volume). Likewise, there are musical
performances further limited to specific religious
practices that, as part of other processes and social
circumstances, have anchored African traditions in
the New World while also attracting other groups to
African belief systems.
In the Americas, Africans and their descendants
also participated in many popular traditional festivities
of Hispanic origin, either on their own or because their
masters sponsored the events. These included purely
religious festivals, such as Corpus Christi, in which
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 3
Africans in Spain had participated since before the
Conquest of the Americas. The Corpus Christi
procession in Cuba featured members of religious,
civic, and labor organizations following the "Majesty"
or image of Christ, with representations of pagan
scenes trailing behind them. These scenes unfailingly
featured a vanquishing angel, when not one of those
warring saints, and also Lucifer, never without his
wife, or other he/she devils who roam in the infernal
domain. Representations also took on the style of
autos sacra mentales (peninsular plays of religious or
contemplative character, frequently with incidental
music) with the participation of blacks, properly
costumed and masked; or adapted the tradition of
battles between Moors and Christians (Moros y
cristianos, resignified in the Americas to symbolize
the conquered and conqueror) in folk versions that
became increasingly remote from the actual battles
waged in Spain during the Reconquest. The tradition
of masqueraded groups (comparsas) , of very ancient
African ancestry, is still retained today in some Catholic
festivities, in addition to other comparsas on diverse
themes organized by neighborhoods with a majority
of blacks and mestizos. From these types of
representations, various festivities associated with the
celebration of carnival have been derived. All of these
occasions incorporate membranophones modeled after
ancient African drums, along with instruments of
European provenance, and idiophones developed in
the Americas, such as cowbells (cencerros), plowshares,
hoeblades, and automobile wheel rims.
In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, a peculiar
reconstruction of cultural traits of a functional nature
took place in areas with large concentrations of people of
African descent resulting from different types of
colonial exploitation. This reconstruction engaged even
the most oppressed, as they began to reorder their
ways of life. In essence, freedom implied greater
economic instability for these African Americans.
Furthermore, this process of cultural reconstruction
also was affected by the different attitudes toward the
black sector of the population reflected in policies
adopted by governments of the new republics, with
more than a few conflicts generated by shifts in social
class-structure among the dominant sectors. Thus, on
the one hand, one cultural response was to integrate
the practice of ancient African cults with old songs
and their texts, and with traditional instruments and
their toques, seeking the closest possible reconstruction
of these songs' and toques' particular ritual functions.
(In this context, a toque can be defined as a rhythmic
locution of patterns and strokes that serves a specific
communicative function.) On the other hand, there
was a sector of the black population that, from the
beginning of the nineteenth century, tended to integrate
into society at large, readjusting and accommodating to
new living conditions, but this only to the extent that
minorities of blacks and mestizos were able to join
a small middle-level bourgeoisie, as measured by the
scale of industrially underdeveloped nations.
The groups subjected to the most drastic relocations
and social upheavals had to face profoundly alienating
circumstances. Those uprooted by such changes had
to adapt habits and customs to new situations and
opportunities. This process of adjustment is reflected,
for instance, in changes that affected musical
instruments. These were greatly modified by the need
to use more readily available materials. In some cases,
their complexity was reduced by simplification; in other
instances, instruments were developed and elaborated
in response to new contacts and ideas. Songs, on the
one hand, suffered noticeable change and loss,
including some cases of a leveling of pitches in the
melodic line. On the other hand, many songs were
added to the repertoire that alluded, for instance, to
ethnic groups, some of them already extinct. Other
songs would commemorate past events and situations,
using texts to store historical memories.
MIGRATORY MOVEMENTS
AND MUSICAL DEVELOPMENTS
Many of the changes noted above were kindled by
migrations, as, for instance, those outward from Haiti
from 1791 until Haiti declared its independence in
1804. The migrations from Haiti to Jamaica carried
with them the festival described as the French Girls'
Parade. On a larger scale, the migrations from Haiti
to eastern Cuba brought the tumbas francesas to the
island. Concurrent with the transfer of Louisiana to
the United States in 1803, another migration from
Haiti led to settlements in south-central and western
Cuba, then continued to some of the Lesser Antilles
until it reached Guadeloupe and Martinique, bearing
the airs of the biguine (begin), greatly enjoyed and
cultivated by the black population. The Louisiana
Purchase preceded by one year Haiti's independence in
1804 and the concomitant greater migration of white
colonizers as well as blacks, both slaves and freedmen,
along with many mestizos, from Haiti to Cuba.
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 4
Another instance-different from the migrations that
originated in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth
century-is exemplified by the fiestas of Big Drum in
the island of Carriacou, the terminal point of migratory
movements that originated in the French possessions
of Martinique and Guadeloupe during the two
moments in history when Carriacou, a satellite island
of Grenada, was in the possession of France (for a
superb study of the Big Drum dance of Carriacou,
see McDaniel 1992). Other migrations took place along
the Caribbean coast, from Colombia to what would
become Panama, and later movements, originating in
Panama after the construction of the Panama Canal
was completed in 1914, carried new musics that had
assembled there to the Lesser Antilles.
By the early 1900s, yet another migratory movement
had played itself out that had some bearing on
traditions carrying the allusive function of recalling,
commemorating, resignifying upheavals, and creating
a historical memory. This movement emanated
mainly from what was then the Spanish colony of
Puerto Rico and can be traced to the early decades of the
nineteenth century. It entailed a slave trade between
Puerto R!:o, the island of Cuba, the Spanish-speaking
territory of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo, the present-
day Dominican Republic), and the rest of the Antillean
archipelago. The demographic shuffling that ensued
took place after the British abolished the slave trade in
1807, thereafter campaigning against it and threatening
the labor supply in other colonies. As the slave trade
was not only discouraged but openly prosecuted, and
therefore at its peak, the price of a slave rose to its
highest. Occasionally sheltered by legal loopholes, this
trade often was outrightly clandestine and even entailed
stealing blacks from other islands, where they were
freedmen, and selling them in Cuba, Santo Domingo,
or places in continental America. This movement
of slaves, which began in the 1820S, brought about
a tremendous mixture of ethnic and age groups to
the physiognomy of the Caribbean, and did not
cease until struggles for independence put an end to
Spanish domination in the Americas. We must keep
in mind that, while these complex migrations were
taking place, new groups of Africans also continued
to arrive, contributing in no small measure to the
transmission and reinvigoration of African traditions
in the New World.
The spirit of abolition of slavery joined the trumpet
call of South American independence, sounded by
Simon Bolivar's victory at Ayacucho in 1824. The
independence of Venezuela and Colombia in 18n and
1819, respectively, led to another important migration
from these countries toward southern Cuba, the lower
coast of Mexico, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico. This
migration included entire families, the departing
Spanish troops, and volunteer forces that united
Spaniards with many creoles, mestizos, and some
blacks. This migratory wave carried· with it a tenderly
amatory type of slow song in triple meter with idyllic
texts that took root in the Caribbean song repertoire
(or cancionlstica caribeiia), appealing mostly to modest
families of an urban middle class. The romantic song
genre or, simply, cancion, prospered in urban centers
and attracted singers and guitars (and possibly variants
of the guitar created in the New World), composers, and
performers who were mostly men (white, mestizo,
and black) from the middle class, as well as manual
laborers frequently performing serenatas offered to
a lady.
As a whole, the population of African descent in
the Americas arrived at different times and places, in
varying numbers, and from ethnic backgrounds as
linguistically diverse as distant in geography. We also
must consider individual differences among Africans,
because just the fact of being African did not mean
that a person knew how to play the drums, or practice
ancestral cult worship, or carve masks, or weave cloth,
or work stone, or smelt metals. And, in addition, we
must recognize the disruption and demands of the
slave trade on individuals and the very few options open
to them. From the slave block, in whatever place in the
Antilles or the South American continent, the slave
immediately was relocated to any of a great variety
of environments-ranging from the city, where they
performed domestic service and drove carriages, to the
most remote sites, for work in inhospitable mines
or fishing for mother-of-pearl. Slaves had to adapt to a
wide variety of conditions, including being assigned to
types of agricultural or other labor with which they were
unfamiliar, and face despotic treatment of many sorts
while enduring indescribable aberrations. From these
initial disruptions, they developed various strategies to
reconstruct their musics. Sometimes softly sung
personal songs were kept alive by an elder, perhaps
accompanying himself with a sanza (mbira) , or by
beating on the seat of a chair. Other songs learned in
Africa included those performed outside of the
boundary of rituals, among them puyas (gibes) for
social gatherings or nonreligious occasions whose
satirical texts served as an indirect form of social
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 5
commentary. There were also work songs, as well as
other types, such as a rich repertoire of sung narratives.
An important religious organization was the black
brotherhood or confraternity (cofradla). The cofradlas
were established by the Catholic Church in order to
disseminate Christian doctrine and often involved a
commitment to mutual aid among its members. With
the Christian doctrine that blacks were more or less
receiving, they also must have learned the ritual songs
of the Marian cult. A similar process took place at the
tum of the nineteenth century with songs of the various
Protestant denominations in the English-speaking
Caribbean, many of which were assimilated into the
local cults that emerged from populations of African
descent in these colonies or countries. There were also
lay religious organizations of greater African influence,
or cabildos, that existed apart from the Catholic Church.
As belief systems were being rescued, Africans and
their descendants began to shape actual forms of
ritual enactment and reconstruct ritual objects as a
means of preserving and transmitting traditions that
eventually would define their cultural patrimony. Along
with the reconstruction of cults, including divination
and ceremonial language, new social hierarchies were
emerging that assigned roles of leadership to those
key practitioners, both male and female, who professed
the greatest degree of faith in these systems and went
on to occupy central positions in the cult houses. In
Cuba, these houses were called casas de santo (saint's
houses), casas de mina (Mina houses, referring perhaps
to a West African ethnic group, or to the practices of
slaves shipped to the colonies from the now-Ghanaian
port city of Elmina), and casas de palo (referring to palo
mayombe, the Bantu-derived cult).
AFRICA'S PRESENCE IN THE MUSIC
OF THE AMERICAS
Timbre
The aesthetic value assigned to timbre or tone color as
a fundamental syntactical element is Africa's principal
contribution to musics of the Americas. The African
conception of timbre in music is analogous to the
function of color in the plastic arts. Timbre refers
to color-textures unfolding in time and space, wherein
pitch, rhythm, and modes of sound production
create distinctly differentiated masses of sound. This
conception probably derived from the role that
means of sound production played in primeval
stages of humanity, as sounds that imitated those
known to humans or allusions to them were used to
obtain sonorities capable of "enveloping" humans or
"occupying" a given space. We should keep in mind
that the very first steps taken by humans-in Africa
itself-must have created a sound in the environment
that occupied space and engaged attention. Even today,
in fact, shouting and screaming (that we could call
voceaciones) are "environmental sounds" that African
women and children utter to accompany chiefs and
dignitaries when they depart for an event and when
they return. The transfer of a real image, such as any
environmental sound, to a performance, which is a
controllable human creation, conceivably could have
been little more than a higher level of animism to
the African mind. The combination of different timbric
layers, organized as sound masses of different tone
qualities, conjures up images of corporeality and color,
and might have stood as a concrete representation of
sonorities transcending auditory images in surrounding
nature. Such a concept of timbre permitted Africans
to assemble a sound mass produced, for instance, by
a drum skin, combined with another sound mass
produced by other means. The latter could entail a
metal idiophone or aerophones, such as ivory trumpets
and resonating vocal tubes. It even could entail a
chordophone. In African music, strings are not used, as
in European music, to produce "melody" with flowing
sounds that combine various intervals. Rather, a
chordophone repeats a single motif whose constancy
makes it sound like a timbric band (franja t{mbrica) of a
specific color, somewhat like the perceptual effect of an
ongoing pedal point. A similar effect can be produced
by internally or externally struck idiophones played
by shaking. The Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz,
perceptively underscoring the importance of timbre
n his works (such as La ajrican{a de la musica
folkl6rica de Cuba [1950] and Los instrumentos de la
musica afrocubana (1952-1955]), pointed out that
African music uses the sound potential of wood,
skin, and metal. Ortiz viewed this as an African means
of uniting the three kingdoms of nature, namely
vegetable, animal, and mineral. What Ortiz interpreted
as an allegorical reference to nature we consider today
as an African cognitive device to attain a concrete
timbric corporealization of different auditory images
offered by nature.
Timbric bands (franjas tfmbricas) are sonorous
masses of different textures and tone qualities that are
temporally extended. While the European musician
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 6
might conceptualize the unfolding of music in time as
articulated by small units, the African musician
conceives of a performance as situated in space, instead
of unfolding in time, more like concrete images within
a space whose dimensions are shaped by the timbric
combinations themselves, and by the very subtle
variables in the quality of such timbres. African music
thus circumscribes a space whose dimensions and
boundaries are intrinsically delineated and easily
perceptible as timbric bands. Such, we believe, would
be a view of African music by African criteria.
Likewise, traditional African singing unfolds within
spaces and boundaries that are easily perceptible to the
listener. However, the referential pitches that frame
intervallic hierarchies are not comparable, for instance,
to the function of a finalis in Gregorian chant whose
reiteration serves to relativize and situate variable
modal structures. For the African singer, these
referential pitches are recurring lines (Uneas de
recurrencias) that, carrying a structural function, differ
from one song to another and can change when they
fulfill the function of introducing another song. The
pitches we are calling "referential,u or recurring
lines that articulate a structure, create spaces between
utterances that the singer fills in with a traditional
melody and text. In turn, the interspersed song-text
itself undergoes variations regulated by a system of
allusions or deprecations. Moreover, the referential
pitches can be emphasized further by ornamental turns
and auxiliary tones, particularly when, in the course
of a song, they accumulate comminatory meaning.
Carrying further the simile we have adopted
in reference to a spatial conception of musical
performance and timbric bands therein, we must add
that the timbric plane occupied by the drums results
from an elaboration of texture, or density. This texture
is obtained, on the one hand, by the combination of
two, three, or more drums of different sizes and
registers, while, on the other hand, the rhythmic
patterns performed by each drum create internal
planes that retain their rhetorical, or discursive,
function. The timbric band is therefore a composite
of the internal planes generated by the rhythmic
patterns and strokes of each drum. In musics closely
circumscribed to religious systems reconstructed on
the basis of African antecedents, drums of various sizes
and head tensions are combined to provide a relatively
wide range, from low to high. The lowest-pitched
drum plays irregular and intermittent rhythmic figures;
the larger diameter and looser tension of the drumhead
allow the drummer to articulate a variety of strokes
produced by different hand positions. He can play at
the rim or toward the center; he can strike with his
fingertips or with his four fingers outstretched, with the
edge of his hand, or with a cupped or a flat hand.
Through these and other resources, the performer
(tamborero) can improvise a line whose oratorical
character reproduces the inflections of speech, hence
our definition of its character as "oratorical." Although
the other drums also maintain their own rhythmic
patterns and their own oratorical character, their
patterns are, however, reiterative (regular or repetitive).
The middle-pitched drum plays repetitive rhythmic
figures in longer phrases, while the highest-pitched
drum articulates rhythmic motifs and pitch variations
in shorter phrases that are constant and reiterative.
There are also many toques, some of them very
complex, in which the middle- and high-pitched
drums mutually complement the inflections of a brief
verbal phrase that drummers know from tradition.
Reiteration, as performed in these middle- and high-
register planes, makes possible a linear and spatial
projection of the drum ensemble's timbric texture.
Other instruments are added to the complex timbric
band created by the drums. Idiophones that enrich the
timbric texture of the drums could include those of
the atchere (achere) type, namely a rattle or kind of
maraca made from the gourd of the gU.ira, totuma, or
calabaza fruit whose strikers are inserted inside the
vessel; ag6go or campana, a generic term for iron
idiophones comprising instruments such as the cencerro
(cowbell) or guataca (hoeblade); and, in other instances,
those of the shekere (chekere) type, namely gU.iros or
shakers externally struck by a netting of cowrie shells,
beads, or seeds, which, known by different names
in different languages, belong to a timbric group
associated mostly with specific religious rituals. This
type of ga,iro is used not only in Santeria, but· also in
Candomble, in the cult of Chango, and in Vodu. Beyond
enriching the overall timbric texture, these idiophones
carry important functions in certain rituals because
their timbric qualities are capable of invoking the
presence of certain deities. (See Maria Elena Vinueza,
"Music in Festive Celebrations of the RegIa de Ocha";
Victoria Eli Rodriguez, "Gu,iros and Bam Drums: Two
Instrumental Groups of Cuban Santeria"; and Carmen
Maria Saenz Coopat and Maria Elena Vinueza, "Oral
Traditions of Cuba," in this volume.)
This conception of timbre, organized as a temporal
projection of color that involves combined orders of
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 7
registers, rhythmic figures, and sound qualities
obtained from specific performance techniques,
constitutes an aesthetic category that Africans
bequeathed to the musics of the Americas. The greater
or lesser presence of this expressive principle, or the
varying importance of timbre as an expressive
mechanism in the structure of musical manifestations
throughout the Americas, might well serve as a criterion
or significant factor in the delineation of musical
areas. At the same time, many musical expressions,
influenced by the demands of urban taste, have retained
historical variants of this aesthetic conception
contributed by Africans. In the Americas, the presence
of this spatial conception of timbre and its syntactical
qualities operates as a creative principle that serves a
communicative function, maintaining to this day its
viability as a form of social and artistic expression.
The pervasive role of timbric elaboration
corroborates the expressive value assigned to timbre,
which we rank at the top of our aesthetic priorities
in African retentions in the Americas. Among the
most enduring retentions of ancient African origin are
the timbric band defined by membranophones with its
specific communicative function, and the use of
idiophones of very diverse shapes and materials that,
incorporated into drum ensembles, fulfill other
functions and often carry added meanings when
associated with cults because, as mentioned above,
idiophones possess timbric qualities capable of
summoning the presence of specific deities. The adja,
for instance, a type of ag6go or bell made of silver, plays
a key role in the ceremony of public presentation of new
initiates in the cults of the Yoruba/Lucumi Obatala, a
deity syncretized with attributes of the Virgen de las
Mercedes; and it suffices to color the atchere with even
commercial red enamel, or combine red with white
stripes, for this type of rattle to produce the timbric
quality required for a ritual "call" to Chango.
In addition, the instrumental timbre of drums
is combined with the vocal timbre of song. This type
of song should not be compared with any of the
European conceptions of singing, nor should it be
associated with urban popular songs of the Americas,
which developed as a response to social functions
conditioned by colonialism and associated with the
respective cultures of domination. This, because in
African-influenced expressions, the text sets forth an
entire narrative that, dealing expositorily with actions,
events, and thoughts, only reveals its meanings to those
who possess knowledge of its allusive associations.
 Using a rather peculiar placement of the voice
(impostacion), as if searching for a specific timbric
quality, the African singer repeats a passage at length,
the same one over and over, with slight variants, while
improvising a text that does not change the basically
expository character of its content. Moreover, the soloist
performs in alternation with a chorus that prolongs
the vocal timbric band and, contributing an element
of greater density, volume, or thickness to vocal
color, also projects the discursive dimension of this
communicative timbric band when performing in
alternation with the soloist.
We insist on defining in this manner the main
contribution of the African musician to musics of
the Americas, which is still easily discernible in
urban musical expressions because many genres-or
species as some have called them-have resorted to
instrumental ensembles that maintain distinctly
defined timbric textures. This principle also can be
detected in 20th-century music of the once "avant-
garde," as composers working with electronically
generated sound continue to explore the potential of
timbric bands. To the value that the African musician
assigns to timbric color, as a "signifier" capable of
combination into "bands" or "zones" that create a
"signified," we must add other African retentions that
complement musical communication. Among them
we can mention the alternation between solo and
chorus as an interplay between two contrasting levels
of density, and melodic shapes ordered preferably from
high to low in linear intervallic profiles that the singer
emits in a single breath.
By transcending mere repetition and raising it to
a rhetorical level, that is, by ordering it as a formal
structure that becomes a system of communication
analogous to a language, the African musician
objectifies an image of the supplicatory functions
stemming from the various belief systems to
communicate with deities, or forces and powers raised
to the level of deities. In this context, resorting to
repetitive formulas is a concrete solution. Repetition
surfaces in song, namely in the recurring lines or
referential sounds that frame a space, "domain," "band,"
or "zone"; and it surfaces in the instruments that are
added or superimposed to the space or "band" defined
by the drums, that is, in the use of those idiophones
that also fulfill ritual functions because of the attributes
assigned to their timbric color, such as the atchere,
agogo, and chekere, for instance. To these forms of
reiteration we can add the sound textures created by
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 8
the middle- and high-pitched drums, whose patterns
are repetitive. As a principle, reiteration in this
context is also a form of objectifying a relationship with
the environment. Musical reiteration thus objectified
might represent a temporal expression of the same
needs that inspired the earliest human decorative arts,
such as painting on parietal (cranial) bones, or etching
rough lines and depressions on ceramics. Through
various artistic modes of objectifying reiteration or
repetition, Africans created rhetorical, or discursive,
expressions. The rhetorical character of their musical
discourse was created by utilizing a system of accents,
or contrasting intensities, as variables whose order is
elaborated by the musician.
Traditional musicology limited the description of
this conception of a musical language by saying
that Africans "displace accents." Likewise, it was
said of their pitch systems that "they suppress
leading tones" and use "off-key" sounds. Such views
did not take into account the communicative value
of other, more systemic conceptions of pitch
combinations, such as those created by Africans. When
viewed from an African perspective, the systematic
reiteration of variable accents within a cycle reveals a
type of discourse based on communicative structures,
like languages. In the same way, specific tunings,
easily defined because of their wide deviation from
tempered tuning (as a convenient comparison), also are
organically structured as systems of communication.
In laboratory measurements of the toques of
instruments that form the musical ensembles called
tumbas francesas in Cuba because of their old Haitian
origin, the Cuban musicologist Olavo Alen Rodriguez
(1986) documented how a system of variable accents is
reiterated within a cycle to obtain a discursive type of
elaboration in phrases of organic structure. These
"phrases," however, lack the periodicity we would
associate, for instance, with European music of the
late eighteenth century. Alen Rodriguez also was able
to demonstrate that some cases of intonation were
part of a system that rules out any reliance on the
octave and its hierarchical functions.
The African spatial conception of timbre, with its
concomitant syntactical qualities, sustains specific
modes of creativity and carries communicative
functions that are artistically viable to this day. Many
contemporary musical expressions, outside of ritual,
represent variants of this traditional aesthetic feature
of African music. Even in musics that are highly
influenced by the demands of urban taste, instrumental
ensembles of various types and for different genres
exhibit well-defined timbric textures.
Rhythm
In traditional popular musics created in the urban
contexts of this region and closely related to dance,
certain rhythmic patterns (or rhythmic motifs) have
become characteristic, even to the extent of identifying
certain genres. These also have been assimilated into
compositional procedures derived from European art
music. Some of these patterns may be of possible direct
African derivation, perhaps traceable to the treatment
given to the membranophones.
The most extended rhythmic· figures are those that
appeared as constants in the Cuban contradanza and its
close derivative, the danza. They also are found in
traditional dance music of Argentina and Peru. In these
cases, the basic motif is
>-
iInn
and
Another rhythmic motif was based on the use of
five note-values within a measure in duple meter,
forming a pattern that the popular Cuban musician
calls a cinquillo (5-note pattern):
and its variant
Yet another rhythmic motif characterized as an
African retention is the so-called tresillo:
In some contradanzas and danzas of the nineteenth
century, the preceding pattern was notated as a quarter-
note tresillo (triplet) within a duple meter:
In all of these cases, the popular musician
manipulates the note-values with great flexibility,
Music in the Life of Africans and their Descendants in the New World, pg. 9
within a series of variables whose elaboration
responds to the rising tension of the music and dance,
leading to a climactic point. At times, the musician
allots equal values to the notes, and at other times
the performer alters the durations. In the same
fashion, the popular musician tends to accentuate
the final beat of the measure, offsetting the regular
metric accents, in order to elaborate an irregular
discourse and create different articulations of the
rhythmic pattern.
CONCLUSIONS
The attempt to identify African influence through
such rhythmic figures, which in some instances
" sufficed to assign them the status of "markers" of
national identity, is simply the result of a lack of
discrimination in aural perception by excluding from
the listening experience the communicative function
that syntactical structures carry in traditional African
musics. Among musicians who are not of African
ancestry or are untrained in the tradition, be he or
she a musician who learned by intuition or an
academically trained musician, the necessity to
reduce the complex elaboration of timbric textures
that carry various communicative functions leads
to a leveling or simplification of values inherent in
traditional sound structures. This reduction to a
common denominator-an attrition of meaning and
retention of simplified rhythmic shapes-can include
the elimination of a plethora of rhythmic subtleties.
The result is neither a sum nor a synthesis of the
different timbric textures, since, in traditional African
music, communication is not achieve~ simply by
polyrhythmic combinations as units of perception.
These simplified rhythmic patternfi neither reflect,
nor can they be analogous to, the timbric textures
or bands projected by the membranophones and
by the various idiophones that complement them
in traditional performance. The reductiVe process
by which urban musicians created these rhythmic
figures, as well as others that have surfaced in urban
popular musics, produced only replicas that stand as
mere references to another, far more enduring,
American reality: the communication system that
Africans contributed through the aesthetic value
assigned to timbre in their musics.
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