Cuba and Its Music by Ned Sublette

Author:Ned Sublette
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569764206
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2004-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Tres and Bongó

The word son (deriving from sonar, to sound) has been in use for centuries, with various related meanings. The genre called son is a Cuban synthesis: Bantu percussion, melodic rhythm, and call-and-response singing, melding with the Spanish peasant’s guitar and language. Its balance of the Bantu and the Spanish, and their common adaptability, made it the great mother form for Cuban music in the twentieth century.

The best evidence suggests that the son appeared during the period when much of what we think of as Cuban music took shape: the last third of the nineteenth century. But the core of the son—the estribillo, or repeated chorus, sung antiphonally with an improvising singer over a rhythmic accompaniment—must have been going on much earlier in monte adentro (deep country) in the mountains of Oriente, developing slowly across a region where travel is difficult. Around Baracoa, one of the most physically isolated areas of Cuba, they say that the nengón, a simple, repetitive form that is a sort of older cousin to the son, was already being played in the Mambí encampments in 1868.

In the early part of the twentieth century, a myth about the origin of the Cuban son had widespread credence. The Santiago composer Laureano Fuentes (1825–1898), in his 1893 book Las artes en Santiago de Cuba, published the transcribed melody of the “Son de Ma’ Teodora,” a tune purportedly composed in Oriente in the sixteenth century by one of two sisters, Teodora and Micaela Ginés, who had come to Cuba from the island of La Española. When Fuentes published his book, two years before the beginning of the war for independence, the idea of a Cuban son already creolized in the sixteenth century had obvious nationalistic implications. Alejo Carpentier repeated the story of Ma’ Teodora’s son in La música en Cuba, but it appears to have been untrue; in 1971, a credible article by musicologist Alberto Muguercia attacked not only the story but questioned the existence of the historical figure of Teodora Ginés.

The eastern side of the island had not experienced the proliferation of the sugar estates in the nineteenth century as did the western side, and accordingly never received huge influxes of new Africans. Few, if any, Yoruba came to Oriente. But Bantu people had been in Oriente since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century their style was creolized, already Cuban, unlike that of the newly arrived Bantu in the western part of the island. While their musical concepts were still fundamentally African, they apparently did not dance the direct-from-Africa styles such as yuka and makuta that were known in Matanzas.1 Though the son emerged about the same time as the guaguancó (see chapter 17), it emerged on the opposite end of the island, so the latter was more rawly African and the former more creolized.

The question of whether musical elements that came to Cuba from Haiti participated in the early development of the son may be unresolvable in any specific way, but as I have

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