Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

722 Popular Music and Identity since the Nineteenth Century an avid amateur dancer. Performed in groups with set figures, it acquired a genteel nature in the French court, and came to be called the contredanse. 7 The contredanse became popular in colonial Saint-Domingue, where its musical accompaniment was impregnated by African influences. Jean Fouchard writes that Haitian mereng (in Creole; méringue in French) developed in the mid-nineteenth century from a Haitian contredanse derivative called the carabinier . 8 As a dance, Haitian mereng was novel because it was performed by individual couples instead of in groups. (I will hereafter refer to such forms as independent couple dances ). As a musical type, it was first played on wind instruments but later developed into a rural and bourgeois song form and a nationalist art music. The several types of merengue all feature the cinquillo rhythm typical of much Caribbean music. 9 Fleeing the black-led Haitian revolution, many Saint-Domingue colonists and many of their African slaves moved to the Spanish Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, taking their expressive forms with them. Alejo Carpentier documents theSaint-Domingue, or « French» influenceon theCuban contradanza , which was also called the danza , arguing that it was strongly influenced by African, and specifically Afro-Haitian, music. 10 Impregnated with local, Afro- Cuban elements, the danza was censured by Eurocentric Cubans. Cultural nationalists, however, embraced it for the same reasons it was denounced, and like mereng, the Cuban danza became a nationalist art music. Utilizing sectional form and a dance figure called the paseo , it had a formative influence on the Cuban danzón , which, like mereng, was an independent couple dance and used the Caribbean cinquillo rhythm. In 1842 and 1843, Cuban regimental bands brought a danza variant called the upa to Puerto Rico. An independent couple dance, the upa was sometimes known as a baile a dos ( « dance for two»), and it was also called merengue . Like the danza in Cuba, merengue’s popularity in Puerto Rican ballrooms was undercut by criticismof its novel dance style, whichwas considered lascivious, and its African-influenced elements. Calling it a « corrupting influence», Puerto Rican Governor Pezuela prohibited merengue in 1849, imposing a fine of 50 pesos on those who tolerated it in their homes and a sentence of ten days in prison on those who danced it. 11 The Governor’s campaign may have contributed to merengue’s decline in Puerto Rico; it was no longer performed there after the 1870s. 12 Merengue nevertheless affected the development of a Puerto Rican form of the danza. Like the Cuban danza, this employed multi-part form: the paseo section was danced in a group, while the merengue section was danced by independent couples. 13 Puerto Rican danza music was often performed by