Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 723 brass bands, and featured the bombardino outlining the Caribbean cinquillo rhythm. Like Haitian mereng, the Puerto Rican danza also developed into a rural music sung to the accompaniment of plucked string instruments. Also like its relatives in Haiti and Cuba, it became a Romantic nationalist concert music, usually composed for piano. The danza maintained its status as a national symbol of Puerto Rico into the twentieth century. 14 Venezuelan merengue emerged in Caracas salons during the late nineteenth century and reached its height of popularity in the 1930s. Venezuelan ethnomusicologist Ramón y Rivera writes that it developed from the danza and considers it a « notable national piece». 15 Like its counterpart in Puerto Rico, Venezuelan merengue was criticized for its lascivious hip motion. 16 Like the fulía and bambuco andino , Venezuelan merengue is in 5/8 meter, which is unusual in the Caribbean. A local form of merengue also developed in the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia, but its early history lies in obscurity. In the final analysis, no hard data link merengue’s early history to any one nation in particular. We do, however, know that the contredanse was fused with local, African-based influences in several parts of the Caribbean, leading to the development of various forms of merengue as well as the danza. In fact, as in Puerto Rico, it is likely that in the Dominican Republic, the terms merengue and danza were interchangeably in the nineteenth century. A 1909 Dominican writing, for example, asserts that « merengue se llamó la danza en el país, por algún tiempo » 17 and a 1907 source states that « [l]a composición campestre denominada Merengue en Santo Domingo es el original primitivo, melancólico, tierno, de la gallarda pieza que algunos compositores han alzado a la eminencia del arte (es decir, la danza ) » . 18 This comparative perspective clearly reveals merengue’s syncretic and pan-Caribbean basis, even if it does not solve the question the music’s origin. A mbivalence and N ineteenth -C entury D ominican M erengue As in Puerto Rico and Venezuela, merengue elicited a mixed reaction in the Dominican Republic. References in contemporary writings indicate its popularity in the Republic, but most of these writings condemn the new dance. These diatribes were written by the best young writers who used their literary gifts to criticize the new fad. Manuel de Jesús Galván’s eleven-stanza poem entitled « Complaint of the Tumba against the Merengue» decries the fact