Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 725 playing merengue in bourgeois ballrooms consisted of combinations of flute; string instruments such as violin, guitar, mandolin, tiple , and cuatro ; drums such as the timbal , tambora, or pandereta drums; and the güiro . Marching band instruments arrived in the Dominican Republic during the 1863-1865 War of Restoration, and salon orquestas began using the clarinet and bombardino. These instruments were also important to the Puerto Rican and Cuban danza and to the Haitian mereng. 23 Additionally, a 1874 newspaper article mentions that merengue was sometimes even performed on the piano in the Dominican Republic in this period. 24 This is significant, because it suggests that, like the Puerto Rican danza and Haitian mereng, nineteenth-century Dominican merengue was played by the bourgeoisie. It is likely that that the Eurocentric sense of Dominicannational identitywas confined to « a minority that controlled the educational and communications systems» in the period following the establishment of independence in 1844. 25 The 1880 population of the Dominican Republic is estimated as 97 % rural, 26 and the culture of the rural majority was steeped in African traditions. Africans arrived regularly until the end of the eighteenth century, and likely continued to come after that. 27 The Haitian occupation of 1822-1844 promoted settlement by Haitians and others of African descent, and black immigration continued in the later part of the nineteenth century. The extent andnature of religious expression reveals the strong African-derived element of rural society. Nineteenth-century Dominican life was characterized by “ an extraordinary religiosity”» 28 which manifested itself in frequent Afro-Catholic religious festivals, usually held in honor of saints or deceased community members. Catholic saints were often syncretized with African deities, and documents attest to the occasional use of African languages in ritual contexts as late as 1784. 29 Music and dance were integral to Afro-Dominican religion, and social dance was also popular; a mid- nineteenth-century account reports that campesinos « dance during all the fiesta days». 30 This aspect of Dominican culture has remained until today. While merengue was expelled from the elite ballrooms, it flourished in the countryside. The early history of rural merengue lies in obscurity, but it likely developed from its urban cousin in the same way that the rural danza evolved from its urban counterpart in Puerto Rico. Each region of the Dominican Republic would then have adapted the music to local instruments and aesthetics, creating the regional merengue variants of Dominican merengue that are performed today and discussed below. Supporting this view is the fact that while the regional variants of Dominican merengue use widely differing instruments, rhythms, and melodies, all are independent couple dances performed in the ballroom dance position.