Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

726 Popular Music and Identity since the Nineteenth Century Flérida de Nolasco suggests that merengue was performed throughout the DominicanRepublic during the nineteenth century. 31 The bulk of data, however, are from the Cibao. Mid-century merengue cibaeño , or Cibao merengue, was performed on plucked string instruments such as the cuatro, the tambora drum, and the güiro . Rural groups also sometimes addedwind instruments in imitation of salon orquestas. 32 The tambora is a double-headed drum; nineteenth-century tambora players held the drum side-ways in the lap, playing it with two sticks: one stick in each hand. 33 In the twentieth century tamboreros began playing with a stick in the right hand and the palm of the left hand. Early güiros were made from dried, hollowed calabashes with horizontal serrations cut around its front and holes bored in its back and scraped with a gancho made of wood to which bits of hard wire were inserted. Later, metal versions of this instrument were substituted for the calabash ones; these are called güiras . Germany was an important trading partner for Cibao tobacco growers, and German one-row button accordions began arriving in the region during the 1870s. According to oral tradition, Germans bartered accordions for tobacco, 34 and shopkeepers Joaquín Beltrán and Bernabé Morales were famous for selling the best accordions as well as the best rum. 35 Before long, the accordion had displaced the string instruments in merengue cibaeño. The accordion came under attack soon after it was integrated into merengue. Many Dominicans felt that string instruments were more sophisticated than the loud and harmonically-limited one-row accordion, which could only play tonic and dominant chords in one major key. The famed popular poet Juan Antonio Alix addressed this issue in two décimas . In « El cuatro y el acordeón», the cuatro tells the accordion that string instruments have been in the Republic longer than the new-fangled German import, that fads come and go, and that the accordion will likely also be replaced someday: ...soy en mi Nación ei primero que soné. Y si hoy me dan con el pié será poique me combiene, y ei que a ti amoi te tiene aunque tú lo vea así, te jará peoi que a mí, si otra cosa mejoi viene. 36 The cuatro continues, insulting the accordion for being an inferior instru­ ment that can only play in one key: