Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 727 Encoideón yo te haré bei que aunque me tienen en poco, en todo tono yo toco lo que tú no pue jasei. 37 In 1887, the municipal government of Santiago de los Caballeros went so far as to propose that the National Congress impose a tariff on accordions to discourage their importation. A Santiago lawyer expressed the municipality’s position thus: Los acordeones no son artículos necesarios, y solo sirven para reunir vagabundos. No contribuyen a la edificación del país, como sucede con el cuatro, que es más sonoro, más armonioso, más perfecto y, por lo tanto, más útil. 38 The accordion may have been rejected because it accentuated the music’s African and percussive elements at the expense of the Hispanic and harmonic elements. 39 On the other hand, the harmonic limitations the instrument were also criticized in Europe: a Finnish folklorist once wrote that accordions were « folk music’s greatest enemy», and that there was only one way to escape this menace: « burn them». 40 Despite the hostile reception, accordion-based merengue flourished in the Cibao under the influence of artists such as accordionist Juan María Rosa. 41 We know little about the musical style of rural nineteenth-century Dominican merengue, but the Dominican composer Julio Alberto Hernández, who conducted fieldwork with elderly musicians in the early twentieth century, provides some clues. He reports that most rural merengues dating from the late nineteenth century consisted of four-measure melodies, repeated many times with improvised variations. 42 These beautiful melodies were from the era of Lilís and earlier... Most of the examples were no longer than four measures, performed with lively variations. 43 Because the early accordions could not execute minor keys, accordion- basedmerengue was necessarily in the major mode. Merengues pre-dating the adoption of the accordion, however, could be major or minor. For this reason, the minor-mode merengue theme collected by Juan Francisco García, whose theme ecame famous as « Juangomero», likely dates to the mid-nineteenth