Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

746 Popular Music and Identity since the Nineteenth Century that it ceased to be merengue. He claimed that the Fernandito Villalona hit « El carnaval», composed by Luis Días (and based on a traditional Colombian song), « is not a merengue, not a mangulina, not a carabiné, nor anything else that corresponds to our musical genres». 108 In the 1970s and 1980s, a debate developed between those who considered pop merengue « a deformation» of « traditional» merengue and the constituency that regarded it as a logical development of earlier forms of the music. While musical genres are often defined according to parameters such as melody and rhythm, if we consider music from a sociological point of view, a musical type’s symbolic significance is crucial to its definition as a genre. As the musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg states, « The meaning of a term... is connected to the willingness of a particular community to use that word and not another», and the « choice of a genre by a composer and its identification by the listener establish the framework for the communication of meaning». 109 The late twentieth century was marked by far-reaching changes in Dominican society: exuberant liberation from dictatorship, foreign intervention, and unprecedented intercourse with the outside world. Stylistic changes kept Dominican music in step with new social realities, while the retention of traditional musical elements and adherence to the term merengue forged links with the past. The use of non-Dominican influences turned the national music’s aesthetic space into what anthropologist Americo Paredes calls a « border-zone», or « sensitized area where two cultures come face to face». 110 Using popular music as an aesthetic customs office, merengue musicians and fans charged creative tariffs that domesticated incoming culture. Stubborn adherence to merengue —a time-tested national symbol— gave Dominicans jurisdiction over the aesthetic borderland during a periodmarked by dizzying modernization and transnationalization. Bachata and Social Class Despite merengue’s phenomenal success, another native music began making inroads on Dominican taste in the 1970s. Bachata is distinguished by its guitar-based instrumentation, association with barrio and rural culture, and texts that use street language to ironically comment on the bitter realities faced by impoverished Dominicans. Several musical types, including merengue, are performed within the rubric of bachata. The most common of these is the Cuban son or bolero-son , which is Dominicanized through the use of characteristic chord progressions and dance steps. Bachata employs