TERNARY-METERED CARIBBEAN SONG REPERTOIRE

Whereas the Southern Fandangos are subdued in ancient Phrygian sonorities, the American Fandangos, particularly the Fandangos belonging to the Cancionero Ternario Caribeno are related to modern sonorities, close to Renaissance and baroque dances. Surviving elements from European baroque and Renaissance are evident in instrumentation and musical structures, which is especially interesting for us as baroque musicians. The diatonic harp, extinguished in European soil, survived in the Caribbean regions of Mexico (Veracruz) Colombia, and Venezuela. More medieval versions of the harp are present in the interiors of Mexico, where we can also encounter violins in rudimentary "Rebab"- forms. An image taken from the fieldwork of Galel Sanchez (Sanchez 2022) in the Huasteca region shows both instruments in action. The musicians performing them belong to the Nahua- Indigenous population, they are performing "Sones De Costumbre" ("Custom Songs") which is the religious Son-tradition. The Son Huasteco, which was studied in the second part of the Research, is understood as its mundane couterpart.

DEFINITION OF

"FANDANGO MUSIC" 

For musicologists, the fact that so many different musical expressions have preserved the name of Fandango across the world has been puzzling. Fandangos appear in Spain as well as other Spanish-speaking countries such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and even including the Philippines (where they are called Pandangos). Since they appear in so many different forms, it is hard to delimit them by their musical characteristics. On defining the characteristics of a possible category that would encompass this whole broad family of "Fandango-Music" Musicologist Miguel Berlanga states:

"Why does one word, fandango, refer to these diverse musical realities? For months I kept coming back to this question until I came to the conclusion that, for at least the initial research, merely searching for shared musical connections was not a useful hypothesis (although later we will see that there are in fact some musical connections). Nevertheless, there was one common element between these diverse fandangos that always appeared, and it could be found not in the musical form, but in the fact that all these traditions were linked to specific types of dances at specific types of social gatherings, almost always danced in pairs.

Based on nineteenth-century texts, colloquial uses of the word “fandango,” and on other arguments regarding musical genre, I concluded that through a process of semantic reduction of this metonymy, in many areas the traditional colloquial meaning (la fiesta de baile) ended up designating music that was traditionally played at these gatherings. The process of creating this metonymy had already begun when these gatherings started to lose popularity by the mid-19th century, if not before, depending on the region." (Berlanga 2016, 15)

Musically, fandangos represent such a diversity, that it is impossible to reduce them to a couple of specific traits and one single category. In order to include other fandango music in the same category it was necessary to broaden the frame of reference, and not define it merely by the musical similarities, but by the form of celebrations in which these dances and songs are performed. But what are the characteristics that define these couple-dances which are related to the ancient ritual of the Fandango as a form of celebration?

• Fandango-Musics are usually folk-genres sung in couplets by a soloist, with instrumental accompaniment for couple dances.
• They are always accompanied by string orchestras, emphasizing strummed guitars and related instruments including violin-style bowed string instruments, and various percussion instruments. 
• They have always the same structure of instrumental introduction/ couplet/ instrumental interlude/ couplet/ etc. sung an undetermined number of times, varying according to the occasion
• They are all based in chordal ostinatos in triple-meter. In American Fandangos, there is a big presence of hemiola or the superposition of three against two called sesquialtera. Berlanga´s hypothesis is that the sesquialtera developed with the interaction with African rhythmic precedents1. The harmonic-rhythmic cycle takes 6 or 12 beats.
• They are sung mostly in octosyllabic quartets or quintets.
• There are two sonorities that stand out: One showing ambiguity between Minor and Phrygian and one showing ambiguity between mayor and Myxolidian. Phrygian is the predominant mode of the fandangos of Southern Spain It is associated with older music from the iberian peninsula. Myxolidian can be considered a sonority of the fandangos of the Americas. It is used to sing in decimas, which is a ten-line stanzas strophe, most notably, the Decima Espinela, which is a structure inherited from the Spanish Renaissance Poetry, with rime ABBAA  CCDDC.

ARTISTIC EXPLORATION OF THE FANDANGOS VERDIALES 

Fandangos Verdiales have been acknowledged as one of the most ancient fandango-music, in terms of sonority, but also in terms of its festivity (usually called simply "La Fiesta") The celebrations in which it traditionally found place, have been proven to be reminiscent of the ancient Roman "saturnalias" or "Baccanales" or pre-Christian pagan feasts in honor to Bacchus, or Dyonisious, the god of wine, the pleasure and social communion (Berlanga 2011). This resonates with the ethos that fandango music has among human groups as a space for the dissolution of the self and the bonding between individuals. Malaga faces the mediterranean sea (just after Gibraltar) and the rural hills surrounding it have been traditionally linked to the production of wine. On the date of the major pre-Christian celebration, the 28th of December, the members of the different "Pandas" (the music bands of a town) would go into a "party-rage", moving from village to village for several days (sometimes almost to a week) playing the loud Fandangos Verdiales in small orchestras. These string ensembles are composed by one leading violin called "Alcalde" (mayor) which marks the alternance between sung improvised copla and instrumental ritornello, played by several guitars, castanets and little cymbals in a homoryhthmic strumming. I created my own Verdiales by listening and transcribing recordings of a Panda: Panda de Verdiales "Raices de Almogías" (under leadership of Alcalde Vicente "El Negocio") . By clicking in this link you can hear a live performance of my own transcription-arrangement. Below you can see a sample transcription of different figures used in the instrumental ritornellos of the violin. There is a big deal of parallel fifths, because in the traditional formation, one violin has to stand out from the "strumming army" in order to conduct the Panda, so the violin is played as loud as possible, with the bow is pressed against two strings at the time. This creates the effect of playing the melody being played in "two different tetrachords".

In another verdiales-style, the style of the town of Comares, the violin is played in heterophony with the lute, creating a type of monody with "Moorish sonority". This speaks for the long-lasting influence of the Arabic heritage of the region, which was part of the sultanates of the Magreb for seven hundred years. Cick here to listen to the first recording ever made of Verdiales by the Panda de Comares in the 50´s, under the leadership of the famous Francisco "Paco Maroto".

Galel Sanchez has identified this way of playing the violin with a low posture as a living example of the descriptions of baroque violinists like Nicola Matteis who is been said to play with the violin "below his belt" or Francesco Geminiani, who declares in his influential treatise The Art of Violin Playing “The violin must be rested just below the Collar-bone, turning the right-hand Side of the Violin a little downwards”. In the image above we can see, as an enlightening comparison, the recently discovered portrait of Arcangelo Corelli. About the evident baroque features of the instruments and musical forms of the Cancionero Ternario Caribeño García de León states:

Another important bifurcation in the development of European Renaissance instruments is the mutation of the lute, the vihuela, and the five-course guitar into countless cognates. Caribbean chordophones come in all shapes and forms. There are instruments with three, four, and five strings, and sometimes double courses. They resemble their European elders in string-tuning, playing technique, and even with the particular chordal sequences they are associated with.

A particular sonority is derived from this nonstandardized, renaissance-derived instrumentation of the Caribbean ternary metered repertoire. The "criollo" harp is only able to produce minor scales by altering its diatonic tuning with practices surviving from the XVI century, like the way of playing denominated "a la manera de Ludovico”, in a 1546 fantasy by Alonso Mudarra. This produces an ambiguity in intonation, creating the colored effect of "minor and mayor" to our tonal ears. Garcia de León describes this chromatic impression as "arabic andalusian", linking it to the moresque sonorities of Spanish instruments before its occidentalization with the counterreformation of the XVI century. An example of this sonority can be heard in this version of Son Jarocho "El Fandanguito" by the Conjunto Tlacotalpan.

The cultural landscape of the Cancionero Ternario Caribeño is determined by the types of economies established in colonial times. Once again it is necessary to insist in the importance of colonial port regions in the Caribbean dynamic of interculturalization, which allowed the formation of a "Hispanic baroque cultural amalgam". García de León describes this "Baroque Universe" in his masterful prose, here in my own translation:

"With their backs to their inland economic zones and their gaze towards the sea, the ports of this Baroque universe recreated a treasure trove in their plantations, in their inland agricultural and livestock niches, in their surrounding areas. The importance of the livestock culture in the internal markets of these ports explains why much of the surviving elements are still reproduced in these environments of breeding or taming of the wild cattle ("orejano" or "cimarrón"), while the great commercial fairs linked the different environments, serving as a transmission belt for the recreation of traditions, adding a certain Europeanising urbanity." (García de León 2002, 61)

Two particular types of fandango music from this Caribbean Cancionero are especially related to livestock culture: Mexican Son Huasteco or "Huapango" and Colombo-Venezuelan "Joropo" or llanero music. These are the two popular fandango types that mainly occupy my research. The particular "cowboy culture" that surrounds these traditions was used to define the image and the identity of the Ensemble I created. In the next part of this research, which goes into the practical explorations, I will discuss Huapango and Joropo in dept, exploring the musical similarities between the Huapango and the Baroque Fandango, and dealing with the experiments with the Joropo-Guitar known as "cuatro".

Back in colonial times, a Fandango celebration in Santo Domingo, a “Pandanggo” in the Philippines, a “Huapango” in the viceroyalties of New Spain (nowadays México), or a “Joropo” in New Granada (Colombia and Venezuela) might have been very similar to a Fandango in the Kingdom of Spain: a space where communities would define and celebrate their identity through song and dance. 

In New Spain, as the first constituted viceroyalty, the Hispanic cultural influence was particularly strong and long-lasting, therefore, there is a strong presence of ancient Fandango "Fiestas" and ancient Fandango "Music" in the geographic room of the Caribbean Basin. This region of influence includes Central America, the Antilles, and the northern part of South America. The sub-family of fandango music in this area is called Cancionero Ternario Caribeño (Caribbean Ternary-Mettered Repertoire) by Garcia de León and Angeliers Leon, taking the concept of Cancionero used by Carlos Vega´s in relation to Argentinian folklore (Berlanga 2016, 14).

Peter Manuel describes the relationship between the Aristocratic Salon-Fandango, the Cancionero Ternario Caribeño, and the Andean ternary songs of the southern cone as follows:

"In the colonial-era, translatlantic fandango-zarabanda complex can be seen to ramify into the peninsular fandango de salón and fandango del sur, at the same time it is also inseparable from a broader set of genres which García de León (2002) calls the cancionero ternario caribeño (“Caribbean ternary-metered repertory”). This category comprises a variety of related genres based on two- or three-chord ostinatos set to ternary meter, with pervasive hemiola/sesquialtera, combining 3/4 and 6/8 meters either simultaneously or sequentially. Such genres, found both in coastal and inland regions of the Caribbean Basin, would include such genres as the son jarocho and son huasteco of Mexico, the joropo and galerón of Venezuela and Colombia, and the Cuban zapateo. Meanwhile, this musical family is itself taxonomically inseparable from a kindred set of ternary-metered, sesquialtera-laden Andean and southern cone genres, such as the Colombian bambuco, the Ecuadorean pasillo, the Chilean cueca, the Peruvian marinera, and the Argentine chacarera." (Manuel, 2016, 8)

As you can see, when attempting a panoramic view, he uses the term Fandango-Zarabanda, then "this expanded fandango family must by extension be seen as part of a broader family of seventeenth-century predecessors, such as the zarabanda and chacona (and perhaps the pasacalle). Like the fandango, these emerged as vernacular dances—presumably with characteristic accompanying music- in the New World. Also like the later fandango, and in accordance with their likely Afro-Latin origins, they evidently consisted of endlessly reiterated chordal ostinatos in ternary meter (in which form they were incorporated into the European Baroque)." (Manuel 2016, 7)

This graphic representation made after Peter Manuel´s brings some order into this taxonomy: 

"FANDANGOS DEL SUR" OR

FANDANGOS FROM SOUTHERN SPAIN

There has been much more research on the fandango in relationship with flamenco and in Spanish music as a whole, so this categorization builds upon the studies of Spanish scholars.

It is relatively easy and logical to delineate a “core” fandango family of Andalusian song forms which Miguel Berlanga has named "Southern Fandangos". They are a group of ancient folklore songs from southern Spain which are the core genres of contemporary flamenco. You can click on the links below to get a sound example of each:

• The "fandangos verdiales" from eastern Andalusia (mediterranean coast), 
• The fandangos from Huelva (atlantic coast), 
• Malagueñas from the Murcia region, 
• Diverse fandangos from the Levante region, 
• Castilian rondeñas and malagueñas
• Malagueñas from the Canary Islands. 

As we can see, most of these fandangos have been traditionally designated with different names. The name “malagueña” is commonly used as an umbrella term to designate them all. The distinctive features of this southern fandangos or malagueñas are: 

• The alternation between sung copla- sections (verse or refrain) with instrumental sections (primarily guitar interludes), which are here referred to as ritornellos (though in modern flamenco discourse, they would be called entrecopla)
• Ritornellos consist primarily of passages that have been variously labeled variaciones, diferencias, or (in modern flamenco guitar playing) falsetas. The ritornellos (in, for example, what guitarists would call por arriba tonality) often outline Am-G-F-E (iv-III-II-I) patterns in the “Andalusian tonality” of E Phrygian major, while the coplas would be in the common practice key of C major, with the progression C-F-(G7)-C-G7-C-F [-E], in which the final F chord marks the dramatic climax and serves as a modulatory pivot to the Phrygian major tonality of the entrecopla." (Manuel 2016, 4). As you can see, the copla is also more leaned towards myxolidian, and could be also notated: V-I-V-II-V-I(II)- VII (I). 
• The coplas are composed of strophes of 4 or 5 verses of eight syllables. each. That means, quatrains and limericks (or humorous five-line poems with a rhyme scheme “aabba")
• They always maintain a ternary rhythm. 
• They are sung with instrumental accompaniment in order to support the characteristic dance. Most of the cases, string ensembles (both plucked and strummed guitars and lutes, and sometimes bowed strings like the rebel or the violin), but this is not exclusive, sometimes (in the case of the Fandango Parao from Alonso, for example, flute and drums are used) (Berlanga 2016, 16).