Danza Music of Puerto Rico

In the late 1700s the country dance (French contredanse, Spanish contradanza) became to succeed as a renowned recreational dance, both in the courtly and festive dialect forms, all over of the Europe, overshadowing dances like the stuffy and prissy minuet. In 1800 a creolized type of the genre known as contradanza, was flourishing in Cuba, and the genre also emerges to have existed, in similar dialects forms, in Puerto Rico, Venezula and elsewhere, though there are limited records. By the 1850s, the Cuban contradanza known as danza was booming both as a salon piano piece or as a dance-band item to accompany social dancing, in a pattern changing from collective renowned dance (like the square dance) to independent couples dancing ballroom-pattern (like the waltz, but in duple rather than ternary rhythm). According to indigenous chroniclers in 1845 a ship came from Havana, bearing among other things, a party of youths who promoter the modern pattern of contradanza/ danza mistakenly known as merengue. This pattern later became vastly well-known in Puerto Rico, to the extent that in 1848 it was banished by the priggish Spanish governor known as Juan de la Pezuela. This ban, however, does not seem to have had much lasting result, and the currently revitalized genre is now more usually known as danza which went on to succeed in particularly indigenous forms. As in Cuba, these types include the music played by dance bands as well as complex light0classical items for solo piano (which some of them are later interpreted by the dance bands). The danza as a solo piano idiom reached its greatest peak in the music of Manuel Gregorio Tavbarez from 1843 to 83, whose compositions have a grace and splendor closely resembling the music of Chopin, his model. Attaining greater popularity were the numerous danza of his supporter, Juan Morel Campos from 1857 to 96, he is a bandleader and extremely creative composer who, like Tavarez, died in his youthful prime (but not before composed over 300 danza).

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In the time of morel Campo, the Puerto Rican danza had changed into a form quite different from that of its Cuban (not to mention European) colleagues. Particularly unique was its form comprising of an original paseo, followed by two or three parts (some known as merengues), which might highlight an arpeggio-laden obbligato melody played on the tiba-like bombardio. Many of the danzas attained island-wide fame including the piece La Borinquena which creates an anthem for the island. Like some of the other Caribbean creole genres such as the danzas, the Cuban danzan highlighted the insistent ostinato known as cinquillo.

The danza remained important until the 1920s, but later that year its appeal came to be limited to the Hispanophilic elite. The danzas of Morel Campos, Jose Quniton, Tavarez and few others are still performing and heard on different events, and a few more current composers have penned their own personal types of danzas, but the genre is no longer a renowned social dance phrase.