Traditional Music of Puerto Rico

Though it is traditional in some circles to say that Puerto Rican music is a product of three cultural influences such as Taino Indian, Spain and Africa, it is complex to attribute features of Puerto Rican music to the Taino. Spain settlers explained the Taino’s areito festival which features singers and dancers accompanied by slit drums and scrapers, but there is hardly indication left that any of this music influenced the island’s later residents. While the guiro scraper may have originated from the Tainos, the rhythms usually played on it now. Though, it is assumed that other instruments have been used to re-form folk Tainos beats.

During the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries the music culture in Puerto Rico is poorly recognized. Definitely it included Spanish church music. Military orchestra music, and different genres cultivated by the jibaros (peasant mainly of Taino descent) and imprisoned Africans and their offspring. While these later never made more than 11% of the island’s populace, they donated some of the island’s most dynamic musical features which become unique indeed.

During the in 19^th century Puerto Rican music starts to appear into ancient daylight, with notated genres like danza being purely better documented than traditional genres like jibaro m,usic and bomba y plena.

The African tribes of the island used a drum that is made of carved harwood covered with an untreated rawhide on one side, generally made from goatskin. A well-known word originated from creole to design this drum was shukbwa which literary refers to trunk of tree. Guadalupe in other islands, this kind of hollowed trunk is known as bwa fuye.

If the word folk music is taken to refer as music genres that have succeed without elite support, and have changed independently of the commercial mass media, the realm of Puerto Rican traditional music would contain the mainly Hispanic-derived jibaro music, the Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and the basically creole plena.

As these three genres changed in Puerto Rico and are distinctive to that island, they inhabit a respected place in island culture, even if they are not presently as renowned as current music’s like reggaeton or salsa.