Music In Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico's rich musical history is chronicled in Donald Thompson's translated texts, a history that is often unavailable to those who do not read Spanish easily. Music in Puerto Rico details the Caribbean island's musical roots from Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the New World in the late fifteenth century to twentieth century developments. It explores a multitude of topics, including native instruments, the introduction of music in schools, folk traditions, the legendary salsa, urban pop, and commercial music. The volume also examines musical differences in various regions, including mountains and plains. Documents from historical figures such as Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas and Manuel Alonso have been excerpted and translated. In addition, Music in Puerto Rico explores the various modes of musical expression that have been unique to different geographic regions, including the mountains and the plains. The documented texts also simplify bibliographic search, as many of the anthology's original sources are difficult to locate. Thompson's book provides a glimpse into a society in which cultures intersect and in which magic was born in the form of the popular salsa. Musicians, musicologists, historians, students of Hispanic culture, and anyone interested in the musical foundations of Puerto Rican life will find Music in Puerto Rico a valuable resource.

Puerto Rican music in New York is given center stage in Ruth Glasser's original and lucid study. Exploring the relationship between the social history and forms of cultural expression of Puerto Ricans, she focuses on the years between the two world wars. Her material integrates the experiences of the mostly working-class Puerto Rican musicians who struggled to make a living during this period with those of their compatriots and the other ethnic groups with whom they shared the cultural landscape. Through recorded songs and live performances, Puerto Rican musicians were important representatives for the national consciousness of their compatriots on both sides of the ocean. Yet they also played with African-American and white jazz bands, Filipino or Italian-American orchestras, and with other Latinos. Glasser provides an understanding of the way musical subcultures could exist side by side or even as a part of the mainstream, and she demonstrates the complexities of cultural nationalism and cultural authenticity within the very practical realm of commercial music. Illuminating a neglected epoch of Puerto Rican life in America, Glasser shows how ethnic groups settling in the United States had choices that extended beyond either maintenance of their homeland traditions or assimilation into the dominant culture. Her knowledge of musical styles and performance enriches her analysis, and a discography offers a helpful addition to the text.

Introduces the history, religions, holidays and festivals, arts, sports, languages, and literature of Puerto Rico.

Thompson (emeritus music, U. of Puerto Rico) compiles a small sampling of the writing about music on the Caribbean island, most in Spanish, from conquest accounts of aboriginal music in the 1490s century to popular music critics in the 1990s. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Winner of the MLA's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and culture (1999) For Anglos, the pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music's implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio places this music in context by combining the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women's studies. She offers a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico, comparing it to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the US have used salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos have eroticized and depoliticized it in their adaptations. Aparicio's detailed examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict, and her interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it. What results is a comprehensive view "that deploys both musical and literary texts as equally significant cultural voices in exploring larger questions about the power of discourse, gender relations, intercultural desire, race, ethnicity, and class."

Selection of articles and reviews of classical music performances. The work documents this aspect of Puerto Rican cultural and musical history within the indicated timeframe.