Music in Puerto Rico

Music in Puerto Rico
Author: Donald Thompson
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2002-02-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1461669871

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.

Listening to Salsa

Listening to Salsa
Author: Frances R. Aparicio
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 0819563080

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.

My Music Is My Flag

My Music Is My Flag
Author: Ruth Glasser
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 1997-05-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520208900

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.

Remixing Reggaetón

Remixing Reggaetón
Author: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-09-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822375257

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

The Great Woman Singer

The Great Woman Singer
Author: Licia Fiol-Matta
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822373467

Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers—Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benítez—to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer. Fiol-Matta shows how these musicians, despite seemingly intractable demands to represent gender norms, exercised their artistic and political agency by challenging expectations of how they should look, sound, and act. Fiol-Matta also breaks with conceptualizations of the female pop voice as spontaneous and intuitive, interrogating the notion of "the great woman singer" to deploy her concept of the "thinking voice"—an event of music, voice, and listening that rewrites dominant narratives. Anchored in the work of Lacan, Foucault, and others, Fiol-Matta's theorization of voice and gender in The Great Woman Singer makes accessible the singing voice's conceptual dimensions while revealing a dynamic archive of Puerto Rican and Latin American popular music.

The Book of Salsa

The Book of Salsa
Author: César Miguel Rondón
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0807831298

Rondón tells the engaging story of salsa's roots in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, and of its emergence and development in the 1960s as a distinct musical movement in New York. Rondón presents salsa as a truly pan-Caribbean phenomenon, emerging in the migrations and interactions, the celebrations and conflicts that marked the region. Although salsa is rooted in urban culture, Rondón explains, it is also a commercial product produced and shaped by professional musicians, record producers, and the music industry. --from publisher description.

From Bomba to Hip-hop

From Bomba to Hip-hop
Author: Juan Flores
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2000
Genre: Arts, Puerto Rican
ISBN: 9780231110778

Flores investigates the historical experience of Puerto Ricans in New York, reflecting their varied areas of cultural expression in the diaspora against the background of contemporary debates in Puerto Rico and recent developments in cultural theory. Close studies of urban space and performance, popular musical styles, and Nuyorican literature highlight the complexities and contradictions of Latino identity.

Caribbean Currents

Caribbean Currents
Author: Peter Manuel
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2012-06-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1592134645

The classic introduction to the Caribbean's popular music brought up to date.

Music Cities

Music Cities
Author: Christina Ballico
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030358720

This book provides a critical academic evaluation of the ‘music city’ as a form of urban cultural policy that has been keenly adopted in policy circles across the globe, but which as yet has only been subject to limited empirical and conceptual interrogation. With a particular focus on heritage, planning, tourism and regulatory measures, this book explores how local geographical, social and economic contexts and particularities shape the nature of music city policies (or lack thereof) in particular cities. The book broadens academic interrogation of music cities to include cities as diverse as San Francisco, Liverpool, Chennai, Havana, San Juan, Birmingham and Southampton. Contributors include both academic and professional practitioners and, consequently, this book represents one of the most diverse attempts yet to critically engage with music cities as a global cultural policy concept.

Reggaeton

Reggaeton
Author: Raquel Z. Rivera
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2009-04-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822392321

A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States, and the world by storm. Superstars—including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Ivy Queen—garner international attention, while aspiring performers use digital technologies to create and circulate their own tracks. Reggaeton brings together critical assessments of this wildly popular genre. Journalists, scholars, and artists delve into reggaeton’s local roots and its transnational dissemination; they parse the genre’s aesthetics, particularly in relation to those of hip-hop; and they explore the debates about race, nation, gender, and sexuality generated by the music and its associated cultural practices, from dance to fashion. The collection opens with an in-depth exploration of the social and sonic currents that coalesced into reggaeton in Puerto Rico during the 1990s. Contributors consider reggaeton in relation to that island, Panama, Jamaica, and New York; Cuban society, Miami’s hip-hop scene, and Dominican identity; and other genres including reggae en español, underground, and dancehall reggae. The reggaeton artist Tego Calderón provides a powerful indictment of racism in Latin America, while the hip-hop artist Welmo Romero Joseph discusses the development of reggaeton in Puerto Rico and his refusal to embrace the upstart genre. The collection features interviews with the DJ/rapper El General and the reggae performer Renato, as well as a translation of “Chamaco’s Corner,” the poem that served as the introduction to Daddy Yankee’s debut album. Among the volume’s striking images are photographs from Miguel Luciano’s series Pure Plantainum, a meditation on identity politics in the bling-bling era, and photos taken by the reggaeton videographer Kacho López during the making of the documentary Bling’d: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop. Contributors. Geoff Baker, Tego Calderón, Carolina Caycedo, Jose Davila, Jan Fairley, Juan Flores, Gallego (José Raúl González), Félix Jiménez, Kacho López, Miguel Luciano, Wayne Marshall, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Alfredo Nieves Moreno, Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Raquel Z. Rivera, Welmo Romero Joseph, Christoph Twickel, Alexandra T. Vazquez