...issues of national identity formation (Moore 1997), folkloricization under the Cuban Revolution (Hagedorn 2001), and general ethnography and religion (Ortiz 1975, 1985). Surprisingly, none of these studies makes more than passing mention of the modal and melodic aspects of Afro-Cuban music. (1) Study of these features is overdue. The melodic practices of Afro-Cuban music constitute a rich and in many ways internally consistent style system. Rather than simple reciting tones or ditties borrowed from Western music, melodies of the extensive corpus of songs are typically distinctive in style, with dramatic leaps, bold contours, coherent modal features, and expressive and appealing characteristics. Their study can be significant not only for its own sake but also for broader implications it may suggest for discovering relationships of Cuban music to African sources, as well as for a better understanding of the extent and nature of creativity and, alternately, conservatism in Afro-Cuban music culture.

In this article, we present a preliminary overview of melodic and modal aspects of traditional Afro-Cuban music, focusing on those genres that might be called neo-African in the sense that they have tended to retain African-derived stylistic features and have, in most respects, largely resisted overt Western influence. These genres, for purposes of this article, comprise in particular the corpus of songs associated with the syncretic religions or sects of Santeria (also known as Regla de Ocha and Regla Lucumi), Palo, Iyesa, and Arara, as well as the secular genre rumba columbia. After making various observations about melodic conventions, modality, and tonicity, we explore harmonization techniques and make tentative comments about relationships to related genres and practices in Africa and about the nature of the musical transculturation and consolidation that occurred in Cuba as different African-derived music traditions interacted with each other and with European music.

The analysis of Afro-Cuban melodic style involves certain challenges that, although hardly unique to this subject, remain significant. No traditional emic terminology for modal or melodic features exists, nor are there extant conventions of articulating principles of such technical features. Such practices as harmonization of melodies are far from standardized, and even ascertaining the tonal center of a given melody (or the sense to which that tonicity is important) may be difficult. Conventions and aesthetics have to be gleaned primarily from practice and from informal emic discourse, while taking care not to impose inappropriate musicological conceptions. However, increasing numbers of performers of traditional Afro-Cuban music have some sort of formal training in or knowledge of Western music, as is the case with Orlando Fiol and such people as David Oquendo, who is both a virtuoso jazz guitarist and a director of a folkloric ensemble. Of course, as Oquendo (2006) points out, singers lacking such technical knowledge may nevertheless be expert musicians: "They may not be able to tell you what the tonic of a song is, but they know the repertoire perfectly and will tell you if you sing incorrectly or out of clave."

In this regard, the authors' backgrounds may merit brief mention. Orlando Fiol, born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, has an extensive background in Afro-Cuban music and may be considered an effective insider to this tradition. As a bata drummer initiated to the sacred, consecrated bata fundamento of Cuban master Pancho Quinto, he has performed in the New York and Philadelphia areas regularly and professionally for over twenty years. In the course of that experience, through a visit to Cuba and through ongoing close musical and spiritual friendships with Cuban musicians, he has acquired a considerable knowledge of songs in all the genres relevant to this article. He is also quite conversant with Western music, trained in classical piano and playing that instrument professionally in Latin bands throughout his adult life. For his part, Peter Manuel brings to this study a long-standing and active interest in Latin music and in the confluences of modal and harmonic music systems.

Extant documentation of traditional Afro-Cuban music is growing, despite the persistence of major lacunae. One useful compendium is Thomas Altmann's Cantos Lucumi a los Orichas (1998), which contains transcriptions of 262 Santeria songs. The song corpus of Santeria (or ocha music) is also well documented on commercial recordings, including the Abbilona series and Lazaro Ros's Orisha Aye set. Recordings and transcriptions of Palo, Arara and Iyesa songs are far less extensive, while isolated rumba columbia songs can be found on various recordings. For purposes of this study, these sources have essentially served to supplement Fiol's first-hand knowledge of the repertoire.

Afro-Cuban Vocal Music

The most extensive, the most formalized, and arguably, the richest corpus of neo-African music in Cuba is that associated with Santeria, which may be regarded as a Cuban version of interrelated Yoruba practices and beliefs, with a thin veneer of Roman Catholicism. The Cuban Yoruba and their language were traditionally called Lucumi; it was not until the latter nineteenth century that the term Yoruba became a common designation for the linguistically related peoples (traditionally identifying themselves as the children of Odudua) of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oyo kingdom in present-day Nigeria.

Several factors may account for the particular resilience and richness of Lucumi music in Cuba. The Yoruba arrived relatively recently in Cuba--mostly after the 1820s--and the ranks of imported slaves included many women and children, assuring transmission of many aspects of culture (see Sublette 2004, 211). Both urban slaves and free people of color--including many Yorubas--consolidated and perpetuated elements of their traditional culture in the cabildos (mutual-aid societies) of Havana and Matanzas. The high degree of formalization of Yoruba culture in Africa, especially in its urban forms, contributed to its durability in the hostile New World environment. It should not be surprising, then, that Santeria music comprises a substantial corpus of songs, sung in a Yoruba-derived lexicon of learned words and phrases, using drums, rhythms, and melodic forms of obvious West African derivation. The best-known body of this repertoire comprises the songs rendered at ceremonies (individually called a toque de santo or tambor) to the accompaniment of three bata drums closely resembling Nigerian bata drums (which themselves exist in regional varieties). In Cuba as well as in Nigeria, the bata are used both as conduits of surrogate speech and as purely rhythmic accompaniment for singing and dancing. This article focuses on the corpus of songs used in public ceremonies intent on praising and ultimately manifesting deities, called orishas, through a process of mounting or possession.

In Cuba, the Yoruba interacted with other groups of West African descent, some of whom were former enemies but who became fellow subalterns in the Caribbean context. One group consisted of the people who in Cuba were called Arara, comprising slaves, and their descendants, brought from the West African coastal states of Allada, Ouidah, and Dahomey. Another were the Iyesa, descended from the Ijesha Yoruba of the region to the east of Oyo. Although Iyesa and Arara rhythms and drums, and most of their songs, are distinct from those of the Lucumi, all share many religious and musical features and came to interact closely in Havana and Matanzas. (2) A more distinct musical tradition is that of the Abakua secret societies, derived from the Efik peoples of coastal Calabar. An older, and particularly influential, stratum of Afro-Cuban music and culture is that from the Bantu peoples of the west-central Congo River region.

As surrogate speech, Yoruba bata drumming imitates and encodes certain linguistic tones, vowel sounds, consonant distinctions, and grammatical constructions. Cuban Lucumi bata drumming has moved in a more abstractly musical direction because many of its surrogate speech techniques and specific texts have been lost. (3) Vocal songs have in some ways compensated for this development because they can communicate with orishas and the faithful via a corpus of ceremonial text, however imperfectly understood, given the decline of intelligibility of spoken Yoruba in Cuba. Accordingly, as Vincent (2006b) notes, songs play a more important part in Santeria bata music than they do in Nigerian Yoruba bata music. Nevertheless, practitioners believe that communication between the faithful and the orishas can still take place during the oru seco (literally, "dry," unaccompanied oru, or salutation), a set of ritual salutes performed on bata drums, without singing, which precedes a toque de santo.

The Santeria song repertoire can be divided into two main categories: cantos (songs) and rezos (prayers). Cantos consist of short or lengthy alternating call-and-response phrases sung in tempo, while rezos consist of lengthy praise texts extolling the orisha's virtues, sung by the lead singer in a free rubato style and answered by an equally free rubato chorus. The lead singer, who must have specialized mastery of the song repertoire, is referred to as the gallo (rooster) or akpwon (akpuon, akpon), and the chorus is called the vasallo (vassal) or masallo, or simply coro. At public ceremonies like toques de santo, songs are accompanied by the bata, a small rattle called achere, and hand clapping. For secret or private rituals, singing is usually a capella or accompanied by small rattles and/or bells. Cantos are organized into suites, either for a single orisha or as a collection of salutations to all the orishas. These suites, called oru cantado ("sung oru") are counterparts to the purely instrumental oru seco. A garland of songs sung for a single orisha is called a tratado (literally, "alliance," pronounced tratao), with each song consisting of a specific set of lyrics and preexisting traditional call-and-response melodies. Successions of songs are introduced in a generally fixed sequence, often using shorter phrases as intensity and likelihood of possession increase. Some songs also move through several sections, which, like the bata parts, should be rendered in sequence (with accompanying choreography). These sections often constitute a proportional diminution of musical and textual phrases, culminating in one or more short refrains that are often portions of preceding longer ones. During these climaxes, the bata tend to hold firm to their basic or fundamento patterns rather than introducing ornate conversations or improvisations called floreos. This constancy is maintained to put focus on the singing, so that the orisha being solicited might be more easily tempted, cajoled, or even challenged into making an appearance through possession of a believer's body.

For their part, most Palo songs fall in the fast ternary meter associated with the rhythm of the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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