12 
12 Merengue is widely recognized as the national music of the Dominican Republic, its most popular and best-known export. Originally a representative of the country’s northern Cibao region, this music and dance became a national symbol, first in reaction to the United States’s occupation of the country in 1916–24, and then, more permanently, under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–61). Because of its symbolic centrality, merengue has been the subject of much debate in the public sphere, a debate that seems to grow in intensity whenever migration and/or economic crises threaten traditional urban class hierarchies or understandings of Dominicanness. This debate is complicated by the fact that in the twentieth century merengue split into different genres, catering to different social groups: the orquesta merengue, centered around wind and brass instruments, and the accordion-based merengue típico.
By rereading this history and analyzing the discourse surrounding típico instruments, one can see that instruments like the accordion represent much more than “things” or even music. They are bearers of cultural meanings and as such often take the brunt of social criticism. The discourse about merengue instruments and the sounds they make is related to social processes such as urbanization, migration, class transformations, and gender construction. In this essay, I examine how the accordion is played in Dominican merengue típico, and I outline historical and contemporary meanings of the accordion as related to class, ethnicity, and gender, suggesting that the instrument often embodies Dominicans’ changing ideas about themselves. To construct this argument, I rely on newspaper articles, scholarly and lay histories, the visual arts, interviews with practitioners, and my own fieldwork conducted among típico musicians in New York City and Santiago, the Dominican Republic’s second-largest city and center of the Cibao, since 2001 and 2004, respectively.
Class conflict has long been a factor in the production of merengue. It has even been said that Trujillo forced the upper class to dance merengue as a kind of punishment for their earlier rejection of him. Classist views of merengue típico are often manifested in descriptions of the accordion’s sound as noise rather than music, which date back to the instrument’s first appearance on the island in the early 1870s. At that time, journalistic invectives against the accordion included one by a former Dominican president, Ulises Espaillat, who compared the “insipid and hair-raising [horripilante]” accordion to stringed instruments like the cuatro, “melancholy and so full of majestic harmony.”1 Such opinions helped to push merengue and the accordion out of the cities for nearly fifty years, initiating their conversion into symbols of the rural peasantry.
Under Trujillo, merengue reentered the city by force—but this time without the traditional accordion. In the urban big band or orquesta of the 1930s, the button accordion was either replaced by a piano accordion or removed entirely, while the güira, similarly considered an instrument of noise rather than music, was reduced to a tangential role. While this new urban style catered to the middle and upper classes in the city centers, rural merengue típico remained on the outside. This position is still visible today in Santiago, where most important típico sites are located on the outskirts of the city. Yet, perhaps ironically, once the sound had been removed from the button accordion and its “noise” was no longer heard, it seemed to become an acceptable national symbol. Although the instrument was removed from the orquesta and barely appeared in folklore scholarship of the time, it appeared centrally in many nationalist paintings and even in nationalist poetry.
I suggest that middle- and upper-class Dominicans rejected the accordion even as merengue rose to the status of national music because the instrument represented a threat. Elites likely perceived the lower classes to be usurping their power and invading city centers. If so, it makes sense that in the wake of the massive urbanization and migration that occurred following Trujillo’s death in 1961, polemics resurfaced over the noisy accordion and, implicitly, over those who play it.
In the 1970s, rural migrants brought their accordion music with them to the cities, and debate about the music and the instrument resurfaced on a large scale, often expressed in newspaper columns. Típico musicians themselves were not given the chance to speak in these public fora, and their music was generally ignored by the press. Journalists and other commentators, often orquesta musicians, referred to the accordion in irate newspaper editorials as a “limited” instrument that “impoverishes,” “strangles,”2 and otherwise does violence to Dominican music and, by extension, to Dominican culture as a whole. Similarly, the migrants who play and support it were later described, rather overdramatically, as “cultural terrorists.”3
Today, Santiago’s long-standing and deeply entrenched two-class structure has been further disrupted by the return of transnational migrants, whose accumulation of wealth puts them on an economic, if not a social, par with the traditional elite. Since the 1990s, some of these retornados or “Dominican Yorks” have invested great sums of money in merengue típico moderno, acting in the traditional role of patron to this controversial “modern” style defined by its focus on inventive arrangements, expanded instrumentation, tight backing vocals, precise rhythmic breaks, influences from foreign styles like hip-hop and reggaetón, and a sectional form organized around riffs called mambos. Others work to ensure merengue típico’s passage to the next generation by purchasing accordions for relatives back on the island. Many Santiagueros consider both retornados and their music to be tacky, even as they also recognize the music’s power as a symbol of Cibaeño and Dominican identity. These migrants are the “cultural terrorists” who spark elite fears over the complications they bring to traditional class structures.
Jacques Attali suggests that when sound is discussed in moral terms, it is often divided into the categories of “noise” (disorder) and “music” (order).4 These categories are often used to maintain existing social hierarchies, even as music may contest them. Indeed, Dominican elites often see musics like merengue típico as a kind of noise. Describing it thus is an attempt to maintain an existing social order where orquestas, saxophones, and urban elites stay on top, and típico groups, accordions, and migrants stay below. Those on the outside of this musical community could never bring themselves to accept the accordion and eschewed it in favor of the instruments one might learn via reading written scores: salon instruments, orchestra instruments, and the instruments of the municipal band. The accordion has thus been associated with the lower classes. Within the típico-listening community, however, accordionists are accorded a high status, as the accordionist is typically also the bandleader and gives his or her name to the group as a whole. Accordionists today are often big stars and thus little affected by the views of a wealthy minority, unless these views affect their ability to conduct business.
The title of this essay is taken from a nineteenth-century décima by Juan Antonio Alix,5 where the onomatopoeic “fuinfuán” depicts the sound of the accordion’s bellows and reinforces the belief that accordions make noise, not music. In contrast, the recent merengue “Fi-fuá” by the típico moderno accordionist Nicol Peña uses the onomatopoeia proudly, noting (or perhaps hoping) that people “all over the world” are dancing to this music.
Figure 12.1 Members of the children’s group Tipifrontera practice in the border town of Dajabón, Dominican Republic, 2007. Photograph by Sydney Hutchinson.
The accordion and merengue típico therefore have an ambiguous position in Dominican society today. For instance, the basic trio of core típico instruments, accordion accompanied by the metal güira scraper and double-headed tambora drum, is often simply termed a perico ripiao. The usage of this term reflects Dominicans’ varying evaluations of the music. A perico ripiao trio is a nostalgic evocation of the countryside for many Dominicans or, for Cibaeños, even of home itself; indeed, today such groups can only be heard playing at family get-togethers, in small towns, or for tourists, since the popular merengue típico moderno style utilizes a much expanded instrumentation. Yet because of the term’s association with musicians that can be paid cheaply and with somewhat suspect origins (the term is sometimes traced to a Santiago brothel of the turn of the twentieth century), those who today play the music professionally prefer to call it merengue típico. The latter term suggests music that is consciously traditional as well as rural, and therefore a respectable upholder of traditional values and preserver of Dominican identity—even though the term and the music in its contemporary style are a creation of the cities. Struggle over terminology is thus a power play, an attempt to raise or lower the status of this musical genre.
Similarly, newspaper articles tend to avoid the more obviously derogatory tone favored in the past, but the nostalgia that has replaced it is often either patronizing toward modern-day musicians or leaves them out entirely. For example, in an article discussing Rafael Chaljub Mejía’s book on merengue típico and the CD compilation Ripiando el Perico, a noteworthy effort to bring merengue típico to the middle classes, Fátima Álvarez writes:
It is high time for that [traditional] merengue to cease to be the exclusive property of those noble workers of the earth, of the flirtatious mulattas that populate these lands, or of the old men who tell their adventures through the notes of the accordion.
Oh Ñico! If only your mouth could sing today / this song of the people / if your hands could rescue us / and give us comfort!6
The reporter poetically calls to the foundational accordionist Ñico Lora to return Dominicans to their roots, at the same time as she calls for the removal of merengue típico from the hands of peasants like Ñico. Conflicted feelings like these—merengue was better when it was played by peasants, but such “backward” people should not be those who represent the Dominican Republic today; accordionists of the past were noble, while those of today are vulgar—are typical of contemporary middle-class attitudes toward típico. Scholarly works, too, tend to leave the accordion out of the discussion because of long-standing views of the instrument and the music as either “simple” or not music at all. Catana Pérez de Cuello, in an otherwise excellent history of merengue, writes the instrument off as nothing more than a “setback” (atraso) in merengue’s development.7
Views of the accordion as noisemaker likely first arose because the sound of these instruments made audible the fact that the lower classes would not stay in their place any longer. This potential threat has in fact become reality with the return of emigrants who now have economic capital to equal those who consider themselves their social “betters.” The conflicting attitudes about típico that circulate in the Dominican Republic therefore indicate continued discomfort with changing social structures as well as profound uncertainty about Dominican identity in the age of transnational migration, particularly as regards the role of traditional music and its updated variants in creating that identity.
The classed meanings of the accordion and the típico ensemble are further complicated by the fact that these instruments also have ethnic identities. The conflation of instrument with ethnicity is common throughout Latin America, where “national” musics are often mestizo ones. In the case of the Dominican Republic, the trio of traditional merengue típico instruments has been used more than any other symbol, except perhaps the sancocho stew, to represent the nation’s triethnic makeup.8 It is said that as sancocho combines the indigenous yuca root with the African plantain and European beef, so does the merengue combine the European button accordion with African tambora drum and supposedly indigenous güira scraper.
The assignment of ethnicities to instruments is based less on the histories of the instruments, which in the case of the percussion are hardly known, than it is on a hierarchical ordering of sounds that places melodic instruments at the top and percussive ones at the bottom. In the case of the Dominican Republic, this polarity was also one of class and race: the first group represented Europe and was capable of learning and producing “civilized” music; the second was symbolic of Africa and the unlettered peasantry and thus could produce only “savage” noise. For example, when the Puerto Rican educator Eugenio María de Hostos visited the Dominican Republic in 1892, he wrote of a party he attended in which “the musical instruments are also the agreement and coordination of one instrument of civilization, the accordion, and one instrument of savagery, the bass drum [perhaps tambora].”9
An outsider to Dominican culture, Hostos gives the expected interpretation: as a recognizably European instrument, the accordion would occupy a higher rung on the social ladder according to the aforementioned hierarchy of sounds. In the Dominican Republic, however, this has not been the case, for three principal reasons. First of all, while within the típico community the instrument’s origin may give it prestige, outside of it, the accordion’s classed meanings seem to have trumped its historical origins. Secondly, the accordion’s ties to European colonial powers have made it a suspect source of “national” music for those of a nativist bent. To cite one example, the musician Rafael Ignacio believed that “[merengue] was most denaturalized when the German accordion entered. . . . The foreign influences in our merengue are fixed because the rhythmic basis is African and the melodic basis is Spanish.”10 And finally, Deborah Pacini Hernández suggests that nineteenth-century urban Dominicans reacted strongly against the accordion because the instrument allowed musicians to bring the African-influenced percussive elements of merengue to the fore.11 Her suggestion gives one possible explanation for the opposition between stringed instruments and the accordion discussed above.
The dialectic between Afrocentric and Eurocentric ways of playing accordion changed over time. During the Trujillo era, Pacini Hernández notes, the merengue orquestas had suppressed African-derived rhythmic tendencies, principally by eliminating the tambora from their earliest incarnations, and thus highlighted the Hispanic/melodic aspects of the music; but after Trujillo, that trend was reversed.12 Afro-Americanisms have indeed become more prominent and more accepted in merengue music since the fall of Trujillo, but the accordion has still not improved its status. Ironically, while accordion music may have been too African for nineteenth-century upper-class Dominicans and for twentieth-century Trujillistas, the instrument of German descent was not African enough for post-Trujillo activists. Even Fradique Lizardo, a Dominican folklorist known for his advocacy on behalf of Afro-Dominican traditions, disdained it as a “limited” instrument.13
These changes were also related to a change in instruments and the split between merengue típico and merengue de orquesta initiated in Trujillo’s time. Contemporary merengue orquestas like that of Luis Alberti, as well as some other groups playing to the middle classes or to immigrants abroad (like Angel Viloria’s Conjunto Típico Cibaeño, which was típico in name only), changed from button to piano accordion to improve their status and acceptability to the higher classes. The piano accordion symbolized urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and “high” culture, unlike the button accordion of the rural peasantry and urban marginals. Because the button accordion is in many ways better suited to the rapid, staccato, percussively rhythmic playing found in merengue típico than the piano accordion, the switch to the latter may have reinforced the shift to more melodic, European-sounding playing in orquesta merengue that Pacini Hernández described.
The techniques used to play accordion have had little effect on popular perceptions of the instrument, including its assigned ethnicity. For musicians or ethnomusicologists it may be clear that it is the musician, not the instrument, who ultimately determines what music the instrument will play, and thus it is easy to point out the Afro-Caribbean characteristics of the music Dominicans play on the accordion, in spite of the instrument’s culturally distant origins. Yet much Dominican discourse about merengue continues to construe instruments in an essentialized manner in which the instrument itself is apparently the agent who creates music, and origins are thus paramount. The tripartite division of Dominican culture and music remains set.
Dominican histories of merengue are clear about the ethnic meanings of merengue instruments, and classed meanings become evident through public debate. The instruments’ genders are perhaps less obvious but are nevertheless a part of how people construct their relationships with these objects as performers and listeners. Veronica Doubleday has shown how gendered human-instrument relationships assume a variety of forms, from the bullroarer of New Guinean men’s cults, protected from women’s touch by taboos;14 to the Indian association of women with vinas, established through the goddess Saraswati and the instrument’s physical form;15 to “in-between” instruments like the saxophone, part of both the traditionally masculine brass family and the traditionally feminine woodwinds.16 The gendered associations of the accordion, güira, and tambora are likewise not simple, one-to-one relationships in merengue típico; in fact, just as merengue típico has both high and low status and both African and European associations, each of the instruments in the ensemble seems to embody a kind of gendered doubleness as well.
The most explicit case is that of the tambora, which was traditionally made of the skins of goats of two sexes, the female on the right, the male on the left (they can be told apart because the male goat has a stripe down the back that is still visible on the tambora skin).17 Thus, the drum has a dual gender and “sings” in two voices, to paraphrase the poet Manuel del Cabral.18 Similarly, the güira can be considered as dual-gendered through its name and performance practice. This instrument is a metal version of the gourd güiro scraper found elsewhere in the Caribbean, and its name is the feminized version of that relative. It is considered the domain of men because of the strength and endurance needed to play it, but is also an instrument frequently taken up by women (at home, if not on the stage).19
The accordion, with its focus on upper-arm strength and digital agility, is also typically coded as masculine, but it is commonly performed by women, who themselves frequently enact the partially masculinized role of the tíguera, as explained below. The word used for the instrument can itself be either masculine or feminine: el acordeón and la acordeón are used interchangeably by practitioners of this music. In addition, the construction and tuning of the accordion adds to the gendered meaning of the “noise” it produces. The accordion tuner Berto Reyes explains that once an instrument has been properly retuned for the playing of merengue típico, it will sound “hard” and “strong,” just as the accordionists themselves wish to appear, and as is appropriate to the kind of urban Dominican masculinity represented by the tíguere (or “clever street tough”). The strength of the sound is directly related to the combination of two reeds that must work together, reeds that Reyes describes as “feminine” and “masculine.” When he has properly tuned the accordion by adding the smaller, feminine reed sound to the instrument, the accordion produces a strong “mascufeminized” (machihembriado) sound in which the feminine reed adds aesthetic appeal and “shine” to the “hard” masculine sound, Reyes says.20 The güira plays a similar role, as the Santiago-based güira maker El Buty explains: “The güira is what makes the music shine, so if the güira sounds bad it will never sound as it should, because the music without the shine is nothing.”21 Together, the masculine and feminine reeds, and the güira, tambora, and accordion, thus produce a dual-gendered sound.
Figure 12.2 Lidia de La Rosa performs in Queens. Photograph by Alex Perullo.
Atypically for Latin American popular and traditional musics, female instrumentalists play important roles in merengue típico. While in related styles like salsa, women are confined to singing or dancing, or else are segregated into all-female groups,22 women in típico generally play accordion, thus also serving as bandleaders in otherwise all-male groups.23 Female accordionists now form a significant and growing minority of performers within this musical genre, and within a culture that has historically been considered machista. The fact that women have not only been accepted in this role but also have been able to make careers for themselves as performers and bandleaders provides evidence of a long-standing but little-studied fluidity in Dominican gender construction. In playing the accordion, women thus take on some masculine characteristics and help to reconfigure gender roles.
The accordion’s sound is associated with the tíguere, a Dominican pronunciation and spelling of the word for tiger. This male role is a masculine ideal for the lower classes but is considered a useless ruffian among the higher ones. It emerged as a response to urbanization and changes in the economic system that made it impossible for most lower-class men to fulfill the obligations of the hombre serio, or serious man, the previously dominant model of rural Dominican masculinity, a provider and patriarch.24 The rural migrants most affected by these changes formed the biggest part of merengue típico’s audience, as they moved to the cities in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them later moving on to New York. At the same time, the legendary accordionist Tatico Henríquez adeptly negotiated the divide and the overlaps between the tíguere and the hombre serio, the rural and the urban, helping to establish the music’s foothold in its new urban context while providing a role model that young men continue to emulate today.25
Women who play accordion today are often termed tígueras (female tigers). The use of this word and not the standard Spanish tigresa shows that this role is, at least in part, an adaptation of the related Dominican male role. Like a tíguere, the tíguera is aggressive, a flashy dresser, and unashamed of her sexuality. She knows how to relajar (engage in joking wordplay), how to drink, and how to party. If she is a musician, she knows how to play and take control of the stage. She looks like a woman, but she can act like a man when the situation demands it. She can also be found at many merengue típico events, on stage and in the audience. Just as male roles evolved over the course of the twentieth century from the hombre serio to the tíguere as a result of socioeconomic change, so have female roles moved women from the home into the street. While Peter Grant Simonson26 found no female counterpart to the tíguere, I argue that a tíguera role has emerged as a specific way of being female over the past two decades, and also that women in típico helped to create and define this role.
While feminine tigueraje is a new development, it has deep roots in Dominican culture and was made possible by the existence of a number of prior role models. Female accordionists have been documented as far back as the early twentieth century, as in the example of Monguita Peralta, whose name lives on in merengue lyrics.27 But the most important, perhaps the ultimate, of the tígueras is Fefita la Grande, the beloved grande dame of Dominican music. She began playing accordion as a child in the 1950s, and one of her earliest performances was for Petán Trujillo, brother of the dictator and director of the state radio and television stations. Fefita’s audacity has been an important part of her self-presentation since that time. She explains, “I was a girl who wasn’t like the other kids of my time. I was very alert, I had no shame. In that time the great generals trembled to go before those people, Trujillo, Petán. And for me it was like eating a piece of yuca.”28 Fefita’s embodiment of the tíguera can also be seen in her aggressive stage presence, lyrics that unabashedly speak to her freedom of choice in—and enjoyment of—relations with the opposite sex, and in her release, at age sixty, of two calendars featuring herself in a different lingerie ensemble for each month.
In the wake of her success, many other young female accordionists have followed, and Fefita’s performance style and strong vocal sound have been widely emulated. Yet the complications surrounding women’s professionalization in the típico world can be seen in discussions of her accordion playing, which other accordionists often describe as unskilled at best. Certainly, her approach to rhythm is unconventional, and she generally does not play the kind of staccato arpeggiations and ornaments so highly valued in típico accordion playing; yet one suspects that what is judged as aberrant in a woman might have been seen as an idiosyncratic personal style in a man. Today’s tígueras tend therefore to emulate masculine accordion technique as a bid for greater respect.
Tigueraje in both sexes is a function of class—the Dominican middle and upper classes tend to see tígueres as worthless street thugs, applying the term only with disdain. Among the lower classes as well as among New York Dominicans, however, young men are often proud to call themselves or their friends tígueres—to make a North American analogy, the tíguere might be comparable to the player. Tígueras tend to come from these same social groups, since lower-class women historically have often been free from many gender-related limitations out of sheer necessity: their families’ need for additional income relaxes restrictions on movement in the street and pursuit of economic opportunities. In contrast, the pressure upper-class families exert on women to maintain decorum and propriety at all times serves to constrain the options of otherwise privileged women. The novelist and poet Julia Álvarez, herself from a privileged Dominican family, describes this kind of “entrapment” as “the golden handcuffs.”29 Thus, it is in the margins, the realm of típico, that women are best able to make their way into male-dominated or otherwise taboo professions.
Doubleday suggests that to play musical instruments is to wield power, and because “gender is one of the most important parameters in human power relations . . . the power play between humans over musical instruments is often enacted along gender lines.”30 The cross-cultural male dominance of musical instruments, as with other technological realms, is tied up with masculine desires for power and control.31 Women’s experiences in playing merengue típico stand out noticeably from this general background of feminine exclusion from instrumental music, forcing us to rethink Dominican gender roles, and indeed the whole concept of Latin American machismo as it is still often presented in academic literature. Nancy López has explained that “Dominican women have a long tradition of engaging in feminist practices through insubordination,”32 a tradition entirely separate from North American and European feminisms. For some Dominican women, playing accordion is one way of perpetuating this tradition. Yet the gendered meanings of the accordion’s sound interact with women’s agency as musicians in complicated ways. The dual-gendered nature of the accordion’s sound, as well as its association with noise and tigueraje in both its feminine and its masculine versions, may relate to the fact that women have succeeded as instrumentalists in this genre more than in any other Latin American popular music. At the same time, they may also contribute to the instrument’s devaluation in the larger society.
I now turn my focus from beliefs and attitudes about the accordion to the instrument itself, its construction and playing techniques. Such information is not only of use to scholars studying accordion music cross-culturally; it is also a needed intervention within the Dominican Republic itself. In spite of típico musicians’ attempts at upward mobility, and the economic success of some of them, many members of the educated class persist in viewing them as inferior musicians, when they consider them at all. Scholars have avoided analyzing accordion music because of the belief that the accordion is capable only of playing “simple” music. In addition, I was on various occasions told that merengue típico players are not “real musicians” because they can not read music. These persons believe that if an instrument is learned by ear, it is therefore easier to play; similarly, an instrument normally dependent upon written notation is more difficult to play and could not be learned by ear. Naturally, none of these persons had ever attempted to play merengue típico or to learn music by ear.
Típico musicians are aware of this disdain, and, turning the tables on literate orquesta musicians and their music stands full of scores, they jibe, “If a wind comes up, they’re done for.” At the same time, many of them buy into the argument they have heard all their lives: that written music is somehow better and more complex. Some believe their own music cannot be written down, and that it is therefore fundamentally different from and likely inferior to notated music. A look at techniques used in merengue típico today will demonstrate the complexity of this musical style and the impressive abilities of these musicians; it will also help to dispel some of the aforementioned widely circulated Dominican myths about accordion playing.
Mark DeWitt has noted a similar situation with respect to the Cajun one-row button accordion, which has also been viewed as having had a restrictive, simplifying effect on the music.33 He counteracts this negative view by showing how Cajun musicians have developed complex techniques to expand the capabilities of their instrument or use them to their best advantage. Merengue típico musicians have also increased the complexity of their music in its nonmelodic aspects by employing finger and bellows techniques, articulation, and rhythmic elaboration. Prior researchers’ perception of merengue típico as “simple” is due, I believe, to their focus on the collecting and notating of melodic material only, which has deflected attention from these important areas.
Finger techniques are one area of increased complexity. In típico, repeated notes, arpeggiation, and broken chords are a few means used to embellish the melody. The first involves trilling the index and middle fingers quickly on a single button, either to enhance the sound of a single, long note in a melody or as a part of an improvisation. The second involves placing three fingers into a chord position and playing each note separately, creating a fast, rhythmic pattern that often interacts in interesting ways with the meter—for instance, placing a three-note arpeggio over a duple-division pulse. The third typically consists of creating a chord with a third on the bottom, played by the index and middle fingers, and the melody carried by the fourth or fifth finger an octave above the top note. Then rhythmic patterns are created either by alternating the third with the top note or by hammering the whole chord together. Accordion riffs in típico are more chordal than melodically based, and these techniques help to increase their interest and difficulty level.
Difficult bellows techniques further increase the level of virtuosity demanded from típico accordionists. Many melodies by nature require multiple changes of bellows direction that can be mind-bending for those not accustomed to diatonic instruments. Bellows changes are often emphasized particularly in solos, allowing accordionists to show off strength and speed. In one such riff accordionists play constant sixteenth notes with a bellows change on nearly every note; the rapid movement of the changes adds visual excitement and a slightly nervous quality to the sound that enhances the feeling of speed.
Percussive, staccato playing is generally the preferred style of articulation. Others may be used, as when creating a slur between two notes, but not sustained throughout an entire melodic theme. As is the case with Cajun music, staccato playing keeps bellows movement to a minimum while also providing a rhythmic reference point for musicians and dancers.34 In the Dominican Republic, it also demonstrates one’s strength, agility, and general competence as an accordionist. Staccato playing may be termed picadito (chopped) or picoteao—also the name of a self-referential song characterized by a particular, precise arpeggiation on the accordion. Along with other strength- or endurance-based techniques like quick bellows changes, staccato playing is often coded as masculine. The accordionist Arsenio de La Rosa traces the current focus on staccato playing to the 1950s, during which time he learned this style from Matoncito, an influential but never recorded accordionist born in Puerto Plata. Tatico Henríquez, considered by many to be the all-time greatest accordionist in the genre, popularized the technique through his playing of “El Picoteao,” a tune he learned from Matoncito.35
It is likely that some musical aspects of merengue típico developed through the application of local aesthetic preferences to the technical possibilities of the button accordion. Examples might include the pointillistic texture created by staccato playing and the focus on rhythmic rather than melodic or harmonic complexity. The enduring nature of such preferences is demonstrated by the fact that they are maintained even when translated to other instruments. For example, in the guitar merengue style that has been developing since the 1960s through the efforts of musicians like Eladio Romero Santos and the growing popularity of bachata groups, an accordion-like staccato sound is produced by shortening the strings of the requinto or lead guitar to nearly half using a capo. The shortness of the strings produces a more percussive and staccato sound. Arpeggiated riffs, similar to or even borrowed from típico accordion playing, are also used in merengue guitar playing.
Left-hand technique is one of the great mysteries of típico accordion, and mastering it might be said to be a kind of initiation for beginning accordionists. Its usage is never verbalized or otherwise explained, even in the relatively formal lessons offered by my own teacher, Rafaelito Román. A teenage accordion student told me that at first it was hard for her to learn the bass because of the difficulty in coordinating both hands. “But later you start to get motivated, and . . . you get to feeling the music in your heart, and you can play it [the left-hand part] more easily.” Her father also helped her to learn the rhythm, because “[if I learn] to play with the bass . . . I can be a better accordionist.” Another parallel with Cajun as well as with Tejano and norteño accordion playing can be found in the fact that in neither style are the bass buttons harmonically necessary, having been largely replaced in their function by the electric bass, but in all cases an accordionist who does not use the left hand is considered incompetent.36 Accordionists employ what DeWitt terms “impossible technique”: by barely tapping the left-hand buttons, accordionists suggest an accompaniment using chords the accordion is not actually able to play. Such a practice shows that accordionists often understand harmony differently than a music theorist might. For instance, in “El Diente de Oro,” the first merengue I learned in its entirety, I experienced a disorienting kind of harmonic collision: in this merengue, performed in the key of C minor on a B-flat instrument, a minor tonic chord and a major dominant chord were the expected harmonies implied by the melody, but I could only accompany it with a dominant chord and a major mediant, as the tonic was not available. The situation is further complicated by the wide variety of configurations possible and available on the diatonic accordion, meaning that each instrument may have different bass notes and chords available. I was told that it did not matter which chords I actually played, as long as I played them, indicating that rhythm is more important to these musicians than harmony. Thus, when playing alone, only beginning accordionists typically leave the left hand out, and they maintain the practice even when playing with an electric bass, both to convince spectators that they are competent and simply to keep time for themselves.
Dominican accordion technique has changed over the past two decades because of the introduction of the mambo section, which may refer either to the latter part of the song where saxophone and accordion unite to play short, catchy, syncopated riffs that serve to motivate dancers, or to the riff itself. The section is also characterized by a driving rhythm where the güira plays mostly on the beat, and the tambora often plays a controversially truncated pattern called maco (toad). Today merengue con mambo or merengue típico moderno is the most popular style of merengue típico among young people.
Accordion playing in the 1950s was relatively tame and unadorned compared to what came after. In the 1970s and 1980s, accordionists like El Ciego de Nagua, Rafaelito Román, and King de La Rosa added new, technically difficult melodies or pasadas to their interpretations of traditional songs, as well as prearranged cortes, or rhythmic breaks played in unison by the percussion instruments. Some elderly fans complained that such practices distorted the music and interrupted the flow of the dancing.37 Today, some complain that accordion playing has gone to the opposite extreme—from complexity to oversimplification. The accordionist Lidia de La Rosa, for one, believes that the mambo style has simplified accordion technique: “Right now, merengue is not being played with many notes, as they say—many solos and picoteos [rhythmic embellishment using finger techniques]. . . . Right now what is mostly being done is more mambo than anything else. It has changed a lot.”38 However, precisely because some traditionalists were criticizing the new style as too simple, too modern, or even too feminized, many young accordionists, including El Prodigio and Geniswing, are now focused on achieving ever more impressive technique in their performance of Tatico-era merengues with all their pasadas.
As the complicated technique used to play merengue típico on the accordion was developing, so was the instrument itself undergoing some changes. First of all, over the course of the twentieth century musicians switched from using a one-row to a two-row model of button accordion. The first had ten melody buttons and four for accompaniment and was designed to play in only one key; the second possessed twenty-one right-hand and eight left-hand buttons and could be played in two major keys and, with a little more difficulty, two minor ones (without leading tones). By the 1960s, the latter was widespread, and today the Hohner Erica is by far the most widely used model. The fact that the three-row model used in Mexican and Colombian accordion styles was never adopted may be a result of the association of the two-row instrument with iconic figures like Tatico Henríquez as well as the desire of Dominican musicians to differentiate their tradition from those of other countries.
The change to a two-row instrument not only expanded the accordionists’ harmonic and fingering possibilities but also led to a change in finger technique. Before, accordionists had played in a sitting position with the instrument at a distance from the body, the accordion resting on a knee and the right thumb hooked through the leather thumb strap. Later, and particularly with the additional buttons available on the two-row accordion, they desired greater mobility of the right hand and switched to playing with the right thumb resting in a groove beside the keyboard, rather than immobilized in the thumb strap. Because the thumb strap was the only thing enabling the push and pull of the bellows when the accordion rested on the knee, a change in body position and the addition of shoulder straps were necessitated: today’s accordions are played standing up with two shoulder straps affixing the instrument to the chest, as with the piano accordion. Chaljub Mejía credits Tatico with having developed the new body position,39 which facilitated a closer relationship between musician and instrument.
Secondly, while accordions are a factory-built instrument not produced in the Dominican Republic, and local musicians cannot make major changes in the body or construction of the instrument, a specialized class of craftsperson has arisen to keep accordions well tuned and to customize their sound. Their services are required not only by those with old and out-of-tune accordions but by purchasers of new instruments, which usually do not come in the preferred B-flat/E-flat tuning; even those that are in their owner’s preferred key may require retuning to achieve a true típico sound. To be an accordion tuner requires a good ear, a memory for tones, and a careful hand, and good accordion tuners are highly sought-after. Juan Prieto, the most frequently patronized tuner in Santiago, explains that he has to tune the reeds to satisfy the “noisy” preferences of típico musicians. Dominican accordionists, he explains, want their instruments to “sound more alive [vivo]. It sounds very lifeless [apagao] when it comes from the factory for playing merengue, because the people here who like to hear merengue típico like to hear a lot of noise [escándalo].” The particular sound he tries to create by ear is one that “has a little more sweetness and a little more tenderness [cariño] and liveliness.” Interestingly, the sound Juan produces seems to come from an earlier model of accordion that is no longer being made. When he began his career in the 1960s, Juan recalls, the instruments “came prepared from the factory,” meaning they needed no alteration. But now, the factory reeds are “all flats,” all the same, so Juan explains, “I put a bigger one with a smaller one; that is called a flat and a sharp one on the same note.”40 His Queens-based colleague Berto Reyes terms the two “masculine” and “feminine.” Either way, one can see that merengue accordionists prefer a fuller sound than what Hohner provides.
Because of their fairly simple and intuitive construction, accordions are easily and frequently customized. For instance, while the usual factory tuning provides eight out of the twelve possible chromatic pitches in an octave, some accordions have two buttons tuned differently so as to give the missing four pitches. Most young accordionists today add a twenty-second button to their instruments at the top of the keyboard, in its lowest range. The key is often used as a seventh, and Juan Prieto explains that this helps them “to embellish more.”41 Some musicians have added more individual features to their instrument. Juan Prieto’s brother Ernestidio Rodríguez, an accordionist and accordion tuner in East New York, Brooklyn, for example, has added two buttons to the bass side of his accordion to further facilitate the accompaniment of minor keys. The choice of one tuning over another is often related to a musician’s choice to play either merengue con mambo or traditional merengue típico. For example, Rafaelito Román uses the “traditional” factory tuning, while his son Raúl uses the twenty-two-button, twelve-tone accordion to play típico moderno.
Two further, though less essential, changes are also made to most accordions. First, a microphone must be added by cutting a round hole into the top of the right-hand side of the instrument and screwing a stripped-down Shure SM58 (when available) into the cavity. Second, customization can also take visual forms, as many accordionists individualize their instrument by adding their names or nicknames to the front of the instrument in paint or rhinestones, and sometimes the bellows are altered, for example, to show the image of the Dominican flag when opened.
While merengue moralists seem to believe that the instrument itself determines what it plays and thus exerts a limiting effect on merengue, the truth lies closer to the opposite of this view. Típico musicians stubbornly persist in playing minor-key songs on their button accordions in spite of the critics who insist that this is an impossibility; they add buttons and retune their instrument in order to expand its harmonic possibilities; and they add rather than subtract musical complexity through their finger techniques and rhythmic manipulations.
A U.S. journalist once asked me if people made fun of the fact that I played and studied the accordion. I replied that, if anything, the opposite is true: in the Dominican Republic, many teenagers want to learn accordion like they want to play electric guitar in the United States. The enduring appeal of the accordion and merengue típico is due, I believe, to the fact that they symbolize something important—a traditional rural Cibaeño way of life—and that they continue to change with the times. But views of the accordion from inside and from outside the típico community differ markedly. To those who subscribe to the típico version of Dominican identity, the accordion is a source of prestige and pride. To those who do not, it is an annoyance at best.
The discourse surrounding the accordion has generally had little to do with its actual capabilities; instead, it is a commentary on the values of the times in which each critic was writing. It is to be expected that instruments playing music with a high symbolic value should be used as focal points in debates over identity. At the same time, the forms these discussions have taken are problematic not only in their political dimensions but for the many contradictions they incorporate. Merengue típico is simultaneously made to represent the rural and the urban, the masculine and the feminine, highly valued “national patrimony” as well as low-class “noise.” The “noisy” accordion raises hackles because it demonstrates that those who play it must be incorporated into Dominican society, and may even determine the form of Dominican identity. Placing musical instruments, in this case the accordion, at the center of ethnographic analysis can thus help researchers uncover existing social hierarchies, while also suggesting how they may be contested.
1. Carlos Batista Matos, Historia y evolución del merengue (Santo Domingo: Editora Cañabrava, 1999), 17.
2. Lizardo qtd. in “Fradique Lizardo: El merengue tiene su origen en Africa,” Ahora! December 8, 1975, 50–51. See also Rosemary Lora, “Apuntes sobre el origen del merengue,” Ahora! August 25, 1975, 58–60.
3. Manuel Núñez, El ocaso de la nación dominicana, 2d ed. (1990; reprint, Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 2002).
4. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 11.
5. Catana Pérez de Cuello, “Génesis del merengue: Raíces, trayectoria, y difusión en el siglo XIX,” in El merengue: Música y baile de la Republica Dominicana, ed. Catana Pérez de Cuello and Rafael Solano (Santo Domingo: Verizon, 2005), 328.
6. Fátima Álvarez, “Ripiando el Perico . . . antes de que se vaya,” Hoy, July 13, 2005.
7. Pérez de Cuello, “Génesis del merengue,” 323.
8. See, for example, José del Castillo and Manuel A. García Arévalo, Antología del merengue (Santo Domingo: Banco Antillano, 1988), 21–23.
9. Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Música y baile en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Librería Hispaniola, 1971), 151.
10. Qtd. in Víctor Víctor, “Hablan los maestros,” El Sol, July 6, 1978.
11. Deborah Pacini Hernández, Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 251.
12. Ibid.
13. Qtd. in “Fradique Lizardo,” 50.
14. Veronica Doubleday, “Sounds of Power: An Overview of Musical Instruments and Gender,” Ethnomusicology Forum 17.1 (2008): 5.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Ibid., 14.
17. While típico musicians generally acknowledge this as the “ideal” case, they also note that it is not always true in reality, nor need it be so. Nonetheless, the fact that this description of the tambora’s dual nature is frequently printed and repeated by Dominican scholars and musicians demonstrates its continued relevance for many Dominicans, and thus the importance of including it in my analysis of Dominican gender and music.
18. His line, “Trópico mira tu chivo / después de muerto cantando” (Tropics, look at your goat / singing after death) is often quoted with reference to the tambora.
19. Sydney Hutchinson, “Merengue Típico in Transnational Dominican Communities: Gender, Geography, Migration, and Memory in a Traditional Music” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2008). In chapter 3 I describe in detail the unusual case of a professional female güira player in Brooklyn, New York. While she and the one other performing güirera I have seen are indeed exceptional cases in the típico world today, and she describes her role as one of challenging gendered divisions of musical labor, many Dominican women in fact play güira in family contexts.
20. Berto Reyes, personal interview, Corona, N.Y., September 18, 2002.
21. El Buty, personal interview, Santiago, D.R., 2004.
22. See Lise Waxer, “Las caleñas son como las flores: The Rise of All-Women Salsa Bands in Cali, Colombia,” Ethnomusicology 45.2 (2001): 228–59.
23. Sydney Hutchinson, “Becoming the Tíguera: The Female Accordionist in Dominican Merengue Típico,” the world of music 50.3 (2008): 37–56.
24. Peter Grant Simonson, “Masculinity and Femininity in the Dominican Republic: Historical Change and Contradiction in Notions of Self” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2004).
25. Hutchinson, “Merengue Típico,” 550–604.
26. Simonson, “Masculinity and Femininity.”
27. Rafael Chaljub Mejía, Antes de que te vayas . . . trayectoria del merengue folclórico (Santiago, D.R.: Grupo León Jimenes, 2002), 317.
28. Manuela Josefa Cabrera Taveras, “Fefita la Grande,” personal interview, Santiago, D.R., August 17, 2004.
29. Julia Álvarez, Something to Declare (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998), 156.
30. Doubleday, “Sounds of Power,” 4.
31. Ibid., 15–16.
32. Nancy López, “Transnational Changing Gender Roles: Second-Generation Dominicans in New York City,” in Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Ernesto Sagas and Sintia Molina (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 185.
33. Mark F. DeWitt, “The Diatonic Button Accordion in Ethnic Context: Idiom and Style in Cajun Dance Music,” Popular Music and Society 26.3 (2003): 305.
34. Ibid., 323.
35. Arsenio de La Rosa, personal interview, Bronx, N.Y., July 7, 2006.
36. DeWitt, “Diatonic Button Accordion,” 326.
37. See, for example, Miguel Tavárez qtd. in Gloria Moanack, “Los tambores son como hijos,” Listín Diario, June 3, 1981.
38. Lidia de La Rosa, personal interview, Brooklyn, N.Y., March 26, 2003.
39. Chaljub Mejía, Antes de que te vayas, 142.
40. Juan “Prieto” Rodríguez, personal interview, Santiago, D.R., July 10, 2004.
41. “Hacer más dibujos en la música.”
