THE TRADITIONAL BAMBUCO IN NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY COLOMBIAN COMPOSITION THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF MUSIC By Aileen Martina, B.M. Denton, Texas August, 1993 Martina, Aileen, The Traditional Bambuco in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Colombian Composition. Master of Music (Musicology), August, 1993, 140 pp, bibliography, 96 titles. Disputes concerning the origin of the term bambuco persist among scholars in Colombia, as well as controversies regarding the process of notating the traditional bambuco (3/4 or 6/8), when it penetrates the written tradition of popular music. Composers writing popular and salon bambucos increasingly perceived the advantage of notating it in 6/8. This study investigates the traditional bambuco and its assimilation into nineteenth and twentieth-century cultivated tradition, with emphasis on piano pieces by representative Colombian composers of art music. I include specific analyses of Cuatro preguntas (ca. 1890) by Pedro Morales Pino (1863-1926), Chirimia y bambuco (1930) by Antonio Maria Valencia (1902-1952), Bambuco en si menor by Adolf o Mejia (1905-1970), El bambuco by Manuel Maria Prraga (c. 1826-1895), and Trozos Nos. 6 and 158 (1927-1970) by Guillermo Uribe Holguin (1880-1971). TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. THE EMERGENCE OF MUSICAL NATIVISM IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY COLOMBIA................................ 1 II. THE TRADITIONAL BAMBUCO. Definition........................................ 19 Theories on the Origin of the term................22 Early performers of sung bambucos.................25 The texts.......................................... 29 Twentieth-century vocal performers of traditional bambucos............................................ 31 Rhythmic renditions............................... 33 Relationship between the bambuco and other traditional genres..................................50 III. REPRESENTATIVE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMPOSERS OF BAMBUCOS............................ 53 Manuel Maria Parraga (c.1826-1895)...............53 Guillermo Uribe Holguin (1880-1971)..............58 Antonio Maria Valencia (1902-1952)...............67 Adolfo Mejia (1905-1970)..........................75 IV. CONCLUSIONS....................................... 79 APPENDIX Appendix A. List of works: Manuel Maria Parraga..........................81 El bambuco by Parraga........................83 Guillermo Uribe Holguin...................... 93 Antonio Maria Valencia......................103 Appendix B BAMBUCO (1872), text by Rafael Pombo....... 105 EL BAMBUCO (1857), text by Rafael Pombo.... 111 LA BANDOLA (1853), text by Juan Francisco Ortiz...................116 Appendix C. Interviews: Leon Cardona--................................ 118 iii Luis Uribe Bueno .... ... .. ........ .... ........126 Mario G6rmez Vignes...........................131 BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................134 iv CHAPTER ONE THE EMERGENCE OF MUSICAL NATIVISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLOMBIA Historical Background By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Iberian colonies in the New World were politically divided into five viceroyalties, each of which was subdivided into audiencias. The five viceroyalties were New Spain, New Granada, Peru, La Plata and Brazil. Nueva Granada comprised present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. Some of the major centers of urban culture were the cities of Santa Marta (founded in 1525); Cartagena de Indias (1533), a city where many musicians settled during the colonial period; Cali (1536); Popaydn (1537); and Santafe de Bogota (1538), which became the capital of the Nuevo Reino de Granada.' In 1810, the viceroy of Nueva Granada was removed and the first- congress was established. Previous discontent among creoles led to what was called the revolt of the Comuneros (1781). At the end of the eighteenth century, 'Testimony of the rich cultural life of Santaf6 de Bogotd during the colonial period is the music archive of the Bogota Cathedral, as documented by Robert Stevenson in Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Organization of American States, 1970), 3-28. 1 2 scholars such as Antonio Narino (1764-1823) and Camilo Torres (1766-1816) brought to the colonies of Nueva Granada liberal ideas from Europe that stimulated the movement towards independence. Antonio Narino imported books on science and philosophy. In 1794 he translated and printed, for the first time in the New World, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen for secret circulation. For the sciences, the famous Expedicibn Botanica (1783) was one of the greatest contributions to human knowledge. 2 The Expedicidn was commissioned by the Spanish Crown to study plant life in northern South America, record observations on astronomy and geography, and draw maps of the regions. studied. Led for twenty years by the Spanish scientist Jose Celestino Mutis (1732-1808), the Expedicidn Botanica became a focus of scientific and liberal learning. Although independence was declared in 1810, wars of independence continued until 1824. In 1819, the Venezuelan Sim6n Bolivar (1783-1830) and the Colombian Francisco .de Paula Santander (1792-1840) arrived in Nueva Granada with an army. During the wars of independence, and even during the revolt of the Comuneros, waltzes, contradanzas, bambucos, minus, and other traditional dances were played at battles and festivities. At the battles of Boyac6 (1819), which sealed Colombia's independence, and Ayacucho (1824), several 2Thomas Blossom, Narino, Hero of Colombian Independence (Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1967), 1. 3 bands, such as the Vencedor or Voltigero (previously called Numancia), played bambucos, contradanzas, and other popular dances (see Example 1) .3 Example 1. La libertadora, contradanza (August 1819). Dedicated to Simon Bolivar OONTRADANZA. F4t Iol. *.p 2- JI J-aP AX- I (LtL.3~rI F f:: 3Jose Ignacio Perdomo Escobar, Historia de la musica en Colombia, 5th edition (Bogota: Plaza & Janes, Editores Colombia Ltda., 1980), 64. 4 Also dedicated to Sim6n Bolivar, the contradanza La vencedora was performed after the victory of August 7th, 1819 (Example 2). In 1829, when the Granaderos army left for Venezuela, a contradanza by Torcuato Ortega was played and many bambucos were inspired by the civil wars of the time. Example 2. La vencedora, one of the contradanzas played after the victory of Boyac .4 T T I 3ONTRAOANZA.~ F ( pl dE *0-i I .1 S IS t I P- 9141 k-mom l !~La a F MR -i I t..* I F 4La vencedora was arranged for band by Jose Rozo Contreras. See Andres Martinez Montoya, "Resefa hist6rica de la mdsica en Colombia, desde la 6poca colonial hasta la fundaci6n de la Academia Nacional de Mdsica," Anuario de la Academia Colombiana de Bellas Artes, I (Bogota, 1932), 65. 5 In 1828, the government split into two political parties, the centralists and the federalists. The former party, headed by Bolivar and Narino, believed in the unification of the area under a strong central government. The Federalists, led by Santander, held instead that the only solution was a separate Colombia under a democratic government along flexible federal lines. Though Bolivar realized his ambition, he also witnessed the disintegration of his Gran Colombia before his death in 1830, when Gran Colombia became the Republic of Nueva Granada comprising the provinces of Boyacd, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena, and Panama. Traditional Music in the Nineteenth Century The traditional musics of Latin America originated mainly fromthree cultural streams: the aboriginal Amerindian, the African American, and the Iberian American. Before the conquest, these cultural streams were part of separate and geographically distant cultures, had developed within different social environments, thereby revealing different degrees of similarity and complexity with respect to pitch, rhythm, timbre, form and function of music in society. 6 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, sW. O. Galbraith, Colombia: a General Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 11-12. 6Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology 1935-1975 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 184-185, quoted in Malena Kuss, Latin American 6 which marks the emergence of independent nations, these traditions had undergone centuries of mutual interaction and change, retaining residual strands of what once were self- contained musical systems. Thereafter styles became diversified when composers begun to incorporate elements from their various traditional repertories into salon pieces, chamber works and patriotic songs. 7 Several demographic streams from different regions of Spain brought their songs, dances, and instruments to the New World. Castilian music was one of the major influences in the Nuevo Reino de Granada. Many Spanish cancioneros were brought to the colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Texts to these songs included political, picaresque, religious, love, and pastoral content. Many salon dances characteristic of the time eventually reached all social classes. The ballo, a sixteenth and seventeenth-century dance, became the counterpart of today's bale del tres, found in the regions of Cundinamarca and Boyacd. The danza de la trenza, cintas, cordon or clizneja reflects the influence of the Spanish danza de los palillos. In the seventeenth century, the Spanish pavana (also called danza del pavo real