Danza

The tradition & historical record

Danza is a musical genre that originated in Ponce, a city in southern Puerto Rico. It is a popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century ballroom dance genre slightly similar to the waltz. Both the danza and its cousin the contradanza are sequence dances, performed to a pattern, usually of squares, to music that was instrumental. Neither the contradanza nor the danza were sung genres; this is a contrast to, for example, the habanera, which was a sung genre. There is some dispute as to whether the danza was in any sense a different dance from the contradanza, or whether it was just a simplification of the name. Through the first part of the 19th century the dance and its music became steadily more creolized. The music and the dance is creolized because composers were consciously trying to integrate African and European ideas because many of the people themselves were creoles, that is, born in the Caribbean; accepting their islands as their true and only homeland. Some well-known composers of danzas are Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, "The Father of Puerto Rican Danza", and Juan Morel Campos, considered by many to have raised the genre to its highest level. Others are Cuban Ignacio Cervantes, and Curaçaoan Jan Gerard Palm.

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Danza”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

Danza is musical genre that originated in Ponce, Puerto Rico, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹