Danzón: A Glossary

In the vocabulary of Cuban popular music, danzón names two things at once: a musical genre and the partnered ballroom dance performed to it, the two senses inseparable in everyday usage.^[1] Histories that trace the form treat it as the central station on a long line of descent, fixing its prehistory in the European quadrille and its posterity in the cha-cha-chá that issued from it, so that a single word anchors a whole sequence of related ballroom and popular styles.^[2]

Antecedents

Several earlier terms fill out that genealogy. The contradanza, the Cuban form of the European contradance, belongs to the nineteenth-century repertoire from which the danzón grew, and the question of which instruments carried that music—the violin, piano, güiro and tiple prominent in the island's nineteenth-century ensembles—remains a defining strand of the genre's instrumental history.^[3] The danzón has further been studied not as an enclosed Cuban possession but as a participant in a wider exchange, the subject of circum-Caribbean dialogues in music and dance that carried the form well beyond the island.^[4]

The charanga

The ensemble vocabulary of the danzón turns on the charanga. The French charanga, or charanga francesa, is the small dance orchestra historians invoke when asking how the danzón actually sounded.^[5] Where the son took shape through a succession of small string-and-percussion groups—from duos and trios to the sextets and septets that came to define it—the charanga stands as a distinct ensemble family attached to the danzón.^[5]

Descendants

A further cluster of terms names the genre's musical offspring. Musicological study places the son and the danzón together at the source of three later forms—the danzón-mambo, the mambo, and the cha-cha-chá—so that each label marks a stage in a continuous unfolding from the danzón.^[6] That unfolding was transnational rather than narrowly Havanan: the Havana–New York axis has been credited with a central part in reconfiguring the dance bands whose shifting formations produced these styles between the 1930s and the 1950s.^[7]

The wider repertoire

Histories of Cuban music routinely situate the danzón among the island's other foundational styles—the son, the rumba, the bolero and the trova—and it survives, too, as one term among many in the working book of Cuban dance orchestras. A durable touring ensemble such as the Sonora Matancera performed the danzón alongside the son cubano and son montuno, the bolero, the chachachá, the mambo, the guajira and the rumba—an inventory that places the genre within the broad field of Cuban danceable music rather than in isolation.^[8]

The danzón plaza

Finally, the genre's public geography supplies a term of its own: the danzón plaza, the open square given over to the dance. A photographic feature entitled "La Plaza del Danzón" documents such a square, recording the danzón as a living site of social practice rather than a museum form.^[9]