Glossary of Son Cubano

Son cubano is a partnered Cuban dance and the music genre that carries it — a tradition that weds singing, instruments, rhythm, and movement, and that may be performed by a couple or in a group.^[1] It took shape in the highlands of eastern Cuba in the late nineteenth century as a syncretic blend of cultural traditions, and is widely regarded as the soulful root of Cuban salsa, the foundational ancestor from which that style descends.^[1] On the floor it is a romantic, distinctively Cuban dance organized around a contrasting rhythmic pattern and aligned with the tumbao; in place of overt display it asks for musicality, subtle movement, and connection, and is marked by elegance, grace, subtlety, and smoothness.^[1]

This entry gathers the core vocabulary a reader meets when approaching the genre, pairing each term with a working definition.

Key terms

Son cubano. The head term names a single Cuban artistic expression in which dance and music are inseparable: a partnered style and a body of compositions gathered under one label, originating in Cuba.^[1] Used of the dance, it points to a structured sequence of steps set to the accompanying music; used of the music, it names the repertoire performed under that name — the choreographic and the sonic held together in one designation.^[1]

Montuno. Within the son cubano lexicon, montuno designates a guitar lick: the Afro-Cuban montunos are repeated melodic cells played in the genre's guitar idiom.^[2] As a recurring motif, the montuno is integral to the instrumental texture of a son, returning across a performance as a recognizable figure.^[2] See also Son clave and the montuno.

About this glossary

A glossary is an alphabetical list of the terms used in a particular field of knowledge, each paired with a definition; traditionally it appears at the end of a book to gather the words in that book that are newly introduced, uncommon, or specialized. The word descends from the Ancient Greek glossa — "tongue," "language," or "wording" — and such a reference is also called a vocabulary or a clavis. A core glossary is a plain explanatory dictionary whose definitions allow other concepts to be defined, aimed especially at newcomers to a language or field, while a bilingual glossary lists terms in one language and defines them in a second, or glosses them through synonyms and near-synonyms.

Glossaries are closely related to ontologies, and automated methods can convert a glossary into an ontology or a computational lexicon. Such methods build glossaries from text corpora and the Web by starting from a domain's terminology and gathering glosses, which can then be analyzed for hypernyms and other semantic relations.