Smeets Haiti

Haiti has a rich blend of African and European music; Cuban and Dominican influences also blend to create Haiti's diverse music. The most notable styles are Kompa and méringue. Evolving in Haiti during the 1850s, the Haitian merengue (known as the mereng in Haitiean Creole and méringue in French) is regarded as the oldest surviving form of merengue performed today and is a national symbol. According to Jean Fouchard, mereng evolved from the fusion of slave music genres (such as the chica and calenda) with ballroom forms related to the French contredanse. Mereng's name, he says, derives from the mouringue music of the Bara, a Bantu people of Madagascar. That few Malagasies came to the Americas casts doubt on this etymology, but it is significant because it emphasizes what Fouchard (and most Haitians) consider the African-derived nature of their music and national identity. Dominican merengue, Jean Fouchard suggests, developed directly from Haitian mereng.

Dominicans are not inclined to highlight African and Haitian influences on their culture. As ethno-musicologist Martha Davis points out, many Dominican scholars "have, at the least, ignored African influence in Santo Domingo. At the worst, they have bent over backwards to convince themselves and their readers of the one hundred percent Hispanic content of their culture. This is not an uncommon Latin American reaction to the inferiority complex produced by centuries of Spanish colonial domination"

Bolero

Bolero is a genre of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance and song. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins. The term is also used for some art music. In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century.

Spain - The bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana. Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited with inventing the dance in 1780. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar.

In Cuba, the bolero is perhaps the first great Cuban musical and vocal synthesis to win universal recognition. In 2/4 time, this dance music spread to other countries, leaving behind what Ed Morales has called the "most popular lyric tradition in Latin America".

The Cuban bolero tradition originated in Santiago de Cuba in the last quarter of the 19th century;[8] it does not owe its origin to the Spanish music and song of the same name. In the 19th century there grew up in Santiago de Cuba a group of itinerant musicians who moved around earning their living by singing and playing the guitar.

Pepe Sanchez is known as the father of the trova style and the creator of the Cuban bolero. Untrained, but with remarkable natural talent, he composed numbers in his head and never wrote them down. As a result, most of these numbers are now lost, but two dozen or so survive because friends and disciples wrote them down. He was the model and teacher for the great trovadores who followed.

The Cuban bolero has traveled to Mexico and the rest of Latin America after its conception, where it became part of their repertoires. Some of the bolero's leading composers have come from nearby countries, most especially the prolific Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernández; another example is Mexico's Agustín Lara. Some Cuban composers of the bolero are listed under Trova.