Danzón: A Glossary

In the lexicon of Cuban popular music the term danzón designates at once a musical genre and a partnered social dance, the two senses inseparable in ordinary usage.^[1] Reference accounts that trace the form treat it as the central station along a longer line of descent, locating 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 sequence of related ballroom and popular styles.^[2]

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

The ensemble vocabulary of the danzón turns on the charanga. The French charanga, or charanga francesa, is the small dance orchestra to which historians appeal in asking how the danzón actually sounded.^[5] Where the son developed 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 separate ensemble family attached to the danzón.^[5]

A further cluster of terms names the genre's musical descendants. 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, for 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 danzón likewise survives as one term among many in the working repertoire 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 situates the genre within the broad field of Cuban danceable music rather than in isolation.^[8]

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]