Rumba Cubana Glossary

Rumba cubana is a secular Cuban tradition in which percussion, song, and dance are inseparable—a blend of rhythm, dance, and poetry whose performances characteristically open with a chant.^[1] It is a festive combination of music and dances that draws principally on African culture, with Antillean and Spanish flamenco elements,^[1] and a music genre that originated in Cuba;^[1] its roots reach back to African antecedents including the Abakuá societies and the yuka drumming tradition.^[3] The tradition is conventionally divided into three principal styles—the slow, sensual yambú danced by a couple, the guaguancó, and the fast columbia in which a soloist improvises against the drum^[3]—and its songs reached international audiences through vocalists such as Celia Cruz.^[2] The entries below gloss the styles, movement vocabulary, lineage, and institutions a newcomer to rumba will encounter.

Styles of the rumba complex

The rumba is not one dance but a family of related forms, conventionally grouped as a triad whose members differ sharply in tempo, mood, and partnering.

• Yambú — The slow, smooth rumba of seduction and grace, traditionally danced by a man and a woman together.^[3] It is the gentlest of the three styles, standing opposite the showy columbia.
• Guaguancó — Named alongside yambú and columbia as one of the three principal styles of the rumba complex.^[3]
• Columbia — The fast, virtuosic style in which a soloist improvises showy footwork against the drum; unlike the partnered yambú, it is traditionally danced alone rather than with a partner.^[3]

Movement, rhythm, and aesthetics

• Cuban Motion — The signature hip articulation of rumba, generated by weight transfer and knee flexion.^[3] It is the technical core of the body's expression, and a cue dancers carry into related Cuban genres.
• Sandunga — A Cuban aesthetic concept tied to the micrometric displacement of a measure's internal subdivisions^[3]—the minute timing inflection prized within the music.
• Basic / body movement — Terms drawn from salsa pedagogy and useful across Cuban dancing: the basic is the fundamental step, while body movement denotes the hip and upper-body expression layered atop the footwork.^[3] Compare Cuban Motion, above, the specific hip articulation of rumba.

Roots, prototype, and kindred genres

• Prototipo de la rumba (rumba prototype) — The generative formal type from which the guaracha cubana and other related Cuban genres are held to descend;^[1] some scholars posit it as the source from which the Cuban guaracha derives.^[1]
• Binarización (binarization) — The historical shift by which ternary-rhythm song-dances moved toward binary rhythmic organization, a change connected to the emergence of the guaracha cubana.^[1]
• Guaracha — A genre so close to rumba that the two names have at times been applied to the same genre, both deriving from the rumba prototype.^[1] (See also Celia Cruz, "La Guarachera de Cuba," below.)
• Rumbitas campesinas (peasant rumbitas) — A manifestation of the rumba prototype and the primeval seedbed from which the son genre developed.^[1]
• Rumba de cajón — In the reading of Rodríguez Ruidíaz, not the "legitimate rumba" but another manifestation of the rumba prototype.^[1]
• Son, danzón, comparsas y congas, ritual music — Neighboring traditions with which musicological surveys of Cuban music group the rumba;^[1] of these, the comparsas and congas are the genre names associated with carnival celebration.^[1] (See also rumbitas campesinas, named as a seed of the son.)
• Salsa — Per Gómez Sotolongo, the marketed category arose from New York's appropriation of Cuban genres.^[1]
• Havana — The capital that stood at the centre of the Caribbean music industry, the base from which Cuban popular music attained market hegemony.^[1]

Institutions and performers

• Cabildos — Guilds and carnival clubs that served as the institutional contexts for African-descended musical practice in colonial Cuba.^[3]
• Celia Cruz ("La Guarachera de Cuba") — A vocalist who performed rumba as part of her repertoire;^[2] she earned the nickname "La Guarachera de Cuba" for her mastery of the guaracha style in 1950s Cuba and built an international reputation spanning rumba, son, afro, and bolero.^[2]

On the glossary form

A glossary is an alphabetical list of the terms used in a particular domain of knowledge, each paired with a definition; it is also called a vocabulary or, in the Latin tradition, a clavis. The word itself derives from the Ancient Greek glossa, meaning language, speech, or wording. Traditionally a glossary appears at the end of a book and includes only those terms found within it that are newly introduced, uncommon, or specialized—a convention most associated with non-fiction, though novels sometimes append one for unfamiliar terms.

A core glossary is a simple explanatory dictionary that enables the definition of other concepts and is oriented toward newcomers to a language or field; it gathers a small working vocabulary, definitions for the important or frequently encountered concepts, and the idioms or metaphors useful within a culture. A bilingual glossary—the kind this Spanish-to-English reference approaches—lists terms in one language defined in a second, or glossed by synonyms or near-synonyms in another.

In its general sense the glossary is conceptually related to the notion of an ontology. Computational methods can extract glossaries automatically from corpora or the Web, beginning with a domain's terminology and drawing one or more glosses per term; the resulting glosses can then be analyzed to recover hypernyms and other lexical and semantic relations, transforming a glossary into an ontology or computational lexicon. The development of glossaries in the classical languages was described by J. H. Hessels in the "Gloss, Glossary" entry of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.