In his guest presentation on the musical traditions found in Latin America, Dr. Munarriz prefaced his discussion of the musical forms themselves with a few remarks problematizing the labels we use for “Latin America”. He started by examining each half of the term. First, “Latin” is an inaccurate descriptor for the region in question, which is characterized by a greater degree of linguistic diversity than almost anywhere else on earth. In Brazil alone 228 languages are spoken, of which 217 are indigenous. Second, “America” takes its name from Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and not anything actually descriptive of the continent itself. He goes on to hint at the extreme musical diversity of this region, and questions if any one term could capture even a fraction of it. I am extremely sympathetic to this argument. It has never made sense to me to exclude French from the list of “Latin” languages in the context of the Americas. Even on its own racist and colonialist terms, “Latin America” makes less sense than “Iberian America”. That’s not to say that “Iberian America” is remotely accurate, given that it erases every trace of pre-Columbian history. The simple fact is that white supremacy has lumped a kaleidoscope of different cultures and traditions into one unit in a way that it did not do for Europe.

This racist amalgamation extends downwards to the way we talk about “Latin American music.” Again, given that Latin America is such a mosaic, it makes little sense to speak of its musical traditions so monolithically. While many of them may share common characteristics (though many really don’t), it is incoherent to speak of them as if they constituted a genre. Not only do musical styles vary wildly from region to region, so do performance practices of the elements certain genres have in common. Dr. Munarriz insists instead on the term “Latin American musics” to break up the illusory coherence of that category. Another, more neutral term might be the “musical traditions of Central and South America.”

Latin American Music refers to music that comes from any majority Spanish-speaking or Portuguese-speaking region south of the Rio Grande river. Latin Music refers primarily to music made by people of Latin American origin living in the United States or Canada.

The heart of Dr. Munarriz’s lecture was about the Ostinato, a key characteristic of many Latin American musics. An ostinato, derived from the Italian word for stubborn, is a rhythmic pattern that repeats over the entire course of the piece. Not only does it flavour the piece, it acts as the structural scaffolding of the music. This is unique to African music and was taken to Latin America by African slaves. It functions as an anchor that structures the whole composition. They come in a number of short pre-sets, such as the Habanera, Clave, or Tresillo, although performance practice can dramatically re-interpret its simplest form. In many Latin American musics, the rhythm is polymetrical in that the ostinato and other rhythms do not necessarily fit into a common meter. That means that there is not necessarily only one way to count the piece.

Some of these rhythms, notably the Habanera, are so ubiquitous worldwide that Historian Robert Farris Thompson has characterized them as “percussive Esperanto.” Nevertheless, it must be said that they have had their most profound effect in Latin America. Caribbean creole populations began applying the Habanera pattern to the French-Spanish Contre-Dance/Contradanza, which was brought by Spanish administrators. Varieties include the Cuban Contradanza, the Tumba Francesa, a kind of Haitian Contre-Dance, and the Barbadian Quadrille. Payata, Milonga, and Tango all feature the Habanera pattern, although often they will merge the syncopated up-beat with the following beat. Yet another example of performance practice varying between regions. The difference between Tango and creole music from Belize is great enough to give the lie to any easy categorization of “Latin American music,” even if they both might make use of the same ostinato structure.