Springfield Union -News 4/19/99

Puerto Rico's Cuatro
Enjoys a 'Golden Age'

The music of the Cuatro, the traditional rural Puerto Rican guitar, has found more stateside devotees and is the subject of a video documentary.

By WILLIAM FREEBAIRN, Staff writer

The Springfield-based group has just released a video in Spanish, entitled "Our Cuatro: Puerto Ricans and Their Stringed Instruments." The 85-minute video will premiere in Springfield this week. For many Puerto Ricans, the cuatro is a symbol of an earlier largely lost agricultural past. The instrument, smaller than a guitar, is closely linked with the lifestyle of the "jibaro," or hill-dwelling Puerto Rican peasant.

On the verge of extinction on the island in the early part of this century, the rustic country instrument with 10 strings has benefited from a series of revivals, the most recent of which is currently in full swing. "There are international superstars of the cuatro, there are cuatro schools, cuatro makers are working overtime," said Cumpiano. "I say we're living a golden age for the cuatro."

Juan Sotomayor, a project member living in East Brunswick, NJ, wanted to learn how to play the cuatro, but found there was a dearth of information about buying or studying the instrument. He met Cumpiano, and the two found they shared a concern for the fate of jibaro music and the instrument that made it. An initial plan to produce a book about the cuatro evolved into the idea of the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project and a video history of the instrument. When they set off to gather information about the cuatro with Connecticut video producer Wil Echevarría, a former Holyoke alderman, they found surprisingly little. Most music professors were uninterested in popular music, Cumpiano said. "Nobody bothered to treat Puerto Rican culture as an object of study or preservation," he said.

Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations helped fund the group's efforts to film cuatro players and makers throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. Their first trips focused on aging cuatro players with memories from the '30s, Echevarría said. The video project languished when money was not available to edit the final documentary. Sotomayor, a photographer for the New York Times, finally took out a second mortgage on his home to fund the completion of the video. "It was, obviously, a labor of love," Cumpiano said. Even knowledgeable people who watch the video are surprised to learn some of the cuatro's history, such as the existence of a colony of descendants of Puerto Ricans in Hawaii who no longer speak Spanish, but still play and listen to jibaro music. "We're preserving a piece of history that has been virtually ignored," Echevarría said. In addition to the video, project members have collected an archive of photographs, cuatromaking information and other documents about the instrument since 1992. The project, which is affiliated with the Springfield-based Spanish American Union, has sponsored live performances of the cuatro, including shows by a band playing 19th-century instruments. The first Puerto Rican Cuatro Festival was held in Holyoke in 1994, and subsequent festivals have been held in New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Chicago.

The first volume of the video history, which covers the cuatro from Columbus' arrival in Puerto Rico in 1493 to 1959, was released in January. Sales of the $30 tape are brisk, project members said. A premiere is planned April 22 at 5:30 p.im in the community room of the Edgewater Apartments on Lowell Street in Springfield. Purchase information is available at the group's Web site -www.pr-cuatro.org. The video tells the story, of the cuatro's evolution from a tiny guitar that hitched a ride on Spanish galleons to a rustic instrument that was the center of country dances and religious ceremonies. Later the cuatro moved into the l9th century salon, playing waltzes, polkas and mazurkas. By the 1930s, however, very few cuatro players were active. The music and the instrument were considered lowbrow, a reputation that dogged the cuatro for decades, Cumpiano said.

He credits one man with saving the cuatro from vanishing completely. Ladislao Martínez kept the music alive in the 30's by featuring it regularly on a radio program popular across the island. There were a number of revivals during this century, including one that corresponded to the agreement to allow islanders to elect their own governor. That revival, like many others, was short-lived. "The revival during the '50s was flattened by rock'n'roll; everybody was listening to the Beatles," Cumpiano said. A second volume of the video will tell the story of the cuatro since 1959, with project members seeking historical film and television footage.

José González, a top cuatro musician who lives in Amherst and teaches elementary school in Holyoke, will be featured in the second part. He started playing the cuatro during the 1970s. "We were rebels. We would study classical guitar at the conservatory during the day, and we'd sneak out to play the cuatro at night. Gonzalez recorded an album of classical music on the cuatro in 1982. "It blew a lot of people away, he laughed."His later work has mixed traditional cuatro music with classical compositions, jazz, a Beatles song, and even a piece that pays tribute to hard rock band Led Zeppelin. Although he enjoys other instruments, Gonzalez said he always returns to the cuatro, for both its powerful sound and emotional resonance. "It's a gorgeous instrument. You fall in love with it." He said he enjoys the fact that playing the cuatro brings Puerto Ricans together. "From the humblest village to the governor's mansion… it cuts across social and political lines."

The, cuatro revival of the 1990s has proved one of the most enduring, project members said. Cuatro classes in Puerto Rico are packed, and a group of cuatro artists sell tens of thousands of albums throughout the world. The cuatro has achieved such status that it is proudly displayed in many Puerto Rican homes, Cumpiano said. Cumpiano said he believes Puerto Ricans, like Scots with their bagpipes, cling to their native musical invention more tenaciously because they have been colonized for much of their history. Under first Spanish, then U.S. domination, Puerto Ricans invested the cuatro with nationalistic pride, he said. Sotomayor agreed. "All cultures have certain things that make them unique. It's very important to preserve our identity as a people... for us to learn and pass on these traditions, this music."         to top