The Music of the Netherlands Antilles - Jan Brokken Caribbean Studies Series

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      Latin America was floating on a cloud of prosperity. The small army of generals and potentates had not yet ransacked its riches; it exceeded North America and other continents in terms of affluence. It exported coffee, cacao, sugar, meat, wood, bananas, gold, precious metals, and (toward the end of the nineteenth century) rubber. The standard of living of the middle classes was one and a half to twice the size of Western Europe; there was an opera house in practically every city, and nearly every merchant’s home had a piano or even grand piano. The well-to-do, usually of Spanish descent, wanted to be entertained by infectious dance music. Notas y Letras supplied this demand, providing scores by Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Venezuelan, and Curaçaoan composers.

      This weekly publication was of enormous importance to the development of Curaçaoan music. Not only could composers publish their work, but they could also count on having a wide audience throughout Latin America. Among the fourteen people that made up its staff were the pioneers of Curaçaoan music, the composers Jan Gerard Palm, Chris Ulder, and Jules Blasini. Joseph Sickman Corsen was the editor-in-chief, a poet-musician who went down in history as having written the first poem in Papiamentu. Notas y Letras did indeed spark a cultural revival.

      The dances Corsen, Jan Gerard Palm, Ulder, and Blasini published in Notas y Letras were all influenced by Cuban music. In the first section, the chaîne, they remained Western European in terms of rhythm, somewhat sedate. Next came the transition to the melodious Iberian song theme in the second section. But—and this is the Dutch Antillean influence—in the third section they became much more rhythmic than the dances from Oriente; they were more hybrid, heterogeneous.

      Curaçao intensified the African elements of the danza. In the second and third sections after the seventh chord comes the cinquillo rhythm, in two-four time with alternating triplets and two eighth notes. In the second section the cinquillo is still played in a somewhat restrained manner, but in the third section the rhythm cuts loose. The beat alternates from 5/8 to 6/8 and becomes just as ambivalent as in the tambú, the drum music to which the African slaves on Curaçao danced.

      The waltz, too, was also rendered with more fiery rhythm, and not always in 3/4 but often in 6/8 time. That had to do with the temperament of the dancers, but also was due to the available space. The dance salons in the Caribbean country estates were quite small compared to European ballrooms; because they were smaller, steps had to be made more quickly. This explains the 6/8 beat.

      6

       As Melancholic as a Sunset

      One European composer was an instant hit when his work reached Oriente, Havana, Saint-Pierre, San Juan, and Willemstad. The primary reason was that he was able to elevate all sorts of banal dances into sublime forms of music.

      Chopin was best suited to the Caribbean temperament, with his mix of volcanic fire and cooling wistfulness, of refinement and rhythm, of melody and dance. To a Caribbean islander, music is only music if you can dance to it, as is certainly the case with waltzes and mazurkas. Consequently, Caribbean composers started composing waltzes and mazurkas in great numbers.

      Polish dances were used by European composers from Rameau to Mozart, long before Chopin was born. They even enchanted Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed a polonaise in his Leipzig period. Chopin heard the simple harmonies at their source: the peasant weddings and harvest feasts he attended on the country estates of his friends in the region around Warsaw. The polonaise and mazurka were excellent vehicles for him to use in his attempts to radically implement musical innovations without shedding traditional structures. Within the fixed confines of a dance form they offered him great stylistic freedom, and he was able to ingeniously exploit them to the fullest.

      The mazurkas became, as Benita Eisler wrote, “the laboratory of the alchemist.” They were a place where Chopin could experiment with expanding the traditional structure of the dance form, but where he could also play with fire. He kept erupting out of strict rhythmic confines, leaning more toward the volatile, the asymmetrical, to mutant forms and sharp dissonances, allowing them to accelerate at a feverish pitch before collapsing in the end. In the words of Benita Eisler, his mazurkas “complied with the ultimate demands of the romantic: ‘beauty that is touched by the exotic.’”

      Chopin already had something in him of the jazz musician who thrives on balancing at the cutting edge of every single measure. His contemporaries had a hard time accepting that aspect of his playing. Even Hector Berlioz, himself an innovator and upstart in many ways, complained in his autobiography like an old schoolmaster about some young whippersnapper: “If you ask me, Chopin has pushed rhythmic freedom far too far.”

      Chopin was just as quirkily adept at turning his hand to waltzes. During his stay in Vienna, he witnessed the rise of Johann Strauss Sr. and in a letter to his father he wrote: “They call a waltz a ‘work’ here.” He thought the Viennese waltz constituted bad taste, but he could not resist exploiting the stuffy one-two-three beat with as many melodic options as he could. In the final analysis, the polonaise was also rhythmically boring. Chopin had already begun experimenting with it at the age of eight and did not rest until he had composed his Grande Polonaise Brillante, a brilliant piece indeed, and just as impetuous as his Grande Valse Brillante.

      The fact that he stuck so stubbornly to the dance beat, while at the same time treating it with such freedom, is what made him appeal to Caribbean composers. But they also recognized other facets of themselves in him: the Pole who had fled to France and ended up in between two worlds. He may have been the son of a Frenchman, but he had not spoken much French in his childhood. His father was just as patriotic as a born and bred Pole; he owed his upbringing and his career to a Polish family and considered himself one of them. Without the care of the Weydlich family, Nicolas Chopin would have taken over his father’s vineyard and remained just as illiterate as all the other small winegrowers of the Lorraine.

      Owing to the cunning machinations of politics involving marriages between European royal families, the duchy of Lorraine was bequeathed to the former king of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century. A Polish count took up residence in a castle near the village of Marainville; his secretary Weydlich took a shine to the young Nicolas, saw to his education, and took him with him to Poland in 1787. Nicolas was sixteen and left to avoid military conscription. In Warsaw he extended his knowledge of French and Polish literature, became adept at mathematics and music (he was an excellent flautist), and took part in the first Polish popular uprising in 1794. The noble, upper-class families saw in him the perfect home tutor: French by birth, Polish by disposition. He took up a post with Count Skarbek and moved to Zelazowa Wola, married a Polish domestic servant girl, and became father to a son and three daughters, to whom he all gave Polish names. He taught the Skarbek children French, and spoke Polish at home. In Warsaw, too, where he had found a better position, he refused to speak a word of French, even though it was the lingua franca of the upper echelons of society. The fear of being mistaken for a foreigner hounded him even in his dreams and was no less acute than the other thing that made him shudder: the fear of being buried alive. When his son left the country, he wrote to him in Polish. The fact that the replies he received from Fryderyk soon came from Paris and were signed Frédéric did nothing to change this; father and son continued to correspond in Polish about money and career matters, ill health, and the wretched situation in which Poland found itself.

      Frédéric would never master French spelling and grammar. Even after having lived in Paris for several years he still spoke French with a strong accent. To make fun of his Slavic sibilants and rolling r’s, George Sand tauntingly called him Frik-Frik or Chip-Chip. She was crazy about his soft lisping voice; he was as ashamed of his pronunciation as he was with a crease in the trousers to his dinner jacket.

      In France, Chopin felt exiled from both his country and language, and that was no doubt the major reason why he sought refuge in Polish melodies and dance forms.

      A similar situation existed for composers from Curaçao. Most of them were of European descent, from France (Blasini), Sweden (Palm), England (Corsen), Germany (Ulder), or Holland (Boskaljon), but they no longer spoke the language of their forebears. At home or in public they spoke Papiamentu

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