Salsa & Merengue

From The Rough Guide to World Music, here is a two-paragraph description of salsa music:

Salsa is a world with vivid associations but no absolute definitions, a tag that encompasses a rainbow assortment of Latin rhythms and styles, taking on a different hue wherever you stand in the Spanish-speaking world.  In her own definition, the Queen of salsa, Afro-Cuban singer Celia Cruz, says: "Salsa is Cuban music with another name.  It's mambo, chachachá, rumba, son ... all the Cuban rhythms under one name."

Literally, the word salsa means "sauce" or "juice" and in Latin American music circles it takes its origin from a cry of appreciation for a particularly piquant or flashy solo.  It was first used to describe a style of music in the mid-1970s, when a group of New York-based Latin musicians overhauled the classic Cuban big-band arrangements popular since the mambo era of the 1940s and 50s.  They set about reworking them into something tougher and more appropriate to their modern, integrated, bicultural lifestyles.  The salsa tag was coined by a Venezuelan radio DJ, so myth has it, and it caught on.

Izzy Sanabria has a more detailed explanation of salsa music in What is Salsa? Where and How Did it Start?  

From the same Rough Guide volume, here is a description of merengue music:

Merengue is synonymous with the Dominican Republic.  In its traditional form, merengue is played on accordion, saxophone, box bass with metal plucked keys, a guayo (a metal scraper --- transformed from a kitchen implement), and a two-ended tambora drum, struck with hand and stick.  In the Dominican Republic, merengue experience something of a golden age during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who held power from the 1930s until his assassination in 1961.  Trujillo was from peasant roots and he promoted the music as symbol of national expression and the culture of the former underclass.  He constrained its traditional role as a music of social commentary but provided a forum for the musicians in the dancehalls.  Larger orchestras were developed, with piano and brass to cater for these new urban audiences.

Today, salsa and merengue are tremendously popular in many parts of the world (see, for example, Tropicalmix Sweden and Salsa Japan).  Like any living cultural form, the definitions and reception of salsa and merengue are evolving processes.  For some people, salsa and merengue fall into a more general class of music styles known as tropical music.  For other people, salsa and merengue could not be more different.  These issues cannot easily be solved in terms of either historical analyses or musical studies.

Instead, we will refer to some survey research on the actual reception of salsa and merengue.  The data here came from the TGI Puerto Rico Study.  This is a survey of 2,439 persons age 12 or older interviewed during the year 2002.  Puerto Rico is one of the capitals of salsa music and it is also in relative proximity to the Dominican Republic.  The distance is in fact closer on account of the huge diasporas of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York City, which is the center from which salsa and merengue were propagated across the globe.

Within the TGI Puerto Rico study, the survey respondents were asked about what types of music they frequently listened to on radio.  41% of the survey respondents said that they listened to salsa music frequently, and 39% of them said that they listened to merengue music frequently.  More interestingly, of the salsa listeners, 86% said that they listened to merengue frequently.  Of the merengue listeners, 91% said that they listen to salsa frequently.  There is a high degree of overlap between the two.

In the next chart, we show the incidences by age/sex groups.  As one would expect, these upbeat musical styles would be less popular among older people.  Between the sexes, there is a significant difference among teenagers, with males being much less likely to listen to salsa/merengue.

In the next chart, we show the incidences by household income and educational level.  By income, the incidence for salsa is quite flat but the incidence for merengue shows a dip for the upper income levels.  By education, both forms of music are higher within the middle education groups.

According to the survey data, in the case of Puerto Rico,there is a great deal of overlap in the audiences for salsa and merengue music on radio.  When probed in finer details, it would appear that the upper socio-economic level are slightly less likely to listen merengue music.

(posted by Roland Soong on 03/08/2003)