Project researcher Juan Sotomayor interviews the late Joaquín Rivera, Jr. in 1994

Oral history interviews
The foundation of the Cuatro Project's knowledge base is its archive of over 125 audio and video field interviews. Begun in 1992, the interviews focused on key figures in the tradition identified as significant by their own peers. The list includes elder and retired cuatro, tiple and bordonúa players and makers; prominent contemporary and up-and-coming young players and makers; musicologists, cultural historians, collectors; and the descendants of deceased artists and folk craftsmen. The Project has also gathered important historical audio interviews of important figures of the past from old radio transcriptions and from private collections. The collection of important oral-history interviews is an on-going effort.

A nineteenth century Puerto Rican cuatro preserved in the United States. No such instruments of this age and condition exist in Puerto Rico.

Original field research
Over the last 15 years, the Cuatro Project has conducted original research, unprecedented in its field, of topics within Puerto Rican organology and cultural history. An early grant from the National Foundation for the Arts and National Foundation for the Humanities facilitated our first field trips and our training in research methods. The research has taken the Project to museum collections around the United States and Puerto Rico--from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Plantation Museum of Hawaii to the Museo de Humacao and the Casa Ulanga of Arecibo. Documents have been procured from the Archivo General de Indias (General Archive of the Indies) in Seville and the Musical Instrument Museum in Rome, to the Archivo Nacional de Puerto Rico. Research into early craft techniques were also conducted, such as inquiries into the properties of vegetable-based glues and medieval and Renaissance instrument-making techniques in Europe and the Americas. The Project has also acquired considerable knowledge of the early twentieth-century migrations of Puerto Rican musicians to New York and Hawaii. As a consequence of this effort, the Project developed a unique hypothesis on the origins and evolution of the Puerto Rican cuatro and other native stringed instruments, one which fundamentally challenges popular notions and the "official story."
 

An updated replica of a early-twentieth century bordonúa commissioned by the Cuatro Project

Recovered and re-created jíbaro stringed instruments
Over the years, the Cuatro Project has acquired an important collection of new and historic traditional string instruments, which include modern recreations of instruments forms that disappeared --made by expert luthiers from measurements taken from relics in museums and private collections. Among the specimens are a four-string cuatro antiguo, several rare bordonúas, several new and old cuatros, requintos, and guitars; several tiple dolientes and a tiple con macho; and a recently-acquired authentic specimen of the fabled violarina. A number of recreated instruments are about to be acquired, such as an eight-string cuatro yaucono, a 19th century six-string bordonúa and a cuatro de higüera.

Feature-length video documentaries: Nuestro Cuatro: Volume One
Partially funded by a 1996 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the first of a series of Cuatro Project video documentaries was first produced in 1997 and remastered with new material in 2007 with a grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The 85-minute work was edited and directed by the award-winning independent documentary producer Wilfredo Echevarria.
       Nuestro Cuatro: The Puerto Ricans and Their Stringed Instruments Volume One summarized many of the findings of the Cuatro Project, spanning 400 years of cultural history from the Discovery up to 1959. It documents in stories, music and images the origins of the Jíbaro population on the Island and their overarching importance to the creation of a distinctive and truly national culture. It details one at a time the multitude of authoctonous Puerto Rican stringed instruments, of which the modern cuatro is virtually the sole survivor; it introduces the audience to the variety of native musical genres that once could be heard around the Puerto Rican countryside; and details the recurring historic links that were forged between Puerto Rican national aspirations and its musical instruments, from late nineteenth-century Spanish colonial times up to the creation of the modern Puerto Rican Commonwealth in the early 1950s.
In Spanish with available English subtitles

Feature-length video documentaries: Nuestro Cuatro: Volumen Twp
The second and final volume of this two-part documentary, the 110-minute Nuestro Cuatro: A Historic Concert, Volume Two, was completed in 2006 with a grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It picks up on the cuatro's cultural history where Volume One left off: with the start of the great Puerto Rican Diaspora into the U.S. northeast during the fifties. It was a time when Puerto Rican musical traditions were avidly preserved by expatriates in New York City, just as their loss was lamented back on the Island. It follows the fading of jíbaro musical venues during the rise of Rock and Roll and Salsa during the 70s and then the music's resurgence on the Island as a symbol of protest during the Vietnam War, propelled by the Nueva Trova movement. Then the vanishing of the jíbaro class and the onslaught of mass culture buried the native musical traditions once more. Later, the renewed and perennial controversy over the political status of the Island yet once again propelled a great resurgence of affection for the fading traditions--presaging a new Golden Age of the cuatro, one which lasts to the present day. The work includes video visits with the legendary masters Nieves Quintero, Nicanor Zayas, Yomo Toro, Tuto Feliciano, Roque Navarro, and Maso Rivera--the last three filmed shortly before they died. The work concludes with a visit to the workshops of two prominent cuatro-makers and a tribute to the remarkable talent of the rising new generations of young cuatro players.
In Spanish with available English subtitles

Short features: La Décima Borinqueña (out of print)
The décima jibara, or jíbaro folk song can be traced to the 16th century décima Espinela, wherein Spanish medieval and Moresque roots can also be found. The jíbaro troubadour faces an exacting challenge: He or she sings and improvises four stanzas of ten eight-syllable lines, which must have consonant rhyme in a strict pattern: abbaaccddc. Demands for specific metric, rhyme and improvisation are further complicated by the "pie forzado" requisite that forces troubadours to compose décimas around end lines presented to them by the public, by a host or by another competing troubadour.
     This 25-minute documentary, funded by the Massachusetts State Legislature portrays four renowned Puerto Rican décima troubadours as they come together to revive the lost Mesa Redonda or Round Table tradition and to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote. While they sing other troubadour recount the history and explain the art of improvising décimas. Edited and directed by Myriam Fuentes.
Twenty five minutes in duration; in Spanish with available English subtitles.

Short Features: Un Canto en Otra Montaña (out of print)
This short feature, titled A Song from Another Mountain was filmed by the Cuatro Project while it was in Hawaii in 1996 gathering research about the jíbaro music which is played in modern-day Hawaii. Only a few minutes of the footage was included in the larger Nuestro Cuatro, Volume One documentary. This work includes in edited form the "rest of the story." The musicians are the descendants of the Puerto Rican migrants that were taken to work in the Hawaiian Island sugar cane fields by the US military authorities in 1900. A short overview of the fascinating history of the Puerto Ricans in Hawaii is presented by Dr. Norma Carr, a history professor of Puerto Rican descent teaching at the University of Hawaii. Turn of the century film footage of the Hawaiian cane fields, musical and cultural artifacts from the Bishop Museum and scenes of the original plantation housing are seen. A gathering of the most prominent Hawaiian- Puerto Rican cuatro- and slack-key guitar players and décima singers tell the story of their estrangement from and longing for their ancestral home, and their urgent passion to learn, play and preserve the seises and aguinaldos that were passed down to them orally by the descendants of the original 19th century migrant settlers. A new, re-edited version is in the works.

Short features: Construyendo un Cuatro (out of print)
A video visit to two prominent Puerto Rican cuatro-makers, Jaime Alicea and Vicente Valentín, Making Cuatros shows the two men at work in their workshops as they describe their techniques and express their passionate commitment to the preservation and perpetuation of their traditions. Vicente Valentín is shown at his rustic sawmill cutting logs into the solid slabs of guaraguao and caoba wood that he is later shown hollowing out in enterizo fashion--following a method repeated by folk-instrument makers since the Middle Ages. Jaime Alicea also talks about the old ways of making cuatros--how when rural electrification left scraps of copper wire littering the countryside, they used it as raw material to replace the ancient tied gut frets with copper wire.  He also tells how he relates to his customers, revealing how he selects his wood to suit the player and how he charges for his instruments on a sliding scale, depending on the musician's ability to pay. In Spanish with English subtitles,

A new, re-edited version is in the works.

Miguel González, the "Pico de Oro de Springfield" and his group, Asi Canta la Montaña

Video-magazine series: Cuatro TeeVee
The first installment of a ongoing series of projected half-hour short documentaries presented in video-magazine format, was funded in 2008 by the  Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The first issue in the series follows the interesting life and career of Miguel Gonzalez, a traditional jíbaro décima singer who was the past Grand Marshall of the New York City Puerto Rican Day Parade. González is transplanted from his ancestral home of Cidra, Puerto Rico, to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he assiduously practices the old ways and performs his songs on stages across the State. He talks about developing his skills on his native island and how we was awarded the honorary title of Pico de Oro (Golden Beak) by the great elder Puerto Rican Pico de Oro, Luis Miranda. At home he grows native Puerto Rican trees, herbs and vegetables which he somehow has taught to survive the snowy New England winters...just like he has.
     The second page of the video magazine is a visit to a Puerto Rican traditional-instrument-maker in Massachusetts, William Cumpiano, who has set out to preserve the native tiple instrument by training young teachers-to-be from Chicago in his shop, teachers which later became his assistants when he taught tiple-making to residents of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago during the yearly Puerto Rican Parade Festival.
Twenty-minute running time. In English.

The late father of the great Puerto Rican cuatrista Yomo Toro, from Yomo's own personal collection

Recovered photographs
The Cuatro Project has archived and digitized hundreds of old photos loaned from the personal collections of many important traditional artists we've interviewed since 1992. These include childhood snapshots, studio portraits and on-stage photos; and old photos of musical groups. Additionally, the Project has attained permission to show and archive photographs culled from public collections, and even un-requested family snapshots sent to us from relatives of deceased artists, wishing to preserve the public memory of their once-famed grandfather or uncle.

The Great One himself, the legendary Yomo Toro, photographed by Juan Sotomayor

  The Juan Sotomayor collection
Juan Sotomayor, co-founder of the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project, is a retired newspaper photographer--the first Puerto Rican photographer on staff with the New York Times--indeed the first on staff with any major newspaper in New York City. He worked the city beat with the Times since 1969 until his retirement almost thirty years later. His collection of his original, predominantly black-and-white photographs of all the greatest Puerto Rican cuatro players and makers, and of other important figures in the Puerto Rican cultural panorama, numbers in the thousands--a treasury of remarkable images which form part of the Cuatro Project photo archives.

The Antonio & David Morales vintage recording collection

Amazingly, some of the earliest recordings ever made were of jíbaro music (J. Alden Mason, 1915). Over several decades, Cuatro Project member, David Morales and his father, Antonio Morales, amassed-- and in recent years made available to the Cuatro Project--what is probably one of the largest and most important collections of vintage recordings of Puerto Rican jíbaro music in the world. The Morales collection, totaling in the thousands, includes recordings that date back to before the First World War. On some, the actual sounds of the vanished cuatro antiguo and cuatro de ocho can distinctly be heard. The collection includes the first recordings of Ramito and Ladislao Martínez and hundreds of recordings on long-since disappeared labels, recordings made during the twenties, thirties and forties. David Morales has been furnishing the Cuatro Project's archives with digitized copies of the old wax, shellac and vinyl, many of which can be heard on the pages of this website. The Cuatro Project recently collaborated with Shanachie Records in the production of The Best of Los Jardineros: Classic Recordings by Puerto Rico's Legendary String Band Ensemble 1929-1932.

The late, great Tuto Feliciano let us archive his private home recordings of much of his memorized repertory. You can hear most of it here. Just before he died, Project members David Morales and William Cumpiano traveled repeatedly from Massachusetts to his home in Paramus, New Jersey, for a series of interviews in which he recapped his entire life and career.

Collection of recovered private home audio & video recordings
Some of the greatest cuatro players in history never or rarely recorded on commercial labels. Yet some rare, private home recordings exist of these artists, made informally on recording equipment in their own homes or in friend's homes. Also, a number of cuatristas who indeed, were commercially successful also produced informal home tapings, sometimes of their entire repertory--in an effort to put down the many dozens of pieces learned by ear and preserved only by memory. We have heard the quip, "I've forgotten more than you'll ever know." Well, because the music existed largely in memory (most traditional cuatro musicians never learned to read music) as soon as the technology had progressed where these artists could record themselves at home, many did. No doubt most of these old reel-to-reel and cassette tapes have been lost to history, but a good number have been found and digitized into our archives, including home-made recordings of great artists such as Ladislao Martínez, Tuto Feliciano, Arturito Avilés, Israel Berrios, Nicanor Zayas, Sarrial Archilla, Leocadio Vizcarrondo and others.

Original Audio CD Recordings
In 2008 the Cuatro Project released an important compact-disk recording that brought together some of the Island's best traditional musicians, troubadours and cultural historians in the production of La Décima Espinela: La Trova de Puerto Rico. The CD includes a bilingual 37-page booklet which sets out the history and origins of the décima espinela in Spain and Latin America, and follows the unique way which it evolved over the centuries--to the present day--in Puerto Rico. Examples of the different ways the décima is performed are sung by Luz Celenia Tirado, Isidro Fernández, and Luis Morales Ramos; backed by the great Nieves Quintero on cuatro, Ramón Vázquez on guitar, and percussionists. The educational booklet included as liner notes were created by the noted cultural historian Myriam Fuentes. Produced by David Morales.

Original audio CD recordings: Tallando Aguinaldos: the decimillas of Luis Raúl Nieves Román (Pichilo)

En 2009 the folklorist and Cuatro Project member David Morales produced, and the celebrated cuatro masterModesto Nieves directed the recording of the beautiful decimillas [the traditional décima poetry in a compact form] of the famous wooden-saint carver Pichilo Nieves, performed as aguinaldos. The troubadours are Mónika Nieves and Carlitos Torres who sing ten aguinaldos backed by the same cuatrista Modesto Nieves, the guitarist Carlos Martínez and the two children of  Modesto, Mónika and Cristian on güiro and bongó respectively.

Project co-founder William Cumpiano points out the way cuatros are carved out of a solid block of wood to curious children at a presentation in the lobby of Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Educational displays at public cultural presentations
Over the last fifteen years, all the Cuatro Project members have freely  volunteered their time to appear at innumerable public events, large and small, in large cities and small towns in the United States and Puerto Rico--standing for hours on end, behind tables covered with photographs, instrument specimens, and video monitors--sharing the many fruits of the Project's findings. These presentations have spanned the gamut from displays at the Lowell National Historical Park, to tiny one-on-one presentations in Moca, Puerto Rico and Holyoke, Massachusetts. Since 2005, the Cuatro Project has participated in Boston's premiere Puerto Rican cultural evening, the annual Jolgorio de Massachusetts. Most recently, In July, 2008 we returned from Chicago to display the art of tiple-making at the Old Town School of Folk Music during their yearly Folk and Roots Festival.

Festivals produced by--or in partnership with--the Cuatro Project
The Cuatro Project has produced a number of important festivals and traditional arts events around the United States an Puerto Rico, wholly or in partnership with established cultural groups and institutions. Typically the festivals include live musical stage presentations with important traditional artists, educational and artisanal displays and booths offering traditional foods and refreshments.   Among these, the more significant are are cuatro and décima festivals at the Children's Museum in Holyoke; several major cuatro festivals at Trinity College and Rutgers University; The First Cuatro Festival of Chicago (first produced in July, 1999, with the Chicago Arts Alliance, now in it's tenth year); The First Cuatro Festival of California (now in its third year); a Puerto Rican Museum and Culture Day at the Smithsonian (November, 1998, in partnership with the National Museum of American History, in commemoration of the opening of the permanent exhibit of the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Historical and Cultural Artifacts); A contest for instrument makers of early Puerto Rican stringed instruments at the Casa Paoli in Ponce, Puerto Rico (October, 1999; in partnership with Centro de Investigaciones Folklóricas de Puerto Rico).

The Cuatro Project web page, www.cuatro-pr.org
We have been building since 1995 a bilingual web-page of remarkable scope: one that summarizes all the Project findings on not only the traditions that surround the family of Puerto Rican stringed instruments, but also the corpus of jíbaro music. Averaging 30,000+ visits a month, the page has become a premiere site on the internet, consistenly ranking between first and fifth on Google searches that specify cuatro or Puerto Rican cuatro and first in ranking under the search, Puerto Rican decima. Currently the page consists of 330 interlinked pages indexing the great  Puerto Rican players, singers and makers of the past and present, the different regional stringed instruments of the Island, the many musical genres with hundreds of audio samples; plus a listing of current events in the traditional music sphere and resources for further study.

The Puerto Rican Wooden Saints web page, www.santosdepr.org
After the Cuatro Project become aware of the cultural significance of an ancient and perishable Puerto Rican crafts tradition--folkloric religious iconography-- it became committed to reveal its beautiful charms to to other Puerto Ricans and also to the world. To further this end, several years ago the Project co-sponsored and mounted a significant and comprehensive bilingual internet site, Santos de Palo de Puerto Rico, [Puerto Rico's Wooden Saints]. The Santos de Palo site, funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was created with content from the most prominent researchers, historians, collector and saint-carvers in the field, including Doreen M. Colón, Irene Curbelo, David Morales, Myriam Fuentes, Nitza Mediavilla de Toste, Francisco Toste Santana and the carvers Luis Nieves Román and Carlos Santiago.

Limited edition publication of "The Musical-Artisanal Traditions of the Stringed Instruments of Puerto Rico: as described in the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project interviews"

Oral history interview transcriptions
The Project has been transcribing its many audio interviews into text as an ongoing task, having already transcribed over 400,000 words into a un-circulated 379-page printed document (available only to other researchers), parts of which have been included within the content of this Cuatro Project website. The transcribed portion is estimated to amount to about a half of the total transcribable content of the interviews. The interviews include lengthy talks with cultural historians and researchers such as Ricardo Alegria, Walter Murray Chiesa, Hector Vega Druet, and Pedro Malavet Vega; musicians such as the late masters Maso Rivera, Roque Navarro, Sarrail Archilla, and Tuto Feliciano; and current masters such as Edwin Colon Zayas, Pedrito Guzman, Nieves Quintero, Yomo Toro, Neri Orta, Nicanor Zayas, Apolo Ocasio, and Iluminado Davila; with now-deceased master builders Efrain Ronda, Tito Baez, Eugenio Mendez and Jose Reyes; and current masters builders such as Jaime Alicea, Cristobal Santiago, Julio Negron, Miguel Acevedo Flores and Rafael Aviles Vazquez; and recovered interviews with Heriberto Torres, Ladislao Martinez and master guirero Marcos Diaz Bauza.

The Project posters
The Project has taken advantage of its rich graphic resources to produce a number of decorative and informative posters, which include dramatic blow-ups of striking instrument and player photographs; posters advertising public cultural events sponsored or co-sponsored by the Project; and large-format educational panels shown during public events or hung in schools and museums.

 

Making Cuatros

PR music timeline

What is a Cuatro?

Cuatro origins

Project co-founder William Cumpiano joined his two talents as draftsman and instrument-maker to create the first measured full-scale plan drawing of the Puerto Rican cuatro, documenting in full detail the form and complete measurements of a cuatro made originally by one the greatest cuatro maker who ever lived, the late Eugenio Méndez. The plan is available on request to the Project for a small fee.

Making tiples in the inner-city
The tiple is small, ancient Puerto Rican folk instrument that all but vanished early in the twentieth cenury. Among other rescue groups, The Cuatro Project is trying to promote a resurgence of the instrument into modern times. In 2007 and 2008, the Cuatro Project supplied the materials and training for a tiple-making workshop, given free of charge to a small group of adolescent high-school drop outs in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The workshop facilities were supplied by YouthBuild Holyoke, a GED equivalency and skills training program in Holyoke's inner city. The ten-day session taught the elements of precision woodworking, hand varnishing and instrument stringing--not to speak of traditional-music appreciation-- to seven very engrossed young men and women. We are hoping to continue these workshops on a twice-yearly basis.

Tiple-making workshops in Chicago
Since 2006, the Cuatro Project has been co-partnering with the San Lucas United Church of Christ in Chicago in a yearly five-day tiple-making workshop, offered to mixed group of nine to eleven Chicagoans, men and women, young and old, free of  charge. The instructor for all these sessions has been master luthier William Cumpiano, co-founder of the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project. The series has been held under a 60-foot tent laden with work benches, hand tools, clamps and several small stationery power tools--held during Chicago's Annual Puerto Rican Week in Humboldt Park, sponsored by the Chicago Park District and several public and private community groups,individuals and agencies. Another such workshop is planned for next year!

The definitive textbook of the cuatro, Buscando Nuestro Cuatro
The culmination of the Cuatro Project's mission is the production of the definitive bilingual textbook on the cuatro --it's origins, evolution, music, craft and historic-cultural significance. The book, titled Searching for our Cuatro: following the trail of the iconic stringed instrumentos of Puerto Rico, largely details our search for the lost history of the cuatro--the story of the fifteen years of detective-work conducted by the Project's co-founder and head researcher, Juan Sotomayor--and his findings, concluding with a controversial new theory on the instruments' origins. What first set out as a quest to discover the history of the solitary cuatro eventually revealed the existence of a 400-year old bouquet of distinctive folk instruments which once existed on the Island, of which the modern cuatro is virtually the only survivor. The search spans the centuries, from the earliest Persian stringed instruments dated 1000 AD, to the present day.
The book presently is in final manuscript form, and is currently being peer reviewed. Partial funding has been already secured for publishing costs; matching funds are still being sought.

Radio programming
The Cuatro Project enjoys access to huge audio resources, given it's broad collection of spoken word interviews, vintage recordings, recent live event audio, and a wide understanding of the historical and cultural context of the music. How better to be able to produce fascinating bilingual educational radio, on the model of PRI Public Radio's Georges Collinet's AfroPop Worldwide?
 

The Cuatro Project Photo Book
The Cuatro Project owns hundreds of striking images of people active within the tradition: makers and players, well-known and anonymous alike. They are shown in ways that radiate their pride and ownership of their traditions and a sense of transcendence derived from expressing themselves in them. We are hoping to be able to publish a compendium of the best photographs from our collection.
 
At left we see Efraín Ronda (1898-2003), prominent New York cuatro maker and player who was photographed when he was 94 years old by the Cuatro Project's Juan Sotomayor .
 

A new audio and video DVD: Women and the Cuatro
For centuries, the cuatro was strictly a man's world. Now step aside, the women are coming! Fueling the cuatro's new Golden Age are countless young women entering the field. The Cuatro Project is marking the ascendancy of women in today's cuatro world, with a companion audio and video DVD recording featuring the new women superstars, among them stage and recording artists Emma Colón Zayas and Maribel Delgado, and as well the great upcoming crop of new feminine cuatristas. Partial funding for this project has been offered. Matching funds are being sought.

Ethnic instrumentmaking schools
The Cuatro Project has the knowledge and resources to offer supplies and training for civic groups and educational institutions who wish to offer vocational curricula to prospective instructors of students interested in Latin-American string-instrument technology, including construction, repair and restoration of Caribbean, Central American and South American traditional stringed instruments. Syllabi, physical plant and tool requirements, and course outlines exist for some instruments. Others are being drawn up.

Video-magazine series: Cuatro TeeVee
After completing its first pilot video-magazine issue, (see above) the Cuatro Project wishes to pursue the production of a series of 10-15 minute short subjects covering the myriad ways the traditional Puerto Rican musical arts are pursued on the Island and around the United States, plus themes of musical history and craft. These would be made available to public broadcasting and schools as they are created on a regular basis.