While touring across Latin America in 1934 the great Cuban Tres player Isaac Oviedo brought his Tres to Puerto Rico, and showed "Piliche," the guitarist of the group Trío Lirico, the rudiments of how to play it. After Oviedo returned to Cuba, Piliche described the Tres he saw to the instrument maker Medina of Santurce and asked him to make him one. That is how, we believe, the tradition of the Puerto Rican Tres began. To learn more about this fascinating tradition, visit our page, The Cuban-Puerto Rican Tres

The Taíno jabao o babao
Interest has recently surged in a supposed Puerto Rican stringed instrument, one made by the Island's indigenous Taíno population. The only thing to have apparently survived is it's name, "jabao taíno". We have inquired at some length about it during our research, but the search has not borne much fruit. Some musicologists say the instrument is only a legend, because no traces of the instrument survive. Read an article about the search for the Jabao Taíno here. 

Note: Cuban tres players often call themselves treseros; while Puerto Ricans playing the tres often call themselves tresistas. We will follow that custom.

LEARN MORE ABOUT:
THE CUBAN TRES
THE PUERTO RICAN TRES
HOW THEY'RE CONNECTED

 A small offering:

  Here is a wonderful introduction to the Tres: the great singer and arranger for the Los Guaracheros del Oriente and for Arsenio Rodríguez, Israel Berrios, sings for us a medley of his arrangements of the standards Temporal and Qué Bonita Bandera, with Charlie Rodríguez on the Tres.

A gift from the Cuatro Project: Downnload a booklet of tres chords that we have prepared in Acrobat pdf format.

Here we offer a translation of Carmen María Sáenz Coopat's research on the Tres for  Center for Research and Promotion of Cuban Music [Centro de Investigación y desarrolo de la Música Cubana]

Antecedents
In the early sixteenth century, the Catholic kings of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castile, commanded that string instruments be sent in large numbers to their "new" world, along with the Spanish colonists, as tools of religious observation and persuasion. Sailors, besides, must have brought their own tiny guitarillos and tiples, instruments popular among the lower-born in Spain at the time, as valued companions during the long ocean passages.
     The high-born brought their own distinctive instruments: once on land, the conquistadores and missionaries could listen to the familiar melodies of the stately vihuela and think of their homes far away.
     Later, regional guitar-like instruments sprang up as mixed-race Creoles, native-born whites and African slaves applied their resourcefulness and simple tools to local materials, creating workable replicas of what must have been expensive and scarce originals.

None of these instruments follow a rational artistic pattern in their manner of construction; their low material value results from their being made by the jíbaros themselves, whom most of the time must rely on barely appropriate tools while making them. It would be interesting to point out the process of bifurcation that the previously-mentioned national stringed instruments have followed: within them, the way guitars and bandurrias are made persists, but the lack of tools has influenced their not being able to be made as perfectly as the models that the Spaniards brought from the Metropolis.
                                                                                                                                             Francisco Del Valle Atiles, 1887

In this way, unique native variants of gut and wire string instruments called tiple, bandolina, tres, and cuatro would endure in the Americas long after the Spanish retired back to Europe at the end of the last century.

Discography
If you'd like to hear the tres, this discography of selected recordings will help:

• SEXTETO BORINQUEN: El Auténtico, Vol. 1 (Ansonia 1312)
• ISAAC OVIEDO: Routes of Rhythm, Vol.3 (Rounder 5055)
• LUIS LIJA ORTIZ Y SU SEXTETO CARAVAN: No Me Persigas (Ansonia 1601)
• JOHNNY PACHECO: El Maestro (Fania 485)
• ARSENIO RODRIGUEZ Y SU CONJUNTO: Montuneando 1946-50 (Tumbao 31)
• ADALBERTO ALVAREZ Y SU SON: Ay, Que Tu Quieres, Que Te Den? (DM 2002)
• MARIO HERNANDEZ Y SU SEXTETO BORINQUEN: Para Ti Son Mis Canciones (Artilleria CDC-332)

  Thanks to Eric Guerini, Ramón M. Gómez-Organización Sambumbia,  Juan Sotomayor and the Acoustic Guitar Magazine article: CARIBBEAN MEMORIES by William R. Cumpiano-- for their assitance to this page.

Above we see the replica of a "true" bordonúa, commissioned by the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project--a luthier's impression of what it may have looked and sounded like--based on the accounts of 19th century observers and iconographers. It was said to have 6 single strings, appeared like an elongated guitar and had a solemn, low-pitched voice [voz grave]. This matches the meaning of the root of the word bordonúa, (bordón) which means "a large bell or thick, low-pitched string."                                                                                         Photo by William Cumpiano

The only contemporary illustration that exists of the 19th century bordonúa shows one hidden in a 1894 painting by the great Puerto Rican oil painter Francisco Oller called "El Velorio"

Francisco Oller’s 1893 painting, El Velorio, may be the most recent document of a nineteenth century bordonúa to be had, if it is true (as the musical historian Pedro Malavet Vega concludes) that the instrument seen at the left of the cuatro player in the painting is indeed a bordonúa.[i] What can be seen in the painting of the instrument in question is the upper part of its sound box, a short neck with six frets and a nut. On its headpiece we can see two string pegs on one side, with a third covered by the players shirt; and three pegs on the other. So it can be deduced that as such, this 1893 bordonúa was made for six single strings, precisely as Del Valle Atiles described it in his 1887 writings. The neck of this instrument coincides with the description that the nonagenarian Efraín Ronda (1899-1994) gave us in 1992: “it had a short little neck. Not more than six inches long.”[ii]

So the written record confirms that in the nineteenth century, the bordonúa was a large guitar with six single strings. The only twentieth-century testimony we have about the nineteenth century bordonúa came from ethnomusicologist Emmanuel Dufrasne, who told us that in the southern city of Ponce, his relatives made six-string bordonúas that fit the description of “guitars of large dimensions,” that is to say, guitars that were larger than common guitars:

Yes, the bordonúa was also made of a single piece of wood, for that is the way that my relatives described it. The González’ of Ponce described the bordonúa and made the bordonúa from a single piece of wood also. They would carve the bordonúa’s shape—which was a very large guitar, larger than the usual one—they would hollow it out and put six single courses on it, that is, 6 single strings, just like the current guitar.[iii]

The scarcity of available data does not allow us to specify how this bordonúa was played. Notwithstanding, some information exists that permits us to make some deductions. In his commentary on the “jíbaro waltz” Fernando Callejo reveals that the old bordonúa was used as an instrument that provided the accompaniment.

The jíbaro waltz has a form different from that of the common waltz. The melodic phrase is short and has few variants; and the harmonic accompaniment is exclusively based on dominant and subdominant tonic chords, called natural chords. Frequently the accompanying bass note, on the first beat of each measure was omitted and was substituted by a knock with the hand on the sound box of the bordonúa.[iv]

We can infer from this that the bordonúa ordinarily provided the “accompanying bass notes,” but in this instance instead of plucking the low note on the waltz’s first beat, the bordonúa “frequently” produced that familiar note with knock on its sound box.

________________________________________________________

[i] Malavet Vega, Pedro. 1992. Historia de la canción popular en Puerto Rico (1493-1898). [History of the Popular Song in Puerto Rico],
Ponce, Puerto Rico: P. Malavet Vega.

[ii] Ronda, Efraín. 1992. Interview recorded in1992 with John Sotomayor. San Juan.

[iii] Interview with professor Emanuel Dufrasne at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras PR, in 1998

[iv]Callejo Ferrer, Fernando. 1915. Música y músicos portorriqueños [Porto (sic) Rican Music and Musicians]. San Juan. Cantero, Fndez. & Co. p. 47. Reprinted with the corrected title Música y músicos puertorriqueños. 1971. Ed. Amaury Veray. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Editorial Coquí

______________________________________________________________

At the end of the 16th century Cervantes wrote that during his age the Spanish countryside teemed with guitars "of every possible size." One of them was a large guitar, call bajo de la uña or "thumbnail bass." 150 years later a guitar appears in Spain that was 7 inches deep and 4 feet long, described as "a deep voiced guitar." We believe these may have been the original instrument that inspired the creation of the large native guitars that appeared in numerous Spanish colonies of our Hemisphere during the following centuries. Many of these are still actively in use today, instruments such as the Argentinian, Chilean and Mexican guitarrones.
    The earliest reference we have found that establishes the existance of a large native guitar-like instrument appears in the book, El Gíbaro, written by Manuel Alonso and published in 1849. Alonso describes the bordonúa as a "guitar of large dimensions, made roughly, usually without any tools other than a knife or a small machete," which played the "deep voice" of the jíbaro string ensemble. In 1887, another observer, the chronicler Francisco del Valle Atiles noted that it had six thick strings.
     It's important not to mistake an instrument "with a deep voice" for a "bass" instrument. The bordonúa was never a "bass." That is it never was made large enough to produce the orchestral bass range, but rather, as it was described, it was a guitar somewhat larger than the usual one--with a playing range that was low relative to the range of the cuatro and the tiple when it was played. For example, the bombardino (a small tuba) played a familiar solo part in high-society dance orchestras of the 19th century. In the countryside, however, the lowly jíbaros loved to play the same dance music on their humble stringed instruments. 19th century chroniclers note that they formed string ensembles (which the Cuatro Project has called "the old jíbaro orchestra") made up of a bordonúa playing the bombardino part, the cuatro playing melody,  the tiple playing the chordal accompaniment and the güiro scratch gourd playing  rhythym.  That is why it was sometimes called "the jibaro's guitar"--because it was shaped like a guitar and it played a lower range in accompaniment with the cuatro. Indeed, early in the twentieth century it largely disappeared from the Island musical scene, along with the tiple, the two being replaced in string ensembles by the Spanish guitar.

EVIDENCE OF THE 19th BORDONÚA

The earliest record in existence regarding the three autochthonous Puerto Rican instruments that still survive in our times is found in Mis Memorias [My Memories] by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882). We can infer from the context that Tapia is referring to instruments he saw around 1835:

… singing songs to the sound of an orchestra of rustic or rural instruments as tiples, bordonúas, cuatros, güiros, maracas.

Another relevant document was written in 1849. Written within several years of Tapia´s narrative, it is a narrative of country customs by Manuel Alonso titled, El Gíbaro. Alonso describes the bordonúa as “a guitar of large dimensions.” Soon after, in 1851, the newspaper El Ponceño mentions the composition of a salon-music danza titled “La Bordonúa.” The next relevant document comes from the newspaperman Ramón Marín, who witnessed a troubadour contest on December 11, 1875 and described the contrasting sounds of the instruments:

…of the high-tuned tiple, the sonorous cuatro, the deep bordonúa and the cheerful güiro.

The following year we meet up with Tapia again in his novel, Cofresí (1876):

…all to the sounds of the tiple that by now was strumming and plucking up in the heights just as the bordonúa accompanied it down in the depths…

In 1887 in a prize-winning essay on the “intellectual and moral” condition of the Puerto Rican rural peasants, sponsored by the Puerto Rican Athenaeum, Dr. Francisco del Valle Atiles described the bordonúa as having six strings. The naturalist author Manuel Zeno Gandía, writing in his 1894 novel, La Charca, confirmed Atiles’ observations with a mention of a "large guitar"--presumably a bordonúa--included in an array of native instruments:

There were three instruments, a large guitar, the cuatro, a smaller tiple and a güiro.

Fernando Callejo Ferrer (1862-1926), in his description of the music and the musicians of his times, tells us of the “coquettish bordonúa” and commented on a certain “jíbaro Calderín” from Caguas who “concertized on the tiple and bordonúa” during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Prof. Orlando Laureano is a distinguished tiplista who has elevated the small instrument from its rustic origins to a high level within modern music. The photograph show a tiple made by Aurelio Cruz Pagán of Morovis

The tiple is the most ancient member of the family of Puerto Rican native stringed instruments. Tiples were used predominantly in the Island's most isolated communities, usually to accompany sacred songs. It is derived from the tiny Spanish guitarrillos of the the 16th century and of the similarly-derived timples of the Canary Islands, brought to the Island during early colonial times. During the centuries different tiples have evolved, some with three, four and five strings, tuned in numerous ways and configurations according to the custom of each region. During the end of the 19th century jíbaros combined the tiple with a cuatro and a bordonúa in an ensemble called orquesta jíbara antigua to play their own adaptations of European salon music, such as the waltz, the minuet, the mazurka, that they overheard emanating from fancy salons of the day. The tiple would have completely disappeared during the second half of the twentieth century had it not been for the efforts of the Institute of Puerto Rican culture and concerned players and researchers such as Alexis Morales Cales, José Reyes Zamora, Vicente Valentín, Juan "Kacho" Montalvo, Orlando Laureano and the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project, among others who have vigorously strived to rescue the instrument from oblivion.

What does a Puerto Rican tiple sound like?

Sacred music played on a tiple and guitar, recorded by Juan "Kacho" Montalvo for his CD, "Adoradores del Fuego"

Maso Rivera plays a tiple on the guaracha "Llevame Contigo." The great Ernestina Reyes, "La Calandria" sings.

The Cuatro Project recently came upon a tiple requinto belonging to the family of the late tiplista  Celestino Santiago (Don Lute) of Coamo--its original owner--probably made between 1910 and 1925. He played single-note melodies on it with a pick. From the notches in the nut and the number of pegs, the tiple appeared to be disposed for three double or single courses. The approximate measurements are:

Lower bout, 7’’

Upper bout, 4.75’’

Waist,  3’

Soundbox Depth, 2"

Soundbox length, 16’’

The distinguished master builder Jaime Alicea of Vega baja
Photo by Juan Sotomayor

The popular account that seeks to explain the Puerto Rican cuatro's evolution goes something like this: the cuatro first appeared  as a rustic four-stringed instrument--hence it's name-- and as the centuries passed, Puerto Ricans progressively added more strings to it, culminating ultimately in the modern ten-stringed instrument. The explanation appears to have a neat logic to it, but we have discovered that this is a myth.

Our research during the last decade has led us to a different conclusion: that it is more precise to summarize the cuatro's history as the evolution of two distinctive, unique instruments which coexisted during the first half of the last century, each with its own form tradition and native geography. We could name these two instrument traditions the early cuatro and the modern cuatro. This new assesment of the cuatro's history is based on findings indicating that within each tradition, the two cuatros differed dramatically in the number of their

strings, their tuning, their size, their shape, their musical function, their musical and geographic range and their ancestry. The differences are such that it is difficult to explain how the two instruments came to share the same name for so long, but folk memory on the Island has fused two traditions into an apparently logical explanation.

It is this confusion that gives rise to the frequently-asked question: "How come it's called a cuatro if it has ten strings?" As we shall see, the name "cuatro" originally described a four-string Puerto Rican instrument born perhaps three hundred years ago which gradually disapperead around the middle of the 20th century. Its name, however, was  transferred in popular usage onto a new ten-stringed instrument, developed in the late 19th century in northern towns and cities of the Island. The new instrument, carrying the old name, passed into the 20th century, and largely due to the skill of a very famous cuatro player, Ladislao Martínez (Maestro Ladí) and his ubiquitous presence over early Puerto Rican radio, became our cherished modern cuatro--the Island's "national instrument."  Here are the details of our findings:

Read about other interesting cuatro variants

The ancient tradition:
The four-string Cuatro
 

The great four-and-eight string cuatrista Tuto Feliciano as a child playing his first "cuatro antiguo" According to Feliciano, who backed the famed singer Ramito, the instrument was still being played in 1950 by himself and others exclusively around the Yauco region He complained of its musical and technical limitations and admired the versatility of the modern ten-string form, although he didn't cross over to the ten-string form until Ramito himself demanded it of him.
                           Photo from the personal collection of Tuto Feliciano

The early tradition of the cuatro begins with the four-single-string cuatro, the oldest form of the instrument. The instrument's four strings--usually made of dried strips of small-animal guts (or strips of rawhide) were usually tuned,

A  E  a  d

from low to high, separated by intervals of 5-4-4. The earliest way to play the instrument was to only fret the top three strings, E a d, relegating the fourth, the lowest pitch string, as a "pedal," that is, constantly playing in the background unchanged in pitch, like a drone. Its was a modal technique that dated to the 13th century. It is believed that the cuatro can be traced back in this configuration to the earliest days of the Spanish colonial times.

This is an early cuatro that was recreated by the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project by Vicente Valentín, made as a copy of a 19th century relic.  Today this form, which hails back to the early days of the formation of the jíbaro people, is largely unknown and forgotten. It was tuned and strung in ways that were similar to the plucked instruments of 16th century Spain.

Over the centuries rustic cuatros tuned this way with a keyhole shape were usually seen in the towns of the Island, brightening up both religious ceremonies and secular events. The instrument most often heard in the hills and remote outskirts was the tiny, simple tiple. In time, the cuatro's presence spread to all corners of the Island.

  The four-string cuatro--its strings made of gut--often played the part of the bombardin (a small German tuba--also called Euphonium--which regularly soloed portions of the Danza in interludes called the bombardino) in big-city Puerto Rican Salon orchestras of the 19th century, and at the same time was played by jibaros in the Island's most isolated communities.  Above we see the cuatrista of the Salon orchestra directed by the composer Jose Ignacio Quintón (1881-1925), playing a cuatro that we today call the "early cuatro."  The photo was taken in 1909.

Later, when the cuatro was included into the  orchestras playing in the upscale city salons, the more skilled cuatro players developed techniques that included all four strings. But they nonetheless had to overcome the considerable technical limitations of the ancient tuning scheme, which created formidable difficulties in it's execution. These undoubtedly led to the instrument's ultimate demise in the 20th century, despite efforts to modernize its stringing as we will see below.

 The Eight-String Cuatro:
the early cuatro's
attempt at modernity

A eight-string cuatro made by Juan Olivera in Yauco during the 40s, property of the family of the late, great eight-string cuatro player Norberto Cales                                         Photo by Juan Sotomayor

Listen to an eight-string cuatro in a late-twenties recording of the guaracha Adios Mojica by Fausto Delgado and the Grupo Piñita

For a relatively short period in cuatro history, a small crop of extraordinarily beautiful instruments emerged in the southern coast of Puerto Rico, in the region including the cities of Yauco and Ponce during the decades of 1920-1940. Notably, they were played by skilled masters such as Heriberto Torres, Efraín Ronda, Norberto Cales and Tuto Feliciano. Although recordings exist of the eight-string cuatro playing popular music, the instrument was most commonly heard in performance of what has been called Puerto Rican classical music: mazurcas, danzas, valses, fox-trots, polcas, pasillos and other otros salon-music genres. Most of the eight-string cuatros made on the Island were product of great yaucano makers Efraín Ronda y Juan Olivera.
     This new instrument form retained precisely the same string scale and tuning as its four-string cuatro antiguo forebear. However, it differed significantly by its use of steel strings configured in four double-string courses.

A A   EE    aa    dd

...from lowest to highest pitch. The eight-string cuatro also differed from the early cuatro in its shape, which we believe was inspired by the influx of North American mandolins that were currently in vogue across the Americas. Indeed its stringing was precisely the same as the mandolin: four doubled metal string courses tuned in unison. But just like its predecessor the early four-string cuatro, its ancient tuning scheme made the eight-string difficult to play by any but the most skilled players. So the instrument disappeared together with the obsolete four-string cuatro by the early 1950s.

Gourd cuatro

String instrument soundboxes made from dried gourds proliferated during remote times in cultures of ancient West African civilizations. As a consequence, it is reasonable to infer that the Puerto Rican tradition of making stringed instruments using the dried out shell of the fruit of the gourd bush is derived from the cultural memories of enslaved West Africans that were brought to the Island before the twentieth century. Although this configuration is rare nowadays, cuatristas still play it and even the late, great Maso Rivera recorded an entire record album on a gourd cuatro.

Gourd Cuatro in the Teodoro Vidal collection at the Smithsonian Intitution in Washington DC

Maso Rivera dedicated an entire recording of tunes
played on a gourd cuatro

Gourd cuatro made by
Graciela Quiñones-Rodriguez of Hartford, Connecticut

The soft-waisted "Southern" Cuatro

A small number of extremely elegant eight and ten string cuatros were made during a brief period (between the twenties and forties, we believe) by Yauco artisan Juan Olivera and others, that were based on the wedge-semicircular form but varied distinctively by have a soft waist, rather than the sharp waist of its early cuatro forebears. The Cuatro Project recently acquired a relic of a "southern cuatro" recently to add to its instrument collection, as seen below:

We have an article about another rare Southern cuatro we found here.

The Cuatro "families:" Cuatro Soprano, Tenor, Alto, and Bass

The concept of a cuatro "family" was the brainchild of a Maestro Jorge Rubiano during the early years of the Instituto de Cultura (1950s). He proposed that the folk instrument could be raised in stature to the level of symphonic performance by the creation of a cuatro "orchestra" that could play pieces of the classical repertory. Rubiano had already established in Puerto Rico a well-known and highly-regarded mandolin orchestra during the 30s and 40s made up of mandolin, mandola, mandocello and mando-bass, each playing the role of violin, viola, cello and bass. He interested the Instituto de Cultura to commission first Antonio Rodriguez Navarro, and then after he went blind, Cristobal Santiago, to make a symphonic family of varying sized cuatros to fill the individual roles of an orchestral string section. I believe they actually played several concerts at the Instituto, but as too often happens with the Instituto, the project died when the next election changed the political party in power.

The "Seis"
The Seis is simply the name the Cuatro Project gives the cuatros that it has seen, strung with six pairs of strings instead of five (12 total). They are not traditional instruments, strictly speaking, but rather contemporary variations of the instrument by makers asked to furnish a cuatro in this special way. Some musicians have asked for them because they want to broaden the instrument's range higher or lower. Others were guitarists who simply wanted to tune it and play it like a guitar without having to learn the cuatro's distinctive tuning. The sixth course is either an additional treble course or an additional course in the bass, accoding to the preference of the purchaser.

The "Cuatro Sonero"

The great prize-winning Puerto Rican cuatro master (master teacher, master player and master builder) Cristóbal Santiago includes among his many creations an interesting variant of the familiar cuatro that carries five triple-string courses rather than the usual five double-string courses. This adds up to fifteen strings, which as you can imagine, presents the player with unique challenges. In the video at right Santiago displays his skill on the difficult instrument as well as his mastery of the form.

                              Photo: Juan Sotomayor

If you ask most any Puerto Rican to name all the traditional stringed instruments of the Island, the most probable response would be, "you mean, there's more than one?"

Every Puerto Rican knows well the national instrument, the cuatro. But, indeed, are there are more?

Truly, there are--and there were--more. The Cuatro Project is in the forefront of a widely-based effort to discover and promote a wonderful bouquet of native stringed instruments that once flowered all around the Island, but which did not survive into the modern era.

Now, after almost a century of neglect, Puerto Ricans are starting to recognize and appreciate these rare gems anew. But this didn't happen by magic--rather it was a result of the efforts of a small band of artisans, musicians and researchers dedicated to rediscover, reveal and promote this "lost history."

Here we present the product of our efforts: the flowers of this Puerto Rican bouquet.

Learn more about Puerto Rico's:

CUATROS
TIPLES
BORDONÚAS
OTHER NATIVE INSTRUMENTS