THE PUERTO RICAN CUATRO
The term cuatro is used to describe several different South American and Caribbean small guitar-type instruments. Like the South American tiple, the Andean charango, Panama’s mejoranera (also mejorana) and other similar Latin American plucked lutes, the various kinds of cuatros are descended from small Iberian guitar-family instruments, such as the Spanish tiple (also timple and guitarillo) and the Portuguese cavaquinho. In Venezuela, Columbia, Surinam, Mexico, Jamaica and Trinidad, the cuatro is a 4-string instrument, akin to largest member of the ukulele family, the baritone ukulele.
Puerto Rico's national instrument, the 10-string Cuatro Puertorriqueño, started life as a small 4-string guitar-like instrument sometime in the 17th century. The highly distinctive body shape of the original instrument – a circular lower half capped with an upside-down pyramid for the upper portion – earned it the nickname "el cuatro arana" (the spider cuatro) because it looked like a spider climbing up its web.
From the early colonial days to the 1950s, el cuatro antiguo (the old cuatro) had four strings made of gut and was played throughout the Puetro Rican countryside to accompany religious and secular celebrations. In the 1920s, a more sophisticated version of the cuatro arana appeared in the southern region of Puerto Rico, the 8-string "Southern" cuatro (also referred to as cuatro de dos codos or cuatro de dos puntos). For next thirty years, this instrument was mainly played in ensembles performing Puerto Rico's classical music.
However, by the 1940s, the older forms of the cuatro were overshadowed by the 10-string cuatro aviolinado (the violin-shaped cuatro), which has ten metal strings arrayed in five courses, tuned in fourths: BEADG. It first appeared in Puetro Rico's costal towns in the early 1900s and was popularized in the mid-1930s by the renowned cuatrista Ladislao Martinez on Puerto Rico's first radio music show, Industrias Nativas. Today, the cuatro aviolinado is Puerto Rico's quintessential string instrument and is found in all of the Island's various music forms from rural jíbaro to urban danza, plena and bomba.
-- Shlomo Pestcoe
For more information, please visit: EL PROYECTO DEL CUATRO PUERTORRIQUEÑO
Illustration Credits:
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Gillygaloo's lead singer Mamie Minch with a Cuatro Puertorriqueño made by Cristobal Santiago of Carolina, Puerto Rico (Photo by W. Weinstein)
