Decima y Rumba

Philip 'Felipe" asmanick

Decima

and

Rumba:

Iberian Formalism in theHeart of Afro-Cuban Song

Introduction

The term

decima

refers to a Spanish poeticform consisting of one or more stanzas each with ten octosyllabic lines.Most decimas are composed in the style known as

espinela,

after the Span-ish poet, novelist, and musician Vicente Espinel(1544-1644), who in 1591published ten-line verses of octosyllabic lines with a rhyme scheme ofabbaaccddc. If virtually unknown to English speakers (Manuel 1991,87), asubstantial body of research and anthologies in Spanish celebrates thedecima from a range of cultural, historical, and musical perspectives. Butinvestigators have paid very little attention to the phenomenon of decimawithin the rumba folkloric style, and there are variations of decima withinthe rumba which appear to be undocumented. This study addresses thisgap in current scholarship.The following original decima illustrates the rhyme scheme and servesto introduce our topic. An English-language companion piece appears atright. The rhyming syllables are emphasized by type style. Rules of Span-ish syllabification account for lines that are apparently of seven (line two)or nine (line nine) syllables. Rhyme occurs according to Afro-Cuban pro-nunciation, which, for example, ignores the word-final "s" and the word-final and intervocalic"d" and interchanges word-final "r" and "1".

1.

Hace tiempo que quisi~a

a For a long time I've been wanting

2.

una dicima cantar

b a fine decima to sing

3.

en la rumba

y

gomr

bin the rumba and to bring

4,

su cadencia placent~a

a its cadence so pure and haunting

5.

que proviene de la &

a its structure, complex and daunting

6.

de Calderon de la Bma

cfrom Iberia's golden age

7.

y

que luego se embma

c

on the farm and on the stage8.

a1

gran mundo pan-hispano

dwherever Spanish is spoken

Latin American Music Review,

Volume 18, Number

2,

Fall/Winter 1997C1997 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin,

TX

78713-7819

Decima

and

Rumba

:

253

9.

donde se hable el castellano

ddecima still reigns unbroken

10.

la espinela es monma

c

on the tongue and on the page.

Coro: Que la vida es sueno,

Chorus: Life is but a dream,

y

10s suenos suen6s son

and dreams are dreams

Decima's

Iberian Genesis

The espinela form is a logical development of a thousand years of Spanishliterary trends. Octosyllabic lines are common in proverbs and the refrainsof songs and are documented in poems recorded as early as the sixth cen-tury (Navarro 1986, 71).

Mozarabe

(Ibero-Muslim) poets used them in theeleventh and twelth centuries, and Iberian Jews and Muslims prized theart of intricate improvised verse (Gerber 1992: 62-67). By the 1400s, songsof eight-syllable lines were widespread among the troubadours of Castille.These medieval poems were often arranged in four-line

romance

style (witha rhyme pattern of abcb) or

redondillas

(abba).The decima can be under-stood as two redondillas joined by a two-line "bridge" that repeats the lastrhyme of the first redondilla and the first rhyme of the second (abba-a/a-abba).By the end of the sixteenth century the decima and the

quintilla

werepopular forms in song, lyric poetry, and the theater. The quintilla is a five-line, two-rhyme verse that can be understood as a half-decima; or to lookat it another way, the decima can be understood as a pair of quintillas intwo variations: abbaa and aabba. When a decima is portrayed this way, itbecomes a palindrome; that is, the pattern is identical read left to right orright to left. This phenomenon is also called "the decima mirror" (Paredes1993, 247). Furthermore, a vertical line of symmetry can be drawn be-tween the two patterns.

palindrome

I

palindromeline

of

symmetry

4

b

Part of the special appeal of the dkcima is precisely this curious andambiguous set of patterns, mathematically stimulating and easily enjoyed.

254

:

Phil$ ?Fel$en Pasmanick

Its inherently rhythmic pattern of stressed syllables and pairs of rhymesrepeated unequally yet regularly is a linguistic emulation of the continuoparts of the rumba. In this way an arcane poetic or literary device becomesanother rhythmic element in the rumba gestalt.Lope de Vega(1562-16351, Tirso de Molina (1571-16481, and Calderonde la Barca (1600-1681) (notably in his famous play

La vida es sueco,

towhich of course our introductory decima refers) used espinelas extensively.Decimas also quickly became popular among Spain's unlettered workingclasses, particularly in rural areas. The decima form, easy to put to musicand blessed with a particularly appealing and satisfying rhyme structureand

cadencia

(cadence), was quickly appropriated by popular poets inAndalusia and the Canary Islands. As the decima's literary fortunes roseand fell, these campesinos maintained a vibrant tradition of decimas im-provised to music, still celebrated today in Spain (particularly in Murcia,the Alpajarra regon, and Almeria), the Canaries, Latin America, and theCaribbean.Decima's popularity in Spain enabled it to bridge languages; workingpeople in the northeastern province of Catalonia wrote decimas in Catalanand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recited them to solicit gratu-ities at Christmas time (see Batlle 1933).The Catalan coastal town of Sitgespreserves decima to this day.Decima's status as a literary form declined after its heyday in the

Siglo de

Oro,

Spain's "Golden Age" of literature, the seventeeth century. The ro-mantic poets (1830s-40s) such as Nufiez de Arce (1834-1903) and Jose deZorilla (1817-1893), and later the "generation of 1927," orge Guillen (1893-1984) and Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), revived the literary decima in Spain.Today, however, the literary decima languishes, again ignored by Spain'sacademic poets (Mendoza 1957,9).Decima spread rapidly throughout the Americas; Latin American poetsas disparate as the Mexican polymath Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz (1651-1695),who won a national decima improvisation contest in 1683, the Nica-raguan modernista innovator Ruben Dario (1867-1916), and the ChileanVioleta Parra (1917-1967) were preeminent decimistas of their times. An-thologies reflect an unending stream of literary poetic inspiration expressedin this classic genre (Orta Ruiz 1990, Feijoo 1982, Bravo-Villasante 1982,Franco-Lao 1970).Decima also entered the musical folk culture of the con-tinent; see for example Mendoza (1957) on the Mexican

balona

tradition,Hernandez (1993) on the Puerto &can

seis

style of decima improvisation,and Aretz (1980: 213-231) for a continental ethnomusicological overview.Decima is sung today in Louisiana among communities of Canary Island-ers who immigrated to that state in the late eighteenth century (seeArmistead 1992) and a long history of decima exists along the Texas-Mexi-can border (see Paredes 1993).