Browsing by Subject "timba"

The focus of this thesis is in the live music of El Niño y la Verdad, which represents Cuban popular dance music. According to the previous literature, the dynamics between the group and the audience and the ability of the group to react in a moments notice are very important factors in the music. At the time of writing, no academic research had fully committed in explaining this phenomenon, and that is how the idea for this thesis came to be. The research material consists of interviews and two songs. For those two songs, I have analyzed both the album version and a live version I recorded in Cuba. The interviews were done on four of the band members, where I we through various themes on the groups’ music. The research question is as follows: How do two of El Niño y La Verdad’s songs differ between the album version and a concert version on the structural level, what are the reasons for the phenomenon and how does the band practically make it happen? In order to answer these questions, I present the history and scene of the Cuban popular dance music (música popular bailable cubana, MPBC) on a general level, and I present the previous research on the structural elements of the music and how they are used. Based on the interviews, I present additions to the way previous research has approached the structure of MPBC, in order to make the analysis of this thesis more feasible. With these tools, I analyze two of the group’s songs, Llévame papá and El baile de la palangana. The analysis is done on both the album version and a concert version for both of the songs. The structural differences between the album and the live versions are notable, and they follow the framework set up by the previous research and especially the additional ideas that came up during the interviews. According to the interviews, the group wants to take the audience from a feeling to another, and to give every concert its own energy. In practice, the lead singer El Niño and the musical director Pachy Jr. use hand gestures and other visual or auditive signs to tell the rest of the group, where to go next. The request can either target the horn section, the percussion section or the choir section. The most important fruit of this thesis is to create a more usable way of analyzing the structure of MPBC, that what has been previously presented by the literature. With this two-dimensional structure analysis chart, the intersections and the overlaps between the different structural part are more visible, and the underlying motivations behind these changes are easier to analyze.