Lauro Ayestarán and Carlos Vega’s Phraseology in the Transcription of the Candombe Drums

Abstract

This paper examines the transcriptions of Afro-Latin American music made by the Uruguayan musicologist Lauro Ayestarán in 1948 and 1965: the “habanera” and its presence in Uruguay in the last third of the nineteenth century; the llamadas (“calling”) by drumming and marching corps of candombe, a musical practice originally played and danced by Afro-Uruguayan people, currently part of this country’s national popular culture.

I will argue that his transcriptions followed the principles of the Fraseología (“Phraseology”) by the Argentinian musicologist Carlos Vega (published in 1941). His approach had certain consequences involving: a specific analytic/visual representation of drumming patterns; the (mis)readings of these representations by later generations of Uruguayan musicians; the relation with the “sides” of the Afro-Cuban clave pattern 3-2, pointed in 2010 by Coriún Aharonián following Ayestarán’s transcriptions.