Miguel Faílde

Miguel Faílde Pérez stands at the formal threshold of Cuban national music, the bandleader whom later authorities recognized as the founder of the danzón, the island's enduring couple dance.^[2] A Cuban musician by profession, he spent his working life in the province of Matanzas during the closing decades of Spanish colonial rule.^[1] Born on 23 December 1852 in the rural district of Guacamaro, and dying on 26 December 1921, his life spanned the long independence struggle that would eventually sever the colony from Madrid.^[2]

Faílde's musical formation reflected the mixed Atlantic society of nineteenth-century Cuba. His father was a Galician immigrant and a trombonist who gave the boy his earliest lessons, while his mother was described in period records as a parda, a woman of dark mixed ancestry.^[3] By the age of ten he was playing cornet in the firemen's band of Matanzas, and he afterwards studied harmony and composition with a French tutor, Federico Peclier, while taking up the viola and the double bass alongside his brass.^[3]

The event that fixed Faílde's name in Cuban memory was the première of 'Las Alturas de Simpson', presented on 1 January 1879 at El Liceo in the city of Matanzas, already shaped so that anyone present could dance to it.^[4] Cuban scholarship situates the genre's formative years between 1868 and 1878, yet credits Faílde with being the first to bring it before the public in finished form.^[4] By that same year the danzón had crystallized into a distinct genre, set apart from the older salon forms that had circulated through Matanzas and Havana.^[5]

In his own account Faílde treated the danzón as a refinement of the danza, which itself descended from the contradanza, the Creole reworking of a European country dance.^[7] 'De la danza al danzón había un simple paso,' he is reported to have said, casting the passage from danza to danzón as a single step.^[7] The genealogy was broader than that aphorism implies, for the contradanza carried English and French roots into the Caribbean through Spanish settlement and, after 1791, through Haitian refugees who added their own Creole syncopation.^[6] The resulting fusion layered African cross-rhythms, expressed in the staggered cinquillo and tresillo patterns, over a frame of European origin.^[6]

What separated the danzón from its predecessors was as much social as musical. It moved more slowly than either the contradanza or the danza, and it admitted pauses between sections during which the dancers stood and listened, a relief welcomed in Cuba's tropical heat.^[8] It was, moreover, a dance for couples rather than a figured sequence that engaged the entire floor, a departure that aligned it loosely with the waltz even though the partners did not travel.^[8] The habanera, a slow descendant of the contradanza and the reigning favourite before Faílde's innovation, kept one advantage the early danzón lacked, since it was a sung genre while the danzón long remained purely instrumental.^[8]

As the genre matured it acquired a fixed musical architecture. Written in two-four time, the danzón became a slow and formal partner dance built on set footwork around syncopated beats, with elegant rests while the couples attended to virtuoso instrumental passages.^[9] Those passages fell to the charanga and the típica ensemble, whose flutes, strings, and percussion gave the form its characteristic colour.^[9] From these provincial beginnings the danzón rose to national standing, eventually acknowledged as the official genre and national dance of Cuba and sustained as a living form among communities in the United States and Puerto Rico.^[14]

Faílde's title as inventor has never been entirely secure. Scholars have observed that Manuel Saumell anticipated many of the rhythmic devices that surfaced later in the nineteenth century, and some regard him as the more consequential Cuban composer of the period, which unsettles any claim of sole authorship.^[10] The official designation arrived only in 1960, by which time the danzón had become a relic and its descendant, the chachachá, had displaced it in popular favour.^[10] The genre's historical weight is nonetheless considerable, since through the danzón-mambo it fed directly into the emergence of the mambo and the cha-cha-chá.^[11]

Beyond the single celebrated composition, Faílde's legacy rests on the orchestra he founded and led to broad success, the Orquesta Faílde, and on a body of work later adapted to other rhythms.^[12] He was also among the many Cuban musicians who conspired against Spanish colonial rule, and his career unfolded against the approaching War of Independence; after his death his remains were placed in the Necrópolis San Carlos Borromeo at Matanzas.^[12] The name carried into the twenty-first century when, in 2012, his descendant Ethiel Faílde established a new Orquesta Failde in the same city, reviving the repertoire of the man remembered as the danzón's creator.^[13]