Music of Puerto Rico

This entry focuses on scholarship on music from Puerto Rico of all genres and time periods. Over the last four decades, research and publications on the music of Puerto Rico have increased dramatically. As the reader will notice, many of these sources have been published since the mid-1990s. This is in great part due to the growing number of music scholars from Puerto Rico conducting ethnographic and archival research in both Puerto Rican and US mainland institutions. One institution in particular, the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, has produced several music scholars specializing in music from Puerto Rico. One cannot speak of a native born and bred tradition of Puerto Rican musicology, but rather of a group of sociologists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and musicologists trained in the United States who returned to Puerto Rico after their studies; only recently (since about 2005) have we seen more concerted efforts by university professors in Puerto Rico (at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico, and the Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico) to train students in the various methodologies of music research. This bibliography aims to present the most important sources available today on classical, popular, and folkloric music from Puerto Rico and by Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, spanning from the colonial period (beginning in the early 16th century) to contemporary times. Some genres have received more attention than others; such is the case of the Puerto Rican danza, recognized as the national classical genre of Puerto Rico, which is the subject of several monographs and articles. Other time periods and genres have received less attention because of availability or lack of documentation; for example, little is known about the music in Catholic church services during colonial times, because most materials have been lost in fires or natural disasters. And other musics and genres have only recently received more attention because of racialized identity politics, such as the plena and bomba, which for many years were not considered representative of all of Puerto Rico, but only of its Afro-descendant community.