Cueca

A family of musical styles and associated dances from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. In Chile, the cueca holds the status of national dance, which it was officially declared in 1979. While cueca’s origins are not clearly defined, it has mostly European Spanish and Indigenous influences. The most widespread version of its origins relates it with the zamacueca, which arose in Peru as a variation of Spanish fandango dancing with criollo. The dance then passed to Chile and Bolivia, where its name was shortened, and it continued to evolve.

A courting dance, the cueca may be a zoomorphic reenactment of the courting ritual of a rooster and a hen. The rhythm and speed vary slightly between regions. In the 1840s, the cueca had a guitar or harp accompaniment, drumming of hands or a tambourine to keep the rhythm, high-pitched singing, and a unique strumming pattern where the guitarist strummed all the strings, returning each time with a slap on the guitar body.

The basic structure of the cueca is that it is a compound meter in 6/8 or ¾ time and is divided into three sections. There are also three distinct variants: the northern cueca (slower with no singing, and the music is played with only Andean panpipes and brass), cueca from the central region (guitar, accordion, guitarrón, and percussion are the prevailing instruments), and Chiloé cueca (no quarteta, and there is a greater emphasis on the way the lyrics are presented by the vocalist). 1800s–    .