Music
Main article: Music of Colombia-
Shakira, Colombian singer
-
Juanes, artist from Medellin
-
Vallenato Festival in Valledupar
-
Colombian tiple
-
Rock to the park, one of Latin America's most important rock events
Modern Colombian music is a mixture of African, native Indigenous, and European (Spanish) influences, as well as more modern American and Caribbean music forms, such as Trinidadian, Cuban, and Jamaican. The national music of Colombia is said to be vallenato and cumbia.
Cumbia is a mixture of Spanish and African music, the latter brought by slaves. The style of dance is designed to recall the shackles worn around the ankles of the slaves. In the 19th century, slavery was abolished and Africans, Indians, and other ethnic groups mixed more fully. Styles like bambuco, vallenato, and porro were especially influential. When the waltz became popular in the 19th century, a Colombian version called pasillo was invented. International Latin, a type of pop, ballad, and salsa music are best-represented by Charlie Zaa and Joe Arroyo, respectively.
Music and dancing are very popular in Colombia, with dozens of popular vibrant styles. The most popular local musical styles are Vallenato, salsa, Merengue, Cumbia and Bambuco. The latter is a very complicated dance with many differently named steps.
Colombian rock developed after an influence of Rock en Español generating fusion of Rock Music with traditional Colombian music and other musical styles.
The musical genre of Colombian pop music has been growing recently with artists like Fonseca, San Alejo, Lucas Arnau or Mauricio y Palo de Agua. Pop with strong traces of traditional Colombian music is also currently rising. Los De Adentro and Maía represent this trend. Many Colombian artists are recognized internationally including among others, Shakira, who is the most recognized Colombian artist in the world.
Dancing to reggaeton became also very popular in Colombia during the first decade of the 21st century.
Read more about this topic: Colombian Culture
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation’s prayer ever in dumb music ascending.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)