Activities

• Multiple Choice Pattern Dictation: A group member or your instructor selects patterns to play (or to string together into melodies) from this selection of patterns using 4 and 6, alternating with patterns using 1, 3, and 5. Notate the pattern number that you heard in the order you heard it. Sing each one back using solfège syllables. For an added challenge add in the patterns from 7 and 2. 

• Performance & Identification of Afro-Latin Rhythms: Perform the clave patterns covered in the pre-class materials. Then, learn the different cascara, palito, and montuno patterns from salsa, mambo, and cha-cha music that fit on top of each pattern. (See the worksheet here). After learning the cascara-palito pattern, break the class into two groups, one clapping the clave and the other clapping the cascara. Continue through each pattern. 

• Finding Afro-Latin Rhythms in melodic performances: Listen to the opening number of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes's musical In The Heights.

  • • Transcribe the clave in relation to the lyrics. How does Miranda's rhythm line up with the underlying 3-2 clave pattern?

    •  A lyric sheet is provided here. A Youtube recording is available here. 

    • Once the transcription is complete - see the "Discussion" section above for additional discussion topics. 

• (Extra Activity) Salsa Rhythms: Have students clap along with the clave of a salsa tune, then ask them which parts of the ensemble coincide with the clave in different sections.

  • • Discuss the essential elements of salsa music, including clave rhythms, syncopations, call-and-response patterns, and the rhythmic interplay between different instruments.

    • Play a salsa tune for the class, focusing on the rhythmic elements and groove. Guide the students to actively listen and identify the clave pattern, the different percussion instruments, and the rhythmic interactions within the music. Facilitate a discussion on the rhythmic characteristics and cultural significance of the song, encouraging students to share their observations and insights.

    • Divide the class into small percussion ensembles, each with a mix of different instruments. Assign specific rhythmic patterns from the song to each group, based on the percussion instruments available.

    • Conclude the activity with a class discussion, allowing students to share their experiences and insights.

Want to learn more? 

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas by Jairo Moreno - Find it in the library!

Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity.

 This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.