Poetic couplets

In traditional Colombian music, knowledge about instruments, genres, and everyday life events are often presented in poetic form, in what is referred to as couplets. Couplets are a common linguistic poetic structure composed by the people to serve different purposes: they can be used in the Presentación de Instrumentos Tipicos, in a couple dance called baile del moño (Dance of Moño), as well as in a sung in a Guabina. Couplets are orally transmitted and have an improvisatory character.

Usually, couplets have four lines (verso) of text that together form a stanza. Colombian music scholar Abadia Morales writes, “La ‘copla,’ del latín copulam, que significa enlace, unión, acoplamiento, es la acomodación de un verso con otro para formar una estrofa” [“The ‘copla,’ from the Latin copulam, means link, union, coupling, which is the pairing of one verse with another to form a stanza.”][3] (183,48). More specific to the music from Vélez are the coplas Veleñas; Paola Caceres explains: “la copla velena es la composición sencilla de cuatro versos que forman una estrofa, cada una de ellas con versoso octosílabos y/o heptasílabos consonantes y/o asonantes, combinados caprichosamente, pero guardando casi siempre la rima entre el segundo y el cuarto verso” [“the copla is a simple composition of four verses (lines of text) that form a stanza that can be combined at the whim of the speaker; each verse comprises seven or eight syllables with the second and fourth line rhyming”] (2011, 80).

In discussing the context and the structure of the couplet, Gradante wrote:

For the common people, the copla serves as the most eloquent mode of expression, especially when it has musical accompaniment. The term copla originally denoted the rhyming pairs of sixteen-syllable lines that made up the romance of Spanish balladry, dating from medieval times. In Colombia, the copla most commonly has four octosyllabic lines with the second and fourth rhyming assonantly(abcb) which functions as a vehicle for the expression of humor and folk wisdom and as a forum for the public projection of local identity, class consciousness, and sociopolitical criticism. Coplas range from romantic poetry to blatant sexual joking (Gradante 1998, 409-410).

There are couplets that are commonly used in traditional Vélez music, while there are others that are characteristic of each music ensemble, created by the musicians of each group. All the couplets that you will find in this project have been written by the members of Corazón Santandereano and they belong to our repertoire. These couplets as well as the repertoire have been orally passed along intergenerationally. Notice that the couplets use colloquial language and cannot be literally translated; however, loose translation of couplets discussed in this project is provided as well as a brief explanation of the meanings of them.

The following table presents examples of couplets with a structure of eight syllables and a combination of seven or eight syllables’ couplets. These examples were collected from Paola Cáceres thesis named Caracterizacion de la Copla en el Ambito Musical (2012, 80-81).