On the evening of June 5, 1905, spectators crowded the Plaza de Baldioroty in Ponce, Puerto Rico, for a Monday night retreta. These public performances, held twice a week in city centers by municipal and military bands during the Spanish colonial period, continued after the island was annexed by the United States in 1898. They introduced audiences to popular and art music from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, as well as works by local Puerto Rican composers. On that June evening, the Banda del Regimiento de Puerto Rico delivered a diverse performance, led by Luis Rodríguez Miranda, a prominent local composer and U.S. Army bandleader. It included the premiere of his danza, “Impromptu op. 10,” a genre tied to Puerto Rican patriotism, alongside American popular music like the foxtrot, European opera excerpts, and Caribbean music such as the pasillo. “Impromptu” demonstrates several distinguishing characteristics of the danza, including common-practice harmony, Afro-Caribbean tresillo and cinquillo rhythms, and the uniquely Puerto Rican “elastic” tresillo. The juxtaposition of culturally significant music from Puerto Rico with genres associated with US colonialism demonstrates the multifaceted nature of Puerto Rican cultural and political identity after US annexation. Within this musical ecosystem, encompassing early jazz as well as European and Afro-Caribbean music, “Impromptu” showcases hemispheric and transatlantic influences while maintaining a distinctly local presence through the danza idiom. In this presentation, I demonstrate how “Impromptu” and the danza idiom complicate genre and reflect Puerto Rican identity and transnational influence during this pivotal period.

The accordion, invented in 19th-century Germany, now enjoys global popularity across Europe and pan-Asian regions, its versatility displayed in international competitions and in classical, folk, and popular repertoires. Tango performance, however, presents a special case. Though historically and sonically bound to the bandoneón—a German button accordion later adopted and reshaped in Argentina—tango is increasingly played on the standard free-bass accordion, even outside Argentina. In many contemporary settings, especially among emerging ensembles and young soloists, the bandoneón is replaced entirely, raising questions about instrument substitution, authenticity, and musical transmission.

This project investigates why the accordion has become a dominant voice in tango far from its Río de la Plata origins. I survey online performance recordings, competition repertoires, and instructional videos to trace how tango is taught and interpreted on the accordion today. Parallel interviews with accomplished accordionists who specialize in tango explore their artistic choices, training backgrounds, and genre perceptions.

My aim is to illuminate both practical reasons—availability, pedagogy, technique—and symbolic or aesthetic implications of performing tango on an instrument not traditionally linked to its cultural birthplace. By analyzing how tango’s identity is negotiated through the accordion, the study contributes to broader discussions of musical adaptation, cultural hybridity, and the dynamics of global instrumental performance.

Over the last quarter century, ethnomusicologists and music theorists have increasingly supported an interpretation of pulsation non-isochrony as a structural metric feature—and not merely an expressive one—in musics from parts of West Africa (e.g., Polak 2010), North Africa (e.g., Jankowsky 2010), and the Americas (e.g., Guillot 2022). This paper extends that work to the Arabian Peninsula, examining pulsation non-isochrony in three musical genres that are often associated with people of African descent and feature what performers sometimes refer to as “Khaliji swing feel” (Yamani and Afif 2017). A timing profile based on chronometric analysis of studio recordings of examples from two of these genres will be presented, demonstrating a superimposition or “nesting” (Polak 2025) of pulsation non-isochrony at binary, ternary, and quaternary levels of beat subdivision that is consistent with “Mode 2” performance in the Mandé region of West Africa (Morford and David 2023). Extended attention will be given to analysis of Liwa, highlighting how pulsation non-isochrony and tempo change interact in processes of metric transformation.