Danzón No.

2
Arturo Márquez

“The Danzón No. 2 is …a very personal way of paying my respects

and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music.”
-- Arturo Márquez

The danzón originated in Cuba in the 1850s and at one time was the
island's official dance. It survives and thrives today in Mexico. The
combined forces of the Youth Orchestra and the Duluth Superior
Symphony Orchestra will play this work at the Young People’s Concert.

http://opcmusic.org/Press.php
Listening Activities

Danzón No. 2 is a symphonic work based on a Cuban dance and music style also called danzón. Though
it is a concert work, it has the warmth and engaging energy of dance music.

If Time is Limited
 Listen to the music with students. Notice two important characteristics:
o A long, legato melody that is first played by the clarinet. It will frequently returns,
sometimes in an altered version.
o The clave rhythm pattern at the beginning of the piece. It also returns played by
different instruments, and with variations.
 Help students focus on the frequent shift in dynamics – quiet and loud. Márquez often pulls
back to a very soft dynamic level which sets up listeners for the next bold section.

#1: Focus on the Danzón Melody

Learning Goal: Students will softly sing the main melody along with the recording, noting its shape

Materials: recording, electronic or hard copies of the melody

Many instruments play the main legato melody in Danzón, starting with the clarinet
Display this melody for students to follow (It is written one octave lower than the clarinet plays). Sing
softly along with the clarinet.

There are several variations of this theme throughout the pieces. Sometimes the melody disappears
and the music becomes almost all rhythm.

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#2: Find the Clave Rhythm in Danzón No. 2
Learning Goal: Students will identify the prominent clave rhythm pattern in Danzón No. 2

Materials: Recording, claves and/or rhythm sticks, clave info (see below), clave rhythm patterns

1. Listen to the clave rhythm pattern in the beginning of the piece (0:00 to 0:35).
Describe the clave using this information:
 In Latin American music, both the instrument AND the syncopated pattern it
plays are called clave.
 The clave rhythm pattern is a tool for organizing time in Afro-Cuban music.
 The word ‘clave’ is the Spanish word for ‘keystone.’ Just as a keystone holds an arch together,
the clave pattern holds the music together.
 The clave is a five stroke pattern. It can be
played as a forward clave pattern of 3 + 2
strokes, or a reversed 2 + 3 pattern.

2. Display the clave rhythm pattern from Danzón. Ask students to decide if it is a 2 + 3 or a 3 + 2
pattern. (2 + 3) Play the pattern with claves and rhythm sticks with the first 0:35 seconds of music.

3. Listen to more of the piece (from beginning to 2:00), asking students to focus all their attention on
the clave pattern and hunt for these landmarks:
 Where do the claves pause for a moment? Thumbs up if you hear it. (0:35)
 What happens around 1 minute into the piece? (1:01) (The claves disappear, and a guiro picks
up and plays a variation of the clave pattern.)
 What happens next? (Guiro drops out at 01:29, but strings play a strong rhythm that holds
things together like the clave did, but it’s not the clave rhythm. (1:36)

#3: Identify Changing Dynamics

Learning Goal: Students will follow a Sound Line with the music to demonstrate that they perceive the
changing dynamics in Danzón.

Materials: recording, copies of the Sound Line.

1. The dynamics in Danzón shift frequently. Help students recall what they know about dynamics in
music using the appropriate terms:
 piano: quiet (symbol is p)
 mezzo piano: medium quiet (mp)
 mezzo forte: medium loud (mf)
 forte: loud (f)
 crescendo: gradually getting louder ( )
 diminuendo or decrescendo: gradually getting quieter ( )
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 Add two more levels to the list, pianissimo (pp), very quiet, and fortissimo (ff), very loud if you
wish to stretch their repertoire of terms. The words are all Italian and are fun to say with a flourish!

2. Listen to a short excerpt of the music, asking students to describe what they noticed about the
dynamics. Then distribute copies of the Sound Line included with this lesson. As they listen, they
can indicate the dynamic levels they hear by sliding a finger or placing and moving a marker along
as the music changes dynamic levels.

#4: Locate Tempo Changes

Learning Goal: Students will identify the changing tempos in the music first with a physical response,
then by sketching what they hear.

Materials: recording, paper, markers or crayons.

Tempo is the musical term for the speed of the music. The tempo in Danzón shifts from slower to
faster. Changes in the tempo make the music more interesting; we wonder what is coming next.
Direct students to quietly tap the underlying beat and give a signal when they notice an accelerando
(places where music speeds up) or a ritardando (places where it slows down.) Use these Italian musical
terms as you speak to students.

Do the same activity with a large piece of paper and a marker or crayon – creating an abstract sketch of
the music’ tempo changes.

#5: Speculate about a Story

Learning Goal: Students speculate about a possible story in the music

Music can tell interesting stories. Marquez did not tell a specific story, but it he did have a time, place,
and characters in mind as he composed the work. Ask students to use their imaginations to speculate
about and create a story line for Danzón. Pose a question as a prompt for this activity:

If Danzón were the sound track for a movie, what going on in the movie?

Extended Activities
1. Watch the YouTube video of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra performing Danzón
No. 2 at the 2007, BBC London Proms Music Festival. The camera work is good; your students will see the
actual instruments that play the key melodies and patterns in the music and have a clearer understanding of
how the spotlight shifts amongst the instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkFHMJ28izM
(retrieved 3/28/16)
2. Learn more about the clave rhythm from the web. There is a detailed lesson plan, Hispanic Rhythm Patterns
and Drums at http://www.teachervision.fen.com/musical-instruments/lesson-plan/6747.html (retrieved
3/28/16).
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3. Students can identify the tone color some of the many instruments that play solo lines including clarinet,
clave, guiro, tom toms (which sound like bongo drums), trumpet, trombones, piano, and sweeping strings.
The YouTube video will help you find them.

About the Composer & the Music

Mexican composer Arturo Márquez (1950) is known for his use of

Mexican musical forms and styles in his compositions. He was born
in Álamos, Sonora, the oldest of nine children. His father was a
mariachi player and his paternal grandfather was a folk musician in
the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua. The many styles
Marquez heard growing up provided the inspiration and foundation
for many of his compositions.
The composer conducting his music
During early adolescence, Marquez’ family immigrated to La Puente, http://sasomusic.org/wp-
California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He attended Fairgrove Junior content/assets/arturo-marquez.jpg
High School, where he played trombone in the school band. He
continued the trombone while attending William Workman High School. While living in La Puente he
also continued private music lessons on piano, and added violin and trombone. He started composing
at the age of 16. He continued music studies at the Mexican Music Conservatory, then won a
scholarship from the French government to study composition in Paris with Jacques Casterede. On
returning to the United States, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and obtained a MFA in
composition from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. There he studied with Morton
Subotnick, Mel Powell, Lucky Mosko, and James Newton. With the introduction of his series of
Danzónes in the early 1990s, Marquez’ music caught the attention of listeners and performing groups
beyond Mexico. 1

The Music
Márquez initial inspiration for Danzón No. 2 came while traveling to Malinalco in 1993 with two
friends, painter Andrés Fonseca and dancer Irene Martinez. They both loved to dance, and took
Márquez to dance halls in Veracruz and the popular Salón Colonia in Mexico City. Márquez found
himself entranced and inspired by the music. As a Latino musician, he deeply felt the music from the
inside out, connecting it with the musical traditions of his parents and grandparents. Of this
experience, Márquez writes:
"I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only
like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre
which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape
towards their own emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between
music and dance that occurs in the State of Veracruz and in the dance parlors of Mexico City.
The Danzón No. 2 is a tribute to the environment that nourishes the genre. It endeavors to get
as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it

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 violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my
respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music."

The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico commissioned the piece in 1994. Márquez dedicated
the music to his daughter, Lily. 2

Danzón
At one time, the Danzón was the official dance of Cuba. Though no longer popular in Cuba, it is still
alive and well in Mexico. The danzón evolved from an older style called the contradanza. The
contradanza was brought to Cuba in the 1790s by French colonists who escaped to Cuba from Haiti
during the Haitian Revolution. In Cuba, the very rhythmic music and dance traditions from Africa
influenced the contradanza leading to a fusion of European and African culture and tradition.

The Clave
The clave rhythm pattern is a tool for organizing time in Afro-Cuban musical styles such as the rumba,
son, mambo, salsa, Latin jazz, conga de comparsa, and others. The five-stroke clave pattern represents
the structural core of many Afro-Cuban rhythms. Just as a keystone holds an arch in place, the clave
pattern holds the rhythm together in Afro-Cuban music.

The clave pattern originated in sub-Saharan African music traditions where it serves essentially the
same function as it does in Cuba. The pattern is also found in the African Diaspora music of Haitian
vodou drumming and Afro-Brazilian music. It also exists in North American popular music, where it is
often used as a rhythmic motif or ostinato.

The word clave, is the Spanish word for "keystone" or "key" which indicates the importance of the
clave rhythm in Latin music. The repeated five-note pattern can be performed with a "forward clave
rhythm" of three notes followed by two or a "reversed clave rhythm" of two notes followed by three.3

Vocabulary
 clave – a syncopated two-bar rhythm pattern
 syncopation – rhythm patterns where the accent falls on a weak or unexpected beat
 rhythm pattern – an arrangement of notes of varying lengths or duration
 accent – a stressed beat; a strong beat
 dynamics – the loudness or softness of music along a system of gradations

1
Based on Wikipedia biography of Arturo Márquez, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Márquez (retrieved 3/28/16)
2
Program notes from the Redwood Symphony Orchestra,
http://www.barbwired.com/barbweb/programs/marquez_danzon.html (retrieved 3/28/16)
3
From Rhythm Web http://www.rhythmweb.com/clave/ (retrieved 3/28/16)

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