The tiples of the Americas

The early Spanish tiples and guitarrillos, as well as its vihuelas, cítaras and
guitars, arrived in the New World inside the knapsacks and sea trunks of sailors, soldiers,
government officials and clergy. Tiples also arrived, brought by Canary Island farmers
who first arrived to the Island in 1695. The Catholic Kings had so decreed: the custom of
the period was that the Catholic Mass was to be celebrated with stringed instruments.
Instruments bestowed an air of legitimacy to the rites and so were deemed indispensible
to the spiritual life of all the colonies.
It is clear that with very few exceptionsi a majority of the small chordophones that
developed in Hispanic America were local adaptations of precisely those same original
Spanish instruments. After each became established in its own distinctive and
archetypical form in each colony, variants of each emerged later in different regions,
which in turn became further transformed to accommodate evolving changes in popular
musical styles and influences.
But this great proliferation of distinctive small and large chordophones can be
traced back to two ancient Spanish non-bowed stringed instrument families: the family of
chordophones played with a plectrum (de púa) and the family of those plucked with the
bare fingers (de pulso). With few exceptions, members of the family of plectrum
instruments were not only played with a pick or quill but were also flat-backed and pear-
shaped, and were predominantly used to arpeggiate the melody in ensembles. On the
other hand instruments of the de pulso family usually were also flat-backed, but shared
the distinctions of an hourglass or figure-eight shape, the fact that they were played with
the fingertips or strummed with the bare hand, playing accompanying chords in
ensembles or for the singing troubadour.
The historic legacy of the small, high-pitched de pulso instruments of the
Spanish/Portuguese peninsula that arrived in New World has been the remarkable
profusion of small Latin American guitars spread all over the Southern Hemisphere. This
profusion is evidence of the great popularity and social utility of this instrumental form
within the colonies and later, within the towns and fields of most of the republics of the
Americas. The profusion is so extensive that a complete inventory cannot be made here
nor is a comprehensive discussion of each possible within the scope of this work. Suffice
it to say that soprano-ranged chordophones called tiple can be found in Cuba, Dominican
Republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Argentina, and also
almost as many that share the legacy of the Spanish tiples and guitarrillos--but are not
called tiple. Among these are the many South American requintos, the Panamanian
mejorana and socavón, the Brazilian cavaquinho, the forty variants of the Altiplano-
region’s charango and the nine regional Mexican jaranas. They all share the guitar-like
form; the role of playing the chord accompaniment in ensembles; and similar string
interval arrangements usually consisting of fourths with an added third.

The Tiples of Puerto Rico

 In Puerto Rico, the tiple was the smallest of the stringed instruments in the early
jíbaro orchestra and perhaps one of the most intimate and soulful means of musical
expression in the Island’s remote communities during times past. Although it appears for
the first time in literary accounts of country customs during the second half of the 19th
century,ii the subsequent narrative that Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882) makes of
his childhood allows us to establish the existence of the tiple at least from the first
decades of that century.iii
Judging from the literature of the end of the 19th century and the first half of the
20th century, and also from studies, field notes and interviews conducted during the
second half of the 20th century, differing tiples once existed on the Island named quinto,
requinto, doliente and tiplón, each one of a particular size, stringing, contour and
distinctive musical function. The tiple that Francisco Del Valle Atiles (1852-1945)
describes in 1887 shared a common trait with various 18th century instruments of not
having its strings placed in order of their pitch. This trait, as we noted earlier, is an
indication of the expressive modality of strumming and accompaniment in which the
fourths are tuned to a higher pitch than the thirds, which results in a uniform strumming
sound when it the strings are stroked up and down. It shares this detail with other
instruments that are principally strummed, such as the Venezuelan cuatro, the Andean-
region charango and the ukulele.
Our attention is immediately called to the numerous immigrations of Canary
Islanders to Puerto Rico, starting from the earliest centuries of the colonization to the
onset of the 20th century, and their probable influence on Puerto Rican folklore.
Accordingly, many significant although circumstantial links can be traced between the
small instruments of both countries. Canary Islanders were one of the most numerous
groups that participated in the colonization of Puerto Rico and we can find likely
similarities between the aforementioned contro or contra—the four string tiple of
Tenerife and the isle of Palma--and the four-string tiple quinto of Puerto Rico which is
“somewhat deeper in the box than the tiple doliente” and deeper-voiced. Researcher
Alexis Morales Cales tells of a five-string “tiple” on the isle of Lanzarote, which retains
that name within its island’s folklore regardless of increased size and baritone voice.
Morales Cales associates these larger timples, with their function of accompanying their
timple, with Puerto Rico’s tiplón. The tiplón, also known variously as tiple con macho
and tiple grande, was likewise used to accompany the smaller Puerto Rican tiples.
Morales Cales also affirms that in those traditional ensembles that had no guitars, a
bordonúa played the low notes and the tiplón provided the treble notes, both instruments
combined filling out the role that a guitar usually furnished by itself.iv As we shall see
later on, the introduction of the guitar into traditional music ensembles offers an
explanation for the virtual extinction of the tiples and the bordonúa during the 20th
century.
Information about the different stringing arrangements of the tiples of the Island
has come to us by way of oral accounts recorded by Alexis Morales Cales, Gustavo
Batista, José “Pepito” Reyes Zamora, Juan “Kacho” Montalvo and Vicente Valentín.
Reyes Zamora identified four different tiples, one called tiple de la montaña [tiple of the
mountain], with an 11.5-inch string length; one called tiple costero [tiple of the coast],
with a 14.5-inch string length; a tiple doliente [mournful tiple] with a 14.5-inch string
length and a tiple grande or tiplón with a 20- to 20.5-inch string length.v The noted
musician and researcher Juan “Kacho” Montalvo recalls that his father, a tiple player,
talked about one-string tiples and three-string tiples. Montalvo pointed to a study by
Professor Edwin Figueroa on the different linguistic forms in the Ponce region during the
decade of the fiftiesvi that mention tiples of different stringing, from one to five strings.vii
Montalvo found two kinds of tiples in the Island’s southeastern municipality of
Peñuelas. The first tiple Montalvo found was the tiple con macho or tiplón. Cales says
these were also found in Guayanilla but in either case, it appears the instrument was used
within a fairly limited region of the Island. It had the peculiarity of a single tuning peg
drilled halfway down the edge of the fingerboard. The string that was tied to this peg was
placed off the fingerboard, a string that was shorter than the others, was always played
open and called pichón, macho, or chillo according to the custom of the region. The
“short string” was used as a rhythmic drone, that is, simply was repeatedly played open
while the remaining strings were fretted in the usual way. Pablo Torres Rivera (b. 1912),
tiple-maker of Adjuntas, a town in the central mountain range, also confirms that on the
tiple con macho the fingerboard string is not fretted, but “is used to add sonority to the
instrument.”viii
The tuning Montalvo furnishes for the tiplón is:
[Fig. ]
Rural musicians described the stringing of the tiple in this way: “it has a first, a second, a
third, but the fourth string is a second and the fifth string uses a first.” To the uninitiated,
this sounds like mysterious jargon. But among rural musicians, the sense was clear.
During the last century, the strings that arrived in Puerto Rico were principally strings
that were manufactured in the United States for American steel-string folk guitars. Each
string came in a small paper envelope numbered according to the order that each was
placed on the guitar. Since these were the only strings available, players of the
autochthonous island instruments had to select among these numbered guitar gauges
those strings that could be adapted reasonably well to their tiples, or cuatros, or
bordonúas. The legacy of this curious situation is the confusing popular nomenclature of
the strings of our native instruments.ix
Montalvo explained that the macho or pichón--the fifth, short string attached to
the middle of the fingerboard--was at times tuned to G and other times to A. He affirmed,
“When there is the necessity of accompanying a troubadour in another key such as G or
its relative, the fifth is changed to G, and if someone asks the tiplero, he would say, “the
tiple is traspuesto.

The concept, "traspuesto,” is the same as “transposed to.” For troubadours that sang in
D or A, well, the pichón was tuned to A. If the singer was going to sing an aguinaldo
cagueño he could place the pichón in G. The different tunings served to support the
singer, partly in the change of timbre, or the ease of execution, or because of the
imperfection of the scales in those days and even now. This tiple is associated with the
accompaniment of the aguinaldo amoroso [romantic aguinaldo]. It was played by picking
notes individually or playing chords.x

Even though no direct link has been found, evidence suggests that enslaved West
African descendants living along the Island’s coast could have influenced the evolution
of the tiple con macho. The peculiar detail of a “short string” attached to the instrument’s
neck recalls a similar detail found on various West African stringed instruments. The
painting The Old Plantation created by an unknown artist between 1774 and 1794,xi
shows a group of enslaved Africans on a North American colonial plantation in South
Carolina, enjoying a moment of relaxation, dancing to the beat of a small drum and an
instrument looking like a banjo. The folklorist Shlomo Pestcoe points out that the
instrument appears like a Hausa and Yoruba chordophone from the region of Nigeria,
specifically one made with a skin-covered gourd called molo, thought to be the precursor
of the banjo.xii The molo had three strings, was fret-less, with a sound box made of a dried
gourd over which a skin head was stretched. Halfway down the neck a peg holding an
open string can be seen, similar to the Puerto Rican tiplón’s macho. Certainly, all modern
North American banjoes used for accompanying bluegrass music preserve this detail.
Coincidentally, several banjo-like instruments also appeared in Central and South
America. Montalvo also notes the presence of the banjo, or as it was called at its
inception, banyá or banjar, in the town of Peñuelas:

In Peñuelas there existed a sugar-cane industry that produced a lot of tonnage, where
many workers came down from the coast to work during slack time [ed.: after the sugar-
cane harvest], especially blacks. At that time the train had a stop in Peñuelas, which
allowed many of these workers to travel to bomba dances in Patillas, Arroyo, Guayama
and to work as strike-breakers during the famous early-century labor strikes in Guayama
and Arroyo. Also in Peñuelas there proliferated mende, or gangá stories that tell of the
use of spoons, drum barrels, tambourines and the banyá as instruments—all of African
origin Possibly,ad the tiple’s macho remains as a trace. xiii

The addition of a short string to a peg on a treble string instrument is not unique to Puerto
Rico, but rather follows suit in other American countries with a prominent West African
cultural ancestry, such as on the cuatro y medio and the cinco y medio of Venezuela. The
short string in both cases is called the tiple.

The second type of tiple that Montalvo mentions is the three-string requinto,
known also as tres. A three-string tiple also existed in the Canary Islands in the 19th
century. The small tres was thought to have disappeared in Puerto Rico, but in the coastal
town of Peñuelas there are still those that make it and players that tune it in G and use it
to accompany Christmas parrandas during the Christmas holidays. Montalvo explains
that although smaller, it was tuned to the same intervals as the Cuban tres but in another
key, a fact confirmed by the late cuatrista Roque Navarro (Adjuntas, 1913-2002).

So the little three-string requinto, which was tuned more or less like this [plays three
notes on his cuatro]... sounds like a tres... it was a tres but very small. The tres now is
bigger than a guitar.xiv But that’s the tuning that little tiple had, like a C Major. It
played lead during the singing of aguinaldos and seises, because there were no other
songs, just…something thing they called "una y una"xv and aguinaldos jíbaros. The
were sung to the Three Kings, they sang it to the Virgin, to Christ, and with it they’d
redeem their promesas.xvi

[Fig. ]
The requinto tiples that Montalvo found carried three single strings, although one of the
two tiples in the Smithsonian Institute Teodoro Vidal collection carries three double-
string courses with six pegs for six strings. The researcher Alexis Morales Cales advances
the thesis that the Puerto Rican requinto de Puerto Rico, which he describes as “a tiny
three-stringed instrument, sometimes of four.” He adds that it is found mainly on the
Southern coastal area of Puerto Rico, and that some old specimens still can be found in
the town of Villalba. Morales Cales notes that the original requinto was often used to
play counterpoint to the melody line and sometimes to strum chords with all its three
strings.
The cuatro player and maker Efraín Ronda (1898-1994) explained to us that the
tiple requinto was the smallest of all the tiples, and its three gut strings were tuned like
the first, second and third strings of the guitar, in intervals of 4-3. He said it was played
using the tip of a horn, in an up and down movement, “p’arriba y p’abajo,” as he put it.
Ronda described the tres’ measurements as: width of seven inches across the bottom part
of the sound box and five across the upper part; the fingerboard measured two inches
wide by seventeen long. The sound-hole measured no more than two inches. Ronda
retells his earliest memories of the tiple:

I was a boy, and I remember that as I and the girl that took care of me as a child
passed by the San Germán market, there I saw the old Nicanor and his son Mencho
selling cuatros, tiples, treses, requintos, carved maybe with a machete. He sold
them for fifteen and twenty cents. A cuatro cost a dollar. If you wanted a fancy one
he charged you two dollars. This was 1912 in San Germán. But one day I went to
Mayagüez and on the wall of a grocery store I saw two tiples hanging on a wall.
One cost a quarter. The other cost fifty cents—because they had placed a pearl
button inlaid in its neck. Then I told my father, “I want that tiple.” Then he told the
man, “bring it over here.” And the man said, “is it for you?” “Yes.” “Because I’m
going to give you a set of strings as a gift, so if they break you can put them on.”
And all for fifty cents! That one was made from a tree called Guanábana [Soursop].
Weightless! The top was Yagrumo.

It’s entirely possible that the stringing intervals of the tiple requinto are derived
from the second and third courses of the Spanish tiple, or from the fourth and fifth
courses of the Canary Island timple. Pablo Torres Riveraxvii recalls that his father also
built the three-stringed tiple and the five-stringed tiplón. He confirmed that strings made
of rawhide were used before nylon strings began to be used.
Sometimes a fourth string was added to the three-string tiple. Morales Cales tells
of another kind of requinto, a bit larger and deeper-voiced, that was used in the southern
region of Yauco and Guánica. It was played with a fingernail or with the tip of the horn
of a cow or bull and was used for accompaniment. The quinto or four-string tiple was
used almost exclusively to play chords, particular accompanying the gay rhythms of the
plena and the guaracha. In the historic Ponce neighborhood of Coto de Laurel this kind
of tiple was used often and in Juana Díaz an old specimen can still be found. A tiplón or
tiple con macho could provide the second voice and part of the accompaniment as well.
As to the relationship between requinto and quinto, Cales observes that in Latin
American countries, instruments called requinto are the higher-pitched ones of the two,
and the quinto is the one that follows at an intermediate scale.
 During 2002 and up to 2004, the Cuatro Project undertook several recorded
interviews withy players and makers of the cuatro and the tiple.xviii In a 1992 interview,
the tiplista Maximiliano Ramos Floresxix remembers having received his first tiple in
1920, while he was an adolescent. Ramos remembers that it had four strings and gut frets
and states that he never saw tiples strung in any other way. He states, however, that at the
height of his times as a tiplista they were already using steel firsts and seconds, a wound
third and rawhide fourth. But the fourth was hardly ever used, except when the tiple was
substituting a cuatro or to play chords. For single-note playing only three strings were
attached. As he explained, the tiple participated in groups that included a cuatro and a
guitar. The tiple would play second voice to the cuatro, played “puntiaíto” [in a
punctuated fashion]. He used the term habanao to describe a technique of accompanying
with the gentle strumming of chords.
Roque Navarro remembers well the five-string tiple that today we call tiple
doliente. He affirms that it was indistinctly termed tiple or vihuela. Navarro’s account is
that this “vihuela” was actually a tiple with the body outline of a bordonúa, but smaller,
and twice the size of the “requintito.” Both tiples were often heard played together,
accompanied by a güiro: “The three-stringed tiple requinto played the melody, be it a
Seis or Aguinaldo, which was what you used to hear in those days. Then, the five-string
tiple accompanied it, playing the role of a guitar.” The name doliente [mournful or
suffering] according to Navarro, applied to any tiple when it accompanied a sentimental
song. They were often played during the baquiné, a ritual in observation of the death of a
child practiced in some regions of the Puerto Rican countryside.xx
Alexis Morales Cales described how the varied uses of the tiples in traditional
groupings supported the principal melodic instrument, the cuatro. He commented that in
this manner, the tiple doliente,

…instead of carrying the complete melody or the original melody, well, the doliente
did for the cuatro what they used to call a floreo, that is a kind of paraphrasing or
counterpoint. As a matter of fact, the expert tiplista was known for the kind of floreo
that he was able to improvise for the cuatro, one that was in such beautiful harmony
to it, that it seemed as if it had been previously written out on paper.

In his 1984 field research, professor Gustavo Batista, found that Lugo Oliveras
(Peñuelas, 1898-?) and Segundo Merced (Aguas Buenas, 1904-?), the former talking
about how the tiple was played and the latter, the bordonúa, mentioned the habanao, (the
gentle strumming of chords) and the punteao, (the playing of individual notes) as
execution techniques.xxi Antonio Rodriguez Navarro, noted instrument-maker from
Corozal, (1919-?) and Cruz Lugo Olivera (1898-?) gave us three tiple doliente tunings:
[Fig. ] y [Fig. ]. The one given by Lugo Olivera was: [Fig. ]. According to them,
there were several tunings with the first string in e´´, g´´, or f#´´. According to Aurelio
Cruz Pagán, instrument-maker from Morovis, it was customary in his region to tune the
five-string tiple in this fashion: [Fig. ]
According to both researchers José “Pepito” Reyes Zamora and Gustavo Batista,
the first and fifth strings were played open like a pedal, or as before, they were not
fretted. The chords were played among the three remaining center strings.xxii The fifth
course could be changed to another note depending on the key being used, like was also
done with the short string, or macho, of the tiplón.
Reyes Zamora quoted the same tuning scheme cited by Cruz Pagán. Reyes
describes this as an old tuning, probably one of the tunings used before the 20th century
after which tiplistas began to tune their tiples in intervals more like the cuatro and the
guitar. Reyes Zamora also discovered the following tuning:
[Fig. ]
It is interesting to note that this tuning, with the first and fifth course tuned to the same
note G brings to mind the words of Francisco del Valle Atiles, who wrote in 1887 that
“the tiple, a tiny five-string guitar, offers the inexplicable peculiarity of having the first
and fifths tuned alike.”
The technique of using one or more strings as a pedal, articulated on open strings
with the musician playing the melody on the remaining strings, is ancient. We find it as
early as the sixteenth century, described thus in Minguet’s 1754 treatise. The 2-4-2
intervals that Minguet describes for the cítaras correspond to the intervals of the tiple
doliente tuning intervals Reyes Zamora cites. And this modality was not limited in Puerto
Rico to tiples: the bordonúas of Candelario Vázquez and Yuyo Velázquez also had the
peculiarity of having the second and fifth single-string courses and the remaining three,
double. This suggests that they too, were used as a pedal. Their sons remarked that their
fathers did not fret the second string when they played.
The instrument-maker and cuatrista Efraín Ronda also shone some light on the
tiple’s 20th century history, reminiscing that when he was a child in San Germán, the tiple
doliente was tuned like a cuatro and like a three-string tiple requinto, referring,
presumably to its tuning intervals. Ronda also told us that players of the tiple doliente
were also tiple requinto players.
Summarizing, the Puerto Rican tiples appear to have developed from the 17th
century Spanish guitarillos by way of the Canary Islands, as small copies of guitars. As a
result, tiples shared shapes, stringing or tunings. For example, we could say that a tiple
requinto is nothing more than a smaller tiple doliente with the first and fifth courses
absent. But with some exceptions, the most persistent, historic link between all of them is
a 4-3 interval configuration within their tuning scheme: four-course guitar: 4-3-4;
Spanish vihuela da mano: 4-4-3-4-4; Spanish tiple: 4-4-3-4; Canary Island timple: 4-3-4-
4; tiple requinto: 4-3; tiple doliente: 4-4-3-4.xxiii
At present, the tiple that survives with the greatest vitality is the five-string
doliente. Groups and individuals within the Puerto Rican folkloric music movement have
undertaken the task of promoting the rescue and re-use of the tiple doliente, and to do this
they have adopted diverse strategies. At the front line of one of these efforts is the group
led by José (Pepito) Reyes Zamora from Jayuya. His strategy has been to adopt a modern
tuning of fourths for the tiple with the aim of attracting modern musicians, offering them
a familiar tuning for playing the melodic line along with and in the same intervals as the
cuatro. This effort has already been fruitful and recently Reyes Zamora has published a
book about the tiple that also includes a method for playing and one for making it.xxiv He
proposes the following tuning for the modern tiple doliente:
[Fig. ]
Another important group that stands out is one called Tisana, based in Yauco. In
contrast, Tisana proposes keeping the traditional tuning closer to that of the guitar,
consistent with the tiple’s traditional function of accompanying the melody in musical
groupings. This mode of execution, with the traditional tuning, requires greater skill and
knowledge on the musician’s part, and may slow the ultimate popularization of the
instrument.
On its own, the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project has itself proposed a tiple of larger
size, (called “tiple mayor”) for the role of being integrated into traditional musical groups
consisting of one or two cuatros, bordonúa and güiro. The tiple mayor’s string length is
16 inches, tuned in this manner:
[Fig. ]
It’s actually the same intervals as the first five strings of the guitar and one of the tiple’s
most ancient tunings. Guitarists can pick up and play this tiple employing the same
positions and chords as on the guitar with the exception of the sixth string. Besides, since
1996 the Cuatro Projects has promoted traditional orchestral groups in presentations that
feature all the instruments of our folkloric music. These allow a space for the tiple, the
bordonúa and the eight-string cuatro antiguo or the ten-string modern cuatro to be
integrated within what was in the 19th century a popular grouping, which Cuatro Project
co-founder Cumpiano originally called the orquesta jíbara antigua, or “early jíbaro
orchestra.” We believe that the saving of this orchestral form is a marvelous way to
assure the preservation and promotion of the tiple and bordonúa.

i
We could consider native adaptations of the African banjo and Italian mandolin that appear in Mexico and
South America as exceptions.
ii
Manuel Alonso, El gíbaro (1849)
iii
Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Mis memorias o Puerto Rico como lo encontré y como lo dejo [My memories:
Puerto Rico how I found it and how I leave it], 1881, published posthumously 1928, De Laisne &
Rossboro, New York
iv
Alexis Morales Cales, interviewed by Juan Sotomayor
v
José Reyes Zamora, El tiple de Puerto Rico: Historia, manual y método. Una propuesta contemporánea
para el rescate del tiple. [The tiple of Puerto Rico: History, manual and method. A modern proposal for the
rescue of the tiple], (2002) Ediciones Puerto, San Juan.
vi
Edwin Figueroa Berríos, Habla y folklore en Ponce [Idiom and folklore in Ponce (Puerto Rico), doctoral
thesis (1965), University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
vii
Kacho Montalvo, interview with Juan Sotomayor in 1992, in Yauco, Puerto Rico
viii
Pablo Torres Rivera, interview by Juan Sotomayor
ix
The gauges of the guitar strings chosen for the tiplón, selected among the available guitar strings result in
the following set of gauges: first string, .011"; second string, .015"; third string, .022" (wound); fourth
string, .015”; fifth string, 011”. The fact that the gauges increase progressively from the first to the third,
and then become reduced for the fourth and fifth,reflects the fact that the strings are not placed in order of
their pitch, and are strung in re-entrant tuning.
x
Ibid.
xi
The Old Plantation. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection: Descriptive catalogue by Nina
Fletcher Little; Colonial Williamsburg, 1957; p. 132, fig. 66
xii
Shlomo Pestcoe, Banjo Roots:Banjo Beginnings, http://www.myspace.com/banjoroots and interviewed
by email in 2009
xiii
Ibid.
xiv
Surely Navarro was referring to another instrument named tres puertorriqueño, a much larger instrument
with three triple string courses that was developed among Puerto Rican septeto ensemble musicians during
the end of the 20s and beginnings of the 30s, which was directly derived from the Cuban tres. We will talk
about these at length later on.
xv
In his book, La Música Folklórica De Puerto Rico, Dr. Francisco López Cruz describes this modality as
"all those seises with harmonies based on just two fundamental chords of a key which the jíbaro calls the
first and second positions” such as the seis bombeao, mariandá, bayamonés and villarán. Notwithstanding,
recordings of seises specifically named una a una can be found in recording catalogs of the 1920s. Upon
listening to them, one can hear that the melody is based primarily on two chords that are repeated “one and
one” over and over again.
xvi
Roque Navarro, entrevista con Juan Sotomayor, 1994
xvii
Ibid.
xviii
All the interviews were done by Juan Sotomayor and recorded on tape. Many were transcribed William
Cumpiano.
xix
Máximo Ramos Flores (1906-1993), Juana Díaz, interviewed by Juan Sotomayor
xx
Roque Navarro, interviewed by Juan Sotomayor
xxi
Batista, Gustavo. “Investigación preliminar relacionada con la bordonúa, el cuatro y el tiple”
[Preliminary Investigation Related to the Bordonúa, Cuatro and Tiple, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña,
San Juan, April 3, 1984.
xxii
Gustavo Batista, op. cit.
xxiii
The last one being one of several tiple doliente tunings--as Gustavo Batista pointed out—is the same of
the first five strings of the modern guitar.
xxiv
José Reyes Zamora, op. cit.