Rhythm four strings.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: The Puerto Rican cuatro - Column

Ask any Puerto Rican to name the typical musical instrument most identified with the island, and the answer will be immediate: the small guitar known as the cuatro. But press the same person to provide any details about the instrument's origin, and the response is likely to be silence. Only in recent years have musicologists begun to probe the history of the enigmatic string instrument, but the studies so far have proven little more than what all Puerto Rican's take for granted. The cuatro and the Caribbean island's folk-loric music are so intertwined they are all but one and the same.

Some may envision a homesick sailor aboard one of Christopher Columbus' ships on the 1492 voyage, strumming a small Spanish guitarra. The romantic notion that some form of guitar was among the first objects of European culture to be introduced to the New World may or may not be historically accurate; but there is not doubt that within a few years of the Spaniards' arrival, the guitar was a part of everyday life in such growing settlements as Havana, Santo Domingo and San Juan.

Most certainly, those first guitars were not what we associate today with the classical Spanish guitar tradition. The Spanish guitar of the fifteenth century was a much smaller instrument, endowed with just four (cuatro) strings. It matters little that the shape has changed over the centuries or that the cuatro may now have as many as ten strings. The personality of the instrument and the role it plays in Puerto Rican life remains much the same today as it has been for almost five centuries.

While Puerto Ricans defend the cuatro as exclusively their own, Venezuela claims its particular version, as well as a strikingly similar instrument called the tiple. Indeed, throughout Latin America, and the world, cousins of the cuatro have evolved, each finding its own form and distinctive high pitched voice.

The cavaquinho is as revered by Brazilians as the ukulele is by Hawaiians. In the interior of Panama, campesinos strum the mejorana. High in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, native craftsmen use the shell of the armadillo as the sound chamber for their distinctive charango. Mexicans call their version of the armadillo-based string instrument a mandola de concha. In the outback of Brazil's northeast, the vaqueiros, or cowboys, favor a small guitar with a short neck called the viola sertaneja. Even Cuba's tres and the banjo of the rural U.S. South owe their lineage to the same family of small...