Danzón piano

The danzón is Cuba's 19th-century ballroom dance (Miguel Faílde, Matanzas, 1879) and the ancestor of the cha-cha-chá and the mambo. It is written in 2/4 at a slow, dignified tempo, and its timeline is the baqueteo played on the timbales: one bar of cinquillo followed by one bar of four even eighths. Scivales's piano example puts that baqueteo in the left hand: a sixteenth rest, then G-D-Eb-D in the tonic bar, then F#-D-D-D stepping down to the low D in the dominant bar, while the right hand holds chords and later carries the melody. Keep the sixteenths exactly even and quiet; the dance is in the gaps, not the notes. The cinquillo here is the same five-note cell that bolero and the Haitian contradanza use.