A Clarification About the Dance of Son: The Beat on Which We Dance Doesn’t Make It Son; Its Structure Does

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This post will be short (kind of) and to the point (hopefully). The following comments stem from my experience teaching the dance of son at different places and the questions that people have asked me during these lessons, and the overall misconceptions that I perceive as existing when it comes to son dancing.

Here is hoping this post helps clarify some of these (mis)conceptions about son once and for all, especially when it comes to timing.

The first major misconception about son that I have encountered is that of the apparent interchangeability of the terms contratiempo and son. In short, some people seem to believe that these two terms mean the same thing.

They don’t.

Contratiempo literally means “against time,” but what it really means in musical terms is “on the off-beat”. In music, off-beats are the 2^nd and 4^th beats. (For…