Music of the former Netherlands Antilles

Colonial past provided the foundation for the Netherlands Antilles' musical identity. Spain conquered the islands in the 16th Century and brought Catholicism and the Iberian languages with them to the Caribbean. With the establishment of the Dutch West India Company in the 17th Century on the islands, European Colonization and Ethnic Capitalism created a stratified society, with the European and Sephardic Jewish elites dominating trade and culture, while the larger population, descended from Africans, was placed in bondage by force and subjected to harsh conditions of labour. For example, Curaçao became a major slave-transfer center (but not a plantation economy), with 500,000 enslaved Africans being transferred through the islands from the 17th to the 19th Century, however there were only a few thousand of those on the island at any given time. The Papiamentu (Papiamento) language is one of the key results of creolization in this region. Papiamentu, based on both Spanish and Portuguese, has Dutch, African and Indigenous roots and was the primary spoken language of the people of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. It has historically served as the primary language of Afro-Caribbean peoples and provided a way to express oral tradition, folklore and eventually pop music. While under Dutch rule, the language was the second preferred language behind Dutch, and formal recognition did not come until the last few decades. Dutch colonialism offered a leg up to local people, including their language. Despite this dominance, Papiamentu has endured and is now used as a way for Caribbean people to express their culture and resist. Most of the traditional Caribbean music, including carnival songs and festival speeches, is composed in Papiamentu; thus setting it apart from that of music produced by European countries. European musical customs were brought by colonizers and missionaries to the Caribbean. By the twentieth-century, people from many different backgrounds, but mainly educated Creoles (mixed people), were composing waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, danzas, and other European-style salon dances. Curaçao especially developed a refined classical music tradition. Among those composers was Jan Gerard Palm (1831–1906), who is often referred to as the musical "patriarch" of Curaçao; he and his contemporaries combined many Western elements with Caribbean influences in numerous works for piano and string ensembles. Those works were often the backdrop at various social gatherings or plantation salon events, not solely as copies of European works, but because they were recognized to have gone through a process of "creolization" through the usage of lively European harmonic structures mixed with syncopated rhythms and phrases derived from the African and local aesthetic. The "Creole waltz" in Curaçao is a localized adaptation of the genre of music. Therefore, the emergent musical identity of the islands' bourgeois and upper classes derives from the combination of both the aesthetic interest found in the Old World and the creative diversity of the New World. Many of the genres commonly composed in the Caribbean, such as the above-mentioned waltzes, marches, and even religious (i.e. church or synagogue) music have been preserved as part of the broader cultural history of the Netherlands Antilles. == Language, Cultural Meaning, and Papiamento in Aruban Calypso ==