What are the performance characteristics of Candombe?

In our last part we would like to give you a brief overview of the key elements in Candombe music as it is known today. This is by no means complete, but rather gives you important examples of today’s comparsas. Candombe nowadays has different parts that are integral to a performance. The instruments have been and remain the key to the music. Together with the different performers that come together they build the Candombe performance. Many scholars and authors have discussed the importance of the drums in regard to African cultural heritage as maintained as one of the only original things left from these displaced peoples. For Patricia D. Fox drums are in the center of this cultural context (79). Drums have become an essential part of Latin American cultures. At the end of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, in an ironic way when the upper-class negros lubolos adopted them for their performances. If they would have done so seriously, they would have had to recognize the part that African-descendants had played in the national narrative. Nowadays, although still part of the carnival, the drums are one of the few things left from the old Candombe and are practiced very seriously by many.