Montuno
The piano's looping figure in Latin music — short, repeating, syncopated
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Montuno is the looping piano (or tres) figure in Latin music: short, repeating, syncopated, locked to the clave, turning the harmony into a driving web. It usually arrives in the second half of a piece, under improvised singing and brass answers.
It is close to an ostinato, but montuno stresses the union of harmony and syncopation, not a bare rhythmic loop. The usual mistake is to loop it any way you like — it must agree with the clave direction, or the more you play the messier it gets.
Read deeper → clave
Sources
- montuno 在 son/salsa 中的功能，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Montuno"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.