Méringue

Méringue is Haiti's national dance music, a couple dance and song form that crystallised in the nineteenth century from European contredanse and contradanza figures combined with African drumming, above all the five-stroke cinquillo pattern. It exists in two intertwined strands: the salon méringue for piano, cultivated by composers such as *Occide Jeanty*, *Ludovic Lamothe* and *Justin Elie*, and the popular méringue played by dance orchestras and carnival bands. In the twentieth century, big bands led by *Issa El Saieh* and Cap-Haïtien's *Orchestre Septentrional* modernised the form, before it yielded commercial ground to compas after 1955.