Casa Paoli's

Efraín Ronda was quite a celebrity. He was one of those wise Puerto Ricans born in the Cotuí neighborhood of San Germán who emigrated to New York in the 1930s. There he founded a school to teach the Puerto Rican cuatro in his own home. He drafted and printed with his own hands, on a letterpress in his workshop, his book on the first method for learning to play the cuatro, La Antorcha [The Torch] (1933).

​​

​​

​​

​​

​

​

​

​

​For many years, in that same city, he maintained a store/workshop for the fabrication and repair of musical instruments, particularly guitars and cuatros. It was a magical place, of meetings and gatherings of poets and musicians. One fine day, the virtuoso Spanish guitarist and pedagogue Andrés Segovia came to his store with his broken guitar so that Ronda could fix it.  

 

He organized various musical ensembles—the Ronda Quintet, for example—that performed our music. He composed dances, waltzes, mazurkas, and songs. In addition, he was a musical arranger who arranged the famous dances of Juan Morel Campos for the cuatro. He played on a cuatro of his own manufacture on the revered boards of the Carnegie Hall Theater. Thanks to oral history, we have the joy of learning about his life and work: it was Juan Sotomayor and William Cumpiano from the Cuatro Project who discovered him for eternity, documenting in their own words his long life and his musical and craftsmanship journey. This book also includes in its entirety a reprint of his method for playing the two Puerto Rican cuatros: the old 4- and 8-string and the modern 10-string.