Colonel Juan Bautista Alfonseca Baris, born in Santo Domingo on 23 June 1810 and died there on 9 August 1875, was a Dominican soldier and musician regarded as merengue’s earliest precursor and remembered as «El Padre de la Música Dominicana».

Soldier and bandmaster

He fought in the Dominican War of Independence and rose to colonel in the national army, where he directed official military bands. He also served as maestro de capilla at the Santo Domingo Cathedral, composing at least two Masses and a Miserere.

The first anthem

After the First Dominican Republic was proclaimed on 27 February 1844, Alfonseca wrote the music for «Canción Dominicana», the country’s first national anthem, set to words by Félix María del Monte. It was never officially adopted, but it was performed publicly at patriotic commemorations for years afterward.

A vanished catalogue

He is credited as the first musician to set merengue to staff notation, folding Dominican folk elements into European dance forms like the danza and contradanza — the foundation later composers such as his own great-great-grandson Luis Alberti would build on. None of Alfonseca’s own scores survived his death; the sole surviving trace of nineteenth-century Dominican merengue is a fragment of his «Juana Quilina», preserved by the musicologist Flérida de Nolasco.

Legacy

In 2005 the Dominican government declared 26 November the Día Nacional del Merengue, formal recognition of a genre whose roots trace back to a colonel who wrote its first surviving notes and lost nearly everything else he composed.