Over the Waves

Juventino Rosas published "Sobre las Olas" in Mexico in 1888, when he was twenty. He was born in Santa Cruz de Galeana, a town in Guanajuato that has since been renamed Santa Cruz de Juventino Rosas after him, and he died six years after the waltz came out, at twenty six, while on tour in Cuba. The waltz outlived him by a very long way. The Oxford Companion to Music calls it one of the most famous Latin American pieces in the world.

It reached American fiddlers early and never left. The folklorist Charles Wolfe called it one of the most popular fiddle tunes in modern history, which sounds like an overstatement until you count the places it turns up: contest fiddling, Tejano bands, New Orleans jazz, merry-go-round organs, and enough circus acts that a great many people cannot hear the second strain without picturing a trapeze. Later writers have hung English words on it more than once, and those words belong to whoever wrote them. The 1888 waltz is public domain and that is what this page carries.

Rosas wrote a set of waltzes, and the full piece runs to more parts than a jam wants, with a key change and a stretch where the three beats regroup into two. Old-time players keep the two strains in G, which are the ones everybody recognizes, and that is what is written out here. Both are sixteen bars and both repeat.

This is the first waltz on the shelf, and the count is the lesson before the notes are. Three beats to the bar, the first one heavier than the other two, and the melody hanging over the bar line rather than restarting inside it. The long notes are where a mandolin earns its keep: hold the dotted halves with tremolo instead of picking them once and waiting for the bar to pass. The other thing to watch is the handful of chromatic notes, the A sharp under the B in the first bar and the E sharp under the F sharp later on. They are one fret below the note they lean on, and they are the reason the tune sounds like a waltz from a ballroom rather than a barn.