Bullumba Landestoy — Pedro Rafael Landestoy Duluc, born in La Romana on 16 August 1925 and dead on 17 July 2018 — was a Dominican pianist and composer. He wrote more than a hundred songs and an uncounted body of piano music, and he is one of the very few Dominicans of his century whose work sits in both the bolero repertoire and the concert repertoire.

The composer

His name travelled on other people’s voices. Yo Soy Mulata is his, and the Mexican singer Toña la Negra is the one who made it known. Pesar sits in the standard anthologies of the bolero alongside Agustín Lara and Bobby Capó, which is the company his generation of Dominican songwriters rarely reached.

He spent years in New York, and the popular songs he is best known for were written there.

The pianist

The other half of the catalogue is written for the instrument he played. Minivals, Valse Criollo and La Toccata are concert pieces, and Dominican pianists still programme them in recitals of national repertoire.

That double life is the unusual thing about him. Dominican music of the twentieth century mostly divided into the popular and the academic, with little traffic between them; he worked on both sides without treating either as a compromise.

Recognition

He was called one of the most important Dominican musicians of the twentieth century while he was alive, and the Ministry of Culture honoured him. When he died Juan Luis Guerra called him one of the great Dominican composers of all time.

He was ninety-two, and he had been writing for something close to seventy years.