Music of Cape Verde
music and musical traditions of Cape Verde
Cape Verde is known internationally for morna, a form of folk music usually sung in the Cape Verdean Creole, accompanied by clarinet, violin, guitar and cavaquinho. Funaná, Coladeira, Batuque and Cabo love are other musical forms.
Language
In the contrary of Cape Verdean literature, the music of Cape Verde is performed in Cape Verdean Creole and not in Portuguese. Therefore, the music, in Cape Verde, is considered to be creolophone and not lusophone. Songs composed in Portuguese do exist (for instance, “Mar eterno” from Eugénio Tavares, “Ponta do Sol” from António Caldeira Marques, “Separação” from Palmeirinho) but are extremely scarce.
History
Cape Verde is an island archipelago that was uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived in 1462. The sailors brought with them African slaves, and the islands' population became mixed with elements of both races. Climate conditions made the islands inhospitable, and the Portuguese governments mostly ignored the inhabitants and the frequent droughts and famines that wracked the islands periodically. As a result, there are now more Cape Verdeans abroad than at home, and sizable communities exist in New England, Portugal, Wales, Senegal, Italy, France and the Netherlands.
In 2011, it would be one of the most recent countries to have its own music award – the Cabo Verde Music Awards.
“Music of Cape Verde” enters the record as music and musical traditions of Cape Verde. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Music, Cape and Verde can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q188237. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1462 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Music of Cape Verde” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.