Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Volume 1193
Volume 1
AFRICA
edited by Ruth M. Stone
Volume 2
SOUTH AMERICA, MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, AND THE CARIBBEAN
edited by Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy
Volume 3
THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
edited by Ellen Koskoff
Volume 4
SOUTHEAST ASIA
edited by Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams
Volume 5
SOUTH ASIA: THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT
edited by Alison Arnold
Volume 6
THE MIDDLE EAST
edited by Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight Reynolds
Volume 7
EAST ASIA: CHINA, JAPAN, AND KOREA
edited by Robert C. Provine, Yosihiko Tokumaru, and J. Lawrence Witzleben
Volume 8
EUROPE
edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Christopher Goertzen
Volume 9
AUSTRALIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS
edited by Adrienne L. Kaeppler and J. Wainwright Love
Volume 10
THE WORLD'S MUSIC: GENERAL PERSPECTIVES AND REFERENCE TOOLS
Advisory Editors
Bruno Nettl and Ruth M. Stone
Founding Editors
James Porter and Timothy Rice
The initial planning of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music was assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 1998 by Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Garland encyclopedia of world music / [advisory editors, Bruno Nettl and Ruth M. Stone; founding editors, James Porter and Timothy Rice].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references, discographies, and indexes.
Contents: v. 2. South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean / Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy, editors
ISBN 0-8240-6040-7 (alk. paper)
1. MusicEncyclopedias. 2. Folk musicEncyclopedias. 3. Popular musicEncyclopedias. I. Nettl, Bruno, 1930- II. Stone, Ruth M. III. Porter, James, 1937- . IV. Rice, Timothy, 1945- . ML100.G16 1998
780'.9dc21
97-9671
CIP
MN
For Garland Publishing:
Vice-President: Leo Balk
Managing Editor: Richard Wallis
Director of Production: Anne Vinnicombe
Project Editor: Barbara Curialle Gerr
Copy Editor: J. Wainwright Love
Desktop publishing: Betty and Don Probert (Special Projects Group)
Glossary and index: Marilyn Bliss
Music typesetting: Hyunjung Choi
Maps: Indiana University Graphic Services
Cover design: Lawrence Wolfson Design, New York
Cover illustration: Musician from the village of Capagmarca, Peru (© Ken Laffal)
Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Audio Examples | |
About The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music | |
Preface | |
List of Contributors | |
Part 1: Introduction to the Music Cultures of the Region | |
A Profile of the Lands and People of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean Dale A. Olsen | |
Approaches to Musical Scholarship Dale A. Olsen | |
Part 2: Issues and Processes in the Music of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean | |
The Distribution, Symbolism, and Use of Musical Instruments Dale A. Olsen | |
Musical Genres and Contexts Anthony Seeger | |
Social Structure, Musicians, and Behavior Anthony Seeger | |
Musical Dynamics Anthony Seeger | |
Native American Musical Cultures Dale A. Olsen | |
Music of Immigrant Groups Dale A. Olsen | |
Popular Music: An Introduction Gage Averill | |
Popular Music in the English-, French-, and Creole-Speaking Caribbean Gage Averill | |
Popular Music of the Spanish-Speaking Regions Deborah Pacini HernaŽndez | |
Popular Music of Brazil Charles A. Perrone | |
Art Music Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy | |
Part 3: Nations and Musical Traditions | |
Section 1 Boundaries and Musics of Native South Americans | |
The Tropical-Forest Region Anthony Seeger | |
Moxo Dale A. Olsen | |
SuyaŽ Anthony Seeger | |
Tukano Dale A. Olsen | |
WaiaŻpi Viktor Fuks | |
Wayana Viktor Fuks | |
Yanomamoš (Yanomam and Sanima Subtribes) Dale A. Olsen | |
Yekuana Dale A. Olsen | |
Kogi Dale A. Olsen | |
Warao Dale A. Olsen |
GuaraniŽ Timothy D. Watkins | |
Quechua and Aymara Thomas Turino | |
Q'ero John Cohen | |
Mapuche Carol E. Robertson | |
Section 2 Countries and Peoples of South America and Their Music | |
The Music of South America Dale A. Olsen | |
Argentina Ercilia Moreno ChaŽ | |
Cuarteto: Pop Music of Argentina Jane L. Florine | |
Bolivia Henry Stobart | |
Brazil: Central and Southern Areas Suzel Ana Reily | |
Brazil: Northeast Area Larry Crook | |
Afro-Brazilian Traditions Gerard BeŽhague | |
Chile Juan Pablo GonzaŽlez | |
Colombia William J. Gradante | 376 |
Afro-Colombian Traditions Lawrence J. App | 400 |
Ecuador John M. Schechter | 413 |
French Guiana Jean-Michel Beaudet | 434 |
Guyana Olivia Ahyoung | 441 |
Paraguay Timothy D. Watkins | 452 |
Peru RauŽl R. Romero | 466 |
Afro-Peruvian Traditions William David Tompkins | 491 |
Surinam Dale A. Olsen | 403 |
Uruguay Ercilia Moreno ChaŽ | 510 |
Venezuela Max H. Brandt | 523 |
Section 3 Mexico: One Country, Many Musics | 547 |
The Music of Mexico's Native People Daniel E. Sheehy | 549 |
Guarijio J. Richard Haefer | 551 |
Mexica (Aztec or Nahua People) Arturo Chamorro | 555 |
Mixtec E. Fernando Nava L. | 563 |
Otopame (Chichimec, OtomiŽ, and Pame) E. Fernando Nava L. | 570 |
PureŽpecha (Tarascan) Arturo Chamorro | 575 |
Tarahumara J. Richard Haefer | 582 |
Yaqui and Mayo James S. Griffith | 588 |
Yuma E. Fernando Nava L. | 595 |
Mexico Daniel E. Sheehy | 600 |
Section 4 Central America: Connecting North and South America | 627 |
The Music of Central America Daniel E. Sheehy | 628 |
Bribri and CabeŽcar Carlos A. FernaŽndez | 631 |
Kuna Sandra Smith | 637 |
Maya Linda O'Brien-Rothe | 650 |
Miskitu T. M. Scruggs | 659 |
Belize Oliver Greene | 666 |
Costa Rica Carlos A. FernaŽndez | 680 |
El Salvador Salvador MarroquiŽn | 706 |
Guatemala Linda O'Brien-Rothe | 721 |
Honduras T. M. Scruggs | 738 |
Nicaragua T. M. Scruggs | 747 |
Panama Ronald R. Smith | 770 |
Section 5 Many Islands, Many Sounds | 787 |
The Music of the Caribbean Martha Ellen Davis | 789 |
Antigua and Barbuda Lorna McDaniel | 798 |
The Bahamas Vivian Nina Michelle Wood | 801 |
Barbados Janice Millington | 813 |
Cuba Olavo AleŽn RodriŽguez | 822 |
Dominica Jocelyne Guilbault | 840 |
The Dominican Republic Martha Ellen Davis | 845 |
Grenada (and Carriacou) Lorna McDaniel | 864 |
Guadeloupe Jocelyne Guilbault | 873 |
Haiti Gage Averill and Lois Wilcken | 881 |
Jamaica Olive Lewin | 896 |
Martinique Monique Desroches | 914 |
Montserrat John Messenger | 922 |
Netherlands Antilles and Aruba Daniel E. Sheehy | 927 |
Puerto Rico HeŽctor Vega Drouet | 932 |
St. Lucia Jocelyne Guilbault | 942 |
Trinidad and Tobago Lorna McDaniel | 952 |
The Virgin Islands Daniel E. Sheehy | 968 |
Glossary | 975 |
A Guide to Publications | 999 |
A Guide to Recordings | 1011 |
A Guide to Films and Videos | 1020 |
Notes on the Audio Examples | 1023 |
Index | 1029 |
The following examples are included on the accompanying audio compact disc packaged with this volume. Track numbers are also indicated on the pages listed below for easy reference to text discussions. Complete notes on each example can be found on pages 1023-1028.
Track | Page reference |
1 Yanomamoš male shaman's curing song (Venezuela) | |
2 Yekuana male shaman's curing song (Venezuela) | |
3 Warao male wisiratu shaman's curing song (Venezuela) | |
4 Warao male hoarotu shaman's curing song (Venezuela) | |
5 Music for siku panpipes (Bolivia) | |
6 Wapaka "Kulwa" (Bolivia) | |
7 Lichiwayu notch flutes (Bolivia) | |
8 "Walata Grande" aerophone-drum ensemble (Bolivia) | |
9 Music for tarka flutes (Bolivia) | |
10 "Lunesta, martesta," song with charango (Bolivia) | |
11 "Folia of the Magi" (Brazil) | |
12 Mocžambique for dancers and percussion (Brazil) | |
13 "Singing Is Beautiful" (Brazil) | |
14 Cane fife ensemble (Brazil) | |
15 ForroŽ for accordion (Brazil) | |
16 "Good Night, Everyone!" (Brazil) | |
17 "Song of the Poet," with guitar (Chile) | |
18 "I Have to Make a Little Boat," dance-song with accordion (Chile) | |
19 Song by blind panpipe player (Ecuador) | |
20 Quechua song with harp (Ecuador) | |
21 Huayno, dance-song (Peru) | |
22 Festival of the Virgin of Carmen (Peru) |
23 Huayno "Don't Tell Anyone" (Peru) | 474 |
24 Music for charango (Peru) | |
25 Zancudito, Christmas song (Peru) | |
26 "The Light-Haired Woman," with accompaniment (Venezuela) | |
27 Festival of Saint John (Venezuela) | |
28 "Cuaulleros" for harp, violins, and jarana (Mexico) | |
29 Corpus Christi dance (Mexico) | |
30 Jarocho piece "SiquisiriŽ" (Mexico) | |
31 Ancestor ceremony "AŽmalihani " (Belize) | |
32 "El Corredizo" for dueling dancers (Nicaragua) | |
33 "Los Novios" for marimba trio (Nicaragua) | |
34 "The Choruses of Saint Michael," with drums (Dominican Republic) | |
35 Merengue piece "Dice Desidera Arias" (Dominican Republic) | 857 |
36 Song for Legba, dance for Ogoun (Haiti) | |
37 Rara instrumental music (Haiti) | |
38 Afro-Martinican street music (Martinique) | |
39 Koutoumba music "Koumen non k'aleŽ fe`" (St. Lucia) |
Scholars have created many kinds of encyclopedias devoted to preserving and transmitting knowledge about the world. The study of music has itself been the subject of numerous encyclopedias in many languages. Yet until now the term music encyclopedia has been synonymous with surveys of the history, theory, and performance practice of European-based traditions.
In July 1988, the editors of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music gathered for a meeting to determine the nature and scope of a massive new undertaking. For this, the first encyclopedia devoted to the music of all the world's peoples, the editors decided against the traditional alphabetic approach to compartmentalizing knowledge from A to Z. Instead, they chose a geographic approach, with each volume devoted to a single region and coverage assigned to the world's experts on specific music cultures.
For several decades, ethnomusicologists (following the practice of previous generations of comparative musicologists) have been documenting the music of the world through fieldwork, recording, and analysis. Now, for the first time, they have created an encyclopedia that summarizes in one place the major findings that have resulted from the explosion in such documentation since the 1960s. The volumes in this series comprise contributions from all those specialists who have from the start defined the field of ethnomusicology: anthropologists, linguists, dance ethnologists, cultural historians, folklorists, literary scholars, andof coursemusicologists, composers, and performers. This multidisciplinary approach continues to enrich the field, and future generations of students and scholars will find The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music to be an invaluable resource that contributes to knowledge in all its varieties.
Each volume has a similar design and organization: three large sections that cover the major topics of a region from broad general issues to specific music practices. Each section consists of articles written by leading researchers, and extensive glossaries and indexes give the reader easy access to terms, names, and places of interest.
Part 1: an introduction to the region, its culture, and its music as well as a survey of previous music scholarship and research
Part 2: major issues and processes that link the musics of the region
Part 3: detailed accounts of individual music cultures
The editors of each volume have determined how this three-part structure is to be constructed and applied depending on the nature of their regions of interest. The concepts covered in Part 2 will therefore differ from volume to volume; likewise, the articles in Part 3 might be about the music of nations, ethnic groups, islands, or sub-regions. The picture of music presented in each volume is thus comprehensive yet remains focused on critical ideas and issues.
Complementing the texts of the encyclopedia's articles are numerous illustrations: photographs, drawings, maps, charts, song texts, and music examples. At the end of each volume is a useful set of study and research tools, including a glossary of terms, lists of audio and visual resources, and an extensive bibliography. An audio compact disc will be found inside the back cover of each volume, with sound examples that are linked (with a in the margin) to discussions in the text.
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music represents the work of hundreds of specialists guided by a team of distinguished editors. With a sense of pride, Garland Publishing offers this new series to readers everywhere.
What we know about the music of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean could fill many volumes. Even tiny islands of the West Indies have books written about their musical practices. Compiling a single reference volume on the music of this vast region has been a daunting task, but we are pleased to present the results of more than ten years of work by dozens of scholars and musicians. Here are gathered the writings of over forty contributors, each a specialist. Approximately one-third of the contributors are from the cultures about which they write; the others are researchers with vast knowledge, most of whom have direct fieldwork experience collecting, studying, and performing music in the region.
This book, like its companion volumes in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, has a three-part structure that proceeds from the general to the specific. Part 1 provides an overview of the entire region, with two articles surveying the major background topics in geography, linguistics, history, performing arts, and research pertaining to the peoples south of the RiŽo Grande.
Issues and Processes
The first article of Part 2 (THE DISTRIBUTION, SYMBOLISM, AND USE OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS) and the following three articles (MUSICAL GENRES AND CONTEXTS; SOCIAL STRUCTURE, MUSICIANS, AND BEHAVIOR; AND MUSICAL DYNAMICS) are intended to be used as a user-friendly introduction to the musical arts of the region. They will help the reader understand how music is made, performed, used, received, appreciated, and changed by its practitioners and its audiences. The following seven articles document genres of music that cross national and cultural borders: the musics of Native American populations and of immigrant groups, popular music, and art music.
Nations and Musical Traditions
We have chosen to emphasize the information in Part 3 as the main body of this volume, and every country in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean is included. Relevant sections contain articles about the music cultures of numerous native American groups from South America and Central America (including Mexico). They are surveyed first because native Americans were the first to inhabit the regions and in order to stress the individualities of native Americans as people and developers of nations. Furthermore, recognizing that native American groups are justifiably nations in their own right (often having their own internal governments, religions, and moral codes), we have tried to include articles that represent a variety of indigenous cultures. Researchers on the native American traditions of these regions, however, are rare, and the number of cultures represented here is limited to twenty-seven, contained within twenty-five individual essays. Additional native
Part 3 continues with essays about South America, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. The countries within these geographic regions are presented alphabetically by region.
Orthography
Hundreds of languages other than English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken in the Americas, but there is no consistent way to represent them in writing. Often, terms will be spelled with a modified phonetic alphabet, as in the use of k instead of qu, w rather than gu, guš, or hu, and so forth; the latter forms are derived from Spanish. Nevertheless, certain terms are so fixed in the minds of English readers that we have given spellings in the Spanish style: for example, Inca rather than Inka, huayno rather than wayno, and quena rather than kena. We have decided to retain the orthography preferred by the authors of particular entries. The large-scale rendering of native American languages, however, is consistent with recent linguistic scholarship. Thus, we have Kechua rather than Quechua, and Warao rather than Guarao. Regional varieties will nevertheless occur, as among the Quichua of Ecuador, who speak a dialect of Kechua; the Carib of Venezuela, who speak Karib; and the GuaraniŽ of Paraguay, who speak Tupi-WaraniŽ.
Some authors have chosen to use diacritics to indicate vowel or consonant sounds of particular native American terms, but none has chosen to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Readers can consult a standard English dictionary to learn how to pronounce vowels that contain diacritic markings. Otherwise, vowel sounds are comparable to Spanish usage. Certain native American languages, however, require additional diacritic markings to represent their sounds properly. Kechua is one of these because of aspirated and explosive consonants. The Kechua-speaking Q'ero, for example, pronounce their name for themselves with an explosive "k" sound. Additionally, some languages have nasal sounds, rendered by the tilde (as in Portuguese): Waia~pi, for example, is pronounced with a nasalized sound on the second a.
This volume in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music has taken over a decade to complete. During that time we have steadfastly worked together to edit, re-edit, and polish the more than eighty essays as if we were two ethnomusicological Michelangelos chipping away stone in an attempt to free "The Captives" from their marble encasements. Michelangelo, it is said, never finished his masterpieces, but we have finished ours. However, it might be argued that an encyclopedia devoted to cultural practices can never be completed.
We wish to thank all the contributing authors whose patience has probably been tried many times but who never gave up. Without their expertise and wonderful work, we could never have undertaken the compilation of this volume. We are saddened by the death of our colleague Dr. Ronald R. Smith (PANAMA), and we hope this volume will stand as a memorial to him and to his love of Panama and Central America.
Furthermore, we wish to thank the many individuals who have been official and unofficial readers. Jacob Love, the volume's copy editor, deserves our highest praisehe is a true scholar with a breadth of knowledge and love of improvisation that are
Karl Barton and Michael O'Connor, respectively, assisted with organizing the glossary and checking reference materials. For translations we thank Carmen ArenciŽbia, Jane L. Florine, Rosemary McBride, and Timothy Watkins. We have greatly benefited from the photographic contributions of Cathy Collinge Herrera, Carolyn J. Fulton, Elena Constatinidou, and the many others who are credited in figure captions. On the audio compact disc, additional examples were submitted by Walter Coppens, Charles Sigmund, and Welson Tremura, while John Banks offered considerable assistance in producing the compact disc. And for its help with many aspects of production, we thank the School of Music of The Florida State University.
Finally, we are grateful to our wives, Diane and Laura, for their patience, understanding, and encouragement in helping us see this project through to its conclusion.
Dale A. Olsen and Daniel E. Sheehy
Cumbia, salsa, tango; carnival, fiesta, shamanic curing; mariachi, samba school, steelband; Victor Jara, Tom Jobim, Astor Piazzollathese genres, contexts, bands, and musicians conjure up sinuous rhythms, lyrical melodies, pensive moods, ideological power, and above all, unforgettable musical art. Music, dance, and music-related behavior are of great importance to the people of the countries south of the RiŽo Grande (the river that separates the United States from Mexico), the island countries south and east of Florida, and many native American cultures that thrive within those politically determined regions.
The articles in this volume cover the music of people from a vast region of the Western Hemisphere. Here you will find descriptions of the music of all the nations south of the Rio Grande (the river that separates the United States from Mexico); of many native American cultures that continue to thrive as autochthonous and somewhat homogeneous entities within these nations; and of all island states south and just east of Florida.
Because of political and cultural history, it can be difficult to make easy geographic classifications in this region. In fact, several problems of classification arise. First is the area known as the Falkland Islands (a British term) or Islas Malvinas (the Argentine term for the same place). These islands are problematic because of their political affiliation (should they be discussed as British or Argentine?) and because no scholarly musical research has been conducted there. Second is the phenomenon of Maroon culture, such as the several societies established by runaway African slaves in the interiors of French Guiana, Guyana, Surinam, and Jamaica, and formerly in Brazil. Like many native American groups, Maroon cultures may not be politically determined by non-Maroon people; like many native American groups, they have their own political systems. Maroon cultures have been studied, however, and much is known about their musics. A third problem concerns Isla de Pascua (Chilean term), Easter Island (English term), or Rapa Nui (Polynesian term), an island several thousand kilometers west of Chile. It is administered by Chile, though its aboriginal people were Polynesians. This region has also been studied; however, when the island is seen as a Polynesian culture, does the implied musical understanding have a Polynesian, non-Chilean tinge? and when studied from a Chilean's point of view, is the opposite true?
Central and South America include topographies of extreme contrast. In South America are the world's largest tropical forest (Amazon) and one of its driest deserts (Atacama). There are many lowland basins (Orinoco, La Plata, Amazon) and frigid highlands and glacial peaks (the Andes, including Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere). The country of Chile itself is, in reverse, a compressed
Demography, the description of human populations, is more than a statistical science. When joined with cultural studies, demography becomes more complex than mere calculation of numbers and migration of people. There is probably no place on earth as racially and culturally diverse and complex as the Americas, especially the Americas covered in this volume.
As a way of explaining the complexity of a particular area, George List (1983) has tried to fit certain regions of South America within the framework of a tricultural heritagenative American, African, and Spanish. But within each of these areas there could be dozens of subareas of influence: which native American culture? which African culture? and even which Spanish culture? These are questions that must be asked (BermuŽdez 1994).
Likewise, terms such as mestizaje 'miscegenation' (a mixing of race and culture, usually assumed between native American and Spanish or Portuguese) and criolismo 'creolism' (usually a mixing of African and European, or referring to European descendants born in the New World; usage depends on the country; in Haiti, Creole refers to the language) have been used to categorize people and cultures in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The terms mestizo and Creole (criollo) are used throughout these areas by the people themselves; however, they are perhaps less useful today, with the amounts of urban migration taking place, the increasing possibilities of upward mobility, and the great influx of immigrants and their descendants from China, England, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. Each country has its own ways of using the terms mestizo and criollo or uses other terms to accommodate its unique demographic mixture.
Ethnomusicology is the study of music made by people for themselves, their gods, and/or other people. The people of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are diverse and the countries pluralistic, and their musical styles and other cultural attributes are equally so. When a person is making music for himself or herself, rarely is he or she completely alone: someonea family member, a friend, a
The Archaeological Record
The Iconographic Record
The Mythological Record
The Historiographic Record
Ethnology and Practice
Almost everything known about music and musical performance in the Americas comes from archaeology, iconology, mythology, history, ethnology, or current practice. Since antiquity, culture bearers, conquerors, missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, politicians, grave robbers, scholars, students, travelers, visitors, and many others have contributed to musical knowledge in the Western Hemisphere.
Probably all ancient cultures in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbeanas, indeed, throughout the worldhave used music for religious and social reasons. Many have used musical instruments for rhythmic or melodic purposes, or as some type of reinforcement of vocal sounds or dancing. Through archaeology it is possible to see (and even hear) some of the musical instruments of ancient people, because many extant musical instruments have been unearthed. Many of these, found in tombs, temples, and other ruins, are available for study in private and public collections. It is possible to see how musical instruments may have been held, which ones may have been played together, and what activitiessuch as dancing, sacrificing, healing, parading, hunting, and so onthey may have been used for. When musical instruments and performances are depicted in pottery, wood, and any other medium, their study is called music iconology. When such artifacts have been recovered from tombs, temples, and other sites lost in time, music iconology is a branch of archaeomusicology.
Nearly everything said about ancient musical instruments and events has to be qualified with the words possibly, and may have, and other modifiers indicating speculation; people living today can never be certain about artifacts from prehistoric times. The materials of ancient musical instruments can usually be ascertained, and the age of the instruments can be roughly determinedby carbon-14 dating for wood and bone, thermoluminescence (TL) for pottery, and other methods of dating. Instruments can be measured and physically described. Beyond these limits, however, archaeomusicologists must speculate.
The primary drawbacks in the study of ancient musics are the absence of emic points of view (what the bearers of the culture might say about it), observable cultural
Sometimes, researchers designate as musical instruments ancient objects that may actually have been constructed and used for other purposes: a ceramic water vessel or beaker may be called a drum with its skin missing, a pipe for smoking may be said to be a flute, and so on. At other times, what may be termed an artifact may actually be an ecofact, as when a so-called bone flute is just a bone, or a geofact, as when a so-called polished stone is a naturally polished stone, rather than a human-crafted lithophone or stone chime.
Archaeomusicology is the study of music through archaeology, and music archaeology is the study of archaeology through musical instruments. Scholars who study the former are usually trained musicians, while those who study the latter are trained archaeologists (Hickmann 1983-1984). Because no etic conclusions (by an outsider) can be made with certainty, since no emic evaluations (by the ancient musician or maker of the instrument) are possible, both fields of study raise more questions than the answers they provide. Musical artifacts can be measured and described, but archaeomusicologists may never know beyond what they can speculate about the use and function of ancient musical instruments, and though the term scientific speculation seems like an oxymoron (a self-contradiction), some speculation can be undergirded by the methods of scientific inquiry. New World archaeomusicologists often consult the writings of Spanish chroniclers from the early years of the Encounter, though these writings may not always be accurate and reliable, may contain prejudiced or biased views, and may even transmit misinformation from their native American respondents who may have had some familiarity with their music-making ancestors. There may be difficulties translating the flowery language of early chroniclerswriters who themselves may not have clearly understood what they were describing. Additional scientific speculation can be based on the technique called ethnographic analogy (commonly used in ethnoarchaeology), whereby interpretations of the use and function of ancient culture are made by comparisons with modern cultures. This method can be particularly valuable when the cultures being compared are from the same geographic region, and especially when the living culture claims to be a descendant of the ancient one.
Within the Caribbean, few archaeomusicological studies have been conducted; most come from the Dominican Republic. Within Mexico, Central America, and South America, however, many studies exist; the cultures receiving the most frequent archaeomusicological investigation come from Mexico and Guatemala, including the Aztec, Maya, NayariŽt, Olmec, and Toltec; the Central American countries of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, including the Chorotega and Nicarao; northwestern Colombia, including the SinuŽ and the Tairona; the northern Andean countries of Colombia and Ecuador, including the BahiŽa, Chibcha, Guangala, Jama-Coaque, Manten~o, Narin~o, Piartal, Tuza, and Valdivia; the central Andean countries of Peru and northern Bolivia, including the Chancay, Chimu, Inca, Moche, Nasca, and Tiawanaku; and the southern Andean countries of Bolivia and Chile, including the Diaguita and San Pedro. Hundreds of ancient cultures thrived in these areas, each
The Caribbean
Archaeological investigations in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico have revealed the existence of ancient bone flutes and ceramic vessel flutes with two or three holes for fingering (Boyrie Moya 1971:14-17; Moldes 1975:6-7; Veloz Maggiolo 1972:49). Specific details of their cultural derivations and contexts are unknown, and their use may have been ceremonial, for personal protection, or for diversion. A musical instrument used by the ancient Taino is the conch trumpet, which may have had a signaling function, as it does today in the Caribbean. It may also have had a ceremonial function, because the protuberances on it resemble those on a Taino idol (zemi), and they may symbolize a volcano or a sacred mountain (Fred Olsen 1974:96).
Mexico and Central America
Between 200 B. C. and A. D. 500 along the rugged coast of west-central Mexico, in the present states of Colima, Jalisco, and NayariŽt, there lived some of the earliest Mexican cultures to produce musical instruments and depictions of musical performance, both done mostly in fired clay. These artifacts, buried in shaft tombs cut into the volcanic rocks of the highlands, were probably the belongings of a religious elite of shamans and rulers. The instruments include many idiophones (scraped, struck, and rattled); bodies of membranophones; and aerophones, such as ceramic duct globular flutes, duct tubular flutes, panpipes, and conch trumpets. In central Mexico are similar musical instruments, plus more elaborate tubular flutes with flared or disk-shaped distal ends that represent flowers or perhaps the sun (
Ancient multiple duct flutes have been discovered in other parts of Mexico and as far south as Guatemala. Their existence suggests that multipart musical textures were used in Mexican and Central American antiquity, though a theory of polyphony is debatable, since no ancient flutists survive to prove or disprove it, and multitubed duct flutes are no longer used in the area.
Other types of duct tubular and globular edge aerophones, however, are common in Mexico today, and all have prototypes in ancient times (Crossley-Holland 1980). Robert M. Stevenson (1968) published the most comprehensive study of the ancient instruments and many others. Basing his findings on historical and archaeological records, he showed how native Americanmostly Aztec (Nahuatl-speakers) and Mayamusical instruments and performing continued during Mexican colonial times, albeit with changes affected by or as a result of Spanish authority. These changes were structural (instruments made from cane rather than clay, six to seven holes for fingering rather than four, unornamented tubular rather than affixed with a disk at the distal end, a pipe-and-tabor rather than panpipe-and-rattle "solo" ensemble) and contextual (instruments no longer used for sacrificial rituals, but for Christian-related ceremonies).
Aztec and Maya influence stretched as far southward as Costa Rica and even Panama, and Chibchan and other South American influences are found in ancient Panama and northward into Costa Rica (Andrews V. 1972; Boggs 1974; Hammond 1972a, 1972b; Rivera y Rivera 1977). Among the former, northern influence is the use of log idiophones similar to Aztec and Maya examples. The latter, southern influence includes ceramic ocarinas (similar to those of Colombia) in the realistic shapes of animals, birds, fish, humans, and reptiles.
In the southern lowlands of the Nicaraguan Pacific Coast, archaeologists have found small tubular and globular duct flutes and evidence for the existence of a log
South America
Hundreds of prehistoric sites are found throughout the northern extension of the Andes and the northern Caribbean littoral of present Colombia. The Spanish conquistadors regarded this region of South America as most probably the land of the fabled El Dorado (The Golden Man), and they made great efforts to locate his supplies and depositories of precious metal. As a consequence, indigenous nations were quickly destroyed. In the north, the great cities of the SinuŽ and villages of the Tairona were sacked and the people were killed, enslaved, or forced into the interior. Musically, the SinuŽ and Tairona are the most important cultures in the region now known as Colombia because of the numbers of their globular and tubular flutes that have been unearthed (Dale A. Olsen 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990). Colombia, however, is a grave robber's dream (an archaeologist's nightmare), and few excavated artifacts have been properly documented. Many sit today in museums in BogotaŽ, in private collections, and in stores that specialize in selling antiquities alongside numerous fakes.
The SinuŽ lived in large cities with elaborate ceremonial centers, situated in the lowlands of northwestern Colombia, along the SinuŽ River in the present department of CoŽrdoba. Most of their musical instruments are elongated duct flutes made of fired clay. Rather than being tubular, they resemble two cones joined lengthwise at their widest points. Each instrument has four holes for fingering and is in the shape of a fish, or on the proximal cone has the adornment of a long-nosed reptile (
More is known about the Tairona, who lived in villages in the rugged coastal foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the present department of Magdalena [see KOGI]. Most Tairona musical instruments are vessel flutes in the shapes of animals, birds, reptiles, and humans, or anthropomorphic tubular flutes. Because Tairona terrain is higher and drier than the SinuŽ River basin, archaeologists have been able to excavate houses, ceremonial sites, and tombs, with yields of hundreds of ceramic and gold artifacts. Most ancient aerophones were unearthed in houses or tombs, but not in ceremonial centers, suggesting a personal rather than priestly use for them. To avoid slavery and death at the hands of the Spaniards, the Tairona escaped into the higher elevations of the Santa Marta mountains. Today, the Kogi claim to be their descendants. The Kogi do not play Tairona musical instruments, but they have interpretations for many Tairona artifacts, to which they attribute great power.
The Andean region of Colombia is archaeologically known more for its gold and statuary (as in the San AugustiŽn area) than for its musical instruments. The myth of El Dorado probably began here among the ancient Chibcha, with the legend of the consecration of each new leader, who would have his body coated with gold dust. As an act of rebirth, he would dive from a raft into Lake Guatavita (near present-day BogotaŽ), to surface reborn as a pure being, free of his golden coating, and filled with the power of the spirit of the lake.
Little is known of the extant musical instruments of the Colombian Andes other than that they were primarily vessel flutes with little decoration. The Narin~o (in the southern region of Colombia) and ancient cultures in northern Ecuador, however, had large numbers of decorative artifacts shaped like the shells of large land-living snailsartifacts that may possibly have been ductless vessel flutes (Nyberg 1974), though they may not have been flutes at all, but ritual vessels (
Farther south, into present-day central Ecuador, the coastal lowlands have yielded numerous musical artifacts made from clay. Most of them are ductless vessel flutes in the shapes of animals and birds. The culture known as BahiŽa or Valdivia produced elaborate humanoid-shaped vessel flutes with two chambers and four holes for fingering. These instruments, capable of many multiple pitches, are elaborate in their exterior and interior design (Cubillos Ch. 1958; Hickmann 1990).
Possibly the richest area of the Americas for ancient musical artifacts is coastal Peru, from Lambayeque in the north to Nasca in the south (Bolan~os 1981, 1988; Donnan 1982; JimeŽnez Borja 1951; Dale A. Olsen 1992; Stevenson 1968). One of the oldest known musical cultures in Peru, however, is Kotosh, high in the Andes in the department of HuaŽnuco. There, what is thought to be a bone flute (with one hole exactly in the middle of its length) was discovered in the Tomb of the Crossed Hands, dating back to about 4500 B.C. (Bolan~os 1988:11). Indeed, the precise uses
Ceramic panpipes from the Nasca culture of southern coastal Peru have been unearthed and studied in detail (
Trumpets, aerophones with cupped mouthpieces, were frequent among ancient coastal Peruvians. The Moche made instruments from the shells of conchs and ceramics shaped to resemble such shells. According to music iconography, these musical instruments were used by priests and shamans, or by the fanged deity in the afterlife. The Moche also played ceramic tubular straight and coiled trumpets, the latter depicting open-mouthed jaguars at their distal ends. The inland Recuay used trumpets that sometimes coiled around vases or beakers (
Numerous ceramic membranophones, some with skin intact, have been discovered at Moche, Nasca, and Paracas sites. Those from the Nasca and Paracas civilizations are the largest and most ornate. Some, reaching two meters high, are profusely painted with cat and snake deities (
Farther south, in the area of present-day highland Bolivia, musical instruments have been archaeologically discovered from the Tiawanaku culture (1000 B. C. -A. D. 1000), an influential civilization. These artifacts include ceramic vessel flutes and
Music iconography is closely related to music archaeology because the source of information is artifactual. Iconography, however, studies the meanings attached, usually pictorially, to artifacts. Music iconography is the description (music iconology, the science) of music through its representation in sculpture, painting, and other plastic arts. Through it, researchers can gain an understanding of events, processes, and performances during the era in which the artifact was authentically used. It is a record of knowledge that is not fully reliable in itself, but when added to archaeological, historiographic, and ethnographic records, can tell much about a culture. Another aspect of music iconography is the study of the designs on musical instruments. One reason for iconography's unreliability is that so much is available only in secondary sources: the originals are difficult to locate because they are rare paintings or drawings or engravings from rare books or sometimes have disappeared altogether.
In South America, Mexico, and Central America, pre-Encounter musical iconography tells us about the uses of music among the Aztec, Maya, Moche, NayariŽt, and other ancient civilizations. In the early post-Encounter period, paintings and drawings from codices and other compilations by chroniclers, missionaries, and others are valuable for their visual commentaries about music. After the Encounter, however, biases appear, and are often represented in art. Flutes, trumpets, and other instruments may be represented larger than life (or smaller), as more complex (or simpler), being played together in unlikely combinations, or in any number of incorrect ways. For this reason, music iconography must be joined with other types of documentation in a check-and-balance manner. As nationalism developed, painting and graphic arts became more detailed and representational. Artists were usually interested in more or less faithfully depicting life in their new countries, and this often included musical life, featuring such activities as playing instruments and dancing. Especially important are paintings of religious festivals, music during work, and music for pleasure. With the growth of tourism since the 1950s, music iconography
The Caribbean
Drawings by chroniclers are somewhat informative about music in the Caribbean during historical times. The chronicler Gonzalo FernaŽndez de Oviedo y ValdeŽs included two drawings of a Taino idiophonic H-drum, a struck idiophone (which I call an H-drum because of the pattern formed by its two prongs cut into the top of a hollow wooden log) closed at both ends (1851, reproduced by Rouse 1963a: plate 90). These drawings are valuable because they suggest a possible connection with the Aztec teponaztli [see MEXICA] or the Maya tunkul [see MAYA] farther west on the mainland. The Taino idiophone is called mayohuacaŽn by Moldes (1975:6), but Loven (1935:495) writes its name as maguay, the term for the century plant (magušey), from which it is made. The Taino H-drum was a large instrument according to ReneŽ Currasco (former director of a noteworthy folkloric ballet in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), who built a reproduction inspired by the historical drawings, and played it while sitting on the floor as his ensemble performed a reconstructed Taino dance; his instrument stood about 1.2 meters high and measured about one meter in circumference. Loven explains that the Taino idiophonic H-drum was played by the chief (cacique) to accompany the festive song (areito) rather than a dance, though this song was possibly danced to. No mention is made of any melodic or linguistic communication on this particular instrument, though it could produce at least two tones. Ferrero (1977:133) reproduced an engraving by Benzoni from 1542, showing a similar instrument of the Gran Nicoya of Costa Rica, having three tongues and played with two sticks.
Rouse (1963b:plate 95) prints a picture by Picard (Fewkes 1907) showing container rattles being used in a Carib war-related dance. The instrument is apparently a large calabash rattle with a long stick handle, on the top of which are numerous vertically extending feathers, in the fashion of each player's headdress. The picture gives evidence of the importance attached to this seemingly sacred rattle, as it is shown being played by priests or shamansthree men of apparently high status, judging from their headdresses and costumes. Each man plays one rattle, while sixteen other men, without headdresses or costumes, dance in a circle around them.
According to music iconography, membranophones (skin drums) may have been used in the ancient Caribbean. A picture (Fewkes 1907, reproduced in Rouse 1963a:plate 92) depicts an Arawak dance to the goddess of the earth, in which two membranophones are played, each with two sticks in the European military-drum fashion. Lewin (1968:53) refers to skin drums among the Arawak during ceremonies of worship, explaining they are "made from the hollow stem of the trumpet tree with manatee skins stretched tightly across." If these portrayals of Arawak ceremonies are accurate, then perhaps European-style membranophones replaced the H-drum idiophones.
Mexico and Central America
The figurines of musicians unearthed in west Mexico (NayariŽt, Colima) provide many details of instrumental performance, such as what instruments existed, who played them, and which instruments have been continuously used to the present. Some people depicted are musical soloists; others are members of musical ensembles. These were probably ceremonial musical performers, maybe shamans. Container rattles, rasps (
Though some musician-depicting artifacts are molded together in clay (
Music iconography can reveal information about musical contexts, but it cannot tell us many details about techniques of playing. It can suggest the big picture but not the little picture, the focus of musical detail. For example, the player of the single-headed drum pictured in
More important, music iconography can show how particular musicians were attired, and from that evidence, scholars can speculate about the performers' social status. For example, the drummer in
Stevenson explains that "at least forty codices record material of interest to the ethnomusicologist. Even late picture books such as the Codex Azcatitlan (painted ca. 1550 in the northern part of the Valley of Mexico) can yield extremely useful documentation on precontact Aztec music" (1968:10). The Bekker Codex (MartiŽ 1968:83-86) pictures Mixtec musicians playing a variety of instruments in great detail. The Florentine Codex of Bernardino SahaguŽn shows how Aztec flutists smashed their flutes on the steps of the temple before being sacrificed (
Another important source for ancient musical iconography of Mexico and Central America is Maya murals, originally painted in temples and tombs. The most famous is from Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. It shows numerous Mayan musicians performing together (MartiŽ 1968:facing page 68). Such tomb art is found as far south as Honduras [see MAYA].
In Panama and Costa Rica, several excavated gold artifacts are interpreted as depicting musicians. One of the most famous is from the CocleŽ culture (about A.D. 1300-1500) in Panama. It is often called the little man flutist (
South America
Perhaps nowhere in the Americas is music iconography so rich as among the prehistoric Moche of the north Peruvian coast [see PERU], who depicted musical instruments, singing, whistling, instrumental playing, dancing, and costumes on ceramic pots, often in exquisite detail. Some artifacts are difficult to interpret, such as deathlike figures who are playing panpipes (
In colonial and more recent historic times throughout South America, many paintings, drawings, etchings, and other examples of the plastic arts have depicted musical instruments, singing, instrumental playing, and dancing. These are valuable for learning about colonial music. In colonial paintings of life in Rio de Janeiro, people of African descent are seen playing mbira-type plucked idiophones, instruments that have disappeared in modern Brazil.
People in all cultures tell stories. In English, stories passed on orally are called by a variety of names: folklore, folktales, mythology, myths, narratives, oral history, oral literature. Misunderstanding often arises when these terms enter into colloquial speech, because people usually think of a folktale, a myth, a story, and so on, as something that is not true. Actually, mythology is not concerned with proving or disproving truth. It is simply the study of a particular form of discourse. It may be true, or it may be false. Usually it is a little bit true and a little bit false.
Although such communications are often perceived as something other than fact, it is not for persons of one culture to determine whether or not the mythology of another culture is fact or fiction. The mythological record can be an important repository of information from which we can learn something about the meaning and contextualization of another culture's music. Much of what is learned may not exist in current practice (or perhaps it never existed, or exists only for the supernatural), but it may provide a framework on which cultural understanding can be built. This cultural understanding takes place, not usually with details that can be physically measured or scientifically studied, but with emotions, ideas, morals, and beliefs.
A myth is an artifact. Unlike an archaeological artifact, it cannot be dated. Nevertheless, it can often provide data that researchers can use comparatively to help reconstruct cultural history. As a repository of historical fact, a myth is usually unreliable, though ideas about great tragedies (massacres, famines, plagues), large-scale migrations, wars, and other memorable events and situations may be related in narratives or songs. More often, myths may relate ideas about the creation of the universe, taboos on human conduct, and the daily lives of gods, cultural heroes, and ogres. Myths contextualize many musical instruments, and these native (albeit mythological) contexts can be compared with historical or contemporary uses of the same musical instruments. Likewise, myths may contextualize singing and dancing in ways that provide information about cultural continuity, acculturation, and cultural extinction.
Most of what we know from the mythological record of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean comes from the twentieth century, the age of ethnographic investigation. Myths, usually transmitted orally, have been collected and written down by historians, travelers, missionaries, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and others. Written collections are important for study, but also important are the original rules of preservation (some myths are guarded by shamans, priests, elders, women, and so on) and dissemination, because those processes are essential in maintaining cultural cohesion and continuity. Therefore, mythology has tremendous internal importance for cultures. Scholars can learn much about a culture by study-ing
The Caribbean
Much of the folklore of the Caribbean region is Afro-Caribbean in origin. Telling stories, reciting proverbs, and singing songspossibly African retentions passed on from generation to generationare commonplace in areas where African slaves and their children lived in great numbers. Many Afro-Caribbean narratives refer to musical performance, musical instruments, dancing, and so forth. The following tale, entitled "MeŽrisier, Stronger than the Elephants" comes from Haiti, and portions of it tell us important information about local music (Courlander 1976:64-66):
Thereupon BriseŽ sets off on a journey, looking for elephants so he can acquire the elephants' great drum. He travels far and visits many people, until he meets MeŽrisier, a Vodou priest. The story continues:There was an old man with three sons. One day he fell ill, and he sent a message to his sons, asking them to come to his house. When they arrived, he said to them, "I am an old man, I am sick. If I should die, how will you bury me?"
One son answered, "Father, may you grow strong again. But if you should die, I would have you buried in a mahogany coffin."
Another son answered, "Father, may you live long. But if you should die, I would make you a coffin of brass."
And the third son, named BriseŽ, replied, "Father, I would bury you in the great drum of the king of the elephants."
"The great drum of the king of the elephants! Who before now has ever been buried so magnificently!" the old man said. "Yes, that is the way it should be." And he asked the son who had suggested it to bring him the drum of the king of the elephants.
BriseŽ went home. He told his wife: "I said I would do this thing for my father, but it is impossible. Why didn't I say I would make him a coffin of silver? Even that would have been more possible. How shall I ever be able to do what I have promised?"
The story continues to explain how the elephants come after BriseŽ, and how BriseŽ stops them each time by throwing a wari nut. The first nut produces a huge forest of pines as a barrier to the elephants, the second a large freshwater lake (which they drink to cross), the third a large saltwater lake (which they drink to cross, but all except the elephant king die). The story continues:Then BriseŽ understood that the old man was a houngan, a Vodoun priest with magical powers. The old man took out his bead-covered rattle. He shook it and went into a trance and talked with the gods. At last he put the rattle away and said: "Go that way, to the north, across the grassland. There is a great mapou tree, called Mapou Plus Grand Passe Tout. Wait there. The elephants come there with the drum. They dance until they are tired, then they fall asleep. When they sleep,
take the drum. Travel fast. Here are four wari nuts for protection. If you are pursued, throw a wari nut behind you and say, 'MeŽrisier is stronger than the elephants.'" When day came, BriseŽ went north across the grasslands. He came to the tree called Mapou Plus Grand Passe Tout. He climbed into the tree and waited. As the sun was going down, he saw a herd of elephants coming, led by their king. They gathered around the mapou tree. The king's drummer began to play on the great drum. The elephants began to dance. The ground shook with their stamping. The dancing went on and on, all night. They danced until the first cocks began to crow. Then they stopped, lay down on the ground, and slept.
BriseŽ came down from the tree. He was in the middle of a large circle of elephants. He took the great drum and placed it on his head. He climbed first over one sleeping elephant, then another, until he was outside the circle. He traveled as fast as he could with his heavy load.
This tale explainsthough with tongue in cheek, of coursewhy Haiti has so many drums and drummers, but it also explains why Haiti has no elephants. It says the Vodou priest (houngan) plays a bead-covered rattle (similar to today's West African and Afro-Cuban instruments), which contrasts with container rattles often found in Haitian Vodou.BriseŽ came out of the grassland. He followed the trails. He went to his father's house with the drum. When he arrived, his father was not dead; he was not sick; he was working with his hoe in the fields.
"Put the drum away," the father said. "I don't need it yet. I am feeling fine."
BriseŽ took the drum to his own house. He ate and slept. When he awoke, he heard a loud noise in the courtyard. He saw the king of elephants coming. The elephant ran straight toward the great drum and seized hold of it.
BriseŽ took the last wari nut that the Vodoun priest had given him and threw it on the ground, saying, "MeŽrisier is stronger than the elephants!"
Instantly the great drum broke into small pieces, and each piece became a small drum. The king of elephants broke into many pieces, and each piece became a drummer. The drummers went everywhere, each one taking a drum with him.
Thus it is that there are drums everywhere in the country. Thus it is that people have a proverb which says: "Every drum has a drummer."
Mexico and Central America
Much of the mythology of Mexico and Central America is native American in origin. Probably all Amerindians have tales that can teach us something about their music. Especially noteworthy are narratives of the Aztec (Nahua), the Huichol, the Maya, and the Kuna. Some are creation myths. Others are everyday stories about animals, life in the forests, and so on. Musical performance, especially singing, is often a part of them.
Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff have shown (1966) how an elaborate cycle of myths, which they call an epic prose-poem, provides information about the birth, life, and death of a master sorcerer known as the Tree of the Wind. Also known as the
Estrada interprets this myth as explaining the "cultivation of the earth. When the shell is played, the wind god and the bees together spread the seed of a new culture" (1992:341). Many cultures (Aztec, Inca, Maya, Moche, and others) venerated conchs and used them as trumpets for sacred purposes; but for native Americans, conch trumpets have power especially when they are sounded, and myths help us understand why.But his shell horn had no holes: [Quetzalcoatl] then summoned forth the worms, which made the holes; thereupon the male and female bees flew into the shell and it sounded.
The sound of the trumpet, significant in prehistoric America, remains an important symbol. A week before carnival in ChamulaŽ, Mexico, in 1969, the master of ceremonies gave the following oral proclamation to the village (after Bricker 1973:85-86):
Chamulas!
Crazy February!
Today is the ninth of February, 1969.
The first soldier came to Mexico.
He came to Guatemala;
He came to Tuxtla;
He came to Chiapa;
He came to San CristoŽbal.
He came with flags;
He came with drums;
He came with trumpets.
Viva! Viva!
The last cavalier came to Mexico.
He came to Guatemala;
He came to Tuxtla;
He came to Chiapa;
He came to San CristoŽbal.
He came with fireworks;
He came with cannons;
He came with fifes;
He came with bugles;
He came with flags;
He came with trumpets.
Mariano Ortega and Juan GutieŽrrez came with their young lady, Nana MariŽa Cocorina.
They go together into the wood to make love.
They return eating toffee, eating candied squash, eating blood sausage.
Viva Mariano Ortega!
South America
The mythology of South American native people is rich. Telling stories is a way of life, and often the distinction between speaking and singing stories is slight. Among South American Amerindians, music is often a part of most myths, and numerous examples portray musical situations that differ from musical situations of the 1990s. Women do not usually play flutes; in myths, however, they are as likely to play flutes as men. An excerpt from a Warao narrative reveals how a woman plays a bamboo flute and sings for magical protection against a jaguar, who is actually a transformed man (Wilbert 1970:164-165):
In anthropology, this is known as a reversal of social order (as when a musical instrument at one time was the domain of one sex, but then switches at some point in history), and often, mythology is the only record of such musical behavior. Furthermore, mythology often elaborates on the processes that produce such cultural changes.He had collected a lot of bamboo and threw it down, "Kerplum." When it became dark he lapped up some water with his tongue, "Beh, beh." After having built up the fire, the boys began to dance. She herself played the flute made of bamboo, "Tea, tea, tea, tail of a jaguar," she said.
The jaguar rushed towards the woman, but she grabbed a piece of firewood and stuck him in the eye. The jaguar stopped. Again, in the dance place, she took the bamboo flute and played, "Tea, tea, tea, tail of a jaguar. Tea, tea, tea, tail of a jaguar." Again the jaguar rushed toward the seated woman. Again, she stuck a piece of firewood into his eye....
By dawn, he could take no more. He sat with his back to them. The woman's little brother arrived with arrows and spear. "Sister, you all survived the night?"
Another trait seen in the above myth, and common in most narratives, is onomatopoeia, as when the jaguar throws the bamboo down and goes "Kerplum." Often such sounds symbolize musical instruments and the noises of everyday life, including the sounds of humans, animals, and spirits. Among the Kalapalo of Brazil, and possibly among most native South American people, spirits have a specially musical language: "Powerful beings are ... capable of inventing musical forms, whereas humans are capable only of copying those forms in their performances" (Basso 1985:70). This is one of the main reasons that music has so much power among Amerindians, as shamans and nonshamans alike sing for protection, for curing, and for other types of theurgy (Dale A. Olsen 1996).
Musical historiography is essentially musical information written by chroniclers of a culture contemporary with their own. These writings are either emic (insider), such as the Maya writing about the Maya or the descendants of the Inca writing about the Inca (problematic because the notion that descendants have an emic claim on their ancestors can be controversial), Jesuits writing about music at their missions, and so forth, or etic (outsider), such as Spanish chroniclers (cronistas) writing about the music of ancient American civilizations, in which case the information may be biased. Another type of historiographic information is philology, which includes
The Caribbean
Early chroniclers (cited in Boyrie Moya 1971:13-14; Loven 1935:492-497; Moldes 1975:6-7) described several musical instruments of the Taino, even though those Arawak-speakers were nearly extinct. These instruments included what the writers called a skinless drum made from a hollowed-out tree, with an H-shaped incision on the top forming two tongues that players struck; a small gourd or calabash container rattle used during a harvest festival; a large, double-handled gourd or calabash container rattle used by shamans for curing illnesses; snail-shell rattles strung around dancers' legs, arms, and hips; small, metal, castanet-type instruments held between a dancer's fingers; flutes; and conch trumpets. Most of these instruments were used to accompany the singing of religious songs (areito).
J. M. Coopersmith (1949:7-8), describing the Taino log idiophone, quotes the chronicler Oviedo y ValdeŽs:
This description is better than those of many other chroniclers, but it is typical because of what is not said. It was apparently uncommon to write about the cultural significance of musical instruments, their origins, or anything else about their seemingly extramusical functions. The obvious question, whether or not the Taino H-drum was borrowed from the Mexican mainland, was apparently never asked. FewThey accompany their songs with a drum, which is made from a hollowed trunk of a tree, often as large as a man and sounding like the drums made by the Negroes. There is no parchment on the drum but, rather, holes or slits are made, from which the sound emanates.... The drum ... (is cylindrical) in form and made from the trunk of a tree, as large as desired.... It is played with a stick like the tympanum (atabal). One sound-hole in the form of an "H" is cut in the middle of one side of the trunk. The two tongues formed by the "H" are beaten with a stick. On the opposite side of the trunk-section, near the base of the cylinder, a rectangular hole is cut. The drum must be held on the ground, for it does not sound if held elsewhere .... On the mainland, these drums are sometimes lined with the skin of a deer or some other animal. Both types of drum are used on the mainland.
The ancient Carib, by contrast, had more musical instruments, which the chroniclers (unknown writers cited in Petitjean-Roget 1961:51, 67-68 and Rouse 1963b:561; Rochefort 1666, cited by Stevenson 1975:52) described in fuller detail. Among them were container rattles made from gourds; a single-headed drum (membranophone) made from a hollowed tree; bamboo flutes and bone flutes; panpipes; conch trumpets; and even a single-stringed instrument made from a gourd. The chroniclers mentioned that mothers used rattles to soothe their children; men played flutes in the morning while women prepared breakfast and people bathed; panpipes accompanied dancing; and conch trumpets were blown to signal wars and hunting or fishing expeditions.
Mexico and Central America
Historical accounts of Amerindian music from Mexico and Central Americathe area known as the Viceroyalty of New Spain, including the Caribbean islandsdate from the early 1500s and were written mainly by Spanish chroniclers. Foremost among them was Bernal DiŽaz del Castillo, who lived between about 1492 and 1581 (Stevenson 1968:12-14). His accounts vividly describe ritual music for human sacrifices, music for battles, and festival music of the Aztecs.
During the colonial period, religious scholars produced many sources about Amerindian music because they believed that knowing about native music would help missionaries convert the Indians to Christianity. The Franciscan order was dominant in Mexico, where Pedro de Gante was the leading missionary who described Amerindian music during the early years of the conversion process. He wrote in letters to King Charles V of Spain about the Indians' musicality: "I can affirm that there are now trained singers among them who if they were to sing in Your Majesty's Chapel would at this moment do so well that perhaps you would have to see them actually singing in order to believe it possible" (Stevenson 1968:157). The printing of music appeared in Mexico as early as 1556, forty-five years before it appeared in Peru, and elaborate polyphonic scores attest to Amerindian choristers' musical skills.
South America
Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, explorers, religious zealots, and others wrote extensively about the new lands of South Americaknown as the Viceroyalties of New Granada, Peru, La Plata, and Brazil, the latter under Portuguese rule. One of the most important writers about sixteenth-century Peruvian music was Felipe GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala (1936 [1612-1615/16]), who described Inca music and musical instruments in detail; GuamaŽn Poma's source provides many drawings of Inca musical performance. Another sixteenth-century author, Garcilaso de la Vega (1966 [1609]), the son of a Spanish nobleman and an Incan princess, also wrote extensively about music among the Inca and other Amerindians.
The major religious orders in Spanish South America were the Augustinians, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Jesuits; the last were musically active in Peru and Paraguay until their expulsion in 1767. Their goal was basically the same as that of missionaries in New Spain: spiritual conversion. Like those missionaries, they trained many musicians, chronicled many events involving music, described many musical instruments, and in essence provided some of the first ethnographies of native cultures.
Writings in the historiographic process often become ethnographies when they deal extensively with the behavior of a culture. Likewise, ethnographies become historiographic sources. Indeed, the difference between histories and ethnographies is
Studies that go beyond the mere description of a culture and include analysis, interpretation, and synthesis based on participant observation, participation, and interaction have moved out of ethnography into ethnology, the science of culture. These include studies in anthropology, ethnobotany, ethnolinguistics, ethnomusicology, folklore, poetics, religion, and so forth, and they number in the thousands of volumes that add to our musical understanding of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
In the realm of specific musical study, participation in and writing about the music of a culture by its bearers themselves (the emic, or "insider" approach) or by non-culturebearers (the etic, or "outsider" approach) has often resulted in the cultivation of knowledge acquired through practice. Two studies that help describe this approach are CapoeiraA Brazilian Art Form: History, Philosophy, and Practice, by Bira Almeida, known professionally as Mestre Acordeon (1986), and Ring of Liberation, by J. Lowell Lewis (1992). Both treat the same musical phenomenon, capoeira, a form of Afro-Brazilian music, dance, and martial art, from Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Because these books differ widely in their approach to this topic, reading them both side by side will provide a better understanding of capoeira than reading only one of them. A thorough understanding of a particular musical topic requires the exploration of all the forms of musical scholarship available.
Music does not exist without a social context. Even music being recorded "out of context," as in a studio, is within a studio context. Likewise, all music is involved with some kind of social, religious, or economic issue, and a process is always at work. These are often complex phenomena, requiring extensive analysis to be understood.
Musical instruments, for example, do not function by themselves, but are entwined with cultural behavior. It is important to understand not only where musical instruments are found and why certain cultures have the instruments they do, but also what instruments physically and sonically symbolize and what roles they play. Musical genres too have typical contexts, entwined with social structure and human behavior.
The Americas are diverse for many reasons, especially because they are largely populated by immigrants, and music often negotiates ethnic and cultural identity among immigrant societies (most commonly in the Caribbean and South America). Music also changes because of inside influences and outside contacts, and new ideas come from the recent or "pop" musics of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
The Classification of Musical Instruments
The Distribution of Musical Instruments
Symbolic Interpretations of Musical Instruments
The Influence of Electronics
People make music by playing instruments, singing, or both, often at the same time. Musical instruments tell us much about cultures, not so much as items in themselves, but as tokens of meaningwhat they signify to their cultures and how they came to mean what they mean. Musical instruments are artifacts and "ethnofacts"the former because they are objects created by humans, and the latter because they have meaning, often of a symbolic kind.
The musical instruments found in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are diverse, and their number is large. From the Encounter in 1492 until the present, about two thousand languages have been spoken by native Americans, not including those of North America. If an average of three musical instruments per language group existed, that means that the names of probably six thousand instruments were once being used. The Spanish, Portuguese, Africans, and all the other foreigners who came after the Encounter and up to the present probably introduced another thousand names for musical instruments. Because of the disappearance of native American cultures, assimilation, modernization, and other forces of culture change, a much smaller quantity exists today. Nevertheless, we are still dealing with a vast number, and diversity is still a hallmark of these instruments. A systematic taxonomy of musical instrument classification, therefore, is necessary in order to understand the distribution, symbolism, and use of musical instruments in the area.
This volume classifies musical instruments in two ways. First, whenever possible, they are classified according to the system designed by their culture itself. When an indigenous taxonomy is not known or does not exist, however, they are classified according to an extended set of terms derived from the work of Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs: idiophone, membranophone, chordophone, aerophone (Jairazbhoy 1990), electrophone (Bakan et. al. 1990), and corpophone (Olsen 1986).
Sounds are transmitted via waves that travel from their sources through air (or water), strike the receiver's eardrum, and register in the receiver's brain. The shape of the wave determines whether what is received is music (and what kind of music),
An idiophone is defined as a 'self-sounder'; the entire instrument itself vibrates, sending off waves of sound. This is a huge category because of the cultural diversity of the geographic areas. Because of forced and unforced immigration, idiophones essentially include instruments from Africa, Europe, and Asia, in addition to those of native Americans. Examples of idiophones, using some common and general terms, range from dancers' ankle-tied bells to maracas (maraŽka, from the TupiŽ language), rhythm sticks, triangles, steel drums, marimbas, gongs, scrapers, and many more.
A membranophone is defined as a 'skin-sounder' in which a skin (or skins) stretched tightly over a rigid support vibrates, sending off waves of sound. Skin instruments are often called drums, a term otherwise used for the body or chamber. Confusion arises when drum is used for items without a skin, such as oil drums or steel drumsthe former not a musical instrument, the latter an idiophone.
An aerophone is defined as an 'air-sounder', a wind instrument in which air within a column vibrates, or in which air acting on the instrument causes it to vibrate, sending off waves of sound. The aerophone category comprises the largest and most complex group of instruments in the Americas, and numerous subgroups can be included within it. Because of diversity, it would perhaps be prudent to refrain from employing terms derived from the classification of Western European orchestral instruments. For example, such terms as edge aerophone for flute, lip-concussion aerophone for trumpet, single-reed-concussion aerophone for clarinet, and double-reed-concussion aerophone for oboe or shawm (a European Renaissance kind of oboe) would be organologically clear. Common sense, however, suggests that for most readers, terms like flute, trumpet, clarinet, and oboe are easier to understand. In all cases, when the common European terms are used in this volume, they will never mean the European form of the instrument unless carefully stated so. Other terms such as ocarina for globular flute (
A chordophone is defined as a 'string-sounder' in which a string (or strings) stretched tightly over a rigid support vibrates, sending off waves of sound. Most musical instruments in this category derive from Iberian prototypes, and their names are most often given in their English forms, rather than Spanish or Portuguese (guitar for guitarra, harp for arpa, mandolin for mandolina, and violin for violiŽn, for example). Sometimes guitar type or small guitar are used in scholarship, but that usage tends to confuse rather than clarify. Exceptions are the tres (
An electrophone is defined as an 'electronic sounder' in which a vibration or action is produced by electronic means, sending off waves of sound. This category serves for several instruments used in contemporary or pop music and includes the
A corpophone is defined as a 'body sounder' in which a vibration or action is produced by a body part (or parts), sending off sound waves. This category includes handclaps, slaps of the buttocks, snaps of the fingers, and so forth, but does not include vocalizations. Musical vocal sounds are songs; the word chant is not used unless it is specifically defined within particular entries.
Karl Gustav Izikowitz attempted to list and analyze all the musical instruments of native South America (Izikowitz 1970 [1935]). Other scholars have made similar attempts for particular countries, including Argentina (Vega 1946), Bolivia (Diaz Gainza 1962), Colombia (BermuŽdez 1985), Ecuador (Coba Andrade 1981), Guyana
A topic of scholars' concern is the distribution of musical instruments. At a general level, this distribution in the southern Americas is determined by one or more of these factors: the locations of the cultures that use them at present, the locations of the cultures that used them at one time, and the locations of their use in popular music.
The first factor is a logical truism, something to be expected. General examples are the distribution of African-derived membranophones around the coast of South America from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, northward to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, northward from Colombia through Belize, southward from Colombia to coastal Ecuador, and into the cultures of the Caribbean basinareas where the largest numbers of African slaves were concentrated. Particular examples are the use of rum membranophones in the CandombleŽ rituals of Bahia, Brazil, and bataŽ drums in the SanteriŽa rituals of Cuba. Another example is the use of guitars or guitar-type instruments wherever Spanish or Portuguese heritage is strong.
The second factor relates to the use of instruments by people who were not the original users, but because the original users lived in the area in times past, they influenced the present users. An example of this is the use of marimba xylophones by Maya people in Guatemala, who learned the instruments from African former slaves or runaway slaves whose descendants no longer inhabit the area.
The third factor is determined by the importation of certain instruments because of popular music. An example is the use of the charango in Santiago, Chile, by performers of nueva cancioŽn in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Inti Illimani and QuilapayuŽn, and its continued use in certain Chilean rock groups of the 1990s, such as Los Jaivas.
The distribution of musical instruments can be affected by culturally determined factors, most of them imbued with interpretations of symbolism or iconicity: concepts of ideal qualities of sound, concepts of physical duality, ideas about extramusical power, the need for giving signals, and the introduction of instruments by agents of foreign powers (such as Jesuit missionaries in 1700s and military bands in the 1800s).
Concepts of ideal qualities of sound
During pre-Columbian times, the predominant melodic musical instrument type was probably the edge aerophone, or flute. This conclusion is based on archaeology and is therefore verified only in areas where archaeological studies have been possible, namely the western third of South America and nearly all of Mexico and Central America. Because of humidity, tropical-forest terrain does not preserve items of material culture made from cane, clay, and bone, whereas dry climates do. The study of living tropical-forest cultures, however, reveals a high use of edge aerophones that are not related to European or African types (bone or cane tubular flutes played vertically, for example), suggesting that the tradition has probably continued from ancient times (see Okada 1995:video examples 26 and 27). Other edge aerophones, however, are found in archaeology but have not survived in living cultures. Globular flutes, for example, were common in ancient Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere, but have disappeared from common use. Likewise, multiple tubular flutes with holes for fingering were prevalent among the Maya and Aztec but have since disappeared. In some regions of the Andes, such as the Mantaro Valley of Peru, many edge aerophones have been replaced by European clarinets and saxophones. Nevertheless, the ancient exemplars and the current usage (including the substitutions) suggest an edge-aerophone distribution wherever native Americans and their descendants (mestizos, or people of mixed race and/or culture) are located today. The distribution is, in fact, so prevalent that native Central America and western South America can be considered edge-aerophone (flute) cultures.
Evidence suggests that lip-concussion aerophones, or trumpets, have continued since antiquity in the Andes, though the materials have often changed from ceramic and wood to cow horn and sheet metal, while the shells of conchs remain fairly constant in certain areas, including Central America and Peru. Although evidence does not exist for single-reed-concussion aerophones in the ancient Americas, idioglot and heteroglot clarinets are common today in tropical-forest cultures (WaiaŻpi, Warao, Yekuana, for example) and elsewhere (Aymara, Guajiro). They may have existed in pre-Columbian times, and perhaps only their reeds disappeared; for example, tubes interpreted as bone, ceramic, or wooden "flutes" or "trumpets" in Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian musical archaeology may have been single- or double-reed-concussion aerophones whose vegetable-matter reeds perished. Today's use of shawms (chirisuya and chirimiŽa) in Peru and Guatemala, possibly introduced by Spanish missionaries, may actually suggest continuity rather than cultural borrowing, a sort of new wine in old bottles. The prevalence of lip- and reed-concussion aerophones among native Americans suggests a pairing or dualistic usage with the use of edge aerophones. Though the "flutes" are whistle-tone instruments, the "trumpets," "clarinets," and shawms are buzz-tone instruments.
Such dualism can be seen as a relationship of opposites, a common phenomenon with regard to the physical use of instruments, such as male and female pairs of instruments, especially in the siku 'panpipe' traditions of Bolivia and Peru. Dualism of sounds or tones exists in the Amazon tropical forest among the Tukano of Colombia, who attach sexual symbolism to the sounds of their instruments (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:115-116). The whistling tone of edge aerophones, for example, symbolizes sexual invitation, while the buzz of lip- and/or single-reed-concussion aerophones symbolizes male aggressiveness. These opposites are joined, and their union is supported by percussion sounds of membranophones and idiophones, which symbolize "a synthesis of opposites ... an act of creation in which male and female energy have united" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:116). This native tripartite theory of music explains the Tukano use of musical instruments and can possibly explain similar usage throughout native South America, especially in parts of the tropical forest,
Throughout most of the central Andes of South America, the area at one time dominated by the Inca, there exists a preference for high-pitched sounds as exemplified by the whistle tones of flutes. This high-pitched aesthetic, favored by the Quechua (also Kechua) and the Aymara, is also found in their choice of the tightly strung charango, a small, guitar-type chordophone, as an accompanying instrument, and their style of singing, most often performed by women. The distribution of flutes throughout this region, from panpipes to duct and ductless edge aerophones, is related to the preference for high-pitched tones.
Concepts of physical duality
We have already seen how dualism is expressed in the sounds musical instruments make; the concepts of the whistle tone and buzz tone combine to create power, according to the Tukano. Many other native American cultures employ the concept of duality, but in a physical way: two instruments, or two halves of one instrument, symbolic of male and female, unite to create a whole. The distribution of symbolically male and female musical instruments coincides with cultures that interpret power as the union of opposites. Nowhere is this belief stronger than in the Andes of South America.
The siku panpipe set of the Peruvian and Bolivian Aymara requires two people to play each half of the instrument in an interlocking fashion. Called ira and arca, the halves are respectively male (the leader) and female (the follower). To play a melody together by joining individual notes in alternation is called in Aymara jjaktasina irampi arcampi 'to be in agreement between the ira and the arca' (Valencia-ChacoŽn 1989:34, English version). This technique is related to the dualistic symbolism common among Andean native people, for whom the sun and the moon are dichotomous creator beings, associated respectively with male and female. But not all dualistic symbolism is mythological or cosmological; it can be sociological when each half of a panpipe ensemble known as chiriwano represents a particular community. Two metaphorical neighboring communitieseach half of the panpipe ensemble"play their particular melodies simultaneously in a type of counterpoint," like a musical duel, "in which each community unit tries to play its melody at a louder volume than the other, in order to dominate." This musical and physical dualism is a metaphor of the Andean society, in which two halves, the leaders of each community, "are structurally necessary to complete the whole" (Turino 1987:20, translated by Dale A. Olsen). This aspect of two parts working together to make a whole is related to the pre-Spanish concept called mita (minga), a communal work effort, in which the whistle tone of a pinkullo (pingullo) duct edge aerophone is coupled with the buzz tone of the bass snare drum as it produces its staccato synthesis of opposites to accompany work.
Panpipes of the Aymara and Chiriwano are not the only instruments played in a dualistic manner symbolizing male and female. Among the Yekuana of the southern Venezuelan tropical forest, tekeya single-reed-concussion aerophones are always played in pairs, one male and the other female. Their music is symbolic of "the movements and songs of a mythological animal pair" (Coppens 1975:1). Among the descendants of African slaves in the Pacific coast of Colombia (the ChocoŽ region), two one-headed membranophones known as cununo mayor and cununo menor are designated as male and female, respectively (Whitten 1974:109).
Ideas about extramusical power
Many of the Andean siku traditions, though imbued with dualistic symbolism, are symbolic in other ways as expressed in particular musical occasions replete with elaborate
The allusion to animals is an important use of symbol with regard to musical instruments. The animal for which an instrument has symbolic significance is usually a living animal. The Quechua antara, a monistic (having one part only) panpipe and an important instrument of the Inca, was often made from human bones. Human body parts imbued musical instruments with power, and antara panpipes made from human bones, "just like the drums from human skin, were not meant to be ordinary musical instruments. Instead, considering the joining of the parts: bones, skin, etc. for their essences, their voices should have been something alive" (JimeŽnez Borja 1951:39, translated by Dale A. Olsen). Indeed, lifeits creation and continuationis assured by fertility, by the joining of male and female, by the planting and harvesting of crops, by the abundance of rain.
In many regions of the Andes, the pinkullo duct aerophone (the term and the "flute" are used by the Aymara and the Kechua) is seasonal, played only during particular calendrical periods, such as the rainy season from October through March:
The pinkullo is associated with fertility, as the symbolism suggested above would indicate.This flute is played during the season when the great rains begin.... Before playing the instrument it is moistened in chicha [beer], alcohol, or water. The coincidence of ... festivals with the arrival of the rains, the moistening of the wood before making the flutes, and the moistening of the instruments before playing them, is quite significant. (JimeŽnez Borja 1951:45, translated by Dale A. Olsen)
Flutes are obvious symbols of fertility because of their phallic shape, and they often have the role of a charm, endowed with power to entice a female lover to a male (they were played only by men in the Andes). So powerful was the sound of the kena ductless edge aerophone to the Inca in ancient Cuzco, Peru, that women could not resist it: "The flute ... is calling me with such tenderness and passion that I can't resist it.... My love is calling me and I must answer him, that he may be my husband and I his wife" (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966 [1609]:87). One ancient technique was to play the kena within a clay potan obvious symbol of the sexual act, its musical imitation forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the tradition persisted into the colonial period, and Borja describes such a jar found in Huamanga, department of Ayacucho, Peru. It has a small opening at the top for inserting the flute, two larger openings in the sides for the player's hands, and two eyelets on the sides so it can be suspended around the kena player's neck (JimeŽnez Borja 1951:37). He explains that to play the kena into such a specially designed clay vessel creates a magical voice that "defeats death and promotes life" (JimeŽnez Borja 1951:36). To further support the fertility symbolism of the Andean flute, especially as an instrument used during planting-related festivals, the term pingullo combines the Kechua pinga and ullu, words glossable as 'penis' (Carvalho-Neto 1964:342).
The need for giving signals
Musical iconicity (relationship between form and meaning) is another criterion for the use of musical instruments in Peru. The clariŽn is a long, side-blown, lip-concussion aerophone made from bamboo and cow horn, played outdoors by men during
The introduction of European musical instruments
When the Spanish Jesuit missionaries came to South America in the mid-1500s to convert and teach the local inhabitants, they employed musical instruments that they thought would assist in the conversion because of their heavenliness. These instruments, also used to play bass, harmony, and melody in the absence of an organ, were the harp and the violin (
After the expulsion of the Jesuits (in 1767), the harp and the violin continued to be played by native Americans until their religious use, and even their European derivation, were all but forgotten. JoseŽ MariŽa Arguedas (1977:16) wrote: "Harp, violin, transverse flute, and chirimiŽa are Indian instruments in the Peruvian mountains.... I remember with special...sentiment the expression of amazement of some of my friends, well known mistis or men of the village, upon finding that the harp, violin and flute are not Indian instruments, but European ones."
The shawm, known as chirimiŽa in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico and chirimiŽa and chirisuya in Peru, was brought, in its European form, by the Spanish colonists. It was used at Jesuit and other Roman Catholic missions as an outdoor instrument in processions, festivals, funerals, and other church-sponsored events. Additionally, it heralded the conquistadors' entrances into indigenous cities and was later played for social and political events of the Spanish aristocracy (Stevenson 1968:289). When many native peoples in the viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, and Peru learned how to play the chirimiŽa, it took on indigenous characteristics (use of a split condor quill for a double reed, for example) and became considered one of their own.
The pipe and taborone person playing a vertical duct flute and drum at the
Indigenous people, especially the Inca, had their own ensembles of military musical instruments, including the kepu (conch trumpet) and wancar (membranophone), as Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1609: "All night long, the two armies remained facing each other, on the alert. When day broke, the conch horns, timpani, and trumpets began to sound, and they marched toward each other, with loud shouting. Leading his troops, the Inca Viracocha struck the first blow and, in no time, there was a terrible struggle" (1966 [1609]:167). These musical instruments evoked fear in their enemies
European-derived wind ensembles or bands (mainly German-influenced) were the result of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century introduction of the military-band concept into the recently independent countries of the Americas. The appearance of such instruments as trumpets, trombones, baritones, tubas, clarinets, saxophones, snare drums, and bass drums coincided with the development of modern
Besides the influence in the development of military bands, the German-manufactured accordion (acordeoŽn) was introduced by German immigrants in the early 1900s. In Colombia, it replaced the locally fabricated can~a de millo, a single-reed concussion aerophone used in popular ensembles to perform vallenato, a rural form of cumbia from the region of Vallenata. Today's vallenato groups use the button accordion (
Related to the accordion because it has multiple single reeds is the harmonica (rondiŽn) from Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, where it is called armoŽnica, dulzaina, and sinfoniŽa. It was introduced by German immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s; today it is still manufactured in Germany by the Hošhner company and imported to the Americas.
Electronics has been one of the most important influences in the producing and receiving, the preservation and learning, and the dissemination and commodification of music in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Amplifiers for charangos, guitars, harps, flutes, panpipes, and other acoustic instruments are common in urban areas, but so are electrophones such as synthesizers. Equally important as musical instruments are the numerous devices for musicaland audiovisual, as in video camerasrecording and playback, such as boom boxes, radios, television sets, phonographs, and tape recorders. Also important are electronic-enhancement devices such as microphones, soundboards, speakers, and other elements of public-address systems and amplifiers. These, like the aerophones, chordophones, idiophones, and membranophones that they amplify, often require skilled technicians who function as performers in their own right.
Electronic production and reception of music
Just as brass bands have replaced weaker-volume panpipe ensembles in some regions of the Andes, so have electronically enhanced guitars and keyboards replaced weaker-volume samba bands in some regions of urban Brazil, and electronically enhanced horns and keyboards have replaced steel drums for some musical events in Trinidad. Stages in CoŽrdoba, Argentina, are packed with speakers and electronic equipment during performances of cuarteto music; stages in Santiago and Vin~a del Mar, Chile, are likewise filled with sound-enhancement devices during rock concerts and performances by groups such as Los Jaivas and Inti Illimani.
Many countries, such as Brazil, Jamaica, and Mexico, have thriving music industries based on the electronic production of recordings. Since the 1980s, many urban centers have competed with the United States in producing muŽsica latina. The 45-rpm recording was the important medium of the 1970s, but the 1980s and 1990s are the decades of the cassette tape. By the mid-1990s, compact discs had become popular in large urban areas, and many musical stars were rereleasing on CDs and cassettes their recordings previously released on vinyl.
The reception of music, too, has become dependent on electronic devices. Probably every home in urban areas has a cassette recorder on which tapes of recent and nostalgic music can be played. Likewise, radios and television sets are important
Electronic preservation and learning of music
It is not unusual in the 1990s to see native Americans, mestizos, or even tourists recording music on boomboxes during patronal and other religious festivals in the Amazon of Brazil, the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, or other locations that normally do not have electricity. The effects of battery-operated recording devices are overwhelming, and often musical preservation on tape and dance preservation on video is a vital technique for the process of learning.
Musicians from many countries in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, and South America have interest in preserving music and dance for the purpose of learning and passing on traditions. In Brazil, the phenomenon known as parafolclore is based on the staging of folkloric events, and the learning process is often derived from the electronic preservation of traditional folclore events that have been recorded by amateurs with their boomboxes. In more sophisticated circles, recordings are made with Nagra and other professionally designed tape recorders, or on videotape, for preservation in institutes and other academic archives.
Electronic dissemination and commodification of music
Electronic dissemination of music is usually done for purposes of commodification. Money is usually the bottom line, though cultural patrimony and ethnic identity may be reasons for the popularity of karaoke among people of Asian descent in South America during the 1980s and 1990s. In Sa~o Paulo, Buenos Aires, and other cities where people of Chinese and Japanese descent live, karaoke bars feature the latest musical hits from Japan and the most recent audio, video, and laser-disc technologies. Karaoke in Spanish and Portuguese, featuring regional popular songs, is common in urban bars, where commodificationsales of food and liquoris more important than the ideals of patrimony and ethnicity.
Sales of cassettes and CDs, however, are the most important means for making money by producers, whereas live concerts are probably the most lucrative means for the performers themselves [see CUARTETO, POP MUSIC OF ARGENTINA]. Both depend on musical dissemination via electronic sound-producing devices, the latest musical-instrument technologies.
Dance, Sounds, and Movements
Religious Music
Secular Music
Tourism
The Music Industry
Music is being played or listened to almost everywhere and most of the time in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Ranging from the sound of a single flute played by a lonely shepherd in a high mountain valley, to privately performed curing ceremonies witnessed only by the curers and the ill, to radios playing in thousands of homes, to massive celebrations mobilizing hundreds of thousands of participants packed into the broad avenues and civic squares of densely populated cities, the richness and diversity of the musical traditions seem almost to defy description.
Yet this musical diversity has underlying patterns that enable observers to speak about the music of the entire region. This article presents some of the significant general features of the musical genres performed and the contexts in which music is played, drawing on the material from the entries on specific societies and nations, where these processes are described with more attention to local histories and the specifics of social processes, cultures, and styles.
The principal contexts of which music is a part in the Americas include religious activities, life-cycle celebrations, leisure, tourism, and to a lesser degree work. Some of these categories are general throughout the lands covered by this volume, but in other cases (such as tourism), music is more heavily involved in some areas than in others.
Many are the contexts for musical performance in the Americas. Although some new contexts replace older ones, what appears to happen more often is that new contexts are added to older ones, which after a generation they may eventually replace. The music changes, but the contexts often remain, and music itself goes on: work, life-cycle rituals, religious events, urban entertainment, tourism, and mass media all include musical performances of significance to their participants.
Music and movement are closely intertwined in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Some native South American communities use the same word for both, arguing that appropriate movements are as much a part of a performance as the sounds themselves. Stylized movements are often an important part
Ritualized movements throughout the region include children's games; musicians' movements while performing; processions; and solo, couple, and group dances. Though some common features can be discerned, dances of Amerindian, African, and European origins have distinctive features, often combined today in popular traditions. Traditional Amerindian dances tend to involve stamping or moving the legs and arms to a fairly regular rhythm, with the rest of the trunk and head fairly straight and rigid. Dances in circles and lines are common, usually with the genders separated; dancing in couples was extremely rare, if found at all. In European dance traditions, the trunk and head are fairly motionless, the legs usually move to a simple rhythm, and dancing in couples (and combinations of couples) is often a defining feature. Dances that originated in Africa frequently involve moving different parts of the body to different rhythmsresembling the polyrhythmic patterns of the music itself. Formations by individuals and in lines and circles are more common than dances in couples.
During the past five hundred years, whatever distinctness the dances of different ethnic groups once had has been blurred by adaptations of existing styles and creations of new ones. This situation is especially true of twentieth-century popular dances, which have often drawn heavily on African-descended traditions. Amerindian and African religious traditions reveal their origins with greater clarity than secular dances. European religions have had an ambivalent attitude toward music and dance altogetheroften banning the performance of secular music and dance and discouraging dancing in religious services. Whereas music and dance open communication with spirits in many Amerindian and African-based religions, silent prayer is considered the most effective communication with the deity in many Christian churches.
Dance halls, nightclubs, and life-cycle celebrations of which dancing in couples is a part (birthday parties and weddings, for example) are important performance locations that provide the livelihood for many musicians. The importance of these locations may have influenced the development of musical technology (in favor of louder instruments that can be played for many hours), and technology has influenced the development of these venues. Many articles in this volume touch on the importance of secular social dancing in the musical environments of the different
Amerindian belief systems
Before the colonization of the Americas by Europe beginning in 1492, it is quite likely that most musical events were in some form or another part of religious or state-sponsored events. Where states were based on religion, it is difficult to separate the concepts of religion and politics. The elaborate ceremonies described by the Maya and the Inca for their Spanish conquerors included musical performances by specialists. The religious rituals of the coastal Tupi-GuaraniŽ in Brazil and the island-dwelling Arawak and Carib communities in the Caribbean featured unison singing, shouts, dancing, and the sound of flutes and rattles. The archaeological record is replete with examples of clay wind instruments; in the humid areas, little else has survived.
Intensive investigation of Amerindian music in the twentieth century has necessarily been restricted to areas where such groups survive and continue to practice what appear to be traditional religions and musical forms. They are often found living in "refuge areas"remote locations, away from non-Indian settlements, in areas of relatively little economic importance to the national society, and where missionization is recent, tolerant, or ineffective. With small populations and facing the effects of new diseases and economic changes, these groups cannot serve for generalizing about the musical situation in the pre-Columbian empires. Their music, however, reveals striking similarities to descriptions written in the 1500s and 1600s of performances in the nonstate societies. In these refuge areas, music continues to be closely related to religious events, and to direct communications with spirits and interactions with spirits of animals (such as jaguars, deer, and vultures) or ancestors. In some cases, musical sounds are themselves the voices of spirits; the performers may or may not be hybrid humans or spirits, and the instruments themselves spirits. Dale Olsen, in his discussion of communication with spirits among the Warao, describes a feature that reappears throughout South America [see WARAO]
Shamanism is a widespread form of communication with spirits. It was found from the extreme southern tip of Argentina and Chile through northern Mexico and right up into the arctic. At one level, shamanism is communication with spirits for the purpose of healing or sickening an individual or a community. At another level, shamanism is a practice that demonstrates to onlookers the continued presence and power of spirits. It makes the sacred visible and experienced directly by the population. Shamans may use tobacco and other narcotics and hallucinogens in conjunction with singing, or they may rely on singing alone. In a few cases, they do not employ music at all. When music is part of shamanism, it can simultaneously structure the shaman's experiences and communicate them to the community as it teaches children how to be shamans and what the supernatural world is like. Like many aspects of community life, it is at once a religious, social, and instructional event.
Shamanism is often a domestic or community practice, but many communities perform larger ceremonies to which they invite neighboring communities. These may involve feasting, drinking homemade beer or ingesting narcotics or hallucinogens, and making music and dancing (as in the upper Rio Negro). Metamorphosis, a transformation into an animal or spirit, is characteristic of a great deal of native South
The music in such events often appears repetitive and is frequently "interrupted" by "nonmusical" sounds, such as animal cries and shouts. Repetition is part of the efficacy of the musicit can provide the underlying structures on which the events develop. The development or drama may not be in melody and timbre, but in the texts and experiences recounted. Often, the music continues for the duration of the eventwhich may last hours, or even days and weeks. Where animal spirits are powerful and sometimes sacred, it should be no wonder that animal cries appear in the performances. They should not be considered extramusical, however, since their absence may result in a performance considered unsatisfactory or without effect. They may be nonmelodic, but they are not extramusical.
In Amerindian communities where missionaries have been active and there is a long history of contact with the colonizers, musical traditions developed that in many places combine aspects of native and colonizer religious events and similarly combine their musical forms and performances. The merging of styles and events through a colonial encounter is much more common than isolation in Mexico and Central and South America. Sain's-day celebrations in the Andes and the highlands of Mexico and Guatemala often combine public inebriation, shouts and cries rarely heard in European performances, and traditional Amerindian instruments with Roman Catholic holidays. In Andean communities in some areas of Peru, Christian holidays are the most important "traditional" musical events that survive.
In some Amerindian communities, especially those influenced by Protestant missionaries, the singing of hymns has replaced all traditional musical forms. In some places, this change has led to unusual new musical events, such as hymn-writing competitions and writing hymns in indigenous languages. In others, the singing of hymns and national and international popular music are the only genres performed today.
European-introduced Christianity
Most countries in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean are nominally Christian, and most of their people are Roman Catholic. This situation is the result of extensive colonization by Spain and Portugal. Amerindians and enslaved African populations were converted to Christianity, and under colonial rule, the Roman Catholic Church influenced their beliefs and social institutions tremendously. The mass itself was seldom elaborated musically, and then for special occasions only, and the singing of hymns has only recently been introduced, but Roman Catholic missionaries were quite concerned with the musical development of the Amerindians they encountered. They set up music schools in several countries, and introduced their own music in part to replace the "diabolical" traditions they
The church supported the establishment of social groups called brotherhoods (Portuguese irmandades, Spanish cofradiŽas), which had been organized in Europe but in the New World came to be one of the few organizations available to enslaved Africans and their descendants. These institutions had social and religious features and often included the performance of music and dancing on religious occasions. Voluntary religious organizations, continued by the descendants of these brotherhoods, survive in many parts of Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, where they perform on saints' days and around Christmas.
For many communities of Amerindian, African, and European descent alike, the Christian religious calendar has structured the most important public musical events of the year. The birth of Jesus is celebrated in the end of December, at Christmas. Local community celebrations frequently extend to 6 January, with pageantlike wanderings of kings bearing gifts. Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, celebrated during Holy Week (culminating in Easter), are preceded by a penitential period called Lent, which itself is preceded by enthusiastic celebrations of carnival during the final days before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Carnival celebrations, not always welcomed by the church, are considered to be a kind of last chance for fleshly excesses before Lent, and music often plays an important role in the events. The most famous of these may be in the Caribbean, in Rio de Janeiro, and in New Orleans, but carnival celebrations and restrictions on musical performances during Lent are found in many communities throughout the area.
In addition to these religious events, the days of many different saints are celebrated in different areas. In some cases, a country may celebrate a saint (as Mexico does the Virgin of Guadalupe); in others, a certain saint may celebrated as the patron of a particular city, a particular trade, or a particular ethnic group. Often saints' days are occasions for competitions in music and dance. Communities with populations of African and Amerindian descent have often combined elements of previous beliefs with Roman Catholic oneswhich has led to a multiplicity of traditions throughout the region.
In the twentieth century, evangelical Protestant groups have made considerable inroads into Roman Catholicism and African spirit-based religions. Hymns, sung in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Amerindian languages, are a common musical form. Among the Protestant sects are Hallelujah groups, in which possession by spirits is common, often to the accompaniment of some form of participatory music. In some communities, considerable conflict occurs between religious groups, expressed in musical events, theology, and church rituals.
African-introduced religions
Africans were enslaved and brought to the Americas from widely variant societies and regions. They therefore had no unifying language, religion, or musical tradition. Many, however, shared general musical traits that transcended particular African communitiesamong them collective participation in making music, call-and-response singing, and dense and often interlocking rhythms played on drums.
Slaves of African descent turned to, and were in some cases encouraged to turn to, Christian churches for worship. They brought to these churches a musical tradition that persisted despite systematic efforts to suppress some of its African elements, such as the playing of drums (repeatedly outlawed in different countries). Important, too, were brotherhoods where slaves and free people of African descent could meet to socialize and to prepare ritual events. These have continued in such places as St. Lucia, Brazil, and Panama (
Among the later waves of peoples brought to the New World were Yoruba-speaking populations from West Africa, whose religion included the worship of spirits that would possess adepts and speak through them. These religions have persisted throughout the Caribbean and along Brazil's east coast right into Argentina, under various names and using various musical forms. Called SanteriŽa in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti, CandombleŽ in northeastern Brazil, and other names in other countries, they usually employ a set of three sacred drums and other instruments whose rhythms are specific to specific gods. Called by the rhythms, the gods descend and "ride" the bodies of specific worshipers. Though formerly persecuted in some countries, these religions are expanding to new audiences.
Other religious communities
Significant populations of peoples of Indian (from India) and Indonesian descent live in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana), and their celebrations are often related to ritual observances of their own. Some European immigrant groups have brought with them their own religious organizations, and these influence different countries to different degrees. Since 1898, Japanese immigrants have introduced their religions into South America [see MUSIC OF IMMIGRANTS].
A great deal of musical performance may be characterized as nonreligious, or secular. There is no attempt in such music to address divinities or to call spirits to inhabit a space or a body. Some apparently secular events, such as saints' days, are intimately tied to the sacred calendar; some are tied to an agricultural calendar; some are related to life-cycle events; some are tied to national holidays and music festivals.
Music for work
A few kinds of music were developed to accompany collective labor. Before steam and electricity came to the aid of human muscles, coordinated labor was the most effective way to move heavy loads and raise heavy sails. In some situations, a fixed rhythm allowed laborers to work at a steady, slow pace, and served to while away the hours.
With the predominance of steam, gasoline, and electric energy, work-related songs are rarely performed. In many parts of the world, however, music continues to be part of the workplace. In Peru, certain collective agricultural work is accompanied by music played on flutes and drums or on other instruments. In many parts of the region, agricultural workers take a battery-operated radio to listen to popular music as they labor in the sun. The productivity of workers in offices may be carefully
More frequently than actually creating the pace at which people work, music marks the beginning and ending of seasons: to begin the planting, to celebrate the harvest, to commemorate a particularly good manufacturing year. Agricultural rituals occur in most countries with large Amerindian populations and in Amerindian communities, but they also occur in communities of European immigrants and populations of African descent.
Life-cycle celebrations
A great deal of music is performed around events in human lives. These range from Amerindian initiations to European-influenced birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and funerals. Many of these events include social dancing, drinking, and eating, and some are highly elaborate. In many countries, weddings are festive events, and performing at them is an important source of income for musicians. Fifteenth-birthday celebrations are major social occasions for young women and their families in much of Mexico and Central and South America. Courting, making new acquaintances, and renewing acquaintances are often part of life-cycle celebrations. They typically include a group of invited celebrants of both sexes and various ages and professional or semiprofessional musicians. Recorded music, occasionally with a disc jockey, may animate the events. Although birth and christening ceremonies are important in some communities, in others death is ritually elaborated. Funerals are usually occasions for sadness, but this does not detract from their musical elaboration. A good example is the wake for a child in Ecuador. These celebrations typically include a group of invited celebrants and a professional or semiprofessional group of musicians. The parties often begin in the afternoon and extend into the evening, or where rural roads and a large distance between neighbors make travel difficult, into the next day.
Nightclubs, bars, brothels, dance halls, clubs, streets
The urban-music scene includes a number of institutions where musicians are employed, music is performed, and people watch, listen, and dance. The audiences are mostly fairly young, attendees are not related to one another, and the musicians are professional and paid or receive contributions.
Bars and brothels are the legendary birthplaces of new forms of popular music, and are one of the reasons many musicians have often been associated with immorality and sexuality. For most of the twentieth century, bars and brothels have been important employers of musicians, and many genres of popular music have evolved from the urban Bohemia: the Cuban habanera, the Argentinean tango, the Brazilian choro, Dixieland jazz, and other forms have been associated with these urban institutions.
Nightclubs are a somewhat different institution. They run the gamut from bars with shows to tourist-oriented theaters where specially produced shows are presented to largely foreign audiences. In some cases, touristic nightclubs build on the foundations of earlier, less high-class institutionsas in the tango nightclubs of Buenos Aires; the jazz clubs of New Orleans; folkloric pen~as in Santiago, La Paz, and Lima; steakhouses in AsuncioŽn; and others.
Dance halls are places where, for a small fee, singles or couples can enter to dance, mingle with others, buy drinks and food, and dance. Many of these businesses specialize in a certain kind of music, frequently a genre of popular music or the music of a group of immigrants who have moved to the city. Immigrant clubs are legion in Peru, in Brazil, and in some other countries. Dance halls specializing in disco music
Athletic competitions, political rallies, and other large, voluntary, public events often have musical components in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Brazilian soccer games are noteworthy for the percussion bands that encourage the players with throbbing rhythms. Political rallies may be animated by protest songs, or by bands playing anthems. Civic holidays are often marked with parades and bands. When large groups of people meet, organizers may arrange for music that represents the event itself, or the participants may bring their own. The kind of music performed, and the interpretation of that music, is a significant part of the events.
The street is an open-air stage for arranged or spontaneous performances. Some musicians are the musical equivalents of hawkers and vendors. Others are beggars or simply entertainers. Often street musicians play homemade instruments (
Tourism is an important feature of the economies of Mexico and many Central and South American and Caribbean nations. Drawing visitors from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia through their natural attractions (beaches, climates) and cultural attractions (festivals, carnivals, nightclubs) is essential to the economic health of most Caribbean nations, and it is important to most of the rest (
In large countries such as Brazil and Argentina, internal tourism is a significant feature of the economy. States in the northeast of Brazil are visited by wealthy residents of the south in much the same way that some Caribbean islands are visited by people from other countries. These visitors are looking for a rural life-style and often want to have the opportunity to see local traditions.
The traditional arts in many countries are supported to a greater or lesser degree
Mass mediaradio, television, cassettes, CDs, videotapeshave transformed the musical environment at an ever-increasing rate during the twentieth century. The entertainment industry creates an important venue for performance and an influential conduit for new styles. Musical performance is no longer a face-to-face event, and new genres, new styles, and new audiences have been created through this transformation.
Technology has at times influenced musical performances in concrete ways. The standard three-minute length for recorded songs was determined in part by the playing time of a wax cylinder, and later by that of a ten-inch 78-rpm record. The difficulty of controlling radio emissions across national boundaries has led to exchange of musical ideas despite local laws and import restrictions. The possibility of creating certain sounds in a studio affects the way live performances are evaluated. The impact of these media is so widespread that it is difficult to imagine musical life without them.
Radio and television
Satellite dishes are popular over much of the region. Music Television (MTV, VH1, and so on) has had a tremendous impact on musical performance in areas where its channels are received. So have local soap operas and other shows. The arrival of electricity, and with it radio and television, appears to result in a quick decline of domestic musical genres: the time that people used to spend singing to each another they now spend listening to or watching others perform.
A result of the impact of mass media on large populations has been the systematic attempts of national governments to control what is transmitted and to place various kinds of censorship on the media. Many countries have imposed some kind of control on radio networks and require a certain percentage of the transmissions to be music from their own country or region. The rest of the time, stations mostly feature popular music from several sources, especially North America. Television programs, being more expensive to produce, are often purchased directly from other countries.
Live performances often include topical songs and local references, but broadcast restrictions in many countries have limited which kinds of ideas can be expressed in music or image. This control has operated with varying degrees of success and has often been opposed by artistsmany of whom have been imprisoned or even killed under military regimes as in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. When music becomes associated with a lower-class or marginal life-style, its practitioners are likely to suffer various kinds of police and political repression.
Audio and video recordings
Many countries have a small recording industry that focuses on inexpensive media, such as audiocassettes, that feature local artists. A locally clandestine industry often produces pirated versions of international hits. Larger countries have subsidiaries of the large multinational recording companies, which publish local music and international popular music. Often local musical styles were adapted, recorded, and popularized by musicians in North America. In some cases, however, local styles became international ones: one need only think of calypso, reggae, samba, and tango. In most cases, the more popular singers were signed by transnational recording companies.
Recordings involve more than a performer and a machine that records sounds: producers, record-company executives, recording engineers, marketing specialists, and many others play important roles in determining the sound of a performance and its diffusion through mass media. Some artists feel they are losing control over their art; others welcome advice from those who know how to make them fit into a pattern that brings success. The relationship among artists, their record companies, and their music is quite complex and varies from genre to genre and place to place.
Widely separated communities within the same country, or communities whose members span several different countries, often create informal networks of audio and videotape exchanges. The Indian and Javanese communities in Trinidad and
Defining Social Features of Musical Performance
Social Groups and Musical Performance
Musical Performance and Musical Events
Mediated Music
Ownership and Rights
Music is firmly embedded in social life and contributes to the ways in which people in most societies work, play, worship, and reproduce themselves, socially and biologically. Music is part of social life because musicians and their audiences are part of larger groups and processes. Composers, performers, and audience members have families, participate in social life, have some attitude toward religious beliefs, and have been brought up under unique historical conditions. Musicians and their audiences use music as a resource for a variety of religious and social purposes. Small Amerindian villages and large nation-states may be seen as comprising social groups, each with its own kind of music, performing together or apart. As they perform, they express, create, or recreate the social fabric of the communities themselves in a constant musical process of reformulation and renewal.
In Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, people have performed to attract lovers and to make fun of them, to support governments and to criticize them, to march to war and to oppose it, to worship gods and to be possessed by them. Some music has been taught in schools, supported by government funds, or sold through commerce. Other music has been prohibited or censoredby parents, slaveholders, governments, and religious leaders. Musical performances are among the ways people express personal, political, and religious beliefs. In so doing, they create and express attitudes about people, social groups, and various experiences.
It is easy to see that music is part of social life; it is more difficult to determine how. Simply looking at an event and asking straightforward, journalistic questions about it is a good start. Performances usually involve certain types of individuals and groups, to the exclusion of others. Different audiences express allegiances to different genres, attend at different times of day or night, and associate music with different goals.
The social contexts of many particular genres may be discovered in the individual entries of this volume, in which musical differences by gender, age, social class, ethnocultural group, and religion frequently appear. What needs to be stressed as a general principle is that most social identitiesan individual's membership in a particular groupare partly constructed through music. Gender and age are relatively fixed, but an individual's membership in many ethnocultural and social-class groups
Music is part of social life because musicians and their audiences are part of a larger society. In moments of ethnic or political crisis, music is a form of cultural expression that becomes an area of attention and conflict. Groups that earlier played various styles may begin to define themselves by a single genre; rallies of different political parties may feature different kinds of music, and arguments over what kind of music to play at a dance may express fundamental political and cultural differences. Music, and the performing arts more generally, can become the focus of intense interest (and violent repression), because art can be used to express complex social and political ideas.
Partly because societies are such large, complex subjects, the entries in this volume describe extremely different kinds of relationships between music and society. Taken as a whole, however, they reveal some regularities. One way to define the social features of musical performances is to look for answers to a few simple questions about a performance or genre: who is performing? for whom are they performing? what are they performing? where are they performing? when is it performed? why are people performing that music in that way? The first two questions direct our attention to the people involved; the fourth and fifth, to the specifics of the event itself; the third is about the music itself; and the sixth raises the issue of motivation. The answers to these questions are an introduction to the social contexts of musical performance.
Who is performing?
The answer is usually simple: a group of children, a military band, an all-male chorus of retired truckers, an all-female unaccompanied group, a foreign rock band. The performers may be identified with an ethnocultural group (Amerindian, African or European descent, or more specifically German, Prussian, and so on). Yet the implications of who is performing begin to indicate the significance of the music. Individuals affiliate themselves with groups, and every group has relationships with other groupsrelationships that usually change over time. Thus age, gender, occupation, and nationality can all be significant aspects of musical performance, especially since conflict often occurs between different ages, genders, occupations, and nationalities.
For whom are they performing?
For an analysis of the relationship of music to social behavior, the audience is just as important as the performers. Ethnomusicologists are not the only ones curious about who listens to a certain genre of music: record-company executives, radio stations, and professional musiciansall want to know about their audiences. The musicians may be performing for children (
What are they performing?
Musical sounds are quite variable: they all have tone (pitch), timbre (quality), and amplitude (loudness), and are usually arranged into pulsing series (rhythms) that unfold in larger overall structures (strophic, binary, variational, and so on). At any given time, certain sounds are associated with certain groups (age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, cultural roots) and certain situations. These features may change over time; they are not fixed. The performance of a certain musical style, or attendance at the performance, often indicates some kind of statement about allegiance with a group or its goals. The exclusion of a musical genre or style may indicate opposition to the group with which it is identified. What kinds of music are not performed can be as important as what kinds of music are performed.
Where are they performing?
Music takes some of its meaning from the place in which it is performed. A song performed in a military parade in the civic center, surrounded by the president's palace, the ministry of justice, and large bank buildings, has different implications from the same song performed on a protest march, in a bar or a brothel, or in a church. Musical repertoire may move from context to context, but it often changes meaning as it does. It may bring some of its earlier meaning to its new context, permitting people to use music ironically, angrily, adoringly, and in many other ways. This ability is partly created by the contexts it is performed in, and by the way it is performed.
When is the music performed?
Different times can have different meanings. The dawn has tremendous significance for many Amerindian groups, and a great deal of music is performed at dawn. Many performances coincide with the agricultural cycle of planting, irrigating, and harvesting crops. Others are part of the Christian calendar of Christ's life (Christmas, Easter, saints' days), or Jewish, Hindu, or other religious calendars. Music associated with leisure, however, will be performed when people are not required to work: on weekends, in the evenings, on holidays and festivals. Some forms, such as Muzak, are designed to be played during working hours; but no one would confuse a quiet Muzak performance of a rock song in an air-conditioned office building with a late-night concert of the "same" song in a soccer stadium where thousands of people are dancing to deafening sounds from huge speakers. Like space, the time of a performance can indicate something about its significance.
Why are people performing that music in that way?
The question why has many answers that can come from many different positions. he musicians may say, "We perform to eat." The audience may say, "We listen because we like them." But that is only part of the answer. Why perform a given piece for a certain audience in a certain place at a certain time? The more specific the question, the more significant the answer may be. It might be: "We performed Mozart because the audience is so uneducated they wouldn't appreciate John Cage," or "We sang the national anthem as our protest march passed the police station so they wouldn't come out and beat us up," or "We had to play something loud to get the audience dancing," or "We thought it would be funny to play the brass-band piece on these instruments." All musicians have to eat, and most audiences have the option of being somewhere else, military and civic events excepted. But those alone do not explain an event. Instead, the specifics of each situation and the decisions made in it can be far more revealing than the generalities.
Small Amerindian communities and nation-states alike reveal musical distinctions based on gender, age, and other social groups.
Gender
Gender identity is distinct from sexual identity. A person has a sexual identity based on physiological traits; a person's gender identity is a social construction. Male humans are physiologically the same, and distinct from female humans. Different societies, however, define gender identities differently. This distinction is important because gender identity can change during an individual's lifetime, while biological identity does not (without surgical intervention). In some communities and some contexts, the musical roles of men and women may be rigidly separated when they are young, and then become more alike after a women's menopause. In other communities and other contexts, men and women may exchange roles, sing in one another's styles, and use gender definition (and ambiguity) as part of their musical performance.
Music is one of the ways gender and its meaning are established and perpetuated. The relationship of gender to musical performances is complex, varies considerably among different groups and at different times, and is changing rapidly as the relative positions of men and women change throughout Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. The ambiguity of gay, lesbian, and bisexual gender roles receives musical and ritual expression in certain secular and religious music, among them transvestite performances in nightclubs (secular) and Brazilian CandombleŽ (religious). In most Amerindian communities, men play a greater number of musical instruments and are more deeply involved in public rituals than women. Women traditionally sang, but rarely played wind instruments, drums, or rattles. Sometimes women were prohibited from even seeing sacred instruments. But distinctions of gender are not restricted to Amerindian communities: worldwide, few orchestra conductors are women, and the Roman Catholic Church bars women from the priesthood; virtually all practitioners of the Brazilian martial art or dance called capoeira are male; most members of salsa or mariachi ensembles are men.
Amerindian women sometimes have entirely separate ceremonies in which they are full participants, ceremonies like iamuricuma, a ceremony in the XinguŽ region of Brazil, and machituŽn, a shamanistic role among the Mapuche of Argentina and Chile. In Amerindian and rural communities, where women's life-styles may remain more traditional than those of their husbands and sons, women often preserve traditions that once were performed by men: the last singers of the Selk'nam men's chants in Tierra del Fuego were women, as are most remaining singers of Spanish and Portuguese ballads (romances). With changes in gender roles can come changes in musical participation.
Age
Age may or may not be a significant factor in different musical performances, and it is hard to generalize across the region. Different societies define age somewhat differently: in some, age or status is determined, not by years alone, but also by a person's perceived stage in lifewhether he or she is dependent on parents, married with children, a grandparent, and so on. Nevertheless, in almost every society, people of different ages perform or listen to different genres of music in groups to some degree differentiated by age. In some cases, they may perform the same genre in different ways. Children are sometimes included in musical events (
The most common form of age-related musical preference is the way different generations view different forms of popular music, often admiring most the forms that were popular when they were adolescents. In urban communities, people seem to be attracted to new forms of popular music during their adolescence, and then to continue to be fans of that music for the ensuing decades, while new generations of youth find new types of music to identify with. Dance-oriented clubs in such cities as Rio de Janeiro seem to have an almost age-grade quality to them. In popular music, musical preference is one of the classic conflicts between parents and children, and between schoolteachers and schoolchildren. The older generation almost always laments the passing of some form, the middle generation is letting it pass, and the younger generation has new interests. This succession, however, is not automatic: the younger generation sometimes becomes more interested in traditional forms as it ages, and eventually they become elders who lament the disappearance of the same traditions their parents and grandparents lamentedand yet the tradition survives.
Kinship
Kinship roles may be important in certain genres. Birthday parties, with their English, Spanish, or Portuguese versions of "The Birthday Song" ("Happy birthday to you") are typically attended by people of various ages and both sexes, many of whom are related by kinship or age to the celebrant. Many local bands include family members. Sometimes the significant groups are not the immediate family, but other kinship-based groups. Among the Ge^-speaking Indians of Brazil, various social groups are identified by a musical genre, a style of performance, or even a musical text.
Occupation
Occupations often have traditions of their own, and some of these may be musical. Clearly the occupation of "musician" has musical features, but shamans and ritual specialists in tribal societies know more about musical performances than most other adults. Other occupations may have their own musical forms: seamen coordinated their labor through chanties; itinerant traders, with their packs filled with merchandise, carried musical traditions and stories to isolated settlements. In some places, different occupations have their own social clubs, with their own performances at leisure
Social class
Social class is often a factor in the performance in or attendance at musical events: just as people of different ages express their solidarity through participating in different musical traditions, so may people of different social classes choose to identify themselves with different genres or styles of performance. Social class is defined in a number of ways and can be quite complex in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Clearest of all are contrasts between urban elite and rural poor. The culture of the elites has traditionally been oriented toward Europe and the United States, including classical, popular, and avant-garde musical styles of performance. Urban workers often identify with a national form of popular music, whereas rural workers and recent immigrants to the large cities often prefer a rural-based country music such as the Brazilian muŽsica caipira (
How important these distinctions are will vary over time and by circumstance. Special cases contradict easy generalities, such as communities of Italian laborers who are enthusiastic fans of nineteenth-century Italian opera, a genre otherwise appreciat-
Religion
Religions influence musical performances and audience participation. Many religions employ distinctive musical forms, and some forbid other kinds of musical performances or condemn music and dance. Amerindians under missionary influence sometimes saw their sacred instruments exposed and burned, and at other times were dissuaded from performing traditional genres by threats and coercion. Overall, European religious music has been a powerful influence on musical performances throughout the entire region. Sometimes religious genres appear in secular situations, and sometimes religions limit musical performances. Islam and some Christian Protestant fundamentalists prohibit drinking and mixed-sex dancing, and frown on participation in musical events in bars, brothels, and nightclubs. Different religious groups may have their own genres and their own professional musicians, as with Christian rock and Christian country (musical styles that may be spreading in the United States), with which members of the religious group identify.
Politics
Politics and music have a long history of association throughout the regionmilitary bands, national anthems, warm-up groups at political rallies, composers of topical songs performing on street corners and in nightclubs. Music must be considered a potent political tool. Over the centuries, governments have harassed, censored, banned, exiled, jailed, tortured, and killed composers and performers from widely different social classes. In addition to the religious repression of musical styles, political persecutions have occurred repeatedly. In different countries, descendants of African slaves were forbidden to play drums and were pressured to abandon certain musical genres. In the 1940s, Brazilian country musicians were censored and jailed for their topical verses. In the 1960s and 1970s, many performers of new song (nueva cancioŽn), a genre that began in Chile and transformed topical singing over a wide region, were severely punished. The Chilean composer and performer Victor Jara was tortured and killed in reprisals against his songs. Sometimes just performing a certain genre of music is understood by all parties to be a protest. Not all music is political all of the time; but when other aspects of public life become intensely politicized, music tends to become so too.
Ethnicity
Throughout the twentieth century, ethnicity has been one of the most important mechanisms through mass movements have been created on the basis of perceived and created differences in ethnicity. The musical implications appear in movements based on identification with ancestors brought to the Americas from Africa. Musical styles clearly descended from musical traditions brought to the Americas and the Caribbean by enslaved Africans have been perpetuated and widely used by people of African descent as a means of affirming a collective identity, from which elements traceable to other ethnic groups have been removed. Frequently, musicians emulate contemporary African styles as they perpetuate older local styles. Certain Amerindian genres, and the practice of performing in unison ornamented with paint and feathers, or playing the flute, are means through which local groups affirm a native identity in many locations. Especially in places where Amerindian identity can confer a legal or
An ethnocultural group may formally identify itself with a particular musical genre, but its members may practice other genres, sometimes bringing to the other genres some of the musical styles of the formally adopted one. Muslim and Jewish communities do not celebrate Christmas or Easter but often participate in national civic rituals and music festivals. Japanese immigrants in Brazil perform and appreciate a number of Japanese musical genres, but a large part of the local Japanese population enjoys Brazilian popular music. The descendants of Italian immigrants may listen to more opera than other members of their social class, because of their pride in the genre itself.
Sometimes a reevaluation of an ethnocultural group will involve creating a new meaning for its music. This is the case of music performed by Brazilians of African descent in the late twentieth century: the musical relationships of their music to the musical traditions of Africa are not only recognized, but encouraged, through visits to Africa and a reevaluation of the history of the music of the Brazilian northeast.
Music is a social resource that can communicate statements of identity and attitudes. Musical performance has been shown to be a resource for expressing identity of and differences of gender, age, kinship, social class, ethnicity, religion, political persuasion, and nationality. The examination of almost any performance reveals how the practitioners and audiences are using these criteria to create meaningful events.
Music is not simply a sound in the air. Musical performance includes the intention of making sounds; the preparation for making them; the making of them; the sounds themselves; their reception, interpretation, and evaluation by an audience; and their perpetuation through new performances. An ethnomusicologist approaches musical performance by looking at many of those features: the goals, the rehearsals, the construction of the instruments and their use, the public performance, and its evaluation. An examination of these can assist in the understanding of the sounds themselves.
The structure of musical events varies considerably in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Some musical events are domestic and informal, and do not require special organization or written rules. Others are national eventswars, athletic competitions, and national holidayswhere different types of music are often rigidly prescribed. Forms that require the cooperation of a group of musicians usually entail defined obligations. Most groups must meet on a regular basis to practice, to learn a new repertoire, and to socialize. The organizations through which this may be done can be occupational (in one Peruvian town, truck owners founded one dance group, truck drivers another), religious (as in the brotherhoods already described), regional (as in the neighborhood organization of the early samba schools in Rio de Janeiro), or based on age or kinship. Rehearsals, if any occur, are usually private and have rarely been studied. Yet many decisions central to the public performances of music are made in them. In some rural areas, practice sessions may often have formal and informal components, with dancing and parties lasting late into the night and many participants returning home only the next day. As the date set for the performance approaches, practices intensify and often become more frequent. In some cases, as in the samba schools (escolas de samba) of Rio de Janeiro, rehearsals become public events, with large numbers of tourists participating in the preparations
Another typical event in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean is less familiar in other parts of the world: the competition. Many national, civic, and sometimes even religious events are staged in the form of competitions among bands, for awards that may be monetary or purely symbolic. Brass bands, steel bands, troupes of dancers, songwriters, and many other musical performers are judged, and winners are announced. The rules are elaborately laid out, and what seems like a spontaneous performance may well be defined as much by the rules of the competition as by the performers' creativity. Judged-performance formats reappear throughout the individual articles of this volume, but Rio de Janeiro's carnival is one of the best examples. The neighborhood-based samba schools compete on several fixed criteria for prestige, civic funds, and participation in three different levels of competition. Each year, the two lowest-ranked groups in the top group go down to a lower level, whereas the two highest-ranked ones in the lower level move up. Rio de Janeiro's carnival is extremely structured: only percussion and friction instruments can be used, no motorized floats are allowed, and a rigid timetable must be followed. Elsewhere, competitions are more informal, as in patronal festivals in the Andes,
Every performance has its own spatial organizationthe way it uses or moves through space. Processions have their own spatial organization, which has been likened to that of the form of a comet: a small group in front, the center core of the procession in the middle, including the bands, and then a long tail of participants who follow along through the streets but are less involved in the performance. Some national parades are strings of such structures, with band after band moving down the avenues. In other cases, the movement from field or forest to the community, and the movement from the plaza to the edges of a settlement, are significant parts of the structure of the event.
When performers and audiences are separated by time and space, they may be called mediated. Performances are preserved and transmitted over media, preserved on wax cylinders, tapes, compact discs, or videotapes, and transmitted by radio, commercial recordings, television, videotape, or the Internet.
Mediated performances differ from the events described above because there is much more variety in the use of the performances. A person can listen to a recording of religious music anytime, not only in church. A television can transmit the sounds of deceased artists, whose contributions have long been adopted by different groups. And the commercial nature of the popular music recording and concert industry influences the social organization of its production and reproduction.
Live performances of large popular-music bands often involve managers, roadies, and promoters. Performance venues need to employ booking agents and all the employees of the location: ushers, ticket collectors, bartenders, security, stage crews, lighting-and-sound technicians, and so forth. Both sides may employ lawyers, insurance companies, and the services of innumerable specialists, though the specifics may vary from group to group and genre to genre. The tour of a large group is as much like a military campaign as anything else: it requires that a large number of people and heavy equipment arrive in a location that is prepared for them at a fixed time, and move out quickly afterward. Expectations vary considerably, however, and attitudes
The recording industry adds new roles to musical performance. Regardless of the type of group (whether it be a small community band with a homemade cassette recording, or a large popular group recording for a multinational recording company), some new roles are involved in the structure, the timbre, and the performance of the sounds. The industry itself applies some restrictions: the music on a CD cannot be more than seventy-five minutes long; a single song often will not receive airplay if it is more than four or five minutes longa holdover from when 78-rpm records could hold no more than about five minutes of music.
Producers of records are a specialized group: their job is to help the band create a sound in the studio that will meet their needs, usually the need to sell as many copies as possible. Producers may have tremendous artistic control: they may insist that an electric bass be added to a genre where there has never been one before, or they may recommend that a full orchestra be added to a folk song. Depending on the power the group has with the record company itself, the producer may have final authority. Record companies themselves can be extremely bureaucratic. They tend to be uninterested in groups that will not quickly recoup the financial investment made in them. Record companies, too, have marketing departments, people who specialize in getting music played on radio, and sales forces that go to record stores. Record stores have their rents, their employees, their losses to theft, and payments to make on their stock.
Touring groups of musicians who make recordings attract a fairly large industry of specialists who are not themselves performers, but make their living from music. In large countries such as Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, the industry is quite complex and developed. In some smaller countries, more of the recorded music is imported, and there is a far less developed social organization of distribution, mass-media performance, and airplay.
Another feature of musical performance that has grown alongside commercialization and a popular-music industry that emphasizes novelty is the industry of intellectual property. In many Amerindian and rural traditions, the actual ownership of a musical idea is considered unimportant, especially after the live performance at which it is introduced. European-modeled copyright laws, however, emphasize individual creativity and allow an author to copyright, or to keep other people from performing, a song or a musical idea unless they pay a royalty to the composer. A famous example is "The Birthday Song," composed in the 1920s. Anyone who records it on a cassette or a compact disc is expected to pay a royalty to the songwriter for each unit soldanywhere in the world. Anyone who performs it in a film, on a stage, or on television is similarly expected to pay a music-publishing company for the use of the song.
The objective of copyright is to enable writers (including composers and songwriters) to earn income by giving them, or their music-publishing company, the exclusive right to record their composition. Anyone else who does so must request a license and pay a fee. For this reason, under international law, all "traditional" folk songs, and all Amerindian traditions without a single author and more than seventy-five years old, cannot be copyrighted. The law, therefore, rewards novelty and discourages tradition. It does more: a composer can base a composition on a traditional song and then copyright the new version in his or her name. This practice can lead to a kind of intellectual colonial exploitation: the musical ideas of a community that can
In many subtle ways, copyright laws influence the music performed and the music an audience hears. First, performers are encouraged to create their own material to make money from the royalties; second, record companies try to obtain the music-publishing rights on those songs to profit from them; third, certain performance locations, in an effort to avoid paying copyright fees, ask that groups restrict themselves to their own compositions or songs in the public domain (not under copyright); fourth, it can be less expensive for radio stations to play music by long-dead composers of classical musicsafely beyond copyright concernsthan contemporary music.
To combat perceived inequities in the copyright law, some South American countries have taken steps to protect traditional music. Bolivia enacted a public-domain law that requires royalties to be paid to the state on all traditional songs. Brazil has proposed a law that would give Brazilian indigenous communities perpetual rights to their intellectual property (with the objective of protecting their shamans' pharmaceutical knowledge, and incidentally their music, dance, and other collective creations). The Brazilian law gives indigenous communities far more protection than it gives non-Indians, but it is consistent with a tendency toward longer-lasting terms and a broader extension of laws concerning intellectual property into all areas of life, among them music.
The way musicians and their audiences define themselves and their music are part of the social processes of the communities in which they claim membership. How they use age, gender, social class, ethnocultural affiliation, space, and time are important for understanding the musical performances themselves and the societies in general. The ethnomusicological approach to music is to examine the sounds of musical performances within the context of the social processes of which they are a part. As is repeatedly demonstrated in the articles of this volume, the relationships of the sounds of music to the social features of their performance is an intimate one.
Musical Enculturation or Socialization
Acculturation and Stylistic Change
Transnational and Transcultural Musical Influences
Most musical traditions are always changing, if at varying rates, through innovation by creators and performers, influences from other traditions, revivals of almost forgotten styles, changes in other features of social and cultural life, and many other causes. Yet outside of studies of popular music, we have little idea of how these changes occur. When a ceramic pot breaks and is discarded, its pieces are eventually covered by earth and preserved virtually unchanged for centuries. When a community is abandoned, the structures of its houses, the location of its hearths, trash from its residents, pollen from its gardens, and some remnants of its food often endure and give mute testimony to details of the life those residents led. But the operative word is mute: there is no sound.
Music could be preserved only in the minds of living practitioners until 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph using a tin-foil cylinder and an amplifying horn. Before then, people had no way to capture musical sounds. Various methods of musical notation had been developed, but these typically focused on only a few features of musical performances. The rest were transmitted through oral traditions (through teaching) and aural traditions (through hearing), and usually changed, in often unconscious ways, over time. Edison's invention of the phonograph spurred the emergence of ethnomusicology as a discipline, because at last it was possible to record sounds in distant places and to listen to them repeatedly for analysis. Researchers eventually took advantage of the phonograph for capturing the sounds of speech and music, and research centers soon appeared. In 1899, the first audio archive was founded in Vienna; in 1901, one was founded in Berlin. Later, archives were founded in the United States. The music industry grew up around audio recording and playback using three-minute wax cylinders or flat discs, and for many traditions, the relationship of tradition and change can be documented from then on.
In the late twentieth century, when audio- and video-recording devices are easy to use and virtually ubiquitous (they are even found in isolated Amazonian communities), it is hard to imagine musical traditions without any recording, playback, or radio. Until the twentieth century, however, the worldwide musical record is based on written descriptions, transcriptions, and manuscripts. For the Americas, the record is even poorer: Amerindians did not transcribe the details of their musical
Despite the sparseness of the records, we know that two associated waves of music were carried from Europe to the rest of the world, often transforming musical traditions and sometimes providing the basis for the creation of new local traditions. These were religious hymns and other church music, carried by missionaries, and brass bands, carried by soldiers, as the European powers explored and conquered. These became the first worldwide influences, eventually to be followed by certain dances and twentieth-century popular music. Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean are filled with examples of religious and band-produced musicexamples that have received local forms and are used in ways quite different from their original intentions. Musical changes, though somewhat difficult to document for earlier periods but dramatically represented today by satellite transmissions of popular music, are hundreds of years old in the Western Hemisphere.
Musical change has traditionally been discussed using concepts developed by anthropologists in the 1930s to describe the continuity and change of cultures. These concepts include music enculturation (the acquisition of musical knowledge, or music learning), acculturation (the changes that occur when members of different cultures come into continuous contact), and transculturation (what happens when distant cultural groups influence one another). Musical deculturation (the loss of culture without the implication of the replacement of it by another) is also described for some communities.
The trouble with these concepts is that they are inherited from a cultural anthropology that described cultures as unitary. In that view, a group has a single culture; two groups have two cultures, and when they are face to face, they interact and something happens. Today, researchers are likelier to view communities as comprising various groups with different sets of values that are often in conflict in specific social processes. Musical performance is one of the domains through which ideas and values are expressed, in which they may be contested, or in which they may be repressed and their participants eliminated. Similarly, individual members of communities may be masters of more than a single musical traditionthey may be bimusical or trimusical, able to shift from style to style with changes in contexts. The decision of which style to learn, which to perform on a given occasion, and which to pass on to one's children or disciples is shaped by many considerations that may have to do with ethnocultural affiliation, social class, political conjunctures, or economic or spiritual rewards. Unfortunately, ethnomusicologists lack a coherent analytic terminology with which to discuss these relationships.
Thus, though the words are used in this volume, enculturation and acculturation and the other such terms must be understood to represent complex interrelationships of groups of people, individual choices, and complex musical contexts. Unlike milk, culture is not something with which a person is filled like a jug, or with which various flavors can be mixed to create flavored milkshakes. Enculturation, or musical socialization, is in many communities a complex and many-layered process. Acculturation, or the combination of traits from two or more musical traditions, is often a representation of relationships of political and symbolic power whose musical expression is a conscious commentary on those relationships. Behind the words lies the complex situations described in the entries to this volume, filled with conflict, choice, and creativity.
Enculturation literally means 'giving culture' or 'endowing with culture'. In music, it
Different musical traditions use sounds in different ways. Rhythms, pitches, timbres, and texts may all be employed differently within a certain community and among different groups. Children, born with the potential for all languages and all musical systems, are socialized into only a few of themsometimes one, sometimes several. In most communities, every member is expected to be able at least to sing a few songs; in some, to perform on instruments and dance. Musical socialization also includes attitudes toward certain sounds and aural structures, and toward those who produce or enjoy them.
If all members of a community learn a few skills, attitudes, and values, a small number of community members usually learns how to innovate, often within fairly fixed, but constantly changing, limitations. These skills may be acquired through informal exposure, formal training, or years of apprenticeship. Musical knowledge may be voluntarily acquired or forced, but in most communities in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, musical expertise is learned voluntarily by a self-selected group of individuals. It may be acquired from relatives, from friends and peers, in institutions such as schools and churches, from specialized teachers, from books, and more recently from audio and video recordings. Family and peers appear to be important everywhere; institutions, specialized teachers, and recordings are found in widely different relationships and interact in complex ways to influence a community's musical traditions.
Musical enculturation probably begins before birth, with patterns of sounds transmitted to the fetus with the sound of the pregnant woman's heartbeat. So far, we know little about what, if any, information a child retains from its prenatal musical experiences. After birth, throughout much of the region, infants are carried almost everywhere by their mothers or another female relative during the initial months, and they hear whatever music is being performed around them. It could be argued that children learn to sing before they learn to talk, in that systematic patterns of pitch, rhythm, and timbre appear in their vocalizations before referential language. Yet again, we have little information about cross-cultural parallels, or relationships of infant babbling to musical traditions, at that age.
By the time children are about three and begin to play together, a whole system of musical sounds and structures has probably been learned; and during later childhood, it is increasingly fixed. In some communities, adults sing special songs to childrenoften containing simplified melodies, rhythms, and words. In other communities (particularly Amerindian communities), there may be no lullabies and no special children's songs: the children fall asleep or stay awake to the sounds of adult music.
A child's first music teacher is often another child. Children in most communities learn to perform songs and games by playing with other children. These may be passed on for generations from one child to another, without involving adults. Collections of children's genres have been made in African-American and European-American communities; we know much less about children's music in Amerindian communities. The examples we have show that children often perform shortened and simple versions of adult genres.
Religious institutions and practices are important in musical education throughout South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Religious events (saints' days, Christmas, Easter, and so forth), most shamanism, and African-derived possession religionsall include music. Children and young adults of the region probably learn more music by participating in religious events than they do in
Though religious institutions are found in almost every part of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, formal education in schools and conservatories varies widely from place to place. Formal education is usually available only to part of the population, often differentiated from the rest by social class and geographic area, financial status, degree of urbanization, and other factors. In many rural areas, there is little formal education, and children acquire musical training by listening to their families, to other adults, to neighborhood performances, radio and recordings, and eventually performing themselves.
The availability of elementary and secondary schools does not mean that children learn much music there. Music is not usually a high-priority pedagogical subject. The music usually taught in most schools bears little resemblance to the music of the child's community or the genres favored by the child's peers. Musical curricula have usually been designed by educators and musicians of a different social class, ethnic group, part of the country, or (in colonial periods) by specialists completely removed from the local culture. The distance between the curriculum and the local community culture is being reduced in some countries in the region, but in others continues to grow, as forms of popular music continue to be ignored in schools in favor of exclusively European-influenced forms. Schoolchildren often learn choral singing; in urban areas, orchestras and bands are found occasionally. Children learn something in music lessons at school, but its relationship to the traditions into which they were born and that they may perform in the future is quite variable.
For children who are particularly interested in music, or whose families want to encourage them to be musicians, the methods through which they acquire advanced training vary according to some of the same factors that determine opportunities for formal education. Motivated children in most areas attach themselves formally or informally to local performers, and they learn through watching, performing, and eventually becoming part of the performing group. In large urban areas, an extracurricular network of music teachers may provide lessons in various instruments for a fee. Members of the elites of most Mexican, Central and South American, and Caribbean countries pay for music lessons in classical-music instruments, such as piano, violin, and classical guitar. Children perceived as being more talented or gifted or devoted to the subject may take further lessons with specialists of increasing ability, eventually entering music conservatories, in their own countries or abroad. The process is rather similar in every case: a child is motivated by outside encouragement, and this motivation is reinforced if he or she can master the required musical skills. Most music conservatories in the region specialize in advanced training in the performance, composition, and instruction of European classical music, though there are exceptions.
In addition to face-to-face means of learning skills, a large amount of music is learned today from recorded music, radio, and television. In most communities, children
Parents, religious groups, and nations have all, at some time in the past few decades, tried to restrict the kinds of music to which children are exposed through the media. (Before electronic media had any important influence, people in the same roles regulated face-to-face musical performances.) Parents may forbid certain kinds of music in the home; churches may restrict their members' music or dance; and nations, to control the international, capital-intensive, market-oriented musical performances that predominate on public media, have offered incentives for certain kinds of music and censored others. These restrictions have met with varied success, pitting children against parents, religious leaders against nonbelievers, and nations against one other in such a way that some kinds of music are divisive rather than unifying. Forms of expression become domains for moral and political contention.
In general, repression seems to have only intermittent success. More successful are the encouragement of individuals and institutions to foster children's active participation in alternative musical events, and efforts to endow those events with positive value and status.
The term acculturation was defined by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits in an important paper: "Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups" (1936:149). The term is often used to describe a process whereby individuals adopt the values, performance styles, and repertoire of another community. The advantage of the term is its vagueness; the problem is that it gives no indication of the relationship between the influencing and influenced culture(s). In music, the term was used extensively by Melville Herskovits and others, and continues in use precisely because its generality allows for further definition through examples.
In South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, a great deal of observed acculturation has involved relationships of cultural, economic, and political dominance of one group over another. Music becomes one of the domains that expresses the relation of the groups to one another. This is not true everywhere. Scholars are still trying to discover a suitable language to express the processes
Amerindian communities in the Amazon have been learning one another's songs for hundreds of years. The mechanisms through which songs have been learned vary: sometimes they were learned from captured enemies, sometimes from peaceful trading partners, sometimes through marriage exchanges, and now through radio and recordings; but the result has been that part of the community's music has come from outside that culture. Amerindian communities often perform songs in a language they do not understand. They usually adopt other Amerindian styles selectively and continue to practice many of their own music and dance forms. Learning another community's musical style is not always, in these cases, a sign of cultural or political exploitation.
Members of different European communities also learned one another's styles. Examples are legion in classical concert music, where composers of one country were hired by patrons of another country to introduce prestigious forms to their courts. The combination of forms is obvious in communal dances in South America, where polkas (originally from Poland) are played between dances associated with other countries: a Viennese waltz (Austria), a schottische (Scotland), a fandango (Spain), a tango (Argentina), or a samba (Brazil). Here, too, the band's decision to play a given dance may be less a reflection of cultural dominance than of the dancers' interests in variety.
Most relationships between European colonists and Amerindians, and between European colonists and the Africans they used for labor, were dominating and exploitative. Amerindians were usually discouraged or prohibited from performing some or all of their traditional music, and new forms were imposed on them. Similarly, enslaved Africans were often prohibited from performing most genres, and in some cases European church music was offered as an exclusive replacement for their earlier traditions. Though the region reveals a complex variety of restrictions and alternatives, the relationships among communities from Europe, Africa, and the Americas differed from most of those among Amerindian groups.
An important thing to remember about South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean is that the large ethnocultural groups are not monolithic blocks. There are many different Amerindian societies, each with its own set of values, its own specific experience with other societies, and its own specific use of music in determining its future. There are many different groups of Europeans, each with its own musical traditions, some of which have tenaciously been preserved in the Americas long after they have disappeared in their homelands. Members of many different African communities were enslaved. Except for a few, such as the Yoruba, a large amount of the individual cultures has not survived. But in their place a general African-derived culture developedin workplaces and the Maroon communities that coalesced in many countries. Significant populations of South Asians, Indonesians, and Japanese live in some countries. Important local differences occur in the cultural attributes found and community members' values and intentions, and it is unproductive to generalize without reviewing the data found in this volume.
Members of communities that are largely dominated by another community react in different ways to the forceful suppression of earlier traditions and the imposition of new ones. In some cases, they will actively embrace the new form and become creative within the new genre. The Waiwai of Brazil and the Guianas today sing little besides hymns, but they have adapted Protestant hymns to their intercommunal relationships; their villages engage in hymn-writing competitions, and the composition
In some cases we can trace a trend called deculturation. This happens when the members of a community cease to practice their earlier culture but do not replace it with anything else. Deculturation may simply be a phase in the longer process by which some traditions are replaced by others, but it is often distressing to community elders and ethnomusicologists when a community abandons a long-established musical tradition and does not become proficient at another one. An Amerindian community, for example, might cease to perform its own traditions and simply stop making music, merely listening to recorded music on radio and cassettes.
More frequent, probably, are communities in which a few genres and some aspects of the former musical traditions are maintained somewhat unchanged, while others are adapted to new musical forms and contexts dictated by the dominating culture. European Christian music has been transformed by the musical contribution of African-American performers and composers. The celebration of saints' days in the Andes has been transformed by the use of Amerindian instruments and styles of performance. When used in these situations, acculturation usually means the combination, or fusion, of two or more styles. Another word often used for this is creolization. Once again, the terms are shifting in the 1990s, as scholars try to fit their concepts better to the complexity of the processes they see occurring.
Creolization takes its definition from linguistics, which describes a Creole language as a complete language based on one or more other languages but distinct from any of them. Thus, in Haiti and elsewhere, French creole languages are unlike French and English and have proved relatively stable through time. Similarly, one could point to some musical styles that are neither European nor African in form but represent a fairly stable combination of traits. The important thing to remember here, though, is that musical fusion does not take place in a vacuum and is not free of values. It is a factor in the social situation of which it is a part.
When the word creolization is applied to music, it is a vague term, as it is more difficult to tell when a musical tradition is "independent" of its parent traditions. At one time, a group will point to certain fusion traditions with pride and say, "That's our music." At another time, they may denounce the same tradition with disdain and complain, "That's a terrible mixture of our beautiful tradition with their ugly one." Traditions that are seen as mixed are often the subject of considerable conflict. Over time, however, one can often trace how these adaptations of parts of other community's styles begin as criticized hybrids and become an integral part of a community's music. In other cases, one can trace how a shared musical tradition is eventually "purified," and becomes the symbolic property of only one of the contributing communities. Different countries reveal different dynamics, as the entries in this volume demonstrate.
The creative mixing of aspects of musical traditions is achieved in many ways: through instrumentation; musical texture, structure, and performance style; musical appropriation; and the creation of genres for new audiences. These features appear frequently throughout the entries.
Instrumentation
Musical instruments are at once sound-producing objects and highly significant representations of a community's history. Thus, a nationalist composer or regional folk-rock
Musical texture, structure, and performance
Chordal texture (harmony) was one of the defining features of sixteenth-century European music, and it continues to define much of the music of the region. The multipart, chordal approach to music was distinct from that of the Amerindians, whose polyphony did not work like harmony in the Western sense. Some African traditions employed multipart harmony; others did not. Amerindian communities and descendants of African slaves learned to perform harmonic structures, often in churches, and many of them carried this form into secular genres. The use of harmonies and the harmonic structures of pieces can be quite variable and are often defining features of genres.
Most Amerindian music featured a single, fairly steady, rhythmic pulse, with melodic syncopation in the vocal parts. A great deal of African music had complex, interlocking rhythms, played on membranophones or idiophones, or by slapping the body. European rhythms could be complex, but most dances were arranged in simple 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, or 6/8 time, and lacked the complexity of West African drumming. The rhythmic structures of African music have been greatly admired by people from
Call-and-response forms, improvisation, and broad community participation in making music have all been identified as having African origins. Certainly these performance processes appear in traditions bearing other obvious African influences. But not all examples of these features should be unquestionably traced to African influences, as they also appear in European and Amerindian traditions.
Musical appropriation
In Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, different groups have often adapted one another's styles, consciously or unconsciously, with the variety of results described in the individual entries. Powerful communities, often European and Christian, have sometimes forced their musical traditions on Amerindians and communities of African descent. Simultaneously, the same wealthy, European-influenced populations in many countries have admired and appropriated, often for their material benefit, the music of the poor and often African or Amerindian peoples in their countries. It has been argued that the poorer parts of the societies throughout Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean have produced many of the musical styles that have subsequently become national styles or popular forms of music. There are different ways to interpret this phenomenon. It may be seen as cultural exploitation or as a musical parallel to classic colonialism (one group provides the raw materials; the other group packages it and sells it back) or simply an uncomplicated case of admiration and borrowing. In many cases, the evidence apparently supports the first two interpretations more than the last.
The patterns of cultural appropriation found in Central and South America and the Caribbean raise important issues of intellectual property and ethics. Most copyright laws exclude traditional music from their purview and give little protection to rural and less wealthy composers and performers. Popularizers have often shown little interest in crediting their sources, to say nothing of paying them a share of royalties (Wallis and Malm 1984). Although these attitudes are changing in a few countries, abuses have made many local musicians suspicious of outsiders carrying tape recorders or video cameras and may impede even legitimate and ethically aware investigations of musical performances in some communities and some countries. Some efforts are underway in various countries to modify the cultural and class biases of existing copyright laws, but most actual modifications apparently perpetuate and accentuate the rights of literate professional musicians with legal assistance over those of nonliterate but highly creative musicians whose work grows out of a strong vernacular tradition.
The creation of genres for new audiences
The most important face-to-face musical genre developed for specialized audiences,
Touristic audiences are not neutral, however. They bring with them expectations of diversion, a short attention span, a lack of understanding of local languages and traditions, and often an ignorance of religious matters. Most performers voluntarily, often at organizers' request, adjust their performances to present them within times and in locations set by tourists' schedules. As surely as other economic systems have created or discouraged certain kinds of musical performance, so does tourism.
Since before Columbus, musical, economic, and other cultural influences have flowed back and forth between the highlands and the lowlands, between North and South America, and around the Caribbean. The arrival of Europeans and Africans stepped up the pace of interaction. Music probably followed the trade routes, with seaports and riverine ports becoming centers of creativity and patronage for the arts, and the trade routes carrying the new creations to other cities and other patrons. In the Atlantic, New Orleans, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and other ports were the originators of distinctive styles of music whose popularity spread far beyond the country's borders. In the Pacific, similar processes certainly occurred among the former Spanish colonies.
Few records of this transnational musical cross-fertilization existed until the era of sheet music, when popular music in its current form emerges in historical documents. The utilization of early recording devices at the start of the twentieth century escalated the trend, and a transnational popular-music industry began to flourish. At first, most recordings were produced in North America, but by the 1920s several countries had flourishing music industries, often owned or licensed by multinational corporations. The popular musical forms of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean have had a tremendous impact on the popular music of Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world.
Tango has had a tremendous impact on France and other parts of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Today, there are hundreds of tango clubs in Finland, where tango has become almost a national dance. As the tango retreats into the realm of tourist art in Argentina, it flourishes as a creative form in northern Europe.
Since the popular recording of "El CoŽndor Pasa" in the 1960s by Simon and Garfunkel; since the residence of Andean musical ensembles such as Inti Illimani and QuilapayuŽn in Europe following the 1973 military coup in Chile; since Bolivian, Chilean, Ecuadorian, and Peruvian street musicians have been performing in Europe; and since the formation of Andean music ensembles in American universitiesAndean (or "pan-Andean") folkloric music has been popular outside of its homelands. Groups that perform at American universities (
Popular music from the Caribbean probably had a large influence on African highlife and other African genres of popular music that later swept back across the Atlantic to the Americas, and returned some of the influences with new features. Subsequently, merengue, reggae, salsa, soca, and other Caribbean musical genres have had a tremendous impact on the Americas and far beyond. The traditions from this region are influencing the development of musical traditions around the world.
What is the source of the impact of Caribbean music on the rest of the world?
Some of the music of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean continues to be heard only within its community. Others of its musical traditions have become part of the world's repertoire. The relationship between local and transnational musics is a theme that reappears again and again in these entries. It remains a challenge for all traditions in the coming century, when current trends will probably continue at an increasing rate.
Though the means by which musical traditions are learned, preserved, transformed, and even performed are constantly changing, the overall use of music in social life is probably increasing. The ways individuals and groups use music, the ways it is taught, the genres deemed significant, the genres that are transformed, the genres that spread across the globe, and the relationships among groups of people given expression through music will continue to be a significant part of musical performances in this hemisphere.
Language Classifications
The Earliest Migrations
The Legacy of Native Americans
On 12 October 1492, the Lucaya, a native people of the Caribbean, discovered Columbus. When he and his crew made landfall, on Samana Cay (San Salvador, present Bahamas), they thought they were in the East Indies; therefore they called these people Indiansa term that has caused confusion ever since, especially considering that hundreds of thousands of immigrants from India also live in the Caribbean today. (This volume uses the terms native American, Amerindian, and Indian interchangeably, reflecting particular authors' choices.) In 1492, the islands of the Caribbean and adjacent Atlantic were inhabited by native American peoples, including the peaceful Island Arawak or Taino (including the Lucaya subgroup) and the warlike Carib. And before them were other groups, including the Yamaye (Jamaica), the Borinquen (Puerto Rico), the Caliponau and Calinago (Lesser Antilles), the Siboney (Dominican Republic), and others (Loukotka 1968).
Columbus had no idea that the islands he encountered were but tiny specks compared to the huge landmasses in the Western Hemisphere, and that millions of people were dwelling in cities larger than many of those in Europe, were living and farming in lands higher in altitude than the Italian Alps, and were hunting and foraging in tropical forests unimaginable to him.
At the time of the Encounter (a term preferred to the Conquest, because most native Americans were never conquered), it is believed that about 15 million people were living in the South American continent; about 26 million or more were living in Middle America (including present Mexico and Central America) and the Caribbean; and about 5 million were living in North America. These inhabitants of what was to become known as the Americas spoke more than two thousand languages, 1,492 of them in South America alone (Loukotka 1968:17). The South American aboriginal languages can be classified into seven large phyla: Macro-Ge, Macro-Panoan, Macro-Carib, Equatorial, Macro-Tucanoan, Andean, and Chibchan-Paezan; those in Middle America (Central America and Mexico) include three families within the collective group Central Amerind (Kiowa-Tanoan, Uto-Aztecan, and Oto-Mangue), plus Chibchan, Hokan, and Penutian, and Equatorial in the
The native American cultures included in this section of the volume belong to many of those language areas. The map on page 79 shows the approximate locations of the South American native people discussed in this volume. The map on page 80 shows the approximate locations of those from Mexico and Central America. Many of these native American cultures are studied in individual essays organized alphabetically by region (for South American regions, see Steward 1949:5:674). Each is identified according to linguistic affiliation and cultural area, and described according to criteria presented in Parts 1 and 2, enabling the reader to make comparisons, observe trends, and so forth.
The "Indians" are the native Americans. But even they are descendants of earlier peoples, who came from the Old World as discoverers, explorers, invaders, and conquerors. It is widely accepted that tens of thousands of years ago, hunters followed game across the land bridge between present Siberia and Alaska. During two ice ages, the first one about fifty thousand to thirty thousand years ago and the second one twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago, the oceans receded to create a continuous stretch of tundra between Asia and North America, enabling animals to migrate in search of food, followed by nomadic hunting-gathering cultures (Layrisse and Wilbert 1966:17-18).
For millennia, these early Americans migrated south and southeast, constantly in pursuit of game, being forced farther south by stronger groups of people, some building elaborate cities and ceremonial centers (ChicheŽn ItzaŽ, Mitla, Monte AlbaŽn, TenochtitlaŽn, TeotihuacaŽn, and Tula in Mexico; IximcheŽ, KaminaljuyuŽ, and UtatlaŽn in Guatemala; Chan Chan and Cuzco in Peru; Tiawanaku in Bolivia; and others), some developing agricultural societies, others retaining hunting-gathering activities. Elaborate priest-god religions developed, while other systems of belief were based on shamanism, whereby a single entranced religious leader communes with the supernatural. In all cases, these peoples developed nations in their own right.
The achievements of many American cultures and nations were distinguished and remarkable. Unfortunately, most of them did not survive the intruders' guns and swords, the enslavement inflicted on them for labor, the diseases unwittingly brought by the Europeans, and the dozens of other wrongs inflicted by one people on others. Hundreds of cultures have survived, however, some still maintaining life-styles and beliefs perhaps similar to those of ancient times, others existing in varying degrees of assimilation. We know little about the present music and musical performance of the native Americans in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, and much study remains to be done.
What remains may be but a mere echo of the past; nevertheless, many musical aspects of today's native Americans still resound and are vital to an understanding of the essence of Mexico, Central America, and South America. Many native American musical forms are being revived, others are being performed with renewed vigor, and still others are disappearing. Those that do continue are often important components of revolutionary movements by native Americans (as in Mexico and Guatemala) and non-Indians (as in nueva cancioŽn chilena &Chilean new song' and the new-song move-
China
India
Japan
Germany
Italy
Spain
Chile
Out-Migration
By immigrants we mean people, other than individuals of the colonial powers of particular countries in the Americas, who entered the Americas of their own free will after about 1810, the beginning of the era of independence for most Central and South American countries. Therefore, native Americans and African slaves are not considered immigrants, even though their ancestral homes were not in the Americas (the original native Americans came from Asia). Likewise, people belonging to New World colonial powers who actually immigrated are not included because their cultural achievements were part of the national development of the countries to which they pertained; their musical achievements are discussed in Part 3 of this volume. Immigrants, then, in the context of this overview, are people who left their homelands to go to a new country in the Americas that had not been colonized by their ancestors, or to go to a new or another country after its independence. Thus, English people moving to Brazil are considered immigrants, whereas those going to Trinidad are not, until after its independence; French people moving to Chile are immigrants, whereas those going to French Guiana, which remains a department of France, are not; Spaniards going to Argentina before independence were not immigrants, but those going after were; Chileans going to Mexico were immigrants; and so on. Although these constraints seem arbitrary, they limit and help organize this survey.
Immigration basically began after 1850. It flourished until World War II and continues to a lesser degree. Its primary cause was the need for cheap labor in agricultural areas of South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The importation of African slaves provided inexpensive labor after the enslavement of native Americans was discontinued, but it, too, ended after the abolition of slavery in the mid-1800s. Even before emancipation, many countries had begun to import persons from several parts of Asia as indentured workers, drawing many from their colonies on the opposite side of the globe. The British in Trinidad and Guyana (then British Guiana) sought out workers from India; the Dutch in Surinam (then Dutch Guiana, sometimes spelled Suriname) brought laborers from Indonesia. Policies of immigration were contracted with governments of other Asian countries, resulting in the importation of workers from China and Japan (including Okinawa). Later, huge numbers of immigrants, including many Jews, came from Europe, especially Croatia,
In addition to the immigrants from across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, much internal immigration within the Western Hemisphere has occurred because of political turmoil or economic hardship. Many Chileans have immigrated to Mexico and Venezuela, Bolivians to Chile, Argentines to Brazil, Cubans to Panamaand of course multitudes to the United States of America.
Thus, ethnic groups and individuals of diverse national origins in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, and especially South America, are many. Overall, they have retained many cultural ways, including music, which often serves as a tool for retaining or teaching cultural identity. When people immigrate in large numbers, they usually do at least three things to preserve their cultural identity: organize schools for their children, with qualified teachers to continue instruction of their native languages (children's songs often serve for teaching language and culture); organize religious organizations and build houses of worship (music is part of traditional worship in most religions); and organize cultural associations that sponsor sports, music, dancing, eating, handicrafts, and other socializing activities.
Below, several of these immigrant groups are discussed by national (rather than ethnic or religious) origin, in the order in which they first arrived in noteworthy numbers. Many cultures are not included only because ethnomusicological research on them is lacking.
The importation of indentured workers from China began as early as 1849 in Peru and 1853 in Surinam. By 1872, thousands of Chinese had entered Peru as laborers (Gardiner 1975:6), and about twenty-five hundred Chinese had come to the Dutch colony of present Surinam to work (de Waal Malefijt 1963:22). Roughly 150,000 Chinese, mostly from Canton, immigrated to the Spanish colony of Cuba. After Peru won its independence, Chinese came to the islands off the Peruvian coast to mine their deposits of guano (accumulated droppings from birds, used for fertilizer); they also came to work on the sugar plantations in coastal river oases, and in nitrate mines on the south coast. After 1930, thousands of Chinese workers immigrated to Argentina and Brazil, many from Peru.
After fulfilling their contracts as agricultural laborers, most Chinese moved to urban areas, where they opened laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores. Living near each other and relying on one another to survive persecutions resulting from the "yellow peril" (negative attitudes and oppression of Asians by non-Asians), they created Chinatowns. These became the locales of musical activities, mostly including theatrical presentations of Chinese operas and other forms of entertainment. The main purpose of such musical activities was socialization.
In the 1990s, Chinese musical activities in such urban areas as Buenos Aires, Lima, and SaŻo Paulo consist mostly of talent shows and karaoke contests. In number and variety, musical activities have never equaled those of the Chinese living in San Francisco or New York, most probably because of ethnic assimilation and the smaller numbers of Chinese in South America. Both factors resulted from the fact that Chinese immigration to South America and the Caribbean peaked early, leading to assimilation, and never reached the tidal-wave proportions that it did in the United States. Similarly, musical syncretism with European and African forms never materialized for the same reasons. Nevertheless, important musiciansnotable not because they are Chinese, but because they are talentedhave been of Chinese heritage. In Trinidad, for example, Kim Loy was a famous panman (steel drummer), and Selwyn Ahyoung, whose grandfather was Chinese and grandmother African, had a great future as an ethnomusicologist until his untimely death in 1987.
The second immigrant culture to arrive in the New World as agricultural workers came from Calcutta to Surinam in 1873. Urban people, these Indians went straight to plantations to do labor at which they had no experience. Soon, rural people were brought over, and by 1916 more than thirty-four thousand lower-caste Indians had immigrated to Surinam (de Waal Malefijt 1963:23). Similarly, the British sent Hindu indentured servants for work in Trinidad and Guyana. In 1987, roughly 41 percent of the population of Trinidad was of East Indian descent.
Asian influence in the musics of Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad has been extensive. These immigrants introduced two religions, Hinduism and Islam, and freedom of worship and musical expression has always been possible in the new lands. Singing is the most important medium of Asian Indian musical expression, including songs for festivals, ritual songs for childbirth, marriage, and death, work-related songs, and Hindu bhajan, devotional songs (Arya 1968:19-31; Manuel 1995:212).
Musical instruments used by the people of Asian Indian descent include numerous idiophones, membranophones, two chordophones, and an aerophone with a keyboard. The main instruments in the first category are two metal rods (dantal), two brass cymbals (jhaŻn~jh), and two brass cups (majira); each set of instruments is concussed (clashed together) to provide rhythmic accompaniment to membranophones. The most common membranophones include two single-headed and closed drums (in the shape of a kettle), one double-headed drum (in the shape of a barrel), and a tambourine. These are the tassa and the nagara (the kettle-shaped drums), and the dholak (the barrel-shaped drum). The tassa, played for Islamic festivals, is struck with a stick by men for the Muharram festival, and by women for the Matkor procession (Arya 1968:8). The nagara is played with two sticks for weddings and other festivities. The dholak is played during weddings. The chordophones include a bowed lute (sarangi) and a plucked lute (tanpura); as in India, the former is a melodic instrument for classical music, and the latter provides a drone. The most common melodic instrument is the harmonium, a reed organ or multiple single-reed aerophone with keyboard. This is the universal instrument for accompanying bhajan songs.
The singing of bhajan, Hindu religious songs of praise to God in any of his
Muharram or Hosay, a Muslim festival, is celebrated by Hindus in Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad. It commemorates the martyrdom of the brothers Hasan and Husain, in A.D. 680. Matkor, a festival celebrated in Surinam, celebrates the mother-goddess's embodiment as the earth and other forms (Arya 1968:13).
Classical singing (tan) is performed by Asian Indians in Trinidad during their celebrations after wedding rituals, especially the dinner, when hired musicians with beaters (dantal), a dholak, and a harmonium accompany the singing of tan (Manuel 1995:215). This singing is followed by song duels (picong-style) and so-called chutney songs, which are danceable and easy to sing.
Asian Indians in the 1990s often maintain cultural contact with India by traveling to the motherland, reading India-oriented books and magazines, watching Indian films, and listening to Indian cassette tapes. At weekend public dances in Trinidad, they first listen to Indian film music, and then begin performing chutney dances, marked by special movements of the pelvis and gestures of the hands and accompanied by beer drinking. In the 1980s, chutney combined with soca (soul calypso) to become chutney-soca, a mixture of Trinidadian modern calypso, sung in Hindi with Indian vocal ornamentations and dholak accompaniment. Noted singers of this tradition are Anand Yankaran of Trinidad and Kries Ramkhelawan of Surinam. Rikki Jai and Drupatee Ramgoonai, Trinidadian Indian calypsonians, write popular calypsos with racial and cultural-unity themes. Also in Trinidad, the leader of the famous band known as Amoco Renegades is the Indian-Trinidadian Jit Samaroo (Manuel 1995:219-220). Even before the rise of these musical leaders of Indian heritage, the playing of tassa was an important influence in the development of steelband and soca.
Japanese indentured workers first reached Peru in 1899. Many came from Okinawa via Hawaii, where they had gone about thirty years before. The first Japanese workers to enter Peru (including people from Okinawa, politically but not ethnically Japanese) were 790 men who came to work in coastal sugarcane plantations (Morimoto 1979:13-14). Japanese immigration next included Brazil, beginning in June 1908, when 781 people (324 from Okinawa), including 158 families, arrived at the port of Santos to work in the coffee plantations (Ando 1976:138; Fujii and Smith 1959:3). By 1940, people of Japanese ancestry in Peru totaled 17,638, and in Brazil there were about 188,500 Japanese; more than 75 percent of those in rural areas were landowners (Cowles 1971:87). In the 1990s, the largest population of people of Japanese ancestry outside Japan is in Brazil; the second-largest is in the United States (including Hawaii), the third in Peru, the fourth in Canada, and the fifth in Argentina (Gardiner 1975:133). Sizable numbers of Japanese live in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and other countries of the Americas.
The Japanese, like the Chinese, Indians, and Indonesians before them, chose to emigrate from their homelands to become wealthya promise usually made by immigration officials. However, wages were low, working conditions difficult, living conditions crowded, diseases rampant, persecution common, and loneliness almost unbearable. An added difficulty in Peru for the Japanese male workers was the initial lack of Japanese women; married men later had their families sent over, and single men married female immigrants, who were often "picture brides" (arranged marriages were based on photos).
In contrast, most Japanese in Brazil were admitted in family groups as colonists
After 1930, Japanese immigration included Argentina and Paraguay (in addition to Brazil and Peru), where colonists introduced new methods of horticulturegrowing flowers and citrus. Most immigrants were peasant farmers, many from Okinawa, whose only musical performances had included singing folk and popular songs; by then, however, shamisen (Japanese orthography) and sanshin (Okinawan orthography) were available. These were lutes, often made locally from South American wood and local dogskin or imported snakeskin.
In all South American countries, Japanese immigration stopped during World War II. After the war, it remained closed in Peru, but resumed in Brazil in 1951. Additionally, in a program initiated by the U.S. Army, Okinawan immigrants came to Bolivia to establish farms in the Chaco region, east of the Andes; larger numbers came to Argentina and Paraguay. From 1951 to 1970, more than fifty-six thousand Japanese immigrated to Brazil, including many white-collar workers, intellectuals, and trained musicians who had lost their homes to the fires and bombs of the war. These new waves of Japanese immigration led to the performing and teaching of music in urban regions of Brazil and Argentina, most notably in Sa~o Paulo, Curitiba, and Londrina in Brazil, and Buenos Aires in Argentina. Japanese musical activity has not developed so strongly in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru (Olsen 1980), though acculturated forms such as karaoke 'empty orchestra'recordings of pop and folk songs minus the singer, a type of sing-along to cassette tapes and videosis extremely popular there, as it is in Argentina and Brazil.
Today, most people of Japanese descent live in urban areas of South America, where musical performance is often a means of socializing and maintaining ethnic identity (Olsen 1983). Many Japanese folk song (minyoŻ) clubs have sprung up in the Japanese quarter of Sa~o Paulo (Liberdade), in Curitiba, and in Londrina in Brazil; and in Lima, Peru. Clubs dedicated to Okinawan minyoŻ and koten (classical music) flourish in Buenos Aires, Lima (
The koto (Japanese orthography) and kutu (Okinawan orthography, a thirteen-stringed zither), the shamisen and sanshin (three-stringed plucked lutes), and the shakuhachi (a notched vertical bamboo flute) are the most popular Japanese classical musical instruments in Sa~o Paulo, Brazil, the capital of Japanese musical performance in all of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. These instruments are usually imported from Japan, since classically trained Japanese-Brazilian musicians desire the finest available instruments.
Brazil has several Japanese court-music orchestras [gagaku 'elegant music'), all associated with the TenrikyoŻ religious centers in Sa~o Paulo and BauruŽ, Brazil, where they serve ritual purposes. TenrikyoŻ, a Japanese religion that developed in the late 1800s, features dance as part of its daily ritual, usually to the accompaniment of koto and bowed shamisen (kokyuŻ). Both instruments were manufactured in Brazil in the 1980s (Olsen 1982), but in the 1990s they are imported from Japan. The koto was made from Brazilian woods (especially cedar), and the kokyuŻ was constructed from lard cans. TenrikyoŻ centers in AsuncioŽn and PiriapoŽ, Paraguay, have kotos and shamisens donated by the main church in Tenri, Japan.
In Sa~o Paulo, Brazil, in the 1990s, classical Japanese music includes nagauta, katarimono, and jiuta (shamisen or sangen traditions); soŻkyoku (koto tradition); shakuhachi honkyoku; gagaku; and noŻ. The Ikuta-ryuŻ and Yamada-ryuŻ styles of playing the koto are represented by teachers who are nisei, second-generation residents born overseas to Japanese-born parents. Likewise, both shakuhachi schools, Tozan-ryuŻ and Kinko-ryuŻ, are taught and performed in Sa~o Paulo by issei, first-generation residents born in Japan. Students of koto and shakuhachi often include non-Japanese people and adult Japanese of all generations who desire to learn more about their Japanese heritage. Tsuna Iwami (born 21 March 1923 in Tokyo; immigrated to Brazil in 1956) is the most important leader of classical Japanese chamber music in the southern hemisphere of the Americas. He is a master (iemoto) in the Kinko-school shakuhachi tradition, with the professional name of Baikyoku V, awarded to him by iemoto Araki KodoŻ IV in 1941 (Olsen 1986). In addition, Tsuna Iwami studied composition in Japan with Kishio Hirao, graduated from the University of KyoŻtoŻ in chemical engineering and industrial administration, and retired in the early 1990s to continue composing music and making pottery. He has composed in a European postimpressionist idiom, and in the 1990s he has modernized his style, usually fusing
Most young people of Japanese ancestry in South America have little knowledge of Japanese traditional music, but they are interested in learning about the heritage of their ancestors, especially the language, baseball (beŽisbol, which they claim the Japanese invented, and which they regard as a warrior attribute, bushido), and karaoke. The last is popular and is used to teach and maintain Japanese philosophy, morals, and culture. Youths who cannot speak Japanese learn to read and sing in the language by becoming temporary pop singers in the company of their friends. In the late 1990s, karaoke singing is the most important medium for maintaining a Japanese identity among the South American people of Japanese ancestry.
German communities arose especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. Germans immigrated to the first three countries as colonists during open-immigration periods of the late 1800s and early 1900s; in Paraguay, many Germans are Mennonite farmers who received homesteading rights in the Chaco region; and in the 1930s, many German Jews emigrated to escape Nazi-sponsored persecution, and many Volksdeutsche (German-speaking Protestants living in Russia) immigrated into Argentina.
The obvious musical-instrument legacy of the immigrant German people is the accordion, of which two forms are found in the southern Americas: the button accordion (acordeoŽn de butones) and the piano accordion (acordeoŽn de teclas). In Argentina, a variant of the first type is known as bandoneoŽn, invented in 1854 by Heinrich Band, after whom it is named. Most of today's accordions are German instruments made by Hošhner, a company that manufactures musical instruments in Germany. Sometimes folkloric ensembles use both types, as seen among the German-derived groups on the island of ChiloeŽ, in southern Chile (YeŽvenez 1980:57). The accordion has found its place in folk and popular music from the tonada in Chile to the tango in Argentina.
Additionally, German immigrants introduced dances, including the polka, the schottische, and the waltz. These dances have fused with national types to become the gato polceado in Argentina, the polca in Paraguay, and the vals criollo in Peru.
Germans first immigrated to Chile in the 1840s, when land was granted to them. Today in the southern lake district of Chile, several towns and cities (Valdivia, Osorno, Puerto Varas, and others) have large German-speaking populations. German architecture, breweries, and Lutheran churches abound in this area. Throughout central and southern Chile, the Chilean folklorist and singer Violeta Parra collected many German-influenced songs, especially waltzes.
In the German community of Alto Sampaio in southern Brazil, a singing society (sociedad de canto) was the most important cultural organization of the immigrants, "because the German loves to sing, and by singing he or she thematically reproduces German culture" (Flores 1983:256, translated by Dale A. Olsen).
Italians constitute the largest immigrant culture in Argentina and make up large numbers of the immigrant population in southern and central Brazil and southern Chile. Although most Italian immigrants to the United States were from southern Italy and Sicily, most Italians who moved to Argentina were from northern Italy, including the border regions between Italy and Austria. For that reason, "the accordion...has challenged the guitar as the Argentine's favorite instrument" (Solberg
Perhaps the most important Italian trait brought to South America is the singing of, and love for, Italian opera and art songs. The popularity of Italian opera in Buenos Aires was influential in the opening of the famous Teatro ColoŽn in 1857. Bellini's Norma was first performed in Rio de Janeiro in 1844 (thirteen years after its premiere), and for the next twelve years, that city was the focal point of the Italian "prima donna personality cult" in Brazil (BeŽhague 1979:112). The popularity of opera among the rubber barons of the Brazilian Amazon led to the construction of an opera house in the city of Manaus; it was completed in 1910, at the end of the rubber boom [see ART MUSIC].
After the Italians, Spaniards (mostly from Galicia) were the second-largest immigrant group in Argentina. Because the national origin of most Argentines is Spanish, the Spanish immigrants had only slight adjustments to make, and upward mobility came quite easily. Many began as common laborers in Buenos Aires (garbage collectors, dock workers, street sweepers), but soon became retailers (Solberg 1966:20). The Spanish have retained their cultural identity, especially in Buenos Aires, where one of the main streets, the Avenida de Mayo, features Spanish cantinas (combination bars and coffeehouses) frequented by people who think of themselves as Spanish rather than Argentine.
The music of Argentina owes much to Spanish culture, but in this most European of the South American countries, this debt stems as much from the Spanish of the colonial period as it does from Spanish immigrants. It is not possible, for example, to slice the tangothe national music and dance of Argentina, especially Buenos Airesinto parts and claim that a certain percentage of it is musically a result of Spanish (or Italian) immigration. Perhaps it is wiser to view the tango as a musical product of common Spanish laborers who worked the docks of Buenos Aires. In any event, the concept of cultural identity through music, where the immigrants are of the same heritage as the colonists, is not so easily defined as that of persons who look and speak differently from those of the dominant culture.
During the early years of the Chilean coup d'eŽtat (from September 1973), when President Allende was murdered and General Pinochet became the military dictator, many supporters of the deposed governmentincluding musicians and artistsfled, fearing persecution and death. Because panpipes (siku), notch flutes (quena), and small guitars (charango) were featured in the protest movement called nueva cancioŽn 'new song', Pinochet made their playing unlawful. Other acts of oppression followed. The folksinger-guitarist-composer-poet Victor Jara was tortured and murdered. Jorge Pen~a, conductor of the children's orchestra in La Serena, was murdered because he had taken his orchestra on a tour to Cuba. In response, many Chilean musicians left for Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere, especially Europe and the United States. Symphonic musicians left Santiago and joined orchestras in other cities outside Chile, such as Mexico City and San JoseŽ, Costa Rica. Musicians such as AŽngel and Isabel Parra fled to Mexico, where they continued to perform, compose, and record their music. The musical impact of Chilean immigrants since 1973 has been felt as far away as Paris, Rome, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
The migration of people out of their homelands to other areas is emigration, or outmigration. It is caused by overt political oppression, as experienced in Chile in the
Issues in Popular Music
Popular Musics Abroad
During the twentieth century, the world was blanketed by mass media and electronic communications while populations all over the globe experienced intense social and cultural changes, variously labeled Westernization, modernization, urbanization, secularization, industrialization, commercialization, and commodification. Mutually reinforcing, these processes overlapped in ways that made them potent constitutive forces of life.
New musics evolved in response to particular constellations of these processes. They arose from, and were marketed to, a mass audience of consumers (Manuel 1988). Most of them blended local and traditional forms with imported, usually Western, norms. Their classification under the rubric popular (or just pop) emphasizes their mass appeal and mass mediation, and distinguishes them from preexisting conceptual categories: folk (the orally transmitted musics of peasants) and art (the written musics of churches, courts, and elites). Musics dubbed popular typically function as entertainment in a variety of urban contexts: bars, bordellos, dance halls, hotels, clubs, restaurants, and streets. Most of them serve to accompany social dancing; hence, much of their persuasive power ties in with the pleasurable involvement of the body in motion. As broadcast media and personal sound systems have invaded homes and workplaces, popular musics have become pervasive in leisure and work. In day-to-day living, much of their impact is in the reassuring sonic presence of a familiar background noise.
Labels such as folk, art, and popular represent clusters of characteristics and do not define a rigid and universal scheme of classification. Popular styles typically share several traits. They are usually urban, mass-mediated, commodified (reproduced and commercially marketed), syncretic, rapidly obsolescent (though hits may be nostalgically preserved as markers of certain periods), and accessible (not overly demanding of listeners).
In Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, important developments in popular musics occurred during periods of rapid social change, such as emancipation and national independence. In particular, independence correlated with consolidations
Popular music has served many political causes and movements in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Organizations and individuals have used pieces and styles to symbolize political affiliation, as in the Dominican Republic in the 1930s and 1940s, when Rafael Trujillo used merengues for campaign music and as symbols of his presidency (Austerlitz 1996). Governments have censored commercial artists, as in Brazil under the military dictatorship of the 1970s, and patronized sympathetic ones, as in Cuba since 1959. Opposition movements have used topical and critical popular musics as organizing tools and rallying cries, as in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Oppressed social classes have used popular music as part of the cultural fabric of resistance, as in Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s. Dictators have offered dance music to the masses as a palliative in lieu of fundamental social change, as in Haiti in the 1960s. However, popular music achieves the desired political goals only if it functions effectively as entertainment.
Though some lay writers, including Barrow (1993), Gerard and Sheller (1989), and McGowan and Pessanha (1991), describe the general history and style of popular musics of the region, most scholarly works engage with more specific sets of issues, even if merely to assert that popular musics and their texts serve as windows into local culture, worldview, and ethos, especially with otherwise "silent" or disadvantaged social groups. The identification of African retentions, an early concern in popular-music research, is still an abiding issue (Liverpool 1993; Roberts 1974), though perhaps not to the same degree as in studies of the traditional music of the region. Perhaps the most fruitful line of investigation since the 1980s is concerned with how popular musics express social identity and stratification, and how they articulate differences in class, race, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, and geography (Austerlitz 1996; Averill 1989; BeŽhague 1994; Crook 1993; Hebdige 1987; Pacini HernaŽndez 1995; Stuempfle 1995). The relationship of popular music to the political realm, including electoral politics, nation-state control, hegemony, and popular resistance, has inspired an increasing number of works (Averill 1997; Manuel 1991; Waters 1985). Biographical studies explain the influence of charismatic superstars such as Bob Marley, Carlos Gardel, the Mighty Sparrow, and how they have helped define and coalesce style, ethos, ideology, and identity (Collier 1990; White 1989). How new technologies, commercial-music industries, and the global flows of popular musics have affected local musical sounds and structures is of primary importance to Guilbault (1993), Hill (1993), and Wallis and Malm (1984), but the same questions crop up widely in the literature.
Popular musics of South America and the Caribbeancalypso, mambo, reggae, salsa, samba, steelband, tango, and many other genreshave competed in markets around the world, where they have influenced local trajectories of musical development (Roberts 1985 [1979]). For example, in the 1940s, Cuban music contributed to Congolese dance music, later called soukous. Numerous crazes for Latin American and Caribbean musics have affected European-American pop markets and figure
Popular genres have helped attract and entertain tourists. As patrons of popular music, tourist bureaus and hotels have sponsored festivals, such as Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica, and the Cartegena Festival in Colombia. In Brazil, Trinidad, Haiti, Cuba, and other countries, carnival serves a dual role as popular expression and tourist spectacle. In tailoring popular musics to foreign markets and tourists' expectations, promoters and industries have marketed tropical fantasies in exotic music, exemplified by the lambada craze of the late 1980s, but also visible in the early-twentieth-century fads for tango and maxixe.
Responding to the needs of audiences, strategies for marketing, and the world-views of populations, musicians have continued to interject enough meaningful content into music to make popular styles an integral part of emerging national identities in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean.
Anglophone Areas
Francophone Areas
One can speak of the English- and French- (Creole-) speaking islands together partly because of what they are not: they are not, in general, part of the sphere of Iberian cultural influence that includes Latin America, Central America, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. The French and British colonies had a much higher ratio of African slaves and free blacks to European colonists than did most of their Spanish counterparts, and consequently, neo-African culture and European-African syncretisms are more evident.
The popular musics of the English-speaking and the Creole-speaking West Indies (Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles) share some notable traits. They are highly syncretic forms with African and European secular antecedents, and they were developed by and for a largely lower-class Afro-Caribbean population. Because many of the English-speaking Lesser Antilles changed hands often during the colonial period, the islands reveal cultural influences from Great Britain and France, and much cross-fertilization occurred among the popular musics of these islands in the twentieth century.
As studies (Abrahams 1983; Guilbault 1985; McDaniel 1986) have shown, the Lesser Antilles retain vibrant traditional cultures, and some have produced dynamic popular forms. Nevertheless, the larger islands (Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, the French Antilles) have dominated the region culturally, especially since the arrival of commercial recordings and broadcast technologies. Genres originating on these islandsTrinidadian calypso, steelband, and soca; Jamaican ska, reggae, and dance hall; Haitian merengue, konpa, and roots music (mizik rasin), French Antillean beguine and zoukhave colonized other islands and foreign markets.
Trinidad and Tobago
In Trinidad, carnival was the main occasion for the performance and development of popular musics. Calypso, a topical genre called cariso in some nineteenth-century accounts, was sung by chantwells, a widespread term for singers in the Creole Caribbean (Cowley 1996). The transition from Creole to English song texts took
Recordings of calypsonians were first made in 1914 by the Victor Gramophone Company (Warner 1985:22). Sporadic interest in calypso by multinational record companies has resulted in international releases by calypsonians such as Lord Invader, Lord Executor, Atilla the Hun, Roaring Lion, Mighty Sparrow, Mighty Chalkdust, and others (for a discussion of recorded calypsoes, see Hill 1993). Calypso's limited success in foreign markets may reflect partly the specificity of its lyrics to local political and social realities (including wordplay and allusion), and in part its near-total immersion in carnival.
In the 1970s, the rise of soca, a style of party-dance calypso influenced by American funk and soul, loosened musicians' reliance on carnival, and shifted the primary venue of musical performance to recording studios, often in the Trinidadian diaspora, especially Brooklyn, New York. Soca singers from other islands, such as Arrow (Montserrat) and Swallow (Antigua), achieved market success, though nationalistic restrictions prevented them from singing in Trinidadian carnival. Soca bands feature wind sections (saxophones, trumpets, trombones), synthesizers, electric guitars, electric bass, and trap drums, with strong bass-drum accents on downbeats, and lyrics that typically eschew topical themes in favor of a party ambience. The involvement of East Indians in Trinidadian popular musics has led to a variety of hybrid styles, such as chutney-soca, and youth-culture fusions with Jamaican dance hall and American rap (ragga and other genres) are common.
Steelbands
Steelbands have roots in the road march of carnival in Trinidad. Starting in the 1800s as neo-African percussion ensembles, road-march bands were restructured after the 1884 Peace Preservation Ordinance, as part of a long-standing campaign against lower-class and African cultural influence in carnival (Liverpool 1993), banned drumming, stick fighting (kalenda), and the brandishing of burning cane (kanboulay). Tamboo-bamboo bands, which resulted, featured percussive and concussive lengths of bamboo, progressively augmented by metallic devices (dust bins, pots, brake drums). In 1937, the vogue for metal sounds reached a peak with the appearance of an all-steel band (Alexander's Ragtime Band). In the 1940s, a series of innovations led to the development of tuned, sunken, multipitched oil drums (pans), which
At first, the social organization of the bands involved gangs of lower-class boys, "bad Johns," the violence of whose confrontations triggered repressive measures from the authorities. In 1949, the government addressed the problem in a study, and in 1950 organized the Steel Band Association. In 1951, the tour of TASPO (Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra) to Britain raised the status of steelband as an indigenous orchestra. In the 1960s, the integration of pan into the school curriculum and the inception of prestigious competitions (Steelband Music Festival, Panorama) domesticated the bands' rivalries (Stuempfle 1995).
Steelbands spread quickly through the English-speaking eastern Caribbean. Recordings from the late 1950s and the 1960s featured bands from Antigua, Anguilla, St. Kitts, Barbados, and Nevis, where bands entertained tourists and accompanied limbo dances. Steelbands are now based in countries all over the globe, and pans are increasingly found in ensembles other than steelbands, such as jazz combos.
Jamaica
Jamaican popular music was influenced in its earliest phase by Trinidadian calypso, which bore a familial resemblance to mento, a Jamaican genre. In addition to "social bands," which performed mento and calypso, the popularity of American swing led to Jamaican big bands, the road bands. Sound-system operators (playing in the 1950s for "blue dances") specialized in imported rhythm-and-blues dance tunes on 45-rpm recordsa style of music also heard on Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion (RJR), and on WINZ in Miami. These operators, such as Clement Dodd ("Sir Coxsone") and Duke Reid, competed on the strength of their systems and on the size and currency of their collections. Among the first to record local musicians, they formed the backbone of a local recording industry (Johnson and Pines 1982).
Locally, rhythm and blues developed an exaggerated backbeat and a quick tempo. This offshoot, ska, emerged in the years surrounding independence (1962); the classic studio-ska band, the Skatalites, was born in 1963. In the latter half of the 1960s, vocal ska recordings lionized ghetto street culture, known as "rudeness." Popular music became slower, and the bass and the drums rose to prominence. The newer sound, rock steady, was the immediate precursor of reggae. The influence of Rastafarianism on the lower class, especially among musicians, showed clearly, not only in aural texture (identified as "dread sound") but also in a preoccupation with biblical imagery and millenarian prophecy. Even non-Rastafarian performers widely copied Rastafarian beliefs, life-styles, and patterns of speaking (for a discussion of rastas, reggae, and politics in Jamaica, see Waters 1985).
"Catch a Fire" and "Burning," releases by Bob Marley and the Wailers, exported reggae to the world. Marley's synthesis of revolutionary ideology and Rastafarian spirituality appealed to disenfranchised peoples, especially those in the English-speaking Caribbean (White 1989). Among Caribbean youths from Trinidad to the Virgin Islands, reggae promoted "dread talk," the colloquial Rastafarian version of Jamaican patois. Jamaicans living in London exposed English youths to ska and reggae, and in London pubs there developed a parallel ska-reggae scene that appealed strongly to British punks (Hebdige 1987), inspiring two-tone, an antiracist movement and music, uniting black and white musicians.
Reggae's success in the United States and the United Kingdomwhich included reggae-style hits for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, Debby Harry, and
Jamaican artists on the island and abroad have made substantial contributions to the technology of popular music worldwide through their pioneering efforts to develop dub tracks and versions (with some original tracks deleted and new tracks superimposed) and their extensive use of sampling. Jamaican styles of chanted poetry to musical accompanimentwhich include toasting, dub poetry, dance hall, and raggahave influenced North American rap and hip-hop vocals and have found a substantial niche in world markets.
The Haitian meŽringue (Creole mereng) and its cousin, the St. Lucian and Martinican beguine (beŽguine) are syncretic couple dances descended from French courtly dances (contredanse and quadrille) and Kongo social dances, such as the kalenda and the chica (Fouchard 1988:19, Rosemain 1986:798). On both islands, elites patronized parlor and (in the twentieth century) jazz-band versions of their national dances. The parlor meŽringue is also called the meŽringue lant 'slow meŽringue'.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the major development in meŽringue was the fusion with Vodou rhythms in the hands of neŽgritude-influenced composers, to produce the genre Vodou-jazz, popularized by the band Jazz des Jeunes (Averill 1989, 1997). But the most commercially significant development in Haitian dance music in the 1950s was the creation of konpa-dire`k, a new kind of meŽringue, patterned on the merengue of the Dominican Republic. The Ensemble Nemours Jean-Baptiste and the Ensemble WeŽbert Sicot made this dance the first commercially successful Creole popular music. In the 1960s, it was adapted for mini-djaz, rock-style ensembles (such as Shleu Shleu, Les Fantaisistes du Carrefour, Tabou Combo, and Les Difficiles de PeŽtion-Ville). These groups performed in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora (chiefly New York).
In the 1970s, musicians in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica adapted the konpa to produce the Antillean kadans. The late 1970s and early 1980s was a period in which konpa, calypso, and kadans influenced each other, drawing liberally from American funk and soul. In Dominica, the group Exile One created a hybrid, kadans-lypso. In France in the early 1980s, musicians from Martinique and Guadeloupe put together a dance music based on kadans, but with a high-tech sound (from multiple synthesizers) and Antillean rhythms. They called their band Kassav?; and their music, zouk (a Creole word for "party"). Within a few years, zouk became the dominant style of dancing in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and was among a handful of popular African and Caribbean dance musics in Paris. It even developed subgenres: zouk-love (light pieces, on romantic themes) and zouk-hard (upbeat tunes, on various themes) (Guilbault with Averill et al. 1993).
In Paris, French Antillean musicians absorb influences from an international community, utilize French technology to modernize their music, and reach an affluent "ethnic" market. In their respective diasporas, Caribbean musicians find potential crossover audiences for their music and a base for penetrating multinational markets.
Transnational Influences
The Genres of Spanish-American Pop
Musicians' Social Backgrounds
Views from Outside the Region
Spanish-American popular musics are hybrids resulting from blending processes known as creolization, mestizaje, and syncretism, which developed in response to the encounter of European, Amerindian, and African cultures. Borrowing and blending have continued to enrich Spanish-American popular musics, most of which draw simultaneously from antecedent folkloric genres (themselves products of cultural blends) and contemporaneous popular musics.
Since the nature and extent of these musical changes typically reflect concurrent processes of social change, Spanish-American popular musics are valuable windows into the realities of the regions from which they have emerged. Useful as these musics may be for such analyses, however, their primary function is, and has always been recreational, whether for dancing, courtship, storytelling, or displaying artistic skill.
The historical trajectories of Spanish-American popular musics have been bound up with regional-cultural demographics and socioeconomic-political conditions, the processes of migration and urbanization, and the development of recording and broadcast technologies. In the early twentieth century, especially in urban areas, where people of European descent (who controlled musical production and dissemination) resided in greater proportions, the musical practices and aesthetics of popular music closely imitated prevailing European styles. Some European-derived musical traditions--contredanse, mazurka, polka, waltzsurvive, though they have been creolized, like the local variations of the polka and the waltz that continue to flourish from Mexico to Paraguay.
In contrast, in rural areas (more heavily populated by people of African and/or Amerindian descent), musics were able to persist or develop according to traditional patterns, with little metropolitan interference. In public discourse, musics more informed by European aesthetics (like the Puerto Rican danza and the Cuban contradanza) were valued more highly than those with conspicuous Amerindian or African roots. However, in situations where nationalistic or indigenistic ideologies called for the rejection of anything associated with colonial powers, the latter musics (such as the African-Cuban rumba and the Chilean cueca) were celebrated as indigenous cultural expressions.
Urban migrations, which accelerated throughout the twentieth century, have
Many contemporary popular genres remain identified with the country whose root genre provided its framework (like the merengue of the Dominican Republic, the cumbia of Colombia, the son of Cuba), but most have been influenced by musics from beyond national borders. The extent of outside influences relates to the degree of linguistic and cultural commonalities shared by lenders and borrowers, but recording, broadcasting, and film have played important roles in expanding the pool of resources from which musicians have drawn; in particular, Cuba and Mexico have been important exporters of popular music styles to the rest of Latin America.
International migration has played a significant role in musical change by bringing musicians and audiences into direct contact with musical sources. In these cases, transformations have occurred far from the region where a music originated, as salsa has emerged in New York and the tango has become legitimate in Paris (Roberts 1985 [1979]).
Borrowing and blending have been more pronounced where similarities between old and new styles or instrumentation have facilitated transitions. For example, the single-reed sound of the European clarinet nicely replaced the indigenous single-reed gaita in the 1930s, when Colombian cumbia was modernized.
Sometimes outside influences have been limited and have not significantly changed the overall sound of a musical style; for example, the electric bass has been added to many otherwise still traditional ensembles. In other cases, borrowing has been extensive and sometimes less predictable; for example, in the 1970s, second-generation Andean migrants to Lima, Peru, creolized the Colombian cumbia by combining cumbia rhythms with highland huayno melodies, producing chicha, a distinctly Peruvian variant of cumbia (Turino 1990).
The evolution of Spanish-American popular musics has been characterized by incrementation and substitution; new forms have not always replaced preceding ones. Traditional and modern forms of a given genre, and a range of intermediate ones, can coexist with equal vigor, albeit with varying levels of commercial success (Manuel 1988): the Cuban son is still played by traditional guitar trios, by contemporary brass and percussion-based ensembles (conjuntos), and by jazz ensembles. Though distance from cities may partially explain the persistence of older rural forms, these musics, like their more modern and commercially lucrative counterparts, are recorded and disseminated through the mass media.
The mixture of tradition and innovation characterizes Hispanic America's popular-music landscape, ranging from only slightly modernized but often mass-mediated versions of such regionally based genres as Mexico's corridos and rancheras, to a country-specific commercial music such as the Dominican Republic's merengue (Austerlitz 1996), Argentina's tango, and Peru's huayno (Turino 1993), to thoroughly transnational contemporary music styles such as salsa, balada, rock en espan~ol, nueva cancioŽn, and cumbia.
On the basis of record sales alone, popular musics with international projections (such as balada) would be considered most significant. National and locally based genres, however, have played far more consequential roles not only as sources for cross-fertilization but also as key symbols of national, regional, class, racial, gender, or political identities. As these musics are treated in other entries, the focus here is on transnational genres that might be omitted as foreign (such as rock or balada); or their connections with similar music in other Spanish American countries might not be articulated (such as salsa, cumbia, or nueva cancioŽn).
Salsa
Rooted in Cuban son, salsa has become so internationalized that it can no longer be associated with any one country (Boggs 1992; Manuel 1995, RondoŽn 1980). Beginning in the 1960s, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic Caribbeans living in New York City modernized and transformed the son by paring down ensembles, combining elements of jazz, and using urban-oriented lyrics.
The term salsa distinguished it commercially from its Cuban predecessor, though musicians and audiences have always acknowledged its connections with son. New York has served as salsa's commercial center, but several Spanish-American countries have competed with New York: ensembles such as Oscar D'Leon of Venezuela and Grupo Niche of Colombia have the attention of an international salsa-loving public.
Music that elsewhere might be called salsa is still produced in Cuba, though locals reject the term as a U.S.-derived commercial name. In many parts of Spanish-speaking America, salsa often falls under the rubric muŽsica tropical, which includes other African-Caribbean dance musics, particularly cumbia and merengue.
Cumbia
In the 1800s, the traditional cumbia emerged among mixed African and Amerindian populations along the Caribbean coasts of Colombia. In the 1940s, coastal cumbias with strongly African-derived rhythms were adapted to large urban bands (orquestas), and recordings by performers like Pacho GalaŽn and Lucho BermuŽdez received international attention.
Today, cumbia is immensely popular throughout Latin America's Pacific-rim regions from Chile to Central America and Mexico, especially among consumers of Amerindian descent. In Mexico, it is so widespread it is considered Mexican rather than Colombian music; in Peru, cumbia Andina has become a distinct variant known as chicha.
In Colombia itself, most cumbias produced after 1970 were targeted at Central American audiences rather than coastal Colombian ones. These cumbias have lost their African flavor and are rejected by coastal Colombians as cumbias del interior (highland cumbias). However, a new generation of Colombian musicians (including Joe Arroyo) are producing cumbias with more pronounced African-derived rhythms and vocal styling (Pacini HernaŽndez 1992).
Balada
The balada, commercially called Latin pop, can be considered the continuation of a long-standing pan-Hispanic tradition of guitar-based romantic song (including the cancioŽn and the bolero). In the 1960s, slickly produced romantic music by the Spanish singer Rafael emphasized sophisticated production and lush, densely textured arrangements, setting a new standard for romantic song. The frank eroticism of the texts challenged the sexual repression imposed by General Francisco Franco (Spanish head of state, 1936-1975).
Spanish-American romantic singers who adopted the sound of baladas in the 1970s found that upwardly aspiring urban middle-class audiences throughout the hemisphere increasingly preferred balada's interpretations of modern romance to those expressed in older romantic musics. Male singers and points of view predominate; yet balada's suggest the more sensitive, emotional side of men, clearly appealing to women, balada's most important consumers.
Since the 1980s, balada has become the most widely consumed and commercially successful music in Spanish America. The most famous balada superstars are the Spaniard Julio Iglesias and the Brazilian Roberto Carlos, but almost every Spanish-American country has an internationally known balada star, including Venezuela's JoseŽ Luis RodriŽguez (El Puma), Mexico's JoseŽ JoseŽ, and Argentina's Sandro. Since the mid-1980s, more and more singers formerly associated with nueva cancioŽn (such as Venezuela's Soledad Bravo and Puerto Rico's Danny Rivera) have been recording in the style of baladas, though they reject songs expressing coarse machismo and female subservience, which sometimes characterize balada.
The neofolk-protest music known as nueva cancioŽn 'new song' is pan-Hispanic American. The term nueva cancioŽn originally referred specifically to Chilean folk-protest music, which emerged in the late 1960s and flourished in the political climate of the Allende years (1970-1973) [see CHILE]. It was inspired locally by singer-song-writer Violeta Parra's pioneer reinterpretations of Chilean folk music, and by her Argentine contemporary Atahualpa Yupanqui's similar work with his country's folk music.
Cuban musicians such as Sylvio RodriŽguez and Pablo MilaneŽs, whose less folk-rooted music (originally known as cancioŽn protesta and later as nueva trova) expressed the ideals of the Cuban revolution, were used as models. After September 1973, when the Pinochet dictatorship crushed nueva cancioŽn, its successor, clandestine or heavily veiled, became known as canto nuevo (also 'new song').
In the 1970s, politically conscious musicians from Mexico to Argentina began employing their own folkloric traditions as vehicles for commentary on local conditions, though they often continued to imitate the sound of their Chilean and Cuban models, as did Venezuela's Los Guaraguaos and Nicaragua's Carlos MejiŽa Godoy (Broughton et al. 1994).
These groups identify their music as nueva cancioŽn to establish solidarity with other Spanish-American ensembles similarly using music to raise political consciousness. Musicians and listeners insist that because nueva cancioŽn is noncommercial and has a serious social mission, it should be distinguished from recreational popular musics. Nevertheless, it must be considered popular music because its musical influences, social contexts, lyrical concerns, and mass-mediated forms of reproduction are unequivocally modern and urban based.
Rock
Rock was introduced to Latin America in the 1960s through television and radio and by the aggressive promotional campaigns of multinational record companies. Since then, it has become an appreciable part of the Latin American musical landscape.
Initially, most rock songs produced in Latin America were covers of U.S. or U.K. originals or highly derivative, prompting nationalists to denounce these efforts as an undesirable consequence of so-called Yankee cultural imperialism. By the late 1970s, bands in many countries were producing original rock, with Spanish lyrics referring directly to local conditions. In general, rock has been more important in Mexico and
During military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay (1970s and early 1980s), when rock concerts were often the only large public gatherings allowed, they became an important forum for solidarity, albeit veiled and unfocused. Subsequently, rock en espan~ol (Spanish-American rock) lost its association with foreign imperialism and began to symbolize nationalism and resistance to political repression.
Spanish-American rock is not monolithic. Like its northern counterpart, it has a range of substylesfrom what could be considered folk rock (combining modern and indigenous styles and instruments, as with Chile's Los Jaivas), to art rock (as with Argentina's Luis Alberto Spinetta), to punk (as with Chile's Los Prisioneros) and heavy metal and grunge (as with Mexico's ManaŽ). In the late 1980s, reggae rhythms were increasingly incorporated into rock repertoires (as by Mexico's Los Caifanes).
Some rockers active since the 1960s (such as Argentina's Charly GarciŽa) have produced innovative work in several of these subgenres. Rock en espan~ol is being produced in Cuba (by Carlos Varela) despite official preference for more autochthonous popular musics.
Through the broadcast media, most Spanish Americans have access to a wide range of popular musics, from local traditional genres, to nationally based commercial dance musics, to pan-Hispanic American genres, to imported pop, mostly from the United States. Latin American musical preferences tend to reflect self-perceived national, regional, class, racial, gender, or political affiliations as much as aesthetic decisions.
Attitudes toward tradition and modernity, toward rural and urban cultures, toward and between racial and ethnic groups, are often in conflict, symbolically or explicitly expressed in the competition between and valorization of available music forms. Designating a particular genre as being the national music of a given country is more often a response to political or racial ideologies than to actual widespread distribution of the music.
In this manner, nationalist Chilean musicians in the 1960s deliberately tried to transform what they perceived as a cultural identity oriented overly toward the North Atlantic into a more indigenous one by promoting as representative of the country's authentic national identity a variety of Andean music typical only of a small, remote area in northern Chile. Similarly, the racist ideology fostered by the Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1930s precluded the designation of African-derived music played on long drums (palos) as a symbol of that country's national identity. Instead, with Trujillo's encouragement, a variety of merengue typical only of
With the occasional exception of genres that have become symbols of a country's national identity, urban Spanish-Americans tend to reject musics closely associated with rural and poor segments of the population as backward and vulgar, preferring instead the transnational genres such as salsa, rock, and balada, or fully modernized, nationally based musics such as merengue and cumbia.
Alternatively, people who identify with rural ways prefer musics clearly grounded in more traditional styles. In the last decades of the twentieth century, as recently migrated urban poor have swelled the cities, new forms of musicthe Dominican bachata, the Peruvian chicha, the Colombian carrileraemerged to express the experience of transition between a rural past and an urban present (Pacini HernaŽndez 1995). In CoŽrdoba, Argentina, cuarteto has a somewhat similar background [see CUARTETO, POP MUSIC OF ARGENTINA]. Essentially urban, these musics are often publicly denigrated and denied equal access to media and distribution because of their association with the poor. In response, informal alternative production and distribution networks have arisen; low-quality recordings are sold by sidewalk or market vendors rather than by record stores; these networks serve as conduits for pirated recordings of mainstream commercial musics.
Among the noteworthy changes in contemporary popular music is the number of all-woman ensembles. Popular music has usually been dominated by men; women have always participated as vocalists, and to a lesser extent as composers, but seldom as instrumentalists.
In the 1940s, Cuba's all-female orquesta Anacaona broke new ground, but it was not until the 1970s that similar all-female ensembles (such as the Dominican Republic's merengue band Las Chicas del Can and Colombia's vallenato band Las Musas) or female-led ensembles (such as that of the Dominican Republic's accordionist Fefita la Grande) began emerging elsewhere.
Although Spanish-Americans have usually maintained a keen interest in international musical developments, a corresponding interest in Spanish-American music from other world areas has been less noticeable. Often, Spanish-American music has been disseminated indirectly through others' interpretations rather than through original versions by Latin American musicians. Musical pieces are often transformed to conform to fit stereotypes of Latin American people and cultures. Dance musics such as the tango, the mambo, and the cha-cha received most of their international attention via watered-down versions in Hollywood films.
Since the 1950s, Latin American elements have appeared fairly regularly in Latino-flavored rock songs by U.S. musicians such as the Coasters ("Tequila") or the Drifters ("Rose in Spanish Harlem") (Roberts 1985 [1979]). Hispanic-American musicians such as Richie Valens, Carlos Santana, and members of Los Lobos have successfully fused Latino elements with rock (Loza 1993), but Spanish American popular music in its original versions had until the late 1980s achieved neither adequate exposure nor commercial success outside the region; even megahits, such as Calixto Ochoa's "El Africano" (1985), interpreted locally all over Latin America, is virtually unknown to most non-Hispanics. In contrast, since the 1950s, African-Cuban music in original versions exerted important influence on Central and West African popular music, particularly that of Senegal and Zaire (Roberts 1974).
This situation has changed since the late 1980s, when a growing interest in world music (worldbeat) reflects and explains the growth of production and distribu-tion
Origins, Background, Foundations
Bossa Nova
MPB: Style and Label
Diversification and Variance
Popular music in Brazil is one of the world's most diverse musical phenomena. Besides the internationally known urban samba and bossa nova, Brazil has strong regional expressions, plus pop styles ranging from roots-oriented original composition to contemporary rock and hiphop. Significant centers of production and consumption exist in Bahia, Minas Gerais, and other states, but the major activity occurs in Rio de Janeiro, the nation's traditional cultural capital.
Brazil's recording industry is well developed. Worldwide, its market ranks among the top seven. The big five multinational corporationsEMI, BMG, Polygram, Sony, WEAdominate the field, but the music branch of Globo, the world's fourth-largest private television network, plays a major role through nationwide broadcasting of soap operas with soundtracks, variety shows, musical specials, and advertising.
Radio is an enormous business; it favors cosmopolitan middle-class fashions but also attends to local, working-class, and rural tastes. Since the advent of recording in Brazil, national musics have competed with imports. In the 1980s, with the rise of Brazilian rock and new dance musics (especially lambada and samba-reggae), the commercial ratio of national production increased markedly.
A dialectic of national or foreign input and influence has been a constant in the formation and study of Brazilian popular music. Other key issues of scholarly inquiry have been migration, identity (class, ethnic, regional, national) via popular music, and the discourse of song, whether for social attitudes, political dissent, artistry, or musical history itself.
The sources of Brazilian popular music are mainly Portuguese and African; indigenous Amerindian elements are negligible. In the late 1700s and 1800s, African-Brazilian lundu was a form of national expression. A historically important tradition of sentimental song was established with the modinha, cultivated extensively in different configurations at all social ranks. Other forms of song and dance music emerged from the imitation and adaptation of European models, including the polka, the schottische, and the waltz. Interaction between black and white musicians, which increased after the abolition of slavery (1888), fostered the definition of new styles.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, urban samba emerged in Rio de Janeiro. Fueled by the recording and radio industries and by the growth of carnival, samba evolved musically, ascended from a station of social unacceptableness, and became the mainstay of modern popular music, especially for the (largely black) lower-class masses.
In the 1930s, a confluence of commercial, musical, intellectual, and political interests contributed to the establishment of samba as a symbol and vehicle of national identity (Vianna 1995). From its roots to the most recent mass-mediated manifestations, it has diversified in complex ways and gone through numerous phases [see BRAZIL: AFRO-BRAZILIAN TRADITIONS AND BRAZIL: CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN REGIONS].
Bossa nova, a major development in popular music worldwide, began to take shape around 1958. It radically altered the traditional samba, offering the educated middle class a sophisticated alternative. The heavy binary beat gave way to lighter syncopation on a drum set; jazz-influenced (altered) chord progressions replaced standard harmonies; the melodic simplicity of romantic samba-cancža~o 'song-samba' became elaborate vocal and instrumental lead lines, which could be sparse and chromatic or involved and dissonant; and melodramatic emphasis of tragic texts was left behind in favor of reserved vocal delivery of lyrics reflecting petit-bourgeois values. Bossa nova dynamically integrated restrained musical elements (BeŽhague 1973).
Vocal music was the mainstream of bossa nova, but instrumental ensembles (like Zimbo Trio) and solo guitarists (like Baden Powell) became a notable branch within the movement. Such 1960s groups, following the tradition of choro, laid the foundation for the expansion of improvisational music in the 1970s and 1980s in the work of such major exponents as Hermeto Pascoal and Egberto Gismonti, who also draw on regional sources, especially those of the Northeast.
In the Western Hemisphere, bossa nova had its greatest impact on jazz. In the early 1960s, before the Beatles craze, the style was widely imitated in the United States. After an ephemeral presence in the pop sphere, bossa nova became a permanent part of the jazz repertoire, in which more than ten of Anto^nio Carlos Jobim's compositions have achieved the status of contemporary standards.
Evolution of bossa nova
The second generation of bossa nova was stylistically and attitudinally heterogeneous in contrast to the first. The new style, having arisen in the sociopolitical context of developmentalism, changed in the populist climate of the early sixties, as musical activity in middle-class circles reflected the nationalism and political activism of the period. The disengaged sentimental discourse of mainstream bossa nova dissatisfied
New songwriters tried to relate to urban and rural problems alike, applying non-standard diction and incorporating samba de morro or regional features into bossa-nova frames. In stylizations of rural genres, sometimes only the characteristic instrumentation or syncopation of bossa nova remained. In keeping with preferred themes, musicians took more forceful approaches. Use or imitation of folkloric melodies, rhythms, or instruments (such as the viola) often implied cultural nationalism or political commitment. A military coup ?eŽtat (1964) further heightened social awareness, leading to greater use of song as a vehicle of protest. The concurrent expansion of the music and television industries favored the growth of contestatory song until late 1968, when civil liberties were suspended and harsh control of the media began.
The success of the local rendition of early Beatles-like music provoked a nationalist reaction. Imitations of rock since the days of Elvis Presley had not constituted significant trends in Brazil; however, mid-sixties teen rock, called ie^-ie^-ie^ (yeah-yeah-yeah), attracted consumers who followed British-American pop and reached a mass TV audience. This movement, called Jovem Guarda (Young Guard), benefited from well-conceived promotional schemes. The music was denounced as alienated by those favoring what they called authenticity in popular music. The original leader of ie^-ie^-ie^ was Roberto Carlos, who went on to become Brazil's and Latin America's best-selling romantic singer in the widely cultivated genre known in Spanish America as balada.
Nationally televised songwriters' competitions began in Brazil in 1965; at first, rock-type music was not accepted. During these festivals, the acronym MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) came into use to denote popular music of a national orientation (bossa nova, derivative forms, stylized regionalist composition). Though not a designation of a discrete style, MPB remained an indicator of the varied musics of the sixties generation, including such artists as Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Edu Lobo, Milton Nascimento, and Caetano Veloso (Perrone 1989).
The original distinctions suggested by MPB would blur somewhat in the 1970s as rock styles were absorbed into the repertoires of artists who had been prominent in the late sixties, but the fundamental contrast between MPB and rock has never dissolved. In the 1980s, the initials MPB distinguished post-bossa hybrids from burgeoning national rock. The term MPB is used, less rigorously, to denote Brazilian popular music in general, including music from before the 1960s.
Several singer-songwriters of the MPB generation have established national (and to some extent international) reputations as exceptional performers, poet-composers, voices of political dissent, or vanguardists. Of these, Milton Nascimento achieved recognition as a unique vocal phenomenon and redefined possibilities of regional identity in pop. Chico Buarque challenged boundaries between the erudite and the popular and devised ingenious musico-poetic strategies of affective expressivity and resistance to the military regime (1964-1985).
The most controversial occurrence in Brazilian popular culture of the late sixties was tropicalismo, the vanguard movement led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who drew from a wide spectrum of sourcesrock, pop, protest, sentimental ballad,
Tropicalismo was an anomalous intellectualization of popular music, with its avant-garde posturing, juxtapositions of rural simplicity and urban sophistication, and metamusical commentary. Among its lessons were the inevitability of mass-media penetration of international cultural products and the advantages of critical assimilation of such information, as opposed to unthinking imitation. More than any other manifestation in Brazil, tropicalismo demonstrated that modern popular music, in addition to its traditional recreational uses, can fulfill political and aesthetic functions.
Hybridization and eclecticism, by some measures attributable to the openings created by tropicalismo, characterized MPB in the 1970s and 1980s. There was ever-increasing adaptation of regional and foreign trendsrock, blues, soul, funk, disco, reggae, other Caribbean styles, and some African music. Popular musics of the Northeast regionwhich had come to Rio as early as the 1920s and had been a notable presence in the late 1940s and 1950sillustrate the flexibility of the folk-traditional-popular-pop continuum and of more recent processes of syncretism involving bardic heritage and varied dance music genres [see BRAZIL: NORTHEAST REGION].
In the 1970s, national rock remained a minority countercultural activity, but in the early 1980s, a generation of home-bred rock bands proliferated and assumed prominence in major urban areas, eclipsing MPB and imports in middle-class preference. This new rockcomposed, performed, and recorded in Brazilused its own idioms and created its own idols, complicating the topic of cultural estrangement via music and stimulating more nuanced debate about alienation and authenticity (Perrone 1990). The Rock-in-Rio festivals (1985, 1991), two weeks long, were the largest ever staged anywhere in the world. In North America, samba, bossa nova, MPB, and Brazilian jazz were all part of the Brazilian wave, a renewal of interest in Brazilian popular music (McGowan and Pessanha 1991). Unlike those kinds of production, however, Brazilian rock has not developed an appreciable international following.
Rock and international romantic music have affected south-central Brazilian country music as muŽsica sertaneja, a massive, commercially active genre centered in Sa~o Paulo State. Related broadcast and performance circuits attend to tastes of agrarian and urban migrant workers. Scholars and the media have begun to pay attention to this music (Carvalho 1993; Reily 1992).
One of the most notable late-century developments came within the context of a renaissance of African-Bahian culture in Salvador. From the mid-1970s, black-focused musics for carnival and general consumption have flourished. One central fact is the spread of bloco afro, festive fraternal orders with novel approaches to samba (via Caribbean musics) and consciousness-raising programs. From local urban and carnival-specific contexts, African-Bahian material moved into local and national circuits of popular music for consumption via shows, recordings, radio, and TV. An industry term (axeŽ music) was coined to refer to these phenomena. Commercialization has provoked criticism about the diluting of negritude and the potential superficiality of back-to-Africa ideologies. Despite unavoidable limitations, these practices involve the consolidation of fresh aesthetics and new processes of social identification for the black population, plus geographical and ethnic conceptualizations of musical practice and participation [see BRAZIL: AFRO-BRAZILIAN TRADITIONS].
The late twentieth century has witnessed the articulation of Brazilian versions of hip-hop. Rap has been most significant in working-class sectors of Sa~o Paulo. In Rio, large-scale funk dances, which have featured recorded black U.S. dance music since soul of the late 1970s, are an important nontraditional vehicle of identity for subaltern groups and have encouraged local renditions of dance-oriented funk and text-focused rap. These cases of appropriation express current dilemmas of disenfranchised black youth, confounding the consensus culture centered on samba (YuŽdice 1994). As numerous originally marginalized forms, funk phenomena are now migrating to mainstream media.
The Concept of Art Music
Understanding Compositional Processes
Understanding Contextual Issues
Further Study
The creation of music requires a processcomposition. It also involves an issue usually relating to social function or contextual use, such as shamanistic curing, ballroom dancing, lullaby singing, concert listening, and many others. What is often termed art music includes processes and issues and is therefore as much the domain of ethno-musicological study as it is the domain of historical musicology, music theory, and criticism. How ethnomusicologists study art music, however, is what makes their approach unique: ethnomusicologists emphasize processes and issues as aspects of human behavior.
By art music we mean the formally taught, notation-reliant European or European-derived tradition of music that is associated most closely with an educated elite. Art music includes the rich store of music created or performed for liturgical devotion and other Christian church events, and secular compositions intended for concert performance. Though art music is not the central focus of this encyclopedia, it has been, to varying degrees in different periods and among certain populations, a significant thread of musical culture in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Several articles in this volume treat art music in national contexts.
The colonial era
The concept of art music did not exist in the pre-Columbian New World, so its history begins with its importation from Europe. The colonial era, spanning in most nations the early 1500s to around the 1820s, was marked by the widespread implantation of European musical style as well as genres and extraordinary accomplishments in the performance of religious art music. Missionaries, particularly Franciscans and Jesuits, used Gregorian chant and other church music to educate and persuade the Indian population to embrace Roman Catholicism. Many Indian populations, for whom music was an important element of pre-Christian worship, proved fertile ground for the transplanted music and became extremely proficient at singing and playing European music and making European musical instruments. In sixteenth-
Colonial secular music is known to have existed, but the documentation that remains, such as guitar-tablature reinterpretations of secular genres of dancing, is scarce. More prevalent are records of villancicos, secular songs with refrains, which served as secular models for the chapel masters' creative production of devotional music in polyphonic style. Many villancicos, such as those based on the well-known late seventeenth-century texts by Sor Juana IneŽs de la Cruz in Puebla, Mexico, were widely admired for their artistry. TomaŽs de TorrejoŽn y Velasco's La PuŽrpura de la Rosa, premiered in Lima, Peru in 1701, was the first opera created and produced in the New World. It is the only extant score of colonial New World opera but was by no means the only theatrical music produced. Operas and Spanish zarzuelas were performed in many theaters in the New World throughout the 1700s and 1800s. A popular theater for rubber barons was the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil (
Nineteenth-century changes
Beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a wave of nationalism brought sociopolitical independence for Latin American countries. The old church-
In the several decades after independence, foreign instrumentalists and singers, Italians in particular, toured and often resettled in the Americas. In larger cities, European operas and zarzuelas were frequently performed, and many opera singers had large followings. Opera was principally available through watered-down piano arrangements. With the lowering of previously strict class barriers and the growth of the upward-aspiring middle class came a demand for piano and other salon music (parlor music) as a means of personal improvement and achieving social status. Military bands performed arrangements of folk melodies and social dances, such as the waltz and schottische, plus Italian opera overtures and other light theater music.
The lack of widespread institutionalized music education was an impediment to supporting the performance and appreciation of purely instrumental orchestral music. By the end of the century, however, several music conservatories had been founded in Rio de Janeiro (1847), Santiago de Chile (1849), Mexico City (1866 and 1877), Quito (1870), and Buenos Aires (1893) (BeŽhague 1971).
The compositional processes of art music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean probably do not differ from compositional processes elsewhere in the world where Western civilization is paramount or influential. The processes first involve searching for sources of inspiration, whether they are abstract ideas in a composer's mind, characteristic sounds of the tropical forest or Andes mountains, tonal possibilities of pre-Columbian musical instruments (or what composers thought they were), musical calculations based on mathematical formulas, impressions of people or places, and so forth. They involve notating such ideas on music paper, playing them on piano or guitar and writing them down on music paper, or creating them in a laboratory and writing down instructions for performance on music, graph, or plain paper. Ethnomusicologists study these processes as human behavior rather than just history or theory.
One of the most fruitful ways to study the composition of art music as a process is to examine composers' sources of inspiration. Throughout the Caribbean, Middle America, and South America, many composers have been influenced by the folk musics or Amerindian musics of their own country, paralleling nineteenth-century European romanticism, the movement exemplified in the works of such composers as AntoniŽn Dvor?aŽk (Bohemia), Manuel de Falla (Spain), Edvard Grieg (Norway), Modest Mussorgsky (Russia), Jean Sibelius (Finland), and Bedr?ich Smetana (Bohemia), and the twentieth-century North American nationalistic movement, which informed works by composers as different as Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Roy Harris.
As nationalist sentiment permeated art-music sensibilities, Latin American composers began following the European model of incorporating nationalist vernacular elements into their music. Premiered in 1871, the opera GuamotziŽn, by the Mexican composer Aniceto Ortega (1823-1875), was based on a romanticized Aztec theme, appealing to nationalist sentiments. The previous year, the Brazilian AntoŽnio Carlos Gomes, the "most successful opera composer of the Americas in the nineteenth century," had achieved international fame through his work Il Guarany, complete with Indian heroes and idealized indigenous dance and music, set in an Italian style of the
Other influential nationalistic and folklore-inspired composers in Latin America include Carlos ChaŽvez (1899-1978) and Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) in Mexico; AndreŽs Sas (1900-1967) and Teodoro ValcaŽrcel (1902-1942) in Peru; Carlos Isamitt (1885-1974) and Carlos LaviŽn (1883-1962) in Chile; Alberto Ginastera (b. 1916) and Alberto Williams (1862-1952) in Argentina; and Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), Camargo Guarnieri (b. 1907), and Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) in Brazil. Some composers produced works inspired by Amerindian music or musical life: Villa-Lobos's Amazonas (1917), inspired by Brazil's native Amazonian cultures; LaviŽn's Fiesta Araucana (1926), inspired by Mapuche music from Chile; ValcaŽrce?s Suite Incaica (1929); ChaŽvez's SinfoniŽa India ("Indian Symphony," ca. 1940), based on Cora, Yaqui, and other Mexican Indian melodies; Aretz's YekuanaŽ (ca. 1974), based on material from the Yekuana Indians of Venezuela; and Ginastera's La Pampa y la Puna, which used a European flute to imitate the Andean kena. Works inspired by African-American music or folklore include SensemayaŽ (1938) by Revueltas, based on African-Cuban rhythms from the AbakuaŽ society [see CUBA]; and Tre^s Poemas Afro-Brasileiros (1955) by Guarnieri. Works inspired by rural mestizo or European-derived cowboys and the harshness of cowboy life include Williams's El Rancho Abandonado ("The Abandoned Ranch") (1890) and Ginastera's Estancia (1941), a ballet with a musical portrait of an Argentine ranch.
Twentieth-century changes
The twentieth century was marked first by a strong trend toward musical nationalism and subsequently by a swing toward universalism, two guiding philosophies that often coexisted to form a dialectic that defined much art music of the time. Many modern nationalist composers tried not so much to incorporate folkloric elements into their European-style compositions (in the fashion of their predecessors) as to create a distinctive nationalist style that abstracted from, synthesized, and transcended European and national antecedents. Universalismthe avoidance or outright rejection of nationalist tendencies in favor of a more personal vision and/or international sphere of influence and endeavorwon the hearts and minds of some composers, but sociopolitical loyalties or constraints compelled others not to alienate themselves from local musical traditions (BeŽhague 1979:125). Although the late twentieth century saw much musical experimentation in keeping with international trends, an abiding obstacle to the understanding and acceptance of experimental musicindeed, art music in generalwas the limited degree of formal musical education available throughout the region.
These are just a few of the sources of inspiration, trends, and philosophies of some Latin American composers and some of their works. One way to study these and other compositions as reflections of a process is to compare them with their sources of inspiration. Several ways to study them as an issue would be to contextualize them by investigating letters and diaries to learn about the composers' reasons for crafting them; examining the reactions of audiences toward their performances and public
Important issues associated with art music in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean generally involve contexts: participating in rituals, listening to concerts, watching ballets, and performing for oneself or one's group. Ethnomusicologists are interested in the broad concept of issue because it tells us something about the persons, peoples, and cultures for which the issue has meaning and importance. Ethnomusicologists ask what caused the art music to be composed, performed, recorded, listened to, or no longer listened to; who listens to it, when, where, and why; and who performs it, how, when, where, and why.
Art music is the musical voice of certain classes of people, just as folk music speaks for other classes and ritual music for still others. All music is made by humans for humans or their gods. Throughout this volume, many authors have written about art music as an aspect of culture.
The most valuable overview of the art music of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean is by Gerard BeŽhague (1979). For each chapter, it includes annotated bibliographical notes that are useful for additional study. In addition, a portion of BeŽhague's doctoral dissertation (1971) presents details about musical nationalism in Brazil. More recently, David P. Appleby (1983) has written an overview about the art music of Brazil, offering cultural-historical data about many composers. Opera is an important medium for presenting nationalistic themes, and Malena Kuss (1992) has explored that topic for Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The most comprehensive source for the study of Latin American art music is the journal Latin American Music Review, edited by Gerard BeŽhague. The American father of Latin American art-music scholarship, however, is Robert M. Stevenson, whose many publications have inspired students and scholars alike for decades.
An ethnomusicological study of the art music of South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (the entirety of so-called Latin America), however, has not been attempted. Although to many students and scholars of the Americas such an approach may not seem possible, it is certainly just as logical to examine the why, when, and how of musical occasions as the music itself.
Excluding native cultures, the politically determined nations in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean number less than fifty, but the names for their musical traditionsincluding dances, festivals, genres, musical instruments, and songsnumber into the thousands. The people and their musical traditions are of native American, African, European, Asian, and other derivations. Most are a mixture of many heritages.
None of the nations, countries, or subcultures in South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean has developed or exists in isolation, and each has experienced musical and cultural growth. This photograph of a procession in northern Peru reveals one of the most important aspects of a culture: musical syncretism, possibly better described as cultural layering, because native American and Spanish elements often exist side by side.
Since the Encounter of 1492, hundreds of native cultures in South America have become absorbed by the dominant cultures of Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French heritage. Nevertheless, many indigenous "nations" remain. Neither acculturated nor traditional native people of South America are completely constrained by the political boundaries of countries, but inhabit broader geographic areas. Therefore, a reasonable plan for grouping the native people of South America is based on geographic areas: Amazon Basin, Circum-Caribbean, Chaco, and Andes (map 4). This grouping eases comparison and is helpful for quickly locating cultures. Another grouping could focus on ecosystems, including tropical forest, desert, mountain, and perhaps others. Of these, the tropical forest is so vast that many regions in the geography-based plan belong to it. The tropical forest is home to most of South America's native peoples. Within it live numerous game animals, many of which provide materials for musical instruments, such as this deer-bone flute, constructed by a Warao man in the Venezuelan jungle.
Musical Sounds and Processes
Social Hierarchies and Musical Performance
Musical Creativity and Innovation
Immigrant Musical Forms, 1500-1900
Immigration after the 1930s
Cultural Interactions
The tropical-forest region of South America includes much of Brazil and parts of at least eight other countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, and Venezuela. It encompasses the Amazon and Orinoco river basins and much of the Guyana shield, extends to the coast of the Guyanas, Surinam, and eastern Venezuela, and reaches into the foothills of the Andes Mountains and toward the savannas of central and southern Brazil. It is huge, with a complex history of indigenous settlement and later, of colonization and economic transformation.
The music of the region is one of the least known in the world. We do not have enough musical information and analysis to define musical areas on a securely comparative basis and are lucky if we have one or two studies from a given family of languages. A great deal of research remains to be done.
There are several reasons for our lack of information: the physical and cultural disappearances of many Amerindian communities throughout the region, the difficulty of reaching the areas and conducting research, the tendency of ethnomusicologists to focus on surviving Amerindian traditions to the exclusion of others, and a concentration on other priorities by most other researchers. A few surveys have been prepared, however, including those by Isabel Aretz on South America (1984) and Venezuela (1991), and by Helza Cameu on Brazil (1977).
Though outsiders think of Indians as the primary residents of the tropical forest, other communities live there, and some have done so for centuries. Even before Columbus, Andean peoples probably influenced and were influenced by tropical-forest peoples. Later arrivals who have settled in the region and remained there included missionaries, gold miners, rubber tappers, farmers, and ranchers. More recent immigrants include factory workers, oil drillers, prospectors, members of new religious organizations, civil servants, and immigrants from rural areas in other areas or countries.
The Indian and non-Indian communities in the tropical forest have interacted over the past few centuries, with profound effects on the music of the former. External influence increased in the last few decades of the twentieth century, with the capital-intensive development of the region and the diffusion of shortwave radios, cameras, tape recorders, and television. In the 1990s, musical influences move in sev-
As with music almost everywhere, two simultaneous musical movements have affected this region. While some musicians looked backward to earlier forms, preserving or reinventing them, other musicians reached out to new forms, incorporating them into their styles to create new traditions. These musical choices are part of specific historical contexts, frequently those of political oppression, economic exploitation, and intentional cultural destruction. In this way, music reflects regional and transnational processes and local communities' reactions to them.
This article begins with a description of tropical-forest Indian musical sounds and a discussion of some pertinent musical processes. Later, it addresses the music of the early immigrants to the region. It concludes with a discussion of how these musical forms have interacted and are evolving.
What does tropical-forest Indian music sound like? If you could hover over the region and listen to the music emanating from the hundreds of Indian communities during a twenty-four-hour period, you might hear a dramatic crescendo with the rise of the morning star, well before dawn, that would reach a peak in the dawn light before sunrise. The sounds would diminish as the day grew hotter then would pick up again in the late afternoon, dying down again around 8:00 P.M., but continuing in some form throughout the night into the predawn crescendo. You would hear flutes of all sizes, played for their overtones; you would hear reed instruments, some played in hocket; you would hear unison men's choruses accompanied by rattles and stamping feet, and unison women's choruses. Shouts, animal cries, whistles, and other sounds would sometimes obscure the text and tune. During the day, you would hear playing children imitate their elder's ceremonies, solo singers, shamans chanting, and lone fishermen and hunters humming to themselves in preparation for the evening's performance.
If your gaze could penetrate the forest and thatched roofs of the villages, you would often see people dancing almost everywhere you heard music. You might see elaborate bodily ornamentation of paint and feathers, and ceremonial dress made from palm fronds that would swish with the dancers' movements. Rattles might be hanging from their bodies; wind instruments might appear in various sizes. Men and women would usually be dancing in separate lines, not together, and sometimes the women would be hiding in the houses while the men alone performed. Somewhere you would see a lone shaman, singing over the sick, searching for the cause and cure of the illness. Nowhere would you see a conductor; indeed, the performers would not often be able to see one another while they perform.
In the early morning, when the sounds died down, you would see men heading for rivers and forests to fish and hunt, and women hurrying to gardens to gather crops to prepare food and, in some cases, fermented drink. Their labor must produce the sustenance that makes the performances memorable: "When we sing, we eat," say some; "when we perform, we drink," say others.
Somewhere you would see a person listening intentlyto sounds coming from an unseen source within, or to a radio or a tape recorder, or to a person from a different community. After a time, the listener will be introducing to excited, colleagues a new song, a new ceremony, a new aesthetic. Then the cacophony will crescendo again.
Ethnohistory
The tropical forest once was a complex mosaic of native communities, interacting with one another in a variety of ways. These groups nearly always lived in small, dispersed settlements. For thousands of years, they traded, intermarried, fought, and learned each others' music. Theirs were mostly traditions of straw and wood, using various kinds of grass, fronds, and vegetal material to construct residences, musical instruments, and symbolically important ritual regalia. As a result, we have little archaeological evidence from the region. Surviving materials include cook pots, charred wood, pollen from gardens, shells, and a few earthworks and other signs of social structure in isolated parts of the region.
Disease, violence, enslavement, missionization, and economic development have dramatically changed tropical-forest Indian settlements. Though some communities survived these ravages, the survivors often live in small, isolated settlements, surrounded by immigrant settlers. These communities are discouraged or actually forbidden to perform their traditional music, and are often deprived of the lands and resources once essential to their livelihood. Even ethnomusicologists who have gone to the most isolated regions and worked with recently contacted groups are studying a situation greatly altered by the colonization of South America. We do not know exactly what musical life was like before Columbus, because no one was asking those questions then; but we can learn something of what it has been like since.
Researchers discussing tropical-forest Indians usually talk about language families or cultural areas. The concept of "tribe" is sometimes helpful, but a tribal name is often a historical accident or a bureaucratic convenience. Peoples often have different names for themselves and often distinguish among communities that have been identified as a single people by a tribal name. As names have been used in the scholarly literature, a tribal name (for example SuyaŽ) identifies a settlement or cluster of settlements with a distinct language or dialect. These linguistic units are themselves then classified as members of language families. Among the largest of these are the Arawak, the Chibcha, the Ge^, the Karib, the Pano, and the Tupi (Nimuendaju 1980). Cultural, cosmological, and musical traditions are usually more similar among the members of a language family than between them, but not always. In some regions, communities of several language families share a single social organization, ceremonial life, and musical style: the Upper Xingu (the Xingu National Park, an Indian reserve, was established in 1967) and Northwest Amazon regions are good examples of this.
Regional traits
Despite the variety, some generalizations hold for most of the region: within a given culture, music and dance are often defined by the same word and are inextricably related; music is transmitted entirely in the oral-aural tradition; throughout the region, certain families of instruments are more common than others; societies with
Among the SuyaŽ Indians of Mato Grosso, music and dance are defined in a single word, ngere, and this practice seems widespread among land-based cultures. Most peoples seem to comprehend performed sounds and movements as a single, unified event. Often, a set of fairly stable sound structures and fairly consistent movements are identified as a named genre, as among the Xavante (Shavante) of Brazil (
In early accounts (1500-1900), observers provided better descriptions of the movements than of the sounds. After the introduction of audio field recorders (twentieth century), better information about the sounds became available. Only in the 1980s, when video recorders became viable field tools in the region, did we begin to get extensive recordings of the two aesthetic systems together.
Participants' costumes and bodily ornamentation and performers' choreography are often important clues to the musical process. When the Waia~pi are dancing the bumblebee ceremony, their instruments are supposed to sound like bumblebees, and they move like them (Fuks 1989); a similar association of dance and sounds is evident in Thomas Gregor's film on the Mehinaku (1973).
All musical traditions are learned and transmitted through the oral-aural tradition. There are no indigenous systems of notation, and if a tradition is not constantly performed, it is forgotten and cannot be revived.
In a purely oral culture, the lack of interest or performance during a single generation can mean the disappearance of the tradition. Musical traditions are as fragile as the tropical-forest ecosystemsonce destroyed, they are virtually impossible to
Idiophones (mostly rattles) and aerophones (a wide variety of flutes, trumpets [see
Uses of instruments appear to correlate with language families. Members of the Ge^ family mostly use rattles to accompany singing; their aerophones are usually whistles, played to accompany song, rather than melodic instruments in their own right. In contrast, some Tupi peoples have many wind instruments, classified in considerable detail (Bastos 1978, 1986). Meanwhile, some Chibchan-speakers, such as the Warao, have dozens of musical instruments, but others, such as the Yanomamoš, have none(Olsen 1981, 1996).
The societies of the region support no full-time native musical specialists or musicologists. Virtually all members of a certain age and gender engage in similar economic tasks and social processes. People make music in addition to all the other things they do in their lives and as part of those other things, rather than distinct from them. This fact distinguishes the tropical forest from some other parts of the world (most court-based societies, for example) and carries with it important implications for studies of tropical-forest music.
Since there are no full-time music specialists, practice is often part of performances. Since there are no full-time scholars of music, discourse about music tends to be phrased in diction borrowed from other domains. This diction appears to be
Most tropical-forest music is associated with religious rituals, rites of passage, inter-communal visiting, annual-cycle rituals, or curing. Except for some lullabies and individual songs, most peoples do not set an "entertainment music" apart from these other forms. This tendency means that the contexts for musical performances are quite carefully defined.
In many cases, songs are known by the name of the ceremony to which they belong. Anthropological literature on these peoples frequently includes extensive analysis of rituals but virtually no discussion of music. This is frustrating for ethnomusicologists, but reflects a general tendency in anthropology to avoid discussions of sounds (and scents and feelings).
Strong singing traditions often coexist with elaborate forms of speaking (Basso 1985; Sherzer and Urban 1986). Virtually all South American Indian groups distinguish between everyday speech and one or more forms of "oratory" or heightened speech. Elevated forms of speech may serve for formal encounters between humans, to recount myths, or to make political speeches.
Song itself may be considered an extreme of oratorythe extreme employment of fixed tonal relationships and rhythmic formsand be systematically related to it, as I have suggested for the SuyaŽ and as Olsen (1996) has suggested for the Warao. Instrumental music does not appear to be used to imitate the patterns of speech, even in communities with tonal languages, but to follow compositional rules that differ from those of speech.
Music is associated with cosmological transformations or travel. During ceremonies in many communities, singer-dancers are transformed into a kind of dual being, part-human, part-animal, or part-human, part-spirit. Some of the mystery and the efficacy of performances lies in these transformations. Among the SuyaŽ, in the course of the mouse ceremony, the dancers become mice (Seeger 1987); among the Waia~pi, in the course of the bumblebee ceremony, they become bumblebees (Fuks 1989); among the Mehinaku, flutists become spirits.
Shamans are often transformed and travel, and their songs report their travels among the Arawete (Viveiros de Castro 1986), the Tenetehara (Wagley and Galva~o 1949), the Kashinaua (Kensinger 1973), and the Shuar (Crawford 1976; Harner 1972, 1973).
What is this all about? Musical performance in the tropical forest appears to be a
Music may structure the hallucinogenic experience, acting like a "jungle-gym of consciousness" (Dobkin de Rios 1975). The role of music in these powerful conjunctions of everyday life with spirit-animal-otherworld through music is one of the reasons music plays such a central part in tropical-forest cosmology.
Communities use music to identify themselves in many ways. They may define themselves as against other Indian communities by the songs they perform (songs that make them uniquely human), or they may define themselves as "Indians" with respect to the national society around them (singing songs that make them uniquely political).
The use of music in forging and proclaiming an ethnic identity is widespread. In the tropical-forest region, the employment of music to this end varies according to the specific sociopolitical situation of the people. The same song may at one time have an internal meaning with little connection to ethnic identity, and only a short time later be performed primarily as a marker of that identity.
Though in the tropical forest there are no social classes in the Marxist sense (of groups with distinct means of production), notions of hierarchy occur in most Indian peoples of the region. Hierarchy is established by gender, by age, by knowledge, by occupation (Hugh-Jones 1979), and by other means. It seems to become more pronounced toward the Andes.
In virtually all tropical-forest Indian communities, most public rituals are controlled by adult males. They make most important musical decisions. They select ceremonies, organize performances, and exclude women and children from some of the events. In some societies, men prohibit certain aerophones to women (Gregor 1977, 1985). In others, they let women sing but not play rattles; or women may accompany dancers with rattles but may not sing.
According to a widespread myth about the origin of sacred flutes, women once played flutes, and men were forbidden to touch them. Women at that time are often described as doing other men's tasks, such as hunting and warring. By deceit, men overcame women and took the flutes, which they have kept to this day. When these flutes are played, women are supposed to withdraw into houses and, under pain of severe sanctions, not even to look at them (Hill 1993).
The male dominance in performances is counterbalanced in many cases by ceremonies or musical genres controlled and performed exclusively by women. In the Upper Xingu, women have their own ceremony, Iamuricuma~; the Ge^ have rituals of reversal and rituals in which women play central roles; in the Northwest Amazon, women have their own song genres (Harner 1972, 1973); and in other areas, the lament is an important women's genre, often also performed by men (Graham 1986:87).
Though women frequently know and are capable of teaching or performing certain musical genres, they do not often perform in the absence of a knowledgeable man. It is always important to distinguish between performance and knowledge. Female researchers have often had better access to women's knowledge than male
Age is also an important means of creating hierarchy. Older men tend to direct the activities of younger men and children (and of women), and older women often exercise authority over younger ones. Knowledge often confers status, and older men and women acquire status and authority over younger ones, partly through their knowledge of music, speech, and stories. Their authority lies in their knowledge and their culturally prescribed license to use it.
Other forms of social organization than age and gender may be important in musical performance. In Ge^-speaking communities, musical performance of certain rituals may be under the control of name-based social groups. Among the SuyaŽ, each social group has its own songs and sometimes its own way of singing: one moiety is supposed to sing more slowly than the other; young men are supposed to sing certain songs at a higher pitch than older men; and so on. In other areas, a certain community may control the ritual knowledge and musical performance of all the subareas.
Where does music come from? Contrary to some stereotypes, tropical-forest Indians do not sing the same thing all the time, but innovate frequently. New music enters their repertoires in a variety of ways. Among some groups, it comes during dreams, through earplugs, or from necklaces (Aytai 1985; Graham 1986; Olsen 1996). In other groups, songs are brought back from shamanic experiences or illnesses, in which individuals have learned songs from spirits.
Many communities are musically multicultural: they perform the music and often entire rituals of neighboring groups. The SuyaŽ are the best documented in this respect: they sing songs from at least ten other societies, including two extinct groups, their former enemies, whose only cultural survivals live on in their music (Seeger 1987). As with all issues of music and identity, under certain circumstances all the music a group sings is "its own" music; under other circumstances, the same group will carefully distinguish the origins of each form.
What makes one performance better than another? Musical aesthetics are often difficult to investigate among tropical-forest communities because music is inextricably bound up with other social events and is rarely discussed dissociated from them. Among the Waia~pi, for example, the success of musical events is judged partly by the quality and quantity of manioc beer served during the performance.
Persistence often yields some forms of evaluation, but it may be worded in a manner that appears to be metaphoric. For example, SuyaŽ descriptions of sound tend to focus on the throat: people with highly appreciated voices are said to have "beautiful throats," people with loud voices "strong throats," and people whose voices are neither strong nor beautiful "bad throats" or "ugly throats."
Children learn music by witnessing or participating in musical performances with their elders. There is rarely any special training, except in the case of shamans, who often undergo long and intensive training and initiations. But shamans' training is more directed toward interaction with spirits than toward musical performance in itself.
Children and young men and women often participate intensively in musical performances, thus gaining musical knowledge and understanding. As there are no full-time music specialists, there are no specialized music schools or other musical-training programs. Children and certain other relatives of particularly knowledgeable musicians often become musicians themselves, having heard a great deal of music during their youth.
The tropical forest was not heavily settled by non-Indians until the twentieth century. The local economies in the region were based on extractive industries, such as medicinal-plant collecting, lumbering, mining, rubber tapping, subsistence agriculture, hunting, and fishing. These required neither extensive clearing nor large settlements. In parts of the region, the rubber boom of the 1800s and the hunt for minerals profoundly affected the health and well-being of the Indian populations.
An important and distinct group of long-term immigrants who created communities that remained isolated from their national cultures were slaves who escaped into the tropical forest and founded free black communities. Settlements of this sort were located in parts of French Guiana, Surinam, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. Some of these communities, known as Maroons, continued a fairly separate existence even after slavery was abolished in their countries. Some spoke a Creole language and developed their own culture from a combination of European, African, and locally indigenous traditions. In regions with large Maroon communities, these people may have had an influence on local Indian traditions [see SURINAM].
Missionaries and their musical baggage
Important beyond their numbers because of the influence they exercised over other groups, missionaries brought new musical forms to the tropical forest, based on harmony and sacred texts. In the interior of the region, large Roman Catholic missions became important institutions with considerable power and authority. They were often run by international orders and staffed by foreigners. Their effect on the Indian communities was often harsh: they forbade traditional music and ceremonies and restricted musical activities.
Later, missionaries of certain Protestant sects intensified the process, some with such success that hymns are the only music performed in certain tropical-forest Indian communities. Singing hymns may take unusual directions, however, as among the Waiwai, where communities compete in composing hymns.
With a few exceptions, the music of the church and the music of the Indians have apparently not mixed: the tunes for Christian services are hymns, and the Indian melodies continue without harmony where they are sung at all. In unusual cases, Indian communities employ some form of harmony that may have its origins in Christian music, as among the Kayabi (strict parallel fifths) and the Javae of Brazil, and the Moxo of Bolivia (Olsen 1976). In Guyana, among the Akawaio, the Makushi, and the Patamona, unusual music developed for the syncretic religion known as Hallelujah (Butt Colson 1971).
Why did Indian communities let the missionaries make them abandon their traditions? Part of the answer certainly lies with the missionaries' economic power. But part of it may have come from the missionaries' ability to win support among the less enfranchised parts of the Indian populationwomen, children, and young men. The missionaries often started schools for children and for extended periods of time took children away from their parents. They often tried to create new leadership of young men. Since adult men dominated the ritual and public life of the village, part of the missionaries' success may have been the willingness of women and young men to challenge the power of traditional leadership.
The tropical forest was not an area of florescence for Christian music; it did not produce the original Baroque compositions found in other parts of the Americas, and
Other early immigrants to the tropical forest came from rural areas in the different countries and moved to the region to participate in its extractive economy. They brought with them rural musical traditions and annual celebrations. They played a variety of national styles on guitar, cuatro, viola, violin, and other stringed instruments, which they often made themselves. Aside from the music performed in churches, they made music at dance parties, in bars, at birthday parties, and during certain calendrical rituals such as saints' days and Christmas. In some communities, residents formed troupes to perform dance-dramas found in their own country and other Latin American countries, and larger settlements often had brass bands and some instruction in music. In some cases, rural forms survive in the tropical-forest settlements but have disappeared in the places from which they came.
Some itinerant poets and musicians probably made their living from their performances, but many more people now play part-time for their own communities. All music was live, face to face, and of course without amplification. The small settlements of Europeans and their descendants often developed distinct regional cultures, incorporating Indian material culture and in some cases a basic vocabulary. These communities usually remained economically and culturally tied to the commercial centers of each country, however, if only through an occasional boat that would exchange supplies for natural products. They remained linked to the national culture of which they were a regional part.
Immigration increased in the twentieth century, and technological changes such as outboard motors, electric generators, recorded sound, radio, and extensive networks of roads in some areas have transformed the economy and the cultures of the entire tropical-forest region. There is now not a single part that lies beyond the reach of a radio transmitter; and with battery-operated portable radios, phonographs, and tape players, even the residents of the smallest settlements can play the latest music.
Pouring into the region on newly constructed roads or flying into newly enlarged airports, immigrants are rapidly altering the face of the tropical forest, physically and culturally. Quechua- and Aymara-speakers from the highlands have opened new communities in the lowlands; large numbers of gauchos from the southern states of Brazil have moved into Mato Grosso, Rondonia, and Acre; Protestant missionaries are making inroads among Roman Catholic worshipers; regional cities have swelled and created industries, established large governmental bureaucracies, and founded universities that bring wealthier and more highly educated people to the region. Each of these groups brings new music to the tropical forest and introduces some new traditions to it.
If you were to hover over the tropical-forest region today, in the haze of the smoke of burning clearings, and listen to the sound of the music, the cacophony would be even greater than before. From tens of thousands of terrible loudspeakers distorting the music from hundreds of sources, you could hear country and rock, industrial products of the world at large; from bars and nightclubs in towns and cities of all sizes, you would hear forms of regional rock, and professional musicians playing styles specific to their region; from Indian villages, a thousand tape recorders would be playing national music and even music from other places in the world. The predawn crescendo will have diminished, to be replaced by an evening one as leisure is fitted and fixed into set working hours. The oratorical styles are now often those of sports announcers and politicians, the national anthems of various countries sound out from thousands of rural schools, and religions have made certain days and hours specific to hymns and other religious genres.
If you could see through the smoke, you would see the separation of music and dance, a general secularization of performances, and a continued fascination with bodily ornamentation and swishing adornments, often now in the form of earrings, wristwatches, makeup, and cologne on the one hand, and machine-made clothing on the other.
The centers of the music industry are not to be found in the tropical-forest region, but a great deal of their product sells there. Whether by radio, by prerecorded cassettes, by magazine articles and photographs, or by television, the sounds and images of urban centers bombard the region. Exporting raw materials and importing finished products, the more remote parts of the region have more than a little colonial flavor. Ownership and patronage also come from the urban centers, and many professional musicians in the region eventually leave to pursue their careers elsewhere.
Probably the largest components of the music industry throughout the tropical forest are the country traditions (in Brazil, muŽsica caipira; in Peru, huayno; and in Venezuela, salsa), which have developed with the spread of recording and playback technology.
Most countries in the tropical-forest region have developed national country or rural-popular genres. Like U.S. country music, most of this music is instrumental dance music or verse-form singing in close parallel harmony by soloists, duets, trios, or quartets accompanying themselves primarily on stringed instruments. It draws heavily from folk music and has had a tremendous influence on it. Widespread and popular but little appreciated by urban sophisticates, this music (and the musical roots from which it draws) is a central part of the repertoire of many immigrants to the tropical forest. Because it does not appeal to middle-class urban sophisticates, we have few good studies of it.
The tropical-forest region continues to preserve some distinctiveness, for it is usually distant from the national capitals and the largest centers of population. The rhythms and songs of carnival, which dominate the popular music of the coastal cities of Brazil from November to February, are hardly heard in Acre. Hip-hop was not the craze in Roraima that it became in Rio de Janeiro. This pattern probably matches that of other national musical forms elsewhere in the region.
With increased communication and increased research, the music of the tropical forest has become an object of study in itself. In virtually every national capital, specialists are working to document and preserve tropical-forest musical traditions. They publish the books and recordings that are the best source most of us have for this kind of music. In each country too, bureaucrats are engaged in trying to turn the traditions into possible tourist attractions. In many small cities, the mayor's office works with the local board of tourism and local groups to ensure the continued distinctive-ness
In the intense interaction that typifies the cultures and communities of much of the tropical-forest region, music plays an important part in forging and demonstrating community or ethnic identity and sociopolitical positions. The transnational entertainment industry and the more commercial regional traditions have heavily influenced local populations through recordings, radio, and television. The processes are complex and ongoing. We do not know where they will lead.
For centuries, Indians have learned each other's songs, including hymns and other immigrant musical forms. This process continues. Upper Xingu Indians are great fans of Brazilian rock; elsewhere, country is the rage. Some Indian communities have consciously tried to reach accommodations with regional culture. For a while, some Eastern Timbira groups in Brazil were alternating their traditional ceremonies with dances in which regional musicians performed and couples danced together. How enduring such accommodations will be depends on whether new generations of "traditional" singers will emerge.
Indian music has become part of the creation and expression of an ethnic identity. Some groups are reviving older forms. To demonstrate authentic Indianness, by which to assert communal rights to land, health care, and other benefits denied to non-Indians, some peopleswhose oral tradition was so interrupted that there is nothing left to reviveare re-Indianizing themselves by learning traditions from other Indians. Music has become part of a complex set of interethnic relations, in which not only Indians but also ethnomusicologists and other researchers are often actual participants.
Indian music may be important in forging a certain kind of national identity, and Indian music from the tropical forest is of sufficient interest to the larger national society to support the production of documentary recordings on small independent labels. In an effort to affirm a distinct national identity, nationalist composers in several countries in the Americas have composed operas and other pieces that tried to combine European and Indian musical traditions. In Nozanina, for example, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), with a Brazilian anthropologist, created a piece that combines European compositional styles with a text that is probably in TupinambaŽ. A similar association of musical forms and ethnic identity is important in certain Afro-Latin American communities, in which fairly isolated cultural forms of the Maroon and other largely black communities of the interior are becoming a source of pride and identity.
Concern with the future of the tropical forest and the appetite of the transnational popular-music industry for novelty have led to manifold results, but not to a great deal of tropical-forest influence on popular music. Some promoters of tropical-forest Indian music support the music to defend the tropical-forest ecosystem; others promote the music to broaden their fans' listening habits. Indian communities that have been given the chance are recording their traditions to defend their livelihood and culture. Some tropical-forest Indians, active in the defense of their ecosystems, fight against thoughtless industrialization. Through intensive political efforts, they make trips to the United States and to Geneva to talk with international organizations about how to invest in the regions in which they live. The Kayapo Indian leader Rauni toured with Sting in the 1980s, speaking out against the environmental destruction being inflicted on the region.
By the late 1990s, however, this activity had not led to a popular musical fusion the way the encounter with South African popular music, Afro-Brazilian music, or
Brazilian popular musicians have taken melodies from the tropical forest: in Brazil, Caetano Veloso uses a Juruna flute melody on one recording, and Milton Nascimento includes segments of Brazilian Indian songs in his recording Txai! (1990). Often laboring under a romantic vision of the noble primitive, many artists have gone to the tropical forest in search of something pure and missing in their own music. Sometimes their encounters have been completely perplexing; sometimes they have been enlightening for both parties; sometimes they have been more useful for one than the other.
Why have so few attempts been made to adapt the indigenous music of the tropical forest? I think it is a combination of social and musical features. Most Indian music is associated with ritual; it has little harmony or polyphony, and what polyphony it has is unfamiliar to unaccustomed ears. Drums and strings are not common in the Indian traditions but are absolutely central to popular music. The long, apparently repetitive performances are foreign to the popular music genre, in which three minutes, rather than all night, is the norm for recorded sound.
In many of these respects, tropical-forest Indian music differs from most African traditions and the Afro-latino traditions of the Americas. The indigenous South American form that has had international success is Andean popular music, whose several types are themselves the result of musical fusion in their home countries. Perhaps tropical-forest fusion will someday develop; perhaps it will not. One of the most enlightened and enlightening musical styles of native and pop fusion in the late 1990s, however, is the music of Marlui Miranda (1996), a Brazilian Indian.
The reasons for adopting or not adopting a certain musical form are only partly related to the sounds of the music. That is why the development of musical styles can be interesting. It is only slightly predictable. The past is obscured by a lack of archaeological record, the devastation of Indian populations before the arrival of the first researchers and the rapid destruction of communities by the advancing frontier, highly capitalized investment, and large-scale immigration. The present is obscured by its evanescence, and the future has yet to emerge.
The tropical-forest region of South America is huge. Its music is little researched and documented. Yet to the people who live there, music is often an indispensable part of life. Through it, they try to accomplish many different things. As with much music throughout the world, we hear and know about only a small fraction of what is performed.
The Amerindian people known as Moxo (Mojo in Spanish orthography) inhabit the Moxo Plains (llanos de Mojos), a large lowland area of grassland and scrub forest in northeastern Bolivia. This area of about 181,000 square kilometers extends from the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Oriental (Eastern Range) of the Andes to the GuaporeŽ River, the present boundary with Brazil, largely within the Bolivian department of Beni. The capital of Beni, Trinidad (named for the Holy Trinity), is its largest city. Other towns include ConcepcioŽn (named for the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary), Magdalena (named for Mary Magdalene), and others with Christian names. These were three of twenty-one missions founded by the Jesuits, who controlled the area from the 1680s until their expulsion in 1767 (Claro 1969:9). According to a 1715 census, about thirty years after their first encounter with the Spanish, the Moxo numbered about eighteen thousand people (Steward and Faron 1959:254).
The Moxo, with their neighbors the BaureŽ, speak a language of the Macro-Arawakan linguistic phylum and Maipuran family (Greenberg 1987:384). The Jesuits imposed the Moxo language as the standard throughout the area, replacing others. After 1767, however, many villages returned to using their original languages. One, a Moxo dialect, is today called Trinitario by its speakers, whom others call Trinitarios. They, like most Moxo, have adopted European beliefs and practices, and their most frequent musical expressions occur as part of their Christian religious beliefs. In numbers and cultural development, the Moxo once dominated northeastern Bolivia.
Jesuit missionaries taught Spanish Christian music to the Moxo, who like the GuaraniŽ in Paraguay became excellent singers (as soloists and choristers), instrumentalists, builders of musical instruments, musical scribes, and even choir directors. The musical instruments built by the Moxo included European-style drums, organs, and violins. The Moxo fabricated a bass instrument by joining up to eleven of their traditional conical bark trumpets into enormous panpipes, which they sounded by buzzing the lips, not by blowing as flutes (Steward 1949:420, plate 39). These they
The Jesuits allowed the Moxo to perform traditional dances as acts of faith in Christian religious processions during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the Blessed Trinity, and the patron saint of each mission. One of these dances, the machetero 'swordsman dance', is still performed. Part of the remainder of this essay, based on research by the anthropologist Dori Reeks while she was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s, describes this dance and other religious musical expressions of the Trinitarios in the village of San Miguel de Isiboro (St. Michael of the Isiboro River) (Olsen 1974).
Living in the ChapareŽ area of Bolivia, in the southern part of Beni, the Trinitarios form one of the last unassimilated communities of the Moxo. The Trinitario village of San Miguel on the Isiboro River, located about three days' travel by canoe from the nearest settlements, was founded in 1955 as a result of the Trinitarios' search for tierra santa, the land of peace and happiness. According to their belief, tierra santa will be a village guarded by jaguars and snakes who admit only the pure. There, living in harmony with an abundance of everything good, chosen Moxo people will be in the presence of God, manifested as Saint Michael (
Vespers service for the patronal festival of Saint Michael
A deep religious conviction is basic to the culture of the Trinitarios of San Miguel de Isiboro, for whom religion is a mixture of traditional Moxo expressions and Roman Catholic Christianity, though the two systems of belief are invoked at different times during a religious event. This dichotomy is especially seen in the vespers service for the patronal festival of Saint Michael, which lasts from 5:00 P.M. on 28 September until 4:00 A.M. on 29 September. The indigenous portion of the evening is the machetero, which until 10:00 P.M. alternates with the more standard Christian musical worship. The remainder of the event includes praying and singing.
Machetero
A machetero is a swordsman who, brandishing a machete, symbolically fights off evil forces. Franz Keller-Leuzinger (1874:160) described the dance:
A dozen of the sword-dancers (macheteiros), on the day of the consecration of a church, went singing and dancing and brandishing their broad knives and wooden swords, from cross to cross, headed by their chieftain, who carried a heavy silver
This description fits the machetero of 1969 as photographed in San Miguel de Isiboro (
The exact significance of the machetero dance is unknown. Claro (1969:14) suggests that it symbolizes a warrior fighting against his enemies or against nature. Dori Reeks (personal communication, 1972) claims that the dancer represents the surrender of human beings to the infinite or to all the powers of nature. She learned from the Trinitarios that as an ancient dance, it was associated with a shamanistic ritual held inside a special house where men sang, danced, and offered corn beer (chicha) to their jaguar god. The dance continues that tradition by replacing the jaguar deity with Saint Michael. Keller-Leuzinger (1874:160) wrote, however, that the dance is "evidently representing the submission of the Indians and their conversion to Christianity." In Keller-Leuzinger's time, the dancer performed inside the church in front of the altar, but today he always performs outside the church.
The instrumentation used for the music of today's machetero consists of a six-holed bird-bone flute with a fipple mouthpiece. The flutist is accompanied by a large bass drum played with one stick, and occasionally by a snare drum played with two sticks. Added to this are rhythms created by the dancer's anklet-strung rattles, which today are often metal jingle bells, especially used by children when they dance (figure 4). A portion of the music played by the flutist (figure 5) consists of a main melody (A) repeated several times, followed by a secondary melody (B) played once, and continuing with several repetitions of that pattern. Throughout the performance, the flutist ornaments the melody, as shown in the transcription.
During the vespers, two musical events contrast strongly with the dance of the macheteros: the processional and the singing of the faithful followers as they approach the church. The processional musicians (
The invocation or versicle sung by the taita is answered by the female chorus an octave higher, while the violin plays in mid-range parallel fifths with the taita, who sings in parallel fourths with the women (
The sketchbook of Franz Keller-Leuzinger (1874) is important for understanding the machetero dance in historical times. His book has one of the best depictions of the bajones as they were played in church. Claro's article (1969) is the most important study of Moxo music during the Jesuit occupation. A recent book by Becerra Casanovas (1990) describes a number of Moxo dances, songs, and musical instruments.
History
Musical Material Culture
Musical Contexts, Genres, and Structures
Social Structure, Musicians and Behavior, Musical Systems, and Performance Practices
Musical Enculturation
Musical Dynamics
Today the SuyaŽ Indians live in a single village of about two hundred inhabitants on the banks of the SuiaŽ-Micžu River, an affluent of the Xingu River at about 11 degrees south latitude (the Xingu flows north into the Amazon River). Horticulture, hunting, fishing, and gathering supply their basic needs, and trade or conflict with frontier settlements and ranches supplies them with salt, ammunition, trade goods, and some medical supplies and services. They speak a language belonging the northern branch of the Ge^ language family. Missionaries are not allowed to practice in the Xingu reserve, and the SuyaŽ have little experience with Christian ideas and practices. Since shamanism is not highly elaborated, Western medical practices employed by Brazilian officials have not undermined the authority of traditional culture. The SuyaŽ continue to perform many of their traditional ceremonies. They made peace with Brazilians in 1959.
Though language identity does not define cultural attributes, the Ge^-speaking communities of Brazil share musical traits found among the SuyaŽ: genres of speech and song are highly elaborated; most music is sung; unison singing marks important social groups; idiophones are common; aereophones are mostly played for emphasis and only rarely for melodies; songs originate from outside the community (from ancestors, animals, monsters, and other Indian communities); hallucinogens, alcohol, and tobacco are rarely central to musical performances; and most music is associated with rites of passage. Specific features of SuyaŽ music that have not been documented among other Ge^ groups include an isomorphism of musical structures and cosmological structures, and the metamorphosis of performers into hybrid animal or human beings during ceremonies.
The historical record for the SuyaŽ is shallow, with neither archaeological nor important ethnographic records extending back before 1884, when Karl von den Steinen (1942) visited the SuyaŽ at the mouth of the SuiaŽ-Micžu. Little cultural material can be preserved in the humid tropics, and most materials used by the SuyaŽ were organic. Ethnographic evidence supports the SuyaŽ claim that they made a long exodus from territory more than 1,100 kilometers to the northeast, fleeing and fighting enemies
Music performed by the SuyaŽ is supremely vocal. Musical instruments play a small role in their performances; the most frequently used are idiophones that accompany singing and dancing. The principal rattle, hwin kraŻ, is made of individual piqui pits strung with hand-spun cotton or occasionally burity-palm fiber to a central string. This can be held in the hand or tied to the knees so that the rattle sounds with each step. In addition to piqui pits, these rattles can be made from deer, tapir, or wild-pig hoofs. These rattles can be held in the hand, wrapped around the knees, or occasionally hung down the back. Although their symbolism is not highly elaborated, hoof rattles are not to be attached to dancers' legs because there is always a danger of the dancer's changing into an animal. In at least two myths the rattles turn into hooves on the singer, who irrevocably becomes an animal, unable to return to human form. Large gourds are sometimes suspended on a string down the back, knocking against the knee rattles.
A gourd rattle is played in certain ceremonies. It is made from a gourd partly filled with seeds with a wooden shaft going through the middle of it, decorated with a band of macaw down (young feathers) around the middle and a few parrot-wing feathers hanging from a string attached to the tip of the staff. In one ceremony, certain social groups carry red gourd rattles, other groups carry black rattles, and a third social group concludes the ceremony by chasing the singer-dancers and breaking their rattles.
Though the SuyaŽ were aware of and even knew how to manufacture a variety of Upper Xingu woodwind instruments, they did not seriously make and play them, though they did seriously perform Upper Xingu sung ceremonies. Nor were any Brazilian musical instruments observed in the village between 1971 and 1998.
The SuyaŽ are fairly well provided with electronic instruments. Their enjoyment
The SuyaŽ named their songs in two fashions. One was by performance style: ngere refers to unison songs, akia to individual shout songs, iaren to recitative-like speech, and sangere to invocations. The other was by ceremony: amto ngere 'mouse ceremony', angroti ngere 'wild-pig ceremony', agachi ngere 'day song (in rainy season)', and kahran kasaŽg ngere 'big turtle song (for dry season)', and so on. Most SuyaŽ rituals were related to the human life cycle, especially that part of it occurring from preadolescence through the birth of several children. The male life cycle was particularly marked by ceremonies involving musical performance. These ceremonies usually corresponded with certain agricultural or collecting seasons. Thus, the mouse ceremony was performed when the maize was ripe, and corn products figured prominently in the ritual foods prepared during it. Other ceremonies were performed in the dry season, when agricultural products and fish were plentiful.
The word ngere was the generic name for music and dance. The SuyaŽ considered the sounds and their associated movements to be essentially part of the same performance. They sometimes hummed a tune without moving, but a real performance always involved specific bodily movements. Most SuyaŽ dance was fairly simple walking or stamping in rhythm, moving clockwise or counterclockwise according to moiety membership, and holding or moving the hands in certain ways. But certain song-dances had more elaborate body movements, difficult enough for the less experienced young men or women to be embarrassed by trying to do them. Older people, supposedly less ashamed or shy, moved their bodies more freely as they sang.
Except for some rather generic songs that could be sung during a fairly long period of the year, most songs were restricted to the appropriate ceremonial period. A ceremonial period could last from a couple of days to an entire season, during which songs associated with the ceremony would be considered appropriate. After the opening evening, larger ceremonies would work their way slowly to a grand finale of all-night singing with full body ornamentation, multiple musical roles, collective euphoria, and some kind of spiritual metamorphosis. But there might be long periods without much activity beyond the seasonal songs in morning and evening.
SuyaŽ shamanism was little developed. Most adults knew some invocations (sangere) they could use to influence the body, but these are quite distinct from the shamanistic efforts to recover souls found widely throughout South America. The
The performer blew before the first and last lines.Master of the still waters [five times]
Rough-skinned white cayman, his hand is spread out [without trembling], how cooooome?
Animal, animal that lies there still
Master of the still waters, with his rough skin, lying there in the stream
Master of the still waters [five times]
Master of our still waters
White cayman, master of still waters
His hand is spread out, his neck skin is spread out, his hand is spread out, he trembles not. How cooooome?
Animal, animal, lying there
Master of the still waters [three times]
Most invocations called on traits of things in the natural world to affect the human body. A slippery fish would be named to cause a fast and easy childbirth (the baby will slip out of the womb the way the fish escapes the hand); the strong-tusked wild pig would be invoked for a toothache; and so forth. The SuyaŽ would give presents to people who performed invocations over a sick relative. In 1994, the first shaman in decades began to give cures using invocations and tobacco blowing and sucking similar to that found in neighboring Tupi-speaking societies such as the Kaiabi.
The most significant song-genre division was between unison and individual songs. Unison songs were called ngere. Most were strongly marked by rattles and stamping, in a steady 2/2 meter. Every SuyaŽ social group had certain songs it sang in close unison. The melodies usually comprised between two and four musical phrases, repeated over and over with slowly changing texts. Unison songs were characterized by a steady upward drift in pitch of as much as a fourthpossibly a trait of musical development. When adult men were singing these, they would send children away because children could not sing as low as the adults. If women sang with the men, they would usually enter later and sing an octave above them. Some ceremonies were performed only by women, and men would watch silently.
In contrast to the unison songs were the shout songs (akia). These varied according to the age of the performer, had two to four phrases and an overall descending contour, and were often sung simultaneously to produce polyphony. These, too, were usually sung to the accompaniment of rattles and stamping in a regular 2/2 meter. Singers would often sing a variety of akia in a single night's performance.
Virtually all SuyaŽ songs were constructed of a set of named nesting dual structures. Like the invocations, virtually every song named at least one animal. Each two-to eight-phrase strophe had a section sung with referential (directly meaningful) words and a part with only song syllables. In the SuyaŽ language, almost every song
Over the course of a ceremony, the performances were often made more complex by the addition of simultaneous sounds: a unison song would be sung with a shout song, with keening, animal calls, and other sounds added to create a dense sonic environment much more complex than can be conveyed in the transcription of a single melodic line. This "development" often increased over the course of weeks, beginning with single performances and concluding with a rich overlay of contrasting sounds. These overlapping sounds were one of the ways a musical performance would be judged beautiful. The simultaneous sonic involvement of large parts of the community created the happiness or euphoria required for a successful event.First strophe (empty): Te-te-te-te-.... [twice]
Third strophe [approaching the naming]: I paint my mask, I paint my mask and leap and sing, te-te-te-te-te... [five times]
Later strophe [telling the name]: red mouse, I paint my mask and leap and sing, te-te-te-te-te.... [repeated many times]
Final coda [kure]: only the second of the two melody phrases, the one without referential meaning: te-te-te-te-te-.... (once)
First strophe (empty): Te-te-te-te-.... [twice]
Third strophe (approaching the naming): I cut my mask, I cut my mask and leap and sing, te-te-te-te.... [five times]
Later strophe (telling the name): big mouse, I paint my mask and leap and sing, te-te-te-te.... [many times]
Final coda (kure), only the second of the melodic phrases, without referential meaning: te-te-te-te-te.... [once]
Virtually all SuyaŽ music was apparently related to rituals and ceremonies. The link between music and ritual is widespread in South America, but seemed to be more extreme among the SuyaŽ than in other reports. There were no work songs, no lullabies, no protest songs. Instead, ceremonial songs might be sung by a man under his breath during a long trip; children were soothed with a gentle shh-shh-shh-shh, but without melody; and protest and anger were indicated through refusing to sing. Silence was an indicator of anger, and refusing to sing was an aggressive act!
Because no missionaries had spent much time among the SuyaŽ, they had no Christian songs, no patron-saint festivities. Unless ceremonies as a whole are considered as theater, there was no theater music as such. Some pantomimes were performed by an old man of the "clown" age grade in the center of the village plaza. They were hilarious but significantly silent; music is part of ritual. Some music may be shown to outsiders, and sometimes guests from other tribes were invited to watch (as were visiting Brazilian doctors, post administrators, and anthropologists), but there was no use of music for touristic purposes. Guests were fed and given gifts, not requested to give gifts. By 1995, the SuyaŽ expected to receive royalties from publications
In SuyaŽ society, people sang not what they wanted but who they were. And as they sang they (re-)constructed their society in a particular way. Each gender, and within the genders each age group, sang different songs or sang the same songs differently. To a certain extent, ceremonies and musical occasions created a village organized on principles different from those of the domestic and kinship relationships. The entire village would be divided up into two groups based on their names (received from uncles and aunts, not parents). The roles they played, the songs they sang, and the way they sang was a function of which group they belonged to and how old they were. Each ceremonial group had a certain repertoire and a way of singing. Each name group might have a particular right or obligation in a certain ceremony, such as being the last to stop singing, or the first in the line of dancers. Nor did the groups remain the same: name membership in the two large groups (ceremonial moieties) changed from dry season to rainy season; who a person sang with conferred and reaffirmed social identity, as did what and how a person sang. Women did not participate in many SuyaŽ ceremonies as singers. Instead, they had other ritual roles and their own ceremonies, in which they took the lead parts while the men were silent, and participated in some ceremonies learned from other tribes. As with many other parts of SuyaŽ life, women claimed no knowledge of domains in which they were knowledgeable and capable of performing. In a sense, SuyaŽ society could be characterized as an orchestra in which each gender, age grade, and ceremonial group had its particular part.
SuyaŽ songs were structured in the same way as their social groups (dual) and their cosmology (dualist). There is thus an isomorphism among SuyaŽ society, cosmology, and song. This is apparently a rather unusual musical situation, yet it is fundamental to understanding SuyaŽ music and SuyaŽ social organization. This appears clearly in recordings and fuller analyses (Seeger 1982, 1987).
In addition to the social correlation between song structure and social structure, there is a cosmological component to most songs. The naming of animals invokes a kind of power that becomes particularly strong during the long finale of major rituals, when singers are considered to be transformed through their singing, dancing, and ornamentation into human or animal beings. At the end of the ceremony, they are transformed back into humans, but altered through the experience. The bringing together of the natural and social worlds in invocations and songs is a deliberate and symbolically rich part of musical performance.
According to the SuyaŽ, music had been learned in "mythical times" from animals, learned in "historical times" from enemy Indians, and introduced by living
Aesthetic concepts
It was difficult to discover SuyaŽ aesthetic concepts, since the evaluation of a singer depended on the evaluator's kinship relation to him or her. The aesthetics of musical performances were couched in terms of the throat. Good singers were described as having strong or beautiful throats, whereas poor singers had weak or bad throats. Certain unison songs were beautiful because the singers had big throats (sang low pitches), whereas other genres required a high-pitched, small-throated performance. A singer who could learn quickly (had a good ear) and perform well (had a beautiful throat) would be highly praised. The SuyaŽ say that when they sing they are happy (kin) or euphoric. When people were euphoric, the ceremony was a success.
MUSICAL ENCULTURATION
Children learned music by following the adults' example. Children sometimes accompanied adults' dancing and singing. They sometimes put on their own ceremonies, in which they recreated all the major parts of adults' ceremoniesusually after the adults had completed them. Boys were given short individual songs, more easily learned than those of adults. Certain ceremonies set up small camp sites in which the youths were instructed in singing. In late adolescence, the boys were expected to sing a lot. Women's singing followed the same pattern. Girls would sing with their mothers and learn the songs. There were no more formal forms of musical enculturation such as clubs, schools, and other organizations.
MUSICAL DYNAMICS
SuyaŽ music has always been changing. The SuyaŽ liked to learn new songs and continued to create music. Between 1971 and 1995, they sang the songs of more than ten different tribes or ethnic groups. They probably sang songs of groups with whom they interacted more frequently and had economic and other social relations. Though they listened to the radio and sometimes danced to recorded Brazilian music, they rarely performed Brazilian songs. Similarly, their music has had little influence on the rest of the world.
Musical Instruments
Genres and Contexts of Music and Dance
Further Study
Deep within the Amazon tropical forest of southeastern Colombia live the Tukano (Tucano), who belong to the Equatorial-Tucanoan linguistic phylum of the Macro-Tucanoan stock and the Tucano family of languages (Greenberg 1987:383-384). The Tucano family includes numerous subfamilies, such as the Cubeo, the Desana, the Makuna (MakuŽ), the Tukano, and others. The names Tukano and Tucano are pronounced exactly the same, but the former spelling here denotes all the Tucano-speaking people in general; when specific information is known, however, particular names are used.
Altogether, the Tukano number perhaps no more than ten thousand people who maintain some traditional lifeways (BermuŽdez 1990:110). Their location is on and between the VaupeŽs (Uaupes) and CaquetaŽ rivers in southeastern Colombia and northwestern Brazil. Contact with rubber-tree tappers, missionaries, and other outsiders has brought disease and change to many Tukano. The lack of roads and the rapids on the rivers make travel difficult.
Traditional Tukano musical instruments include idiophones and aerophones and exclude membranophones and chordophones. The Desana, an eastern Tukano group, have about twenty musical instruments, each "associated with a certain ritual, a certain time of day, a certain age-group, and a certain animal" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1981:91). Each has a particular sound that relates to a particular color, odor, temperature, and message. This kind of sound-classification taxonomy may be unique to the Tukano.
Idiophones
Tukano idiophones include internal container rattles and external anklet and staff rattles, tube stampers, coca-pounding pestle and mortar, struck log idiophones, and rubbed tortoiseshells. These are important collective ritual instruments, but the gourd container rattle is the most powerful. Called nyahsaŽnu 'to shake' by the Desana, it is the sacred instrument of the shaman (payeŽ), who employs it for curing illnesses. Within its body are quartz crystals, which, when the shaman is in a malevolent
Tukano dance-music uses the gourd rattle (nyahsaŽnu), with external strung rattles such as the uaituŽge (from the word for 'bell', though the rattlers are dried seeds) worn on the dancers' ankles and/or upper arms; a staff rattle consisting of a uaituŽge placed on a pole; a long and thin staff rattle with a slot containing seeds; and a tube stamper (boreŽpudeariŽyuhkeš 'white stick that strikes the ground') (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:119). The stampers are painted with the Snake-Canoe decoration, giving them female sexual imagery, but their phallic shape makes them male. To the Desana, this paradox symbolizes strength: the joining of female and male symbols in one instrument represents power.
The mortar and pestle is an implement of work, especially among the Tucano-speaking Cubeo, who use it to beat coca leaves into a narcotic powder. Performers often use several implements of different sizes at the same time, creating multipart rhythmic sounds, sometimes accompanied by panpipes (Tayler 1972:45).
The Tukano no longer use hollowed-out log idiophones.
A large tortoiseshell (Tatuya goo, Desana peyuŽ vaŽri 'turtle to scratch') is covered with beeswax and rubbed with the musician's hand, producing a low-pitched hum. Tortoiseshells are often played in pairs, producing multipart music. Sometimes the player of a goo accompanies himself by playing a panpipe, held in his free hand (Tayler 1972:45). Among the Desana, the instrument "symbolizes the vagina and clitoris of the Daughter of the Sun, clearly indicating its threatening character" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:113).
Aerophones
Tukano wind instruments include a large number of multiple single-tubed cane ductless instruments or panpipes, cane and bone deflector duct flutes (some multiple tubed) without and with holes for fingering, and trumpets. Panpipes, called veoŽ-paŽme (veoŽ 'cane', paŽme 'parallel objects') by the Desana, have a varying number of tubes, depending on the musician's age: boys aged five through nine play panpipes of three tubes; at puberty, they play four or five tubes; and men play panpipes having eight or nine tubes. This arrangement is determined by the development of the musician's testicles: the more developed, the more tubes. Played in pairs called male and female, Tukano panpipes establish the fertility of humans and game animals. Among the Makuna, two or more musicians play "counter to one another in a type of antiphonal
The Desana have a panpipe that is ducted with deflectors, making a double fipple mouthpiece. Karl Gustav Izikowitz (1970 [1935]:335) called it a double mataco whistle. Other small fipple flutes are three-holed, single-tubed, deer-bone instruments, played only by men. These instruments are all-powerful, and Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981:91) gives an example of how the Desana understand this power:
A small whistle is blown by adolescent boys early in the morning when they bathe in the river before dawn. The odor of the tune is said to be male, the color is red, and the temperature is hot; the tune evokes youthful happiness and the taste of a fleshy fruit of a certain tree. The vibrations carry an erotic message to a particular girl.
The most powerful Tukano aerophones are huge duct flutes, widely called yuru-pariŽ, after a ceremony of the same name. The flutes come in pairs, male (poreŽ) and female (ponenoŽ); the Tukano believe that the "male flute produces a sustained sound that excites, while the sound produced by the female flute is interpreted as a threatening vibration" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:112). This is a fitting symbolism because the yurupariŽ ceremony is a fertility ritual for initiated men, and women are forbidden to see or hear the large flutes.
An irony is that according to Cubeo mythology, women were the original players of these instruments. A reversal of the social order occurred because the women played the flutes continually and did not work; therefore, a god took the flutes away from the women and gave them to the men; the god warned the men never to let a woman play or even see the flutes again (Tayler 1972:35). According to a Desana myth, however, men were the first players of the flutes. One day, when the men were away, the women found the flutes and handled them; but when they touched their own naked bodies, "suddenly hair grew on their pubis and under their armpits, places that previously had no hair" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:169-170). Variations of the yurupariŽ myth about flutes stretch across the Amazon basin (Hill 1993:58; Murphy and Murphy 1974:88-89).
Another aerophone used in the yurupariŽ ceremony is a bark trumpet, made by wrapping long pieces of bark into a conical tube; the mouthpiece is made from wood. As a buzzing instrument, this is essential to the fertility ritual because it symbolizes male aggression.
One of the buzziest aerophones is a free-swinging aerophone, the whirled plaque (Desana nuraŽ-meše 'horsefly'). The people perceive that the sound of this instrument imitates the buzz of the horsefly and that its appearancewhirling around the player's head in a threatening fashionimitates that insect's flight. The horsefly, a masculine symbol, is associated with fertility, but like a horsefly, whose sting is indiscriminate, the symbolism of penetration means 'lewd person' and even incest, which is taboo among the Desana. The swung plaque, though rare in the 1990s, functions as a reminder, a warning from the creator (the instrument's voice is "the voice of the power of the sun") to practice exogamymarriage outside a particular group, rather than among siblings.
Almost all music among the Tukano is for rituals or ceremonies. The available literature makes no mention of lullabies or of songs of leisure or work, except for panpipe music to accompany the mortar-and-pestle rhythms of the preparations of coca leaves. The ritual and ceremonial music can be divided into songs for shamanism (individual performances by the payeŽ) and those of communal performance, including dance performance by the kumuŽ for the communityfestivals, YurupariŽ, mourning ritual, and courtship ritual.
Shamanism
The payeŽ is the powerful Tukano shaman who cures illnesses, functions as the communicator between Tukano hunters and the supernatural masters of the animals, and presides over life-cycle ceremonies such as puberty, initiation, and burial (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:15). In his role as intermediary between the Tukano world and the spiritual realm, he uses hallucinogenic drugsthe drink yajeŽ (Banisteriopsis caapi) or the snuff vihoŽ (Piptadenia sp.), the latter inhaled through the nose. During rituals of
Another religious practitioner is the kumuŽ, who cures illnesses caused by the supernatural intrusion of pathogenic agentsstones, splinters, thornsinto the patient's body. He cures by blowing and sucking, rather than by singing and reciting spells. Nevertheless, he is an important singer in his other role, as spiritual leader of certain festivals, especially the ceremonial exchange of food.
Communal events
DabucuriŽ
The ceremonial exchange of food (dabucuriŽ) is a three-day ritual of alliance between Tukano villages. During this event, the religious leader, kumuŽ, sings songs of god (go?a mešeš bayaŽri), invoking the sun (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:136-137). This leader can be interpreted as a priest, and his role in Tukano culture is much higher than that of the payeŽ; he is, in fact, the most important Tukano religious functionary.
Held once a year, YurupariŽ is a ceremonial complex in several parts, including the ritual of the sacred flutes and trumpets, along with the distribution of food. It is seen as a fertility festival, an initiation ceremony, and even as "a warning not to commit incest and to marry only the women from another group" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:171). For several days, residents of neighboring villages unite to celebrate with music and dance, to eat, and to drink. Versions of this ceremonial complex occur throughout the Amazon basin.
On the death of a ceremonial leader or elder, the Cubeo hold an elaborate ceremony called oyne 'weeping', during which singing, playing musical instruments, and dancing occur over a long period. Beginning with wails, spells, and songs, the first part of the ceremony is followed by burial. A year later, the Cubeo stage a ritual that includes the playing of bark trumpets and other musical instruments, dances with masks, and
CachiriŽ
A party featuring beer (chicha), the cachiriŽ is a large social gathering that involves many people from neighboring villages. Often cachiriŽ are held "to celebrate a special occasion, such as the completion of a new maloca, or a boy's naming ceremony, the end of a girl's isolation after puberty, or to honour the visit of some traveller, missionary, or ethnographer. But more often they may be held for no particular reason at all" (Tayler 1972:41). They include much making of music with panpipes, bone flutes, gourd rattles, strung rattles, dancing staffs, and almost any other musical instrument but sacred long flutes and trumpets. Men and women, with painted bodies, wear elaborate headdresses of egret, harpy eagle, and macaw feathers, and necklaces of many animal parts. Dancing and drinking last sixteen hours (Tayler 1972:42). This is the festival most travelers have commented about because of its lavishness and gaiety.
In 1938, Francisco de Igualada, a Spanish Roman Catholic missionary of the Capuchin order, published the article "MusicologiŽa IndiŽgena de la Amazonia Colombiana," freely translated as "The Musicology of the Indians of the Colombian Amazon." Though based on European concepts, it was one of the first outside attempts to understand the music of the Indians of the Colombian Amazonian tropical forest, which included some Tukano villages; the title, however, is the best part of the article. A much more objective study was made between 1960 and 1961, when Brian Moser and Donald Tayler recorded and analyzed the music of the northwest Amazon and of other native people of Colombia. Tayler's publication (1972) resulted in well-documented LP recordings with an eighty-eight-page booklet, a map, and forty-four photographs. In 1966, Ettore Biocca published a multivolume study of Amerindian cultures from the upper Rio Negro and Orinoco, a study that includes recordings of Tukano music. The most prolific scholar of the Tukano, however, was Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who wrote many studies (1971, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1981, 1986) about the ethnography, folklore, mythology, and religion of the Desana; these studies include much contextualized information about Tukano music. This essay draws most of its information from the publications by Tayler and Reichel-Dolmatoff.
The People in History
Musical Instruments
Musical Genres and Contexts
Social Structure and Musical Performance
Musical Acculturation
The Waia~pi (Waya~pi), whose language is included in the Tupi-GuaraniŽ family, inhabit villages scattered throughout the northern territory of Brazil and the southern part of French Guiana [see FRENCH GUIANA]. Their area is part of the Guiana region of South America. About three hundred Waia~pi live in the Amapari area of Brazil, and an additional 650 live along the Oyapock River in French Guiana.
Though the Waia~pi constitute a single ethnic group, there are important differences between the Waia~pi of Brazil and the Waia~pi of French Guiana. The former initiated formal relations with sectors of Brazilian society only in 1973, but the Waia~pi of French Guiana have had contacts with French society since the 1700s. Other differences between the subgroups concern patterns of residence, language, music, and other forms of artistic expression. The French Waia~pi live along a major river, the Oyapock, and the forest-dwelling Brazilian Waia~pi inhabit inland villages close to small rivers, such as the Amapari. Thus, access to resources, mobility, and contacts with other societies vary. A friction idiophone (pupu) made out of a turtle shell is hardly used by the Brazilian Waia~pi but is regularly employed by their counterparts in French Guiana (Beaudet 1980:6). Likewise, the kuripeawa, a side-blown flute played by both groups, is a nasal flute among the French Guiana Waia~pi but a mouth-blown flute among the Brazilian Waia~pi.
A review of current knowledge of the Brazilian and French Waia~pi groups broadens understanding of the role of music in Waia~pi society as a whole. (Evidence of a yet uncontacted group of Waia~pi has surfaced, but details are limited.) Over time, identified Waia~pi groups have declined in number; some have merged with other Waia~pi groups and even with the Carib-speaking Wayana and Aparai Indians (Gallois 1983:110-112).
Most historical accounts of the Waia~pi, as of other Tupi-GuaraniŽ-speaking groups, note the importance of music in these societies (Baldus 1970:1; MeŽtraux 1927:30-37). Only recently have studies focused on the role of music in Waia~pi and
Historical descriptions of the Waia~pi are available in accounts written by missionaries, governmental officials, and travelers. At best, they reveal only general aspects of Waia~pi music and culture. The first written records can be traced back to the 1600s, when the Waia~pi (or Guaiapi) are believed to have inhabited the land along the XinguŽ, a major tributary of the Amazon (Bettendorf 1909:115-116; Gallois 1986:78). Pressure by colonizers in central Brazil probably led them to leave that area. Like other Tupi-GuaraniŽ Indians, the Waia~pi had mythological reasons that led to extensive migrations to a "land without evil" (MeŽtraux 1927:131-136). As a result, they migrated northward until arriving in the Guiana area in the early 1700s (Rivie`re 1963:185-186).
This new pattern of settling in the Guiana area was also marked by contacts with other ethnic groups, such as Portuguese and French colonizers, and with other indigenous groups, including the Wayana. In addition, the Waia~pi had commercial relations with the Boni (Maroons), who acted as middlemen between Indians and colonizers. From the Boni, the Waia~pi acquired such industrialized items as knives, metal pots, and glass beads, even before they had face-to-face ties with Westerners.
Newly arrived in the Guianas, the Waia~pi then had conflicts and major wars with the Wayana and other Carib-speaking groups, whom they fought for land and resources. These relations are described in the accounts of some travelers, who also alluded to Waia~pi music (Sausse 1951:73). FreŽdeŽric TheŽbault, Adam de Bauve, and Father FerreŽ were the first to attest that the Waia~pi were incorporating Wayana traits in their music and rituals (TheŽbault 1857:22); Bauve and FerreŽ cited Waia~pi songs that alluded to cannibalistic practices (1833:277).
These themes are included in Henri Anatole Coudreau's accounts of Waia~pi music, which note the use of manioc beer (caxiri) in Waia~pi musical performances (1886-1887, 1895:317). Cannibalistic themes still regularly occur in Waia~pi musical performances, which are marked by the consumption of large amounts of beer. Coudreau mentions the importance of bodily painting using the dyes genipapo, urucu, and tsipa~ during certain musical activities (1895:453). These are still important for the Waia~pi. At the end of the 1800s, several authors referred to the continuing decline in population primarily caused by the "bacteriological war" unwittingly waged by colonizers (Coudreau 1895:572; Crevaux 1883:217). Despite a devastating loss of population (Campbell 1982:4), the Waia~pi held firmly to their traditions. In the mid-1990s, a major musical revitalization has paralleled significant increases in the population.
Despite missionaries' negative attitude and the policies of the Brazilian Indian Agency (FUNAI), I witnessed in the mid-1980s almost daily collective musical performances, including the use of more than sixty-five different musical instruments. During my fieldwork, which lasted more than eight months between 1984 and
A large number of Waia~pi musical instruments are played in different contexts. Most Waia~pi musical instruments are aerophones, including flutes, clarinets, and trumpets (Fuks 1988, 1989:194). The only exceptions are the friction idiophone pupu, the rattles maraka or marari played only by shamans, and a shaker (awai) tied to the ankle of the leader (jara) of collective musical performances.
Waia~pi musical instruments are also classified in different families in which the same instruments, but of different sizes, are played by different people. The differences are based on knowledge, general repertoire, and each performer's physical limitations. Some flutes, such as the erebo panpipes, can be made in smaller sizes to suit children.
Waia~pi flutes (usually known as nhimia) vary in size, material, and performance context. The main distinction, however, relates to whether the instrument is played solo or in ensemble. Flutes and reeds of the class ra?anga can be played only in ensemble, and flutes such as the so?o kangwera are used by only a single player.
In classifying Waia~pi musical instruments we are faced with an incompatibility of Waia~pi and Western categories; for example, the Waia~pi term for flutes, nhima, may include the trumpet nhimia poku; and the class of ra?anga includes flutes, trumpets, and reeds. For that reason, I will outline some Waia~pi musical instruments and explain Waia~pi endogenous notions and translate them into musicological terms (Fuks 1989:195-209).
Flutes
The smallest Waia~pi notched flute, so?o kangwera, is made of deer bone; it is played by the person who killed the deer and made it. Its high pitches are believed to penetrate the forest as a request for the "owner of animal species" to release game for the Waia~pi to hunt. Like the bones, so?o kangwera are cross-sectionally triangular with rounded edges, have three holes, and like other Waia~pi musical instruments, generate a range of pleasurable emotions.
Another important Waia~pi flute, the erebo, is a panpipe, which can be played solo or collectively (
The most common Waia~pi flute is the end-blown pipimemyra. It has five holes in front; in back, an additional hole always remains open. The term pipimemyra means 'aunt's daughter'a potential wife, according to Waia~pi rules of cross-cousin marriage. Pipimemyra music thus symbolizes the love and happiness associated with marriage, birth, and hunters' good luck.
The side-blown flutes (kuripeawa) are played nasally by the French Waia~pi and with the mouth by the Brazilian Waia~pi (Beaudet 1980:10-11). Made of bamboo, these flutes have three holes for fingering and a large hole for the embouchure. Some have two attached parts, similar to the Western flute. The kuripeawa is often associate-
Nhimia miti and nhimia mytare are also for solo performances. Like the kena (used throughout the central Andes), they are ductless notched flutes. The distinction between nhimia miti (a small flute) and nhimia mytare relates to their sizes. Both may have three or four holes for fingering. Nhimia mytare follows a certain standard; it is usually longer, thus harder for children to play. These flutes are often associated with animals such as a certain monkey (kwata) and the kuri kuri. Like other Waia~pi flutes, they are used in times of happiness and are associated with such emotions.
The general class known as ra?anga includes more than sixty different musical instruments, including a variety of edge flutes and reeds. These instruments are "imitations" of some specific animal, fish, or insect, which each Waia~pi collective musical performance honors.
Some of the most common Waia~pi ra?anga are pira ra?anga, flutes specifically built for fish festivals. All ra?anga are used exclusively in such events, and at the end of the performance are disposed of. To emphasize the "likeness" with fish, ra?anga have carved wooden shapes of fish attached to their ends. These shapes and the names of each pira ra?anga vary according to the species of fish represented in performance. They include the surubi, the paku wassu, the tucunareŽ, and other species, with their specific surubi ra?anga, paku wassu ra?anga, and tucunare ra?anga.
Other ra?anga include the cancan ra?anga, a whistle associated with the cancan, a bird; the mangangan ra?anga of the bumblebee (mangangan); and the tarutaru ra?anga of the tarutaru, another bird (Fuks 1989:207-208, 231, 274).
Jawarun ra?anga are important musical instruments used in collective musical performances for jaguar. These instruments consist of two, three, or four reeds inserted into a larger, shallow pipe; they produce sounds considered similar to those of the jaguar.
The Waia~pi use other reed instruments, of which the most important are tureŽ,
Trumpet
The Waia~pi trumpet known as nhimia poku 'long aerophone' can be used in a number of contexts. It is often played only solo, with the purpose of announcing special events or indicating structural points in the collective musical performances. In the latter case, only the "owner of the beer" (caxiri jara) is permitted to play. As "owner of the beer," he is not permitted to drink; and as a sober Waia~pi, he can control the performance sequence by cueing changes in it. The trumpets are played in pairs during the bird dance (aisilili), with panpipes and a rattle (see
Music plays a major role in several Waia~pi activities. These include shamanistic rituals in which the shaman (pajeŽ) evokes spirits by singing and playing his maraka (marari). Shamanistic music is performed in different contexts to cure the sick, scare away evil spirits, weaken enemies, and increase hunters' luck. The intensity of shamanistic song, and its accompaniment by the maraka, is believed to evoke the spirits of Waia~pi ancestorsand occasionally the spirits of the forest (anhan).
The Waia~pi make major distinctions according to the purpose of musical performances and whether they are solo or group performances. Vocal and instrumental musics performed in ensembles are usually marked by the consumption of manioc beer. Some Waia~pi say they can make music collectively only with beer.
One of the reasons performers drink beer derives from the fact that group performances often relate to another species of animal, a fish, or an insect; some mythical characters are the theme of collective musical performances. In the course of these events, the Waia~pi are transformed into jaguars, bumblebees, or fish. This transformation is emphasized by a change of behavior: the performers emphasize the attributes of the species they represent. In addition, the expressive sensations are modified, with the participants making the "music of this other non-Waia~pi." Nowhere, other than the use of the ra?anga and the change of text in these performances, does the transformation become so obvious.
The words used in the songs of these events are gradually modified as the participants dance, sing, and drink beer. At the start of each performance and before the transformation occurs, the participants name and call "the other." When "the other" entities arrive, the words of songs say "we are the jaguars" or name other species relevant for the performance. The literal translation of ra?anga denotes imitation. Thus, the sounds of the ra?anga are "like those of the 'other'." Playing these musical instruments shows that the Waia~pi are "becoming" the protagonist species of the performance. Though there are many Waia~pi musical performances, there is only one species per performance. Thus, in the fish festival, all participants become transformed into the honored fish.
Waia~pi men also sing or play solo music. Examples include a good hunter's songs, emphasizing his pleasure in hunting and eating game, and the playing of the pipimemyra, indicating the performer's upcoming marriage. Solo instrumental music is also performed while relaxing in a hammock and playing a Waia~pi flute. The announcements of special events are introduced by the trumpets nhimia poku and sometimes by vocal music.
The Waia~pi distinguish music on the basis of performance context, whether it is solo or collective, and whether it is vocal or instrumental. Variation occurs according to the age of the performer or performers. Adults rarely perform children's songs unless they are used as musical satires of children's songs; these performances provoke laughter and highlight the importance of imitation in Waia~pi music.
The Waia~pi use several levels of imitation: vocal imitation of instrumental music and vice versa; imitation of the "music" of animals, insects, and fish; and imitation of music of people of other ages and the opposite sex. The sounds of nonhuman species inspire musical performances. Vocal music may similarly provide patterns for instrumental renditions. Instrumental tunes and timbres serve as models for vocal imitation and improvisation. The modification and reinterpretation of these models is the basis of Waia~pi musical improvisation.
Adults perform music in different contexts and unisex groups. Only men may play musical instruments. Thus, women's music is strictly vocal. In most cases, women sing their own repertoire, but during collective musical performances they sing the same songs male participants perform. Usually women's songs are associated with butterflies and garden products, such as manioc. The most important Waia~pi food, manioc requires long and arduous processinga task undertaken only by women. From manioc, they make the basic staple and beer, plus items such as tapioca and tucupi, a sauce (Fuks 1987). Women's songs often describe the preparation of these items. Men usually sing about animals, fish, or insects.
Prescriptions for musical performance point to the importance the Waia~pi place on defining labor and expressive modes on the basis of sex. Despite the differences, the Waia~pi emphasize the complementarity of the sexes: men hunt game, which people eat with the women's manioc. Musically, the complementarity of male and female songs enrich the effect of collective musical performances. Despite these differences, each Waia~piman, woman, or childis expected to have and to employ some form of musical ability. Every Waia~pi is a potential musician. Making music, especially singing, is considered as necessary as eating, sleeping, and socializing.
In the late twentieth century, the Waia~pi began to be exposed to Western musical styles of Brazil. In addition, they have heard and seen Western musical instruments such as metal and plastic trumpets and flutes, and they use cassette tape recorders (see
The Waia~pi are interested in the vocal music of other societies, and they have
The Wayana inhabit a region bordering Brazil, French Guiana, and Surinam [see FRENCH GUIANA]. They speak a language that belongs to the Carib linguistic family. Carib-speaking communities, including the Panare, the Wayana, the Aparai, the Waiwai, and the Tyrio, constitute the linguistic majority in the Guiana region (Rivie`re 1984:1-12).
Carib culture has influenced that of other native American communities, including the Waia~pi [see WAIA~PI], Emerillon, and Palikur. The process of acculturation varies according to communally endogenous traits and to external influences of societies across the borders of Brazil, French Guiana, and Surinam. The Caribs' cultural impact has led some authors to study the "caribization" of the Guiana region (Gallois 1986:145). Carib communities have established forms of exchange with other Indian groups and with the descendants of Maroons (runaway slaves) known as Boni in French Guiana and as Mekoro by the Wayana.
Different Carib-speaking groups have occasionally fused to form a single local and cultural unity, as have the Wayana-Aparai of the eastern Paru River in Brazil (Velthem 1983:139). In 1985, the Wayana population was about 950 persons, of whom 250 lived in Brazil (some with the Aparai), 550 in French Guiana, and 150 in Surinam. They cluster in several villages. Individuals frequently cross the borders, especially during major celebrations marked by intense musical performances.
Only scattered records of Wayana music exist. They are mainly superficial descriptions written by travelers, governmental officials, or health specialists. In 1856, TheŽbault described Wayana music and its association with dance, rituals, and drinking beer (1857:22). Coudreau (1895:127, 158) also described musical performances, including the musical exchanges established between rival Wayana and Waia~pi settlements. One such exchange is exemplified by the use of the tuleŽ (tureŽ, ture`), a single-reed musical instrument (Coudreau 1895:174).
The Wayana formerly warred with neighboring tribes, including the Galibis, the Pianoi (a Tyrio group), and the Waia~pi, a Tupi-GuaraniŽ-speaking group (Velthem 1983:147). Though some travelers mention bellicose music and Waia~pi cannibalistic
After peaceful exchanges with other cultures, the Wayana made an important cultural mark, including music, and they too incorporated some features from their former enemies, now their partners in trade (Beaudet 1983:20-26; Crevaux 1883:234; Grenand 1982:234; Schoepf 1972:92). Jules-Nicolas Crevaux (1883:217) alluded to the importance of shamanistic music performed in different contexts, such as curing, keeping away evil spirits, and increasing a hunter's luck.
The texts of songs, myths, and other narrative forms regularly performed by the Wayana are important sources of information about Wayana history. They provide an explanation of Wayana recent history (such as wars), reinforce a sense of ethnic identity, emphasize principles of social organization, and refer to belief systems, including shamanism. Shamanistic practices feature vocal musical performances for the purpose of scaring evil spirits, curing the sick, or weakening enemies. The shaman evokes spirits by singing appropriate songs and dancing. In addition, he wears special paraphernalia and ornamentation, symbolizing supernatural powers. Shamanistic songs are accompanied by the sounds of healers' rattles (kuwai) and whistles.
Asked about Wayana musical instruments, the Wayana say they simply play lueŽ. The term includes all aerophones, especially flutes (lueŽ) and trumpets (titiru or tiroro). The latter are low-pitched instruments that produce only one sound each, except for harmonics, occasionally produced by overblowing but considered to be in bad taste.
The flutes are wooden, with duct mouthpieces. They are played in pairs: two people alternate their single notes in interlocking fashion. Attached to the distal end, an armadillo's shell serves as a resonating box. Melodies played on paired flutes are improvisations based on vocal tunes; they are called roriro, an onomatopoeic representation of their sounds.
The term lueŽ includes the end-blown lueŽ ko^riroŽ, made of various types of bamboo, small trees, and bones of animals. To make these and other musical instruments in the late twentieth century, the Wayana have used plastic and metal pipes. Instrumental music is restricted to adolescent and adult males. Flutes can be played only by initiates.
In addition to aerophones, the Wayana use shakers when accompanying dances and collective musical performances. Attached to both legs or ankles of each participant, the shakers sound when the dancer stamps his feet. For collective ceremonies, shakers are attached to long sticks, which men strike on the ground while singing.
Wayana ceremonies are marked by different sections, each with specific music and dance. At a ceremony in 1985, the hosts (inhabiting the village of Twanke) sang a song of love while the guests sang and danced a song about the pleasures of drinking beer. Women brought food to the center of a plaza while the men and the initiates danced around it, wishing they could eat the food and drink more beer. They formed different circles of initiates, adults, and old persons. These circles occasionally merged: the initiates danced clockwise, while the others danced counterclockwise; previously initiated men sang tunes different from those of the new initiates.
The marake
The entire marake may take several months, during which participants drink large quantities of beer, decorate their bodies, and wear long and elaborate clothes embroidered with glass beads. These events are formally opened after guests from different villages have arrived and have rested for a few days. Large amounts of manioc beer (caxiri, or sakura 'boiled caxiri'), kept in large wooden or aluminum pots, are served to the participants.
The okoma starts with the combined music and dance of hosts and guests. The hosts are represented by tapirs (maipuli), in opposition to the guests, represented by canoes (kanaue). The dance starts with the burning of pepper (achi), causing people to cry, cough, and move around. Young boys hold trays with the burning pepper, but most male children do not participate in the music and dance. Women remain on the dancers' right. They occasionally join their husbands in the singing and dancing, but never play musical instruments.
For several days, the protagonists (maipuli and kanaue) perform different music and remain separated. They unite only at the grand finale, the close of the ceremony, which marks the incorporation of boys into adulthood, allowing them to start playing flutes and trumpets and to engage in other men's activities and attributes. The end of the marake is marked by the unification of the protagonists in loud and multicolored action, achieved as the participants sing and play their musical instruments at full volume. Excitement is enhanced by the colorfulness of the participants' costumes and bodily ornamentation. Having drunk beer for several days, the dancers enter outboard-motorized canoes filled up with family members, fruits, pets, and other items. They navigate in circles on the river while singing, shouting, playing flutes and trumpets, and even shooting guns. The result is an ecstatic event, highlighted by loud sounds.
The Wayana subdivide vocal music according to gender and age. Adult male songs often allude to animals, such as deer and tapirs. Men may sing mareica~e 'women's songs for Wayana males', songs to attract women. They have a large repertoire of melanda, songs that invoke the beauty of their wives and demonstrate affection. They have solo songs that serve to announce the performer's presence in the village and wake up friends; men who hear these songs invite the singer to go hunting with them.
Women's songs often refer to women's past experiences, especially to the times when they were children, and allude to food and insects. In addition, women have a large repertoire of lullabies and songs of love. Women's songs employ melodic and rhythmic structures similar to those of men's songs, but have a nostalgic feeling of their own.
Children sing versions of adult songs, male and female, such as the songs of the ceremonial protagonists described above. Some of their songs refer to games, sweets, and the virtues of their family members. Because of missionaries' impact, children have added hymns to their repertoire, emphasizing religious refrains, such as alleluia. Children also like songs from the Maroons, such as the song "Sawaere," performed in Saranantogo, the Maroons' language. Wayana children do not seem to understand the meanings of the words of these songs.
As a result of multiple influences, the Wayana have incorporated traits of different musical traditions. These aspects of acculturation include music and musical instruments from other indigenous groups and from the major colonizing countries (Brazil, French Guiana, Surinam). In addition, Maroons have affected Wayana society, though not much in musical traditions.
Perhaps the most important influence on Wayana musical performances is that of Protestant Christian missionaries, who not only teach hymns and modify traditional beliefs but also discourage participation in festivals featuring the consumption of beer and the performance of Wayana music. Traditional Wayana instruments are being replaced by Western musical instruments, such as harmonicas and guitars. The resulting impact is felt mostly among the young and adolescent. On several occasions, I witnessed children singing hymns and adolescents playing U.S. tunes on harmonicas.
Other Western influences vary according to the location of each village. In Surinam, the government has built cement houses for paramount chiefs it has appointed and has built airstrips and brought electricity to some villages. Some houses have stereos, radios, and even television sets, which play various kinds of non-Wayana music. Dutch and U.S. Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries also encourage Wayana participation in Christian rituals to counterbalance their neglect of traditional Wayana music. In French Guiana, missionaries are not permitted to enter Wayana villages. Western impact is seen in the solar cells placed on the roofs of most houses; these generate electricity for lights, refrigerators, radios, and tape recorders. In Brazil, the source of outside influence, though not so apparent, is present through direct contact with the regional population and governmental officials. The Wayana also participate in parties organized by the local population, governmental agencies, and the church.
In all Wayana villages of Brazil, French Guiana, and Surinam, there is even a mixture of Brazilian, North American, Dutch, and French musical traditions. On several occasions, I heard calypso tunes, sambas, and American and European pop. The flow of French, Brazilian, and Dutch music, and of other modes of artistic expression, is fairly uninhibited. In turn, these musical exchanges combine with traditional Wayana music in complex musical expressions.
Though most Wayana participate in traditional musical performances, several individuals refuse to attend musical eventsor when they do attend, participate passively, neither drinking beer nor playing musical instruments. They hide their traditional tattoos under Western clothes. In some cases, body-ornamentation motifs, such as snakes and birds, are replaced by tattoos of crosses and Christian names. However, most Wayana proudly execute different forms of traditional ornamentation at all times and especially during musical performances, which stress the importance of this ornamentation.
The Wayana consider some traditional performers musical specialists, as was the case of Anataka, son of the paramount chief of Kowen Hakon Village. A good singer, he knew many songs, which he could sing in high tessituras at full volume. Likewise, a good instrumentalist has a large repertoire and performs as loudly as possible, demonstrating traditional virtuosity associated with the rapid production of intense musical attacks.
The Yanomamoš (also written Yanomama, Yanoama, and Yanomami) are hunter-gatherers who inhabit the tropical forests of the upper Orinoco highlands of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Their area covers about 260,000 square kilometers (Miagliazza 1980:101), and their total population has been estimated (Smole 1976:3) at fifteen thousand individuals, of whom in 1985, according to the national census of Indians, 9,717 lived in Venezuela.
Included within this culture are numerous subgroups whose names have often been designated by outsiders. SherianaŽ, SherishanaŽ, and Guaharinbo, for example, are terms applied to them by neighboring Carib-speaking Yekuanaterms that otherwise mean 'howler monkey'. Waika (Guaika) is a distasteful Yanomamoš word meaning "to kill an animal (or man) that is already dying from a wound" (Chagnon 1968:38)a term that one Yanomamoš subtribe would apply, not to itself, but to other subtribes. Samatari, Pubmatari, Nabudub, and Casapare are other Yanomamoš designations, often village names. Because of the inadequacy of some of these words, though they were chosen as subtribal designations by the scholars whose recordings and ethnographies are available (Layrisse and Wilbert 1966:182-208; Wilbert 1966:175-235, 1972a: 13-64), only the following designations, because they are Yanomamoš self-desgnations, should be employed: Yanam, Yanomam, Yanomami (Yanomamoš), and Sanima (Sanema).
With dialects often as diverse as the names for the subtribes, the Yanomamoš language, like Waraoan, was considered independent until Joseph Greenberg (1987:106) included it within the Macro-Chibchan language phylum. The discussion of Yanomamoš language classification continues, and additional comparative linguistic research is needed.
Cultural similarities between the Yanomamoš and the Warao occur, though these cultures are separated by about 1,300 kilometers. Numerous Carib-speaking cultures inhabit the grasslands and forests between them, but the Yanomamoš and the Warao speak languages belonging to the same phylum, have similar views of the world, and share genetic similarities (Layrisse and Wilbert 1966:201-205). Despite these resemblances, however, a big difference between the Warao and the Yanomamoš is that the latter traditionally have no musical instruments, whereas the Warao have many [see
Shamanism
The Yanomamoš traditionally recognize three types of religious practitioners: the hašwišawan priest-shaman (similar to the Warao wisiratu); the kailalaŽ doctor-shaman (similar to the Warao bahanarotu); and the shabori or sabliŽ shaman (similar to the Warao hoarotu). Within today's subtribes, however, contact with Carib and Western cultures has led to the development of variations on this pattern. Some groups, such as the Yanomam, no longer have the priest-shaman (Layrisse and Wilbert 1966:186), while among the Sanima that office has "degenerated" into a kind of wizard (BarandiaraŽn 1965:14).
The most musical of these religious practitioners is the shabori (Yanomam) or sabliŽ (Sanima), also known as sapuli, saboli, shapori, or shaboliwa, depending on the subtribe. His is a favored office, and each Yanomam village "has as many shabori as there are men who wish to enter this status: probably half of the men in each village are shamans" (Chagnon 1968:52).
The most important function for which the shabori or sabliŽ uses music is the curing of illnesses. All illnesses among the Yanomamoš, as indeed among most native South Americans, are believed to be caused by supernatural forces. The intrusion of a foreign hekura (Yanomam) or hiŽkola (Sanima) into the patient's body is a common cause of illness, one that is somewhat analogous to Warao concepts of pathogens. The hekura is a spirit that "exists or lives above, in the top of the heavens or in the mountains," emanating from the "three kingdoms of nature: mineral, vegetable, and animal, and from giant prototypes of all the vegetable and animal species" (BarandiaraŽn 1965:5, translated by Dale A. Olsen). Napoleon A. Chagnon (1992:139) explains that according to Yanomamoš belief, there may be thousands of hekura.
The Yanomamoš have an additional cause of illness: soul loss. It is unlike Warao concepts but resembles those of the Yekuana. "Transformed into hekura, the shamans travel through cosmic space to recover a soul from a demon or from enemies....They transport themselves instantaneously to distant places, traveling horizontally from one point of the compass to another, and vertically to reach the celestial disk or to penetrate into the underworld" (Lizot 1986:124-126). Singing occurs during the shaman's flight of ecstasy to recapture the lost soul, often in imitation of distant spirits the shaman meets.
Besides singing, the principal catalyst used in contacting the spirits is a hallucinogenic snuff, Yanomamoš epena or ebena, Spanish yopo (Virala theidora is the main ingredient). During the actual contacting, the drugged shaman dances in front of his own or his patient's section of the communal roundhouse (shabono) while singing and growling with a sound corresponding to whatever spirit he is contacting. The more the drug takes effect, the louder the shaman sings. During the actual curing, the shaman massages the patient's afflicted part to remove the evil spirit causing the pain. Then, by sucking or pulling, he extracts it from its victim and sends it off into the wind.
Musical style
The predominant melodic terminating patterns (cadences) of Yanomamoš shamanistic songs are based on the interval of a third, manifested in many ways but especially as an approximate minor third. Also found in Yanomam musical grammar, however, are neutral thirds, major thirds, and even augmented thirds. (This intervallic pattern resembles that of Warao curing songs.) Some curing examples of the shabori and sabliŽ begin with an approximate minor third, which after a few seconds expands into a neutral third or a major third. At other times, a minor third is instantly expanded by a glissando. These intervals should be conceived as manifestations of a basic third-ness, fluctuating with the various degrees of the shaman's altered state of consciousness.
Most Yanomam shamanistic music spans a range of only two or three tones (such as tonic, minor third, and fourth). Higher tones are rare, but lower tones are sometimes used in a secondary, grace-note fashion, often with fluctuating definite and indefinite pitches.
Yanomamoš shamanistic music is fast, often with seemingly metrical traits. The music accompanies often frenzied dancing by the shaman under the influence of epena. Grunts, yells, and other extramusical sounds may be employed (
Another extramusical sound peculiar to Yanomamoš shamanistic songs is buzzing of the lips, used in alternation with texted singing. During the portions of the shaman's ritual when he is communicating with his spirits, his buzzing functions as an imitation of the particular spirit being called, or more correctly, is said to be the spirit itself: "When the shaman begins to sing his special call, the distinct hikolas begin to come. The vegetable and animal hikolas come ... with their whispers and hums or buzzes, and others, on the contrary, with thundering loud noises"
During shamanistic curing rituals, the Sanima make use of distinct musical sections, some based on a tiny range and others consistently larger; some involving only a buzzing of the lips and others using words; some fast and others slow. Of the songs of sabliŽ, several are important:
(1) The song of the okamo-haldikeŽ is a night song for exorcising all the adverse spirits and all the possible intrusion of adverse forces or of wandering spirits in the form of jaguars from within the dwelling area of the people. It contains some "bbrrrrrrrbbbrrrrr bbbrrrrs..!!!" that are noisy and grating, and tremendous yells like those used for chasing off enemies or obstacles.... (2) The song of the haa-suluŽ-basuŽ is the song of the feeding preparation for receiving the hikolas. (3) The song of kalideŽ or song of the question "what happens?" is the great shamanistic song in which he explains all the phenomena of humanity, reverts to delimiting and naming the genre of the patient's infliction, and at the same time he calls the hikolas, beginning the job of creating the microcosmos within his soul and chest. (4) The supreme shamanistic song is the huudumuŽsilibeŽ or "melody of the heaven." It is a humming or whispering song, excessively sweet and melodious, in which the shaman, after drugging himself with yopo and taking certain narcotic plants besides yopo, makes his celestial trip to the court of the Supreme Being Omao, asking him the final recourse of his own divine hiŽkola.
These four principal shamanistic songs have the common name of heekulamoŽ, forming part of the unity of performance that is properly shamanistic, with the eruption of the world of the hekoras or hikilas. (BarandiaraŽn 1965:17, translated by Dale A. Olsen)
A large number of short and fast songs are sung by Sanima shamans. One shaman sang thirty-five different songs during a ritual, each sung as many as three times in succession, and almost all of them lasting only as long as a singer's breath. The singer cuts off abruptly, as if suddenly running out of air (
Festivals
A feast (reaho), often to celebrate the dead, is a celebratory event, filled with wailing, singing, mock fighting, and a cannibalistic ritual during which the villagers ingest the ashes of the cremated deceased, mixed into a soup made with crushed bananas and water. Only in this way can the dead person's soul "be preserved as part of the energy reservoir of the community" (Wilbert 1972:61).
The ritual singing of the reaho is nocturnal, communal, and responsorial. A woman leads, followed by a chorus of women, or a shaman leads, followed by a chorus of men (Biocca 1966:252-253). Chagnon (1992:203-205) writes eloquently about his observation of this kind of singing, which occurred in 1965 when two war parties (visitors and hosts) met for a feast, singing, dancing, and chest-pounding duels in the Yanomamoš village where he was doing research:
These exchanges exemplify the blurred boundaries of speech and song (see Okada 1995: example 25), and for that reason Chagnon uses the term chant, rather than song. It is during these melodic recitations that the men from the two villages conduct trade deals, using a highly metaphorical language; when wanting a dog, for example, a man asks for jaguar toenails (Chagnon 1992:205).Shortly after dark, the marathon chanting (waiyamou) began, and it continued until dawn. A man would chant softly, bidding for a man from the other group to come forth and chant with him. A second man would join in, also softly, responding melodically to the first one's chanted phrases. The first man would move slowly toward the second, gradually coming face to face with him, and then he would go into his routine, a highly ritualized, partially memorized monologue that sometimes crescendos into loud staccato screams. The second man, unable to predict what the first is going to say, must respond to each utterance with some twist or nuance of it. It might be a rhyming line or a clever counterpoint, or perhaps a scrambled version, with the words reversed or the order of the syllables changed. It is something like a fast game of Ping-Pong, with the melodic, staccato phrases as the ball. After some fifteen or twenty minutes, the man who has been leading the chant stops, and his partner takes the lead as they continue in the same fashion. When the first pair of chanters has finished, the last one to chant starts bidding for a new partner from the other group, and so it continues.
Individual and collective social and power songs
Men sing mostly during shamanistic and ritual events, but women sing for social reasons and during the feast. Social songs include lullabies, work-related songs, and songs about Yanomamoš life. The last, especially, are important tools of enculturation. Wilbert (1972:40-41) recorded the following individual woman's song, which explains how hunters depend on the food gathered by women:
The Yanomamoš explained the song this way: "Why did the mighty jaguar, the great hunter of the forest, bother to catch and eat a tiny spider? Because he was hungry and had nothing else to eat, that's why." To assist hunters, women sing and dance collectively, so their men will hunt successfully.The spider, waikushihemu,
Stood at the door of his house.
Along came the jaguar,
Who caught and devoured
Poor waikushihemu.
Individual songs of power are also sung by women. Kenneth Good, an American anthropologist who married a Yanomamoš woman, explains (1991:319-320) how his wife sings to a rock-formation spirit, which, if the spirit hears her song, will bring rain, make the river rise, and enable boatmen to pass the rapids safely. Group songs and dances of power are performed by young men and women during evening rituals called amoamo to ensure the success of the men who are off in the forest on a ritual hunt (heniyomou) in preparation for the feast (Chagnon 1992:197).
A shaman acquires the ability to sing during his initiation, when, during a trance and under the effect of epena, he will supernaturally have "his flesh stripped from his bones and replaced with that of the bat, have his throat and chest opened and cleaned of blood, and his tongue pulled out to be replaced with one capable of singing the beautiful shamanic chants" (Wilbert 1972:59). These songs are the property of the male shamans only, and women must never sing them; if they did so, the women would become blind and deaf.
Except for the ritual songs of the reaho and amoamo, women sing their songs among themselves, except when asked by the men to sing for the community. Helena Valero, kidnapped by the Brazilian Yanomamoš in 1937 and forced to live as the wife of a Yanomamoš for twenty years, explains the following: "The women sing women's songs and the men sing men's songs. Every tribe has its favourite songs, and the men are never too shy to sing; but the women are often too shy." She explains how men and boys often ridicule the women: "Many were too shy and would not sing, because often, the next day, the youths who had listened while lying in their hammocks, jeered at them saying: 'You had a little voice, a wretched voice. How ugly your song was!' For this reason some of the young girls used afterwards to cry" (Biocca 1971:179, 181).
Yanomamoš men are aware of the noisiness of their singing when they are under the influence of ebena, and how they are not alert to enemy attacks when they are singing: "In the evening, they performed their dances. Before they began their songs, the [headman] said 'Let no man take epenaŽ. At night, while we are singing, it is possi-ble
About three thousand tropical-forest people known as the Yekuana (Ye'kuana, Yecuana) inhabit portions of the Amazon Territory of southern Venezuela. These portions include the regions of the headwaters of the Ventuari, Cuntinamo, Padamo, and Cunucunuma rivers and the state of BoliŽvar, around the Caura, Erebato, and Paraguya rivers and their tributaries.
Residing in thirty-one villages (one is within Brazil), the Yekuana are Carib-speakers who for decades have erroneously been called by the Arawak term Makiritare 'Water People, River People'. This name was introduced by missionaries, and though it was once used by outsiders as a generic name (Layrisse and Wilbert 1966:72), it is no longer accepted. Among themselves, the people are known as Yekuana 'canoe people, person' (Guss 1989:7-8).
Of the Carib-speaking native Americans in Venezuela, only the Yekuana have managed to continue their traditional ways, which include shamanic rituals, elaborate group ceremonials, and individual music making at leisure. They have inhabited their present locale for several hundred years. They were first met in 1744 by the Jesuit priest RomaŽn, but musical documentation did not occur until 1911-1913, when the German explorer-ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grušnberg made recordings, took photographs, and collected examples of Yekuana music and musical instruments. His recordings provide magnificent examples of what Yekuana music was like before the major acculturative influences of the second half of the twentieth century.
Surprisingly, much of the music associated with shamanism is virtually unchanged from the time of Koch-Grušnberg's recordings; this is proof of the Yekuana people's cultural self-preservation. Outside pressures do exist, especially from American Protestant missionaries, who forbid old customs, drinks, myths, music, and lifeways. As with all other cultures, change is continuous; only the speed at which it occurs is variable.
Because artifacts made from vegetable matter deteriorate quickly in the tropical forest, no Yekuana musical instruments appear in the archaeological record. An array of
Idiophones
The most sacred Yekuana musical instrument is the shaman's rattle (madaka), a container idiophone. With singing, it is the shaman's most important tool. It is made from a single calabash, pierced with an intricately carved heartwood handle, depicting two shamans seated back to back in states of deep concentration or trance (Coppens 1975:2). A typical example is about 45 centimeters long (
The extension of the handle, which pierces the upper end of the rattle, often includes an attachment of the black, velvety feathers of the crimson-crested woodpecker (Campephilus melanoleucus); the Yekuana believe this bird is the double of Wanadi, their cultural hero. The presence of these feathers therefore gives the rattle power. Additional power is provided by wiriki (also spelled widiki) or quartz pebbles, plus the roots of the aiuku and kaahi plants, the shaman's drugsall of which, being contained within the rattle, give the instrument a distinctive sound when the shaman shakes it (Guss 1989:243).
Another sacred idiophone used by the Yekuana is the wasaha, a pole rattle or staff rattle. The rattles that are attached to the top of a pole by a vine consist of seed pods, which strike together when the pole is shaken or tapped on the ground. The musician executing the wasaha is the lead dancer, who keeps time for the chorus, which performs circular movements around the central pole of the circular communal house (Coppens 1975:2). Included within the ensemble of musician-dancers are bamboo clarinets and a drum; the lead clarinetist may manipulate the wasaha with one hand while playing his clarinet with the other.
The Yekuana make a rubbed or friction idiophone (kodedo) from the shell of a tortoise. This instrument is rarely used. The natural openings of the shell are filled with beeswax, and the musician rubs the shell with his hand. It often accompanies another musician playing a panpipe.
Membranophone
The Yekuana struck membranophone drum (samhuŽda) is constructed from a cylindrical section of hollowed-out tree trunk, covered at both ends with skins of jaguar, howler monkey, deer, or peccary. The skins are folded over a thick vine hoop, laced together with smaller vines. The samhuŽda is played with one stick in ensemble with bamboo clarinets and drum or by a singer accompanying himself.
Aerophones
The Yekuana use several edge aerophones, including a panpipe (suduchu), constructed from five small bamboo tubes. It is often accompanied by the friction idiophone. More common are the ductless bone flute (kawadi deješ) and the cane flute (hiŽto, wiŽchu, fhidyu), always played in recreational contexts.
A small, end-blown flute is made from a deer's tibia. In exterior size and construction, it resembles the Warao muhusemoi, which has three fingerholes and a wide notched mouthpiece. In its interior, however, a small beeswax diaphragm is placed between the upper and middle holes. This diaphragm considerably changes the acoustical properties of the Yekuana flute: when a hole is covered, certain pitches ascend, rather than descend. The resulting music sounds like calls of birds.
The hiŽto is a long-tubed end-blown flute with a duct mouthpiece, five holes for fingers, and one hole for a thumb. Unlike most other plug flutes throughout the world, the Yekuana instrument is closed at the distal end. Koch-Grušnberg described this flute, noting the following traits: "the back hole is in the same place as the top front hole, which along with the others are covered with the fingers. The back hole stays open, because if it were not so, the sound would suddenly drop nearly an octave, given that the cane is closed in the distal end by a node, carrying somewhat of a sculpted tab, a particularity that distinguishes it from similar flutes" (quoted in Aretz 1967:219, translated by Dale A. Olsen). He added that the instrument was often played in pairs, and that the two instruments (each of a different size) were often attached by a string. In the 1990s, however, the hiŽto is the favorite instrument of men's leisure, played alone, often in one's hammock.
The bamboo clarinet (tekeyeš, tekeya, wanna) is a ritually important Yekuana instrument. It is an idioglottal single-reed aerophone of the toreŽ-clarinet type (Izikowitz 1970:259), and it is always played in pairs, with one instrument considered male and the other female. The instruments measure from 1 to 1.5 meters long. Koch-Grušnberg observed these clarinets as they were played during a new-house ritual, and his colleague Erich M. von Hornbostel added the following description of their construction:
Each musician blows into the proximal end of the large tube, causing the single reed to vibrate freely without being touched by the player's lips. Because the single free-reed system cannot be seen while the instrument is being played, many observers erroneously call the tekeyeš a bamboo trumpet.The tubes (wanaŽ) are 119 and 117 centimeters long. Each is divided by a partition of resin at 28 centimeters from its proximal end. In the middle of each partition is made a hole into which the sounding device (suruiŽdey) is introduced (if necessary, a wool thread is wrapped around it to to make it fit snugly). This sounding device consists of a short green cane tube closed at its top by a natural node and open at its bottom. The middle portion of the cane is lightly filed, and in its wall a tongue is cut. A thread is attached around the tongue (in the manner of the tuning device for the tubes in our organs) which can be positioned so as to modify the freely vibrating portion of the tongue and thereby raise or lower the pitch of each instrument. (Aretz 1967:264-65, translated by Dale A. Olsen)
According to Coppens (1975:3), "the music played on these clarinets symbolizes the movements and songs of a mythological animal pair." Paired instruments per-form
One of the most important musical instruments of the Yekuana is a bark trumpet (siwo) "made by rolling the inside part of the bark into tight, spiral funnels ... decorated with flowers and fresh shoots, emblems of the new life soon to come" (Guss 1989:34). These trumpets are played by men for the female-fertility rituals of the garden, known as adaha ademi hidi 'garden-song festival'. The term siwo comes from the Yekuana word for the lower windpipe or thorax: "Wanato, the first human, discovered this music when he overheard a group of fish singing in the Orinoco headwaters" (Guss 1989:227).
The final musical instrument of the Yekuana is a conch trumpet (hanawkwa), which, because the Yekuana live a great distance from the ocean, they acquire through intertribal trade. They turn the shell into an end-blown trumpet by boring a hole into its apex. They blow the conch "to announce important events such as the departure for or the return from a long trading expedition or, in former times, the return of a warring party" (Coppens 1975:4).
Unlike Yanomamoš society (in which as many as half the men are shamans) and Warao society (where bahanarotu shamanism is becoming increasingly popular among young men), the Yekuana have few shamans. A reason for this is that many Yekuana medicinal cures and religious festivities do not require the use of a shaman. Those illnesses that are supernaturally caused, however, can only be supernaturally cured by a shaman (huuwai), whose principal function is the curing of illnesses.
Yekuana shamanistic curing rituals take place in the forest, away from villagers' ears (CesaŽreo de Armellada, personal communication, 1974), or at the foot of the central pole of the ceremonial roundhouse (atta), especially in the sacred space known as annaka, representing the innermost circle of heaven, reserved for men (Guss 1989:22).
Curing
The Yekuana categorize three types of illnesses by their causes. The first is an intrusive illness, caused by the bodily intrusion of a harmful essence, a pathogen that can be introduced in a variety of ways: by a malevolent huuwai; by the direct action of certain demons (such as Kanaima and Odo'sha); by the wandering of a dead person's soul, reluctant to leave its old home (BarandiaraŽn 1962:84); by an animal spirit set loose because the beast was killed by a man who has a sick child; or by "the overwhelming charge of vital energy experienced by the invalid's progenitor in moments of danger" (Wilbert 1972:158). The second form of illness is caused by a violation or rupture of the strict hierarchy of the patient's vital energies, or by "a transgression of the moral or ethical code of the tribe" (Wilbert 1972:159). The third type of illness is caused by the loss or theft of the soul, a common ailment because the Yekuana believe that each person has six souls.
Possibly as a result of this diversity and the low number of shamans in a given community, recorded examples of Yekuana songs of curing are rare. Examples available include six songs recorded in 1971 and two others from one of the first expeditions among the Yekuana by Koch-Grušnberg (Coppins 1975). Another example from the Koch-Grušnberg collection exists in a notation made by von Hornbostel (1955-1956). These examples, recorded sixty years apart, reveal nearly identical melodies, showing the consistency of shamanic music for curing.
Other songs of power
Shamanism is a male domain, but the Yekuana have many other songs of power for everyday use among women and men, individually and collectively. Most items brought into use among the Yekuana must be purified with a solo song (yechumadi) or a collective song (ademi). Solo songs suffice for small items, such as the purification of healing herbs, body paints, food, artifacts, and so forth; collective songs, however, are employed for large things, such as the inauguration of a new communal roundhouse dwelling, the annual garden-song festival, or the welcoming of travelers (Guss 1989:65). Naturally, the collective songs take much longer than the individual songseven several days, as each part of the large event or item must be musically named. The atta ademi hidi sung over a new house "must carefully focus on every detail, from the largest crossbeam to the smallest piece of thatch" (Guss 1989:66).
Other individual songs of power called ademi are short and private, performed daily to name the spirits associated with each object with which a person comes in contact, such as a particle of food, a musical instrument, a utensil for eating or drinking, a tool, a bow, an arrow, a hammock, and so on. Everything has to be made safe for human use through song: "It is through these chants, with the help of paints and herbs when appropriate, that the invisible dangers inherent in each object are neutralized.... No object, no matter what its origin, is ever integrated into the Yekuana world without first being purified by the corresponding chant" (Guss 1989:146). So important is this concept that death can result if a song is not properly performed. The power comes from the special words and the singer's breath; the proper union of words and breath (the singer's spiritual essence) provides the individual with power to communicate with the spiritual essence of the object and cleanse it, making it safe and suitable for use.
The garden-song festival
The largest communal musical event is the adaha ademi hidi 'garden-song festival' (literally, 'to sing garden'), which marks the transference of the gardens from men's concerns to women's. It converts the center of each garden into a centerpost linking the earth to heaven, serving as a conduit for the supernatural powers of growth.
During this festival, which may last several days, the women sing softly in a high register (always falsetto), and the men blow bark trumpets. The women's singing, led by a female songmaster, is a lengthy narrative (the "Garden Song") serving several functions: it recalls the origin of the plants and the first garden, explains the genesis of important entities in the physical world (celestial bodies, lightning, honey, various animals, cultural heroes), cleanses the men (infested by spirits in the forest), and protects the women (Guss 1989:36). It becomes a competition of music and dance. The ritual spaces shift from the communal male roundhouse to the communal female garden, endowing each with collective male-female power to exorcise and purify.
Possibly because the Yekuana are an agricultural society, they make music and dance together as a way of strengthening their ideology. Living in a communal roundhouse, clearing and planting a communal garden, and undertaking other communal efforts habituate them to adopt cooperative approaches to many kinds of ritual endeavors.
Music and dance, when joined, create a pulsation describable as singing "in a syncopated responsive style" (Guss 1989:35). This contrasts with the quieter aesthetic of nondanced female singing, when women interpret their collective songs. Likewise, male shamanistic singing is quiet. When individual-to-spirit or group-to-spirit communication is involved and purification or curing is hoped for, the singer's words are often secretive and the delivery guarded. Although this behavior is perhaps
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Learning
Performance and the Aesthetics of Music and Dance
The Kogi (Cogui, Kogui; also called Kagaba and CaŽgaba), about six thousand native Americans, inhabit the northern foothills and slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northeastern Colombia. Speaking a Macro-Chibchan-derived language, they are related to the SaŽha (SankaŽ) on the eastern slopes of the sierra and to the Ika (Ijca, Bintukua, Arhuaco) in the southern region (Tayler 1972:13). Of these groups, the Ika are the most acculturated, and the Kogi are the least.
The Kogi life-style and system of beliefs reflect their isolation and religiosity. Scholars hypothesize, and the Kogi believe, that they are descendants of the ancient Tairona, a civilization that once inhabited the vicinity of the northern and western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The conquistadors enslaved many Tairona men, women, and children, killed their chiefs and priests, and caused the remaining people (ancestors of the Kogi) to withdraw into rugged terrain, the forests of the sierra.
Archaeological investigation has revealed that the Tairona lived in numerous federations of large villages (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1965). Each village consisted of hundreds of circular dwellings built on stone foundations, much like Kogi settlements. Stone sepulchers, stone systems of irrigation, stone-walled terraces, and stone-paved roads led from one village to another. The Tairona founded ceremonial centers in mountain retreats, to which they made pilgrimages. In addition to working in stone, they were adept at ceramics and metallurgy.
Thousands of excavated ceramic objects detail many aspects of Tairona life and beliefs. Hundreds more are musical instruments (flutes and ocarinas), made in lifelike shapes of humans and animals and in highly stylized versions of both. Small, ceramic, some side-blown but most with fipple (duct) mouthpieces, these instruments were probably musical-effigy figurines, regarded as powerful tools for supernatural use. In addition to these items, early Spanish chroniclers mentioned several musical instruments of the Tairona and other Native Americans of the sierra. In 1514, Gonzalo FernaŽndez de Oviedo y ValdeŽs described log idiophones suspended from rafters inside Tairona temples: they "make large drums from about six or seven palms in length, made from the hollow trunk of large trees" (quoted in Reichel-Dolmatoff 1951:93). Other chroniclers describe "cornetas" and conch trumpets, instruments of loud sounds and possible priest-congregation ceremonial use. However, that these
Because the Kogi claim to be descendants of the Tairona, because of their proximity to the homeland of Tairona civilization, and because they often refer to the Tairona (and even use ancient artifacts for religious purposes), Kogi ideas about religious beliefs, the life-death cycle, magical protection, and other ideologies help explain the uses and functions of the Tairona musical-effigy figurines. Contemporary usage with regard to musical instruments, however, reveals little Tairona continuity (BermuŽdez 1985; List n.d., 1983; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-1950, 1953).
Aerophones
Around their necks, Kogi dancers wear ceramic whistles (huiŽbiju), which they blow intermittently while dancing. The whistles may once have symbolized totemic animals (bats, foxes, jaguars, owls), though today, having lost their totemic power, they serve only as musical instruments. The continuity of their use, however, suggests a musical connection between the Tairona and the Kogi. By ethnographic analogy, one can hypothesize about the function of the ceramic musical-effigy figurines among the Tairona. By the 1950s, clay ocarinas that represent birds and other animals were serving in ceremonies whose function is to ward off illnesses.
The major Kogi aerophone is a duct flute, the kuiŽsi (kuizi), a vertically held instrument, which mestizos colloquially call a hatchet flute. Its shape is unique: its mouthpiecea quill, set into a flattened mass of beeswax mixed with charcoalresembles the blade of an ax. The beeswax secures a thin quill (eagle, seagull, turkey), which serves as a tube to transmit the player's breath. The body of the flute, made from cane (carrizo), is up to 60 centimeters long and resembles the handle of an ax. With a smoldering splinter, the flutist himself (never a woman) burns in the holes for fingering, and he uses a hardened splinter to round them. He calculates the distances between the holes as the width of two fingers and half the width of his thumb; he calculates the length of the flute as three times the span of his extended thumb and little finger, plus the span of his extended thumb and index finger.
The Kogi play kuiŽsi only in pairs, the kuiŽsi sigi 'male flute' and the kuiŽsi bunzi 'female flute'or more commonly, kuiŽsi macho and kuiŽsi hembra, respectively. The male instrument has one hole for fingering, and the female has five (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-50:71 reverses the flutes and the number of holes). The player of the male flute shakes a rattle in one hand while playing his flute with the other. In the mestizo-Kogi village of AtaŽnquez, the player of the female flute often fills one of the holes with waxwhich "alters the series of fundamentals and overtones that can
The Kogi employ a large trumpet, the nung-subaldaŽ. Each trumpet produces but one tone. Made from totuma, the fruit of the calabash tree (Crescentia Cujete), it can be fairly long and somewhat curved. Its mouthpiece is an opening in the calabash.
Other instruments
The tani, a container rattle, is about 20 centimeters long. It is an ovoid calabash into which small stones or dried seeds are placed. A short, cylindrical, wooden handle fits tightly into its bottom, fastened with cotton or hemp thread and packed with beeswax. The exterior of the calabash is sometimes decorated with dotted lines or is punctured many times with little holes. The instrument is played only by the man who plays the male flute. In acculturated situations, one man may play two rattlesone in each handas an accompaniment to flutes.
The Kogi make an idiophone from the shell of an armadillo and another from the shell of a tortoise. They scrape the former like a rasp and rub the latter. The shell (morrocoyo), covered with a resin and rubbed with a wet hand, produces a sound whose pitch depends on the size of the shell.
The Kogi employ several drums. One has a long, cylindrical body with a single oxskin head, fastened and tuned by rope and wedges. Placed on its end, it is struck with one stick and the fingers of one hand. The Kogi use it to make rain. Another membranophone, also played by a male, has two skins and is played with two sticks; its use is secular. Yet another, smaller drum has a single head; it is played by a woman, who holds it under her arm and strikes it with two sticks.
The Kogi are unwilling to sing songs outside their proper contexts, especially for strangers; therefore, recorded examples are rare. As late as 1974, the Colombian Institute of Anthropology, in BogotaŽ, had in its archives only one recording of Kogi shamanistic music, including a song for making rain (
The central person in Kogi musical performance is the priest (mama), who musically presides over religious ceremonies that probably derive from ancient Tairona rituals. Central to the Tairona religion, according to the Kogi, was a jaguar god, KashinduŽcua; but in the mid-1900s, the Kogi sacred being was a mother-deity, Guateovan or Nebulwe, creator of the sun. Her sons and daughters are the founders of the ancient clans, TuŽxe and DaŽke, representing male and female descent groups distinguished by colors and designs on cloaks, the plans of houses, words, songs, and dances (Tayler 1972:13).
Many Kogi individual and collective ceremonies that include music and dance address the anxiety Kogi men have about their mortality. Death preoccupies them,
Kogi culture teaches male children to follow strictly the culturally determined behavioral path, lest they be exposed to danger. Through mythology, transmitted in song or ceremonial speech, boys learn about the supernatural dangers of natural and atmospheric phenomena (echoes, lightning, rainbows, stones, thunder, trees) believed to be entities in whose presence one must carefully tread: most "myths, tribal traditions, descriptions of the ceremony, and other themes are sung, and the people learn by way of these songs" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-1950:73).the prevention of illness, and masked dances are performed on these occasions with singing of chants and songs concerning the closing of gates and roads to illness. During these ceremonies, besides the masks, ceremonial staffs are used and clay whistles shaped like birds and felines are blown on. The ceremonies include the blowing of long-necked gourd trumpets, the playing of single and double membrane ceremonial drums, maracas and paired flutes (Tayler 1972:14).
Musical knowledge is a Kogi measure of status. Selected boys learn ceremonial songs and dances beginning at ages five or six. Seated, the mama puts his hands on the hips of a standing boy, who wears a heavy wooden mask. Humming, reciting, or shaking a rattle, he rhythmically molds the child's body. After two years of this education, he begins teaching the boys to sing. He guides them through songs, spells, and myths, covering the main cosmological figures and events. Some items are in an ancient ceremonial language that only he fully understands. The boys memorize related texts, melodies, and motions. The Kogi say children learn to dance before they learn to walk (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976:279).
Giving importance to animals for protection against disease and misfortune, the Kogi consider them ancestors. Therefore, the Kogi practice a form of totemism in which a particular animal offers magical protection. One method for obtaining supernatural power from the animals is through dances and songs that imitate these animals: "animal imitation dances and songs, and those that are performed as a means of asking the animals for help, are the strict 'property' of those individuals who descended from a particular ancestral animal" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-50:188). Thus, the preoccupation with death among Kogi males of all ages, priests and non-priests alike, has caused them to acquire methods for facing danger and ultimately for preventing death through the use of dance and music. The concern for prolonged life probably derives from the pre-Columbian past, since the intangible elements of belief, such as concern for the life-death cycle, are the most resistant to change.
Kogi men's style of singing is unusual: a singer inhales audibly,
This description pertains to men's singing only, as the women rarely sing ceremonial songs. During ceremonies, the mama and other men employ ritual singing and ritual conversation, both of which are similarly intense in delivery.contracts his abdominal muscles, and lets the air escape very slowly from his half open mouth, sustaining the singing tone until completely using up the air contained in his lungs. Violently and noisily he inhales again and then lets out the air again, all with great physical force and muscular tension. For the Kogi, the art of singing consists of retaining the air for the longest time possible while sustaining a tone or certain modulations of tones without breathing. Extreme volume contrasts are employed. Sometimes, for example, the beginning of the song is almost inaudible, then it slowly increases in volume and then diminishes, according to the rhythm of the song or the movement of the singer's body. Generally the songs
are nasalized and sung in a high falsetto, which is characteristic not only of the songs, but also for all the ceremonial conversation. From this falsetto he then descends one octave to his lowest tone which he sustains until he either rises again in pitch or sings the melody once more. This manner of singing requires considerable physical force, and the singer often finishes completely spent and covered in sweat. (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-1950:72; translated by Dale A. Olsen)
Ritual songs often use vocables, lexically meaningless syllables, fixed from performance to performance. The song in
Singers of ceremonial songs sometimes accompany themselves by dancing. The performance has three sections. First, after starting to sing, the dancer
In the second section, the dancer takes quick or short steps, or walks on his knees, moving in a straight line. He turns toward the spot where he began singing and dancing; again he makes convulsive gestures. In the third section, he circuitously returns to where he started. Sometimes he makes figure-eights, turns and moves in the opposite direction, or "jumps on one foot, rapidly crossing the other in front of or behind him after each jump" (Ibid.). In addition to these dances, the Kogi dance collectively for the fertility of crops. Such dances imitate "the movements of planting, harvest, or coitus.... Various individuals dance, forming lines, walking one behind the other. Only rarely do they dance in a circle and when they do the dancers hold hands" (Ibid.). Women do not dance during religious ceremonies. They dance only during the curing of illnesses, when their participation can drive away evil spirits and other dangers. Traditionally, Kogi men and women never danced together.puts his weight from one foot to the other, slowing down little by little, while his arms dangle the length of his body, one hand holding the small calabash container filled with lime for his coca [a stimulant every Kogi male enjoys]. Slowly the rhythm again intensifies, and the dancer lifts one foot and stomps it on the floor, then the other, accompanying these gestures with rapid movements from his shoulders or head, resembling painful convulsions. (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1949-1950:72-73; translated by Dale A. Olsen).
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Performers and Performances
Further Study
Tropical-forest spirits singing with beautiful voices, fruit scattering on the forest floor, a scissors-tailed kite circling high above the forest canopyit's time to sing a magical protection hoa song, or you will die! So believe the Warao of eastern Venezuela, deep within the tropical forest of the Orinoco River Delta. "And so many Warao die because they do not know the songs," says Jaime, a Warao elder and religious leader. The Warao speak and sing in a language believed to belong to the Chibchan-Paezan phylum, making them related to the Yanomamoš, Kogi, Kuna, and other native Americans in northwestern South America (Greenberg 1987:382).
The designation Warao is their name for themselves; they are the canoe people (wa 'canoe', arao 'owners of'), and their traditional world is the swamp of the Orinoco River Delta, known politically as the Delta Amacuro Federal Territory. They are also the song people (wara 'ritual song communication', arao 'owners of'), and magical singing is as essential to them as canoeing (Olsen 1996).
Most Warao (also spelled Warrau, Guarao, Guarauno) live in houses built on pilings over water. Each extended family shares a cluster of houses. Because the delta is a web of rivers and streams, constituting about 26,500 square kilometers, the Warao are a riverine fishing people, though they were not always so. In ancient times, they lived in the jungle, siting their villages next to groves of moriche palms. This palm, then as today, has provided the Warao with essentials of life, including mortal food for themselves and spiritual food for their patron being, Kanobo (Our Grandfather). Also during ancient times, the Warao were primarily gatherers and occasionally hunters; today, they have added horticulture to their food-quest activities. They have always needed to travel through swampy jungles, by land as well as by water, in search of food or cosmological sustenance.
Until about the 1950s, isolation kept the Warao relatively free from contact with European- and African-derived cultures. For this reason, they are many in number and rich in traditional culture. Extensive missionization of the Warao began in 1925, when Spanish Capuchin missionaries founded mission schools in the delta. Even in the late 1990s, these missionaries control the area, and Protestant missionization, common in other parts of the South American tropical forest, has not been possible.
Other locally acculturative forces of the late twentieth century are creole-owned
The Warao live closer to the Caribbean Islands than the people of any other native South American culture. Trinidad is a short distance by sea, north of the delta. Some musical traits of extant Warao culture resemble those noted in historical accounts of indigenous Caribbeans, especially the Taino or Island Arawak; the most important of these traits involve musical instruments, festivals, and shamanic tools common to the Warao and the Taino. These peoples share some religious and musical similarities with the Yanomamoš, a thousand kilometers to the southwest.
The Warao use ten traditional musical and noisemaking instruments in shamanistic rituals, nonshamanistic ceremonies, and signaling. They play two borrowed instruments for entertainment. They retain knowledge of three other instruments, but these belong to an extinct part of the culture and are no longer used.
The ten surviving traditional instruments are four idiophones, sewei (strung rattle), habi sanuka (small container rattle), hebu mataro (large container rattle), and a small woven wicker container rattle; one membranophone, the ehuru (double-headed drum); and five aerophones, muhusemoi (deer-bone notched vertical flute), hekunukabe (cane vertical flute), isimoi (clarinet), heresemoi (conch trumpet), and bakohi (bamboo or cow-horn trumpet). The recently borrowed instruments are two chordophones: sekeseke (violin) and wandora (Venezuelan cuatro).
The following classification, based on the production of sounds, serves for an objective study. The Warao themselves suit their instruments to certain cultural contexts: religious ritual and dance, shamanism, traveling in the jungle or on water in search of food, entertainment, and tourism. Some of these contexts cause the overlapping use of certain instruments.
Idiophones
The religious dances known as habi sanuka (for fertility) and nahanamu (for harvest) are occasions for attaching strung rattles (sewei) to male dancers' right ankles. Consisting of numerous small hoofs, seeds, nuts, fruits, or beetle wings threaded on a string, these rattles are sacred instruments, whose sounds enhance the rhythms of the dancing. Women never use strung rattles. As gifts from the Kanobo, they have great value; only village chiefs or shamans own them.
The habi sanuka, a small container rattle, is used by Warao men and women, led by a bahanarotu shaman during the fertility festival of the same name (see below). It is made from the fruit of the calabash tree (Crescentia cujete), known as mataro or totuma in the delta. The fruit is filled with small stones, pieces of shells, or black seeds, and is pierced by a wooden handle. The total length of this rattle is 23 centimeters.
The hebu mataro is a huge calabash container rattle about 70 centimeters long. It serves for the festival of nahanamu and in wisiratu shamanism (see below). No instrument among the Warao is more important than this rattle, whose size, sound, symbolism,
The Warao believe the hebu mataro capable of profound spiritual help as a "head-spirit" (Wilbert 1993:133). The handle (the leg), which pierces the calabash (the head), is made from a stick of wood, and the stones (the voice) are small quartz pebbles, which are not found in the central delta but must be brought from Tucupita, the territorial capital. When the hebu mataro belongs to a powerful wisiratu priestshaman
The hebu mataro is usually gripped and shaken with both hands while the player dances during the festival of nahanamu and while he cures illnesses. In the latter context, a wisiratu shaman will usually begin his work of curing by sitting on a bench, singing, and shaking his hebu mataro (
Tourism accounts for the existence of one Warao musical instrumenta small, finely woven, wicker rattle, about the same size as the habi sanuka. It is simply a toy, most often made for sale to tourists in the Venezuelan towns of Tucupita and Barrancas.
Membranophone
A double-headed skin drum known as ehuru (or eruru) is used by the Warao while traveling through the jungle in quest of food and to the morichal (grove of moriche palms) to prepare for the nahanamu. In those contexts, it often accompanies singing; it has the secondary function of letting those behind the drummer and those ahead at the destination know where they are. Additionally, the Warao use the ehuru to frighten off jaguars and evil spirits that lurk in the jungle when the Warao go off to gather the starch for nahanamu (Turrado Moreno 1945:227).
A hollowed log cut into the shape of an hourglass, the ehuru has heads usually made from the skins of howler monkeys. The player strikes one end with a single stick; the other end has a snare made of twisted moriche-fiber string and toothpick-sized thorns.
Chordophones
Solely for entertainment, the Warao use two stringed instruments: a violin and a wandora, a small, four-stringed guitar, like the Venezuelan cuatro.
The sekeseke is an often crude copy of a European violin, especially of the Renaissance prototype of the modern violin. A bow, slightly arched at each end, is made from a branch with several dozen loose strands of cotton fibers attached. Warao bowing especially resembles European Renaissance bowed-lute technique.
According to Warao lore, the sekeseke was first fabricated and transported to the Warao in a ship captained by Nakurao, a man-monkey from a far-off land. This creature, who had the upper torso of a man and the lower torso of a monkey, learned how to make the violin in a dream.
Aerophones
The music for the Warao nahanamu includes two wind instruments, the muhusemoi and the isimoi.
The muhusemoi (muhu 'bone', semoi 'wind instrument') is a bone flute made from the tibia of a deer (
During the nahanamu, several muhusemoi are played in ensemble with two isimoi clarinets, several strung rattles, and hebu mataro. Men may play several bone flutes with the ehuru drum while traveling by foot in the jungle. If a man does not own a muhusemoi, he may fabricate a hekunakabe, a disposable plant-stalk flute with the same proportions as the bone flute. After the travelers have reached their destination, the men play their instruments again while women collect and prepare moriche-palm starch (yuruma) for Kanoboa process undertaken in preparation for the nahanamu.
The most sacred wind instrument played during the festival is a heteroglot clarinet without holes, the isimoi, made and played by the musical leader of the festival, the "owner of the isimoi." The Warao believe that, according to the ancients, the isimoi has a spirit that is the same as Kanobo.
The owner of an isimoi plays his instrument in duet with another isimoi played by an apprentice; the former has a lower pitch. Though the isimoi does not have holes, by increasing and decreasing the air pressure a skillful player can produce two distinct notes at the interval of a minor third, plus limited microtonal glissandi. Like the first interval produced by most muhusemoi flutes, and like the basic interval of Warao shamanistic music for curing, an approximate minor third is the interval that fundamentally identifies most Warao music.
The end-blown conch trumpet, heresemoi, is an important instrument in Warao culture, though it is associated primarily with canoeing during the crabbing season. Basically a signaling instrument used for giving directions to canoes at night, and to signal the departure and arrival of the crabbing canoes, it can be blown to announce the death of a tribal member, to signal the annual trek to the morichal in preparation for nahanamu, to announce the completion of a newly made canoe (Furst 1965:27), and "to herald each new phase in the process of felling and trimming the tree and scooping out the trunk" of the tree from which a canoe is built (Wilbert 1993:55).
Electronic sound devices
Generally, modern Venezuelan material culture has had little effect on Warao music. A tr?ansistor radio may occasionally appear in a village, but the lack of receivable broadcasts and the expense of batteries work against its use and survival. In Warao villages adjacent to Roman Catholic missions, small phonographs can be found, and children can occasionally be seen dancing to Venezuelan creole music from scratchy 45-rpm records.
By far the most important Warao context for making music is theurgy (supernatural communication), and the most common kind is healing. Sickness and accidents abound, and though their causes are always attributed to the supernatural, some require the help of a shaman. Song, however, is always the most powerful medium for curing.
Music and the work of shamans
The Warao view of the world specifies three types of cosmological practitioners loosely classifiable as shamans: wisiratu, who oversee the apex of the Warao celestial dome and communicate with ancestral spirits; bahanarotu, who communicate with the eastern part of the cosmos where the sun rises, a good place; and hoarotu, who appease the spirits of the dead in the west where the sun sets, a bad place.
One of the most important duties of these specialists is curing illnesses caused by the intrusions of foreign essences. Through an ecstatic technique, culturally induced with the aid of music and tobacco smoke, shamans transform themselves into powerful entities able to sustain contact with the spiritual world to determine the illness-causing essences and how they got into their patients. Each type of shaman has a melodically and textually distinct set of songs for curing.
In all cases, the curer must name the illness-causing spiritual essence. When
The wisiratu shaman has three melodically and textually differentiated sections to his curing-song cycle. These respectively function to release and communicate with the helping spirits that reside within his chest, to name the illness-causing essence, and to communicate with the spirit essence after it has been removed and before it is blown off into the cosmos. The first of these, characterized by masking of the voice, has the narrowest melodic range, consisting of two or three notes based on the terminating interval (cadence) of a minor third (such as fourth, minor third, tonic). This section of his curing song is accompanied throughout by the hebu mataro, which is at times vigorously shaken as a means to punish the illness-causing hebu.
The second section is the naming section, in which the shaman seeks out the illness-causing spirit within the patient. It does not include masking of the voice, and in it the rattle is only minimally played. Guided by the patients symptoms, the wisiratu names animate and inanimate objects from the Warao physical, vegetable, or cosmic worldobjects that he suspects are causing the illness. This section is characterized by the widest melodic range, again based on the terminating interval of a minor third (such as fifth, fourth, minor third, tonic). In the naming excerpt transcribed in
The third section of the wisiratu curing-song cycle, when the shaman communicates with the illness-causing spirit, is an unmasked, high-pitched, one-note recitation.
The bahanarotu shaman cures gastrointestinal and gynecological illnesses caused by the intrusion of essences of material objects (believed to be the material objects themselves) that living or ancestral malevolent bahanarotu shamans have placed into a victim via magical arrows. He is the ritual specialist pertaining to hokonemu, the misty, easternmost part of the Warao cosmos and the tobacco-smoke home of Mawari, the supreme bahana bird.
Like the wisiratu, the bahanarotu sings musical sections that differ melodically and functionally. The first, in which the shaman communicates and releases his helping spirits from his chest, is characterized by masking of the voice, and has a narrow range that emphasizes major-second and minor-third terminating intervals in about equal proportion. This is followed by a second section, similar to the first except that the voice is not masked, and the function includes dialogues with helping and malevolent spirits.
When the bahanarotu finishes the second part of his ritual, he begins to suck on the patient's body where the illness is believed to be located, removing the illness-causing material object. Accompanied by noisy slurps and gagging sounds, the shaman produces a saliva-covered object from his mouth, such as a thorn, a nail, or a piece of rope. This, he says, was causing the illness.
If the bahanarotu shaman does not detect and remove an object, or if the removal causes no relief, he will continue singing a third section, in which he names what he believes to be the illness-causing object itself and its supernatural cause. This third part, the naming section, which has the widest melodic range of his curing ritual and melodically resembles the naming section of wisiratu curing, is used only when an object has been placed within the patient via the magical arrows of the supernatural bahana wizards living in hokonemu. The curing wizard names as many objects as he can, until the patient's body begins to vibrate, when he once again applies suction to extract the pathogen.
The third type of Warao shaman, the hoarotu, attempts to cure deadly diarrheal or hemorrhagic illnesses, believed to be caused by the supreme deity of the western part of the Warao cosmos. This cosmic place where the sun dies is the abode of Hoebo (symbolically represented by a scarlet macaw) and his accomplices, the living-dead hoarotu shamans of eternity. Hoebo and his court, who feast on human flesh and drink human blood from human bones, must be fed by living hoarotu shamans. Through dreams, a living hoarotu receives a message to provide food for his supernatural leaders, which he accomplishes through inflicting songs ("sung" mentally) for killing other Warao (Olsen 1996), especially children. (Warao cite this practice in explanation of high infant mortality among them.) This inflicting genre employs an ascending two-note melody based on a major second (sung aloud only when being taught to an apprentice) in which the shaman names the essences that he will place into his victim.
Living hoarao (plural form) are called upon by the families of the patients to cure what are believed to be hoa illnesses. Through performing a curing ritual characterized by singing a descending naming melody similar to those employed by the wisiratu and bahanarotu shamans, but with different words and spiritual intent, a hoarotu
A fourth kind of affliction among the Warao requires musical healing, though the curer need not be a shaman. This is a physical and often external ailment of the body, such as a wound from a knife or a hatchet, the sting of a bee or a scorpion, the bite of a snake, a bruise, an internal problem during childbirth, an abscessed tooth, and others. These ailments are believed to be caused by supernatural powers possessing the objects or animals and causing them to harm the Warao. A cure is effected by knowing the proper prayerful song (boa), sung directly to the body or the object or animal that inflicted the condition, and by blowing tobacco smoke over the patient.
The power of music can be used malevolently. Only the hoarotu shaman, however, inflicts illnessand andeven deaththrough song. This genre employs an ascending two-note melody, in which the shaman names the essences he will place into his victim.
Another kind of hoa serves for magical protection against supernaturally altered animals and ogres (Olsen 1996). These songs rely on the power of naming the danger, and on the melodic aspect of the song itself. The following musical text is for protection from a transformed mera 'lizard' about which the singer said: "The mera comes transformed to eat us. This isn't from here, but is in the jungle. It comes to hunt us and to kill us. This hoa is good for saving oneself, when he leaves for the jungle":
You are arriving. You were born in the earth. This is your movement; this is your name. You were born in the earth. You are a small lizard of the earth, a little lizard of the jungle. This is your movement, and this is your name. Go away from me. Make your path, because the world is large. This is your movement, small lizard of the jungle, little lizard of the earth.
Like other Warao songs for controlling the supernatural, these have their own individual melodic patterns.
A supernatural charm, the mare-hoa, is employed for enticing a woman to love a man: the man names all the parts of a woman's body, causing her to find him irresistible. Another kind of hoa is sung during the ritual for felling a large tree from
Utility
Another common Warao context for music is utility, including lullabies and songs for working and traveling in the jungle, often with drum accompaniment.
Lullabies are sung by men and women, and often have texts that teach older children about Warao life and beliefs, including the dangers of ogres and animals. "Go to sleep, little child, or the jaguar-ogre which has no bones will think you are a deer and eat you" is a common theme. The educative aspect of the lullabies is an important form of Warao enculturation.
Work-related songs once had an entertainment context. Known as dakoho, they are dance songs whose dance context is obsolete. They are more commonly sung to ease the work of men and women, to accompany the paddling of canoes, to augment drinking, or just for relaxing around the house. The excerpt transcribed as
Unlike theurgical songs and the other songs of utility, most work-related songs have Western melodic traits. Many of them can effectively be accompanied with standard tonic, dominant, and subdominant harmonies, though the most common practice is to sing them unaccompanied. They are occasionally played on the seke-seke, or less often accompanied on the wandora. When and how this aspect of acculturation occurred is unknown. Dakoho from the 1930s and 1940s notated by the Spanish missionary Basilio MariŽa de Barral (1964:253-574) display more traditional traits than those I collected in the 1970s.
When the Warao walk through the forest to get to the morichal to find large cachicamo trees (which they cut down for building canoes), to visit neighboring villages not easily accessible by canoe, or to gather food, they sing songs. Led by a male player of the ehuru drum, the songs keep the group together and help maintain the walking pace.
Most Warao makers of music are adults, though children, because of the constancy and closeness of family and village contact, learn all kinds of songs informally from adults. Occasionally children will sing hoa prayers to themselves to ease their pain from cuts, stings, or bruises. Likewise, dance songs and popular Venezuelan songs are a part of some children's musical repertoire, especially those who attend Roman Catholic mission schools in the delta.
Though women have been shamans, most singers of theurgical songs are men. The older the male adult, the more likely he knows the important theurgical songs, whether he is a shaman or some other leader of his village. Because Warao male elders are highly respected as leaders of families, knowledge of the songs increases the opportunity to sing them.
All Warao men must have a role within their society. Without a social positionas shaman, maker of baskets or canoes, keeper of the isimoi, and so forthmen would have no place to go with their wives after death except to the western part of the cosmos, the place of eternal death. And nearly all Warao roles, from shaman to artisan, include songs of power.
The underlying structure of Warao theurgical music is not an aesthetic one. It is based on the proper knowledge of the melodic formulas determined by context, and on the ability to choose words that will effectively communicate with the proper supernatural entities for accomplishing the appropriate tasks. This lack of aesthetic concern is typical of lullabies and other secular songs. The Warao sometimes, however, comment that someone is a good singer of dakohoa reference to knowledge and ability. Other than the knowledge of dakoho or Venezuelan popular songs, there is no musical creolization or mestization between the Warao and African- or Spanish-derived Venezuelansa factor caused by the Warao's physical isolation.
Recent books about the Warao are by Dale A. Olsen (1996), which explores the role of Warao music as power and pleasure, and by Johannes Wilbert (1993, 1996), which studies Warao cosmology, including some uses of music. Additionally, Charles L. Briggs (1993, 1996) has studied several areas of Warao music, including ritual wailing and healing.
Furst, Peter T. 1965. "West Mexico, the Caribbean and Northern South America." AntropoloŽgica 14:1-37.
Girard, Sharon. 1997. Review of Music of the Warao of Venezuela: Song People of the Rain Forest, by Dale A. Olsen. Latin American Music Review 18(2):331-337.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Olsen, Dale A. 1996. Music of the Warao of Venezuela. The Song People of the Rain Forest. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Book and compact disc. Turrado Moreno, A. 1945. Etnografia de los Indios GuarauŽnos. Interamerican Conference on Agriculture III. Cuadernos Verdes 15. Caracas: LithografiŽa y TipografiŽa Vargas. Wilbert, Johannes. 1993. Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. -----. 1996. Mindful of Famine: Religious Climatology of the Warao Indians. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Further Study
The area the present-day GuaraniŽ inhabit is much smaller than the area they inhabited in the 1500s, when they first encountered Europeans. Because of the activities of Jesuits, who gathered GuaraniŽ people from various localities and put them in the same mission towns (reduccioŽnes 'reductions'), and the genetic mixing of the GuaraniŽ with Europeans, subtribes mentioned by Spanish conquistadors and missionaries have disappeared.
Since the 1700s, the GuaraniŽ who resisted Jesuit missionary activities and did not become integrated into the greater mestizo Paraguayan culture have been known collectively as CainguaŽ or Ca'aguaŽ ('inhabitants of the forest'). The names that designate individual GuaraniŽ groups appear to have originated in the 1700s.
The Eastern Paraguayan CainguaŽ can be divided into three groups: the MbyaŽ (also known as Mbwiha, Ava-mbihaŽ, CaayguaŽ, ApytereŽ, and Baticola), the ChiripaŽ (also known as Ava-GuaraniŽ and Ava-katuŽ-eteŽ), and the PaiŽ-tavyteraŽ (also known as Pan~). The MbyaŽ live mostly in the departments of Alto ParanaŽ and ItapuŽa. Some live in the region around Corpus in the Argentine province of Misiones, and others are widely scattered throughout the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, ParanaŽ, and Rio Grande do Sul. The ChiripaŽ live south of the JejuaŽ-guazuŽ River and along both banks of the upper ParanaŽ River, along the YuytorocaiŽ River, and north of the IguassuŽ River. The PaiŽ-tavyteraŽ live north of the Jejui-Guazu River. Of these groups, the MbyaŽ remain the least acculturated, and the ChiripaŽ are the most acculturated. In addition to these three groups, the Chiriguano (Chiriwano) are a GuaraniŽ group in the Chaco area west of the Paraguay River, extending into Argentina and Bolivia. Several groups of GuaraniŽ (including the Apapocuva and the TanyguaŽ) found in Brazil regard themselves as distinct from the CainguaŽ of Paraguay, though they are closely related.
The archaeological record of pre-Columbian GuaraniŽ musical culture is scant; it contains only a few end-blown bone flutes. Among the reasons for the scarcity of archaeological musical artifacts is that the GuaraniŽ led a seminomadic way of life, partly reflecting the belief that the souls of the dead continued to inhabit the structures that had been their homes during life. The climate and the soil have contributed to the nonsurvival of wooden instruments.
The most informative historical accounts of GuaraniŽ music come from Jesuit
The anthropological literature does not specify a GuaraniŽ taxonomy for musical instruments, though some instruments are used exclusively by men and others exclusively by women. Therefore, the common system used in ethnomusicology is followed.
Idiophones
One of the most important idiophones in use among all the GuaraniŽ is the mbarakaŽ, a spiked calabash rattle with small stones or seeds inside and a wooden handle, usually adorned with feathers. The mbarakaŽ is a shamanistic instrument, played only by men. Its origin is attributed by the ChiripaŽ to Hy?apuŽ GuazuŽ (the primordial father), and it is associated with thunder (GoŽmez-Perasso n.d.:114). They see it not as a receptacle for spirits but as an instrument for invoking them by its sound. During religious rituals, each man of the tribe uses his own mbarakaŽ, but these are not regarded as being as potent as the shaman's instrument (BartolomeŽ 1977:98).
Another instrument used exclusively by men is a pair of wooden concussion sticks (popygua?i) about 30 centimeters long. According to Sequera (1987:70), who described their use among the MbyaŽ, the sticks are a shamanic instrument that accompanies tangaraŽ, a ritual dance performed within the ceremonial house (opy), and are played outside that house before ceremonial occasions for chasing away evil spirits. Each initiate (yvyra?ijaŽ) makes his own sticks.
Women play a bamboo tube stamper (takuapuŽ) whose length varies. The MbyaŽ instrument is between 70 and 90 centimeters long and about 10 centimeters wide. The ChiripaŽ associate it with N~ande Sy EteŽ, the primordial mother, who plays it as she begins the search for Hy?apuŽ GuazuŽ (GoŽmez-Perasso n.d.:114). Strings of rattles may be attached to it and worn around the ankles, waists, or wrists; they are traditionally made from deer hooves, turtle shells, or other materials and may even consist of bottle caps strung together (Boettner n.d.:20).
Membranophones
Two-headed membranophones (angu?aŽ) are distributed among the GuaraniŽ groups. They are made of several materials (wood, clay, or even tin), and the material used for the membranes may be animal skin or cotton cloth. These drums may be played with sticks or with the hands and are of various sizes. Despite variations in details of construction, all are used only by men.
The mba?e pu ovava?eŽ is a MbyaŽ cylindrical drum. The shaman usually plays it to accompany prayer-songs (n~embo?e pošra), but after a successful hunt, a hunter must use it to accompany propitiatory songs to the animals he has killed (Sequera 1987:70-71).
Aerophones
GuaraniŽ flutes (mimby) may be vertical or transverse. Adjectives describe flutes, as in mimby guazuŽ 'large flute'. The old-style flute (mimby kueŽ) is a wooden, notched, vertical flute of the quena type, with five holes for fingers and one hole for a thumb. The temimby ie piasaŽ, a Chiriguano transverse flute, is made from hollow cane and has six holes for fingers. The MbyaŽ long flute (mimby pukuŽ) is a vertical duct flute with five holes for fingers and two for thumbs; its duct is formed by wax. MbyaŽ and ChiripaŽ men use their flutes to attract potential spouses; they may play flutes with a two-headed drum (angu?aŽ puŽ) to announce hunters' return to the village (GoŽmez-Perasso n.d.:115).
The GuaraniŽ play raft panpipes. Chiriguano examples may be of Andean origin (Boettner n.d.:26). MbyaŽ panpipes (mimby puŽ 'sounding flute'), primarily women's instruments, are sometimes played by men (Sequera 1987:72-73).
Among the more uncommon aerophones is a bundle panpipe, played by Caingua women. It consists of five bamboo tubes, not bound together but held in a bunch with both hands. The Chiriguanos have a double flute.
The onomatopoeic word turuŽ is the generic GuaraniŽ name for trumpets. As with flutes, compound names are descriptive of size and material. The instruments are usually made of cane or bamboo, though cow horn sometimes serves. Or special note is the uatapuŽ, a trumpet used to attract fish.
Chordophones
The GuaraniŽ use several types of musical bows. The guyrambau (or simply lambau), a large MbyaŽ example, consists of a bow, the end of which is placed in the player's mouth while the string is plucked with the fingers or a small stick. It is played by men for recreation (Sequera 1987:71). A musical bow similar to the Brazilian berimbau is called gualambau in GuaraniŽ. It has a gourd resonator close to one end. Harmonics are obtained by light placement of the fingers on the string, struck with a small stick. The gualambau seems to be falling into disuse (Boettner n.d.:31).
The guyrapa-iŽ is a double musical bow in use among various GuaraniŽ groups. It consists of a smaller bow (embirekoŽ 'wife'), which rubs a larger bow (imena 'husband') whose end is placed in the player's mouth for resonance. Before playing, the string of the imena must be moistened with the lips. The player produces different notes by stopping the string of the male bow with the four fingers of the left hand. The instrument is associated with the guyrapa-iŽ yaretaŽ spirit and has obvious sexual symbolism. It is not played by women because they believe it would make them overly amorous (Boettner n.d.:31).
A chordophone that illustrates musical acculturation resulting from Jesuit missions is the MbyaŽ three-stringed fiddle (raveŽ). Apparently derived from the violin, it is considered by the MbyaŽ a sacred instrument. It is made of cedar, also considered sacred. Its strings were traditionally made from plant fibers, but nylon strings are now widely used. These strings are played by a small bow, made of wood and horsehair. The raveŽ measures from 45 to 52 centimeters long. Only men may play it, and it accompanies a ritual dance (tangaraŽ). Though all initiated men are expected to play it, the most proficient player receives the title rave jaŽra 'master raveŽ-player' (Sequera 1987:71-72).
A five-stringed guitar (kuminjareŽ) is another example of musical acculturation. It
Music is of great importance to GuaraniŽ shamans, who use the sound of the mbarakaŽ and songs to communicate with supernatural figures. Central to the recognition of an individual as a shaman is his supernatural inspiration with chants. Any ChiripaŽ man or woman may have a personal sacred song (guauŽ), revealed to him or her by a dead relative. The recipient of the guauŽ may then teach it to the rest of the community. Its possession is believed to confer a certain immunity against accidents and has curative power. It is differentiated from koti-huŽ, songs with no religious significance and may be a true sacred song (guauŽ eteŽ) or a lesser sacred song (guauŽ aiŽ). The difference between the two genres seems to be that the guauŽ eteŽ consists mainly of vocables (not understood even by the singers), whereas the guauŽ aiŽ makes frequent use of archaic words and phrases; however, in importance, the texts seem to be secondary to the melodies (BartolomeŽ 1977:110).
A type of shaman, N~andeŽ RuŽ (Our Father), also known as PaiŽderived from MbaiŽ 'the solitary one' because he lives figuratively between the upper world and the loweris any man whose singing is unusually potent because of his spiritual force (BartolomeŽ 1977:110-112). According to local mythology N~anderuŽ GuazuŽ (Our Great Father) created the earth (yvy). One day he encountered N~anderuŽ Mba?eŽ Kua?aŽ (Our Father Who Knows All). The two decided to create a woman, so N~anderuŽ GuazuŽ fashioned a clay pot, which he instructed N~anderuŽ Mba?eŽ Kua?aŽ to break. From the broken pot emerged N~aandesyŽ (Our Great Mother). She had sex with both, and as a result bore twins. The older twin, the son of N~anderuŽ GuazuŽ, received the responsibility of caring for the earth during the day; he is known as N~aanderykeyŽ (Our Older Brother) and became Sun (KuarahyŽ). The son of N~anderuŽ Mba?eŽ Kua?aŽ, having received the care of the earth at night, became Moon (JacyŽ); he is known as N~andetyvyŽ (Our Younger Brother). N~anderuŽ GuazuŽ now resides in The Land of No Evil (YvymaraeyŽ), where he continues to communicate with shamans. He tells them that unless the GuaraniŽ continue to pray, he will destroy the earth. If all the GuaraniŽ obey his wishes, he will instruct the shamans to take their communities on a trek where they will be shown the way to YvymaraeyŽ, the place where good people go when they die.
The prayer dance
The most important ritual in the GuaraniŽ religious complex is the prayer dance. It and its variations may be performed for a variety of reasons, but a good example is the prayer of the forest (n~embo?eŽ kaagušy), a fertility-related dance traditionally celebrated once a year by the ChiripaŽ. It takes place in the big house (oga guazuŽ) in the center of the village. Typically, this house is a 3-meter by 6-meter area, covered with a low thatched roof. It may or may not have walls, though at least the side facing east (the direction of YvymaraeyŽ) is open. Along the eastern side is a candle holder (tataŽendey 'fire holder'), which consists of three 1.5-meter-long poles (spaced a meter apart) and a crossbar on which candles and other sacred objects are placed. On the
The n~embo?eŽ kaagušy lasts for nine nights, from sundown to dawn. The celebration divides into two parts: the first eight nights are the sacred part, when only guauŽ are sung. The final night is secular: after a shaman sings a song indicating that the deity present for the guauŽ has departed, koti-huŽ may be sung. The dance and the songs it accompanies begin with all the men in a line, graduated from oldest to youngest, shaking their mbarakaŽ. The shamans, shaking their own mbarakaŽ, go into trance and begin to sing. At this point, some married women stand along the western wall of the big house and begin marking time with their takuapuŽ. Single women begin to dance from side to side in the center of the house. The shamans may remain at the tataŽendey, or they may lead the rest of the men on a simulated trek around the women and around the big house. The dance continues for ten to twenty minutes, until the shamans return to where they started, in front of the candle holder. After a minute or two of rest, dancing begins anew.
Other occasions besides the n~embo?eŽ kaagušy that make use of variations of the prayer dance include the female puberty ritual, the initiatory dance for males, a name-giving dance, a dance for the dead, and a trek-related dance. This variety of occasions ensures that the prayer dance is celebrated quite frequently. In fact, shamans may call for its celebration for almost any reason. Its objectives are threefold: (1) to maintain a day-to-day contact with Our Great Father and Our Older brother, who provide guidance; (2) to please Our Great Father, who has instructed the shamans to keep dancing so they may ensure the earth's safety; and (3) to receive the final instructions that will guide them to YvymaraeyŽ (Albiol 1981:47).
In addition to the guauŽ and the koti-huŽ, a song-dance genre known as mboraheŽi pukuŽ 'long song' is frequently found in the prayer dance and its variations. Its text consists of a responsorial retelling of the principal stories of GuaraniŽ mythology. The singing is led by a mboraheŽi jaŽra, a shaman renowned for his singing, who sings every verse twice. After hearing the verse and its repetition, the other singers repeat it twice more, after which the mboraheŽi jaŽra goes to the next verse, and the same procedure is followed (MeliaŽ, Grušnberg, and Grušnberg 1976:242).
Soul dances
A different kind of dance is linked to the GuaraniŽ conception of life after death. The GuaraniŽ believe that every person has two souls. The first soul, a spiritual one (Apapocuva ayvucueŽ, PaiŽ-tavyteraŽ n~e?e 'word'), resides in the throat. Identified with a peaceful disposition, this soul enters the body during gestation or immediately after birth. A person's temperament is conditioned by an animal soul (acyiguaŽ). In some traditions, these souls are aspects of the same soul, which after death separate. The spiritual soul tries to go to YvymaraeyŽ, but may linger for a while near its former home. The animal soul may turn into a ghost, showing itself sometimes as an actual animal. To drive the spiritual soul away, the shamans organize a dance in which two groups of dancers run past each other repeatedly, to confuse the soul and make it become lost. A shaman can then deliver it to the deity Tupa~, who takes it to the land of the dead. The animal soul must be attacked with weapons (NimuendajuŽ 1914:305).
The search for YvymaraeyŽ has associations with dance. A legend says ancient GuaraniŽ shamans gradually subjugated their animal soul through constant dancing, until their spiritual soul could fly to YvymaraeyŽ. The trek enacted in the prayer dance has occasionally been undertaken literally in migratory movements by villages and
MoiseŽs Bertoni's study La civilizacioŽn guaraniŽ (1922, 1956) is a good introduction to GuaraniŽ culture. The pioneering work of Kurt NimuendajuŽ Unkel (1914) and LeoŽn Cadogan (1949) are invaluable contributions to the study of GuaraniŽ religion by anthropologists who actually underwent initiation as shamans. Branislava Susnik's El rol de los indiŽgenas en la formacioŽn y en la vivencia del Paraguay (1982, 1983) deals with historical cultural change among the GuaraniŽ through the 1800s. An excellent source for GuaraniŽ oral literature is Literatura guaraniŽ del Paraguay (Saguier 1980), which contains transcriptions of materials collected by anthropologists among the MbyaŽ, the PaiŽ-TavyteraŽ, the ChiripaŽ, and the Apapocuva. Georg and Friedl Grušnberg's Los Chiriguanos (1975) is a good introduction to the culture of that subtribe.
Musical Instruments
Song Traditions
Aesthetics and General Stylistic Traits
Musical Contexts
Pan-Andean Generalizations
Quechua (Kechua) was the official language of the Inca (Inka) empire, which stretched from northern Ecuador to central Chile. Most of the indigenous peoples of highland Ecuador speak it, as do the peoples of most of the Peruvian sierra and highland migrants in coastal cities. Aymara, the second most prominent native Andean language, is spoken in Peru, mostly in these areas within Puno Department: HuancaneŽ Province, on the northwest side of Lake Titicaca; Chucuito Province, on the south side of Lake Titicaca; and between HuancaneŽ and Chucuito, where Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples live. In Bolivia, Aymara-speaking communities cluster south and east of Lake Titicaca in the province of La Paz. The Bolivian linguistic situation is complex: Quechua and Aymara are spoken in areas juxtaposed throughout its highlands. To a much lesser extent, Aymara-speaking communities occur in northern Argentina and Chile (TarapacaŽ Province).
Population figures for speakers of Quechua and Aymara vary and are difficult to substantiate. In rural native Andean communities, Spanish bilingualism is common among middle-aged and young people, especially men.
The use of the linguistic terms Quechua and Aymara as ethnic, cultural rubrics is a late-twentieth-century development that remains restricted to certain contexts. For convenience, scholars and state institutions use these terms as cultural categories. Indigenous groups involved in political struggles have sometimes strategically used them as the basis of ethnic-bloc formation, especially in Ecuador and Bolivia. Notions of a Quechua or Aymara culture or nation, however, are alien to the discourse of villagers, who more frequently define their identities in terms of specific communities and regions (Montoya 1986).
Cultural and musical practices vary importantly by microregion and macroregion in the Andes but do not necessarily correspond with the language spoken. Quechua-speaking communities only 50 kilometers apart may differ fundamentally in their inventory of musical instruments, genres, and fiestas, whereas neighboring Aymara- and Quechua-speaking communities may share many similar traditions.
The only generalizable difference between making music in Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities is the prevalence of vocal music among the former and its relative lack of importance among the latter. Beyond this, Quechua- and
To describe this sensibility and native Andean musical practice at a general level, I return continually to the themes of regionalism and ethnic and class divisions between people identified locally as criollos (whites, Spanish-Americans), mestizos (fusing Iberian and indigenous cultural heritages), and indios (Indians, self-defined as Quechua runakuna and Aymara hak?enaka 'people'). These divisions must be understood against the backdrop of a long history of harsh repressionby states (first colonial, later republican), by local elites, and at different times by the Roman Catholic church. Ethnic and class categories are social constructions, constantly negotiated within processes of social mobility, political confrontation, and urban migration; once established, however, these categories have real effects on peoples' lives.
Notwithstanding the intensity of ethnic and regional cultural diversity, general features of native Andean music can best be described in relation to two macromusical regions, located roughly to the north and to the south of the Lake Titicaca area of Peru and Bolivia, with the lake area belonging to the southern region. The southern region favors large-ensemble performance of indigenous wind instruments and drums. In the northern region, smaller ensembles and solo performance on indigenous winds and drums and on strings are more common, and stringed instruments in a greater variety have a more prominent role.
The prototypes for the idiophones, membranophones, and aerophones played in Andean villages arose in pre-Columbian societies; chordophones were not used before the 1530s.
Throughout the Andes, instrumental performance is a male domain. Exceptions are small, hand-held drums (like the tinya), and for dancing, rattles, leggings, and bells. Before the 1500s, women played different-sized drums, some of them resembling the late-twentieth-century tinya. Women accompany their singing with tinya in the central-southern Peruvian highlands (JuniŽn, Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Apurimac, Cusco, Arequipa). Women in northern PotosiŽ, Bolivia, play a similar drum, the jochana.
Idiophones and membranophones
Idiophones and membranophones are played as part of many Andean traditions involving instrumental ensembles, dancing, and singing. In native Andean music, the primary idiophones are leggings and shakers made of goats' hooves or metal attached to cloth, leather, string, or ribbons. In isolated localities, some peoples use other idio-phones,
Aerophones
As suggested by the archaeological record on the Peruvian coast, panpipes, end-blown notched flutes, trumpets, whistles, and ocarinas were the major pre-Hispanic wind instruments. A transverse flute with two holes for fingering existed in Moche culture (Stevenson 1968:252-257, Olsen 1992:78-79), but side-blown flutes were probably much rarer than end-blown types. No good evidence for end-blown duct flutes has been found in the Andean area, though the presence of whistles and ocarinas indicates that the technology for duct flutes was available before the Spanish encounter.
Archaeological panpipes have received the greatest attention from scholars (Bolan~os 1985, 1988; Haeberli 1979; Rossel 1977; Stevenson 1968; Valencia 1982), but they agree on little beyond three observations: single-row panpipes were used, they were sometimes played in consorts of two sizes tuned in octaves, and high-pitched tunings were favored.
Iconography on a pre-Columbian Moche pot from the north Peruvian coast shows two players' panpipes, connected by a cord. This illustration has often been cited as evidence that double-unit panpipes (with the series of pitches alternating between the halves) were played by paired musicians in interlocking, or hocket, fashion during the pre-Colombian period, as is commonly done in southern Peru and Bolivia. CeŽsar Bolan~os (1988:25, 105-106), however, argues that nothing in the archaeological record corroborates this; but he may have identified several consorts of single-unit Nasca panpipes with different-sized instruments tuned in octaves, plus panpipes with corresponding tubes tuned roughly a quarter-tone apart. The range of his measurements of variations in pitch between the instruments' corresponding tubes closely resembles the range of variations in pitch in contemporary panpipe consorts in southern Peru.
Our knowledge of pre-Columbian and early colonial panpipes in the Andean highlands derives largely from historical sources and iconography of the 1500s, such as GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala. For the early colonial period, the chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1966 [1609]:127) says "los indios Collas" (Qollas, Aymara-speakers from around the Lake Titicaca region) played double-unit panpipes in interlocking fashion. His reference to different vocal parts (tiple, tenor, contralto, contra-bajo) in Colla panpipe performance may suggest that different-sized panpipes created polyphony (as they do today). Garcilaso, associated with the Inca elite of Cusco through his mother, apparently did not know the name of the instrument, which he says was a foreign instrument belonging to the Collas in the south. Bolan~os uses this and other evidence to suggest that the Incas may not have used panpipes, but that peoples they subjugated did.
In accounts of highland societies from the early colonial period, panpipes were called antara (GuamaŽn Poma 1980). Siku (or sico), a term for double-unit panpipes, appears in Ludovico Bertonio's Aymara dictionary of 1612 (1956). These terms, plus the Spanish word zampon~a, are still used in the highlands.
Types and distributions
Single-unit (a rafted set of pipes constituting one instrument) and double-unit (two rafted sets of pipes constituting one instrument) panpipes are played from northern Ecuador to northern Chile. Specific traditions are localized, and areas where the panpipe is played are not contiguous. In Ecuador and northern Peru, single-unit traditions, such as the rondador and the smaller, seven-tubed antara, are played solo, sometimes with drum by a single musician, and in groups with drum accompaniment.
The antara from the northern Peruvian department of Cajamarca is played solo for informal, personal performance while resting or herding animals (Romero and CaŽnepa 1988:4). Ecuadorian rondadores range from small panpipes with eight tubes (pentatonic) to larger hexatonic instruments with twenty, thirty, or more tubes (Moreno 1949:33); people of the central Ecuadorian provinces play the larger, single panpipes in fiestas throughout the year.
In the Peruvian departments from Ancash to Cusco, indigenous panpipe traditions are rare [see Q?ERO]. Double-unit panpipes are commonly played in the broad region surrounding Lake Titicaca in Peru (Puno and parts of Tacna and Moquegua departments), throughout Bolivia, and in northern Chile. A few localized single-unit traditions also occur in this area (Turino 1987:107-108) (
Many types of double-unit panpipes exist, with their names, construction (some have matching resonating tubes), tunings, and repertoire varying from one locale to another and from one occasion to another in the same locale. Many have a heptatonic series of pitches that alternates between the halves, played in interlocking fashion
Except for variable life-cycle fiestas, contractual performances at mestizo Roman Catholic fiestas, and state-sponsored folkloric festivals, double-unit panpipes in the southern Andean region are traditionally played mainly in the dry season, April through October.
The word pinkullu (also pincollo and pingollo; Aymara pinkillu), a pre-Columbian term, seems to have referred generically to end-blown flutes. Since there is no evidence of pre-Hispanic end-blown duct flutes in the Andes, we can assume that the term denoted end-blown notched flutes, which, with five or six holes for fingers and one for a thumb, are played from the central Peruvian department of JuniŽn south through Bolivia; they are not traditionally used in northern Peru and Ecuador (Moreno 1949:36).
Notched flutes are known by the generic term kena (Spanish quena) and various local names, sometimes corresponding to dances, such as pulipuli in neighboring HuancaneŽ, Peru (Aymara), and Charazani, Bolivia (Quechua); chokela in the departments of Puno, Peru, and La Paz, Bolivia; and lichiwayu (or lechewayo) in Cochabamba and northern PotosiŽ departments, Bolivia.
The smaller end-notched kena (35 to 38 centimeters) has become a prime solo instrument in urban folk-revivalist groups in Andean cities. In southern Peru, they sometimes combine with harps, violins, and other instruments in bands that typically play for dancing during mestizo fiestas (
In the area around Lake Titicaca and to the east and south, longer end-notched flutes (about 55 centimeters or more) are played in large communal ensembles, often with drum accompaniment, for public ritual and festival occasions. In Bolivia, they are played in consorts of different sizes. Like panpipes, they tend to be strongly asso-ciated
In the twentieth century, the Quechua term pinkullu (in Ecuador, pingullo; Aymara pinkillu) most often denotes an end-blown duct flute, one of the most common instruments of the Andean area. In southern Cusco and Puno, Peru, and in Bolivia, these appear in sizes ranging from cane instruments 20 centimeters long to wooden instruments more than 100 centimeters long.
Combinations of flutes and drums
In Ecuador and central to northern Peru, cane or plastic duct flutes with two holes for fingers and one for a thumb, such as the roncadora of Ancash, Peru, are played in pipe-and-tabor fashion for religious festivals and work-related occasions. In various regions of Ecuador, three-holed pingullo-and-drum combinations accompany festival dances throughout the year; this music may be played by a single musician or an ensembleeight persons playing three-holed pingullo-and-drum combinations in unison in Cotopaxi Province, Ecuador (Moreno 1949:111).
To drum accompaniment, people in Imbabura Province, Ecuador, play a six-hole duct flute, piŽfano. For the Fiesta del Coraza in Otavalo, Ecuador, villagers have a mixed ensemble including small eight-tubed panpipes (rondadorcillos), pingullo, and drums (Coba Andrade 1985:187). In Imbabura Province, Ecuador, villagers have a similar mixed ensemble (Aretz 1980:830), as they do for el yumbo, a dance. Three-holed duct flutes, played solo or in small groups in pipe-and-tabor style, are a central tradition in northern and central Peru. In the departments of Ancash and JuniŽn, small, five- and six-hole cane duct flutes are combined in ensemble with other melody instruments, such as violins (Otter 1985, plate 48); as in Ecuador, people play duct flutes at different times of the year.
In Puno, Peru, and in Bolivia, large communal ensembles of five- or six-hole pinkullus play basically in unison, usually accompanied by indigenous snare drums (cajas) or Western snare and bass drums. In some regions in Bolivia and southern Peru, consorts of duct flutes comprise different-size instruments played in parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves, or in interlocking fashion. In northern PotosiŽ, Bolivia, a consort of four different-size pinkillos occurs, each with its own name: machu, about 110 centimeters long; k?ewa, 70 centimeters; tara, 56 centimeters; and juch?uy k?ewa, 36 centimeters (SaŽnchez 1988:7). Neighboring southern Cochabamba has a similar consort (charkas), with flutes tuned in fifths but often played in parallel octaves (Baumann 1982:27). In the Titicaca region and throughout Bolivia, duct flutes are associated with rainy-season festivals beginning with All Saints Day and carrying on through March; pinkullus (pinkillus) and wooden flutes (tarkas) [see BOLIVIA] are strongly associated with carnival in this region.
Cane or wooden side-blown flutes with six holes for fingers are played throughout the Andes. In the department of Puno, Peru, consorts of such flutes (pitus, falawatus, falawitas) include three sizes played in parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves, accompanied by Western snare and bass drums. Side-blown flutes are also played in large communal ensembles in the department of La Paz, Bolivia. From the departments of Ayacucho and Cusco, Peru, north to Ecuador, ensembles including one or two side-blown flutes, played in unison with snare and bass drums, accompany costumed dancing (
Before the 1500s, coastal peoples used curved and straight ceramic and metal trumpets, and conch trumpets were important in the highlands. In the late 1990s, conch trumpets are still played by village headmen in the department of Cusco, Peru. Circular valveless trumpets (wak?rapuku, cacho), made of connected sections of bull horn, are played in the central-southern Peruvian highlands. In JuniŽn, for Santiago (St. James) and other rituals connected with animal fertility, they are sometimes performed with violin, a drum (tinya), and singing; in the departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac, for bullfights, they combine with side-blown flutes and drums.
Trumpets such as the pututu and the erke, made from a single cow or bull horn, are played in Peru and as far south as PotosiŽ, Bolivia. In Puno, Peru, and in PotosiŽ, Bolivia, small, valveless, bull horn or metal trumpets (usually called pututu) are sometimes used like nonharmonic drones with pinkullu ensembles, and metal pututus are played in groups as noisemakers during carnival in HuancaneŽ, Peru. A single droning horn plays in the panpipe ensembles of Italaque, Bolivia.
Long (1.5 to 3 meters or more) valveless, side-blown, wooden or cane trumpets (clariŽn, llungur) have been documented in the northern Peruvian departments of Cajamarca and Ancash, and in the central-southern region of JuniŽn and Huancavelica. As on all the trumpets mentioned here, pitches are produced on the clariŽn and llungur by overblowing. The clariŽn is blown during religious festivals (see p. 118) and communal agricultural labor in Cajamarca (CD track 21); the llungur is associated with agricultural occasions in central Peru; and musicians have been observed playing clariŽn during carnival in Ancash, Peru (Otter 1985:94). Similar long trumpets, known as can~as, are played in central Bolivia, associated with the dry season, according to the Bolivian ethnomusicologist Luz MariŽa Calvo.
Brass bands are the most ubiquitous type of ensemble in the Andean area. They point up the complexity of ethnic or class associations with instrument and ensemble types. Associated with mestizo fiestas in towns, they are popular at rural village festivals and weddings. The participating musicians in bands might be of mestizo or indigenous heritage; musicians often learn the band instruments and music literacy while in the military.
Typically, bands work on a contractual basis and are therefore often too expensive for indigenous village eventshence the more common association with mestizo occasions. Nonetheless, given the makeup of personnel and the bands' popularity across ethnic or class lines, it is currently difficult to ascribe a single ethnic identity or emblematic meaning to these ensembles, though identity and meaning vary locally.
In the Aymara-speaking district of Conima (Puno Department, Peru), two small, local, brass bands were associated with indigenous communities. They would occasionally play for weddings in the indigenous villages and on contract for mestizo fiestas in the district capital; local indigenous wind traditions (siku, five- and six-hole pinkillu, tarka, pitu), however, remained at the center of village musical life, with brass bands at the margins. By contrast, in the nearby Peruvian Aymara-speaking area to the south of Lake Titicaca (Puno and Chucuito provinces), brass bands rival the local panpipes and flutes in popularity; and in the region around Copacabana, Bolivia, on the south shore of the lake, they have effectively replaced the local winds.
Chordophones
To help convert Andean peoples to Christianity, missionaries of the 1500s and 1600s taught European music. Stringed instruments, especially the diatonic harp and violin, were diffused to many Andean regions in this way. From the departments of Cusco, Apurimac, and Ayacucho, Peru, to the northern province of Imbabura, Ecuador, these instruments are extremely important to indigenous and mestizo musicians.
In the Peruvian departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac, harp-violin duos accompany dansaq 'scissor dances', and in this area (JuniŽn, Cusco, Ancash, and further north), the harp and violin play together and separately in various instrumental combinations. Dance-oriented bands in Cusco (associated with mestizo events but often involving native Andean musicians) include harp, two violins, two kenas, accordion, and bass drum. In JuniŽn alone, standard ensembles include harp-violin duos; cow-horn trumpet, violin, and tinya; two violins and drums; violins, small duct flutes, and drums.
In Ecuador, the diatonic harp is important among Quichua-speaking peasants in some regions; solo harp with golpeador (person who beats the body of the harp) is played at children's wakes and at weddings in Imbabura Province, and harpists are
Indigenous communities of the central-southern Bolivian sierra use violins, though traditions of playing violins, and especially playing harps, are relatively unimportant in the southern Andean area. Strings are of marginal importance and are often absent in Peruvian Aymara- and Bolivian-Quechua-speaking communities on the shore of Lake Titicaca.
For people in the Andean region, musical instruments and style indicate ethnic or class identity. The sixteen- to twenty-stringed bandurria (shaped somewhat like a mandolin) has become the main instrument among Quechua-speakers in the province of Canchis, department of Cusco, Peru. Mandolins have been more widely adopted by indigenous peasants in Peru, though mandolins, like guitars, often carry mestizo ethnic or class associations.
Charangos
South and east of Lake Titicaca, the charango is the primary stringed instrument of indigenous peasants. Its traditional area of diffusion, for indigenous and mestizo performers, is the departments of Huancavelica and Cusco in Peru to northern Argentina, though it has been diffused more widely by urban folk revivalists.
Of central Andean origin, extant by the early 1700s, the charango is usually a small, guitar-shaped chordophone with a flat wooden back or a round back made of carved wood or armadillo shell; some charangos have round, rectangular, or teardrop-shaped boxes. The body is about 15 to 20 centimeters at the widest points. Charangos played by indigenous peasants usually have between eight and fifteen thin, metal strings, arranged in five courses. For a dense, driving sound, indigenous players typically strum a single-line melody or ostinato, using one or two courses with the other strings open.
Especially in the Huancavelica Valley, Laras and Canas provinces in Cusco, and Puno and Chucuito provinces in Puno (all in Peru), the charango is played primarily by indigenous young men as a part of courting activities. They may play a single genre (such as kashua in Canas and kh?jhelo in Puno) or even a single melody associated with lovemaking and thus they aptly communicate their intentions (Turino 1983). Also in Cusco Department, the charango sometimes has its resonating body crafted into (or contains inlays depicting) a mermaid (sirena 'siren'), a symbol associated with magical powers for courtship (Turino 1983) (
In northern PotosiŽ, Bolivian charangos are associated with the dry season, and their performance is juxtaposed with a larger guitar variant known as guitarrilla, used during the rainy season (Luz MariŽa Calvo, personal communication). In southeast Cochabamba, Bolivia, a larger tabla (flat-backed) charango is used during the rainy season, and a smaller, round-backed k?ullu charango is associated with dry-season festivals. For northern PotosiŽ, Walter SaŽnchez mentions the use of a round-backed charango during the dry season and a similar flat-backed charango-like instrument (known locally as jitarroŽn) during the rainy season. Both are played solo or in small groups of the same instrument, and the tunings vary according to the fiesta. As in Peru, the charango and the jitarroŽn are here associated with young men and lovemaking (SaŽnchez 1988:3-4, 13-14; 1989:2).
Among the Chipayas in the southeast of the department of Oruro, Bolivia, the guitarrilla is the only stringed instrument. The guitarrilla, about halfway between the size of a charango and a guitar, has five double courses of strings and a slightly rounded back. To accompany singing and dancing for marking animals, the Chipaya play it
Like the inclusion of the charango in an agricultural ceremony in Canas, Cusco, the strong seasonal associations of charangos and guitarrillas in Cochabamba and PotosiŽ suggest that this chordophone has been redefined as an indigenous instrument and is being conceptualized and used according to local musical principles.
In Quechua-speaking communities throughout the Andes, songs are sung on most musical occasions, and even pieces performed instrumentally frequently have known texts. As with instrumental genres, indigenous genres of song are frequently labeled and defined according to context. People identify a song as a matrimonio 'wedding', a carnaval, or a San Juan.
Rodrigo, Edwin, and LuiŽs Montoya (1987) published a major study and collection of Quechua song texts from twelve Peruvian departments. Themes they listed and contexts of performance that I have observed include agricultural, herding, and other work-related songs; songs for various life-cycle stages (including weddings, roof-raising activities, and death); songs of love and courtship; joking songs; political songs; songs associated with departure and migration; songs performed at Roman Catholic festivals and indigenous rituals; and others.
During carnival and other occasions associated with courting, a lively tradition of song duels between the sexes occurs in many Andean areas. The singing of Quechua hymns at Roman Catholic festivals is widespread. Quechua songs, performed solo or by groups, are accompanied by a wide range of instruments; they may be performed without accompaniment, as are agricultural songs (harawis), sung in the fields.
In contrast, songs are unimportant among Aymara-speakers (Tschopik 1946:555 for the south side of Titicaca; Turino 1989 and 1993 for HuancaneŽ, on the north side in Puno, Peru; Buechler 1980:97 for Bolivia). The members of Aymara-speaking communities may know local songs (and songs from the radio), but they rarely perform them in communal festivals. Over the course of a year and a half, I heard songs sung in fiestas in Conima on two of about fifteen occasions (Candlemas and Easter). In casual contexts, I did not encounter singing, though women may have sung in private. On the south shore of Lake Titicaca, Aymara-speaking women sometimes sing vocables with the men's pinkillus during carnival, and young men sing kh?ajhelos 'songs of courtship', accompanied by charangos (Paniagua 1982).
Because of regional variation and fluid distinctions between indigenous and mestizo identities, useful generalizations about native Andean musical sound, practices, and aesthetics are few. Aural features that reflect general Andean aesthetic preferences include high pitch, dense sound, intensive and extensive repetition, and the use of subtle contrasts.
Tessitura and timbre
Indigenous charango players' use of high-pitched tunings and a strumming technique with numerous thin, metal strings ringing open fits with the preference for dense, high-pitched sound. Indigenous players criticize deeper-sounding mestizo charangos with nylon strings because they do not ring, or "cry out like a cat," as they believe charangos should. The creation of the charango, with its shorter length of string, may have involved the preference for higher tunings.
Though women do not usually play musical instruments, they are the preferred singers in indigenous Andean communitiesespecially young women, because of the preference for high-pitched music. Women often sing at the top of their range, using falsetto. They also use nasal head- and throat-singing techniques, which create a dense vocal sound; collective singing is often slightly heterophonic, as vocal overlapping adds to the aural density.
Flute ensembles mirror these traits. With the exception of panpipes, Andean flutes are usually played in their overblown ranges, and their potential for producing lower pitches is not utilized. Because of a greater abundance of overtones, overblowing contributes to the density of the sound and the height of the pitch. As with collective singing, a slightly heterophonic approach to wind-ensemble performance is common.
Adding to the density of ensembles of end-blown flutes, side-blown flutes, and panpipes, the preferred spectrum of tuning for "unisons" within a consort may be more than a quarter tone, resulting in abundant combination tones. The wide into-national spectrum that typifies most Andean wind ensembles is deliberately produced in the construction of the consort or, if the instruments are tuned in close unison, by some musicians blowing slightly sharp or flat off the median pitch. Bolan~os's measurements of pre-Columbian Nasca panpipe tunings suggests that this preference is an old one. Studies of pre-Encounter panpipes also indicate an early predilection for high pitch. Many other examples point to a general native Andean preference for
Andean ensembles of flutes and panpipes usually include low-pitched, resonant drums, which sonically balance high-pitched winds. In the wind consorts of southern Peru and Bolivia that have different-size instruments played in parallel octaves or polyphony, there is often an attempt to balance in volume the high and low sounds. In Conima, Puno, Peru, sikus, pitus, and tarkas are played (but never together) in three linear ranges; people state as an ideal that high and low sounds should be balanced in volume around the louder, main, melody-carrying center group. In the nearby kantus panpipe tradition of Charazani (Saavedra Province, department of La Paz, Bolivia), ensembles use three levels, tuned in fourths, fifths, and octaves, and players seek a balance in the volume of the more prominent high and low groups.
Repetition and contrast
Native Andean music generally has a great deal of repetition of small motives within and across phrases and sections of a piece, and of the same piece in performance. Forms such as AABB, AABBCC, and ABAB, consisting of short sections or phrases, are common. There is a strong tendency toward the use of subtle levels of contrast, or conversely, what appears to be almost an avoidance of stark contrasts. Hence, two sections or phrases of a piece may differ only by one or two short motives or by a different juxtaposition of previously used motives. In the context of extended repetition of a piece, there is a common tendency to perform subtle rhythmic and melodic variations on the basic melody in solo and ensemble performance throughout the Andes (such as substituting rhythm A for that of rhythm B in
Ensembles in the southern Andean area typically consist of one type of melodic instrument with or without percussive accompaniment. Timbral contrasts are not featured, as they are in many mestizo and urban folk-revivalist ensembles and native Andean ensembles further north. When trumpets are played with pinkillu ensembles (in Puno, Peru, and in Bolivia) or panpipe ensembles (in Italaque, Bolivia), the horns add to the sonic density but function more like nonharmonic, percussive drones than like melodic instruments. Similarly, native Andean performers do not typically utilize dynamic contrasts such as those created between strummed and plucked sections in mestizo charango performance.
In underlying rhythmic feel, native Andean music often follows a consistent, repetitive groove that facilitates collective dancing, singing, and working. Drums play repetitive patterns shaped in accord with specific melodies, or rolling, often driving ostinatos. The strummed patterns on the charango are those of the melody or of an ostinato accompanying a song or a dance. In Ecuadorian harp performance, a second person beats a driving, repetitive pattern on the body of the harp.
Tempo
Although repetition and constancy in most musical parameters within a piece are the rule, changes of tempo sometimes create contrast. In some faster genres of dance, such as pinkillu carnival music in the Lake Titicaca area, the last few repetitions of the piece will be played at a faster tempo (such as a quarter-note metronome marking of
More generally, native Andean musicians and listeners often seem to be acutely aware of tempo as a parameter. In Conima, Peru, community-ensemble styles were considered quite different, largely because the groups played the same genres at slightly different tempos. In the same region, two important siku genres are differentiated and labeled according to tempo ("slow ones" and "fast ones"). A similarly acute attention to issues of tempo occurs in Bolivia.
Sound and cultural associations
Native Andean music has been characterized as predominantly pentatonic (Harcourt and Harcourt 1990 [1925]). Though pentatonic melodies are common in mestizo and indigenous music, other scales occur in native Andean music, and they may vary from one instrumental genre to another within the same community (Olsen 1980:408-410). Scales with an initial minor third above the tonal center are in the majority, and people foreign to Andean villages have romantically interpreted the use of "minor modes" as signs of sorrows, hard lives, or melancholy. These scales, however, do not have the same emotional associations for mestizo or native Andeans as they do in European and Euroamerican musical conventionsnative Andean composers might well cast joyful or joking songs in those scales.
Other musical parameterstimbre, tessitura, temposeem to correlate more commonly with locally defined associational meanings. The seasonal associations with certain instruments have community-specific meanings involving timbre. For Aymara-speakers in Compi, on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca:
In another community south of La Paz, the hoarseness of the tarka was thought to attract dry spells, whereas the clarity of the pinkillu was thought to attract rain.Between the end of the dry and the beginning of the wet seasons, a period during which rain falls irregularly, the tarka, a hoarse-sounding wooden flute, was strictly prohibited, for its sound could harm the freshly sown crops....
In the neighboring Chua, panpipe dances ... were expected to assure a good harvest and were played between carnival and Rosario (first Sunday in October). An elderly informant assured me that when the brass bands replaced the panpipes, production decreased, only to regain its original level when the pipes were recently reintroduced. (Buechler 1980:41)
In Conima, Peru, the peasants do not seem to associate instrumental sounds with climatic conditions or agricultural phases per se. They explain their strong associations of duct flutes with the rainy season and panpipes with the dry season simply as a matter of custom. Of many questioned on instrument associations, only one Conimen~o associated siku specifically with the harvest. The use of five-hole pinkillus for All Saints and carnival was simply explained in terms of the instrument's happy, lively sound being appropriate for these festivals (during All Saints to cheer the family of a person recently deceased). Conimen~os considered the sound of the smaller, higher five-hole pinkillus happier, in contrast to the lower, more serious six-hole pinkilluindicating that there may be emotional associations with different ranges of pitches. In Conima, genres with slower tempos tended to be considered more serious, profound, or emotionally moving, whereas faster tempos were associated with happier, upbeat occasions.
In the rural highlands, native Andean musicians perform in three basic types of situations that greatly influence the social and musical dynamics. The first type of context
In-community festivals
Smaller in-community festivals, life-cycle celebrations, and work-related musical occasions in the Lake Titicaca region and further south usually involve a single communal ensemble. Any man from the village can voluntarily join with his communal group, whose musicians perform on a collaborative (nonprofessional) basis for the sponsor of the occasion and for the rest of the community. In such events, the musicians (and dancers, if a costumed troupe is required) are treated as honored guests, and from the sponsor and other community members they receive prestige, thanks, and offerings of food, drink, and coca. In this region, collaborative arrangements (or a contract with only minimal payment) might occasionally be made between musicians and someone in another indigenous community on the basis of friendship or ties of coparentage (compadrazgo), especially for weddings.
In the Cusco-Apurimac-Ayacucho region of Peru and further north, these types of in-community collaborative arrangements are found for the nonspecialized and specialized instrumental traditions, but musical specialists sometimes require contractual arrangements with cash payment. Solo harp performance at children's wakes, weddings, and private masses in Imbabura Province, Ecuador, seem to involve payment even within the community. Solo performance of three-holed pincullu and tinya for communal-work projects in JuniŽn, Peru, has become a specialists' tradition, often with only one man in a community knowing the repertoire. Communities without such a specialist sometimes hire a musician from another community, and private landowners may do so for collective labor projects.
Intercommunal festivals
The second type of performance situation, intercommunal festivals, is distinguished from in-community events by size, and especially by the dynamics of musical competition. Because of the importance of music as an emblem and an activity constituting group identity, in intercommunity fiestas, musical and dance ensembles representing their communities, moieties, or barrios typically enter into direct competition with other ensembles for the honor and prestige of their group. Even when ensembles of specialistssuch as dansaq 'scissor dance' groups in Huancavelica and Ayacucho, Peruare hired by the sponsor of a fiesta, they still typically compete with the ensembles hired by other sponsors for the prestige of their employer and his social
Large intercommunal festivals usually occur in and around the central plaza of a district or provincial capital town or, on occasion, in a neutral place in the countryside. Each communal ensemble usually keeps to itself, celebrating separately alongside the other communities. The main form of intercommunal interaction is nonformal competition between the ensembles. Success in the competition is partially marked by the number of spectators and unaffiliated dancers a given ensemble attracts during the festival. Each ensemble may assert that they were the best or the most popular at a given festival, but people not directly involved in performing usually reach a loose consensus afterward.
In many areas of the Andes, in mestizo and native Andean contexts, musical competition constantly underlies the drive for musical innovation and quality. Among Aymara-speaking communities in HuancaneŽ, Peru, and Quechua musicians in the Charazani valley, Bolivia, composing new pieces for each major fiesta is an important component of the indigenous wind traditions. In HuancaneŽ, the quality and uniqueness of new compositions indexes an ensemble's competence and originality, and a group's success in intercommunal competition is influenced by the popularity of its pieces. In this region, siku, pinkillu, and tarka ensembles are also judged on their volume, on the tuning and blending of the group, and on the length of time they spend performing in the plaza for public enjoyment.
During intra- and intercommunity fiestas, native Andean musicians perform for the members of their own or other indigenous communities. In these situations, their performances are judged and appreciated according to shared aesthetic values and social expectations. Musicians are usually treated with respect, and they gain prestige when they perform well according to communal expectations.
Mestizo-sponsored events
An extremely different type of situation involves events organized by mestizos in which mestizos and criollos are the target audience. In many parts of the Andes, for patronal fiestas and weddings, mestizo sponsors may contract indigenous musicians and dancers to perform. In these instances, the hierarchical nature of relations between native Andeans and mestizos is often clearly articulated. In contrast to the favorable status and artistic freedom indigenous musicians enjoy in their home villages, even when contracted, they are frequently treated like lower-class servants by mestizo sponsors and their guests. The sponsor and his entourage typically dictate what and when the musicians will play and may sharply criticize musicians who perform below expectations.
In rural district and provincial capitals, and in highland cities, mestizo or criollo townspeople or state cultural institutions may organize folkloric festivals and contests involving native Andeans in staged performances for a nonparticipatory audience. This practice results in a variety of alterations in the spirit and manner of performance. In formal contests, usually with mestizo judges, the musicians and dancers may stylize their traditions according to their perception of what the judges and the audience will favor, and this stylization in turn is often based on the model of mestizo music and dance. Whether the performances are voluntary (as in contests) or are contracted, these situations are an important venue where mestizos, criollos, and the state exert influence on indigenous aesthetics and arts.
Native Andean musical occasions
Native Andean musical occasions are extremely varied. Each region has unique traditions regarding the number and kinds of festivals it celebrates within the annual
Dance-dramas are typical of patronal and other Roman Catholic festivals. In this type of tradition, a dance group represents a certain historical or mythical character, and the performance often embodies or is part of a larger narrative. Certain characters and motifs are found throughout the Andean region. Threatening outsidersdevils, jungle Indians, Spaniards, lawyers, government officials, and foreign soldiersare frequently parodied. Blacks, old men, occupational groups, and local spiritual forces (such as mountain divinities) are other common characters represented in masked dance. Dance-dramas and many of these specific motifs are found throughout Latin America. They are partially rooted in Iberian traditions, especially colonial religious plays used for conversion, and dancing at carnival.
In some regions, indigenous communities may hold their own patronal fiestas, or they may participate voluntarily in the fiesta of a district or provincial capital as they would in any intercommunal event. In many places, however, patronal and other religious fiestas (such as Christmas, Holy Week, Easter, Corpus Christi) celebrated in large towns are controlled by mestizos, and native Andeans take part only on a contractual basis, or as passive observers.
It is typical for indigenous communities to celebrate festivals with Roman Catholic or European names but to invest them with local meaning and practices. Carnival (in February or March) and All Saints (todos los santos, 2 November), two major indigenous festivals in southern Peru and Bolivia, are prime examples. Carnival and other rainy-season fiestas (including Candelaria, 2 February) are typically redefined as agricultural, ripening, or earth-fertility festivals and occasions for dancing, courting and lovemaking. The wiŽfala is a courting dance performed on such occasions (
In addition to native Andean agricultural and animal fertility rituals (with or without Roman Catholic names), music is often performed as part of communal work projects. Within communities, communally owned land and reciprocal labor exchange are the basis of collaborative agricultural labor. Often musicians lead the workers to and from the fields and perform during breaks. Other communal work projects involving music include the cleaning of irrigation canals and the building and roofing of houses. These types of events, like carnival and All Saints in southern Peru and Bolivia, typically involve noncostumed social dancing.
Life-cycle fiestas are the other major type of musical occasion in the Andes. Weddings typically involve music and social dancing. In the area of Lake Titicaca, Aymara weddings last three days, and to ensure widespread participation are often scheduled just before or after other communal festivals. In Ecuador, children's wakes are a primary event for harp performance. In some regions, families may elect to have music at first-haircutting ceremonies, which welcome babies into the communitya pre-Columbian Andean tradition.
A few features have been suggested as characteristic of native Andean music. They include a predilection for high pitch; dense timbres and ensemble textures; intense repetition of motive, piece, and rhythmic movement; and minimalist contrasts, including constant subtle variations in the melody, resulting in varying degrees of heterophony in ensemble performance. In contrast to the tempered scale, wider tuning variances are favored. As a result, much native Andean music, particularly when played by larger ensembles, has a hard, driving, slightly dissonant quality that contrasts fundamentally with the sweeter, more consonant sound of the urban-revivalist Andean style, well known internationally as played by bands with solo kena, zampon~a, charango, guitar, and drum. Pentatonic melodies are common but are not the hallmark of native Andean music, as formerly assumed: four-tone melodies are most common for traditional music in Canas, Cusco; three-tone scales are abundant in central Peruvian ritual music; and scales with six and seven tones are the mainstay in panpipe and pinkillu music in HuancaneŽ, Puno, Peru.
In the Andes generally, with the exception of small hand-held drums, rattles, and bells, instrumental performance is a male domain; women are often the preferred singers, and are active in dancing with men. In many genres, dance and music are conceptualized as an integrated unit, and musical genres are often defined (labeled) by context. In addition to noncostumed social dances, dance-drama traditions involving dramatic characters and narratives are performed at festivals throughout the Andean region. Generalizable musical contexts include Roman Catholic festivals and certain life-cycle ceremonies, especially weddings. Carnival tends to be one of the most important and popular festivals throughout the Andes; in southern Peru and Bolivia, at least, it often meshes with agricultural rituals for the earth. In contrast to the case with many native American groups, music does not seem to be an important adjunct of healing practices in the Andean region.
North-south distinctions
Though we must allow for further variations within, it seems possible to discuss the highland Andean area below 15 degrees latitude south of the equator as musically distinct from the Andean area to the north. The southern area has a greater prevalence of large wind ensembles (ten to fifty performers) accompanied by drums, and music-dance performance is more consistently a nonspecialist, large-group, or community
People of the southern region make strong wet-dry seasonal associations with specific wind instruments, though the meanings of those associations vary locally. In Cochabamba and PotosiŽ, Bolivia, different types of charangos (or the charango and the guitarrilla) are similarly contrasted. Like musical instruments, generic categories (and stylistic features that differentiate them) are usually identified by specific musical occasions, instruments, or dances, such as matrimonio, carnival, todos los santos, pinkillada, chiriguano, and pulipuli. Context-free generic categories (such as wayno, marinera, cueca, yaraviŽ) are more typical of mestizo musical culture in the region.
In the Titicaca region and south, musical ensembles play for community-member life-cycle celebrations and communitywide festivals on a collaborative basis, though the fiesta sponsor and other community members often give musicians gifts of instruments, food, drink, and coca. Christian festivals are common in this area, but festivals and rituals for the earth, local mountain divinities, and ancestors take on a greater importance than in the northern region. In southern Peru and Bolivia, fiestas with Christian names are typically reinterpreted according to the local indigenous religion and agricultural cycle, whereas a more orthodox Roman Catholicism seems to become more important farther to the north. Musical traditions associated with communal agricultural labor and other work remain important in southern Peru and Bolivia, though they were once important but now are disappearing in the Peruvian department of JuniŽn and to the north. Scholars make little mention of work-related music in Ecuador.
North of Lake Titicaca, the people of indigenous communities like to mix melodic instruments: harp and violin in Ayacucho, Peru; violins and wakrapuku in JuniŽn, Peru; panpipes and duct flutes in Imbabura province, Ecuador. They favor stringsespecially harp, violin, guitar, mandolin. Their ensembles are smaller. Even their large public events feature duets or solos. These traits imply musical specialization and professionalism: in central-southern Peru, hired harp-violin duos enliven indigenous dansaq; in Ancash, Peru, and in northern Ecuador, hired harpists and violinists grace indigenous weddings and children's wakes.
In the southern area, community wind traditions and charango traditions are typically learned by watching and imitating during rehearsals and performances. Young boys may receive guidance from their fathers or other men in private, but such instruction tends to be incidental.
The musical traditions of the northern area seem to involve pedagogical processes of greater formality. Evidence of more formal teaching exists in the north. Teacher-
Aymara-Quechua distinctions
The only general Aymara-Quechua musical distinction I am aware of involves the centrality of songs among Quechua-speakers and the relative lack of importance of vocal music in Aymara-speaking communities. In pre-Columbian days, the southern Andean area was known as Collasuyo. Before the Inca period, independent Aymara-speaking states existed in what are now the Peruvian departments of Arequipa, Puno, and southern Cusco, and the Bolivian department of La Paz. Harry Tschopik (1946:503-504) noted that
The musical traits described here as belonging to the southern area are possibly the heritage of Aymara-speaking peoples, and the relative musical homogeneity of the southern area may be due to strong Aymara influence. Garcilaso's identification of double-unit panpipe performance with the Collas during the early colonial period is a hint in this direction. Yet this conclusion is speculative and requires further research. Until more locally specific information comes to light, it seems safe to say that most musical practices do not line up neatly with Andean linguistic groupings in the contemporary period, and therefore linguistic categories do not serve well as cultural categories. Indigenous peasants typically use community and region as the basis of social identity, and region provides a better basis for understanding Andean musical practices and styles than language does.there is little doubt that in pre-Inca times, and probably until well into the Colonial Period, Aymara was more widely spoken than at present, but it is difficult to be certain of its former boundaries from the vague and scattered references to be gleaned from early Colonial documents.
Musical Instruments
Musical Genres and Contexts
Social Structure, Ideology, Aesthetics
Musical Acculturation
Further Study
The Q'ero are a Quechua-speaking people living high in the Andes east of Cusco, Peru. Their cultural traits include distinctive survivals. Though it is tempting to see the Q'ero as an Inka (Inca) survival, their unique musical practices probably reflect an even earlier Andean diversity with an Inka overlay.
Q'ero ceremonial music is heard throughout seasonal cycles, and the Q'ero exploit every local ecological zone from the mountaintops to the jungle. Centered on flocks of llamas and alpacas, music is an integral part of Q'ero rituals. The Q'ero share many social, economic, and cultural ties with their Andean neighbors, but they have been sufficiently isolated to have preserved their own cultural and musical traits in coexistence with contemporary elements.
Living at an elevation of 4.25 kilometers, the Q'ero are essentially herders, but they raise potatoes in the lower altitudes and grow corn, melons, and peppers in the jungle farther below. Each family has temporary wood shelters in the jungle, large stone houses in the ceremonial center at an elevation of 3.65 kilometers, and small stone houses located in isolated clusters in the high valleys. The total population is about four hundred people distributed in five hamlets (ayllu, a Quechua word for community, family, or other social grouping).
The Q'ero share certain musical traditions with the entire region of Cusco, but they have distinctly emblematic songs and music, heard only in their highland homeland. Their major festivals coincide with Spanish calendrical festivals, but with no European or colonial elements. Each of their festivals has songs and instruments specifically associated with it. For this reason, their music cannot be characterized by a single style, musical scale, or musical function. This diversity within the music of a single community is inherent in Andean cultural life.
Q'ero music is not influenced by European elements: it uses neither instruments introduced by the Spanish, nor any of the stringed instruments (like the charango and the bandurria) or the brass instruments that evolved in the Andes in the colonial era [see Cohen 1984). Though the Q'ero have had transistor radios since 1980 and can hear Andean radio programs of huayno (wayno) music broadcast from Cusco, they
Panpipes
Canchis sipas are single-unit raft panpipes, two bound rows of seven reed tubes each [see QUECHUA-AYMARA]. One row is never played. The name means "seven young (unmarried) girls." These instruments and their related songs have their own scale. On the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist (24 June), Q'ero women address the songs associated with the canchis sipas to female alpacas, llamas, and sheep. One song says:
Another says:Because you eat, we eat.
Because you drink, we drink.
Because you are, we are.
In the department of Cusco, panpipes are rare, but they are common in the altiplano around Lake Titicaca. The presence of these panpipes (and the Q'ero use of four-stake looms) therefore suggests an earlier cultural connection to the Titicaca basin (Cohen 1980).Mother, my mother [the female animal],
Open me up [to luck], and speak inside of me.
Flutes
The pinculu, an end-blown notched flute capable of four notes, produces the music most uniquely associated with the Q'ero. This instrument is played at two fertility rituals: those for llamas (Quechua Ahata Uhuchichis, Spanish Santiago 'Saint James') and those for alpacas (Quechua Palchasqa or Palcha, Spanish Carnaval 'carnival'). These flutes accompany the special four-note songsincluding "Bandarra," "Kius," "Palcha," "Serena," "Turpa," and "Wallata"sung only for these festivals.
Wallata are the wild geese that fly in pairs over the mountains in Q'ero territory. The text includes these words:
Turpa is an herb that grows on the mountain; the translation of the Q'ero words to this melody is: "Panti Turpa, why have you come to these desolate ravines?" Palcha isWallata, black and white, with eyes of pearls;
Wallata, black and white, with scalloped wings:
The running waters which you drink in the highlands.
Always in connection with animals, shepherds play the pinculu in pastures while herding. Usually, several such flutes can be heard playing independently of each other across the high pastures (puna). The music directs and comforts the animals by locating their shepherd in space.
Pinculu are made from hollow reeds (Arondo donax, obtained in the jungle), ranging from 15 to 71 centimeters long. Four rectangular holes for fingering are evenly spaced toward the distal end of each tube to be made into a flute. Four-hole flutes of this description have not been found in other parts of the Andes; they are seen neither in Harcourt and Harcour?s collections (1990 [1925]) norexcept for some from Paracas culturein ancient graves.
A person plays the pinculu by uncovering the four holes in sets of two fingers rather than one finger for each tone (see Okada 1995: example 12). Sometimes only the outline of the melody is heard with segments conceived under the breath without being audibly played (the musician plays mentally, silently). In addition, coloration is sometimes given to the music when the flutist overblows on the notch, producing short and high overtones or octaves. A technique frequently used in transitions from one note to another is to rapidly touch down two fingers, covering and uncovering two holes, producing a sound akin to a trill. In the lower register, intermediate notes are accessible by breathing with reduced force; these notes occur in passing, not as melodic terminal points. A particular Q'ero melody may have more notes in the sung version than when played on the flute. The flute gives the impression of an outline of the gist of a melody. Finally, pinculu are not tuned to each other and are not played together in unison. Three men playing in the same room will play the same tune together, though not at the same pitches, and not with shared points of starting or stopping (Cohen 1984).
Other musical instruments
The Q'ero use musical instruments found in other Andean communities. Of these instruments, the pututu is a conch trumpet, played by communal authorities as a sign of their position. The conch produces a blast of sound to announce the beginning of an event or a ceremony. Pututu are old: because the shells come originally from the sea, hundreds of kilometers away, they must be traded for and carried to the mountaintops.
Another outside musical instrument employed by the Q'ero is the can~a (Spanish) 'cane, reed', an end-blown six-note ductless flute, made of reed or plastic pipe. Played by shepherds, can~as are used for melodies heard throughout the mountains.
A side-blown six-note flute, pitu, is used only for melodies of the chunchu (jungle Indian culture)music played with drums during the fiesta of Corpus Christi and at the pilgrimage to Collariti. The chunchu melody is far richer than that performed on the pinculu, and it always ends with a sequence of notes unrelated to the tonal center of the melody. No texted songs are associated with this music. Dancers representing the chunchu dress in brightly colored feather headdresses, carrying long pieces of jungle wood (from a bow), festooned with short feathers. The chunchu as a visual motif is also seen in Q'ero weaving (Cohen 1957).
The Q'ero celebrate their annual festivals in their hamlets or at a lower elevation at the ceremonial center, where the entire community gathers several times a year for major feasts. In addition, they make a pilgrimage to Collariti during Corpus Christi
The most unusual and emblematic Q'ero festivals, Palchasqa and Ahata Uhuchichis, occur roughly six months apart. Both focus on alpacas and llamas. The vocal and flute melodies associated with these festivals are sung and played throughout the year. During the festivals, however, they are performed with greater intensity.
At Palchasqa (February or March, based on the Christian calendar), individual Q'ero families hold rituals in their houses. The woman of the house sings, and the man plays a pinculu. They pour corn beer (chicha) onto grass from the pasture, and onto little statues of the animals. Then several families join together outside and throw flowers (palcha) at the alpacas while singing and playing pinculu. Five or more women sing at the same time, interspersing ritual phrases with complaints about their daily lives. Each tells her own story in song. At times, the musical texture consists of different people singing personalized songs simultaneously. Only occasionally do they meet on ritual phrases or on final notes.
The following translation from one woman's singing of a floral song is adapted from Cohen n.d.; the performance can be seen in Cohen 1984.
The ritual is repeated late in the day, with the animals in their corrals.Scatter the flower, Huaman [a mountain spirit].
What suffering you leave me, my brother [refers to alpaca],
Huaman, my brother sun [a mountain spirit].
Don't leave me, mother [refers to the lineage of alpacas].
The red flower that I gather,
The earth hill that I climb [site of the ritual],
You will make blossom.
Come here, my mother [lineage of alpacas],
Where I sleep with my lover.
Leave those ancient things [old, male, infertile alpacas]:
Black alpaca with red feet,
You eat by the side of another,
Or with the alpacas of Santo Domingo [a nearby mountain spirit].
You drank to the earth.
You gave me flowers, Huaman.
Suffering takes away the happiness of my valley.
Alpaca who leads the way,
Flower that I have to give,
Wouldn't you nurture me?
Together you are sleeping.
Don't look at me, mother [for you are sacred].
Scatter the panti [flower], Huaman.
The following day, many elements come together. For carnival, the entire community descends from the isolated mountain hamlets, gathering at the central village, Hautun Q'ero, which serves as the ceremonial center. Each Q'ero family has a large house here, used only for community rituals. The male authorities are greeted with exchanges of conch trumpets, while other men play flutes and do a stomping dance (kius). The ayllu groups sing and play all night in the large houses. Twenty people may be packed together inside, drinking, singing heterophonically, with conch trumpets blasting. Sometimes, late in the night, the individual qualities become less
On the day of carnival, everyone gathers at the plaza (outside the church) overlooking the jungle. While the men dance, sing, and play pinculu, the women sing separately or in unison as ayllu groups. In this way, five sets of women representing the different ayllus sing the same song in overlapping disregard for each other. The women are arranged in a single line that arcs around the men, who dance, sing, and heterophonically play pincullu. There is a rich and pulsating texture to the event, perhaps more obvious to the outside listener than to the participants. This kind of heterophony does not occur elsewhere in the Andes, but it resembles celebrations in the Amazon basin. The structure of this Q'ero music may therefore suggest a cultural connection between the Andes and the Amazon.
The prevalent song at carnival is chosen or composed by the president of the Q'ero community (elected during Chayampuy, several weeks earlier) when he goes to Paucartambo, where the government registers his authority. During his trip, he reads the landscape for signs and composes a new song to be sung at carnival and throughout the year (Webster 1972).
Similar celebrations with music are held at the hamlets in the high valleys. From late July through August, individual families thank the gods for the strength and fertility of their llamas. In the corrals, they mark the male animals by putting tassels in their ears, and force them to drink corn beer. This festival is known as Ahata Uhuchichis (Let's Drink Corn Beer). Each family's ritual differs slightly from that of its neighbors. Though families celebrate on separate days, they all employ similar ritual items. A special cloth, the uncunu, is set on the ground as an altar (Spanish mesa 'table') on which ritual objects are placed. These are special ritual versions of items used in daily life: ropes, bells, and offerings of corn beer and coca leaves.
The ritual moves from the corral into the house. As it progresses through the night, the men increasingly mimic the animals, shaking llama bells and ropes, hitting each other with whips as if they themselves were llamas, and whistling as they do when they drive the animals along. Some men sing in a low, forced growl, in imitation of the llamas' humming. Often the women sing intensely, and some men play pinculu.
The music goes on continuously, but individuals start and stop as they please, sometimes not completing a phrase. After the ritual items are put away, the celebration becomes an expression of human fertility as couples go off to bed. This musical style allows for a maximum expression of the individual while retaining a distinctive communal identity.
Dances organized around specific symbols are associated with the ritual festivals. Kius, for example, is a legendary bird of the gods. It is danced during carnival with unmetered stamping and slight leaps. At the festival in Collariti, ukuku represents a bear with a shaggy costume, and chunchu represents the jungle Indian.
Because Q'ero music functions as an integral part of ritual, considering music a separate entity may be a mistaken notion. The Q'ero explain music this way: "It's always like this, we sing this song of the Inkas. We compose the song from all things. Every song comes on its appropriate date. If there is no song, there is no fiesta; and without the fiesta, there is no song."
Q'ero songs reflect a complex cosmology that moves freely between mountain spirits (auki and apu) and personal events from daily life. The texts speak of parallels
Though men and women know and sing the songs, women are the primary singers; only men play the accompanying pinculu or canchis sipas. (Consistent with indigenous Andean tradition, Q'ero women do not play instruments.) At rituals for the fertility of the animals, gender differences in styles of singing are defined in terms of the animals: men imitate the sound of male alpacas; women imitate the sound of female alpacas.
Often the flute serves as a prod to initiate women's participation, and the flutist will delineate a melody in anticipation of the singing. The woman's singing is more involving and intense than the flute. At communal gatherings, the maximal female vocal qualities find fullest expression. Their singing becomes emotional and intense rather than formal or dutiful. Men's singing can become an expression of a constrained explosion, a forceful assertion of local conceptions of maleness, complete with growls and explosive yelps.
The general Q'ero musical aesthetic allows different pitches, texts, and rhythms to sound at the same time. Though the Q'ero sometimes sing in perfect unison, their songs are structured to be sung individually. There is no sense of choral singing or harmony. A family, ayllu, or community may be singing and playing the same song at the same time, but each singer sets her or his own pace, pattern of breathing, and point of starting and stopping. Yet the melodies sung at communal occasions have a sustained note at the end of a phrase, permitting the other singers to catch up and share this prolonged duration, which serves as a drone. When the new verse starts, the heterophony begins anew.
Although Q'ero practices may appear archaic and isolated, some Q'ero nonetheless deal with bank loans and interest rates to function economically. The value of their alpaca wool is affected by international market prices. When the Q'ero meet the world outside their boundaries, they disguise themselves. At Tinquy, they abandon their distinctive music, and conform to the music and costumes of their neighbors, dancing to popular huaynos and carnavales played on portable phonographs. This social dance, performed by couples in lines and often holding hands, in form resembles descriptions of an Inka dance known as cashua taki. About this dance, the Q'ero call themselves Inka and their neighbors Qeshwa 'People of the Valley'. When the Q'ero visit the commercial center at Ocongate, 30 kilometers away, they hide their
The material presented here is based on my visits to the Q'ero over a thirty-five-year period, when I attended most of their major festivals. My recordings of Q'ero music (1964, 1991) have provided ethnomusicologists with ways to construct a model for Inka-Andean tradition and to augment or refute Harcourt and Harcour?s pentatonic theories. Alan Lomax (1968) used a Q'ero example from this recording to characterize the Andes in his global musical map for cantometrics; Rodolpho Holzmann (1980, 1986) used this music to establish a tritonic basis for Inka music; Dale A. Olsen (1980) transcribed an excerpt to explain the use of tetratonic scales and to demonstrate the use of microtones; and Bruce Mannheim (1984) used a Q'ero example from the same source in his studies of subliminal verbal patterning in southern Quechua folk song. In Peru, Oscar NuŽn~ez del Prado has made recordings of Q'ero music (unissued). A published Peruvian mention of Q'ero music (Ochoa and Fries n.d.) derives from his writing or the sources above.
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Acculturation
Further Study
The Mapuche (People of the Land) inhabit the lands between the BiŽo-BiŽo River and ChiloeŽ Island in Chile and western Argentina. Anthropologists and government officials often use the name Araucano to designate these people, who share a common language (Araucanian, according to Joseph Greenberg 1989:383), though many continue to identify themselves as Pehuenche, Puelche, Tehuelche, Ranquel, Huarpe, and Pampa-Boroga. The politics of naming and specifying cultural identities in this area of Chile and Argentina is a puzzle that can be solved only through a discussion of archaeological records, musical forms, and ritual practices. The history of the southern Andes unites traditions of warriors, prophets, shamans, and nomadic pastoralists under a linguistic umbrella, mapudungun 'words of the land'.
Archaeological records and oral histories trace several migrations across the Andes Mountains. For millennia, peoples of the eastern pampas traded with their western neighbors and utilized the natural resources of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Ancient Moluche warriors and hunters from the pampas conquered the agriculturalists between the BiŽo-BiŽo and TolteŽn rivers more than a thousand years ago (Berdichewsky 1971). Between the 1400s and 1700s, the Chilean Mapuche reversed the direction of this influence by extending their military and trade empire all the way to what is now Buenos Aires (San MartiŽn ca. 1919; Schoo Lastra 1928).
Clay vessels and stone panpipes suggest that trade routes extended from Patagonia to the southern borders of the Nasca, the Wari, and (much later) the Inca empires of Peru. In the late 1400s, the Inca incorporated the Kolla Suyu (Southern Kingdom) into their extensive domain and established military outposts south of the Maule River to protect their claims (Aldunate del Solar 1992). Thus, by the time of the Spanish invasions in the 1500s, the people we know as Mapuche had become a heterogeneous mixture of autonomous communities, formed into military confederations to resist incursions from Inca and Spanish forces.
Several centuries of contact between peoples on both sides of the Andes produced an intricate cosmology and a body of ceremonial lore loosely shared by peoples with differing systems of social organization (Faron 1956, 1961, 1964; Robertson 1979; Robertson-DeCarbo 1976).
Until about 1900, Mapuche military success was reinforced by a system of elaborate
Present-day Mapuche oral historians assert that formerly there were no permanent chiefs among Mapuche peoples; rather, in wartime, prominent citizens (often male diviners or heads of lineages) would be installed as military chiefs, expected to step back into the ranks once peace had been secured. Prominent women were consulted on matters of military strategy. Authority was negotiated through a system of lineage exchanges. The social and ritual power of each lineage was embodied in characteristic songs and dances.
The persistence of warfare over five centuries radically changed Mapuche social organization. Once the Argentine and Chilean armies usurped control of Mapuche lands, they established land-distribution patterns (Chile) and a system of reservations (Argentina) that altered access to the people's water, trade routes, animal herding, and authority structures. With men at war for long periods, social authority, ritual life, food gathering, and animal herding had fallen increasingly into the hands of women.
The Argentine and Chilean national governments were slow to recognize the rights of Mapuche women and restricted their claims to land and herds. The power arrangements that had prevailed in peacetime were replaced with permanent, hereditary chieftainships. Despite the conqueror's misogyny, several Mapuche women inherited the title of community chief (lonko) in Chile and Argentina. Each chief now answered to the white (huinca) military or provincial authorities of each territory (MartiŽnez Sarasola 1992).
The ritual power of the shaman (machi) was undermined by missionization, public education, and governments, which feared shamans' power to energize the will of a subjugated people. Decreased access to fertile land and to the new economic system diminished a community's ability to provide feasts, horses, silver ornaments, and personnel requisite for important rituals, including seasonal rites of increase and female rites of passage (kataŽn kawil).
The Mapuche have always challenged scholarly reduction, for while engaging in many musical practices common to other South American peoples, they have fashioned their dialogue with the sacred through unique uses of vocal and instrumental techniques.
The archaeological record offers extensive examples of pitucahue, stone panpipes of up to eight tubes, linking the Mapuche to panpipe traditions reaching as far north as Panama (PeŽrez de Arce 1986, 1987). Some Chilean pitucahue were carved as early as the tenth century. Stone, an unyielding medium, was eventually replaced by wood and cane.
Though stone panpipes were used to make melodies, their cane and wood counterparts (pifušlka) were used as markers of rhythm. Most pifušlka are double-tubed flutes open only on one end, yielding a fundamental and an overblown fourth, fifth, or octave. Wooden varieties became scarce in the 1900s and have been replaced by ensembles of single canes of varying lengths. Rather than playing cane flutes in melodic groups (as in the northern Andean traditions), Mapuche musicians play each tube separately: to create rhythmic patterns, each player coordinates the pitch of his tube with his fellows' pitches. When large numbers of pifušlka players gather to dance
Many other kinds of flutes have been found in archaeological sites, as have straight trumpets with oblique or transverse mouthpieces. Among the latter, the trutruka (with oblique mouthpiece) continues to be an important sonic element in the annual rites of increase [see ARGENTINA:
Another instrument that has pre-Columbian antecedents is the kultruŽn, a single-headed drum central to Mapuche healing and ceremony. It consists of a wooden bowl (mamušl raliŽ), covered with hide of guanaco, dog, or (in recent times) cow or horse, fastened with human hair or sinew. Drums are painted with symbols that denote the four directions, the four lines of ancestors, the sun, the moon, spirals, planets, and other forces of nature (Aldunate del Solar 1992; Grebe 1979-1980). They often appear in ancient rock drawings in scenes depicting important social changes, hunts, or spiritual revelations.
Many other instruments within the archaeological record have fallen out of use: shell rattles (chunan), calabash rattles (huada), shell rasps (cadacada), musical bows (quinquerche or quinquercahue), diverse flutes made of bone and cane, and a sucked trumpet (lolkin~ or nolkiŽn). Of all the instruments mentioned, the kultruŽn is by far the most important, for it offers a point of entry into Mapuche cosmology.
In Mapuche ideology, each individual has two souls. The first, alweŽ or almeŽn, is distinctly personal: it is born with each individual and yet survives the physical limitations of that individual. It is the source of each individual's creative energy. When a person dies, this soul wanders across the earth until it reaches the end of the western horizon, through which it enters the realm of gods and ancestors.
The second soul, kimpen~, is an inherited soul embodying the life force of a lineage. It originates in the sacred ancestral past, but it is transmitted across the boundaries of time to the contemporary descendants of a lineage. This soul is individualized only in that it enters a person at birth. Its nature is cumulative, compounded through time, and contributed to by all deceased and living members of each lineage. Lines of kinship are traced through an individual's four grandparents. Though this soul can be traced to an individual's father's father, each person may invoke up to four sets of ancestors, according to circumstance and need.
The power of each kimpen~ is coded in its song, known as tayil. Each tayil is a signaturea shorthand statement of the natural powers and physical properties associated with a particular lineage, its guiding spirits, its animal totems, its spiritual history. As AndreŽs EpullaŽn, a Mapuche elder of Andean Argentina, put it in 1978, "Tayil is a way of feeling. When the women pull out tayil, they do it with great emotion. In that moment, they are feeling everything that has ever flowed through the veins of those who hold that chant. They feel it through their wombs."
This genre can be performed only by women, for it is a form of giving birth to spirit. The verb used for vocalizing a tayil is the same verb used for the process of going through labor and giving birth. Many variations of tayil melodies exist, but
Specific melodic contours and coded syllables are combined to signal the character of a lineage (
The goal of performing tayil is to bridge the present and the past. Each performance consists of four phrases, and each phrase articulates the lineage soul in a different sphere of time and space. When a woman performs her husband's tayil (
Tayil are critical to the Mapuche process of ritual and healing. In Mapuche belief, most disease is caused by the wandering of the personal soul (alweŽ). This detachable aspect of self can become entangled in the spirit world or can be captured by another human being. An individual whose soul has been tampered with may suffer illnesses, exhibiting physical and spiritual symptoms. Treatment may be approached through several methods. In Chile, the most common is the machituŽn, wherein the machi uses her voice and her kultruŽn to journey for her patient and take the diseased soul through a cathartic process that will bring a release into wellness (Grebe 1979-1980; Grebe, Pacheco, and Segura 1972).
Persecution, intimidation, and missionization have made Argentine Mapuche wary of acknowledging the presence of shamanic practitioners in their midst (Robertson 1991). As in Chile, healers on the eastern slopes of the Andes are usually women. Men in this profession have always dressed and behaved socially as women, developing an artificial womb through which to channel healing.
In Argentina, ceremonial leaders are known as witakultruntufe 'women carrying the drum'. Like the Chilean machi, the witakultruntufe combines chant and drumming with herbal medicine and ritual action to create a healing gestalt in which the spiritual and social patterns and behavior of the patient may be modified. If illness is the result of a personal soul's wandering, the patient may be strengthened when the healer "pulls" the tayil, fusing past and present, creating a union of the mundane and sacred worlds. The healer may resonate sounds in parts of her body that correspond to affected parts of the patient's body. To treat respiratory diseases, she may sound
Vocal genres
Several traditional vocal genres persist among the Mapuche. A precomposed style of ceremonial song (ošl) accompanies dances at the annual rites of increase. Improvised songs (kantuŽn) are often denoted by a Spanish term, romanceo. Spontaneous creations, these usually describe recent events and may cleverly juxtapose Spanish and Mapuche texts to cultivate the metaphors and puns of Mapuche humor. The melodies and rhythms of many kantuŽn have been influenced by the Chilean cueca, and by chamameŽ, chotis, milonga, polka, and vals, styles introduced by frontier soldiers and gauchos. Late-twentieth-century examples may show traces of melodies by Mexican mariachis and even the Beatles.
KantuŽn may be composed and sung by men and women, unaccompanied or with guitar and accordion. The ošl are often sung by women simultaneously with the hocketed melodies of pifušlka ensembles; but tayil are the exclusive domain of women's voices.
Because Mapuche homes are often at great distances from one another, whole communities do not gather frequently. Men who work on road-construction sites or on cattle farms owned by non-Mapuche settlers may gather at makeshift pulperias, where alcohol lubricates the throat and loosens cuecas and romanceos. Since the 1960s, women have begun to join their men at ramadas, song-and-dance feasts held in criollo towns, in which participants may dance until they collapse from exhaustion.
The Mapuche are famous for their endurance in song and dance. Some boast that they have been well honed for ramadas by years of participation in the annual rites of increase, held at the end of each harvest season, and involving three or four days and nights of perpetual dancing and ceremony. The goal of the ceremony is to draw the ancestors' and deities' attention to the needs of their earthbound children. Sheep and horses are sacrificed and offered on an altar (rewe); women sing tayil and ošl to fortify ritual actions that link the community to sacred time.
The dances of these rites vary from one community to another, depending on the mix of Andean and pampa groups that has resulted over centuries of migration and intermarriage. Among the most widely known dances are puel purruŽn and lonkomeo, performed in areas of Chile and Argentina. Their rhythms are signaled by the kultruŽn and are sometimes accompanied by young male dancers playing pifušlka and trutruka.
Puel purruŽn means 'dance to the east', whence come light and life. The puel
The lonkomeo 'moving the head' differs from puel purruŽn in that it is a virtuosic display of individual skill. The choreography of this dance depicts five stages in the life of the choike, a rhea, whose size and power impede its flight but which at death soars heavenward to meet the ancestors. Drummed rhythms accompany the emergence of the rhea from the egg, its wobbly attempts to walk, its strut as a mature bird, and its death and ascent. Old and young men alike are selected to form groups of four or five dancers representing the major lineages in a community. Kinswomen pull forth the lineage soul or each dancer so the dance, a ritual metaphor for life on earth, will evoke compassion in the beings of the spirit world.
Mapuche performance spaces often accommodate more than one event at a time, so instrumental and vocal genres often occur simultaneously without the need for synchrony. Thus, though dances, chants, and instrumental passages may accompany the same ritual action, they may do so as separate artistic statements. This is especially evident in group performances of tayil, in which each woman may begin her rendition on any pitch and perform at her own speed, for each woman is pulling her lineage soul forth as a separate, personal effort (
This approach to performance often carries over into some of the musical genres learned from Argentine gauchos and performed at annual sen~aladas, when animals are branded, separated, and prepared for journeys to higher pastures where they will spend the summer. These events are capped in the late afternoon by house parties at which hosts provide meat, wine, and song. Guitars, accordions, and Western band instruments seldom seen in colder months may be brought down from the rafters for renditions of a late-nineteenth-century vals or chotis, and an occasional polka. Many of these styles were learned by grandfathers of the present generation while in captivity in frontier forts. Sometimes, an accordion, a guitar, and a trumpet may play in different keys and at different tempi, for although they are part of the same event, each performer asserts a degree of independence.
Though many Mapuche children have been estranged from traditional world views by schools, missionization, and a world that hawks "modern" values and rejects old ways, they continue to participate in the agricultural and ritual cycles of their communities
In 1981, Gregorio Cayulef, a Mapuche elder from the Argentine-Chilean border, said:
Chile and Argentina may declare war on each other forever. But we know that though our grandfathers came from many places, we are now one Mapuche people. We find seashells in the mountains and know these Andes were not always there. Change will come; but as for us, we must keep two things: our language and our chants.
The Chilean composer and scholar Carlos Isamitt was one of the first to study and write about the music and dance of the Mapuche, whom he called los araucanos (1937, 1938, 1941). Another Chilean composer interested in musical nationalism, Carlos LaviŽn, also published about the music of the Mapuche (1967). The Chilean composer, musicologist, and Indiana University professor Juan Orrego-Salas drew on the findings and publications of these Chilean scholars, those of Pedro Humberto Allende, and also his own laboratory research, resulting in an article in Ethnomusicology (1966) entitled "Araucanian Indian Instruments." This was one of the first studies in English on Mapuche music. With the expansion of the foremost Chilean scholarly journal, Revista Musical Chilena, into more ethnomusicological topics and themes, numerous articles on Mapuche music appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Most important are those by MariŽa Ester Grebe (1973, 1974), Ernesto GonzaŽlez (1986), Luis Merino (1974), and Carlos Munizaga (1974).
An early but important anthropological study of Chilean Mapuche music is by Titiev (1949), entitled Social Singing among the Mapuche. His studies (also 1951) and those by Louis Faron (1964, 1968) are important ethnographic works for contextualizing Mapuche music.
Two commercial recordings that include Mapuche music are by Dannemann and Wenzel (1975) and Clair-Vasiliadis, et al. (1975). Dannemann and Wenzel include several excerpts of trutruka music and a lengthy example of a machi shaman accompanied by a kultruŽn. Clair-Vasiliadis's recording includes numerous social songs, love songs, marriage songs, and other vocal examples, plus a short excerpt of a trutruka solo.
What is the essence of South American music? Many will think of the guitar and its dozens of relatives. Others may think of skin-covered drums or hand-held rattles such as maracas. They are also right. South American music includes these instruments and many others, as it is a region of many heritages and great musical diversity. We think immediately of Spanish and Portuguese, African, and native American backgrounds. But we must also think of other Europeans, the great diversity of Africans forcibly brought to the New World, and the multitude of other immigrants whose musics have become part of the cultural mosaic of South America.
Linguistic Diversity
History
South America is a continent of twelve politically independent countries and one department of France (maps pp. 243, 244, 246, 247). Five official or national languages are spokenDutch, English, French, Spanish, and Portugueseas are hundreds of native American tongues, dozens of imported languages [see MUSIC OF IMMIGRANT GROUPS], and several localized ones, such as Creole, Taki-taki, and Papiamento. Most of the continent's three hundred million people, however, speak Spanish or Portuguese.
Apart from the speakers of indigenous languages, the linguistic diversity of the South American continent originated from its colonial background. In the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Pope Alexander VI set a demarcation line that divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. It awarded Spain all lands 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal everything east of the line (Goodman 1992). This treaty led to the development of Brazil as an officially Portuguese-speaking country, whereas the other colonies in South America (except the Guianas) officially spoke Spanish. England, France, and the Netherlands, however, eventually established colonial outposts on the northern Atlantic coast of the continent, where their languages prevailed; this area, a sort of coastal buffer between Spain and Portugal, was known as the GuianasBritish Guiana (Guyana), Dutch Guiana (Surinam), and French Guiana.
For the purpose of government, Spain divided its lands into four large domains, or viceroyalties (subkingdoms): New Spain (much of Central America north into the western half of the present United States), New Granada (present Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela), Peru (present Chile and Peru), and La Plata (present Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay). Portugal's domain became the viceroyalty of Brazil, which grew much larger than the land originally determined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. For almost three centuries, viceroys ruled these areas, representing the crowns of Spain and Portugal. Unique in South America, Brazil became the
Independence movements started in the 1800s. SimoŽn BoliŽvar and JoseŽ de San MartiŽn are considered the liberators of Spanish-speaking South America. Brazil, however, was given to Dom Pedro by his father, Dom Joa~o who returned to Portugal. Dom Pedro proclaimed Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 and had himself crowned emperor of Brazil. The remaining European colonies on the north coast (the Guianas) did not become independent until the 1900s, and French Guiana remains French territory. Since the 1800s, most South American nations have experienced dictatorships, elitist or military rule, and many changes of governments; only since the 1980s have some of them become democratic.
South America is a continent of great geographic contrasts. It contains one of the driest deserts on earth (the Atacama Desert in northern Chile), the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere (Aconcagua, on the border between Argentina and Chile), one of the world's longest rivers (RiŽo Maran~oŽn-Amazon, Amazon), the world's largest tropical forest (the Amazon), the world's highest waterfall (Angel Falls in Venezuela), and many other unique physical features.
In historical times, wars have been fought over some of these regions. From 1879 to 1883, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru fought the War of the Pacific over the discovery of nitrates (Chile won). From melted-down cannons, Argentina and Chile built a large statue of Jesus Christ (Cristo Redemptor, "Christ of the Andes") on their border between Mendoza and Santiago; its inscription translates: "Sooner shall these mountains crumble to dust than Argentines and Chileans break the peace sworn to at the feet of Christ the Redeemer" (Herring 1968:736). Border and internal skirmishes, and even wars, have been waged in the South American rain forests and foothills, mainly because of the desire for slaves, the discovery of minerals and hardwoods, or the possibility of finding deposits of oil. The Brazil-Paraguay war (1864-1870) was one of the bloodiest conflicts in all of South America, and the Chaco War, between Paraguay and Bolivia, was one of the longest (1928-1954) (Herring 1968:815-818). What can be termed genocidal wars against native Americans have continued in South America even into the late 1990s.
Native South Americans have been affected by the processing of rubber, narcotics, and gold and by intrusions into their lands by missionaries and nonmissionaries. In tropical forests, the Andes, the Caribbean coasts, and elsewhere, indigenous cultures and species of flora and fauna are in constant danger of extinctionmostly because of greed. Nevertheless, native South Americans have survived, though not without changes to most of their societies. Many musical occasions reveal these changes, as seen in musical instrument usage, ceremonial dress, dance styles, language, and musical genresor the disappearance of any of the above (
But just as the native South American music cultures have evolved, so have the Spanish, Portuguese, and many African music cultures. Most music of South America is a cultural mix, a musical mosaic (Olsen 1980). South America claims some of the world's most populous cities, greatest architectural achievements, and largest slums. It also claims some of the world's most exciting music and elaborate folkloric events. Much of this is because of the amalgamation of culturesthe fusion of dozens of heritages in a multitude of ways.
South Americans have great feelings of musical and cultural nationalism; art-music composers have borrowed on traditional themes, and popular-music composers have created national expressions. Throughout the centuries, many countries within South America have experienced musical censorship; however, some traditions, such as the tango in Argentina, never die (
Aboriginal Inhabitants
Musical Instruments
Religious Musical Contexts and Genres
Secular Musical Contexts and Genres
Enculturation and Learning
Musical Change
Located in the southern "cone" of South America, the Republic of Argentina is the southeast extreme of the Americas and covers about 2.77 million square kilometers of continental land. It extends westward to the Andes and Chile, eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, Uruguay, and Brazil, northward to the borders with Bolivia and Paraguay, and southward to Chile and the Atlantic Ocean. Its territory has a varied topography in which several cultural areas can be distinguished: Patagonia (Chubut, NeuqueŽn, RiŽo Negro, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego provinces), the area of the pampa (Buenos Aires, La Pampa, Santa Fe, the south of CoŽrdoba), the area of Cuyo (Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis), the northwestern area (Catamarca, Jujuy, La Rioja, Salta, TucumaŽn), the central area (Santiago del Estero, the center and north of CoŽrdoba), the area of Chaco (Chaco, Formosa, the east of Salta), and the littoral area (Corrientes, Entre RiŽos, Misiones).
Argentina's population is about 34 million persons, of whom about 85 percent are of European descent. Natives and mestizos have been pushed aside or absorbed. A famous character, immortalized in literature, is a kind of mestizo called gaucho, a human stereotype synonymous with the country. The most representative music of Argentina, known all over the world, is tango, a popular dance for couples, with sensual and complex choreography.
The archaeological record for native Argentine music comes almost totally from the northwest; the historical record covers more of the country. Archaeological studies begun in the 1880s have centered in the northwestern Andean province of Jujuy, where numerous idiophones and aerophones have been found.
Ancient idiophones included rattles made of gourds and fruits, jingles (cascabeles) made of fruits, small metal and wooden bells (with and without clappers), and a gourd sistrum (Vignati 1982).
Aerophones included widely various flutes, whistles, and trumpets made from stone, ceramic, bone, and wood. Their forms were mostly abstract, though a few were zoomorphic. Excavations have revealed mostly ductless oval and pear-shaped
globular flutes (ocarinas) made from stone or ceramic. One was made from an armadillo cranium, with an avian humerus for a duct (Vignati 1982:93). Bone end-blown flutes were found, with and without holes for fingering, with and without the rectangular notch of the quena (or kena). Raft panpipes of three or four closed tubes, made from stone, ceramic, and wood, were also found. Excavations have revealed trumpets, usually made from bone. The panpipes and trumpets have most commonly been found in Jujuy.
Historical records
Historical sources for the study of Argentine music began in 1520. They include the chronicles of explorers, travelers, colonizers, and missionaries. Most of these sources superficially describe the indigenous musics of Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, RiŽo de la Plata, and the Chaco.
Little has been published about the aboriginal music of Tierra del Fuego, except that music was related to birth, childhood, curing, and death (Vignati 1982). The YaŽmana and the Ona had collective songs and solo shamanistic songs, based on few pitches with small intervals (Gallardo 1910; Lothrop 1928; Segers 1891). There is no agreement about YaŽmana and Ona musical instruments, because the chroniclers could not competently determine whether or not an object was a musical instrument; only an aerophone and a women's rhythm stick have been mentioned (Furlong 1909; Gallardo 1910; Lothrop 1928).
Rattles made of gourd, bark, or leather (d'Orbigny 1835-1847; HernaŽndez 1910 [1836]), rhythm sticks with and without rattles (Faulkner 1935 [1774]; Pigafetta 1800 [1534]; Transilvano 1837 [1829]), little bells (HernaŽndez 1910 [1836]), a sistrum (Morris 1750), and drums (d'Orbigny 1835-1847; SaŽnchez Labrador 1936 [1772]) have been documented in Patagonia. In the 1800s, aerophones such as flutes, conch or cane trumpets, and whistles made of bone, wood, ceramics, and stone have been mentioned (d'Orbigny 1835-1847; Moreno 1890-1891; Vaulx 1898). Several mouth-resonated bows were reported during the last decades of 1800s, but the first mention was made by d'Orbigny, who saw such a bow among the Auca in 1829. Dances and songs were mentioned in association with birth, puberty, healing, death, marriage, religion, hunting, sadness, and thanksgiving.
The earliest sources dealing with the southern part of Argentina are by Pigafetta and Transilvano, chroniclers from Magellan's expedition (in 1520), followed by the chronicles of Fray GarciŽa JofreŽ de Loaisa (in 1526), SimoŽn de Alcazaba (in 1535), Sarmiento de Gamboa (in 1584), Francis Drake (in 1578), and Francis Fletcher (in 1578). None of the seventeenth-century Argentine sources mention music, and only about 1750 does music begin to be documented in quantity. Among the most important contributions are those of Joseph SaŽnchez Labrador (1936 [1772]), Alcides d'Orbigny (1835-1847), Estanislao Zeballos (1881), and a magnificent description by Hunt (in Despard 1854), a companion of the missionary George Pakenham Despard (1854). Hunt describes a melody sung by the Patagones in 1845, giving the texts and the rhythm on a musical staff.
Meager information from RiŽo de la Plata mentions flutes, duct flutes (pingollos), drums, cornets, and trumpets associated with war. The main sources include the chronicle by Ruy DiŽaz de GuzmaŽn (1969-1972 [1612]), who traveled between 1536 and 1538; the chronicle by MartiŽn del Barco Centenera, who traveled between 1572 and 1581; and the monumental history written by Pedro Lozano (1874-1875) about the Jesuit missionaries' activities.
On the Chaco, few documentary sources before the 1700s are available, and only MartiŽn del Barco Centenera and Pierre F. J. Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian, mentioned music, always in conjunction with dance (Vignati 1982). In the 1700s,
Jesuit works were produced by Florian Baucke (1942-1944), who traveled between 1749 and 1767, and Martin Dobrizhoffer (1784). Mentioned frequently are clarines (possibly a type of trumpet), flutes, cornets, trumpets, clarinets, duct flutes, and the ritual use of a rattle and a water drum in many villages. Music served various ceremonial functions having to do with health, death, war, evil spells, and the preparation of drinks.
Also important for the study of extinct Argentine cultures are recordings made by European and American scholars: fifty-one Tehuelche melodies were recorded by Robert Lehmann-Nitsche in 1905; more than forty recordings of the YaŽmana and the Selk?nam were made between 1907 and 1908 by Colonel Charles Wellington Furlong; and work in Tierra del Fuego was continued by Father Gusinde in 1923-1924 (all these recordings went to the Phonogramm-Archiv Berlin). Much later, Anne Chapman completed the last recordings of the Fueguian Selk?nam (1972, 1978). Beginning in 1931, documentary recordings of the music of living indigenous and creole cultures were made by Carlos Vega, Isabel Aretz, and other scholars; these recordings are preserved in the archives of the Instituto Nacional de MusicologiŽa "Carlos Vega."
Instruments associated with Argentine traditional music can be classified by type and organized into the categories indigenous and criollo. Ten of them are idiophones, of which six are in the indigenous category: rhythm sticks; rattles made of animals' toenails, metal bells, or calabashes; stick rattles; and Jew's harps (birimbao). Four idiophones are in the criollo category: triangle, sistrum, matraca (cog rattle), and birimbao. Nine are membranophones: five indigenous drums (four double-headed and one kettledrum) and four criollo tubular and frame drums. There are twenty-three aerophones, including eleven indigenous instruments (seven types of flute, two types of whistle, two types of trumpet) and twelve criollo types (six types of flute, harmonica, button accordion, keyed accordion, bandoneoŽn, clarinet, trumpet). There are eleven chordophones: five in indigenous use (musical bow, rebec, guitar, two types of violin) and six used by criollos (charango, mandolin, guitar, requinto, violin, harp).
Various indigenous musical instruments, many of which are flutes, occur among the Mapuche, the MbyaŽ, the Chiriguano-ChaneŽ, the Chorote, the ChulupiŽ, the Toba, the PilagaŽ, and the MocoviŽ. Except for the Mapuche (who live in Patagonia), the native groups are from Chaco and Misiones in the north and northeast, respectively.
The most complete collection of traditional Argentine musical instruments is in the Instituto Nacional de MusicologiŽa "Carlos Vega" in Buenos Aires, which has obsolete and currently used instruments from Argentine indigenous and criollo cultures. The collection is related to the institute's scientific archive, which includes related photographic and aural materials.
Among the indigenous idiophones, the jingle rattle is used only by the Mapuche and the Mataco, and the rhythm tube is used only by the MbyaŽ, a GuaraniŽ group in the forest of Misiones. All the other idiophones are found among groups of the Mataco-Mataguayo and MbyaŽ-GuaycuruŽ linguistic families of the Chaco. There, the gourd rattle is symbolic and is used by all the extant indigenous cultures for different types of shamanistic rituals: female initiation, fermentation of drinks, weather phenomena, birth-related rites, curing, and so forth. Particularly among the Mataco, the gourd rattle has an enormous power conferred by Tokwaj, a mythic hero who instituted therapeutic shamanic practices in which song and the gourd rattle are elements of power and communication.
The Mataco and to a lesser extent the Chorote each have a class of shaman who makes and uses a gourd rattle, never associated with dance as it is with other indigenous groups in the area. The Chiriguano-ChaneŽ gourd rattle is also a shamanic instrument with similar functions; however, this shaman accompanies his ritual with dance. Chiriguano-ChaneŽ shamans are solicited by the chief of a community to counteract an unfavorable meteorological effect; the assembled shamans smoke in the center of the village while conversing and divining the causes of the problem, then go to the fields where they dance (PeŽrez Bugallo 1982:225).
Of the indigenous membranophones, the kultruŽn, a single-headed kettledrum played with one stick, is used only by the Mapuche, who believe it has existed since the beginning of the world and that the gods of music (tayiltufe) teach the shaman (machi, always female today) how to paint the symbolic designs on its drumhead and how to play it. The kultruŽn has a complex symbolic content. As a shamanic tool, it represents the shaman along with her transcendent roles. It has value as a symbolic microcosm, representing the shaman and the Mapuche universe, conceived as a "complex network of relationships among diverse elements related through a good-evil polarity: colors, cosmic supernatural and natural areas, the cardinal directions, the stars, and earthly regions" (Grebe 1979-1980:12).
The supernatural world is reflected on the drumhead, always painted with abstract motifs, usually by the shaman herself. The natural world is represented by the body of the drum, constructed from the wood of a sacred tree, to which is attributed the power to help the shaman during her trance. In the cavity are placed various symbolic elements, such as rocks, feathers, medicinal herbs, and the hair of animals, which will confer efficacy to the shamanic endeavor (PeŽrez Bugallo 1993:42). The kultruŽn is always the leader of the instrumental ensemble in which it is played, carrying out the function of ritual communication in relation to sickness, death, initiation, and fertility.
Criollos commonly use several membranophones: one bombo is a large double-skinned cylindrical drum, beaten with two sticks and played with guitar (or, in the northwest, criollos commonly use guitar and accordion) to accompany several dances; another bombo is a double-skinned frame drum, beaten with one stick and used in religious ceremonies, in panpipe bands, and in some popular urban sports; a caja is a double-skinned frame drum, beaten with a stick and used to accompany songs (
Two indigenous aerophonespifušlka and trutrukaare found among the Mapuche, and several others are found among groups in the northwest and northeast; most are symbolic. The pifušlka, a wooden whistle whose sound recalls the whistle of a mythic vampire who musically announces his disgrace, is constructed so its shape suggests the mythic creature's wings (PeŽrez Bugallo 1993:92). The evolution of this instrument, first traced from archaeological sources and then through chroniclers and travelers to the present, shows it has accompanied the various historical situations
The widespread belief that associates some flutes with male-female sexual attraction is present among the Chiriguano-ChaneŽ with respect to the end-blown flute called the temišmbi-puŽku. For this reason, men play the instrument in solitude to express feelings about their selection of a woman with whom to mate. Different melodies exist for courting, thanks, happiness over having found a woman, and sadness over wooing a married woman (PeŽrez Bugallo 1982:244). In numerous stories, animals and supernatural beings employ the flute as a vehicle of sexual attraction. Although the Andean quena once had similar symbolic significance in the Argentine altiplano, it is used more as a criollo instrument, alone or with a charango, or with a guitar and a bombo. Likewise, the Aymara siku are rarely used except in folkloric ensembles.
The aerophones the criollos use occur solely in the northwest, except for those with reeds, which are found mostly in the central and northeastern areas. Aerophones used in criollo music are numerous, and their distribution is well defined. Flutes, for example, are found in the northwest and have an old repertoire, but reed-concussion aerophones (single-reed and double-reed types), with a recent and mainly danceable repertoire, are found in the central and northeastern areas. Most notable among the vibrating reed instruments is the erkencho (erquencho), a single-reed clarinet made from cane and a cow's horn, found in the northwest. A multiple single-reed concussion aerophone is the accordion, introduced from Europe about 1850 (in some places, it has begun to be replaced by the guitar and violin). A similar instrument, the bandoneoŽn (a concertina, whose popularity was spread by the tango) has become popular since 1950.
The native use of chordophones in Argentina occurs in the west, north, and northeast. The Mapuche may anciently have used a musical bow (cunculcahue), but
Criollo chordophones are the mandolin, the tiple (rarely used), and the guitar, the most widely dispersed instrument in the country, except in the high Andes. The charango, a small plucked lute often made from an armadillo shell, is the only double-course chordophone of Argentina; usually having five courses, it is played in the Andean northwest. Bowed lutes such as the rabel and the violin are distributed in various parts of the west-central area and throughout the north and the northwest.
Mapuche
A strong female shamanic (machi) tradition is found among the Mapuche of the Patagonian Andes [see MAPUCHE]. The shaman's function is that of healer, ceremonial officiant, repository of mythology, poet, musician, dancer, and prophetess (Grebe 1979-1980:23). She leads the ceremonies in which the kultruŽn is used, and by singing sets up transcendent ritual communication with ancestors, spirits, and deities. She does this through the tayil, a paternally inherited song.
Each lineage has specific musical elements (pattern of vocalization, totem-related text, melodic contour) that unite its dead members with its living ones (Robertson 1979:236). At death, the shaman is transformed into a mythic being who goes to the place in the supernatural world that the spirits of the other deceased shamans, other ancestors, and gods inhabit. The kultruŽn is buried with her or is destroyed by her since, because of its ritual use, no other person may play it.
For the Mapuche, the most important seasonal ceremony is the ?illipuŽn, especially in the mountains of NeuqueŽn and Chubut. Primarily a supplicatory ceremony, it takes place after harvest, but it can be performed during unfavorable meteorological conditions or in times of calamity. It lasts four days and follows a complex ritual. Throughout, music is important. Variations depend on where it is performed, but it invariantly consists of a reception (alwušnde); the climbing of a nearby hill, on which men give ritual yells (ipa), imploring help for the supplications of the women; an ostrich (rhea) dance (loncomeo); and a women's suppliant song (purrum). The reception is performed on horseback, with a standard-bearer leading the participants; at its end, they gallop around the altar or sacred space.
The lonkomeo (loncomeo) dance is done by young Mapuche boys, who imitate the ostrich from its gestation in the egg through its birth and adult development (
MbyaŽ
Every January, the MbyaŽ (MbišaŽ) of Misiones celebrate the n~emongariŽ, a ceremony related to the ripening of fruits (Ruiz 1984). It has two principal objectives: the offering to the gods in thanksgiving for blessings received and supplication for the people's health and prosperity, and the naming of children beginning to walk.
The importance of naming consists in the belief that a child's soul is sent by one of the four deities, and the group's religious leader (pa?iŽ) must ascertain which of the deities is responsible; only then can it be known what name the child will carry. On
After noon, adults enter the ceremonial enclosurefirst the men, led by the ceremonial assistant and musicians (playing a rabel and a guitar), followed by the women, led by the wife of the pa?iŽ. After placing the offerings, they leave, to return soon after sundown. The second stage also takes place in the ritual enclosure, which adults enter after dancing to the music of rabel and guitar. Once they are inside, the communication of the children's names takes place, followed by sacred songs to the accompaniment of guitar and rhythm sticks.
Daily at sundown, MbyaŽ men, women, and children dance to honor their deities. Accompanied by rabel and guitar, they perform in an open space in front of the ritual enclosure. After an hour or more, they enter the enclosure, where the pa?iŽ leads the religious ceremony with more dancing and singing, accompanied by guitar and rhythm sticks.
Andes, Chaco, and the pampas
Harvest celebrations (often known as the minga in the Andes) are common in several countries of the Americas. They take on local traits in the northern and northeastern provinces of Argentina, however, and include the spontaneous and free collaboration of rural people for the labor of harvest and related tasks. The workers include employees, friends, and neighbors, who by day gather in a given field for the necessary amount of time and at night participate in traditional dances and other diversions.
In the northern area, people collectively gather the fruit of the algarrobo, from which chicha, one of the most popular local drinks, is made. At the end of spring (October-November), when the algarrobo pods are ripe, entire families go into the woods for several days of gathering, followed by parties and nightly dancing.
Among the indigenous groups in the Chaco, dancingalmost invariably in conjunction with singingformerly occurred during such occasions as celebrations of victory in battle, preparation of beverages, the conjuring of evil spells and natural phenomena, courtship, and marriages. No current studies of the subject exist.
The ritual marking of animals is another musical context that takes on different local traits. It is usually celebrated in the fall (March-April) in the pampa, or at the beginning of winter (June) in the northern provinces. In the north, it is called sen~alada, because the marking takes the form of a shaped cut (sen~al 'signal') on the ear of each goat or sheep born the previous year. The sen~alada is followed by a fertility ritual in which two persons take two animals, position them as if they are mating, and then feed Pachamama (Mother Earth) in supplication of the production of manure. The entire celebration is accompanied by the music of a single-reed concussion aerophone (erkencho) and a snare drum and by the singing of bagualas with or without allusive texts. In the pampa, marking (there called yerra) implies certain outdoor skills, but not ritual ones. Music signals the end of the process of marking and the end of every workday, creating the ideal occasion for milongas and dances including the chamameŽ, the polka, the ranchera, and the the vals.
Roman Catholicism
Roman Catholic Christianity was introduced by the Spanish, who used it as a tool for cultural penetration and domination. Most festive Christian celebrations that utilize traditional music are found in the northern provinces and to a lesser degree in the rest of the country.
There are several types of Roman Catholic musical manifestations, some using an ecclesiastical repertoire that has fallen out of official use but appears in processions and masses. Others have local traits and texts obviously conceived for occasions such as patronal feasts, whereas still others include only instrumental performances that accompany the moving of saints' images.
Another Roman Catholic repertoire, though not overtly religious, accompanies feast-day celebrations of the saints at night, in places equipped for dancing, eating, and drinking. These celebrations have some or all of the following events: pilgrimage to the shrine, mass, vigil, novena, procession, and a fair where local artifacts, food, and drink are sold. This procession can be carried out with publicly venerated saints or family ones, and is usually accompanied by instrumental music performed on the bombo and violin.
A procession that attracts the largest number of faithful is that of the Virgin of Punta Corral in the province of Jujuy, where the religious statue is carried every year from Punta Corral to the village of Tilcara, where there is a church (CortaŽzar 1959). This procession, which takes a ten-hour march over steep mountains, is the occasion for the most splendid gathering of panpipe bands in Argentina. Playing waynos (huaynos) and marches, they make themselves heard during four stops made for the purpose of prayer and rest. Panpipe bands are made up of pairs of siku of three or four different sizes, military drums of three kinds, and a rattle.
According to Silvia P. GarciŽa (1978), the summer solstice, celebrated in pre-
Patronal festivals in Argentina have acquired various features ranging from the official form, emanating from its use in Rome and predominating in urban centers, to forms typified by localized traits. In patronal celebrations, situations when the church is more influential, only the ecclesiastically approved form can be observed. In rural areas of the northwest, however, a different kind of festival is found. Examples are the fiestas of Saint James (Santiago) and Saint John the Baptist (San Juan); the latter, as the patron saint of sheep, inspires devotion among shepherds.
Both celebrations occur in front of family shrines with neighbors and friends in attendance, or at the churches, to which some of the saints' statues are carried. In some towns of Jujuy, both celebrations use a dance known as cuarteada, so named because the dancing couples carry the hindquarter of a sacrificed sheep or goat, advancing or retreating with it in front of the saint's statue, placed on a table in an open space. This dance shares some of the traits of the country dance, and is usually accompanied by the sounds of a long cane trumpet (erke [erque]). Displaying traits of a fertility ritual, it culminates with an attempt to rip the meat; whoever pulls at it with the most force keeps it, unless it tears in two.
In the town of Yavi, bordering Bolivia in Jujuy, an example of what the celebration of Holy Week was formerly like can be seen in small groups called doctrinas, originally formed to teach Christian doctrine to those preparing to take first Communion. These classes, commonly seen in the villages of the Andean altiplano until about 1900, can still be found in Yavi (Moreno ChaŽ 1971). The entire ceremo-
Another type of religious celebration with a peculiar repertoire is the celebration of the Child-Mayor (Nin~o-Alcalde) in the province of La Rioja. A local veneration of the baby Jesus, this celebration goes back more than three hundred years. It relates to events in which, some people believe, the mediation of the baby Jesus made local native Americans submit to Spanish rule. In the ceremony, celebrated for three days starting on 31 December, the principal images are those of the Child-Mayor and Saint Nicholas, each having its own devotees who form its court in a hierarchical organization similar to those of European religious brotherhoods across Latin America (Aretz 1954).
Music is performed during the processions and the novena, which is said before both images. During the novena, alabanzas and gozos are sung. During the procession to the church and the novena, a special song for the occasion ("An~o Nuevo Pacari 'Pacari New Year'," using the Quechua word pacari 'origin, beginning') is sung in Quechua to the accompaniment of a snare drum played by the Inca, a character who, representing indigenous vassals, belongs to the court of the Child-Mayor. The entire musical repertoire is European derived, syllabic, and in a major key.
Other European dances occur on 26 December in the province of San Juan during the celebration of the Virgin of Rosario de Andacollo; the major source of inspiration for this celebration is probably the fiesta of the same name occurring in the north-central Chilean town of Andacollo. The celebration usually consists of a novena prayed to the Virgin, followed by a procession and the climax of the fiesta, the presentation of the chinos (Quechua 'humble servant'), persons who honor the Virgin by dancing in fulfillment of vows (Olsen 1980:410). Many prayers and songs derived from the Chilean chinos interrupt this dance. Accordion, guitar, and triangle accompany the dances and marches of the procession.
Numerous indigenous life-cycle rituals have disappeared in Argentina; among the criollo populations of certain northwestern provinces, a few remain. The rutichico is a barely surviving Inca ceremony in Catamarca, Jujuy, Salta, and Santiago del Estero. In it, a boy's first haircut serves as a transition between his first and second childhoods. The haircut is initiated by the boy's godfather and is continued by the guests, who give the child gifts. Frequently, the freshly cut hair is offered to the Virgin Maryan example of an old European practice superimposed on an indigenous one. The ceremony always ends with dancing.
At funeral rituals in the province of Santiago del Estero, women are hired to pray and sing Roman Catholic songs such as salves and alabanzas in the presence of the deceased. Wakes for children, formerly common, now occur only in remote areas. Argentinian Roman Catholics, who believe that children's souls go directly to heaven, do not see a child's death as a sorrowful loss. For this reason, manifestations of happiness, such as songs with couplets (coplas), are sung to the child and its parents, accompanied by a snare drum or a guitar. The Passion of Christ, similar to a wake, is dramatized in remote locales of this area. Calvary is simulated, and an effigy of Jesus is taken down from its cross, placed in a crystal coffin, veiled, and nocturnally paraded around villages.
The most vigorous dramatizations occur during carnival, when the women's ceremony known as topamiento de comadres occurs (a similar ceremony for men is now extinct). Women parody the baptism of an infant, thus sealing their relationship as
After the ceremony, which includes singing with drummed accompaniment, the godmothers and their invited guests dance. After the carnival, a symbolic burial is enacted. Carnival can be represented by a human being, a rag or wooden doll, or the statue of the devil. Its death is symbolized by its burial or destruction by fire. This process is observed by all the revelers, and a mother of the personification (Quechua pujllay, in many places carnaval) accompanies this death with tears of farewell. In towns and cities, carnival has no dramatizations among the masqueraders (murgas).
Protestantism
Protestant Christianity was introduced in 1838, when Anglican missionaries began working in the south of the country among the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego. In 1914, Protestants began proselytizing to the Mataco of the Chaco in the north. Protestantism spread quickly in the north and has competed since the 1940s with Pentecostalism, which has gained more adherents.
The first organized indigenous Pentecostal religious congregation, recognized officially in 1958, was the Iglesia EvangeŽlica Unida (United Evangelical Church), which prospered most among the Toba living in their native Chaco and in the outskirts of larger cities. In addition to its religious function, it provides a feeling of identity and protection from global society.
Dance and music are extremely important in Toba Pentecostal worship. In only one of the five parts of the service are these genres absent. Different types of songs can be distinguished. Some have texts and music composed by the Toba; others have texts (in Toba or Spanish) taken from North American hymnals, though the original music (when it is available) is ignored. Most of the service is sung in unison by the congregation; sections are sung by small ensembles in two or three parts and by soloists. Until the 1970s, Toba Pentecostal singing was unaccompanied, but since then the guitar, the bombo, and the tambourine, and in the 1990s the charango, the kena (quena), and the accordion have been introduced. Influence of folk-derived music and lore can be seen in the incorporation and treatment of criollo instruments and in the use of chamameŽ and zamba.
Pentecostalism has been understood in indigenous terms (Roig 1990). The healing effected by the shaman as mediator is not replaced but is superimposed on the healing effected in worship by the pastor and the faithful. Originally the communication between the shaman and the supernatural was verified by song and rattle; now, power is realized through the song and dance of the pastor and the faithful, accompanied by criollo instruments. The gift of song to the shaman now comes from the Holy Spirit and often the learning of an instrument requires isolation, as it did for the shaman. In certain conventions or important meetings of the Toba Pentecostal church, dedications of musical ensembles of young people are reminiscent of forgotten initiation ceremonies, in which youths, in addition to marking their passage to adult life, entered the world of music.
Africanisms
The presence of African-derived beliefs in Argentina includes two variants of African-Brazilian religions: Umbanda and Batuque. The official opening of the first African-Brazilian temple was in 1966, and by the mid-1990s there were some three hundred churches, most in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Most of the adherents of Umbanda and Batuque are of the lower middle class (Frigerio 1991:23).
In most of the temples, both religions are practiced, but Batuque is sometimes replaced by other cults of the same origin, such as CandombleŽ. According to Alejandro Frigerio (personal interview, 1990), music and dance are of minimal importance in the Argentine versions, probably because the musical transplantation is abrupt and the repertoire has little in common with traditional or popular Argentine culture.
The repertoire of songs is learned through repeated listening to Brazilian recordings; the texts are in Portuguese and Yoruba, languages incomprehensible to most followers. The instrumental music is played on drums (and sometimes bells), often different from those used in Brazil. For Umbanda, however, the drums are Brazilian; for Batuque, they are locally available commercial instruments. A drummer's training is brief.
There is a relative homogeneity among these African-Brazilian cults from Belem do ParaŽ (Brazil) to AsuncioŽn (Paraguay), and from Montevideo (Uruguay) to the Brazilian Northeast (Gallardo 1986:46). In the northeastern province of Corrientes, a syncretic celebration honors the black Saint Balthasar, not canonized by the Roman Catholic Church but popularly accepted as a saint to whom masses are offered. According to Roman Catholic traditions, Balthasar was one of the Magi, the three kings who journeyed to salute the baby Jesus in his crib on 6 January, the Epiphany. Though Argentina does not have a traditional black population, it once had a considerable one, which disappeared rapidly under mestization after the national abolition of slavery in 1853. In the present celebration of Saint Balthasar, African traits of social organization and music are superimposed on the structural base of the Roman Catholic saint's celebration (Kereilhac de Kussrow 1980). In certain localities in Corrientes, where the festival is celebrated, candombe (known locally as charanda or ramba) is still danced. It was found in Buenos Aires until about 1800 and is still found in Montevideo, Uruguay. Today, this dance appears with no racial connotations but with social ones, because it is danced by members of marginal social classes with remote native American or African ancestors.
In candombe, the coronation of African kings is represented and homage is given to them. Some traditional characters in candombe, such as the king and the escobillero, an acrobatic dancer (who dances with a small broom), were replaced by others of local significance and with GuaraniŽ names such as cambaŽ-caraiŽ and camba-ra-angaŽ. The music consists of simple melodies sung in Spanish and GuaraniŽ in a major key and in binary rhythm, accompanied by bombo and triangle. Unlike the bombo of Andean music, for candombe the bombo is a double-headed conical membranophone with two heads attached to rings fastened by cords; it is played with the hands or with small sticks by two players seated astride it. The type of drum, its position on the ground, and its being played with the hands are unique features in traditional Argentine music. They suggest an African origin.
This ritual is now a votive dance found in the context of a Roman Catholic festi-
Music as entertainment is particularly important among Argentine criollos, who with music and dance often celebrate family events such as weddings or birthdays. They celebrate patriotic celebrations in much the same way, but on a local level. Since the 1960s, music has gained importance at sporting events and political rallies, where, as an expression of support, ridicule, or happiness, it occurs as multivoiced songs, usually improvised as quatrains or pairs of lines, or as multivoiced songs, transmitted orally by ensembles.
A large, double-headed bass drum has occupied a privileged place in this type of musical performance and is used with a European trumpet and a wooden noisemaker. The melodies have a strong beat. They are simple, catchy, and always in a major key, similar to the melodies used in murgas.
Apart from these musical traditions for public events, several large traditions stand out for having local, national, and international importance. These are folkderived music, tango, tropical music, and rock. Some of them reflect social and cultural events that occurred in Argentina during the twentieth century.
Heavy European immigrationmainly from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spainbegan after 1870 and continued until the end of the 1940s. After the 1940s, the pace of immigration increased, with new waves arriving from the bordering countries and some arriving from Asia. This situation mainly oriented Argentinian society toward European cultural life. The relation between immigration and the origin of tango is strong, because tango permitted the immigrants to blend with other sectors of society.
Another migration took place within the country. From the late 1940s, a lot of people from rural areas moved to the urban centers, attracted by the increasing industry. This is related to the appearance of folkloric music in the cities.
Folkloric music
Since the 1960s, spectacles known as jineteada or jineteada y doma have appeared in rural and semiurban areas mostly in the central part of the country, organized by traditionalist societies, local municipal authorities, or special brokers. These spectacles include daylong displays of outdoor skills with ropes, horses, and colts. They are always accompanied by traditional pampa musical forms such as cifras, estilos, milongas, and rancheras, invariably used to set the mood while people display their skills. Some famous musicians often provide entertainment with their guitars for these events. At night, dancing marks the end of the celebration. Recordings are usually used, but instrumental ensembles occasionally accompany dances such as chacarera, chamameŽ, gato, ranchera, and vals.
Folkloric festivals (festivales de folklore) have occurred in Argentina since the late 1950s. The most important one, begun in 1960, takes place every year in CosquiŽn in the province of CoŽrdoba. Similar festivals have appeared in neighboring countries. These festivals are competitions of singing, dancing, or both, usually celebrated annually in a consistent location under the auspices of local authorities. In addition to singing and dancing, the CosquiŽn competition features parallel events such as conferences, seminars, and craft-oriented fairs.
The music heard throughout a week by an enthusiastic crowd of about twenty-five thousand is not traditional, however, but revivalistic, composed in traditional styles by famous musicians who sometimes perform it themselves. A good performance in a competition like the Festival de Folklore de CosquiŽn can launch a performer's career at the national or international level, especially when followed by recordings and live appearances. The singer Mercedes Sosa started her career in this manner.
Though revivalist in intent, some folkloric repertoires reflect ideologies. A search for cultural and national identity marks the repertoires of the immigrant and of the nativist or traditionalist gaucho societies. These were formed in the late 1800s in defense of a nationality seen as endangered by the great European and Asian immigrations. They are still active preservers of the gaucho tradition, seen as the archetype of everything Argentine. Other ideologies are of a protest nature and can be seen in protest songs (canciones de protester), which, partly as a consequence of the Cuban revolution of 1959, expanded throughout Latin America. Rock too became a vehicle for protest.
Public performances of traditional and popular musics can involve various scenarios. In rural areas, venues are set up for particular occasions, with buildings constructed from straw, canvas, or wood. As temporary structures, they provide spaces for nights of music and dancing after days of fairs. The structures where music and dance occur on a permanent basis acquire different names in different areas: almaceŽn, carpa, chicheriŽa, and ramada. The music for these events may be recorded or live.
In urban areas, folk-derived music is performed in pen~asplaces where people of the same area meet, typical dances are performed, and local foods are consumed; they may be in the headquarters of traditionalist societies or in social or sports clubs. Some concerts by musicians of established fame take place in concert halls in large cities. Folk music reached its peak of popularity in the 1960s and has gradually lost its audience to national and international rock, which the middle and upper-middle class enjoy.
The so-called muŽsica de proyeccioŽn folkloŽrica, or simply 'folklore', is nothing more than the result of the process of urbanization of traditional rural repertoires that has occurred since the late 1800s. This was provoked by several internal and some external reasons. Internal reasons were the collection and documentation of traditional elements, the important activity of theater, circus, and payadores (singers of challenges and poets who sing with guitar), the emergence of musical nationalism, and the development of pen~as. External reasons were the different streams of migration from Europe and Asiastreams that generated a local tendency to defend ethnic identity through music (Moreno ChaŽ 1987). Since the 1920s, this process has been assisted by various official measures for the study, appreciation, and transmission of musical folklore and by internal migrations in which many rural inhabitants moved to the Buenos Aires metropolitan area in search of work. Aided by nationalistic fervor and governmental support, traditional music and culture have reached new geographical areas and social groups previously unfamiliar with them. Numerous ensembles (conjuntos) and instrumental groups of different kinds appeared, with repertoires not strictly traditional but based on traditional music. Different geographic areas were somewhat unequally represented by these groups, and there was a marked influence of the central and northwestern parts of the country.
Concurrently, between 1960 and 1965 a professionalization of composers and poets occurred, with an explosion of a movement known as the folklore boom. Famous singers, instrumentalists, and poets appeared widely on radio, television, and records. Theatrical events featuring music and dance were produced, the Festival de Folklore de CosquiŽn was founded, and several magazines covering the movement
In the 1990s, the folklore revival experienced a soft revitalization, due in part to support by the national government through two radio stationsRadio Nacional and Radio Municipal. Folkloric music received a good amount of airplay on other radio stations (though little was on television) and was still performed in some of the more traditional festivals. It no longer had the widespread popularity that it did during the 1960s but is alive in the pen~as and at family reunions of people with provincial roots. To a great extent, the repertoire is that of prior decades, performed by old and new musicians.
The most widely known folkloristic performers on the international stage who rose from this processEduardo FaluŽ, Ariel RamiŽrez, Mercedes Sosa, Jaime Torres, and Atahualpa Yupanquiremain influential through their recordings. Many of them attract audiences of a size that characterized this type of concert in its most glorious years.
Tango
Tango is music of nostalgia and melancholy, centered on one cityBuenos Aires. Its popularity peaked in the 1940s then declined, but in the 1980s began to rise again, nationally and internationally. It is a form of music and dance that in the late 1800s began to make its way through cafeŽs, academies, halls for dancing, sites for dancing at carnival, theaters, variety shows, cabarets, and early recordings (Ferrer 1977). Today's tango continues to be danced in halls and clubs and is heard in tangueriŽas, a recent name for tango clubs given by its fans.
In its first stage of development, the tango did not reach the central locales of Buenos Aires but remained marginalized among lower-middle-class people and seedy characters. Beginning in 1912, political and social changes brought together various social classes in Buenos Aires. With the opening of cabarets downtown, the tango encountered more demanding venues, where it won not only new audiences but also new musicians who, being better trained, could make a living by playing it.
The early instrumentation of tangos included one bandoneoŽn and two guitars; or a bandoneoŽn, a violin, a flute, and a guitar; or a clarinet, a violin, and a piano; or a violin, a piano, and a bandoneoŽn; or a similar trio or quartet. The 1920s saw the appearance of solo performers and the formation of the typical ensemble (orquesta tiŽpica): two violins, two bandoneones, a piano, and a string bass.
During the heyday of tango, different genres and expressions developed within the idiom. These included sung tangos (tango cancioŽn and tango caracteriŽstico), instrumental tangos (tango romanza, milonga, and others, performed by virtuosic ensembles), important lyrics, the appearance of prolific writers (such as Pascual Contursi and Celedonio Flores), and male and female singers who acquired tremendous popularity, of whom the most important was Carlos Gardel.
The most prominent musicians of this time were Julio De Caro, an icon in the development of the composition, arrangement, and performance of instrumental tangos, and Osvaldo Fresedo, who singlehandedly did away with the tango's chamber-music character (in which solo instruments were important) by consolidating the orchestra so groups of instruments were treated as single voices.
The beginning of the 1930s was a difficult time for the tango and its musicians. Since most tango performances accompanied silent films, the arrival of movies with sound took away much of the market. From 1935 to 1950, however, the tango recovered its popularity and gained a new audience, particularly through the media of film and radio. Cabarets attracted a new audience, the middle class, which adopted the tango as its favorite dance because it acquired a stronger rhythm and became easier to dance. Instrumental parts continued to be treated homophonically (like voices in a chorus), and solos decreased.
The great orchestras of the 1930s and 1940s were those of Miguel CaloŽ, Carlos Di Sarli, Enrique Mario Francini, Osmar Maderna, and Osvaldo Pugliese; major figures were AniŽbal Troilo, Alfredo Gobbi, and Horacio SalgaŽn. Singers acquired a new importance as soloists, because they began to sing all the lyrics rather than just the refrains. The vocalists Edmundo Rivero and Roberto Goyenche became highly popular.
The 1950s marked the end of tango's greatest creativity and popularity. It became associated with closed intellectual circles, which did not dance to it but listened to and studied it as a relic of earlier times. Beginning in 1955, however, a new stage of tango avant-garde began. It was headed by Astor Piazzolla and his octet: two bandoneones, two violins, piano, and electric guitar. New venues where the tango could be heard opened. These included GotaŽn 676, La Noche, and other clubs, frequented mainly by upper-middle-class porten~os (people of the port, Buenos Aires) and international tourists.
The 1960s marked the appearance of Editorial Freeland, dedicated to the publication of the lyrics from the "golden age" of tango. Studies of dictionaries on the subject appeared, and the Academia Porten~a del Lunfardo opened. It was a center for the study of the dialect (lunfardo) used by the social classes among which the tango originated and which is still used in some lyrics.
During the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, the tango had a resurgence, not so much in terms of new compositions but in the appearance of new singers and small instrumental ensembles (trios, quartets, sextets). The principal reason for this resurgence was tango's recovery as a dance. Since Piazzolla, beginning in 1955, the tango became just a music to listen to because of its rhythm. The success of tango show; abroad, especially Tango Argentino (Paris, 1983; Paris and Venice, 1984; Broadway 1985), brought a renaissance of the dance in middle and high classes, especially in big Argentinian cities; however, much of the tango's popularity in Europe resulted from the international activity of Astor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Pugliese, Horacio SalgaŽn the Sexteto Mayor, and the singer Susana Rinaldi.
In 1990, the Academia Nacional del Tango (National Academy of Tango) was founded. Several scholars develop research on, preserve, and diffuse the tango through conferences, publications, courses, and concerts. Other factors were impor-tant
Since the 1970s, tango as a dance has attracted the attention of important choreographers, including Maurice BeŽjart (Belgium), Dimitri Vassiliev (Russia), and Pina Bausch (Germany), and outstanding dancers, including Mikhail Baryshnikov (United States), Julio Bocca (Argentina), Milena Plebs, and Miguel Angel Zotto (
Since the 1980s, tango has been going through another phase of splendor and has occupied prominent places in such countries as Japan, Germany, and Finland. In Argentina, it has been preserved by some sectors of Buenos Aires that never abandoned it and transmitted it by tradition. Tango began to obtain more visibility through films, literature, and research, and by embracing new audiences. These came from abroad and from the Argentinian middle and upper class, especially young people, anxious to learn from professional dancers called maestros (Moreno ChaŽ 1995).
Tropical music
Caribbean music has been represented in Argentina since the 1960s by the cumbia, a Colombian dance, which became enormously popular. Ensembles such as WawancoŽ, Cuarteto Imperial, and Charanga del Caribe experienced such great success that their music, consisting mostly of cumbias, was widely recorded. Moreover, Caribbean music has been represented since the 1980s by genres like salsa, son, guajira, and reggae.
Caribbean-style music in Argentina is known generally as tropical music (muŽsica tropical). It gained popularity during the 1980s, and is heard in dance halls (bailantas or bailables, from bailar 'to dance') and in sport clubs and stadiums. In addition, the success of tropical music has revived an earlier genre, muŽsica de cuarteto or muŽsica
Caribbean percussion is important as a defining element of tropical music. The genre may incorporate different mixtures of keyboards, accordion, electric bass, trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and other European-derived instruments. The lyrics are short, simple, and repetitive, and straightforwardly deal with dancing and love.
In Buenos Aires and its suburbs, a hundred thousand people visit no less than eighty tropical music venues every weekend, contributing to the proliferation of tropical music. The people who frequent these locales are of the middle and lower-middle classes, and the success of tropical music in the resorts of Mar del Plata and Pinamar and in the Uruguayan Punta del Este since the summer of 1990-1991 showed that the higher classes also enjoy this music.
The success of recordings has accompanied the popularity of this music. Each LP disk by popular singers such as Ricky Maravilla and Alcides surpasses two hundred thousand in sales. Two recording companies, Magenta and Leader Music, are dedicated to tropical music, and they produce vinyl discs at a cost one-third that of multinational record companies. Although the composers are unknown to the general public, they often share the credit with the performer who records the music for the first time.
The tropical music of the dance halls has enjoyed a boom that goes beyond the music to reach its typical locales, its own record labels, its specialized magazines, and its FM radio stations (Radio FantaŽstica and Radio Tropical) dedicated exclusively to the genre. It is a massive phenomenon based primarily on the desire for amusement through dancing, in couples or large groups, to sounds and lyrics that denote simple and contagious joy, often shared by entire families. It has variants defined by the origin of its principal performers and its fusion with traditional local genres. Some refrains of popular songs are sung, with adapted lyrics, at soccer matches.
Rock
Other popular musics, national and international, are danced to nightly in locales known as discos, disqueriŽas, or boi^tes, in social and sports clubs, and are heard in open-air or enclosed stadiums. These styles, known in Spanish by the English word "rock," have become most widespread in the mass media.
Argentine rock began about 1965 under the name muŽsica progresiva nacional 'progressive national music', in an attempt to differentiate it from the commercial music of the time and from British and American rock. Like those forms, it began as a young people's musical expression, challenging adult culture. The first stage in its development saw tension between an international rock-blues style and protest music based on urban concerns directed at a working-class audience (Vila 1989). It included a fusion of tango, jazz, and Argentine folklore dealing with lyric, personal themes. This stage reached its peak with the development of an ideology that sought to identify with the working class and resist the military dictatorship then in power. This ideology made rock a movement in which young people sought to construct their identity during the fifteen years when military dictatorships blocked or diverted their channels of expression.
Argentine rock thus attracted another audience, now not only from the working class but from the middle class also, and between 1975 and 1977 it typically incorporated Brazilian music, tango, Argentine-Latin American musical folklore, jazz, English rock, traditional rock, and ballads. This peculiar combination, which included
In 1981, university student organizations began to function once more, and young people were again able to participate in political parties. At that point, some national bands began to deal with the traditional themes of international rock for the first time, with lyrics centered on the body and leisure. This created a crisis in the movement, aggravated by the intervention of the recording industry and its broadcasting capabilities.
Then in 1982, the war over the Malvinas (Falkland Islands), claimed by both Argentina and the United Kingdom, provoked the prohibition of any music sung in English. From then on, rock nacional began to gain the airplay that for years had eluded it: television and recording studios at last opened their doors to it without reservation. Finally, the arrival of democracy in 1983 saw a flowering of new musical styles, and the movement lost the need to keep its branches united.
Since the 1970s, rock nacional has received the support of the written press through magazines such as Pelo, Expreso Imaginario, Mordisco, and Estornudo; but whereas radio programs have been dedicated to the genre since 1972, the support of radio stations was generally lacking. This changed in 1985, with the magazine Rock & Pop, followed by the appearance of additional magazines and inserts in the most widely distributed newspapers in Buenos Aires.
Other factors that played an important role in the development and popularity of rock nacional are related to technological advances. The amplification and electrification of musical instruments from the United States, Japan, and England; the development of recording studios with new resources; and festivals that incorporated high-tech sound-and-lighting effects attracted ever more enthusiastic followers.
Rock nacional has always incorporated different styles, such as pop, heavy metal, blues, folk, symphonic rock, tango rock, jazz rock, new wave, folklore rock, techno, reggae, and rap. Many of these styles were influenced by styles current in England and America and by the concerts of its famous performers in the large cities. Others had more local roots.
Rock nacional is no longer a locally Argentine phenomenon. Since about 1990, it has been the third most exported national variety of rockafter those of the United States and the United Kingdom (Vila 1989:1). It has had success in other Latin American countries. The existence of about six hundred bands and soloists and the production of more than five hundred recordings attest to the development of this genre.
In Argentina, rock nacional competes with British and American rock, which attracts a high-economic-level audience that can understand English. This music benefits from a great amount of airplay and record distribution, and the important support of music videos, broadcast nationally on Argentine television and internationally on cable televisionincluding MTV, Music 21, and Much Music.
The displacement of rock nacional by imported music has been notable since 1988. In 1989, 9.23 percent of the music broadcast on the ten privately owned radio stations in Buenos Aires was sung in Spanish, Portuguese, or other languages, whereas 90.77 percent was sung in English. In the 1990s, this situation continued, improving the presence of U.S. rock groups and U.S. alternative music like that of Pearl Jam.
National and international rock (represented by famous performers from the United States and England) are featured in numerous festivals and concerts, and Argentine and foreign musicians often share the same stage. The festivals that take place every year in Buenos Aires, CoŽrdoba, and elsewhere are special occasions that
Argentina's audience for rock tries to identify itself with artists through appearance, dress, haircuts, and other details. Fans are young and strongly enthusiastic, often participating in concerts by singing along, clapping, swaying to the rhythm, showing approval by whistling, and lighting cigarette lighters. Some of these manifestations have become common in folk-music concerts, when musicians incite enthusiasm with their rhythms and lyrics.
The music-video industry began in Argentina in 1985 with local stars such as Soda Stereo, Virus, and Charly GarciŽa. Though its product has seen success in Europe and the United States, the industry has not yet reached maturity. In the opinion of producers of videos, the reason for such underdevelopment in this part of the music business is the lack of economic support, despite the existence of numerous television programs dedicated to the genre. There are ten recording studios in Buenos Aires, but many of them cannot carry out the entire process of production.
The people of indigenous cultures teach and learn music informally and orally; voluntary repetition and the example of more experienced musicians are the most widespread methods of learning.
Indigenous cultures have another method, that of shamans, who believe in the gift of song from supernatural beings or ancestors. One of the most rigorous processes of learning is that of the Mapuche shaman. Among Protestant and African-Brazilian religious groups, learning is also informal, voluntary, and aural.
Among performers of popular music, learning for commercial distribution is unique. It usually occurs in formal settings. The level of expectation is greatest in the genres of rock and tango, and much less in tropical music, in which many musicians play by ear and barely read music.
The 1990s saw the rise of institutions that provided training in popular music. The Taller Latinoamericano de MuŽsica Popular (Latin American Popular Music Workshop), with headquarters in Rosario, has as its purpose the development of popular musicians and the awakening of critical and creative attitudes in composers, performers, teachers, journalists, and listeners. To train musicians of jazz, tango, and folk in a four-year program, the Escuela para Instrumentistas de MuŽsica Popular de AmeŽrica Latina (School for Instrumentalists in Popular Music of Latin America) was created in 1985 in Avellaneda, a suburb of Buenos Aires. In reality, however, pop musicians get their musical training almost exclusively from private teachers, sometimes the most famous musicians in the field, who own and operate workshops or labs for that purpose.
Another kind of institution eases the study of folk music: the secondary school with an artistic focus. In addition to studies leading to the bachillerato (high-school
Courses in musicology are offered at the university level. The Universidad CatoŽlica Argentina offers a major in musicology, in which students study music of oral traditions and others. Similar subjects are taught in the fields of arts or humanities at other universities. In general, however, the faculties of Argentine universities treat these subjects from highly theoretical and Western viewpoints.
During the twentieth century, traditional music in rural areas has been touched in varying degrees by three great events: the arrival of Protestantism, the European and Asian migrations, and the appearance of radio and television. European immigrant communities living in rural Argentina since about 1900Germans, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, Spaniards, and othershave gained influence by introducing particular musical instruments, most notably the accordion, and styles of dancing. However, Chinese and Japanese immigrants (who came in the 1930s) have maintained the music and dances of their respective home countries as means of cultural identification. Rarely have their expressions reached wider audiences.
Because of newly introduced musical genres, mass communication has been the most profound agent of change in rural Argentina. Typical rural instrumental ensembles began to disappear, replaced by records and cassettes of folk and fashionable international musics.
These factors of change had consequences that differed from one place to another. In the northwest Andean area, the native tritonic scale disappeared, native pentatonic and criollo heptatonic major-minor scales yielded to European major and minor scales, and singing in parallel thirds gradually disappeared. In the central and northeastern area, European salon dances (such as the polka, the mazurka, and the waltz) were introduced in the early 1800s and become extremely popular. These changes initiated a process of creolization, resulting in genres with truly local traits. One of them, the polka, gave birth to other genres, such as the chamameŽ and the rasgueado doble. Since the 1970s, the chamameŽ has been the only traditional Argentinian music and dance form that is expanding, is spreading more and more (
Some Argentine governments have ignored the political aspect of music, but others have paid attention to it. Among the latter have been those of strong nationalistic and populist character, such as the Peron regime, which mandated the broadcasting of a certain percentage of music of national origin over all radio stations and in all places of entertainment. In 1949, a minimum of 50 percent of Argentine music was required to be aired; in 1969, that mandate was reiterated. In 1971, the proportion was increased to 70 percent, with the specification that this amount was to be divided equally between urban, folk, and "modern" musics. After 1983, with the return of democracy, all these requirements were abrogated.
Because rock was associated with subversive ideas, additional governmental actions included the suppression of rock concerts. Through censorship, the military governments impeded the activities of some folk musicians because of the musicians' sympathies with leftist ideologies. In contrast, the creation of a tango orchestra in the
Since the early 1990s, music of all types has been broadcast on about 2,100 radio stations and 330 television channels in Argentina. Especially important is the Servicio Oficial de RadiodifusioŽn (SOR), made up of LRA Radio Nacional and its forty affiliates, and the Argentina Televisora Color (ATC) television channel. About another 470 closed-circuit channels and several cable broadcasts come from Europe and the rest of America.
TRANSLATED BY TIMOTHY D. WATKINS
History of
Musicians' Social Class and Behavior
The Recording Industry
Musical Aesthetics
Cuarteto, also called muŽsica cuartetera 'quartet music', is a pop or dance music from CoŽrdoba, Argentina. Long considered to be low-class music by many Argentines, it is a mass, working-class phenomenon; almost twenty thousand people dance to it every weekend in the city of CoŽrdoba alone, and thousands more dance to it in the province of CoŽrdoba and in neighboring provinces. Upper-class elitists, who look down on it, often hypocritically use it to liven up their own private parties. Weekend dances in the city of CoŽrdoba are most commonly held at large athletic clubs, with an average of fifteen hundred to three thousand people in attendance per evening, whereas dances held on weeknights take place in smaller locales, which hold about eight hundred people. Other common sites, especially outside CoŽrdoba, are gymnasiums, schools, outdoor athletic fields, and renovated movie theaters. Dances, which last four hours, normally run from 12:30 A.M. to 4:30 A.M. on weekends.
Besides the regular weekend dances, muŽsica cuartetera is performed and danced to on various occasions: patron saints' or seasonal festivals, carnival, gypsy celebrations for the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother's Day, birthdays, wedding receptions, antidrug campaigns, and political rallies. It is basically a pop music to which people dance to forget their worries and have fun. Its lyrics usually refer to love (at times with erotic overtones and double meanings), the joy of dancing, and daily life. It is not normally heard in a concert.
Cuarteto was "invented" in 1943, when Leonor Marzano of the Cuarteto Leo (the first cuarteto group) developed an accompanimental pattern, the characteristic and identifying feature of all cuarteto music, called the tunga-tunga (Hepp 1988:59-60, 67-68). This pattern is played by the piano and the string bass (
Despite its apolitical nature, cuarteto music has occasionally suffered setbacks at the hands of government leaders. It was banned for a time after the 1976 military coup (Barei 1993:46), and recordings of it were removed from record stores in CoŽrdoba during the World Cup of 1978 so tourists would not be exposed to it (Mero 1988:54-60).
Though at times hundreds of cuarteto ensembles have been able to make a living simultaneously, only about forty remain active in CoŽrdoba, where, in the late 1990s, three groups reign supreme: CheŽbere, Tru-la-laŽ, and Carlos "La Mona" (The Monkey) JimeŽnez. Over the years, cuarteto groups have evolved in instrumentation, style, and number of members. Though they are still called cuartetos, groups are now bands or orchestras usually having from eight to thirteen performers. Two of these performers are normally singers: one does tropical 'Caribbean-influenced' tunes, and the other sings moderno 'modern' genres (rock, jazz, and ballad-influenced selections). At times, as in the case of Carlos JimeŽnez, one singer covers all four hours of dances. Another of the performers is an announcer (locutor), who reads greetings and messages passed to him by members of the audience; this gives the dances a feeling of intimacy.
Instruments currently used by cuarteto groups are a combination of electronic keyboards or synthesizers, electric piano, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, Latin percussion, drum set, brass, and accordion. Only traditional-minded groups, such as that of Carlos JimeŽnez, maintain the use of the accordion; the style associated with this type of instrumentation is called cuarteto-cuarteto, which means "authentically cuarteto-style cuarteto music." CheŽbere, the group considered as having the most evolved style (so evolved that it may not be cuarteto music, say some people), has two trumpets and two trombones. Use of the other available instruments depends on each group's repertoire and style.
On the road: traveling musicians
Cuarteto music is a lucrative, highly competitive business in CoŽrdoba. Groups earn most of their money at dances (box-office receipts after taxes), perhaps netting 30,000 pesos (one peso equals one U.S. dollar) in a single weekend; additional income comes from record sales and royalties (
Cuarteto fans are extremely loyal and normally follow only one group; some wear special hats and headbands with the names of their favorite group on them, and one official fan club existsfor the singer Gary and his band. The fans' social class depends on the band that they follow. For example, CheŽbere is noted for attracting university students whereas JimeŽnez crowds are from more disadvantaged populations. Many fans dance with their chosen group three or four nights a week, often
Dances normally feature four sets of music, which alternate between moderno and tropical styles (singers thus take turns) of about forty-five minutes each (JimeŽnez sings only the cuarteto-cuarteto style, however); at the end of the second moderno section, a lyric piece without the tunga-tunga might be performed. Recordings of cuarteto music are put on by a disc jockey during breaks, when fans buy alcoholic beverages, eat choripan (sausage sandwiches), and chat with the musicians. During breaks, bandsmen go to the bar and socialize with the public. Girls are often waiting to talk with them, especially when the dances are over. Those present at dances commonly have sexual encounters at nearby locations or hotels afterward.
Many different types of people are involved in the functioning of a cuarteto group. Musically speaking, members of the cuarteto world commonly label band personnel (those seen up on stage) in the following categories: owners (duen~os), arrangers, singers, musicians, and announcers. Each person's level of musical influence usually falls into the same order; however, since there are cases in which some people fulfill multiple roles, the importance of individual members varies from group to group. For example, an owner who serves only as the announcer for his group will not have as much musical power as an owner who is the arranger, solo singer, and keyboard player of his own group. Behind the scenes, cuarteto groups employ orchestra managers, administrative personnel in charge of promotion and publicity, box-office personnel, drivers, lighting and sound-equipment men, and handlers (plomos, who carry, set up, and take down the equipment).
Women are seldom seen in cuarteto groups. Except for the singer Noelia, who has had some success, and two female choral singers in Gary's group, the cuarteto world is a male one. Since many owners believe musicians must look good and perform well (to attract female dancers), most men on stage are between the age of twenty and thirty, are physically attractive, and often have long hair (
Owners are by far the most powerful and hard-working individuals in the cuarteto world. Since they have often had to invest or borrow as much as three hundred thousand pesos to start a group, they have a lot at stake; they keep most of the profits and pay other group members by the dance (group members do not get paid for canceled or rained-out dances). Some owners are singers who have broken away from other groups to try to make it as soloists. If not, they are normally performers in their own groups, and they arrange and compose. Owners often run their own offices and perform numerous administrative duties. They pick all personnel and establish group policy. Since cuarteto groups are incorporated companies and most group members are employees, owners must deal with issues such as taxes, salaries, benefits, retirement pay, and vacation time. Besides hiring personnel and establishing group policies, they must arrange everything that pertains to promotion, scheduling, travel, buses, equipment (sound and lighting), publicity (radio and television, in CoŽrdoba and in other locations), uniforms (each group has several, often matching jackets and pants or shirts and pants), rehearsals, repertoire, recording, distribution, record companies, and record stores. They must keep up on new developments and trends in the music business, local and international.
Arrangers may or may not perform with the groups with whom they work. Besides composing, making musical arrangements, and copying parts by hand, they often conduct rehearsals. Since arrangers establish the musical sound of their groups, their own musical backgrounds influence group styles. Some groups, such as that of Carlos JimeŽnez, use no group arranger at all. Arrangers can suggest tunes for their groups to perform or record, but often the owners tell them what to arrange. In some instances, arrangers have great power in the recording studio, especially when they make demos (sequences are used to prepare most of the instrumental voices of the tunes) that subsequently serve as the basis of their groups' commercial recordings. In these cases, only the singers and a few musicians record live over what the arranger has prepared. By not having all group members record live, owners save in studio costs and time.
Though they often have little or no musical training, singers are normally more important in cuarteto groups than sidemen (accompanying musicians) or announcers, even if they are not soloists or owners. A successful singer is usually paid more than a sideman because it is his charisma that brings girls to the dances; since he is harder to replace, he is worth more. Though musicians' turnover in cuarteto groups is fairly high, especially as new groups are born and others die, singers often leave groups because entrepreneurs lure them away. Solo singers who own their own groups often dress as they please rather than in group uniforms, and only their faces appear on record covers (as opposed to shots of the entire group); they are free to make their own rules. For example, Carlos JimeŽnez (
Announcers normally have small musical roles in cuarteto groups. Like singers, they may play percussion instruments when they are on stage. They may choose the selections to be performed during the evening, depending on the climate of the dance. If they are also owners or musicians, they can be influential in repertoire selection and composition of new tunes for the group.
Most cuarteto owners, arrangers, singers, musicians, and announcers are from the city
Cuarteto musicians do not normally work their way up the ranks to positions of greater musical power. Though percussionists have learned how to play keyboards and/or other instruments by ear, most orchestra managers, handlers, and sound or lighting personnel are those who sometimes get "promoted" by being turned into musicians (players of congas or timbales, for example) or announcers.
On days they are not working with their groups (usually Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays), bandsmen must take care of their personal business and family affairs. Some can often be seen in downtown CoŽrdoba in the cuarteto district, an area of a few blocks, especially in the Bon Que Bon bar, where bandsmen go to talk and exchange gossip. In better economic times, when many more cuarteto bands were performing in CoŽrdoba and often needed substitute performers, people could hear about work opportunities at the Bon Que Bon. Owners are frequently seen downtown on their days off, since they must pay nearby radio stations and arrange for publicity. They may be seen at Rango TV, where their television commercials are usually made. It is common to see many people waiting in cuarteto offices on Tuesdays and Wednesdaysthe only sure way to talk with owners.
Making Musical Decisions
The musical contribution that any one group member can make is largely determined by the group owner's (or owners') personality or style of management; a group member can make a contribution only if he is allowed to. Whether or not a group plays by ear affects an individual's musical influence. The impact of these factors can be seen in choice of repertoire, rehearsals, compositional style, performances, recording sessions, and aesthetics.
A group's repertoire is generally chosen by its owners, but other group members often suggest covers (of local, Latin American, and international hits) that can be adapted to the tunga-tunga. If the original lyrics are in English, they are translated into Spanish. Some groups introduce new cover tunes weekly at their dances so as always to have something new to offer their fans. Some groups, however, perform almost no covers; they prefer to do original material. When the time to cut records comes, the groups that mix covers and new material in their dances more often than not record both kinds of songs. Since musical royalties are lucrative, these might be tunes composed largely by an owner or a local composer. In many groups, however, owners encourage bandsmen to contribute their own compositions; by allowing their employees to earn money in royalties and contribute musically, they boost morale and lower the level of frustration. Owners who encourage contributions from their group members feel that it is wise to choose the best materialwhat will sellinstead of worrying about how much they will make in royalties. Many believe that eleven or twelve persons working together can come up with better ideas than can one person.
When new pieces are offered to owners, even by group members, they are normally presented in the form of demos. Nowadays, few tunes are presented sung only to piano or guitar accompaniment. Once the tunes for the next recording have been chosen, the group arranger and owner often switch around the lyrics and some arrangements; if this happens, they are listed on the recording as being partial composers of the song. In rehearsals, group members sometimes have a chance to modify newly chosen repertoire; at times, they give ideas for solos, breaks, introductions, and the like. The musicians of Carlos JimeŽnez are even expected to contribute ideas so as to enhance the repertoire; in this case, the compositional process is a collective one (the original composer's arrangement or demo is respected as much as possible, however).
Some groups try to rehearse once a week to add one or two new covers to their repertoire; in periods of extensive work, rehearsals are suspended. Other bands, for lack of time, rehearse only when they are getting ready to prepare a new recording; they often rehearse for ten to twelve hours a day for a few solid weeks to prepare and perfect the selections to be recorded. In the case of one ensemble, the final versions of tunes are invented live in the recording studio; when it performs at dances, the group then imitates what it has recorded. In groups that play with music, members try to be creative in rehearsals by working on ensemble playing, creating dance steps, and adding swing and stylistic knowledge to what is being performed. Musicians who belong to groups that always play by ear feel they can be highly creative; many say that they could not work in a group in which they were told to play what was on a written page, and even what timbre to add.
Even in groups that play with written-out parts, some individuals always perform by ear. The parts for piano, guitar, and bass often consist of no more than chord symbols (
Groups that perform every weekend in CoŽrdoba usually launch two recordings a year, on compact discs and cassettes; groups that play mostly outside the city usually release only one new recording a year. These discs are presented at special ceremonies, often complete with sets on stage, new uniforms, and other effects. A launching, with new material, is a type of rebirth, a shot in the arm for the public that constantly follows the groups. Recordings are often made in Buenos Aires, but are sometimes made in CoŽrdoba. CheŽbere recorded a disc in Hollywood, California, however, and Gary is about to do the same. Some groups record live, one track at a time, and group members critique each other's performances. In other cases, however, demos of the new tunes are taken to the recording studio, and only the singers and a couple of musicians dub in their parts. Guest musicians, such as female singers or symphony musicians, may participate in these sessions. Mixing is normally done in Buenos Aires, usually by the owner-arrangers, but has been done in the United States. In the case of Carlos JimeŽnez, however, most of the musicians are consulted. The cuarteto recording industry is controlled by multinational companies, including BMG, Sony, and WEA, which handle local and international distribution, mostly to countries bordering Argentina. CheŽbere, which in 1995 signed a contract to have its discs distributed in the United States, reached the goal of all cuarteto artists: to conquer the international Latin music market, especially in the United States and Mexico (CheŽbere 1994).
Since the main aesthetic concern of cuarteto dancers is that the tunga-tunga be present in all cuarteto music, some owners feel limited in what they can do musically. At the same time, owners have another problem: their fans are constantly expecting them to come up with something new. (In fact, group members and fans get bored hearing the same repertoire for six months at a time, and they all want a change.) The constant need to have new material or ideas has created fierce competition among groups, and bands must keep up with the competition to retain their followers. To polish up cuarteto music, refine fans' musical tastes, and introduce changes, some owners have gone too far in their experimentation; they have lost their followers and have had to return to the generic cuarteto style to try to win them back. For this reason, owners are cautious with the novelties that they introduce; after all, cuarteto is a business venture. In 1994, one of the trends in cuarteto music was a risky one: Carlos JimeŽnez added Afro-Caribbean rhythms and percussion, mixing cuarteto with genres such as rap, conga, and merengue (Carlos JimeŽnez 1994). Then, in 1995, the band returned to the traditional cuarteto style (Carlos JimeŽnez 1995). Since Carlos JimeŽnez, despite the temporary use of African rhythms, is the last follower of the traditional cuarteto style, there is much speculation regarding the future of muŽsica cuartetera when Carlos retires. Indeed, change, competition, and commodification are the driving forces of pop music in Argentina, Latin America, and throughout the industrialized world.
Early Musical Activity
Musical Instruments among Native Americans
Musical Contexts and Genres
Musical Performers and Performances
Musical Ideologies and Aesthetics
Acculturation
More than 75 percent of Bolivia's population of some 6.5 million lives in the highlands, an area dominated by the cold, high central plain (Spanish altiplano 'high plain'). At an altitude of 4 kilometers, the altiplano is bordered by two steep mountain ranges. The western cordillera follows the border with Chile, and the eastern cordillera drops through intermontane valleys toward the Amazon basin. The hot, eastern lowlands, which make up more than 60 percent of the country's area, are much less densely populated and comprise plains and tropical forest.
The official national languages are Spanish (spoken by 87 percent of the population), Quechua (34 percent), and Aymara (23 percent) (van Lindert and Verkoren 1994:72-73). In the lowlands, some forty Amerindian languages (including GuaraniŽ, Moxo, and YurakareŽ) are spoken, but mainly by small, dispersed groups [see MOXO]. With Peru, Bolivia is notable among South American countries for the strongly native American aspects of its culture and population [see QUECHUA AND AYMARA].
The archaeological record
Archaeological evidence of musical activity in the Andean highlands of Bolivia is poorly preserved in comparison with the wealth from early Peruvian coastal cultures. The earliest finds, said to date from 900 B.C. to A.D. 300, include clay panpipes, vessel flutes, and three-holed bone notch flutes. These are on deposit in the university museum at Cochabamba.
Tiwanaku (Tiahuanacu, Tiawanaku), at its height around A.D. 1000, was one of the most important early highland cultures, centered a few kilometers south of Lake Titicaca. The zampon~ero, a large stone statue found there (kept in the Gold Museum, La Paz), is believed to represent a man holding a panpipe to his lips. Other finds include three bronze figurines depicting musicians holding end-blown flutes, a drum, and a four-tubed panpipe (Diaz Gainza 1988), and what appears to be a workshop for constructing panpipes.
The mythological record
A creation myth recorded by the seventeenth-century Spanish priest and chronicler
Music and musical practices in Bolivia are often associated with enchantment and myth. These range from the consequences of breaking musical taboos to pacts with the devil to gain special musical powers and enchant members of the opposite sex. A Bolivian version of the almost universal story of the singing bones tells of a priest from PotosiŽ who dug up his lover's body and fashioned a flute from her tibia. A more rural version of the same story (told as far north as Ecuador) tells of a young man who fashioned a flute from the bone of his lover (a partridge), which his parents had killed and eaten.
In many highland peasant communities of Bolivia, the image of three maidens connected with music is common. The Callawaya call these maidens Tusuy, the goddess of dance, compared to a spinning distaff; Wancay, the singer, who has the mouth of a toad; and Munakuy, love, the beautiful, who wears her heart outside her chest (Oblitas Poblete 1978). In other areas, three maidens with enchanting voices are said to have been invited to a wedding, but partway through the ceremony they turned into toads (Torrico 1988).
The historical record
The expansion of the Inka empire from Cuzco, Peru, around 1450 included all of today's highland Bolivia. Before this, the region was divided into kingdoms and ethnic groups, principally speaking Aymara, Pukina, and Uruqilla. The constant wars and shifting alliances among these kingdoms were exploited by the Quechua-speaking Inka, who introduced elements of their own culture, including music.
The Inka achieved uniformity and stability through implanting groups of loyal Quechua-speakers into troublesome parts of the empire, such as the valleys of Cochabamba, southern PotosiŽ, Chuquisaca, and Tarijaareas now predominantly Quechua-speaking. The continued use of Aymara was accepted by the Inka, and Aymara remains the dominant indigenous language of the high plains of La Paz and Oruro departments.
In a late-sixteenth-century account of the musics of the Inka Empire, GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala (1980 [1600?]) depicts altiplano women playing a large drum suspended from a frame, accompanying men who each blow across a two-tone pipe. The jantarka, a similar instrument, is still played by women during carnival in the village of Calcha, PotosiŽ Department (Stobart 1987).
The Spanish invasion of the southern Andes in the 1530s followed less than a century of Inka rule. It brought from Europe new instruments that profoundly influenced indigenous music. In contrast, the invaders often viewed native American instruments with suspicion. They associated panpipes with those played back home in Spain by lowly castrators of pigs and grinders of knives. Spanish efforts to evangelize often repressed indigenous musical instruments, but the native Americans were immediately attracted to European instruments, and musical instruction was among the methods of Roman Catholic indoctrination. Lessons were given in plainsong and polyphony, and instruments such as shawms (chirimiŽas) and recorders (flautas) were taught to provide processional or liturgical music.
Jesuit missions not only encouraged the use of instruments such as violins and transverse flutes, but also, unlike other Roman Catholic sects, sometimes adapted
In the 1570s, with the adoption of compulsory labor (mit'a, Spanish mita) to work the silver mines of PotosiŽ, native Americans were drafted from communities all over the highlands, walking sometimes up to 1,600 kilometers from southern Peru. This glittering city was a melting pot of indigenous and foreign cultures. Descriptions of its legendary feasts by the chroniclers Arzans de OrsuŽa and Vela (1965) mention native American instruments such as cane flutes, trumpets (of conch, cane, or gourd), and a kind of marimba. These were played alongside instruments from every level of Spanish society, including bugles, guitars, harps, hornpipes, pipe and tabors, trumpets, vihuelas, and rebecs (Baptista Gumucio 1988).
PotosiŽ and nearby La Plata (today Sucre) boasted theaters dating from the early 1600s, for which much music was composed. Several accounts mention the importance of persons of African descent as entertainers, and in 1568 a black and a mulatto were contracted in La Plata to open a school of music and dance (Stevenson 1968). Few manuscripts from that period survive, but a large collection of sacred pieces, dating mainly from the 1700s and 1800s, is held in the national archives in Sucre, mostly scored for voices, sometimes with violins and basso continuo, specifically harp and organ.
A school of military music was founded in La Paz in 1904, as were the National Conservatory in 1908 and the National Symphony Orchestra in 1944. Twentieth-century Bolivian composers adopted a nationalistic style, often through incorporating traditional elements or forms into their music. This was most successful, for example, in the stylized traditional dances (cuecas) for piano by SimeoŽn Roncal (1870-1953). In the late twentieth century, composers tried to incorporate traditional instruments in a classical format, as in the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments) of La Paz.
The introduction of the brass band, most especially in mining towns such as Oruro, had a huge impact on Bolivian popular music in the twentieth century. Similarly, accordions, saxophones, electric guitars, and keyboards (synthesizers) are widespread and exert increasing influence over popular styles of urban music.
Bolivia is remarkable for the diversity of its musical instruments, which vary according to cultural group, area, time of year, and ritual function. In many highland zones, cane is the most common material, because of the proximity of the tropical valleys of the Yungas and Cochabamba; to the south and west, wood and bamboo are frequently used.
The names of many instruments are interchangeable, and a single generic term may refer to a variety of instruments of different construction. Confusions often arise in orthographic conventions between Spanish and indigenous languages; for example, the Spanish quena or kena is written as qina in standardized Quechua. Alterations and inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation often make a word almost unrecognizable, as with the Spanish word for "flute," spelled variously flauta, flawta, flawata, lawuta, and lawatu. This article uses standardized spellings for indigenous languages and common Spanish spellings.
Idiophones
Highland percussive instruments include triangles, bronze llama bells (sinsiru, cencerro), cog rattles (matraca), and heavy metal spurs attached to wooden sandals (suila jut'as). Among the lowland percussive instruments are seed-pod rattles (paichochi), worn on many dancers' ankles, drums and various idiophones, such as the gourd and beeswax toaŽ of the MoreŽ a friction idiophone (Leigue Castedo 1957), and pestles and mortars played by paired women among the Chacobo (Prost 1970).
Membranophones
Double-headed drums are used throughout the highlands to accompany wind ensembles. Among the larger types are long cylinder drums (phutu wankara), commonly played with panpipes, as are shallower, military-style bass drums (pumpu, bombo). Military-style side drums (tambora) are particularly common in the altiplano, while vertically held drums (wankara, caja), often with a single beater and a snare of string, and sometimes porcupine quills, are universal there. Women sometimes play these types (quchana, chinki) in special rituals.
Aerophones
Panpipes are common throughout the highlands and are found in several parts of the lowlands. Among the lowland Chacobo, four tubes are simply grasped in the player's right hand; but in other regions, the tubes, ranging from two to seventeen, are usually tied together.
Highland panpipes are usually played in consort, on instruments of graduated sizes (tube lengths of 2.5 to 109 centimeters for the julajula of northern PotosiŽ), typically tuned to play in parallel octaves or fifths (
Other double-unit panpipes played without drums range from the simple three-tubed (male) and two-tubed (female) bamboo pipes of the Chipayas (Baumann 1981) to three- and four-tubed varieties, such as the julajula (northern PotosiŽ), the chiriwanu (La Paz and Cochabamba departments), and the julujulu (La Paz Department). These are respectively associated with ritual fighting, dances imitating combat, and hunting dances (Baumann 1982a).
Double-unit panpipes played with drums usually have more tubes (for example,
The end-blown notched flute (qina, qina-qina, lichiwayu, chuqila, mullu, and others),
The six-holed cane side-blown flute (flauta, piŽfano) is common among lowland groups, especially those influenced by the Jesuits. In the highlands, it is played in consort to accompany certain dances, such as the ch'unchu, which caricatures lowland native Americans.
Several types of duct or fipple flutes (pinkillus, flawtas) are played in consort with drums in most highland regions and some lowland ones. Most types have six holes for fingering, but techniques of construction vary widely. Some types, such as the pinkillu (flawta) of northern PotosiŽ, are made from branches with a pithy core, burned away with red-hot irons to form a hollow tube. Exceptional among flutes, groups of pinkillu of northern PotosiŽ are played in hocket and are not accompanied by drums. In southern PotosiŽ, among the Chipayas and in parts of La Paz Department, another form of pinkillu is made from curved branches that are split lengthways, hollowed out, and tied back together with tendons from an ox or a llama. Such instruments as the saripalka (
Most notable among the cane duct instruments of the plains of La Paz and
The three-holed pipe and tabor (waka pinkillu 'bull flute') is played in many highland areas. It is sometimes made from a condor's wing bone, when it is known as the quri pinkillu 'golden flute' (
Highland natural trumpets include those made from conchs (now rare), animals' horns (pututu, corneta, pulilitu), and cane and gourd (pululu). Trumpets are often played nonmelodically in combination with wind ensembles or for signaling. However, certain types may be played melodically. These include the can~a, a spectacular, 3-meter-long cane of Tarija, with a bell formed from the dried skin of a cow's tail (Calvo and GuzmaŽn 1984), and the equally long pututu (or tira-tira) of northern PotosiŽ, made of wood and the horns of oxen. Though resembling panpipes in shape, the huge bajoŽn of the lowland Jesuit mission of San Ignacio de Moxos (Beni Department) is a multiple-tube trumpet (Becerra Casanovas 1977) that plays the bass in a European-style ensemble that usually includes violin and flute.
A simple clarinet (irki or erke), consisting of a single idioglot reed inserted into the narrow end of an animal's horn, is played in many regions of the southern highlands, especially by the Jalq'as (near Sucre), where men and women play at distinctive pitches at carnival (MartiŽnez n.d.). Such performance is especially notable in Tarija, where the erke is played as a solo instrument with drum (caja chapaca).
Chordophones
Musical bows are played by many lowland groups, such as the MoreŽ in Beni Department, and others in Pando Department; they appear to be the only indigenous
The peasant charango, often traditionally made using the carapace of an armadillo or half of a gourd, is especially associated with courtship (
The peasant guitar (kitarra, guitarilla, qunquta, talachi, guitarroŽn) is strummed to accompany singing. It uses sheep-gut (archaic), nylon, or metal strings, or a combination of nylon and metal. The depth of the sound box varies from 6 centimeters to more than 20. Many types are painted bright colors, depicting the growing crops of the rainy season, when these instruments are usually played.
Though widely used in churches and played in rural towns in the early 1900s, harps became rare by the end of the century. Violins, played in the valleys of Tarija, Chuquisaca, and PotosiŽ to accompany dancing, are usually held below the shoulder, as was the practice in Europe before 1800. Locally constructed instruments may be made of a variety of materials, including cane of wide diameter.
Other Western instruments
Common in many larger towns, brass musical instruments from the West are becoming increasingly popular in the countryside. Most notable are the brass bands of Oruro and other mining centers, considered some of the finest in Latin America. These incorporate mostly imported trumpets, baritones (bajos), sousaphones, and, less commonly, trombones (often valve trombones).
The accordion sometimes replaces the charango and is commonly played in combination with saxophone or trumpet and percussion to supply music for dancing. Because Western instruments are costlier than local ones, they remain beyond the resources of most peasants.
The technology of music
Traditionally, many instruments, especially panpipes and flutes, were made in the communities where they were played. In valley regions with abundant wood, instrument-making traditions have tended to be stronger, and instruments are still commonly exchanged or bought by highland herders of llamas on their visits to the valleys in the dry winter months (JuneAugust). However, certain highland communities specialize in manufacturing instruments, and some supply a variety of regions. These artisans have been influential in maintaining, revitalizing, and dispersing musical traditions.
Every large town has at least one radio station, and many stations broadcast in native American languages such as Quechua, Aymara, or GuaraniŽ. Popular Latin American musical styles predominate, and outside the main cities most music broadcast on radio is local or national. Though peasant families living in remote regions often do not own a radio or are unable to afford batteries, radio-cassette recorders are
Televisions are common in towns with electricity but rare in the countryside; the national average is one set per sixteen people (Myers 1992:470). The city of La Paz boasts more than seven channels, with a surprisingly large amount of time dedicated to music, mainly of the urban variety.
Neither musical notation nor other practical mnemonic devices are commonly used in peasant music; however, players in brass bands can often read Western notation and may use it when learning new melodies. In the 1990s, the famous charango player Ernesto Cavour developed forms of nonrhythmic notation for the charango and certain other instruments.
Maintaining a stable and creative relationship with the spiritual world is the central concern of most Andean and lowland ritual shamanic practices and curing. Traditional indigenous beliefs are highly complex, localized, and related to the surrounding environment, though most cosmogonies feature spirits of ancestors, the sun, the moon, lightning, and the earth, such as the Andean Pachamama (Mother Earth) and mountain deities. These beliefs are deeply syncretized with those of the Roman Catholic church, the official and dominant religion. In certain areas, the sun and moon are called tata santiŽsimu 'holiest father' and mama santiŽsima 'holiest mother' respectively, and thunder and lightning are called gloria, Santa Barbara, or Santiago 'St. James'.
Musical sound, often said to be the manifestation of spirit (animu), plays a central role in many rituals, especially at climactic moments. Most processions and many ceremonies are considered incomplete without the presence of appropriate music. In highland animal-fertility rituals such as k'illpa, special songs may refer directly to the animals, or pinkillu may be played. The sound of the flutes is said to engender the animals (causing them to multiply) and console the peaks (where the animals graze).
Seasonality and music
One of the most remarkable features of highland peasant music is the strong association of certain instruments, genres, and even tunings with specific times of year, the agricultural cycle, and other cyclical activities or celebrations. Over the course of a year, individual players from a single community may play as many as twelve instrumental types, each linked to a prescribed feast or season.
Musical instruments are often believed to influence agricultural production directly, and their sound is considered to affect the weather. Among the lowland MoreŽ, for example, the toaŽ, a friction idiophone, is considered to control rainfall. In highland northern PotosiŽ, the high-pitched sound of the charango is said to attract the frost, necessary in the winter months for the preparation of chun~u (freeze-dried potatoes). In contrast, flute music is commonly said to bring rain and prevent frosts.
During periods of drought, people sometimes play pinkillu to call the rain, but the hoarse sound of the tarka is said to attract dry spells and is especially associated with carnival, when continued rain would spoil the ripening crops. In some regions during the growing season, pinkillu and tarka are alternated as required: the pinkillu bring rain, and the tarka attract dry spells (Buechler 1980). Some instruments (such as kitarra and pinkillu) are played continuously throughout a prescribed season, while others (such as lichiwayu and julajula) are confined to specific fiestas within a specific period.
The rainy season (November to March) is especially associated with the souls of the dead, said to participate in agricultural production. According to Aymara legend, they "push the potatoes up from inside the earth" (Bastien 1978:81). At the feast of Todos Santos (1 and 2 November), the dead are invited back to the world of the living, and are ritually fed in family houses and the cemetery. In northern PotosiŽ, pinkillu and kitarra begin to be played a few weeks before All Saints (1 November), when planting is begun or completed; their music continues until carnival, the ritual end of the growing season. On the final night of carnival, dancers imitating the spirits of the dead and devils dance out onto the mountainsides. At a climactic moment, the instruments of the rains are dramatically hushed and hidden away, and the people start singing the songs of the dry season to the strumming of the charango (Harris 1982a).
In contrast, the ritual start of the dry season is sometimes linked with the resurrection of Christ, following Lent and Holy Week, when music is often banned. During the vigil of Easter in Ingavi Province, La Paz Department, the musicians stand silent until the church bells ring kalan kalan (mnemonic, onomatopoeic vocables) to announce the resurrection. At this signal, musicians begin to play the qina-qina, which are not put away again until October. In many areas, the most intensive festal activity occurs between July and September, when a series of patronal festivals (saints' days) occurs. But in some areas (as Yura, PotosiŽ Department), such activity is almost entirely confined to the growing and harvesting season, between the solstices of December and June (Rasnake 1989).
Strummed chordophones such as charango and kitarra commonly change tunings and performance techniques according to the time of year. As with the construction of instruments, many localized variations occur.
Fiestas and music
Most traditional musical performances occur at fiestas, events that serve a broad range of functions and mark a wide variety of celebrations and anniversaries. Carnival and All Saints are celebrated in most of the country, but the dates of other fiestas are subject to local variations. Besides acting as foci for ritual activity, celebration, recreation, and opportunities for courtship and social interaction, fiestas sometimes serve to provide contexts for public expressions of injustice or dispute.
In northern PotosiŽ, full-scale battles may occur during fiestas, often within the context of ritual fighting (tinku). Some of the most intense moments of confrontation occur in the music itself, with aggressive stamping dances (zapateo) to the music of the charango and provocative performance on the julajula. This fighting expresses individual courage and communal solidarity, especially in territorial disputes.
Huge crowds of people simultaneously playing different musics, widespread inebriation from alcohol, raised passions, fighting, and the spilling of bloodall are said to be essential to the success of a fiesta. From this chaos and creativity emerges a new
Some fiestas are centered on the sites of miracles or on villages with important patron saints and may involve pilgrimages of several days' walk carrying the community cross or standard, accompanied by almost continuous music para alegrar el sen~or 'to make the saint joyful'. On the participants' arrival, music is commonly performed in each corner of the village square, and then inside or facing the main door of the church in adoration or consolation of its patron. Social investment is another important aspect of fiestas, through sponsorship of fiesta-related activity and in the common experience of collective participation.
Many lowland peoples perform special dances at initiations and marriages. At the lip- and ear-piercing ceremony of ten- to twelve-year-old children, the MoreŽ dance the chiquiŽt to the sound of a gourd rattle of the same name. In the highlands, informal musical performance may follow baptisms and the ceremony of a child's first haircut, but it is almost always an important aspect of nuptial feasts, when special songs (ipala) are often sung by the bridegroom's sisters, or songs of insult (takipayanaku) are improvised between in-laws. Music may be provided for dancing by local wind instruments, brass bands, or charangos, for which a special tuning (kasamintu) is used in some areas.
For certain fiestas, married couples are expected to take part in hierarchical series of cargos, ritual-sponsorship obligations. In northern PotosiŽ, for fiestas where julajula are played, the main sponsor (alfeŽrez) provides food and drink over the course of the festivities, while the minor sponsor (mayura) obtains the instruments, teaches the new melody, and carries a whip to discipline the dancing and control the ritual fighting (tinku). In other traditions, the sponsors (pasantes or cabezas) may contract local musicians who perform out of goodwill, or musicians from outside the community who for their services are paid with money or local produce. The sponsorship of fiestas in some regions alternates between sponsors (alfereces) and communal authorities (kuraqkuna) or cabildos. These positions of authority are rotated each year, and each married couple is obliged to take a turn.
Music is not usually played at funerals, but in La Paz Department, bamboo alma pinkillus are sometimes played for the Misa de Ocho Dias, a mass held on the eighth day after a death. Traditions vary widely for the feast of the dead at All Saints; in many areas, music is banned in favor of weeping in cemeteries, while in others the strains of pinkillu may replace prayers at the sites of graves. There is a special relationship between music and the ancestors or the recently dead.
Dance
In most Bolivian genres, music and dance are inseparable, and the physical action of dancing is often of great ritual significance. Dances in a circle are universal. Among the Tobas of the Gran Chaco, they were used in curing and life-cycle rituals. Encircling the patient would supposedly make the malignant spirits possessing the body depart with the dancer's perspiration (Karsten 1923). The courtship dance songs of the highlands often alternate sung verses with energetic stamping dances; the ring of dancers breaks periodically to rush energetically from one household or bar to another. Similarly, with much ritual wind music (played by flutes and panpipes), circles
In processional julajula dances of northern PotosiŽ (linked with ritual battle), single files of sometimes up to a hundred players snake into village squares for major fiestas. For this dance, participants wear ox-hide fighting helmets, identical in shape to those of the Spanish conquistadors.
In the highlands of La Paz Department, many dances include a burlesque or pantomimic aspect (Harcourt and Harcourt 1959; Paredes Candia 1980), such as the waka tokori, which caricatures a bullfight; other dances represent mock combat or hunting, such as the chuqila (chokela), a ritual hunt for vicun~as (Baumann 1982b). Lowland dances are often connected with hunting or sometimes with the conversion of warlike tribes to Christianity. On Palm Sunday, macheterosdancers with feather headdresses and large knives (machetes)process through the streets of Trinidad (Beni Department) in a bowing dance of supplication before an image of Christ on a donkey (Rivero Parada 1989).
The most famous processional dances of Bolivia are the costumed and masked dances of Oruro carnival, which developed among urban miners and occur in other towns (Guerra GutieŽrrez 1987). Two of its most spectacular dances are the choreographed diablada 'devil dance' and morenada 'black-slave dance', which feature huge, colorful, costly masks and are accompanied by brass bands. Among the many other urban dances of this type are those that caricature ethnic populations from other regions of Bolivia (such as Toba and Kallawaya) and even native North Americans. Partner dances or dance songs between men and women, such as the duple-time huayn~o, the compound-triple-meter cueca (a dance with handkerchiefs), and the takirari of the lowlands are popular in middle-class contexts but less common among traditional peasants.
The mimed dances, the extravagant costumes, and the dramatic aspect of many rituals are evidence of the popularity of theatrical presentation. A play based on the murder of the Inka Atahualpa by the Spanish is one of the few traditional dramas still performed. It appears as part of Oruro carnival, but early in the twentieth century it was staged in rural towns (Lara 1989). Music is an important aspect of the performance, especially in the laments of the Inka princesses.
The variety of musics and types of instruments is one of the salient markers of Bolivian cultural identity and differentiation, especially with the steady decline of traditional dress. People use music to express solidarity and competition at various levels. Some instruments and musical forms are closely associated with the immediate community and local agricultural production. Others are linked with the larger sociopolitical groups and may relate to the maintenance of territorial boundaries.
Competition often occurs between wind ensembles from different highland hamlets, communities, ayllus, or wards. Each attempts to dominate the other during a fiesta, in volume and assurance of melody, ideally causing their opponents to falter. But within the ensemble itself, there is a strong sense of solidarity, social leveling, and reciprocity, which reflect traditional forms of social organization and exchange.
Gender-based roles
With few exceptions, instrumental performance is the role of men. In the highlands, women are the main singers, and a song is said to be incomplete with only men's voices and without women's. Historically, women have often played drums to accompany
In the highlands and the lowlands, music is a central aspect of courtship. Many instrumentssuch as the moraŽo, a ten-tube panpipe of the lowland MoreŽ and the pinkillu and guitar-type instruments of the central highlandsare specifically associated with the young and unmarried. Songs of courtship are often laced with erotic metaphors, continually refer to marriage, and like the instruments themselves, are often linked with agricultural fertility.
North of PotosiŽ, many couples meet only in the context of song and dance at fiestas and do not regularly spend time together until, after obtaining the permission of the woman's parents, the woman steals away to live with the man's family in concubinage. Following marriage (or concubinage), musical activity by women is sometimes frowned on because of its associations with courtship. In some regions, women are prohibited from singing and dancing. However, males of all ages, including boys, are expected to play in the massed panpipe bands that perform at certain highland festivals; in some places, older men are said to be better musicians because they have greater experience and know more tunes.
Class and ethnicity
Class structures are transitory and highly complex; they vary considerably according to region. Ethnicity, residence, wealth, education, occupation, and physical type may all contribute to the construction of class position. Distinctions of class as cultural identity are often clearly defined by the use of specific musical styles, techniques, rhythms, genres, and instruments. In many places, the choice of nylon or metal strings on a charango is not so much an issue of musical taste as one of class and ethnic identity. A peasant who uses nylon rather than metal strings may be understood to be rebelling against his ethnic origins and aspiring to a higher class.
The peasants (campesinos, indios) of the highlands are subsistence farmers or herders who principally speak Quechua or Aymara. In some regions, people retain traditional dress and strong ethnic identity. Their music is often closely linked to social considerations, cosmology, and agricultural production. Some dispersed indigenous groups remain in the lowlands, speaking a mosaic of languages, but few traditional musical practices survive among them.
The broad spectrum of middle classes ranges from those who speak indigenous languages and Spanish and retain localized music traditions, to educated monolingual Spanish-speakers with a strong sense of national cultural identity. The brass band developed among urban miners, but strong localized charango, guitar, and accordion styles developed among the more rural middle classes. A repertoire of nationally popular songs and dances, muŽsica folkloŽrica, including many highland and lowland dances, is constantly played on the larger radio networks. Other Latin American styles and performers, such as the Colombian cumbia and the Peruvian huayno (huayn~o in Bolivia) are often heard, while younger generations sometimes favor rock and the fusion of these elements into the so-called commercial tropical style, known in Peru as chicha music.
The culture of the small, white, and wealthy mestizo population is more aligned with that of Europe and the United States, as is the growing migrant population of the lowlands, which includes many Okinawan Japanese [see MUSIC AND IMMIGRATION]. African Bolivians still perform sayas 'praise songs' in the streets of Cochabamba, and the saya is a popular musical form among pan-Andean folk groups such as Inti Illimani, Kjarkas, and Pacha.
Composition
In rural communities of the highlands, the performance of new melodies each year and sometimes for individual fiestas (especially carnival) is commonly considered a ritual necessity. Old tunes are said to have no power and in Quechua are called q'ayma 'insipid'. In the high plains of La Paz and Oruro departments, new melodies are sometimes obtained through a process of collective composition. They may consist of no more than a few short motifs treated according to consistent formulae with, for example, rhythmic repetition at intervals of the fourth or fifth, or repetition of pitches with rhythmic variation.
It is often said that new melodies cannot be made up inside a house. Players describe how they are inspired when alone on a mountainside, beside a river, or sometimes when playing in an ensemble of pinkillu; often, a new tune appears under their fingers as if by magic, "played by the siriŽnus." Musical abilities and new melodies are commonly attributed to the siriŽnus 'sirens' or the yawlus 'devils' (MartiŽnez 1990; SaŽnchez 1988) said to live beside streams and waterfalls or in caves or large rocks; these places are described as (Spanish) lugares feos 'ugly-evil places'. The siriŽnus supposedly take various forms, including that of humans, and can transform themselves into animals such as toads, doves, cats, dogs, and foxes.
Men sometimes visit siriŽnus late at night after buying a new instrument or shortly before fiestas, to endow their instruments with special magical powers. After making ritual offerings that may include the sacrifice of a red cockerel (made to crow before being killed), they leave the instruments beside a rock or a spring and retreat to a safe distance; they may leave the instruments for several nights. Traditions vary widely: in some places, people say if you hear the music of the siriŽnus, you will become mad; other people claim to listen to the music and copy it; in some parts, to frighten off the siriŽnus and collect the tuned instruments, people make a noise by throwing a tin can as soon as they hear the first tuning note. The tuned instruments are then said to have magical powers that attract girls with their enchanted music, as suggested in a text from Bustillos Province, PotosiŽ Department:
Kay charanguytuyki | This charango of yours |
Kasaru kustillu | Wants to get married |
Sapa waqasqampi | Each time it weeps |
SiriŽnu kustillu. | With the desire of the siriŽnu. |
In the tropical lowlands, music is often performed in a gentle, meditative manner; the SirionoŽ, for example, frequently sing while lying in hammocks (Key 1963; Riester 1978). Such meditative and day-to-day performance is rare in highland peasant communities, where most music is confined to fiestas, when women usually sing
The dynamic aspect of musical performance emphasizes its ritual and socializing role in the reciprocal exchange of energies between paired performers (using inter-locking technique) and between the worlds of humans and spirits. Such an exchange is analogous to the tradition of reciprocal labor in which work performed as aid to others is later returned with produce or a similar form of labor (Harris 1982b). In fiestas, dynamism and aesthetic saturation (food, drink, music, color) are considered ritually essential, contrasting vividly with the austerity of everyday life. Complaints about the quality of performance are rarely made, but if the music falters and stops, people are swift to criticize, even when the musicians are almost too drunk and exhausted to stand.
Many traditional wind instruments, especially of highland Oruro and La Paz departments, are played in consorts (tropas) of a single type of instrument made in graduated sizes and tuned in unison, parallel fifths, or octaves. Blending is essential, and people say the tonal color of the ensemble should be consistent, with each voice heard equally and no single voice standing out from the solidarity of the ensemble. In weaving, color is also often blended through chromatic graduations, k'isas 'sweetness' (Cereceda 1987); and what from a distance appears as a monochrome may be blended from, perhaps, fourteen shades and colors.
In contrast with the pure harmonics of the European flute, a broad tone, rich in harmonics (tara), is usually preferred in the highlands. Tarka or taraka probably derive their name from the Aymara word tara, which denotes a hoarse voice. When blown strongly, the sound of these flutes divides so the fundamental tone and the octave above are of near-equal intensity.
Rich, dense, and often dissonant tonal color is sometimes consciously added by an instrument that plays in parallel to the rest of the ensemble, but at a dissonant interval. For example, in the tropa recto (an ensemble of musin~u), all the instruments are tuned to play in parallel octaves or fifths; however, the single sobre requinto, tuned a fifth above the irasu-sized instruments, is pitched a tone above the four requintos. The resulting consistent parallel dissonance enlivens and enriches the timbre of the ensemble, como oŽrgano 'like an organ'.
Fascination with sound is emphasized rather than developed instrumental technique, and little individual practice is necessary. Musical performance is essentially a socializing activity in which general participation and interaction are encouraged, reflecting traditional egalitarian social structures while discouraging excessive power or subordination. The notion of a soloist is contrary to many traditional highland musical practices. This presents a marked contrast to urban ensembles (conjuntos), which, following Western practices and tastes, combine a variety of instruments with contrasting timbres, use harmony and polyphony, and feature one person playing both panpipe halves to form a single instrument with the player periodically acting as a soloist.
Many types of double-unit panpipes and the pinkillu ensembles of northern PotosiŽ divide the notes of the scale between paired instruments. The combination of paired instruments (that is, two halves), such as the three-tubed male panpipe and the two-tube female panpipe of the Chipayas, is usually stated to be "like older and younger brothers" but is sometimes compared with heterosexual intercourse. These concepts may be understood in terms of the organizing principle of duality or complementarity (Quechua yanantin) by which paired elements are said to belong together and to be incomplete or uncreative alone (Platt 1986).
Similarly, the hoarseness of tara, which refers to the timbre of some highland wind instruments, can be glossed 'double'. This vibrancy, rich in harmonics, is said to be in tune and creative like the balancing of male and female and the sexual union of a man and a woman. But when instruments produce a thin tone with few harmonics, do not sound well, or are out of tune with the rest of an ensemble, they may be called q'iwa, a concept said to imply singleness or aloneness, used to denote castrated animals, infertile plants, homosexuals, and misers with money or food. Associated with the inability to produce and with imbalance, q'iwa is understood in terms of agency and is of central importance to concepts of regeneration. In traditional communities, musical timbre is directly related to regeneration, productivity, and creation (Stobart 1992).
Poetry and music
The universality of dualistic principles in Bolivia may be attributed to certain musical forms and aesthetics, particularly in the poetry of Quechua songs. Each line is a union of two halves, and adjacent lines are commonly paired through common or opposing ideas or through vocabulary of similar sound, often as wordplay, as seen in a text from Ayllu Macha, Chayanta Province, PotosiŽ Department:
Walli q'iririnqa, | Valley q'iririnqa, |
Puna q'iririnqa: | Highland q'iririnqa: |
Warmi wachakuqtin, | When the woman's giving birth, |
Cholay q'ipirinqa. | My girl will be carrying. |
This verse, sung by women, likens the q'iririnqa (a bird) to highland men who travel to the valleys with llama caravans each year to exchange salt for maizea journey associated with amorous intrigue. The first and second lines suggestively contrast low and high (valleys or birth versus highlands or child on its mother's back). By semantic coupling, the single idea of "woman" is expressed in two contrasting words, warmi and chola; the words q'iririnqa and q'ipirinqa are almost identical in sound, though different in meaning.
The transmission of music
Traditionally, music is learned informally and socially through collective imitation and repetition. In the rural highlands, children and young men carry instruments while herding or on journeys; they learn alongside friends or while they are passing the time alone. New tunes on wind instruments are usually taught in collective contexts, through continual repetition of the complete melody.
Ensembles usually consist of members of existing social groupsa hamlet, a community, an ayllu (ethnic group), a ward, or even an urban migrant neighborhood or cultural center. But the brass bands and troupes of Oruro and several other towns are much institutionalized and autonomous, in themselves serving as a social focus.
The teaching of music in schools is mostly confined to singing local or national songs (especially the national anthem) and depends largely on the enthusiasm of individual teachers. Players in urban conjuntos sometimes take individual or collective lessons, and they may study Western classical music at the National Conservatory.
Throughout history, highland Bolivian music has been subject to change, with the reinterpretation of new musical ideas, often brought from other cultures, within a cosmology centered on traditional economics, social structures, and agricultural production. But the latter half of the twentieth century, even more than the Spanish
The introduction of radios and tape recorders and widespread migration to the cities have meant increased contact with urban mestizo and Western music in the countryside. The high prestige of such music, accompanied by increasing orientation toward Western values and aesthetics, means that traditional practices tend to be devalued and their significance forgotten. With increased ownership of tape recorders, tunes are becoming fixed, and taped music is beginning to replace live musicians, even in ritual contexts. Musical scales and melodic structures appear to be increasingly influenced by Western-based diatonic music; for example, a series of lawatu (flute) melodies recorded in southern PotosiŽ in 1977 included a six-note scale, but lawatu tunes played in the same village ten years later commonly used a seven-note scale.
Among the middle classes, recorded music is heard in most buses, bars, and cafeŽs. There are numerous radio networks, and sales of vinyl records and cassettes are high. Styles are diverse, but some of the most popular are the rhythmic lowland dance songs of such groups as TriŽo Oriental, who combine vocal harmonies with accordion, bass, and percussion. Besides incorporating forms such as the taquirari and the saya from Bolivia's own indigenous and black populations, this so-called tropical style is often influenced by African-Caribbean rhythms (such as the Columbian cumbia and the Peruvian chicha). Some highland bands have adopted similar forms and rhythms; for example, Maroyu's commercial style combines voice, electric guitars, organ, and percussion. Countless electric bands of this type, with considerable awareness of rock, are found in urban centers; typically, they supply music for dancing at weddings.
Since the agrarian reforms of 1953 and a policy of cultural unification, the state has encouraged folkloric festivals in certain regions. Many developmental agencies, radio stations, and political parties continue to organize competitions of peasant music, often with Westerners or mestizos as judges. These practices have served to transform essentially participatory music into a medium that differentiates musicians and audience. The radical reversal in ideology has often been accompanied by the abandonment of seasonal considerations, the encouragement of virtuoso instrumental techniques, and the development of new forms.
Nevertheless, traditional music is being rediscovered and valued again by many urban migrants. Far more than a hundred indigenous ensembles (grupos autoŽctonos) regularly perform in La Paz. Numerous urban ensembles (conjuntos) tour internationally on a regular basis. Andean music is often identified internationally with folkloric ensembles (grupos folkloŽricos), whose instruments typically include charango, guitar, quena, panpipes, and percussion, sometimes using highly developed instrumental techniques. Such ensembles are commonly seen on tour in international concert halls, or as migrants busking on sidewalks in Europe and the United States. Kjarkas, Rumillajta, and Savia Andina are among the most famous Bolivian ensembles of this type; their original songs and stylized versions of traditional dances are famous throughout the middle classes and are recognized as the popular national culture. Other groups, including Awatin~as, Los Masis, Norte de PotosiŽ, and Los Yuras, often include examples of more traditional peasant styles in their programs. Many more localized mestizo huayn~os or other forms of dance and song are recorded and sold in large numbers, typically sung in a high, plaintive, full-voiced style, accompanied by charango and guitar or accordion.
The group Wara has combined more traditional folkloric instruments with electric
Formal concerts of classical music on Western instruments, and even new music especially composed for native instruments, take place in La Paz and other large towns. But public performances of more urban folk-derived music usually take place in the more informal setting of music clubs (pen~as), where an array of professional and semiprofessional ensembles play styles likely to appeal to urbanites' and tourists' tastes; the most famous is Pen~a Naira in La Paz. One of the most famous groups to come out of the music clubs in La Paz is Los Jairas, featuring the virtuosic charango playing of Ernesto Cavour and the florid quena playing of the Swiss-born Gilberto "El Gringo" Favre.
Major competitions are held annually for folk-derived music in mestizo style, often resulting in prestigious coverage, recording contracts, and opportunities for the winners of prizes to travel abroad. Regional competitions are held for music from peasant communities and smaller towns, usually organized by radio stations or foreign-aid groups.
Historical Overview
Musical Traits of Central and Southern Brazil
Musical Instruments
Music within Popular Roman Catholicism
Music in Urban Contexts
Music in Migrant Communities
Further Study
The music of central and southern Brazil is as diverse as the one hundred million people that populate the area. Gross topological contrasts occur throughout the rural areas of central and southern Brazil, which cover about 2,224,000 square kilometers, and an equally wide range of musical activities occur in such urban centers as Rio de Janeiro and Sa~o Paulo. These and other cities provide opportunities for hearing many kinds of Brazilian musics, including Brazilian popular music genres that have become known all over the world; traditional southeastern rural genres of medieval origin and their later developments; a wide variety of Afro-Brazilian traditions; northeastern traditional genres, brought by migrants searching for a better life in the south; and the musical traditions of the immigrant groups (Chinese, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Middle Easterners, Poles, Spaniards, and so on) that came to Brazil from the early 1800s on and particularly after 1888, when slavery was abolished in the country [see MUSIC OF IMMIGRANT GROUPS]. Concerts of Western art music are given regularly, and outlets of mass communication bombard the Brazilian public with the latest popular hits from abroad.
There are further distinctions between the musical preferences of different Brazilian social classes, ages, religious communities, professional categories, and even political parties. In effect, musical activities and preferences have become markers of identity for the social groups that make up Brazilian society.
Little is known of the music of central and southern Brazil before the area's first encounter with Portuguese explorers on 22 April 1500. Information is also scant regarding the first three hundred years after that. During the colonial period, documents detail the musical activities of the major Roman Catholic cathedrals and the parlors of the upper classes, but data about musical life outside these domains are sparse. Some information is available in writings left by such travelers as Jean de LeŽry, who lived in Brazil from 1557 to 1558 and produced the first known transcriptions of native American music: two chants of the TupinambaŽ, near Rio de Janeiro (LeŽry 1980:150, 162). From his description of a "savage ritual," it is clear that, like other
The European settlement of Brazil was undertaken as a joint venture between Portugal and the Roman Catholic Church; with the sword came the cross. The Portuguese were allotted the landmass east of the demarcation set in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which included a large section of present-day Brazil. The colonization of the area combined economic, political, and religious objectives. Despite the Christianizing model of colonization, the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil was weak, and its weakness had important implications for colonial musical life: without ecclesiastical subsidies, musical performanceeven for religious ritualsbecame almost exclusively the prerogative of lay people.
Since 1179, when the Portuguese crusade against the Moors began, the Portuguese crown had been on good terms with Rome, and a series of papal bulls had granted the king concessions over Portuguese religious institutions, rendering the church in Brazil subservient to the state. Though in the first years of colonization the goals of Portugal were seemingly congruent with those of the church, the crown's greater interest in gold than in souls had important consequences. About 250 years after the first encounter, Portugal had scarcely fulfilled its part of the bargain; there were but eight dioceses in the colony, and only a few thousand priests to serve a population of 1.4 million freemen and others. Most of the priests were employed on northeastern plantations to administer the sacraments to owners and their families.
Central and southern Brazil were especially affected by the crown's neglect. Unlike the northeast, where sugarcane had started generating profits almost immediately after the arrival of the Portuguese, the southern areas had little economic importance to the metropolis. The land was settled by Portuguese subsistence farmers, who moved farther and farther into the hinterland, displacing the indigenous population. They formed small, scattered communities (bairros) of around ten to fifteen households, which helped one another with tasks that a single family could not complete. These circumstances led to the emergence of a peasant ethos, marked by nomadism, community solidarity, and an emphasis on personalized social interaction.
In these communities, Christian festivities were the primary sociable contexts. In the absence of priests, colonists developed devotional forms based on rituals brought from Portugal, many rooted in late medieval musical traditions. Households alternated in promoting popular religious festivities. It was up to the host of the festival (festeiro) to invite musicians to lead the ritual proceedings at his house. The only leadership roles in these communities were those of popular Christian traditions. In rural areas, in such traditions as the baptism of Saint John the Baptist, the Saint Goncžalo dance, and the folia de reis (see below), the legacy of the household forms of popular Christianity can still be observed.
The communal work party (mutira~o) was another important venue for making music and socializing in rural communities. At the end of the day, the host offered the workers a meal, followed by the caterete^ (also catira), a widely practiced double line dance. In some areas, musical traditions developed to amuse the workers while they worked. In the ParaiŽba Valley, which lies between the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sa~o Paulo, the mutira~o is still accompanied by sung riddles (bra~o) sustained throughout the day (
In southern Brazil, the church was far more active with the indigenous population than with the Portuguese. Jesuit missionaries, who arrived around 1550, were particularly fervent in their desire to convert the native Americans. By the late 1500s, more than five hundred Jesuits were in Brazil, baptizing and domesticating the
Music was often included in morality plays (autos) that priests enacted for the natives, and it is thought that even before the foundation of the Indian Theater of Sa~o Lourencžo in Rio de Janeiro, there had been a native American theater in Sa~o Vicente. The first morality play believed to have been written in Brazil was the Auto da Pregacža~o Universal, attributed to the missionaries JoseŽ de Anchieta and Manoel da NoŽbrega. It was first performed in Piratininga (now Sa~o Paulo) in 1567 before being taken to other coastal settlements.
The Jesuits were successful in acculturating native Americans through music and musical instruction, particularly within the missions (called reductions) they organized in the extreme southern parts of the country. By the mid-1600s, the GuaraniŽ were not only playing European organs, harpsichords, woodwinds, and stringed instruments, but masterfully manufacturing instruments (Preiss 1988). Native orchestras accompanied religious songs sung in Latin, Portuguese, and native languages. Their ability to perform European music became a major argument in a scholastic debate as to whether or not native Americans had souls.
Although cultural interchange within the missions was essentially unilateral, some musicologists have claimed that the caterete^ had a native origin (Andrade 1933:173). Anchieta (and later, other Jesuits) supposedly used it during religious festivals held among the TupinambaŽ, though evidence of this is weak. The acculturation of the native Brazilian population seems to have been so effective that at the level of the greater society, native American influence in almost all areas of life in Brazil is small. In the domain of musical expression, it may be limited to the preservation of a few indigenous terms, certain choreographic practices, and the occasional use of maraca-type rattles. In 1759, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil, and the native Americans they had domesticated were enslaved. An important era of musical life in Brazil came to an end, and Rome lost its only strong ally in the colony.
Near the end of the 1600s, lay brotherhoods (irmandades) began to appear in urban centers throughout the colony. These voluntary associations became the main colonial institutions linking church and society. They built churches and maintained charitable institutions. Their main public activities involved the celebration of patronal festivals. Thus, they became particularly important in promoting the musical life of the colony.
The gold era
The significance of the lay brotherhoods becomes particularly evident with the rise of what has been called the barroco mineiro 'baroque of Minas Gerais'. This phase of artistic development occurred as a consequence of bandeiras, expeditions led by Portuguese colonizers from the Sa~o Vicente Captaincy into the interior of the country searching for gold. The rugged frontiersmen who left Sa~o Vicente and Sa~o Paulo on expeditions usually returned only with natives, whom they kept for themselves or sold as slaves to prosperous local aristocrats. Though these expeditions did not bring immediate prosperity to the colonizers of the Sa~o Vicente Captaincy, they paid off in the long term.
In 1698, prospectors found gold in the Serra do Espinhacžo, and during the 1700s, the mines of Minas Gerais, GoiaŽs, and Mato Grosso were producing 44 percent of the world's supply of gold. Gold attracted prospectors from all over the country, even from Europe. New communities grew up overnight, particularly around the major mining sites of Minas Gerais but also along the routes used for transporting the gold to the ports.
From about 1750 to about 1800, the concentration of wealth in gold-rush areas
Between 1760 and 1800, nearly a thousand active musicians were associated with lay brotherhoods in Minas Gerais, primarily concentrated in Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto), SabaraŽ, Mariana, Arraial de Tejuco (now Diamantina), Sa~o Joa~o del Rei, and Sa~o JoseŽ del Rei (now Tiradentes). Many were free mulattoes, trained in family-based musical establishments, who studied Latin, voice, and instruments, and learned to read and copy music and to set liturgical texts to melodic lines.
The most outstanding local composer of the period was JoseŽ Joaquim EmeŽrico Lobo de Mesquita (ca. 1740-1805), who composed more than three hundred pieces, of which about forty have survived. Other important composers were Marcos Coelho Netto (d. 1823), Francisco Gomes da Rocha (d. 1808), and Ignacio Parreiras Neves (ca. 1730-1793). By 1820, the gold in the mines was becoming exhausted, and the golden era of Brazilian music was declining.
The coffee era
The gold-rush developments were followed by a boom in coffee, and the establishment of coffee plantations (fazendas) affected musical practices. In the early 1800s, coffee had become popular in Europe and the Americas. Coffee plants could be cultivated profitably in the soil of the ParaiŽba Valley, an area soon taken over by large landholdings, modeled on the northeastern plantation system. Around 1860, coffee moved westward to the areas around Campinas, and into Ribeira~o Preto. By 1900, the state of Sa~o Paulo was producing nearly 75 percent of the world's supply. In the mid-1940s, northern ParanaŽ became the locus of the new boom. Today, as coffee takes over the scrub lands of central Minas Gerais, fortunes are still being made.
As coffee made its westward march, rural communities were absorbed as sharecroppers into the plantation life-style. The coffee economy brought vast numbers of African slaves and their descendants, mostly of Bantu origin, plus European and other immigrant groups. The musical traditions of these social groups existed side by side, but in time they began to borrow from one another.
As in rural communities, sociability on plantations centered on Christian festivities. On special saints' days, landowners provided a hefty meal and entertainment for their workers. At these festivals, the landholding elites congregated in the parlor of the plantation house for European-style dancing in couples; sharecroppers participated in the caterete^ in the front patio of the house; and slaves amused themselves in batuques near the slave quarters (senzalas). In the batuque, individual dancers entered a circle to perform acrobatic steps to other participants' singing, clapping, and percussive accompaniment. The soloist ended his or her performance with a belly bump (umbigada) against someone in the circle, transferring the role of soloist to that person.
As the population increased, patronal festivals became common in towns throughout the coffee-producing areas. The hosts (festeiros) of these festivals were mostly large landholders. To confront labor shortages, they competed with one another to produce ever grander festivals, demonstrating their benevolence toward
These ensembles still perform for patronal festivals throughout central and southern Brazil. In many rural communities, the patronal festival is the most important event of the calendar, bringing crowds of people to the streets, where they are bombarded with sounds, music, dancing, smells, and visual stimuli.
Musical life in Rio
Outside the mining areas, the only other colonial town of significant size in southern Brazil was Rio de Janeiro, where musical life centered on the monastery of Sa~o Bento and the cathedral of Saint Sebastian. In 1763, Rio became the capital of the colony, and throughout the 1800s it was Brazil's cultural center. The new musical trends and fashions that emerged in Rio radiated to other parts of the country. Thus, Rio set the tone for the country's art music and urban popular music.
Rio was the birthplace of Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1739-1800), the first known composer of modinhas and lundus whose texts are extant. His songs scandalized the Portuguese court because their manner of addressing women in the audience struck the court as being indecently direct (Tinhora~o 1990:92-93). GregoŽrio de Matos Guerra of Bahia (1623-1695) may already have written and sung lundus and modinhas, but none of his works has survived.
The modinha and the lundu developed in the early 1700s, competing for the distinction of being the first "truly Brazilian" musical form. The lundu made its way into upper-class parlors from the batuque circles, but the modinha evinces influences from Italian opera. The lundu is faster, and deals with comical and satirical themes. The modinha is more melodic, and incarnates the Brazilian romantic spirit, appropriate for serenades.
Even essentially art music composers such as JoseŽ MauriŽcio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), Francisco Manuel da Silva (b. 1812), and Carlos Gomes made their contributions to the repertoire, exemplifying how fluid the dividing line between Brazilian popular music and art music has been.
In 1808, to escape the Napoleonic threat, the Portuguese court moved to Rio. Though the king, Dom Joa~o VI, remained in the colony only thirteen years, his presence gave new vitality to musical life in the capital. A patron of the arts, he stimulated musical activity, and Garcia, one of Brazil's most renowned priest-composers, soon found himself in the monarch's favor, much to the annoyance of the former court-based composer Marcos Portugal (1762-1830), who had also followed the king to the colony.
When Dom Joa~o returned to Portugal, he left the kingdom in the hands of his
In 1840, his successor, Dom Pedro II, assumed the throne, and musical life in Rio was revitalized. This was due to the efforts of Francisco Manuel da Silva (1795-1865), the master composer of the imperial chapel, whose most famous work is the Brazilian national anthem. In Rio in 1847, Da Silva founded the Music Conservatory, which he directed until his death. In 1860, the National Lyric Opera was founded; its first production was A Noite de Sa~o Joa~o by Elias Alvares Lo^bo (1834-1901), who based his libretto on poems by the Indianist writer JoseŽ de Alencar. It was also through the National Lyric Opera that Brazilian audiences were introduced to Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), Brazil's most successful composer of operas. In his most celebrated pieces, Il Guarany and Lo Schiavo, he drew on the romantic image of the native Brazilianwhich made him especially popular in Europe. Reminiscences of native Brazilian motifs and popular Brazilian urban genres were present in his music.
The arrival of the Portuguese court had other important implications for colonial musical activities. With the entourage came the first pianos, which families with sufficient means soon acquired. By 1834, pianos were being constructed in Brazil, and the piano remains an important status symbol for the upper classes. By 1834, Brazilian publishers were editing the music of the latest European dances (country dances, polkas, quadrilles, schottisches, waltzes, and others), which amateurs throughout the country played with enthusiasm. Popular composers, such as Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847-1935) and Ernesto NazareŽ (1863-1933) Brazilianized these dances, providing the country's amateur pianists with a locally flavored repertoire. The influence of the modinha could be observed in the waltz, while the fusion of the polka with the lundu provided the matrix for the Brazilian tango and the maxixe, an early form of the samba.
While the upper classes gathered around their parlor pianos, Rio's bohemians were playing the same repertoire in the streets on violo~es (guitars) and cavaquinhos (small, four-stringed, guitarlike instruments similar to ukuleles, with metal strings). During the 1870s, a standardized ensemble evolved, consisting of an ebony flute (which played the melody), a cavaquinho (for the harmony), and a viola~o (guitar, which provided a bass). The musicians that played in this manner became known as choro~es. Many early choro~es were employed in military bands, which became important venues of musical instruction for those who could not afford private piano tuition. Near the end of the century, other band-derived wind instruments (such as the flute, the ophicleide, the clarinet, and the saxophone) would often play the melody. The repertoire became progressively faster and required greater virtuosity. It eventually evolved into a distinct musical genre, the choro (also chorinho).
Even in the late 1990s, the masterpieces of such popular composers as Pixinguinha, Zequinha de Abreu, Anacleto de Medeiros, and others were still being played and recorded, though choros were performed by larger ensembles, including tambourines and other percussion instruments. Small stringed instruments came to be used as melodic instruments.
Musical nationalism
By the late 1800s, musical nationalism had become a feature of Brazilian art music, particularly in the work of Joaquim Anto^nio da Silva Callado (1848-1880),
Without doubt, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), a native of Rio, was Brazil's most talented and prolific nationalist composer. He composed numerous orchestral pieces including twelve symphonies, thirteen tone poems, twelve suites, and more than twenty concertos. He also composed seven operas, numerous chamber and choral pieces, and a vast repertoire for solo instruments, especially piano and guitar. As a youth, he played with choro~es, and later he traveled around the country, acquainting himself with the national soundscape, drawing on this material in his compositions. Among his most celebrated works are a series of Choros, composed between 1920 and 1929; the Bachianas Brasileiras, composed between 1930 and 1945; and his piano music, particularly the Lenda do Caboclo, composed in 1920; and suites based on children's songs, A Prole do Bebe^, No. 1 and No. 2, composed between 1918 and 1921.
Born in Sa~o Paulo, MaŽrio de Andrade (1893-1945) was the intellectual leader of the nationalist movement. In a book about Brazilian music (1964 [1928]), he called on Brazilian composers to participate in the construction of a national serious music tradition through the use of Brazilian expressive elements. Though he was himself not a composer, he used his literary work to introduce his project to Brazilian music circles. Much of his work (especially 1975, 1982, 1983) was dedicated to the collection and analysis of the national repertoire, which provided composers with raw material for their compositions. His research inspired other artists and intellectuals to collect the musical folklore of the country. Among these are Oneyda Alvarenga (1946, 1982), Alceu Maynard de ArauŽjo (1964), Augusto Meyer (1958), Baptista Siqueira (1979), and others.
Musical nationalism remained a hallmark of Brazilian art music well into the twentieth century, spearheaded by Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993). The only composers who openly rejected it were those associated with MuŽsica Viva, a movement that congregated around Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (b. 1915), a German Jew who fled to Brazil to escape Nazi persecution, bringing with him the techniques of dodecaphonic composition. Some exponents of MuŽsica Viva did try to produce nationalist twelve-tone music, most notably ClaŽudio Santoro (1919-1989) and CeŽsar Guerra-Peixe (1914-1993).
It was not until the 1960s that Brazilian composers began to break away from the nationalist mold. Through organizations such as the New Music Group in Santos and Sa~o Paulo, the Brazilian Society of Contemporary Music in Rio de Janeiro, and festivals of avant-garde music, Brazilian composers began to experiment with new compositional techniquesserialism, electronic music, aleatory procedures, atonality, and composition in mixed media. Major contemporary Brazilian composers active in central and southern Brazil include Gilberto Mendes (b. 1922), Willy Corre^a de Oliveira (b. 1938), Marios Nobre (b. 1939), and Jorge Antunes (b. 1942).
Contemporary musical traditions in central and southern Brazil resonate with the processes of interaction of the social groups in the area. Although Portuguese material has been substantially reinvented over the centuries, the strong sense of solidarity that had united peasant communities prior to the invasion of coffee culture has guaranteed the persistence of a marked Lusitanian-Hispanic legacy in the area. Iberian stylistic traits include arched melodies, conjunct melodic movement, parallel thirds and sixths, tonality, stanza-refrain alternation or strophic form, and the extensive use of stringed instruments.
Many contemporary musical traditions associated with blacks and mulattos evince the influence of the batuque. These traditions often involve responsorial singing, syncopated rhythms (irregular accentuation and anticipation), and the extensive use of percussive accompaniment organized around an eight-pulse timeline.
In the process of acculturation or mestization, unique musical styles developed, reflecting the amalgamation of European and African musical practices. Many African traditions incorporated parallel thirds, functional harmony, and stringed instruments of European origin; likewise, the eight-pulse timeline became ubiquitous in the traditions of the Portuguese peasantry, as in the typical rhythmic sequence of the caterete^ (
Some forms (embolada, moda-de-viola, xaŽcara, and others) have fixed texts, but many genresparticularly those involving musical duels, including the cururu paulista and the porfia of the extreme south, known as cantoria in the northeast [see BRAZIL, NORTHEAST REGION]involve textual improvisation within the form of the Iberian quatrain. In these genres, two singers take turns improvising versified insults about each other until one is declared the winner. The texts of the jongo, the bra~o, and other riddle-based genres are also improvised, and the exposition of the enigmas and the quest for their answers involve song, as seen in the following example of a jongo improvisation. After a quatrain for the enigma, it has a quatrain for the answer.
Debaixo de papai velho, | Under old father, |
Menino taŽ sepurtado. | Boy is buried. |
Quero contar no meu ponto: | I want to tell you in my verse: |
Menino foi interrado. | Boy was interred. |
Meu irma~o, sendo mais velho, | My brother, being older, |
Licencža pecžo pr?oce^: | I ask you to excuse me. |
Vou desinterrar o menino | I'll now exhume the boy |
Pra noŽs tudo aqui beber. | So all of us here can drink. |
In many popular Roman Catholic traditions of Brazil, competence in improvising verses is fundamental to ritual leadership. More than in other domains of performance competence, this ability is viewed as evidence of the leader's gift. Though age is a determining factor, criteria based on musical competence are important in constructing the internal hierarchies common to most popular Roman Catholic musical ensembles.
Some genres are sung solo (the cururu paulista and improvisations in the carangueijo) and others are sung collectively (processional prayers and refrains between improvisations in the carangueijo), but a common configuration throughout central and southern Brazil is that of the dupla, singing in parallel thirds or sixths. Its modas and toadas (tunes or melodic sequences) often encapsulate narrations related to rural social and religious life and traditional values.
One of the most typical features of rural traditional music is the consistent use of parallel thirds. The main voice is in the higher register, considered the more salient. Yet for the last chord of each verse, the first voice takes the mediant, while the second takes the tonic, rendering the first voice tonally subordinate to the second (
The two voices are perceived as a unity; when one is not present, people feel something is missing. This kind of vocal construction can be viewed as a way of reconciling notions about the equality of the participants with the hierarchical aspects of vocal organization. Rendering the role of the first voice ambiguous causes its dominance to become structurally muted, and the two voices conjoin to form a complementary unit. Far from being merely an aesthetic preference, parallel thirds have probably been stable because they provide a sonic means of reconciling the asymmetry of social relations with notions of human equalitya fundamental issue of the Roman Catholic and socially oriented ethos of rural Brazil.
Only in the extreme south did the stereotype of the cowboy (gauŽcho), androcentric and individualist, so influence the formation of the Lusitanian-Brazilian personality that parallel thirds and other polyphonic traits are less prevalent. There, male solos are far more common, and groups are more likely to sing in unison (Mendoza de Arce 1981). Distinctively, the southern Brazilian states have received the musical legacy of waves of European immigrants, particularly Germans, who in isolated communities maintain their language and musical traditions.
Numerous musical instruments are used during central and southern Brazilian social events; the rhythmic percussion instruments are used in ensembles, while the melodic instruments are played solo or in ensembles. The former include a great variety of idiophones and membranophones; the latter include aerophones, many influenced by use in military bands, and chordophones derived from colonial times. Only the most common musical instruments are included here.
Idiophones
The idiophones of central and southern Brazil are mostly small percussion instruments used to give timbral diversity to various ensembles. The ganzaŽ (also guaiaŽ, cylindrical shaker), mele^ (also afoxeŽ, friction rattle), re^co-re^co (spring or bamboo scraper), and triangle are used in many different settings in urban and rural contexts. The double bell (agogo^) is used exclusively in Afro-Brazilian urban traditions such as
Membranophones
Membranophones of various shapes and sizes are common throughout central and southern Brazil. Like idiophones, some are used in numerous traditions; others are only found in specific contexts. The tambourine (pandeiro, often known as adufo in some rural areas), and the caixa (a medium-sized double-headed drum, with or without snare) (
Afro-Brazilian traditions, which use several drums of different sizes, often have distinct names for the different membranophones. In the popular traditions of Roman Catholic dramatic music and dance, the three most commonly found are a small drum (repico), a medium-size drum (caixa), and a large drum (bumbo). Two drums are used in the jongo: the tambu, the larger, and the condonqueiro, the smaller. A friction drum (puiŽta) is also used. Baterias, the percussion ensembles of samba schools, may have any number of small, single-headed frame drum (tamborim) (
Aerophones
One of the most popular aerophones in Brazil is the accordion. Throughout the country, it is known as sanfona, but in the extreme south, it is called gaita. It was introduced into the country by German immigrants in the early 1800s but became popular with the population at large only after 1870. In southern Brazil, it is commonly associated with the fandango, a social dance; in southeastern and central Brazil, it often accompanies the quadrilha, danced during festivities in honor of Saint John the Baptist.
Military bands have left their legacy throughout central and southern Brazil, and many small towns maintain bands that perform for patronal and civic festivities. The wind instruments used in these ensembles often include flutes, clarinets, alto and tenor saxophones, cornets, trombones, saxhorns, tubas (bombardinos), and sousaphones (baixos). Their repertoire consists primarily of dobrados (marches in 2/4 time), appropriate for processions. Flutes, clarinets, and saxophones also serve as melodic instruments in chorinhos. In many percussive ensembles of African influence, the leader uses a whistle to cue stops and transitions.
Chordophones
The most common stringed instruments in the area include the viola (a guitar with five single or double courses of strings), the viola~o (the ordinary Portuguese term for guitar), the cavaquinho (a small, four-stringed guitarlike instrument similar to the ukulele, with metal or nylon strings), the bandolim (a small mandolinlike instrument with four double courses of strings), and the rabeca (folk-derived violin, the term reflecting the European word rebec).
The viola, the Brazilian descendant of the Spanish vihuela, is the most important instrument of central and southern Brazil, and it exists in a variety of types. A form of the instrument found in Mato Grosso do Sul is known as a viola de cocho 'trough
In southeastern Brazil, the most common viola is the viola caipira 'country guitar'. It is smaller than a guitar, and has five double courses of metal strings. In contrast with the viola de cocho, it has a full, metallic timbre. It can be tuned in many ways, the most common being the cebola~o 'big onion' and the rio abaixo 'downriver' (
A violeiro (viola player) must be competent to play in a tonality other than the one in which the instrument has been tuned. MuŽsica sertaneja (the Brazilian equivalent of North American country music) is accompanied by a viola and a viola~o, an instrumental configuration that has come to be known as o casal 'the couple'. Since the 1960s, however, the viola~o has been taking the place of the viola, since it is considered more modern and versatile.
Though the viola is the quintessential instrument of the Brazilian lower classes, the viola~o epitomizes the popular musical traditions of the upper and middle classes. It was celebrated in many pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and it was the primary instrument of the bossa nova movement. Nonetheless, it is used in popular Roman Catholic traditions in rural areas, just as it is included in samba styles of the urban underprivileged. The choro musician (chora~o) Horondino Silva created a seven-stringed guitar (viola~o-sete-cordas) to give him a wider range for his bass notes. The instrument continues to be used for choros.
The cavaquinho is primarily an urban instrument, used to accompany choros and samba. The bandolim is also used in the choro tradition, often as a melody instrument. The rabeca, however, is fundamentally a rural instrument, played primarily during popular Christian festivities.
Musical activities in rural areas are associated with religious events, and many popular rituals still take place with little or no ecclesiastical intervention. Many saints who have become the objects of popular devotion in Brazilthe Virgin Mary, Saint John the Baptist, Saint Sebastian, and many othersare depicted with all-too-human traits, and quite frequently they are fun-loving musicians and dancers. Devotion to these saints typically involves making merry, eating heavily, performing music, and dancing.
The Saint Goncžalo dance
Saint Goncžalo of Amarante (flourished about 1250), patron of violeiros, is invariably depicted with a viola. It is said that every Saturday night he would take his instrument to the brothels of Amarante, Portugal, rounding up prostitutes, with whom he played and danced, tiring them so much that on Sunday they would not sin.
For this reason, the saint is honored through the Saint Goncžalo dance, a double line dance similar to the caterete^, involving rhythmic clapping and stamping. It is usually performed on a Saturday night in someone's yard to fulfill a promise made to the saint in return for a miracle, often a miraculous cure involving a person's legs. People with promises often dance holding the saint's image (
The tunes (toadas) used by folias de reis often involve an accumulation of voices (usually six), leading to a loud and prolonged major chord. The voices make successive entrances, each entrance tonally higher than the previous one; with each entrance, the texture becomes denser. Thus, the structure of the music reflects the ritual role of these ensembles: it is a sonic representation of the accumulation of donations, which, once collected, allows the community to stage its festival (Reily 1994b: 13).
In central and southern Brazil, ensembles of dramatic music and dance known as caboclinhos, caiapoŽs, congadas, mocžambiques, and others are collectively called ternos. They often perform in the streets during patronal festivals. They are usually dedicated to the Virgin Mary in her capacity as Our Lady of the Rosary and to Saint Benedict the Moor (d. 1589), but they may come out for festivals in honor of other saints.
Their typical choreography consists of a symbolic battlebetween Christians and Moors, or Africans and slavers, or Indians and Portugueseenacted through dialogues (embaixadas) and various uses of batons (
At large festivals, several ternossome local, and others from neighboring municipalitiesroam the streets. Each ensemble has unique uniforms and a unique combination of colors, and all the ensembles compete with one another, beating their instruments as loudly as possible.
In some areas, people distinguish between the music and the choreography of each type of terno. In the ParaiŽba Valley, congadas do not use batons and knee-tied bells, because these are associated with the poorer mocžambiques. In other areas, mocžambiques do not perform embaixadas, though both ensembles battle with batons.
Ternos are voluntary associations, but membership tends to be almost exclusively male; women may participate as bearers of banners (porta-bandeiras), leading the procession of musicians and dancers. The ensembles perform in two parallel lines, in which the leaders stay behind the instruments, in front of the dancers (soldados 'soldiers'). The dancers are organized in pairs according to their ages, with elders in front.
The musical performances of these ensembles begin with a slow toada sung in
The parallel thirds and the harmonic accompaniment of the toada in
At the turn of the twentieth century, musical activities in the urban centers of central and southern Brazil were clearly defined along class lines: the elites congregated in enclosed spaces (parlors, concert halls, ballrooms) to participate in events involving European and national art music and dancing in couples; the middle classes were associated with choro~es, which performed in the street, though in respectable places; and the lower classes, who were restricted to the hills overlooking Rio and poor peripheral neighborhoods, were recreating musical forms that had developed in batuque circles during the slave era. By the 1930s, however, samba had become a national phenomenon, cutting across these class-drawn barriers.
Samba
Samba is the best known of Brazil's musical expressive forms. Almost an international synonym for Brazilian music, it has become something of an umbrella term to designate a range of popular styles, including samba carnavalesca (carnival samba), sambaenredo (theme samba), samba baiana (Bahian samba), samba-lencžo (handkerchief samba), samba rural (rural samba), samba de morro (hill samba), samba da cidade (city samba), samba de terreiro (yard samba), samba de breque (break samba), samba departido-alto (specialist samba), samba corrido (verse samba), samba-cancža~o (song samba), samba-choro (choro samba), and many others. All these genres have elements that at some level can be traced to African origins, particularly to Bantu traditions organized in eight- and sixteen-pulse timelines.
These timelines generate some rhythmic patterns (batucadas) played by several instruments in the percussion ensembles (baterias) of the urban carnival associations known as samba schools (escolas de samba) (
Brazilian musicologists argue about how and where the samba originated. Most concur that the word developed out of the Quimbundo (a Bantu language) term semba, which denotes the belly bump, one of the distinctive choreographic features of the batuque. According to SiŽlvio Romero (1954), the term was associated with a specific Bahian dance in the second half of the 1800s; Bahian ex-slaves then brought it to Rio de Janeiro, where it fused with such urban styles as the polka, the habanera, the modinha, and the lundu. Kazadi wa Mukuna (1979), however, argues that it may have developed on the coffee plantations of the ParaiŽba Valley before reaching the capital. Many rural forms of the samba are still danced throughout the coffee-producing
Whatever the antecedents, samba first became associated with carnival (carnaval) in Rio de Janeiro. At carnival around 1900, mobile associations (ranchos, also blocos), made up of blacks, mulattoes, and unskilled white laborers danced down the streets to the rhythm of percussive instruments, singing responsorially to the
The new 2/4 rhythm proved particularly suitable for keeping unity in the movements of the mobile associations while allowing each dancer to move freely. By appearing to be more organized, these ensembles were less likely to attract official repression. Soon the samba became extremely popular among the lower-class inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro (cariocas), displacing practically all other musical genres. Samba and carnival would remain linked from then on, each lending its prestige to the other.
One afternoon in 1928, a group of samba musicians (sambistas) belonging to an association known as Deixa Falar (Let Them Speak) was rehearsing in a field in front of a teacher-training college. Inspired by this situation, they decided to call their own association a samba school (escola de samba). Thereafter, other carnival associations adopted the term, and samba schools began turning up in Rio neighborhoods.
During the 1930s, samba schools began presenting themes (enredos) in their parades, and these presentations soon led to the development of the samba-enredo, samba with a narrative text. Various uniformed dancers (alas) became clearly demarcated, each representing part of the story of the samba-enredo. Floats carrying destaques (people in special outfits placed on the floats) were added, also relating to the theme.
It did not take long for local politicians to perceive the political utility of the samba schools, for these were among the few associations capable of organizing the urban popular masses. In 1930, GetuŽlio Vargas came to power, and by 1937 he had instituted a nationalist regime, the new state (estado novo), modeled on Mussolini's Italy. The Vargas government was quick to coopt Rio's samba schools, incorporating them into its nationalist project.
In 1934, carnival in Rio was made official, and only legally registered schools could receive public funds to help cover the costs of their exhibitions. By 1937, these groups had to develop themes that would stimulate nationalist feelings among the participants by glorifying patriotic symbols and national heroes. National glorification remained a dominant thematic trait of samba-school performances long after the Vargas era, which ended in 1954. In the mid-1960s, literary figures and Brazilian folklore became dominant themes.
With the onset of the 1980s, as the country faced redemocratization, many samba schools began to use the parades as a venue for addressing national issues, such as direct presidential elections, inflation, poverty, ecological devastation, discrimination against minorities, and other social and economic problems that afflict Brazil's people. One of the best examples of this change was "O Luxo e o Lixo" ('Luxury and Trash'), the 1989 theme developed by the producer (carnavalesco) Joa~ozinho 30 (whose surname is a number) for his samba school, Beija-Flor; it starkly depicted the inequalities of Brazilian society.
Hill samba and city samba
The distinction between hill samba and city samba emerged in the 1930s, when members of the ascending middle classes within urban contexts took to the new rhythm. Styles classed as sambas from the hills were those used by the lower classes that lived in shantytowns (favelas) overlooking the respectable neighborhoods. These included the various forms of carnival samba (samba carnavalesco, samba baiana, and samba-enredo), samba de terreiro (sambas played by samba school musicians outside the carnival period), samba de partido-alto (sambas in which prominent musicians improvised long verses between refrains), and samba corrido (a style of samba without refrains). City sambas catered to middle-class tastes; they emphasized melody and text, and their composers had better access to recording studios. Their dominant form was song samba (samba-cancža~o), but break samba and choro samba were also included in this category.
The first recording of a samba, made in 1917, was of the composition "Pelo Telefone" ('By Telephone'). Only in the 1930s, when the radio was more widely diffused, did samba become a quasi-national phenomenon. With the popularization of the genre, the demand for it was no longer restricted to carnival, and composers of sambas responded by creating a new modality: samba-cancža~o, samba for any time of the year. Performers and composers such as Ary Barroso, Noel Rosa, Araci Cortes, Carmen Miranda, AtauŽlfo Alves, and many others could be heard year-round, all over the country.
As were the samba schools, the most popular musicians were quickly coopted by the Vargas government, which contracted with them to perform on National Radio, a state agency. During this period, Ary Barroso composed the internationally famous
In the 1980s, a new form of samba, samba de gafieira, became popular in large urban centers. Gafieiras are large dance halls patronized by the urban working class, and samba de gafieira is the style of samba used in these establishments. In the early 1990s, the samba was fused with reggae to produce samba-reggae.
Bossa nova
After more than two decades of samba-cancža~o, Brazilian audiences in the late 1950s welcomed the change brought by bossa nova. During the Vargas era, the country had undergone dramatic changes; as industry spearheaded the country's economic growth, rural bases of power had lost ground. Juscelino Kubitschek was elected president in 1955, espousing a platform encapsulated in the slogan Fifty Years in Five. He promised to lead the country in a developmental drive that in a single term of office would reduce its fifty-year lag in relation to the developed world. National pride was at a high, and the urban population was resolutely behind him.
In this era of national euphoria, the urban middle classes centered their preoccupations on making the most of the modern conveniences industrialization had brought them. By now, the lower and upper social classes of Rio had become spatially isolated from one another, and for the first time in Brazilian history, a new generation had grown up with only a superficial experience of interclass contact.
Youths who grew up within this context lived a carefree existence of sun, beaches, and romance, secure in their belief that Brazil was finally taking its place on the international scene. They were searching for a musical style that suited their self-image: it had to be simultaneously Brazilian and nonexotic; it had to be able to speak of traditional guitars and Rolliflex cameras.
Furthermore, nightlife for Rio's upper classes had moved out of the large big-band halls to the intimate dark setting of nightclubs, and such establishments were proliferating in the city's affluent neighborhoods. The nightclub context called for a mellow musical style, which could promote the romantic intimacy young dreamy-eyed couples were seeking.
Bossa nova answered all these requirements. While drawing on various traditions, the mellow sound of the guitar and the soft percussion highlighted their complex principles of rhythmic organization, rather than their visceral qualities; the timid and quiet vocal style of bossa nova negated the stereotype of Brazilians as an over-emotive, exuberant race, to portray them as contemplative, intimate, and sophisticated.
The first recording of a bossa nova was made in 1958. The song was "Chega de Saudade" ('No More Longing'), which united the heavyweights of the movement, epitomizing their individual contributions. Anto^nio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) wrote the music, which had a modal feeling set against altered and compact chords; the lyrics, by ViniŽcius de Mora~es (1913-1980), had a colloquial ethos, crafted to make full use of the timbre of each word, in a manner reminiscent of the symbolist poets of the late 1800s. Joa~o Gilberto's (b. 1931) nasal, speechlike vocal style, was ideally suited to bossa-nova aesthetics.
Gilberto's guitar technique attracted special attention: he slotted the chords between the syncopations of the melody, avoiding coincidences, a style that became known as the stuttering guitar. Gilberto derived the upper snaps of his beat from the rhythms of the tamborim, while the thumb reproduced the thump of the surdo. He produced chords with up to five tones by using the little finger of his right hand to pluck the highest string (Cabral n. d. :12).
Classics of the bossa nova repertoire, such as "Desafinado" ('Off Key', Anto^nio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendoncža), "Samba de Uma Nota SoŽ" ('The One-Note Samba', Jobim and Mendoncža), "Garota de Ipanema" ('The Girl from Ipanema', Jobim and ViniŽcius de Mora~es), "Insensatez" ('How Insensitive', Jobim and de Mora~es), "Corcovado" ('Quiet Night of Quiet Stars', Jobim), "Wave" (Jobim), and many others, became known internationally (Reily 1996).
Popular music after bossa nova
After bossa nova, Brazilian popular music (muŽsica popular brasileira, MPB) took many directions [see POPULAR MUSIC OF BRAZIL]. The 1960s saw the rise of a protest movement in which musicians such as Carlos Lyra, Geraldo VandreŽ, Chico Buarque, and others somewhat naively proposed to use their music for raising the consciousness of the underprivileged masses.
Various local styles were reformulated within the bossa-nova framework, and musical texts moved away from love, sun, and beaches to depict the harshness of life, especially for poor people. Though too distant from the reality of the lower classes to have any effect on them, these songs did help incite intellectualized sectors of the upper classes, who began to organize in opposition to the military dictatorship. But the 1960s was the decade of the young guard (jovem guarda), a romantic and alienated movement, which helped set the foundations for Brazilian rock (roque brasileiro). Trying to place Brazilian popular music back onto its "evolutionary track" (an expression used by Caetano Veloso in an interview with Augusto de Campos [1986a:63] in 1966), the tropicaŽlia movement of the late 1960s depicted Brazilian society as an amalgam of diverse and contradictory elements. In text and music, tropicaŽlia exposed the contradictions of this diversity. But the movement was cut short with a new law, Institutional Act No. 5 (1968), which led to the imprisonment of Veloso and Gilberto Gil and their subsequent exile in London.
The 1970s saw a series of revivalist and locally oriented movements. With the recognition that the national repertoire was made up of more than samba, Brazilian popular music in the 1980s became particularly heterogeneous; it was the decade of the independents. Alongside Brazilian rock, the mineiros, led by Milton Nascimento, were reinventing their local styles; the nativist (nativista) festivals of Rio Grande do Sul were reviving the cowboy-derived traditions; and various reformalized northeastern tendencies found niches in the southern commercial recording market.
In the early 1990s, traditional southeastern genres were being stylized, reviving for urban audiences the viola caipira and its repertoire. "Pantanal," a prime-time television soap opera (novela) set in an ecological reserve on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, provided a strong impulse in this direction by featuring SeŽrgio Reis, a leading figure of muŽsica sertaneja. Prime-time soaps are major setters of style in Brazil, influencing many domains of urban life-styles, including musical taste.
During the 1930s, Brazil began developing its industrial focus, and with that development the country moved from an essentially rural society to an urban one. From the 1950s, more and more migrants from the rural areas flooded into the large urban complexes, particularly those of the southeast, bringing with them their rural values and musical heritages. In the late 1990s, 75 percent of Brazil's population lived in cities or towns. Greater Sa~o Paulo and greater Rio de Janeiro together are home to nearly 20 percent of all Brazilians.
Unskilled on arrival, most migrants have been forced into marginal markets. They eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in the shantytowns surrounding the major
In such contexts, participation in musical activities based on traditional rural genres has played an important role in providing the migrants with a means of processing their experience and of constructing mutual support groups in new contexts. Urban folias, ternos, and other devotional ensembles attract fellow townsmen (conterra^neos), providing the structure around which they can reconstitute their towns of origin in the big city. Northeasterners unite around their repentistas (performers of northeastern musical duels), and they congregate in establishments where they can dance the forroŽ (a northeastern dance in couples). But it is in muŽsica sertaneja that the best example of a migrant musical creation appears. It is the most popular genre among the migrant populations of greater Sa~o Paulo, and the industry catering to this audience is booming.
Country in the city
Traditional southeastern genres of dupla, particularly the moda-de-viola, became muŽsica sertaneja when they started to be recorded commercially in the late 1920s. The musicians for these recordings were recruited from itinerant professional performers active in the circuses that have roamed the countryside throughout the year since 1900. Though the performances took place under circus tents, the attractions they offered were mostly melodramatic plays and comedies. Duplas were performed before the play, between acts, and after the play. Since the 1980s, many circus owners have dispensed with the play altogether, offering only performances of dupla in their tents. The term muŽsica sertaneja became current only in the late 1950s, replacing the more pejorative term muŽsica caipira. (Caipira might best be glossed 'hillbilly', though it officially refers to the inhabitants of the interior of the state of Sa~o Paulo.) The change in nomenclature coincides with the formation of the migration chains moving from the interior of the country toward the southeastern industrial centers.
No doubt "modern" muŽsica sertaneja is far removed from its rural origins, as it has taken the direction of technological sophistication and full-scale production. MuŽsica sertaneja proper, however, is typified by duos such as Tia~o Carreiro and Pardinho, and Pena Branca and Xavantinho, who have been able to derusticize traditional genres by using "correct" Portuguese and a more sophisticated vocabulary, while their sung narrations refer to themes related to the experience of migration.
Yet they have maintained some fundamental musical elements of the caipira aesthetic, such as continuous parallel thirds and the viola and viola~o accompaniment. Their performances pay attention to tuning, instrumental technique, and vocal simultaneity. The vocal timbre has lost some of its nasality without acquiring excessive vibrato. The music sounds like that of the duplas caipiras, but it has been cleaned up, so to speak. Furthermore, these duos are the ones most likely to be found performing in the circuses of the periphery, allowing the audience more personalized contact with them.
Through these elements, urban migrants have created a means of using music as a symbolic representation of those traits they feel they have acquired through migration and access to urban life. Just as the music has become more organized and "cleaner," so have those who participate in the performances; and inasmuch as the language in the verses has become more grammatical and sophisticated, it expresses
Migrant musical creations stand as symbols of the possibility of reconciling urban economic mobility with a rural ethos of noncompetitive sociability. Through music, migrants have constructed a symbolic universe, in which they have reconciled contradictory experiences of urban and rural life, creating a positive image of themselves. In the long term, this process may give them dignity and confidence enough to confront the society that marginalizes them.
Brazilian art music has received the attention of numerous scholars. General histories of it include Renato Almeida (1942), David Appleby (1983), Gerard BeŽhague (1979), Bruno Kiefer (1976), Vasco Mariz (1983a), and others. Other historical musicologists have focused on specific periods or important figures in Brazilian art music; these include JoseŽ Maria Neves (1981), Vasco Mariz (1983b), and Bruno Kiefer (1986). Studies of the social history of Brazilian art music are contained in LeŽa Vinocur Freitag (1986), JoseŽ Miguel Wisnik (1978, 1983), Enio Squeff (1983), and others.
Documentation of the rural musical traditions of central and southeastern Brazil abounds, but much of this research is purely descriptive. Since the early 1980s, anthropologically oriented studies have emerged, though scholars have tended to emphasize Amazonian and northeastern musical traditions. Studies of interest for central and southern Brazil include Carlos Rodrigues Branda~o (1981, 1985), Suzel Ana Reily (1994a), Kilza Setti (1985) for central and southeastern Brazil, and Daniel Mendoza de Arce (1981) and Richard Pinnell (1984) for the south of the country.
Special interest has been shown toward urban popular musics. Researchers in this sphere include Edgar de Alencar (1965), Augusto de Campos (1986b), Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha (1991), Charles A. Perrone (1989), Claus Schreiner (1993), JoseŽ Ramos Tinhora~o (1981, 1986), Ary Vasconcelos (1977), Hermano Vianna (1995), and many others. More recently, scholars have been turning their attention to the musical traditions of rural migrants in the urban context. Northeastern musical traditions in Sa~o Paulo have been studied by Maria Ignez Novais Ayala (1988); southeastern genres have been studied by Waldenyr Caldas (1979), JoseŽ de Souza Martins (1975), and Suzel Ana Reily (1992). Overviews of
Musical Traditions of the Interior
Musical Traditions of the Coast
Northeast Brazil comprises all or parts of nine statesAlagoas, Bahia, CearaŽ, Maranha~o, ParaiŽba, Pernambuco, PiauiŽ, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipewith an area covering roughly 20 percent of Brazil. This region can be divided into the following three ecological-geographic zones: the zona da mata, a heavily populated, humid, coastal strip, running from Bahia through Rio Grande do Norte; the agreste, the zone mediating a wet coastal strip and a dry interior; and the serta~o, a sparsely populated, drought-prone hinterland.
In size and population, the northeast is larger than most Latin American countries. It contains a mix of three principal ethnic groups: African, European, and Amerindian. Portuguese-descended people are found throughout the region; the zona da mata has the largest concentration of Brazilians of African descent, and the most pronounced degree of African cultural manifestations. Also in the zona da mata the mix of Portuguese and African populations is most evident. In the hinterlands, in the agreste and the serta~o, live pockets of Amerindian groups, but the bulk of the population consists of caboclos, bronze-colored mestizos of Portuguese and Amerindian bloodlines, with a smaller degree of African heritage.
Common history, economic hardships, and the blending of cultural traditions have helped northeasterners develop a strong regional identity. Colonized by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, the region was intended to provide commodities (first brazilwood and then cocoa, coffee, cotton, and sugarcane) for European markets. The most prosperous center of early activity was in Pernambuco, but the original administrative center of Brazil was Salvador, in Bahia.
Slavery was institutionalized as first Amerindians and then Africans were exploited as workers. By the 1600s, a prosperous sugarcane colony in the zona da mata featured a feudalistic social and economic system. In the 1700s, the expanding livestock industry and the introduction of cotton pushed populations farther inland into the agreste and serta~o. The decline of the economic and political importance of the northeast was foreshadowed by the move of the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, accelerated in the 1800s with the discovery of precious stones and metals in south-central Brazil; it was completed by the growth of the cattle and coffee industries in the south. During the 1900s, the industrialization of the south widened
Since the 1940s, swelling migrant caboclo populations in the cities, improved transportation, and a common diet of cultural stimuli via mass media have blurred distinctions between countryside and city. The northeast has an entrenched socioeconomic class system, with an extremely small, wealthy elite of landowners and businessmen, a small middle class, and a huge, disenfranchised underclass. Contrary to the myth of a Brazilian racial democracy, race does correlate with class: the underclass comprises primarily people of color, and the upper class continues to be almost exclusively white.
But racial and ethnic categories in the northeast (as in Brazil as a whole) are complex and cannot be defined by ancestry alone. Rather, they are constructed on a combination of physical attributes, socioeconomic standing, and cultural markers. Any division of musical traditions based solely on the racial descent of the producers or the consumers is riddled with problems and inconsistencies. Participation and identification with specific musical styles often correlates more with gender, class, region, and age than with race and ethnicity. Though specific instruments, genres, and stylistic features can sometimes be traced to a specific geographical origin (in Africa, Europe, or the Americas), most northeastern Brazilian musical traditions are the legacy of interaction among groups.
For the present discussion, the musical traditions of the northeast are divided into two categories: the music of the interior and the music of the coast. Traditions associated strongly with African heritage or African-Brazilian identity are discussed in AFRO-BRAZILIAN TRADITIONS.
The music that dominates rural areas, towns, and small cities of the serta~o and the agreste (and migrant caboclo neighborhoods in coastal cities) is the result of ethnic diversity and the historical processes of colonialization and nation building. Closely identified with mestizo populations, caboclo music is viewed paternalistically as "folklore" by state-sponsored cultural institutions and the private culture industry. Caboclo musical traditions include cantoria, a repertoire of secular songs performed by singer-bards; religious songs, mainly those associated with Roman Catholicism; the music of instrumental ensembles, accompanying a variety of occasions; and social dance-music known generically as forroŽ.
Brazilian scholars have noted that Amerindian inflections and intonations of speech, patterns of phrasing, and styles of dancing have influenced caboclo music, but they find it hard to pinpoint the precise Amerindian musical practices that persist. Certain instruments, such as cane flutes and gourd rattles, have strong Indian associations for caboclos; dramatic dances and carnival revelries frequently caricature native
Iberian and African influences in caboclo music are more easily distinguished. The catechistic practices of Roman Catholic missionaries during Brazil's colonial period included medieval European modes, Gregorian chant, and Iberian musical elements. The ubiquity of modal structures led the noted Brazilian composer and musical scholar Guerra-Peixe to identify six northeastern modes with a variety of heptatonic scales (1985:95). Particularly distinctive are scales employing a flatted seventh (
Intonation varies greatly from region to region and from musician to musician. In wind, string, and vocal performances, pitches frequently do not conform to the tempered system of tuning. Particularly noteworthy is intonational variance at the third, fourth, and seventh scale degrees. For instance, caboclo fifes (piŽfanos) are tuned to neutral thirds and sevenths (in relation to the tonic), which produce tonal frame-works that fall ambiguously between major and minor scales. Similar intonational characteristics exist in vocal styles. These practices distinguish traditional caboclo music from national and international popular styles (which conform to fixed tempered tuning) disseminated via broadcasts, recorded media, and live performances.
Harmonically, caboclo music emphasizes tonic and dominant relationships. Harmony is articulated chordally or by melodic outlining of chords, commonly by viola~o (guitar), viola (a medium-size guitar, with five double courses), or accordion. Singing and playing melodies in parallel diatonic thirds (typical of Iberian folk polyphony) and using harmonic or rhythmic drones are widespread practices.
Rhythmically, caboclo music demonstrates Iberian and African influences. Recitative-like singing, reminiscent of Gregorian chant, occurs in secular and religious repertoires of songs, and strict adherence to rules of text construction derived from Iberian poetic forms frequently results in irregular phrase lengths. In some genres such as the aboios (cattle-herding songs), certain tones are held for long and irregular durations, creating unpulsed and unmetered rhythms. In various dramatic dances, syncopated duple meter may alternate with unmetered recitative-like sections. Religious praise songs often feature tempo rubato effects at the beginnings and endings of phrases.
African-based rhythmic principles are particularly evident in caboclo dance music. Duple meter with syncopated accents, the interlocking of two or more cross rhythms, rhythmic-melodic ostinati (repeated patterns) of two to eight pulses in length, and subtle ambiguities between duple and triple subdivisions of the pulse suggest the influence of African rhythmic aesthetics. Most caboclo dance music features the interlocking of multiple rhythmic ostinati performed by ensembles of two to four percussion instruments. The repeats are typically subjected to continual variation and improvisation. Caboclo musicians value the ability to play "in the cracks" between duple- and triple-derived subdivisions of the beat.
The subjects of the songs come from history, current affairs, myths and legends, political criticism, and especially the situation of the poor of the northeast: homelessness, poverty, misery, and the need for agrarian reform. The function of cantoria as political criticism is particularly evident during election season, when singers align with political candidates and perform at their public rallies, praising them and criticizing their opponents.
Songs of sociopolitical criticism have even been recorded by popular music luminaries. One example is Elba Ramalho's recording (1984) of "Nordeste Independente" ('Independent Northeast'), composed by BrauŽlio Tavares and Ivanildo Vila Nova. The jacket of this recording bears a warning: "Public broadcast of the song 'Nordeste Independente' is prohibited by the federal board of censorship." Local radio programs devoted to cantoria can be found throughout the northeast. Public and private sponsored competitions and concerts or festivals have become increasingly common since 1970 (Ayala 1988).
Cantoria singers are evaluated primarily for verbal, rather than musical, skills. Cantoria typically involves improvised song duels (desafios), performed by two singers accompanying themselves on a viola or percussion instruments such as a tambourine (pandeiro) or a metal cylindrical shaker (ganzaŽ).
Numerous prosodic forms are employed in viola-accompanied cantoria (cantoria de viola). The desafio involves two singers, who alternately improvise verses utilizing a series of fixed forms. Desafios begin with sextilhas (six-line heptasyllabic stanzas) featuring a rhyme scheme of abcbdbin the past, four-line stanzas rhyming abcb were also common. Each singer (traditionally male) must begin his stanza with an obligatory rhyme (deixa) matching the last line of the preceding stanza. The following two sextilhas (from A Arte da Cantoria 1984), are linked by a deixa rhyming in -ito.
Neste momento sublime, | In this sublime moment, |
Eu noto o tempo bonito | I note the beautiful time |
Canta OtaciŽlio Batista | OtaciŽlia Batista is singing |
De Sa~o JoseŽ do Egito, | From the town of Sa~o JoseŽ do Egito, |
Transporta versos da terra | Carrying the verses of the land |
Para a casa do infinito. | To the house of the infinite. |
Eu jaŽ sou doutro distrito. | I am from another district. |
Declaro na minha loa | I declare in my praise song |
Eu sou filho de Panelas, | I am a son of the town of Panelas, |
Pernambuco, terra bo~a; | Pernambuco, good land; |
Que por impulso da arte | But because of the impetus of my art, |
Moro hoje em Joa~o Pessoa. | I now live in Joa~o Pessoa. |
Sextilhas are usually sung in a quasi-duple meter, while some other poetic forms used in cantoria de viola, especially those based on the deŽcima, tend to be unmetered.
During a desafio, sextilhas are followed by a variety of poetic forms, including gemedeira, a sextilha with the insertion of the call ay-ay-ui-ui between the fifth and sixth lines; moura~ o-de-sete-peŽs, a dialogic seven-line stanza that one singer initiates and ends while the other singer provides lines three and four; moura~o-de-voce^-cai, a dialogic twelve-line stanza with a fixed ninth line including the words voce^ cat 'you will fall'; oito-peŽs a quadra~o, eight-line stanzas with an aaabbccb rhyme scheme ending with the word quadra~o; and martelo, primarily in ten-line stanzas featuring the rhyme scheme abbaaccddc.
Throughout a desafio, the viola supplies a harmonic-rhythmic drone (open fifths and octaves are typical), and fills in between stanzas with a syncopated ostinato known as a roja~o or baia~o de viola (
In addition to the desafio, cantoria de viola includes another poetic form inherited from the Iberian peninsula, the ballad (romance). Usually sung in quatrains with heptasyllabic lines, ballads cover the exploits of local folk heroes, historical events, the trials and tribulations of daily life, and other subjects. A large repertoire of ballads concerns Lampia~o, a twentieth-century bandit from the serta~o. Another important form of cantoria is the ABC, so named because the beginning letter of the first word of each line must follow the sequence of the alphabet.
The several forms of cantoria, accompanied by tambourine or ganzaŽ (or both together), are typically performed in outdoor public spaces such as street corners, parks, and fairs. For instance, emboladores (song duelers specializing in tongue twisters known as emboladas) accompanying themselves on pandeiros perform six days a week at a public square in the center of Recife. These performances include put-downs, appeals for money, and comical reference to the onlookers who encircle the singers. Most audiences belong to the working class (clerks, taxi drivers, maids, street vendors, night watchmen, and so forth) or are tourists. Nasalized, the style of singing is staccato and rapid fire, with many repeated notes within a small melodic range. The pandeiro parts that accompany these duels are based on additive patterns similar to the rhythm of the roja~o (
The co^co de embolada, a special type of embolada, is associated with the African- Brazilian circular dance known as the co^co but is also performed without the dance. It alternates between improvised stanzas and a fixed refrain, is usually satirical and comical in nature, and makes extensive use of double meanings and onomatopoeia.
A purely unaccompanied form of cantoria is the aboio, which originated among cowboys (vaqueiros) of the northeast. It is freely improvised in unmetered rhythm with long-held notes, legato singing, and frequent glides between pitches. Mostly sung with nonlexical syllables, it utilizes stock endings, such as the phrase ei boi.
The rodeo song (toada de vaqueajada), a genre closely related to the aboio, is sung by professional and semiprofessional cowboy singers in competitions at rodeos. These strophic songs (typically set in heptasyllabic sextilhas with a rhyme scheme of abcbdb) are sung in parallel diatonic thirds by two singers. Aboio-style singing in a high falsetto, glides between tones, and imitations of cattle sounds and cowbells are typical of it.
Religious songs
The Roman Catholicism practiced by caboclos includes numerous acts of public and private devotion to saints and popular religious figures, such as making pilgrimages to holy sites, participating in religious processions, and hosting ritualized prayer sessions. In all these activities, devotional singing is ubiquitous. Women take active and dominant roles in religious life in general and in singing in particular. Loosely structured groups of female specialists (turmas de mulheres 'groups of women') that often lead praying and singing at domestic religious rituals have extensive repertoires of hymns, praise songs (benditos), funerary songs (excele^ncias), and prayers (rezas). The whole month of May, women's groups organize nightly prayer sessions involving a sung rendition of the rosary with hymns and praise songs honoring the Virgin Mary. Female specialists also take leading roles in religious pilgrimages (romarias) to sacred locations such as Juazeiro do Norte in CearaŽ, where hundreds of thousands of devotees of Padre CiŽcero, a priest from CearaŽ (
Songs praising God, the Virgin Mary, Padre CiŽcero, saints, and other important religious figures follow the modal traits of caboclo music (flatted sevenths, augmented fourths) but also make use of the major mode. Songs are strophic, and the text is usually set syllabically. The style of singing is smooth and legato in a flexible and fluid
One of the most popular praise songs, "OŽ que caminho ta~o longe" ('Oh, What a Long Road'), is dedicated to Padre CiŽcero. Here are three stanzas from it.
OŽ que caminho ta~o longe, | Oh, what a long road, |
Cheio de pedra e areia! | Full of rock and sand! |
Valei-me meu padrino Cicžo, | I took refuge in my beloved Padre CiŽcero, |
E a ma~e de Deus das Candeias. | And in the mother of God of Candeias. |
No ceŽu soŽ canta os anjos; | Only the angels sing in the sky; |
No mar soŽ canta as sereias. | Only the mermaids sing in the sea. |
Valei-me meu padrinho Cicžo, | I took refuge in my beloved Padre CiŽcero, |
E a ma~e de Deus das Candeias. | And in the mother of God of Candeias. |
Oferecžo este bendito | I offer this blessing |
A luz que mais alumeia, | To the light that shines brightest, |
Intencža~o do meu padrinho, | Intended for my beloved father, |
E a ma~e de Deus das Candeias. | And for the mother of God of Candeias. |
Caboclo wakes (Guerra-Peixe 1968) include a sung rendition of the rosary, prayers, and the singing of funerary and praise songs. Specific items are required at specific times: during the hour of clothing the deceased, in the morning, and at the time the casket is taken out of the house. The number of funerary songs conforms to the age of the deceased (for an adult twelve, for a baby seven). Songs with religious themes accompany various plays and dramatic dances, such as the reisado, depicting the story of the Nativity and the journey of the Wise Men, and the pastoril, recounting the shepherds' visit to the stable in Bethlehem.
The spread of Protestant religions in the northeast among caboclos has introduced Protestant hymn singing among born-again believers. Protestant proselytizing, which frequently occurs in parks and on street corners, involves the amplified singing of hymns accompanied by a small ensemble of electric guitar, electric bass guitar, drums, and other instruments.
Instrumental ensembles
Instrumental ensembles accompany secular and religious occasions in the northeast. The Dancža de Sa~o Goncžalo (a dance performed by devotees of Saint Goncžalo, the patron saint of guitarists) is accompanied by string-and-percussion ensembles. In Sergipe, the ensemble includes viola, viola~o, cavaquinho (small guitar with four metal strings), folk violin (rabeca), small hand-held drum (adufe), tambourine (pandeiro), snare drum (tarol), and bamboo scraper (re^co-re^co) (Dantas 1976). The choreography (in seven segments) involves two lines of dancers, led in front of an altar.
An important instrumental ensemble found throughout the northeast is the fife-and-drum band. Several such bands, performing for a wide range of social festivities and caboclo religious rituals, are known under a variety of names, including banda cabacžal (CearaŽ), esquenta mulher (Alagoas and Sergipe), and terno de zabumba
The most important performance context of the fife-and-drum band is the novena, an all-night domestic prayer session honoring a saint or an important religious figure. In it, the ensemble accompanies the religious activities (such as the procession, reciting the rosary, singing devotions, and offering obligatory music) and animates a secular party that follows. Though largely identified with rural folkways, most fife-and-drum bands maintain a close relationship with life in towns and cities. Bands from rural areas frequently come to town on market days to play for tips and to participate in celebrations of patron saints' days and other festivities. Since the 1950s, many bands have relocated to urban areas in search of economic opportunities. There they continue to perform for traditional occasions such as the novena but have penetrated local and regional cultural industries and have developed a style they call folklore, which they identify with microphones, stages, showcase performances, colorful costumes, and tourism. A few groups have produced commercial records and tapes.
Fife-and-drum bands have two musical repertoires: devotional music appropriate for the veneration of saints, and secular music for dancing and partying. Conceived as an act of devotion, the performance of devotional songs is linked to the religious style of singing cultivated by the female specialists. This style features tempo rubato, fluid and legato connection of pitches, and a minimal ornamentation of the basic melody. As in most of the devotional repertoire, fifes play the melody legato, with glides and slurs between notes.
Fife-and-drum bands play marches and waltzes during processions at novenas and patronal celebrations. Most pieces have a simple binary form with symmetrical phrases, featuring parallel diatonic thirds, triadic outlining, and alternation of implied tonic and dominant harmonies (
Fife-and-drum bands share much of their repertoire of dances with accordion-based ensembles, which specialize in the highly syncopated caboclo dance-music known as forroŽ.
Music for social dancing and revelry (used to animate the secular portions of novenas, parties, stage presentations, and radio programs, and at commercial dance halls) features adaptations of European and Latin American social dances (bolero, mazurka, polka, quadrille, schottische, tango) and local genres (abaianada, arrasta-peŽ, baiano, baia~o, forroŽ). In contrast to the legato style of the devotional repertoire, secular music features a distinctly articulated staccato style of playing and interlocking rhythmic patterns. The abaianada, a possible forerunner of the baia~o and forroŽ (discussed below), is based on two interlocking parts performed on the heads of the zabumba. The drummer hits the top head with a soft mallet and the bottom head with an open hand (
The accordion was brought to southern Brazil by Italian immigrants in the mid-1800s (Almeida 1942:113) and was taken to the northeast in the 1860s by veterans returning from the war with Paraguay. During the same period, European social dances (mazurka, polka, quadrille, schottische, waltz) and Latin American dances (bolero, ranchera, tango) were spreading across the country. In the northeast, the accordion became a preferred instrument among caboclos to accompany their own versions of these dances, plus the baia~o and the arrasta-peŽ.
Accordion-based groups are particularly active during the month of June, when a series of winter festivals celebrate three Roman Catholic saints: Saint Anthony, Saint John, and Saint Joseph (
The main social dances of a forroŽ include the arrasta-peŽ (a fast, foot-dragging dance), the baia~o (a syncopated dance), the forroŽ (a syncopated modern hybrid of the baia~o), and the xote (a slow northeastern version of the schottische). Most of the music stresses a driving syncopated rhythm, exciting improvisation, and double-entendre (sometimes pornographic) lyrics. Though this music is seasonally associated with the June celebrations, it has been popularized throughout Brazil via broadcast media and commercial forroŽ clubs that operate year-round. The history of the popularization of this music goes back to the 1940s or before.
Northeastern accordion music was first popularized nationally in the 1940s by Luiz Gonzaga, "King of the Baia~o," regarded as the creator of the genre. In an interview ("O eterno Rei do Baia~o" 1972), Gonzaga claims he took the rhythmic pattern (baia~o de viola) used by guitarists and mixed it with zabumba patterns common to fife-and-drum bands. The musical basis of the baia~o is thus a syncopated rhythmic pattern performed on the zabumba featuring two interlocking parts played on the top skin of the drum with a soft mallet and on the bottom skin with a thin stick (
Though the term baia~o already existed in popular usage in the northeast before Gonzaga popularized itit even appeared on a recording in 1928 (Tinhora~o 1986:221)Gonzaga, with his partner Humberto Texeira, developed the baia~o into a genre of commercial popular music. Many credit Gonzaga with establishing the trio format: accordion, zabumba, triangle. His first big hit, in 1946, entitled "Baia~o," was coauthored with Texeira. During the 1940s and 1950s, Gonzaga released a string of hits based on the baia~o and other northeastern genres, such as aboio, chamego (dealing with themes of love), toada (melancholy romantic lyric song), xaxado (rhythmically resembling the baia~o but telling the history of northeastern banditry), and xote.
Between 1946 and 1956, northeastern music was a national fad, and the baia~o even made an international splash. By the mid-1950s, working-class forroŽ dance halls featuring accordion trios emerged in Rio de Janeiro and Sa~o Paulo, catering to homesick migrant laborers from the northeast. Around the late 1950s or early 1960s, zabumba drummers began deleting the stroke that fell on beat two of the baia~o. This change produced a new, more syncopated baia~o (
Further experimentations with the baia~o yielded another variant, which came to be called forroŽ. The rhythmic basis of the forroŽ is a syncopated interlocking pattern performed with variously muffled and open strokes on the zabumba, featuring continual variations and improvisations (
During the 1960s, the national popularity of northeastern music waned. ForroŽ groups began releasing records on so-called migrant labels, which catered primarily to working-class northeasterners in the south. Back in the northeast,forroŽ groups continued to perform, especially during the June festivals. In Campina Grande in ParaiŽba, Caruaru in Pernambuco, and other cities, June celebrations became huge
During the 1970s and 1980s, experimentation with electric instruments (keyboards and electric guitar), drum set, and wind instruments evolved into a genre dubbed forrock (forroŽ + rock), infusing new commercial life into the music. Since the 1980s, northeastern musiciansGeraldo Azevedo, Alceu Valencža, Fagner, Nando Cordel, Elba Ramalho, and othershave incorporated forroŽ into mainstream Brazilian popular music. There is also a movement of roots-oriented musicians (Alcymar Monteiro and Jorge de Altinho, for instance) who, though incorporating wind and electronic instruments in their groups, stick close to an arrasta-peŽ-forroŽ-toada-xote repertoire. All these musicians have now expanded forroŽ beyond its seasonal association with June festivals to a year-round commercially successful music.
Music of the northeastern coast is largely a mix of African and European traditions. The establishment of sugarcane plantations and the introduction of African slaves during colonial times left indelible marks on musical life. European erudite traditions were sustained by the Portuguese upper class (often by training slaves to play European music), while vernacular African and Iberian traditions were maintained and mixed by slaves and peasants.
Historical documentation shows that European-style erudite musical activities existed in the two major urban centers of Pernambuco (Recife) and Bahia (Salvador) from the 1500s (BeŽhague 1979). During the colonial period, art music was primarily related to activities sponsored by or relating to the Roman Catholic Church, as local chapel masters and organists composed and organized music for daily services and special rituals. Formalized music instruction was given to blacks and mulattoes as early as 1600, and some excelled as instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Private
In addition to these activities, marching bands and concert bands have a long history in the cities and towns of the area and still serve for a variety of community functions including religious processions, ceremonies of state, and public concerts. In the 1800s, communal bands helped disseminate European social dances of the day. The abolition of slavery (1888) and the subsequent urbanization and proletarianization of former slaves had an important impact on the vernacular musical traditions of the area, and on the formation of urban popular musics that developed in the 1900s. The two most important coastal traditions are dramatic dances and carnival music.
Dramatic dances
The northeastern coast is the center of the danced folk plays that MaŽrio de Andrade (1982) termed dramatic dances. These dances were mostly introduced by Jesuit priests during colonial times to instruct the non-Christian Indian and African populations in religious matters. They present stories of conversion or death and resurrection, divided into two parts: a procession and a sequence of choreographed scenes. Both parts are danced, involve stock characters and a cycle of songs, and are usually accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Though based loosely on religious themes, most dramatic dances include an abundance of secular action. Dramatic dances can be divided into three broad categories: the baile pastoril, a Christmas cycle; chegancžas, recounting Portuguese maritime exploits and battles between Christians and infidels; and reisados, cyclic dances associated with Christmas and Epiphany.
Baile pastoril
In numerous forms, the baile pastoril occurs during the Christmas season, when it presents the story of the birth of Jesus. It is particularly popular in Alagoas, Pernambuco, ParaiŽba, and Rio Grande do Norte, where teenage girls dressed as shepherdesses form two lines (blue and red) and perform a series of danced segments (jornadas) that include songs and spoken dialogue accompanied by pandeiros and maracas (Alvarenga 1982:83). Small ensembles of string, wind, and brass instruments may accompany the singing. A secularized version, pastoril de ponta-de-rua, has been compared to a burlesque variety show. It includes sambas and cancžonetas accompanied by accordion, triangle, and bombo (Mello 1990).
Chegancža
The maritime exploits of the Portuguese are presented in chegancžas, dances such as the chegancža de marujo (of Alagoas), the barca (of ParaiŽba), the nau catarineta (of ParaiŽba), and the fandango (of Pernambuco, ParaiŽba, Rio Grande do Norte, and Maranha~o). Epic stories of seafaring are told through a series of songs sung by men dressed as sailors, accompanying themselves on tambourines.
Other dances involving battle scenes between two opposing groups (commonly Christians against infidels, or blacks against Indians) also occur. The quilombo (from Alagoas), for instance, enacting a symbolic battle between blacks and Indians, is accompanied by a band of fifes that plays dance music specific to each group (Branda~o 1978).
Reisado
The reisado, a cycle of dances associated with Christmastide, features a variety of human and animal figures presented in short scenes. The last dance in the cycle,
Bumba-meu-boi
The bumba-meu-boi developed in the 1700s in Brazil among African slaves as a mechanism to criticize and ridicule the ruling class (Kazadi wa Mukuna 1994). Its principal figures include a bull (boi), a Portuguese master, a slave (Francisco) and his wife (Catarina), several cowboys, a priest, a Portuguese doctor, and an Indian shaman (
Various instrumental ensembles accompany regional variants of the bumba-meu boi. A cavaquinho, an oncža (a large friction drum), a tambourine, a folk violin, a bamboo scraper, a viola~o, a zabumba, and a variety of brasses and woodwinds may all be employed.
Carnival music
The northeast coast is renowned for the variety of its participatory traditions of carnival (carnaval). Though carnival is officially confined to the five days before Ash Wednesday, carnival season in the major cities involves six to eight weeks of intense activity. All cities and most towns sponsor carnival celebrations. The two major carnivals in the northeast occur in Pernambuco (Recife / Olinda) and Bahia (Salvador) and feature a variety of musical traditions unique to those cities.
Carnival season is a busy period for amateur and professional musicians, hired to play for a variety of activities. In addition to municipally sanctioned public parades, presentations, and competitions, masked balls in the private social clubs of the middle
Frevo
The early composers of frevo were mainly bandleaders and instrumentalists who did not know how to write music down. In contrast to the semi-erudite salon music cultivated by the more educated composers of the day, the frevo de rua was a loud street-band music, heavy on brasses, winds, and percussion. Typical instrumentation included four clarinets, five saxophones (combinations of alto, tenor, and baritone), four trumpets, four trombones, two tubas, a snare drum (tarol), a tambourine (pandeiro), and two tenor drums (surdos). The music of a frevo de rua is typically in a fast duple meter (
A frevo de rua is typically organized into two repeated sections of sixteen measures each, separated by a short bridge or interlude. Highly syncopated melodies and countermelodies played by the brasses and woodwinds are accented and punctuated by the percussion. Individual compositions are strung together with drum cadences and rolloffs, allowing for nonstop music and dancing while the band is marching down the street with hundreds of dancers and revelers in tow. The instrumental frevo de rua continues to be an important part of frevo clubs (clubes de frevo) in Recife and Olinda, which hire bands to accompany their parades.
Because encounters between carnival clubs around 1900 often became violent and most of the revelers were from the lower strata of Recife society, the frevo de rua acquired an unfavorable reputation among the middle and upper classes. Around 1915, new carnival associations (called blocos) catering to middle-class tastes emerged in Recife. Among these groups developed the frevo de bloco, which featured songs sung by a female chorus accompanied by supposedly soft instrumentsthe flute, the clarinet, the bandoliŽn (similar to a mandolin), the banjo, the cavaquinho, the violin, the viola~o, and a few percussion instruments. The frevo de bloco is distinguished from the frevo de rua by lighter instrumentation, the inclusion of a female chorus, slower tempo, frequent use of the minor mode, and lyrical sentimentality of the text.
To animate middle-class carnival balls held indoors in private clubs, the frevo song (frevo-cancža~o) was first cultivated by popular composers in the 1930s in Recife. It is a solo song (with choral refrains) featuring an instrumental introduction (inspired by the frevo de rua), followed by a song. Two of the major composers of this genre are Capiba (Lourencžo Barbosa) and Nelson Ferreira, who led popular jazz orchestras in Recife. In addition to writing for the three types of frevo, these composers experimented with a stylized version of the maracatuŽ (an Afro-Brazilian carnival genre from Recife) and composed in other popular Brazilian and international genres.
The three main types of frevo are the primary moving forces behind the carnival in Recife and Olinda. Annual competitions for new frevos are sponsored by the city of Recife, and the top winners are recorded on commemorative albums. Popular frevo singers such as Claudionor Germano (specializing in frevo-cancža~o), backed up by professional bands, release seasonal records each year in conjunction with carnival. Other popular musicians from Recife (Alceu Valencža, for instance) include frevos in their repertoires.
Other major carnival traditions from Recife not specifically Afro-Brazilian in nature include the caboclinhos 'little caboclos' and the maracatuŽ rural 'rural maracatuŽ' (Real 1990). Caboclinhos typically comprise thirty to forty black and mestizo revelers from the rural regions of the zona da mata and neighborhoods surrounding Recife. They dress up as Brazilian Indians (with feathers, bows, and arrows) and perform a sequence of dances such as the aldeia, the emboscada, and the toreŽ, accompanied by a gaita (end-blown flute with four holes for fingering), a snare drum, and a pair of metal maracas (chocalhos). The music is in a fast-paced duple meter, with highly ornamented melodic ostinati played on a gaita.
The maracatuŽ rural is a caboclo- and African-inspired tradition that emerged in the outlying areas of Recife in the 1930s (Real 1990:72). Its most striking figures are the caboclos de lancža, performers who imitate Indian warriors by carrying large lances and engaging in mock battles. Costuming is extremely creative and eclectic, combining brightly colored cellophane wigs, streamers, sneakers, and cowbells. Music for the maracatuŽ rural combines semi-improvised narrative songs (related to cantoria) sung by the mestre de toadas (leader of the songs) and answered by a chorus. Accompaniment is provided by a small instrumental orchestra of snare drum, ganzaŽ, large cowbell, and one or two brass instruments, commonly trumpet and trombone.
Salvador da Bahia has an elaborate carnival, with unique electrified music inspired by the frevo from Pernambuco (GoŽes 1982). This form is the trio eleŽtrico. In the early 1950s, two Bahian musicians, Dodo^ and Osmar, began performing frevos on a trio of treble, tenor, and bass electric guitars, (respectively the guitarra baiana, triolim, and pau-eleŽtrico), backed by a small percussion group of cymbals, snare drum, zabumba, and surdo from the back of a pickup truck, blasting their music into
Most of Bahia's stars of popular music perform atop sound trucks during carnival for the more than one million revelers who crowd the streets of Salvador. Some of the most dynamic and popular traditionsincluding afoxeŽs (street manifestations of African-Brazilian religious cults) and blocos-afros (African blocs, which combine samba with Jamaican reggae)are intimately associated with the renaissance of African-Bahian culture and contemporary black consciousness.
Religious Musical Traditions
Secular Musical Traditions
Urban Popular Musical Traditions
Both nationally and around the world, the Afro-Brazilian traditions most clearly identify the musics of Brazil. Afro-Brazilian traditions shape the unique character of the musics of Brazil as recognized at the national and international levels. These traditions must be viewed, however, in their specific historical and regional contexts in order for their true meanings to be understood. A multiplicity of black identities emerges from the ambiguity of ethnic self-identities and the complexities of Brazilian social stratification.
Although historically Afro-Brazilians have remained at the lowest of the social strata and discrimination continues at certain levels, Brazil has seen deep racial integration throughout the twentieth century. Official segregation never became a reality in the post-slavery period. All of this facilitated the true nationalization of certain originally Afro-Brazilian popular musical expressions.
The history of African cultural transfers to Brazil is imprecise and often confused. The aftermath of the abolition of slavery brought such an overwhelming sense of national shame on the part of some governmental officials that in 1891 the minister of finances, Rui Barbosa, ordered the destruction of a large amount of archival documents relating to slavery in the naišve hope that such negative aspects of national history would be forgotten. Our sources of knowledge of early Afro-Brazilian musical traditions, therefore, are primarily oral, written, and iconographic sources dating mainly from the 1800s and throughout the twentieth century (Almeida 1942).
Traditional Afro-Brazilian musical manifestations are centered essentially in three parts of the country: the northeastern and northern states of Alagoas, Bahia, Maranha~o, ParaŽ, ParaiŽba, Pernambuco, and Sergipe; the southeastern regions of EspiŽrito Santo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro; and parts of Sa~o Paulo. As far south as Rio Grande do Sul, however, religious worship of African gods, as in the Batuque of Porto Alegre, survives. Moreover, significant aspects of Afro-Brazilian traditions are an integral part of some of the most significant genres of Brazilian popular music of the twentieth century.
Despite various racist policies at the beginning of the twentieth century (including advocacy of the cultural whitening of the black population), Brazil at the end of the twentieth century retains the position of being the second-largest black country
After a period of sociopolitical vindication since the late 1970s, and especially after the centenary of the Brazilian abolition of slavery, the position of black musicians in the national market of the late 1990s remained ambivalent. In Bahia, these musicians have come of age in terms of their own involvement, freedom in, and control over their activities. In other areas, their future is uncertain. In general, however, at the end of the twentieth century, Afro-Brazilian musics command nationwide an unprecedented recognition and respect.
Brazilian racial democracy has remained a myth, yet the multicultural expressions of contemporary Afro-Brazilians are a reality. Indeed, Afro-Brazilian musical traditions cover a wide continuumfrom traditional, Afro-related music integrated in religious systems inherited from Africa but developed independently, to obviously Iberian songs and dances also prevailing in nonblack Brazilian communities. This spectrum of musical expressions is not contradictory because it reflects the actual cultural experience and heritage of contemporary Afro-Brazilians (Tinhora~o 1988). More than any other expressive means in numerous contexts, music in Brazil transcends social and ethnic boundaries. As some Afro-Brazilian musical traditions affect nonblack Brazilians, some Luso-Brazilian traditions are faithful expressions of Afro-Brazilians.
The stylistic continuity that can be observed in Afro-Brazilian religious music is most probably a case of cultural resistance during centuries of cultural confrontationscenturies that also involved cultural sharing. Afro-Brazilian religions present a complex configuration of dogmas and practices resulting from the local adaptation and transformation of systems of beliefs inherited from Africa and Europe, encapsulating the historical national experience.
The most nationally acknowledged popular religion, Umbanda, is found almost everywhere. Other religions, such as various types of CandombleŽ (CandombleŽ Ge^ge-Nago^, Congo-Angola, de Caboclo in Bahia and Sergipe, and Macumba in Rio de Janeiro), Xango^ (Pernambuco) (Carvalho 1993), Tambor de Mina (Maranha~o), Batuque (ParaŽ), Pajelancža (Amazonas), and others, are specific to certain regions. In varying degrees, they all recognize some aspects of the African Yoruba and Fon pantheon and the basic beliefs and practices of traditional African religions.
Animism, divination, initiation, ancestor worship, various kinds of offerings to the deities, ritual use of sacred plants, ritual music and dance, and specific social hierarchical organization prevail in all Afro-Brazilian religious communities. In Brazil, African religions underwent a great deal of transformation. On the one hand, Yoruba-Fon religions (of the orixaŽ / vodun complex) exerted considerable influence on Bantu (Congo-Angola) religions; on the other hand, Roman Catholicism, imposed on slaves in Brazil, became integrated in varying degrees with African beliefswhich explains the so-called syncretism of Afro-Brazilian religions.
In the most traditional CandombleŽ religions of Brazil (Ge^ge-Nago^ and Congo-Angola, in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), syncretism is not so evident as it is in CandombleŽ de Caboclo, Macumba, Umbanda, and other religions, though African deities (orixaŽs and voduns), usually have counterparts in Roman Catholic saints. Thus, the cult of orixaŽs and voduns eventually became fused with that of santos, if only as a result of a historical accommodation, in which during the period of slavery, saints served to camouflage African deities.
CandombleŽ
In CandombleŽ, the center-leader, known as babalorixaŽ or pai de santo (if a man) or ialorixaŽ or ma~e de santo (if a woman), assumes full responsibility in general liturgical matters and in the musical and choreographic training of the initiates and their subsequent position in the center. The ultimate authority in the knowledge of music and dance, he or she usually leads the performance of the proper sequence of songs. The religious leader also exercises power through the authority recognized and acknowledged by all. This power emanates primarily from ritual knowledge, including music and dance, in addition to the whole complex of esoteric knowledge of the precepts operating in the ceremonies. Among these, the most dramatic and richest is undoubtedly the cycle of initiation rites, representing the highest degree of participation in religious life. Initiates go through a severe education in ritual behavior, ritual language, music, and dance, all for serving their particular deity. In effect, this liturgical behavior results from a deep sociocultural conditioning, of which the performance of sacred songs and of specific dances represents an integral part. The relationship of music and spirit possession also results from this conditioning; that is, initiates are taught the meaning of certain songs within the mythology of their specific orixaŽ and the corresponding expected behavorial response. It is therefore the association of such sacred ritual songs and corresponding accompanimental rhythms with their respective god that triggers the trance behavior, not necessarily fast and loud drumming as is usually believed. Initiation, the ultimate degree of participation in religion, consists in "placing the orixaŽ in the candidate's head" (in local terminology, the obrigacža~o da cabecža) so as to predict that deity's behavior when he or she takes possession of devotees. In actuality, spirit possession indicates the presence of the supernatural among humans (see Okada 1995: example 4). The possessed initiate is identified as the orixaŽ himself or herself. Whether or not anyone should go through initiation is determined by the ifaŽ, a divination game interpreted by the diviner (babalao^), frequently the same pai or ma~e de santo.
The music of the Ge^ge-Nago^ groups retains a strongly Yoruba style, both in the pentatonic and hexatonic melodic structures and in the rhythmic organization of the accompaniment. Overlapping responsorial singing prevails, the solo vocal lines performed in general by the cult leader, the master drummer, or less frequently by any of the official civil protectors of the group, known as ogans. The monophonic choral responses are provided by the initiates and any members of the congregation, male and female, who may wish to participate. The lyrics and most ritual speech of Ge^ge-Nago^ groups are still in the Yoruba and Fon languages, though these languages are not spoken in Brazil as a rule, and few participants can give a word-for-word translation of the texts. This does not prevent them, however, from knowing the overall meaning and function of the songs. Portuguese dominates in CandombleŽ de Caboclo and Umbanda.
The extensive repertoires of song originate from the association of specific songs with each deity, with all private and public ceremonies, and within each ceremony with a rigorous sequence of ritual events. Each event or gesture has its corresponding songs. Thus, repertoires are classified according to their ritual functions: botanical songs, sacrificial songs, songs of offering, songs for calling the gods, songs for sending them away, and so on. The ritual power of musical sounds, combined with the liturgical significance of lyrics as components of myths, explains the length and complexity of CandombleŽ ritual songs.
The rhythmic structure of CandombleŽ music reveals a typically African sense of rhythm whereby regular motoric, unchangeable parts are contrasted with improvised parts. Ritual drumming occurs as an accompaniment to sung performances and in solos. Specific rhythmic patterns (
Umbanda
Since the 1950s, Brazilian religious music has gained a greater following as a result of the countrywide popularity of Umbanda, the religion that combines CandombleŽ beliefs, popular Roman Catholicism, spiritualism, and Kardecism (a Brazilian spiritualist movement, based on the writings of Allan Kardec). Umbanda music displays stylistic changes that illustrate how completely national values permeate strong regional and urban cultural settings. Indeed, Umbanda music caters to all segments of urban society, especially the lower middle class, by relying on a nationally omnipresent and familiar style, the folk-urban type of dance music most readily associated with the samba.
In contrast to traditional CandombleŽ religions, the repertoire of Umbanda music is in constant elaboration, albeit stylistically restricted. But this stylistic limitation appears the most effective in attracting worshippers from all social strata. In effect, Caboclo, Umbanda, and their expressive means (mostly music and dance) may be the most important factors contributing to the cultural, regional integration of Brazil in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
The ancestry of secular traditions is not always easily established whenever the elements of a given musical genre and of specific sociocultural contexts of performance cannot be unequivocally related to an African derivation. Regardless of origin, one
"Sacred" and "secular" are relative concepts, especially in Afro-Brazilian culture, in which songs and dances functioning outside a religious context frequently refer to sacred topics. As in Africa, religion sustains expressive culture in all its dimensions.
The game-dance known as capoeira is considered by some to have come from Angola, and by others to have been the creation of Brazilian blacks during slavery. Most probably, it is a local elaboration of some African model (Rego 1968). From a game fight believed to have been practiced by slaves during resting periods in the fields, it developed
Capoeira is accompanied by an ensemble (
Capoeira songssome 139 have been collectedconstitute a rich source of Afro-Bahian expressive culture relating to slavery, the local lingo, and poetics. Except for the "hymn of the capoeira" and litanies (ladainbas), the repertoire of capoeira songs borrows a great deal from other repertoires, such as children's game songs of the ciranda genre. Other songs, such as "Santa Maria, ma~e de Deus" ('St. Mary, mother of God'), invoke religious themes and figures.
Traditionally, capoeira has been taught and practiced in academies (academias) led by masters (mestres). Among historically known masters, none has enjoyed as much fame as Mestre Bimba, who developed a new form, capoeira regional, adding a number of dance figures resembling some of the strokes of other martial arts (Pinto 1991).
Since the 1960s, the influence of tourism has resulted in the impoverishment of the capoeira tradition, in the performance of golpes and toques and the knowledge of songs. In addition, the popularity of capoeira abroad, primarily in Western Europe and the United States, has brought about fundamental changes in traditional performances.
Dramatic dances
Originating in missionaries' activities during the early colonization of the country, dramatic dances (bailados) have survived in contemporary Afro-Brazilian communities. These dances include processions and actual dramatic representation, with numerous characters, spoken dialogues, songs, and dances, accompanied by small instrumental ensembles. The major themes of such dramatic dances relate to the Iberian medieval catechistic theater, including conversion, resurrection, and battle scenes between Christians and infidels (Moors). Among significant dramatic dances enacted by Afro-Brazilians are the bumba-meu-boi, congada, congo, marujada, and taieira, all known by many different local names.
The bumba-meu-boi, perhaps the most popular of all folk dramas, is known and practiced in various styles in several regions of the country, north and south. It has its origins in the triethnic heritage, but its Afro-Brazilian elements are especially evident in the northeastern and northern states. The main character is the bull (boi), representing for some an African totemic survival. The dramatic action enacts regional variants of a legend concerning characters of the colonial periodthe Portuguese master, the black slave (variously named Mateus or Francisco), his wife Catarina, the captain (cavalo marinho), and others. Fantastic figures and animals participate in the representation, but only human characters actually sing. According to MaŽrio de Andrade (1982), the dance includes fixed and variable elements, the former consisting of the main characters' entrances and dances, the latter also involving the secondary characters. Most of the songs exhibit characteristic elements of mestizo folk music, including the style of cattle-herding songs known as aboios.
Documentation of the dance in Maranha~o (Kazadi wa Mukuna 1994) reveals the presence of three distinct styles, the boi de zabumba (zabumba is a double-headed bass drum), the boi de matraca (matraca is a type of wooden rattle), and the boi de orquestra (mostly brass-band instruments). Of these, the first is considered to represent a truly Afro-Brazilian tradition, not only through its instrumentation (including, besides the zabumba, the friction drum [tambor oncža] and other percussion instruments), but also its musical and choreographic structures. The criticism of the dominating characters, hence of the ruling class, evidenced in the comic scenes of the bull's death and resurrection, is seen as an important clue that the drama originated in slaves' culture.
The marujada (from marujo 'sailor') of the coastal area of the state of Bahia is performed entirely by black associations on specific feast days. It combines and celebrates Portuguese maritime feats and the confrontation of Christians and Moors. Performers representing Christians, dressed in Brazilian white navy uniforms, reenact episodes of exploration, including the hardship of life at sea, the battle with the Moors (dressed in red capes) and their imprisonment, the wounding and symbolic death of the leader of the Moors, and his eventual resurrection as a Christian, welcomed into his new community in a final scene. The performance includes choral numbers in a processional type of march by the sailors and several solo and duet
Social dances
Dance music of a predominantly Afro-Brazilian tradition includes a variety of genres and instrumental ensembles. Quite frequently, collective singing forms an integral part of such genres, so singing combines with dancing. The performance of this music occurs on numerous social occasions, from spontaneous, informal performances in party gatherings to formal contexts associated with cyclical celebrations of life.
The substantial Afro-Brazilian contribution to and influence on Brazilian folk dances in general is reflected not only in the larger number of specific Afro-Brazilian dances, but also in the Brazilianizationthat is, Afro-Brazilianizationof European dances, an important aspect of Brazilian urban popular music. The most common traits of folkloric choreographic structure are circular formation, frequently with solo dancers, and the presence of umbigada (from Portuguese umbigo 'navel'), the symbolic bumping of the couples' navels, signifying an invitation to the dance or challengeand an indication that the dances originated in Africa.
Music and dance are inseparablewhich explains why the name of a dance is applied to the music it accompanies. Among the dances of predominantly Brazilian blacks are the batuque and the samba, the caxambu, the jongo, the co^co, the baiano (baiaŽo), and the former lundu and sarambeque, all with numerous regional names. Only a few can be considered here.
A round dance given an Angolese or Congolese origin, the batuque is no longer performed as such, and the term has acquired the generic sense of black dance accompanied by singing and heavy percussion. However, in Rio Grande do Sul and BeleŽm, ParaŽ, batuque now designates Afro-Brazilian cults associated with different religious groups, and in Sa~o Paulo state, it is a specific dance of local Afro-Brazilian cults. The accompanying instruments of the latter include drums (tambu, quinjengue) and rattles (matraca, guaiaŽ).
Many regional varieties of samba exist. As a folk dance, it was formerly important, but its importance has diminished in most regions of the country because of the pop-
MaŽrio de Andrade studied the samba campineiro of Sa~o Paulo (calling it Paulista rural samba) in 1937 and observed that samba was defined by its choreography rather than by its musical structure. The latter shows an arched melody in duple meter, syncopated rhythmic figuration, strophic and variable textual forms, and the relative importance of textual improvisation. The dance itself stresses collectivitywhich explains the absence of the umbigada. Besides the instrumentalists (who also dance), the main participants are women. The samba de roda has lost its former importance in Sa~o Paulo, but in the northeast (especially in Bahia), it is still the most popular social dance. As a round dance involving soloists, it is usually performed responsorially, with frequent overlapping between the vocal soloist and the choral response.
The Bahian samba de viola is a type of samba de roda from a choreographic standpoint, but violas (various sizes of guitars, with five double-stringed courses as a rule) are the central instruments of the ensemble, completed by a prato-e-faca 'plate and knife', a pandeiro, a triangle, an occasional atabaque, and hand clapping. The lyrics (chulas) set this samba apart from others, in their extreme eclecticism in form and subject. In the 1980s and 1990s, the tradition of samba de viola lost its former importance and was known and performed by only a handful of older musicians (Waddey 1981).
The coconut (co^co) is a dance of poorer people in northern and northeastern Brazil. Its name derives from the fact that the dance is commonly accompanied by clapping with hands cupped to create a low-pitched sound, like that of a coconut shell being broken. Sometimes a drum or a rattle may be used, in which case the dance is named after the instrument: co^co-de-ganzaŽ (shaker), co^co-de-mugongue^ (drum), and so on. In the northern states, different names refer to the type of song associated with the coconut, such as co^co-de-deŽcima, co^co-de-embolada, and co^co-desafio (Alvarenga 1982). The choreographic structure dictates the alternation of stanza and refrain in the song: a solo dancer in the middle of the circle improvises a stanza and is answered by the other dancers. A frequent feature of coconut-song melodies (also present in co^co-de-embolada) is the peculiar rhythm of short durations (usually sixteenth notes in 2/4 time) repeated continually, resulting in exciting ostinatos.
The Afro-Bahian maculele^, another martial dance, is believed to have originated in the city of Santo Amaro in the 1890s in celebration of the abolition of slavery. Strongly reminiscent of black African stick-fighting dances, the maculele^ is performed with sticks used as mock weapons and percussive instruments. Responsorial singing with drum accompaniment praises two figures as having been responsible for the abolition of slavery: Our Lady of Conception is the main religious one, and Princess Isabel de Bragancža (1846-1921) is the historical one. The songs are in Portuguese with numerous African words in the choral refrains. Some of the dance figures resemble those of capoeira, but in no way can it be said that maculele^ functions as a prepa-
Brazilian popular music owes much of its character and creativity to Afro-Brazilians (BeŽhague 1985). In the 1700s, the Afro-Brazilian dance known as lundu had already been assimilated by upper-class composers as an expression of the tropical colony, and it had influenced the modinha, a sentimental genre (opposed to the Portuguese moda) in its characteristic syncopated rhythmic accompaniment (ArauŽjo 1963; BeŽhague 1968). In the 1800s, the black flutist-composer Joaquim Anto^nio da Silva Callado, professor of flute at the Imperial Conservatory, Rio de Janeiro, began to nationalize European dances (including the polka, the schottische, and the waltz) by incorporating into his compositions in these genres melodic and rhythmic patterns associated with the popular scene of Rio de Janeiro. Reinforced by the introduction in Brazil in the mid-1800s of the habanera, with its typical dotted rhythm (dotted eighth, sixteenth, and two eighth notes), the Brazilian tango emerged. In effect, the systematic application of subtle variants of the habanera pattern, and the frequency of occurrence of a syncopation such as the sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth pattern in a duple meter, created the maxixe, at first the name only of a fast, syncopated style. The semipopular composer Ernesto Nazareth wrote for the piano many polkas and tangos that are true maxixes from a rhythmic point of view.
In Rio between 1875 and 1900, popular instrumental ensembles of strolling street musician-serenaders known as weepers (choro~es) appeared, performing dance music (maxixes and polkas) and arrangements of sentimental songs of the modinha type. This kind of ensemble, which came to be known as choro, typically included guitars (violo~es, sing. viola~o), a cavaquinho (small four-stringed guitar of Portuguese origin), a flute, a tambourine, and later a saxophone. While the ensemble's performance stressed improvisation and virtuosity, the musical genre choro, which developed after 1900, continued to use the same rhythmic foundation as maxixes and polkas. Many black popular musicians active during the period 1900-1930 became composers and performers of choros.
Urban sambas
The urban samba, which came to epitomize Brazilian popular music in general, has been strongly identified with Afro-Brazilian expressive urban culture. The first commercially recorded samba, "Pelo Telefone" (1917), was the work of the black composer Donga (Ernesto dos Santos). Sinho^, called the King of Samba in the 1920s (Alencar 1968), and Caninha, both black musicians, contributed greatly to the popularity of the genre; but it was Pixinguinha (Alfredo da Rocha Viana), another black composer, who had the greatest influence. With his bands Os Oito Batutas (1922), Orquestra TiŽpica Pixinguinha-Donga (1928), and Grupo da Velha Guarda (1932), he popularized the urban samba among different social classes in the 1920s and 1930s (Alves 1968; Efege^ 1978-1979).
In emphasizing a percussive ensemble and traditional responsorial singing, the so-called samba of the slums in the hills (samba de morro) maintained a closer identity with the folk samba. Out of this ensemble developed the batucada (percussion ensemble and percussive dance music) associated with the samba school (escola de samba), first organized as a carnival association in 1928. The music history of the samba school since then has been primarily associated with Afro-Brazilians as composers, arrangers, and performers (Alencar 1965). In addition to the samba de morro,
In the 1970s and 1980s, the samba from Rio (samba carioca) regained vitality with the works of Martinho da Vila and others, especially the emergence of the pagode, as part of the complex world of Rio's slums (favelas). Some pagode pieces in the performance of Bezerra da Silva, such as "O Preto e o Branco" ('The Black and the White'), picture vividly the issues of racial relations and the deterioration of city life in the slums (Carvalho 1994).
Bahian genres
Urban popular music found its most notorious early cultivators in Rio de Janeiro, but the state of Bahia came second. As early as the mid-1930s, the Afro-Bahian Dorival Caymmi, through his fisherman or beach songs (cancžo~es praieiras) and his sambas (even before the advent of bossa nova), created an innovative style based on authentic, empathetic references to Afro-Bahian folklore and music. For several decades, his popularity throughout the country remained strong, perhaps because he was able to convey even to listeners alien to Bahia the essence of his cultural experience as a black Bahian worshiper of CandombleŽ and a cultivator of the most modern popular genres and styles. In addition, his lyrics, deeply rooted in the African linguistic and emotional tradition of his native state, represent a chief asset of his creativity (RiseŽrio 1993).
The innovations brought about in the samba tradition by bossa nova musicians beginning in the 1950s were the work of sophisticated musicians, primarily middle-and upper-class whites (BeŽhague 1973; Castro 1990). Some black performers, however, participated in the new trend, indicating their integration in the modern era of Brazilian popular music. In addition to Johnny Alf, Jair Rodrigues, Wilson Simonal, and especially the great guitarist of the 1960s, Baden Powell, bossa nova's second generation of black musicians included the internationally successful composers Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento, who each used a variety of styles and subjects to express and transcend their ethnic identity (BeŽhague 1980; Perrone 1989).
The city of Salvador, Bahia, the traditional bastion of Afro-Brazilian artistic expressions, has become a significant locus of popular-music developments since the 1960s. Besides the avant-garde movement of tropicaŽlia, whose members were mostly Bahians, a new carnival music appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. The Afro-Bahian phenomena of afoxeŽ, carnaval ijexaŽ, and bloco afro had significant sociopolitical and economic repercussions at that time. The traditional music and culture of CandombleŽ played an important role as a creative source and force in the concept of black ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s. The emergence of an African consciousness among young people of African descent represents a social and human history of great significance, in which traditional music has had a fundamental function in the movement of ethnic and political vindication. Local black and mestizo young people have contributed to the re-Africanization of carnival (RiseŽrio 1981; repeated by Crook 1993). The process of a new black-consciousness movement, though it has much to do with the ideology of negritude, was never based on the cultural incorporation of contemporary African elements; rather, it originated in a new interpretation and rendition of the most traditional elements of Afro-Bahian culture. It would appear more accurate, therefore, to refer to a re-Afro-Brazilianization within a new concern of validation of the contemporary black culture and the necessity of expressing a new ethnicity.
The revitalization in the 1970s of the Afro-Bahian carnival associations called afoxeŽs gave the new black movement a starting point. AfoxeŽs whose members were
By extension, the new carnival of the 1970s and 1980s became known as carnaval ijexaŽ, primarily to establish a direct relationship with some of the most essential aspects of black culture. In a general sense, however, the word ijexaŽ implied at that time Afro-Bahian culture associated with CandombleŽ, in which the term designates a specific drum rhythm resembling that of a slow samba. Actually, several lyrics composed for afoxeŽs call ijexaŽ a rhythm, a style, and a dance.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, new carnival organizations called blocos afro began to appear. The first one, founded in 1974, bore the linguistically and politically significant name Ile^ Aiye^ (from Yoruba ile^ 'house, temple', and aiye^ 'real world' in Yoruba cosmovision and mythology as opposed to Yoruba orum 'supernatural world'). At first, Ile^ Aiye^ barred white people's participation, and its compositions constantly mentioned the aiye^ as the living, exciting, beautiful world of black people. The themes "black is beautiful" and "the living world is the black world" became part of the ideological manifesto of blocos afro. Reinforced by the appearance of the militant political group known as Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU), blocos afro took on the form of true activism in the 1980s. Their support of the MNU, however, was more a symbol of black identity and power than a direct political militancy. Their songs not only evoked the Afrocentricity of their origins, but also addressed the issues of racism and socioeconomic injustice. The creation of a new aesthetic involved the imitation and transformation of African and Afro-Caribbean models of music, dance, and dressing, known or imagined. The choice of instruments was limited to drumsseveral surdos (low pitched), repiques (high pitched), and snare drumsand other percussion, supporting a responsorial vocal structure (
With the new afoxeŽs and blocos afro, the direct relationship to CandombleŽ diminished considerably, since the young leaders were no longer CandombleŽ priests, the musicians not necessarily CandombleŽ drummers, and the songs no longer derived from liturgical repertoires. The members of the new groups, however, did not fail to recognize and adhere to some aspects of CandombleŽ traditions, as some members are
Among the Afro groups that emerged in the 1980s (including Araketu, Badaue^, Ebony, Male^ Debale^, and Muzenza) the most successful bloco afro undoubtedly has been Olodum, founded in 1979 by former members of Ile^ Aiye^. Musically innovative, Olodum had by the mid-1980s introduced different patterns into their fundamental samba beat. These patterns were reminiscent of Afro-Caribbean rhythms (merengue, salsa), but the influence of Jamaican reggae was so strong that the new patterns of drumming, having acquired the interlocking structure of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, became known as samba-reggae (BeŽhague 1992a). Cuban timbales joined the percussive group of Olodum. Ideologically, the reference to Jamaica created a sense of affinity and solidarity with the Bahian-black movement. Through reggae and Rastafarianism, Jamaican black culture had been recognized the world over, and Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff were idols of Afro-Bahian youths. Eventually Olodum created its own Banda Reggae, which toured extensively. The success of Olodum's sociopolitical programschools, shelters and jobs for street children, a variety of community serviceswas due to the vision and determination of various leaders of the group, and to the inevitable selling out to the music industry. Though its first commercial success was local, its international popularity, translated into multimillion-dollar activity in a few years, has tarnished the ideological grounding of its beginnings, since Olodum is now viewed as another style of worldbeat.
In Bahia, samba-reggae was so successful that in the late 1980s several popular commercial bands, especially Banda Mel and Reflexu's, jumped at the opportunity to flood the pop market with synthesized renditions of the style. Among Afro-Bahian composers who specialized in the new genre has been Edson Gomes, one of the best representatives of resistance reggae (reggae resiste^ncia). Bahian mass-mediated popular music ended up establishing a trend called axeŽ music (from Yoruba axeŽ, denoting the vital spiritual force of CandombleŽ and everything and everyone associated with it)an obvious misnomer, as this music has little or none of the Afro-Bahian religion's
Another development that capitalized on bloco afro's success was the early 1990s timbalada, so called because it involved an instrumentation in which the timbre of the timbal is the focus, provided with a plastic head and special tunings, in trying to approximate the percussive sound of bloco afro. Carlinhos Brown and others had a central role in popularizing timbalada, nationalizing a primarily regional style of popular music.
The Bahian pop star LuiŽs Caldas, a light mulatto sometimes called the Brazilian Michael Jackson, won wide popularity in the 1980s with his lambadas, reggaes, and another genre of carnival dance music, fricote. His hit "Fricote" combines elements of ijexaŽ and bloco afro rhythms, a lambada type of tune, and lyrics that have double meanings and overt sexual connotations. The lambada popularized in Bahia is actually an adaptation of the established popular dance from ParaŽ known as carimboŽ. The market for international recordings fostered another short-lived craze for the lambada, of easy musical access and suggestive, acrobatic, sensual dancing. In Brazil, lambada continued in the 1990s only as a tourist attraction in the Bahian coastal resort of Porto Seguro.
Many Brazilian black pop musicians have been busy in adapting North American pop-music trends, such as funk and rap. Rock in Brazil has been associated predominantly with the white middle class. Funk and rap, introduced in Brazil in the 1980s, are heavily supported in big cities by peopleespecially teenagersof the lower socioeconomic class, primarily blacks. Some musicians and singers of these styles "have associated themselves openly with the various black movements" (Carvalho 1994:30). In addition, funk musicians have frequently commented in their songs on the racial situation in Brazil and expressed black pride openly. In the late 1990s in Rio de Janeiro, articles in newspapers report that funk and rap are being used by the drug lords of the city.
Around 1990, in homage to the gangs, the "kings" of Rio rap, William Santos de Souza and Duda (Carlos Eduardo Cardoso Silva), who earned about $80,000 a month in 1995, recorded a famous rap, "Rap do Borel" ('Rap of Borel'), about a slum in the Tijuca neighborhood, where drug dealers operate. Raps exist for almost all the main favelas of Rio, and even as a challenge to drug enforcement, for the Division of the Repression against Drugs, as in the "Rap da DRE" ('Rap of the Divisa~o de Repressa~o a Entorpecentes'). Comando Vermelho (Red Command), the famous organized crime group, is known to have subsidized funk parties to recruit kids for dealing drugs. The more radical types of funk and rap, however, have served mostly for sociopolitical messages on local, regional, or national issues, as demonstrated by the rap groups Ca^mbio Negro (Black Exchange) and Chico Science. In opposition to hip-hop, Ca^mbio Negro adheres to consciousness rap (rap conscie^ncia). The noncompromising ideology of this group reflects militancy against racism and social injustice in deliberately shocking and foul language.
Charm, another form of urban popular music of the 1990s, attracts predominantly lower-to-middle-class blacks in Rio and Sa~o Paulo. A form of well-behaved, apolitical funk, it stresses bourgeois values.
Native Americans
Musical Instruments
Religious Musical Contexts and Genres
Secular Musical Contexts and Genres
Musical Change
Popular Music
Further Study
The Republic of Chile, a long and narrow Spanish-speaking country, hugs south-western South America between the Pacific Ocean and the crest of the Andes Mountains. It is about 4,200 kilometers long and between 87 and 400 kilometers wide. Its terrain is extremely varied, from the driest desert in the world (Atacama Desert, in the Norte Grande) to glacier-filled estuaries and rugged peaks (Tierra del Fuego, south of the Magellan Strait). Because its location and terrain physically isolate it from the rest of South America, it is a rich repository of musical folklore.
A culture known archaeologically as San Pedro (named for the region of Atacama) originated about 500 B.C.; it was influenced by the Tiawanaku civilization (near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia) from A.D. 300 to 1000 and was dominated by the Incas from 1471 to 1533. Its descendants, named Atacamen~o by the Spanish after 1536, have retained certain agricultural techniques and folkways from ancient times.
The Atacamen~o, with the Aymara, the Mapuche, and the Fueguino, constitute the prevailing indigenous cultures of Chile; Rapa Nui (Easter Island, culturally Polynesian) can be considered an outside colonial addition [see OCEANIA VOLUME: EAST POLYNESIA: Rapa Nui]. These four broadly defined native Chilean cultures have been isolated from the concept of nation and nationality that was created and sustained by the dominant Chilean culture; thus, they have developed different levels of acculturation, resulting from a variety of contacts with the Western-derived Chilean world. The Fueguino are extinct.
The Atacamen~o live in oases of the Atacama Desert, Antofagasta Province. They call themselves Lican-antai and speak Kunza (their native language, now revived in their rituals) and Spanish. They developed a kind of urbanism by building villages, fortifications (pukaraŽs), and irrigation systems, still used today. They practiced oasis agriculture, pasturing, and commerce among themselves and with the Inca and the Diaguita. Their social organization is based on small, autonomous kinship communities, and their indigenous religious system is linked to the earth, fertility, and water. They also practice Roman Catholicism (Munizaga 1974).
The Aymara live in TarapacaŽ Province, part of Bolivia before the War of the
The Mapuche are the main ethnic minority of Chile [see MAPUCHE]. About seven hundred thousand Mapuche live in the southern provinces of Arauco, BiŽo-BiŽo, CautiŽn, Llanquihue, Malleco, Osorno, and Valdivia, and in the cities of Santiago and ValparaiŽso. Their languages are Mapudungun and Spanish. They resisted the Inca and Spanish conquests but were defeated in 1884 by the Chilean army. A low degree of acculturation exists in their music and religious systems. Only the Pikunche (Mapuche of the north-central valley) and Williches (Mapuche of the south, Valdivia to ChiloeŽ) were absorbed into Chilean mestizo culture.
The so-called Fueguino cultural group included four distinct nomadic nations that inhabited Tierra del Fuego. The Ona (or Selk?nam) and Patagones (or Tehuelches) were hunters, and the Yahgan (or Yamana) and Alacaluf (or Halakwalup) were fishermen. Little is known about the musical activities of these groups because of their remoteness, the secrecy of their rituals, and their meager population during recent history. The acculturation of the Alacaluf began in the 1930s. Since then, they have sought to integrate themselves into the Chilean economy, and since the 1960s they have identified themselves with Chilean culture rather than their traditional culture. Westernization produced a dramatic demographic reduction among them (only forty-nine Alacaluf remained alive in 1971), resulting in the extinction of their culture.
Chilean musical instruments can be classed as indigenous, Spanish, mestizo, or criollo, though the variety of mixtures makes classification somewhat unreliable. Many indigenous types can be described according to their native characteristics, uses, and functions.
Indigenous instruments
In the north of Chile, Atacamen~o musical instruments descending from pre-Hispanic times include two trumpets (clariŽn, putu) and a rattle (chorimori). The Atacamen~o adopted the snare drum (caja chayera) and the guitar from the Spanish. The clariŽn is a 2-meter transverse trumpet made of a cane bound with colored wool; the putu is a cow-horn trumpet decorated with wool; and the chorimori is a rattle of metal bells without clappers. The clariŽn and the putu are played together, respectively representing male and female principles during the native ritual of talaŽtur 'praise to the water'. The caja chayera, a double-headed frame drum, is used in carnival with the guitar (AŽlvarez and Grebe 1974).
Aymara musical instruments include the kena (quena, lichiwayo) and the siku (Spanish zampon~a) [see QUECHUA-AYMARA; BOLIVIA]. The Chilean Aymara also
The kena, widely used in the Andean area from Ecuador to Chile, is a notched end-blown flute with five to eight fingerholes. Ancient kena made of cane, clay, and bone have been found in the Chilean Aymara region, and modern kena are made of cane, plastic, or copper, especially near the Chuquicamata copper mine, Antofagasta Province (
The siku is a double-unit or paired, two-halved panpipe (a set of six to eight closed cane tubes per half), requiring two people to play one instrument. One half is called ira and the other arca, representing male and female principles and having respectively leading and following functions during performances. Each half of the instrument is a set of closed tubes, attached to a frame of open tubes. The siku was probably used in shamanistic practices during pre-Columbian times. Sets of siku are divided by register in the following categories: sanha (tenor), contra (alto), and liku (soprano).
The tarka, a wooden duct flute with a square-shaped outer surface, is played in ensembles known as tarkeadas. The pinquillo, a cane duct flute, is played alone or accompanied by a bandola, during carnival and while pasturing. The bandola is a guitar of four quadruple courses, derived from the Hispanic bandurria.
Among the Chilean Mapuche [see ARGENTINA; MAPUCHE]), the shaman (machi) plays three instruments: a kultruŽn (small kettledrum with internal rattle), a wada (gourd rattle), and a kaskawilla (bell rattle). The rest of the Mapuche community plays kullkull (cow-horn trumpet), nolkiŽn (hollow-stem trumpet, played by inhaling), trutruka (2- to 6-meter-long cane trumpet, played by exhaling), pifušlka (one- or two-tubed panpipe), piloilo (two- to five-tubed panpipe, made of stone, clay, cane, or wood), pinkullwe (cane transverse flute), and makawa (double-membrane drum).
The kultruŽn, a symbolic microcosm of the Mapuche universe, is a leading Mapuche instrument. It signals the beginning and ending of musical performances, provides rhythmic patterns and tempos, and may induce the machi's trance during rituals. It is made of sacred wood, filled with elements of animal, mineral, and plant origin, and painted with representations of the cosmos. It is played as a solo instrument, in a kultruŽn ensemble (with a wada or a kaskawilla), or with the other Mapuche sacred instruments (see Okada 1995: examples 11 and 12).
The trutruka is played as a solo or ensemble instrument by adult men during rituals, especially the nguillatuŽn. Because of its length, its performance requires physical strength. It is constructed from a 2- to 6-meter-long hollowed-out section of coliguše cane, covered with a horse intestine; a cattle horn is usually attached at the distal end as a resonator (
Mapuche secular instrumental musi?c is often played on the Jew's harp (trompe) adopted from the Spanish or other European settlers (especially Germans, who came to the Mapuche region during the mid-1800s). The Mapuche also adopted the accordion from the Germans.
Mestizo and Creole musical culture
Spanish Roman Catholic and Arab-AndaluciŽan traditions are the foundations of the traditional Chilean musical-poetic practice that can be called Chilean Creole music (muŽsica criolla chilena) or mestizo music. This expressive art includes musical instruments, religious and secular music and dance, musical-poetic practices and forms, and performance styles that developed in central Chile, where the Spanish predominated.
Mestizo musical instruments in Chile (those of indigenous origin but played in Roman Catholic rituals) include the flautones or flutes of chino dancers, the oldest type of dance group in patronal festivals of central Chile (see Okada 1995: example 13). A flautoŽn 'big flute' is a single-tubed panpipe, with extended sides in the shape of an elongated V added to a single cane tube (Olsen 1980). Sets of flautones play two-note melodies in hocket. The origin of the chino flutes is undoubtedly native American, and they may in fact derive from the Mapuche pifušlka.
Chilean Spanish and criollo music is performed upon or accompanied by European or syncretic instruments. The European instruments include a three-stringed fiddle (rabel), a six-stringed guitar (guitarra; see photo, p. 240), a five-stringed guitar (vihuela), an accordion (acordioŽn), a diatonic harp (arpa), the piano, the tambourine, and drums. Chilean Creole instruments are the guitarroŽn 'big guitar', a five-course guitar with twenty-five strings, the charrango (board zither) (
Patronal festivals in ChiloeŽ include musical performances by an ensemble consisting of a guitar, an accordion, a double-skinned drum (bombo), a violin, and formerly a flute and a rabel. The last instrument is a Renaissance European transplant.
Indigenous
Two indigenous rituals (cauzuŽlor and talaŽtur) and one mestizo ritual [carnaval 'carnival') provide the foundations for Atacamen~o musical practice. These rituals, devoted to fertility of the earth and abundance of water, are landmarks of the agrarian cycle. The people also perform rituals during patronal and livestock-marking festivals, as do the Aymara. Songs are sung in Kunza in native rituals; Kunza and Spanish are used in carnival. The Atacamen~o musical system is tritonic, based on notes that approximate the Western major triad; this acoustic foundation has ensured its survival and eased its mixture with Western tonality and instruments. Atacamen~o singing is syllabic and
In mid-August in Caspana, cauzuŽlor celebrates the end of the communal cleaning of the waterways, built in pre-Hispanic times. This ritual shows the importance of water in oasis agriculture. To the Atacamen~os, water embodies music, and they learn the ritual melodies by listening to the flow of the water. They express gratitude and pray for abundance, fertility, peace, and communal prosperity. While singing and dancing, they open the gate to the cleaned waterway and pour wine and throw corn into the water. Between August and October in Peine and Socaire, talaŽtur praises the water, invoked to irrigate the earth. The songs for talaŽtur are associated with singing to the water, according to the magical principle that the similar attracts the similar. The singing is collective, accompanied by a clariŽn, a putu, and a chorimori.
Carnival among the Atacamen~o is a harvest-celebrating rite, observed around Ash Wednesday in the regions of Atacama and Loa; it marks the end of the agrarian calendar, which culminates in the harvest of corn and wheat. The festivities performed in the Chilean Andean area coincide with Ash Wednesday, in preparation for the abstinence from eating meat during Lent. Under ecclesiastical benevolence, this coincidence allowed the pre-Columbian harvest rite to survive. In Chile, the Andean carnival is a rural phenomenon, practiced by the Aymara and Atacamen~o communities of the highlands and precordillera. Its syncretism is shown in Indian and Spanish musical features. The carnival couplet (copla de carnaval) is its main musical genre. Sung in Kunza or Spanish, these coplas are quatrains of eight-syllable lines rhyming abcb, linked by common themes. They include improvisational dialogues, usually competitions between men and women. The melodies are tritonic, with the accompaniment of caja chayera and guitar (Claro 1979; Grebe 1980).
Aymara religious music is performed during seasonal rituals of carnival, sowing potatoes (pachallampe), and marking livestock (enfloramiento), and patronal and Marian festivals. The main genre of the Aymara carnival festival is the tone and round (tono y rueda), consisting of strophic melodies in major scales. Tones and rounds are played by pinkillo and bandola in the mountains and by guitar in the precordillera; they are danced in rounds by unmarried women in the highlands and by mixed people in the foothills. Two ensembles perform during carnival: a tarqueada plays taquirari songs, and an orquesta (ensemble with strings and winds) plays cueca, cumbia, huayno, taquirari, and vals.
To ask for agricultural fertility, the potato-sowing ritual is celebrated in October on the communal grounds of the church; during the celebration, tones and rounds are played. The rite for marking livestock (llama, alpaca, sheep, cattle) is celebrated within the corrals and animal-holding areas during February. Owners of livestock sing intimate songs to the animals to protect them and make them fertile. Accompanied by bandola, the songs are categorized according to the type and sex of the animal, and the function each animal performs.
The juxtaposition of Hispanic and native religious beliefs has developed since the 1500s in the Andean area, producing a blend of musical and choreographic features, which have their largest expression in the celebration of the religious festivals of the Roman Catholic calendar. A major patronal festival of the Chilean Aymara is celebrated in Isluga, a ritual town in the highlands, where the four ayllu (kinship divisions of the Aymara territory) are represented. There they celebrate two female patrons, St. Barbara (4 December) and the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (8 December), and two male patrons, St. Thomas, patron of Isluga (21 December), and Corpus Christi (Feast of the Blessed Sacrament). The festivals last
Several ensembles perform during Aymara patronal festivals: lichiwayo, sikuri, and brass bands. Lichiwayo lead the procession, playing heptatonic melodies in parallel fourths, in strophic and binary forms (AABB). The sikuri are ensembles of ten panpipe players, consisting of one zanja, two contras, and seven liku. Players of contra and liku also play a double membrane drum. Wearing hats with long rhea feathers (chucos), the musicians play tonos de sikuri, pentatonic tunes for procession. Laquita (lakita), ensembles of small panpipes, played by teenagers and other young people (trained by missionaries), play religious and dance music, especially cueca, cumbia, huayno, taquirari, and vals. Brass bands, derived from military bands, play the same repertoire as laquita.
The Mapuche divide their music into sacred (older, fixed, powerful) and secular (newer, freer, amusing). Mapuche sacred instrumental and vocal music is related to a fertility ritual (nguillatuŽn), shamanic initiations (machilwušn and neikurreweŽn), funeral rites (elušwuŽn), and medical rituals (pewutuŽn 'diagnostic', datuŽn 'large therapy', ušlutuŽn and lawentuchen 'small therapies'). The shaman (machi), with her kultruŽn, is the leading performer in most Mapuche religious rituals. Mapuche music uses two basic scales: pentatonic and tritonic. Melodies are descending and include frequent portamentos and glissandos. Binary divisions prevail in metric and phrasal structures.
Christian Festivals of the Virgin Mary
The government of King Philip III of Spain (1578-1621) mandated devotion to the Virgin Mary in Hispanic America. The king ordered each town to have a manifestation of her as its patron. During the celebration of her day, guilds and fraternities danced and sang in front of her image. Today these troupesas dance groups (bailes), confraternities (confraternidades), and brotherhoods (hermandades) are formed by pilgrims who attend the festivals.
Each baile has an administrative director (alfeŽrez 'conductor'), who may personally finance the event, and an artistic director (caporal 'ringleader'), who instructs the pilgrims during the year and conducts the performances. The bailes dress emblematically and are categorized by choreography into step dances (bailes de paso) and jump dances (bailes de salto); the former are older.
In the Aymara region of Chile are found the following troupes: chinos (
The structure of the festivity for the Virgin Mary derives from the relationship between the dancers and the image of the Virgin. Its arrival, entrance, and departure from the church, and the people's greeting, praise, and farewell to it at different times of the day are the high points of the ceremony. Most of the lyrics are sung or recited
The festival of the Virgen de Las Pen~as, celebrated 83 kilometers east of Arica on the first Sunday of October, is the oldest patronal festival of the Chilean Aymara. The earliest legend explaining the origin of this Virgin is carved in stone, dating from 1642. Bailes from Chile (chunchos, morenos 'browns', gitanos 'gypsies', and cuyacas), Peru (lakitas and sikuri), and Bolivia have attended this festival. They include bands consisting of two trumpets, two clarinets, a trombone, a snare drum, and a bass drum; or small flutes and snare drums; or two kena and a bass drum (for a similar musical event at the patronal festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Aiquina,
The festival of the Virgin of Carmen, celebrated in La Tirana, 84 kilometers east of Iquique during the week of 16 July, is the biggest expression of religious syncretism in Chile (
The Virgin of the Candelaria
The festival of the Virgin of the Candelaria is celebrated for three days during the first weekend of February near the northern city of CopiapoŽ. An ancient Christian festivity, it recalls the purification of the Virgin Mary after the birth of Jesus. The use of candles (from which the name candelaria derives) comes from a pagan Roman tradition, and other celebratory aspects reveal non-Christian origins. In Chile, the festivity started in 1780, with a muleteer's discovery of a stone icon of the Virgin. Originally, only regional bailes or confraternities known as chinos and morenos participated in the festival. Today, those traditional dance groups attend, as do newer ones, called devils (diablos), redskins (pieles rojas), sailors (marinos), and gypsies (gitanos), from other towns. The presence of these troupes gives the festival a carnivalesque character; strict regulations control the participants' discipline, moral behavior, hon-orableness, hierarchy, and duties.
During the first day, before vespers, the festival's sponsors (mayordomos) deposit a candle and an offering (chuya) of water, sweets, cinnamon, carnations, and coca
On the second day, four rites are performed. In the first, at 3:00 A.M., the sponsor and the sacristan recite three Hail Marys in the church and remove the candles and the chuyas of the previous day. The sacristan sprinkles the cross, the church, and the bell tower with the chuyas, because the edifice and the tower, symbolizing female and male, protect and prosper the community. In the second rite, performed at dawn, people of the community gather in front of the church to ask forgiveness for their sins, and then walk to the opposite end of town and burn incense for Jesus (whom they think visible in the sunrise). In the third rite, performed during the afternoon in the house of the alfeŽrez and in the church, the images of the saints and the virgin are decorated, and candles and flowers are sprinkled with alcohol, coca leaves, and holy water. The fourth rite is performed in front of the church at night, when all the candles are lit. The community, the alfeŽrez, the sacristan, and the priest pray the rosary and sing religious songs, followed by dancing around the church by the bailes. When the sacristan closes the church, the dance groups retire to a house (casa de baile) to dance cachimbos, cuecas, cumbias, huaynos, and trotes all night.
The rituals of the third day, designated as the Virgin's day, start at noon with a mass, followed by a procession by the bailes and the populace. A new alfeŽrez is installed for the next year. The day ends with offerings to the authorities of the festival and more dancing in the dance house.
One of the oldest religious festivals in mestizo Spanish-speaking America has been celebrated every October and December since the late 1500s in the gold-mining town of Andacollo, in north-central Chile. According to folklore, the adoration and celebration of Our Lady of the Rosary (Nuestra Sen~ora del Rosario) of Andacollo began when native Americans discovered an image of the Virgin Mary that Spaniards had hidden in the outskirts of La Serena. The festival has been attended by bailes chinos since 1584 (playing flautones and drums), turbantes since 1752 (playing guitar, mandolin, accordion, flautas, and triangle), danzantes since 1798 (playing guitar, flautas, and triangle), and chunchos, diabladas, and indios since 1958 (accompanied by brass bands). The alfeŽrez of each baile sings octosyllabic quatrains in front of the image, making promises and pledges, asking favors, and expressing gratitude to the Virgina practice that shows the preponderance of Hispanic influence.
Other Christian festivals
Spanish influences are prevalent in the one-day religious festivals of Cruz de Mayo (May Cross, 3 May), Corpus Christi, and Saints Peter and Paul (29 June), commonly celebrated in the provinces of ValparaiŽso and Aconcagua. These festivals are organized around bailes or cofradiŽas. Each troupe consists of twenty to thirty members, a patron (called the owner), and an alfeŽrez (abanderado 'conductor'). The dances are of the chino type. Dancers perform in a reverent squat (
CoŽmo estaŽ, mi buen alfeŽrez? | How are you, my good director? |
CoŽmo estaŽ? coŽmo le va? | How are you? how are you doing? |
Me alegro de verlo bueno, | I'm glad to see you well, |
Sin ninguna novedad. | Without any news. |
Vengo bien, abanderado; | I'm fine, conductor; |
Lo digo de corazoŽn, | I say this from my heart. |
El Baile de Campiche Afuera | The dance group of Campiche Afuera |
Le hace saludacioŽn. | Gives you greeting. |
The island known as ChiloeŽ, situated in the northern part of the southern archipelago, was under the control of the Spanish until 1826. Therefore, Hispanic influence on the island is more evident than in other areas of Chile, which became independent in 1810. The Williche culture (the Mapuche of the south) was absorbed by Spanish influences, but descendants of the Williche maintain parts of their social organization. Beginning in the 1600s, Jesuits contributed to the process of change of ChiloeŽ by developing a Baroque-influenced architecture and the teaching and practice of religious singing. Singing the rosary in novenas and at patronal festivals and wakes is a common practice in ChiloeŽ. Rosary orations are sung as psalmody; sacred mysteries are sung in a Gregorian style; religious hymns precede the rosary, are interpolated, or conclude it. Cantos de aŽngeles 'songs of angels' are performed during wakes for infants. Chilotes (people from ChiloeŽ) sing prayer songs for the dead, Christmas carols, and salves (songs with religious texts, promoted by missionaries since colonial times).
The patronal festivals celebrated in ChiloeŽ are organized by local cabildos (male and female hierarchical organizations). After the religious festivals and communal-work efforts (mingas) are over, the Chilotes dance waltzes, corridos, cuecas, and rancheras. Dances once popular in ChiloeŽthe cielito, the nave, the pavo, the peri-cona, the sajuriana, the trastrasera (most of them derived from the Spanish cuadrilla)are extinct. Children still play musical games and sing game songs (ron-das) learned in school, and their parents sing lullabies, many from historical times (Dannemann 1978; LaviŽn 1952).
Starting in the late 1500s, the remoteness of ChiloeŽ and the archipelago has led the Roman Catholic Church to instruct governmental leaders (fiscales) to replace the priest as conductor and controller of religious festivities. These leaders care for the church and teach and conduct religious singing.
Indigenous
The Mapuche use a Jew's harp to play love songs, shepherds' songs, and lullabies. Mapuche secular vocal music is used to converse, argue, court, welcome, and express gratitude (Titiev 1949). Repetitions and variations of short melodic patterns of descending thirds are used in Mapuche secular songs (GonzaŽlez 1986).
Spanish-derived and creole
Chilean Spanish-derived musical-poetic tradition originates from the genres, instruments, performance styles, and uses of music brought to Chile by Roman Catholic Spaniards (and Arab-AndaluciŽans) during the Encounter and the colonial period. The Spanish romance, villancico, deŽcima, and quatrain and the AndaluciŽan nuba (nawba) and zejel are among the ancestors of the musical-poetic tradition of the Chilean central valley. The narrative genres of Chilean Creole music are the ballad (romance, corrido), the couplet (copla), the verse (verso), and the tune (tonada). All are based on genres of Spanish sung poetry brought to America during the colonial period by couplet singers (copleros), successors of European medieval minstrels.
The romance is formed by an indeterminate number of quatrains, recited or sung in one musical sentence (AB), in 6/8 or 3/4 meter, in the major mode, and with or without guitar accompaniment, usually with only tonic-dominant harmony. Its main textual themes have always been disaster, crime, love, and adventure. It survives only in the game song (rondaŽ), the cancioŽn, the corrido, the tonada, and the verso (Barros 1970).
The verso, sung poetry accompanied by a guitar or a guitarroŽn, has the form of one octosyllabic quatrain plus five deŽcimas (each rhyming abbaaccddc). The quatrain states the subject of the verso, which four deŽcimas then gloss, each tenth line quoting one line of the quatrain; the fifth deŽcima is a farewell. The verso has secular and religious themes (fundamentos), called a lo humano (to the human) and a lo divino (to the divine), respectively. Secular themes include modern and ancient history, astronomy, geography, nature, love, exaggerations, duels, and riddles; versos a lo humano are performed at weddings, baptisms, birthday parties, and recreational occasions, and after religious festivals. Religious themes derive from the Old and New Testaments and from Christian doctrine; versos a lo divino are performed at wakes, funerals, and novenas during the celebrations of the Cruz de Mayo and the festivals for the Virgin Mary. Both kinds of verso are maintained by oral and written traditions.
The melody of the verso is based on recitative-like patterns in major, minor, and Mixolydian modes, with half and full cadences (requiebres and caiŽdas). The harmony is modal, tonal, or mixed, with or without bourdon (tonic pedal on open strings). The chords are often I, V7 (with and without the third above the root), and flat VII (IV of IV). The accompaniment derives from the relationships between tuning and performing patterns (left-hand positions and right-hand strumming and plucking techniques).
The popular poets (poetas populares), the singer-composers of the verso, maintain
Tonada
The genre known as tonada, widely performed in the central valley of Chile, may originate in part from the zejel, an AndaluciŽan poetic form that alternates a refrain with stanzas. During the Chilean colonial period, the term tonada served to designate any intoned tune. Nowadays, the tonada is sung by one or two female or male singers (the duet style is in thirds) in a nasal style. It is accompanied by one or two guitars (with or without a harp), using normal or altered tunings (such as D-a-d-f?-a-c?)
The octosyllabic quatrain is the common poetic meter of the tonada, though other poetic forms such as the deŽcima, the romance, the quintilla (five-line stanza) and the ten- or eleven-syllabic line are used. The tonada may or may not have a refrain. Some quatrains start with the last line of the previous one (de coleo) or are the retrograde of each previous quatrain (al reveŽs). A cogollo, a quatrain of farewell and homage to an important listener, is commonly added at the end. The tonada, which has a festive function, is played at rodeos, wheat harvests, and birthday parties. It is called esquinazo, villancico, and parabieŽn when it is performed as a serenade, Christmas carol, and marriage greeting, respectively. It is also performed during wakes, when it is called tonada de velorio (Barros 1964; Pereira Salas 1941).
An urban form of the tonada developed in the 1920s, when rural peasants and plantation elites migrated to cities. This change gave impulse to the development of a popular music based on the tonada, evoking the relationship between the migrants and the countryside, nourished by a nostalgic attitude of paradise lost. Vocal quartets, accompanied by a harp, an accordion, and guitars, and wearing costumes of the Chilean cowboy (huaso), evoked the folklore of the central region of Chile. Though the cowboy does not usually sing (as a soloist or in a group), his costume is brilliantly impressive as a spectacle and reflection of authority from the countryside. It is also the attire used by landowners and other men of rank.
The first groups of singing cowboys were formed by university students who later divided their time between professional careers and artistic activities. The most distinguished quartets were Los Cuatro Huasos (founded 1927), Los Huasos Quincheros (1937), and Los Provincianos (1938) (
Cueca
Most Chileans consider the cueca a national symbol, though not every Chilean appreciates it, and many Chilean musicians have not mastered it. Different cultural
The performance and theme of the cueca change with the setting. In the Andean mestizo areas of the north, it is performed by brass bands or panpipe ensembles; it has no lyrics and is danced before a trote, another name for huayno in parts of Chile. In
The cueca chronicles historic and social settings. The urban cueca has commented on historic eventsChilean independence from Spain (1810), the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), the Chilean revolution of 1891, and World War II. It has narrated catastrophes, accidents, and crimes. It has paid homage to Chilean men--the brave peasant (roto 'broken') and the he-man (gallo 'rooster'), sports stars, musicians, and poets. It has glorified and ridiculed love, and has exalted nature and wine.
The cueca is almost always performed in the major mode (principally with I and V chords), in a fast tempo in compound 6/8+3/4 time. Its structure is based on coplas, seguidillas, and pareados (two-line stanzas of seven- and five-syllable lines), sung with a ternary music sentence (ABB and ABA), as in the following text:
Tengo pena, tengo rabia, tengo ganas de llorar, Porque a la Corina Rojas la quieren ajusticiar. Dicen que la Corina, siendo una dama, Ha muerto a su marido, estando en la cama, estando en la cama, siŽ. No puede ser Que fusilen en Chile a una mujer. Le pasoŽ a la Corina por asesina. I am sad, I am angry, I want to cry, Because they want to shoot Corina Rojas. They say Corina, being a lady, has killed her husband, being in bed, being in bed, yes. It can't be possible For them to shoot a woman in Chile. That happened to Corina for being a murderess.
The danced cueca is a choreographic account of a woman's conquest by a man, metaphorically represented as the conquest of a hen by a rooster. The stages of search, conquest, and victory correspond respectively to the copla, the seguidilla, and the pareado. Because the male dancer twirls a handkerchief, the cueca is often called a scarf dance (Claro 1982, 1989).
Folklorists and folkloric composers
Composers who cultivated Chilean folkloric music (muŽsica tiŽpica chilena 'typical Chilean music') such as the tonada, the cueca, and other genres include Nicanor Molinare (1896-1957), Victor Acosta (1905-1966), Violeta Parra (1917-1967), Luis Bahamonde (1920-1978), Clara Solovera (1909-1992), and Francisco Flores del Campo (1907-1993). Predominant themes in the songs of these composers are the idealization of the woman and the self-glorification of the man, with the man suffering love's deceit. The woman is presented in a dualistic fashion: on the one hand, she is virtuous, yet flirtatious; on the other, she is stubborn, yet reserved. The man appears with complementary traits: honesty and forcefulness, valor and patriotism.
Chilean folkloric music developed into a distinct style, as much because of its repertoire as because of its manner of interpretation. For the Chilean nation and the world, it forged Chile's sonic image and was the principal current of Chilean popular music until the early 1970s. Nevertheless, by providing knowledge of new genres, repertoires, and interpretive practices, folklorists such as Violeta Parra and Margot Loyola (b. 1918) contributed to the diversification of the notion of Chilean folklore prevalent in urban sectors of Chile until the 1960s.
Violeta Parra began transcribing folk songs in the early 1950s. She traveled throughout the country and became friends with popular poets and singers, from whom she learned the repertoire she preserved and disseminated while developing her own poetic and musical style (Parra 1979). A large portion of her songs are rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and formal models of Chilean folk music, and are standards
Margot Loyola applied her academic musical training to the service of folk-musical collecting, transcribing, and preserving, especially by reconstructing and disseminating in traditional style a vast amount of her interpretations. She made recordings and gave concerts, developing an important pedagogy of folklore starting in 1949. From her efforts appeared ConcumeŽn (1955), a folk-musical ensemble dedicated to collecting and disseminating traditional songs, dances, and costumes from the central parts of Chile.
Since the 1800s, musical influences from Europe and Latin America have been incorporated into Chilean musical practices. During the twentieth century, many Latin American urban and rural folk-musical styles (especially Afro-Latin music) have been diffused via radio, film, and recordings and have been integrated into Chile's music (orally transmitted and composed) and dance. Especially between the 1930s and the 1960s, cultural expressions from Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba, including such genres as the tango, the zamba, the corrido, the guaracha, the cha-cha-chaŽ, and the bolero became popular in Chile.
As early as the 1920s, the tango was danced in Santiago and ValparaiŽso, where it retained its traditional Argentine form. Repeated visits by Argentine musicians, along with Argentine films and recordings, ensured its presence in Chile. It was diffused through dance, musical performances, and composition contests; through the efforts of dance academies and professors; through the foundation of tango clubs; through the publication of special records, books, and magazines; and through the creative activities of Chilean composers, musicians, and dancers.
The Argentine zamba was diffused in Chile during the 1940s by the Argentine performers Antonio Tormo and Atahualpa Yupanqui and through records and broadcasts. During the later 1950s, the closeness of the zamba to peasant Chilean music, along with its harmonic and melodic richness, contributed to its popularity among Chilean youths, who sang Argentine songs and played Argentine guitars, enriching amateur musical performances and expanding interest in the guitar.
Throughout Latin America beginning in the 1930s, Mexican films began diffusing Mexican peasants' music. Chileans widely performed the Mexican cancioŽn ranchera and corrido, stripped of their narrativity and epic character. The Chilean people identified with the rurality of these genres; this identification led to the Chilean development of soloists and ensembles in mariachi styles, and of duets and trios in norten~o styles [see MEXICO]. The Mexican-style singer Guadalupe del Carmen (1917-1987) and the quartets Los Veracruzanos, Los Queretanos, and Los Huastecos del Sur were active in Chile during the 1940s and 1950s. These ensembles, which formed part of the artistic programming of certain radio stations in Santiago, performed the most recent and fashionable canciones rancheras and corridas from Mexico. They also interpreted musical soundtracks from Mexican films shown in Chile.
The internationalization of Afro-Cuban music, helped by Mexican and U.S. music and films, brought to Chile between 1930 and 1950 the orchestral rumba of Xavier Cugat, the conga of Desi Arnaz, the mambo of DaŽmaso PeŽrez Prado, the
The bolero arrived in Chile in the mid-1930s via recordings and live performances by Mexican singers, including Juan Arvizu and Pedro Vargas. During the 1940s, the first Chilean bolero singersRauŽl Videla, Arturo Gatica, Mario Arancibiaappeared, followed in the 1950s by Lucho Gatica (
The incorporation of Andean music into popular urban Chilean music was a process that began in the 1950s with the countrywide diffusion of dances and songs transcrib
Beginning in the mid-1960s, the ensembles Inti Illimani and QuilapayuŽn and the musicians Angel Parra, Isabel Parra, and Victor Jara were the founders of a movement that became known as new song (nueva cancioŽn). It incorporated Andean genres musical instruments (siku or zampon~a, kena, charango, bombo, guitar) and native American sentiments from northern Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Their music, which has common threads from a vast region of South America (even beyond the Andes), symbolized the social and cultural unity of Latin America and reinvigorated the deprived and oppressed native people of the Andes. It therefore was ideologically attached to the progressive spirit of the 1960s and the Allende years (until 1973). These musicians and the later ensemble Illapu (
After the military takeover of Chile (in 1973), new song was banned, its ensembles and musicians exiled (Inti Illimani lived in Italy until 1988, and QuilapayuŽn has continued to live in France), or killed (Victor Jara, d. 1973). Chileans were not encouraged to play Andean instruments because those instruments were laced with the Marxist ideological overtones of the Allende years. Another movement followed, however. It inverted the term for new song, coining the term canto nuevo, also gloss-able as 'new song'. The ensemble Barroco Andino, using the same Andean instruments as had nueva cancioŽn, made recordings of music by Bach, Telemann, other classical composers, and the Beatles. Other ensembles were Ortiga, Aquelarre, and
Rock
After the 1960s, when an imitative rock movement known as new wave (nueva ola) developed in Chile, the fusion-rock band Los Jaivas electrified the Chilean pop scene in the early 1970s with the use of Andean siku, kena, electric guitars, keyboards, and other contemporary instruments. They released their thirteenth album, Hijos de la tierra, in 1995, recorded in Paris on the Sony label. The arrival of a new generation of Chileans by the early 1980s, more pragmatic and less idealistic than the previous ones, contributed to starting a pop-rock movement in Chile by the mid-1980s, with bands such as Los Prisioneros, Fulano, La Ley, and Los Tres. During the 1990s, some of them have reached popularity in Latin America and have been featured on MTV in the United States.
The investigation of Chile's musical cultures began in earnest with the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones del Folklore Musical in 1943, integrated into the University of Chile in 1947. The institute sponsored musical fieldwork; managed teaching, recording, publication, and diffusion; and created an archive and library. Ethnomusicological research started in Chile during the 1960s with the publications by Manuel Dannemann (1978) and Raquel Barros (1958, 1964, 1970) on Chilean Creole and mestizo music and by MariŽa Ester Grebe (1967, 1973, 1974, 1980) on Chilean creole and Indian music. Samuel Claro (1979, 1982, 1989), Luis Merino (1974), Ernesto GonzaŽlez (1986), JoseŽ PeŽrez de Arce, and Rodrigo Torres have also made ethnomusicological contributions in Chile.
Musical Instruments
Musical Ensembles
Musical Contexts and Genres
Popular Music
Art Music
Further Study
From Pacific mangrove swamps to the Amazon basin, from Caribbean beaches to Andean summits, Colombia is a land of contrasts. Because of the heterogeneity of its pre-Columbian peoples, the strength of its Iberian lineage, and the admixture of New World African culture, its musical heritage is extraordinarily rich and varied.
Colombia can be subdivided into five distinct regions, reflecting geographic features and cultural traits: the Pacific and Atlantic-Caribbean coasts, eastern plains (llanos), Andes, and Amazon basin. The focus of this essay is the musical culture of the Andean region, the homeland of most of the national population, especially those of primarily Hispanic descent.
Colombia has a tricultural heritage: Spanish, African, and native American. In the Andean region, however, the most important traditional music instruments are out-right adoptions or creolized developments of archaic European originals. Instruments of indigenous or African origins have been incorporated into some regional ensembles; though these instruments remain among the less essential elements of a given ensemble, other evidence proves indigenous and African influence on Andean musical styles, instruments, and performance.
That some instruments occur almost everywhere in the world makes it difficult to determine whether they are indigenous to Colombia or are Old World imports. In popular culture, where these instruments are employed and enjoyed, such considerations are meaningless because all are cherished icons of Colombia's cultural history.
Idiophones
The chucho, a shaken tubular rattle, consists of a bamboo internode closed at both ends containing small rattling objects. In South America, such rattles may be divided into two historically distinct types: the first consists solely of a tube with internal rattling objects (probably pre-Columbian); the second features palm needles or wooden or metal nails, thrust through the tube walls into the interior resonating cavity, creating
This idiophone has a variety of regional names: chucho, chuchas, or alfandoque in BoyacaŽ, Cundinamarca, Huila, and Tolima; guacho (guache) in Antioquia; caraŽngano, guasaŽ (guazaŽ) or sonaja in Cauca, Narin~o, and Valle del Cauca. Among the more heavily African-influenced cultural groups inhabiting Colombia's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, tubular rattles tend to be played in pairs by one or two musicians; in the Andean region, more strongly influenced by traditional indigenous practices, it is a single instrument. In both regions, it is shaken, whether held horizontally by both hands or vertically in alternation, like a maraca. The chucho of southern Colombia is held horizontally in one hand, palm facing downward at waist level, the sound being produced through a deft dropping and catching of the instrument in alternating hands. Because of the absence of internally penetrating needles or nails, the sound produced is of short duration, precise, and crisp. When inserted into the context of a dueto bambuquero, the chucho may be held horizontally and played sitting, the player alternately tapping the ends on the thighs. The chucho's relative of the eastern plains and the Atlantic Coast is the more familiar maraca, a gourd with a handle.
The jalajala, a strung or bunch rattle, is another shaken idiophone. The jalajala of the rajalen~a ensemble consists of six 2-meter lengths of twine, strung with reed segments 15 to 20 centimeters long and a little more than a centimeter wide. Each of six pieces of twine is strung with a single reed before all six pieces are knotted together, ensuring that the reeds do not all slide toward one end of the twine. The second set of reeds is strung and knotted in place, and the process is repeated until all six segments, each made up of six strung reed rattles, have been completed. Finally, the ends of the twine are tied together, forming a large loop, which the musician wears over his head and across one shoulder. The player grasps the cords emerging from opposite ends of a single bunch of six loosely strung reeds and rattles them against each other. This motion produces a sympathetic rattling among the five remaining reed bunches, resulting in a delightful cacophony of percussion.
Indigenous populations throughout South America use similar rattles made of seashells and fruit shells, seeds, animal hooves, metal, bone, and reed. Among the mestizo populations of northeastern Colombia, where it is commonly played in the conjunto guabinero, this instrument is known as quiribillo, quirivin~o, piribique, or trivin~o.
The jawbone (quijada) is a scraped, shaken, or struck idiophone [see AFRO-PERUVIAN TRADITIONS]. A player usually scrapes its teeth with a stick, but it is also a rattle, because the teeth chatter when the jawbone is shaken. The player may hit it with a fist. Its organological origins may have been among the indigenous peoples or the West African slaves who arrived in the colonial era. Across the savanna of BogotaŽ, burros' jaws are played by rural ensembles that call the instrument cumbamba, which means 'jawbone' in several indigenous languages. The jawbone is an integral part of the guabinero ensembles of northeastern Colombia (where it serves as a struck and a scraped idiophone), the rajalen~a ensembles of southern and central Colombia, and the traditional conjunto llanero of Colombia's eastern plains region (where it is known as the carraca).
A notched gourd (carrasca), classifiable as a scraped idiophone, is known by many names. Some of theseguširo, gušira, guširederive directly from the Spanish name of the gourd from which it is typically constructed. After the gourd has been cleaned and dried, shallow transverse grooves are etched across its surface. To produce its rasping sound, a player scrapes a piece of stick or bone, sometimes coupled with
Membranophones
The tambora, a double-headed cylindrical membranophone, is decidedly European in construction, though the manner in which it is played suggests African influence. Early accounts note that indigenous peoples regarded Spaniards' playing drums as a threat. With reed flutes and fotutos (gourd, shell, and ceramic trumpets), the drums of the native Americans performed a similar military function. The Spanish chroniclers reported encountering native drums they called atambores, atabales, cajas, and bombos, but none have survived archaeologically in Colombia. Such drums were described as being stood on the ground or held under one arm and played with bare hands or a single drumstick. Pebbles or other rattling objects were often enclosed in drums for an additional percussive effect. The hides used for membranes were fastened with wooden nails or loops of string, or a wet skin was stretched over the drum and allowed to dry in place. The tradition of slowly burning the centers out of tree trunks or stumps is still practiced in some regions. Documentation of the ancient indigenous custom of fashioning drums from inflated human skins also exists.
Drums similar to the tambora in construction, bracing, tuning, and performance are utilized throughout the Andean region of South America by indigenous, African-Hispanic, and mestizo ensembles. The modern Colombian tambora measures about 60 centimeters high and 35 centimeters wide. The heads are attached by means of indirect bracing, with the bracing cords running through equidistant holes in the outer hoops, laced in alternation from head to head. With the addition of supplementary ligatures, the simple tightening of two lateral cords running parallel to the outer hoops and perpendicular to the bracing cords (creating a netlike effect) is sufficient for tuning. Other traits assignable to European origins are the use of a counter-hoop shaped from a single piece of bent wood, and a small sound hole drilled in the upper side of the drum at a point equidistant from both heads, which in performance maintains air-pressure equilibrium inside the drum.
The player holds the tambora by slinging its strap over the right shoulder, across the back, and under the left arm. The drum hangs diagonally, almost horizontally across the front and left side of the player's body, resting on the left hip (
Friction drums are known throughout South America. In Colombia, a friction drum is called the puerca or marrano in the central and southern Andean murga ensemble, and the zambomba or zambumbia in the context of the guabinero ensemble. Although varying in size, friction drums consist of a wax-covered friction stick inserted and tied into a treated cow's bladder, which in turn is stretched over the open end of a dried gourd. Similar friction drums date at least to the Middle Ages, when they were known in Europe as rommelpots; correlates are known in Africa. Friction drums found in Brazil and Venezuela are called cuiŽca and furruco, respectively.
Aerophones
In various parts of Colombia, the Spanish term flauta, the generic denomination for 'flute', may denote panpipes, vertical flutes, or horizontal flutes. In most contemporary murgas, however, the term refers specifically to the transverse reed or cane edge aerophone. The transverse flute likely accompanied the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century conquistadors on their missions of conquest and colonization, probably with the military drum. Native Americans' affinity for the European flute, introduced to them by colonial-era missionaries, probably resulted from their previous experience with indigenous flutes. Whether these were of the horizontal or the vertical variety remains unknown.
Among contemporary native American groups in the central and southern Colombian Andes, the typical musical ensemble consists of two or more six-holed side-blown flutes, accompanied by drums closely resembling the tambora (
The flute typical of southern Colombian ensembles is made of reed (cane), and is fashioned in pairs with reference to existing instruments (
Perdomo Escobar (1963:17) reports the existence of the fotuto, a large, indigenous aerophone used by the Muisca in the 1500s. The fotuto was made from gourds, metal, wood, conch shells, clay, or animal horns, but present-day correlates are made almost exclusively from large gourds. In the department of Huila, such gourd instruments (instrumentos de calabazo) have acquired a central role in the celebration of carnivalesque June festivals, albeit with a humorous dimension. Gourds are wired together in the shape of orchestral instrumentstubas, contrabasses, violins, trombones, and saxophonesand played through carved gourd or manufactured metal mouthpieces (
Chordophones
It is a subject of debate whether the pre-Columbian arsenal of musical instruments was devoid of stringed instruments of any kind (Izikowitz 1970:201-206), but the musical bows of the Yupka (MotiloŽn), the Waru (Guajiro), and the Kogi of north-eastern Colombia may be indigenous or an adoption from African-Colombian traditions extant on the Caribbean coast [See AFRO-COLOMBIAN TRADITIONS]. Musical ensembles of the Colombian Andes usually feature strummed and plucked chordophones of European origin.
The caraŽngano is an idiochord tube zither used in mestizo ensembles of southern Colombia. Tube zithers are found primarily in Asia and West Africa, and Colombian specimens are probably the result of African influence. Instruments similar to the caraŽngano of the mestizo murgas appear throughout Colombia and Venezuela, in predominantly African and relatively unacculturated indigenous cultural groups (AbadiŽa Morales 1973:59; Aretz 1967:112-117; Davidson 1970:2:100-101; Liscano 1950:99-100; Perdomo Escobar 1963:328).
The bamboo used to make the caraŽngano of southern Colombia measures from 2.5 to 3 meters long, and from 15 to 20 centimeters wide. A strip of the cortex a meter or two long is lifted from the middle of the tube, great care being taken neither to detach it at either end nor to puncture the hollow inner tube itself. After wooden bridges have been inserted at each extremity, raising the strip of cortex to a height of 6 or 8 centimeters, alternate segments of the main tube are punctured with rectangular sound holes.
In performance, the caraŽngano is held at waist level by assistants at each end. The primary player alternately strikes the raised strip of cortex with two large sticks, causing it to vibrate noisily. Dried and inflated cow bladders partially filled with dried corn kernels (vejigas) are pressed against the vibrating strand of cortex by a second musician, making the caraŽngano a chordophone and an idiophone simultaneously (
The tiple is a medium-size, flat-backed chordophone related to the Spanish vihuela and is a descendant of the gittern of sixteenth-century Europe (
The present-day tiple has twelve strings grouped in four courses and tuned as diagramed (
In the context of the performance of festive rajalen~as and sanjuaneros, the tiple renders a syncopated, percussive, chordal accompaniment. The combination of strumming the fingers and striking the palm or knuckles against the strings (golpe apagado, shown in
The tiple has a big role in Colombian legends, where it is not only the lovesick troubadour's sympathetic companion but also the object of elves' and trolls' mischievous antics. The people and musicological scholars of the Andean region of Colombia romantically consider it the most Colombian of musical instruments, a product of the process of creolization, not unlike the mestizos themselves (An~ez 1970 [1951]:31; Perdomo Escobar 1963:265, 388-392).
The guitarra (
A relative of the mandolin and a direct descendant of the Spanish bandurria, the modern bandola or lira usually has a teardrop or circular shape, with a flat or slightly arched back (An~ez 1970 [1951]:35). Its four courses of three steel strings and two pairs of copper-wound strings are tuned in descending fourths (
A close relative of the guitar, the cuatro, has, as its name implies, four courses of single, usually nylon strings. Rhythmically complex, its strummed accompaniments are featured in the conjunto llanero, the harp-based ensemble typical of the eastern plains of Colombia, and in Venezuela, where alternative tunings occur (
In professional contexts, the musical genre known as bambuco is typically performed by the duŽo or dueto bambuquero, consisting of two vocalists accompanying themselves on guitar and tiple (
When someone is organizing a serenade (serenata), the services of a dueto bambuquero may be obtained with the gift of bottled aguardiente (an alcoholic drink made from sugarcane) and a promise of more. Entire evenings may be spent locating musicians, rehearsing, and deciding which four or five musical selections will produce the desired effect on the recipient of the serenata. The actual performance takes place precisely at midnight, and lasts less than fifteen minutes. Approach and departure are executed in silence, and the recipient of the serenata makes no indication of her attendance other than, possibly, turning her light on. The identity of the male responsible for organizing the serenata is understood but remains unannounced.
Bambucos are most commonly performed by the dueto bambuquero, but they provide a large percentage of the repertoire of the estudiantina ensemble. Also known as the lira, rondalla, or tuna, such ensembles specialize in instrumental music, sometimes of the classical variety, and in instrumental arrangements of pasillos and other genres of Colombian popular music.
The estudiantina is a large ensemble, adding any number of bandolas to a core group of tiples and guitars. Pedro Morales Pino formed La Lira Colombiana, Colombia's first estudiantina, in 1899 with three bandolas, two tiples, and a guitar. Morales Pino's second Lira Colombiana of 1912 featured five bandolas, four tiples, one guitar, and a cello. Reaching the zenith of their popularity on the professional level during the golden age of Colombian popular song (1890-1930), estudiantinas survive in schools, businesses, churches, and other social organizations where their size and flexibility of instrumentation allow for maximum participation among their members. Many estudiantinas work in association with choral groups, or like the Lira Colombiana, rely on their own instrumentalists to perform vocal parts. Estudiantinas may be observed in the context of a serenata, in an open-air recital on a bandstand in a park or a plaza, in schools or churches, or in the more formal setting of a concert hall.
The municipal budget of most Colombian Andean towns provides for contracting a band director and paying for the services of such an ensemble as he can assemble. The only full-time professional musician, he recruits, teaches, rehearses, manages the budget for paying these instrumentalists, and maintains the equipmentseveral sets of uniforms and musical instruments typical of a small European or North American marching band. His responsibility is also to ensure satisfactory performances by his ensemble at their contracted occasions. Such contexts include welcoming visiting dignitaries, participating in parades on civic holidays, and providing a festive ambience during local festivals and fairs. The most common context is the regular public concert on the bandstand in the plaza in front of the church on Sunday afternoon and usually one other evening per week.
The parish priest and various local religious associations raise funds to hire the municipal band to provide appropriate music for public religious observances like
The murga differs from each of the ensembles discussed above. Throughout the Hispanic world, the term murga commonly denotes an informal group of street musicians and merrymakers, and in Colombia it identifies typical ensembles performing at Andean Colombian festivals. The existence in the Colombian Andes of such ensembles, featuring tiples, clarinets, tambourines, tamboras, quijadas, and reed flutes, was documented as early as 1840 (Davidson 1970:3:123).
Unlike the musicians of an estudiantina or a dueto bambuquero, the members of a murga are frequently not only nonprofessionals, but also nonmusicians. Rather than concentrating on technique and execution, a murga tries for spontaneity and celebration. Contemporary murgas have neither rehearsals nor set personnel, and their instrumentation depends on their region. In the southern departments of Tolima and Huila, a typical murga, called a cucamba or a rajalen~a, consists essentially of a pair of reed flutes, a tiple, and a tambora with a variety of percussion instruments: caraŽngano, carrasca, chucho, jalajala, puerca, and quijada. In the northeastern departments of Santander and BoyacaŽ, the typical murga, called conjunto guabinero, consists of a tiple, a requinto, a quijada, a chucho, a tambourine, and spoons; in the southwestern Andes, the typical murga, known as chirimiŽa, may consist of tiples, reed flutes, guitars, and whatever other instruments happen to be available.
Improvisation is a theme that runs through virtually all aspects of a murga. Its membership is improvised; musicians may come and go during a performance. Instruments themselves are often improvised as individuals are drawn into the context. The predominant vehicle for textual expression by members of murgas is the copla, whether precomposed, traditional, or spontaneously improvised. Most performances feature coplas of all three varieties. Performances, often unscheduled, last for no set period of time.
The principal contexts for murgas are festivals for local patron saints, carnival, the extended Christmas and New Years' celebration, and the June festivals associated with the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (24 June, celebrated as la fiesta de San Juan in Tolima) and Saints Peter and Paul (29 June, celebrated as la fiesta de San Pedro in Huila). The principal function of a murga is to attract townspeople's attention and draw them into participating through dancing, singing, or even joining the murga.
Communal collection and consumption of alcoholic beverages is often central to the activities of the murga.
The typical ensemble of the plains region of southern Venezuela and eastern Colombia is the conjunto llanero. In Colombia, it traditionally consisted of cuatro, requinto, and carraca. AbadiŽa Morales (1973:75-76) and others, however, view the harp and maracaswhich have long since replaced the requinto and the carraca, respectivelyas tourism-inspired additions to the authentic conjunto llanero, though they may be considered traditional in Venezuela. Genres contributing to the repertoire of conjuntos llaneros are the galeroŽn, the corrido, and, most prominently, the joropo.
In the novel MariŽa, Jorge Isaacs (1962 [1867]) referred to the bambuco extant in the department of Cauca as a musical form brought to Colombia by slaves from an African kingdom known as Bambuk. In the twentieth century, these remarks kindled controversy: as Colombian scholars began to research the history and origins of their beloved national dance, many were horrified to think that it might not be the product of the intermingling of Spanish and indigenous cultures.
Researchers (including AbadiŽa Morales 1973:58-59 and An~ez 1968 [1951]: 24-44) have put a great deal of effort into trying to determine the actual origin of the bambucoor rather, to prove Isaacs wrong. Questions concerning whether or not, or the degree to which, African influences in the bambuco's development should be acknowledged have been central to the resulting discussion. Less attention has been paid to the study of its actual musical traits and performances, or to the emergence of its contemporary varieties, the bambuco de saloŽn, the sanjuanero, and the rajalen~a. Researchers have disagreed about the most appropriate way to transcribe its rhythm and meter into staff notation. The controversy involves the employment of 3/4 or 6/8 time signatures (because of the juxtaposition of both, or sesquiaŽltera) and the proper placement of bar lines (
Examination of choreography, song texts, vocal styles, instrumentation, and musical functions associated with the bambuco show a high degree of inherent Hispanic influence. Little evidence of indigenous influence in the modern bambuco has come to light, and only when one analyzes the bambuco's less-commercialized, unpolished, rustic cousins (such as the rajalen~d) do African traits become obvious.
Early references to the bambuco identify it with the bunde, a scandalous genre. Documents mention bundes throughout the mid-1700s, often censuring individuals who had participated in them. Juan CrisoŽstomo Osorio y Ricaurte wrote in his Diccionario de MuŽsica (1867) that the bambuco was a brief sung and danced musical form in ternary meter, characterized by syncopation, appropriately performed by
If this nexus can be established between bambuco and bunde, the former may be considered the oldest form extant in Colombian folk-musical traditions. The bambuco is believed to have been among the favorite dances of SimoŽn BoliŽvar, the liberator of Colombia. In 1824, just after the battle of Ayacucho, Bolivar's troops celebrated to the sound of bambucos (An~ez 1968 [1951]:38; Perdomo Escobar 1963:57), showing that the genre already had a widespread acceptance among the lower and middle classes.
By 1837, Colombian troubadours were delighting Guatemalan audiences already familiar with the bambuco and introduced the dancing of the torbellino (An~ez 1968 [1951 ]:24). This date may demarcate the beginning of a second stage in the history of Colombian popular music, one that lasted until about 1890. During that stage, the composers Nicomedes Mata GuzmaŽn, Rafael Padilla, SimoŽn Ospina, and Pedro Morales Pino composed bambucos, pasillos, and other popular forms while leading Colombian popular music into its golden age. At the same time, Manuel MariŽa PaŽrraga composed the first stylization of the bambuco in a piano work, El Bambuco: Aires Nacionales Neo-Granadinos, becoming the forerunner of a long line of composers of nationalistic art music.
Most modern Colombian folk musicians originally learned to play their instruments informally from friends and relatives, but learned Colombian traditional music from the radio. Nationally known duetos bambuqueros such as GarzoŽn y Collazos, however, have established their own centers for formal instruction in tiple, guitar, and bandola. Such centers, located in BogotaŽ, tend to serve the upper echelons of Colombian society and deal primarily with the urban variety of the bambuco repertoire. This genre, also known as lyric bambuco, bambuco de saloŽn, and bambuco santaferen~o, is the kind of bambuco most commonly heard on radio, on recordings, and in concert. Like most sanjuaneros, bambucos of this category have known authors, in some cases trained professional composers.
Performance of a given bambuco involves significant repetition of material, instrumental and textual. Nearly all begin with a melodic introduction performed by the guitar to chordal tiple accompaniment. The first stanza of text is then delivered, usually in a minor key, and after a second rendition of the instrumental interlude, it often repeats. Next, a new instrumental interlude is performed, or the same one is repeated, with a cadence in a new tonal center. The second stanza of text may now be sung and possibly repeated before the final dominant-tonic cadence. For pasillos, guabinas, valses, danzas, and bambucos, this hypothetical format is quite common, but the pattern of repetition is set by the performer, the audience, and the musical occasion. When texts include more than two stanzas, repetition may be limited accordingly.
The emotionality of bambuco texts is emphasized by modulations, usually from minor to parallel or relative major keys or to the subdominant; the associated vocal style involves the liberal use of dramatic pauses, rubato passages, and fermatas, all intended to enhance the emotional impact of the lyrics. Texts often consist of octosyllabic lines, but they may employ any form of traditional Spanish poetry. Concepts recurring in these texts include the extolling of a woman's beauty and desirability, the joys resulting from the idyllic love shared by a man and that woman, the anguish caused by the loss of that love, and pride in being Colombian or from a particular region.
Many bambucos are dedicated to the beloved tiple, as in the following example, an excerpt from "Tiplecito Bambuquero" ('Little Tiple the Bambuco Player'), by JoseŽ Alejandro Morales:
Tiplecito, bambuquero, | Little tiple, you bambuco player, |
tiplecito, embrujador, | little tiple, you enchanter, |
eres tuŽ mi compan~ero | you are my companion |
en mi alegriŽa y en mi dolor. | in my joy and in my sorrow. |
Por eso es que yo te quiero | That is why I love you |
como si fueras mi amor, | as if you were my lover, |
tiplecito, bambuquero, | little tiple, bambuco player, |
tiplecito, embrujador. | little tiple, enchanter. |
Y cuando pulsan mis manos | And when my hands play upon |
tu embrujado diapasoŽn, | your enchanted fingerboard, |
siento que tuŽ y yo lloramos | I feel that you and I are weeping |
en un solo corazoŽn. | with a single heart. |
Other lyrics comment on current events or make philosophical statements about everyday life, particularly the struggles of the peasant or proletarian classes. Since the late 1940s, the social changes that have convulsed Colombia have given rise to a class of bambucos which musicians have come to call bambucos de protesta. A sample of this subgenre is seen in the following example, an excerpt from "?Ora SiŽ Entiendo Por QueŽ" ('Now I Understand Why'), by Pedro J. Ramos:
Ayer que ?tuve en el pueblo, | Yesterday when I was in town, |
compadrito Juan JoseŽ, | dear old friend Juan JoseŽ, |
los estudiantes gritaban, | the students were shouting, |
"ĄViva la rivolucioŽn!" | "Long live the revolution!" |
y le deciŽan al alcalde | and told the mayor |
que se asomara a su balcoŽn, | to come out onto his balcony, |
Qu? es qu? "alliŽ ?taŽn..." | "There they are..." |
y qu? "esos son | and "Those are |
los que venden ..." | the ones selling..." |
no seŽ queŽ... | I'm not sure what.... |
Qu? es qu? "alliŽ ?tan..." | "There they are..." |
ricuerdo ya | I remember now |
"los que venden la nacioŽn." | "the ones selling out our country." |
Written in the peasants' vernacular, the text uses ?tuve for estuve, ?taŽn for estaŽn, rivolucioŽn for revolucioŽn, and ricuerdo for recuerdo.
Like most Latin American folkloric musical genres, the bambuco has a choreography that resembles its counterparts in that it is a pursuit dance: the partners rarely touch
Researchers (Jaramillo 1955:547-555; Koorn 1977:131-136; Perdomo Escobar 1963:271-272) agree that the proper performance of the bambuco involves eight basic steps: invitacioŽn, invitation to the dance; ochos, dancing in a figure-eight pattern; codos, dancing with elbows touching; coqueteos, flirtatious stepping, when the man tries unsuccessfully to steal a kiss; perseguida, the man pursuing the woman, dancing in a circle; pan~uelo, neckerchief playing; arrodillada, the woman dancing in a circle around the kneeling man; abrazo, the man placing his right hand on the woman's waist, and dancing thus to her original position.
In southern Colombian June festivals, the bambuco is replaced by the sanjuanero, with more animated, athletic choreography, involving almost twice as many steps. When the murga's drummers are inspired to perform an extended solo section, they can drive the dancers to joyous exhaustion. The sanjuanero features more extensive teasing and pursuit involving the traditional neckerchief and the sombrero, and several steps imply or require brief embraces (
The festivity of the sanjuanero, also known as the joropo huilense, is evident in the following text, an excerpt from the festival theme song "El Sanjuanero Huilense," by Anselmo DuraŽn:
No hay guayabo que resista | There's no hangover that can resist |
este joropo caliente. | this hot joropo. |
Por eso estaŽ con celos | That's why its partner, |
su compadre, el aguardiente. | cane-sugar liquor, is jealous. |
Felices vienen y van, | Merrily they come and go, |
sin pensar en el dinero, | never thinking of money, |
trayendo tiples y guitarras | bringing tiples and guitars |
pa? cantar el sanjuanero. | to sing the sanjuanero. |
In festival contexts, where most spontaneous, unrehearsed bambuco dancing occurs, individual dancers interpret the national dance according to their own knowledge, preferences, and abilities: they may emphasize one step over another, or omit steps entirely. The order in which they perform steps is flexible.
Improvisation is permissible except in the context of a competition, the most prominent of which is the Festival Nacional del Bambuco, held in June in Neiva, the capital of the department of Huila. Such competitions may have saved the dance aspect of the genre from extinction, but they have frozen it: what was once a simple description of the characteristic steps has become a prescription that must be followed exactly. To earn maximal points from the judges, entrants must execute steps in the proper sequence and in the prescribed manner. They must wear folkloric costumes far costlier and more elegant than anything ever worn by any actual folk.
For the common people, the copla serves as the most eloquent mode of expression, especially when it has musical accompaniment. The term copla originally denoted the rhyming pairs of sixteen-syllable lines that made up the romance of Spanish balladry, dating from medieval times. In Colombia, the copla most commonly has four octosyllabic lines with the second and fourth rhyming assonantly (abcb). Improvisation
Sung in Colombia since the 1500s, coplas continue to serve in established Colombian folkloric genres. The original corpus of coplas, inherited from Iberian tradition, has grown exponentially and exhibits considerable regional variety. The study of the informal musical performance of coplas may be the most exciting field of musicological research in Colombia, as the practice is still widespread among the populace and has not become commercialized by professional performers or inhibited by institutionalization. The genres of the rajalen~a and the guabina appear to have the greatest potential for the further flowering of the art of singing coplas, at least until new forms emerge.
Rajalen~a
The inherent style of rajalen~a music, performed only in festival contextsin which reversals and the reconciliation of opposites are dominant themesvirtually reverses the folkloric style employed during secular times of the year. Harmonically, rhythmically, melodically, and textually, and in instrumentation, ensemble, and vocal style, the rajalen~a differs fundamentally from other local musical genres. The rhythm section's cross-rhythmic accompaniment, the vocal style, and the leader-chorus format are more typically African than Spanish. Melodic interest and vocal artistry are deemphasized, and the focus is the establishment of a context for the improvisation of coplas.
The term rajalen~a refers literally to the chopping or splitting of wood, but the colloquial interpretation is 'insulting or criticizing without concern for consequences'. The behavioral license of rajalen~a contexts permits and even encourages pornographic subject and language, and singers perform without the fear of resentment or retaliation. A few examples may be seen in the following lyrics:
Que nos gobiernen los godos | Let the conservatives govern, |
o mande el liberalismo; | or give liberalism the game; |
para tirarse a los pobres, | when it comes to screwing the poor, |
todos resultan lo mismo. | they all turn out the same. |
Todas las mujeres tienen | All women have |
en la barriga el ombligo | a button in their tummy, |
y maŽs abajito tienen | and a little bit lower, they have |
yo siŽ seŽ, pero no digo. | I know, but I'll play the dummy. |
żCuaŽndo seraŽ que estaremos | When will we be |
como los pies del Sen~or? | like the Lord's feet? |
uno encima del otro, | one on top of the other |
y un clavito entre los dos. | and a nail to make us meet. |
The social, psychological, and artistic aspects of the conceptualization and performance of rajalen~a is the subject of Gradante's (1991) doctoral dissertation.
Guabina
Another vocal genre, the guabina, has unclear origins. Three different forms share the name. In central and southern Colombia, composed guabinashumorous and lively as often as they ate melancholy love songs or regional tributesmake up a big portion of the repertoires of duetos bambuqueros. Though popular among musicians and
The guabina of the departments of Santander and BoyacaŽ has been described as a lyrical lament, coplas performed repetitively by laborers and travelers. Similar descriptions have been given of the torbellino, one species of which may be considered the instrumental counterpart of the guabina. The third and probably most vital guabina today is the guabina velen~a, named for the municipality of VeŽlez, Santander, nationally known for its guabina competition in August. With the rajalen~a, the guabina velen~a is one of the least commercialized forms of popular music in Colombia. Performed by nonprofessionals and absent from radio (except during the annual festival), it is relatively unknown outside the region. It may owe its survival to the festival rules committee, which strictly prescribes how it must be composed and performed; however, such rules serve to freeze the genre in its present form, restricting its ability to evolve naturally, requiring purity at the cost of vitality.
Performances of the guabina velen~a typically begin with an interlude plucked on one tiple while a second strums a chordal accompaniment. Percussion is provided ideally by a carraca, a zambumbia, a quiribillo, a pandareta (tambourine, usually without jingles), a guacharaca, and a chucho until the introduction is completed. Coplas, fixed or improvised, are then sung unaccompanieda trait that makes the guabina velen~a unique among Andean Colombian genres. After the first half of the copla has been rendered, the instrumental interlude is repeated, leading to the vocalist's completion of the copla. The melodic line is simple, almost modala trait that has led some observers to posit its origin in the plainsong taught to the region's inhabitants during the colonial era. As with the rajalen~a of the southern Andean region, informal, noncompetitive performances may last from a few moments to a few hours, depending on the endurance and improvisatory skills of the copleros. The excerpts of guabina texts presented in the following example are typical (Koorn 1975:224, 226):
Tan alta que va la luna | How high is the moon |
y un lucero la acompan~a. | accompanied by a star. |
Tan triste que queda un hombre | How sad is a man |
cuando una mujer lo engan~a. | when he is cheated by a woman. |
Ayer paseŽ por tu casa, | Yesterday I went by your house, |
te vide moliendo arepas; | and saw you grinding corn cakes; |
La risa me reventaba | I broke up with laughter |
de verte jondiar las tetas. | on seeing your tits jiggle. |
The second of these coplas is commonly performed in the rajalen~a of southern Colombia.
The pasillo, an adaptation of the Austrian waltz, was cultivated in Colombian bourgeois salons before Colombia became independent. It was known as the valse del paiŽs 'waltz of the country', the valse redondo bogotano 'the round waltz of BogotaŽ', the valse apresurado 'the hastened waltz', the capuclinada, the estroŽs 'Strauss', the varsoviana 'Warsaw thing'; and elsewhere in South America it had other names. A favorite among the elite classes, it was one of the few forms in which dancing couples embraced. Having gradually made its way into traditional culture, it exists in two forms, the romantic pasillo lento 'slow pasillo' and the pasillo instrumental 'instrumental pasillo', a faster version.
The slow pasillo (pasillo lento), like the Ecuadorian version, is known for its nostalgic, effusively romantic texts and its melancholic melodies. Its origin among the aristocracy is evident in the choice of verse forms, which shun the copla in favor of the longer lines typical of Spanish lyric poetry. Individual lines go beyond the standard eight syllables of the copla and may have from ten to fourteen syllables. Slow pasillos tend to be romantic songs reflecting idyllic love or bitter rejection by the fickle object of a suffering man's attentions. The liberal use of fermatas and evocative pauses comes from the bambuco, as has the custom of alternating instrumental interludes and vocal sections and sesquiaŽltera (see
Probably the most famous pasillo of the Colombian tradition is "Flores Negras" ('Black Flowers'), composed in 1903 by Julio FloŽrez (1867-1923) and considered a masterpiece of the golden age of Colombian popular song. Two passages from this piece illustrate the textual style.
Oye: bajo las ruinas de mis pasiones
y en el fondo de esta alma que ya no alegras,
entre polvo de ensuen~os y de ilusiones
brotan entumecidas mis flores negras.
Guarda, pues, este triste, deŽbil manojo
que te ofrezco de aquellas flores sombriŽas.
GuaŽrdalo, nada tcmas, que es un despojo
del jardiŽn de mis hondas melancoliŽas.
Listen: beneath the ruins of my passions
and in the depths of this soul you no longer gladden,
amid the dust of my dreams and fantasies,
my black flowers bloom benumbed.
Keep, then, this sad, frail bouquet
of those gloomy flowers that I offer you.
Keep it, do not fear, for it's the spoils
of the garden of my deep melancholy.
Like its slower counterpart, the instrumental pasillo is sectional: it usually has three sections, each in a contrasting tonal area, typically a closely related key such as the subdominant or the relative or parallel major or minor. Syncopated and often sequentially related melodies and alternation of duple and triple meters in the bandola melodies and the guitarra and tiple accompaniment are typical (see
A descendent of the waltz of the European tradition (
Pueblito de mis cuitas,
de casas pequen~itas,
por tus calles tranquilas
corrioŽ mi juventud.
En ti aprendiŽ a querer
por la primera vez,
y nunca me ensen~aste
lo que es la ingratitud.
Hamlet of my heartaches,
of tiny cottages,
through your tranquil streets
ran my youth.
With you I learned to love
for the first time,
and you never taught me
the meaning of ingratitude.
In the early 1800s, the habanera, related to the independence era's contradanza, an adaptation of the English contredanse, spread across the Caribbean to Colombia, where it became known as the danza. The danza is the only Andean Colombian popular-music form set in duple meter (
Structurally, the danza has two parts, the second frequently in the relative or parallel major of the (minor) key of the first. Like texts of pasillos, texts of danzas spring from the tradition of Spanish lyric poetry rather than that of the copla. The danza enjoyed its greatest popularity beginning around the close of the 1800s in the salons of the privileged classes, but it never rivaled the status of its contemporary the pasillo. Unlike the pasillo, it was never adopted by the common people but remained a symbol of the exclusivity of the colonial elite. Instrumental danzas are rare.
LuiŽs Duen~as Perilla's composition "Negrita," probably the most famous Colombian danza, remains a favorite serenade selection:
Negrita,
TuŽ viniste en la noche
de mi amargo penar.
TuŽ llegaste a mi vida
y borraste la herida
de mi pena letal.
La ilusioŽn de mi vida
es amarte, no maŽs:
implorarte el consuelo,
el calor y el ensuen~o
que jamaŽs pude hallar.
Dark-skinned girl,
You came in the night
of my bitter suffering.
You came into my life
and wiped away the wound
of my grievous heartache.
The revery of my life
is to love you, nothing more:
to beg of you the comfort,
the warmth, and the dreams
that I've never found before.
As in this excerpt, the danza is suitable for serenading, in which the romance and sentimentality of its lyrics are especially appreciated.
The joropo may be considered a close but more rhythmically complex relative of the bambuco or the sanjuanero. It is typical of the eastern plains and is only occasionally heard in the Andean highlands. Spanish influence in the musical aspect is strong and features frequent use of hemiolas and duple and ternary metric alternation. Copla form is prominent in the textual presentation of the joropo [for greater detail about the joropo, see VENEZUELA].
What may be called folkloric music (muŽsica folcloŽrica, also muŽsica tiŽpica 'typical music' and muŽsica colombiana 'Colombian music') began to evolve at the close of the 1800s in BogotaŽ. The setting was after hours in piqueteaderoscombination general stores and coffee houses, which became centers for informal congregation and the cultivation of a bohemian nightlife. Musicians there were young men, frequently with conservatory training, who spent their time teaching, performing religious music in churches, or singing in the chorus for visiting opera or zarzuela companies. They began to associate with the great poets Julio FloŽrez, CliŽmaco Soto Borda, Eduardo LoŽpez, Carlos Villafan~e, JoseŽ VelaŽsquez GarciŽa ("Julio Vives Guerra"), Rafael Pombo, and others. Together, these artistsdrinking, chatting, playing, singing, improvisinginspired and shared a new cultural milieu, which became known as the golden age of Colombian popular song. They collaborated in the creation of bambucos, pasillos, valses, danzas, and guabinas, which still serve as the foundation of traditional music performed in Colombia.
Pedro Morales Pino, the greatest bandola player in history, is remembered for the addition of a sixth course of strings to that instrument and for authoring method books for the guitar and the bandola. In 1890, he began transforming what had been an oral tradition into a written one, meticulously transcribing the melodies, rhythms, and texts of popular songs of his day. In 1898, he organized Colombia's first estudiantina, with which he toured the Andean region of Colombia, Central America, and the United States. Between 1901 and 1903, this ensemble performed in concert halls in New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago, Buffalo, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Their repertoire featured not only Colombian popular music but also classical music, including pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and pieces by Colombian composers. Reorganized and expanded, this estudiantina later toured the South American continent.
Morales Pino was an extraordinary arranger of classical music for estudiantina and is credited with more than a hundred compositions of his own, including orchestral works, in which he employed folkloric materials and nationalistic themes. His most famous popular songs include "Cuatro Preguntas" ('Four Questions'), a bambuco, words by Eduardo LoŽpez; "Triguen~a" ('Woman with Wheat-Colored Skin'), a bambuco; and "Onda Fugaz" ('Fleeting Ripple') and "DivagacioŽn" ('Melancholy Musings'), both danzas with words by Carlos Villafan~e. Few educators can claim as impressive a group of students as those he nurtured at the Academia Nacional: Emilio Murillo, Alejandro Wills, LuiŽs A. Calvo, Fulgencio GarciŽa, and Carlos Escamilla.
Emilio Murillo (1880-1942), founder and director of the famous Estudiantina Murillo, was a prolific composer of popular songs, the most famous of which were "El Trapiche" ('The Sugar Mill'), a bambuco, words by Ismael Enrique Arciniegas; "Fiebres" ('Fevers'), a cancioŽn, words by Julio FloŽrez; and "Hondos Pesares" ('Deep Sorrows'), a bambuco, words by Julio FloŽrez. Searching for authentic Colombian musical lore, he engaged in extensive fieldwork, and in 1929, with Alejandro Wills,
JeroŽnimo Velasco, and Alberto Escobar, he traveled to Spain to represent Colombia in the Seville Exposition.
The golden age of Colombian popular song began with the emergence of vocal duets. Alejandro Wills (d. 1942) and Alberto Escobar (d. 1934) were the most popular musical duo in Colombian history. A guitarist and vocalist in Morales Pino's Lira Colombiana and the Estudiantina Murillo, Wills was an acclaimed composer and performer of popular music for some thirty years. Some of his best-loved works are "Beso Robado" ('Stolen Kiss'), a bambuco, 1930; "El Boga" ('The Oarsman'), a bambuco, words by Nicanor VelaŽsquez Ortiz; and "Los Arrayanes" ('The Myrtles'), a danza, words by Julio Vives Guerra. In 1915 his two danzas, "Riberen~a" ('The Woman Who Lives by the River'), words by CliŽmaco Soto Borda, and "Sumercesita Linda," words by Carlos Villafan~e, achieved enormous success, and with "Caramba" (a cupleŽ, 1916), Wills became the leading Colombian popular-music composer of his day. Beginning in 1918, the duo Wills y Escobar toured Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and New York, where Wills created a sensation by performing on a carpenter's saw. While in New York, the duo made some of the earliest recordings of Colombian musicwith the Victor Company.
LuiŽs A. Calvo (1882-1945) was a prolific composer of religious music and orchestral pieces. Among his more successful popular music efforts are "Serenata," a cancioŽn; "Gitana," a danza; and "El Republicano" ('The Republican'), an instrumental bambuco. Fulgencio GarciŽa (1880-1945), an extraordinary bandola player, composed several pieces of the bandola virtuoso repertoire, including the pasillos "Coqueteos" ('Bandola Riffs'), "Vino Tinto" ('Red Wine'), and "La Gata Golosa" ('The Sweet-Toothed [Greedy] Cat'), all composed in 1912. The last, originally named "Soacha," was renamed for Gaite Galoise (French Gaiety), a piqueteadero frequented by GarciŽa. Patrons jokingly turned its name into Gata Golosa. The name stuck, not only to the establishment, but to this pasillo.
Carlos "El Ciego" ('The Blind') Escamilla is remembered as Colombia's greatest tiple player. A member of the first and second incarnations of the Lira Colombiana, he composed several still-popular pieces, among which figure the pasillos "NeneŽ" ('Baby'), "ColoŽn" (possibly named after the Teatro ColoŽn in BogotaŽ, where the group played), "13 de Marzo" ('Thirteenth of March'), and "Brisas del Amaime."
Any survey of prominent composers of Colombian popular music must include Alberto Castilla (1883-1938), the founder of the IbagueŽ Conservatory and author of "Bunde Tolimense" ('Bunde of Tolima'), a bunde, words by CesaŽreo Rocha Castilla; and "Rondinela" (named after a popular piqueteadero), a pasillo, 1916. Others worthy of inclusion are JoseŽ A. Morales, author of "Pescador, Lucero y RiŽo" ('Fisherman, Star, and River'), a pasillo; "MariŽa Antonia," a bambuco; and "Yo TambieŽn Tuve Veinte An~os" ('I, Too, Was Once Twenty Years Old'), a bambuco; and Carlos Vieco, composer of "Hacia el Calvario" ('Toward Calvary'), a pasillo comparing Christ's walk to Calvary with an orphan's suffering, words by Pablo Restrepo L.; "AdioŽs Casita Blanca" ('Goodbye, Little White House'), a pasillo, words by Padre Villarraga; and "Campesina" ('Peasant Girl'), a bambuco, words by Eladio Espinosa. Jorge Villamil Cordovez has had enormous success since the 1960s, supplying contemporary duetos bambuqueros with "Espumas" ('River Bubbles'), a pasillo; "Oropel" ('Fool's Gold'), a vals; "Los Guaduales" ('Bamboo Grove'), a guabina; "Llamarada" ('Flames'), a vals; and others, several of which have been recorded in various styles throughout Latin America. Ignacio "Papi" Tovar, Jorge Camargo, and Rodrigo Silva have also made their marks on contemporary Colombian popular-music history.
With the rise of the dueto bambuquero, Colombian traditional music first came to be performed by musicians with conservatory training. Performances moved from the countryside and the city's back streets into theaters and salons. Musicians discarded
Jorge An~ez was a member of the second Lira Colombiana, the duet Bricen~o y An~ez, and the Estudiantina An~ez and composed popular songs, including the bambucos "Los Cucaracheros," "AgaŽchate el Sombrerito ('Put the Brim of Your Hat Down Lower'), and "Ibagueren~a" ('Girl from IbageŽ'), words by Eduardo LoŽpez. An~ez's quartet, the South American Troubadours, consisted of two Colombians, a Mexican, and a Panamanian opera singer and featured a pan-Hispanic repertoire. Whereas in the 1800s Europe had been the ideal destination for aspiring Colombian musicians, the recording studios of New York now began to claim their attention. In the 1910s, the first recordings of Colombian music were made in New York and Mexico City.
In his memoirs (1970 [1951]) An~ez shares his insider's perspective on Colombian popular music during its golden age. He toured extensively in North and Central America and spent years in New York recording Colombian popular songs for Aeolian, Brunswick, Columbia, Victor, and other companies. In 1933, when he returned to BogotaŽ, he was bitterly disappointed to discover that the golden age was only a memory. The veteran musicians had died, and the piqueteaderos and bohemian atmosphere were gone.
The evangelization of the indigenous peoples of Colombia was helped by instruction in European music. Father JoseŽ Dadey (1574-1660) founded musical education in Colombia. A Jesuit priest who came from Milan in 1604, he established the Colegio Seminario de San BartolomeŽ, which instructed indigenous people in religion and music, including reading, writing, singing, and organ playing. He ordered violins, harps, chirimiŽas (single-reed aerophones), and flutes brought from Spain, and established the organ-building tradition in the BogotaŽ area.
The 1800s saw new beginnings in Colombia, then rebelling from Spain and struggling to create an identity of its own, politically and culturally. Two of the most important figures in this period were Juan Antonio de Velasco (d. 1859) and NicolaŽs Quevedo Rachadell (1803-1874), who introduced German and Italian music to BogotaŽ audiences. The first Spanish comic operas (tonadillas) had been presented in BogotaŽ in 1783. Their director, the composer Pedro Carricarte, established the first state-sponsored band in Colombia, La Banda de la Corona, in 1784.
By the mid-1800s, troupes of musicians primarily from Italy and Spain were doing their best to bring the Colombian privileged classes up to date with the latest European artistic trends. The first operatic selections in Colombia were presented in 1849. A twenty-eight-year-old tenor, Oreste Sindici, arrived in 1864 with an Italian opera company. Like others before him, he remained in BogotaŽ after his contract
Throughout the 1800s, the center of national musical activity remained in BogotaŽ. The piano became the instrument of choice for study, particularly by young ladies. By 1850, more than two thousand pianos were in the cityone for every fifteen people. Music-sponsoring organizations that focused the efforts of a growing nucleus of composers, performers, and consumers in the capital included the Sociedad LiŽrica (1848), founded by JoseŽ JoaquiŽn GuariŽn (1825-1854), pianist, composer and teacher; the UnioŽn Musical (1858), founded by the composer Manuel MariŽa PaŽrraga; and the Sociedad FilarmoŽnica de Santa Cecilia (1868), founded by Pedro Vesoni. The English-born pianist and composer Enrique Price (1819-1863) founded the most important of these, the Sociedad FilarmoŽnica de BogotaŽ, the basis on which all subsequent musical organizations in Colombia have been built. In 1847, he attached to it a professional school of music, the first in Colombia. With Rafael Pombo, his son Jorge W. Price (1853-1953) revived the Sociedad FilarmoŽnica in 1875 and with state funding in 1882 opened the Academia Nacional de MuŽsica.
In 1888, the Colombian government contracted the Italian-born Manuel Conti to develop state bands, and by 1890 he had established the first musical-supply store in Colombia. It sold instruments, sheet music, and related items. The military bands he organized formed the basis for the Banda Nacional de BogotaŽ, which became the Orquesta SinfoŽnica Nacional (National Symphony Orchestra). In 1910, the Academia Nacional de MuŽsica was officially renamed Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica, under the directorship of Guillermo Uribe HolguiŽn (1880-1971), who attached what is currently the Orquesta SinfoŽnica Nacional to it. The most influential composer of his generation, Uribe HolguiŽn incorporated impressionistic, modernistic, and sometimes polytonal influences into his symphonic and piano works, many of which are clearly nationalistic, incorporating native rhythmic and melodic patterns, especially the pasillo, the bambuco, and less frequently the joropo. In 1936, Guillermo Espinosa (b. 1905) was appointed first director of the Orquesta SinfoŽnica Nacional. In his position as chief of the music division of the Pan American Union, he organized the Inter-American Music Festivals in Washington, D. C., promoting new works by Latin American composers.
Establishing nationwide musical training has been consistently difficult in Colombia because of a chronic lack of economic and political stability, further hampered by the failure of a sophisticated cultural ambience to materialize in the capital, where young students would be exposed to the highest caliber of international music production. All Colombian musicians of renown received their training at the national conservatory but continued their studies in Europe, many in Paris under the tutelage of Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. Most returned to teach at the conservatory, in some cases assuming the directorship of the institution or founding similar centers in provincial capitals.
Another early nationalistic composer was JoseŽ MariŽa Ponce de LeoŽn (1846-1882), who composed zarzuelas, mazurkas, bambucos, pasillos, and valses, plus overtures and religious music. A forerunner of Colombian musical nationalism, he showed in his orchestral works the influence of Colombian folk dances. He composed the only two operas produced in Colombia in the 1800s: Ester (1874) and Florinda (1880), their librettos written by the poet Rafael Pombo.
AndreŽs MartiŽnez Montoya (1869-1933), a composer and one of the great pianists and piano teachers of his time, was director of the Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica for many years and wrote a history of Colombian music. Santos Cifuentes (1870-1932), a composer, wrote texts on aesthetics and music theory that were adopted by the national conservatories of Colombia, Chile, and Mexico.
Antonio MariŽa Valencia (1902-1952) founded the Conservatory and School of Fine Arts at Cali in 1933, and introduced Colombia to modern European piano literature. In many compositions, he utilized impressionist techniques to incorporate nationalistic themes, including bambucos, pasillos, and cumbias [see AFROCOLOMBIAN TRADITIONS]. In Colombian musicology, his former student and biographer, AndreŽs Pardo Tovar, is a key figure in his own right as the author of a series of articles entitled Cultura Musical en Colombia (1966) and for his other writings on music (1958).
Scholars in this field include composer Emirto de Lima (b. 1892), author of a treatise on Colombian folklore; Daniel G. Zamudio (1885-1952), noted composer, folklorist, and author of El Folklore Musical de Colombia (1950); and Guillermo AbadiŽa Morales, the late director or the folklore and ethnomusicology program at the Universidad Nacional in BogotaŽ and author of many publications on Colombian music.
Scientifically researched, analytically oriented, and systematically presented ethnomusicological studies of any part of Andean Colombia are rare, in English or Spanish. Koorn's (1977) doctoral dissertation provides an analysis of Andean folk-musical culture, with particular attention to the northeastern highlands of the department of Santander. It includes description of musical instruments and a good, concise discussion of Spanish poetics in his treatment of the copla.
The literature on the folk-musical traditions of the Colombian Andes consists mostly of descriptive, outdated accounts of widely varying quality. Such studies are seldom analytical and rarely discuss associated human behaviors. Information concerning folk-musical instruments, associated masks, costumes, or dances tends to be included as briefly treated subtopics or genres within the context of larger compendia. Little emphasis has been placed on the study of folk music as a cultural expression or the projection of local identity within the context of folkloric performance.
Systematic analyses of the copla, the most important popular versifying in Andean Colombian folk-musical performance, are rare. Studies of coplas tend to take the form of collections, with little or no attention paid to the copleros and their roles as artistic creators and disseminators. Gradante's doctoral dissertation is a detailed analysis of the role of coplas and the musicians who create and perform them.
For insiders' accounts of the golden age of the Colombian popular song, the contributions by An~ez (1970 [1951]) and Restrepo Duque (1971) are excellent. Davidson's three-volume collection is a treasury of resources for the study of Colombian musical folklore. BeŽhague's chapter on Colombia (1979) is a concise evaluation of the history of art music in Colombia. The folklorist AbadiŽa's offering deals with Colombian mestizo, Afro-Colombian, and indigenous musical traditions in all regions of the country. Perdomo Escobar's work examines music in Colombian life from prehistoric times to the twentieth century and includes a glossary and an extensive bibliography. Pin~eros Corpas (n.d.) is a good collection of recordings of African-Colombian and Andean Colombian music.
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Afro-Colombian Popular Music
Mediated and Live Performance
Further Study
During the past five centuries, African peoples and their descendants have contributed significantly to the development of music and culture in Colombia. From the beginning of Spanish colonization, they have blended their own music and musical practices with European and Amerindian influences, forming a rich and variegated musical tapestry. The specific ethnic origins of Colombian music are often blurred and complex because the process of mestizaje (the racial intermixing of European, Amerindian, and African peoples) began hybridizing cultural forms early on. As a result, few or no extant musical forms in Colombia are purely African; conversely, only a small portion of Colombian music has not been affected by African culture.
Africans were present from the beginning of Spanish exploration. They accompanied Pizarro on his expedition to the Pacific in 1526, and their numbers in Nueva Granada grew rapidly because of the demand for labor (Whitten 1968:1). An estimated one million enslaved Africans from as many as thirty-eight cultures passed through Cartagena, settling first in the Atlantic littoralla Costathen spreading to the Pacific coast as slaves were needed to work in the gold mines (List 1967:116). Though miscegenation created a triethnic population, mestizaje did not occur uniformly throughout Colombia, and the regional patterns of ethnic distribution established during the colonial period persist, with the highest concentration of Africans occurring on the two coasts and along the Cauca and Magdalena river valleys.
During the colonial period, Spanish influences were strongest in shaping the national character, including the arts. European musical forms including the copla, the contradanza, and the fandango and European musical instruments were brought to Colombia and blended with African and indigenous elements. Concurrently, as a result of social, economic, and religious factors, African culture developed in other regions with varying degrees of independence. For the slaves, Roman Catholic missionaries established cabildos, modeled after the cofradiŽas in Spain but organized ostensibly by tribal origins, as places for religious conversion. In several areas, slaves rebelled and fled into the jungle, establishing independent communities. Havens for people of West African tribal origins, these communities often became microcosmic reconstructions of pan-African society and cultural practices.
Evolving economic and social patterns affected the distribution of blacks and the
The rising tide of nationalism that culminated in Colombia's independence (1819) sought ostensibly to break the influence of Spain on the national character; nevertheless, Colombian development continued to be guided by Western models of economic success. Though Colombia has one of the longest traditions of democratic rule in Latin America, partisan power struggles led to some of the bloodiest civil wars in the hemisphere. Behind the rhetoric of national unity, the white-mestizo political and social hegemony succeeded in maintaining class structures divided along racial lines. Many blacks chose to deny their African heritage in the collective search for upward mobility, which they associated with lighter shades of skin color. African-derived musics were ignored in Colombia's cultural mainstream; as a result, the most noticeably African-derived musical traditions persisted in marginalized communities. The vocal style of black Colombian music uses melodies and/or texts that originated in Europe, but African-derived traits predominate, including call-and-response singing, overlapping phrases, disjunct rhythmic cycles in phrasing, offbeat accents between text and melody, and the use of vocables and gritos (shouts of emotional expression). African influences are detectable on some music by the vocal tone quality. Especially noticeable, however, are African influences in musical instruments.
An organological overview of Afro-Colombian music shows that most instruments were developed from African sources, often blending with European or Amerindian influences.
Idiophones
Idiophones are the most numerous and diversified instruments in Afro-Colombian music. Tube rattles of native American origin, called guasaŽ and guacho in the Pacific and Atlantic (Caribbean) areas, respectively, are constructed from sections of hollow bamboo, wood, or metal tubing and filled with seeds or pebbles. The main difference between the two is that the shell of the guacho is pierced with holes into which thorns or nails are thrust internally, altering the timbre. Though of Amerindian origin, maracas are used in many ensembles that perform African-derived music. The guacharaca is a scraper made of wooden tubing with notches cut into it and rubbed with a wire fork. Palmetas are wooden spatulas struck together to augment handclapping or substitute for it. The mariŽmbula, a large member of the mbira family, consists of a wooden box and seven or more tuned metal keys, which are plucked. It is used in the Atlantic and Pacific coastal areas to provide bass accompaniment in some ensembles. It is believed to have been brought to Colombia from Africa via Cuba early in the twentieth century (List 1983:27).
Another tuned idiophone commonly used in Afro-Colombian traditional music is the marimba of the Pacific littoral. Black libres began constructing marimbas as early as the 1500s, based on principles brought from West Africa. The keys are cut
Membranophones
Membranophones are the most prominent instruments used in Afro-Colombian music. In construction and performance, they bear a strong resemblance to their West African counterparts. The tambor mayor 'large drum' (also called tambor macho 'male drum') is a single-headed conical drum made from the trunk of a tree. The head, laced on and tuned with wooden wedges, is struck with the hands; the drum is sometimes lifted off the ground to change the tone. The tambor menor 'small drum' (tambor hembra 'female drum', llamador 'caller') is constructed and played in the same manner, though its musical role within an ensemble is different.
A third drum found in a typical coastal ensemble is the bombo, perhaps a hybrid of Spanish, Indian, and/or African influences. Barrel-shaped or cylindrical and double-headed, it is played with sticks on both heads and on the shell. In the Pacific coastal area, another conical drum called cununo is usually played in pairs (cununo mayor 'large' and cununo menor 'small'). Though the cununo and the tambor are similar in many respects, the primary difference between them is that the former is closed at the bottom except for a small hole.
Chordophone
The only chordophone of distinctly African origin in Colombia is the one-stringed musical bow, which may no longer be in use. Known as marimba in Palenque de San Basilio (a village near the Atlantic coast), it is played by striking the string with a thin stick and alternately stopping it with a piece of wood (List 1966). This produces two fundamental tones, amplified by the player's mouth, which serves as a resonator.
Aerophones
Two aerophones are commonly used in the African-derived genres of the Atlantic coast. The can~a de millo (also called pito) is an idioglottal transverse clarinet used primarily in the cumbia. Possibly of Amerindian and African origin, it is made from cane or millet, and has four holes, played with the flats of the fingers, over a range of about a fifth.
A vertical duct flute (gaita) is probably of native American origin [see KOGI]. It is constructed from a hollowed-out section of cactus stalk, with a quill duct and a duct-encasing head made of beeswax and charcoal. Gaitas are usually played in pairs. The female instrument (gaita hembra) has five or six holes and is used for the melody, while the male instrument (gaita macho), having only one or two holes, plays accompaniment (see BermuŽdez n.d.).
European instruments
European instruments have been incorporated into many black genres of music in Colombia. The button accordion, originally from Germany, has been used in different folkloric genres, but it primarily became identified as the signature instrument of vallenato (see below). The clarinet has been part of several brass-band traditions, including the chirimiŽa; however, the clarinet's main use in Colombia has been in
The settings in which African-derived music is performed in Colombia are almost as varied as the people themselves. Most musical contexts can be classified as religious, recreational, or related to labor, though some categories overlap. Colombians? localized and situationally determined perceptions of contexts and styles create a complex and somewhat ambiguous body of terms that may have multiple meanings. Furthermore, African influences in Colombia have become manifest in various ways. Blacks reconstructed or invented new forms and styles in response to whatever local conditions were present, often incorporating into their music European and Indian elements and new Africanisms brought by recent immigrants.
Religious contexts
Some of the oldest contexts with the longest traditions have evolved from religious practices. In many areas, Roman Catholicism became syncretized with West African religions, affecting the contexts and practices of black music in Colombia. In most of Colombia, festivals honoring Christian saints are organized locally on particular dates and are some of the prime musical occasions. These are religious festivals, but music, dance, celebration, and alcohol are frequently inseparable parts of them. Ritual sacrifices, spirit possession, symbolic choreography, initiatory rites, and group participation in religious observances are African-derived traits, whereas the use of the Bible, European melodies, the names of certain saints, and the burning of candles are Christian traits. By European standards, local distinctions between the sacred and the profane were obscured by the syncretism of African and European values, often bringing the disdain of priests and politicians.
In addition to the primary Christian holidays, most towns have a special festival in honor of the local patron saint. These festivals may last up to two weeks and are usually the largest community function of the year. While religious observances are occurring, the primary activities center on music, dance, and celebration; furthermore, these festivals may become vehicles for social and political commentary through lyrics, costumes, and dramatic scenes during parades. Music varies regionally, ranging from arrullos, a kind of religious praise song performed on the Pacific coast by a women's chorus in call-and-response manner, to brass bands playing porros and cumbias in the northeast. During the Advent and Christmas season, people perform special songs including fugas 'flights' and alavados 'hymns', incorporating European melodies and texts plus African-derived vocal and rhythmic techniques.
Wakes for the dead and funerals are another important religious context for African-derived music. Though practices vary among blacks in Colombia, the concern for the dead, use of funerary rites, and incorporation of music are generally derived from African ancestor-cult traditions. The wake for a small child (velorio del angelito) is a common practice on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Because people believe the child's soul goes directly to heaven, the music and the occasion are celebratory. In the Atlantic area, the velorio is usually held in the parents' home; relatives, friends, and people from the community attend. Music is provided by a specialized chorus of singers in leader-and-chorus refrain style, while the others sing and dance in a circle around the corpse. In the Pacific area, this wake also takes place in the family's
The use of music in wakes for adults varies throughout Colombia. In the Atlantic area, music for these occasions occurs only in Palenque de San Basilio, where traditional funerary music (lumaluŽ) is performed by professional musiciansusually a chorus of female singers with two drummers playing a large drum and a small drum. A musical prelude signals the mourners to enter. The women sing, dance, clap their hands, and interject African vocables. In the Pacific area, the wake for an adult is a more solemn occasion: the attendance is more exclusive, there is no drumming, and everyone sings dirges. In both areas, the novenaria (uŽltima novena) is celebrated at the conclusion of the mourning period, usually nine days, to send the deceased's spirit to heaven. These rites were traditionally carried out in the community, but because authorities frowned on delayed interment, their practice has continued in secrecy. The bunde, once a generic term for African dancing, now denotes a kind of song primarily in funerary use. The rhythm is provided by cununos, bombos, and a guasaŽ; the texts, usually praising a saint, are sung responsorially. The drums are believed to have magical powers to influence the spirits.
Recreational contexts
Another large category of musical contexts falls under the broad rubric of recreation. In many recreational functions, music and dance are closely associated, just as they are in religious functions. In the Pacific area, the currulao is danced at the local marimba house (casa de la marimba, where the instrument is kept). The currulao is believed to have originated in a seventeenth-century dance that may have been diffused from Cartagena, through the interior to the Pacific coast, by the migration of slaves (Wade 1993:275; Zapata 1967:94). The ensemble that performs the currulao (
At least thirty distinct currulao melodies (bordones) can be combined with nine different rhythms, including the bambuco, the agua larga, the fuga, the patacoreŽ (a rapid, complex rhythm), and others. The choreography and texts symbolize relationships
Carnival is celebrated before Lent in Colombia as it is throughout Latin America. Though it is based on the Christian calendar, the church considers it secular or pagan, but in practice its celebration has many traits of Roman Catholic festivals. The danza de negros congos during carnival in Barranquilla, which features blacks parading in traditional African dress, probably originated from the cabildos in that area (Wade 1994:89). In Evitar, near Palenque de San Basilio, the danza de negros is performed by men who strip to the waist, paint themselves blue, and engage in a mock-battle with Indians, whom they defeat. The term danza de negro may also refer to a particular musical style, usually involving at least a male solo vocalist, a tambor, a llamador, and palmetas. Other styles played during the danza de negro include the garabato, created during the 1940s, and the mapaleŽ, a distinctly African form. Accounts from the 1700s emphasized the fast rhythm and "frantic" drumming of the mapaleŽ and the erotic nature of the choreography (Wade 1993: 89-90).
The bullerengue (also known as tambor or chandeŽ) may have originated in African puberty rites (Zapata 1967:93). It has become a common musical form with many uses along the Caribbean (Atlantic) coast. It frequently occurs at the beginning
Music and dance occur on many informal, social occasions that do not necessarily mark a special festival or holiday. The cumbia is one of the most popular and widely diffused forms of African-derived music originating in la Costa. The name of the genre derives from the West African cumbe dance, and the genre itself may have appeared as early as the 1700s. Traditionally during the cumbia, dancers carried bundles of candles and circled around the musicians. The instrumentation of the conjunto de cumbia consists of three drums (tambor, llamador, bombo ), shakers (guachos), and a pito or a gaita, which plays the melody (
Complex polyrhythms and interplay between the drums, with a moderately fast tempo and melodic repetition, characterize the cumbia. In ensemble use, the llamador has the simplest part (marking time), the bombo plays a characteristic ostinato pattern, and the tambor improvises intricate counterrhythms. This trio forms the nucleus of the traditional conjunto de cumbia, but these drums are used in many other styles. The porro, a faster, more rhythmically regular style, may have developed from the cumbia (
The eclecticism of life in la Costa has produced music that, though associated with black culture, may come from diverse origins. The fandango is of Spanish origin, but the term has several meanings: it can denote a place where festivities occur, or a musical style used to accompany two kinds or dance (Zapata 1967:94). One is a dance in a circle, similar to the cumbia, and the other is a processional dance that commences nearly all carnivals. There is no set instrumentation: the conjunto de pito,
The chirimiŽa band is believed to have originated in ChocoŽ Province, northwest Colombia (Pacific coast). In its earlier forms, its instruments included bombo, cununo, brass instruments, and cymbals, playing European genres such as the contradanza and the fandango. The chirimiŽa is an example of European instruments and genres being adapted to local, African-derived performance, evident in the rhythmic style of the drums. ChirimiŽa groups have expanded and spread throughout Colombia. They usually perform outdoors at parades and festivals. Common genres adapted by them are the jota, the bambuco, and the porro.
Vallenato emerged early in the twentieth century in northeast Colombia, influenced by work-related songs (zafras) and the Spanish romance. The term vallenato referred to a trioaccordion, caja (small, single-headed drum), and stick rasp (guacharaca) that performed merengues and paseos (
Another source of diversion through music is the performance of songs of praise or derision. Traditionally, deŽcimas are a strictly vocal form of ten lines, whose melodies and verses derive from the European copla. The vocal style and lack of synchronization between accent and text indicate an African influence. Usually, two decimeros compete in a display of musical skill that includes adherence to strict musical formulas and ingenuity at incorporating texts that alternately praise themselves and deride their opponents. The audience helps determine the outcome of the competition and may even become the subject of the coplas.
Zafras appear to have been common among blacks in the Atlantic coastal area. They consist of coplas sung by a farmer for his or her own amusement, with texts usually based on humorous or philosophical topics. VaqueriŽas are songs used by cattle herders to quiet the animals and communicate among themselves. Children's game-playing songs and lullabies, called arrullos (not the same genre as on the Pacific
The music of the interior is generally more European in character, but traces of Africanisms have diffused into it from the coastal areas, earlier by migration of blacks and later through technological means. Throughout Colombia since the 1800s, the bambuco (not the same as with the currulao) has been a popular genre and a source of national pride [see COLOMBIA]. Though the melodies are distinctly European and the compound sesquiaŽltera pattern, combining 6/8 and 3/4, recalls "colonial rhythm" (Olsen 1980:392), the disjunct placement of rhythmic cycles and offbeat accents seem to be African traits.
Modern Colombia has been shaped by many of the processes affecting other developing nations, including urbanization, technological advancement, and political and social unrest. As blacks have migrated to the cities, African-derived forms have been diffused into mainstream culture or sometimes abandoned in favor of more modern forms. The availability of technology, especially radio and sound recordings, has hastened the processes of acculturation and diffusion. Some traditional black musics such as cumbia and vallenato have spread far beyond their local roots and have affected national and international styles. Conversely, black populations, even in some remote areas, are exposed to an increasing variety of outside music. They incorporate these influences in their own styles, often bringing in other African-derived music, including that from Cuba (son), Jamaica (reggae), and Nigeria (ju`juŽ), and music from Europe and the United States.
In the late twentieth century, the violence traditionally associated with the instability of Colombia's political system was exacerbated by increased factionalism. Leftist guerrilla groups, exporters of illicit drugs, and right-wing paramilitary troops undermine hopes for democracy, as struggles for power often end in bloodshed. Efforts for black political solidarity and preservation of black cultural identity were reflected in the constitution of 1991, which provided for the protection of cultural identity of ethnic groups, but basic issues of human rights have taken precedence for most Colombians. Despite these problems, Afro-Colombian musics are being increasingly accepted into the Colombian mainstream, especially by younger people. As an avenue for defining social identity and expressing protest, music provides a safer outlet than political activism. An emerging sense of black identity is being negotiated and defined through the re-Africanization of Colombian pop music and cultural borrowing of other black musics.
Historically, cumbia and vallenato are the two most popular styles that have evolved out of the traditional music of Colombia. Cumbia began appearing in the coastal towns in the 1920s, and by the 1930s it had spread to the interior. As it attracted a more sophisticated (that is, mestizo) audience, it lost much of its polyrhythmic vigor, gradually developing a four-beat, loping rhythm. Costen~o bands that played cumbia, such as Los Corraleros de Majagual, added brass, electric bass, and occasionally accordion, but the clarinet became the most popular melody instrument for the commercial style. By the 1960s, cumbia was the nonpareil music of Colombia; it was standard fare at any dance or fiesta, and it took on the air of a national music.
As cumbia gradually went out of style in Colombia during the 1970s, it gained popularity elsewhere, spreading through Central America to Mexico and into Tex-
When salsa emerged as a style in the 1970s, it rapidly displaced cumbia as the most popular style in Colombia. Though it had originated in New York and Puerto Rico, many Colombians adopted it as their own music. Many Colombian artists had successful careers in the salsa market, at home and abroad. Over time, many recordings followed the proven formulas of the salsa industry, yet some Colombian artists, such as Jairo Varela y Grupo Niche (from MedelliŽn), have used salsa as a vehicle for expressing their black musical and cultural identity. The black Colombian salsa star Joe Arroyo (1992, 1993a, 1993b) has gained popularity by incorporating African-derived musics into the salsa idiom. Considered one of the most innovative and exciting composer-performers in Colombia and abroad, he has fused cumbia, merengue, and salsa with music of the French and English Caribbean into vibrant new forms.
When vallenato spread from its rural context into the cities, its rhythms got simpler and other instrumentsbass, guitar, conga, cowbelljoined the accordion-drum-scraper trio, modernizing the sound of the ensemble. By the 1980s, vallenato superseded salsa as the preferred music among blacks throughout much of Colombia. Vallenato groups developed a rhythmic intensity, exciting basses, and virtuosic displays on the accordion by artists such as Alejo DuraŽn, but the main focus remained on lyrics, whose subjects ranged from sentimental ballads to political protest and praise of wealthy patrons. Sensationalism probably exaggerates the influence of Colombian drug money on promoting vallenato, since its popularity transcended many social sectors. It is now commercially exported to audiences outside Colombia in various formsthe more traditional style, versions that include salsa brass arrangements, and a new style called charanga-vallenato.
Outside influences
Along the Atlantic coast, particularly in Cartagena and Barranquilla, other African-derived music began to be imported, perhaps as early as the 1960s. By the 1970s, recordings of African-derived popular music were being appropriated and recontex-tualized by local DJs as symbols of an emerging black identity. Caribbean styles such as soca, merengue, reggae, and Haitian music have a strong appeal to black communities as do African ju`juŽ and soukous. The Colombian middle class originally referred to this style by the pejorative term muŽsica champeta (meaning something crude), but gradually a broad range of younger audiences began calling African-derived musics therapy music (muŽsica terapiŽa), a way to feel good (Pacini 1993a). Colombian artists have responded to this demand by creating local styles from various sources, such as cariben~os (zouk and salsa), cumbiamberos (cumbia and son), and reggaespan~ol (hiphop or dance-hall reggae with Spanish lyrics). The revolutionary lyrics of Fela Anikulapo Kuti (of Nigeria) and Bob Marley (of Jamaica) have inspired a movement toward messages of black identity and resistance in popular Afro-Colombian lyrics. These contemporary styles became even more popular among blacks as older music was appropriated by the mainstream, mestizo population.
Technology, particularly the media and recordings, has had the biggest impact on musical contexts in Colombia. Discos Fuentes was the first Colombian recording company to promote national artists abroad, but current European and American appetites for exotic music have encouraged an ever greater market for Colombian musicians, many of whom receive distribution through major international labels, including Sony, Virgin, and Mango records. At the other end of the spectrum, cassette piracy supplies many of Colombia's poorer peoples with cheap copies of local and international pop musics. Beginning in the 1950s, DJs with mobile sound systems (picoŽs) began playing a variety of music catering to black costen~os and by the 1970s had become an important factor in disseminating African-derived music. For local dances, DJs often featured unauthorized recordings of soukous and other Afro-Pop musics on powerful and elaborately decorated picoŽs. In response to changing social conditions, the context for picoŽ performances gradually changed from family parties in private homes to hired engagements for dances held in temporary structures called casetas 'cottages' (Pacini 1993b).
Music festivals sponsored by private companies or by the government have appeared throughout Colombia, providing exposure for artists and venues for a variety of styles. The popularity of vallenato spawned several festivals or competitions, some sponsored by record companies such as the one in San Pelayo, or state events such as the Valledupar Fiesta de Vallenato, held each spring. The winner of the competition is decided on the basis of musical talent and the singer's cleverness at devising musical texts. African-derived folkloric music of Colombia is being performed by groups such as La Negra Grande de Colombia at festivals, with lesser-known gaitero and pitero ensembles. The Festival de MuŽsica del Caribe, founded in Cartagena in 1983, has grown to include major Caribbean and African artists representing many different styles. The Green Moon Festival, another festival emphasizing musics of common African heritage, began in 1987 on the Colombian island of San AndreŽs.
Besides mass media, recordings, and festivals, several contexts have evolved to incorporate music and/or dance. Beginning in the 1960s, bailaderos were established in private homes; these operate primarily on weekends and holidays, serving food, alcohol, and music for dancing, usually from a stereo system. As a focal point for urban black culture, the bailaderos were defined largely by the music played there. In the 1980s, vallenato music was featured exclusively at the bailaderos as an emblem of black community at a time when it was not accepted by mestizo culture (Wade 1993). Salsa or vallenato bars cater to a mixed, though primarily black clientele, and feature music and alcoholbut no dancing because it interferes with liquor sales. A venue that includes music and dancing is the discoteca, modeled after discos in Europe and the United States. Discotecas are usually elaborately decorated with lights and sound systems. Though patronized mostly by mestizos, they play salsa, vallenato, and other Latin, Caribbean, and American styles.
The primary ethnomusicological studies of the Colombian coastal areas were conducted during the 1960s by Norman E. Whitten Jr. on the Pacific coast, which historically includes coastal Ecuador and Colombia as a contiguous culture area (n.d., 1965, 1967, 1968, 1974; Whitten and Contreras 1966), and George List on the Atlantic coast (1966, 1967, 1973, 1980, 1983). Important studies of contemporary Colombian coastal musical culture include works of Egberto BermuŽdez (1985, 1994), Jeremy Marre and Hannah Charlton (1985), and Deborah Pacini HernaŽndez (1992, 1993a, 1993b), the ethnographic work of Peter Wade (1993), and studies of political economy by Charles Bergquist et al. (1992). Films by Marre (1983) and
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Performers and Performances
Musical Ideologies and Aesthetics
Further Study
One of the smallest countries in South America, Ecuador is extremely variedgeographically, climatologically, and culturally. Its name means 'equator', from the fact that the equator goes right through it. Yet Ecuador has snow-capped mountains because it is an Andean country, and it has a dense tropical forest because east of the Andes is the Amazon basin. Between the Andes and the Amazon is the densely and tropically forested montan~a, the rugged foothills of the Andes.
The native American populations of Ecuador include descendants of many pre-Inca people and those whom the Inca subjugated. Some, such as the Shuar (earlier called JiŽvaro) of the tropical forest, were feared as headhunters by colonists and explorers; others, such as the Otavalen~os (Quichua, native Americans in the Otavalo Valley), have become wealthy textile artisans.
Ecuador is archaeologically rich. Prehistoric coastal cultures, especially, produced elaborate figurines and musical instruments. Likewise, the highlands were the sites of ancient cultures that used music in a variety of contexts, some of them partially explained by the iconography of ceramic vases. The archaeological ceramic musical instruments in the collection of the Museo ArqueoloŽgico of the Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito, reveal a lengthy development with considerable formal variety. The roughly 130 vessel flutes in this collection are ductless, and their resonating chambers are globular in shape. Of the four types of vessel flutes in this collection, the first is a miscellaneous group, having an unobstructed resonating chamber; the external shapes are most often those of animals or birds. These instruments represent the archaeological phases of Manten~o, BahiŽa, Jama-Coaque, and Guangala of the coastal region. The second type of vessel flute has the northern sierra as provenance, representing the ceramic styles of Piartal and Tuza; these display a consistent design, all having four holes for fingers and one for the embouchure. The fundamental shape of these instruments is of a stylized conch shell whose construction mimics the interior spiral of the shell. Decoration includes geometric motives, monkeys, and birds. The third group is the largest, also with consistency of designin this case a single finger hole and a large embouchure hole; once again, there is the imitation of a natural shell, and decorative motives are geometric and zoomorphic. These instruments belong to the ceramic styles of Piartal and Tuza. The fourth type is miscellaneous in
Currently housed in the Casa de la Cultura, Quito, the Pedro Pablo Traversari Collection of Musical Instruments is an important repository of European and South American archaeological and modern exemplars. Perhaps one-third of the instruments are on display; the remainder are in storage. Many stored instruments are broken and in disarray, lacking proper identification. A wonderfully diverse collectionincluding a harp with crocodile-shell sound box, a lyre-guitar, a rabel, a pre-Columbian kena, an eighteenth-century Italian oboeit has been carefully catalogued by Richard Rephann (1978).
Idiophones
The variety in idiophones in Ecuador is greater than that for aerophones or membranophones. Struck idiophones include tuntui and marimbas [see AFRO-COLOMBIAN TRADITIONS], The Shuar play the tuntui (or tunduy), a large hollow log idiophone. Taboo for women, it is used to send signals of war, death, or event. It has a penetrating sound that carries up to 5 kilometers away. Used by Cayapa Indians and Afro-Ecuadorians in Esmeraldas Province, marimbas are discussed below.
Shaken idiophones include fruit-capsule rattles, cowbell chains, gourd rattles, tubular rattles (including the guasaŽ), and maracas. The Shuar play the shakap, makich, and chilchilall types of fruit-capsule rattle. Women place the shakap on their waists and dance with it, whereas the makich is attached to the ankles for dancing. As described below, the Quichua of Imbabura and Pichincha provinces wear chains ("series") of typically twelve cencerros, or cowbells, tied to a leather cape; the bells sound as dancing men play side-blown flutes. Cencerros, likewise mounted on the back, may be seen today also at dancing during the Fiesta de los Diablos (2 February) in Spain. Afro-Ecuadorians of the Chota River Valley, Imbabura, and of neighboring Esmeraldas Province play gourd rattles (maracas) and tubular rattles (alfandoques and guasaŽs). The usage of alfandoques dates back at least to the 1800s in the Chota River Valley (Carvalho-Neto 1964:80).
Scraped idiophones include an animal's jawbone whose teeth are scrapedor the jawbone is shaken (called quijada in some places of Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico; in Colombia, the term carraca llanera is also found). The jawbone is used by Ibero-Ecuadorians and Afro-Ecuadorians in Imbabura and Esmeraldas. The notched gourd (guširo), scraped with a nail or comb, is found among the same two groups in the same regions; moreover, the guširo is being incorporated into Quichua ensembles in Imbabura (Coba Andrade 1979:71-73).
Membranophones
Single-headed and double-headed membranophones appear in Ecuador. Double-headed types probably predominate in the 1990s. Single-headed drums include the cununo and the zambomba. The cununo, found in cylindrical and conical shapes, is tuned by means of wooden wedges and is played with the hands. It resembles the tambor mayor of the Atlantic coastal region of Colombia. Two cununos form part of the ensemble for the currulao, a secular ritual of Afro-Ecuadorians of Esmeraldas Province in the Pacific littoral region of northwestern Ecuador. The currulao ensemble incorporates the double-headed bombo drum, a marimba suspended from the
Three important types of double-headed drum are the caja, the bombo, and the bomba. A frame drum, the caja is found among Afro-Americans of Imbabura and Esmeraldas provinces and Quichua of Tungurahua Province. In Tungurahua, the caja is played along with bombo and side-blown flutes during the festival of Corpus Christi. With these other instruments, it creates the orquesta de toros, which accompanies masked youths (toros) as they dart about the plaza. A larger frame drum than the caja, the bombo appears notably among highland Quichua. The bombos of the Salasaca Indians of Tungurahua Province are among the largest drums in the country. The Salasaca are known for the elaborate painted designs on their drumheads (for a contextual photo, see Schechter 1994a:61).
At Corpus Christi in central highland Tungurahua and Cotopaxi provinces, bombos are played alone (by a single musician), in consort with cajas, and in pipe-and-tabor fashion with pingullo (the painted-drumhead version). Salasaca painted drums may contain a snare. Elsewhere in the Ecuadorian highlands, the bombo appears in LicaŽn, Chimborazo Province, and among Afro-Ecuadorians of the Chota River Valley, Imbabura and Carchi provinces.
Afro-Ecuadorians of certain villages in the Intag and Chota river valley region of Imbabura and in RiŽo Limones, Esmeraldas, play bombas with their hands while seated, holding them between the knees (for a contextual photo, see Schechter 1994c:288). The bomba has been used by Afro-Ecuadorians for at least a hundred years in Chota (Carvalho-Neto 1964:99), where it provides accompaniment for ensembles that otherwise incorporate guitars, guasaŽs (bamboo or metal rattles, filled with seeds or stones), and vocals. These ensembles perform the bomba (same name as drum), a lively dance in sesquiaŽltera meter (juxtaposed 6/8 and 3/4), and other genres.
Aerophones
The pipe-and-tabor technique, mentioned above in the discussion of bombo, joins a membranophone and an aerophone into a single instrument played by one person (
Known as pingullo in Ecuador (written variously pincullo, pincollo, pinkayllo, pinkillo, pinkullo, pinquillo for its different manifestations in Peru, Bolivia, and northwestern Argentina), the aerophone part of this instrument is an end-blown duct flute. Often made of bamboo, the pingullo typically has two anterior finger holes and one posterior, making it apt for pipe-and-tabor usage.
A duct flute with six anterior finger holes, the piŽfano is played by one person (often a Quichua musician), typically with a second musician playing the tamboril, a double-headed drum varying in size. On ritual, festive, or amatory occasions in the
In Ecuador, the bocina, a simple trumpet, encompasses a large family of aerophones. It may be long and straight like the huarumu (Carvalho-Neto 1964:228-229) or, as among the Salasaca in central highland Tungurahua Province, composed of several curved segments of cow horn joined with a guaduŽa bamboo bell (Coba 1979:79, 93). The Afro-Ecuadorians of the Chota Valley play different-size puros, gourd aerophones (such as the chile frito of Guerrero, Mexico) in the traditional banda mocha ensemble of this region: gourds, leaves, small combs, bombo, and cymbals, perhaps with a European trumpet (Coba 1979:87, 94).
The people of several Ecuadorian highland provinces use a conch-shell trumpet (churu). Since at least the 1800s, its sounding has called Quichua to congregate for festive occasions or for minga, a communal work gang. For the same purposes, the churu, also known as quipa (after the Peruvian Quechua qquepa), is used not only in Imbabura but also in Cotopaxi, Tungurahua, and Chimborazo provinces. Peruvian conch-shell trumpets date back to the ChaviŽn era (900-200 B.C.) and were used through the Inca period and into the twentieth century.
The rondador, a single-unit Ecuadorian panpipe, comprises from eight to thirty-four or more tubes set not in staircase arrangement (as in the central Andes), but in zigzag fashion. Like the harp, it is frequently played by blind musicians on street corners and in marketplaces (
In addition to the unique array of tubes, the tuning and performance of the rondador are also distinctive: adjacent tubes may be a major second apart, or a major or minor third, a perfect fourth or fifth, or a major or minor sixth; and adjacent tubes (especially thirds and perfect fourths) are typically played simultaneously, notably at the ends of phrases (Olsen et al. 1987). Rondadores are typically of cane, sometimes painted with the yellow, blue, and red of the Ecuadorian flag; smaller types may be made of condor or vulture quills.
Chordophones
Chordophones include tumank (tsayantur), paruntsi, keer (kitiar), bandoliŽn, guitar (guitarra), harp (arpa), and numerous variations. The tumank, or tsayantur, and the
Quichua and Ibero-Ecuadorians in the highlands play the guitar, basic for the accompaniment of such folkloric genres (muŽsica nacional) as albazo, pasacalle, and pasillo. The Quichua regularly use it to accompany the sanjuaŽn. Moreover, the Afro-Ecuadorians of Chota are guitarists. Certain Chota musicians, such as GermaŽn Congo, have achieved notable virtuosity on the requinto (sometimes slightly smaller in size than the regional guitar), which leads ensembles.
The charango, a small guitar whose center of diffusion is Peru-Bolivia, is sold in quantities in music stores in Imbaburafrequented by large numbers of Western tourists; some ensembles of younger Quichua are now incorporating it, since they see it included by visiting Peruvian groups who come to play in the larger Ecuadorian cities.
The use of harps dates back in Ecuador to the 1700s, when they played an important role in the evangelistic work of Jesuits in the Maran~oŽn River zone of the Peruvian-Ecuadorian Oriente (Chantre y Herrera 1901:653-654, 661-662) and the Andean highlands, where harps are said to have been extremely widespread among indigenous peoples (Recio 1947 [1773]:426). In eighteenth-century highland Ecuador, Indians at missions played harps for the mass, baptism, and Via Crucis; in the Maran~oŽn region, the harp took its place alongside the violin to perform in Corpus Christi processions (Chantre y Herrera 1901:661-662).
Three principal kinds of Ecuadorian diatonic harps are in use in rural towns and
The Imbabura harp is of cedar, with wooden nails in the construction of the sound box; sound emanates from three holes in the sound box, the holes on either side of the short forepillar. The neck is uncarved. Quichua male musicians in Imbabura Province perform pieces from the sanjuaŽn, pareja, and vacacioŽn genres on this instrument at children's wakes and at weddings; rhythmic accompaniment for the harpist is provided by a golpeadora friend or family member who kneels by the harp and beats the sound box in rhythm. Quichua harpists are typically soloists, with golpeador (
The Ecuadorian-Paraguayan harp has a neck in the form of an exaggerated inverted arch, a shape that dates back in Ecuador to the early 1800s and characterizes Paraguayan harps of the 1990s. The design of soundholes in the Ecuadorian-Paraguayan harpa painted S shape, terminating in small holesdates back to harps of seventeenth-century Spain (Schechter 1992a). Iberian-Ecuadorian harpists play muŽsica nacional genres on the folk harp and the Ecuadorian-Paraguayan harp as soloists or with other stringed instruments. Noted practitioners are EliŽas Imbaquingo (of a community near Cotacachi) on the Imbabura harp and Don CeŽsar Muquinche (of Izamba, near Ambato) on folk harp and Ecuadorian-Paraguayan harp (Schechter 1992b:415-420).
This section treats musical genres in six broad contexts: religious settings, life-cycle rites, seasonal rites, the San Juan patronal festival, dance and music, and music as entertainment. The discussion of religious settings encompasses shamanic practices
Coverage here is selective; one can find an enormous variety of musical genres and contexts in Ecuador, where multiple native American, Afro-American, and Ibero-American cultural groups exploit multiple ecological-geographical niches.
Shamanic healing
Native American peoples of Ecuador, like those of Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and other nations of South America, practice shamanic healing. Through song, frequently self-accompanied by idiophone, Ecuadorian jungle Quichua and Shuar shamans travel in the therapeutic process between this world and a realm of spirits. Musical style comparisons may be made between the shamanic songs of these two lowland groups, inasmuch as they share similar underlying etiological beliefs and behavioral aspects.
Notations by Karsten (1935) and melodies transcribed by Moreno Andrade (1830) point to tritonicity (triadic or nontriadic) as the traditional Shuar tonal gamut, especially in social dance-songs (Harner 1973); in many whistling and sung segments of shamanic curing, the established Shuar featuresextensive tonic repetition, tritonicity, and dotted figuresare present (Harner 1973; List 1965). Shamanic songs in the curing ceremonies of Shuar and lowland Quichua are syllabic (Crawford 1979), reflecting the need in both cultures for extensive commentary during the ritual.
Processions
Whereas the shamanic phenomenon reflects an indigenous view of the nature and power of spirits to affect health, prominent processions in highland Ecuadornotably those for Holy Week and Corpus Christibetray strong links to an imported belief system, Roman Catholicism, the most significant influence in colonial Latin America. Arriving in the Americas in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, missionariesnotably in South America, the Jesuitsbrought their European musical forms, musical instruments (violin, harp), and religious philosophy and practices. Thus, we find celebrations associated with prominent saints, processions at major junctures of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, and the ritual of the child's wake.
In highland Ecuador, indigenous processions for Holy Week date from at least the 1800s (Hassaurek 1867:161). During Semana Santa (Holy Week), the week before Easter, the Quichua who live in small communities (comunas) outside Cotacachi, Imbabura Province, conduct processions organized by comuna, each with its own icon (santo) that is adorned and carried during all Holy Week processions. Many icons depict stations of the cross; others venerate the Virgin Mary. The processions begin on Palm Sunday and are repeated on Wednesday evening, Holy Thursday evening, Good Friday at midday, and that evening.
On Palm Sunday in 1980, two types of musical performance were in evidencethe same types that were heard in each of the other daylight and evening processions observed in Cotacachi during Holy Week that year: cane side-blown flute (six finger holes) duos and trios, and the responsorial song of Jesus' Passion in Quichua. In the midst of each of these processions, a male Quichua ritual specialist (catequista) led responsorial singing of one of the Passions. Musical settings of Jesus' sufferings and death as told by the evangelists, the Passions were sung a cappella, in this case in the
Performed in Quichua and sharing the pentatonic mode with much Imbabura-area Quichua secular dance music, this and all Holy Week processional renditions by both men and women were sung without vibrato, with the same rhythmic freedom of phrase with which Gregorian chant, an import from Europe, is performed in church or cloister. An example that illustrates these features (
Strongly traditional in Spain, Holy Week appears vital in this hemisphere among Ibero-Americans and native Americans. The emphasis observed on the contribution of each Quichua comuna in Cotacachi Holy Week finds an echo in Silvia, Colombia, where each neighborhood (barrio) contributes to and participates in the celebration (Gradante 1980:45).Huan~una horas n~ami chayashka,
Nishpa Jesusca, Diospac churica,
Oracionmanta anchurijushpa,
Huirto punguman chayagrijucpi....
Now having arrived at the hours of his death,
He called Jesus, son of God,
Going away, on account of the sentence imposed on him,
Having arrived at the door of the garden....
A similarly long lineage appears for the festival of Corpus Christi, a movable feast held on the Thursday after the seventh Sunday after Easter. The Spanish form of the rite was first incorporated in 1280 in Toledo, then Seville in 1282 and Barcelona in 1319 (Carreras y Candi 1933:556).
The syncretism of Corpus Christi in Ecuador is perhaps more profound than that of Holy Week. In the central highlands (Cotopaxi and Tungurahua provinces), the festival of "Corpus," as it is known there, brilliantly displays features drawn from medieval Roman Catholic ritual and native American Andean ritual. The rite juxtaposes the European facets of elaborate processional, incorporating pipe-and-tabor performance with a native Andean harvest celebration at the June solstice, the approximate date of Corpus Christi. Moreover, in medieval Europe and in twentieth-century Andean South America, theater occurred and occurs outdoors: in Europe, miracle and mystery plays; in modern Ecuador, pantomime involving simulation of planting (which follows close after the harvest), pairs of actors (with one often taking
The rite of the Ecuadorian "Corpus" incorporates at least three elements that have a two-hundred-year heritage: danzantes, pipe-and-tabor musical accompaniment for the danzantes, costumed indigenous dancers; and the erection of castillos, fruit-bearing poles. On 5 June 1980, I recorded the processional music of two musicians, each playing pingullo and bombo in a small village outside Patate, Tungurahua; they were accompanying the dancing of two processional danzantes (for a contextual photo, see Schechter 1994a:61).
Much the same type of pipe-and-tabor accompaniment to performing danzantes is described by an eighteenth-century Jesuit writer recording a "Corpus" in the Maran~oŽn Espan~ol region along the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border (Chantre y Herrera 1901:661-662). In addition, this writer describes the building of castillos along the route of the procession; he saw live animals, fish, fruit, and other foods. The castillos I observed, on "Corpus" proper (5 June 1980) and on its octave, were telephone-pole-like structures, sustaining one or two large, wooden, inverted triangles to which net-works of strings had been attached; these strings held potatoes, peppers, bananas, gourds, and other fruits of the harvest. After they had been erected (in June 1980), one, two, or three men climbed them and tossed the fruits of the harvest down to the community, gathered in the plaza below. Following this sharing out of the harvest,
In June 1980, "Corpus" proper featured musical performances by several ensembles (a local brass band, stationed on the church patio in the plaza, played national folk music), but the octave had only the bull ensemble. Rather than a musical celebration, the octave was dedicated primarily to street theater, notably pantomime. Most of the acting was in pairs. At one point, a man in normal dress entered the plaza; behind him came the master, in a Caucasian mask (blanco) and wearing an old suit with a large hat. They dropped the log for the small castillo. Then the master pretended that his hobbyhorse was bucking; the servant came over, grabbed the reins, patted it on the head, and calmed it down. This mime pair continued the bucking-calming routine for a short time then left the plaza. One more pair of mimes then appeared: a ram with four horns on his head, tied by rope to his master; they ran along together, the master repeatedly calling his ram, "Pachito, Pachito!"
One may find multiple transcriptions of "Corpus" pingullo melodies (to accompany danzantes) emanating all the way from northern Carchi down to southern Can~ar and Azuay provinces (Moreno Andrade 1972). Comparisons reveal significant uniformities of style among these melodies; many are heavily tetratonic, some extending the tonal gamut to upper 7, thus creating pentatony, and others using the arpeggio of the minor dominant (Schechter 1994a).
Children's wakes
In native American, Afro-American, and Ibero-American cultures throughout Roman Catholic Latin America, a festive wake is celebrated at the death of an infant or young child. One finds accounts of such occasions in nineteenth-century Mediterranean-coastal Spain; in the Western Hemisphere, the rite is described back as far as 1788 (in Puerto Rico). This celebration is called most broadly velorio del angelito, or wawa velorio (as it is known among northern Ecuadorian highland Quichua), or wawallo (as it is known among Afro-Ecuadorians of the Chota River Valley, northern Ecuador), or baquineŽ (as it is known among African-Antillans of Puerto Rico). In the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, children's wakes have appeared in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. With rates of infant mortality high in Ecuadorian rural areas, the ritual continues to be practiced, though many believe it is dying out.
In Roman Catholic belief, a vital regeneration in Christ occurs through the administration of baptism, a sacrament that unconditionally promises salvation to a child dying in infancy. In Roman Catholic Spain and Latin America, the deceased infant is believed to dwell among the angels. This is a cause for rejoicing. Wherever the ritual has been celebrated, the body of the child has always been conspicuous by its presence, typically in the same room in which family and friends dance to the favorite music of the region, either the Valencian jota in the 1870s in Alicante Province, Spain (Davillier 1874:409), the gato in rural Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, in the 1870s (d'Aurignac 1890), or the sanjuaŽn in rural Imbabura, Ecuador, in 1980 and 1990 (Schechter 1983, 1992b, 1994b).
The ritual makes a profound impact on those who observe it, whether nationals or foreign visitors. In some works of art, such as the painting Velorio de Indios by Ecuador's JoaquiŽn Pinto (1842-1906), the ritual is depicted in a fundamentally
In Ecuador, the child's prominent display sometimes takes on traits that might relate to earlier Inca practices. As depicted by Felipe GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala, during the month of November (Aia Marcai Quilla 'Carry the Dead Month'), the dead were taken from their stone crypts, dressed in fine clothes, given food and drink, put onto litters, and carried through the streets from house to house and through the plaza (1836 [1615]:256-257). The 1573 RelacioŽn (GeograŽfica de Indias), "La Cibdad [sic] de Sant Francisco de Quito," discussing the burial rites of Quito-area Indians, is similar: the deceased is carried on a seat placed on a litter that the bearers carry on their shoulders; the corpse is also buried thus seated ("La Cibdad de Sant Francisco del Quito" 1897 [1573]:3:60-104). In nineteenth-century Quito, this custom was employed explicitly in Indian child burials: "The Indians and other indigent people [in Quito] bury their children after a very curious fashion. They hire an angel's suit and other ornaments in a church or convent, trick up the dead body, place it on a chair in a sitting posture, and carry it about in procession before they take it to the grave-yard" (Hassaurek 1867:151). A nearly identical description occurs in Charles Wiener's (1880:94-96) account of an Afro-Peruvian child's wake observed in the 1870s in Trujillo. Wiener describes the child being placed into a chair, paper wings being attached to the back (sometimes themselves attached to an owl's wings), and a crown of flowers being placed on the head. The child is thus processionally borne to the homes of relatives and friends. Wherever the cadaver is set down, a fiesta takes place.
A vivid account of a similar indigenous child-cadaver procession and festivity appears in Bemelmans's (1941:97-98) description for Ban~os, Ecuador, in the twentieth century. As for the northern Ecuadorian Quichua, Elsie Clews Parsons (1945:78-80, 83) provides an extended description of a child's wake and procession in Peguche, a village near Otavalo. A violinist provided dance music for the wake and the funeral procession the following morning. Again, as with the indigenous celebration documented outside Ban~os perhaps ten years earlier, Collier and BuitroŽn's (1971:151) description of a child's wake in and around Otavalo includes mention of the deceased child's being seated on a table or a platform.
From my own observations of four children's wakes (three in 1979-1980, one in 1990) in Quichua comunas on the slopes of Mount Cotacachi, Imbabura, many of the preceding facets are found, as always tempered by those aspects that pinpoint the rite to a specific locale. Indeed, research has supported the hypothesis that wherever it occurs in time and space, the Latin American or Iberian child's wake serves as a kind of microcosm of local cultural preferences in types of music, instruments, and dances. Thus, we are not surprised to find the Cotacachi Quichua wawa velorio reflecting its own locality's preferences. Violinists had provided the music some fifty years ago at a Quichua child's wake in Peguche (only some thirty minutes' drive from the wakes I attended outside the town of Cotacachi), but the Cotacachi Quichua tradition specifies solo harp, not violin, for the ritual. Pinto's Velorio de Indios describes a solo harp providing the music one hundred years ago. Like Valencian jota and Argentinian gato in their own times and places, the Cotacachi sanjuaŽn and pareja, musical genres of Imbabura, are performed at the child's wake.
The most prominent dance music type in the area, sanjuaŽn, is in simple duple meter, consisting of the regular repetition of a single, primary motive, with a secondary motive occasionally inserted. As noted above, Cotacachi Quichua harp per-formance
Complementing sanjuaŽn and pareja at wawa velorio was a musical form called vacacioŽn, performed by harpists. An unmetrical genre with no sung text, it is a steady, percussive music, comprising several consecutive cycles of a gradually descending melody. It was always the first music performed in the deceased's home at the evening vigil, prefaced only by the harpist's tuning. Cotacachi Quichua harpists (maistrus) explained that performance of vacacioŽn at the beginning of the ritual was to drive away the demonio from beneath the platform supporting the child. Whenever action centered on the child (as during the late-night adorning of the body or the mother's lament at dawn), vacacioŽn would be performed as a kind of musical child marker. Unlike sanjuaŽn and pareja, it is not danced, nor is it accompanied by a golpe. In the Pacific coastal area of Ecuador-Colombia, where the ritual is termed chigualo, Afro-Ecuadorians commence the rite with a man beating a rapid rhythm on the bombo; Whitten (1974:138) notes that one function of this percussive music is "frightening the body- or soul-snatching Tunda apparition away."
At wawa velorio in Cotacachi, merrymaking is compulsory. Visiting family and friends are continuously barraged with food (stewed corn, maize gruel) and drink (trago 'cane alcohol'). They are entreated throughout the night to dance to the music, and they are involved in tricks (notably played on those who fall asleep), teasing, and horseplay. The degree of lightheartedness and sheer playfulness cannot be overstated. Even at about 10:30 P.M., when the child is removed from its platform, placed on the floor, and adorned with ribbons on its wrists and waist and with a wreath of flowers on its head, the laughter and teasing continue, coinciding with the mother and godmother's lamenting.
Weddings
The importance of the harp, and the degree to which the solo harp with golpeador is embedded in Cotacachi Quichua culture, are underscored by that instrument's prominence in marriage (matrimonio), another life-cycle ritual of the Imbabura region. The Imbabura Quichua wedding typically lasts five days, often from Saturday to Wednesday. At the conclusion of the nuptial mass (held in a church), all go to a local tavern, where a meal is served. Thereafter, all retire to the groom's father's house, for another meal (miza). The evening is spent in expressing gratitude to the godparents for their assistance.
The next morning, people may dance to the music of a local band performing Quichua sanjuanes and perhaps mestizo albazos, often with amplifiers and speakers.
At some point that morning, however (at 11:00 A.M. at a Cotacachi comuna wedding celebration I attended in October 1990), the n~avi maillai takes place. This is a traditional ritual, with pareja and sanjuaŽn dance music provided throughout by solo harp and golpeador. The bandsmen, in my experience, retire from their musical instruments, temporarily leaving the site or staying to observe the ritual (Moreno Andrade 1972:191-195; Parsons 1945:58; Rubio Orbe 1946:286-287).
Carefully organized and led by a male Quichua, the n~aupador 'he who goes ahead', n~avi maillai is a mutual washing of the face and feet. After a community elder has recited prayers, the series of mutual face and feet washings takes place. The n~aupador first washes the face of the bride's mother, who then washes his feet; then he washes her feet. Thereafter may follow the godfather's washing of the face and/or feet of the godmother, then the godmother's washing of the godfather. The bride and groom then wash each other's face and feet. Then the groom's parentsthe hosts, for the momenttake their turn washing each other's face and feet. This concluded, the principals and the most honored guests (community leaders and close friends) form a bomba, a circle around a cross, and dance to the harpist's music (
Harvest
The Inca performed responsorial harvest songs; similarly, responsorial harvest work songs using the word jaway date back to seventeenth-century Quito (Carvalho-Neto 1964:255). In central-highland Chimborazo Province, indigenous men and women perform harvest songs (jaway), which set the pace of the chore of harvesting grain. In this genre, a male lead singer (paki) reignites traditional village rivalries or comments on love affairs while a chorus responds "Jaway, jaway" (Harrison 1989:21-22). The term for these songs varies with the province: jaway (the generic term) in Chimborazo, Tungurahua, Can~ar, and Azuay; jauchihua in Cotopaxi; jaichima in Pichincha; and jailima in Imbabura (Carvalho-Neto 1964:256).
New Year's Eve
In many regions of the Ecuadorian highlands and coast, New Year's Eve is termed an~o viejo 'old year'. In a practice that dates back to the 1800s in Guayaquil and that was still observed among Quichua on Cotacachi's slopes in 1979-1980, the Old Man (Viejo), a gigantic straw-filled male effigy in old clocheseffectively symbolizing the year now completedis constructed, often by children. At the moment of the new year's arrival, it is torched, and the crowd tosses its burning pieces around.
At an~o viejo in the Cotacachi comuna of Topo Grande (still lacking electricity in 1979-1980), two comuna guitarists performed sanjuanes while the straw man's burning garments were tossed about in the darkness. In the Quito version of the ritual, black clothes and a black mask cover the effigy, the Widow (Viuda). This ritual has parallels in Uruguay, where similar effigies, bearing the name of Judas, are burned at Christmastime; in Mexico, giant bamboo Judases are constructed to be burned or exploded on Good Friday evening or Holy Saturday morning. In certain parts of Eastern Europe, an effigy of a hag is borne and burned by children in a spring rite: the old woman stands for winter and must die, allowing spring rains to arrive for the crops (Slobin 1992:167-168). In the Andes, New Year's Eve falls during the same season when rains are needed to nourish corn and beans planted in September and October.
Festival of St. John the Baptist
The festival of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (San Juan) dates back at least to the 1860s in Imbabura and neighboring Pichincha provinces (Hassaurek 1867:266-267; see also JimeŽnez de la Espada 2:1884:21). The festival remains strong in Cotacachi, Imbabura, where, two weeks to one month before the onset of the fiesta, one hears on Cotacachi's slopes the sound of a conch trumpet (churu), which apprises the Cotacachi Quichua that San Juan is approaching. On the eve of San Juan, they dance throughout the night to the sound of transverse flutes and guitars. The next morning (24 June), Quichua from all the comunas, in costume, go down to the plaza in front of the principal Cotacachi cathedral, completely packing it. They dance in the park and elsewhere to the sound of flutes, guitars, and churu.
During San Juan, long-standing communal rivalries resurface. These recall the traditional, annual encounter ritual (Quechua tinku), which still takes place in certain communities of the Bolivian altiplano, such as Chayanta, in northern PotosiŽ (Delgado P. 1980:1-2); in the plaza, Quichua from, or allied with, "opposing" Cotacachi-area communities engage in fistfights and throwing stones. Days later, on the eve of the feast of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June), the same dancing as on the eve of San Juan occurs, and Quichua once again gather in the plaza the following day, where dancing continues for up to five days (Andrade Albuja 1979).
Specific ritual phenomena at Imbabura San Juan include culebrillando and aruchicos (Carvalho-Neto 1964:88-89; Coba Andrade 1985:35-38). Culebrillando is single-file serpentine dancing that may simulate a snake's movement in the view of some or the path of a sun's ray in the view of others. Arriving at the predetermined site (a plaza, or a street corner), the "snake" forms into a circle and stomps its feet to the cries of jalajajaja! Each group is led by a foot-captain (chaqui-capitaŽn) who wields a cattle whip. In certain towns of Imbabura and neighboring Pichincha, the aruchicos are featured. Their dress is unique: long sheepskin coat, poncho, cloth hat, dark glasses, and leather cape from which hang lines of bronze bells that sound with the forceful dancing to the sound of flute duos and perhaps rondador.
The principal genre of dance of Imbabura is the sanjuaŽn. In some parts of the province, Quichua musicians call the genre sanjuanito, the term used by mestizo and Afro-Ecuadorian musicians to denote an expanded form of sanjuaŽn. Sanjuanes in
A sanjuanito may be autobiographical (see below; the sanjuanitos of the IlumaŽn composer Segundo Galo Maigua), or it may enumerate the multitudinous features of a beloved animal such as the sheep (the word llama is used among northern highland Quichua to refer to sheep) in "N~uka llama di mi vida" (Schechter 1982:2:410-411). It may speak of disaster, inebriation and its effects, and courting, as in "Rusa MariŽa wasi rupajmi" (Schechter 1992b). It may exploit semantic juxtaposition and syntactic paralleling to strong effect, as in "Juyalla," where we hear: "As a girl I was fine, as an old woman I have deteriorated; / As a girl I was lovely, as an old woman I shall become ugly" (Schechter 1987).
Mestizos of the highlands dance to pasacalles and albazos, both of which commonly glorify a prized aspect of one's own region: its women (as in the pasacalle "Cotacachen~ita de mi corazoŽn"), one of its favored musical instruments (as in the albazo "Arpita de mis canciones"), or its beautiful flora and abundant fruits (as in the pasacalle "Ambato, Tierra de Flores").
Entertainment
Not tied to fixed season or ritual, music serves a vital function as entertainment, notably in the highland and coastal regions of Ecuador. In the highlands, groups of mestizo musiciansperhaps guitarists, an accordionist, a trumpeter, a guširo-player, and a drummerwill jump in the back of a pickup truck and travel throughout a community, giving serenades of perhaps three songs at each home. The purpose will often be fund raising: to buy gifts for the schoolchildren at Christmastime, or perhaps to purchase uniforms for the local soccer team. These musicians will play famous pieces from the repertoire of traditional music (muŽsica nacional 'national music'): albazos, pasacalles, pasillos. Established local ensembles, such as Cotacachi's "Rumba Havana," will perform regularly at the large outdoor coliseums of cantonal capitals, drawing sizable crowds for their amplified music.
Among Afro-Ecuadorians in the tropical forest of coastal Esmeraldas, the marimba dance (currulao) is a kind of secular ritual. Performed on holidays, special occasions, or Saturday nights, a currulao takes place in a house built on piles, whose owner has made most of the instruments of the ensemble, including the marimba (Whitten and Fuentes 1966). This marimba, suspended by ropes from rafters, is a xylophone with bamboo resonators (guaduŽa) and a chonta-palm keyboard. Played by two men, the instrument has from twenty-one to twenty-six keys and forms part of an ensemble that includes a glosador (typically male vocal soloist); respondedoras (female chorus) who shake guasaŽs; two cununo membranophones; and two bombos. The marimba part is played by two persons, a bordonero and a tiplero. The bordonero plays the lower part, the bordoŽn, an ostinato repeated with slight variations; the tiplero plays the tiple (treble), or requinta, a contrapuntal and/or harmonic improvisation based on the ground bass part, the bordoŽn. Whereas the marimba music of
The marimba dance is a baile de respetoa respectful and intense dance, which usually does not involve touching. It is characterized by the interplay between the glosador and the solista (the respondedora who answers the glosador and sings melody, as opposed to harmony, for the other respondedoras); the two sing of their respective sex roles and difficulties, and of life in the region. Of the nine different types of currulao, the bambuco, a pursuit dance, is the most commonly performed.
The increasing contact of coastal Afro-Ecuadorians with highland mestizos has inflated economic aspirations, and currulao has been scorned by upwardly mobile blacks. Higher per-capita income and the arrival of electricity have resulted in more saloon dancing, featuring such popular forms as cumbia and bolero. Hence, marimba dancing has become more and more a commercial activity, produced for the benefit of fee-paying highland tourists. Traditional practices and motivations are disappearing, as the costen~os modify their instrumentation to conform to tourists' image of what their music should be (CaŽceres 1978:233-234).
Afro-Ecuadorian musicians of the Chota River Valley, in highland Imbabura and Carchi provinces, bordering on Esmeraldas, also perform for tourists; but they preserve a unique sesquiaŽltera genre, the bomba. One ensemble, Grupo Ecuador de Los Hermanos Congo y Milton Tadeo (
In rural highland Ecuador, instrumentalists are nearly always men, whether one speaks of Quichua, Afro-Ecuadorian, or mestizo musicians. In particular, Quichua harpists and their golpeadores are always men, as are most mestizo harpists.
This contrasts with rural Chile, where women are harpistsa heritage from sixteenth-century Spain, when certain women were virtuosos on the instrument (Schechter 1992a). Quichua girls, though, as well as boys, will know and sing sanjuanes in Imbabura. Harpists (males), even those known to be masters on the instrument, will often suffer ill repute: at the occasions for which they perform, such as wedding and child's wake, they are frequently entreated to drink trago nearly incessantly, despite their attempts at denial. Thus, the reputation of harpists as being heavy drinkers is often reluctantly acquired (Schechter 1992b:415-420).
In the Otavalo Valley, teenagers and young men are actively engaged in musical performance. The number of ensembles of Quichua musicians is high; one famous group, Conjunto IlumaŽn, is shown in
Among highland and lowland Quichua in Ecuador, women's songs are important avenues for expressing a variety of sentiments. In highland Chimborazo, Regina Harrison (1989:122-125) recorded a song in which a Quichua woman expresses a willingness to do myriad domestic tasks in her husband's absence; she speaks of the need for a husband and a wife to work together to sustain their family.
In contrast, in Amazonian Ecuador, Harrison (1989:132-133) found Quichua women's songs that speak openly of physical abuse. A clear tone of self-assertiveness appears in women's songs from this region. One woman sings of her physical strength (working in the fields), the powers she has received from her family, and her sexual powers (Harrison 1989:139-140).
Also in the tropical forest, a woman may privately sing songs with which to enchant, often seeking out upper elevations (with strong winds), whence her sung words might be borne a great distance (Harrison 1989:145-147). These are known as llakichina 'to make sad. Rich in jungle imagery, they are often sung to make the person to whom they are directedhusband or loverreturn to the singer. Thus, they might stress love, loyalty, and/or the singer's desirability (Seitz 1981:228, 233). The recipient may perceive the song's message through the song of a bird or in a dream; the message is made to appear through the intermediary of the singer's spirit helper (Seitz 1981:243).
In the jungle region, Canelos Quichua women create highly artistic mucahuas, decorated pottery bowls for drinking chicha; in the course of their work, these women "think-sing" special songs, "owned" by the spirit or soul beings about whom they are singing. The women believe that, in the process of decorating, they are imparting various types of soulssuch as the "huarmi huasimanda ayatian, household soul continuity," and the "ahuashca huarmi aya, woman's soul built into the clay by labor and knowledge of technique and design" (Whitten 1976:90).
Composition
Mention (above) of the Congo brothers and Milton Tadeo (Grupo Ecuador) brings us to the subject of their and other Ecuadorian musicians' creative processes. In the Chota Valley, traditional bomba (genre) texts, such as for "Este pan~uelito," dealt with themes such as love. In the 1980s and 1990s, FabiaŽn Congo (the vocalist-guitarist of the ensemble) was composing songs with distinctly political content. Though his bomba "Promesas poliŽticas" expresses a growing disillusionment of the people with their government's promises, his "Deber y dolor" and his brother GermaŽn's (lead guitarist) "El Ecuador y Colombia" reflect the musician brothers' consciousness of the special geography of Chotawithin highland Imbabura, Ecuador, and close to the Colombian border. In effect, the Congos' musical compositions are directed outward: they express regional pride and regional consciousness, yet with a strong admixture of commentary and topicality.
In contrast, the compositions of an Imbabura Quichua composer, Segundo Galo Maigua of IlumaŽn (see
Discussion of Galo Maigua's sanjuanitos brings us to formulaic expression, a fundamental compositional technique for sanjuanito. In multiple performances within the cycle of dispersion, an Imbabura sanjuaŽn or sanjuanito will maintain its general melodic and rhythmic character. In relation to text, however, certain words, phrases,
The pattern is that of Milman Parry's concept of the formula, in which certain groups of words are typically used within identical metrical conditions to express certain fundamental ideas (Lord 1978 [1960]:4). The most stable formulas are those correlating with the most often used ideas. Verbs, in particular, often serve as formulas in and of themselves. Examining Cotacachi Quichua sanjuaŽn texts, one can pinpoint this formulaic operation; one finds, in Parry's phrase, "systems," mostly but not exclusively of verbs, in sanjuaŽn lines of from seven to twelve syllables. Prominent verbs in these systems are the Quichua verbs for 'to dance', 'to turn', 'to say', 'to get drunk', 'to be', 'to go this and that way', 'to come', and 'to walk.' The prominence of 'to dance' reflects the multiplicity of festive occasions in which sanjuanes are performed; thus, it often appears in imperative form; 'to turn' is used partly for the same reasonsto turn while dancing. 'To say' appears solely in a quotational function. 'To get drunk' is fixed to particular personages in certain popular sanjuaŽn texts. 'To be' facilitates the elaboration of certain static conditions, such as the diverse sheep features in the sanjuaŽn "N~uka llama de mi vida" 'My Sheep of My Life'. The three verbs 'to go this and that way', 'to come', and 'to walk' are tied neither to particular festive occasions nor to famously fixed texts; instead, they are used metaphorically and freely to mean, roughly, "walking" or "going this and that way" on account of a loved one. Finally, sanjuanes frequently appear in textual couplets, the patterns for which (involving balance, antithesis, apposition, parallelisms) seem to be characteristic of the workings of the oral mind (Schechter 1987:39-42).
Primary and secondary sources for the study of historical and modern Ecuadorian musical instruments include Carvalho-Neto (1964), Coba Andrade (1979, 1981, 1992), JijoŽn (1971), Rephann (1978), Schechter (1992a), and Traversari Salazar (1961).
Though good beginnings have been made in organological studies for Ecuador, further studies are called for on the musics of Ecuadorian central and southern highland Quichua. Despite studies by CarrioŽn (1975), MorlaŽs GutieŽrrez (1961), and Riedel (1986) on the Ecuadorian pasillo, and anthologies of text and music such as that of Godoy Aguirre (1980s), major scholarly work still remains in documentation and analysis of the stylistic character of other genres of national folkloric music.
Afro-Ecuadorian musics have been explored by Thomas White, Norman E. Whitten, Jr. (1967, 1974) and Whitten and Fuentes C. (1966) for coastal Esmeraldas, and by Carlos Alberto Coba Andrade (1980) and John Schechter (1994c) for the coastal and highland (Chota) regions. Work on lowland Quichua and Shuar and other Oriente musics has been sporadic; see Belzner (1981), List (1965), Muriel (1976), and Monteros (1942), and the important recordings of Coba Andrade (1990), Crawford (1979), and Harner (1973).
Finally, Ecuadorian ethnomusicology owes a debt to the pioneering works of Segundo Luis Moreno Andrade and subsequently of Carlos Alberto Coba Andradestudies that are foundational for their breadth and depth. Since the late 1970s, after a slow start, the field of Ecuadorian music-cultural studies has begun to make substantial progress.
Amerindians
Creoles
Maroons
Interrelationships among Local Cultures
Bordered to the east by the Oyapock River and Brazil, and to the west by the Maroni River and Surinam, French Guiana has an area of 90,500 square kilometers. Situated just below the equator, it is crisscrossed by innumerable currents of water and is almost entirely covered by a tropical forest. Administratively linked to France, it is one of the last areas of South America that is not politically independent.
Colonization dating from the 1600s has directly formed the population, which totaled 114,800 persons in 1990. The first people to occupy the land were Amerindians, whose number has risen to 4,200 (about 4 percent of the total population), indicating a strong demographic dynamism after the epidemics that decimated the indigenous populations of the Americas in past centuries.
The most numerous people of French Guiana are Creoles, descendants of slaves taken from Africa and freed in 1850. Creole culture resembles that of other peoples in the Guianas and the Antilles. Next to the Creoles are Maroons, descendants of slaves who escaped from plantations in the 1600s and 1700s and reconstructed their original civilizations, imprinted with strong African components. French Guiana's ethnic mosaic is completed with French people and numerous families originally from Brazil, China, Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Vietnam. Since these populations are largely minorities, their musical practices do not represent the major traits of the country.
This demographic composition is comparable with that of Surinam, with, however, clearer cultural boundaries and a tendency to partition in French Guiana. Few cultural exchanges occur among the various cultures, which live alongside each other more than they mix. Thus, local musical life resembles a juxtaposition of traditions and practices.
The Amerindian people of French Guiana live in two different native milieus and are distributed according to three cultural linguistic families. Six distinct languages are still spoken in the country: the Arawak and the Palikur (Parikwene) belong to the Arawak linguistic family and are established in the north, in the coastal zone; the
The most salient differences and the likenesses among the musics of these peoples can be outlined first by these two geographic regions: the musical systems of the people in the south are comparable among themselves, whereas the three ethnic groups have different historical origins; we can assume there was an important network of communications among the groups of the south in previous centuries. These cultural exchanges are much less apparent for the people of the coast (the Arawak, the Kalina, and the Palikur), who have been in continued contact with colonizers for three centuries.
In repertoire, performance, and discussion, all Amerindian people of French Guiana distinguish between collective music, danced and accompanied by manioc beer, and individual music, played or sung solo, not characterized by public participation or drinking. This distinction is does not strictly make a ritual-profane opposition; in particular, shamans usually sing alone, addressing a group. Cetain repertoires or circumstances of performance have an intermediate significance between these poles. Individual music includes masculine repertoires (mainly flute airs) and feminine repertoires (love songs, lullabies, and lamentations). Performances of feminine pieces are becoming progressively rarer.
Among the Emerillon, the Wayana, and the Waia~piŽ, women sometimes accompany men in collective songs, but their place is clearly secondary. Of the three ethnicities in the south, men are responsible for music; at the time of festivals, women are primarily responsible for beer, served according to formal codes regarding the exchanges between music and drink (Beaudet 1992). On the coast, the situation differs. Palikur women have an original and voluminous repertoire of collective songs sung in unison, including wawapna 'song of the rattle', whose rhythm they mark three times with small rattles (waw) attached to long, pointed sticks; mayapna 'song of the Mayes', the people who formed the present Palikur nation; wukikapna, the song for haircuts after a disease; and kuwapna 'song of the butterflies'. Kalina women have a specific repertoire associated with the stages of the ceremonial cycle of the funeral procession; they sing the rhythm of these songs in unison to the slow, steady pulse of the large basket rattles (ka:lawa:si), which, for most stages of the ceremonial cycle, are set on long pointed sticks.
Musical instruments
Apart from the Palikur and Kalina rattles, all Amerindian instruments are reserved for men. This distribution of instruments by sex conforms to a general law among the Amerindian cultures of the Americas (Beaudet 1983). Structural analysis shows that this prohibition contributes to a polarization between, on the one side, women (who have reached menses and have borne children) and on the other side, men, aerophones, and political prestige.
Like most indigenous people of South America, those in French Guiana make flutes, trumpets, and clarinets (Beaudet 1989a), and these aerophones usually have significant social and religious functions. We find characteristic instruments in the center and north of the Amazon, such as the large ture` (tureŽ) clarinets (Beaudet 1980 and 1989b) (
To add rhythm for dancing, the Amerindians in the south of French Guiana use cowbells with seeds of yellow oleander (Thevetia peruviana), a tree of the dogbane family. According to the Kalina, in their mourning rituals they give preponderant significance to the sambula, a large drum with two skins, probably of European origin. The first sequences of these rituals present two distinct musics: on one side, six to eight men sing with their drums in one powerful voice, and on the other side, women (their number increasing as the ceremony proceeds) shake their rattles and in a high-pitched and plaintive voice sing songs from a different repertoire (Kloos 1975). Collective vocal music is popular with all groups. There are always unison songs, except among the Waia~piŽ, or when the women sing with the men to produce heterophony, a high-pitched heterogeneous canon superimposed on the men's grave, low unison.
Repertoires and social organization
In each of these musical traditions, the repertoires could have several originsthe mythical world or neighboring groups. The musical form usually described is in effect a transmission from the spirits of the forest or the river through the mediation of shamans, whose musical inspiration is explicitly defined as coming from the spiritual powers of their environment and village.
Waya~piŽ musical practices are organized in correspondence with social organization: instruments and repertoire exist for each social level (individual, nuclear family, extended family, village, regional group). Little known, Emerillon music must be understood as a component that affirms a strong identity, a miraculous affirmation if we account for the demographic catastrophe of the pastafter many epidemics, the Emerillon were but fifty-three in 1952.
The sociomusical organization of the Wayana seems oriented toward two poles: the shamanistic and the marake, adolescents' major rite of initiation (Hurault 1968). The repertoire and musical practices of the Palikur are evidence of the federated dynamics that for many centuries have shaped these people. As for other Arawak and the Kalina, this group is equally engaged in a strong folkloric movement associated with a cultural revival supported by current trends. Individual music, threatened for years by the increasing demands and pressures of tourism, everywhere disappears more quickly than collective music.
Within French Guianan creole culture, we could once distinguish between more rural life and more urban lifetwo constantly interrelated worlds. Today, rural life has almost completely disappeared, and Creole culture is more unified. Creole musical practices have always divided into two large groups. The first, called folkloric music (musique folklorique) or local dances (danses locales), are the dances accompanied by singing, derived from drum ensembles with originally African rhythms. The second group, typical music (musique typique), is a dance music played by orchestras of different forms, depending on the season and social categories; these dances and their music have the most pronounced European origins, but they have been reappropriated and remodeled along forms common in the Antilles (Jolivet 1989).
The danses locales, which first appeared as slaves' dances, were divided into two subgroups according to whether they were considered more reserved or more "devilish." The first could be danced in front of masters and in parlors. The grageŽ is a dance that is particularly presented in the Sinnamary region, driven by tambourins, frame drums of different sizes. The leŽrol is a form of quadrille accompanied by three drums and a rattle (chacha-leŽrol). The kamougeŽ is a dance accompanied by two long, cylindroconical, single-headed drums resting on the ground. The first (fouleŽ), 3 meters long, is considered male and plays ostinato rhythms; the drummer hits the skin with his hands, while another musician beats on the barrel with two short sticks (tibwa). On another drum (coupeŽ 'cut'), shorter and considered female, various formulas are executed.
The most "devilish" dances were executed among slaves; these are the belya and the kaseŽko (casser le corps). The kaseŽko is the only creole dance that remains alive in French Guiana; it is accompanied by tibwa and two single-headed cylindrical drums, made from small barrels and held between the knees. Among the dances born among the slaves, the kaseŽko is the most favored; it is sometimes danced at night in the courtyards of particular houses in the suburbs of Cayenne or in market towns, but like the other folkloric dances, it is particularly performed in shows associated with the revival movement or with tourism.
If musiques folkloriques are associated with a strong territorial feeling (people say the grageŽ from the Approuage is different from the grageŽ from Sinnamary), the creoles resent musique typique groups, which they believe unoriginal, "copied" from the other Antilles. Orchestral genres and styles have always been imported from the French Caribbean, English, and least often Spanish people. Sometimes, the musicians themselves originally come from Sainte Lucie (St. Lucia), or today, from Haiti.
The middle class of Cayenne, like all the creole middle class, has tried to imitate European classical music for piano and violin, but the real musical life was in ballroom orchestras. Changes in the instrumentation and repertoire of these orchestras has followed the musical transformations throughout the Antilles. In French Guiana, the most creative period was during the rush for gold at the end of the 1800s, which gave birth to many orchestras. For more than a century, banjos, clarinets, guitars,
The most original aspect of these musics (folklorique and typique) always seems situated in the lyrics, where the particularities of local creole culture find expression. The poetry and infectiousness of French Guianese songs are presented in the danced and drummed repertoires (grageŽ and kaseŽko especially), and in the carnival parade music (videŽ) and among songwriters, of whom the best known are Sabas, Lubin, the Volmar brothers, and Ruffinel in the first half of the twentieth century, and of whom Viviane EmigreŽ could be considered a typical representative of the 1980s (Play 1989).
Less numerous than in Surinam, the Maroons of French Guiana live primarily along the Maroni River in four large, distinct groups: the Aluku (also called Boni), the Djuka, the Paramaka, and the Saramaka. The Aluku coalesced the most belatedly, at the end of the 1700s; most live in French Guiana. Though each of these people has a different history, they all share numerous common traitsin particular, a pronounced African heritage. They have synthesized with their original music some elements from Amerindian culture and Creoles of the region. Creativity is another common trait found among these cultures, a trait manifested particularly in the arts (Price and Price 1980). In musical life, this creativity translates into valuation of improvisation and games, even during ceremonies. The barriers between speech and song, among the daily amusements and the formal ceremonials, are fuzzy and movable.
Aluku women and men like to create songs spontaneously to comment allusively on everyday life or to mark the rhythm of the heaviest chores. For several decades, men have sometimes accompanied their songs with a resonating pluriarc (agwado) whose playing can lead certain hiding games. The most important Aluku ceremonies are the funeral songs booko deo and the relief of mourning puu baaka (Bilby 1989), accompanied by an ensemble of three cylindroconical drums of different dimensions: the large drum (gaan donn), the small drum (pikin doon), and the tun. These drums have one skin, often ornamented with engravings (Hurault 1970) and are similar in shape to drums of West Africa. The cowbell (kaway) is another rhythmic instrument important in ceremonial music; its name and shape clearly indicate that it has been directly taken from the neighboring Wayana.
Aluku rites or mourning consist of a series of sequencesmato, susa, songe, awawa, awasathat mix song, recitation, dance, virtuosic demonstrations, provocations, improvisations, women, men, and drummers. Besides these funeral ceremonies are many other occasions for performance. Certain circumstances are formal, such as
The large cultural groupsAmerindians, Maroons, creolespresent three manners of acting on the relation between tradition and creation. The Creoles of French Guiana are considered the main imitators of musical currents that travel from the Caribbean region. They produce few original compositions in popular music, whereas the ancient drum-accompanied dances are particularly the objects of revival.
As this population is influenced by the media, the Creole music of the Antilles and the African popular music they listen to have become a sort of slang music (musique veŽhiculaire) among the younger generations of all the cultural groups in the image of Creole, the language that serves as langue veŽhiculaire of French Guiana. Amerindian musical behaviors divide into two clearly distinct domains from the viewpoint of practices and the viewpoint of discourses: one part of Amerindian musics, not being acclaimed, is continually weakening, in accordance with contact with colonial society; and the other part is an adhesion of the young to the popular music broadcast by Creole ensembles. Finally, the Maroons affirm their creativity across the synthesis of cultures present in every level of their musical civilization.
TRANSLATED BY ROSEMARY MCBRIDE
The Cultural Traditions of Guyana
National Musical Contexts and Genres
The republic of Guyana is one of three former colonies originally known as the Guianas, which lie side by side on the northeastern coast of South America. The Arawak word guaianaŽ 'land of many waters' (Tremblay 1988:58) was the name given the area, sighted by Columbus in 1498 and comprising today's Guyana, Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana), French Guiana, and parts of Brazil and Venezuela. Guyana (bordered by Surinam to the east, Brazil to the south, Venezuela to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean to the north), is the only English speaking-country on the South American continent. The British divided Guyana into three counties: Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice. In 1982, through a process called regionalism, the country was politically divided into ten regions. Most of its eight hundred thousand inhabitants live in the coastal regions, and most of its 215,000 square kilometers are covered by tropical forests.
Originally believed to be the mythical El Dorado (legendarily believed to be rich in gold and precious stones), it was first sought out by early Spanish explorers. Between the 1500s and 1800s it was invaded by the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and British. The first European settlers were the Dutch, whom in the late 1500s the indigenous inhabitants welcomed as trading partners. The area was partially settled in 1616, when the Dutch established a fort at Kyk-Ober-Al in the present county of Essequibo. In 1621, the colony was placed under the direction of the Dutch West Indian Company, which administered it for the next 170 years, interrupted briefly by periods of French and British rule.
During the Dutch occupation, British settlers began migrating to the region in large numbers, and by 1760 they were a majority of the population in Demerara. The Dutch held the three colonies until 1796, when they were captured by a British fleet. The territory was restored to the Dutch in 1802, but a year later the British retook it. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna assigned the three counties to Britain. In 1831, they merged to form British Guiana, which remained a British colony until 1966, when Britain granted it independence.
Guyana's history resembles that of the former British West Indies, culturally linking
The peoples who contributed to Guyana's cultural heritage and development include the aboriginal inhabitants; British, Dutch, and Portuguese colonists; African slaves; and East Indian and Chinese indentured laborers brought in to relieve the labor shortage created by the Emancipation Act (1833). The merging of these peoples' cultural traditions in a common sociocultural context over an extended period stimulated processes that shaped the evolution of Guyanese music.
Native Americans (Amerindians)
The continuing presence of native Americans distinguishes Guyana from much of the immediate English-speaking Caribbean. Unlike their counterparts in the West Indies, who became extinct, the Amerindians of Guyana escaped that fate by retreating into the forests and savannas. Among the population today are small groups of Arawak, WaiwaŽi (Waiwai, Wai-Wai), Patamona, Wapishana, and Macushi, the last group being the most prominent of the savanna peoples. There are also mixed groups: Spanish Arawaks, such as the Arecuna of the Moruka River area, and Spanish Warao, living on and near the border with Venezuela. The savanna peoples, rarely seen in the populated coastal areas, subsist by farming, hunting, fishing, and to a lesser degree selling their craftspolished stone implements, weaving, and beadwork.
Though historians have recorded sketches and pictures of aboriginal carvings, paintings, stonework, basketry, and beadwork, scant collections of Amerindian musical culture in the form of instruments, dance, and song exist. Since about 1975, the Guyanese government has tried to address the need for documentation. In 1985, the artist-historian Denis Williams founded the Amerindian Museum, which displays life-size replicas, artifacts, and literature of each of the indigenous cultures of Guyana. Some information on local Amerindians can also be found in the Georgetown Museum, whose founding curator, Sir Everard Im Thurn, wrote a pioneering work on the Amerindians in 1883. Sister Noel Menezes, a Carmelite nun and historian, has researched and written extensively about the culture of the Amerindians of Guyana. Other studies have been made by Walter Roth (1924), Niels Fock (1963), and Jens Yde (1965) for the WaiwaŽi.
Local Amerindians had a song for every aspect of life. Vocal music making occurred around campfires, in fields while sowing or harvesting, or at the feasting after a successful hunt (mashramani, also the name for a carnival-like celebration in Guyana). Sometimes, dance would accompany vocal music, usually performed in a circle. In the Caribbean as a whole, with the early demise of the Arawak and Carib populations, indigenous religious expression was wiped out; however, the tribes remaining in Guyana give evidence of traditional rituals and feasts that have remained intact. Music in the form of divine incantations is utilized for the purpose
The most popular Amerindian instrumental types in Guyana are membranophonic drums and flutes. Skin drums vary in size according to their use (hunting, feasting, dancing, warfare). They are mostly made from the hollow trunks of trees, with the skins of animals to cover the ends. Rawhide thongs or bush ropes (made of vines) tighten and keep the skins in position. Bamboo flutes were often used, and as with the skin drum, different types were used depending upon the occasion. Flutes were made from long-jointed or short-jointed bamboo, the latter being favored for instrumental merrymaking.
The influence of other people's musics has not escaped these groups entirely, so today locally made instruments such as the guitar, the violin, the banjo, the maracas (shak-shak), the side-blown bamboo flute, and occasionally a tambourine are found.
People of East Indian heritage
Indians, most from North India, first came to Guyana in May 1838, and continued coming until 1917. The majority were of the Hindu religion, about 10 percent were Muslim, and some were Christian. By 1917, about forty-two thousand Muslim Indians were in Guyana; in the late 1990s, their numbers probably totaled about seventy-five thousand. They brought with them their religious and cultural patterns, which they have maintained (with slight variations), forming a thriving subculture in Guyana. They kept up their celebratory practices of Ramadan and other rituals, such as Phagwa (which honors the Hindu god Lord Krishna), Divali (a Hindu festival associated with lights and rejoicing, signifying the triumph of light over darkness), and Hosay (an Islamic festival). Other cultural ties were continued through folk music, storytelling, traditional weddings, and especially language, which they retained. By the end of the indentureship period (1917), Indians who had chosen not to return to their homeland began to participate actively in the society of their adopted country. In the 1990s, East Indians accounted for about 41 percent (328,000) of the Guyanese population.
Instrumental music, song, dance, and drama always played a significant role in the daily existence of these people. Since the Indian people of Guyana practiced their culture strictly among themselves, there has been a dearth of written information about local Indian musical instruments, their construction, and methods of performance. With the establishment of the National History and Arts Council (now the Department of Culture), local Indian musical ensembles flourished during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Membranophones were their major instruments, including the dholak, the tabla, the taja, and tassa drums [see MUSIC OF IMMIGRANT GROUPS]. The dholak and tabla were usually brought from India. Until the late 1970s, some were available for purchase in Indian merchants' stores.
The dholak is a double-headed barrel-shaped drum whose shell is hollowed out of a solid block of wood to a thickness of 25 millimeters. It is about 45 to 50 centimeters long, with a diameter of 30 centimeters on one end and 18 to 23 centimeters on the other; the size, however, can vary. Both heads are covered with stretched leather. Attached to the heads are thick cotton thongs that pass through circular rings of metal near the middle of the shell; these rings help tune the heads. The dholak is used for folk music and festivals.
The tabla, which consists of two drums, is the most widely used percussive instrument in Indian vocal and instrumental music in Guyana. The bayan, played with the left hand, is made of clay or copper; the dayan is usually hollowed out of a block of wood and played with the right hand. Both drums have single leather
The taja was always popular in Guyana and was played by Indian immigrants during the 1800s. It is a double-headed membranophone made from an oak barrel covered with goatskin on both ends. The skins are held securely by thick cotton laces that pass through small metal rings; the tension of the laces regulates the pitch. The taja is not usually mentioned with other instruments of Indian origin, so it is believed that this drum may have been originally built by local Indians for entertainment rather than rituals.
The tassa, known as the wedding drum, is a popular membranophone among the Hindus in Guyana. It is usually played alongside another large drum, the baydam, during weddings, mundan (shaving of the head of a child), and other ceremonies. Kettle-shaped, the body of the drum is made of metal, 45 to 60 centimeters in diameter. Goatskin covers the single opening, held in place with goatskin straps. The tassa is played with two small bamboo sticks and is usually accompanied by a pair of small metallic cymbals (jhaŻn~jh).
Since the early 1960s, European instruments have infiltrated the few East Indian popular film-music bands found in Guyanaa clear indication of the impact of European and North American culture. Most Indian musical ensembles are not complete without a harmonium, a portable reed organ with a keyboard ranging about three octaves and a bellows. The harmonium player sings as he accompanies himself, playing melodies with his right hand while operating the bellows with the left.
Because of their initial isolation on the sugar plantations in the rural areas of Guyana, the Indian community maintained and recreated many aspects of their traditional life, including worship, thus keeping their musical traditions somewhat intact. By modeling, older Guyanese Indians teach Hindi devotional songs (bhajan) to their children. The East Indians, however, still practice religious and secular festivals from India (with reinterpretations), and some of these, such as Divali, Phagwah, and Eid, are nationally observed. During these ceremonies, many East Indian musical traditions are expressed, including classical, secular, and religious Indian song and dance, some strongly influenced by the film industry of India.
With the wave of nationalism that spread throughout the country after independence, Guyanese East Indian cultural traditions began to develop a local flavor, becoming distinct from those of India. Early in the 1970s, the National School of Dance, through its choreographers, incorporated East Indian dance steps into its performances, accompanied by traditional Indian instruments such as the tabla. Some choreographers were Indians, but the majority were not.
People of African heritage
Thirty-seven percent of Guyana's population is of African heritage, descendants of slaves mainly from West Africa who brought with them their languages and a cultural heritage that included traditions of storytelling. In colonial British Guiana, people of African heritage experienced considerable prejudice and discrimination. Their cultural practices were deemed pagan and immoral and were seen to be potentially dangerous, having the capacity to incite the emotions. Drumming in particular was held in contempt and at one time was even outlawed. Yet enslaved Africans kept their music
Tapping vivid memories of home, African slaves in Guyana built African musical instruments in their new land; several have survived, especially skin drums. Today, there remains a strong tradition of drumming, singing, and dancing. Two surviving membranophones are a conga and a tam-tam (variant spelling of tom-tom, a large and slightly convex-shaped drum, played with the hands).
The conga is an elongated bass drum, about 40 centimeters in diameter, whose body is made of wood. It is about 1.2 meters high, covered at one end with skin and open at the other. Wooden stakes attached to loops affixed to the skin are hammered into the side of the drum body, making the skin tight and allowing the drum to be tuned. The tam-tam is similar in style except for its diameter, about half that of the conga; as a result, it produces a higher sound. These drums, held between the legs of seated musicians, are played with the hands. Drumming is heard only in specific social and religious contexts such as weddings and wakes (rituals lasting nine nights after a person's death), particularly in rural areas.
Another African retention is the que-que, a ceremonial song-and-dance sequence, performed mainly as a celebration honoring a couple intending to marry. In this context, singing and dancing accompany each other, with the dancers' bare feet simulating drum patterns. The dancers line up in two files, men on one side, women on the other, while spectators gather in a ring. A soloist improvises a line or a stanza (usually in quadruple time), and spectators and dancers answer, clapping their hands. The dancers move around in a circle, stamping on the ground in a one-two-three pattern, and kicking in the air on the fourth beat. The que-que usually lasts several hours, since it follows a sequential pattern of songs. During it, food and drink are served.
Enslaved Africans kept their religious traditions alive as they had done with their music and language. Dale Bisnauth describes a syncretic sect unique to Guyana; known as the Church of the Western Evangelical Millennium Pilgrims (WEMP) and founded by Nathaniel Jordan, it draws beliefs and practices from Christianity, Hinduism, and traditional religions of Africa (1993:42). Because of the attire prescribed by the church, members are commonly called the Jordanites or the White-Robed Army. They come mainly from the black working class. Derived practices include singing a cappella, the use of Protestant hymns and European harmonies, the technique of lining out, rhythmic hand clapping, and responsorial texture.
Another common musical form in Guyana is calypso, whose roots lie in African oral traditions. Because it originated in Trinidad, however, its musical influences include French and Spanish concepts from the colonial periods, East Indian drumming (tassa drumming), and African revivalist spirituals. In style, it also shows influences of rhythm and blues, swing, and bebop, brought to Trinidad by United States troops stationed there during World War II. Calypso can be described as witty, using satirical poetry in song. It serves as a vehicle for the town crier, village gossip, and rich entertainment.
The average Guyanese does not use calypso as an everyday means of expression; therefore the calypsonian is a specialist to whom many people can relate because he offers clever commentaries on current social ills. The Guyanese form of calypso is usually four stanzas long, with a chorus after each stanza. The tunes are catchy,
The steelband, which came to Guyana from Trinidad in 1952, is in part a descendant and reinterpretation of the hollow log idiophones and xylophones of Africa. It includes steel idiophones (pans) made from 55-gallon oil drums. Pans range from full-size basses to the ping pong, cut to about 15 centimeters from the top of the barrel. Steelbands play any type of music on any occasion but play mostly during national festivals [see TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO].
In Guyana, the late-twentieth-century reawakening of masquerade bands, though not widespread, represents a revival of African elements. A tradition of music, dance, mask, and mime, the masquerade can be found in several islands of the Caribbean. Though its roots are strongly African, Al Creighton (1994) cites other influences, such as Morris dancing and medieval mumming plays. The name masquerade (used in Nigeria) may come from the Yoruba word egungun 'masquerader'.
In Guyana, the masquerade is performed mainly at Christmas, though it has no traditional links with the Christian nativity. It is made up of instrumentalists playing fife and two types of drums, flouncers (dancers who perform a series of intricate steps), and various masked and costumed characters (see Okada 1995: example 21). The last include stilt dancers (symbols of agility and strength recreating the steps of ancestral gods), the mad cow (which drives fear into onlookers and controls crowds), and Mother Sally (a towering, 2-meter image, dancing wildly with flailing hands).
Music and dance play equal roles in masquerades. The fife, with its size and piercing quality akin to those of the piccolo, plays a rhythmic melodic line above the drumbeats. Dictating the dancers' steps, the bhoom (bass drum) keeps the beat, while the kittle (a smaller drum) plays counter-rhythms to the bass. Both drums are played with sticks. Despite attempts in the 1990s to revive interest and elevate its status, masquerade is a dying art in Guyana.
British traditions
Guyanese formal music education was developed mainly by the British. Generations of young people were and still are being taught music theory, piano performance, and other instrumental playing in preparation for the examinations set by the British Royal Schools of Music. These examinations are an external equivalent to those held in England and are adjudicated by an examiner sent from England. High standards of instrumental performance were attained by some of these candidates, who were later to form the nucleus of a concertgoing public and patrons of the arts.
As part of their legacy, the British (with the help of musically trained Guyanese) established in 1952 the Music Festival, a biennial competition, which continued until 1973. As with the examinations, an adjudicator was sent from England to judge
The outstanding vocal work by a Guyanese composer is a three-movement musical setting of A. J. Seymour's poem "The Legend of Kaieteur," referring to a Guyanese waterfall. Composed in 1944 by the late Philip Pilgrim, this work was intended for orchestra, solo piano, three soloists, and a choir of a hundred voices. The composer died before completing the orchestral score, but the work has been performed (in 1944, and again in 1970) with two pianos substituting for the orchestra. For the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (CARIFESTA), held in Guyana in 1972, the composer's brother rescored the work for two pianos and steelband. As far as is known, this was the first time a steelband was used in an extended work of its kind. The event served to highlight a perceived need for the region's traditional instruments to be fully recognized and used in nontraditional ways.
The British also established military bands and chamber orchestras. In the initial stages, a military band known as the B. G. Militia Band was made up of British foreign nationals under the directorship of a British bandleader. One former director, Major S. W. Henwood, wrote compositions for the band and encouraged bandsmen to compose. A few compositions by former bandsmen are still performed. Gradually, in the early 1960s, the makeup of the band changed to include young local men (taught to play wind instruments) and a local bandmaster. During the 1970s and 1980s, the band, now known as the Guyana Police Force Band, began to include women among its members.
In the 1950s, British expatriates' establishment of the Theater Guild of Guyana allowed for the production of several British plays and operettas, particularly those of Gilbert and Sullivan. Dance bands that flourished during the 1930s and 1940s played the music of the swing era for ballroom dancing. During British rule, music and music education flourished in schools, churches, and concerts.
The great influence of dance and folk drama on the music of Guyana is reflected in festivals and dramatic presentations that have become part of everyday life. Singing has always been a major part of Caribbean culture, and in the vocal repertoire of Guyana, many forms of songs appear. Among these are the spirituals, chanties, work songs, classical European art songs, English folk songs, and religious songs. Examples of these genres are not always sung but are sometimes used instrumentally as part of dramatic presentations. Examples of this practice can be found during Mashramani (an Amerindian term for celebrations after a successful hunt or harvest). During these celebrations (formerly marked by national competitions called Mass Games, inspired by similar events held in other socialist countries, especially North Korea), music, movement, dance, choral speaking, and visual art combine to produce exciting dramas.
Guyanese work songs formed a considerable portion of the vocal literature in the pre-and early postindependence eras. Work songs can be described as songs that accompany and stimulate workers during periods of communal labor. In Guyana, many of these songs dealt with activities of the sea and shipbuilding. That Guyana borders the sea is reflected in the many boat songs and chanties in the musical repertoire.
Among the work songs peculiar to Guyana are timber workers' songs. Others are used by builders who believe in the need to appease evil spirits, thus ensuring safe and proper construction. The foreman customarily leads these songs, and the other builders or loggers join in on the chorus. Also in the work-song category are those sung by gold diggers, locally known as pork-knockers, who paddle boats to and from the goldfields and diamond fields in the interior of Guyana. To save time, these workers often engage in the dangerous practice of riding the rapids; their songs offer them comfort and protection. One of the most famous of their songs is "Itanamee," referring to a Guyanese river; in its text, a frightened man pleads with the captain to be put ashore. Completing this group are boat-race songs and chanties, formerly sung at the annual regatta (Brathwaite 1962:6).
Starting in 1970, after the attainment of independence and on a change in the form of government to a republic, a wave of nationalism spread through the country, fostered and reflected in governmental cultural policies of the 1970s. A few jazz musicians experimented with various rhythms and motifs in an attempt to create a Guyanese beat. Two beats that enjoyed brief spells of popularity were the bhoom and the lopi, the first in the 1960s and the second in the 1970s.
Other evidence of the growth of musical nationalism was seen in the creation of the Guyana Festival of the Arts (GUYFESTA), which replaced the British-style Music Festival in 1973 with several folkloric arts. It allowed competitors, even those who had received no formal music training, the freedom to compose and perform their own works, mostly for voice with guitar accompaniment, on any themefolk, national, political, social. It helped showcase a young breed of composers whose compositions were more rhythmic and syncopated than the earlier, hymn-style pieces (
Tourism, media, and musical outreach
Unlike most West Indian islands, Guyana does not boast blue waters and sandy beaches. As a result, tourism has never been a large part of the Guyanese economy. Foreign nationals staying in the country are mainly there at the request of the government, working on national projects through their embassies. Much Guyanese music is heard in the context of social events: Mass Games; Mashramani, a kind of carnival (
There is no public television station in the country. Not until 1992 was a private station begunCNS, devoted to East Indian culture (Manuel 1995:214). Radio, however, plays an important role. It devotes airtime to Indian programs of religious and secular music, but most of its fare is American popular music. Musical competitions continue during Mashramani, with calypso, steelband, and fife-and-drum competitions.
Some importance must be placed on the contributions made by visiting artists and foreign nationals living in Guyana, as on the roles played by the cultural arms of various embassies. Guyana has been fortunate in this respect, and the contributions made by the Indian Cultural Center, the USIS Information Services, and several other foreign embassies, have helped in no small measure to broaden the cultural outlook of the Guyanese people.
The social class structure, which arose even musically as a consequence of British traditions, no longer exists, and instruments and those who make and use them have
Though Guyana boasts many formally trained musicians, they have yet to make a musical impact on the world scene, as performers in Jamaica and Trinidad have. Such an achievement can be possible only through the combined efforts and cooperation of the Department of Culture and the Ministry of Education, the agencies responsible for determining the direction of music and music education in Guyana, and their subsequent export abroad.
The Colonial Period
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Social Structure and Musicians
Popular Music and Electronic Media
Further Study
Paraguay is often called by its citizens the heart of South America, because of its landlocked position in the center of South America and national pride in its cultural riches. About 95 percent of the population is of mixed Spanish and GuaraniŽ Indian descent. Though little else of GuaraniŽ culture has survived, the GuaraniŽ language has left a strong mark, and its use is a focus of national pride. Most of the population is bilingual; 90 percent of the population speak GuaraniŽ, and 75 percent speak Spanish. Widespread bilingualism has led to frequent mixing of the languages, creating a linguistic hybrid, JoparaŽ. Racial and linguistic mixtures contribute to the ethnic, cultural, and social homogeneity of the population. This homogeneity, in turn, contributes to a strong sense of cultural identity, often expressed in music.
Though the landmass of Paraguay (406,750 square kilometers) is almost the size of California, most of the 4.5 million population has traditionally occupied an area within 160 kilometers of the capital, AsuncioŽn. Large-scale migrations to the east and south since the early 1970s have reduced this concentration, but most of the population still lives in the eastern half of the country. Though the western area accounts for 60 percent of the landmass, only about 4 percent of the people live west of the Paraguay River, in the area known as the Chaco.
The Paraguay River serves as a cultural divider among the country's Indians. The four groups in eastern Paraguay all speak varieties of GuaraniŽ [see GUARANIŽ] or GuayakiŽ, a related language. Those in the Chaco represent five language families: the Ayoreo and Chamakoko belong to the Zamuko family; the AngaiteŽ, Guana, Lengua, and Sanapana belong to the Maskoy family; the ChorotiŽ, ChulupiŽ (ChurupiŽ), and MakaŽ belong to the Matako family; and the GuaykuruŽ family is represented by the Toba language. The only GuaraniŽ group in the Chaco is the Chiriguano. The GuaraniŽ language often serves as a lingua franca among the native populations.
The archaeological musical record of pre-Columbian Paraguay is scant; it contains only a few bone vertical end-blown ductless flutes (mimby) of GuaraniŽ origin. Besides the climate and the soil, among the reasons for the paucity of archaeological musical artifacts is that the indigenous inhabitants led a seminomadic way of life, occasioned at least in part among GuaraniŽ tribes by the belief that the souls of the dead continued to inhabit the structures that were their homes during life.
The historical musical record begins with the arrival of the Portuguese explorer Aleixo GarciŽa in 1524. Among the chroniclers, MartiŽn del Barco Centenera (1982 [1602]), who in 1572 accompanied the expedition of Juan Ortiz de ZaŽrate, mentioned the mbarakaŽ (large rattle), horns, and drums. Ruy DiŽaz de GuzmaŽn (1945:187) wrote of trumpets (cornetas) and horns (bocinas), sounded by the Indians before an attack. Ulrich Schmiedel, a Bavarian soldier who accompanied Pedro de Mendoza in the exploration up the ParanaŽ and Paraguay rivers, recounted that music was played while the chief or the JeruŽsscholars have not identified this culture; it may have been the name of a villageate his meals, and that at noon, if the chief so wished, the most attractive men and women danced before him (1942:60).
Some of the most informative accounts of natives' musical performance come from Jesuit records. The Cartas anuas, annual reports made by each Jesuit province to the Jesuit general in Rome (Leonhardt 1927-1929), tell us that some GuaraniŽ surrounded the house of a certain Spaniard and for several nights played their horns and drums "in a warlike manner." The Jesuit historians praised GuaraniŽ musical abilities, which they used for missionizing other Indians. Gonzal Carrasco recounted how the missionaries would travel into new areas by canoe, taking Indian converts. As they headed upriver, the missionaries, echoed by their recent converts, sang songs to attract the attention of other GuaraniŽ, who came out of the forest to the riverbanks, and sometimes even swam after the canoes, at least in part because of their fascination with the music they heard (Charlevoix 1769 [1756]:60).
The Jesuit accounts focus on life in the thirty mission towns (reducciones 'reductions') established by the Jesuits among the GuaraniŽ. These accounts have little to say regarding native musical practices among the GuaraniŽ, but they do attest to the extent to which the missionaries instructed the Indians in European musical styles. As early as 1609, the year the first mission towns were founded, the Jesuit provincial (the highest-ranking Jesuit in the province), Diego de Torres, ordered that the Indian inhabitants should be taught "not only doctrine and singing, but to read and write music with ease." By 1620, Pedro de On~ate reported that in the mission town of San Ignacio the missionaries had taught the Indians to sing well in three voices, and there was a good trio of chirimiŽas (shawms). By about 1700, all the mission towns had choirs and instrumentalists trained in European styles, whom observers frequently compared favorably with European performers. The GuaraniŽ musicians performed music imported from Europe and written by Jesuit missionaries, including the Italian composer Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726).
In addition to the musical instruction available in each mission town, GuaraniŽ youths who showed musical talent were sometimes sent to the music school established at YapeyuŽ, near the Uruguay River. The most important figure in the musical life of YapeyuŽ was Anton Sepp von Reinegg (1691-1733) from Tirol, whose accounts (1696, 1973 [1710]) of his life as a missionary shed important light on the development of music not only at YapeyuŽ but in all the mission towns. He is credited with the introduction of the harp, an instrument that has obtained musical primacy in Paraguayan folk music, and he built the first organ to have been constructed in the mission towns. This organ seems to have been moved from ItapuŽa, where it was built, to YapeyuŽ.
GuaraniŽ from the mission towns sometimes visited Argentine cities, including CoŽrdoba and Buenos Aires. In 1628, Francisco de CeŽspedes, governor of RiŽo de la Plata, wrote about having seen in Buenos Aires a group of more than twenty Indians from San Ignacio. He described them as "great musicians" who played "the organ, violin, and other instruments," and performed the "dances of the Sacrament." He insisted they were as skilled as if they had been educated in Spain (Pen~a 1916:173).
Inventories made of the mission towns on the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish lands show the use of a remarkable number and variety of musical instruments. Among them were harps, guitars, vihuelas, bandurrias, violins, violas, harpsichords, spinets, horns, trumpets, trombones, chirimiŽas, bajones, flutes, and organs. Some of these instruments had been imported from Europe, but many had been made by the GuaraniŽ. The only instrument with precontact roots recorded in the inventories was a conch trumpet.
In addition to the written inventories, an iconographic record of some instruments found in the mission towns still exists. High on the walls of the church in the partially restored ruins of the town of Trinidad is a frieze depicting angels playing many of the instruments mentioned in the written accounts of musical life in the Jesuit mission towns (
Numerous musical instruments are in use today among the indigenous, mestizo, and European-descended inhabitants of Paraguay, though there is no record that indigenous instruments were used in Jesuit mission towns.
Idiophones
One of the most important idiophones in use among the GuaraniŽ is the mbarakaŽ, a spiked calabash rattle with small stones or seeds inside, and a wooden handle usually adorned with feathers. It is regarded as a shamanistic instrument [see GUARANIŽ].
The takuapuŽ, a GuaraniŽ word for an indigenous bamboo stamped tube, is played only by women among themselves and other groups. Among the MakaŽ and other Chaco indigenous groups, the length may vary between 1. 5 and 2 meters. The takuapuŽ tubes in the Chaco may have strings of rattles attached and are used in women's dances to mark the beat. Strings of rattles, such as those attached to the takuapuŽ, may be worn around dancers' ankle, waists, or wrists. They are traditionally made from deer hooves, tortoiseshells, or other materials or may even consist of bottle caps strung together (Boettner n. d. :20).
Membranophones
Indigenous groups use various types of drums. Water drums are used by theToba, the MakaŽ, the GuaykuruŽ, and other groups living in the Chaco. The bodies of these
Aerophones
Flutes are the most frequent type of aerophone among all indigenous groups in Paraguay. The generic term for flutes among the GuaraniŽ is mimby, but a wide variety exists. One of the most notable flutes among the non-GuaraniŽ Paraguayan groups is a wooden globular flute found among the ChulupiŽ.
The krywaŽ, a resonating tube played exclusively by AcheŽ-GuayakiŽ women, consists of a simple cane tube, open on both ends but with no holes for fingering (
Chordophones
Traditional chordophones played by members of indigenous groups in Paraguay include several types of musical bows. The cajuaveŽ is a small, mouth-resonated bow found in the Chaco. It is held between the front teeth and struck with a small stick; the musician's mouth serves as a resonator and a means of changing the amplitude of the overtones. The sound of the cajuaveŽ is soft, and it is a personal instrument, played by men on occasions such as the death of, or separation from, their wives (Boettner n. d. :30).
The AcheŽ-GuayakiŽ hunting bow (rapaŽ) serves as a musical instrument. Players place it over a resonating container, and strum it to produce a monotone ostinato. Traditionally, clay pots were the resonators of choice, but metal buckets are sometimes used. A possibly related chordophone used by the AcheŽ-GuayakiŽ is the
A one-stringed violin is used by the MakaŽ and the Lengua of the Chaco, probably as a result of contact with missionaries. The hairs of the bow are moistened by the player's mouth to produce sound when drawn across the string. The body of the violin is made from wood or a tin can.
The most ubiquitous instruments in the folk music of the population of Paraguay are the guitar (guitarra) and the harp (arpa). These are considered indispensable for folkloric ensembles (conjuntos). The guitar, called mbarakaŽ in GuaraniŽ, is of standard European design, with six nylon strings.
Harps and harpists
The diatonic Paraguayan harp (sometimes called arpa india 'Indian harp', though it is of European descent) is usually the featured instrument of a conjunto, and the harpist is often the director of the group. The Paraguayan harp produces a bright, powerful sound. The neck is made or two halves of laminated wood, through which the tuning pegs pass, and the strings (usually 36 to 40) come out of holes in the bottom side of the neck. This construction causes a centralization of pressure in the neck, which makes a high string tension that creates a bright sound. This construction allows for a lightweight instrument, usually between 3 and 5 kilograms. Tuning pegs were traditionally made of wood, though most harps now feature guitar-type mechanical pegs. The body of the Paraguayan harp is about 1. 4 meters long and about 40 centimeters wide at its widest point. The sound resonates from the body through a single, large, round hole in the base of the sound box. Traditionally, harpists made their own instrumentsa practice that can still be observed in the interior of the country. However, a thriving harp-making industry now exists in and around AsuncioŽn, providing harps for professional harpists in Paraguay and throughout the world. The popularity of the Paraguayan harp has spread widely since 1970, even as far as Japan (
An important aspect of harp-performance technique in Paraguay is the lack of standardization. Harpists learn by experimentation and observation. This results in widely various techniques and special effects, which become part of the tradition. Techniques of muffling and glissando are especially important in harp pieces such as "PaŽjaro Campana" ('The Bellbir'), "Cascada" ('Waterfall'), and "El Tren Lechero" ('The Milk Train'), based largely on natural or human-made sounds.
The most influential Paraguayan harpist-composer was Felix PeŽrez Cardozo (1908-1952), composer of the onomatopoeic "Llegada" and "El Tren Lechero," and arranger of the famous traditional melody "PaŽjaro Campana" He was one of the first harpists to popularize the Paraguayan harp outside the country. Other famous harpists include LuiŽs BordoŽn, who lived for many years in Brazil; Digno GarciŽa, the
When the harp is played at home or in concert as a solo instrument, the harpist is usually seated; in a conjunto performance, usually with two or three guitars, the harpist usually stands, sometimes placing the legs of the instrument on a small stool to obtain the correct height. In addition to the harp and standard guitars, a requinto (a smaller guitar) is sometimes used in folkloric ensembles.
Religious
Religious contexts form an important part of musical life in Paraguay. Music is an important part of shamanism among the Indian groups, where sickness is often believed to be caused by intrusion of substances into the patient. Healing results from naming and extracting the intrusion, which follows several hours of chanting by the shaman.
African-derived music
Though Paraguay never had as many African slaves as did regions along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, there was in the 1800s a small number of Paraguayans of African ancestry. They have mostly been absorbed into the population at large, leaving little trace of their African heritage except the musical bow (gualambau, guyrambau, lambau, and other names) and possibly the mbarimbau. The one exception is the community of Laurelty, where the celebration of the feast of Saint Balthazar is observed by the descendants of the blacks who had followed the Uruguayan General Artigas into exile. This celebration retains certain Africanisms, especially the primacy of drums, played exclusively by men.
In the 1980s and 1990s, African-Brazilian cults including Umbanda and CandombleŽ made inroads into Paraguay, principally because of large numbers of Brazilian immigrants in the western part of the country. There has been little study of these cults in Paraguay, and even less of their music. Given the relative homogeneity among African-Brazilian cults from Belem and Bahia in the Brazilian northeast to AsuncioŽn, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, it is to be assumed that the music of these cults in Paraguay is similar to that practiced by their adherents in Brazil. The most important terreiros (centers of African-Brazilian worship) in Paraguay are in AsuncioŽn, CaaguazuŽ, Campo Nueve, Coronel Oviedo, ItaŽ, and ItaguaŽ (Gallardo 1986:43).
Roman Catholic festivals
About 95 percent of Paraguay's population is Roman Catholic. Most of the other 5 percent are Mennonites, Baptists, or Pentecostals, or belong to smaller Protestant denominations. Beginning with the Jesuit mission towns, Roman Catholicism has been a significant cultural force through Paraguay's history. Given the greater freedom that began after the second Vatican Council (1962-1965), liturgical music has been somewhat influenced by the coritos (short choruses) prominent in many of the Protestant churches. Much music associated with the Roman Catholic Church, especially in religious festivals, is greatly influenced by folkloric traditions. Traditional religious songs include gozos 'joys', alabanzas 'praises', and villancicos 'rustic songs'.
An important musical event that occurs during Holy Week is the activity of the pasioneros (relating to the Passion of Christ), also called estacioneros (relating to the
Patronal festivals
Patronal festivals are especially important musical occasions, in which a complex of religious and secular ceremonies forms a unified whole, providing an occasion for celebration and strengthening communal bonds, often marked by the return of family members who have moved away from the community. The festivals are usually organized by a festivity commission (comisioŽn de festejos), composed of prominent men and women in the community. The religious observance begins nine days before the feast of the patron saint. Masses are said for community members who have died in the past year, and for the sick. Weddings are an important part of the celebration.
Traditionally, the image of the patron saint is kept in the home of a caretaker, but this custom is no longer widely observed. From the caretaker's home, the image is taken in a large procession to the church for the beginning of the novena. In communities where the image is kept in a chapel, the procession from the chapel to the church takes place on the eve of the feast, accompanied by a joyful celebratory procession marked by fireworks, band music, flying flags, and people on foot and (in rural areas) on horseback. After the image of the saint arrives in the church, masses are celebrated.
The feast proper begins before dawn with a trumpet signal (diana mbaja~), the pealing of bells, brass-band music, and fireworks. The national flag and the standard of the patron saint are raised in the central plazas. If the patron saint is female, young men may serenade her, accompanying themselves with guitars and harps.
The central ceremony of the patronal feast is a high mass (always sung), in which a conjunto often supplies the musical accompaniment. Frequently, especially in rural areas, the mass is in the GuaraniŽ language. The church is highly decorated for the occasion. The entire town attends the mass, as do residents of neighboring localities and towns. Many pilgrims or promeseros, children and adults, come dressed as the patron saint or at least wear elements of clothing such as habits, cloak, belt, or tiara associated with the saint. They may carry the standard or insignia of the saint and as a sign of penance may carry stones on their heads. These promeseros may walk great distances; in the days immediately before 8 December, the feast of the Virgin of CaacupeŽ, attended by pilgrims from all over the country, it is common to see promeseros walking for many miles up rugged hills on their knees in supplication or in recognition of answered prayers.
After mass, the image of the saint is carried in a solemn procession through the streets of the town, which have been adorned with bamboo arches, small flags, flowers, ticker tape, and aeolian noisemakers, which sound in the wind. The procession is
More secular events also take place. In the plaza in front of the church or on a vacant lot, a temporary amusement park (kermese) is usually set up. Tents and booths provide cover for various activities, including raffles, darts, target shooting, cards, and other games. Typical foods and drinks, alcoholic and nonalcoholic, are sold as are local arts and crafts. A merry-go-round is an indispensable part of the festivities. Bullfights are frequent occurrences as is the toro candil 'lighted bull', in which one or two men inside a mock-bull play the part of a fighting bull. The bull's body is made of cowhide or canvas over a wooden frame; its head is fashioned of a cow skull, to the horns of which are tied flaming torches.
An important part of the celebration surrounding patronal festivals is the concerts provided by military bands (from the local army post) or by similar civilian bands (banda koyguaŽ) and by conjuntos performing folk music, which may accompany folk dances like the polca paraguaya, the galopa, and the golondriana. Groups of musicians may go from house to house serenading ecclesiastical, civil, and military authorities and prominent families.
Social and athletic clubs hold their own festivities. These events frequently feature rock bands, and are characterized as bailes. Those who attend come to dance. Dances (danzas) are not so frequent in the celebrations at these clubs.
Other feasts
Alongside the feasts of local patron saints and of the Virgin of CaacupeŽ, the most important patronal festivals are those of San Bias, patron saint of the nation (3 February), and Saint John the Baptist (24 June). The festivities of the night of 23 June are anticipated the entire year. Besides the typical revelry, musical performance, and dancing, a particular feature of this celebration is fire. Around dusk, a large bonfire (fogata de San Juan, or in GuaraniŽ, San Juan rataŽ) is lighted. Around midnight, when the fire dies down, the white-hot coals are raked out into a uniform bed on the ground, about 1 meter wide by 4 or 5 meters long, over which the faithful walk barefoot after exclaiming "Viva San Juan!" This practice, which apparently does no harm to the practitioners' feet, is known as tataŽ ari jehasaŽ 'to walk on fire'. Other important activities of this feast involving fire are the crowd's kicking around a fireball (pelota tata~), a ball of rags soaked in tar and kerosene and set afire, and the burning of Judas vin effigy (Juda kaŽi). The figure of Judas is often filled with fireworks, causing a great commotion. The Juda kaŽi and tataŽ ari jehasaŽ mark the highlight of the festivities and for that reason bring the music to a temporary halt.
Protestant music
The music of the Protestant churches formerly tended to resemble that of the denominations in the United States and Europe to which they were related. Many of the Protestant hymns were Spanish translations of European and North American hymns and gospel songs. Since the 1970s, however, short repetitive choruses (coritos), written originally in Spanish, have been gaining popularity. These may or may not be settings of Scripture. Their texts are much more subjective and emotionally charged than those of traditional hymns. Musically, they tend toward diatonic, conjunct
Secular music and dance
Folkloric music, a primary vehicle for expressing Paraguayan ideology, is particularly linked with a sense of national identity. Much of this musical nationalism is related to the importance of the GuaraniŽ language and mythology in mestizo culture. Many musical texts are in GuaraniŽ or JoparaŽ. Several songs of wide renown are based on GuaraniŽ mythology. Much folkloric music is composed by individuals but is generally conceded folkloric status based on preconceived notions of genre. The executive branch of the government demonstrated the nationalistic importance of music in a 1959 decree, which ordered that 50 percent of the music played on the radio be by Paraguayan composers. The decree is still technically in effect, though unenforced.
The musical genre known as guaraŽnia, created in 1925 by JoseŽ AsuncioŽn Flores (1904-1972) and later adopted by other composers, is widely acknowledged as an important national tradition. Often in minor mode, the guaraŽnia is slower than a polca, though it makes use of the same dual-meter (sesquiaŽltera) rhythmic device. It is defined primarily by the characteristic rasgueado, or guitar strum. The texts of many guaraŽnias assume a nostalgic viewpoint, expressing a yearning to return to a particular locality as does the song "AsuncioŽn," or remembering a lost love as does "Recuerdos de YpacaraiŽ," which became famous throughout the world. The following partial text of "Recuerdo de YpacaraiŽ" reveals the typical nationalistic and romantic flavor of the guaraŽnia, including the GuaraniŽ term for "girl" (cun~ataiŽ):
Donde estaŽs ahora cun~ataiŽ, | Where are you now, cun~ataiŽ, |
Que tu suave canto no llega a mi? | That your gentle song does not reach me? |
Donde estaŽs ahora? | Where are you now? |
Mi ser te adora | My being adores you |
Con frenesiŽ. | With frenzy. |
Todo te recuerda, mi dulce amor | Everything is reminiscent of you, my sweet love. |
Junto al lago azul de YpacaraiŽ, | Near the blue lake YpacaraiŽ, |
Todo te recuerda. | Everything is reminiscent of you. |
Mi amor te llama, cun~ataiŽ. | My love calls you, cun~ataiŽ. |
Dancing frequently accompanies folkloric music. Especially prominent are several varieties of polca. The dance music of the polca paraguaya is unlike that of the European and North American polka. Whereas its most prominent feature is the melody's duple rhythm, it uses a dual metera syncopated compound binary in the melody against simple triple meter in the bass.
Polcas are often qualified by terms that describe how they are danced: polca syryryŽ 'smooth, slippery', polca popoŽ or jeroky popoŽ 'jumping polca, jumping dance', polca jekutuŽ 'stationary (in which the dancer does not cover much space)', polca valseado 'characterized by a smooth balance of the dancer's body as in the waltz'.
The gallop (galopa) consists of two musical sections: the first resembles a polca, but the second has notable syncopation, emphasized by percussion instruments. It is performed by an instrumental ensemble usually consisting of brass and woodwind instruments, bass drum, snare drum, and cymbals. The dancers (galoperas) are women who dance to fulfill religious vows. The galopa usually takes place outdoors, in a space prepared for the occasion, lit with torches and adorned with flowers and paper pennants. The galoperas, in traditional dress, improvise steps as they dance with pitchers of water or bottles of alcoholic can~a balanced on their heads, from which they offer drinks to observers. Formerly, some galoperas would carry baskets of fruit on their heads rather than pitchers or bottles. The symbolism of water and fruit and sensuous motions of the dancers, most of whom are young, seem to identify this dance as a type of disguised fertility ritual.
Other important folkloric dances include the chopiŽ (also known as the Santa Fe), the palomita, the golondriana, the london karapeŽ, the pericoŽn, the solito, and the cazador. All of these are couple dances, performed in traditional clothes.
Steakhouses and touristic performance
An important context for Paraguayan folkloric music and dance can be found in the steakhouses (parrilladas) of AsuncioŽn, especially those catering to tourists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Japan, and the rest of the world. These restaurants, featuring typical Paraguayan cuisine, frequently offer performances of conjuntos of singers accompanying themselves with harp and guitars, as well as performances of folk dances.
One of the most impressive dances, and a popular tourist attraction, is the bottle dance (danza de las botellas), usually accompanied by polca music (
Sometimes feats such as picking up a handkerchief from the dance floor with the teeth emphasize the dancer's agility and balance. In particularly lavish productions, as many as fourteen or fifteen bottles may be placed one on top of the other on the dancer's head by a helper, who may need to ascend a ladder to stack them. The final bottle is usually decorated by the insertion of flowers or by the attachment of a tricolor ribbon.
Music and life-cycle events
Life-cycle rituals are frequently settings for musical performance in Paraguay. Especially notable is the quincean~era, a girl's fifteenth-birthday celebration. This
Serenades
The serenade (serenato) is a frequent occurrence at a quincean~era, often performed by a young woman's suitor, who may be accompanied by his male friends. The serenade may be a surprise to the recipient, or she may have had prior knowledge of the event, usually as the result of gossip. The music usually begins with a love song, frequently a guaŽrdnia, sung to the accompaniment of guitars, and is followed by two or three faster songs such as polcas. At the end of the serenade, the recipient and her family are expected to thank the musicians graciously, and if they had prior knowledge of the event, to invite them into the house for an ambiguŽ, food and drink. Longer serenatas are sometimes called musiqueadas. Both are performed as a sign of respect for family members, important members of the community, and girlfriends.
Wakes
A wake, especially that of a young child, is an important musical event. According to popular belief, the spirit of a young dead child (less than about eight years of age) bypasses purgatory and goes directly to heaven, where he or she becomes an angel or even a star. For this reason, the wake of a young child is called a little angel's wake (velorio de angelito) and is the scene of festivities (Gonzalez Torres 1991:312-313). The child wears a white crown; the clothes are white or pink for a girl or light blue for a boy. A small crucifix or palm leaves are placed in the child's hands, folded on the chest. The body is placed in a white casket whose edges are decorated with white flowers and is displayed on a table covered with a white sheet. Candles are lighted at the head of the casket. Family members and friends who attend the wake place flowers and sometimes money on the body or on the table.
During the wake, a conjunto (an ensemble of harp, guitar, and flute, or at least two guitars) plays and sings. Alcoholic beverages, including can~a (sugarcane alcohol) and beer, flow freely. Those attending the wake frequently dance all night, and fireworks are not uncommon. The mourning parents of the deceased child usually remain in a separate room, where friends and family console them.
A burial procession is headed by musicians. The casket may be carried by four childrenfriends, relatives, or schoolmatesor may be carried by the mother or godmother on her head. The lid of the casket is carried by other children. Once at the cemetery, the crucifix or palm leaves are taken out of the child's hands, and the casket is closed for burial. In some parts of the country (such as Alto ParanaŽ and ItapuŽa), store owners commonly pay for the expenses of wakes and provide money to deceased children's parents. This service entitles store owners to sell food and drinks to the guests.
Musical performance in Paraguayan culture is widespread within all ages and social classes. Singing among groups of friends is perceived to have great entertainment value and is a frequent pastime. Guitars are widely played, though mostly by ear; few players have any formal training in music. Men and women play guitars, but few women play harps. Some professional and semiprofessional conjuntos include women, who tend to be singers rather than harpists or guitarists.
The intentional role of music in the promotion of cultural identity can also be seen among various ethnic groups of foreign extraction, such as the communities of Japanese, Koreans, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, and Arabs, some of whom main-
Most musical education in Paraguay takes place informally, based on oral tradition. Basic study of music is part of the public school curriculum, but not many people learn to read music. The Ateneo Paraguayo, founded in 1883, is one of the oldest and most highly regarded musical institutions of the country. It offers lessons in applied music and music theory. The Escuela de Bellas Artes, part of the National University of AsuncioŽn, was established in 1957; it is made up of departments of music, voice, classical dance, and plastic arts. More or less advanced musical training is available at the Baptist and Mennonite seminaries, which also sponsor choirs. The offerings of these educational institutions are supplemented by the Orquesta SinfoŽnica de la Ciudad de AsuncioŽn, which, in addition to concert seasons of art music from the Western tradition, carries on educational activities for young people.
Individual teachers, primarily in AsuncioŽn, provide private music lessons. The most frequently studied instruments are harp, guitar, and piano. The study of classical guitar is particularly prestigious, and Paraguayans take pride in the two guitarists of world fame Paraguay has produced: AgustiŽn Barrios MangoreŽ (1885-1944) and Cayo Sila Godoy (b. 1920).
Paraguayan folk music such as polcas and guaraŽnias continues to exercise great appeal, but other styles are popular. Local rock bands are in constant demand for public dances (bailes). These bands perform music of their own composition, plus covers of songs that have obtained success through recordings or on the radio, including those by musicians from the United States, Europe, and the rest of Latin America. Rock bands are somewhat influenced by popular Caribbean styles. The influence of Argentine rock is especially apparent.
Electronic musical culture in Paraguay includes a widespread network of forty-two AM and forty-eight FM radio stations, covering the entire country. Eight television stations and a cable television system cover the main population centers, in the eastern half of the country. Television and radio signals from Brazil and Argentina can be received in the areas bordering those countries. Several small recording studios are located in AsuncioŽn; these produce mainly cassette recordings by Paraguayan folkloric and popular musicians.
The Jesuit accounts provide most of the historical records regarding music in Paraguay during the 1600s and 1700s. Most important are those by Pierre Francžois Charlevoix (1769 [1756]), Anton Sepp von Reinegg (1973 [1710]), Martin Dobrizhoffer (1784), and Florian Paucke (1696).
One of the best sources on Paraguayan folklore is Mauricio Cardozo Ocampo's Mundo folkloŽrico paraguayo (1989). The first volume, Paraguay folkloŽrico, is devoted almost entirely to Paraguayan folkloric music and is notable for the number of musical texts included. Most of the music in the volume has been arranged for piano by the author.
The definitive work on Paraguayan dance is Celia Ruiz Rivas de DomiŽnguez's Danzas paraguayas, meŽtodo de ensen~anza: Resen~a histoŽrica de la danza en el Paraguay y nociones sobre el folklore (1974b), an excellent overview of the history and choreography of Paraguayan folk dances. It is supplemented by the same author's Album musical:
Brief biographies of Paraguayan musicians can be found in Miguel Angel Rodriguez's Semblanzas biograŽficas de creadores e inteŽrpretes populares paraguayos (1992). More extensive works about individual musicians include Armando Almada Roche's JoseŽ AsuncioŽn Flores: PaŽjaro musicaly liŽrico (1984), and Richard Stover's Six Silver Moonbeams: The Life and Times of AgustiŽn Barrios MangoreŽ (1992).
For further information on the Paraguayan harp, see Alfredo Rolando OrtiŽz's Latin American Harp Music and Techniques for Pedal and Non-Pedal Harpists (1984) and John M. Schechter's The Indispensable Harp (1992).
The section on Paraguay in Paulo de Carvalho-Neto's Estudios afros: Brasil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador (1971) is an invaluable overview of the sources on African descendants in Paraguay. Josefina PlaŽ's Hermano Negro: La esclavitud en el Paraguay (1972), in addition to discussing the history and social context of slavery in Paraguay, dedicated a chapter to the cultural legacy of Paraguayans of African descent.
Archaeological Background
Historical Background
Musical Instruments
Musical Genres and Contexts
Social Structure and Ethnicity
Tradition and Musical Change
Andean Migrant Music in the Cities
The Mass Media and Popular Musics
Further Study
Peru is a country of diverse geographical regions, languages, races, and cultural traditions. It is the third-largest nation in South America, with more than 20 million inhabitants distributed within its coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions. It borders Ecuador and Colombia to the north, Brazil and Bolivia to the east, Chile to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Spanish, Quechua (Kechua), and Aymara are the principal languages spoken in Peru, along with numerous languages of Amazonian peoples.
The pre-Hispanic cultural heritage of Peru can be traced back to about 1400 B.C., when the ChaviŽn culture surged in the central Andes of Peru. Throughout the centuries after its decline, there emerged successive and prosperous regional cultures, all of which the Inca Empire subdued in the 1400s. The Spanish incursion of the 1500s put an abrupt end to the autonomous development of indigenous cultures in coastal and Andean Peru. The colonial system introduced an era of economic exploitation of the Peruvian Indians through such institutions as the encomienda, a system by which land and peasants were governed by Spanish landlords (encomenderos), the mita (coercive labor for the colonial administration), and the collection of forced tribute (Indian contributions in kind to the Spanish crown). With these tactics, ideological struggles against indigenous religious practices, such as the extirpation-of-idolatries campaign conducted by the Spanish clergy in the 1600s, were enforced. These actions and the diseases brought by Europeans caused a dramatic depopulation of indigenous peoples.
Distinctive social and ethnic groups began to emerge soon after the arrival of Europeans. A solid difference was made between the Spanish born on the Iberian Peninsula and those born in the colonies; the latter, labeled Creole (criollo), were considered socially inferior to the former. Early miscegenation between Spanish men and Indian women created a mestizo racial group, which during most of the colonial period occupied an ambivalent social position between Spanish and Indian. The importation of African slaves added another ethnic dimension to the colonial social framework.
The modern nation of Peru resulted from the political and economic independence of the Creoles from Spanish jurisdiction in 1821, after which a new sector of
In pre-Hispanic Peru, indigenous cultures had occupied the coast and the mountains, but during the colonial domination, the Spaniards settled mostly in the coast, while the mostly Quechua Indian peasants (Aymara in the far south) inhabited primarily the Andean region [see QUECHUA-AYMARA]. Thus, coastal Peru became a bastion for white and creole culture (with the important presence of the black slaves, eventually liberated in 1854), whereas the Andes became a stronghold for Indian and mestizo communities. The geographical and cultural partition of the country began to blur with massive migrations to the capital, Lima, beginning in the 1950s and given the consequences of the revolutionary regime of 1968-1980, which implemented radical agrarian reforms and structural changes crucial to the Peruvian economy. The Peruvian Amazonian region, the third important geographical region in the country, continued to be occupied by more than fifty scattered and seminomadic ethnolinguistic groups, which for centuries remained isolated from the national scene.
Among the earliest musical instruments are a sixth-century-B.C. panpipe (Kechua antara, also andara) and an end-notched flute (Aymara kena, also spelled quena) found in the Chilca region. One of the oldest samples of musical iconography is from the ChaviŽn horizon, around 1400 B.C. It shows musicians playing conch trumpets (Bolan~os 1985:11, 14).
The musical iconography of the pre-Incan Moche (Mochica) culture, around 100 B.C., is one of the richest in Peru. Moche ceramics depict musical instruments, costumes, and dances in detail. Among the most significant representations is that of two panpipers facing each other, their instruments attached with a stringevidence that these instruments were played in pairs in pre-Hispanic times. Musical iconography depicting panpipes exists in textiles from the Huari culture, around A.D. 600 (Rowe 1979).
Clay panpipes from the Nasca culture have been the most studied and debated pre-Hispanic musical instruments. The excellence of their condition (most are housed in the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Lima), enabled several investigators to measure their pitches and hypothesize about pre-Hispanic musical scales. Carlos Vega (1932) and AndreŽs Sas concluded that blowing the panpipe produces a series of semitones and quarter tones. Sas also concluded that the Nasca used diatonic and chromatic scales (1936:232). Later, Stevenson (1968), Haeberli (1979), and Bolan~os (1988) restudied Nasca panpipes with new methodologies; they provided new data and arrived at similar conclusions about pre-Hispanic musical scales. These studies rejected the conclusion by Raoul and Marguerite d'Harcourt (1990 [1925]) that pentatonicism was the dominant scale in ancient times [see APPROACHES TO MUSICAL SCHOLARSHIP].
Spanish chroniclers of the 1500s and 1600s first documented the musical practices of the Inca period. GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala (1956 [1613]) committed many pages to describing musical expressions and activities. In his famous drawings of pre-Hispanic life, he depicted musical instruments and performance settings. Other chroniclers, such as Pedro Cieza de LeoŽn (1967), BernabeŽ Cobo (1956), and Garcilaso de la Vega (1959), profusely described and commented on various pre-Hispanic musical manifestations. Colonial dictionaries of Quechua and Aymara by Diego Gonzales HolguiŽn (1608) and Ludovico Bertonio (1612), respectively, contain important definitions
Among the issues addressed by these chroniclers are the regional and ethnic diversity in music and dance. GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala (1956:242) and Cobo (1956:270) agreed that each province or part of the Tawantinsuyu (the Inca empire) had unique songs and dances. The relationship between music and society was another concern of these writers, who claimed that certain kinds of music were performed only by elites during particular rituals and thus were not intended for popular use.
Regional and ethnic diversity in pre-Hispanic times was paralleled by a process of musical differentiation whose corollary was various songs and dances. In the post-Encounter period, it was frequent to observe "many and diverse" dances in massive fiestas and processions; on one occasion, forty different dances occurred in the Corpus Christi procession in the province of Collao (Cobo 1956:270-271). The chroniclers characterized songs and dances on the basis of texts rather than on musical traits. For these reasons, most of their references to musical genres are in the domain of literary pictures, and their information does not permit a clear understanding of the musical structure of actual pieces. In general, references to musical genres therefore tend to be merely nominative or defined in relation to the character of the sound. GuamaŽn Poma (1956: 233-235), for instance, mentioned various musical genres, indicating their character and transcribing their lyrics, among them the harawi (haravi, a nostalgic love song), the kashwa (cachua, a cheerful song), the wanka (uanca, also a love song), and the haylli (a harvest song) as the most important ones. Early definitions of musical genres already included the cachua, described by Cobo as a dance of men and women joining hands in a circle, and Gonzales Holguin's portrayed haylli as joyful, victorious songs, sung during the sowing of the fields and harawi as songs dealing with unrequited love (Stevenson 1960:169).
Musical instruments are probably the most fully documented musical phenomena of pre-Hispanic times. The references about them are abundant, and note their uses in everyday life. Chroniclers confirm the presence of numerous idiophones, drums (huancar), flutes (pincullu, quenaquena, antara), and trumpets (k'epa) in the Inca empire, and the absence of stringed instruments. Although allusions to aspects of musical performances are scanty, they constitute the only extant references for the pre-Hispanic period. Garcilaso de la Vega's description of panpipe ensembles is one of the most prominent (1959:201). He narrated, briefly but concisely, the interlocking technique of performance by panpipe ensembles, and suggested that fifths were the foremost tonal intervals in these ensembles. He also noted the presence of larger intervals at the expense of smaller ones in musical scales. Carlos Vega (1932:350) thought that in this passage, Garcilaso was trying to describe a pentatonic scale. GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala referred to the musical accompaniment of the pingollo and the quenaquena in several dances and songs, and highlighted two cases of antiphonal dances of men and women (1956:233). The first of these, the uaricza araui, was sung by the Inca and his women, the cuyas and the n~ustas. The Inca's chant imitated the gentle moan of an animal, and was repeated over and over again until it resembled the high sound of a dying animal. His chant was answered by the women. The second case of an antiphonal chant was the saynata, in which a man responded to a women's chorus.
No chronicler provided a musical transcription, but later colonial sources do include notation. In the second half of the 1700s, Bishop Baltasar MartiŽnez Compan~oŽn included the notations of seventeen traditional songs and three instrumental dances in the ninth volume of his encyclopedia of life and nature in Trujillo, the province to which he was assigned. In a five-hundred-page encyclopedia, the
The Andean area
Many pre-Hispanic musical instruments, including a drum (tinya), a flute (quena), and a panpipe (antara), are still used in the Peruvian Andes. Other instruments developed during the colonial domination as a consequence of the cultural encounter between European and indigenous models. These included a small guitar (charango) and a coiled cow-horn trumpet (wak'rapuku). Various European musical instruments, including the guitar, the accordion, the harp, and the violin, were introduced by the Spaniards. Among the European instruments that since the 1890s have been adopted by the Andean peasantry are the trumpet, the saxophone, the clarinet, and other band instruments.
Drums receive different names according to their sizes and localities. These names include tinya, wankara, and the Spanish terms bombo, caja, and tambor. There are drums of different sizes, ranging from a tinya of about 20 centimeters in diameter to a caja of 70 centimeters in diameter. Most, however, are double-headed cylindrical drums. Contrasting with aerophones (played only by men), small drums like the tinya are, as in pre-Hispanic times, mostly played by women, on several occasions, including music for marking animals in the central Andes. Bigger drums are played by men, mostly for accompaniment, in small or large ensembles.
Traditional panpipes such as the ayarachi, the chiriguano, and the sikuri in Puno are always played collectively (Valencia 1983). These panpipes are usually named after the ensemble of which they are part and are tuned to a diatonic scale. These are double-unit panpipes, designed to be played in pairs, each component having complementary pitches. One of them is designated ira 'leader'; the other, area 'follower'. The playing technique of these groups is complex. Sikuri ensembles consist of different sizes of panpipe (siku,
Different kinds of vertical end-notched flutes (quena), vertical duct flutes (pincullo, tarka), and side-blown flutes (pito) are widely disseminated in the Andes. The quena, also known by local names, including lawata, chaqallo, and quenacho, is usually made from cane but also from wood and since the 1970s from plastic. It can have diverse lengths, but most are between 25 centimeters and 120 centimeters. It may have three to eight holes for fingering. One of the most ubiquitous types, measuring 30 to 40 centimeters long has six holes in the front and one in the back. The quena can be played as a solo instrument in private and contemplative situations, but in public performances it is usually played with other instruments in ensembles, such as the conjunto in Cusco, or with large ensembles of instruments of the same type as for choquela dances in Puno (Cuentas Ormachea 1982:59) and carnival dances in the Colca valley, Arequipa (RaŽez 1993:286).
No archaeological evidence has been discovered for determining the origins of duct tubular flutes, though globular flutes with duct mouthpieces are found archaeologically in Peru [see APPROACHES TO MUSICAL SCHOLARSHIP]. It is therefore generally considered that they originated during the colonial period. The term pingollo, however, was usually employed by the early chroniclers to denote pre-Hispanic flutes. Today's duct flute is most frequently made of wood or cane, may be of different sizes (from 30 to 120 centimeters long), and may have a variable number of holes, stopped with the fingers of one or two hands. One of the most common names for duct flutes (played with two hands) in the Peruvian Andes is pincullu (also spelled pincullo,
The tarka, another popular duct flute, occurs only in the southern department of Puno. The feature that distinguishes it from other duct flutes is its hexagonal cross-sectional shape [see BOLIVIA]. Usually with six holes for fingering, it is played in public festivals in large ensembles (tarkeadas), but it has been reported to be played as a solo instrument in private situations by shepherds in the mountains (Bellenger 1981:24).
In the Andes, the side-blown flute is known by diverse local names, including flauta, pito, phalahuita, and even quena (Instituto Nacional de Cultura 1978:221). In Puno, where it is called pitu, it is made of cane, has six holes in the upper side, and is played in large ensembles of multiple side-blown flutes in community festivals (Turino 1993:57). In Cusco, two six-holed pitus are accompanied by drums in the war bands (bandas deguerra), ensembles recurrent in public festivals throughout the region.
Different kinds of locally constructed trumpets are widely used. These include the wak'rapuku in the central Andes, the clariŽn in the northern Andes, and the pampa corneta in Huancavelica. The wak'rapuku (
The Spanish introduced double-reed instruments such as the chirimiŽa (a shawm made of wood), which during colonial times was frequently played for official ceremonies related to municipal affairs in urban centers. The chirimiŽa is still played in the northern coastal and Andean areas in public festivals (Casas Roque 1993: 324-326) and in highland Lima, Huancavelica, and Ayacucho, where it is known as chirisuya (JimeŽnez Borja 1951:79).
Since ancient Peruvians used no chordophones, it is reasonable to conclude that many chordophones currently in use were introduced by the Spaniards during the colonial periodthe guitar, the mandolin, the bandurria, the harp, and the violin. The charango, in certain localities also called quirquincho 'armadillo' and chillador 'screamer', is a small guitar, made of wood (
The European guitar has not suffered any drastic morphological changes in its adaptation to Andean musical practices, though its tuning varies by region. Besides the standard system, other tunings depend on the locality, each of them with a specific name. In Ayacucho, the most common tuning, comuncha (E-B-G-D-B-G), predominates in rural areas. This tuning serves primarily for playing peasant huaynos (waynos) in E minor. Other tunings, such as harp tuning (temple arpa, E-B-F?-D-A-F?), used to play huaynos and carnavales in B minor, and devil tuning (temple diablo, E-C-G-D-B?-G), used to play yaravies in G minor, are also widely used (Pinto 1987:84-86). In JesuŽs, HuaŽnuco, Villareal Vara (1958:35) found six different tunings in carnival guitar music, one of which, called plain (llano), corresponds to the standard European tuning E-A-D-G-B-E.
Spanish missionaries propagated the European harp and the violin throughout all the Andean area. Today, both instruments are widely dispersed in the communities of the Peruvian Andes; they are usually played individually or together as part of larger ensembles. The harp, contrasting with the guitar and the violin, has experienced considerable morphological adaptation, ranging from the triangle-shaped arpa indigena (
Harp performance styles vary by region. Olsen (1986-1987) has distinguished six principal regional styles in Peru: CallejoŽn de Huaylas-HuaŽnuco in the northern Andes, Mantaro in the central Andes, Ayacucho in the south-central Andes, Urubamba-Abancay in the southern Andes, Chancay in the central coastal region, and urbanized in Lima. The harp can be played solo and in ensemble, where it provides bass and harmonic functions. In some regions of the country, it is played as an accompanying percussion instrument by a tamborero, a person who beats his fingers on its body while someone else plucks the strings [see ECUADOR].
Andean music has adopted the accordion, widely used throughout the region but especially in conjuntos in Cusco, in string ensembles in the CallejoŽn de Huaylas (den Otter 1985:91), and in the estudiantina group of stringed instruments in Puno. Wind instrumentsclarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tubamake up brass bands (
Regional instrumental ensembles play in various contexts. Throughout the Andes, ensembles combining a harp and violins are pervasive, as is the combination of flute and drum played by a single performer or by several, as in the banda de guerra of Cusco, which combines quena (kena) flutes, accordion, mandolin, harp, and a violin. The banda tipica in northern Cajamarca mixes quenas and percussion instruments (snare drum and cymbals). Large ensembles of one instrumental typefor example, aerophones such as pitu, pinkillu, and tarkaare also common in the south. The estudiantina ensemble of Puno includes guitars, charangos, mandolins, and an accordion. The herranza, an ensemble that accompanies herding rituals in the central Andes, merges a violin, several wak?rapuku, and a tinya. The string ensemble (conjunto de cuerdas) of Ancash combines a violin, a mandolin, and sometimes a harp or a quena and an accordion.
The Coast
After the lute (lauŽd) and the bandurria had disappeared, the guitar became the most important instrument in creole music of the urbanized coast (Santa Cruz 1977:49). It serves as a solo instrument or for voice-accompanying duos and trios, especially in the vals criollo. After the 1950s, when creole music began to be disseminated primarily via commercial records and the mass media, the creole repertoire began to be performed by various musical instruments and ensembles. The guitar remained the most vital instrument in live performances, but percussion instrumentssuch as the cajoŽn 'big box' and Iberian castanets (usually replaced by a pair of spoons in live performances)were introduced. The cajoŽn is a variably sized wooden box with a hole in its back, commonly used by Afro-Peruvians [see AFRO-PERUVIAN TRADITIONS]. The performer sits atop the instrument and strikes it with both hands.
In the rural areas of the Peruvian coast, other instruments can be found. Many of themsuch as the pinkullo and the caja (played by a single performer, as in the highlands), the harp, the chirimiŽa, and the instruments that form the brass band in Lambayequeare also played in the Andes. For marineras (dance music in 6/8 meter), a tamborero beats on a harp's sound box while the harpist plucks the strings and sings. The banjo, introduced in some areas of the north Peruvian coast around 1900, is now used to play valses and marineras (Casas Roque 1993).
The guitar is the most important instrument in the Afro-Peruvian tradition. Peruvian blacks incorporated it and the harp in street fiestas as early as the 1700s, but this tradition has been forgotten (Estenssoro 1988:163). Still in use are the quijada (or carachacha), the jawbone of an ass, mule, or horse, whose teeth rattle when the jawbone is struck with a hand. After the 1950s, when a process of revitalization of Afro-Peruvian music took place, Caribbean instruments (including congas, cowbell, and bongos) were incorporated.
The Amazonian Region
An extensive assortment of musical instruments can be found among the nearly sixty ethnolinguistic groups that inhabit the Amazonian region (see Okada 1995: examples 9-11). Among numerous types of wooden and membranophonic drums are those used to send messages and signal the group or other parties (Pawlik 1951). Many classes of musical bows are employed as are diverse types of European-derived wooden zithers and violins. Cane and bamboo trumpets and vertical and side-blown flutes of different sizes and number of holes are also common. The panpipe is played as a solo instrument or in ensembles.
The Andean area
Current Andean musical expressions are re-creations of pre-Hispanic indigenous genres, local developments based on colonial European models, or recent configurations derived from the encounter with national and transnational urban musical forms. Among the pre-Hispanic genres of song cited by early chroniclers and still persisting among Andean peasantry is the harawi, a monophonic genre of song that consists of one musical phrase repeated several times with extensive melismatic passages and long glissandos. It is associated with specific ceremonies and rituals (including farewells and marriages) and agricultural labor (including sowing and harvesting) in the southern Andes. It is usually sung in a high-pitched, nasal voice by a group of elder women called harawiq (Cavero 1985:237). In Cusco, this genre, known as wanka, is associated with the same ritual contexts (Arguedas, cited in Pinilla 1980:390). The kashwa, a pre-Hispanic genre usually associated with nocturnal harvest rituals, is performed in a circle by young, unmarried men and women (Roel 1959). Haylli is a responsorial genre, performed during communal agricultural work in the fields.
Among other Andean musical genres associated with specific contexts is the carnaval, a song and dance for the homonymous festivity. This genre has several regional variants and designations, such as wifala and puqllay (in Ayacucho, Puno, and Cusco), araskaska and the recently introduced pumpiŽn (Ayacucho), and the more disseminated pasacalle (in Ancash and the southern Andes). The walina, a genre linked with the ritual cleaning of the irrigation channels in the highlands of the department of Lima, is customarily sung by men, with a chirimiŽa playing a countermelody.
Some genres have become dissociated from their original contexts. These include the santiago (originally a kind of song from the Central Andes, performed by a woman during the ritual marking of animals), the huaylas (once a ritual harvest song, also from the Central Andes), and the carnaval of the southern Andes. These genres became accepted beyond their villages, achieving regional significance in traditional fiestas. Later, they began to be distributed by the record industry, achieving national coverage and eventually emancipating themselves from their original ritual contexts.
The most widely disseminated and popular song-dance genre in the Andes is the
The huayno has many regional variants and adopts different names, including chuscada (Ancash), pampen~a (Arequipa), cachua (Cajamarca), chymaycha (Amazonas and Huanuco), and huaylacha (Colca Valley). Usually in duple meter, it consists of a pair of musical phrases in periodic form (AABB). Like other Andean genres, it may have a closing section, called fuga or qawachan, which consists of a contrasting theme in a faster tempo. Today, it reflects the styles of the different social and ethnic groups that perform it. As an autonomous expression of contextual and ritual constraints, it can be performed at any time and in various settings (see Cohen 1984).
The yaraviŽ is a slow, lyrical, mestizo genre in triple meter and binary form.
Contrasting with fixed genres are nonfixed genres organically linked to specific ritual contexts, including fertility rituals, agricultural communal work, the cleaning of irrigation channels, the building of edifices, and life-cycle ceremonial phases (baptism, courting, marriage, funerals). In many cases, the accompanying music bears the name of the ritual involved, though in some cases a fixed musical form may be associated with the ritual.
In the Mantaro Valley in the department of JuniŽn, the nocturnal harrowing of grain was until the 1950s accomplished by young unmarried men and women who sang unaccompanied or with guitar accompaniment and danced on top of a mound of grain, separating the seeds from the husks. In the same region, the music of a pincullo and a tinya, played by one performer in a pipe-and-tabor fashion, is reserved for times when the peasant community gathers to work in the fields in specific moments of the agricultural calendar, especially the first tilling of the soil and the harvest. Each musical repertoire pertains solely to its corresponding performance context, and although each tune is given a descriptive name, the whole repertoire lacks any concrete name other than the occasion for which it is intended. In Cajamarca in the northern Andes, the clariŽn is played during the minka (communal work in the fields), especially during the harvest of grain (CaŽnepa-Koch 1993:150; JimeŽnez Borja 1951:75).
The marking (marcacioŽn) of animals is one of the most ubiquitous fertility rituals in the central and southern Andes of Peru. Associated with the Andean mountain deities (the wamani, the apu, or the achachila, depending on the region), it is usually performed during specific seasons of the year [see Q?ERO]. In the highland areas of the Colca Valley, the music of a large pincuyllo and a tinya is played in the tinka, a ceremony during carnival when a llama is sacrificed and ritual offerings are buried for the deities. Music accompanies the steps of the ritual and is played during rest periods when, after the ritual, the participants dance and relax. An ensemble of eighteen
The cleaning of irrigation channels (michicoq, fiesta del agua 'festival of the water') is a ceremonial task performed by all the members of the peasant community. It is an especially strong tradition in Puquio, Ayacucho, and San Pedro de Casta, Lima (see Okada 1995: example 15). Here, the walina is a fixed genre associated exclusively with this ritual. A large repertoire of walina is sung only by the men, who perform the ceremonial cleaning; it is accompanied by the chirimiŽa, which plays a relatively independent countermelody to the lead singer's melody.
The communal construction of buildings (pirkansa) is an event in which communal labor fulfills an indispensable function and in which music is ceremonially vital. In the Mantaro Valley, the pirkansa occurs when the walls of an edifice are being built: during the ritual, a performer of pincullo and tinya music (as in agricultural music) participates. A similar instrumental combination is employed in Ancash (flauta and caja) in the same setting (den Otter 1985:113).
Ceremonial life-cycle phases (baptism, courting, marriage, funeral) are also contexts for major musical repertoires. The role of music in courting rituals is particularly solid in Cusco. In Canas, young unmarried men summon their chosen women by playing the tuta kashwa ('night dance', a particular melody) on their charangos during the fiestas of Saint Andrew (San AndreŽs) and the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz) (Turino 1983:85). Funeral music is usually sung by specialists at the wake or actual burial as in the festivity of the DiŽa de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). In the Mantaro Valley, items in the repertoire of the funeral-song singers (responseros) have Quechua texts with strong musical-liturgical influence. In other areas, the relatives of the deceased themselves may weep and grieve, combining spoken passages with musical cadences. When an infant dies in Puno, a lively huayno is sung with charango accompaniment because it is believed that the dead baby goes to heaven in a state of grace; thus, the death is an occasion to celebrate rather than grieve.
The annual festival calendar is the natural context for the numerous dance-dramas that exist in the Peruvian Andes. The fiesta calendar, prolific throughout all the Andean region, is the result of the blending of the pre-Hispanic agricultural calendar with the Christian annual calendar. Different types of festivals are celebrated with greater or lesser intensity according to each region and locality. Some fiestas have achieved pan-Andean relevance. These include the Purification of Our Lady (Virgen de la Calendaria, 2 February), Fiesta de la Cruz (3 May), the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (San Juan, 24 June), Saints Peter and Paul (San Pedro y San Pablo, 29 June), Our Lady of Mount Carmel (16 July), St. James the Apostle (Santiago ApoŽstol, 25
Frequently, the actual fiesta lasts from three to five days, depending on the type of festivity and the region. The main events usually occur during vespers the evening before the central day, on the central day itself, and on the closing day or the farewell. In the Colca Valley, fiestas usually consist of five parts, coinciding with the five days of the fiesta. First is the antealba, when the communal preparations are concluded and the musicians begin to rehearse. Second, the alba constitutes the evening of the principal day, when fireworks are set off. Third is the principal, the main day, when all the dance-dramas are performed and the customary bullfights or horse races are presented. Fourth is the bendicioŽn, when the fiesta continues and the organizers for the next year are chosen; during that night, a general farewell takes effect with music and dance, and continues until the following day, the fifth and closing day, known as kacharpari (RaŽez 1993:278-279). In Ishua, Ayacucho, the fiestas have a similar temporal division, but different names: anticipo, viŽspera, diŽa, cabildo, and despacho (Bradby 1987:200).
Music and dance are integral parts of the Andean fiesta (
Music for dance-dramas can be performed by a single musician, several performers (
There are numerous dance groups and choreographic representations in the Andes, and their classification has seldom been agreed on. Using thematic criteria, Luis Valcarcel (1951:11-13) distinguished the following thematic types in Andean dances: religious, totemic, martial, associational (guilds), satirical, regional, pantomimes, entertainment, agricultural, and strolling dances. Mildred Merino de Zela (1977:70), preferring to use a chronological model, classified them as pre-Hispanic, conquest, colonial, independence, and republican dances. Poole (1990:101), however, has highlighted the fact that ethnic or historic representation, if in fact the most important external trait that these classification systems emphasize, is not necessarily the most important factor involved in Andean dance. The significance of local concepts of time, space, and hierarchy in representing "the other" go beyond the plain illustration of a personage.
Musical competition is pervasive in the Andes, where competitiveness is an essential trait intended to encourage social productivity and solidarity (Montoya 1987). In the Mantaro Valley, after a ceremonial labor day, the laborer who worked fastest and best was elected to inspire the other workers. During traditional festivals throughout the Andean region, contests in which a jury of selected personalities chooses the best music-and-dance group are pervasive. In other instances, a jury is
The Coast
The waltz (vals criollo), the most representative genre of the repertoire, is generally called creole music (muŽsica criolla), and many Peruvians consider it the foremost national music. A development of its European counterpart, it had achieved regional consolidation by the end of the 1800s. It developed from the Spanish jota and mazurca and from the Viennese waltz, popularized in Lima by the mid-1800s (Santa Cruz 1977). The Peruvian vals originated in the lower classes and neighborhoods of Lima. It was the genre the working classes in the barrios preferred, while the upper classes rejected it (Stein 1982).
The polka, now seldom performed, is also part of the creole repertoire. The marinerauntil about 1900 known as zamacueca, chilena, mozamala, and resbalosais one of the most widely disseminated song-and-dance genres in the country. Originally from coastal Peru, it is widely performed in Andean regions. In compound duple and triple meter (6/8 and 3/4), it has three distinctive parts: the song itself (three stanzas), the resbalosa (one stanza), and a closing fuga ('flight', not a fugue in the European sense). The tondero, a related genre, followed a parallel evolution in the northern coastal departments of La Libertad, Lambayeque, and PiŽura. In music and choreography, the tondero resembles the marinera, but it exhibits a distinctive harmonic structure: the first section (glosa) begins in the major mode, the second is in the relative minor mode (dulce), and the piece returns to the major mode in the third (fuga). Both genres are usually accompanied by guitars and a cajoŽn. In northern Peru, the latter is replaced by a harp and a banjo.
Creole musical contexts in Peru are limited to the city of Lima and adjacent coastal areas. In coastal Lambayeque, dance-dramas (including pastoras, margaros, and diablicos) are accompanied by a pincullo and a caja (played in pipe-and-tabor style), brass instruments, and a chirimiŽa (Casas Roque 1993:304-318).
The practice and performance of African-derived music, dances, and rituals by black slaves in Peru since the early years of the conquest is well established in colonial and republican sources. The 1700s marked the beginning of creolization of the music of Peruvian blacks. With their integration into the dominant society, they began to accept and adopt creole cultural and musical expressions. During the 1800s, after the abolition of slavery, they intensified this process. By the 1950s, a small number of specialists remembered a few genres of song associated with them, the repertoire had contracted to a minimum, and the choreographies of most were lost.
This repertoire was the subject of a revival and reconstruction that labeled it Afro-Peruvian, as put forward by the brother and sister Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, who performed, produced, and promoted Afro-Peruvian music and
The Amazonian Region
Among the groups that inhabit the Amazonian region, the musical cultures of the Aguaruna (border with Ecuador), the Huitoto (frontier with Colombia), the Culina (frontier with Brazil) and the Campa, Cashibo, Shipibo, and Yagua (central Amazon) are better known than others. In the Peruvian tropical forest, music is customarily linked with ritual and festival cycles, which (as in the Yagua group) are strongly influenced by the Roman Catholic calendar. Ritual songs are most prominent in healing ceremonies such as the ayahuasca ritual (in which a hallucinogenic drink made from a vine is imbibed) and other shamanistic activities. Vocal music is more pervasive than instrumental music. The vocal imitation of animal and jungle sounds is especially emphasized by the Cashibo. Widely various scales have been reported, ranging from two to seven pitches. Among these, pentatonic scales are quite common in groups such as the Culina. Although heterophony is most commonly observed in musical renditions, two-voice polyphony in intervals of fourths and canonic singing have also been observed (Pinilla 1980:380-384).
In assessing matters of social and performance styles in the Peruvian Andes, ethnic distinctions between Indian and mestizo musical cultures have played a fundamental role (Arguedas 1985). These terms no longer exclusively indicate racial types as in the colonial period, but normally refer to cultural and aesthetic orientations. The categories of "Indian" and "mestizo" have generally been understood as polar entities, the Indian usually contemplated in the context of a rural, closed, corporate community, and the mestizo as being an intermediary, equally fluent in a rural milieu and an urban setting. Along these lines, Indians have been assumed to be monolingual in Quechua, wear only Indian clothes, practice ancient customs, and live according to communal rules and principles. Mestizos, in contrast, have been described as bilingual, favoring European dress, and holding urban values (Adams 1959:92).
Nevertheless, the concepts of Indian and mestizo are in fact relational and refer to abstract social units. Therefore they should not be considered descriptive of individuals or social groupings, fixed in time and place. Mestizos of one locality may be considered Indians by the standards of another locality, and Indians and mestizos may assume the opposite condition in variable situations and contexts (de la Cadena
With these considerations in mind, we can distinguish Indian aesthetics from mestizo aesthetics in various ways. Most rural Indian music tends to look simpler in form, consisting frequently of a single phrase repeated several times, with extensive melodic variation in the repetitions. Mestizo forms usually consist of a two-phrase symmetrical structure in a periodic form, like the huayno (wayno). Monophony prevails in rural Indian musical genres such as the harawi, the wanka, and the haylli, whereas homophony and the presence of European harmony are pervasive and indispensable in mestizo forms, like the huayno, the marinera, and the yaraviŽ. Indian music can also be antiphonal or responsorial, as in the haylli or liturgical hymns sung during pilgrimages. Indian singing generally features high-pitched, nasal, tense vocalizations, especially noticeable among women. In collective singing, unison is preferred, contrasting with the pervasive intervals of thirds in mestizo musical performances. (It is not uncommon, however, to find intervals of thirds in Indian music.) Parallel voicing at the fifth is featured in panpipe-ensemble traditions in southern Peru. Music for dance-dramas follows a suitelike plan, in which each section has its own style and form.
Most Andean communities are concerned about safeguarding their traditions, which, for them, represent the past, though their origins are not necessarily thought archaic. Several musical expressions in the Andes are locally considered traditional, though their origins can be traced back only to the beginning of this century. In the cities of Puno, young people regard the panpipe group Qantati Ururi of Conima as the true keepers of the panpipe tradition, though this band uses intervals of thirdsa practice introduced as a result of urban influence in Conima during the first decades of the twentieth century (Turino 1993:130). In the Mantaro Valley, a variant of the typical orchestraclarinets, violins, harpis considered to represent authentic performance, though clarinets were introduced into the valley only in the 1920s. In Cusco, the dance los majen~os 'the men of Majes [a town in Arequipa]', normally accompanied by a brass band, is considered traditional regional folklore, though it became popular only in the 1960s (Mendoza-Walker 1994:55).
Trends in musical change include the spread of brass bands throughout the Andean region at the cost of smaller traditional ensembles with less dazzling instrumentation. This change happened especially in the case of dance-dramas. In the Mantaro Valley (Romero 1985:21), in the Colca Valley (RaŽez 1993:280), and in most of the Andean region, brass bands have displaced Indian and rural ensembles and have achieved intense popularity. One of the factors in their expansion is that they are more elastic in repertoire than are the regional ensembles. They can play any musical genrecumbia, marinera, pasodoble, tropical music, and even the latest popular music hitand this versatility adds to their popularity among younger people.
The cumbia, originally a genre from Colombia, is immensely popular in the Peruvian Andes. It is commonly performed by the ubiquitous brass band and is danced at special times in traditional fiestas. In regional ensembles, called jazz bands by the people of Cusco, its basic rhythmic pattern has influenced the rhythmic accompaniment of mestizo genres like the huayno and those of festival music. The similarity of this rhythmic pattern with that of the huayno is striking.
Andean music had been present in Lima since the 1930s in the festival of Amancaes every diŽa del indio (24 June), and well before that through the works and performances
In the 1950s, the sale of Andean records grew considerably in urban sectors of Peru, mainly because of the increasing migration of Andean rural peoples into the capital. The appearance of the first folkloric programs (programas folkloŽricos) on commercial radio stations in Lima dedicated to the diffusion of Andean music and the promotion of folkloric festivals contributed to this success (Llorens 1991:180). In the 1960s, as a result of this outburst of production and consumption, Andean mestizo celebritiessongwriters, instrumentalists, performersachieved popularity and recognition. Singers including the Pastorcita Huaracina, el Jilguero del HuascaraŽn, and Picaflor de los Andes sold thousand of records and became celebrities. The effort was not limited to records but also included live performances in marginal spaces where migrant musicians could play and migrant consumers could attend, such as live radio shows, open theaters (coliseos), and regional associations.
Coliseos were the most influential musical settings for these musical styles. Beginning in the late 1940s, masses of Andean migrants congregated in them, usually on Sundays and holidays, to watch their favorite professional and amateur performers. Today, these venues have disappeared, replaced by public performances and musical festivals in provincial clubs and athletic stadiums. Many provincial associations celebrate their regional fiestas in Lima, recreating their own music and dances (NuŽn~ez and Llorens 1981:66-70).
Until the 1970s, commercial records were produced by major Peruvian record companies, including FTA, IEMPSA, Mag, Sono Radio, and Virrey. Only the first two survive and are now the biggest record producers in Peru. Both maintain an Andean music division, one of their most important production departments. It was not until the 1970s that small and independent record companies in open competition with IEMPSA and Virrey began to record nonprofessional peasant performers. Consequently, huayno songs were less emphasized by these companies, and widely various songs and dance genres (including ritual music) began to be recorded on commercial discs. These recordings are not distributed on a national scale, but prevail in local and regional markets (Romero 1992:198).
During the early 1960s, the popularity of the cumbia among Andean residents and migrants was boosted by the appearance of a new urban musical genre, called chicha or cumbia andina, which blended musical elements from the huayno with the cumbia. Chicha achieved great approval among the younger generations of Andean origins, and became especially important in its center of operations, Lima, though many of its principal performers came from the central Andes. Chicha style and the instrumental makeup of its musical groups reflect the influence that since the early 1960s international Latin American popular styles and American and British rock have had on young Andean migrants (Turino 1990:19). A typical group (figure 12) consists of two electric guitars, an electric organ (replaced in the 1990s by a synthesizer), an electric bass, Latin percussion (timbales, congas, bongos, cowbell), and a vocalist, who performs in a style recalling that of Andean mestizo songs.
Chicha music became a nucleus around which young unmarried men and women from first- and second-generation cohorts in Lima congregated every Sunday and holidays. Several chichoŽdromos (locales for chicha events) opened in downtown Lima and in the outskirts, and such groups as the Shapis, AlegriŽa, and ChacaloŽn y la Nueva Crema gained fame. Though most chicha lyrics deal with romantic love, other themes directly linked to the problems of the migrant in Lima also prevail. As a product of migrant Andean people, chicha was regarded by the upper classes and by the mass media as a low cultural product in bad taste, and its performances were considered dangerous and promiscuous. With time, however, chicha has opened new channels for migrant music on FM radio stations and during prime-time television. This reversal does not mean that upper and middle classes in Peru have changed their attitudes toward chicha music but that Andean migrants have achieved an influential position in Peruvian society. The role of chicha as the urban expression of a new Andean cultural identity transcending regional characters to achieve national significance has been emphasized by Peruvian social scientists since the 1980s (Hurtado SuaŽrez 1995).
In rural areas, as in Paccha in JuniŽn, chicha is usually played in public buildings at night in social dances (bailes) organized during the traditional fiestas. Without disturbing the normal development of the fiesta during daytime, the bailes in Paccha gather young unmarried men and women together. In this setting, they may interact freely and independently in ways that they cannot during traditional festivities. In the context of a social dance, chicha functions as a courting ritual, does not require heavy expenses, and may be enjoyed at any period of the year (Romero 1989:131).
The mass media have been responsible for disseminating transnational musical genres and styles since the first decades of this century. Peruvians with access to the radio and movie theaters became familiar as early as the 1920s with the Argentine tango, the Mexican ranchera, and the North American fox-trot, one-step, and Charleston (Basadre 1964). Local orchestras disseminated these genres in social and private dances and events. Jazz has been played in Lima since the first decades of the twentieth century, especially by orchestras influenced by the styles of New Orleans. In the late 1960s, Jaime Delgado Aparicio, a pianist, arranger, and musical director trained
In the 1960s, rock and roll became popular among the younger generations in urban centers, thanks to the massive influence of radio, the LP-recording industry, and national television. In that decade, local singers and groups sang rock in Spanish (rock en espan~ol), gaining for the genre a sudden, though short-lived, fame. In 1985, rock and roll in Spanish reemerged as Micky Gonzales, a performer and composer, sold thousands of copies of his first rock album and suggested the same path to subsequent rockers. In the 1990s, rock in Spanish, with lyrics based on nationally significant themes, regained popularity among young people of different social sectors. Other bands have been equally open to influences of pop, reggae, rap, and worldbeat, but the most consequential musical influence is Argentine rock en espan~ol, whose popularity in Peru preceded the development of Peruvian rock in the 1980s. Unlike Argentine rock bands, however, Peruvian bands have had only a limited international distribution. The most commercially successful band in writing lyrics portraying national reality with a satiric touch is No SeŽ Quien y No SeŽ Cuantos (I Don't Know Who and I Don't Know How Many), the best-selling Peruvian rock band of all time. Most Peruvian bands have begun producing CDs, cassettes, and videos, all of which the national media broadcast intensively.
In the early 1970s, the movement known as nueva cancioŽn latinoamericana 'new Latin American song' began to influence politically conscious university students. As a result, many performing groups emerged. The main influences that had achieved immense popularity among university students were groups performing nueva cancioŽn chilena 'new Chilean song' and nueva trova 'new song', a Cuban genre. In the early 1980s, the movement lost its vitality in Peru, and political-oriented Peruvian musical groups dissolved. Among them were ensembles formed within the Taller de la CancioŽn Popular (Popular-Song Workshop), which the composer Celso Garrido Lecca had established at the National Conservatory of Music in the 1970s.
The nueva cancioŽn movement in Peru precipitated the rise of numerous neofolkloric groups that later achieved worldwide popularity. Mainly directed to the foreign-tourist market, these groups, which usually combine the siku, the quena, the charango, the guitar, and the Argentine bombo, play Andean musical genres, usually in faster tempos and altered in their rhythmic, harmonic, and instrumental aspects, furthering their commercial aims. In the 1990s, it is common to find these groups playing in pen~as folkloŽricas (coffeehouses and/or restaurants featuring neofolkloric music)
In the 1950s, Cuban and Caribbean popular genres such as the son, the rumba, and the bolero began to gain wide acceptance in Peru, as did (later) the most commercial versions such as the cha-cha-chaŽ and the mambo. The regular visits of renowned Cuban and Caribbean performers and bandleaders consolidated the popularity of these genres throughout the years. Today, salsa music is one of the most popular genres throughout Peru. Live performances of salsa are frequent in salsoŽdromos (nightclubs for dancing to salsa) around the country, and numerous AM and FM radio stations exclusively broadcast salsa music at all hours. Most local salsa activity consists of the performance of covers of hits from New York and Puerto Rico. Peruvian composers and performers of salsa have not yet achieved international distribution, with the exception of the singer-composer Antonio Cartagena.
Latin pop dominates Peruvian markets and record sales. In the mass media, it is the most disseminated genre, closely followed by Top 40 international hits. Both are highly popularized by the media, and both styles fill the stacks at local record stores. A survey of the musical preferences of limen~os (people of Lima) in the early 1990s revealed that more than 57 percent of limen~os who listen to radio prefer Latin pop and salsa, 19 percent prefer Andean and creole music, and 17 percent prefer rock and roll. Jazz and classical music were the least-represented categories, with 3 percent total (Bolan~os 1995:111). The remaining 4 percent is accounted for by other categories.
Today, the Peruvian recording industry is in a transitional stage. Recordings in the LP format ceased to be produced in the late 1980s, and since then the cassette industry has controlled the market. Though the bigger companies are slowly switching to the CD format, they are unable to compete with small and informal companies that market inexpensive cassettes. Illegal copying and cassette piracy are common throughout the country, as are ambulatory retailers who frequent the busiest streets and local markets.
Radio is a powerful medium in contemporary Peru. It reaches even distant rural communities. In 1992, there were 331 AM and 180 FM radio stations in the country. Of these, only forty-seven AM and thirty-nine FM stations were located in Lima. In the 1980s, television networks experienced a notable growth. Today, Peru has six private television stations and one state-supported channel, most with national coverage. Cable television, available only in the capital, airs TV programming from Europe, the United States, and other Latin American countries. Parabolic antennas, which pick up satellite waves, are widely dispersed in the rest of the country, providing television to rural communities that cannot receive signals from national television stations.
An excellent survey of traditional musical instruments in Peru is JimeŽnez Borja's seminal book on the subject (1951). A more recent and exhaustive organological inventory for all three geographical regions of Peru can be found in the Mapa de los Intrumentos Musicales de Uso Popular en el PeruŽ (Instituto Nacional de Cultura 1978).
The first known wax-cylinder recordings made in Peru were made by the French couple Raoul and Marguerite d'Harcourt in the 1920s. The d'Harcourts recorded extensively throughout the Andean areas of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, and used these recordings as the basis for a book (1990 [1925]). The current location of these recordings is unknown, and it is widely assumed that they are lost. Around 1900, Heinrich Brušnning recorded wax cylinders in the north coast of Peru, documenting
The first recordings of Andean Peruvian music known to be extant are those made in the 1940s by the South American ethnomusicologists Isabel Aretz and LuiŽs Felipe RamoŽn y Rivera, who recorded extensively on reel-to-reel tape in the southern Andes of Peru. Their collection is deposited in the National Institute of Musicology in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in the FundacioŽn Interamericana de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore in Caracas, Venezuela. More recent recordings of Peruvian traditional music are deposited in the Library of Congress and the Archives of Traditional Music of Indiana University, Bloomington. The largest collection of unpublished audiovisual materials is housed in Lima, in the Archives of Andean Traditional Music of the Catholic University of Peru.
The African Heritage
The Spanish Heritage
Traditional Afro-Peruvian Genres
Creole Musical Genres
Twentieth-Century Developments
Academic Folklorists and Further Study
The African presence in coastal Peru began with the Spanish encounter in the early 1500s and increased over the next three centuries. Afro-Peruvian musical development was a function of black exposure to the musical traditions of African, Spanish, and indigenous people. Though the link with Africa was reinforced with each new arrival of slaves, blacks in colonial Peru worked closely with the Spaniards, for receptivity to Spanish culture, language, and religion was the key to their social advancement. Interracial mixing and the eventual decline of the black population relative to others on the coast also promoted acculturation.
The strength of the African heritage varied in intensity, following social and cultural changes in Peru that affected black behavioral attitudesparticularly the growth of political and folkloric nationalism, and ultimately, in the late twentieth century, the worldwide movement of negritude. Despite Afro-Peruvian eclecticism, however, blacks in Peru not only retained much of the integrity of their musical style, but also profoundly influenced the development of national music in coastal Peru.
One of the principal sources of cultural unity and community for Peruvian blacks from about the 1550s to the 1850s was the cofradiŽas, religious brotherhoods or sodalities for black slaves, established by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1540s. Each cofradiŽa was devoted to a particular saint and served the members' spiritual and physical well-being. Though much activity of the cofradiŽas was supervised by the church, it apparently included African ritual elements.
The cofradiŽas were a major factor in the preservation of African musical traditions, as evidenced by descriptions of them in colonial literature. Though most accounts of the music and dance of non-Hispanicized slaves (bozales) in the cofradiŽas were biased and critical (Lee 1935:144), the municipal leaders of Lima still required the cofradiŽas to take part in the city's state and religious processions. An ordinance called the cofradiŽas to assemble according to their respective nations of origin with their typical dress and musical instruments, and to dance and sing their traditional music.
From the descriptions of musical instruments in the colonial literature, blacks showed a marked preference for percussion instruments. Their only aerophone was a nose-blown flute ("Rasgo ... de los Negros Bozales" 1791), and their only chordophone was a musical bow, strung with catgut and struck with a small cane (W. B. Stevenson 1825:304). They had several membranophones, particularly those formed from hollow logs or large conical, ceramic vessels (botijas de barro). Both types are described in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources and are remembered by elderly consultants as being used in rural areas until the early 1900s.
Of now obsolete idiophones, the marimba was once among the most popular. It consisted of wooden tablets placed on an arch of wood over the mouths of gourd resonators. The tablets were struck with sticks by a player who squatted in front of them. The existence of the marimba in northern Peru in the 1780s is documented by MartiŽnez Compan~oŽn (1978: plate 142), who ordered a watercolor made of it. The last known reference to it is in a travel account from the first decades of the nineteenth century (Rushenberge 1834:39).
Black slaves also employed other idiophones, including a notched stick, a bamboo rasp, and a long stamped pole hung with pieces of tin, ribbons, and tinsel, the base of which was struck on the ground.
Perhaps the most unusual musical instrument used by Afro-Peruvians until the first decades of the twentieth century was a mesa de ruidos 'table of noises', called tamborete in Lima and tormento in Chile. It consisted of a sheet of wood placed on four legs, with a possible box resonator underneath. On top of the sheet were (perhaps partially nailed) bottle tops with chips of wood on top of them. Agile fingers played rhythms on top of the sheet, causing the bottle tops and wood chips to vibrate.
Among the idiophones still extant are the cajita and the quijada. The cajita consists of a small wooden box with a hinged wooden lid. It is suspended in front of the player by a cord that passes around his neck or waist. He plays rhythms by striking the side of the box with a stick and opening and closing the lid (
The quijada, also called carraca or carachacha, is the lower jawbone of an ass, mule, or horse, stripped of its flesh and with the teeth loosened so they can rattle in their sockets (
A watercolor "by Pancho Fierro" from the mid-1800s illustrates the use of the cajita and the quijada to accompany the son de los diablos, a dance performed during carnival (
In northern Peru, the idiophones angara and checo are also used. Each is fabricated from an empty calabash with one of its sides opened. The player puts it between
The Afro-Peruvian idiophone used most widely in the twentieth century is the cajoŽn, a simple wooden box about 50 centimeters high, 30 wide, and 25 deep, with a sound hole about 10 centimeters in diameter in the back. The player normally sits on top of the cajoŽn, rhythmically striking the front and sides of it with his hands (
Many of these instruments seem to be of African origin or inspiration. The African affinity for percussive instruments is evident, and the buzzing produced by numerous African instruments reappears in the Peruvian marimba, rasps, quijada, cajoŽn, and tamborete. After the 1950s, as folkloric groups strove to reconstruct their African musical heritage, they rediscovered some of these instruments.
Colonial literature shows that blacks in Peru used two forms of musical expression. Music rooted in African traditions continued to be performed in the cofradiŽas into the 1800s; however, blacks skilled in playing Spanish musical instruments had long performed military music, and soon Afro-Peruvian musicians became commonplace in all facets of social, religious, and musical life in Spanish Peru.
As early as the 1500s, but especially during the 1800s, many blacks developed proficiency in the graces of European salon music and dance. Some black dance masters attained considerable fame (Fuentes 1925:110-111; R. M. Stevenson 1968:304). Even the church exploited blacks' musical talents: in the 1600s, the College of San
As black musicians encountered more European music, they adapted and reinterpreted elements into their own music. New Afro-Peruvian genres emerged. Some of them were indigenous to Peruvian blacks; others were black stylizations of Spanish musical forms. The pantomimic moros y cristianos, one such musical tradition, was eventually absorbed into black culture from Spanish folklore. Several chroniclers wrote about it during the 1800s, and Pancho Fierro portrayed it in a watercolor in 1830. This mime-drama has probably disappeared from coastal Peru, and already by the 1970s, only the oldest people in rural areas remembered having seen it.
Another Afro-Peruvian genre that originated in Spanish traditions is the son de los diablos, danced by several blacks dressed in devil costumes and masks (
Celebrations of Christmas
Christmas in Peruvian homes takes place around often elaborate cre`ches (nacimientos, belenes). In some rural areas and small towns, late December also brings out the hatajos de negritos (see Okada 1995: example 22), boys dressed as Magi, who sing and dance in adoration of the Infant Jesus to the accompaniment of a solo violin in front of cre`ches. Mestizos and even indigenous peoples have dances de negros that imitate blacks. The songs and dances of the hatajos from the more densely black-populated areas of Ica, however, are rooted in their own history and heritage. In their performances, boys represent not only kings and shepherds, but also enslaved blacks.
The costumes of the negritos vary from group to group but generally consist of an ornate cap representing a crown, and a band of bright red or blue cloth, crossing diagonally over the upper body like a royal sash. The crown and the band bear a profusion of tinkle bells, bits of bright paper, bolts of cloth, and tiny mirrorsand paper currency, donated to the dancer. Each negrito holds a handbell (campanilla) and a decorated rope whip (chicotillo). At one time, small jingle bells (cascabeles) attached to the dancers' ankles would sound with each movement of their feet. The negritos dance repetitive choreographic figures in two lines, employing rhythmic stamping reminiscent of the wayno (huayno) but with more frequent use of zapateado (rhythmic striking of the heels and toes of the shoes against the floor or against each other) and escobillada (a brushing movement of the shoe or bare foot along the floor or ground).
Some songs reveal native American influences in the texts and melodies, and occasionally even in the vocal styleparticularly the broken, wailing voice at points where the melody suddenly descends. The hatajo of El Carmen, composed mainly of blacks, employs a more kinetic style than does that of mestizo groups. Residents of the area consider black dancers particularly skillful in zapateado. Many of the texts employ black dialect and make frequent references to life under slavery.
Spanish prosody
Afro-Peruvian traditions have absorbed several recited or competitively sung Spanish poetic forms, some of which may be recited or sung competitively. Among the most important of these is the deŽcima, a poetic form consisting often octosyllabic lines, developed in Spain during the 1500s and popularized throughout Latin America. The deŽcima deals with biblical subjects (a lo divino) or themes of philosophy, politics, satire, or love (a lo humano). It is usually recited but may be sung in a declamatory, syllabic style with guitar providing an unobtrusive chordal accompaniment (socaboŽn or socavoŽn).
DeŽcimas can be presented sueltas 'individually' or en pieŽ forzado 'forced foot'. The structure of the deŽcima en pieŽ forzado varies in different regions of Latin America. In Peru, it consists of four deŽcimas preceded by an octosyllabic quatrain (glosa) that becomes the skeleton on which four ten-line strophes hang, thematically and structurally. Each line of the quatrain in turn becomes the final line of one of the corresponding deŽcimas.
The cumanana and amor fino, less complicated coastal poetic forms, are sung in declamatory style. They are accompanied by the guitar and, like the deŽcima, are often performed competitively by two or more poet-musicians. The cumanana, found in the northern Peruvian departments of Piura and Lambayeque, consists of four octosyllabic verses of text set to a melody, the style of which closely resembles that of the triste and the native yaraviŽ. When it is performed in competition, the singers alternate cumananas but must retain the same melody throughout. Their texts present a dialogue in which each singer draws from his own repertoire or demonstrates his improvisatory skill in responding to the thoughts or questions presented by his opponent. An almost obsolete sister form of the cumanana is the amor fino (in the department of Lima), also based on a quatrain of essentially octosyllabic lines but with an optional two-line refrain (estribillo), making it somewhat similar to the Argentine payada.
The deŽcima, the cumanana, and the amor fino have roots in the Spanish poetic tradition. Representative of all cultural groups in coastal Peru, they do not belong exclusively to any one group. Nevertheless, many African-derived cultures demonstrate an affinity for verbal dueling, and my oldest consultants in Peru remember many of the masters of these poetic forms as being of African descent.
As blacks became integrated into the social and economic order of colonial Peru, they developed musical genres that reflected the realities of the New World. The penalivio or panalivio 'ease-pain', a satirical dance and song of lament dating from the 1700s, commented on the conditions of slavery. Afro-Peruvian work songs, street vendors' songs (pregones), and songs accompanying the watermelon-harvest festival (maca-maca) in Ica also reflect something of the nineteenth-century black life-style (Vizarreta 1941).
The
Probably the most important Afro-Peruvian musical form is the festejo (see Okada 1995: examples 19 and 20), whose rhythms occur in several genres. A typical festejo melody consists of short phrases with a surging rhythm, frequently interrupted at phrase-endings by a sudden pause, or by a tone of longer duration. The question-answer character of the melodic line in consecutive phrases is exaggerated in the final section (fuga), composed of melodic fragments sung responsorially by soloist and chorus. Considerable metric variety and even simultaneous use of two different meters can be found, but the underlying meter is essentially 6/8 with a stilted iambic rhythm.
A typical example (
A don Antonio Mina | They stabbed and killed |
lo pican y lo mataron. | Sir Anthony Mina. |
Arriba en la huaca grande | Up at the old ancient tomb |
al don lo vido yo. | I saw the gentleman myself. |
AtiralalaŽ, atiralalaŽ, atiralalaŽ | Throw it, throw it, throw it |
desde Lima a Lunahuana. | from Lima to Lunahuana. |
Cachaplaca, chaplaca, chaplac. | Mark of the blade. |
Un jarro de agua y un dulce. | A jar of water and a candy. |
El turronero de yema. | The candy maker. |
The festejo was probably danced in free style. In addition, several other genres of dance are based melodically and rhythmically on the festejo. These include the son de los diablos (described above), the alcatraz, the ingaŽ, the zapateo (zapateado) criollo, and the agua ?e nieve.
These include the alcatraz and the ingaŽ. My oldest consultants remember them only as sources of entertainment. The alcatraz is performed in a circle. One male-female
Competitive dances based on the
Two dances utilizing festejo rhythms in a competitive demonstration of skill are the zapateo (zapateado) criollo (or the pasada) and the agua ?e nieve (or agušenieve). The zapateo criollo is danced by a solo male who demonstrates his skill by improvising intricate rhythmic patterns with his feet, supplemented by rhythmic slapping (see Okada 1995: example 21). An element of virtuosity and even acrobatics is often present. The dance is usually performed competitively by two or more individuals who take turns trying to impress onlookers or to score points with the person chosen to judge their contest. The agua ?e nieve is essentially the same, but based on escobillada technique.
The only rhythmic accompaniment used in these dances comes from the guitar, which provides a simple, unobtrusive musical framework on which the dancer improvises. When these dances are performed by the hatajo de negritos, however, rather than using the festejo rhythm, the violin plays an accompaniment resembling that used for villancicos, and boys combine zapateado and escobillada techniques.
The
Another Afro-Peruvian musical genre, rhythmically distinct and more complex than the festejo, is the landoŽ. Colonial-period literature provides no information that reliably
Fragments of a few traditional landoŽs have survived, and new ones are being composed. The landoŽ exhibits richly syncopated rhythmic variety using six units per bar, conceivable as (4+2)/4 time. The primary accentuation is on the first and fifth quarter notes; a secondary accent occurs on the third. Contrasting meters, especially 6/4 time, often occur in instrumental and vocal parts, producing polyrhythms and cross-accents (
The nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of Peruvian culture. Political and cultural alienation from Spain led to national independence (1821), the abolition of slavery (1865), and the War of the Pacific with Chile (1879-1883). In all these movements and events, blacks played important roles.
Concurrently, nationalism in folk music was evidenced by the emergence of new national genres of music. Thus, even as the mixture of races along the Peruvian coast produced a distinctive mestizaje, the blending of Hispano-European, native American, and African music traditions gradually synthesized a creole music (muŽsica criolla), truly representative of coastal Peruvian culture.
The
Probably the most important new national musical genre of the nineteenth century was the zamacueca (or zambacueca), which appeared in coastal Peru not long after 1800. Its choreographic theme, shared with dances derived from it, was a courtship pantomime, performed by a man and a woman amid a crowd that accompanied
Other coastal dances choreographically related to the zamacueca appeared during the 1800s. The most notable were the tondero and the resbalosa. These dances are distinctive in their musical form and style. The tondero, still found in northern coastal Peru, has a ternary structure: glosa (always in minor mode), dulce or canto (always in the relative major), and fuga (in the original minor mode). The resbalosa, found in the areas closer to Lima, is musically more syncopated, and its steps are based on escobillada.
The zamacueca became popular in many Latin American countries during the mid-1800s, and numerous regional and national variations developed. In the 1860s and 1870s, the zamacueca chilena, a Chilean version of it, was the most popular form in Peru. After the War of the Pacific, however, Peruvians, not wanting their national dance to carry their enemies' name, renamed it the marinera, honoring their seamen who had died in the war. Modern, commercial Afro-Peruvian renditions of the zamacueca, which began with Victoria Santa Cruz's popular "Ven a mi encuentro," bear little resemblance to the historical version.
The marinera has a choreography similar to that of the zamacueca, with regional variations throughout Peru (see Okada 1995: example 24). Most important to a study of Afro-Peruvian music is the marinera of Lima (marinera limen~a), which functions in one of two contexts: as a jarana, a competition (contrapunto) between or among singers; or as a noncompetitive performance of a simple marinera with singing and/or dancing. Unlike the marineras of other regions, the marinera limen~a follows strict rules of performance in dancing and singing. The essential accompaniment consists of two guitars, the cajoŽn, and clapping. The poetic structure of a marinera limen~a is ternary, consisting of three strophes, each of which must adhere to set poetic and musical structures.
The jarana is performed by two or more singers who sing alternate strophes in a series of marineras. A singer may choose strophes from traditional Spanish poetry, or from verses composed before the competition, or may even improvise strophes. According to strict rules, the texts of the strophes of a given marinera must be adapted spontaneously to fit the melody, chosen or improvised by the performer who sings the first strophe (Hayre 1973).
A complete performance of a jarana consists of three to five marineras, each having three strophes followed by a resbalosa and fugas. The resbalosa, the complementary movement to the marinera, consists of two or more strophes sung in a somewhat livelier and more syncopated rhythm than that of the marinera, with fewer metrical and musical restrictions than its counterpart. The fugas are the climax of the piece and the competition. In them, the competitors test each other's knowledge by singing couplets or quatrains of verses back and forth to each other in rapid succession. If a singer makes an error during the jarana, or is unable to answer at all, his opponent wins. Many of the greatest interpreters of the marinera and performers of jarana have been Afro-Peruvian, including Bartola Sancho DaŽvila, Manuel Quintana, EliŽas and Augusto Ascuez, Augusto Gonzales, and Abelardo VaŽsquez. Only a few individuals who know how to sing jaranas are still alive. The only commercially available traditional performance is the LP disk La Marinera Limen~a es AsiŽ (n. d.).
The creole waltz
The creole waltz (vals criollo) is the most popular national form of music among most races and social classes in coastal Peru. Though it has its roots in the Viennese waltz,
By the 1850s, the vals already differed considerably from the European waltz. It had, and still has, a free choreography consisting of short, slow steps with considerable rhythmic movement of the hips, arms, and shoulders. Its melody usually abounds in displaced accents, anticipated and retarded beats, and occasional use of rubato. In the early 1900s, the traditional instrumental accompaniment of two guitars was enriched by the addition of the cajoŽn. Most composers of valses have been whites or mestizos, but Afro-Peruvians are among the carriers of the tradition, and their influence has helped make its character unique.
Folkloric nationalism (criollismo) continued to develop throughout the twentieth century in Peru, with the black population always playing an important role. Many musical genres identified principally with Afro-Peruvian culture, however, began to fall into disuse in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
Only a few families of black musicians in Lima and rural areas remained familiar with the forms. Black composers, singers, and dancers showed little interest in traditional Afro-Peruvian music. Instead, they dedicated themselves to creole music in vogue, especially the marinera, the resbalosa, and the vals, plus imported popular music such as the tango (from Argentina), the boston and shimmy (from North America), and even the zarzuela.
Beginning in the 1920s, semiprofessional musical ensembles of Afro-Peruvian musicians and singers attained renown in the performance of creole music, often entertaining on stage or at late-night parties (also called jaranas). These groups, usually living in and identified with particular neighborhoods of Lima, developed repertoires of valses, polkas, marineras, resbalosas, and tonderos. One musician of Afro-Peruvian heritage, Samuel MaŽrquez, formed the ensemble Ricardo Palma, which in addition to popular creole genres performed some old Afro-Peruvian songs. In 1936, he presented this repertoire in the theatrical performance Del 96 al 36 'From [18]96 to [19]36'. Much Afro-Peruvian music had already been lost by then, and often only portions of choruses survived; therefore, MaŽrquez made arrangements based on surviving fragments. His presentation was a success, and for the next couple of decades, Ricardo Palma performed Afro-Peruvian folkloric music at many kinds of celebrations.
The first attempt to bring an entire program of Afro-Peruvian music to the stage was achieved through the efforts of JoseŽ Durand, a white creole. Frequenting festivities where the foremost black singers and musicians performed, he collected information and songs from knowledgeable elderly blacks. The result was La Cuadrilla Morena de Pancho Fierro (The Brown Company of Pancho Fierro), which made its deŽbut in the Teatro Municipal of Lima in the summer of 1956. This engagement
Though Durand's ensemble eventually disintegrated, it inspired other commercial Afro-Peruvian groups. During the 1960s, Victoria and Nicomedes Santa Cruz formed Danzas Negros del PeruŽ and Cumanana. Other groups initiated in the 1970s included PeruŽ Negro (founded by Ronaldo Campos), Gente, Morena, Los Frejoles Negros, and the Afro-Peruvian ensembles of the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore (led by Victoria Santa Cruz). The next two decades saw the formation of many more commercial Afro-Peruvian groups in Lima and some smaller coastal towns. Several scholars' research has confirmed that most of the repertoire of these commercial groups since the 1950s has been stylized, newly invented, or Africanized "folklore," with few roots in Afro-Peruvian tradition (VaŽsquez RodriŽguez 1982:44-51).
Festejos, landoŽs, and other Afro-Peruvian music can now frequently be heard in nightclubs, pen~as criollas, and centros musicales. Though pen~as were originally where amateur performers of creole (and occasionally Andean) music met for jam sessions, the term is now loosely used by entrepreneurs to describe cover-charge dinner concerts of popular Peruvian music with professional performers or even dinner dances with Latin American music provided by a disk jockey. Numerous vinyl records, cassettes, and compact discs of commercialized Afro-Peruvian music have been issued.
In Can~ete every August, the Festival Negroide promotes Afro-Peruvian musics. It gives awards for the best black dancers, vocalists, and composers. Governmental agencies promote creole and Afro-Peruvian music by requiring a certain portion of the programming of radio and television stations to include national music.
The twentieth century saw the beginning of scholarly research on Afro-Peruvian music. In the 1930s and 1940s, Fernando Romero began studying African influence on Peruvian coastal music. Other scholarsincluding Abraham and Felipe Arias Larreta, Fernando Assuncžao (1969), JoseŽ MejiŽa Baca (1938), JoseŽ Durand (1961, 1971, 1973), Carlos Hayre (1973), Arturo JimeŽnez Borja, Robert M. Stevenson, Rosa Elena VaŽsquez RodriŽguez (1982), and Carlos Vega (1936, 1953)have researched diverse aspects of coastal creole and black culture.
Possibly the most popular Afro-Peruvian folklorist and prolific writer of the 1960s and 1970s was Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Most scholars have taken issue with his theories, especially those concerning the nature and origins of colonial Afro-Peruvian and creole musical instruments and genres, but no other folklorist during this period did more to make Peruvians aware of the richness of their Afro-Peruvian heritage.
Most elderly Afro-Peruvian consultants who remembered traditional black music as it was performed around 1900 have now died. They asserted that contemporary Afro-Peruvian "folklore" is an invention of modern black ensembles that wish to Africanize performances to make them more exotic. Afro-Peruvian music has entered into the commercial music industry. To succeed, it must be marketable and competitive with other youth-favored music, particularly Caribbean dance music. Only the Hatajo de Negritos has remained uncommercialized and totally within the realm of tradition.
Despite the arguments about "true" Afro-Peruvian traditions, however, one must avoid the misconception that the only authentic Afro-Peruvian music is that which has remained unchanged from former centuries. Culture is not static, and African-derived culture has been characterized by resilience throughout history as it interacted between the past and present, absorbing and reinterpreting elements from the musical traditions around it.
Similarly, modern Afro-Peruvian music reflects the ethos and group consciousness
Native Americans
African Influence
Indonesian Influence
Urban Creole Music
The small country known as Suriname (from Surinam, an Arawak name) in its early colonial period, then as Dutch Guiana before its independence in 1975, and today as Surinam or Suriname, is unique because of its cultural extremes. It is home to native Arawak- and Carib-speaking inhabitants of its interior forests; it is the domain of the most African-derived subcultures in South America, the Maroons (formerly "Bush Negroes") in its interior forests and savannas; and it is the home of descendants of Portuguese Jews and indentured workers from China, India, and Indonesia. Added to this are an overlay of Dutch and English culture and a population speaking mostly Sranan, an English-based creole, along a partially urbanized and highly populated Atlantic seaboard (Manuel 1995:222).
A country of 163,265 square kilometers, Surinam lies in northeastern South America between French Guiana to its east and Guyana to its west. Of its population of about four hundred thousand people, about 95 percent live along the Atlantic coast, and about a third dwell in Paramaribo, its capital. The country was controlled by the British until 1667, when they traded it to the Dutch in exchange for Manhattan Island in New York.
As in other colonial settlements in the Western Hemisphere, many indigenous people of Surinam were enslaved by Europeans or migrated deep into its interior. Others have always inhabited the humid regions bordering Brazil to the south. Native Americans near the Atlantic coast were Arawak- and Carib-speakers about whom little is known. What is left of their cultures reveals high levels of acculturation. The major forest people include the Akumo (Ocomayana), the TirioŽ (Trio), and the Wayana (Oayana) [see WAYANA]. All three groups speak Carib-derived languages within the Ge^-Pano-Carib phylum (Loukotka 1968). Their cultures are somewhat preserved, but missionization has led to acculturated and syncretic musical forms of expression. Wayana music can be heard on Musique Boni et Wayana de Guyana (1968).
The TirioŽ number about a thousand people; they have received evangelical indoctrination since the arrival of American missionaries in the 1970s. As a result,
American missionaries have introduced portable radios into the forest, enabling the TirioŽ and others to hear Brazilian popular music broadcast from Amazonian stations. Nevertheless, TirioŽ shamanic lore is being passed on to apprentice shamans, ensuring that curing songs and ethnobotanical agents will continue to be used for another generation (Plotkin 1993:285).I couldn't believe the TirioŽs had been forced to give up such an essential part of their culture in exchange for an imported religion. "So what do you sing now?" I asked. "The missionaries taught us new songs," he replied excitedly. "Here, listen to this." The tune he sang sounded vaguely familiar, but it took me a minute to recognize it: a TirioŽ version of "Jingle Bells."
Slaves from Africafrom the region of West Africa formerly known as the Gold Coast (principally Ashanti, Fon, and Yoruba cultures)first arrived in about 1650, and some three hundred thousand Africans entered Surinam until the end of slavery in 1863. During several political-economic conflicts involving the Dutch, the English, and the French beginning in 1663 and lasting for a hundred years, many African slaves escaped from the European-owned sugarcane plantations into the interior, where they established communities fashioned on African models (Bastide 1971:52-53). Known as Maroons (meaning 'runaways'), they live in three main cultural groups, having a total population of about forty thousand: the Saramaca (the largest, numbering about twenty thousand), the Auca (also known as Djuka or Ndjuka), and the Boni (also known as Aluku). They collectively obtained official governmental recognition (their own independence) in the 1770s, and today, in terms of their cultural identity, they are among the most African of South American people.
The Maroon "river cultures" of Surinam have retained many African beliefs. Most notable is the belief in a supreme deity known by several names: Nyan Kompon (a Fanti-Ashanti name) among the Saramaka; Nana (an Agni name) among the Djuka; and Masu Gadu (a Fon name) among the Boni. Beneath the supreme deity are many lesser gods or spirits. Many have particular foods, colors, taboos, songs, drum rhythms, and dances (Bastide 1971:58-59). Village priests supervise the
Musical instruments
The Maroons of Surinam use musical instruments of all four organological classes, but most prominent are struck idiophones and membranophones.
Small container rattles made from beautifully incised calabashes are important instruments for ritual use (Dark 1970). By themselves, their sounds can induce possession in believers. Saramaka and Djuka religious dancers use strung rattles made from seed pods and attached to their ankles. These the Maroons originally acquired from their indigenous neighbors, but today the Maroons themselves make them.
Struck idiophones that accompany drumming include two pieces of iron that are hit together, the felu-ko-felu 'iron-against-iron', a concussion idiophone that provides a steady pulse during ritual musical performances. Another instrument that provides a steady pulse is the kwakwa, a squat wooden bench or stool beaten with two sticks. Both instruments are played by men and women. In addition, women clap to accompany singing and dancing.
Surinam is the only country in the Americas where a plucked idiophone similar to the African mbira is used. This instrument can be heard on Music from Saramaka (Price and Price 1977). Known as the benta, it consists of a board that supports split bamboo reeds, plucked with the fingers. A versatile instrument, it is played only by young menfor entertainment, for imitating animals or birds, communicating via the Maroon language, and dancing (Price and Price 1991:211-212). Power to play the instrument was attributed to spirits of the forest, and it is said that "some players were able to walk on water across the river while playing" (Price and Price 1977).
Single-headed open-ended drums are the most powerful Maroon instruments in Surinam. They come in various shapes and have various names, depending on the subculture they pertain to and on the deity they communicate with. The three most important of these membranophones are the agida, the apinti, and the tumao. All have the power to summon gods and ancestral spirits, function as the voices of supernatural beings and articulate their messages in a specially drummed language, and send the gods and spirits back to their celestial or metaphysical homes at the conclusion of the ceremonies. All the drums are in the domain of male players, and "no woman may play drums, or even touch them. Belief has it that if a woman plays the drums, her breasts will grow until they reach the ground" (Herskovits and Herskovits 1969:523).
The agida, measuring up to nearly a meter long, is the lowest-pitched drum of the battery of ritual drums. Its head, tightened with pegs driven into the side of a log body, is played with a single drumstick, providing a steady pulse for evoking earth gods and snake gods. Meanwhile, the player's other hand plays intricate cross-rhythms on the same skin. Herskovits and Herskovits observed an agida that was more than 2.4 meters long, and "so powerful was its call, that only a few minutes after it began to sound the invocations to the Snake god, devotees from nearby villages, under possession, made their appearance" (1969:522). The ritual to the snake god is known as vodu or papagadu, the latter being the name of the deity that lives in anacondas and boa constrictors (a good example can be heard on Price and Price 1977).
The apinti derives from the apentemma of the Ashanti in Ghana. It is a pegged
The tumao is a medium-to-long cylindrical log drum (slightly larger at the top than the bottom, but not enough to be called a conically shaped instrument). Its skin is tensioned by wedges driven downward through a hoop attached to the head. It is larger than the apinti and smaller than the agida, has plain sides, and is played with the hands. In its ritual context, it is dedicated to bush spirits (Herskovits and Herskovits 1969:521).
Religious music
Many Maroon gods pertain to the fauna and flora of the forest and other natural thingsanimals (snakes, especially anacondas and boa constrictors), the bush (the fierce kromanti), rivers, and even the sea (far from their villages, but probably an African retention). Some gods are known throughout the subcultures, but others are regional and pertain to particular villages and clans. Many aspects of Maroon ritual life are related to African (especially Ghanaian) counterparts.
Secular music
One of the most important kinds of secular music among the Maroons is se^ke^ti, "often cryptic" songs and dances, "drawing on heavily poetic, metaphorical language, ...composed by both men and women as expressions of love, despair, admiration or derision, and ... a major form of social commentary" (Price and Price 1977:4). Se^ke^ti are usually performed responsorially, with leader and chorus dancing while singing, accompanied by clapping and drumming (listen to Gillis 1977a and Price and Price 1977). They can be performed in settings of solitude as when paddling alone in a canoe or sewing alone at home; they are often performed by women. Saramaka women say se^ke^ti are "songs of love (loŽbi), cursing (koŽsi), or hardship (fickaŽ)" (S. Price 1984:167). An example of the last refers to the hardship of loneliness experienced by a woman when her husband leaves home to work away from the village (after S. Price 1984:178):
A reason for not laughing anymore was the flooding of the Surinam River (called Lendema's River in the song, after the man responsible for constructing a dam), creating a huge artificial lake (Lendema Wata) for hydroelectric power. This project destroyed several Saramaka villages upstream from the dam; the displaced families were relocated in government-built houses on the coasta factor causing major cultural changes for many Maroons.M'aŽ oŽ laŽfu mo^o`-eŽeŽ.
DiŽ woŽmi de^ a Lendema liŽo.
M'aŽ oŽ laŽfu mo^o`.
I won't laugh anymore.
The man's at Lendema's River.
I won't laugh anymore.
In 1891, the Dutch in Surinam began to import Javanese indentured laborers from their Indonesian colony, the Dutch East Indies. By 1940, about thirty-three thousand Javanese had immigrated to the former Dutch Guiana (Waal Malefijt 1963:25-28). Some forty thousand people of Javanese descent still live in Javanese communities in Surinam, where performances of gamelan music and shadow-puppet plays occasionally occur.
As former members of the Javanese rural class or their descendants, those that have continued to work in agriculture follow beliefs that are something of a mixture of Islam and the worship of spirits. Rain and harvest rituals; traditional curing of illnesses; magic; rituals of birth, circumcision, marriage, and death; various slametan rituals, "a constant re-affirmation of the unity of the community, which makes everything right, and enables the people to live 'the good life'" (Waal Malefijt 1963:161); wayang; and the celebration of Ramadanall these occasions incite singing and musical performance. Musical specialists include the dukun (a male or female shaman who performs love-controlling magic and curing), the le`de`k (a female religious dancer), and the dalang (leader of the wayang, a puppet theater that employs a gamelan, an orchestra consisting mostly of struck idiophones). The most musical of these specialists is the dalang, and the gamelan is the major musical expression of the Javanese in Surinam.
Instruments for the traditional Javanese gamelan were not brought over by the original laborers, who had to make the voyage without possessions. In the early 1900s, bronze instruments were imported, but without their wooden frames, which were built in Surinam from local woods. In Surinam, Annemarie de Waal Malefijt (1963:154) interviewed many elderly Javanese who commented on how beautifully carved the gamelan instruments were in Java, and how plain they were in Surinam. This situation is because the aristocratic court elite (prijaji) did not emigrate from Java, and therefore did not support the manufacture of gamelan instruments in Surinam. The instruments in a Surinam-Javanese gamelan include gende`r, metal-keyed marimbas with bamboo resonators; saron and demung, metal-keyed marimbas without resonators; suspended metal gongs, in several sizes; and kendang, double-headed membranophones (Gillis 1977).
Though Waal Malefijt (1963) photographed and described only Javanese-style gamelan instruments, I observed and photographed a Balinese gamelan angklung from Surinam that was on display in the Jaap Kunst Museum in Amsterdam. Several accompanying photographs documented its use in processions, as in Bali.
The Javanese gamelan provides musical accompaniment for wayang in Surinam. The dalang manipulates the puppets, singing and reciting the dialogue. Only the elderly Javanese-born in Surinam understand the dialogue of the dalang. Nevertheless, theatrical presentations still last from 8:00 P.M. to 6 A.M., and attention is demanded from young and old. At outdoor performances, children usually fall asleep by midnight.
The only other Javanese musical instrument employed by the mostly Islamic population in the rural settlements is the bedug. This is a ritual drum, sounded for the traditional and daily Islamic call to prayer (as it is in Java) and for announcing death by the Islamic religious leader (ka'um), who beats a rhythm that the community recognizes.
The annual, monthlong celebration of Ramadan (Pasa in Surinam and Java) requires fasting and other Islamic ritual acts. It ends with Bodo (also Lebaran), a holiday that government officials erroneously call the Javanese New Year, when Javanese music is played on the radio.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Indonesian government has furnished Surinam with
Along the Atlantic seaboard is a thriving but largely unknown musical scene, which has produced three musical genres that reveal Maroon musical traits. These genreskawina, kaseko, and alekehave been researched by Peter Manuel (1995:221-231). His work, the only recent study of popular Surinamese music in English, provides the foundation for the following descriptions.
This is the oldest creole musical form of Surinam, developed by the people of African descent who remained in the coastal region rather than escaping into the interior forest as did the Maroons. Kawina probably originated in the late 1800s as a mixture of musical traits from creoles, Maroons, and foreign migrant prospectors; these included Afro-Surinamese drums, European accordions and clarinets, and responsorial singing. The European instruments were discarded in favor of percussion instruments, and in the 1990s, kawina ensembles have included a small bench struck with sticks, hand-held container rattles, timbal membranophones (large single-headed drums, not to be confused with Caribbean timbales), and koti kawina and hari kawina, small double-headed drums, all as rhythmical accompanying instruments to responsorial singing laced with European harmonies.
Kawina can function as religious or secular music. The former (winti kawina) accompanies Afro-Surinamese ceremonials associated with the Winti religion, while the latter (prisiri kawina 'good-time kawina') accompanies social dancing and singing (the lyrics often make comments on current events and people). Since more than half of the world's Surinamese live in the Netherlands, many popular kawina bands reside and record overseas in Amsterdam (Manuel 1995:223).
More contemporary than kawina music, kaseko merges many Caribbean and African styles, often blending Caribbean calypso, reggae, and zouk with West African soukous and Surinam Maroon Djuka drumming (Manuel (1995:224-226). The result is a highly danceable music, popular in the Netherlands and Surinam. The Netherlands issues CDs, but Surinam relies mostly on its cassette-producing industry.
Like many other contemporary Caribbean and West African musics, kaseko features trumpets, saxophones, keyboards, electric guitar, electric bass, and percussion (including some Maroon drums); the melodic instruments play extended ostinatos
As a more recent contrast to kawina and kaseko, aleke is heavily percussive, featuring Djuka drums in spirit and aleke drums (such as a combination agida and conga) in actuality. A battery of three aleke drums (the use of three drums also retains the Djuka concept) and a horizontally placed bass drum (djas 'jazz') and a high-hat cymbal are used. In addition, aleke is a vocal music with communication in mind; its lyrics often "deal with decidedly modern themes, from AIDS and poverty to the pros and cons of condoms" (Manuel 1995:230).
Native American Inhabitats
Traditional Musical Instruments
Religious Musical Contexts and Genres
Secular Musical Contexts and Genres
Musical Behavior and Creativity
Learning Music
Musical Change
Uruguay, officially named the RepuŽblica Oriental del Uruguay, is one or the smallest countries of the Americas, with an area of 177,508 square kilometers. It extends northward to Brazil and the Atlantic Ocean, eastward to the Atlantic, and westward and southward to its border with Argentina across two rivers, the Uruguay and the RiŽo de la Plata. The population, mostly descendants of Spanish and Italian settlers, was 3,168,000 in 1994. The native population is extinct, and vestiges of Africans who came as slaves remain in some cities, especially in the capital, Montevideo.
The political, cultural, and musical history of Uruguay is closely related to that of its larger neighbors; nevertheless, since colonial times, Uruguay has developed special musical genres related to carnival, to the tango (which it shares with Argentina), and to Uruguayan popular song (canto popular uruguayo), the most important Uruguayan musical movement of the second half of the twentieth century.
The writings of Spanish and Portuguese sailors, geographers, and conquistadors provide the principal historical sources for the study of Uruguayan traditional music, including references to native American religious and secular dances, songs, and instrumental music. No archaeological evidence for Uruguayan indigenous music exists. Governmental archives and private collections have held traditional Uruguayan music only since 1944.
The ethnic group that predominantly inhabited this region at the time of the Spanish encounter was the ChanaŽ-CharruŽa. The first musical reference to these people was made in 1531 by the Portuguese Lopes de Souza (1927), who related that when his men landed on a beach in search of fresh water, the natives approached them singing (AyestaraŽn 1953:6).
The first reference to ChanaŽ-CharruŽa musical instruments was made by the Spaniard MartiŽn del Barco Centenera (1602); in his poem "Argentina y conquista del RiŽo de la Plata" ('Argentina and Conquest of the River of Silver'), recounting his travels along the river, he mentions trumpets (trompas), horns (bocinas), and drums, which the CharruŽas used in battle (AyestaraŽn 1953:7). Later, a French observer described a musical bow brought to Montevideo by four presumably CharruŽa
Another group that inhabited the territory of present Uruguay was the TupiŽ-GuaraniŽ, among whom Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries proselytized. In 1680, some participated in a Spanish-led battle against the Portuguese. CristoŽbal Altamirano admonished them to "take their pingollos or fifes, or flutes with which they encouraged themselves in battle" (AyestaraŽn 1953:15). Altamirano used the Quechua term pingollo perhaps because he was Spanish, and several Jesuits of this time had been working in Peru.
After 1767, when the pope expelled the Jesuits from the Americas, many GuaraniŽ from Jesuit missions in the north wandered southward into the area now known as Uruguay. There are many references to their activities as instrumentalists and singersskills that had been well developed during their time in the missions. Some of these musicians made up the fife-and-drum corps that performed during Uruguay's struggle for independence from Spain. The TupiŽ-GuaraniŽ were absorbed into the new cultural system of the 1800s, which arose from Uruguay's independence.
Little else is known about Uruguayan Indian music. Lauro AyestaraŽn amassed a collection of about four thousand recordings from all over the country between 1944 and 1966; they are housed in an archive named after him, kept in the Museo HistoŽrico Nacional. His research is important for understanding Uruguayan music and musical performance.
The major sources for the study of Uruguayan musical instruments are by Fornaro (1989) and AyestaraŽn (1953, 1967). Uruguay's traditional musical instruments derive mostly from Europe; some are of African-Brazilian derivation. In the former group are chordophones such as the guitar and the violin. Aerophones include the usual military-band instruments, plus the harmonica, the button-and-keyboard accordion, and the bandoneoŽn (a square accordion, used just for tango). Membranophones and idiophones are mostly military-band instruments, such as bass drum, snare drum (redoblante), and cymbals; with tamboriles, they are strongly connected to murgas, groups of dancers and singers that appear at carnival.
Instruments of African-Brazilian derivation are membranophones such as atabaques (mostly single-headed cylindrical drums, struck with the hands), and idiophones such as the ageŽ (a hollow gourd, covered with a net into which seeds, beads, or shells are woven) and the adjaŽ (a small bronze bell).
Musical expressions related to Roman Catholicism are not so abundant in Uruguay as in other parts of Spanish-speaking Latin America, but there does exist a familiar tradition of unaccompanied songs among women and children, including religious and secular lyrics. Religious songs deal with the infant Jesus, saints' lives, and miracles. Secular songs can accompany some children's games and can be Christmas carols, lullabies, narrative songs (romances), songs of love, and other musical genres (Fornaro 1990b).
Two occasions of national celebration relate to the calendar of saints: the feast of the Virgin of Verdun, whose celebration is centered in Minas, in the department of
Other festivities take place in other locations. These include the feasts of Saint John and Saint Isidro Labrador, particularly popular in rural agricultural areas. Also popular are patron saints' festivals, which incorporate sacred and secular elements. In addition to the observation of appropriate Roman Catholic ritual behavior, the selling of food, drink, and other items, and participation in games and other activities are important (Fornaro 1990b:48-49). Traditional music, performed on guitars, accordions, concertinas, bandoneones, and harmonicas, and traditional dance occur spontaneously at these celebrations, enlivening, in addition to the processions, various contexts.
The feast of the Virgin of Verdun, for example, is one of the main venues for a payada, a poetic and musical duel between payadores, competitors in improvising to the same melody. A payador is a singer who improvises poetic texts to a given musical form (such as the milonga), accompanied by a guitar. The subject of a typical competition deals with country life and rural dwellers, among whom the gaucho has a symbolic role; historical and nationalistic themes are not so prevalent. Payadas, which occur most frequently during Holy Week, include performances by payadores from all over the country. Organized by criollo societies, this celebration includes other events stressing outdoorsmanship (activities of the gaucho). Usually the winning payador is determined by the spectators' applause, rewarding the competitor who shows the most wit, sagacity, and ability to improvise rhymes.
Se nos pide la opinioŽn, | We are being asked for an opinion, |
el concepto, el testimonio | a concept, a testimony |
sobre el tema matrimonio, | on the theme of marriage, |
convivencia y comprensioŽn: | living together, and understanding |
y el jurado y la reunioŽn, | and the jury and the audience, |
sin ninguna terquedad, | without any obstinacy, |
pero con mucha ansiedad | but with great anxiety |
en sus discretos reclamos, | over their discreet allurements |
quiere saber que opinamos | want to know what we think |
sobre la infidelidad. | about infidelity. |
Pues bien, si la gente insiste | Well, if people insist, |
debemos con claridad | we must clearly |
hablar de infidelidad | speak about infidelity |
y explicar en queŽ consiste. | and explain what it includes: |
La infidelidad es triste, | infidelity is sad, |
destructora de la paz, | destroyer of peace, |
obra cruel de SatanaŽs, | cruel work of Satan, |
hecho nefasto y nefando, | fateful and infamous fact, |
lamentable siemprey cuando | always lamentable |
lo cometan los demaŽs. | when others commit it. |
The contestants sing different melodies of milonga, the most common genre for this kind of contest.
Africanisms
The use of music in the context of African religious systems is totally different from that in celebrations derived from Roman Catholic culture. In African-derived events,
These manifestations are characterized by their liturgies, the musical repertoire that accompanies their public acts (mostly performed in Portuguese), and records and cassettes of Brazilian origin. As in Brazil, these religions, known collectively as Umbanda and Macumba, are highly syncretic, combining Yoruba beliefs with Bantu,
Music and dance serve as means of communication with different deities. Songs may be performed by soloists or ensembles, accompanied or unaccompanied. Accompaniment consists of the following instruments: one to three differently sized atabaques, a hollow gourd, and a small bell (adjaŽ, sineta). The most popular ceremony is devoted to IemanjaŽ, goddess of the waters. It takes place on 2 February on the beaches of Montevideo, and by riverbanks and streambeds throughout the country (
Another African-derived dance is found in Montevideo's carnival. This dance was brought by Africans who entered the country as slaves after the mid-1700s. The carnival dance known as candombe (whose name in the 1800s denoted African-Uruguayan dances and locales for dancing) commemorates the coronation of Congo kings. It imitates certain non-African state organizations and reveals syncretism between Bantu fetishism and Roman Catholicism (AyestaraŽn 1953:103). Its nineteenth-century precursor was celebrated every year in Montevideo between the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany (6 January). It survives not only among the descendants of Uruguayan slaves but also among other persons, who dance it during the celebration of carnival in Montevideo and on sporadic occasions. An expansion of this dance occurs in the interior of the country, where some of its elements grace political, athletic, and cultural events outside of carnival contexts.
It is in carnival celebrations, however, that candombe takes its most typical form as presented by Black Lubolos, the carnival ensembles approved by the municipal carnival regulations of the city of Montevideo. Black Lubolo societies perform in various carnival parades on different dates, their appearance announced by drummed calls (llamadas) lasting from two to fifteen hours, played at different sites from the end of December until the beginning of Holy Week. The candombe itself is performed to the sound of at least twelve drums (a number set by a municipal regulation), but sometimes up to thirty drums. This kind of drum, called tamboril afro-uruguayo, is considered an emblematic instrument of Uruguay. It is an open, barrel-shaped drum, constructed from many slats of wood; the membrane for each instrument, previously tacked in a traditional manner, is now usually attached
Several secular dances of European origin are performed throughout Uruguay. These include the polka, the mazurka (known as the ranchera), and the waltz, the last two being the most widespread. All of them passed from urban to rural surroundings in the late 1800s and can be found in organized rural-dance festivals and in family settings. In addition, Brazilian folk dances such as the chimarrita, the tirana, and the carangueijo may be present along the border.
Music is used in criollas, societies whose principal objective is the preservation of traditional rural festivals. In certain localities, music affords a special occasion for entertainment through retretas, Sunday musical performances by bands supported by municipalities, police departments, or the armed forces. Folk-music festivals take place in the interior of the country, attracting rural and urban spectators. The most important ones occur in the cities of TacuaremboŽ and Durazno.
In schools and homes, children's music is found in songs and musical games. Lullabies continue to be widespread. Most of these genres derive from the children's repertoire of the European tradition, which has spread all over Latin America.
The musical stage
Since the 1940s in Montevideo, a kind of light theater known as teatro de revistas developed along the RiŽo de la Plata. Related to the Spanish tonadilla esceŽnica and the French varieŽteŽ, it alternates comic or satirical dialogue with music and dance, usually presented by luxuriously costumed players. It has a roguish and even impudent character, in which there is not usually a dramatic flow so much as a succession of independent scenes, including opportunities for performances of tangos. It enjoyed a brief renaissance in the 1980s (Fornaro 1990b:22).
In Uruguay, carnival retains aspects of the medieval European one, in which popular sectors questioned the existing social order by parody, satire, or other resources. For five weeks before carnival, officially competing ensembles perform on street stages (tablados), in athletic clubs, in the Teatro de Verano in Montevideo, and at other locales throughout Uruguay. The official competition of carnival groups, the responsibility of the municipal government of Montevideo and the Uruguayan Associated Directors of Popular Carnival Shows, occurs every year (
The relationship of Montevideo's carnival to tourism is evidenced by the annual publication of the municipal carnival regulations (the 1991 version consisted of twenty pages) by the Tourism Division of the Municipality of Montevideo. Because carnival attracts national and international tourists, some celebrations are performed in Punta del Este, where some groups go in search of foreign audiences.
During Montevideo's carnival, theatrical presentations abound. Each year, the
The murga is a popular art. In contrast with genres considered cultured, it relates to popular genres such as teatro callejero, zarzuela, and operetta and has developed its own stock characters (Diverso 1989:14). Its presentations satirize political and social events that have happened since the last carnival.
Yo quiero ver que esta noche | Tonight I want to see |
la alegriŽa te siga; | Happiness catching you; |
quiero ver en tu cara | I want to see in your face |
sonrisa de carin~o. | A smile of love. |
Quiero que esta noche riŽa | I want you to smile tonight, |
que usted disfrute a mi lado. | And enjoy being with me. |
Yo quiero hablar del presente; | I want to talk about the present; |
no quiero hablar del pasado. | I don't want to talk about the past. |
Quiero encontrar una calle | I want to find a street |
que no esteŽ llena de ahujeros, | That isn't full of potholes, |
para decirle a Pacheco: | So I can ask Pacheco: |
"żCoŽmo le vaŽ, compan~ero?" | "How's it goin', buddy?" |
Pacheco was Jorge Pacheco Areco, president of Uruguay (1967-1971).
A show has four parts: the presentation (presentacioŽn), consisting of the director's speech and a choral song; the potpourri (potpurriŽ), performed by the chorus and soloists; the cupleŽ, performed by soloists and the chorus, appealing to social, moral, or political interests; and the leaving (retirada), containing the richest harmonies of the unaccompanied chorus. Only at the end do drums emphasize the high point of the action. The chorus begins in three, four, or five voices, and displays canonic imitation.
Popular music
The tango, a ballroom dance in 4/4 time [see ARGENTINA], is the most characteristic urban dance along the RiŽo de la Plata. It developed on both riverbanks, with its Uruguayan center in Montevideo and its Argentine center in Buenos Aires. Since its popular origins (after the 1860s), it has had a long development in duets and trios that combined violin, guitar, flute, accordion, bandoneoŽn, clarinet, and harp, until the development of the typical ensembles of the mid-1900s.
In comparison with the Argentinian capital, the development of the tango in Uruguay was delayed because of the slow development of music publishing and recording (Legido 1994:36-37) and because the rise of talking movies in Buenos Aires at the end of the 1930s gave tango a relevant presence there. Several artists migrated to Buenos Aires and Europe to start international careers, thus becoming important names in the history of tango. This was the case with Alfredo Gobbi, a composer and musician who made recordings of tango in Paris in 1907 and was one of the first teachers of tango in France; and with Francisco Canaro (1897-1948) prolific composer and representative character of the traditional tango of his time. Similar cases include the singer Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), the world-famous singer of tangos, and Julio Sosa, his best successor, who did influential work in Buenos Aires between 1949 and 1964. Horacio Ferrer, the most important living poet of tango, has dedicated himself to diffusing, studying, and promoting tango in both capitals (Montevideo and Buenos Aires), in each of which he founded the National Academy of Tango.
The tango is now an internationally recognized dance, widely found in Europe and America, and played by various ensembles, at the core of which are the piano, the violin, and the bandoneoŽn. It has a widespread popular appeal throughout Uruguay, especially among the generation born before the 1940s, who early in their lives experienced the genre at the height of its popularity.
Two institutions in MontevideoJoventango since 1977 and FundacioŽn Tango since 1987have helped disseminate tango music and dancing. Tango festivals celebrated each year include Festival de Tango de Montevideo, Viva el Tango, and Buscando la Voz del Tango. Tango shows are becoming popular: in 1995, "Todos somos Gardel" ('We're All Gardel), "Mano a mano" ('Hand to Hand'), and "Tangueces" attracted large audiences. El Tango Ha Vuelto a las Calles de Montevideo (The Tango Has Returned to the Streets of Montevideo) is a traveling production performed on spring weekends. The show ends with tango classes given by teachers in the streets of different neighborhoods of the capital.
In popular music, the most typical expression from the 1970s to 1990s is the movement known as canto popular uruguayoa name chosen to differentiate it from the rising movement of folkloric music occurring in Argentina at the same time. This movement began in the 1960s, and its essence was testimonial: its protest songs dealt with a great economical and political crisis. Thus, its texts expressed the desire for social and political change and a search for national and regional identity. This search was effected by including in the repertoire the performers' texts and music, by using Spanish (contrasted with English, used in rock), and by incorporating rhythms of Uruguayan and Latin American derivation (Martins 1986:23-24).
The music showed strong affinities with that of Uruguayan folklore, candombe, the tango, and the murga. The most common instrument was the guitar, but in the 1970s the bandoneoŽn and sets of tamboriles joined the ensemble. The main promoters of this movement included Jaime Roos, Braulio LoŽpez, RubeŽn Rada, and Eduardo Darnuchans. From Jaime Roos and RauŽl Castro come the lyrics of the song "Que el letrista no se olvide" ('Hope the Poet Doesn't Forget'), devoted to the authors of lyrics for carnival murgas; here is a stanza:
This song reminds listeners of subjects that must be in the lyrics.No te olvides de cantarle a los cracks que no llegaron.
DediŽcale alguna estrofa al borracho y su amistad,
y no vayas a olvidarte de dudar de tanto verso.
żCuaŽntas veces el silencio es la voz de la verdad?
Don't forget to sing to the experts who haven't arrived.
Devote a stanza to the drunkard and his friendship,
and please don't forget to distrust such a verse.
How often is silence the voice of truth?
Uruguayan disco is strongly associated with American and British recordings of international music, mainly from the United States, England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Uruguay's youth, more familiar with the English language than are their elders, are attracted to this music. They also enjoy tropical music (muŽsica tropical), an influx of Caribbean genres such as salsa, merengue, cumbia, plena, and others. This musical movement has brought typical Caribbean percussion instruments and styles to Uruguay, and has encouraged the formation of local bands dedicated to playing the new repertoires.
Events for rock and popular Uruguayan song (canto popular uruguayo) are usually held in large urban settings, such as athletic stadiums, clubs, and theaters. Rock concerts are usually performed by international figures apportioning their performances among Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. During summers, Punta del Este (an important international tourist destination) joins this circuit. Rock and other kinds of popular music are broadcast over eighty-six AM and sixty-six FM radio stations and twenty-four television channels in Uruguay. Numerous recording companies release national and international music, on records and cassettes.
Instrumental performance in Uruguay and the construction of musical instruments is almost exclusively the province of men, while women join them by dancing and singing. Different social groups are centered around various musical events; carnival and Afro-Brazilian rituals (such as Umbanda) attract the widest cultural and social diversity; they appear in urban and rural locales, reaching widely various ages and social groups. Events involving mostly traditional criollo music occur predominantly in rural areas, whether on beaches, arenas, streets, or soccer fields.
Audiences include people of all ages, who may participate by singing and dancing or, as with the payada, by simply observing. In urban areas, popular music is performed in the streets and large athletic stadiums, dance halls, social clubs, and tangueriŽas, locales in which live performances of tangos can be heard, sometimes accompanied by dance.
In the cities, the young people are more divided. The young people of the middle
Uruguayan musicians' creativity is situational, conditioned by the repertoire and its function. Musicians who perform rock and popular Uruguayan song enjoy a certain creative liberty, but carnival musician-composers employ established popular melodies, to which they add their own instrumentation and texts. The texts and the music of Afro-Brazilian ritual songs come mostly from Brazil, but drummers enjoy rhythmic latitude. For criollo instrumentalists who perform traditional music, creativity is shown especially in special tunings for the guitar and in strums, which sometimes acquire a virtuosic character.
The reaction of the public to the diversity of repertoires is also varied. It runs from the participation common in the Afro-Brazilian cults (in which parts of the audience sing while the initiates sing, dance, and enter into trance) to the nonparticipation (listening and applauding only) of audiences at theatrical performances of popular music (such as teatros de revista, canto popular uruguayo, and others). Between these extremes are the active participation of the audiences at rock concerts, which includes whistling, singing, clapping, and dancing, and the passive participation of murga audiences, represented in the texts sung by the chorus.
Ideologies underlie some musical expressions. Throughout the repertoires of payadores and personified by gaucho mentality is a nationalist sentiment, linked to traditionalist movements from the late 1800s; these movements tried to contrast national elements with the great wave of European immigration which the country was experiencing. Yoruba mythology is the obvious basis of the Afro-Brazilian cults, whereas a politically and socially questioning attitude dominates the movement of popular Uruguayan song. Social and political satire predominate in the texts of some carnival songs, especially the murgas. At sporting and political events, music increasingly serves as a rallying force; drummed rhythms, marches associated with athletic clubs or political parties, and improvisation of short texts over simple and catchy melodies are traditionally associated with these events.
The learning of traditional criollo music is voluntary and unsystematic. It takes place through observation of other musicians, the same process that occurs among immigrant communities. In the music of the Afro-Brazilian religious rituals, the same process is in operation for the songs and the training of advanced instrumentalists. In the music of carnival, the director of the group takes the teacher's role, but learning still takes place mainly by ear. In popular commercial music, musicans sometimes have a basic knowledge of musical rudiments that permits them to read scores and learn instruments in conservatories or with private teachers; usually, however, commercial musicians play from memory or by ear.
Uruguay has several private or official conservatories. Most are oriented toward European academic music, but two in Montevideo teach folk and pop. These are the Centro de Cultura Popular, operated by the Ministry of Education and Culture (includes a traditional dance program), and the Taller Uruguayo de MuŽsica Popular (Uruguayan Popular-Music Workshop).
Entities such as criollo societies and athletic clubs often facilitate the learning of dances through courses that supplement the teaching of folk music at the high-school level. At a higher level, there is the Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica and the musicology program at the Universidad de la RepuŽblica, both oriented toward European music.
The Uruguayan ethnomusicologist Marita Fornaro (personal communication) gives three main reasons for change in traditional Uruguayan music: the depopulation of rural areas, which has led to the presence in Montevideo of more than half the national population; the increasing technology in agricultural areas, which has led to the disappearance of traditional festivals and their attendant musical events; and the influence of mass communication since the 1960s. Of these reasons, the last has been the most influential in several ways: radio has introduced new genres, especially Argentine folk music and Caribbean forms of music and dance; television has spread the popularity of Rio de Janeiro's carnival, with the consequent influence of its costumes, musical genres, and samba schools; and television has influenced traditional children's songs. The process of musical creolization began early in the colonial period, and certain extant dances reveal that the process was still occurring during the twentieth century, when the mazurka and the polka acquired local traits. Most mestization of the late 1990s relates to the extant Africanisms in certain religious contexts and the candombe of Montevideo's carnival.
TRANSLATED BY TIMOTHY D. WATKINS
Indigenous Music
Folk Music
Musical Contexts and Genres
Social Structure and Performance
Popular Music
Further Study
When Spanish explorers encountered the bay of Maracaibo, on South America's north coast, it reminded them of Venice; therefore, they called the land Venezuela 'little Venice'. Today, the country of Venezuela has a land area of 912,050 square kilometers (more than twice the size of California) and 2,800 kilometers of Caribbean coastline, and in 1992 had a population of 20,675,970. Its five major cities are Caracas (the capital, founded in 1567, with close to 25 percent of the national population), Maracaibo, Valencia, Maracay, and Barquisimeto. From the early colonial period through the first decades of the twentieth century, most of Venezuela's inhabitants lived in rural communities, but today, more than 90 percent of its population resides in urban centers.
Traditional Venezuelan music derives from the cultures that have influenced most Latin American and Caribbean countries: the indigenous (or aboriginal, Indian, Amerindian, native American), the European, and the African. Venezuela still manifests pockets of unacculturated indigenous music, but most of its traditional music is an assortment of genres and styles stemming from Spain and Africa. Two pioneering twentieth-century ethnomusicologists of Venezuela, LuiŽs Felipe RamoŽn y Rivera and Isabel Aretz de RamoŽn y Rivera, have classified traditional Venezuelan music into three categories: indigenous, folk, and popular musica classification often criticized for being too rigid and simplistic. In it, the indigenous category pertains to pre-Columbian music, remaining essentially unacculturated. Folk music encompasses the music of Spain and Africamusic that has been transformed in Venezuela and is not attributable to specific authors. According to Aretz and RamoŽn y Rivera, popular music is music composed by known authors using traditional forms, primarily European. Aretz and RamoŽn y Rivera recognize art music (academic music) and latter-day popular forms such as salsa, but do not view them as "traditional" music.
Though this overview follows the three categories of traditional music presented above, a more comprehensive study of traditional Venezuelan music might utilize classifications proposed by Rafael Salazar (1992a) or other Venezuelan musicologists. The question of what is indigenous, folk, or popular is widely debated in Latin America today. The term traditional popular, for example, is sometimes used in place of folk.
In 1498, when European explorers arrived on Columbus's third voyage to the New World, about fifty thousand native Americans were thought to be living along the central Caribbean coast of Venezuela, an area no longer populated by indigenous peoples. Indigenous music survives primarily in the Amazon region, the Orinoco Delta, and the Guajira Peninsula. European and African influences predominate along the coast of north-central Venezuela, the most densely populated part of the country. Perhaps more than two-thirds of the Spanish who arrived during the first century of colonization came from AndaluciŽa, in southern Spain. With colonization came Moorish influences; thus, when the term European is employed here, it is used in its broadest sense, including influences from Arabic, Islamic, and West Asian sources that were part of AndaluciŽa during the colonizing of the Americas.
In the Andes, Spanish influences predominate. Spanish-derived vocal forms and musical instruments form a plurality of Venezuela's existing folk music, and Isabel Aretz (personal communication) has identified twelve families of song (cancioneros) in Venezuela's folk music, eleven of which she calls Spanish in origin; the remaining one is African-Venezuelan. Likewise, though in any survey of musical instruments indigenous-inspired rattles and African-derived drums abound, the stringed instruments of Spanish origin are the most notable. The national instrument of Venezuela, a four-stringed lute (cuatro) closely resembling the ukulele, and Venezuela's next most prominent musical instrument, a harp (arpa), derive from Spain.
A Caribbean-island character is also apparent in much of Venezuela's music, linking this country musically to places such as Cuba, Curacžao, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago. Much of this influence is African, and the influence of Africa on Venezuela as a whole is much greater than is often perceived. Venezuelans often emphasize their European and indigenous cultural roots, but the African impact on local culture, and music in particular, is undeniable. From the earliest colonial times, Africans were taken to Venezuela directly from the African continent, but the greatest number of Africans and their immediate descendants came indirectly to Venezuelafrom Spain, Colombia, and Caribbean islands. These people represented cultures from widely dispersed areas of Africa. In particular, vestiges of West Africa and Central Africa survive in Venezuela today, although Central African influences appear to be more prevalent (GarciŽa 1990).
No social groups or religious organizations in Venezuela can be traced directly to a specific African ethnic group (Pollak-Eltz 1972, 1994). In Venezuela, the importation of slaves from Africa ended early in the 1800s, while it continued in other countries of the Americas. By 1930, African-Venezuelans knew little about the African origin of their principal musical instruments and forms. Not until the research of Juan Pablo Sojo (1976 [1943]), Juan Liscano (1943), LuiŽs Felipe RamoŽn y Rivera (1950), and others did interest in the African heritage of Venezuela arise.
The indigenous societies encountered by Europeans during the early 1500s in the area known today as Venezuela were neither so numerous nor so complex in social organization as those found in other territories in South America. Spanish chroniclers documented Venezuelan indigenous music from the 1500s through the 1700s (Quintana 1995). Many of these societies no longer exist. About thirty indigenous languages survive, spoken by some two hundred thousand people.
Supernatural and symbolic phenomena are associated with most Venezuelan Amerindian instruments. Some groups give human and/or spiritual significance to their musical instruments. Symbolism, as when the handle and the gourd of a rattle represent male and female spheres of influence, respectively, are common [see
The forms of vocal musicsolo songs and collective songs, men's songs and women's songs, songs dealing with the supernatural world and songs dealing with mundane activities (such as working and walking in the forest)vary widely from one indigenous group to another. Musical texts commonly deal with nature and the supernatural world, and songs are sometimes sung by shamans in secret or in bygone languages or even mentally, without sounds [see WARAO].
Musical structure among indigenous Venezuelans is much like that of other aboriginal groups of the Americas. Indigenous groups of Venezuela share no comprehensive system of tonal organization, and the number of tones used in performances varies greatly among individuals and ethnic groups. One song might be sung on a single tone, whereas other songs use five or more (Olsen 1980b:365). Multipart singing may be heterophonic or canonic, as in singing rounds. Rhythmic practices also vary. Free rhythm is common in solo singing, whereas collective singing is often clearly metered, especially when it accompanies dancing.
Among the indigenous peoples of Venezuela, shamans are the key individuals and usually the most important makers of music. Responsible for the mental and physical health of their people and for singing the myths and legends that tell the people's history, they are the vital link between society and the supernatural world. They combine spiritual leadership, divination, healing, and historical narration, and they use their voices (and often rattles) as the paramount implements in conducting their official duties.
Some indigenous groups have several kinds of shaman, each with a unique musical repertoire. The Piaroa (Wothuha) of the Amazon region have two: the dzuwe`we` ruwa, who fights to protect his people from hostile and evil spirits, and the me`n~eruwa, the master of the me`n~e, sacred songs that men perform at nighttime rituals in communal houses (Agerkop 1983:13). Me`n~e have four functions: combating the fatal illnesses caused by consuming the meat of certain animals; insuring the wellbeing of agricultural crops and pregnant women; curing acute afflictions, such as snakebites or wounds caused by wild animals; and accompanying the blowing of incense when someone dies or at the beginning of a special ceremony called warime.
Musical acculturation among native Venezuelans began in the 1500s with the coming of Europeans and Africans, and especially Christian missionaries. The adoption of Christian music often led to a repudiation of traditional music, which missionaries felt was too closely integrated with indigenous beliefs. Increasing contact with Venezuelan creole culture led indigenous people into new musical realms, affecting their music. Some indigenous groups have been in contact with nonindigenous cultures for decades, but still maintain most of the traditional music they had on first contact. Venezuelan indigenous music was some of the earliest to be recorded by modern technology (around 1900), so to study musical continuity and change, ethnomusicologists can compare early recordings with present-day performances.
Though elite and urbane individualsfrom native American shamans and African princes to Spanish priestshave influenced traditional music in Venezuela, the main subjects in this development have been peasants. European and African traits predominate in most folk-musical forms; indigenous phenomena are less apparent. Some Venezuelan folk music blends European and African music, but most of it is European- or African-based. Some songs are obviously European in form. Others feature the leader-response form of African music. Certain ensembles feature Iberian
The music of Venezuelan peasants of mixed ancestry is often called creole music (muŽsica criolla). RamoŽn y Rivera (1969) uses the term folk in classifying and describing this music, but he and other Venezuelans often use the term criolla when discussing the music created in Venezuela since the arrival of the Europeans and Africans. In parts of Latin America and the Caribbean this term is used to identify those of purely European ancestry; in Venezuela, it usually refers to the cultural trinity of indigenous America, Europe, and Africa. Likewise, creole often designates the traditional music of Venezuela. Even music sometimes called African-Venezuelan music (RamoŽn y Rivera 1971) is occasionally designated as creole music by those who perform it.
As in other parts of the Americas, European musical influences are the easiest to trace through written sources. We have not only published accounts of music and musical instruments in Europe during colonial days (elements that may or may not have reached Venezuela), but also explorers', officials', and clerics' inventories of instruments and vocal music brought from Spain. Europeans reported extensively on indigenous music and instruments but hardly mentioned early musical imports from Africa. For those imports, we must rely more on comparisons of existing phenomena with recent ethnomusicological research in Africa.
Traditional Musical Instruments
The roots of creole music in Venezuela can be traced in part through the study of musical instruments. Two important organological contributions to creole music from indigenous sources are rattles and wind instruments. The major instruments from Spain are stringed instruments, and African-Venezuelans are locally known for their knowledge of drums and drumming.
Container rattles (maracas), usually in pairs, accompany just about every genre of creole music. Indigenous Venezuelans commonly use a single rattle to accompany singing, but creole ensembles commonly employ a pair. (An exception is the use of a single rattle in some African-Venezuelan ensembles of the central coast.) Paired maracas are not usually equal in size or sound. One, usually larger, with more seeds, emits a deep, raspy sound; the other, with fewer seeds, emits a clearer and brighter sound. Often, a gender designation is assigned to each: the lower-sounding instrument is male, the higher-pitched is female.
The most prominent idiophones of African derivation are the sides of woodenbodied
Another African-derived instrument, from the area of Barlovento, is an ensemble of stamped bamboo tubes called quitiplaŽs (
Also of African derivation is the mariŽmbola [see DOMINICAN REPUBLIC:
Though indigenous peoples of Venezuela used numerous kinds of drums, most drums used today are of African and European origin. From Europe came at least two double-headed drums, the bass drum (bombo) and the side drum (redoblante). The drum found most widely in the country, the tambora, may have been inspired by both traditions.
Africa is responsible for the greatest variety of drums. Barlovento (Windward), on the central coast in Miranda State, is famous for its African-Venezuelan drumming. It has produced three distinct sets of membranophones: minas, redondos, and tamboras. Its stamped bamboo tubes, musically related to redondos and sometimes called drums themselves, are part of its heritage. Though multiple sets of drums commonly occur among ethnic groups in Africa (as among the Yoruba of Nigeria, who have different families of drums), they rarely do in communities of the African diaspora in the Americas. Barlovento is an exception. Unlike in Africa, though, where a variety of composite rhythms or instrumental pieces can be played within the context of one family of drums, the drum sets of Barlovento each feature only one composite rhythm. The only exception to this rule is the malembe rhythm and song form, performed for processions rather than dancing, primarily by redondo ensembles, but also sometimes by mina ensembles.
Long, heavy log drums with a skin at one endburro, cumaco, mina, tambor grandeare common in Venezuela. In performance, each is most often placed on the ground. The main drummer straddles the end near the skin, and one or more other musicians beat the side of the drum with palos or laures.
The Barlovento variant of this drum, the mina, is not placed on the ground. When played, it rests on crossed poles (see
Two other drum types of the central coast, redondos and tamboras, have skins at both ends. The commonest are tamboras, the main instruments that accompany all-night observances for honoring a saint or the Holy Cross. In Barlovento, tamboras can be played alone, or in ensembles of up to four or five instruments, by performers who hold the drums between their knees while sitting. The physical traits of the tamboras and the rhythms played on them recall those of the redondo ensemble. The
Redondos, found in a smaller area south and east of Caracas, are longer than tamboras, and are held between standing drummers' legs (
Neither the mina nor the redondo tradition seems to have a direct link to a specific community in Africa; scholars have not found any drumming traditions in Africa that exactly match those of either ensemble; however, generic links are traceable to parts of Africa. The most direct links with central Africa, specifically the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), have been made by the Venezuelan researcher JesuŽs GarciŽa (1990), a native of Barlovento. Other links have been made to West Africa. The construction of the mina, with its skin held in place by ropes tied to pegs that protrude into the body of the drum, recalls construction techniques in West Africa. Furthermore, there may be some connection between the term mina and the name of Almina, an important port in Ghana from which many slaves embarked for the Americas. Aspects of this ensemble found in central Africa include sitting over the end of the drumhead while playing it and using the heel of the foot to alter the sound of the drum. Similarities exist between redondos and instruments in the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Tervuren, Belgium (Liscano 1960). In the film Salto al AtlaŽntico (Esparragoza 1991), GarciŽa presents evidence linking Venezuela and Africa.
Scholarly focus has been on Barlovento, but three neighboring areas, also called Barlovento by some people, have similarly African-Venezuelan genres and instruments. The Litoral (shore) and the Guarenas-Guatire Valley lie between Caracas and Barlovento proper, separated from each other by a chain of mountains running along
The drumming traditions of the Litoral are closely related to those from Barlovento proper. The cumaco, also commonly called tambor grande, closely resembles the large mina but has a drumhead nailed to one end rather than being fastened by pegs and wedges. Unlike the mina (propped up on two poles), the cumaco is placed on the ground while the drummer sits on it, playing it with bare hands and sometimes controlling the sound with the heel of one foot. One, two, or three cumacos can be played at the same time. Other musicians play sticks on the trunk of the drum. Other names for cumaco-like drums in this area are burro negro, campanita, mayor, piano, pujo, macizo, primero, and segundo. Some communities also have a curbata, an instrument much like that of Barlovento with the same name. The town of Naiguata, in addition to having cumacos, has drums made of barrels called pipas. Tamboras or tamboritas, much like those of Barlovento, accompany fulias at velorios. There are no redondo-type drums in this area, but redondo-type rhythms are played on cumacos to accompany songs and dances, much as in the redondo tradition of Barlovento.
In the Tuy Valley, southwest of Barlovento, redondos rule. They are somewhat shorter than the redondos of Barlovento, and their rhythms and combinations are somewhat different from those of Barlovento.
In the Guarenas-Guatire Valley, two tambora-like drums (prima, cruzao), and a military-style side drum (grande) (RamoŽn y Rivera 1969:92) accompany redondo-like songs and dances during the festivals of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist (24 June). The best-known fiesta of this area is the Parranda de San Pedro (Saint Peter's Procession), which takes place in the town of Guatire on 29 June. The procession and dancing of this fiesta are accompanied by cuatros, maracas, foot stamping, and singing. The characters in this reenactment of early colonial days, all of whom are men with faces blackened to represent their African ancestors, are MariŽa Ignacia (a man dressed as a woman), one who carries and dances with an image of Saint Peter, a flag bearer, two boys who dance next to MariŽa Ignacia, and two dancers with squares of thick, hard leather attached to their sandals, enhancing the sound of their stamping. Other men (often three) play cuatros and maracas. MariŽa Ignacia represents a legendary colonial woman who had promised to dance in honor of Saint Peter every year if the saint would help with a cure for her ill daughter. The daughter survived, but MariŽa Ignacia died soon after, so her husband, dressed in MariŽa Ignacia's clothes, danced every year in his wife's place. Today, the man portraying MariŽa Ignacia carries a black doll, representing the cured daughter.
Around Lake Maracaibo, San Benito (Saint Benedict the Moor, of San Fratello and Palermo) is honored during the Christmas and New Year's season by drumming on chimbangueles. The music is primarily African-Venezuelan. Documents about
A single-headed friction drum known as furruco (furro) is used in aguinaldo ensembles (
The most important Spanish contribution to the instrumental music of Venezuela was the introduction of stringed instruments. Today, the four-stringed cuatro, found everywhere in Venezuela, even among indigenous groups, is considered the national instrument (
In large cities, the cuatro is played as much as, or more than, in the countryside. It is often called a guitar (guitarra), since it is the most commonly used instrument of the guitar family in Venezuela. It is also known by diminutivesguitarra pequen~a, guitarrita, guitarilla, guitarilloand by other names, such as discante. Primarily an accompanying instrument, it plays chords, mostly the tonic, dominant, and subdominant, but virtuosos such as Fredy Reyna (Danzas y Canciones Para Los Nin~os 1981) include exquisite melodic techniques in their performances.
Small guitars with nylon strings are used primarily as accompanying instruments. Most, like the cuatro 'four', are named for the number of their strings. They include the cuatro y medio 'four and a half', cinco 'five', cinco y medio, seis 'six' (but smaller than the standard six-stringed guitar), cuatro con cinco cuerdas 'cuatro with five strings', and cinco de seis cuerdas 'six-stringed cinco'. In the west of Venezuela, the tiple 'treble' is common [see COLOMBIA]. Used as a melodic or chordally accompanying instrument, the tiple most commonly has four double or triple sets of strings.
Of the stringed instruments used to play melodies, the violin (violiŽn) is the most widely used instrument in Venezuela. It is a European model, like that used throughout the world.
The diatonic harp, once popular in Spain, is an important creole instrument in many countries of Latin America [see COLOMBIA; ECUADOR; MEXICO; PARAGUAY; PERU]. The arpa criolla usually has between thirty and thirty-seven strings; thirty-three and thirty-four are the commonest numbers. Its main performance styles in Venezuela are that of the plains (arpa llanera) and that of Aragua (arpa aragušen~a, from the state of Aragua). Because the latter style also occurs in the federal district, the state of Miranda, and states closer to the coast than the plains states, it can conveniently be called the style of the central-coast harp. More commonly, it is specified by adjectives derived from the names of places, including Aragua (arpa aragušen~a), Miranda (arpa mirandina), and theTuy River area (arpa tuyera).
The instruments differ slightly from one area to another. The plains harp has a narrower sound board than does the central-coast harp and now uses only nylon strings. The coastal harp sometimes has gut or nylon strings in its lower register, but metallic upper strings give it a more brilliant sound. Performance brings out an even more prominent difference between these harps (see below, in relation to the joropo).
The diatonic harp was taught to indigenous Venezuelans by Spanish priests during the early colonial period, and its music was fashionable in the salons of the urban upper class. The harp music heard today in Venezuela has roots in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain, when the Renaissance modes had not yet been fully
Aerophones
Wind instruments are notable in the music of marginalized creoles such as the people of Falcon State, who dance to the music of an ensemble featuring turas, end-blown flutes, one male and the other female. Other flutes of this ensemble are cachos, made from a deer?s skull with antlers attached; these are played in pairs, one large and one small.
Another popular Venezuelan aerophone is the panpipe, locally called by several names, including carrizo 'cane' and maremare 'happy-happy', played by creoles in many parts of Venezuela. Especially well known are the panpipes of Cumanacoa, in Sucre State, and those of San JoseŽ de Guaribe, in Guarico State. There are many other kinds of creole aerophones, including cane and wooden flutes (vertical and transverse types) and conch trumpets (trompetas de caracol, guaruras). The last instruments play in drum ensembles of the Barlovento area.
Folk Catholicism
Venezuelan folk-religious music is based primarily on Christian conventions. There are no clear links to specific African religions, nor do the traces of syncretism between Christianity and African beliefs in Venezuela reveal the same levels of importance found, for example, in musical performances of Cuban SanteriŽa or Brazilian CandombleŽ. The concept of Saint John the Baptist may have syncretic links to African deities and celebrations but no direct links to African prototypes are obvious.
Folk-religious music in Venezuela accompanies rituals that are apparently Christian, though many are not based on formal Roman Catholic teachings. Instead, this music has evolved with a creole version of Roman Catholicism developed from early colonial days to the present. The church was less influential in colonial Venezuela than in such places as Colombia and Mexico, and Spanish priests were not in abundance. Peasants (campesinos) observing native American, African, and Spanish beliefs and customs were at liberty to develop and conduct religious ceremonies, embellishing them with music, dance, costumes, and practices not always acceptable to visiting clerics. Even today, representatives of the official church frown on many ritual aspects of Venezuelan fiestas.
Not all this music can be considered entirely religious in design. Much of it is dedicated to Christian saints, but texts and meanings are often interspersed with secular ideas and words. Some aspects of a particular fiesta (such as salves, sung at the beginning of a tamunangue in Lara) are traditional and acceptable facets of the Roman tradition, yet the music and dance known as la perrendenga, performed in front of the image of San Antonio later in the fiesta, has little to do with Christianity. Therefore, although the fiestas described below are Christian in name, creole Roman Catholicism plays a dominant role as they unfold. Furthermore, alcoholic beverages are almost invariably associated with these quasi-religious celebrations; it would be most unusual for the members of a participating music ensemble, usually men, not to share a bottle of rum or some other kind of spirits.
The combination of music and dance as tribute to deities is locally important, as is the concept of la promesa, the promise to honor a saint through music and/or dance for certain favors. The interplay and coexistence of beliefs and performances has produced a wealth of religiously inspired creole music and dance.
Velorios
Velorios, nightlong celebrations or night watches to honor a saint or the Holy Cross (not to be confused with wakes for a deceased person, also velorios) are common in Venezuela. In the plains, the music of the velorio is primarily Spanish in origin, with stringed instruments predominating, whereas in the central coastal region the music is more African in origin, where the tambora drums accompany songs called fulias. Perhaps the velorio most widely celebrated in the Venezuelan plains is the wake of the Holy Cross (velorio de cruz) or May Cross (cruz de mayo). Table altars are decorated with flowers, and a chapel or a temporary roof is often constructed of fronds, papier ma^cheŽ, flowers, or other materials to honor a cross, usually made of wood and decorated with the same materials. In the plains and surrounding areas, especially in the states of Apure, Carabobo, Cojedes, GuaŽrico, Lara, Portuguesa, and Yaracuy, the Holy Cross is venerated by performances of three-part polyphonic pieces (tonos), usually sung by men, sometimes unaccompanied, but more often accompanied by one or more cuatros. The music and texts came from Spain during the early days of the colony. Most harmonic singing in Venezuela is in two parts (usually at intervals of a third), but plains wakes use more complex polyphony, unique in Latin America. The lead singer (guiŽa 'guide') usually sings a solo phrase and is then joined by two other men improvising a harmonic responsea higher part (falsa, also contrato and other names), and a lower part (tenor, also tenorete). In velorios of the central coast (especially in the federal district, the state of Miranda, and parts of the state of Aragua), vocal harmony is less important than melody. Here, the velorios are centered on the singing of fulias, accompanied by at least one tambora (but usually three or four), the scraping of a metal plate with a fork, a spoon, or other utensils, and usually one maraca or a pair of maracas. The tamboras are held between seated musicians? knees. The most complex of the drum-accompanied vocal genres of Barlovento, the fulia is found in a more widely dispersed area of the central coast than are the songs associated with other drums. It has an alternating solo-chorus form of singing, like the other drum songs. The solo is sung by a man or a woman, and the choruses usually consist of male and female singers. The verses have fairly complex texts, but the choruses almost always include vocables or syllables, such as o lo lo la lo lai na.
Though the vigil continues until dawn, fulias and the accompanying tamboras do not play constantly. The music is broken up every twenty to forty minutes with the recitation of deŽcimas, ten-line stanzas of poetry brought from Spain in the early days of the colony. Men and women (usually men) recite this poetry after an order is given to the musicians to stop playing, usually with the words hasta ahiŽ, suggesting that the musicians take a pause. Some people, even those who cannot read and write, are recognized as specialists in deŽcimas. Dancing is never part of celebrations that employ the singing of fulias and the playing of tamboras. The fulia-tambora tradition is not limited to Barlovento; it occurs in more or less the same form in neighboring areas of the central coast.
Mampulorios
Nightlong velorios for the deceased occur in Venezuela, but they are not usually associated with music. An exception to this were angel?s wakes (velorios de angelito) for infants and young children. In the central coast, these velorios, called mampulorios, were festive occasions to celebrate the purity of sinless souls, which would ascend directly into heaven. Primarily religious in intent, they lasted all night, with the adorned body of the child present. Attendees ate food, drank alcoholic beverages, and played games. Mampulorios rarely occur now, and little is known about their music.
San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist)
From the state of Yaracuy in the west to the state of Miranda, south and east of Caracas, the central Caribbean coast of Venezuela is home to many Venezuelans of African origin. Most of their communities lie along the coast; some are 50 kilometers or more inland. These people claim St. John the Baptist (or simply San Juan) as their patron saint. Juan Liscano (1973), the pioneer twentieth-century Venezuelan folklorist, noted the connection between the celebration of Saint John the Baptist (24 June) and summer-solstice celebrations elsewhere in the world. In central coastal Venezuela, Saint John the Baptist is honored with African-derived music and dancing beginning on 23 June and ending on 25 June, with ritual and musical observations varying from place to place.
A rhythm and song known as malembe accompanies the street processions with the image of Saint John the Baptist. Minas or redondos accompany the malembes and processions with a unison rhythm or its variants notated in
In some communities, a statue of Saint John the Baptist is kept in the local church or chapel; in others, it may be kept in the home of a devotee or leader of a San Juan society. For his fiesta, the saint is dressed in red vestments and is paraded through the streets. Some larger images of the saint, such as that in Curiepe, are placed on platforms and carried on the shoulders of four or more people, who are more likely to be dancing than walking. At times, because of the carriers? gyrations, it seems that the statue will surely fall off the platform. One or more of the images may be danced about in the hands of a devotee. Saint John the Baptist is said to love danc-ing
Tamunangue
One of the most famous expressions of music and dance in Venezuela is the tamunangue, from the state of Lara in the northwest of the country. It is a suite of dances and music, usually performed in honor of San Antonio de Padua (Saint Anthony of Padua), the patron saint of Lara. It is regularly performed on 13 June, the saint's feast, but can occur during the weeks before or after.
The music for the tamunangue consists of singing accompanied by stringed instruments or maracas and a drum of African origin. The tamunangue usually begins with the singing of salves dedicated to the Virgin Mary in a church or a chapel outside which the dance of the tamunangue will be performed. The salves are usually accompanied only by stringed instrumentsthe cuatro, the cinco, the quinto, the lira, the cuatro de cinco cuerdas, and the cinco de seis cuerdas. A tamunangue ensemble could have a minimum of two such instruments (one cuatro and one cinco), but many ensembles, often composed of musicians from diverse communities, have seven to ten.
The principal drum of the tamunangue (usually called tamunango but also called tambor grande and cumaco) resembles the tambor grande and the cumaco from the central coast. With one head nailed in place, the drum normally measures slightly more than one meter long and sits on the ground during performance. In addition to the rhythms played by hand on the drumhead by a drummer who sits on the drum while playing it, sticks (palos, also laures) are played on its side by one, two, or three men (paleros ?palo players?) who bend over one or both sides of the drum behind the seated drummer. On some occasions, and especially when the ensemble graces processions, the large double-headed drum known in most parts of the country as tambora is used.
The tamunangue begins with the piece "La Batalla" ('The Battle'), also called a game juego). It is followed by distinctive dances and pieces of music that vary slightly from one community to another. Aretz (1970) analyzes the most commonly performed eight pieces of the suite, which she lists in order of performance as "La Batalla," "La Bella," "El Chichivamos" or "Yeyevamos," "La Juruminga," "El Poco a Poco," "La Perrendenga," "El GaleroŽn," and "El Seis Figuriao." "La Batalla" is a graceful stick dance accompanied by music. The stick (palo) or staff (vera), the size of a walking stick, is usually decorated. The battle, always between two men (regularly replaced), is gracefully executed with stick hitting stick, never touching opponents? bodies. Four lines of verse are sung in 2/4 time.
Saint Benedict the Moor, also known as Saint Benedict of Palermo and of San Fratello, is the patron saint of people from Venezuela?s northwest coast around Lake Maracaibo, especially those of African descent. The festivities for the saint take place after Christmas and into the new year, accompanied by three or four drums mentioned earlier, called chimbangueles. The saint is represented by images or statues of a black man. Like Saint John the Baptist in central Venezuela, he takes on the Venezuelan creole mix of traits from Spanish, African, and possibly native American sources, resulting in a zest for both the profound and the sacred. Saint Benedict is associated with the drinking of rum, and he is thought to have an eye for beautiful women.
Los diablos danzantes de Yare
Many central-coastal communities, including Cata, Chuao, Naiguata, Patanemo, and San Francisco de Yare, have organizations of masked devil dancers who perform during the feast of Corpus Christi (Ortiz 1982). The most famous of them is San Francisco de Yare, in the upper Tuy Valley (
Secular music
The lullabies and children?s songs of creole Venezuelans are based on European models. A rich corpus of children's music exists among many African cultures, but this kind of music seems not to have come to the Americas with African slavery. Scholars who have studied children's songs around the world have noted that they are more likely to be passed on from one generation of children to another than from adults to children. (This is not true, of course, of lullabies and other kinds of children's music.) Since few children were brought to the Americas as slaves, this might be one reason that traditional African children's songs are not found among African-Venezuelans. European migrations to Venezuela, however, did include childrenwhich may have had some impact on the children's songs sung in Venezuela today and on children's songs fostered by the formal education of the Spanish elite.
Most chores and tasks in the Venezuelan countryside have songs to ease the burden of the labor. The most common are grain-pounding songs and milking songs. A once common sight in the Venezuelan countryside was el piloŽn 'the mortar', often operated by two women, each with a pestle, to grind or pound grain to the rhythm of a song. These songs, though, are seldom heard today, but we can still hear the milking songs, sung to pass the time and put the cow at ease so the milk will come easily. They are especially popular in the plains states. Other kinds of work-related songs include coffee-picking songs, clothes-washing songs, and songs to encourage beasts of burden that turn the machines that press juice from sugarcane (RamoŽn y Rivera 1969:30-31).
Several types of music performed during December (Christmastime) are nonliturgical and bridge the religious and secular categories. Aguinaldos are Christmas carols. Their texts can be religious and secular. The word aguinaldo in Venezuela also means 'Christmas gift'. Itinerant musicians perform this music at Christmastime as they go from house to house, a tradition called the parranda. (In neighboring Trinidad this tradition is called parang, a word thought to be an anglicized rendition of the Spanish word parranda.) The aguinaldo musicians usually expect a gift, which could well be a shot of rum or an hallaca, a Venezuelan Christmas delicacy, wrapped in a banana leaf.
The most characteristic musical instrument of the aguinaldo ensemble is the friction drum (furruco, also furro) (
The music of the plains seems to dominate the traditional music scene during much of the year, and aguinaldos can be heard throughout cities, towns, and villages at Christmastime, along with holiday favorites from abroad. It is the gaita, though, that reigns at the end of the year, not only in the Lake Maracaibo area (where it originates), but also in Caracas and other communities. The traditional gaita of the state
Many gaitas heard today use electronic keyboards and other modern instruments in addition to the standard percussion instruments. The rapid beats of the tambora, though, and the growling of the furruco, make this kind of music easy to distinguish from other genres.
Secular dance and music: the
Some creole music is not associated with dance, but most is. Partly because of urbanization, contemporary Venezuelans are less skilled at folk dancing than were their ancestors, though Venezuelan folk dancing is taught in most grade schools; most recorded folk music heard today on public broadcasting systems and on private systems in homes and vehicles is played for listening rather than for dancing. Venezuelan young people are no longer brought up in surroundings where folk dancing is a natural aspect of daily life. Nevertheless, most Venezuelans are aware of the association of dance with most of their folk music. The pieces of the tamunangue suite, for example, are more often associated with the dances than with the music accompanying them. Perhaps the greatest joy of participating in the San Juan festival in Barlovento, unless one is a key musician, comes from joining the public dancing to the mina ensemble or propelling oneself into the dances of the redondos, in which only one couple, through interchanges of partners, is dancing at any one time.
To most Venezuelans, the epitome of folk dance is the joropo, a music and dance influenced by both Africa and Europe and known as the national dance of Venezuela. The term joropo refers to more than just dance. It also denotes a genre of music and the event in which the music and dance are performed. A person can attend a joropo (event), request the performance of a particular joropo (musical piece), and then execute a joropo (dance). Most often, the term names the dance. This is a couple dance, and each participant normally holds one or both hands of the partner, in the same dance position used by European couples to dance a waltz, for example. (Usually many couples dance at once.) The dance involves both basic and intricate footwork. It is similar in style throughout Venezuela, but the musical ensembles that accompany it vary locally.
The term joropo was first used to describe an event in a rural setting with dance, string music, and song, and its meaning as a genre of dancing probably came in common usage around 1850; before then, a dance of this style was probably called a fandango (RamoŽn y Rivera 1969:191). People in the countryside may speak of a particular joropo as an event that took place in the past or one planned for the future. It can be on a small scale, organized by a family or a segment of a community, and may take place in a house. An excuse to have a modest joropo might be a baptism, a birthday party, or a visit by a special friend. Alternatively, it might be a more public event, perhaps as part of a communitywide fiesta coinciding with a national holiday or a religious celebration, such as that for the local patron saint. Such a joropo would probably take place in an outdoor public area or a community hall. Like many fiestas in Venezuela, it would probably start early in the evening and last until sunrise. In the early 1920s, it was much more important than it is today. It included not only musical entertainment and dancing but also special food and drink, children's play, and courtship.
As a musical piece, a joropo can be rather complex. There are many names for the musical forms that accompany the dance (RamoŽn y Rivera 1953). The list includes joropo, but four other words are more appropriate for classification: corrido, galeroŽn, golpe, and pasaje. Even these are not mutually used in the same context by all musicians. The term joropo is often used for pieces that some might call golpes and especially for pieces in three, four, or more parts, written by famous composers, such as Pedro EliŽas GutieŽrrez, Francisco de Paula Aguirre, and Carlos Bonet. The joropos of urban composers are now often performed in rural areas of Venezuela, and traditional pieces that might once have been called golpes or other names forgotten by younger performers are now simply called joropos (RamoŽn y Rivera 1967:54, 1969:191). Revuelta is another commonly used term for joropo music. It is usually an extended version of a pasaje, though both names are often used for the same kind of piece. Yet another commonly used term, hornada (a batch or ovenful), denotes a medley of revueltas or pasajes. Other names usually refer to particular movements, literary texts, or specific pieces, such as the corrido called "El Pajarillo" and the golpe called "La Refalosa."
Joropo music is rhythmically sophisticated, commonly notated with a double-time signature of 3/4 and 6/8, producing polyrhythms and an always present polymetric sense of simultaneous duple and triple figures (hemiola or sesquiaŽltera), which provide creative possibilities for instrumentalists and dancers. The tempo is always brisk (a common pace is 208 quarter notes a minute), keeping dancers and musicians active. Some vocal lines conform strictly to the accompaniment, especially in golpes, but much of singing demonstrates the "melodic independence" that RamoŽn y Rivera has often written about. This is a free style of singing, in which, excepting the beginnings or endings of certain long phrases, much of the vocal line does not coincide rhythmically or metrically with the instrumental accompaniment.
Melodies are clearly Spanish in character, but they have roots in AndaluciŽa. The texts, sung in Spanish, relate to Spanish genres of early colonial days (such as the romance and the deŽcima). Most melodies have fixed texts, but some texts are improvised. All this music is distinguished by having one musical note for each syllable of text.
For accompanying joropos, the plains harp ensemble is probably the most famous in Venezuela. This is almost always an all-male ensemble and can be purely instrumental or can have one vocalist, also usually male. It is often presented as the trademark of Venezuelan traditional music, in part because of the attractiveness of the instrumental combination and its repertoire. During the dictatorship of PeŽrez JimeŽnez (1950-1958), this music came to the fore as a national symbol, supported by that government.
The arpa llanera is the featured melody instrument of the ensemble, sharing the melody role with the vocalist, who does not usually play an instrument. The other two instrumentalists play a cuatro and maracas. Since the mid-1900s, a fifth musician, playing an acoustic or electric string bass, has been added to accentuate the bass, traditionally played by the lower strings of the harp.
The bandola, a four-stringed, pear-shaped lute that takes the place of the harp in many ensembles (and which may have preceded the arpa in some Venezuelan communities), remains the melodic instrument of choice in the states of Barinas and Portuguesa; it is also played in Apure and Cojedes. An eight-stringed version of it appears in Miranda, Sucre, and Anzoategui. The virtuosity possible on the bandola has been ably demonstrated by Anselmo LoŽpez, master of this lute. The instrument is plucked with a pick, so the lower two strings provide an ostinato, much like that of
In the plains ensemble, the cuatro provides the basic harmonic framework, plus a rhythmic pulse through its strumming (rasgueado). One might expect the maracas to provide a basic rhythmic background, but a good player of maracas (maraquero) can steal the show with rapid rhythmic embellishments, a subtle shifting of accents from triple to duple meter, and a masterful visual display of arm and hand techniques.
Joropo
The joropo of the central coast (especially in the states of Aragua, Miranda, and the federal district, and in parts of Anzoategui, Sucre, and Carabobo) is traditionally accompanied by two male musiciansone who plays the harp and one who sings and plays maracas. An eight-stringed bandola (four double courses and similar in shape to the plains bandola) sometimes takes the place of the harp. The harp also differs somewhat from that of the plains; the sound board is slightly wider at the bottom, and the upper strings are metal, not nylon, though the lower strings are usually nylon or gut.
Central-coastal joropo music is less flamboyant than plains joropo music, and in form it is quite different. The vocal and instrumental melodies of the plains ensembles are songs with European-based harmonies and fixed texts, but the coastal style features shorter and more repetitive phrases, with melodies and texts more likely to be improvised. The harp makes complex melodic patterns.
The African cultural presence is more concentrated on the coast than on the plains. Because Barlovento is at the heart of this area, one would expect to find more African influences in this music than in plains joropo music. Indeed, the vocalist's improvisation recalls African musical traditions, as does the repetitiveness of themes and phrasesan important musical trait not always appreciated by those who do not know African music.
The golpe of Lara State, somewhat northwest of the plains, is a cousin of the plains joropo in music and dance (Fernaud 1984). Its standard instrumentation is one or two cuatros, a cinco, a tambora, and a pair of maracas. Occasionally, other instrumentsa violin, the large drum used for the tamunangue, a standard guitarsubstitute or join the ensemble. Other instruments (such as an arpa, a bandola, and a bandoliŽn) were formerly used but seldom appear today.
Instrumental and vocal golpes are almost always performed by men; women, however, participate in the dancing. Unless a bowed chordophone is involved, the melodies are carried by vocalists, usually a duo singing in thirds. Musicians claim that golpe music and dance are distinct from the plains joropo, especially in tempo, said to be slower and more sedate.
Though the two harp ensembles mentioned above are conspicuous for performing joropo music, other notable joropo ensembles exist. Many Venezuelans argue that the vocal part is the most important musical component of the joropo, but some joropos are purely instrumental, especially in the plains. If only one instrument is used, it probably would be a cuatro. If another musician were to accompany the cuatrista, it would probably be a maraquero ('maracas player'). A joropo with maracas alone or with maracas and voice would be possible but rare.
Presentations of Venezuelan folk music in urban settings, at home and abroad, have since the 1960s often been organized and performed by university students and middle-class devotees of these traditionscitizens of ethnic and social backgrounds somewhat different from those who claim this music as their own. With the decline of the petroleum market in the final two decades of the twentieth century, a change that has brought economic strife to Venezuela, the number of urban performances by young people with roots in rural areas has surged. The core of this music remains in the countryside, performed by agricultural workers who, though not always having the educational and financial resources of their urban cousins, do have access to the carriers and surroundings of traditional culture. It has been passed on to them orally by older relatives and neighbors, who in turn lend their musical skills from earlier generations of local contacts. Since the 1980s, a revival of interest in creole traditions has produced hundreds of community-based performance groups scattered throughout the ranchos (poorer neighborhoods of Caracas), where few existed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Most instrumentalists continue to be men. Women contribute in an equally important way to the vocal music and dancing. Drummers in Barlovento, harpists in Apure, and players of cane flutes in the states of Zulia and FalcoŽn to Sucre are almost always men, reflecting similar practices in native American, Iberian, and African cultures. Often a woman will play a maraca or another supporting instrument, but seldom do women serve as lead instrumentalists. In addition to enhancing vocal music, they usually play a prominent part in organizing fiestas, without which performances would not occur.
Middle-age and older men and women usually take the most prominent musical roles, but young peoplefrom babies to teenagersare always present at fiestas, encouraged to participate in making music. Children are expected to clap and sing, and certain instruments, such as sticks struck on the wooden bodies of the large drums, provide access for young people to play minor parts, even at the height of important celebrations. During less festive occasions, as when instruments are being made or prepared for performances, children are encouraged to touch and play them. Formal courses of instruction in folk music are more likely to be found in the schools of cities and major towns than in rural settings.
Most music described here was once maintained solely by rural people, including people of European descent, whereas the upper classes in towns and cities, especially the elite descendants of Europeans, regarded this music as inferior. This situation has changed, and Venezuelans of all social classes and walks of life tend to be proud of their folk music. In the last decade of the twentieth century, sometime during their schooling most Caraquen~os are encouraged to learn to play the cuatro, dance the joropo, and absorb other aspects of Venezuelan folklore.
Musical Acculturation
Venezuelan folk music began to undergo substantial change during the mid-1900s, when large migrations from rural areas to urban centers began. The African-Venezuelan area of Barlovento is a good example of musical change.
Though Barlovento is close to Caracas, it was until the 1940s isolated by mountains, the lack of modern roads, and a reputation for malaria and other tropical illnesses. Isolation had an impact on the cultivation of African music, leading to its present fame. Since the early 1950s, these traditions have undergone major transformations, primarily because Venezuela's major eastern highway now penetrates Barlovento, allowing wealthy Venezuelans from the capital to purchase and develop its land. Likewise, in a reverse migration, many African-Venezuelans who have called Barlovento home for generations have moved to Caracas for better jobs, education, and health care. These changes at first had a detrimental impact on traditional drumming, since these people usually did not bring the instruments and their music, but folk music from the countryside became much more acceptable during the last decade of the twentieth century.
The cities of Venezuela, especially Caracas, have genres of popular music, influenced in varying degrees by the music of the Venezuelan countryside and of other countries in the Americas and Europe. Ensembles and individual performers who became popular in the 1960s for drawing on Venezuelan folk music in their compositions and performances include such famous recording artists as the cuatro player Fredy Reyna, the internationally known folk singer Soledad Bravo, and popular groups such as El Cuarteto, GurrufiŽo, Quinteto Contrapunto, and Serenata Guayanesa.
Perhaps the best-known group to perform and promote both folk and popular music in Venezuela during the last decade of the twentieth century is Un Solo Pueblo, which has produce many CDs. Another important group is Tambor Urbano, with a CD entitled La Rumba, especially popular in 1997 and 1998, which features African-Venezuelan music of the central coast and especially the region of Barlovento. In 1998 the group known as ODILA (Orquesta de Instrumentos LatinAmericanos), the performance component of the FundacioŽn de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore (FUNDEF), celebrated its fifteenth anniversary promoting not only Venezuelan folk music, but also music from various other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The performances of ODILA are based primarily on recordings and research conducted since the 1950s under the auspices of the former Instituto Nacional de Folklore (INAF), the former Instituto Interamericano de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore (INIDEF), and their succeeding organizations, such as FUNDEF.
The music of Venezuela portrays an exquisite model of the Amerindian, European and African layers of culture that make up the identity of this important region of Latin America. Intertwined with rituals, fiestas, and dances, the music unique to this vibrant South American country continues to endure and embodies a fundamental ingredient of the national psyche. To experience Venezuelan music is to capture the essence of a positive national pride and beauty that is truly remarkable.
The most comprehensive study of indigenous Venezuelan music is by Aretz (1991), who presents a survey of twenty-three Venezuelan societies that exist in various states of acculturation. A brief synopsis of her work on this subject appears as an article in The World of Music (1982). Before making a detailed musical inventory of each ethnic group, Aretz discusses the consequences of musical contact with Europeans, gives
A publication on the music of Caracas (R. Salazar 1994) surveys the music of the Caracas valley from the time of the first known encounters between Amerindians and Europeans to the most famous popular groups of the late twentieth century. It covers scores of urban genres and performersthose with minimal ties to rural Venezuela and individuals and ensembles using Venezuelan rural sources in their works. A perspective on the music of the joropo, the first major work on this subject since RamoŽn y Rivera's classic work of 1953, is a book and compact disc by Rafael Salazar entitled El Joropo y Sus Andanzas (1992a). The deŽcima has been studied in detail by RamoŽn y Rivera (1992). Other relevant works by Rafael Salazar are LatinoameŽrica es MuŽsica (1992b) and Memorial del Canto (n.d.).
Since music is an important part of most festivals (fiestas) in Venezuela, at least two books are important. One is Fiestas Tradicionales de Venezuela by Daria HernaŽndez and Cecilia Fuentes (1993), with photographs by Nelson Garrido. The other is Diablos Danzantes de Venezuela, edited by Manuel Antonio Ortiz (1982).
A study of African-Venezuelan music by Max H. Brandt (1994) focuses on the aspect of music as identity among the people and musicians of Barlovento. It includes photos of African-Venezuelan drummers. In addition to written sources that address musical instruments (especially Aretz 1967), excellent recordings outline the distribution of Creole instruments in Venezuela, such as Folklore de Venezuela (1971), The Music of Venezuela (1990), MuŽsica Popular Tradicional de Venezuela (1983), and those by Lares (1969, 1978a, 1978b).
Mexico is often seen as a land with a varied topography and at least three cultural identitiesnative pre-Columbian, Spanish colonial, and modern mestizobut in reality it is much more complex and varied. Contemporary native Mexican groups speak fifty-four languages, and the twentieth-century emergence of a national identity has embraced diverse strands of regional mestizo culture. Music has been a major signifier of these cultures. The large bass guitar shown opposite and known as the guitarroŽn is featured in mariachi groups that seem to typify Mexico by their presence in many Mexican restaurants in the United States. In reality, the instrument and mariachi itself are rooted in just one of Mexico's culturesthat of Jalisco and the surrounding states of western central Mexicoand especially in the city of Guadalajara.
Major population growth and serious unemployment brought massive migration that moved three-quarters of the Mexican people to urban areas and made Mexico City the most populous city in the world. An influential commercial media industry centered in Mexico City disseminates popular music from Mexico and abroadparticularly from the United Statesand exports Mexican music to countries throughout the Americas.
Native Musical Traditions
Native Musical Instruments
Mexican Amerindian culture is varied and complex, and there are many native American musical traditions in Mexican territory (see map 3). Fifty-four native languages are spoken in Mexico, perhaps half the number thought to have been extant at the time of the Encounter. Although a few native groups have lived in relative isolation since the early 1500s, most have experienced significant political and cultural oppression, evangelization, and acculturation. About 10 percent of Mexicans speak Amerindian languages; most of those also speak Spanish. Through isolation, as with the LacandoŽn Maya [see MAYA], or resistance, as with the Yaqui [see YAQUI AND MAYO], some groups have maintained a high degree of continuity in many of their cultural and musical practices. Many communities maintain a sense of native American identity while accepting Spanish religious beliefs and customs and adopting Spanish musical practices, instruments, and occasions for performance. It is often difficult to draw a line between native American and mestizo musics, given that the latter are by definition a blend of native American and other cultural elements.
The variety of Mexican Amerindian musical traditions defies generalization, but a few traits are shared by nearly all: music is strongly linked to ceremonial or ritual occasions, though songs of love, lullabies, and humorous songs also exist; most music is intended to accompany dance and has a regular, marked, rhythmic pulse; instrumental performance predominates; singing is usually in a high range. The ritual occasion may be one of many possibilities: a Maya shamanic chant to encourage sufficient rain for the season's crops; the Totonac dance of the flying men (danza de los voladores), in which four men swing around a pole from a rope tied to their feet, to the accompaniment of a cane flute and drum in seasonal homage to Mother Earth; or a Mixtec banda performing on the village saint's day as a promise (manda) to God, a saint, the Virgin Mary, or some other religious figure. In keeping with its ties to social and religious function, music is generally not conceived of as "art for art's sake," a separate activity to be cultivated solely for aesthetic pleasure. Dancing can be communal, or it can be quite individualized as in the Yaqui dance of the deer (danza del venado), in which a single dancer evokes the spirit and movements of the deer.
There is a great diversity of musical instruments across the native American cultures of Mexico. Certain instrumentssuch as the Yaqui baa weŽhai, an idiophone consisting of half a large gourd placed closed side up in a container of water and struck with a stickare particular to a given group. Many musical instruments are distributed widely among multiple groups. The pipe-and-tabor combination of duct flute and double-headed drum played by a single person is found in virtually all areas of Mexico. The hueŽhuetl and teponaztli have survived from pre-Encounter times in the east-central and southern parts of the country. Small rattles strung around dancers' legs, gourd stick rattles, and a tortoiseshell idiophone (ayotl) are found in various places. Instruments of European origin are used widely by many groups: the harp, the violin, and the guitar took root early in the colonial period, and one or all of them are now central to the traditional music of the Tzotzil Maya, the Yaqui, the PureŽpecha (also Tarascan) [see PUREŽPECHA], and many others. Typical of the conservatism of Amerindian music, another early colonial importation, the double-reed aerophone chirimiŽa, is now played exclusively by native Americans, particularly the PureŽpecha of MichoacaŽn and the Nahua of Puebla and Tlaxcala. Wind and percussion instruments associated with brass bands make up the instrumentation of small and large bandas in Amerindian towns and villages in central and southern Mexico.
Guarijio History and Ethnography
Ceremonial Music
Further Study
About two thousand Guarijio (VarojioŽ, Warihio, HuaraijioŽ) live in the foothills, low mesas, banks (barrancas), and mountain slopes along the upper RiŽo Mayo, on the western side of the Sierra Madre Occidental in southern Sonora, Mexico. This area, northeast of Navajoa, Sonora, varies from lowland desert to steep mountainsides covered with trees and shrubs, predominantly oak at lower elevations and pine forests at higher ones. Possibly the least known of all the indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Guarijio are members of the Sonoran Tara-Cahitan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family (Miller 1983). The majority live in the state of Sonora; those who live on the highest peaks dwell in the state of Chihuahua. This distribution is important, not for governmental demographic reasons, but because environmental considerations functionally divide the Guarijio into upland and lowland dialects. Ceremonially and musically, however, these groups celebrate the same rites with the same instruments and songs.
Little is known about Guarijio prehistory. Because of the geographic distance from central Mexico, all the Sonoran peoples showed little of late Mesoamerican origin in their customs at the time of the Encounter. Early missionaries said the ChiŽnipas, Guasapan (Guazapares), and TeŽmoris (most likely extinct Guarijio groups of dialects, or possibly peoples related to the Tarahumara) lived near the Guarijio, who may have separated from the Tarahumarans some five hundred years ago. Proselytized in the late 1600s, the Guarijio were uncooperative. Rather than remaining in mission life, they often revolted and returned to the sierras (Perez de Ribas 1944 [1645]). Only one major mission church remains in the heart of Guarijio land.
Though Hispanic contact and its attendant missionization was made nearly four hundred years ago, Mexican ranchers now dominate the area by owning most of the land. The Guarijio were thought to be extinct but were rediscovered in the early 1930s, when about sixteen hundred Guarijio were living (Gentry 1963). The lowland peoples were "much acculturated" and the upland peoples "remain [ed] distinct" (Hinton 1983). Most lowland men are employed by local ranchers, though their socioeconomic position resembles late-eighteenth-century indenturement more than
Most families reside in one- or two-room huts (jacales) made of wattle and daub, and occasionally of adobe or stone, with thatched roofs and an attached brush enclosure (ramada). Household possessions are centered in the ramada, which serves for cooking and sleeping, and consists of coiled and scraped pottery ollas and bowls, twilled baskets and sleeping mats, woven woolen blankets and sashes, and handmade wooden stools, benches, and tables. Modern appurtenances, including portable radios or boomboxes, are available only to those living in the Mexican-style villages. Musicians' rattles, violins, and harps are stored in one of the rooms when not in use.
The primary method of transportation is walking, usually following the river and streambeds. Once a month, if they walk to one of the local Mexican-Indian villages, Guarijio who get a government stipend receive transportation to a town where they can buy staples more cheaply than in the hamlets. In the early 1980s, a government school and clinic was opened at Mesa Colorado, providing the first formal schooling and first local medical treatment for the Guarijio. However, for most of them, the coming of education and medical treatment has brought few changes in their lifeways.
The major ceremony practiced by the Guarijio, the tuŽmari, includes two distinct activities: the tuburada and the pascola. All known musical activities center on these rites, normally presented simultaneously in adjacent spaces; the former may be performed without benefit of the latter. A brief description of the events illustrates local musical material culture, music, and dances; enculturation and syncretisms in the events; and social relationships and musical interactions.
The tuŽmari (tuŽguri, tuwuŽri, cognate with Tarahumara tutubuŽri) is celebrated irregularly throughout the year for thanksgiving, benediction, propitiation, fertilization, and/or curing, possibly (but not always) related to the agricultural cycle. It functions as a social and religious celebration, and it may have been the basis for pre-Columbian communitywide interaction (Hinton 1983). Guarijio territory may be divided into four overlapping tuŽmari areas on the basis of attendance patterns (Gentry 1963). Contemporary ceremonies appear to attract members of localized groups of hamlets, with minimal attendance from more distant villages and a few Mayo visitors. Local Mexican ranchers are asked to leave before the ceremony starts.
TuŽmari begins with the placement of a shrouded cross, a censer, and a rosary (made from local seeds) in the plaza. A chanter (wikataŽme tureŽlo, seleme) conducts a preliminary rite, which contains elements of Christianity such as making the sign of
The tuburada, which begins after the admonition and a triple blessing of the people, is the only documented autochthonous Guarijio ritual event, despite its aspects of Christianity. It is led by a chanter (tureŽlo) and two assistants, who sit on a bench facing the plaza. The dance begins when several younger girls form a line shoulder to shoulder, facing the singers and moving forward and backward between the singers and the cross. To the beat of the song, they stamp their right feet loudly on the hard caliche surface of the ground. As the night progresses, they are joined by successively older women, at times in groups of two dozen or more. Each singer shakes a gourd rattle (hali?), the only traditional musical instrument used by the Guarijio; it is made from buli, a native gourd (Lagenaria siceraria).
The songs are brief and repetitive (two or three phrases with variations), but have a rising feature resembling that of songs of Yuman and Baja cultures to the north, including the typical change in the rattle-played pattern from a strong-beat sequence to a continuous roll at the rise. A second genre progresses at a faster tempo and lacks the rise. Guarijio ceremonial texts, presented in a variant musical language, speak of things native to the locale, such as bees, beehives, birds, various animals and plants, and the natural process of reproduction. The singing lasts all night (about twelve hours), with pauses from time to time.
A while after the tuburada is firmly established, the sound of violins and harp can be heard from the pascola ramada, about 50 to 75 meters away. Normally, two violinists (yaweros) play their violins (yaweras) with a single harpist. The yaweras, patterned after the Brescian-style violin of the late 1600s, are made entirely of local woods. The harp (paracaŽ) usually has twenty-five strings, the highest nineteen made of monofilament, and the lowest six made of twisted goat gut. The Guarijio are known as the finest craftsmen of these instruments in the area, though similar instruments made by their Yaqui, Mayo, and Tarahumara neighbors are more widely known outside the area. The group performs throughout the night with the exception of a brief period in the middle when the violinists leave to eat, and the harpist will then perform solos.
The music is of two typesthe contradanza and the son principal distinguishable by variations in tempo, meter, and accompanimental rhythmic pattern; the forms are similar, and the opening and closing formulas are constant. The contradanza is in duple meter with a triple subdivision (6/8) at a tempo of about 120 beats per minute. The accompanying pattern in the bass of the harp consists of chords played on the beat, interrupted with the Mexican style contratiempo syncopation every four to twelve beats. The so?n principal is in duple meter with a duple subdivision and a faster tempo (about 144 beats per minute). It is usually played without syncopation, accompanied by a short-short-long rhythm in the harp. Formally, both genres consist of short stanzas lasting less than a minute and a half, repeating for up to twelve minutes, depending on the dancers' wishes. Each stanza has four phrases in an aabc or abcd pattern, the final phrase being as long as the first three. Melodic intensity is
The dancing of the pascola provides a comic relief to the solemnity of the tuburada. Three pascola are led to the ramada by their manager (moro), masks covering their heads. The opening rite, a speech (in mixed Spanish and Guarijio) mocking that of the chanter and exhorting the people to enjoy the fiesta, is followed by a risqueŽ burlesque, in which the pascola mimic a sexual act by inserting the manager's stick into the sound holes of the harp to shouts of encouragement from the observers, mostly men, though a few women may watch this opening rite. After the opening dance, the pascola perform in turn (youngest to oldest), wearing their masks on the backs of their headsa practice different from that of the Yaqui and the Mayo, who wear the mask on the side of their heads. Several noisemakers are part of the regalia. The most unusual are chairiŽgoas (better known by the Yaqui term teneboim), rattles made from the cocoons of the giant silkmoth and wrapped around the dancers' legs from ankle to knee. Exacting footwork produces a swishing sound from them. A coyole, a belt with "hawk's bells" (small, claw-shaped metal bells), is worn around the dancer's waist. In the middle of the dancer's back, under the coyole, is stuck a sistrum (senasum), which the pascola shake with their hands only during the first and last dances.
Soon after daybreak, the pascola stop dancing, and the chanter concludes the ceremony with communal prayers to the supernatural and an oration to the community. The pascola then terminate the activities with one final dance, which all gather to watch. The tuŽmari ends with a meal of goat stew (wepasuni).
The study by Gentry (1963), though dated, remains the most comprehensive survey of the Guarijio. So little has been written about Guarijio music, however, and so little recorded soundonly one cut on a commercial LP disk (Indian Music of Northwestern Mexico 1978)is available that it is virtually impossible to make suggestions for further study that would not require fieldwork or access to tapes in private collections.
Early Mexica Culture
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
The oldest known version of NaŽhuatl, a member of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family (Greenberg 1987:381), was spoken by the Mexica people in pre-Columbian times. During the expansion of the Aztec Empire, it spread to other parts of Mesoamerica and served many native Americans as a lingua franca. Today, it has regional dialects. The Mexica were the bearers of a strong tradition of music and dance, particularly in the context of religious ceremonies, which they disseminated widely in many parts of what is now Mexico and Central America; like their language, these traits have regional variants in contemporary life.
Archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century have revealed the former use of ceramic tubular duct flutes with holes (many with multiple tubes), globular flutes (some with multiple chambers) with and without holes, and other ductless aero-phones. There is evidence pro and con for the existence of polyphony or multipart texture in ancient Mexico. Charles Boile`s (1965:218) posited that a particular notion of harmony could be explored based on archaeological evidence from the TotonacapaŽn region in Veracruz, where he found triple vertical flutes made of clay. Samuel MartiŽ (1968: 210) came to the same conclusion, on the basis of the discovery of quadruple vertical flutes from TeotihuacaŽn. JoseŽ RauŽl Hellmer (1960) noticed that quadruple vertical flutes produce not only chords but two or more melodic lines. Robert M. Stevenson (1968:84) agreed that pre-Columbian cultures had harmony; however, he insisted that the notion of multipart texture has to be understood within the concept of parallelism.
In pre-Columbian times, the notion of melody may have been subordinated to the prosody of native languages (Mendoza 1984:28). Ceramic flutes may not necessarily have been used for musical purposes because they were found only in burials for their symbolic content (Schošndoube 1986:99).
Archaeological and historical evidence, the latter including chronicles written by Franciscan and Augustinian missionaries shortly after the Spanish conquest, indicate that within the Aztec Empire during the early 1500s there was probably no Nahua concept equivalent to the Spanish notion of music. The latter was introduced primarily
One typical written historical reference concerning this connection (DuraŽn 1967:121) reveals that the Spaniards perceived Aztec instrumental sounds as being senseless and disorganized, though demonstrating deep religiosity:
This performance occurred during the celebration of the ancient Aztec calendrical month Xocotl Huetzi (When the Fruits Fall), a festival among several dedicated to Xiuhtecuhtli (Yellow Face), the god of fire, one of the main deities of the Mexica pantheon (SahaguŽn 1956:1:2:188). Other festivals with dances and music honored Xochiquetzali (Feathered Flower), goddess of the moon. But two specific gods for music and dance were honored in the festival Xochilhuitl (Flower Festival). One of them was Xochipilli (Flower Prince), the solar deity of dance, music, flowers, games, love, pleasure, and poetry, whose counterpart was MacuilxoŽchitl (Five Flowers), the patron of dance and games (Stevenson 1968:8).As a guide for their dance, they had an Indian who was dressed in the same way as their idol was dressed, like a bird or a bat, with its wings, ornamented comb, and long feathers. On their feet and wrists the dancers wore rattles, according to custom. With the rattling sounds and with their mouths they produced great noise, many expressions, diverse body movements that were disordered and out of beat with the others, and every so often they uttered some sounds, saying words that few people or probably nobody would understand.
Xochipilli had a close affiliation with Xochiquetzali (FernaŽndez 1959:35; Soustelle 1950:40,88). There was a difference, however: Xochipilli was a solar and masculine deity, the patron of poetry, dance, music, and art; Xochiquetzali was a lunar and feminine deity, the patron of painters and other artisans, and partner of Tezcatlipoca (Smoked Mirror), one of the main gods of the Mexica pantheon.
Important musical instruments used for music and dance included struck idiophones and membranophones, plus certain aerophones. Two of the formerthe teponaztle and the hueŽhuetlwere legendary in Mesoamerica. The teponaztle (also teponaztli)
Pictographs in early colonial codices, particularly the Florentine Codex (SahaguŽn 1956), offer important information about how the ancient Nahua played their percussion instruments in particular situations. The Codex Borbonicus (Paso y Troncoso 1979) describes the ancient calendars, rituals, cyclical celebrations, ceremonies commemorating the months of the Aztec year and other celebrations of the Aztec world. These codices offer ancient visual representations of Mexica culture and include many images of the dance associated with the sounds of the teponaztle, the hueŽhuetl, rattles, and conch trumpets. There are frequent allusions to the teponaztle and the hueŽhuetl in sixteenth-century chronicles by DuraŽn, SahaguŽn, Diego de Landa (1959), Bernal DiŽaz del Castillo (1928), and Diego Mun~oz Camargo (1947) and in precolonial native paintings such as those found in the Florentine Codex, the Atlas DuraŽn (appended to DuraŽn 1967), and other codices from the Mexica culture (Seler 1960).
A description by Diego Mun~oz Camargo (1947:146) tells how the hueŽhuetl and teponaztle were often played to accompany dances:
They had drums made with great beauty, tall ones, more than a half a man's height; and another instrument called teponaxtle [sic], made of a single log, rounded and hollowed out, whose sound carries more than half a league. Together with the drum they make strange and smooth sounds. With these drums, along with wooden trumpets and other instruments such as flutes, they produce a strange and admirable noise, and songs and dances so in rhythm that it is a sight to behold.
Modern uses of ancient instruments
Today, the teponaztle is still in use and has various functions. Among some Nahua people from middle and west Mexico, certain patterns of sound played on the instrument have a communicative function. In Tlaxcala, a few such patterns have been learned through syllabic formulas in the Nahua language, like the following:
Nahua: | nacatamal | kemaca | tleco kix | kemaca |
Syllabic formulas: | na-ca-ta-mal | ke-ma-ca | tle-co kix | ke-ma-ca |
English: | corn dumpling | yes there are | fire to get | yes there are |
In the valley of Puebla and Tlaxcala in central Mexico, the hueŽhuetl accompanies certain parts of Christian ceremonies, calls people to mass, and announces the beginning of patron saints' celebrations. In these settings, it forms part of the conjunto azteca, an ensemble that includes a hueŽhuetl-scyle drum, a snare drum, and a pair of chirimiŽas (double-reed aerophones). This type of ensemble is heard during Christian festivities in most Nahua- and OtomiŽ-speaking towns in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley.
In relation to dance, the teponaztle and hueŽhuetl have been preserved mainly among conchero groups in Mexico City and in several other central Mexican cities. The conchero dancers play armadillo-shell guitars while they dance in public displays tied to Christian traditions, especially the annual commemoration of the Virgin of Guadalupe (12 December). This is one of the main occasions for such performances, when groups from many central Mexican towns congregate and perform to the accompaniment of teponaztle and hueŽhuetl.
Notwithstanding the indisputably Mesoamerican character of the use of teponaztle and hueŽhuetl, contact and fusion of indigenous and Spanish musical traditions occurred during the conversion of the indigenous peoples to Christianity, beginning in the early 1500s. This change coincided with changes in the Nahua people's values and view of the world and has transformed the music significantly. New European instrumental sources were adapted for and accepted in emergent musical ensembles. The three instruments that significantly reflect the European musical traditionviolin, guitar, harphave been those that most faithfully represent the preferred sound of indigenous peoples in contemporary times. It is difficult to conceive of a traditional Mexican indigenous musical tradition that would not include bowed, strummed, or plucked chordophones. Most currently active ensembles are not reconstructions of European ensembles but fusions with Mesoamerican instruments including rattles, usually played in ceremonially danced rituals. Most of these stringed instruments are manufactured by indigenous people and mainly take the form of the four-stringed
The native style of playing these instruments, formulating chordal progressions, and creating repertoires gave rise to son, a new musical genre. In the mestizo tradition, the word son is most often associated with regional musical styles performed on chordophones such as the violin, the jarana, and the harp. In indigenous music, however, especially Nahua music, the term son (pl. sones, diminutive sonecito) relates not to geographical locations but to the close relationship of the music with body movements and the symbolic representation of personages in ceremonial dances. In the Malinche dance (of Acayucan and Pajapan, Veracruz), a first group of musical pieces and a dance are formed by five sones, and a second group of musical pieces and a dance are formed by six sones. The Malinche dance begins with a musical piece and dance called la cortesiŽa or reverencia (the act of demonstrating respect for the dance), performed as the first encounter with La Malinche. This is an allegory of the native woman, Malinche, Cortes's concubine, adviser, and interpreter.
In this first group of sones, minor details in the dance receive local names. The first is the son de cinco pasos y vuelta 'son of five steps and a turn', the second is the son de tres pasos y golpe de taloŽn 'son of three steps and a heelstroke', the third is the son de la vuelta entera 'son of a whole turn', the fourth is the son de cuatro pasos al frente 'son of four steps ahead', and the fifth is the son de cuatro pasos 'son of four steps'. A second group of sones indicates a change in attitude to that of a warlike confrontation (an allegory of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish); it includes a sixth son (the corrida del monarca 'the monarch's run'), a seventh son (the son de la guerra 'son of war') and an eighth son, with textual strophes about La Malinche (Anguiano and Munch 1979).
Another example is the danza de cuauileros (or danza de cuauilones), found in the towns of Aquila, Coire, Maruata, Ostula, and PoŽmaro, near the Pacific Ocean in MichoacaŽn (Chamorro 1984). Also known as the coloquio de la conquista de HernaŽn CorteŽs 'colloquy of the conquest by HernaŽn CorteŽs', the dance represents the battle between the native Americans and the Spaniards. The performance is introduced with simulated combat using a wooden cudgel (cuauitl), Nahua warriors' favored weapon. The accompanying sones have different local Spanish names: the first one is pata volando 'flying foot'; the second, cruzado 'crosswise motion'; the third, la cortesiŽa 'the paying of respect'; the fourth, moviendo cadera 'hip shaking'; the fifth, primer paloteo 'first attack with cudgels'; the sixth, el brinquito 'the little jump'; the seventh, segundo paloteo 'second attack with cudgels'; the eighth, la cuchilla 'the knife'; the
The titles of all these sones mainly indicate a display of skill in a simulation of battle. This display represents how the ancient Mexicans developed their military training. In addition, the attack with cudgels has to be precise and in accordance with the musical accents. The striking of the cudgels always occurs on the strong accents of every part of the musical piece; thus, there is no syncopation.
Some choreographies, such as those of the cortesiŽa and mochi nimochikahua, are actually addressed to the saint. The body motions in certain parts of the dance stereotypically evoke religious attitudes; however, dancers' display of skill and competence earns high social status in Nahua society. Such dancers will gain prestige and will be recommended to other festival leaders.
The same towns in MichoacaŽn have another dance known by the Nahua terms xayaŽcatl or xayacates 'the disguised men' (Chamorro 1984), a parody of the famous Spanish dance moros y cristianos 'Moors and Christians', which reenacts the battles of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. Disguised men perform stylized simulated scenes of combat in which the dancers appear as grotesque personages with rudimentary costumes made of coconut palms, leather masks, and tree branches. Accompanied by violin and guitar, the dance has two sections: xayaŽcatl de alastik 'the disguised men of the flat disguise', and xayaŽcatl pasultik 'the disguised men of the curled disguise'. In both parts of the dance, symbolism involves the domination of evil. Within the xayaŽcatl de alastik occurs a representation of All Saints Day, performed two days later on the evening of 3 November with the following four types of son: nin~os disfrazados 'disguised boys', in which disguised children enter with small canes, cowbells, and jingle bells; quebrado 'broken or turned motion'; mihkuhika 'the first change'; and mihtutilo 'the later change'. At the end of this final choreographed son, a new set of dancers, clothed in branches, thick grass, and other vegetation, enters, dancing and clapping their hands to the son de pasultik. The Nahua people of the Mexican Pacific Coast frequently allude to this event not as a dance, but as a game to frighten people (mauiltic 'to frighten, to play').
The most important musical trait of sones for Nahua dances is an ostinato bass in the harp, supporting a tonality that normally alternates between tonic and dominant chords. The musical meter does not change, there is no prominent syncopation, and there is no emphasis on improvisation, in contrast to the mestizo music of the nearby MichoacaŽn region known as hot land (tierra caliente), where improvisation, syncopation, and changes in metrical emphasis are characteristic. With the use of harp and jarana, the Nahua musical tradition shows a tendency toward isorhythm in its repetitive rhythms and short musical phrases. This is evidently the result of the link between the phrases of sones and the kinetic requirements of the dance.
The Nahua sones for dancing are included in most important nonliturgical ceremonies
Early Mixtec Culture
Present Mixtec Music Culture
National Policy
Further Study
The term Mixtec 'Cloud People' (Spanish Mixtecano) encompasses four indigenous groups of Mexico: Mixteco (476,000 people), Amuzgo (33,000), Trique (18,000), and Cuicatec (15,000). They are located in the Mixteca region of Mexico, divided into Mixteca Alta, Mixteca Baja, and Mixteca de la Costaupper, lower, and coastal subregions, respectively. The region is a mostly mountainous area of about 30,000 square kilometers extending from northwestern Oaxaca State to the Atlantic coast, from eastern Guerrero State to the Atlantic coast, and in southeast Puebla. The Mixtec occupy practically the whole region, the Trique and Amuzgo reside within the region, and the Cuicatec are located on the northeastern side. Two non-Mixtecan groups, the Ixcatec and Chocho, also reside within the region. Outside neighboring groups of the Mixtecan people include the Mazatec, the Nahua, the Popoloca, the Tlapanec, and the Zapotec.
Except for the Nahua, all groups in the area speak Oto-Mangue languages with-in the Central Amerind phylum (Greenberg 1987:381). The Mixtec branch of Oto-Mangue has thirty varieties of the Mixteco language, two of the Amuzgo, two of the Trique, and one of the Cuicatec. These languages are tonalwhich explains the name Cuicatec as 'Song People' (NaŽhuatl cuica 'song', teco 'people').
In pre-Columbian times, Mixtec culture was prominent, like that of the Zapotec and the Maya. At the time of the Spanish encounter, they were under the control of the Aztecs, to whom they paid taxes. There is much information about the music of the early Mixtec from pre-Hispanic documents, archaeological findings, and descriptions in chronicles by Europeans who arrived in the region during the 1500s. Such sources describe the following idiophones: ke?e, a log idiophone similar to the Nahua teponaxtli (teponaztli); tiyoo, a tortoiseshell struck by a deer's antler, similar to the Nahua ayotl; to^nda~xin, a rattle; a scraper (made from bone, with a human skull as a resonator); and jingle bells, preferred as decoration of artifacts used in celebrations and applied as decoration on bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and breastplates. Gold jingle bells made for dancing were considered valuable jewels; some were preserved as a communal heritage rather than as private possessions. The membranophone most
Many Mixtec practices were documented in pre-Hispanic books (codices) depicting musical ensembles. Spanish chronicles mention war-related music and how the native people, in dances and songs, cried to their gods for victory in battle. The chronicles say that a chief's attire included anklet jingle bells, and when in battle the Mixtec warriors lost to the Nahua, the former played their conch trumpets as a sign of surrender. They add that during preparations for a new monarch's celebration, orchestras of cane flutes, conch trumpets, and tortoiseshell idiophones, with other percussive instruments, were organized.
Researchers have speculated that each ancient Mixtec town had at least one annual festival for its supreme god and that during this festival, dances were held. Every four years, the men cut their hair and held celebrations. With the healing of an ill governor, the clergy held dances. Women who were about to give birth prepared festivities of singing and dancing for the goddess of baths. There were celebrations twenty days after a child's birth and on the child's first birthday. Weddings were elaborate sequences of rituals that ended in dance. Other rituals included variations on the flier's dance (baile del volador), some executed by only one man, though among the Cuicatec by four. A similar Totonac dance, los voladores de Papantla 'the fliers of Papantla', is still performed in Veracruz. The Mixtec played another danced game that survives among the Totonac, who call it huabua.
Sources from the period of national independence (1810) until the beginning of the twentieth century are devoid of information about Mexican indigenous groups; they mainly concentrate on the growth of the mestizo population. Mixtec musical practices were influenced by this mestizo groupand remarkably by a growing black population in the Atlantic coastal region, where African influence is evident.
Today, even with mixtures of native American, mestizo, and African traits, traces of ancient Mixtec music remain. These include the rites of initiation practiced by initiate musicians in caves in Guerrero, just west of Mixtec territory. Elsewhere within caves, the Trique venerate their lightning god (dioŽs rayoŽ), syncretized with Saint Mark (San Marcos). They dance to a special melody played on a three-stringed violin, a small guitar (jarana), and a drum. Trique mythology includes la nuera 'the daughter-in-law', sung and danced for the wind god (dioŽs del viento) and the forest god (dioŽs del monte). This practice contrasts with later songs sung to Spaniards (dioses sucios 'dirty gods'). A survival east of the Mixtec region is acrobats (maromeros), who during celebrations walk a tightrope and do other stunts associated with the flier's dance.
Musical instruments and ensembles
Present Mixtec idiophones include a container rattle used for dancing and African-influenced percussion instruments, including the cajoŽn de tapeo (a wooden box struck with the hands, similar to the cajoŽn or Peru) and a scraped charrasca (quijada de burro 'donkey's jawbone' or quijada de caballo 'horse's jawbone'). Membranophones most often correspond to the tarola (a snare drum from the European tradition) or the double-headed African-styled tubular drums that use a ring-rope system for tension. Additionally, the Mixtec make a friction idiophone (oticonte, a Nahua term, also called Spanish bote del diablo 'devil's can' and arcuza) from half a calabash by covering it with a skin into which they fasten a stick, which players rub. Surviving Mixtec aerophones are tubular cane duct flutes, now used to play Western melodies.
The most common ensembles are string groups (violin and guitar) (
Bands (bandas), consisting of European-derived clarinets, trumpets (
Except for a few band musicians, most performers cannot read music. Singers of praises, who cannot read music, occupy a place in the religious hierarchy. Only men lead religious musical practices and singing. Women participate by singing in several dances and the responsorial choruses of religious songs; children participate only in the latter.
Festivals
Sacred and secular festivities are the foundation on which music and dance are built. Festivals include dances with such topics as Moors and Christians (moros y cristianos) and chareos (related to Saint James), doce pares de Francia (twelve French couples), la conquista (a drama about the battle between the Aztecs and the Spanish), tortuga (turtle), and tejoŽn (badger). In Mixteca de la Costa, there are organizations of dancers called los tejorones who perform for free and may engage in dances such as the tiger (el tigre, actually a jaguar).
Ten religious festivities have major importance. These include especially la Virgen de Calendaria (for blessing seeds) and carnival, which has comic dances, the he-mule (macho mula) and the he-rope (macho riata), representing herders' jolly activities, and graceful dances called little masks (mascaritas), imitating quadrilles of the 1800s. During these holidays in Mixteca Alta, masked people roam the streets, and in Mixteca de la Costa, the tejorones dance; both activities are accompanied by string music (often violin and jarana). The playing of bull horns announces the Trique carnival. Special musical pieces marking each stage of the ritual include the cloud-flower (flor de nube), a song with string accompaniment; the dance of the bull that jumps (el toro que brinca); and music danced by men in women's clothing. Other religious festivities are the third Friday of Lent, a great Trique fair; Holy Week, with several processions; a peticioŽn de lluvia asking for rain on St. Mark's day; the feast of the Holy Cross; the day the Cuicatec pray for a good harvest; All Saints; All Souls, celebrated by visits to cemeteries and the custom called the raising of the dead (la levantada de muertos), when people in disguise roam around the town accompanied by music; La Virgen de Guadalupe, important for all Mixtec; and the nativity cycle (ciclo naviden~o), celebrated in some places with shepherd's dances (bailes de pastores).
Life-cycle events
Among Mixtec life-cycle events, a celebration held by Trique women at the time of childbirth stands out. It consists of dancing accompanied by string music from the genre called flowers (flores), which refers to the ancient ritual of the bath (rito del ban~o).
Baptisms and weddings are also times of musical celebration. When a Trique wedding is arranged, parties occur simultaneously at the homes of the bride and the
For death, aside from the communal observations, music is performed at private occasions. When an old civil servant dies among the Mixteco, the authorities take a band to the home of the deceased to pay homage. Among the Amuzgo, funerals are accompanied by songs of praise, sometimes sung in Latin. During the wake (la velacioŽn), which lasts all night, a band, a string group, or a singer participates. Music accompanies the body of the deceased to the cemetery and is played during the burial.
Specific Mixtec pieces are played for children and adults, establishing an important dichotomy between so-called happy genres (in a fast tempo) and sad ones (at a slow tempo). Music performed at a child's wake is happy (songs of love), but music at an adult's wake is sad (marches). The existence of many different dances possibly reflects the aesthetics of ancient Mixtec culture.
Secular music
A separate repertoire of musical pieces includes Afro-mestizo dancesthe devils' dance (danza de los diablos); the son of the trough (son de artesa), to which people perform stamping (zapateado) atop a wooden platform (tarima); and the chilena, a famous couple dance with Afro-Hispanic rhythms and Spanish stanzas, related to the marinera (formerly zamacueca) and the cueca of the Pacific coast of Peru and Chile.
Euro-mestizo genres are the ones most widely performed. These include boleros, chiflateras, corridos, cumbias, jarabes, marches, oaxacados, and polkas, sung in Spanish. All over Mixtec territory are strong reminders of European influence, such as religious songs with Latin texts; polyphonic music performed by two brass bands during Holy Week; and overtures, mazurkas, and waltzes played by bands whose members can read music.
Other songs in the native language include a genre known as katikubi, whose structure is non-Western, with improvised texts and topics that describe everyday people and common situations, including marital conflicts, though some are especially dedicated to brides. The Amuzgo sing these songs unaccompanied, but the Mixteco sing with harmonica accompaniment. A genre of minor importance is the taraŽntula, sung to provoke and encourage movement in those who have been stung by a poisonous insect.
Since the 1980s, Mexican governmental organizations have encouraged the performance of Mixtec music and dance by organizing and supporting fairs, festivals, and festivities. The Mixteca region has three cultural-indigenous radio stations (Radiodifusoras Culturales Indigenistas del Instituto Nacional Indigenista): La Voz de la Mixteca (The Voice of the Mixtec, serving the Mixteco and the Trique), La Voz de la Montan~a (The Voice of the Mountain, serving the Mixtec, the Tlapanec, and the Nahua), and La Voz de la Costa Chica (The Voice of the Little Coast, serving the Mixteco and the Amuzgo). Aside from broadcasting in Spanish, the stations broadcast in the native languages, play folk music, and organize festivals.
For years, the economy of the region has caused large migrations, especially of the Mixtec. The two main destinations are California (both the U.S. state and Baja California, Mexico) and Mexico City. The former region has another indigenous radio station, La Voz del Valle (The Voice of the Valley), serving the Mixtec, the
For a Mixtec overview that includes contextual information about music and dance, books by MariŽa Luisa Acevedo (1992), Juan JuliaŽn Caballero (1994), Barbro Dahlgren de Jordan (1954), Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus (1983), CeŽsar Huerta RiŽos (1994), and Robert S. Ravicz (1965) are of value. Thomas Stanford has written important studies about Mexican Amerindian musical and dance terms during the colonial period (1966) and contemporary Mixtec music and dances (1963, 1977). Recent articles and books about contemporary Mixtec music within festivals and funeral contexts are by Luciano Mendoza Cruz (1994), E. Fernando Nava L. (1984, 1987), and Francžoise Neff (1995). A series of recordings by the Mexican Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Institute for Indigenous Studies, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1994d, 1994e, 1995) provide valuable documentation of Mixtec music. Thomas Stanford (1977) and Rosa MariŽa Garza Marcue (1995) have issued recordings of Mixtec traditional and popular music, respectively.
TRANSLATED BY CARMEN ARENCIŽBIA
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Further Study
In the east-central part of Mexico are three indigenous groups known collectively as the Otopame: the Pame, Chichimec, and OtomiŽ. Joseph Greenberg (1987:381) places their language in the Oto-Mangue family of languages of the Central Amerind phylum. The Pame (2,650 people), calling themselves Xi?uŽi, reside primarily in the state of San Luis PotosiŽ. The Chichimec (1,500 people), calling themselves Ezar, live in one community within the state of Guanajuato. The OtomiŽ, or N~ahn~uŽ (about 5,500 people), divide into several groups; most live in the eastern part of the state of Guanajuato and in the western part of the state of QuereŽtaro; the rest are spread throughout Mexico.
Otopame groups are living exponents of the oldest culture of central Mexico. Their antiquity is supported by archaeological studies that have unearthed musical instruments from various parts of these territories. Clay aerophones have been found, but none of the indigenous groups preserves a musical tradition that uses them. During the colonial period, except for some dances whose aspects survive in contemporary indigenous practices, colonialists were more interested in describing warfare than art. Even in modern times, a predominantly mestizo culture's lack of interest in indigenous culture has led to few studies of Otopame culture. Still, all three groups show multiple levels of extant musical traditions.
Pame music has two flute traditions. Some musicians still play a pre-Hispanic flute they call mitote (a Nahua term), made of thin cane and measuring about 40 centimeters long. It has five holesfour for covering by the fingers, and one (near the proximal end) covered by a matted cobweb protected by an elote leaf, acting as a mirliton. A duct mouthpiece is made from a turkey quill held in place with wax. Traditionally this flute was always played in pairs; today, because of a shortage of musicians who carry on the tradition, it is usually played solo. It is used only to accompany the dance called xancaa and mitote (after the flute), also of pre-Hispanic origin.
The other Pame aerophone is an end-blown cane flute (nipjiiht), measuring more than 40 centimeters long by 3. 5 centimeters wide. It is found in most of
The OtomiŽ have end-blown duct flutes, played in three ways: a flutist accompanied by a drummer; a pipe-and-tabor soloist, who plays the flute while accompanying himself on a small drum, struck with a drumstick; and a pipe-and-tabor duet, with each performer playing a flute and a drum. The last are called tunditos, and their repertoire includes sacred and secular music. Currently, the Chichimec do not use these aerophones.
String music is played throughout the whole eastern-central region of Mexico. The Pame and the Chichimec share the most complex of chordophone musics: the huapango arriben~o 'highland huapango?, a variety of son [see MEXICO]. The Pame preserve the traditional ensemble: two violins and a guitarra sexta the standard sixstringed guitar. The Chichimec have a more recent and mestizo-influenced arrangement of instruments: guitarra huapanguera (resembling the guitarra sexta, but slightly larger, with a bigger resonator, a deeper sound, and five courses of three double and two single strings), two violins, and a Jalisco-style vihuela (a round-backed small guitar). These ensembles usually accompany Spanish literary genres (secular and sacred), such as poems in couplets (coplas) and ten-line stanzas (deŽcimas), and songs and instrumental music for deceased infants and children (angelitos 'little angels'). Otopame ensembles of one or two violins and one guitar are common. Such ensembles alone perform almost half the highland repertoire. Groups known as muŽsica de golpe 'strike music'a violin accompanied by double-headed membranophones (snare drum, bass drum)are equally common among the OtomiŽ and the Chichimec.
The Otopame, especially the OtomiŽ and the Chichimec, have a strictly percussive dance music, played only by a double-headed bass drum and a snare drum, or by a single bass drum. These dances come from the period of the Encounter (early 1500s) and were traditionally performed by male dancers, though today women also dance them; the dancers' shell ankle-tied rattles emit a sound that adds to the timbral sonority of the music. On special occasions, such as Holy Week, the Pame use a pair of snare drums during their processions; these they play in alternation, much like a dialogue.
Of all the Otopame, only the OtomiŽ have wind bands and percussion bands. The iconography of some small chapels shows that they formerly had larger ensembles. Friezes depict groups of aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones, though these ensembles are not used today.
All Otopame groups have religious songs (alabanzas 'praises') sung unaccompanied, mostly in Spanish, in two, three, or four voices. Only the OtomiŽ sing songs in their native language. A subgenre of Pame religious songs is the linnet (jilguero, a kind of finch), a genre employed in a duel or challenge in which two singers or groups of singers compete and show off their memory skills.
Of secular songs, the deŽcima is performed in two ways: as poetry (poesiŽa), a series of five or six recited ten-line stanzas that alternate with a sung quatrain whose first line repeats the last line of the stanza; or as valona, a quatrain glossed by four stanzas, each of which ends with its respective line of the quatrain, and the whole is sung in recitative, like a salmodia. These genres are performed only by the Pame, but are enjoyed by all three groups. The character of these verses is historical and narrative. The verses relate to Otopame ritual practices documented during the colonial period. In them, singers often engage in dialogues that describe nocturnal reunions of
Otopame songs in native languages are rare. The indigenous languages are tonal, but a lyrical tradition among them does not exist. The only group in the area that has some native lyrical manifestations is the OtomiŽ. A recent wave of interest in the preservation of indigenous cultures has resulted in the compositions of some lyrical songs in the native languages of the groups.
Singing and dancing
All three groups preserve male dances that commemorate, from a European perspective, the Spanish conquest of Mexico. No version includes spoken dialogue, but with choreography and gestures (representing anger, threats, battles, and courtship fights) these dances narrate episodes of this historical period. The Pame have two similar versions accompanied by violin and guitar: malinche and monarca. The Chichimec call them by the general name danza chicbimeca 'Chichimec dance', and accompany them with violin and snare drum or by drum only, while dancers play calabash rattles (xichat) (
The OtomiŽ also preserve the conquest dance of the concheros (players of armadillo-shell guitars), which originated in the Otopame region. Though these dances were extremely popular in the central part of the country, only the Chichimec performed them until the 1950s. The accompaniment consisted of mandolins (mandolinas) or small guitars (conchas de armadillo, each with an armadillo shell for a resonator) played by several dancers.
Other dramatic manifestations include the shepherds (pastorelas), derived from Christmas celebrations first organized locally during colonial times. The Pame of the north preserve some that last an entire night. Between extensive dialogues, a violinist and a guitarist perform songs and instrumental pieces. The main characters of another dance genre accompanied by a violin and a guitar are a leader, a bull, and cowboys. The Pame depiction of these characters is playful, bordering on mockery.
Several dances are exclusive to the Pame. In la ropa del muerto y el arco 'the
Other musical genres
The minuete, a purely instrumental genre, is practiced by the Chichimec and the Pame. All compositions in this genre are anonymous. Most are in ABCD structure, with melodies modulating to neighboring keys. Among the tonalities used, D, G, A, C, and F are the most frequent and are associated with specific rituals. Different tonalities have different functions, such as minuetes for ceremonies with religious statues and to escort the bodies of deceased infants to the cemetery. Despite the name, these pieces bear no resemblance to the European minuet. They resemble those of a genre played by the Cora of Nayarita music whose basic elements led to the mariachi genre.
Mestizo genres that are widely performed throughout the Otopame indigenous regions include the jarabe, the cancioŽn, the corrido, and the polca. Other genres considered local are the huapango huasteco and the son arriben~o. The former is played by a string trio with a fast rhythm; the latter is the son music performed during the huapango arriben~o.
All three groups observe the traditional holidays of Holy Week, the feast of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz), Corpus Christi, and All Saints. The only group that celebrates carnival in a joyful manner is the OtomiŽ. Each town's major celebration is its patronal festival. Some are special celebrations, like those in which the OtomiŽ and the Chichimec visit each other's towns; or Saint Michael's Day (DiŽa de San Miguel) among the OtomiŽ of TolimaŽn in QuereŽtaro, which starts two months early so they can perform all the daily dances and pilgrimages that they must complete for their celebrations.
Outside the festive calendar, the most important Otopame celebrations are weddings, for which modern groups with electronic equipment are usually hired. An important event for the Chichimec is the wake, for which they play sacred pieces (piezas sagradas). The Pame also perform these pieces for musicians' and dancers' wakes. Specific pieces are for adults, some are for children, and others are for important moments in the wake. These pieces differ primarily in tonality, which changes to suit the purpose.
Not much music remains associated with agricultural rituals. The Pame and OtomiŽ are the only ones who still have ceremonies in which a singer leads a group in praise. The only other occasion when the Chichimec and Pame had a labor-related celebration was for the completion of a house, when the owners were responsible for hosting a party for the whole town. Pame and OtomiŽ leadership roles are played by indigenous governors. Though they lead dances, it is the musician's job to lead the ceremonies of civil and religious events.
General works on the Otopame are by Doris Bartholomew (1994) and Jacques Soustelle (1993). Studies of specific cultures are by Carlo Bonfiglioli (1996), RauŽl GarciŽa Flores (1993), Gabriel Moedano (1972), and E. Fernando Nava L. (1994a) for the Chichimec; Heidi ChemiŽn Bašssler (1993) for the OtomiŽ; and Dominique ChemiŽn (1994), ChemiŽn Bašssler (1984), Nava (1994b), and Miguel AŽngel Rubio
TRANSLATED BY CARMEN ARENCIŽBIA
The Ceremonial Tarascan Cultural Universe
The Christian PureŽpecha Cultural Universe
The Secularized PureŽpecha Cultural Universe
Further Study
The PureŽpecha (P'urheŽpecha) or Tarascan are an Amerindian group in west Mexico. Their territory is delimited by an ecological system formed by four areas: the Tarascan Plateau (including the main portion of ParicutiŽn Volcano), Lake PaŽtzcuaro, La Can~ada (a stream near the Zamora Valley) and Zacapu (toward the north of Lake PaŽtzcuaro).
The PureŽpecha are descendants of an older ethnic group known as WacuŽsecha (People of the Eagle Dynasty), who took up residence at Lake PaŽtzcuaro a few centuries before the Spanish conquest. The more recently used term PureŽpecha, an autodesignation meaning 'newly arrived' or 'arrived from somewhere else', has replaced another older term, Tarascan, meaning 'son-in-law'. Joseph Greenberg (1987:382) classifies the Tarascan language within the Chibchan family of the Chibchan-Paezan phylum.
To understand the development of PureŽpecha music, the existence of three etic universes in the history and culture of PureŽpecha has to be considered. In the first cultural universe is the music of the ancient Tarascans from the precolonial period, which can be identified as the Tarascan ceremonial universe of culture. The second one departs from the Spanish colonial period and is the Christian PureŽpecha universe of culture. The third is also from the influence of the Christian world; however, it must be understood as the secularized PureŽpecha universe of culture.
This cultural universe is archaeologically documented with ancient evidence from the Lake PaŽtzcuaro Basin. Ritual burial grounds have produced widely various clay, stone, bone, seashell, and copper artifacts, probably used for ceremonial purposes. Collars of seashell pieces and copper bells made with the lost-wax technique were common (
Within the Tarascan pantheon, the main deity among terrestrial gods was Cuerauaperi, mother of all terrestrial gods and spirit of creation, to whom the main festivals with sounds, dances, and ceremonial libations were dedicated. JeroŽnimo de AlcalaŽ (1980:11) described the predictions and dreams these people had before the Spaniards came to their province, where their main gods came from, the feast they celebrated, and the importance of the butterfly dance (parakata uarakua), in which the main priests, accompanied by drums and large trumpets, danced with a big butterfly in honor of Cuerauaperi, embodied as a beautiful maiden:
The priests said, "Gentlemen, please stand up because the goddess Cuerauaperi has already opened the door." ... All the priests were naked, covered with soot, and seated with trefoil garlands on their heads.... They started to play their trumpets and drums while burning incense ..., singing with her as they bathed and dressed her.... They put very fine clothes on her,... a trefoil garland on her head,... bells on her ankles,... and they brought much wine, which they offered for drinking.... On the day after the feast, all the women from the village were taken to the kitchen fire, where they prepared toasted corn.... Thereafter, a few dancers came in and performed a dance called Paracata Uaraqua in the patio surrounded by a wooden fence or in the houses of the priests. And the priest of this goddess danced there, wearing a snake as a waistband and a paper butterfly.
Solemnity in burials ... [was] memorable for Tarascan kings.... Upon the death of the king, his successor gave the news about it to the rest of the lords ... [and] the first thing they did was to wash the entire body, dress it with a shirt and shoes, and put a few small golden bells on the dead king's ankles.... After all the pomp, and with musical accompaniment, they took out the corpse from the main palace at midnight .... A double sound was made with tortoiseshells percussed with crocodile bones, instead of the double sound by bells.... In the middle of many bonfires, conch and horn trumpets were sounded in alternation with songs in a doleful tone, which were created as praises for the dead king.
An ideological change took place from the Spanish encounter until the late 1500s. The ceremonial Tarascan dimension moved toward the Christianized PureŽpecha world by means of evangelization, using Christian vocal practices and other methods of religious conversion, as performed by Christian friars of the orders of Saint Francis and Saint Augustine. Visual resources were also useful in evangelization. Pablo de Beaumont (1932) relates how Christian missionaries handled diverse paintings and icons representing the mysteries of faith so they could be learned more easily by the natives; moreover, they assisted in an attempt to eradicate cult practices of the ancient Tarascan gods. Some evidences of painting and icons as tools of evangelization among the PureŽpecha can be seen from the images of angel musicians in some local Christian churches. Angel-musicians are shown magnificently dressed and playing musical instruments including a double-reed aerophone (chirimiŽa), a krummhorn (orlo), an early bassoon (bajoŽn), a bowed viola (vihuela de arco), a six-stringed sixteenth-century guitar (vihuela de mano), and a harp (arpa). These are wooden icons, carved into the wooden roofs of Christian churches in Cocucho, NaranjaŽn, Quinceo, ZacaŽn, and other places. With this evidence, the arrival of European music in the PureŽpecha territory is clear.
These visual images can be compared with the written sources provided by the Augustinian friars. Diego Basalenque (1963:62, 63, 85) describes the chapels in TacaŽmbaro and TiripetiŽo, where the Spanish commissioner CristoŽbal On~ate established centers for teaching European music, and Christian music in particular. Minor centers (visitas 'visits') were also established, the most important at Parangaricutiro. The Franciscan Isidro FeŽlix de Espinosa (1945:148-151) mentions the remarkable work of Juan de San Miguel, a friar devoted to teaching organ and choral music, who organized a native American chorus (semaneros 'weekday workers') to sing hymns.
ChirimiŽas were also played in the musical ensembles of the visitas in PureŽpecha territory, as explained by Diego Basalenque (1963:45) in his description of the sounds during an Easter celebration at TiripetiŽo:
The role of chirimiŽas in PureŽpecha religious thought is important for understanding the PureŽpecha view of the world. ChirimiŽa performance has been maintained as a permanent custom during Corpus Christi celebrations, even today. JesuŽs HernaŽndez TziandoŽn, an elderly chirimiŽa player from CheraŽn AtziŽcurin Village, explains that during Corpus Christi, the chirimiŽa is played as a part of a religious responsibility in that the modern Christian PureŽpecha consider the instrument a symbol of the divine world.Easter and solemn days required that all the visitas should assist the priest, and those in the procession should bring their crosses and candlesticks with their trumpet music. These days were of great rejoicing to the people, especially the
Corpus Christi festival, which was established with particular devotion; thus it was instituted, and devotion still grows with the invention of services which they perform in the streets, such as dances and performances of trumpet and chirimiŽa music at each altarbecause each visita brings its own music.
Another cultural legacy from the Christian world still in use by the PureŽpecha consists of songs, prayers, and alabanzas, hymns in praise of the Eucharist, performed responsorially in Spanish or in PureŽpecha by an elderly male or female leader (keŽngi, a native authority on celebrations) and a choir of native women and men.
Within the PureŽpecha secular or social festival universe is the chanaŽntskua, a carnival tradition of dances and games. Included is a symbolic element known as the little bull (torito), represented in three forms: as music, as a handcrafted cardboard costume for a dance-drama, and as a musical instrument shaped in wood. As music, little bulls are characterized by short and redundant melodies in 6/8 meter, played by local brass bands to accompany dances and games. In the village of CheraŽn, little-bull melodies are played during the holy-child-awakening ceremony (levantamiento del Nin~o) in February or March. As an artifact for dances and games, a cardboard bull is carried by one or two men as a body-enveloping mask for dancing and a device for charging and butting onlookers. As a musical instrument, especially in the village of Ahuiran, a little bull is an idiophone also known as kiringua. Manufactured from a small carved log and played with two sticks while carried by a man who dances while he plays, it resounds throughout the village.
Also within the PureŽpecha secularized universe are social events that include new native musical traditions born after the end of the Spanish colonial period. Since the 1800s, such new musical genres as abajen~o, son regional, and pirekua have reshaped a PureŽpecha musical culture with some European influences.
Abajen~o is a genre of instrumental music whose name comes from western Mexican Spanish, meaning 'from lower lands', referring to the lowland musical traditions of mestizos of Jalisco, Colima, and MichoacaŽn. This music is characterized by the plucking of a thirty-six-stringed harp, the strumming of a guitar, and the bowing of a violin. Its structure includes rhythmic alternations in 6/8 and 3/4 meters, syncopated basses, and parts that are improvisedpossible African influence. Eduardo RuiŽz (1969) asserted that this mestizo tradition comes from the 1800s in MichoacaŽn, according to written sources that mention popular dances called zapateados 'foot stampings', accompanied by a harp and performed during the War of French Intervention (1862-1867). PureŽpecha musicians rework abajen~os in their own way by performing them with string orchestras and brass bands. String-orchestra abajen~os are played by violins, a guitar, vihuelas, violoncellos (for rhythmic and harmonic accompaniment), and a string bass. Brass-band abajen~os are mainly characterized by the sounds of tuba and trombone playing bass lines and percussion instruments playing rhythmic combinations. Also included are E? saxhorns (like medium-size euphoniums) called armoniŽas 'harmonies' because of their harmonic-rhythmic function, and clarinets. PureŽpecha abajen~os are structured by repeated melodies in fast tempo,
A clearly nineteenth-century European influence appears in the genres son regional (a mostly instrumental 'regional son' genre) and pirekua (a vocal genre); both are related to the waltz in rhythm and tempo. Henrietta Yurchenco (1983:255-256) asserted that the waltz characterizes the son and the pirekua in a special way because both genres are in a slow triple meter and are enriched by abundant diatonic melodies that are played and sung as duets with a rhythmic sequence of two to five notes against fixed patterns in the accompaniment. Two or three chords (usually I, IV, and V) provide harmonic motion in major or minor keys, with little use of modulation. Sones and pirekuas are intended only for listeningas serenades and for musical competitions during a feast.
PureŽpecha composers make use of a rhythmic feature known as cuatrillo, in which four grouped notes are played in the place of three in 3/8 time. This combination produces the effect of a syncopated rhythmic pattern in some of the instruments. A variant of pirekua, called abajen~o, is sung and accompanied in fast tempo in a combination of 6/8 and 3/4 meter. Beyond these characteristics, sones and pirekuas are identified by their instrumentation and interpretation. Sones can be performed by a violin, a violoncello, a string bass, a clarinet, a saxophone, and a trombone (old orchestras added a flute) (
If vocally interpreted, sones are normally sung in Spanish, but pirekuas are usually sung in Tarascan. Sones textually express ideas about everyday events, feelings, people, and places, but pirekuas are poetic expressions that describe the PureŽpecha worldview.
Tsištsiški sapichu, | Little flower, |
shaŽnkari seŽsi jaŽshika! | How beautiful you are! |
NaŽri arhiŽkuariski? | What is your name? |
NaŽnina? pirini para p?ikukuarini? | How can I take her? |
NoŽtaru modu jarasti. | There is no way. |
NiraŽsinga keŽtsimani juchit amigu. | I am walking downtown with my friend. |
Juchit amigu niraŽsinga keŽtsimani Elbiritani esheŽni. | My friend, I am walking downtown to meet Elbirita. |
K?uinchikua janoŽnguasti. | The feast is already here. |
Tsinari, tsinari, malesita. | Wake up, wake up, my dear girl. |
K'uinchikua janoŽnguasti. | The feast is already here. |
Animacha andaŽmutanisti k?oru. | It is close to the Animas feast. |
AriŽ tsištsiški shaŽni p?untsumika, | This flower has so much fragrance, |
oktubri jimboŽ anapu. | from October precisely. |
Elbirita shaŽni tereŽkuarka k?oru. | Elbirita is smiling so much. |
Other PureŽpecha pirekuas have gained prestige abroad for their composers, including "La Josefi`nita" by Uriel Bravo and Juan MeŽndez (from ZacaŽn), "Male Seberiana" by JesuŽs ChaŽvez (also from ZacaŽn), and examples by Jacinto Rita (from AngaguaŽn), Juan CrisoŽstomo (from Quinceo), Francisco SalmeroŽn (from Quinceo), Salvador ProŽspero (from Tingambato), Cruz Jacobo (from Sevina), and Juan Victoriano (from San Lorenzo). The last is the composer to whom Henrietta Yurchenco (1970) devoted a great part of her local research between the 1940s and the 1960s.
The major study of PureŽpecha music is a recent book by Arturo Chamorro (1994). In Spanish, it provides a cultural and semiotic analysis of music and musical performance by focusing on the son and its variants. Sources in English are few but include a study of rural Mexican festivals by Brandes (1989) and Henrietta Yurchenco's liner notes to a recording (1970).
Environment and Living Conditions
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Further Study
The Tarahumara (Tarahumar, RaraŽmuri, or 'runners') of northwest Mexico occupy the meadows, canyons, valleys, and uplands of central and southern Chihuahua. Numbering some fifty thousand, they have lived in this area for more than two thousand years. They were contacted by Jesuits as early as 1610 (PeŽrez de Ribas 1944 [1645]). In 1767, at the time of the Jesuit expulsion, they supported nearly thirty missions and more than fifty visitas, small, nearby suburbs of a mission. The Franciscans replaced the Jesuits in northern Mexico, but mission activity declined among the Tarahumara, and many of them retreated into the mountains in the southwest corner of Chihuahua.
Despite the presence of missionaries, miners, and cattlemen, little acculturation occurred before the middle of the twentieth century, when the Mexican government opened facilities for the Indians. In the early 1960s, with the opening of the trans-Sierra Madre railroad (Ferrocarril de Chihuahua al PaciŽfico), outside influences expanded rapidly. Even so, the Tarahumara have selectively adopted outsiders' cultural traits. Few archaeological investigations have been conducted in their area.
The climate of the Sierra Madre varies from tropical in the valleys to extreme cold in the highlands in winter. Lowland areas are desert, but the mountainous valleys are heavily wooded; in the uplands, heavy rainfalls provide adequate water for junipers, pines, and many other trees. Most Tarahumara live in hamlets (rancheriŽas) of several families, each occupying a one-or two-room house. Until early in the 1900s, when outsiders opened local sawmills, houses were made of stone with earthen roofs; many Tarahumara still live in caves in the upper regions of the territory. Local leaders and ceremonial practitioners are elected, or more often appointed, as needed.
The Tarahumara practice hunting, gathering, and farming, mostly of corn, squash, and beans. Some, especially the lowlanders, work in a wage-based system. Corn is the staple, used for food and drink, especially the alcoholic tesgušino.
Indigenous musical instruments are limited to the gourd rattle, though a handheld drum may have been present in precontact days. Archaeological sites show the use of
The gourd rattle is normally made from a bottle gourd (arisiki), which grows in the valleys. It grows in pear and globular shapes, and when cleaned out and partially filled with seeds or pebbles serves for dancesthe traditional yuŽmari and the adopted matachiŽn. With the coming of sawmills, some Tarahumara began making a distinctive four-sided rattle from thin ureŽ-wood shavings glued to each other and held together by two disks where the rattle handle passed through the container. These are normally topped with a small cross and used by matachines. Rattles may also have been made of hide, deer hooves, and ankle-tied cocoon versions.
Nonindigenous instruments
Instruments adopted from early Europeans are the guitar and the violin, and possibly the pipe and tabor (there is evidence in pre-Columbian Mexico for the pipe and tabor combination). Guitar and violin soundboards are made from local woods, usually pine or ash (ureŽ, cabariŽ, sawaŽ, watosiŽ; for scientific names, see Pennington 1963:163), and fingerboards are made from inoŽko, a hardwood. The guitar is less waisted than a modern instrument, but the bend is well above the center of the sound box. Metal frets are inserted in the fingerboard, and commercial guitar strings are purchased from local stores. Most guitars are undecorated, though occasionally colored tin from a fruit can serves to hold the strings. The guitar is found much less frequently than the violin; when used, it plays chords beneath the violin melody for the matachiŽn dancers.
The violin is somewhat larger than a modern European instrument, nearly the size of a viola, sometimes with an extreme waist. It is made of the same woods as the guitar, with inoŽko used for the fingerboard, pegs, and bow. The bridge may be made of local woods, or sometimes of another material, such as plastic. Commercial violin strings or guitar strings are used, and the tail piece is made of wood or tin from a can. The head of the scroll box is often carved, usually in the shape of an animal's head (horse heads often occur), and geometric patterns are frequently cut into the lower part of the fingerboard. Horsetail hair is used for the bow, and a peg is sometimes used to apply tension to it. Stringed instruments are normally unvarnished and undecorated. Makers may use colored pencils to outline the eyes of the scroll animal and the large f-holes.
Held in the old-fashioned way (against the bottom of the collarbone) violins are played in large ensembles for matachiŽn dancers, often with as many as eight to twelve violinists; for small fiestas, a single violinist will do. The music consists of one to three short phrases, repeated with variations lasting from five to thirty minutes, depending on the dancers' patterns. Velasco Rivero (1983:170-77) outlines some of the typical line-dance patterns as figure-eights, crisscrossing lines, and reverse loops. Melodies may be played in unison or in parts, usually thirds, and infrequently with a drone. Little is known about the songs of the matachines. The system is somewhat complex, with different tunings used throughout a night's performance and possibly different repertoires for different activities, such as playing for private fiestas at home and dancing in front of or inside a church, or in procession (Griffith 1979). After tuning, one performer begins playing, and others will join in as soon as they feel comfortable with the composition.
The pipe and tabor consists of a duct flute and double-sided drum. The drum is held with the little finger of the left hand, which plays the notes on the pipe, and struck with a stick held in the right hand. Sometimes the drum may be rested against the knee or the ground (
Tarahumara musical performances blend indigenous and European ideas, freely reinterpreted after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the area (Merrill 1983:296). In local cosmography, the universe consists of seven layers. One godthe father (ononruŽam), the father god (tata rioŽsi), the sun (rayeŽnari, called el padre 'the father' by GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez 1982:78)inhabits the uppermost level, and the god of the lower housetereŽgor, the devilinhabits the lowest. The Tarahumara live in the middle levels. Other levels are occupied by mother, the moon, the Virgin Mary (metsaka, called la madre 'the mother' by GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez 1982:79), Mexicans, other non-Tarahumara (caboŽci 'whiskered ones'), and others. The people "conceive of human beings as composed of a body 'sapaŽ' and one or more [autonomous] souls" (Merrill 1988:87).
Tarahumara rituals perpetuate goodness and restore the well-being of particular individuals or the community, but most elements of either kind of celebration are the same. Rituals derived from Christian customs mark the feasts of the Virgin of Guadalupe (12 December), Christmas, the Feast of the Three Kings (Epiphany, 6 January), and Holy Week (especially Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday through Holy Saturday). Less important or localized celebrations may take place for the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (8 December), Candlemas (2 February), Corpus Christi (in June), and various local saints. Fiestas normally begin
Traditional ceremonies
GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez (1982:145) lists eight genres of dances: tutuguri, yuŽmari, matachiŽn (not precontact), pascola, warishiŽwami, kuwari, ayena, and yo'eŽ, indicating that the last four are rare indeed, if found at all. Among Tarahumara ceremonial practices, other sources list bakaŽnawi as a curing ceremony, korima as a harvest ceremony, and nawesari as 'ritualized public sermons' that apparently occur within larger ceremonial contexts. Merrill (1988) and Velasco Rivero (1983) present analyses and examples of sermons, the primary method for presenting reproductions of knowledge through words as a means of restructuring Tarahumaran customs. Merrill discusses curing, including the processes of diagnosis and the prevention and alleviation of sickness, especially in relation to the concept of soul. Such cures are led by a curer (owiruŽame). Other sources describe curing only in relation to tutuguri.
Most sources state that tutuguri and yuŽmari are names for the same ceremony. It is suspected, however, that further research will show that tutuguri is the name for the entire ceremony complex, and yuŽmari may more specifically refer to the dance performed in a circle within the larger ceremony. Some sources indicate that the two names may be specific to particular geographical regions, though that concept seems less justifiable, or that yuŽmari is a generic Spanish term for native dances in this area. Tutuguri, a precontact ceremony, is often called a curing ceremony, but is actually practiced to maintain harmonycuring in the most general sense. Led by a chanter (wikaraŽame, saweŽame) who presents the sermon and with two additional singers leads the singing, the tutuguri consists of a synthesis of indigenous and Roman Catholic elements, including a sacrifice of fooda white goat or chickens, plus food to be consumed in the fiesta followingto the sun god, line and circle dancing, and the use of a cross, incense, and a rosary (this resembles the Guarijio tuŽmari) [see GUARIJIO]. Tutuguri is also celebrated at eclipses and the winter solstice, with a representation of the sun painted on large drums played during the night.
Tutuguri songs differ from most Middle and North American Indian songs in that they start low and ascend, though the overall structure has successive phrases beginning at lower tones. Songs are usually quite brief, as few as three phrases of only about four seconds each, repeated for up to five minutes or more. A rattle pattern is played with downward strokes throughout most of the song, alternating with rolls at the ascent (Indian Music of Northwest Mexico 1978). Nearly all sources report the musical texts as being unintelligible, but a seventeenth-century observer (Guadalaxara 1683) translated a musical text loosely into a Spanish sentence glossable as "she asks the moon to take care of her sheep so they can have much wool to card, comb, and knit for good blankets" (GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez 1982:110). Tutuguri, therefore, is sung and danced for curing, for propitiation, and for entreating the gods on behalf of all Tarahumara, or as they say, asking forgiveness (wikaŽlawi taŽnia) for a long and healthy life, abundant crops, and many children.
Tutuguri ends with the offering of food in the early-morning hours, followed by a feast for all in attendance. A tutuguri performed during Lent may be accompanied by fariseos dancing to the pipe and tabor; the rest of the year, matachines may or may not be present.
Several sources, including the seventeenth-century authors Cajas Castro (1992:199-211) and RodriŽguez (1982), mention the use of peyote (jiŽkuri) by the Tarahumara. Cajas Castro believes this practice to be older than that of yuŽmari, but
Acculturated ceremonies
European-derived ceremonies center on the Christian liturgical calendar. In remote locations, they follow an outmoded calendar, modified by time and the absence of priests. Being an oral-tradition culture, the Tarahumara are not attuned to changes in the dates for the celebration of various ceremonies as dictated by the ecumenical council known as Vatican II. Therefore, they continue to celebrate the ceremonies as they think they always have, using the dates of the former calendar.
Two main organizations are found: the matachines and the societies of Holy Week. Matachines dance throughout the year, except during Lent and Easter, especially for Our Lady of Guadalupe day, Christmas, and Epiphany, though they may appear at private fiestas and even dance at tutuguri. Matachines, introduced from Europe in the 1600s, were first noted in the village of Norogachi in September 1737 by the missionary Lorenzo Gero (GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez 1982:146), and again in January 1752 by BartholomeŽ Braunthe latter undoubtedly for an Epiphany celebration, the former probably for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
Dancing in front of the church or a private home, the matachines (called awiŽeme 'dancer') are led by one or two organizers (monarkos, rather like booking agents but physically present to lead the group) and a chapeyoŽ (another kind of dancer, found principally at smaller, home ceremonies) wearing a deer's head. From four to twenty or more matachines move in intricate lines, changing directions at the organizers' shouts and occasionally performing elaborate circle-eight figurations (see Velasco Rivero 1983:170-177, for movement diagrams). On their heads, the matachiŽn dancers wear crowns made from a shell of wood covered with bright, meter-long streamers and mirrors or reflective pieces of metal, distinctively different from those of their northern neighbors, the Yaqui and Mayos. Their lower face and shoulders are covered by scarves, as is the front of the waist; brightly colored shirts and jeans are worn beneath. In some regions, colorful bolts of cloth may be draped around the body. In their right hand they carry a gourd rattle and in the left a wand, sometimes shaped like a heart, covered with crepe paper. The dancers, all men, move to the music of violins, in a few places accompanied by one or two guitarists.
Holy Week celebrations are more elaborate and involve two sodalities: pariseos (Spanish fariseos 'Pharisees') and sontaŽrusi (Spanish soldados 'soldiers'). Leaders appoint appropriate boys and men from the village to dance with each group. Between mass and other ritual devotions, different activities take place daily, including dancing inside and outside the church, and processions. A straw-stuffed effigy of
The soldiers dance simultaneously with and against the pariseos, are dressed distinctively in long white cloths draped over their bodies, and wear long, red head-bands. The leader carries a large red banner of office, and all carry long lances. Holy Week festivities are sponsored by one or two pisteros assisted by their relatives and friends, who may take a year or more to save enough money to pay for the occasion. As with all Tarahumara celebrations, the dancing ends with feasting for all and much drinking of tesgušino, often continuing in private homes for several days after Easter.
Detailed descriptions of the presentations of matachines (including more information about organizers and chapeyos) are given in Bennett and Zingg (1976 [1935]), Cajas Castro (1992:154-163), Fontana et al. (1977, 1979), GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez (1982), Merrill (1983), and Velasco Rivero (1983:152-188). Tarahumara Holy Week celebrations have been studied by GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez (1982), Velasco Rivero (1983:189-233), Cajas Castro (1992:164-187), and Merrill (1983).
The Yaqui and Their Music
The Mayo and Their Music
The Music of Neighboring Tribes
Further Study
The traditional homeland of the Yaqui and the Mayo is in northwest Mexico. Yaqui territory was, and is, along the lower RiŽo Yaqui in central Sonora; the culturally related Mayo live along the banks of the RiŽo Mayo in southern Sonora and the RiŽo Fuerte and the RiŽo Ocoroni in northern Sinaloa. The two groups are sometimes called CaŽhitan-speaking peoples (Beals 1945:1003). They speak closely related languages belonging to the Uto-Aztecan stock (Greenberg 1987:381). The Yaqui call themselves Yoeme, and the Mayo call themselves Yoreme.
Both groups have an uncertain archaeological record, and they may have arrived in their homelands fairly late in the prehistoric period. Both groups experienced intensive contacts with Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s and developed religious and ceremonial systems blending European and native elements. Yaqui and Mayo musics resemble each other in general form and in how they are used within their cultures. Inasmuch as the Yaqui have been much more thoroughly studied, written about, and recorded, they may serve as a baseline in describing the music of both groups.
The earliest recorded contact between the Yaqui and Europeans was in 1533, when the Yaqui fought a Spanish slave-raiding expedition to a standstill. As the Spaniards expanded their missions and permanent settlements up the West coast of Mexico, this pattern continued, with Spanish attempts at entering Yaqui territory being repulsed. Finally, in the early 1600s, the Yaqui formally requested that missionaries be sent to them. This was done in 1617, when the Jesuits TomaŽs Basilio and AndreŽs PeŽrez de Ribas arrived on the RiŽo Yaqui. They received an enthusiastic welcome, and thus began a Yaqui-Jesuit association that lasted until increasing Spanish pressure led to armed revolts on the part of the Yaqui.
These revolts started in 1740 and continued off and on until the early twentieth century. The earlier issues involved Yaqui autonomy; later on, the sacredness of Yaqui land became an issue, especially during the 1800s, when Mexican pressures to put that land to "civilized" uses increased. Facing a policy of genocide and deportation
Today in Arizona, there are several settlements of Yaqui in addition to the traditional villages on the RiŽo Yaqui. Guadalupe near Tempe, Yoem Pueblo at Marana, and three communities in or near Tucson hold the bulk of the Yaqui population in the United States. All these but the Marana community hold the annual cycle of Yaqui Roman Catholic ceremonies. The Yaqui were federally recognized as a tribe in 1978, when the Pascua Yaqui Reservation was established southwest of Tucson.
Older forms of Yaqui music
The earliest mention of Yaqui music is in a 1645 account (cited in Beals 1945:31-32) that describes the Yaqui as having flageolets, probably the two-piece, three-hole flutes that are still in use; trumpets, possibly made from conchs; atabales, kettledrums, possibly flat single- or double-headed drums resembling contemporary drums; and teponaztli, a term used in central Mexico to describe cylindrical idiophones with an H-shaped slit creating two lamellas that were struck.
Other instruments found in contemporary CaŽhitan-speaking culture may be of native American origin. Rasping sticks (hirukiam) of a hardwood (often brazilwood) are played while supported on gourd resonators (bweham). A waxed half gourd is floated in a basin of water and struck with a wrapped stick, making a hollow "thunk"; in Yaqui, the instrument, a struck idiophone, is called ba kubahe 'water drum'. Gourd and split cane rattles are also used, and may have existed before the Spaniards arrived. Other instruments of probable native origin are idiophones worn by ritual dancers, such as leg rattles (teneboim), made from cocoons of the giant silk moth (Rothscbildia jorulla) that are dried, filled with seeds, and strung together. The deer dancer wears a belt of deer-hoof rattles (rihhutiam), which, like the dance itself, may also be of pre-Hispanic origin.
Traditional Yaqui music is closely tied to the Christian ceremonial cycle and Yaqui ceremonialism. Yaqui (and Mayo) religion is a syncretic blending of native concepts and practices with those introduced in the early 1600s by Jesuit missionaries. The annual ceremonial cycle involves a series of public and private religious fiestas. These may celebrate patronal saints' days and other important Christian feasts, including Palm Sunday and Easter.
The oldest level of Yaqui ceremonialism seems to be the deer dance (
The deer dancer wears cocoon-husk leg rattles and a deer-hoof rattle belt and carries two gourd rattles (ayam) in his hands. During his dance, he becomes the deer, whose voice the singers provide. The rasp is said to be his breath, and the water drum his heartbeat. Many Yaqui believe the dance and the songs came from the time in Yaqui history when they relied heavily on hunting and performed the dance at an all-night feast before the hunt took place to "please the deer and ask his pardon for having to kill him" (Griffith and Molina 1980:34).
Pascola
Appearing in the same context as the deer dancer is the pascola dancer. Any religious fiesta (pahko) must have at least one pascola present. Pascolas play many roles. They formally open and close the fiesta with speeches and dances. They act as ritual clowns, focusing people's attention on the unfolding pahko. They act as ritual hosts, dispensing water and cigarettes to spectators, and they dance to two kinds of music.
While the musicians are playing harp and violin (a small harp, supported on the player's lap, and one violin for the Yaqui; a larger harp and two violins for the Mayo), the dancer performs a complex, European-appearing dance (
The violin and the harp are European instruments, probably introduced by Jesuit missionaries to provide suitable music for the mass and other ceremonial occasions. Though the vertical three-hole flute may be native American in origin, its simultaneous use by a drummer is distributed over much of Mexico and has strong parallels with European usage dating back to the 1200s.
Matachines
Another body of Yaqui and Mayo music is played on violins and guitars for matachines, contradances done by men and boys as an act of devotion to the Virgin Mary. Some matachiŽn melodies bear a haunting resemblance to Anglo-Celtic fiddle melodies, but it is hard to carry this comparison beyond the realm of generality (Spicer 1980:99-103).
Matachines are known over much of what was northern New Spain. Pueblo Indians in New Mexico and mestizos in many parts of northern Mexico and the United States Southwest perform them. Among the Yaqui (and to a lesser extent among the Mayo), they are intensely sacred and are never performed on secular occasions. This practice contrasts with performance of the deer dance and pascola dances, which can be part of purely secular celebrations.
Though the use of the violin and guitar shows European influence, the Yaqui and the Mayo play a perhaps more ancient mouth-resonated bow (baka aapa 'cane harp'), in its modern form a length of local cane with a tuning peg at one end and a single nylon string. Coastal Mayo and Yaqui frequently use fishing line for the string. This is strictly a solo instrument, played usually for the musician's enjoyment; he plays melodies (sones each son has its own title) that include those from pascola and deer dances (Warman 1976).
A purely secular Yaqui song is the corrido, sung in Yaqui, often to the accompaniment of a guitar. Corridos are sung narrative poems that deal with persons or incidents of interest to the Yaqui community. They are frequently sung by groups of men in the same manner as deer songs (Nuss 1976).
The Yaqui have always been quick to take up new instruments and new kinds of music. Since the end of World War II, many Yaqui musicians have been performing in the norten~o style, which has spread from Texas into the Arizona-Sonora border country. Several Yaqui combos (conjuntos) have been active around Tucson; in 1972, one of these, El Conjunto Murrietta, recorded two LP disks ("Chicken Scratch": Popular Dance Music of the Indians of Southern Arizona 1972). In 1993, Los Hermanos Cuatro, a Yaqui norten~o quartet from Old Pascua Village in Tucson, performed at the Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. This group has been extremely popular among working-class Yaqui and Mexicans on Tucson's southwest side. Yaqui norten~o activity has been also strong in Sonora. The polka "Flor de Capomo" ('Water-Lily Flower'), with words in Spanish and Yaqui, was composed by a Yaqui named JoseŽ Molina. It was popular during the mid-1990s in Arizona and Sonora. Arizona Yaqui also participate in mariachis and triŽos romaŽnticos.
The Spanish contacted the Mayo shortly before they contacted the Yaqui, as the Spanish expedition was moving up the coast of Mexico. Differences between the two peoples that appeared at this first contact have persisted. The Mayo seemed to accept the incursions of outsiders (at least to some degree), but the Yaqui have always resisted foreign entry into their land unless it was on Yaqui terms. The Mayo participated in revolts against the Spanish and later the Mexican governments, but their resistance basically ended in the late 1800s, and they never experienced the genocidal programs directed by the Mexican government against the Yaqui (Crumrine 1977; Spicer 1962:46-85). The Mayo continue to live along the Mayo and Fuerte rivers, experiencing constantly greater disruption and incursions on the part of their Mexican neighbors.
Mayo music is extremely similar to Yaqui music, but small differences occur. Mayo pascola groups usually use two violins and a harp, but the harp is larger than the standard Yaqui lap-held harp. Mayo deer dancing tends to be heavier than that of the Yaqui. But these are differences of style within the same general pattern.
Several other native groups in northwestern Mexico and southern Arizona have music that appears to have derived from Yaqui or Mayo sources. The Tarahumara of the Chihuahuan Sierra Madre have a pascola dancer who performs on sacred and secular occasions to the music of a solo violin [see TARAHUMARA]. The Tarahumara also have a strong matachiŽn tradition in which the music is supplied by a violin (heard on Tarahumara Matachin Music / Matachines Tarahumaras 1979).
The Warihio [see GUARIJIO] of the Sonoran mountains play pascola music that closely resembles that of the nearby Mayo. TheTohono O'odham (formerly Papago)
For an overview of Yaqui history, see Spicer 1962:46-85 and 1980. Leticia Varela (1986) takes a detailed look at Yaqui traditional music and musical instruments as they existed in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Recordings of Yaqui music have been made by anthropologists and others since the 1920s. The earliest known recordings were made in Guadalupe, Arizona, by Frances Densmore during Holy Week of 1922 (Densmore 1932); these cylinders, housed in the Library of Congress, contain deer songs and Yaqui corridos. In the early 1940s, Laura Boulton visited the Yaqui Regiment in Tlaxcala, south and east of Mexico City. During the 1930s, trying to neutralize the Yaqui as potential armed defenders of Yaqui land, the army recruited able-bodied Yaqui males into this regiment, gave them decent pay, and stationed them far from Yaqui country. Boulton's expedition, which occurred during Holy Week, resulted in a Folkways recording (Boulton 1957). In 1940, Edward Spicer of the University of Arizona arranged for John Green to bring portable recording equipment into Pascua Village near Tucson, Arizona, during Holy Week. Green recorded deer and pascola music, antiphonally sung hymns, and matachiŽn music; this was released on the General label, and reissued on Canyon in 1980. Henrietta Yurchenco recorded in Vicam on the RiŽo Yaqui in 1946, and some of her materials were released on Folkways (Yurchenco 1952). Samuel Charters, vacationing in Guaymas, Sonora, in 1956, happened on a Yaqui harpist playing pascola music on the streets while his son danced; another Folkways album resulted from that encounter (Charters 1957). Finally, the Canyon Record company arranged recording sessions in the RiŽo Yaqui village of Potam (1972), in Old Pascua Village in Tucson (1976) and in a studio near Phoenix; these sessions resulted in three albums (1972, 1976, 1980) containing deer and pascola music, matachiŽn melodies, and Yaqui corridos.
With few exceptions, Yaqui music has been recorded wherever there have been large concentrations of Yaqui in the twentieth century. The contexts of Yaqui recordings have included actual ceremonies, field-recording sessions using portable equipment, and studio sessions. For a videotaped presentation of part of a Yaqui deer and pascola performance see Seyewailo, the Flower World: Yaqui Deer Songs (1978).
Mayo music, like Mayo culture in general, is less recorded, less studied, and less available. The Instituto Nacional de AntropologiŽa e Historia of Mexico issued some Mayo music, including the elusive mouth-resonated bow (baka aapa), on an LP album with notes by Arturo Warman (1976). Canyon issued the album Indian Music of Northwest Mexico (1977), containing recordings of Mayo and related Warihio music. But as with anthropological studies and general attention from the outside world, the Yaqui have received much more notice than their Mayo cousins. Written transcripts of music collected in 1933 from Yaqui and Mayo appear in DomiŽnguez (1962).
Musical Contexts and Genres
Musical Instruments
Learning Music
Musical Change
Further Study
The Yuma are an Amerindian people residing in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. They divide into several subgroups with common cultural traits. The Yuma who occupy Mexican territory include the CucapaŽ (136 persons), the Kumiai (96), the Pai-pai (360), and the Kiliwa (41); all four groups have been in existence for hundreds of years. That each group's language has words and names for the other groups shows that intergroup communication has occurred for generations. Joseph Greenberg (1987:381) places the Esselen-Yuman language in the Hokan family of the Northern Amerind phylum. Data from colonial chroniclers to present-day ethnographers confirms that the Yuma groups have maintained similar cultures. In the beginning, they were hunter-gatherers with a militaristic tradition that made their colonization difficult. Today, they are farmers, cattlemen, and laborers.
One of the first kinds of music described for the native Yuma was not indigenous. It was music taught by religious colonists, including friars Eusebio Francisco Kino and Juan MariŽa Salvatierra. No indigenous Yuma music has survived. Colonists outlawed shamanic songs and established religious holidays and celebrations, especially that of Saint Francis. Written accounts of native music and musical practice survive. To gain local trust, Salvatierra participated in a performance: "entering a circle of dancers, he danced with them for a long time a piece they call, in their language, nimbeŽ" (Lemmon 1977:10[55]:16).
It was not until the 1800s that Yuma regional genres began to be transcribed. Among these pieces are dances and songs that the Yuma used to retain their cultural identity and to defend themselves from Spanish influences. These songs have an important function, characteristic of the Yuma macroculture and its present subgroups: they represent the convergence of communal, intertribal, interethnic, and regional identities. Their homogeneity, which includes mythological references, allows a discussion of Yuma musical tradition with minor internal differences.
Though the Yuma have repertoires sung exclusively by men, men and women participate in music. There are five genres of Yuma song: songs within the narrations
From a structural viewpoint, the songs usually follow the pattern AABA, with repetitions ad libitum. Each section has anywhere from one to four phrases of about the same length and a range of five to twelve tones. From a melodic perspective, section B (levantada) is unique among indigenous musical styles. It involves imitation, partial substitution, lengthening, or insertion of the main melodic principle several tones higher than the tonic while a rattle makes a sort of crescendo-tremolo. In some cases, the "transposed" fragment is sung on tones not used in the main melody. After it, the melody goes back to its former, quieter state, and in some cases it uses an altogether different range of pitches from that of the initial melody. The main melodic character is descending. The melodic range is restricted to anywhere from a perfect fifth to a major ninth. The range of most of a song's parts is limited to major seconds, minor thirds, and major thirds. The tonic is usually the lowest melodic tone, and the major third, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth above it are the most important tones. The scales are essentially pentatonic.
Literary forms such as prose and stanzas are sung and are repeated according to the duration of the melody. Often texts include vocables or words from Yuma languages. At times, the lyrics of the levantada differ from those of the main melody. Though this process might seem confusing, it actually helps the music by emphasizing the melodic line and making it an efficient system of communication. Most songs are shared by the Yuma subgroups, making them part of a long-standing intertribal tradition.
Each song begins with the shaking of a rattle (
The practice of Yuma shamanistic singing has decreased but it is performed in curative practices and rituals. The CucapaŽ shaman alternates singing with movements of his hand, rocking of his body, and cries similar to those in the dance. These practices transcended Yuma territory. In previous times, the CucapaŽ and other groups sought Pima healers (related to the Uto-Aztec), who sang in a style resembling that of the Yuma. Some movements of rattles are specific to shamanic practice.
Dancing
In social dancing, up to four rows of ten persons holding each other's shoulders move in advancing and retreating patterns. While they dance, a singer and backup singers (ayudantes 'helpers') standing in front of them sing in unison. The Kiliwa have another way of dancing: in a squatting position. The singers begin singing while seated, but stand up to join the dance after the first levantada. At times, the bodily movements and rhythms, with accompanying cries, do not follow the musical beat. Some song-dance cycles mark specific times of day: the wildcat (gato salvaje) is a cycle that begins at sunset, with songs about the first stars of the evening; but at midnight, with the coyote's howl, morning pieces begin to be played. When the owl (tecolote) hoots at dawn, the dancing ends.
Festivals and other celebrations
Yuma dances are performed during holidays, times when the Yuma visit other groups. These intertribal, interethnic visits may entail traveling across the border between Mexico and the United States. Such holidays demonstrate the groups' cooperation, particularly in dances that were sometimes the only way men and women met potential mates. Cycles of songs about birds, the peoŽn (a guessing game with bets), cats, and the kuri-kuri (the Yuma cannot translate this word) are sung during holidays like the one held in September, which may fuse an agricultural festival and Mexico's independence day. Aside from holidays, the Yuma attend festivals organized by indigenous institutions on both sides of the border.
Though weddings and birthdays are also celebratory occasions, more emphasis is given to celebrations of funerals and holidays related to death and the dead, though ritual behavior has formally decreased. Until the 1950s, cremation-related ceremonies were common; these were all-night rituals with singing, dancing, and wailing. As in religious and harvest ceremonies, any cycle of songs could be performed, but the Yuma preferred the favorite songs of the deceased.
A rattle is the only instrument now used to accompany Yuma singing (see
Two other idiophones formerly served in alternation with the rattle for the accompaniment of song: a rattle made of deer's hoofs strung together with strings (believed to have originated among the Kumiai, but used only by the CucapaŽ); and the tortoiseshell rattle (among the Kiliwa, the shell's designs were sketches of a future world). A flute and a drum, the only Yuma aerophone and membranophone, are seldom used.
According to the Yuma, people learn melodies, accompanying rhythms, and ceremonies in which singing and dancing play a part, through dreams. Another method of learning is through listening and repeating the songs of festive celebrations. Arizona Yuma culture is considered the creative center for songs, and the CucapaŽ are credited as those who have contributed most to the diffusion of songs. The place of origin of some songs is known, especially of songs that have become diffused during the twentieth century. An example is that of the Pai-pai man who went to learn from the Mohave in Arizona and brought his knowledge to the Yuma, CucapaŽ, and others. Another is that of a Kumiai man who learned to sing in Yuma and taught a Pai-pai man. The Kiliwa consider themselves to be the least skilled in this art, but they attend the performances of their Pai-pai neighbors.
Some Yuma songs are so old that their origins are unknown. Not only do single songs travel; complete cycles of songs have spread throughout different regions. This diffusion of song is common not only among the Yuma, but also among the Uto-Aztec (Yutonahua) people and the Papago (Tohono O?odham), groups that share cycles, genres, and styles of singing. Yuma singers usually attend Uto-Aztec celebrations, and vice versa. Back-and-forth exchange of the Yuma repertoire makes it coherent.
The extensive repertoire of songs accompanied by a rattle suggests that the Yuma have preferred rattle-accompanied songs for generations. This theory is strengthened by the fact that unlike neighboring tribes, the Yuma do not use readily available artifacts, such as pottery and baskets, as percussion instruments.
In the 1970s, the Yuma adopted the six-stringed Spanish guitar (guitarra sexta), the button accordion, the violin, and the bass, with the genres these instruments usually perform in Mexico, such as the popular mestizo tunes heard through the media. Nevertheless, such ensembles rarely appear in the heart of the culture, and they never
Musicians, their songs, and holidays have played important social roles, especially during moments of cultural crisis, because they preserve the social continuity of each community. This is why each group tries to have at least one singer who can hand down his knowledge and art to local children.
Because some Yuma live in the United States, several excellent studies are in English. Two classics are by Frances Densmore (1932) on the Yuma and Yaqui and by George Herzog (1928) on the Yuma. More recently are studies of the Cocopa (CucapaŽ) by William Kelly (1977) and the Kiliwa by Mauricio Mixco (1983, 1985). Numerous investigations of the Yuma in Baja California include those by Gema Camacho Fajardo (1989); Thomas B. Hinton and Roger C. Owen (1957); Jorge MartiŽnez Zepeda (1989); Roger C. Owen, Nancy E. Walstrom, and Ralph C. Michelsen (1969); and MariŽa Teresa Uriarte Castan~eda (1974). This region has been important for Yuma research because of Jesuit influence in Baja California. Alfred E. Lemmon (1977) has written about the Jesuits and their music in that part of Mexico, and Miguel Del Barco (1973) has studied the colonial chroniclers' writings; both studies deal with early Yuma music.
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The Scholarly Record
Pre-Encounter Music
The Historical Record
Widespread Genres
Music and Public Policy
Popular Music
Further Study
In 1843, when Frances CalderoŽn de la Barca, the wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico, wrote that for Mexicans, "music is a sixth sense," she joined a long line of distinguished observers singing the praise of Mexican musical performance. Evidence of the musical achievements of Mexico's indigenous people is abundant. Archaeological remains bear witness to the complexity of musical instruments and performance in native American cultures more than a millennium before contact with Europeans. Sixteenth-century European chroniclers described the prestige and prominence of musical life among the indigenous peoples they encountered, and twentieth-century documentation has revealed that many distinctive native musical cultures survive nearly five centuries after the Spanish conquistador HernaŽn CorteŽs defeated the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma.
During the colonial period, Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian, Jesuit, and other Roman Catholic missionaries found European sacred music a valuable means of teaching the indigenous population the tenets and customs of Christianity. Many pre-Conquest indigenous musical practices were easily transferred to Roman Catholic contexts, so church music prospered. As deadly diseases and Spanish oppression diminished the native American population and as Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans intermingled, a new, mestizo ("mixed") population gradually rose to prominence. African peoples, most brought to Mexico as slaves, had a profound influence on the shaping of mestizo culture and musican impact not yet fully understood or appreciated.
In the century after 1810, when Mexico achieved independence from Spain, many observers published accounts of regionally distinct traditions of music among rural mestizos. After the revolution of 1910, many of these traditions were officially promoted as symbols of national identity, or were widely popularized through the power of Mexico's media. Also, from the adoring nineteenth-century accounts of visiting Italian-style opera singers and from the strong following of nationalist composers in the twentieth century, we know that European secular fine-art music did not escape the Mexican attraction to music.
Many musical threads of Mexico's past have continued to the end of the twentieth century. Rapid urbanization, the intensified commodification of music, an
Written sources on Mexican music history reflect four major periods: the pre-Encounter era (before 1521); the colonial period (1521-1810); the so-called Independence Period (1810-1910); and the twentieth century after 1910. Most musicological sources were written after 1930. Earlier writings were penned mainly by soldiers and missionaries in colonial times, foreign and urban travelers, journalists, and observers of traditional lifeways in the 1800s, and antiquarians around the turn of the twentieth century.
The pre-Conquest and post-Conquest eras are marked by events that began in 1519, when Spanish conquistador HernaŽn CorteŽs and his comrades arrived at what is now San Juan de Uloa, Veracruz. They made their way to TenochtitlaŽn, slew the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma (1520), and took his nephew CuauhteŽmoc captive (1521), bringing an end to Aztec rule over a multitude of Mesoamerican tribes. Since 1325, when TenochtitlaŽn was founded, Aztec domination had extended over territory extending from north and east of what is now Mexico City south to Central America. A rich store of archaeological and written evidence has allowed scholars to surmise much concerning the importance and centrality of music to Aztec public and ritual life, but fewer archaeological remains of other native American civilizations and their greater chronological distance from European documentarians have greatly limited our knowledge of their music. Most notable among the latter civilizations are the Olmec along the Gulf Coast (circa 1200-400 B.C.), the Maya (flourishing circa A.D. 300-900), and pre-Aztec groups of west-central Mexico.
Extensive historical evidence supports the claims that during many periods and in numerous areas of what is now Mexico, music was complex and important. Tubular duct flutes with multiple tubes that were apparently played simultaneously, unearthed on the east and west coasts and perhaps going back more than two thousand years, point to the existence of polyphony. With the possible exception of the musical bow, chordophones are thought to have been absent before their importation by Europeans. Other musical instruments were abundant, and many were found widely throughout Aztec territory. Many tribes used the same instruments, though with names in the local tongue rather than in NaŽhuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
Important ancient Mexican musical instruments include the following, given in their NaŽhuatl names. Idiophones included an ayacachtli, a gourd or gourd-shaped rattle made from clay or gold; an ayotl, a tortoiseshell struck with deer's antlers; a coyolli made of clay, copper, dried fruit, gold, or nutshells (Stevenson 1968:40), often strung around a dancer's legs or waist; a rasp (omichicahuaztli) made from the bone of a deer or a deerlike animal; and a log idiophone (teponaztli). Membranophones included a single-headed drum (hueŽhuetl). Aerophones included a conch trumpet (atecocoli), a clay whistle (huilacapiztli), a wooden or metal trumpet (tepuzquiquiztli), and a tlapitzalli, an end-blown clay or bone tubular duct flute with four holes. Many similar instruments continue in use among native American peoples [see NAHUA].
The Aztec held the hueŽhuetl and the teponaztli in particularly high esteem. They considered these instruments sacred and often paired them and situated them at the center of important ritual dances and other events. The hueŽhuetl was typically fashioned from a hollowed log with three supporting legs carved at one end. Its head, of
Tubular duct flutes were also prominent in Aztec music (see p. 17). An account by Fray Bernardino SahaguŽn, in his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espan~a (Stevenson 1952:23-24), points to the social and ritual importance of such flutes:These two drums playing in unison with the voices stood out quite strikingly, and sounded not at all badly. The performers sang merry, joyful, and amusing melodies, or else some ballad in praise of past kings, recounting wars and such things. This was all in rhymed couplets and sounded well and pleasing.... When it was at last time to begin, eight or ten men would blow their whistles lustily.... Many times a thousand dancers would assemble for this dance and at the least four hundred. They were all leading men, nobles, and even lords. The higher the man's quality the closer was his position with respect to the drums.
In Aztec civilization, music was closely linked to spiritual and material life. Accounts by sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, including Toribio de MotoliniŽa (1941 [1858]), SahaguŽn (1956 [1547]), and Diego DuraŽn (1867-1880), describe many elaborate ceremonies and rituals with music at their center. Robert M. Stevenson has drawn from such accounts to reach numerous conclusions about music in Aztec life. These accounts point to musicians' prestige, the closeness of music's link to ritual and specific ceremonial occasions, the communality of music performance, belief in the divinity and origin of certain instruments, attention to accuracy of pitch and rhythm,At the festival of the sixth month they sacrificed a handsome youth whose body was perfectly proportioned.... They selected for this purpose the best looking among their captives....and took great pains to choose the most intelligent...and one without the least physical defect. The youth chosen was carefully trained to play the flute well, and taught...how to walk about as do the nobles and people of the court.... The one chosen for the sacrifice...was greatly venerated by all those who met him.... He who was thus chosen to die at the next great feast went through the streets playing the flute and carrying flowers.... On his legs he wore golden bells which rang at every step he took . Twenty days before the feast...they married him to four beautiful maidens.... Five days before the sacrifice they worshiped the young man as one of their gods.... [After four days of preparation, they at last] took him to a small and poorly decorated temple which stood near the highway outside the city.... Upon reaching the foot [of the temple] the young man mounted the steps by himself. As he mounted the first step he broke one of the flutes he had played during the past year of his prosperity; on the second step, another, and so on successively until he had broken them all, and had reached the summit. There he was awaited by the priests who were to kill him, and these now grabbed him and threw him on the stone-block. After seeing him pinned down on his back with feet, hands, and head securely held, the priest who had the stone knife buried it deep in the victim's breast. Then drawing the knife out, the priest thrust one hand into the opening and tore out the heart, which he at once offered to the sun.
Music in the colonial period (1521-1810)
New Spain, as Mexico was called when it was a Spanish colony, enjoyed an active musical life. Most documentation surviving from the 1500s and 1600s tells of the learning, creation, and performance of European fine-art music, particularly that associated with the Roman Catholic Church. Missionaries relied heavily on music as a means of enculturating the indigenous population in the principles and ways of the Spanish Catholic tradition. Native Americans responded by taking up European music in large numbers; many of them attained a high degree of musicianship in choral and instrumental performance. New Spain's church life was a rich vein of European musical production until its decline in the 1700s.
Vernacular European and mestizo music outside religious contexts seldom made their way into musical notation. Official documents suggest that musical performance was abundant. It often attracted the reprimand of religious authorities on moral grounds. A violist named Ortiz was among the followers of HernaŽn CorteŽs. Locally made Spanish musical instruments were abundant soon after the Encounter. In the 1600s and 1700s, blacks gave profane musical performances (oratorios, escapularios) during religious festivities, ridiculing the sacred event. Colonial documents show that blacks played harps and guitars, danced publicly, and played important roles in shaping the people's grass-roots music (SaldiŽvar 1934:220-222).
In the late 1700s, as Spanish influence over the New World waned, the vernacular music of New Spain's criollos and mestizos took on a more local character, different from its Spanish roots. Spanish seguidillas, fandangos, sung verses called coplas and letrillas, and other folkloric genres were the models for the creation of new pieces called sones, first documented as such in 1766 in Spanish Inquisition records. Popular theater performed in the Coliseo in Mexico City around 1800 featured tonadillas esceŽnicasshort, simple dramas replete with new sones and other local melodies. The jarabe, a son intended especially for dancing, also emerged around 1800.
Music in the Independence Period: 1810-1910
Independence from Spain and the decline of ecclesiastical influence brought Mexican secular music to greater prominence. Sones, jarabes, and other melodies associated with political insurgence were honored as symbols of national identity. Writers of that time described a Mexican culture alive with musical activity marked by regional traditions and interregional sharing (CalderoŽn de la Barca 1843; Esteva 1844a, 1844b; Prieto 1906:347-351). Traditional Mexican melodies were arranged for piano and exalted in genteel society as national airs (aires nacionales) and little sones of the country (sonecitos del paiŽs). Jarabes flourished, especially in west and central Mexico, gradually evolving into potpourris of excerpts from sones and other popular melodies.
Independence led to the importation of music from Europe, especially Italy and France. Italian opera was imported, imitated, and emulated by Mexican musicians and composers. Outside the confines of the Roman Catholic Church, instrumental fine-art music was virtually unknown in Mexico until the first wave of foreign performers, after 1840 (Mayer-Serra 1941:30). The piano became a standard piece of furniture in the homes of an expanding middle class. European fashions in dancing were adopted unchanged. The waltz (vals), introduced by 1815, met frequent con-
The composition of fine-art music in the 1800s largely imitated European models. Some works, such as Ecos de MeŽxico (1880) by Julio Ituarte (18451905), drew heavily from Mexican melodies but were entirely European in style. Mexican composers Melesio Morales (1838-1908), Gustavo Campa (1863-1934), and JuliaŽn Carrillo (1875-1965) emulated Italian, French, and German musical conventions, respectively (Stevenson 1952:227). Salon music consisted of popular operatic melodies, other diluted versions of elite music (Mayer-Serra 1941:70), and Romantic-style romanzas, contradanzas, caprichos, and so forth. A truly nationalist movement did not occur until the revolution of 1910 put an end to the thirty-five-year presidency of Porfirio DiŽaz and the hegemony of European cultural models it had encouraged.
Music in the postrevolutionary twentieth century
With the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, came a nationalist movement in cultural thought and policy. Intellectuals elevated and idealized Mexico's Amerindian past, and music scholars combed through archives and archaeological relics, recovering pre-Encounter musical achievements. Native American and mestizo songs and dances were collected and published. Mexico's centralized educational system codified and disseminated a select repertoire of music and dance. JoseŽ Vasconcelos, Secretary of Public Education from 1921 to 1924, directed his agency, through its Aesthetic Culture Department, to encourage traditional dance; on the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the republic (1921), thousands watched as thirty couples danced "El jarabe TapatiŽo" in a Mexico City ceremony unveiling the version to be taught throughout the country (SaldiŽvar 1937:9). Rural musicians representing locally distinctive mestizo styles migrated to Mexico City in search of professional musical opportunities.
Art-music composer Manuel M. Ponce (1882-1948) successfully blended traditional harmonic and melodic material into a Romantic musical style and was among the first generation of nationalist composers (Mayer-Serra 1941:147). Carlos ChaŽvez led the next generation a step further as he incorporated native American instru-ments
In the 1930s and 1940s, the nationwide expansion of the radio and recording industries created a demand for local musics that possessed the potential for broad appeal. In the same decades, the Mexican film industry, while it created star entertainers singing in pseudo-folk styles, contributed to public awareness of certain styles of traditional music. All these media were powerful vehicles for foreign music to infiltrate local culture. For intellectuals, music from the United States was a major source of concerna fear that led the music historian Gabriel SaldiŽvar (1937:21) to promote national music as "a barrier of pure nationalism to the avalanche ... of shabby [quinto patio 'slum'] songs" that had invaded Mexico.
Postrevolutionary nationalism remains a potent frame of reference among intellectuals, in government cultural policies, and for the population at large, but other social forces have a major bearing on musical life. A high birthrate, bringing Mexico's population to near a hundred million at the end of the twentieth century, has made it the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, with a high proportion of young people. More than 20 million people reside in metropolitan Mexico City, the most populous city in the world. The country's population is three-fourths urban, though many people have rural roots. The media industry is one of the most influential in Latin America and is in turn greatly influenced by the fashions of the United States. There are more than four hundred radio stations nationwide, most of them commercial. Although the media are the central force in shaping musical tastes, the fabric of Mexico's musical life, like that of most twentieth-century large urban societies, is made up of hundreds of threads, commonly described in several ways: music of "ethnic groups," referring principally to Amerindians; regional musical culture (muŽsica regional); certain widespread genres of music, such as narrative ballads (corridos); folk-derived popular music; international pop-music fashions; and fine-art music.
As mestizo culture took shape, the particular cultural blend, the shared life experiences over time, and the isolation of local communities and regions led to considerable cultural diversity among mestizos. Musical life was more local and regional than it was national, and this tendency was reflected in the mestizo music that had evolved by the 1800s. During the time of self-discovery after national independence, writers such as JoseŽ MariŽa Esteva (1844a:234-235) described many of these traditions in detail:
Jarocho musicians continue to perform most of these sones.The sones danced by the jarochos [of Veracruz] are composed by the jarochos themselves and by other Spaniards [sic], or are from the interior of the republic, and rearranged according to their own tastes; consequently, they dance [the local genres] Canelo, Tusa, GuanaŽbana, etc., along with Manola, Agualulco, and TapatiŽo [genres from other areas]. Most jarocho women dance the same way, but with much grace, and sometimes in certain sones like the Bamba, one admires the agility with which they tap their heels and make a thousand movements, carrying a glass filled with water on their heads without spilling a single drop, or forming a
noose from a sash laid on the ground that they adjust with their feet and which they then untie without using their hands at all.
In the postrevolutionary era, a national road-building effort, other improvements in transportation, a powerful media industry (which bombarded even the most distant village with the latest musical fads), governmental efforts to educate the population about its national culture, and professional opportunities in urban areas for rural musicians altered these patterns profoundly. But even as local and regional musical distinctions were fading, several regional styles of music were increasingly heard, incorporated into a national canon of region-based national identity. This canon has reinforced regional musical identity at its roots, creating national and international markets for the performance of regional music by professional musicians. Regional musical identity persists, though in part solely as a musical style and as an emblem of an idealized rural, regional heritage. Regional musical distinctions are based on repertoire, typical instrumentation, style of performance, related regional traits such as style of speech and vocabulary, traditional dress, local topics alluded to in song texts, and other factors.
At the core of most regional musical styles that emerged with the formation of mestizo culture, particularly those of central Mexico, is the musical genre known as son. As the Spanish seguidillas, fandangos, zapateados, and secular forms widely known as tonadillas were accepted and reinterpreted by mestizos, new genres of music were created, based on their Spanish predecessors. In the early 1800s, the Gran Teatro Coliseo de la MetroŽpoli in Mexico City and other theaters in the provinces were clearinghouses for a variety of genres of song and dance. Short theatrical interludes featured Spanish and mestizo melodies and dances that circulated throughout New Spain. These pieces, often called sones, exemplified a variety of forms, including that of jarabes, pieces documented as early as the late 1700s. Writing in the 1950s, the folklorist Vicente Mendoza stated that the son was "one of the most genuinely Mexican of musical genres," and he estimated that 60 percent of Mexican traditional music, with the son as its nucleus, had origins in the tonadillas popular nearly 150 years before (1956:59, 66). Indeed, many extant sones, including "La Bamba," "El Perico," and "El Palomo," were documented in the early 1800s.
The mestizo son continues to be diverse in form, but a few generalizations are possible. It is oriented toward accompanying social dance, with vigorous, marked rhythm and fast tempo. It is performed most often by small ensembles in which string instruments predominate, with notable region-specific exceptions. Its formal structure is based on the alternation of instrumental sections and the singing of short poetic units called coplas. The mode is usually major, with harmonic vocabulary mostly limited to progressions drawing from I, IV, II7, V, and V7. In contrast to the Amerindian son, the mestizo son is fundamentally secular as is reflected in its textual amorousness and wit, its overall extraversion, and its performative settings.
When danced, the son is usually performed by couples, though some sones have special choreography that may call for other groupings. Triple meter (6/8, 3/4, or a combination of both) predominates, with many exceptions in duple meter. The performing ensembles include melodic instruments, such as violins and harps, and instruments that provide chordal and rhythmic accompaniment corresponding to specific regional styles, especially guitars. Singing is usually in a high vocal range, often in parallel thirds. Men predominate in the public performance of sones, though many women may learn and perform sones, particularly in family settings. Sones are often among the repertoire of music performed at important life-cycle events (especially baptisms, birthdays, and weddings), in public commemorations of the civic-religious
Coplas performed for sones are short poetic stanzas that stand alone as complete thoughts, as opposed to being linked together in a long narrative (as in some other Mexican genres). They usually consist of four to six octosyllabic lines. The even-numbered lines rhyme; the odd-numbered lines may end in consonance or assonance. Two typical coplas are the following:
Date gusto, vida miŽa, | Give yourself pleasure, my love, |
que yo me dariŽa otro tanto. | for I'd give myself some. |
No vaya a hacer que alguŽn diŽa | Don't let it happen that someday |
el gusto se vuelva llanto. | the pleasure changes to tears. |
Buenas noches, sen~oritas; | Good evening, misses; |
muy buenas noches sen~ores. | a very good evening, sirs. |
A todas las florecitas de rostros cautivadores | To all the little flowers |
de rostros cautivadores | with captivating faces |
van las trovas maŽs bonitas | go the prettiest verses |
de estos pobres cantadores. | from these poor troubadours. |
Para bailar la bamba, | To dance the bamba, |
se necesita | one needs |
una poca de gracia | a little grace |
y otra cosita. | and some other little thing. |
Ese lunar que tienes, | That mole that you have, |
cielito lindo, junto a la boca: | dear, next to your mouth: |
no se lo des a nadie, | don't give it to anyone, |
cielito lindo, que a mi me toca. | dear, for it belongs to me. |
Sen~ora, estaŽ usted servida. | Madame, you are served |
SoŽlo le encargo a usted: | I only ask this of you: |
que las deŽcimas no se deŽ, | that the deŽcimas not be given away, |
aunque el propio rey las pida. | even if the king himself requests them. |
Si las tienes aprendida(s) | If you have them learned |
y alguno las necesita, | and someone needs them, |
no le deŽ, porque le quita | don't give them to him, because it takes away |
la gracia y la decorrupta, | their grace and purity, |
que a todo el mundo le gusta(n) | for everyone loves |
las deŽcimas bonitas. | pretty deŽcimas. |
DeŽcimas are present in certain sones of southern Veracruz, and in the valonas, a
Regional
Although these and other unifying traits make a case for mestizo son "supergenre," many regional styles of son are easily recognizable by the distinctiveness of their instrumentation, instrumental techniques, treatment of the copla, vocal nuances, repertoire, associated dances, and other factors. Many regional styles of Mexican music are distinguished by their forms of sones and several other styles in which the son has been historically influential, but not currently central to their identity. Seven principal kinds of son that mark regional musical styles are son huasteco of the north-western geocultural region known as the Huasteca; son jarocho of the southern coastal plain of the state of Veracruz; son istmen~o or son oaxaquen~o of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, mainly in the southwest portion of Oaxaca, overlapping with Chiapas; chilena of the Costa Chica along the Pacific coast of Oaxaca and Guerrero; son guerrerense (son calenten~o) of the Balsas River basin hotlands in Guerrero; son michoacano (son calentano) from the neighboring hotland region of MichoacaŽn; and the son jalisciense of Jalisco. Many regional styles in which the son is influential but not central are those found in YucataŽn and the northern border area.
Son huasteco
The Huasteca comprises portions of the states of Tamaulipas, Hidalgo, Veracruz, QuereŽtaro, and Puebla. The son huasteco, also known as huapango, possibly developed from the NaŽhuatl cuauh-panco 'over the wood', a dance performed on a wooden platform. Son huasteco is typically performed by a trio of musicians playing a violin, a huapanguera (guitarra quinta, a deep-bodied guitar with eight strings in five single and double courses), and a jarana (small five-stringed guitar) (
Son jarocho
The son jarocho takes its name from a term of uncertain origin (possibly from jaras, clubs said to have been wielded by colonial militia) denoting the people of the south-a
It is often supposed that the son jarocho, more than any other regional son tradition, is of African origin. Most sones jarochos are based on a short, cyclical rhythmic-chordal pattern (compaŽs) that drives the music through continuous repetition in the fashion of the West African timeline usually played on a bell or the African-Cuban beat played on claves. Certain sones "El Coco" and "La Iguana" have a responsorial refrain. The style and degree of interaction between musicians, dancers, and audience also suggest a more African style. These factors, with the prominence of African and mulatto people in the region's ethnographic history, further support this notion.
Son istmen~o
Unlike most regional son styles, the son istmen~o customarily is neither performed by string ensembles nor sung. Wind-and-percussion bandas follow the basic pattern of "sung" sections alternating with instrumental interludes, though sections sung in other areas are performed instrumentally in a cantabile style. The bandas follow the models of European brass bands of the 1800s. Most bandas are composed exclusively of native Americans, the banda being a central social institution of many Amerindian communities. The performances at civic and religious celebrations, however, are part of the musical life of mestizos and native Americans alike.
In the southernmost state of Chiapas and the southern edge of Oaxaca, the marimba (
Chilena
Though the cultural antecedents of the chilena from the Costa Chica differ from those of sones rooted in the colonial era, the overall character and musical traits of the genre argue for its inclusion in the son family. It is derived from the cueca, a musical genre and dance performed by Chilean and Peruvian adventurers who stopped in Acapulco on their voyage to California during the gold rush of the mid-1800s. Its Chilean origins are found in the structure of the text and in the choreography, with its dancers' use of handkerchiefs. Until its decline in the mid-twentieth century, an ensemble of harp, five-course jarana, and some form of percussion typically accompanied the chilena. Today, the guitar and six-stringed requinto, the latter similar to the guitar, but smaller and tuned a perfect fourth higher, most often fill that role.
Son guerrerense
From Guerrero, this son, also called son calentano (from caliente 'hot', referring to the hotlands of Guerrero and MichoacaŽn) is associated with the ensemble consisting of one or two violins, six-stringed guitar (formerly a smaller jarana), a tamborita (small, double-headed drum, played on the head and rim with two drumsticks), and occasionally a bass [guitarroŽn), borrowed from contemporary mariachis. The tradition is found mainly in the area of the Balsas River basin of Guerrero. Most sones in this region are called by different names, reflecting differing characters. Those called son are usually fast-paced instrumental melodies intended for dancing, those called gustos are typically strophic songs in triple meter, and those called chilenas resemble those of the Costa Chica.
Son michoacano
In the neighboring hotlands of MichoacaŽn, the son michoacano (son calenten~o) is closely identified with a string ensemble consisting of a large diatonic harp (arpa grande), two violins, a vihuela (five-stringed guitar with a convex back), and a jarana (also known as guitarra de golpe, a deep-bodied guitar with five strings). Unlike the sones of Veracruz and the Huasteca, the son michoacano has fixed musical interludes that separate the sung sections. Occasionally during these instrumental interludes, a violinist or guitarist will kneel down and beat the lower face of the harp with his hands as a percussive accompaniment (
The son is central to the ensemble's repertoire, but two other traditional genres, the jarabe and the valona, are also distinctive of the region. The jarabe is similar in
Son jalisciense
The son jalisciense (son from around the state of Jalisco) is perhaps the most widely known of Mexican sones through its performance by mariachis throughout the country. The son jalisciense is closely related to the son michoacano and to a lesser extent to other sones throughout territory stretching from southern Sinaloa to Guerrero. Previous to the introduction and standardization of trumpets in mariachis during the 1920s through 1940s, the accompaniment to this son was one or two violins, a vihuela, perhaps a guitarra de golpe, and a harp or a guitarroŽn. Most sones jaliscienses are strophic songs in which coplas alternate with melodically fixed instrumental inter-ludes
Two other musical regions influenced by the son, but not identified by a distinct kind of son, are YucataŽn and the northern border area. Regional music of YucataŽn is distinguished by the jarana and the bambuco. The jarana is a couple dance resembling the Spanish jota in its choreography and the meter of its music. The jarana is performed instrumentally, most often by a small orchestra of wind and percussion instruments, and has no text, excepting occasional brief breaks, when a dancer declaims a copla. The compositions usually consist of a series of short melodies, similar to those of a jarabe. Although the jarana may have been rooted partially in the sonecitos of the 1800s and earlier, its repertoire and overall style show few close similarities with those of regional sones. The bambuco is a slow, often melancholic genre of song, apparently brought to the region by Colombian musicians perhaps as late as the early 1900s. It is often sung in two or three-part harmony, accompanied by a guitar, a six-stringed requinto, and a percussion instrument or a bass.
El Norte (the north), the vast and arid region stretching from Tamaulipas to Sonora, took shape as a distinctive cultural region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was sparsely populated through colonial times. In the second half of the 1800s, the growth of ranching and, more important, mining attracted an enormous migration of workers from other regions of Mexico and of professionals and others from European countries such as Germany, Poland, and France. The lack of a strongly unified cultural base made the region fertile ground for the implantation of the European musical and dance vogues that held sway over most of urban nineteenth-century Mexico. Mazurkas, polkas, schottisches, waltzes, and other European dances attained a preeminence that endured throughout the twentieth century. No unique form of son emerged in the north. However, songs, corridos in particular, were set to the rhythms of the European dances, with the 2/4 polka meter being the most favored. The son's overall form of coplas alternating with instrumental melodies and its strong identification with the people (el pueblo) may have deeply influenced this music, which has long been considered distinctive of the north (Reuter 1985:185). This polka-rhythm song, accompanied by accordion as lead melodic instrument, a large twelve-stringed guitar (bajo sexto), an acoustic or electric bass, and perhaps a drumset or a redova (small, hollow woodblock played with two sticks), much like the mariachi, became widely known through its success in the commercial media (
Many regional musical customs, genres, and pieces are shared widely, especially by mestizos. Religious observances paying homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe or reenacting Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem, songs sung by and for children, corridos, serenades (serenatas), the song "Las Man~anitas," and a canon of "national" music and dance derived from regional traditions are some of the most pervasive.
Religious music
More than 90 percent of the Mexican population is nominally Roman Catholic. In addition to more universal liturgical music and sacramental events that include secular music (such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals), there are specifically Mexican religious occasions with their own musical repertoires. Key to the conversion of Mexican Amerindians to Roman Catholicism was the belief that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to an Amerindian named Juan Diego on the hill Tepeyac, located in
Early December is one of the most important occasions for devotional performances by musical-choreographic groups often known as concheros, named for the guitar many of them play, fashioned from an armadillo shell. Concheros, whose performance also may be known as Aztec dance (danza azteca), are active in many parts of Mexico and the southwestern United States, but especially in the federal district (Mexico City) and in the neighboring states to its north and east. Consisting mainly of blue-collar and lower-middle-class mestizo and Amerindian people of both sexes and all ages, these groups take part in many saint's-day celebrations, singing, playing, and dancing while dressed in highly ornate costumes, evoking images of ancient Aztecs. Many carry out long-distance pilgrimages to the BasiŽlica de Guadalupe at the foot of Tepeyac, where they perform tightly coordinated devotional choreographies.
With Christmastide comes las posadas, the musical reenactment of Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. Churches, social groups, and individuals organize these events so children and adults can dress up as characters in local interpretations of the story: Mary, Joseph, shepherds, Bedouins, Romans, devils, and others. The participants divide into pilgrims and innkeepers (caseros). The pilgrims ask for lodging (versos para pedir posada), and the innkeepers deny them a place to stay. In the following lyrics (after Reuter 1985:101-102), the pilgrims sing the first two stanzas, and the innkeepers sing the second two:
En nombre del cielo, | In the name of heaven, |
os pido posada, | I ask of thee shelter, |
pues no puede andar | for my beloved wife |
mi esposa amada. | cannot go on walking. |
No seas inhumano; | Don't be inhumane; |
tennos caridad, | have charity with us, |
que el Dios de los Cielos | for the God of the heavens |
te lo premiaraŽ. | will reward you. |
AquiŽ no es mesoŽn; | This is not an inn; |
sigan adelante. | continue on your way. |
Yo no debo abrir; | I don't have to open; |
no sea alguŽn tunante. | don't be a pest. |
Ya se pueden ir | Now you can go away, |
y no molestar, | and don't bother, |
porque si me enfado, | because if I get angry, |
los voy a apalear. | I'm going to hit you. |
Entren, santos peregrinos; | Enter, holy pilgrims; |
reciban esta mansioŽn, | receive this lodging, |
que aunque es pobre la morada, | for though the abode is humble, |
os la doy de corazoŽn. | it is given to you from the heart. |
Dale, dale, dale. | Hit it, hit it, hit it. |
No pierdas el tino, | Don't lose your aim, |
porque si lo pierdes, | for if you lose it, |
pierdes el camino. | you lose your way. |
No quiero oro; | |
I don't want gold; | no quiero plata: |
I don't want silver: | yo lo que quiero |
what I myself want | es romper la pin~iata. |
is to break the pin~ata. |
Licencia queremos, | We request permission, |
familia decente, | good family, |
y sin ofenderlos | and without offending you |
dispense a esta gente. | forgive these people. |
Naranjas y limas | Oranges and lemons, |
limas y limones | lemons and limes, |
maŽs linda es la Virgen | the Virgin is prettier |
que todas las flores. | than all the flowers. |
Dispense a esta gente | Forgive these people |
que venga a su casa, | who come to your house, |
y si son gustosos, | and if you are pleasant, |
veraŽn lo que pasa. | you will see what happens. |
Naranjas y limas, etc. | Oranges and lemons, etc. |
Ya se va la rama | The rama is leaving |
muy agradecida, | very thankful, |
porque en esta casa | because in this house |
fue bien recibida. | it was welcomed. |
Naranjas y limas, etc. | Oranges and lemons, etc. |
The corrido
The corrido is distributed widely throughout Mexico but has been favored particularly by people in northern and western areas. In simple terms, its historical roots are thought to be in the Spanish romance, a long, often epic ballad, structured in a series of coplas, and the nineteenth-century printed deŽcimas distributed in the fashion of English broadsides as a means of spreading accessible accounts of socially notable events. The revolution beginning in 1910, however, provided the intense popular interest that catapulted the corrido to prominence, as it conveyed the events and often heroic exploits of such revolutionary figures as Francisco Madero, Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and myriad others.
It was in the era of the Revolution (1910-1917) that the form and function of the corrido became relatively fixed. Structurally, the corrido most often consists of a simple melody the length of a copla cast in a I-V7 harmonic framework and repeated for a variable number of coplas constituting the piece. The meter is usually 3/4, though 2/4 is common, particularly in renditions from later years when muŽsica norten~a with its polka rhythm came into fashion. The emphasis is on the text, sung in a straightforward fashion unfettered by musical complexities. Usually, the first copla is a formal introduction, and the final copla is a formal farewell. An excerpt from the corrido "Valentin de la Sierra" illustrates this structure:
Voy a cantar un corrido | I'm going to sing a corrido |
de un amigo de mi tierra. | about a friend from my land. |
LlamaŽbase ValentiŽn | He was called ValentiŽn, |
y fue fusilado y colgado en la sierra. | and he was shot and hung in the sierra. |
No me quisiera acordar: | I don't want to recall: |
fue una tarde ?el invierno | it was a winter afternoon |
cuando, por su mala suerte, | when, from bad luck, |
cayoŽ ValentiŽn en manos del gobierno. | ValentiŽn fell into the hands of the government forces. |
Vuela, vuela, palomita. | Fly, fly, little dove. |
PaŽrate en ese fortiŽn. | Go alight on that fortress. |
Estas son las man~anitas | These are the man~anitas |
de un hombre valiente que fue ValentiŽn. | of a valiant man who was ValentiŽn. |
The corrido continued in its function of memorializing current events, real or imaginary, long after the revolution subsided, in 1917. Battles between police and smugglers (contrabandistas), assassinations, horse races, and a wide range of tragic and comic stories provide fodder for the composers of corridoson both sides of the MexicoU.S. border.
Songs by and for children
Children's game-playing songs are "probably one of the most traditional and persistent" musical repertoires in Mexico (Mendoza 1956:55). This conservatism is undoubtedly tied to the group identities that the songs reflect and engender in the children who sing them. Most Mexican game-playing songs are clearly of Hispanic origin, though many variations on those Spanish prototypes have emerged over the centuries of practice in the New World. Circular games (rondos), the most prominent, include jump rope and clapping songs, in which the song guides the movements of the game. "La paŽjara pinta," "Amo atoŽ matarile rileroŽn," "Don~a Blanca," "A la viŽbora de la mar," "Juan Pirulero," and many others are heard on school playgrounds, parks, streets, and other places where children play. The variety of melodies and texts is great, but most involve constant repetition and the use of nonlexical syllables (Reuter 1985:118).
Lyric songs not associated with playing games
Mexican children have three other general kinds of children's song: lyric songs not associated with playing games, songs derived from adults' songs, and songs sung by adults to young children. Of the first variety, "La Rana" ('The Frog') exemplifies songs that tell cumulative stories (in the fashion of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm") (after Mendoza 1956: musical example 85):
Cuando la rana se sale a solear, | When the frog goes out to sun itself, |
viene la mosca y la quiere picar: | the fly comes along and wants to bite it: |
la mosca a la rana, | the fly to the frog, |
la rana en el agua: | the frog in the water: |
Ącua, cua, cua! | croak, croak, croak! |
Cuando el herrero se sale a pasear, | When the blacksmith goes out for a walk, |
viene la Muerte y lo quiere matar: | Death comes and wants to kill him: |
la Muerte al herrero, | Death to the blacksmith, |
el herrero al cuchillo, | the blacksmith to the knife, |
y el cuchillo al buey, | and the knife to the ox, |
y el buey al agua, | and the ox to the water, |
y el agua a la lumbre, | and the water to the fire, |
y la lumbre al pato, | and the fire to the duck, |
y el pato al perro, | and the duck to the dog, |
y el perro al gato, | and the dog to the cat, |
y el gato al ratoŽn, | and the cat to the mouse, |
y el ratoŽn a la rana, | and the mouse to the frog, |
la rana a la mosca, | the frog to the fly, |
la mosca a la rana, | the fly to the frog, |
la rana en el agua: | the frog in the water: |
Ącua, cua, cua! | croak, croak, croak! |
Children's songs derived from adults' songs are of several kinds. Centuries-old Spanish romances, such as "Delgadina," "MambruŽ se fue a la guerra," and "El sen~or don gato," were appropriated and developed by children. Many songs created and recorded especially for children by composer-singers such as Francisco Gabilondo Soler (pseudonym Cri-Cri, el Grillito Cantor 'Cri-cri, the Little Cricket Minstrel') have made their way into oral tradition. And of course, the unrelenting presence of commercial advertising jingles and theme songs from soap operas and children's programs in the popular media has left its mark on the songs children sing, particularly in urban areas.
Songs sung by adults to children consist mainly of lullabies (arrullos) and coddling songs (cantos de nana). Arrullos often involve repetition and nonlexical syllables, in keeping with the purpose of putting an infant to sleep. Cantos de nana often refer to the parts of the body and are combined with movements to develop the infant's physical coordination.
Other musical practices widespread in Mexico include serenatas, the related song "Las Man~anitas," and songs and dances (usually associated with a particular cultural region) that have spread through the educational system or the popular media. Serenatas (apparently from sereno 'night watchman', referring to the early hours when their performances traditionally occur) are courting, congratulatory, or devotional serenades. A man may contract or organize a group of musicians and unexpectedly serenade his lover outside her home. The recipient of the serenade may otherwise be a person celebrating a birthday or other happy eventor even a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe (particularly on 12 December).
The song "Las Man~anitas" is often the first song sung on these occasions. In earlier times, the term man~anitas 'early morning' was nearly synonymous with serenata, and included a range of songs that varied greatly according to local custom. Currently, it often refers to a specific song, an arrangement combining portions of two different man~anitas "Las Man~anitas Mexicanas" and "Las Man~anitas TavatiŽas."
In the postrevolutionary era, numerous governmental efforts have promoted a common canon of folklore throughout the country. Public-school curricula include a small repertoire of traditional songs and dances, and many universities have ongoing ensembles studying and performing folkloric music and dance from a variety of styles. The federal government's social security agency (Seguro Social) sponsors music-and-dance groups and presentations as part of its concern for the well-being of the population. Representations of folkloric traditions are a key element in public and privately funded efforts to promote tourism. Other sectors of government, the armed forces and police departments, for example, may subsidize the performance of such music and dance.
There is no greater archetype of this canon than "El Jarabe TapatiŽo." Jarabe ('syrup' in Mexican Spanish) referred in Mexico to a dance piece as early as 1789, when "El Jarabe Gatuno" was condemned by Inquisition authorities on moral grounds. In the early 1800s, the jarabe was still a single, short dance, most likely included in what were called sones. Its identity as part of an oppressed mestizo culture catapulted it to prominence as the Mexican insurgents won independence from Spain. It thus became one of the earliest musical symbols of national identity. By 1900, it was a series of short sones linked together as one composition and was most prevalent in the west-central states of Colima, Durango, Jalisco, MichoacaŽn, and Nayarit. Some of these jarabes, such as "El Jarabe TapatiŽo," were arranged for piano and published, becoming established as standard versions. In performances of "El Jarabe TapatiŽo" in Mexico City in 1918, the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova popularized choreographic innovations that further standardized the piece. By 1921, when, in Mexico City, performers premiered the version of "El Jarabe TapatiŽo" to be taught in the nation's public schools, its primacy and the title of "El Jarabe National" were fixed, though at the expense of losing much of its dynamic quality as a social dance.
Folk-derived popular music
Though the recording and broadcasting of regional musics had already been underway during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the major explosion in Mexico's popular media history did not occur until the fourth decade. The powerful radio station XEW began broadcasting in 1930. It was followed by XEB and others, creating an enormous demand for live musical performances to fill the air time. Seeking opportunities, musicians representing regional musical traditions flocked to Mexico City. In 1935, the Victor Talking Machine Company opened Mexico's first major record-production facility, expanding the availability of recordings of homegrown music. The Mexican film industry prospered in the 1930s and 1940s, and many influential films, such as "AllaŽ en el Rancho Grande" (1936), "Cielito Lindo" (1936), and "Ay Jalisco no te rajes!" (1941) portrayed regional musicians, often to evoke an idealized sense of rural life. Mariachi, jarocho, marimba, and other kinds of typical music (muŽsica tiŽpica) were heard and seen throughout Mexico and abroad.
The dramatic growth of the radio, recording, and film industries during this time had major and profound effects on Mexican musical life. Professional composers proliferated, many building on the Mexican tradition of the nineteenth-century romantic song (cancioŽn romaŽntica). Pseudo-folk and urban derivative styles of music emerged from rural predecessors. The communal character of regional music was displaced by a star system promoted by the commercial media. Foreign folk-derived genres, such as the Cuban bolero and the cumbia [see PANAMA], took hold at
Mexican song: the cancioŽn romaŽntica and the cancioŽn ranchera
The gamut of Mexican genres, structures, styles of interpretation, and accompanying instrumentation is great. Its range and diversity reflect the musical currents influencing the creation and performance of song in Mexico, particularly since the mid 1800s. It was during this timeof European romanticism, Italian opera, and the rise of the middle classthat a strain of sentimental and nostalgic composition emerged in Mexico. The terms cancioŽn romaŽntica and cancioŽn sentimental described this musical vein, which was much in vogue into the early twentieth century and still constitutes a major thread of contemporary Mexican musical life. With Yradier's "La Paloma" (see above), Veracruzan composer Narciso Serradells "La Golondrina," cast similarly in an habanera meter, was an important prototype for songwriters between 1870 and 1900.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Yucatecan composers, influenced by the Colombian bambuco and Cuban parlor music, contributed greatly to the shaping of canciones romaŽnticas. The prolific Yucatecan songwriter Augusto "Guty" CaŽrdenas Pinelo (1905-1932) wrote many songs, such as "Rayito de Luna," that became embedded in the growing national musical repertoire. MariŽa Grever (1884-1951), based in New York for most of her musical career, created songs such as "JuŽrame," "Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado," and "Mun~equita Linda," and movie music with wide appeal in the United States, Latin America, and abroad. AgustiŽn Lara (1897?-1970) brought a new urban and more openly sensual sensibility to the cancioŽn romaŽntica in more than five hundred compositions, such as "Mujer." His early prominence on Mexican radio and in films in the 1930s had a broad impact on musical tastes and contributed to the popularity of his music.
Typically, the cancioŽn romaŽntica was, and continues to be, performed by a soloist or a duo or trio of singers, often accompanying themselves on guitars, perhaps with a form of subtle percussion such as maracas or guširo. One such group, TriŽo Los Panchos, which became enormously popular in the late 1940s, contributed greatly to the subsequent prominence of the Cuban-derived, slow-tempo, romantic bolero. Its style of interpreting a variety of songs with suave, mellifluous voices singing in two-or three-part harmony forwarded the close association of such groups to canciones romaŽnticas and the status of the romantic trio as a major Mexican musical stereotype.
The cancioŽn ranchera came about with the mass migration of rural people to urban areas, Mexico City in particular. Near the end of the twentieth century, urban Mexicans preserved a strong identity with their rural roots. The emergence of the cancioŽn ranchera is closely linked to the rise of the popular media and to the popularity of folk-derived ensembles such as the modern mariachi. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the century, popular singer-actor stars of the screen such as
Mariachi
Since the 1930s, the mariachi (
The old-time mariachione or two violins, a guitarra de golpe and/or a vihuela, and a harp or some form of string bassstill exists in some rural communities of Jalisco and NayariŽt, where it plays a generations-old repertoire of sones, jarabes, and religious pieces called minuetes. Its presence has been eclipsed almost entirely, though,
The preeminent and archetypal modern mariachi since the 1940s has been Mariachi Vargas de TecalitlaŽn. Under the guidance of the late Silvestre Vargas, Mariachi Vargas came to dominate commercial mariachi music. It appeared regularly in the major electronic media, accompanying the most prominent singers of muŽsica ranchera, and producing countless recordings. Its musical arrangements of traditional pieces and modern compositions set the standard for virtually all modern mariachis throughout Mexico and abroad. Since the 1950s, the group's close collaboration with the composer-arranger RubeŽn Fuentes, who joined Vargas as a musician in 1945, had a profound impact on mariachi music. His innovations brought the harmonic language of contemporary popular music and new instrumental techniques and rhythms into the canon of mariachi conventions.
Other folk-derived popular musics
The twentieth century saw the creation of many folk-derived musical expressions. In the early decades, the orquesta tiŽpica, an ensemble of musicians in folkloric garb, played regional melodies on a variety of (primarily stringed) instruments. Miguel Lerdo de Tejada was its leading exponent. The Veracruzan harpist AndreŽs Huesca, the requinto player Lino ChaŽvez, and others brought standardized arrangements and compositions in a modified son jarocho style to audiences in the 1940s and later.
Other regional styles of music penetrated or were coopted by the mainstream Mexican commercial media. In the 1950s, the accordion-driven muŽsica norten~a entered the commercial market through actor-singers such as the witty Lalo GonzaŽlez "Piporro," and in the 1960s and 1970s through successful recording artists such as Cornelio Reyna. By the early 1990s, "new" pop groups called bandas, emulating the raucous, brass-woodwind-percussion sounds of two closely related ensembles, Sinaloa-style bands (bandas sinaloenses) and Zacatecas-style bands (tamborazos zacatecanos), dominated Mexican pop. The marimba ensemble, though never a major force in the popular media, was an indispensable musical icon, often used to represent the cultural milieu of Chiapas and southern Oaxaca. Although each of these styles reflected the fads of commercial popularity, through widespread recognition as a music representing part of Mexico's national cultural identity, they all filled a long-lasting niche in Mexican musical tastes.
International popular music in Mexico and Mexican music abroad
Although homegrown musical strains, muŽsica ranchera in particular, account for a major share of the commercially dominant popular music in Mexico, pop-music fashions from abroad hold sway among urban people. Interest in foreign musical models is not new. The Mexican middle class that emerged in the 1800s adored European salon music and opera. A passionate interest in the Cuban danzoŽn, kindled in the 1920s and 1930s, waned but continued throughout the century. American dance orchestras of the 1940s and 1950s spawned countless Mexican imitators and internationally popular composer-bandleaders such as Luis Arcaraz. MuŽsica tropicalin its most general sense, referring to rhythmically lively urban dance music of Caribbean origingained a large following. Beginning in the late 1940s, the mambo, the cha-cha-chaŽ, the cumbia, and, later, salsa penetrated Mexican markets and entered the repertoires of many kinds of musical ensembles throughout the
Much Mexican popular music and, to a much lesser extent, grass-roots traditional music has found a following outside Mexico. With the rise of the commercial music complex in the early twentieth century, Mexican musicians recorded and performed abroad. The first mariachi recording is thought to have been made in Mexico City in 1908. Folkloric troupes of dancers and musicians presented theatrical renditions of regional music and dance on every continent, especially in Europe and the Americas. TriŽo Los Panchos, which formed in New York, toured widely in the United States before settling in Mexico. Commercially aspiring ensembles saw touring abroad, particularly to economically prosperous locations like New York and Los Angeles, as means of gaining greater recognition and profits. Powerful radio stations such as XEW broadcast Mexican music deep into Latin America. Many Mexican musicians resettled in other countries. At the first annual Encuento del Mariachi in Guadalajara in 1994, mariachis from the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Aruba, Venezuela, Italy, Belgium, Japan, and other countries joined their Mexican counterparts. In the final decades of the twentieth century, many Mexican artists, from Mariachi Vargas de TecalitlaŽn, to singers such as Angeles Ochoa and the veteran Lola BeltraŽn (d. 1996), to composer-singers such as Armando Manzanero, Luis Miguel, and Juan Gabriel, had major followings abroad. The combination of long-proven Mexican musical productivity and a large and successful Mexican music industry exporting music around the world opened a broad swath in many parts of the world, especially among Spanish-speaking communities.
English-language sources on pre-Conquest, colonial, and nineteenth-century music in Mexico are few, but Robert M. Stevenson offered a cornucopia of insightful documentation, synthesis, and critical references of previous scholarship in Music in Aztec and Inca Territory (1968) and his earlier Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey (1952). Peter Crossley-Holland offered new analysis of pre-Aztec musical instruments of West Mexico and an appeal for greater scholarly collaboration among musicologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, physicists, and others in his Musical Artifacts of Pre-Hispanic West Mexico (1980). Among the milestone English-language articles on the topic are Charles Boile`s' works on flutes and the musical bow (1965, 1966a, 1966b) and E. Thomas Stanford's analysis of music-and-dance terms in three sixteenth-century native-language dictionaries (1966).
Several Mexican scholars have published important works in Spanish on Mexican music history. Gabriel SaldiŽvar broke much new ground through his examination of colonial documents and ancient instruments, resulting in his Historia de la muŽsica en MeŽxico (eŽpocas precortesiana y colonial) (1934). Samuel MartiŽ's Instrumentos musicales precortesianos (1955; second edition, 1968) offers photographic illustrations of musical artifacts, and his Canto, danza y muŽsica precortesianos (1961) employs iconography, historical accounts, and ethnographic musical transcriptions in search of knowledge about Aztec song, dance, and music. Articles and book chapters by the folklorist Vicente T. Mendoza (1938, 1956), Daniel Castan~eda (1933, 1942), and Carmen Sordo Sodi (1964) are among the many shorter publications treating preen-counter music. Otto Mayer-Serra's Panorama de la muŽsica mexicana desde la independencia hasta la actualidad (1941) offered a critical treatment of fine-art music from 1810 to the 1930s.
Though scholarly research on tribal, folk, and popular music in the final decades of the twentieth century has built on and advanced the accomplishments of SaldiŽvar, Mendoza, Stevenson, and others, many musical traditions still lack comprehensive, in-depth, authoritative documentation. Jas Reuter's La muŽsica popular de MeŽxico (fourth edition, 1985) offers a brief, introductory overview of tribal and mestizo music. The Serie de discos edited by Irene VaŽzquez Valle (1967-1979) is the most comprehensive effort to document a panorama of native American and mestizo musical traditions through recordings and descriptive notes. Other important recordings of Mexican music are by Lieberman et al. (1985), Montes de Oca H. (1994), Strachwitz (1992, 1993, 1995), and Strachwitz and Sheehy (1994). In Historia de la muŽsica popular mexicana (1989), Yolanda Moreno Rivas synthesized much background and biographical detail on the origins, leading personalities, and major trends of popular musical styles. The music of Mexico's Amerindian peoples, particularly that of smaller, more marginal, groups, is acutely in need of further documentation.
Central America connects Mexico and South America. In pre-Columbian times, the region was the center of one of the world's most celebrated and musically complex civilizationsthe Maya. Three centuries of Spanish colonial rule and independent evolution since 1821 have wrought differing national complexions from varied cultural roots. For example, most Guatemalans are Amerindians, most Costa Ricans claim European heritage, and nearly half the Belizean population is African. Musical cultures of the region reflect these differences. European-derived musical instruments such as the harp, guitar, and violin are popular among native American and mestizo groups.
Amerindian Cultures
Spanish, African, and Mestizo Heritages
Urban Migration
The term Central America denotes the region comprising seven nations: Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama (map 10). To their north is Mexico, with 92 million people living in 1,216,510 square kilometers. The seven countries of Central America, by contrast, have an aggregate population of 32 million, only one-third as large as that of Mexico, and with 325,142 square kilometers of territory, about one-fourth the size of Mexico.
With the exceptions of Belize and Panama, the Central American countries were briefly united after their declaration of independence from Spain (1821) as the United Provinces of Central America (1823-1826). A mild desire for greater unity remains, though it is consistently thwarted by nationalism and a long-standing tradition of local political control. Immediately after independence, Panama joined its southern neighbor, Colombia, but separated from Colombia in 1903 and came to be considered part of Central America. Belize was a British colony, British Honduras, until 1973, when it attained independence.
Prehistoric Central America was home to two of the world's most celebrated civilizations. The apogee of Mayan civilization, centered in Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize (A.D. 600 to 900), saw notable accomplishments in astronomy, mathematics, systems of writing, and expressive culture. The Aztec Empire, farther north, encountered in 1519 by the conquistador HernaŽn CorteŽs, impressed the Spanish adventurers with its pyramids, ceremonies, and music. Its influence extended from the northern areas of central Mexico southward to what is now the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Native American culture in Central America is often simplistically expressed in terms of these civilizations, but hundreds of distinctive cultures and languages existed within and alongside them (see map 3).
The Amerindian population suffered a steep decline in the 1500s, as the Spanish invaders practiced abusive policies toward their New World subjects and unwittingly carried diseases against which native peoples had little resistance. Nevertheless,
Localized practices vary the general pattern. Most Guatemalans are Amerindians, most Costa Ricans primarily claim European heritage, and nearly half the Belizean population is African. Spanish is the official language of six of the countries, but English is the official language of Belize and is the lingua franca in much of the sparsely populated east coast of Central America, where immigrants from English-speaking Caribbean islands settled. Numerous Maya-related and other Indian languages are spoken by about one-fifth of Central Americans, especially in Guatemala. More than 85 percent of the Central American population is at least nominally Roman Catholic, but native American religious beliefs and practices continue in some places, and evangelistic Protestant sects have gained ground in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere.
The twentieth century saw sweeping societal changes that profoundly influenced culture and music. Massive migration to urban areas left about one-half of Central Americans living in cities. The birthrate in Central America, one of the highest in the world, drastically increased the population. Poverty and civil unrest led to significant migration northward to Mexico and beyond. The growth of electronic media and the music industry gave an advantage to popular musics of the more developed countries. On radio and television and in films, Mexican music had an enormous impact on Spanish-speaking Central Americans and was in turn influenced by popular music of the United States.
Central America is a region of striking cultural contrasts and hundreds of musical threads. The modern descendants of ancient Amerindian cultures, rural-rooted mestizo traditions, African-derived traits, and international urban popular musics exist side by side, giving rise to new musical hybrids. Musical life is filled with possibilities as an increasingly younger population charts its course into the future.
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Further Study
The Bribri and the CabeŽcar live in six tropically forested reservations along the Atlantic and Pacific slopes of the Talamanca Mountains in southeastern Costa Rica. At the time of their first contacts with Spaniards (1502), these peoples appear to have inhabited the Matina Valley on the Caribbean coast (Stone 1977:165). Fleeing from Spanish settlers, they settled in Talamanca. In 1605, captain Diego de Sojo y Pen~aranda succeeded in overpowering them and founding Santiago de Talamanca, which became the first Franciscan mission in the area (FernaŽndez Guardia 1975:168).
Until the late 1800s, the Bribri and the CabeŽcar strongly resisted non-Indians' attempts to convert and settle the area, first by colonial powers and later by Costa Rican authorities. In 1909, the Costa Rican government and the ChiriquiŽ Land Company, a subsidiary of United Fruit Company, signed an agreement by which the latter acquired rights to begin banana production in the Talamanca Valley (Borge and Villalobos 1994:35-45). Most Bribri and CabeŽcar were removed from the lower portions of the valley and established in the upper floodplain. After the 1930s, when the United Fruit Company abandoned the area, indigenous populations returned and resettled there.
Bribri and CabeŽcar clans are traditionally matrilineal. They distinguish themselves by mythical territorial origins defining their kin relationships, positions within political and religious hierarchies, and occupational specialties. Communities that resettled the lower floodplain of the Talamanca Valley have undergone acculturation since 1940, marked to a large extent by the establishment of schools for Indians and the pressure of agricultural, timber, oil, and other industries. In 1977, after intense lobbying by indigenous organizations, the Costa Rican congress created the Bribri and CabeŽcar reserves, now administered by local populations.
Because the languages, kin relationships, and political and religious organization are similar, the Bribri and the CabeŽcar are often considered a tribal unity (Bozzoli 1986:86). Both their languages fall within the Western or Archaic Group of the Macro-Chibchan Phylum. Most Bribri and CabeŽcar maintain their languages, with many of their traditional customs and beliefs. It is estimated that in the mid-1990s
A maraca (tošnoš), made of a gourd (Crescentia cujete) filled with platanillo seeds (Heliconia spp.), is used in traditional Bribri and CabeŽcar funerals and medicine. Through perforations drilled in one end of the gourd, a cord is passed to a bird-bone handle. The blur cue, a sun-dried armadillo shell, is played by rubbing its ribbed sides with a wooden stick or a large seed (Salazar 1992:36-37). It accompanies songs and dances, usually with the sabak (
The Bribri and CabeŽcar have three kinds of aerophones (Salazar 1992). The talacabe is an end-blown flute made of bird bone or carrizo (Chusquea spp.) with a
According to Bribri respondents, singing is the preferred communicative medium of Siboš. An essential aspect of Bribri culture, it appears in traditional narratives, life-cycle rituals, and medicine. Until the early 1900s, the Bribri, like the CabeŽcar, were governed by a hierarchy of ritual specialists, official carriers of the oral traditions: a high priest (uŽse^košl, the last of whom died in 1910), a funerary singer (stsošŽkošl), a manipulator and burier of corpses (oŽkošm), a master of ceremonies (bika`kla), and a doctor (awaŽ). Ritual specialists retain an important role in the political and religious lives of indigenous populations. Members of certain clans continue to train to become practitioners of these ritual offices, of which singing is an important component.
Ritual songs
Sacred narratives (siwa? paŽkošl 'histories') include sung dialogues between Siboš and other characters. Ritual specialists perform them at night for adults and children. These narratives, mythological in content, serve as a major means of preserving and shaping Bribri and CabeŽcar history, custom, and morals, and are an important form of entertainment.
According to one mythic narrative, the Bribri are descendants of maize seed that Siboš left in Alto Lari, about 400 meters above sea level along the Lari River in the Talamanca Valley. Some seeds sprouted and became animals, which formed clans and tribes. Other narratives tell of the creation of the world, the sea, the sky, and other salient aspects of the Talamanca landscape, flora, and fauna (Bozzoli 1977).
Birth, menarche, pregnancy, illness, and death call upon the awaŽ to care for members of his community. The therapy he provides usually involves singing to the rhythm of his rattle, cleansing by blowing tobacco on the patient, and treating the patient with forest-collected plants. The Bribri traditionally believe that illness is caused by entities that can be set free by oloŽbsoŽ, the guardian of "where the sun rises." The awaŽ heals people or cleanses objects by sending these entities to the realm of bukublu, guardian of "where the sun sets" (Bozzoli 1983:126-127).
To become an awaŽ (pl. awaŽpa), an apprentice must memorize lengthy ritual songs and sacred narrativesa process called se? suleŽte`ke 'our learning'. The songs, put under the category of siwa? 'knowledge', are classified according to particular textural traits and performance contexts. Healing songs directed to patients or their illnesses are siwa? kule` 'shouted knowledge', whereas those done to communicate with Siboš's messengers are siwa? kus 'whispered knowledge', which is sometimes only thought. The awaŽ recognize two other styles of singing used in teaching an apprentice: siwa? ajkošbta 'recited knowledge' and siwa? ajkoški 'sung knowledge'.
Ritual songs performed by awaŽ have a series of repeated melodic phrases in irregular rhythms with accents depending on textual requirements, plus a nasal quality (Jones 1974:429-433). The songs are sung in a linguistic register different from everyday speech, featuring repetition, vocables, and archaic vocabulary. They follow this sequence: those in which the awaŽ presents himself and the patient to Siboš; those directed to the particular illness, describing its nature and history; and those asking Siboš to send the illness back to "where the sun sets." For serious illnesses, the last follows the drawing of images on a piece of barkwood (Ochroma lagopus) that represent Siboš, the illness, and the animals and plants that cure it (Bozzoli 1982:88).
Public schools, health-care clinics, and missionaries have discouraged traditional medicine, but awaŽpa continue to be sought, usually in conjunction with non-Indian medicine, by older members of the community and sometimes by non-Indians from urban centers outside reservations. Many awaŽpa are well known locally, and even internationally, and since the 1980s have created organizations working to maintain traditional knowledge and ways and to develop projects of benefit for their communities.
Bribri funerals have several main events: wrapping the cadaver and placing it in the forest (done shortly after an individual's death); packing the disjointed skeleton and storing it in a provisional shelter (done six to nine months after the death); sula`r 'music for our people', a ceremony; and a procession to the ossuary of the clan of the deceased, leading to burial of the bone-bearing package (Cervantes 1990:26-47). In the course of these funerary activities, members of the community narrate the life of the deceased on several occasions, each time in an increasingly elaborated fashion, and always in recitative.
Though all ritual specialists have some knowledge of the musical traditions, the stsošŽkošlpa (sing, stsošŽkošl) are assigned the role of specialists in funerary music. The songs for the sula`r, known as sblaŽuk, are sung by the stsošŽkošl, accompanying himself on a ceremonial gourd rattle (tošnoš), and by his assistants, the stsošŽkošl sini?pa (Cervantes 1990:42-43). The stsošŽkošl sings while his assistants and other men play sabak or armadillo shells, dancing in a circle. On such occasions, women do not play instruments, but they participate in a linear dance also carried on during the sula`r, though the funerary singer, his assistants, and other players stand outside the row.
Traditionally, funerary singers came only from certain clans. According to one mythical narrative, they originated from four tropical-forest birds: the macaw (Ara macao), the toucan (Ramphasta swainsonii), the parrot (Amazona sp.), and the quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno). Each bird is said to have its own vocal style that characterizes funerary singers from different clans. These birds in turn had been born from taŽ, a plant whose seeds are used in ceremonial rattles (Bozzoli 1977:185-186). The institution of the stsošŽkošl has practically disappeared, and in most areas the awaŽ has taken over his ritual functions.
Secular song and dance
Other Bribri songs fall under the general category of jtsošk 'to sing'. Bribri men sing work-accompanying songs (also called kule`); women and girls sing ajkoš`yošn_uk 'extemporaneous song' as they wash clothes or grind foodstuffs. The latter term also denotes dialogues sung between women (Bozzoli 1982:66). To kinfolk on birthdays and other occasions, women often sing personalized songs, seen as amicable expressive gestures. Other Bribri songs, known as ajkoški 'songs elaborated or prepared with a goal', tell of the birth or death of someone in the community, or mark first menstruations and weddings.
People commonly dance during the corn-beer fiesta and communal meetings. The sošrboš, a dance done in a circle by men and women, young and old, commemorates
When danced by a group, the sošrboš is performed responsorially by a singer (awaŽ, oŽkošm, or bikakla) and dancers. The main singer sings a musical phrase that all other participants repeat. As the dancers repeat this phrase, the singer interjects more elaborate phrases. The sošrboš and other song-dances are often accompanied by a sabak, which the CabeŽcar of ChirripoŽ use to accompany other dances, including the muakuke 'game of the drums' and the bulsique. The latter resembles the sošrboš, but the songs that accompany it, exhibiting greater variation in pitch, rhythm, and accent, are more complex than those sung by the awaŽ (Jones 1974:430).
Singing and dancing add to youthful entertainment. Amateur musicians are often called to prepare ensembles for villagewide celebrations. Vocal and instrumental music performed by Bribri young people is markedly influenced by the popular music of Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, and even the United States, partly because of the impact of national and local broadcasts, and partly, later in the twentieth century, by the increasing availability of boomboxes.
The Bribri and the CabeŽcar have been the focus of numerous ethnographic studies, including those by Bozzoli (1982, 1986), Gabb (1875), Salazar (1980), Sapper (1978), Skinner (1920), and Stone (1962). These works provide historical depth to current understandings of Bribri and CabeŽcar ceremonial uses of song and music, particularly in funerals and medicine. Sapper (1978) transcribes several yošcsoro melodies collected in the ChirripoŽ area; Stone (1962) includes the texts of more than fifteen songs and other information about music. Bozzoli (1986) provides the most detailed study of Bribri medicine to date.
Acevedo (1986) gives an introduction to Bribri and CabeŽcar musical culture. Jones (1974) and Salazar (1992) have studied musical systems and instruments in detail. Cervantes (1990) deals with local funerary rites and songs from an ethnography-of-communication perspective, and provides important analyses of linguistic, oral-poetic, and communicative features of these events. Further research is needed on native musical style and performance, oral composition, participant aesthetics, and indigenous systems of classifying genres and instruments. Linguistic and oral-poetic analyses of other genres such as siwa? and jtsošk are lacking.
Customs and Musical Culture
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Social Aspects of Music
Further Study
Kuna compositions and choreographies unfold according to musical principles that predate European contact. The Kuna are famous for their ability to modernize their lives, reflecting the world around them in ways that preserve and maintain what is uniquely theirs. As a display of knowledge and artistic skill, they weave foreign elements into their traditional music. Men who have worked on foreign ships relay stories of their travels; these are woven into lullabies and historical chants. Kuna groups that have danced in festivals in Panama, Latin America, North America, and Europe bring back foreign styles of dancing that are imitated in Kuna choreographic sequences, as in "The Way Americans Dance," which depicts square-dance figures. The cultural cohesion and adaptability of the Kuna people are related to their historical dispersion over a wide geographical area.
Numbering about thirty thousand, the Kuna (Cuna) live along several rivers in northern Colombia and eastern Panama, and along Panama's Caribbean coast and on the San Blas Islands. Kuna expressive culture displays the wealth and imagination afforded by leisure, strong communal organization, and an unbroken heritage of indigenous civilization. The Kuna are among the most extensively documented living nations of Latin America. They comprise several slightly different cultural groups sharing a common language and traditions, including music. These groups are distinguished by slight differences in vocabulary, style of speaking, interpretation of oral traditions, and music.
Kuna ancestors once lived in the northern Colombian highlands, where the development of their material and expressive culture reflected a riverine way of life. Some village groups spread along the rivers into the Colombian lowlands toward the Gulf of Uraba. Others spread northward through the mountains into eastern Panama, where they settled along rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean. These populations ranged across 300 kilometers and were separated from each other by dense jungle and, in some cases, by other native groups. Offshoots of the mountain and river populations in eastern Panama and northern Colombia formed coastal villages
The island-dwelling Kuna, now far outnumbering the mountain- and river-dwelling Kuna, maintain their highland heritage. They travel up and down the coast in canoes, they use the metaphorical structure of rivers and pathways to describe their traditional arts, and they construct their musical instruments, mostly flutes and panpipes, of materials from the mountains. These instruments have a closer affinity with instruments used by Andean peoples of South America than with those used by neighboring lowland peoples of Central America. Each island village maintains social, cultural, and political ties with its mainland relatives, whose linguistic and musical styles are consequently reflected throughout the island population.
Because the Kuna are geographically scattered, interspersed with other native groups and with Latin American populations, they place a high premium on communication between the distant members of each of their cultural groups, and among their different groups as a whole. Much of this communication is carried out musically during periodic gatherings when the cultural leaders of different villages convene to perform tribal oral histories and discuss social and political issues.
Kuna music consists of vocal and instrumental genres. Most of the latter are associated with dance. Individuals of all ages and both genders participate in musical performances, though most musical genres are gender-specific. The following examination of Kuna music uses as a framework Kuna beliefs about the origin and development of their musical traditions and Kuna terminology for musical items and activities.
The Kuna believe that musical traditions, which encompass ways of singing, playing instrumental music, and dancing, exist almost in a Platonic sense in an other-worldly realm. This is the realm of the ancestors and the gods, from where the legendary hero, Ibeorgun, helped bring to the Kuna certain musical instruments, mostly end-blown flutes and panpipes, each with its particular music and dance. The instruments were animate beings that existed in social combinations, such as couples or groups of three or six; they each 'sang' their own language and danced their own dance, and they all arrived singing and dancing. The Kuna believe they have undergone legendary and historical periods of cultural decline and renewal, and when they have sought to relearn forgotten traditions, their cultural leaders, like Ibeorgun, have helped them hear the tradition-carrying ancestral voices. The Kuna believe that their musical traditions are continually modified in the slow march of culture, and that
The Kuna language does not employ terms that correspond directly to English concepts of "music," "chant," "song," and "dance." Most Kuna vocal genres are directly associated with the term igar (also igala) which can be glossed 'way' or 'path'. Igar is more broadly associated with formalized ways of speaking, which can include knowledge about communicating with the world of spirits. Each vocal musical genre with igar employs specific linguistic and musical conventions; musicality is part of the igar of these specialized ways of speaking. Each piece or text of one of these genres with igar has a name and a 'way' or manner of expression. It follows a specific 'path' that guides expression along a theme or spiritual journey and directs the expression toward an audience of common villagers or trained cultural leaders, Kuna-speakers or Spanish-speakers, nonhuman living things, or spirits or ancestors. Vocal genres with igar are learned in formal apprenticeships.
Vocal genres without igar use ordinary language. The texts of these genres are neither named nor formalized; they are freely improvised around common themes. Musically, these genres, like those with igar, follow certain conventions, but they have greater individual freedom of musical expression than those with igar.
Most instrumental genres are associated with musical instruments that have igar. Each genre employs a unique musical system, compositional structure, and style of dancing, and all are used in specific social contexts. The pieces within each genre are named, and they are learned in formal apprenticeships. Instruments without igar are used for free improvisation or for playing the musical pieces of the instruments having igar.
The term namaked denotes the performance of vocal genres with or without igar; normal speaking is called soged. Namaked denotes all kinds of human 'calling' and individual kinds of flute-produced music. A parallel term, gormaked, denotes all nonhuman calling and the sound of flutes in a generic sense ("the calling of the flutes"). Birdcalls are also gormaked. To indicate improvisation on flutes without igar, the Kuna say the name of the flute followed by the words binsae 'thinking up' and namaked 'calling'. They use the term dodoed to denote flute-produced music associated with dance, and the term dodoged to refer to the dancing itself. They also use the term dodoged to denote the playing of flutes in ensemble, whether or not the performance is choreographed.
I use the term chanting to denote vocal namaked with igar, and singing to denote vocal namaked without igar. This usage is consistent with the usage of Sherzer (1983), who has made the most extensive ethnography of Kuna speaking to date. I use music to denote human and flute namaked and flute dodoed. I use dancing to denote formally structured human movements.
Considering Kuna beliefs about Kuna musical traditions and the terminology the Kuna use to define musical instruments, compositions, and performances directs attention toward certain features. Broadly speaking, the Kuna do not have an all-encompassing musical system that can be defined tonally or compositionally; rather, musical systems are genre specific. Kuna musical instruments, compositions, and performances are primarily constructed and organized around the interactive roles characteristic of the specific kinds of social groupings represented by the instruments being used or by chanters' or singers' interactions with their audiences. As a vehicle for enhanced communication to certain audiences, music includes formalized patterns of interaction. Cultural leaders are responsible for learning and teaching musical traditions and providing and supporting the contexts that require musical expression.
Each Kuna musical instrument is described below, with emphasis placed on the
Kuna instrumental music is represented only by idiophones and aerophones. Musical instruments are neither abundantly nor evenly distributed in Kuna territories, and outside knowledge about their use is limited. There is homogeneity in construction and repertoire among the communities that are in mutual contact. Although variation occurs between community groups that are not in frequent contact, Kuna music on a tribal level shows greater homogeneity than variation.
Of eight reported idiophones, seven are rattles, and one is a humming top. Only one rattle remains in use: the single calabash rattle (nasis), shaken by women when singing lullabies and by men when chanting during celebrations of female puberty.
The Kuna have seventeen aerophones, including shell trumpets, voice-modifying instruments made of animal skulls and bamboo, and flutes and panpipes made of wood, bone, and bamboo. Kuna aerophones fall into nine organological classes, distributed among twelve Kuna-defined genres. Most Kuna aerophones are designed to be played in sets of two, three, or six component instruments. Some paired instruments are made up of a complementary male-female couple; others are composed of a primary and secondary speaker. The three-part aerophone contains members arranged in a sequential hierarchy, with the members providing different numbers of pitches. The six-part aerophone contains members that are alike, each producing only one pitch. Each aerophone is associated with a different genre of dance. Some flutes, such as suara, are associated with a single dance or way of dancing, but others, such as gammu burui, have a large repertoire.
The Kuna do not construct their flutes and panpipes according to a single scale at a standardized pitch. Each kind of aerophone is made to produce a particular array of tones, but its size and range can vary. When matching sets of aerophones are used, as when dancers need three sets of the paired gammu burui panpipe, the sets are constructed exactly alike. Different kinds of aerophones are not played together in concert except to produce a cacophony used to drive away harmful spirits.
Flutes
The Kuna distinguish nine kinds of end-blown flutes. A single end-blown flute with external duct (dolo) is used for improvisation or for playing the repertoire of the other aerophones. It is constructed like the Kogi hatchet flute [see KOGI]. An external duct made from a pelican's quill is embedded in a large wad of pitch built up from the proximal end of the bamboo tube. There are four equidistant holes for fingers and sometimes one for a thumb.
A single end-blown vessel flute (dede) made of an armadillo skull is used to purify the space where musical performances occur. Medicinally, armadillo spirits open pathways or tunnels into Kuna spiritual dimensions.
Four kinds of end-blown internal duct flutes (sulupgala, gorgigala, mulagala, uasgala) made of wing bones of eagles, pelicans, and vultures were reported to have been used singly and in sets during celebrations of puberty. Several of these flutes are suspended on necklaces and worn by dancers to make a percussive sound while they dance; this use continues in the late 1990s during celebrations of puberty.
Paired end-blown flutes with external duct (supe) resemble the Kogi hatchet flute, but they are constructed in male-female pairs that Kuna musicians call primary
Paired end-blown notched flutes (suara) are constructed like the Andean kena (quena) in male-female couples. The male flute has four equally spaced holes for fingers and sometimes one for a thumb; the female flute has no, one, or two holes. The pair is played in interlocking patterns indigenously described as su-ar-aaa, su-ar-aaa, with the male flute sounding su-ar and the female flute sounding aaa. Paired end-blown ductless and unmodified flutes (gammu suid) are also constructed as male and female. Both flutes have two holes for fingers and together produce four consecutive pitches, spanning a fourth. Two chanters use these flutes to chant through and to play overlapping melodic motifs during celebrations of puberty (
The Kuna describe one side-blown flute (galabigbili). It is constructed of bone or wood and has four holes for fingers. Its use has not been reported in print.
An end-blown conch trumpet (dutu) is used to call performers from their homes. Two voice-modifying instruments, one made of a jaguar's skull (achunono) and the other of a deer's skull (goenono), are constructed with an unmodified open-ended bamboo tube attached to the nape of the skull. Each performer, making jaguarlike or deerlike sounds, directs his voice through the bamboo tube into the skull. Together, the performers pantomime a jaguar hunting a deer (
Panpipes
The Kuna have two kinds of bamboo panpipes, bound and unbound, distinguished in three different groupings: paired panpipes; a panpipe made up of three different members; and a panpipe made up of six similar members. Each kind of panpipe is played in an ensemble of six players. The paired panpipe is played in three matching sets; the panpipe having three members is played in two matching sets; the six-part panpipe is played by six performers.
The paired panpipe (gammu burui) is made up of fourteen lengths of bamboo tubes in total, giving fourteen consecutive pitches of an equiheptatonic scale, spanning one note short of two octaves. The tubes are distributed alternately between a
Some gammu burui pieces consist of the repetition and modification of two or more melodic statements, each usually closing with the figure presented in the introduction of the piece. The melodic themes are stated and repeated in their shortest forms in the first section; then they are each expanded by a few notes by internal segmental repetition or the insertion of new material. The expanded statements are in turn repeated several times; in the last portion of the piece, the melodic themes contract to their original forms. The total length of a piece is fifteen to twenty minutes.
In a gammu burui composition of this sort (
Titles given to gammu burui compositions name birds and animals, human relationships, techniques of playing the instruments, and activities of the celebrations, with each piece following certain compositional principles. Pieces about birds and animals imitate calls and behaviors in a theme and a series of variations; compositions about techniques of playing instruments feature specific interlocking patterns of movement.
The three-part panpipe (goke) is constructed of three bound tubes, two bound tubes, and a single tube. The set is duplicated so that six players perform together. The tubes are graduated in size and are arranged to produce six consecutive pitches. The lowest pitch, which I call pitch 1, is produced by the player of the single tube. Pitches 2 and 3 are produced by the player of the two-tube raft. Pitches 4, 5, and 6 are produced by the player of the three-tube raft. The pitches are equally spaced, with the intervals slightly smaller than a whole step; all together, from lowest to highest, the pitches span a sixth. The ensemble plays together, but their musical parts are arranged hierarchically. The music, called gokedom, is composed of three short melodic statements of equal length. Each statement can be notated as two eighths followed by a quarter. In each statement, the player of the single tube plays on the quarter, whereas the player of the two-tube raft plays pitches 2, 3, and 2 for each statement. The player of the three-tube raft plays a different sequence in each statement: first he uses only two tubes, playing pitches 4, 5, and 4; then he uses all three tubes, playing pitches 6, 5, and 4; finally, using only one tube, he plays the phrase on pitch 4 as 4, 4, and 4. The three statements are each repeated once, and the entire sequence is played over and over.
The last panpipe, guli, has six single unbound tubes producing six closely spaced consecutive pitches spanning a third to a fifth. Six men play single tubes in alternation, interlocking their notes to create a melodic line. Guli is an onomatopoeic name of the song of the golden-collared manakin, a bird whose sounds and movements are imitated in a dance associated with this panpipe.
An outline of Kuna musical genres closely parallels the Kuna division of specialized knowledge into eight named disciplines, all but one of whichthe discipline of prophecy and prognosisinvolve music. The disciplines of specialized knowledge that utilize music include traditional chanting for history, medicine, exorcism, puberty rites, and funeral rites; traditional gammu burui music and dance; and the discipline that includes all other forms of traditional instrumental music.
Chanting
The disciplines involving chanting are practiced by men who, though not shamans, are trained specialists in traditional medicine, history, exorcism, puberty rites, and funeral rites (Sherzer 1986.) Chanters neither transform themselves into spiritual entities nor perform extraordinary acts, but their practices are embedded in a framework that includes beliefs about spiritual matters. Medicinal and exorcistic specialists chant in fixed texts to a collection of wooden doll-like spiritual helpers, informing them how to carry out specific acts. The spiritual helpers then interact with other spiritual entities on behalf of a specialist and his patient.
Addressing the members of their village, historical specialists chant texts woven from fixed stories and accounts to describe mythical and historical events, report on their travels, and recount humorous parables. Christian and other religious groups have established missions, schools, and social projects in some Kuna villages, where the singing of hymns is taught. This music is not combined with indigenous chanting or other Kuna musical traditions, though Christian beliefs and personages are in some places woven into the stories and historical chants.
Funeral specialists perform chants that guide the soul of the deceased to the cemetery and protect the released soul as it begins its journey to the world of spirits. Specialists in puberty rites chant through gammu suid, addressing entities in the spiritual world. The word gormaked denotes the calling of the chants through, or by, the flutes. The long, fixed texts prescribe all the special preparations and activities of the puberty ceremony, but they are in a linguistic form that the Kuna do not understand. The calling of the gammu suid accompanies all the activities, linking the participants and their actions to the spiritual world.
Musically, the performance of all these kinds of chanting, except those used for puberty rites, share stylistic features (Sherzer and Wicks 1982): they are not accompanied by musical instruments; their statements consist of short parallel phrases beginning on a high pitch and ending on a low pitch while diminishing in volume and tempo; and the final phrase of each statement terminates with a long tone. The overall melodic shapes of the phrases suit each chant, but all of them contain strings of syllables on a single pitch: some descend in a steady pattern; others seesaw up and down; others cluster in repeating patterns corresponding to repeated linguistic phrases. As the chanter proceeds, the range of the chanting ascends and increases in volume, strength, and tempo.
Chants for puberty-related rites have a different musical style. The statements are chanted in short notes with a change of pitch on nearly every syllable. One or two musical tones are played on the flutes to introduce each chanted line. Standing side by side, the chanters shake rattles in a continuous, steady rhythm, slowly rotating their bodies as a pair while stepping in place (
Medicinal, exorcistic, and funeral chanters perform alone; historical chanters perform in pairs, the primary one chanting two or more phrases at a time, ending with a long final vowel; the secondary responder overlaps a short phrase of confirmation. The responder uses a single tone, near the midpoint of the range of tones used by the primary chanter. Before the responder finishes, the primary chanter overlaps
Chanters of puberty rites perform in pairs and are replaced by their students from time to time during the ceremonies, which last several days. During the celebrations, all villagers participate in four days of ritual and informal music and dance. Though only girls are celebrated in this way, men and women carry out official tasks, participating equally. Before the celebrations begin, many itemsfood, fermented drink, flutes, rattles, special hammock-supporting ropes, pictographic boards, medicinal materialsare prepared. Male and female specialists are appointed to direct each aspect of preparation; as part of the preparations, some men perform chants. Throughout, the specialists tend to the villagers and the girl or girls being celebrated by serving them food and drink in ritualized, dancelike ways and by performing specific kinds of flute-and-panpipe music and dance at appointed times. This kind of performance is limited because most villages no longer have the proper musical specialists. Outsiders' knowledge of this music is speculative, primarily based on observations in other contexts. Away from the ceremonial activities, men informally perform for each other as entertainment.
At the close of the celebrations, a villagewide dance spirals around the two chanters, first at a running pace in a large circle, and gradually at a slower pace, as the line of dancers closes in. Alternating along the line, men and women intertwine their arms, with their hands on the shoulders of dancers to either side.
Dancing
Only adults perform the chanting traditions and the instrumental music of puberty-related festivals, but people of all ages participate in gammu burui music and dance. In several villages, gammu burui dancers organize themselves into societies. They hold regular rehearsals and performances; their music is suitable for group learning and participation because once a lead pair of gammu burui players has learned a piece, other players can follow in unison. Dancers are led through formations by principal male and female dancers. Sometimes groups of dancers from several villages compete (
The defining movement of gammu burui dances is a step and a hop in place, which becomes a skip when the dance speeds up. Men and women use the same step, though men perform it more vigorously than women. Choreographies consist of formations such as parallel lines, circles, and squares, with men and women dancing as a group, rather than as couples. In each dance, the tempo and intensity develop from a slow, calm, walking pace to a fast, vigorous, running pace.
Most danced pieces last twenty to thirty minutes; some contexts require shorter versions. Melodic themes and choreographies are sometimes slightly varied by each group; however, the repertoire shows a high degree of homogeneity, and most pieces are known by all the groups. A few troupes perform for tourists who visit the uppermost end of the archipelago. These performances consist of a few dances, each one abbreviated to about five minutes.
Improvised singing
Musical genres that are not named and are not considered to be special disciplines are the vocal genres without igar: lullabies sung by women to calm and quiet children, songs women sing to each other during puberty celebrations, and laments sung by women to their dying and deceased relatives. These genres are performed in private,
The singing of lullabies occurs every day and throughout the day. Lullabies are performed within the privacy of the matrilocal household by female relatives of the child: an older sister, cousin, aunt, mother, or grandmother. They are improvised around common themes, but always address the circumstances of the child at hand. Musical phrases are short and rhythmically regular. Their melodic shapes are oscillating, each phrase ending on a low tone and the last ending with a long tone. The singer, sitting in a hammock with a child, shakes a rattle at a fast and steady pace close to the child's head. This sound, combined with the rapid swinging of the hammock, quickly puts the child to sleep.
When women sing beside a dying relative, they use a weeping style. Sometimes several individuals sing simultaneously, though each is singing about her own feelings and memories. This kind of singing has no rhythmic accompaniment, and it is not rhythmically regular. It continues after the relative dies and the body is taken to the burial site, where women may continue singing for a short while after the burial.
A third kind of improvised singing is performed by women in private but outside the home. This is when a village's adult women gather in the festival hall during the first few days of a puberty-related celebration. They are sequestered in a small space and served fermented drink by younger girls. Sitting as close to each other as possible in two facing rows with shoulders, hips, and knees touching, they sing for
Kuna chanters, players of aerophones, and makers of instruments are men. For some genres of dancing, rattle-playing women join men. Improvised singing is the purview of women. No classes defined by kinship or economic level occur in Kuna society. Cultural leaders are men who have learned the chants associated with the disciplines of traditional knowledge in history, medicine, exorcism, and puberty and funeral rites. Through one-on-one apprenticeships, they train younger men according to their talents. An apprentice studies sequentially with several teachers, and each teacher may instruct several apprentices. Novices strive to obtain widespread training, often including periods of study at universities in Panama or abroad. Their courses of study might be in history, political science, law, anthropology, social science, or medicine. The Kuna expect that the period of training will last ten to twenty years.
Most Kuna are bilingual in Kuna and Spanish, and some are multilingual, speaking also English, French, or German. They use Panamanian newspapers, radio, and television to follow international, national, and tribal events. With these media, they have become familiar with foreign musics. Nevertheless, they keep their own music compartmentalized and private. They do not incorporate foreign musical instruments with their own in performances, and they do not play foreign music on their own instruments. They keep their music mostly inaccessible to foreigners.
The Kuna have developed a form of notation to help them memorize their long chants (
Musical enculturation and acculturation
Beginning with lullabies in infancy, Kuna individuals learn traditional language, song, and customs. Lullabies describe the duties a child has toward other relatives, the village, and the tribe. The singing of lullabies is learned through exposure and imitation, as mothers sing to their children and girls sing to their younger siblings. In nightly or weekly gatherings, villagers listen to their leaders' historical chants. Topics of concern are embedded in the context of mythical and historical tribal lore. In annual puberty celebrations, all kinds of traditional music and dance are displayed. Through music and dance, all villagers participate in the ceremonial rebirth of the girl being celebrated.
Most Kuna musical settings are rural, occurring in indigenous villages. Festivals organized by the gammu burui dance societies take place in some villages (
Electronic media
Electronic media form a small part of the material culture of Kuna music. The Kuna use cassettes to transmit oral letters, and in this way they often send entire speeches
Musical evaluation
Most Kuna consider aesthetic judgments inappropriate, and leave evaluations to musical specialists, men who judge the uniformity of dancing and playing, the enthusiasm and vigor of dancers and musicians, and the speed and tightness (or closeness) of interlocking musical parts and choreographic figures.
Kuna women look for similar features in evaluating their textiles, which include appliqueŽ blouses and beaded bands worn on arms and legs. They judge uniformity of colors and designs used by groups of women (such as members of dance groups, the friends of a girl going through the celebrations of her puberty, and even all the women of a single village), brightness and contrast among the colors, intricacy, tightness, closeness, and evenness of interlocking visual patterns. In the images depicted in appliqueŽ blouses, they evaluate humor and the play of multiple levels of meaning. The Kuna similarly value these features in historical chants and their colloquial interpretations and in some gammu burui pieces.
Kuna music and dance are meant for human and nonhuman receivers. Most traditional chanting is addressed to nonhuman entities. Human participants are merely witnesses with passive reactions. These relationships characterize the music and dance that occur in the ceremonial contexts of puberty-related festivals. Performances for public entertainment, however, are also addressed to human audiences. Reactions are mostly passive, but exceptionally good performances stimulate bursts of approval.
Some individuals and communities gain reputations for being more innovative than others. Creativity is expected and encouraged from these, while orthodoxy is expected from others. Chanters develop individual styles by combining styles learned from different teachers. In some traditions, they tailor their chanting to specific situations. In this sense, chants are always developing. Women's songs, however, are spontaneously created at each sitting. Each group slightly varies instrumental compositions and choreographies, but new compositions are few, introduced only by leaders of the group.
Musical texts have been published in translation and in the Kuna language, keyed to transcriptions of indigenous colored pictographs (Holmer and WasseŽn 1953, 1963; Nordenskiold 1928); an ethnographic study of curing (Chapin 1983) links the pictographs more closely with Kuna medicinal knowledge than with textual translations. A description of Kuna rites of passage (PrestaŽn 1975) contains detailed accounts of the preparations and ceremonial activities for girls' puberty rites. The Kuna history-chanting tradition is documented in Howe's ethnography on political organization (1985), and general descriptions of the musical aspects of chanting and women's singing were made by Frances Densmore (1925, 1926) and Narciso Garay (1930). (For the Kuna, Densmore uses the name Tule, which means 'person' in the Kuna language.) Most recently, the singing of lullabies (McCosker 1974) and the performance of instrumental music (Smith 1984) have been studied.
Museums in Germany, Panama, Sweden, and the United States of America house collections of Kuna domestic equipment, textiles, and musical instruments. The Kuna construct and use all but a few of their instruments in pairs or sets, but most collections contain only partial or mismatched sets, or instruments in disrepair. Consequently, misinformed photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of construction and usage have persisted.
Few recordings of the musical instruments of the Kuna are commercially available. Moser and Taylor (1987) released excerpts from recordings made in Panama in 1960 for the British Institute of Recorded Sound. The complete recordings are available for study in the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University.
The Highland Maya
The Lowland Maya
Further Study
Maya civilization developed and flourished roughly between 200 B.C. and A.D. 900 in the forested highlands and lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America. It reached its artistic and intellectual peak in the eighth century and then fell into abrupt decline. Pre-Columbian Maya musical life is known from Spanish records written in the early years after European contact and from Maya art and writings, which record history, genealogies, religious beliefs, and ritual practices. These records survive in murals, figurines, sculptures, and painted ceramic vessels. Three lowland-Maya booksthe Dresden Codex, the Codex Paris, and the Codex Madrid (Tro-Cortesianus)contain glyphic texts associated with pictures, some of which depict Maya instruments, ensembles, and musical occasions. The archaeological remains of musical instruments and the contexts in which they are found provide information about instruments made of ceramic and bone. Instruments of perishable materialscane, wood, and other organic productshave not survived.
Shortly after the initial Spanish contact, musical texts were written down in indigenous languages in the Spanish alphabet. These include texts in Los Cantares de DzitbalcheŽ (The Songs of DzitbalcheŽ) a manuscript from Campeche, Mexico (Barrera VaŽsquez 1965), and in the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel), a mythology and tribal history of the QuicheŽ [see GUATEMALA]. These and similar sources contain texts of ritual and calendric songs, lyric songs, and laments. The descriptions of the Maya left by Spanish colonists of the 1500s and 1600s contain scattered references to music and instruments. No comprehensive, systematic study of the musical life of the ancient Maya exists, but some understanding can be gained from these sources.
The music of the ancient Maya was part of a unified cosmos in which all things had sacred significance and function. Certain godsnotably the sun god, for whose
Survivals of musical instruments show that the Maya developed various aerophones, principally vessel flutes, of unique forms and acoustical properties. Double-duct or double-tube and triple-duct or triple-tube flutes evidence the use of paired and multiple tunings (MartiŽ 1968:191-212). Bone mouthpieces were probably used with trumpets, whose flared bells were made of basketry impregnated with wax or of wood, as depicted on some painted vessels and murals.
Maya idiophones included rattles, strings of shells or seed pods (draped on dancers or sewn to their clothing), spiked vessel rattles, and the hollow feet of ceramic offering bowls, which contained clay pellets or pebbles. Bone or wood rasps and struck wood or carapace idiophones were common. Maya membranophones included a waist-high single-headed wooden drum and smaller ceramic hourglass-shaped single-headed drums, sometimes joined in pairs. Murals and painted vessels reveal that the Maya combined instruments of different kinds to form ensembles. Stringed instruments were absent from ancient Maya music.
Maya culture has a perceptible homogeneity, but natural environments and historical developments have differentiated Maya musical life into two streams: that of the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, and that of the lowlands of Belize, Guatemala, and southern Mexico. It is therefore convenient to discuss highland and lowland Maya musics separately.
The Maya who live in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands are among the least assimilated indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America. Though surrounded by Ladinos (people of non-Maya culture whose first language is Spanish and who still function as semiautonomous groups in social, economic, political, and religious affairs), these Maya have resisted mestization. They share a common history as part of the Audiencia de Guatemala, a colonial administrative unit that tied Chiapas more closely to Guatemala than to the rest of colonial Mexico.
The Roman Catholic missionaries of the 1500s and 1600s were dedicated to the Spanish musical education of indigenous people, particularly in styles practiced in Seville. They trained singers for choirs that sang plainchant and polyphony, and developed ensembles of strings and winds to accompany them. Spanish secular music too was implanted in the Maya colonies (Harrison and Harrison 1968:2). In the 1800s, it became fashionable among the upper classes to collect Maya melodies and write them down in European musical notation, adjusting their details to conform to Western musical concepts.
In Mexico, the music of the Tzeltal, the Chol of Tojolabal, and the Tzotzil-speakers in the neighboring villages of San Lorenzo ZinacantaŽn and San Juan Chamula are the most extensively documented. In Guatemala, the music of QuicheŽ groups, especially the Tzutujil-Maya of Santiago AtitlaŽn, is best documented
Musical contexts and genres
The traditional music of the highland Maya reflects the profound influence of colonial Spanish music, of which it contains some striking survivals, such as the singing of the texts of Tenebrae services (psalms and prayers of the Divine Office for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday) and late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century style "falsobordone" settings, in which a plainchant melody is transposed to a higher octave and harmonized below in three or four parallel partsa texture still cultivated in Santiago AtitlaŽn, Guatemala. Survivals of Spanish folkloric and secular styles appear in pieces whose style and form recall those of the chaconne and the sara-bande, now played in Chiapas and Guatemala on instruments that conform to European models of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Examples are ritual songs frequently sung on a single melody (known as bolonchoŽn in ZinacantaŽn) and some ancestral songs of the Tzutujil-Maya in Guatemala. In highland Guatemala, the term zarabanda denotes certain forms of popular music.
Among the highland Maya, traditional music is closely connected to events of the ritual calendar, in which indigenous and Christian cycles are intertwined. Little survives that has no European influence, but the least acculturated genres are shamanic songs, addressed to the ancestral gods by the shaman (curandero), a native ritual healer or maker of prayers. These songs cure illnesses and injuries, heal women after childbirths, bless new houses and fields, and enhance calendric rituals. They are freely sung to nonmetrical or (less frequently) metrical texts that contain standard material, improvised in what are known as Maya couplets, paired lines of poetic text in parallel construction, in which the second line repeats and varies the first. These are sung or declaimed to formulas that govern melodic contour, mainly on a single tone, except for an occasional drop to a lower tone before the performer breathes or a rise at the end of a phrase, but they sometimes require more complex melodies.
Stemming from Spanish colonial origins, yet thoroughly revamped by Maya musical style, are guitar-accompanied songs (bix rxin nawal 'songs of the ancestors') of the Tzutujil-Maya [see GUATEMALA]. Among them is a melody identical to the bolonchoŽn of Chamula, performed in Chiapas instrumentally or sung in unison without words.
The most frequent contexts for public musical performance in highland towns are fiestas, celebrations of feasts of patron saints of towns, according to the Christian calendar. For these celebrations, which may last from three to eight days, musicians from surrounding towns and villages join the throng and play in their local style, often simultaneously with other musicians, creating a characteristic combination of multiple kinds of music. Typical of such festivities in Chiapas is the celebration of the fiesta in ZinacantaŽn. In the central plaza on 20 January, the feast of Saint Sebastian, a local trio of harp, guitar, and violin plays the piece most typical of ZinacantaŽn, the "Canto de San SebastiaŽn" ('Song of Saint Sebastian'), a piece strongly reminiscent of the chaconne, with a sarabande-style rhythmic accompaniment. A similar ensemble accompanies ritual officials on their way to the church. Other musicians stroll with guitars, visitors from Chamula play button accordions, and a wind band hired from out of town plays clarinets, saxhorns, and drums. Near the church, other ritual officials dance to the music of a three-holed flute and two large drums (tambores).
In Chiapas, a few melodies serve for many deities, so a single melody has many names. Similarly, the Tzutujil of Guatemala know a melody or a melodic formula by a broad title, such as "Song to Face-of-the-Earth," but may also call it "Rain Song" or
In Chiapas and Guatemala, commercialized and media-dispersed popular music is pervasive. It is predominantly the popular music of Mexico, but also that of Latin America as a whole, and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean. Recorded popular musiccanciones rancheras, corridos, cumbias, or whatever is currently broadcast on radio and televisionis played on loudspeakers during the fiesta, sometimes drowning out the ritual music. Hymns of evangelical missionary churches, mostly from the repertoire used in the United States (in Spanish or Mayan translation), are broadcast daily over loudspeakers in virtually every rural village and town, influencing popular musical taste.
Musical instruments
The Tzutujil classify their musical instruments as male and female [see GUATEMALA]. Whether other Maya employ a similar taxonomy is unknown. Therefore, this overview follows the general system employed in this volume, rather than assuming all Maya have the same taxonomy.
An important Maya instrument is the log idiophone (tun, also t?ent?en and c?unc?un; NaŽhuatl teponaztli) [see GUATEMALA:
In Guatemala, where the log idiophone has the same names, it is treated with similar reverence. For rituals associated with rain and the sun, log idiophones are often played in pairs of a larger and a smaller instrument. In the town of Rabinal, Department of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, the log idiophone forms part of the ensemble that plays for the dance-drama Rabinal AchiŽ, called baile del tun 'dance of the drum'.
Similar to the log idiophone is the tortuga, made of the carapace of a tortoise struck on the ventral side with a stick or an antler. The tortuga is mainly associated with posadas processions, which occur during Advent.
A cylindrical, double-headed wooden drum has skins of deer or dog tensioned by cords laced through the hoop, to which the heads are fastened. The drum is known
A drum to which snares made of knotted leather cords have been added is smaller than the tambor and in QuicheŽ languages is called caj (from Spanish caja). In some highland Chiapas towns (Magdalenas, Tenejapa, Venustiano Carranza), several drums combine with valveless trumpets and sometimes three- or seven-holed cane flutes. Their repertoire includes pieces in strict and rapid rhythms, plus melodies closely related to the European fife-and-drum tradition, imported from Spain during the early contact period.
A Maya end-blown cane fipple (duct) flute, with one hole for a thumb and two to six holes for fingering, is known by various names (Tzotzil ?ama, amael; QuicheŽ xul, zu, zubac; Spanish pito). It measures about 15 to 35 centimeters long, and 1.5 to 2 centimeters in diameter. A three-holed flute (tzijolah) produces various tones by overblowing. Because in this and other highland Maya styles exact pitch is less important than melodic contour, broad variations in flute-produced scales occur.
The Maya violin (violiŽn) has a flat bridge, long f-holes, three pegs, and two or three strings. When played, it is held against the chest, not under the chin. The strings are stopped with the flats of the fingers. Each note is played with a full stroke of the bow, whose tension is adjusted with pressure from the player's thumb. Double-stopping is common. European prototypes of these violins are probably from the early 1600s.
The guitar (ctar) has several forms and sizes. The Chamula guitar has four courses, the first double and the rest triple, with one unstrung peg. The ZinacantaŽn guitar has five courses, the first triple and the rest double, with one peg unstrung.
In Chiapas, a large, four-string bass guitar (kin) has strings widely splayed at the bridge, resembling its late-sixteenth or early-seventeenth-century European prototypes. The technique of playing predominantly involves chordal strumming (rasgueado), which makes all the strings sound with a single stroke of the nails. The number
The Chiapan harp (arpa) is from 1.5 to 2 meters high, has a straight forepillar with incised decorations and a curved neck with a carved design. The design usually represents angels or birds facing each other, perhaps suggesting the ability of winged creatures to fly to a world above the earth and the power of ritual music to contact the gods. The back, made of five panels, is tapered, and the soundboard has three holes. The tuning pegs and feet are of wood, and the strings are of metal or nylon. It is leaned against the right shoulder with the right hand playing the upper register and the left the lower. Zinacantecos play with the fingernails of the right hand and fingertips of the left; Chamulas use fingernails only.
At highland Guatemalan fiestas, a mixture of musical genres and ensembles is common, though the marimba or the marimba band is practically universal, and string trios are rare. A principal difference in the musical practice of the areas is the importance and frequency of use of the marimba: it is much more commonly played by Ladinos than by the Maya in Chiapas, where it is regarded as a Ladino instrument; but in Guatemala, it is equally claimed by both cultures and is ubiquitous at festivities of all kinds. In Chiapas, marimbas usually have chromatic keyboards and wooden, boxlike resonators; they are built by Ladino makers in the major municipal centers, including Tuxtla GutieŽrrez and Venustiano Carranza. In Guatemala, marimbas with gourd resonators, though rare, are still used, and diatonic and chromatic keyboards are common; there, marimbas are commonly built by Maya and Ladino makers. Marimba players in Chiapas tend to play mestizo-style music, but Guatemala has a sizable repertoire of traditional Maya marimba music, some of which has African roots or early colonial origins.
Most widespread among the highland Maya is the ensemble of cane flute and drum. In highland towns, it heralds a ritual action or the event that follows it, often in procession [see GUATEMALA:
Among the most common ensembles in Chiapas is the string trio, which combines one or more guitars, harps, and violins. This ensemble plays for religious rituals but may be hired to entertain at private parties. The instruments are locally made.
An important part of the musical spectrum at highland fiestas is the brass band, which may be hired from the Ladino community if no Maya ensemble is available. In Chiapas, where the marimba is identified with Ladinos, a marimba band is usually hired from outside for fiestas. Its main components are the marimba grande, a chromatic, six-octave instrument with boxlike resonators beneath the keys and played by two or three players; and the marimba tenor, with four or five octaves and two or three players. To these marimbas are added saxophones, trumpets, a string bass, drums, and claves, maracas, or guširos.
The traditional indigenous music of the lowland Maya groups of YucataŽn (including the Mexican states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, YucataŽn, and parts of Chiapas; and the country Belize) is little documented. In lowland Chiapas, the
Musical contexts and genres
Singing is the principal LacandoŽn musical expression. In rituals, men sing solo songs honoring local gods and spirits, petitioning them for health and protection, accompanying rites of passage, and appealing to the spirits of animals. Their texts usually describe the actions being performed, as in the "Song for Offering Ma?atz to the Gods" (En Busca de la MuŽsica Maya: CancioŽn de la Selva Lacandona 1976:3:2):
O god, please descend from heaven.
We have prepared maize, please drink it.
We will also eat it.
Some songs, such as lullabies or those to ward off animals, try to influence events (En Busca de la MuŽsica Maya: CancioŽn de la Selva Lacandona 1976:5:13).
Ya ha ha!
Here is your mother.
Sleep, sleep, it's your mother .
Among such songs are those for the yearly renewal rites of the sacred vessels, including the sacred drums (k?ayum, also the name of the god of music). LacandoŽn singing is syllabic, and syllables may be lengthened, elided, or slurred. Some songs are on a single pitch, and some are inflected by a loose melodic formula. Rhythm is governed by the rhythmic pattern of the text, or sometimes a rhythmic formula is repeated in each phrase. The male falsetto voice is often used, as is a wide vibrato.
In lowland Maya villages outside the LacandoŽn area, songs are sung for ritual occasions, extended hunting trips, curing, giving thanks for the harvest, and protecting crops, cattle, and similar objects and activities. Many towns have teacher-singers (maestros cantores), men who carry on an office established by Franciscan missionaries in colonial times. They formerly acted as lay assistants to priests, providing daily observances of Roman Catholic rituals. Today, after a long and widespread sacerdotal absence, they have come to be in charge of Christian and indigenous rituals. They sing hymns and songs that have been in oral tradition for many generations, and they play violins and single-headed drums (about 36 centimeters high) suspended at the player's side, and sometimes a cornet or trumpet. In the Guatemalan highlands, men who perform these functions are called sacristans (sacristanes).
The Yucatec Maya's most widely known ancient costumed dance is the ribbon dance (xtoles). It was formerly done in public during carnival in MeŽrida, Mexico. Recalling pre-Columbian lowland iconographic depictions, fourteen male dancers (seven dressed as women and seven as men) carried spiked vessel calabash rattles, which sounded with metal pellet bells sewn to their clothing. The accompaniment was provided by two musicians each playing an end-blown duct flute (pito, a long tin tube, pierced with holes for fingering) and a single-headed cylindrical tin drum, played with the hands. The xtoles song was sung in Maya during the dance. For public festivities a band played before and after the dancing, going from house to house.
Another dance, once widespread in YucataŽn, probably as part of a fertility ritual,
The Maya of YucataŽn have largely adopted the musical styles of local mestizos. The Spanish jota has left its influences of rapid triple meter and the percussive staccato of its castanet accompaniment, and the styles of nearby culturesthe Colombian bambuco, the Cuban habanera, the Mexican jaranahave submerged indigenous features.
Social structure, musicians, and behavior
In traditional Maya perspectives, the musician's role is one of communal service (cargo), in which an individual holds a civil-religious office for a year at a time (and if he chooses, in successive years), passing through various stages of a hierarchy and finally becoming an elder of his community. The cargo holders' function is to carry out ancestral customs to placate the gods and ensure the people's well-being. A musician's vocation is typically a lifetime service, reserved to males and often passed down in a family through the male line. To serve in calendric rituals, some musicians are appointed by ritual officials on a rotating yearly basis.
There is no formal instruction in traditional Maya music. Musicians report receiving inspiration and instruction from ancestors in dreams. Technique and style are absorbed through observation and imitation. Apprentice musicians will often be allowed to play percussion in an ensemble before being permitted to play strings or winds. Formal instruction in styles regarded as non-Maya, such as playing brass-band instruments or playing a six-stringed guitar for popular music, is available to some through public schools and private instructors.
Musical instruments
The LacandoŽn use a ceremonial vessel stick rattle (soot) fashioned from a gourd (jiŽcara) pierced by a stick that traverses it to serve as a handle, held in place with wax or thongs of bark. The crown of the gourd is decorated with perforations that form a crossperhaps the four cardinal directionspainted in red and white. Another kind of rattle is a tortoiseshell filled with pebbles and sealed; it is used in rituals by the maker of prayers, who shakes it while singing softly to communicate the people's desires to the gods (Villa Rojas 1967:51).
The k?ayum is a LacandoŽn drum made of a ceramic bowl around 50 centimeters in height and somewhat smaller in diameter, with a lip over which a skin is stretched. Its base rests on a hoop of braided reeds. On one side is an effigy of K?ayum, the singing god, the god of music. Prayers and incense are frequently offered to K?ayum, embodied in the drum. New drums are fashioned each year during the spring rites of renewal (of which chants form a significant part), when the old ones are destroyed.
The LacandoŽn have an external-duct cane flute (sur) about 36 centimeters long and 1 centimeter wide, with four to six holes for fingering close to the distal end. A small reed tube, held in place with beeswax, directs the player's breath against a sharp edge (Baer and Baer 1952:43). Another LacandoŽn aeropohone is a whistling jar of terra cotta, about 3.5 centimeters high by 3 centimeters wide. It emits a low sound, used for calling in the forest. The LacandoŽn use a conch trumpet to sound a single tone toward each point of the compass after food is offered to the gods, to call them down to partake of the offerings.
The other lowland Maya use a stringed instrument (hichoch) whose body is a tortoise carapace or an armadillo shell; a conch trumpet (hub), used to assemble people or make announcements; a cane or wooden flute (h?chul); a hollowed log idiophone
The major study of pre-Columbian Maya musical instruments is by MartiŽ (1968). He has compared many of the ancient instruments from Mexico with Mexican instruments in current use and has explored ancient Mexican musical contexts by studying pre-Columbian musical iconography and comparing it with how musical instruments have been used in Mexico during the twentieth century. Other, more scientific studies are by Flores and Flores (1981), Hammond (1972a, 1972b), and Rivera y Rivera (1980). Three important studies that include descriptions of musical performance by late-twentieth-century Maya are by Daniel Alfaro (1982), Gary H. Gossen (1974), and RauŽl G. Guerrero (1949). Linda O?Brien's dissertation (1975) studies Maya music of Santiago AtitlaŽn, Guatemala. Two recordings, Modern Maya: The Indian Music of Chiapas, Mexico (1975) and Musiques des communauteŽs indige`nes du Mexique (1969-1970), offer valuable recorded material.
The Miskitu are an Amerindian people whose current population totals about 170,000, including 120,000 within the borders of Nicaragua (calculated from Hale and Gordon 1987:18), fifty thousand in Honduras (calculated from Ashby 1976:6 and VelaŽsquez and Agerkop 1979:11), and a small number of families in Managua, Nicaragua, and along the coast in northeastern Costa Rica. With the neighboring Sumu [see NICARAGUA], the Miskitu speak a language belonging to the Macro-Chibcha linguistic phylum. Chibchan-speakers once occupied the greater part of the Caribbean coastal region known as the Atlantic Coast (Holm 1978:298; Stone 1966:210).
The Miskitu's first development of a distinct ethnic identity most likely dates to the 1600s, when the first references to Miskitu appear in documents (Holm 1978:306-309; for an earlier dating, see Nietschmann 1973:23). The name has no relation to the insect but probably came from the association of the group with muskets they had purchased from English buccaneers. Different spellings of the name are still common (for example, Mosquito in English and Miskito in Spanish), but the Miskitu language has no /o/ sound.
Contemporary Miskitu identify themselves, and are considered by outsiders, as essentially of native American descent, but in the last five centuries they have mixed genetically with Europeans and Africans. Their early openness to contact and trade with Europeans led to their military and economic dominance over the native American groups related to them that became collectively known as the Sumu and the Paya [see HONDURAS]. The Miskitu eventually expanded their control to encompass their current area of habitation, running along the Caribbean coast from RiŽo Negro, Honduras, to RiŽo Escondido, Nicaragua, and extending far upriver of most major tributaries, especially along the RiŽo Coco, which forms the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. In the 1700s and 1800s, the Miskitu further intensified mutually beneficial relations with the English, who until the end of the 1800s promoted the concept of a Miskitu king and a kingdom of Mosquitia. From escaped slaves originally brought to the Atlantic Coast by the English, and possibly from survivors of shipwrecked slave ships, several Miskitu communities acquired a significant African genetic heritage (Bell 1989:3; Helms 1971:16).
In the 1880s, the proselytizing efforts of German and German-American Moravians led to mass conversions to Moravian Christianity among the Miskitu. Over time, the Moravians successfully reduced the political power of traditional shamans (sukia), but the shamans' role in traditional healing and funerary rituals remains strong (Hale 1994:40, 50). Twentieth-century missionary efforts attacked some of these functions, and the viability of several traditional genres of music and dance may be precarious (VelaŽsquez and Agerkop 1979:56). Except where otherwise noted, the following discussion is drawn from research conducted in the mid-1970s by Terry Agerkop (1977 [1992]) and Ronny VelaŽsquez (1987, 1988) among Miskitu in Honduras, and research of Eduard Conzemius in Nicaragua in the 1920s.
Idiophones
The insuba (also simbaika) is a handleless rattle, made from a dry gourd filled with small stones or hard seeds. Shamans use a small size (about 8 centimeters in diameter) in curative practices. Women formerly utilized a larger size (about 15 centimeters in diameter) to accompany their songs during funerary rituals (sikru); it is now limited to the wakes (kwal taya).
The kuswa taya is a tortoiseshell that produces two tones when struck on the free ends of its ventral side with a deer's horn, wooden stick, or large nail. Formerly used in funerary rituals, it can currently be used in a variety of musical contexts.
To create an ispara almuk, a performer drives an old machete into a tree trunk. Standing up, he presses his abdomen against the handle and strikes the blade with a long nail. This instrument provides rhythmic accompaniment to the player's whistling and/or singing of songs related to laments (inanka) and in young people's musical repertoires. It is also played during children's wakes.
A deer's horn or large nail is used to rasp the loose teeth of the jawbone of a horse (aras napat) and to strike the base of the mandible. This instrument accompanies songs called tiun (see below). Another rasp is the krita, a food grater.
Membranophones
The turu-turu is a mirliton no longer than 3 centimeters, made by stretching a bat's wing between two small pieces of reed, held together by beeswax, which covers the entire instrument. The player positions the instrument entirely in his mouth, and the vibration of its membrane modifies his voice. The turu-turu was primarily used in funeral rituals, in which it was a medium for communicating with the ancestral spirit to whom the ritual was dedicated.
The klisang, another mirliton, is made from a piece of cane, 8 to 10 centimeters long. One end is stopped by the natural growth between segments, and a membrane (from a bat's wing, a cow's gut, or thin paper) is wrapped around the other end and
The kungbi, a large drum, is likely a result of contact with coastal populations of African descent. Measuring 40 to 50 centimeters in diameter and 1 to 1. 5 meters long, it is made from the hollowed section of a mahogany (yulo) log. The skin used for the heads is rolled at the edges around a circular bent branch and fitted over one end of the barrel. To secure the skin, a second wooden hoop is fitted over the first. This assembly is held in place by cords wrapped around the second, outer hoop and tied to five pegs driven into the body of the drum. The drum is laid on the ground and the player sits atop it, beating with his hands to accompany the singer, who sits immediately behind him on the same drum. The kungbi has traditionally been used in funeral rituals. The influence of the Moravians, who have attacked it as demonic, has diminished its ritual presence and resulted in its being used supremely for secular entertainment.
Chordophones
The kitar (from English guitar) is a rustically manufactured plucked wooden lute. Its strings, once made from catgut, are nowadays purchased commercially. The peg-holding end of the fingerboard is designed for six strings, but the kitar used by youths to accompany their tiun customarily employ fewer. The standard six-stringed Spanish guitar is now also widely used.
The tina (from Spanish tina 'washtub') consists of a single string made from vegetable fiber and fixed between the protruding end of a meter-long wooden pole and the bottom of an upturned tin washtub. The string passes through a hole bored through the bottom of the tub and held with a stick on the other side. Players obtain different pitches and timbres by placing the pole along the edge of the tub, plucking it at different places, and varying the tension by moving the pole. The tina is principally used to accompany Christian hymns and, less often, young people's tiun.
The lungku is a musical bow made from a thin and flexible wooden branch about 50 to 80 centimeters long and a cord from the dried fiber of the sani (Spanish majao) plant. The player places the bow in his or her mouth to act as a resonator and plucks the string with the right hand. The left hand holds the bow, creating two fundamental tones by alternately letting the string vibrate freely and tightening the length of the string with the thumb and index finger (
Aerophones
The bra-tara, a vertical notched flute around 30 centimeters long, has four holes with a beeswax-molded mouthpiece. Both beeswax and the kind of cane used are difficult to find. At the present time, bra-tara are manufactured only in MocoroŽn Village, on the Ibantara River.
The only Miskitu calendrical festival is Krismis, a dance in a circle, named after the month in which it is performed, Krismis (from English Christmas, Miskitu for December). A soloist among the ring of dancers calls out improvised phrases in a strongly marked, regular rhythm that the rest of the participants repeat. Each performance
Several kinds of song are related to curative rituals. An iumu, the harmful spirit responsible for the person's ailment, can be removed from an afflicted person who drinks water that has been empowered through song by a specialist in the community. The specialist collects fresh water in a bottle. He sanctifies the water by singing and blowing through a hollow cane (klisang). Each illness requires a specific song; the specialist may need to try several songs and bottles before making a correct diagnosis. For a more serious illness, when the Miskitu believe a dead person's soul has invaded the patient, the shaman performs a daylong isingni ulan (from isingni 'soul' and ulan 'mounted'). This ritual revolves around the shaman's spoken incantations and solo singing, accompanied by a handleless rattle (insuba). During the ceremony, younger members of the community may perform tiun to distract the harmful soul and help the shaman capture it.
At the end of the 1600s, the English buccaneer and navigator William Dampier (1652-1715) witnessed a performance of the sikru and made the earliest extant written reference to Miskitu music (Dampier 1699:10). Long bara (flutes, larger cousins of the bra-tara) and kungbi were prominent and remained so, as described in the twentieth century in detail by Conzemius (1932:161-164). Pressure from Moravian missionaries forced many Miskitu to abandon the ceremony around the 1950s, and only fragments of the cycle of songs once used by the shaman survive.
Despite the atrophy of the sikru, funerary ceremonies remain important occasions for traditional musical performance. Laments (inanka), sung by women at
Three days after a death, a shaman begins an extended kwal taya, or wake for the deceased (isingni 'soul'). To first capture the soul, he sings and accompanies himself with an insuba while hunting for the manifestation of the soul in a firefly (also called isingni). On a night set by the shaman, the main section of the wake takes place. Again, the principal musical expression are laments; however, the shaman dances and sings to the soul, manifested as a firefly trapped in his hands. The shaman's dance is accompanied by one or more kitar, food-grater rasps, handleless rattles, and the jawbone of a horse. Simultaneously, younger men perform their own tiun, accompanied by the same instrumentation. Contemporary ritual celebrations have incorporated portable radios and record players, combining popular music with the above-mentioned traditional music. As the sky lightens, the performers move to the grave, where the shaman buries the firefly with the body. After this ceremony, the eldest women of the family are required to sing laments about the deceased for a series of specific occasions, including at the beginning of each day; when strong rain and storms approach; when something negative, such as a major illness, befalls the community; and when something especially positive happens, such as a good harvest or an abundance of fish.
The principal secular form of Mi?skitu music is kitarlawana (from kitar and lawana, song) or tiun, which Agerkop suggests spelling "tune" to correspond to the English original of the word (1977:16). These are songs composed by men, and their lyrical content centers on a woman. Most often, their sentiments are of longing and desire, but they can express a range of emotions, including strong negative feelings (see examples from the late 1800s in Bell 1989 [1899]:89, 312). Their performances can be accompanied by one or more kitar and/or guitars, plus the percussion of scrapers (kritas) and horse's jawbones (aras napats). The impact of centuries of European contact and an intensive European missionary presence are evident in the melodic design and full use of functional harmony. Tiun are sung solo or harmonized in a roughly followed pattern of parallel thirds and sixths. Their vocal style can vary from a forceful production that borders on shouting to relaxed, often plaintive timbres, in which the singer cracks his voice at the end of phrases. The tonality is overwhelmingly in a major key. The meters can be in either 3/4 or 4/4 at a moderate-to-slow tempo. Dotted rhythmic accompaniment is pervasive, as shown in
The first recordings of Miskitu music, NicaraguamuŽsica y canto (1992 [1977]), were made by Salvador Cardenal Argušello in Managua in the early 1960s. Miskitu music was first exposed to the mestizo population of Nicaragua when these recordings and live performances by Miskitu visiting Cardenal Argušello's studios in Managua were broadcast over his radio station. In the 1980s, groups of young Miskitu presented nationally televised versions of traditional dances, and Pacific Coast mestizo folk-dancing troupes usually included a representation of Miskitu dance in their repertoire. Several cassettes of Miskitu musicians performing tiun were produced by the state recording label initiated by the Sandinistas (Grupo Lanlaya
The Maya
The Garifuna
Creole Music
Further Study
Belize, formerly known as British Honduras, is the only English-speaking country in Central America. Located on the YucataŽn Peninsula bordering Mexico to the north and northwest, Guatemala to the west and south, and the Caribbean Sea to the east, Belize has a land area of 22,965 square kilometers. Geographically, the country divides into six major districts: Belize, Cayo, Corozal, Orange Walk, Stann Creek, and Toledo.
Belize has a population of 189,392 (1991 census), composed mainly of the following cultural and ethnic groups, in descending order of population: mestizos (of European and Amerindian descent, 81,253 or 42.9 percent; creole (of African descent, with varying degrees of admixture from other ethnic groups), 55,364 or 29.2 percent; Maya (three Amerindian groups, including the K'ekchi, the MopaŽn, and the Yucatec), 20,438 or 10.8 percent; Garifuna (of African and Caribbean Amerindian descent), 12,335 or 6.5 percent; and East Indians, 6,457 or 3.4 percent. Other cultural or ethnic groups in Belize are Arabs, Chinese, Koreans, Mennonites, and Rastafarians. There is much debate over this census, which for the first time identified the mestizos, rather than the creoles, as the largest ethnic group.
Though English is the official language of the country, Creole (a synthesis of English, African languages, and Spanish) is the lingua franca, especially in Belize City. Other local languages include Garifuna, low German (as spoken by Mennonites), Hindi, Maya (K?ekchi, MopaŽn, and Yucatec), and Spanish. Recent arrivals include Haitians, Hondurans, Jamaicans, and Taiwanese. Musically, Belize reflects European, Amerindian, and African cultural practices and their synthesis.
Several historical events affected the development of Belize's cultural and ethnic fabric. In 1519, the Spanish conquistador HernaŽn CorteŽs landed in YucataŽn. By 1650, the coast of Belize had become a haven for British pirates, who attacked Spanish vessels carrying gold and silver back to the Spain. In the 1720s, the British began importing African slaves to the region. The emancipation of slaves occurred in 1838, opening the way for people from India to be brought to Belize (and other British colonies in the Caribbean) as indentured servants between 1844 and 1917. During the Caste War in the Mexican YucataŽn (1847-1850), thousands of Maya and mestizos fled the Spaniards and entered Belize as refugees. In 1862, Belize became
In pre-Columbian times, the Maya inhabited many Middle American areas that include portions of the present countries of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico [see MAYA]. In the Belizean area of the YucataŽn Peninsula alone, more than thirty-five sites of ancient Maya centers have been discovered. The earliest indication of Maya existence in Belize has long been debated. Carbon-14 testing of wood from the settlement of Cuello suggests Maya occupation as early as 2600 B.C., but some archaeologists think the testing results are incorrect.
Knowledge about the music of the ancient Maya in Belize has been gained from archaeological remains of actual instruments, iconography, writings in Maya manuscripts, and sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the Maya from the end of the Postclassic Period (1500s). Archaeological excavations in Belize, conducted at sites including Altun Ha, Barton Ramie, Benque Viejo, Lubaantun, PacbituŽn, San JoseŽ, and Santa Rita, have yielded valuable information on Maya music of the Late Classic (A.D. 600-900), Postclassic, and earlier periods.
Fragments of musical instruments and complete exemplars of eight ceramic globular flutes (ocarinas), five tubular flutes, two composite flute-rattles, and ceramic hand-held drums were found in 1986 in Late Classic tombs of two elite women in PacbituŽn. Some globular flutes represent a fat god (associated with death) and a kneeling water-lily-holding woman (associated with the afterlife). Each of the tubular flutes has two holes for fingering, a circular mouthpiece (probably a ducted fipple mouthpiece, like other Maya flutes), and a globular resonating chamber in the middle. The distal ends of four of them are in the shape of ornate flowers. These flutes were capable of playing in several octaves. The most suggestive discovery in the PacbituŽn tombs was two composite flute-rattles. Each instrument, about 16 centimeters long, is evenly divided between a flute handle and an incised rattle ball, containing fifteen to twenty ceramic pebbles. One instrument, painted red, has two holes for fingering; the other, with "a stubby, perpendicular projection" for a mouthpiece, was painted blue and has four holes (Healy 1988:28-30).
Contemporary Maya music
Little research has been conducted on the music of Maya Indians currently living in Belize. Contemporary Mayan music is a syncretization of indigenous and Spanish elements. The pre-Columbian combination of flute and drum (two musicians) can still be heard, but the marimba is commonly found in the Cayo District in central Belize, the home of many MopaŽn Maya. Spanish musical influences from neighboring Guatemala are also quite prevalent; the K?ekchi Maya of the Toledo District in southern Belize play melodies on harps, violins, and guitars. The romantic lyrics and extensive use of the guitar among the Yucatec Maya in the districts of Orange Walk and Corozal can be attributed to the influence of traditional Mexican music. The Maya festival of the feast of Saint Louis (San LuiŽs) includes drumming to signal the beginning of the procession, playing marimbas and rattles, singing, ceremonial dancing of the tiger dance and the holy-deer dance, and more drumming to signal the culminating event of the festival, the raising of the greased pole (MallaŽn 1993:45-47).
Music of the typical K?ekchi harp ensemble serves for entertainment, such as dancing in a circle involving male-female interaction, mostly through hoplike steps. The music is always instrumental, with guitar, a thirty-stringed diatonic harp, and a violin mostly doubling the main melody one octave lower than the harp. The K?ekchi harp is plucked with the thumb and the first three fingers of both hands. The resonator doubles as a percussion instrument when a second musician beats on it.
Legends in some Maya communities attest that K?ekchi harp music was created and named by the Maya gods. Others maintain that the pieces were named by the Spaniards as they converted the Maya to Christianity. The effects of indirect Spanish influence on Maya music are clear in the occasions when the harp is typically played: Easter, Christmas, and other major feasts, all of them Christian events. The performers are usually men who learn to play from childhood by being apprenticed with masters in villages. Florencio Mes (Palacio 1988), in his fifties in 1996, is one of the few bearers of this ancient tradition. As a typical Maya harpist, he not only plays but builds all his instruments, using traditional tools, local hardwoods, and nylon fishing line for strings. A highly respected elder in his community (San Miguel, in the Toledo district of Belize), he has represented his country at major Caribbean and European festivals (Scott 1996b).
The Garifuna of Belize and adjacent coasts [see GUATEMALA; HONDURAS; NICARAGUA] are products of the genetic mixture of former West Africans and Carib and Arawak (also Taino) who occupied the island of St. Vincent, in the Lesser Antilles. Sebastian Cayetano (1989:31-32), a Garifuna historian and linguist, states that the Garifuna ancestry can be traced back to the Yoruba, Ibo, and Ashanti cultures of West Africa, in the lands that today comprise Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Mali. The encounter between Africans and Amerindians began in 1635 (and perhaps centuries earlier; see Lawrence 1987), when two Spanish vessels carrying West African slaves en route to Barbados were assumed to be destroyed at sea during a storm; surviving Africans swam to St. Vincent Island and took refuge among the Amerindians there. Some sources suggest that the population of Garifuna on St. Vincent was augmented by runaway slaves from nearby islands: Maroons, also of West African origin, from groups including Ashanti-Fanti, Congo, Efik, Fon, and Yoruba (Coelho 1955:6-8).
The Amerindian origin of the Garifuna is intricate. Douglas Taylor (1951:32), a noted ethnographer of the Garifuna, stated that the Island Carib who had intermixed with the West Africans were the offspring of the Arawak people known as Igneri and the Carib people known as Kallina or Galibi. During raids on Arawak (Taino) villages, Carib warriors would kill the men and take Arawak women as wives. Therefore, the Island Carib women spoke an Arawak language, whereas the men spoke a Carib language. Though Carib prevailed as the dominant language of the Garifuna, numerous examples of men's and women's using different words for the same object survive. The term Garifuna may reflect the Africanizing of the pronunciation of the terms karifuna and kalinago as Garifuna and Garinagu, respectively (Foster 1982:9). The former are words the Island Carib used when referring to themselves; today, the word Garifuna refers to the people and the language. The word Garinagu, the plural form of Garifuna, is used primarily by the people when referring to themselves.
The Garifuna, also called the Black Carib by foreign observers, were defeated in battle by the British and exiled to Roatan Island, off the coast of Honduras, in 1797. The first Garifuna migrated to Belize from Honduras in 1802 (S. Cayetano
Garifuna ritual music and musical instruments
The ritual music of the Garifuna displays elements of the music of West African worship of ancestors and Amerindian shamanism. Religious practices, conducted by a shaman (buyei), include shamanistic healing and spirit-possession ceremonies, of which adušgušrušhani (feasting the dead, the last of the postmortem rituals), also known as dušguš, is the most elaborate. Postmortem rituals that follow the funeral and precede dušguš are beluria, nine nights of family prayers, often concluding with communitywide participation in singing, drumming, and dancing; a Garifuna mass, a translation of the Roman Catholic mass into the vernacular, with hymns sung to the accompaniment of a garawoun primero and a segunda (see below); arairaguni, an invocation to determine the cause of illness; amuyadahani 'refreshing the dead', a private ritual, in which family members make offerings to their ancestors; and achuguhani 'feeding the dead' (also called chuguŽ), usually a single day's ancestral-spirit-placating ritual that may or may not include singing and drumming. The influence of West African drumming and Amerindian vocal music and modality is apparent in the music of adušgušrušhani. The Garifuna of Nicaragua call this ritual walagayo (Wells 1980:5), a term whose use in Nicaragua may be attributed to its use in a popular dušguš song referring to a crowing fowl (Garifuna gayo).
The most extensive sacred music of the Garifuna occurs in dušguš, for supplicating and placating ancestral spirits (gubida). The term gubida is most commonly used when referring to ancestral spirits that inflict illness; the term ahari, a deceased relative's spirit (E. Cayetano 1993:17), is frequently used in reference to ancestral spirits in general. When an individual of the Garifuna community becomes ill and cannot be cured by conventional medicine, a shaman is consulted to determine the cause of the illness. With the assistance of his or her spiritual helpers (hiuŽruha), the shaman conducts an invocation ceremony (arairaguni). With the shaman acting as a medium, the gubida reveals that it has caused the relative to become ill because it feels neglected. The gubida is always of consanguineal relation to the afflicted individual. The gubida may then request achuguhani or dušguš. Good health is restored to the individual if the gubida and the officiating shaman consider the ceremony a success. The spirit may request that the patient's family build a new temple (dabuyaba) within which to hold the dušguš and other religious rituals. Essential to all Garifuna communities, the temple symbolizes cultural and religious continuity (
The primary function of music during the dušguš is theurgy (communication with the realm of the spirits), in which songs and drums are the principal media. The Garifuna do not believe that ancestral spirits literally reside in the drums; they believe that the sound of the heart drum (lanigi garawoun), the central and largest instrument of the three segundas, has a calming effect on ritual participants, especially those who have become possessed by gubida (John Mariano, personal communication).
In design and construction, garawoun reveal African and Amerindian traits; however, unlike many drums used in African, African-derived, and native American religious practices, they are played only with the hands. They are constructed in the following manner (
Several song-and-dance genres are performed during the dušguš: abelagudahani, aŽmalihaniŽ, and ugulendu. Abelagudahani, a "bringing-in" song, is performed at the beginning of the ritual to escort fishermen to the temple from the sea, where they gather ritual food at the outlying cays. AŽmalihaniŽ, a complex dance, characterized by movement in a circular pattern and reversals of direction, is used to placate the spirit. Spiritual possession (oŽnwehani) frequently occurs as female participants dance, forming lines behind the shaman, who faces the drummers; maintaining this configuration, they move first in a clockwise direction, and then counterclockwise around the temple. Possession by ancestral spirits may occur during ordinary daily activities and has even occurred during Christian church services.
Possession has occurred in contexts without the influence of musical accompaniment. Performers shuffle while stopping at positions that mark the four cardinal directions. Standing in front of the drummers, the shaman lowers his container rattle to the ground and raises it again in the directions of the spiritswhere they live, and whence power may be drawn. Ugulendu, the fundamental sacred dance of the dušguš, thought to be of Carib origin, is a tightly bound shuffle (legs and feet held close together) performed in a circular pattern. Awangulahani, a circular dance of rejoicing for having fulfilled the spirit's request, is one of the final events of the ritual. Three themes associated with this dance are the drawing of elder participants into the circle, the calming effect of the dance and its ability to make participants happy, and the circle as a symbol of completeness (Wells 1980:5). Many songs for the dušguš are composed in remembrance of a specific ancestor.
Sociological benefits attributed to the dušguš in general are a psychological catharsis, the curing of illness, and the reassertion of solidarity as expressed by relatives and friends in the community (S. Cayetano 1989:15).
Gender roles in the musical performances of dušguš (and in other kinds of ritual) are apparent. Drumming has traditionally been considered the men's domain, but in most collective vocal genres (in sacred and secular contexts) women predominate as singers (gayusa). However, when no women are present, men serve as lead and responsorial singers. At the beluria and similar events, men who play garawoun often serve as lead singers. Traditional vocal ensemble music is always performed in unison. Responsorial singing occurs most often when a vocalist introduces a new song to the ensemble. The introductory phrase, the solo vocalist's call, is quickly overpowered by a unison choral responsethe preferred method of collective singing. Songs of the same genre are usually performed successively without interruption to the continuous accompaniment of garawoun drums and sometimes two sisira.
Texts of most dušguš songs refer to ancestors as female (grandmother or great-grandmother, even if the dušguš is being given in honor of a man), perhaps reflecting the matrilineality and matrifocality of Garifuna society. It may also be a reflection of gender-based empowerment, because older women predominate as organizers, ritual participants, and composers of ritual songs. Skilled composers, dancers, and drummers who know sacred and secular genres are highly respected in their villages and become known from one community to another.
UŽyanu are unaccompanied, semisacred, usually mournful gesture-accompanying songs in irregular meter (Jenkins 1982a:2). They fall into two categories: abeimahani and arumahani, for ensembles of women's and men's voices, respectively. Only women compose the melody and the text for abeimahani, and only men compose the melody and text for arumahani. Two kinds of lyrics are associated with each genre:
Abeimahani, once performed at events such as house parties and to comfort the sick, are performed during the liminal period of the dušguš, between midnight and 3:00 A.M., when the segunda are silent. Abeimahani are performed by women who stand in a line with their fingers linked (the manner in which hands are linked may vary from one community to another) while gesturing to irregularly metered music. Gestures include unison swinging of the arms forward and backward, slightly bending the knees, and moving the upper torso forward in coordination with the backward swing of both arms. The number of singers of abeimahani may range from only a few women to several dozen. The genre is clearly of Amerindian origin (S. Cayetano 1989:77; Jenkins 1982b).
Arumahani, reported by many non-Garifuna scholars as all but extinct, are performed almost exclusively in the temple during dušguš. Though arumahani are performed less frequently than abeimahani, the genre is not in danger of becoming extinct (John Mariano and Rolando GoŽmez, personal communication). Most of these songs are performed by the men present (usually only a few) and women who know the texts.
Garifuna shamanistic songs are said to be songs given to a shaman by his spiritual helpers during times of struggle and transformation. Some shamanistic songs call specific spiritual helpers by name. Shamanic songs are often unaccompanied, in free rhythm, have a range of about one octave and a descending melodic contour, and are based on repetitive melodic material characterized by descending leaps of thirds and fourths followed by short passages of whole tones and semitones. These traits show Amerindian influence.
Garifuna secular music and dance
Traditional Garifuna secular music and dance display a synthesis of West African, Amerindian, English, Spanish, and Creole traits. The Garifuna use idiophones, membranophones, and chordophones to accompany many secular kinds of songs and dances. Drums are the most prevalent musical instruments of Garifuna traditional secular music, and rattles are often used with them to accompany some singing and dancing (
In secular Garifuna contexts, music is used for accompanying processions and mime-dances, wakes, and work, and as social commentary, lullabies, and entertainment. Specific rhythmic accompaniments and lyrics are associated with particular dances.
Processions performed during the Christmas holidays are frequently accompanied by a combination of membranophones and aerophones, perhaps influenced by the British fife-and-drum tradition. The Garifuna perform four specific processions and mime-dances: charikanari, pia manadi, wanaragua, and waŽrini. Traditionally performed
Charikanari is a mime-dance that depicts the meeting of a hunter, a cave man, and a cow that taunts children and spectators (S. Cayetano 1989:77). Primeros, segundas, and a harmonica provide accompaniment.
Pia manadi, a processional play, uniquely involves the death and resurrection of one of the characters and displays traits resembling those of English mumming plays. Pia, a Carib hero from the Guianas, was one of the twin children of the sun and a genius of the forest. He and Manadi, a man dressed as a woman, are characters in the comedy (Taylor 1951:7-8). This play is accompanied by a horizontal cross-blown cane flute, one primero, and one segunda, in a style reminiscent of the British fifeand-drum tradition. Few performances of this drama are seen today.
Little has been written about waŽrini. It is simply defined as a masked dance that is a prelude to wanaragua (E. Cayetano 1977:87). The costume for warini includes palm leaves attached with a cord or string and worn around the shoulders and waist, the latter extending to the knees. Wanaragua, commonly known as John Canoe, is an old song-and-dance genre, composed and performed solely by men. Formerly presented throughout Afro-Caribbean cultures at Christmas, it is perhaps derived from the egungun festival of the Yoruba, in which participants appeared in whiteface, which symbolized the death transformation of the ancestor spirits. In the 1990s in Belize, performers disguised as men and women use painted wire masks resembling Europeans as they travel from yard to yard, amusing the children. Each performer wears a headdress known as wababa, a term that may come from the Yoruba, meaning 'father' (Felix Miranda, personal communication). Performers also wear knee-tied rattles. WaŽrini are composed by men only and consist of a single call-and-response pattern, continuously repeated until a new song is introduced (Hadel 1973:91). Free duple patterns on the primero are superimposed on the three-against-two rhythm of the accompanying segunda, and the meter seems to shift from 2/4 to 6/8, or even 3/4 (Whipple 1971:91). Accompaniment for wanaragua and waŽrini is provided solely by primeros and segundas.
The texts of numerous songs mournfully address death, the dead, ancestors' power, misfortunes, and other common Garifuna matters. Nonritual songs of death and mourning convey the importance of kinship, the influence of the dead, and the relationship of mutual dependency between the living and the dead as a source of power. Garifuna songs do not address imaginary events and feelings (E. Cayetano 1977:17).
In the beluria, the Garifuna sacred and secular worlds meet. An all-night event in commemoration of a recently deceased relative, the beluria is the culmination of
BeŽrusu, a musical form for solo voice and guitar, is for general entertainment and is often played at wakes. In the berusu performed on the recording by Jenkins (1982c:3), the composer says he has seen God and dreamed of his own death. Some traits of this song include a simple harmonic structure based on alternations of tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords, a formal structure of ABAB, and the repetition of melodic material during interludes between verses.
Leremuna wadaguman and leremuna egiŽ are work-accompanying songs for men and women, respectively. Leremuna wadaguman is usually performed as men work cooperatively at strenuous tasks, such as chopping down large trees and hauling logs downriver and onto the beach to make boats; the title derives directly from the Garifuna word for work, wadagimanu. Leremuna egiŽ, performed by women when grating manioc, is accompanied by rhythms produced when the manioc root is beaten against a wooden grater. The title derives from the Garifuna word eremuha 'to sing' (E. Cayetano 1993:42). Musical traits of the second grating song on the recording by Jenkins (1982c:3) are a small ensemble of female voices, responsorial form, a repetitive rhythmic motive (usually a quarter followed by a dotted eighth and a sixteenth) as the only accompanimental sound, the range of a minor tenth, and repetition of melodic material. Grating songs, incorporating exclamatory vocables and repetitions in a typically Amerindian style, are performed with a high nasal timbre.
Paranda, a Garifuna genre resembling a serenade and serving as a vehicle of social criticism, is usually composed by men. It was influenced by Hispanic musical genres, and it has a particularly Hispanic sound because of the close relationship maintained between the people of Barranco, in southern Belize, and their nearby Guatemalan and Honduran neighbors. The primero plays variations of a basically duple meteran eighth, two sixteenths, and a quarteragainst the segunda, which emphasizes a strong accent on the second half of beat two, producing syncopation. As a song about love, a. paranda incorporates the unison singing of one man and two women, repetition and alternation of verse and refrain, and a simple harmonic chordal structure, played on a guitar. When performed solely as a dance, it is a slow march accompanied by drums, guitar, and siŽsira or maracas (Ugundani Dance Company 1994).
Another social-commentary song-and-dance form, the most popular and best-liked Garifuna genre, is punta. In duple meter, dancers employ quick alternating movements of the hips and feet, keeping their upper torsos upright. As an expression of sexual politics, it is a variation of the cock-and-hen mating dance common to many African-influenced cultures of the southern Americas and the Caribbean. Also the favorite form of social commentary by women, it provides an arena for exposing unacceptable behavior in personal affairs. Puntas seem to be composed only by women and are performed responsorially (Hadel 1973:5); the call, usually half a sentence sung by the leader, is followed by the response and the completion of the sentence by the chorus. Andy Palacio, a celebrated performer of the contemporary genre punta-rock, suggests that the call-and-response form encourages community participation, and that drumming characterizes puntas (Pillich 1992:6). A transcription of the accompaniment for a punta (
Hušngušhušnguš, a popular Garifuna dance in triple meter with unison singing, is frequently performed for holidays, processionals, and other festive occasions. Lyrics may vary from relating historical events, such as the departure from St. Vincent, to describing a deceased loved one. It is a secular version of ugulendu. Its step is a sort of shuffle, similar to a slide, in which the upper torso is held upright at times and bent slightly forward at others (Whipple 1971:109).
The genre called "combination" is a dance with alternating sections of the rhythms of punta and hušngušhušnguš. As the accompanying garawoun drums shift from the duple meter of punta to the triple meter of hušngušhušnguš and back again (as cued by the primero), dancers also shift to proper movements for the corresponding accompaniment.
In gunjeŽi, a graceful dance staged in a circle, partners switch at the call of the word sarse (Jenkins 1982c:4). The identifying duple-meter ostinato rhythm is played on the segunda and consists of an eighth and two sixteenths followed by four sixteenths. The primero presents improvisatory passages based on the ostinato rhythm of the segunda.
Chumba is an old dance performed by a soloist in a highly individualized manner. Each dancer in turn moves to the center to perform gestures that portray aspects of everyday life. S. Cayetano describes chumba as highly accented and probably related to the chumba found in the Caribbean, such as that of Grenada and Carriacou. The identifying rhythmic pattern played on the segunda is in duple meter and consists of a dotted eighth and a sixteenth, followed by two sixteenths. Improvisatory patterns are performed on the primero.
In the senbei, each performer salutes the drum and jumps into the dancers' circle, displaying fancy footwork. The identifying rhythmic pattern is played on the segunda in lively compound duple meter. It consists of three eighths, beginning on the second principal beat of the measure, followed by an accented dotted quarter on the first principal beat. Recent attempts to revive this genre have been successful.
As subjects of anthropological, sociological, and musicological studies since the 1950s and recipients of Western cultural influences, the Garifuna of Belize, like those of Honduras and elsewhere, have become aware of the importance of preserving their traditional cultural practices. The Belize National Folklore Company, founded in 1996 as a division of the Belize National Dance Company of the Belize Arts Council, is devoted to preserving the traditional and indigenous dance and music of Belize. The Ugundani Dance Company is devoted solely to the preservation of traditional Garifuna dance and music.
Garifuna popular music: punta-rock
The most popular of the contemporary genres of dance-music in Belize, punta-rock, features the synthesis of electric instruments (as used in rhythm and blues and reg-gae),
The trio that today makes up the second generation of the Original Turtle Shell Band are blood relatives of Cayetano, practitioners of Rastafarianism, and part-time farmers. In their most recent recording, Serewe (1996), they use the sound of a conch trumpet, maintain call-and-response forms, refer to Garifuna spiritual ideals and culinary arts, and borrow rhythmic material from indigenous genres, such as punta, paranda, and hušngušhušnguš (Scott 1996c).
I greatly acknowledge Gina Scott, an authority on the Creole music of Belize, for her input for the following section.
Some creole songs are based on national and international issues (including those of the Caribbean), but most are about historical and domestic incidents, often embarrassments, whose publicity subjects their participants to the rhymed and sung gossip of the onlooking community. The transformation of domestic event into song is a universal cultural phenomenon, not limited to the Caribbean area (Beck 1980b:17).
A major appeal of Creole music is responsorial structure. The traditional performances of creole songs require a minimum of two voices. One, the call, sings the first, third, and subsequent alternating lines, each of which varies the basic line in melody and words. The other, the response, sings an unvarying, one-line refrain. Some performances involve a group of singers, with a solo voice presenting the call and an audience giving the unison response. Call and response overlap (Beck 1980a:10-l 1). Traits of Creole songs include a simple harmonic structure, a refrain, structures that may include ABA and three-part rondo forms, and melodies frequently in common time based on diatonic movement, arpeggios, and sequential figures.
Brukdown
The term brukdown denotes a kind of dance and song reflecting usual and unusual events in the life of the common Belizean, or a specific rhythmic organization. The instrumentation may be as simple as one guitar providing the harmony, with an ostinato pattern played by a broomstick pounded on the floor for rhythmic stability. At the other extreme, a brukdown ensemble may include guitars, banjos, accordions, a double-sided gumbeh or boom drum, and various percussive devices, including a horse's jawbone rasped with a metal rod.
Brukdown reflects African slaves' journey into the mahogany camps of Belize and the resulting culture of survivalthe Belizean creole culture. It uses syncopated rhythms and responsorial patterns firmly rooted in Africa, diatonic harmonics bor-
As the urbanization and popularization of radios and jukeboxes heightened, brukdown became a music most often heard at Christmastime during parties (bram, gato). One of the most prominent personalities and practitioners of brukdown has been Wilfred Peters, Jr. In his mid-sixties in 1997, he carries on the musical family tradition and is considered the grandfather of brukdown music. He has taken brukdown music with his inimitable vocal style to major festivals throughout the Caribbean, the United States, and Mexico. He continues to perform traditional, anonymously composed songs he learned from his grandfather and father. His repertoire also reflects European influence. He does not stop there, however, but has created brukdown songs reflecting his experiences. He has retained the traditional brukdown strophic form: verse (the call) and hook chorus (the response). His songs have ensured the survival of some aspects of Creole.
Popular brukdown, like punta-rock, involves synthesized electronic instruments with those of the traditional brukdown ensemble (see Okada 1995: example 1). Electronic instruments include bass, guitar, keyboard, and frequently a drum machine. The content of the lyrics remains similar to that of the traditional form: political commentary, social satire, humor, and often party slang (terms and phrases that become popular in everyday Creole). In reality, the popular Belizean brukdown is most similar to the Trinidadian soca. The most prominent brukdown singer-composer from the 1960s through the 1980s was Lord Rhaburn (Gerald Rhaburn), whose popular band was known as the Lord Rhaburn Combo. Popular brukdown is played by local bands, which also play punta-rock, soca, and reggae.
Cungo
The popular musical style known in Creole as cungo 'let's go' emerged in the 1980s.
Ethnomusicological research on the Garifuna has been conducted by Emory Whipple (1971), Carol and Travis Jenkins (1982a, 1982b, 1982c), Kenan Foley (1995), and Gina Scott (1996a, 1996b, 1996c). Whipple's master's thesis (1971) describes the musical culture of the Garifuna and discusses percussion instruments, performance, secular song-and-dance forms, and semisacred songs. Carol and Travis Jenkins have made extensive recordings of secular and sacred music and have made cantometric analyses of the music, trying to identify Amerindian and African cultural traits. Foley's master's thesis (1995) contains some musical analyses and transcriptions of interviews with a shaman. Ervin Beck (1980a, 1980b) has extensively studied folk songs in Creole.
Much musical research is yet to be done in Belize. Garifuna research has been substantial, but nothing has been investigated about the music of the mestizos, the largest population in the country.
The Archaeological Record
Historical and Ethnographic Records of Native Americans
Spanish, Criollo, and Mestizo Music
Education, Mass Media, and Organizations
Further Study
Most inhabitants of the Republic of Costa Rica are descendants of immigrants from Europe (mainly Spain) and from other early Spanish-American colonies. Most of these immigrants settled in the Costa Rican central plateau, which still holds more than half the national population. The Spanish settlers introduced slaves from Africa and frequently relocated native Americans, destroying their social structure and reducing their population. Intermixtures between European, African, and indigenous peoples occurred. Spanish cultural norms predominated during colonial times.
Archaeological evidence suggests the existence of two major cultural areas in Costa Rica during later pre-Columbian times. The northwestern Pacific coast was inhabited by the Chorotega, a Mangue-speaking group. To escape Olmec oppression, the Chorotega migrated from Soconusco, Mexico, to the Isthmus of Rivas about A.D. 800. Displaced by intrusions of the Nicarao, a NaŽhuatl-speaking group, at about A.D. 1200, they moved into the Nicoya Peninsula, where they were first contacted by Gil GonzaŽlez DaŽvila in 1523 (Fowler 1989:35, 68-69).
Globular and tubular duct flutes, whistles, container idiophones (sonajas), and various struck idiophones and membranophones (minus their skins) have been found in archaeological sites of the northwestern Pacific coastal area. These instruments exhibit zoomorphic or anthropomorphic shapes. Most are made of clay, but log idiophones similar to Aztecan teponaztli and Mayan tunkul have also have been found. The globular flutes are of great variety in size, shape, and tuning. Examples with four holes are predominant. Their exterior forms occasionally exhibit abstractly painted or carved designs of Mexican influencewhich may point to a dominant Nicarao presence in the area during the Late Polychrome Period (A.D. 1200-ca. 1520).
The rest of the country was inhabited predominantly by peoples of Macro-Chibchan affiliation as the archaeological record and linguistic similarities show (Ferrero 1977). These peoples are distinguished mainly by their patterns of settlement and by the geographic and ecological conditions in which they lived. In the central plateau, they included the AserriŽ, the CurrirabaŽ, the Guarco, the Huetara, and the Pacaca chiefdoms; in the central Pacific and TilaraŽn range, they included the
Most of the pre-Columbian artifacts mentioned above are housed in the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, Museo ArqueoloŽgico del Instituto Nacional de Seguros, Banco Central de Costa Rica, and private collections (Stone 1966).
The earliest written accounts of native American music in Costa Rica are from the observations of sixteenth-century travelers. Ferdinand Columbus, Christopher's son, documented such encounters with indigenous peoples along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Panama in 1502, and noted the native use of cuernos y tambores 'horns and drums' (Oviedo y ValdeŽs 1851-1855[4]:96-99). According to Columbus, the playing of these instruments accompanied a hostile display toward his expedition. Gonzalo FernaŽndez de Oviedo y ValdeŽs (official chronicler of the Indies from 1532 to 1537) documented Chorotega dances, ritual sacrifices, and festivities that he witnessed during 1529 in the Nicoya Peninsula. Communal song-dances (mitote) occurred on various occasions, including rites that involved human sacrifices and rites that celebrated the conclusion of the corn- or cacao-harvest seasons. As part of these events, large groups of people danced to the rhythm of drums while dressed in bird-feather costumes and colorful paint. A ceremony witnessed by Oviedo in the Gran Nicoya region and described in his chronicles appears to be the volador, a ceremony well known in Mexico and Guatemala.
Colonial documents prepared by religious and civil authorities reveal important information regarding processes of native American assimilation and resistance to Spanish rule. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, native Americans living in the central plateau were relocated into reducciones, settlements of converted populations that provided tribute and labor for Cartago, the colonial capital (Fonseca 1986:110113). Many of these communities were organized into cofradiŽas, sodalities that supported the Church in its activities and celebrations. Indigenous members were required to adorn streets, prepare altars, assist in carrying images of their religious patrons, and perform their own dances and music during processions (Ordenanza de CreacioŽn de la CofradiŽa de la Inmaculada ConcepcioŽn de Cartago 1594). Enforcement of these duties was sometimes contested at the highest authority, as in 1638, when Cartago's parish priest demanded that the governor force all native Americans in the region to attend the Corpus Christi processions (FernaŽndez 1881 [1]:278). The governor forced nearby reduccionesAserriŽ, CurrirabaŽ, Tobosi, and othersto attend the processions; however, populations living far from Cartago had governmental permission that exempted them from participating in these festivals.
During the 1600s and 1700s, missionaries converting populations outside the central plateau recorded aspects of musical culture of native populations. In the area of Talamanca, Fray Francisco de San JoseŽ (1697, quoted in FernaŽndez 1886[5]:369-374) and Manuel de Urcullu (1763, quoted in FernaŽndez Guardia 1975:152-157) observed many native shamanic rituals and described healing practices, including the use of songs. They also reported the indigenous practice of funerary songs and the use of membranophones.
Nineteenth-century native American history and culture were documented by JoseŽ MariŽa Figueroa (1873-1883), whose manuscripts contain descriptions and pictorial renditions of medicine, dance, and music in indigenous communities of the southern Pacific coast and Talamanca. The manuscripts contain the earliest transcriptions of music performed by native Costa Ricans, including that of a chirimiŽa (a double-reed aerophone with six holes for fingering) melody "La sangre de Cristo" ('Christ's Blood'), performed by the Tobosi of Cartago. The musicdiatonic, emphasizing tonic, mediant, and dominantseems influenced by melodic patterns of Gregorian chant (Salazar 1992:160).
Maleku
The Maleku are a small, indigenous community of about 520 people. They are descendants of the Voto, who inhabited the Atlantic watershed in pre-Columbian times (Stone 1977:79, 161). These peoples moved into the northern savannas of Costa Rica to escape the Spanish encomienda, a policy by which the Crown granted Spanish settlers rights to exploit labor or receive tribute from specific indigenous populations. During the 1700s and 1800s, the Maleku resisted colonial and republican expeditions aimed at controlling their territories.
The Maleku inhabit three settlements (palenques)Margarita, El Sol, Tonjibe in a reservation created in 1976 near San Rafael de Guatuso, Alajuela Province. Despite legislation that assures them access to land and other resources, they are undergoing radical change in their customs, mainly because nonindigenous peoples have seized some of their lands, and they increasingly depend on wages from landowners surrounding the reservation (Guevara and ChacoŽn 1992:99).
Music is an important part of Maleku daily life, religious and secular. In Maleku mythology, TokuŽ (creator of the earth and the sky) and Maika (receiver of the dead) sing and communicate with each other, deciding the fates of human beings. To call for godly protection against human wrongdoing or evil spirits, specialists sing or recite the prayers poora and jalacomapacuaper (Acevedo 1986b:52-53). Mythical narratives and religious songs and prayers are commonly transmitted orally from parent to child.
The Maleku practice a traditional burial ceremony (fiesta de sufrimiento), which occurs on the third day after an individual's death. Guests extend condolences to the family. As they approach, each plays a funerary melody on a five-holed side-blown cane flute (karakukua), specially constructed for the occasion by a family member of the deceased. By playing these flutes, the guests assure the family that the dead person's wrongdoings are being forgiven.
The Maleku call song napurete, and songs of love (curijurijanapuretec) are common (Acevedo 1986b:53). The text of each song is personal, but the songs usually follow traditional melodic patterns. Singing is often typified by imitative melodic contours and downward glissandi at phrase endings (
Songs are performed for two Maleku traditional line dances, napuratengeo and nakikonaraŽjari, in which men and women, usually elders, dance together (Acevedo 1986b:53-55). The music is performed responsorially by a lead singer and the dancers. In addition to tali, the Maleku use traditional maracas, a reed flute
Every major event in the community is marked by a fiesta, an occasion for communally sharing foods, drinking corn beer (chicha), and performing music and dance. One such occasion occurs at the end of the hunt for turtles (caza de la tortuga), held during March, April, and May. An annual event, this hunt involves ritual purification, emphasizing aspects of reciprocity between humans and nature (Bozzoli 1986:19-29).
Through study within the national educational system, travel outside the reservation for work, and exposure to Costa Rican and Nicaraguan radio, many Maleku young people are losing their indigenous heritage. Because of their assimilation of non-Maleku culture and life-styles, they rarely perform their traditional dances, and many ignore the songs. Nevertheless, Maleku young people are adapting indigenous culture and using it in new ways. With traditional songs, instruments, and dances, they present collective dramatizations of Maleku myths and stories in the Malekuan language (Acevedo 1986b:55-56). Exogenous technologies also appear, as Radio Tonjibe, a Maleku-owned station, broadcasts these dramatizations to the community.
Brunka and Teribe
The Brunka and Teribe inhabit the savannas of Buenos Aires and the Brunquen~a range, both located in southeastern Puntarenas. Their population amounts to more than four thousand in three adjacent indigenous reservationsBoruca (Brunka), Rey CurreŽ (Brunka), TeŽrraba (Teribe)incorporated by the Costa Rican legislature into the National Indian Reservation system in 1977. These reservations are experiencing some of the problems affecting other indigenous reservations in Costa Rica: displacement of indigenous populations through relocation, reduction of landholdings, invasions of land by nonindigenous farmers, and the use of local fields and forests by national and transnational corporations (Guevara and ChacoŽn 1992:110).
During the early 1600s, Brunka, Coto, and Quepo peoples who inhabited the south Pacific coast were forcibly relocated to Boruca, a reduccioŽn (Stone 1949:3). Intermixtures occurred, and Brunka cultural patterns predominated. Around 1700, some Teribes were relocated from Talamanca to what would later become TeŽrraba. Since then, the Teribe have assimilated to the cultural patterns of the Brunka. Few of them speak their native languages, despite the efforts of indigenous organizations to incorporate their languages and customs into local educational programs (Bozzoli 1986:60, 66).
Research on the music and dance of the Brunka and the Teribe has focused primarily on the present seasonal festivities, the fiesta de los negritos and the fiesta de los diablitos (Acevedo 1986b; Salazar 1980; Stone 1949). Both fiestas exhibit the choreological use of hobbymules and hobbybulls, a characteristic shared by other Spanish-derived festivals in Central America and Mexico.
The fiesta de los negritos 'fiesta of the little black men', occurring on 8 December, coincides with a celebration in honor of the Virgen de la PutiŽsima ConcepcioŽn de MariŽa SantiŽsima, patron saint of Boruca. Preparations for the event begin on 6 December, when the village council selects the men who will represent the little black men (negritos), who formerly wore the skins of forest animals, with their faces painted in mud and soot or coala disguise said to accentuate their native identity. The performers still use coal. One dresses as the sarocla 'little mule'. The negritos go from house to house, dancing around the hobbymule, playing tricks on people, and begging drinks from everyone. They strike the little mule with sticks adorned with multicolored sashes (Salazar 1992:172). According to Brunka respondents, the event celebrates the military supremacy that the Brunka formerly exercised over the Teribe (Acevedo 1986b:73).
The fiesta de los diablitos 'fiesta of the little devils', conducted from 30 December to 2 January by little devils (diablitos), a society representing the Boruca community, dramatizes the fighting and sacrifice of a bull, said to represent the Spanish conquerors and settlers. Only men participate in its planning and performance, though women are involved in preparing rice tamales and corn beer (Salazar 1985:112). Non-Indians are allowed to participate as spectators. The diablitos are organized hierarchically:
The diablitos are traditionally "born" at midnight, 30 December, on Cerro VolcaŽn, residence of CuasraŽn, a legendary shaman (sukia) who, according to local oral history, never surrendered to Spanish rule (Maroto 1979:77). The fiesta begins with the sounds of cattle horns and conchs. During a three-day marathon, the masked diablos parade through the village, stopping in homes to perform salomas, songs recited with words or vocables, narrating personal experiences. On the last day, the bull is symbolically sacrificed, cut up, and distributed among the listed buyers (Acevedo 1986b:72-73).
During these and other events, the Brunka and the Teribe play indigenous instrumentsmaraca, caja, kiviŽand locally crafted nonindigenous instruments, including fiddles and guitars (Salazar 1992:171175). The maraca, made from a dry calabash (Crescentia cujete), is often embossed with scenes depicting regional flora and fauna and abstract designs. Traditionally filled with platanillo (Heliconia sp.) seeds, the calabash is attached to a wooden handle with a rope. The caja is a membra-nophone made from a cylindrical piece of Spanish cedar, balsa, or coyol-palm trunk. Each end is covered with the hide of wild peccary or cattle, fastened with liana rings and laced with maguey cord. The performer strikes the hide with the palms of the hands, or with sticks. The kiviŽ, a duct flute, is made of carrizo (Chusquea sp.), with a beeswax embouchure and five holes for fingering (
Brunka young people also play and dance nonindigenous music, mainly because of their exposure to radio programs and continuous contact with nearby urban centers, such as Buenos Aires de Osa. As early as 1949, the cumbia, the punto chiricano, and the vals were heard in the region. By the late 1970s, ensembles from neighboring towns and local musicians were engaged to play in corn-beer fiestas (chichadas), communal meetings (juntas), and festivities of diablitos and negritos in Boruca and Rey CurreŽ. These ensembles performed cumbias, pasodobles, and other popular musics on nonindigenous instruments, including fiddles, guitars, and concertinas (Salazar 1985:118). By the early 1990s, ensembles were incorporating electric bass guitar and drums and using amplifiers for singers and instruments.
The fiddle was apparently introduced in the Teribe area by Franciscan priests during the colonial period (Salazar 1992:112). In the early 1990s, examples were constructed by local Teribe craftsmen, using wood of guanacaste (Enterolobium cyclocarpum), a gum extracted from a local palm, and metal guitar strings. The repertoire performed on this instrument is influenced by the community's exposure to national and regional radio programs.
A transcription of a performance of a pasodoble by a Teribe fiddler (
GuaymiŽ
The GuaymiŽ, originally from ChiriquiŽ, Panama, settled in three main areas of the southeast Pacific coast: GuaymiŽ, Abrojos, and Conte-Burica, all of which are protected as Indian reservations. A highly mobile community of more than twelve hundred,
Sound is an important aspect of GuaymiŽ medicine and religion. According to local caciques, maracas made of dried cocoa fruits have divinatory powers. Used with other items, these maracas allow healers to expel bad spirits that have taken hold of a patient's body (Salazar 1992:27-28).
The GuaymiŽ practice mamanchiŽ, a syncretic religion (also practiced in Panama) that combines Roman Catholicism with indigenous religious and musical elements. In a mixture of GuaymiŽ and Spanish, mamanchiŽ priests perform litany-like religious songs and conduct the responses of a women's choir (Bozzoli 1975: 111-112).
Like the Brunka and the Teribe, the GuaymiŽ perform salomas. Other secular songs often allude to animals or other elements in the local environment and to aspects of social life and material culture. A transcription of a canto a la maraca 'song dedicated to a rattle' (
Two traditional dances still practiced by the GuaymiŽ are a frog dance (jehio), usually performed by men, and the bugutaŽ, performed by men and women. Both are danced outside at sunset, at night, and during a corn-beer fiesta, a celebration after collective work (Acevedo 1986b:64). In the frog dance, the performers begin in a single file and end in a circle; while crossing one leg behind the other, they march backward. The bugutaŽ is danced in a single file, with each dancer holding onto the arms of the one in front. It involves various rapid steps forward, usually initiated by the lead dancer, heading the file. It is executed around a pole, near which the musicians are situated.
These dances are commonly sung and accompanied with tošn or a caja, a short, double-headed, cylindrical membranophone of cedar or balsa, covered with the skin of a wild boar. Each drumhead is attached to the body by two rattan rings. One is tied to the skin. The other holds the head against the body. Both heads are tightened by a W-patterned lacing.
GuaymiŽ dances are sometimes accompanied by gneleŽ, dru mugata, and dru nošraŽ (Salazar 1992). The gneleŽ is a friction idiophone, a tortoiseshell covered with beeswax, played by softly rubbing the edge of the shell with the palm of the hand; it was formerly used to communicate across mountains. The dru mugata is a globular flute made of beeswax; it has two or three holes for fingering and is capable of producing tritonic or tetratonic scales. The dru nošraŽ is a double-duct flute made of
During the summer, the GuaymiŽ practice la balseriŽa, a week-long friendly competition between two communities. The host community provides food, corn beer, and music. Two all-male teams compete against each other, having as their objective the demonstration of strength and agility. One team, armed with balsa logs, tries to hit the other team, which is unarmed; as a strategy of defense, the unarmed team dances out of the way. Hundreds of players have participated.
Afro-Caribbean Music
Little research has been done on the music of people of African descent, the largest ethnic minority in Costa Rica. Nationally, they make up nearly 5 percent of the population. The presence of African peoples in Costa Rica dates back to the 1600s and 1700s, when Spanish settlers imported Bantu-speaking peoples and other Africans to
Little documentation about the musical life of these peoples exists; however, many blacks and mulattoes eventually settled in La Puebla de los Angeles, outside the colonial capital of Cartago, where the cofradiŽa de Nuestra Sen~ora de los Angeles, a Roman Catholic confraternity founded by mulattoes in 1652, organized annual festivals and religious services to honor its patron (FernaŽndez Guardia 1921:265287). These festivities involved processions with floats, stagings of comedies, and dances, including the zarabanda, a seventeenth-century Spanish dance in triple time. By 1722, criollos were also involved in the cofradiŽa.
From the 1870s to the late 1920s, fleeing poverty and economic crises, tens of thousands of African-American English-speaking laborers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, Nicaragua, and Panama migrated to Costa Rica. They were attracted by the construction of the railroad between the central plateau and LimoŽn and the United Fruit Company's plantations in the lowlands of LimoŽn. Thousands left the area during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but many blacks remained and went on to become full-time farmers. After the civil war of 1949, many farmers acquired citizenship and were able to register land. From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, with the rise of cacao prices on the world market, these farmers emerged as comfortable landowners (Bourgois 1989:161-164). This period marked the beginning of the economic and cultural integration of the black population into the Costa Rican state.
Religious musical contexts and genres
PocomiŽa, a syncretic religion incorporating traditional African and Protestant beliefs and practices, existed in LimoŽn around 1900. An important aspect of it was possession by spirits. The celebration of PocomiŽa included the use of altars and special ceremonial artifacts, drum-accompanied ritual dances in a circle, and the singing of hymns and other sacred songs and the reading of biblical passages (Duncan and MeleŽndez 1974:103-104).
Since the early 1900s, Protestant (Anglican, Baptist, Methodist) religious services have been important musical occasions among Jamaican immigrants. Hymns composed or arranged by Ira David Sankey (1840-1908) were popular. Concerts of religious music in which soloists, duets, and choirs participated were frequent. Today, Protestant churches attract many people to their services, especially during Holy Week. English hymns, such as those of the Broadman Hymnal (1940), continue to be sung by older people. Services include religious songs in Spanish.
Through the 1920s, the people of Limon and other communities on the Caribbean coast organized religious programs that included singing and reciting, in processions and in local churches and halls. Special activities on Easter Monday included games of darts, cricket, and baseball, plus the Maypole dance, which some churches of LimoŽn are reviving. On those occasions, amateur musicians performed on locally crafted instruments such as a coconut grater, a double-headed cylindrical wood drum with a tapir-skin membrane, a six-stringed bowed tube zither, a bamboo flute, and a horse-jaw idiophone (Palmer 1986:56-58, 103). With special foods and dances, the people of LimoŽn commemorated Slavery Day (1 August 1833, when the British government abolished slavery). In December, Harvest was a time to give thanks for a good harvest season and included praying and the singing of hymns. Christmas services were followed by caroling and parties in people's homes. Slavery Day is no longer celebrated, but some Baptist churches still observe Harvest.
Though local economic depression from the 1930s to the 1950s stifled the celebration of these events, local churches, parent-education boards, teachers, and the local offices of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica by Marcus Garvey in 1919, played a vital role in sustaining the cultural life of the African-derived population. From the 1920s to the late 1940s, they organized concertsincluding sacred concerts, rag concerts, and Pleasant Sunday Afternoons to raise funds for hiring English teachers from abroad and supporting other scholastic and communal activities (Palmer 1986:202-204). Usually held on Saturdays and Sundays, these events were somewhat religious and included the performance of hymns and biblical plays, plus competitions in music. Children performed as soloists and in duets and choirs, and prizes went to the best singer and the best instrumentalist. Women played major roles organizing these events, giving lessons, playing the pedal organ, and directing plays. Today, privately funded English schools and teachers still promote English-speaking creole culture in LimoŽn. Students learn nursery rhymes, rounds and other game-playing songs, hymns, and popular songs from the West Indies, Britain, and the United States. The local UNIA office sponsors bilingual education and the work of various art troops and youth groups.
Wakes continue to be social occasions in which adults and children recite prayers, sing hymns, play traditional Jamaican game-playing songs, and share foods, including bami (a baked bread prepared with grated cassava, oil, and salt) and aid (a lemonade prepared with brown sugar and ginger). One of the best known game-playing songs is "Go Down Emmanuel Road" (
Another traditional game played during wakes is balimbo, which usually involves boys and girls. In a yard outside, players stand in a circle with the leaderan adult called balimboin the center. The suitor waits outside the ring and then approaches it. The song consists of calls from the leader to the suitor and a joint response by the other participants:
Leader | Other participants |
Boy, you come, you come. | Yes, balimbo |
What you come about? | Yes, balimbo |
You come to court a girl? | Yes, balimbo |
You have your cocoa farm? | Yes, balimbo |
You have your house and land? | Yes, balimbo. |
Walk and view the ring. | Yes, balimbo. |
Pick the girl you choose. | Yes, balimbo. |
Girl, you love the boy? | Yes, balimbo. |
Kiss and make me see. | Yes, balimbo. |
Secular musical contexts and genres
Afro-Caribbean immigrants brought to Costa Rica the square dance (cuadrille), a traditional dance of rural English origin practiced mainly by the Jamaican middle and upper classes. Cuadrille troupes commonly competed during the 1920s and 1930s, and the dance remained popular well into the 1950s. It is still performed in LimoŽn, especially by folk-revival youth groups, with at least four couples and an ensemble usually containing a clarinet, a banjo, a guitar, and a trumpet (Salazar 1984:32-38). The repertoire includes more than fifty dances, each having up to five or six figures or movements, including vals, Colombian pasillo, Prince Albert, Caledonia, Lancers, and Basquet Cotillion.
During the 1930s, regional musicians became acquainted with country, swing, blues, and other music transmitted by U.S. radio stations. Phonograph records brought to LimoŽn by American, British, and Dutch ships were played on Victrolas at local clubs. From travelers or by mail, self-taught musicians acquired musical scores and books on constructing and playing instruments (Palmer 1986:221-223). Dance-oriented
Beginning in the 1950s and through the 1960s, calypsonians from Panama and Trinidad, including Lord Cobra, Mighty Sparrow, and Lord Kitchener, became popular. Local clubs and radio stations sponsored competitions among aspiring calypsonians, who accompanied themselves with guitar or tenor banjo, or with a vocal or percussion ensemble. Prizes were given to those demonstrating the greatest skill at textual and musical improvisation, a skill calypsonians call rhyming. Two well-known Costa Rican calypsonians are Edgar "PituŽn" Hutchinson and Walter "Mr. Gavitt"
After each of these stanzas, the calypsonian sings a refrain:I know a woman she name Irene.
She had a mighty family.
Monilia plague the gal until she walkin? lean.
She had to sell out all she property.
Ladies and gents come listen to me;
I want you all to understand.
Monilia is a power from a high degree,
And then it comes to kill off every man.
Who never read the Bible,
I say they read it now contentedly.
Get down on they knees and they start to pray;
Beg their master for sympathy.
Monilia you've come to stay,
And all you bring is hungry belly.
You say you no going away,
Till you bring me down to poverty.
Until the 1970s, local musical ensembles provided live music for boleros, guarachas, pasillos, rumbas, and swing. Some musicians played ready-made instruments, including guitar, trumpet, and clarinet. Others made their own, improvising materials for tumbas and bajos de caja. In the late twentieth century, many clubs began playing recorded musica practice that decreased wage-earning opportunities for traditional ensembles. Surviving ensembles often included a lead singer, a banjo, a guitar, a bajo de caja, a guširo, maracas, a bongo, and occasionally a tres (six-stringed guitar, with double courses), and tumbas. Repertoires may include a wide variety of Afro-Caribbean genres such as bolero, calypso, guaracha, rumba, and son. Other ensembles, keeping up with younger local, national, and international audiences, have begun to incorporate electronic instruments and broaden their repertoires to include reggae, New York salsa, and North American soul and rock.
Carnaval de LimoŽn is the major annual event of LimoŽn Province. Celebrated during 12-14 October, it commemorates Columbus's landing in America (1492) and is an occasion for thousands of expatriates to return and reestablish social bonds. It was introduced to LimoŽn after World War II by migrant workers who had experienced the Carnaval de ColoŽn in Panama (Salazar 1984:29). Concerts and competitions between local calypsonians are among its outstanding activities. The Carnaval de LimoŽn presents parades in which percussive ensembles and dancers (comparsas) compete against each other with elaborate floats, costumes, and the use of clever taunting songs. These ensembles usually include bongos, tom-toms, a bass drum, congas, and timbaletas, a pair of single-headed drums tuned a fourth apart and set side by side on a metal stand. The event brings musicians from Panama, Puerto Rico, and the United States and attracts tourists from the entire country and from abroad.
The first European settlers of Costa Rica were mainly immigrants from Spain (particularly from AndaluciŽa, Extremadura, and New and Old Castile) and other New World Spanish colonies. After initial settlements in Bruselas (near the present-day Pacific port of Puntarenas) and Nicoya (on a peninsula north of Puntarenas), they established in the central plateau in the mid-1500s, founding the village of Garcimun~oz in 1561. In 1564, they moved east to the Guarco Valley, which had better lands and a larger native American population (wanted as labor), and founded Cartago, capital of the colonial province.
During the colonial period (1502-1821), much of the known musical activity of Cartago revolved around Roman Catholic religious services, official visits, and patronal celebrations (Campos 1984:21-42). Corpus Christi, the most important religious festival, often included performances of ethnic music and dance by Spaniards, Africans, and native Americans. The traditional veneration of the Virgen de los Angeles (Virgin of the Angels), practiced since 1635, included the Te Deum or a sung mass, vespers, and processions for which special singers and instrumentalists were engaged. During that era, saraos, evening parties with dancing and music, were a common form of entertainment.
By the 1700s, musical events included musical-theatrical representations and popular dances, such as the AndaluciŽan fandango, a lively dance in triple time. European musical instrumentsbass viol, bugle, drum, flageolet, guitar, violinwere available to the settlers. In 1785, an inventory of the church of Orosi, a settlement close to Cartago, includes, in addition to the instruments mentioned above, a marimba for use in religious services (Blanco 1974:249-250). By the early 1800s, musicians from Nicaragua and Guatemala were being engaged to perform and teach (Flores 1978:40).
During the 1800s, new institutions and expanded trade brought important
Throughout the 1800s, woodwind and string instruments were commonly used in social gatherings and other events, such as wakes and processions (Figueroa 1873-1883). With the opening of London markets to coffee exports, local elites imported an increasing number of scores and musical instruments, including pianos and organs. An expanding interest in European art music was stimulated by the creation of the Teatro Nacional (built between 1890 and 1897), which provided a place for visiting European opera companies and artists to perform.
Aspects of musical life during the late 1800s are depicted in JoseŽ MariŽa Figueroa's manuscripts (1873-1883), which include descriptions and drawings of religious services and other social occasions. Among the events Figueroa represents is a child's funeral (velorio de un angelito), in which a bass viol, three violins, and two flutes are played. Another drawing illustrates the procession following that funeral, during which musicians also performed.
Musical Instruments
Of the instruments introduced by the Spaniards during the colonial period, the six-stringed acoustic guitar remains the most popular and can be found throughout the country, including among African and indigenous populations. It is used as a solo instrument, to accompany voice, and in triŽos (three-member ensembles usually performing on voices, guitars, and light percussion), mariachis, and other ensembles. Most manufacturers of guitars are located in the central plateau, mainly in San JoseŽ, but artisans in rural areas make instruments for local clientele. Native woods commonly utilized are Spanish cedar (Cedrela alliodora), mahogany (Switenia macrophyla), laurel (Cordia alliodora), cristoŽbal (Platymiscium pinnatum), cocobolo or rosewood (Dalbergia retusa), and ceniŽzaro (Pithecelobium saman); imported woods are also employed (Salazar 1992:128). Some manufacturers produce mandolins, lutes, requintos (small guitars, used as lead in triŽos), and occasionally violins.
The quijongo (
The marimba simple, diatonic with thirty to forty-two wooden keys, was apparently introduced into Costa Rica from Guatemala by Franciscan missionaries during the late 1700s. During the 1800s, it became popular in the central plateau and Guanacaste, where it accompanied recreational events and dances celebrated in the streets (Pittier and Thiel 1974:306-307). It included gourd resonators with beeswax-attached spiderweb mirlitons; the keyboard's frame was supported by a rattan arc on which the player sat. In 1910, the chromatic marimba was introduced by Guatemalan musicians engaged to perform for communal festivities in Orotina, Puntarenas Province (Salazar 1988:32). Well-known manufacturers of marimbas conduct business in Guanacaste, Puntarenas, and San JoseŽ. Marimba keys are usually made of cristoŽbal or hormigoŽn negro (Miroxylon balsamum); resonators are made of caobilla (Guarea spp.), Spanish cedar, or cypress (Cupressus lusitanica). Ensembles with one or two chromatic marimbas, the latter known as marimba en escuadra, commonly perform at clubs, restaurants, and hotels.
Two kinds of accordions, known as concertinas, are commonly found in the country (Salazar 1992:195-196). One is diatonic and ordinarily of European make; introduced to Costa Rica during the mid-1800s, it is still used by Bribri, CabeŽcar, Brunka, and TeŽrraba musicians and by people of African heritage in the Atlantic coastal region. The other, introduced during the early 1900s, is chromatic and comes in various sizes; alone or with the accompaniment of other instruments, it is commonly used during wakes, rosary-reciting meetings (rezos), baptisms, fairs, and other social events.
Musical genres
Spanish romances (ballads), villancicos (Christmas carols), arrullos (lullabies), and rondas infantiles (children's game-playing songs), recited and sung, are important oral traditions in many parts of the country, particularly in the towns and villages of the central plateau, the Nicoya Peninsula, and other areas settled by Spanish settlers and their descendants. The texts of some romances are sixteenth-century creations, Christian and Sephardic. Religious ballads include "Los tres magos del oriente," "La calle de la amargura," and "Por queŽ no cantais, la Bella"; novelistic ballads include "Bernal FranceŽs," "La esposa infiel," and "Las sen~as del marido" (also known as "La vuelta del marido"), well known in the repertoire of Hispanic ballads. The texts often exhibit a great degree of fragmentation, but maintain clear similarities with their Spanish counterparts. Popular villancicos include "Vamos con los magos," "Venid, pastorcillos," and "Pastores, venid; pastores, llegad," Children's game-playing songs include "QueŽ bonita la panadera," "Man~ana domingo," "MambruŽ" (also known as "MartiŽn se fue a la guerra"), "Estaba una pastora," and "MiroŽn, miroŽn, miroŽn."
Performed with or without guitar accompaniment, ballads are essentially monodic. Melodies are rhythmically simple and regular, and repeat after every four lines of text. They typically lack chromaticism and modulation. Though traditional children's game-playing songs and lullabies exhibit few melodic variations (perhaps a result of having been part of the repertoire of music education since the early 1940s), balladic melodies vary greatly from one version to the next (
The genres retahila 'string' and bomba 'praise', related to the Spanish copla, have been popular in the region of Guanacaste but also occur in other areas. The poems of both have eight-syllable verses. The retahila (elsewhere known as ensalada) involves elaborate consonant or assonant rhymes (abbccdde, aabbccdd, acbcdfef) of variable length; it usually links incongruous images and themes to produce humorous effects. Men and women recite examples during parties and other recreational activities. The bomba, usually composed of octosyllabic quatrains rhyming abcb, is improvised by men, women, and children in various social settings, interjected within songs and
QuieŽn te ve tan galancito, | How deceptively gallant you look, |
tan lleno de sonrisas. | so full of smiles. |
Sabe Dios coŽmo andaraŽn | God only knows how |
las faldas de tu camisa. | the flaps of your shirt are. |
Las faldas de mi camisa | The flaps of my shirt |
muy limpiecitas estaŽn. | are extremely clean. |
A que vos no me ensen~as | I bet that you don't show me |
los remedos [sic] del fustaŽn. | the patches on your petticoat. |
Morena de ojos quemantes, | Woman of burning eyes, |
que al mirarme me adulaŽs, | Who fawns on me with her gaze, |
decime, pero cuanto antes, | Tell me, but in a hurry, |
żpor queŽ diablos reculaŽs? | Why the hell do you turn away? |
Te quise en el puro invierno; | I loved you in midwinter; |
tambieŽn te quise en verano: | I also loved you in the summer: |
sabanero liberiano, | Herdsman from Liberia, |
ya soy soga de otro cuerno. | I've now lassoed another horn. |
Todas las noches me paso | Every night I pass the time |
como los toros, mugiendo; | Like the bulls, mooing; |
y hasta me pongo a rascar | And I even scratch myself |
pa ver si asiŽ te comprendo. | to see if I therefore understand you. |
En los buses de mi tierra | In the buses of my land |
pasan cosas muy bonitas | Lovely things occur |
cuando voy pa' mi trabajo | When I'm things occur |
siempre muy de man~anita. | Early in the morning. |
El chofer muy apurado | The driver hastily |
va cobraŽndole a la gente | Charges passengers their fee |
mientras toman su cafeŽ | While they drink their coffee |
con arepa bien caliente. | With hot pancakes. |
ĄBomba! | Bomba! |
"żDiay, queŽ? żYa no hay caballeros, | "Hey, is it that now there are no gentlemen, |
que nadie se va a parar?" | [and] that nobody is going to stand up?" |
"Sen~ora, caballeros habemos muchos; | "Lady, we are many gentlemen; |
lo que no le quedoŽ fue lugar." | What wasn't left for you was a seat." |
ĄBomba! | Bomba! |
"Y ese sen~or de sombrero, | "And that man wearing a hat! |
que se corra para atraŽs. | Move on toward the back. |
Y usted, por favor, la de vestido rojo, | And you, please, the one in a red dress! |
no se me haga del rogar." | Don't make me beg." |
The son suelto (also known as baile suelto) and tambito are popular song-dances. The son suelto sometimes exhibits stamping (zapateado), a trait common to many traditional Spanish dances. Another song-dance is the callejera (or parrandera), but there is little agreement about its musical traits. Both names indicate the musical context: the first literally means 'of the street', and the second can be glossed 'reveler'.
Song-dances exhibit binary (AB) or ternary (ABA) formal structures with repeated or double periods. The tonality is often major; tonic, subdominant, and dominant triads (I, IV, V) prevail. When in minor tonalities (as many danzas are), these compositions modulate to the relative major from one double period to the other.
Rhythmic and melodic configurations that characterize these song-dances depend on the ensemble performing the music. They may be played by a quijongo, a solo singer with guitar, a triŽo (usually a requinto [small acoustic lead guitar], a guitar, and a singer, who often plays maracas), an accordion, a variety of marimba ensembles, or a cimarrona (a small, traditional ensemble of woodwinds, brass, and percussion).
An excerpt of a son suelto (
The tambito is a song-dance whose creation is attributed to the Talolingas, an ensemble from Guanacaste. It has become popular among composers of muŽsica tiŽpica (RamiŽrez 1986:115), a local term for music of known authorship that utilizes traditional song-dance styles and forms. The guitarists usually provide vocal harmonies. Melodies are often harmonized in parallel thirds or sixths. The guitarists use various techniques of strumming (rasgueado): the first and fourth beats are played apagado 'stopped'; the second, third, and fifth are left to sound freely (
Contexts
Ballads and other traditional songs are usually performed at home among family or friends, and on special occasions, including novenas (wakes), veladas escolares 'public performances at schools', and patronal fiestas. According to Betancourt, Bonamore, and Cohen (1992:12-13), who studied the balladic tradition in Heredia Province, rosary-reciting meetings for Christmas and Holy Week often include the performance of villancicos and romances, recited or sung, interspersed among devotional prayers and songs of praise (alabados).
Birthdays, baptisms, debutante parties (quincean~os), weddings, anniversaries, and other small social gatherings are among the occasions when Costa Ricans enjoy singing and listening to music. In urban and rural settings, professional or amateur triŽos are an important source of music for these occasions. Serenatas by triŽos, considered an essential part of courtship, are often used to amend stressed relationships, to ask parents for their daughter's hand in marriage, and to celebrate a wedding. In urban areas, the music provided by these ensembles may include traditional and popular music, but boleros, particularly those popularized by TriŽo Los Panchos and TriŽo Alma de AmeŽrica, are the preferred expressive form. Middle and upper-class quincean~os and weddings may feature special parties with dancing to live music or recordings.
Through the 1960s, responsorial singing and the playing of organs remained the
Weekly performances by local municipal bands (military bands were eliminated with the 1949 abolition of the Costa Rican army) are common. Such events, known as retretas (evening open-air concerts) and recreos (Sunday-morning concerts after Mass) usually take place in the municipal plaza or park and include a variety of music, including marches, overtures, and pasodobles from Spanish zarzuelas. These
Fairs and festivals, religious or secular, are important social activities for which entire communities convene. Holding fairs (turnos) remains the most effective way to raise money for churches, nursing homes, schools, and other causes. Small-scale weekend events, fairs usually feature live music, raffles and other games, traditional foods, and fireworks.
More than any other activity, annual patronal fiestas, held since early colonial times, evoke communal spirit and devotional fervor. They usually include horse shows and parades in which masqueraders (payasos)men and sometimes adolescentswear costumes that personify traditional characters, including el copetoŽn 'the giant', la copetona 'the giantess', el diablo 'the devil', and la muerte 'death'. Music for these occasions is often provided by a cimarrona (
Entertainment among the middle and upper classes of the central plateau includes attending seasonal concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra (established in 1926) and the National Symphony Choir, recitals and concerts by chamber ensembles, and performances by local and visiting foreign musicians. These concerts usually present music of the standard international repertoire, but often feature compositions by contemporary Costa Rican composers. In places such as the Teatro Nacional and the Teatro Melico Salazar, opera, symphony, dance, and Latin American music are regularly presented.
Institutionalized schooling and mass media have had an important impact on traditional forms of learning and are increasingly shaping the population's musical aesthetic. Musical education is obligatory at the primary- and secondary-school levels; teachers focus on preparing the school band or choir for scholastic activities and official holidays, such as Independence Day (15 September). Educators teach patriotic and traditional songs designed to instill patriotism, moral values, and acceptable attitudes. They have compiled several songbooks for this purpose (Cruz-SaŽenz 1986:xxi-xxiii). Their repertoire includes Costa Rican and other Latin American songs. Secondary-school choirs frequently participate in festivals and competitions. They memorize the choral parts and usually perform with instrumental accompaniment.
The Conservatorio Castella, an institution approved by the Ministry of Education, has instituted an eleven-year plan that combines primary- and secondary-school studies with an intensive program in folk and popular music, dance, and drama. Musicians are trained in the Youth Program of the National Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1970 by the administration of JoseŽ Figueres (SaŽenz 1982). Public and private universities offer degrees in musical performance, conducting, composition, musicology, and education. Teachers and students perform in local orchestras, chamber ensembles, choral groups, and popular-music ensembles.
Especially in rural areas and for lower-class people (who have less access to newspapers, books, film, television, or other media), radio is the primary source of information and entertainment. Commercial stations broadcast popular music, soap
Costa Rican television programming relies heavily on imports from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States (Beisanz et al. 1982:166). Local television and cable stations air performances by national and international pop and classical musicians, and feature bands and orchestras on locally produced family-oriented programs. Some transmit videos of pop music from Mexico, Spain, and the United States. The Sistema Nacional de Radio y TelevisioŽn Cultural, a national radio-television system, broadcasts folk, popular, and classical music. Throughout the country, it has recorded many folk-based ensembles and popular artists, and it annually sponsors the festival Somos Como Somos.
Music for advertising and consumers is produced by private recording studios, which provide facilities for local musicians to make soundtracks for documentaries, films, "jingles," and records. The studio INDICA (in 1988 acquired by Sony Corporation) produces, records, and publishes music for the Central American market, distributes records and tapes to local radio stations and retailers, and promotes local and visiting label artists.
Despite the effects of mass media on Costa Rican musical culture, many artists have revived popular interest in folk-oriented music and dance through their research and performance. The folklorist Emilia Prieto (1978) has compiled and recorded many traditional songs of the central plateau. Other groups (including Ballet FolcloŽrico Nacional, Cantares, ChubuzuŽ, Curime, and Nacaome) and individual artists (including Guadalupe Urbina and Juan Carlos Uren~a) have attained national and international recognition. Much of this success has been achieved through the patronage of state and municipal agencies. Grass-root organizations are promoting traditional arts and music. One of these, the AsociacioŽn Aires Costarricenses, furthers research and performance of folk-oriented music and dance of the central plateau. Another, the AsociacioŽn de Grupos e InteŽrpretes de la Cultura Popular, promotes traditional artists and sponsors music events and festivals.
Of native Americans in Costa Rica, only the music of the Bribri and CabeŽcar of Talamanca has been studied in detail [see BRIBRI AND CABEŽCAR]. Jorge L. Acevedo (1986b) provides a general introduction to many aspects of the musical culture of contemporary indigenous populations. Rodrigo Salazar (1992) contributes a needed organological study with important information regarding musical contexts and instrumental use. Further research is necessary in native musical style and performance, oral composition, musical terminology, aesthetics, and indigenous systems of classifying genres and instruments. Linguistic and oral-poetic analyses of indigenous singing are also lacking.
Quince Duncan and Carlos MeleŽndez (1974) provide an overview of African history and culture in Costa Rica, including aspects of music and religion. A study by Rodrigo Salazar (1984) discusses the recent history of popular Afro-Caribbean music of LimoŽn. Paula Palmer's study of the coastal communities south of LimoŽn (1986) contributes valuable information about the social and musical life of peoples of the country through the 1970s. More research on Afro-Costa Rican musical composition and poetics, performance, and aesthetics is desirable. Studies of contemporary social contexts of musical performance, particularly life-cycle events, Protestant religious services, and yearly celebrations (such as carnival) are lacking. Research might explore the processes of cultural change in the country since the 1950s, particularly
Information about the musical life of Spanish, criollo, and mestizo populations of the colonial and post-independence periods is scattered in historical documents, which rarely deal with the topic specifically. Valuable sources can be found in the works of LeoŽn FernaŽndez (1881-1907, 1975), Ricardo FernaŽndez Guardia (1921, 1975), and FernaŽndez Guardia and others (1929). Ricardo Blanco (1974) discusses the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Costa Rica and has documented aspects of colonial musical life. A good source for the history of art music, including that of bands and opera, is Bernal Flores (1978). Discussion of cultural policies affecting art and popular music since the 1970s can be found in Guido SaŽenz (1982).
Research on Spanish, criollo, and mestizo oral traditions has aimed at publishing textual collections for use in the educational system. Early studies include those by Emma Gamboa (1941), ReneŽ AniŽbal (1944), Julio Fonseca (1950), and Evangelina de NuŽn~ez (1956). MariŽa Eugenia Monge's El romancero en Costa Rica (1946) is the first philological study of traditional Spanish balladry in Costa Rica. Later studies include those by Miche`le S. de Cruz-SaŽenz (1986), Helia Betancourt (1986) and Betancourt, Alessandra Bonamore, and Henry Cohen (1992), which include textual and musical transcriptions and contextual information. Aspects of Costa Rican religious practice and genres, including prayer and song, can be found in Carlos M. Campos (1984). Acevedo (1986a) provides a general overview of the music of Guanacaste, including aspects of pre-Columbian and colonial culture, instruments, religious sodalities (cofradiŽas) and patronal fiestas, and traditional music and dance. Further research is needed on the social history of these traditions, their musical and poetic traits, and their performance. Studies exploring the effects of public education and mass media are also necessary. More work is needed on popular music and the music of other long-standing immigrant communities, such as Jews and Chinese.
Archaeological Background
Musical Instruments of Spanish and African Inspiration
Musical Contexts and Genres
Music for Entertainment
Social Structure, Musicians, and Behavior
Dynamics of Musical Culture
Further Study
El Salvador, with an area of 21,200 square kilometers featuring mostly rugged topography caused by volcanic and tectonic activity, is the smallest country in the mainland Americas. It has a high population for its size: more than 5 million predominantly rural people. Its largest population density is found in its principal city and capital, San Salvador, located in the Valle de las Hamacas (Valley of the Hammocks), at the foot of the San Salvador volcano. The political and administrative organization of the country includes fourteen departments in four zones: eastern, central, subcentral, and western.
Salvadorans are basically mestizos, though in some places traces of Negroid features are visible. Almost complete racial almagamation between Africans and others occurred during the colonial period, and El Salvador's Amerindian population is totally assimilated (Herring 1968:483).
Archaeological findings from the other countries of Mesoamerica suggest that the first musical instruments in El Salvador were used about twelve thousand years ago. In the Pre-Ceramic Period (from an unknown start to 1200 B.C.), hunter-gatherers are believed to have used stone and bone rasps, turtleshell idiophones, and strings of shells as percussion instruments. Among the aerophones were flutes and a whirled plaque (palo zumbador 'bull roarer'). Rasped turtleshells (forerunners of the guširo) also appeared. During this period, hunter-gatherers lived within permanent or semi-permanent communities that had multiple levels of social status, such as those corresponding to shamanism and other specializations (Castellanos 1970:44).
Throughout Mesoamerica, crops such as corn, squash, and beans had long been raised domestically, and around 1600 B.C. the first agricultural communities appeared. The characteristic feature of this period was that sound-producing materials found in the natural environment were incorporated into ritual and life-cycle practices. The use of naturally hollowed trees from the jungle and humanly hollowed trunks as percussion instruments dates to this period, and the proto-teponaztli 'hollowed log idiophone' possibly originated from them. Shamans of this period probably used concussion sticks to scare away evil spirits. The early tambor simple, a single-deerskin
The Pre-Classic Period (1200 B.C. to A.D. 250) marked the change to a new means of subsistence; in what is now El Salvador, groups of nomads tended to settle where the surroundings were favorable. The first inhabitants probably settled in the coastal plain because they could enrich their diet with animals and wild fruit from the mountains and marine resources from the coast (Casanova de PaŽrraga 1969:6). The great discovery of this period was the manufacture of ceramic or fired-clay objectsa discovery that led to the experimentation of new sounds from newly created ceramic musical instruments, such as rattles, scrapers, and strings of clay beads. In many cases, these were copies of earlier models of instruments made from other materials. Single-membrane kettledrums in the form of a pot or a vessel with a rounded bottom and later double-membrane drums separated by a partition were made in several sizes. With the use of fired clay, a disproportionate number of aerophones flourished, including ductless edge flutes with U-shaped notched mouthpieces, similar to the Andean kena; straight or globular double flutes with a single air channel or two independent ones; globular flutes (ocarinas) with one, two, or three interconnected resonance chambers; single and double whistles; and whistling pots (Castellanos 1970:45).
The characteristic musical feature of the Classic Period (A.D. 250-900) was the organological fusion of aesthetic and empirical concerns, a fusion manifested in an amazing variety and assortment of sound-producing artifacts remade from known materials. These instruments were "improvements" on instruments based on previously known acoustical properties. During this period, one struck idiophone appeared: the caŽntaro, a large jug tuned with water and used musically for low-pitched accompaniment (Contreras Arias 1988:68). Among the aerophones were a great quantity and variety of clay flutes with up to six holes for fingering; straight, piston-type flutes with a rolling ball inside them (their existence suggests that microtones were known in that period); and wooden trumpets about 1.5 meters long. Depictions of these trumpets, which had distal ends shaped like bells, were engraved on an ancient pot that was found in El Salvador and is now in a private collection; on this vessel, performers can be seen resting their trumpets on the ground in about a sixty-degree angle.
Around A.D. 800, just before the beginning of the Post-Classic Period (A.D. 900-1524), the Nahua had learned metallurgy from the peoples who then lived in the areas corresponding to the present-day countries of Peru and Colombia. According to the Spanish chronicler Cieza de LeoŽn, during this period pre-Columbian bells made of gold were sounded during religious rites, including human sacrifices (Contreras Arias 1988:68-69); they were part of a way of life that had a socially established theocratic structure.
Salvadoran culture blends three heritages: the native American (from Mesoamerican ethnic groups whose influences have come down to us through traditional practices), the European (Spanish), and the African (from West African slaves). These broad cultural strands have become syncretically interwoven. The Spanish used musical instruments in military deployments and during times of rest. Many artifacts used in dances by Spanish soldierssuch as clubs, machetes, and swordsfunctioned as idiophones. Little by little, indigenous peoples incorporated them into their own dances, though the indigenous idiophones of Mesoamerica were so numerous that those contributed by the Spaniards were inconsequential by comparison.
Of the membranophones brought by the soldiers, the atabales or timbales 'kettle-drums', and trompetas 'trumpets', cornetas 'bugles' were used along with sacabuches 'sackbuts' (forerunners of the trombone) in military maneuvers, battles, and civic and religious ceremonies, where they added splendor. The timbales were replaced by two-headed membranophones (tambores), still observable in present-day town bands. The European military tambor had two rims, between which a W-shaped system of lashing tightened the heads, one with a rustic snare stretched across it. The drum now used in the El Salvador countryside also has two rims, lashings, two skins, a snare, and tuning cords that wrap around the instrument to help twist the lashings into the shape of a W.
Another musical instrument found in the colonial period and today is the pipe and tabor, a one-man ensemble resembling the Basque txistu. The flute portion of the ensemble, known as calambo, is a two- or three-holed cane duct flute; the tabor, or drum, is small.
Chordophones are the major contribution that El Salvador has received from nonindigenous cultures, principally those of Spain. Since the beginning of the colonial period, strings have played a major role in secular life and religious rites, such as masses, prayers, and weddings. The Spanish aristocracy was interested in bringing over the latest musical innovations from Spain, particularly stringed instruments such as viols, violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses, guitars (guitarras), and small guitars (vihuelas). In numerous cabinet-making workshops, such stringed instruments were built and repaired. In some workshops today, musical instruments, especially guitars, mandolins, and violins, are made; workshops also exist in penitentiaries located throughout the country. The following European stringed instruments are currently found in El Salvador: guitars with six single courses (six strings) and six double courses (twelve strings); the guitarrilla 'little guitar' with four strings (the instrument comes from the medieval flat-backed guitarilla of Europeanmainly Spanish and Italianorigin); the requinto 'small guitar'; and the mandolina 'mandolin', both the flat-backed European type and the round-backed West Asian type. Because of the local influence of Mexican ranchera music, trios, and mariachi music, the Mexican vihuela (with a rounded back) has joined the Salvadoran inventory of instruments. This kind of vihuela does not correspond to the colonial type of instrument, played by plucking; instead, the Mexican vihuela in El Salvador, as in Mexico, is strummed and serves as a rhythmic accompanying instrument.
Roman Catholic missionaries during the colonial period installed big bells in high and open places so their ringing could be heard for great distances. Other idiophones included a wooden ratchet (matraca) and a wooden rattle (carraca), both of Arabic origin and in use during the European Middle Ages. These instruments replaced the bell (campana) used in Roman Catholic religious processions. The organ (oŽrgano), an aerophone with keyboard, was used in the Roman Catholic liturgy. An example of this is the colonial pipe organ found in the church of MatapaŽn.
Influenced during the 1800s and the beginning of the twentieth century by Italian and French culture, Salvadorans of high social status cultivated the playing of the violin and the piano. On the opposite end of the social continuum were the small village brass bands that developed in the 1840s from the first military bands. With religious music, these bands "were the early manifestations of what would later become Salvadoran national music" (Luna 1971:84).
African slaves added to the instruments of El Salvador by stimulating the development of two types of marimba, the criolla 'creole' and the de arco 'with bow'a portable type carried with a strap and whose bow kept the instrument in front of the musician's body while being played. The term marimba probably comes from a word of Bantu origin; during the colonial period, the largest number of African slaves came
Other African-derived idiophonic instruments found in El Salvador are the quijada de burro 'jawbone of a donkey' (also called charrasga), which is struck on its side or scraped along its teeth with a wire, a deer horn, or a piece of wood; claves (concussed wooden sticks); and a scraper (cacho 'horn') made from a serrated animal horn and played like a guširo. The cajoŽn 'big box' is a wooden box struck with the hands; it is a camouflaged version of the ancient teponaztli or a substitute for an instrument such as a skin drum, borrowed from Africa. Africa-derived membranophones in El Salvador include the sacabuche and the zambumbia, friction drums with fixed sticks attached to single heads. Finally, the caramba, a musical bow with gourd resonator, is a chordophone that has possibly descended from the African hunting bow.
Religious music
Salvadoran music and musical occasions for religious purposes (Roman Catholic or Protestant) can be liturgical, life-cycle related, or festive. Christianity has an extensive ritual structure that usually includes music. There are also rituals for life-cycle events, such as baptism, confirmation, funerals, and marriage, of which only the latter uses song. Parallel to these are popular rituals of a spiritual nature in which singing is sometimes used: the burial of the umbilical cord of a newborn, an ancient ritual connected to notions of the earth as mother; parabienes 'congratulatory songs' for brides; parabienes sung at wakes for dead children; religious songs or chants for burial; the bardo, recited during the first nine days of mourning to help the deceased separate himself or herself from the earthly world; lullabies; children's songs; and birthday songs.
The Roman Catholic Church supports seasonal rituals, some of which reveal syncretism between Amerindian and Spanish sources. The DiŽa de Santa Cruz (Day of the Holy Cross), for example, is a syncretic festival held at the beginning of May. Though priests forced the Cross on the indigenous population, the latter made it out of palo de jiote (terebinth, a small tree of the sumac family), which normally peels every year. This wood apparently represents Xipi Totec, the Lord of Spring, and symbolizes the rebirth of nature.
Organizations founded in colonial times by the Roman Catholic Church were called cofradiŽas 'confraternities'. Their members took charge of organizing the patron-saint festivals, which priests have never controlled in any waynot even in finances. Patron-saint festivals are syncretic because they mostly involve devotions for animal-accompanied saints; the miraculous element has to do with the animal, not the saint, because it represents the pre-Columbian nahual, a spiritual guide or guardian spirit such as an animal that a person has as an inseparable companion. These festivals use religious songs from the church to which the saint and the animal belong, and they all make extensive use of dance and music. Various municipalities in El Salvador hold these festivals for a total of 137 days of the year.
Traditional dances
Traditional Salvadoran dances are syncretic forms of expression, in which traces of dances from past epochs coexist with contemporary traits. Traditional dances are closely related to the celebration of the lives of the saints and the patron-saint festivals. According to the inventory of dances put together by the Cultural Inheritance
The oldest dances are those of pre-Columbian origin, especially dances connected to Mesoamerican mythology, and in particular, dances named after animals or dedicated to an animal-accompanied saint. To rid them of paganism, the Roman Catholic Church usually adapted them and incorporated them into celebrations and patron-saint festivals. Nevertheless, the dancers' costumes incorporate zoomorphic effigies evoking prehistoric mythological elements.
In the colonial dances, some European subjects survive; in the process of becoming creole, these subjects took on an American flavor. All these dances have origins texts or elements that have been passed down from generation to generation.
Salvadoran dances can also be grouped by their contents. There are hunting dances, dances of appeasement, offering dances, dances of courtship, bull-related dances, burlesque or comic dances, festive dances, and war-related dances. This taxonomy is used in the following discussion of major dances.
The bailes de caceriŽa 'hunting dances' are dance-dramas reminiscent of communal hunts that took place thousands of years ago. They concern the sharing of an animal that was part of the fauna of the places where the hunting took place. The dance of the mountain hog and the dance of the jaguar and the deer are examples of such dances. In the dance of the mountain hog, one person dresses up like a pig, another like a devil, and two like masked old men. Everyone dances to the sound of a flute and drum. The devil and the old men hunt the pig, and when the pig has been caught and killed, they symbolically divide up the parts of the animal among everyone in the community, doing so with a humorous dedication.
Tradition has it that because of a miracle that the "Lord of Charity" (Jesus? granted to them, an elderly couple promised to dance the dance of the jaguar and the deer every year as a form of appeasement. In the dance-drama, the old man, the old woman, and the deer manage to conquer the jaguar after surviving all sorts of dangerous happenings. Once the jaguar is dead, they divide it up in equal shares. The dancers imitate the movements of the animals, and the hunters add comic relief. As the performers symbolically divide up the meat of the jaguar, they sing to their neighbors comments such as the following.
La cabeza para la nin~a Teresa. | The head for the little girl Teresa. |
Lo de adelante para el comandante. | The front part for the commander. |
Lo de atraŽs para e juez de paz. | The back part for the justice of the peace. |
El intestino para Don Regino. | The intestine for Don Regino. |
The bailes propiciatorios 'dances of appeasement' are performed to obtain mercy from saints and other supernatural beings that serve as intermediaries of God. The dance of Saint Benedict and the dance of the big box are good examples of this genre.
For the dance of Saint Benedict, a charra (a wide-brimmed women's hat, made of palm fibers) and two little flags (made of China paper, luxurious paper used for printing) are placed atop the altar. After the prayer, two worshipers sing to the saint, asking for permission to dance all night. After the ceremony is over, all the helpers go out to the street, form a circle, and to the accompaniment of chordophones dance the son 'song-dance' of Saint Benedict. When the first couple stops dancing, the two dancers pass the hat and the flag to another couple; this procedure is repeated time after time. Everyone who receives the hat and the flag is obligated to dance; if not, he or she will be subject to punishment from the saint. The women's costumes include brightly colored blouses, showy long skirts, hats, and shawls; the men wear shirts of coarse cloth, street pants, and hats. All of them carry small flags in one hand.
The dance of the big box developed during the colonial period, when a wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was found in a 1.5-meter wooden box in a grotto on La Perla Beach, in the department of La Libertad. People of the area removed the Virgin, took her to the church, and brought the box to the cofradiŽa of Saint Ursula. Tradition has it that on some days people find the Virgin with traces of sand on it because she has gone to the beach to bathe. The day of the festival of Saint Ursula includes a vigil that begins at 6:00 P.M. and ends at dawn; cocoa and tamales are served. The dance that ensues is slow, repetitive, and continuously performed around the original box (struck rhythmically with the hands) during the helpers' drinking of alcohol, a ritual act. This dance could be a pre-Columbian ritual that has survived, whereby the Amerindians, to protect themselves from the inquisitive eyes of the Church, camouflaged the tepunahuaste by adopting the wooden box of the Virgin as an instrument for dancing.
People perform bailes de ofrenda 'offering dances' to thank a supernatural being for some favor that has been obtained. The dance of Saint Tingo is performed by married women, who sing songs and dance to the accompaniment of the tingo, a log idiophone, related to the ancient teponaztli, personifying Saint Tingo. The participants carry arches adorned with flowers, leaves, and feathers, which sway over the tingo. While this could be one of the "replacement" dances that appeared in colonial times, Saint Tingo is not a Roman Catholic saint, though the participants believe that the tingo personifies the saint. In prehistoric rituals, the teponaztlithen the equivalent of the tingoplayed an important role.
The bailes de cortejo 'dances of courtship' are gallant, light, and amiable in character, especially when danced by couples. The dance of the flea and the louse, belonging to the cofradiŽa of Santiago Texacuangos, is performed by one group of young men in male clothing and another group of young men in female clothing. Within these groups are pairs or godparents and a bride and groom. The godfather gives away the bride, wearing traditional bridal dress, to the groom, wearing a dark suit. The participants dance to the sound of stringed instruments, talk among themselves, repeat bombas (short, witty, improvised verses), and tell jokes among themselves.
The bailes taurinos 'taurine dances' are directly related to bulls or bullfights. One example, the dance of the little spotted bull, parodies bullfighting, a pastime brought from Spain. Eight characters participate: an elder, an old woman, a doctor, a marksman, a mine administrator, a dog, an orangutan, and a little spotted bull. A fife and drum announce the dance, followed by an introduction by the elder:
The participants begin to dance, and Don Heracles avoids the thrusts of the little bull as he follows the rhythm of the fife and drum. Each person introduces herself or himself in a humorous way, and spoken dialogue occurs between fife-and-drum interludes. The little bull gets lost, and the old people speak with the mine administrator to ask for his assistance. With the help of the administrator's dog, SolimaŽn (Mercuric Chloride), the bull is found and returned to its owners. The dance continues, and then the orangutan is lost. The elder and the old woman ask the sharpshooter to go find it and to bring it back. The sharpshooter fires, wounds the orangutan, and returns it to its owners, who run to seek a doctor's assistance. After the orangutan is cured, the sharpshooter asks the two old people to lend it to him so he can ask it questions, wanting to find out if it is intelligent. The questions he asks have double meanings and sexual connotationsimplications that make the spectators laugh.Yo soy el viejo mayor. Mi nombre es Don Heracles, esposo de la nin~iŽa Olimpia, que hemos venido a todos estos lugares en company~iŽa de este torito pinto y este monito orangutaŽn, solo por venir a celebrar las fiestas de San Antonio Abad.
I am the elder. My name is Don Heracles, husband of the young girl Olimpia, and we have come to these parts accompanied by this little spotted bull and this little monkey orangutan, just to celebrate the festivities of Saint Anthony the Abbot.
In bailes burlescos 'burlesque dances', humor is focused on a sector of the population or some person who has political or economic influence in town. Three dances are representative: los chapetones 'the Spaniards', los tapujeados 'the masked men', and la giganta 'the giantess'.
Los chapetones is a biting satire of colonial Spanish manners. The Spaniards are mocked by how they hold hands and entwine arms while dancing, and by the costumes of the "gentlemen," which consist of white shirts, colored neckties, black vests, black suits with black frock coats, black stovepipe hats, and black umbrellas, sometimes used as canes. The dance-drama itself depicts an agreement occurring between Spain and Turkey about the marriage of Don~a Lucrecia of Castille and Don TomaŽs Raynel. Twelve chancellorsfrom Argentina, China, Colombia, Eastern Chile, Japan, and elsewhereare present. During the dance, accompanied by two guitars and a requinto, speeches such as the following are made:
And what do you think, gentlemen? They say that it would be great if I could already marry the little girl Lucrecia of Castille by offering her my fortune, though I don't have it here, but I will send a message to the city of Uropa [Europe], so my coins will be brought to me so I can marry her.żY queŽ les parece, sen~ores caballeros? Y dicen que cosa impresiona se pudiera yo casarme con la ya nin~a Lucrecia de Castilla, ofrecieŽndole mis caudales, aunque no los tenga aquiŽ, pero mandareŽ un correo a la ciudad de Uropa, que me traiga mis monedas para poderme casar con ella.
The other gentlemen answer: Me parece muy bien, sen~or caballero 'It sounds like a good idea, Mr. Gentleman', and tilt their heads in an extreme theatrical exaggeration, which makes the members of the audience laugh.
Los tapujeados is performed by men who disguise themselves with masks and eccentric clothing; their function is to dance jovially through the streets of the town. They accept donations at the end of the dance, usually in the form of alcoholic beverages. The masked men and los emplumados 'the feathered men' also participate in the baile del toro 'dance of the bull'.
The dance of the giantess is performed by a group of masked people and a doll about 2.5 to 3 meters high, from which the name of the dance derives. The body of the doll has female traits; it is made with wooden framework, its head is made of cloth, and its clothing is made of colorful fabric. A variation of this dance, baile de la chabelona 'dance of Big Liz' (from the nickname "Chabela" for Isabel 'Elizabeth'), satirizes the English Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
The bailes festivos 'festive dances' are a type of social folklore in which people get together to chat. The baile de la soguilla 'dance of the little rope' is a representative example. On 30 November in the town of San Antonio la Cruz, las capitanas, the wives of the lead dancers, make a big rope out of pieces of olote (the centers of corn cobs), painted in several colors and decorated with cacao seeds; they also decorate a big hat with ribbons and flowers. Popular songs are performed to the accompaniment of stringed instruments. The mayor of the cofradiŽa begins the dance by inviting the wife of the sponsor (mayordomo) to be his partner. He puts the decorated hat on her head and she puts the rope around his neck. As they dance, they look around to select another couple. In this fashion, everyone ends up going to the center of the patio to participate in the dance. The dance is done in couples, but the dancers do not touch each other.
Christmas dances
Bailes naviden~os 'Christmas dances' are part of the celebrations dedicated to the birth of the baby Jesus and to the three wise men or to passages from the Old Testament. People of both sexes and all ages participate in these dances; the costumes depend on the portrayed character, whose dialogue and songs are based on religious themes. The dances classified as Christmas dances are baile de la garza 'dance of the heron', baile de los pastores machos 'dance of the male shepherds', baile de los herodes 'dance of Herods', baile de los pastores o machines 'dance of the shepherds or white-faced monkeys', baile del zope 'dance of the buzzard', baile de los diablitos 'dance of the little devils', and baile de los chiraguaquitos 'dance of the little Chiragua Indians'.
In the town of Apaneca, Christmas processionalsdramatizations of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter, the Nativity, and the journey of the three wise menare carried out, and the dance of the heron is performed. The heron character is created from a framework similar to that used for pin~atas. Besides a heron, the characters include three policemen, a mayor, a bride, a groom, a rogue, an Indian, an old lady, an old man, and two little monkeys. They all wear everyday clothing but use wooden masks corresponding to the characters they portray. The music is accompanied with strings, and some pieces are ancient Mexican tunes.
The dance of the male shepherds is performed in San Rafael Cedros and the town of ConcepcioŽn de Ataco on 24 and 25 December. Only men participate. Some dress up like little monkeys, others like old men, and yet others like a little bull, wearing a bull costume made over a wooden framework. The other men wear suits with everyday jackets, put on hats decorated with moss as if from a cold climate, and carry
The dance of the Herods is similar to the dance of the shepherds, except that the sung verses refer to the infanticide ordered by King Herod (Matthew 2:16). The ensemble of chordophones that accompanies it is called chilamate. A dance with a similar name, the dance of the shepherds, is done in the city of Nahuizalco from 22 to 27 December to 3 to 7 January. The performers are twelve young men (eight shepherds and four white-faced monkey gods) who are in street dress and wear hats of palm fiber decorated with colored ribbons. Each shepherd uses both hands to hold up his staff (about three meters long), which serves as a support for fifteen balls, strung from the smallest to the largest. Each ball, made of woven vines and newspaper and lined with cloth of many different colors, contains a bell that sounds when shaken, symbolizing happiness for Jesus's birth. The space between balls (the distance of a jeme, calculated from the end of the extended thumb to the end of the extended forefinger) is decorated with several garlands of crepe paper that flutter in the wind. The monkey gods have small rattles in their right hands, wear dark cashmere suits, and on their heads have black conical hats (cucuruchos) out of whose tips protrude numerous colored ribbons. Dancing in couples, they wittily imitate the movements of monkeys and make reverential gestures among themselves. After this, the shepherds pass before Jesus and describe their offerings:
AquiŽ te traigo, sen~ora, | Here I bring to you, my Lady, |
una ramita de azahar, | A small branch of [orange or lemon] blossom, |
para que se la des al nin~o | So you might give it to the Child |
cuando empiece a llorar. | When he begins to cry. |
The dance of the little devils, performed in SalcoatitaŽn, Sonsonate, always takes place in the large entrance or entryway of the church (but not inside), or in front of houses where Nativity scenes are erected. The dancers are thirteen people disguised as devils; they wear red, one-piece jumpsuits with long, black tails. Within the dance, their hierarchy shows a mixture of Spanish medieval and cofradiŽa elements: a guitar leader (capitaŽn), a violin leader, a first king of the horn (cacho), two vassals who carry snare drums (zambumbias), two vassals who carry 'jawbones of donkeys' (charrasgas), two vassals with small handheld bells, two vassals using whips, and a main devil. During the performance, dancingaccompanied by violin and the other instrumentsalternates with the speeches made by each devil. During the last devil's part, everybody comes together and kneels in front of Jesus, asking him for mercy.
The dance of the little Chiragua Indians is performed in the town of Santo Domingo de GuzmaŽn, Sonsonate. Six young girls and six young boys participate. The girls put on indigenous wrap-around skirts, and the boys wear everyday pants and shirts. All the children carry fruit crates filled with ratchets (batidorcitos 'little noisemakers'), tin cans, and little colored flags. Accompanied by accordion and guitar, they sing and dance in the entryway to the church, enter the building to await the birth of Jesus at midnight, and then go to a parry in the cofradiŽa until dawn the next day.
War-
Bailes guerreros 'war-related dances' portray battles. Performances of these dances were used by the missionaries to destroy Amerindian idols. The conquistadores always triumph, as do their rites and symbols. The baile de los emplumados 'dance of the feathered men', the baile de la partesana 'dance of the halberd', and the baile de los moros y cristianos 'dance of the Moors and Christians' are representative of this genre.
In Cacaopera, department of MorazaŽn, the dance of the feathered men is performed; it is from the area of the Lenca, an indigenous group. It recalls a meeting of eight chiefs that took place before the colonial era. Each had a retinue of warriors (with big spears) and dancers, and each dancer had a retinue of three people. All of them adorned themselves with tufts of feathers of macaw or torogoz, a small blue bird, the national bird of El Salvador. Out of this great spectacle, only two dancers remain at the end. The tufts of feathers are still used today for this dance, but are now made of other materials. The musicians who accompany the dance are a drummer, two guitarists, and a violinist.
The dance of the halberd is performed in Santiago Nonualco, in the department of La Paz. A pre-Columbian dance, it features long-poled lances (falas) with three metal points on their tips. Jumps executed by the dancer require great agility.
The dance of the Moors and Christians, the dance best known throughout the country, was brought from Europe during the first years of the conquest. Its source of thematic inspiration, its functional relationship with reality, lies in Spanish history during the reconquest from Moorish domination. Pre-Columbian ritual celebrations facilitated the assimilation and diffusion of this dance. Since the 1500s, many versions of it have appeared. The Hispanic structure of the dance never changes; instead, in its several versions, one group of people is replaced with another: the Moors become indigenous people who have not been Christianized, and the Christians become indigenous people who have already been baptized; or the Moors become an indigenous band of warriors commanded by Moctezuma, and the Christians become HernaŽn CorteŽs and the conquistadores.
Music for entertainment is strictly linked to the demands of nocturnal establishments where North American repertoire makes up the largest percentage of the music. Some Salvadorans believe that national music (muŽsica national) has declined in quality by having fallen into the repetitious poverty of foreign music, which, rather than allowing people to think, aims to make them relax, enjoy themselves, and purchase more of it. In the 1990s, however, a high level of musicianship has been displayed in concerts. Excellent directors, guitarists, and pianists from all over the world have participated in these performances. Hotels put on shows designed by the Instituto Salvadoreano de Turismo (Salvadoran Tourism Institute). They are mostly performed by the Ballet FolkoŽrico (Folkloric Ballet), which has represented Salvadorans as much inside the country as abroad. Organizers discover talent by searching for stars via competitions. The major musical figures of El Salvador started their careers by performing
Salvadoran musicians have always played an important role in rituals, festivities, and entertainment. When musical ensembles or sound systems played popular and fashionable music outdoors, musicians listened to and learned the melodies so they could perform them later in small village pavilions. This is how many pieces that have disappeared from their places of origin have remained in the repertoire.
In El Salvador, Mexican music is mostly heard in the Salvadoran countryside, and North American music is heard in the city. Rural inhabitants have experienced situations similar to those experienced by Mexicans, and since latino music has reflected these shared experiences, it is only natural that rural dwellers of other Latin American countries also identify with Mexican music.
The Salvadoran upper class originated in the agricultural system, and the national way of life began in colonial haciendas. The Salvadoran nation was basically rural. Rich people, poor people, foreigners, nativesall had similar dwellings. In colonial times, Spanish music (religious, secular, art, traditional, military, popular), Amerindian music, and African-derived music were performed; these traditions tended to mix. The aristocracy always brought what was new from Europe to America, so there was a constant influx of teachers, musical instruments, and music. Near the end of the 1800s, the phonograph introduced to the Salvadoran countryside additional songs and other music from Europe, the United States, South America (especially Argentina), Cuba, and eventually, above all, music known internationally via the classic movies of the Mexican film industry. The children of landowners studied in Europe, but by the time they did so, they were adolescents or had gone through adolescence and had already incorporated Mexican ranchera songs into their heritage. A paradox sometimes arises in El Salvador: though the socioeconomic elite looks down on listening to or singing rancheras, this same practice is tolerated if the president of the republic cares to use ranchera music for political reasons.
Musical performance in El Salvador has always been a male pursuit; only in a few instancesplaying the piano, for examplehave women been involved in it. In the 1990s, women have joined bands and orchestras, frequently for decorative purposes; they sometimes sing but are especially seen dancing, often in skimpy attire.
Art music is heard and performed by people who usually have middle- or upper-class backgrounds. They normally prefer music from the European baroque, classical, and romantic periods; contemporary music has a minuscule following. Art music is now broadcast more than before, thanks to Radio ClaŽsica (Classical Radio), a station whose programming has allowed art music to reach a larger part of the population, including people who live in marginal zones. A curious phenomenon in El Salvador is that many mothers who work as maids leave their children alone at home, under lock and key, with Radio ClaŽsica tuned in. Intellectuals, though they have been affected by the backlash of popular music, prefer art music or music with a high degree of social contentmusic with a message.
North American music, because of the frequency with which the media program it, remains the most popular music in cities. Preadolescents prefer rock because it supposedly suits their rebellious nature. Young people like rock en espan~ol (rock sung in Spanish), and adults like the music they have grown up with. When the media plan their programming, they do a lot of research to differentiate the sectors of the population.
Salvadoran commercial music basically consists of imitations (covers) of compositions that have already been tried out successfully via public channels. These compositions
Ideological music is promoted by organized entities. During political campaigns, lyrics of fashionable songs are changed to become vehicles of propaganda. The songs sung by guerrillas during the Salvadoran civil war are another example of this type of music. In El Salvador, bossism (caciquismo) fulfills an intermediate role between the countryside and the central government. Monopolies that control channels of social communication reproduce this power structure by becoming intermediaries between the nation and international interest groups. Bills to pass laws that will protect consumers are easily shelved by the Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly). The Ministry of Education does little about this situation. Because of external pressure in the 1990s, a law favoring copyright protection was passed, but music piracy in El Salvador still occurs.
Salvadoran music is promoted, cultivated, and disseminated institutionally. In the 1880s, the Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica (National Conservatory of Music) was founded by legislative decree under the direction of EscolaŽstico Andrino. Despite having a small budget, this conservatory used to train the best instrumentalists in the country. It satisfied the demand for trained musicians. As popular music grew in importance, what the conservatory offered could no longer meet the demand for musical training. For this reason, the conservatory was closed in 1969, and the Centro Nacional de Artes (National Center for the Arts) was founded, with the idea of training schoolteachers. The best instrumentalists continue to occupy places in musical groups and commercial orchestras, and the rest devote themselves to teaching in public and private schools.
Traditional methods of teaching
Song was originally the basic means of teaching music, and the traditional method consisted of classes in singing. On the basis of that concept, musicians created mnemonic shortcuts that they later applied to the learning of zarzuelas and other year-end presentations. The ideology behind the choice of certain pieces was the instilling of moral and civic values. During the educational reform that began in the 1970s, modern methods of teaching musicthose of Dalcroze, KodaŽly, Martenot, Orff, and Suzukiwere analyzed, and exercises and pieces were chosen and placed in a progressive order, based on how easy they were to sight-read. For the program to continue, it was necessary to produce sufficient didactic materials and to develop a new mentality among the teachers, who had to be retrained so they could judge pedagogical change fairly. Thus, each teacher, by having a new point of view, had to come up with his or her own instructional materials. Besides being clearly planned, this goal appeared easy to accomplish. As it turned out, however, the opposite was true: teachers assimilated the material that they had learned, and they repeated the same exercises for years, finally reaching the saturation point. To discipline and address the children's boredom, teachers, for no pedagogical reason at all, seized on the commercial popular music of the times.
In 1970, several foundations had their cultural projects in place, and a few had permanent musical programs and controlled private concert halls. Little by little, political convulsions ended these initiatives and shows; though they had been programmed, they never reached the public. The Civil War took over all of these spaces,
With the ending of the Salvadoran civil war, a gradual rebirth of cultural activity is being seen. The Teatro Nacional (National Theater), Acto Teatro (Theater of Acts), Teatro Presidente (President's Theater), La Luna (The Moon), and other theaters in the capital and in Suchitoto present artistic events. Activities have been initiated by several foundations, among which the MariŽa EscaloŽn de NuŽn~ez Foundation has done much work.
The technology of music
Musical technology reached El Salvador toward the end of the 1800s, when the first phonographs arrived. Between 1900 and 1930, a golden age in Salvadoran musical production began, and the Marimba Centroamericana (Central American Marimba Ensemble) recorded for the Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick labels. Their recordings achieved international popularity. From them, municipal bands and marimbists made their own arrangements, which they played during concertsfrom kiosks, in local parks, and during social festivities. Composers sent their scores via a local store to New York, where record companies would have orchestras record them, barely acknowledging the composers. This was when Salvadoran popular songs began to be commercialized, a time that coincided with the introduction of electricity and radio to the capital of the country.
In 1926, on the top floor of the National Theater, the government installed the first radio station in El Salvador and Central America. For two hours a day, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., the station broadcast marimba music and music played by municipal bands. The repertoire of these ensembles included waltzes, foxtrots, Cuban sones, tangos, and rancheras.
Between 1930 and 1960, several composers, including Felipe Soto, Wesceslao RodriŽguez, David Granadino, and JoseŽ NapoleoŽn RodriŽguez, recorded for the Columbia label. Around 1940, the first commercial radio station was installed in the DireccioŽn General de PoliciŽa (General Police Headquarters). In 1942, the electric company installed meters in residences, and radio transmission increased to seven hours per day. Other radio stations were created, and programs of entertainment with Salvadoran music ensued. From 1940 to 1950, marimba ensembles, including CuscatlaŽn, Nima Quiche, Sonora, Nuevo Mundo, Royal, and Atlacatl, popularized swing, mambo, chachachaŽ, boleros, and Salvadoran country music. Atlacatl gave concerts in several countries of the Americas and Europe. Beginning in 1945, big dance orchestras sprang up. They stayed in vogue until 1960, when rock began to take over in popularity. In 1960, the first black-and-white televisions arrived in El Salvador, as did youth dance and song competitions that imitated those in the United States and Mexico. From then on, DJs and their programs were oriented toward younger audiences. The one record company in the country was founded during this time, only to
Improvements in the international and domestic economies have brought positive and negative changes to El Salvador. Since 1990, the importation of technology has produced many musical changes, and the market has generated competition at the regional level. The introduction of electronic instruments and compact recording laboratories has simplified the processes of musical recording and production. Local musicians who, because of the cost, do not participate in this kind of competition remain marginalized in this environment, in which millions of dollars circulate.
Music and identity
Mestizaje, the mixing of cultural elements, and criollizacioŽn, the process of becoming creole, are giving El Salvador a new identity. Latin Americanism is a movement that has strong support and far-reaching ramifications in science and culture. To take on mestizo identity means to cast off one ideological mind-set and to adopt a new one. In this way, the idea of a national culture is being adopted, and direction for the future is being given.
Acculturation is usually a form of penetration and ethnocentric domination that creates inequality in conditions between the center and the periphery. As social strata begin to be defined, social differences also come to be determined. The contribution of Western culture enriched and prepared a world for the Spaniards and other foreigners who came to El Salvador, but the cultural space occupied by the hegemonic class has become so large that most Salvadoran traditions that have not been assimilated into religious practices have disappeared.
Populations are identified by the music they listen to: rock and disco are for preadolescents and urban adolescents; ranchera music is for rural and semiurban people; and orchestras have a wide range of followers from adolescents to adults, depending on the repertoire that they perform. Salvadoran society does not approve of adults who have maintained the fashions or genres of yesteryear; if they have not kept up with the musical times, they are directly or indirectly ridiculed.
Popular music in El Salvador has not demonstrated noteworthy originality. The use of electronic equipmentelectric guitars, bass guitars, synthesizers, and amplifiershas initiated a period of competitive consumption of a product that is valued according to how well it imitates what comes from the United States. Rock, in all its forms, is aimed at adolescents, and each generation has its own performers.
The best source for the general music history of El Salvador, though it is outdated, is by Rafael GonzaŽlez Sol (1940). Musical archaeology is more recent, and works by Stanley Boggs (1974) and Salvador MarroquiŽn (1991) are the most valuable. Traditional musical instruments of El Salvador have been studied by MarroquiŽn and Miguel Villegas (1977). In the early 1940s, the Committee of Folkloric Investigation (ComiteŽ de Investigaciones FolkloŽricas) undertook studies of El Salvadoran musical ethnography and folklore, and its transcriptions and other findings were published in 1944. Also in the 1940s, Rafael GonzaŽlez Sol (1947) published an informative book about Salvadoran civic and religious festivals and popular exhibitions.
TRANSLATED BY JANE L. FLORINE
Musical Instruments
Music of the Maya
Music of the GariŽfuna
Music of Ladinos
European-Derived Art Music
Further Study
Before the Spanish contact in 1524, the territory that is now the Republic of Guatemala was part of the area where Maya civilization developed, flourished, and declined [see MAYA]. By the time HernaŽn CorteŽs had sent his envoy Pedro de Alvarado to conquer the territory for Spain, the great Maya temple-cities had long been abandoned, and classic Maya culture lay hidden beneath covers of jungle and time. The Spaniards found the Maya of Guatemala a people divided into more or less mutually hostile, petty kingdoms of the QuicheŽ, Cakchiquel, Ixil, KekchiŽ, Mam, Pokoman, and Tzutujil clans. Until independence from Spain (1821), Guatemala was part of the political unit known as the Audiencia de Guatemala, which included territory extending from Chiapas, Mexico, to Costa Rica.
From the writings of the ancient Maya (who in the 1500s recorded texts of their myths, clan histories, and dance-dramas using the Western system of writing) we learn about Maya musical life at the time of contact. Principal among the sources are Los Anales de los Cakchiqueles (The Annals of the Cakchiquels) and the QuicheŽ Popol Vuh (The Book of Counsel), which contain the history of the people, their myths of creation, and the deeds of their ancestral heroes. Instrumental music, dances, songs, and other arts figure importantly throughout these texts.
These sources show that for the Maya the arts were then, as now, a system of rituals and symbols originated by primordial ancestral heroes. These rituals functioned at the time of Spanish contact, as they do today, to maintain a harmonious relationship between the human world and the world of spirits. In the Popol Vuh, the ancestral pair of heroic brothers, Jun Baatz' and Jun Ch'oven (whose names mean 'monkey' and 'artisan'), are proficient in all the arts, since they became flutists, singers, writers, carvers, jewelers, and silversmiths (Edmonson 1971:59). Also demonstrated in these sources is the Maya belief that their ancestors' music has the power to do what it says. When the younger brothers sang and played the spider-monkey hunter's song for the elder brothers on the flute (zu) and drum (k'ojom), the elder brothers turned into monkeys. The Popol Vuh contains the texts of laments that express the sorrow the people felt when they left their homeland in Tula to migrate into highland Guatemala, such as the following (Edmonson 1971:171):
The Annals of the Cakchiquels and The Title of the Lords of TotonicapaŽn, sixteenth-century documents relating the origins and myths of the Cakchiquel and the QuicheŽ, mention a bone flute (zubac), a conch trumpet (t'ot'), a drum (k'ojom), and a spiked vessel rattle (sonaja). The origin of the latter is related in the following story from the Popol Vuh (paraphrase of translation in Edmonson 1971:76):Alas, it is not here that we shall see the dawn,
When the sun is born again
Brightening the face of the earth.
This story suggests that the magical powers of the spiked vessel rattle stem from its mythical identification with the heroic ancestral twins who conquered the forces of evil, personified as the Lords of the Underworld.The head of the hero, Jun Jun Aj Pu (One One Hunter), was severed by the Lords of the Underworld, and became a living gourd on a calabash tree. The maiden X Kiq (Blood Girl) discovered the head in the branches, and from a drop of spittle the calabash-head let fall on her outstretched hand, conceived the twin heroes Jun Aj Pu (One Hunter) and X Balan Ke (Jaguar Deer).
Historical and ethnohistorical records of the music of the Maya in the Audiencia de Guatemala come from journals, letters, and the Spanish colonists' official records and from the accounts of travelers and explorers. References to music and musical instruments in these sources, though scattered and brief, provide a general knowledge of Maya musical instruments and ensembles seen in public performances. An extensive body of manuscripts in Western musical notation of music of European origin or style composed in Spain, Mexico, and Guatemala survives from the 1500s forward. Similarly, after independence, most information collected by ethnographers and anthropologists contains little specifically musical detail, but does include valuable information about the contexts of Maya music.
The present Maya
The Maya in the 1990s constitute more than half of the population of Guatemala, speak a Maya dialect as their primary language, and mostly live in rural areas, engaging in subsistence agriculture, small-scale commerce, and home-based crafts. Their customs and traditions are rooted in ancient Maya religion. Their musical culture tends to retain old and traditional musical styles and instruments and to resist outside influences; nevertheless, the loss of traditional styles is more and more evident. Principal among the agents of this loss are the people's conversion to evangelical Christian religions, whose missionaries identify the music of traditional Maya rituals with the powers of darkness, in which they see a hindrance to salvation; the economic pressure that stems from the fact that, unlike popular styles, the performance of
The musical instruments and styles typical of Guatemalan music can be conveniently grouped into those commonly used by the indigenous Maya and those more commonly used by the Ladinos (Guatemalans whose primary language is Spanish), though the lines separating Maya and Ladino music are blurred by an overlapping of cultures. Nevertheless, musical instruments and styles are associated mainly with one group rather than the other, though not limited to it. Crossing these lines is international popular music. Radio is accessible virtually everywhere, television and other media are available in cities and larger towns, and recordings of popular artists and styles bring to Guatemala the same music being heard in Mexico, Central America, and Los Angeles.
The Tzutujil classify musical instruments as male or female. Female instruments (k?ojom) are those that are struck or plucked; within the Tzutujil cosmos, they represent or are related to the geographic plane or the surface of the earth. The large, double-headed drum is always called k?ojom in Tzutujil. Other female instruments may be called simply k?ojom, or may be called by Tzutujil names derived from Spanish: ctar 'guitar', arp 'harp', mrimp 'marimba'. Male instruments (xul) are those that are blown; they are related to or represent the cosmic tree or central axis that penetrates the geographic plane, communicating with the world of spirits under the earth and above it in the sky. Except for the cane flute (always called xul in Tzutujil), male instruments may be called xul or by Spanish names: saxofoŽn 'saxophone', chirimiŽa 'shawm', trompeta 'trumpet'. Traditionally, the playing of musical instruments is limited to men.
Because the Tzutujil have delineated their own taxonomy for musical instruments, which is likely accepted by other Maya subgroups who share the same cosmology, musical instruments are presented that way in this essay.
Female instruments
Spiked vessel rattles made of a calabash (QuicheŽ chin-chin, Spanish sonaja, maraca) are pre-Hispanic ritual instruments used in curing and divination. Today, they are made from various materials including calabash, metal, basketry, and terra-cotta and may contain pebbles, seeds, clay pellets, or (in basket rattles) pellet bells. They are used mainly in dance-dramas (dramatic presentations of part of the Maya world myth, many of them undocumented), but also by ensembles of guitars and guitarrillas (small guitars used for local music), and by Maya and Ladino ensembles of popular music. Ceramic replicas are sometimes offered for sale in local markets. Terra-cotta vessel rattles surviving from pre-Columbian times, sometimes in figurine form, are often unearthed during cultivation, and such ancient artifactsincluding whistles, nonmusical figurines, and other shardsare especially valued by shamans for use in divination or curing.
Rattles of coins threaded on string or wire across the face of a metal plate are used in some dance-dramas. Rattlesnake rattles are prized for the buzz they add to stringed instruments, flutes, and whistles, when inserted into their cavities or resonators.
A tortoiseshell idiophone (Spanish tortuga) struck with a bone, stick, or antler is used by the Ixil of the Department of QuicheŽ in the deer dance (bade del venado). It
The hollowed log idiophone
The tun is an idiophone made from a hollowed-out log of lowland hardwood (hormigo), into which an H-shaped slit is cut, creating two tuned tongues (
The tun appears in Maya ritual and dance-dramas, often in differently sized pairs. Probably the most ancient of these is the dance-drama often in colonial documents called baile del tun 'dance of the tun', in which a tun and long wooden trumpets (also called tun or tum, which may mean 'tube, cylinder') accompany dances and narratives. The log idiophone was used in this presentation with an ensemble of flutes, rattles, skin drums (Spanish atabales, tambores), conch trumpets (Spanish caracoles), and wooden trumpets. Because the dance represented the sacrifice of a captive taken in battle, the church repeatedly proscribed its performance. It persisted, nevertheless, and survives as the dance-drama Rabinal AchiŽ (Hero of Rabinal) in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, and as Ox Tum in Ilotenango, SacatepeŽquez. Today, it is accompanied by valveless metal trumpets about one meter long with one loop, appearing to be nineteenth-century band instruments, and a log idiophone (Mace 1970).
Other idiophones are small metal clapper bells and pellet bells, rasps of gourd, wood, or bone with transverse grooves, and a wooden ratchet (matraca) originating in Spain and used principally during Holy Week, when church bells are customarily silent.
The marimba
The most popular Guatemalan folk-derived instrument is the marimba, a xylophone
The marimba with gourds (marimba de tecomates) is a xylophone of diatonically tuned wooden slats (the "keyboard") made from lowland hardwood (hormigo or granadillo) suspended above a trapezoidal framework by cord or string which passes through each slat at its nodal point, and through threading pins between the slats (
In its oldest form, the marimba was carried by a strap that passed around the player's neck or shoulders. In this form, called bow marimba (marimba de arco), the instrument had no legs. The keyboard was kept away from the player's body by a bowed branch (arco), which had its ends fixed to the ends of the keyboard. Later models, called table marimba (marimba de mesa), have legs and lack the bow. The diatonic keyboard (marimba sencilla 'simple marimba') has from nineteen to twenty-six slats that can be tuned by adding a lump of wax, sometimes mixed with bits of lead, to their undersides; a marimba tuned this way may be called a marimba with wax (marimba de ceras). The slats are struck with mallets (baquetas) made of flexible wooden sticks wrapped with strips of raw rubber: larger and softer mallets are used for bass slats, smaller and harder ones for the treble range. The marimba with gourds is played by one, two, or three players, each using two to four mallets.
The marimba was first mentioned in Guatemala in 1680 by the historian Domingo Juarros (1953), who observed it played by Maya musicians in public festivities. During the 1700s, it became popular and was reported at religious and civil events. Its growth in popularity among Ladinos in the 1800s led to the extension of the keyboard to five, six, and seven octaves, and the addition of a fourth player. During the Guatemalan independence celebration of 1821, it became the national instrument. Later, the gourd resonators were replaced by harmonic boxes (cajones
The expansion of the marimba keyboard to include the chromatic scale is usually attributed to SebastiaŽn Hurtado in 1894. Its names, marimba doble 'double marimba' and marimba cuache 'twin marimba', refer to the double row of slats that accommodates the chromatic scale. Unlike the piano keyboard, in which a raised semitone is found above and to the right of its natural, in many Guatemalan marimbas the sharp key is placed directly above its corresponding natural.
The repertoire of the double marimba is more popular and contemporary than that of the diatonic keyboard, though the former is often used to play the traditional son guatemalteco or son chapiŽn, folkloric dance pieces typically in moderate to rapid 6/8 time that may be sung to four-line verses. Many local variations occur. The son guatemalteco, the national dance of Guatemala, is danced with stamping (zapateado). Music for the double marimba ranges from these traditional sones to light classics and popular music, often elaborately arranged, in which players display a high degree of virtuosity, precise ensemble playing, and expressive effects.
In villages and towns, the double marimba is often combined with saxophones, trumpets, trap set, bass viol with three strings (normally plucked), one or more male singers, and percussion instruments such as maracas, a shaker made of a thermos bottle with pebbles or pellets inside, and percussion sticks, to play music popularized in the media.
In larger towns and cities, double-marimba musicians are more often Ladinos than Maya. The instrument is commonly played in pairs: the marimba grande of six and one-half octaves (usually sixty-eight keys) played by four players, and the marimba cuache (also marimba piŽcolo, marimba requinta, marimba tenor), which has a range of five octaves (usually fifty keys), played by three musicians.
The traditional repertoire consists mainly of sones. When played in the context of Maya culture, these may belong to a body of melodies reserved for calendric rituals of the saints and spirits, which are often danced but seldom sung. Sones played by Ladino musicians are drawn from the traditional folk repertoire of the son guatemalteco or son chapiŽn.
The membranophones most commonly used by the Maya of Guatemala are cylindrical,
The snare drum (caja, also called tambor de judiŽa and pregonero) has snares made from knotted cords stretched across the head. Most commonly, the tambor or the tamboroŽn is found in ensemble with the flute or the shawm (chirimiŽa,
The adufe is a quadrangular double-skin frame drum, roughly 30 centimeters square, sometimes containing a rattle. It is used in some local dances. The zambomba (also zambudia) is a small friction drum used in the dance of the twenty-four devils (baile de los veinticuatro diablos) in SacatepeŽquez.
Chordophones in Guatemala stem from stringed instruments introduced from Europe; there is no evidence of them before the Spanish encounter. They include the violin (violiŽn, rabel), sometimes crudely constructed, with four holes for tuning pins, but usually only three strings. It is played with a loose horsehair bow, tensioned by the pressure of the thumb. Homemade bows are straight, rather than arched, and are usually gripped partway up the stick. The instrument is held against the chest rather than under the chin. The violin is played as a solo instrument, and it accompanies voices during funerals or calendric rituals. It joins a harp for playing sones and other traditional melodies.
A five-stringed guitar (guitarra) is documented among the Tzutujil and
The harp in Guatemala resembles that of the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. It is about 1.2 meters high, with a straight, carved pillar and a curved neck that may bear elaborately carved decoration. Its back has five panels; the sound board is of a single piece of wood, with three or four sound holes. The tuning pins are of wood, as are the pegs that fasten the strings to the sound board. The harp rests against the player's shoulder and sits on two wooden feet fixed to the base, holding the instrument off the ground. The fingertips of the right hand play the melody on twelve to fifteen diatonically tuned strings of the upper register, and a wooden plectrum held in the left hand is used to play the seven bass strings, tuned to the tonic major triad. There are two or more unstrung pegs between the bass and treble strings. The sound board is sometimes beaten with a padded stick. For playing sones and other pieces, the harp often joins a violin, a snare drum, and an accordion (
The guitarrilla (tiple), a now rare five-stringed guitar with a gourd body as resonator, sometimes joins the diatonic harp. Also disappearing is the twelve-stringed bandurria (bandola, bandoliŽn).
Male instruments
The Maya of Guatemala use various aerophones, but perhaps the most common is the duct flute made of cane, terra-cotta, or metal. Known in various Maya languages as xul (pronounced "shool"), zu, zubac, tzijolaj, and cham-cham, and in Spanish as pito, this is a 26-to-36-centimeter-long vertical fipple (duct) flute, open at the distal end, usually with six holes (the tzijolaj, being smaller, may have three). It combines with a drum (tambor or tamboroŽn) to make the most widespread and common ensemble in Guatemala (
A side-blown cane flute (also xul) with a rectangular hole for blowing is documented only among the Cakchiquel of San Marcos, AtitlaŽn (Arrivillaga CorteŽs 1986). It has an inner diameter of about 38 millimeters and is closed at the proximal end by a hollow sphere of black beeswax that has a small perforation over which a
The chirimiŽa is a small double-reed instrument of the shawm family, with five or six holes for fingering. Unlike its modern European counterpart, the oboe, it has a cylindrical rather than a conical bore, no keys, and a pirouette (mouth disk) like the shawm of Arab countries. Introduced to the Maya in the early years of Spanish colonization, it is widespread in Guatemala. The reed is fashioned from the dried and smoked leaf of a palm or bromeliad. A shawm is commonly played with a tambor or snare drum to accompany dance-dramas, but it is also played in processions and other contexts.
The conch trumpet, now rare, is used in some dance-dramas. Valveless metal trumpets (tun) about 90 centimeters long with one loop, probably nineteenth-century European band instruments, have replaced the long wooden trumpets described in colonial sources. They are used with tun in the Rabinal AchiŽ and other dance-dramas.
The music of the Maya of Guatemala is a function of the Maya belief system, in which the ancient Maya religion has accommodated a considerable overlay of Christian beliefs, symbols, and practices. Major public musical events are related to a calendar that mixes Maya and Roman Catholic religious observances with the Maya agricultural cycle. Less-public musical events relate to individual life-cycle events (courting, marriage, funerals) and to human needs, such as curing disease, dispelling evil, and protecting or blessing.
Traditional music is understood by the Maya as having been created and handed down from primordial ancestors who established all the customs, including music, that are pleasing to the spirit-lords (Maya gods), as a means of ensuring the continuing harmony of the cosmos. Tzutujil origin stories relate how the spirit-lord Rilaj Mam (Old Grandfather, Spanish MaximoŽn), to begin his service to the people as their guardian, taught them the songs and dances that must be sung and played to invoke his power. Since their ancestral songs translated "Of the Dead" and "Of the Drowned" call into the singer's presence the spirits of the deceased, special precautions
In the highland Maya towns of Guatemala, social events are marked by the sound of the marimba. Many of these events follow the Christian calendar of feasts, which often fall on days of solstice, equinox, or other celestial events important in the Maya calendar or are based on Maya customs relating to the agricultural cycle, such as times to pray for rain or sun, good germination, abundant crops, or successful harvest, each accompanied by its own ritual music.
Christian feasts
The manner of celebrating saints' days varies from town to town. Most common are colorful processions of townspeople to or from the church and the house of prayer (cofradiŽa), preceded by the xul and the tamboroŽn, whose music heralds what is coming (see
Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to the Saturday before Easter, is the occasion for the greatest festivities and the widest variety of musical forms. Characteristic of this time is the clacking of the matraca (a large wooden ratchet, swung above the head on a long handle); marimba combos (conjuntos) consisting of three-stringed bass viols, saxophones, and other instruments; and the xul and the tamboroŽn. On Good Friday,
Great numbers of dance-dramas are performed in highland towns following the yearly calendar of rituals and customs. Four to twenty costumed dancers recite or sing dialogue and dance to instrumental accompaniment. Dancers themselves may play spiked vessel rattles or rasps. Dance-dramas often last several hours and are customarily performed for eight days in succession, beginning on the saint's day or feast being celebrated. Some clearly predate Spanish contact. These include Rabinal AchiŽ, which is accompanied by the tun (and is therefore sometimes called the dance of the tun) and two long trumpets, and the deer dance, which may be accompanied by a gourd marimba and a xul or by other instruments. Other dance-dramas are importations from Spain. These include the dance of Moors and Christians (baile de moros y cristianos), accompanied by flute and tambor, and the dance of the conquest, accompanied by chirimiŽa and tambor.
Maya ritual contexts
Life-cycle events, particularly rituals of christenings and weddings, may be celebrated with a marimba or by an ensemble that may include strings, marimbas, or guitars, or by a band. For wakes, it is common to engage a violinist or a guitarist to play and possibly sing. Following the casket to the grave, women sing laments. At the burial ceremonies, a local specialist in ritual music (maestro del coro 'choirmaster', maestro cantor 'song master', sacristaŽn 'sacristan, man in charge of ritual') may sing sections of the Roman Catholic burial service, usually in Latin, with violin or other accompaniment.
One of the commonest means of obtaining what is needed from the spirit-lords is to engage a shaman for a ritual that will include the singing of a prayer. Using formalized but flexible texts, praising and petitioning the spirit-lords for what is needed, the shaman sings on a single tone, inflected (at points convenient to the singer and to the significance of the text) by a drop to a lower pitch for a syllable or two before taking a breath to continue. Vocal quality varies greatlyfrom a stridently marcato style to a relaxed speech-song. This prayer has become a tourist attraction in some places, notably in Chichicastenango, where a shaman lights candles and begins to sing on the steps of the church on cue as the daily tourist bus arrives.
Among the Tzutujil, the yearly rituals for rain and controlling the winds take place in Santiago AtitlaŽn, in a cofradiŽa closed and tightly locked to contain the winds the ritual will arouse. A shaman dons a special rainmaking shirt, sings a prayer song, and dances. During these actions, a singer accompanying himself on a five-stringed guitar sings an appropriate ancestral song (bix rxin nawal)apart from the shamanic prayer songs and chants, the only indigenous genre of Maya vocal music documented in Guatemala. Tzutujil ancestral songs are also known as bix rxin Ruchleu 'songs of Face-of-the-Earth', the god whose body forms earth, sky, and underworld. Songs of Face-of-the-Earth are identified by titles that describe their functions, such as "Song of San MartiŽn" (the spirit-lord of wind and rain), "Sad Song" (for women's laments), and "Song of the Road" (where a boy courts a girl). They are improvised by the guitarist-singer on a topic associated with the melody, expressed in a generic title such as "song for courting" and "sad song" (
That the Tzutujil have a common origin with the Cakchiquel and the QuicheŽ, whose creation and hero stories and clan histories (The Annals of the Cakchiquels and Popol Vuh) include musical texts, suggests that the ancestral songs of the Tzutujil are part of an old tradition that probably survives in the broader group but has not yet been documented. Tzutujil texts are in Maya couplets (paired lines in parallel syntax, whose second line usually repeats and varies the first). Some are related to the QuicheŽ origin stories of the Popol Vuh; the history and customs of the people; prayers of ancestors and gods; songs for mourning, courting, traveling, rain, and so on. The following is an example from "Song to the Sun, Lord of the World":
The call to be a singer and instruction in singing and playing are received in signs and dreams, and singers belong to the group of ritual specialists who serve the community by maintaining ancestral traditions.Green mountain world,
Green mountain Face-of-the-Earth,
You hear us where we stand;
You hear us where we walk,
Face-of-the-Earth, God,
Lamp Samardatina.
You are in the sky;
You are in glory.
Perhaps two hundred,
Perhaps three hundred steps
We will take up and down you,
Oh God, oh World.
Some traditional Maya music may be heard on commercial recordings, but the
The Caribbean coast of Guatemala, especially the towns of Livingston and Puerto Barrios, is inhabited by the GariŽfuna, descendants of Arawak and Carib inhabitants of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and African slaves brought by Spanish colonists (Arrivillaga CorteŽs 1990:252). The GariŽfuna came to coastal Central America in the late 1700s and now inhabit the Caribbean coast from Belize south to Islas de la BahiŽa in Honduras. Large GariŽfuna communities live in Laguna de las Perlas, Nicaragua, and in New York and Los Angeles.
GariŽfuna musical ensembles include groups that use at least some traditional instruments and genres. The most traditional combo includes several sizes of garaoŽn, siŽsira, and voice. The garaoŽn primera (also garawung), the lead instrument, is a membranophone fashioned from the trunk of a tree, perhaps 60 centimeters long, of a slightly conical shape. A deerskin head is laced to a branch that has been bent into a hoop. This is fitted to the larger end, tightened by a cord laced around a second hoop fitted above the first, and from there through holes in the body of the drum near the open end. Threaded between the cords are wooden dowels, rotated to regulate tension. Sometimes snares of nylon guitar string or fishing line are strung across the head. The garaoŽn segunda is of the same kind, but larger. Two or three of them are used with one primera, which plays virtuosically, periodically returning to a basic rhythm between improvisations. The segunda often plays an introduction (llamado), establishing the rhythm for the other instruments and any dancers; it maintains the basic rhythm throughout. The garaoŽn primera is considered male; the garaoŽn segunda, female (Arrivillaga CorteŽs 1990:258). The siŽsira, also called chiŽchira, is a spiked vessel rattle made of a large gourd containing seeds or small stones. Players, often holding two siŽsira in each hand, maintain the basic rhythm. Sometimes a conch trumpet joins the ensemble. These instruments accompany singing led by a soloist and answered by a chorus, gesturing to express the text. The audience participates by singing with the chorus, clapping, commenting, laughing, and sometimes dancing. Afro-Cuban in rhythm and style, the combo's repertoire includes the following genres: chumba, jungujugu, jungujugu de Chugu (junguledu), parranda, punta, sambay, and yankunuŽ (Arrivillaga CorteŽs 1990:260-266). Further study is needed to describe these forms and their relation to other Caribbean genres.
Other GariŽfuna combos include electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano, bateriŽa (drums and other percussion instruments), congas, sometimes trumpet, trombones or saxophones, and voices. These ensembles play a fusion of traditional rock rhythms in what is called punta rock, plus reggae and other popular styles. Neighborhood combos of boys from the same barrio may be made up of garaoŽn, snare and bass drums, cymbals, tortoiseshell idiophones, spiked vessel rattles, claves, and conch trumpets. They play puntas, parrandas, calypsos, and other Caribbean genres. Ensembles of guitar and light percussion, such as claves, gourd rasps, and bottle rattles play at parties, in bars, in the street, at home, and at wakes, provided the deceased enjoyed this kind of music. Their repertoire shows Jamaican influence. In the first half of the twentieth century, municipal brass bands played popular rhythms (fox-trot, blues, ragtime) in public parks, at private parties, and for square dances (seti). Today, brass bands with garaoŽn and siŽsiras play religious or funeral marches for religious festivals and processions.
GariŽfuna songs and dances
GariŽfuna songs include Christian songs (lemesidi) for liturgical use at mass or other services of the Roman Catholic Church; ritual songs for the ancestral cult of the gods Chugu and YankunuŽ (Arumajani), and work-accompanying songs. Most are responsorial between a soloist and a chorus, or antiphonal between a small group and a chorus. The punta is the most widely known GariŽfuna dance-song genre. Topical, erotic, or moral, its texts serve as social regulators. Many are old; some are used at the rituals of Chugu and Yankunu; but new ones are regularly composed. The punta, for a dance known as the culeado, is usually done by women in the center of the circle formed by musicians and audience; they perform for recreation, on San Isidro's day, and at nine-day wakes (novenarios).
The jungujugu de Chugu (or junguledu) is the most sacred GariŽfuna genre, used in the ancestor cult of Chugu and Dugu. Drums play a lightly accented rhythm while women and sometimes men dance in a group and may enter trance in which contact is believed to be made with the ancestors. The jungujugu de fiesta is played in procession, and its mood is moderate.
The yankunuŽ (probably from "John Canoe," a masked dance known as junkanoo in other parts of the Caribbean) is also called wanaragua (enmascarao in Honduras). This is a majestic warriors' dance usually performed by men, dramatizing victory over Europeans. Musically, it is a dialogue between a drummer and masked dancers, who wear shell rattles (illacu) strung around their calves. It is performed on 25 December and 1 and 6 January.
The parranda or zarabanda, used for celebrating, is usually played while in transit through the streets. Its texts are social regulators of behavior between couples. The parranda is done on 12 December for the festival of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The erotic dances chumba and sambay and the courting song genre gunyei have not been studied. There is a growing movement among the GariŽfuna of Central America, however, to study, rescue, and revitalize traditional GariŽfuna music and dance. Popular on the commercial media, mainly cassettes, compact discs, television, and radio are the popular Atlantic coastal and Caribbean styles merengue, calypso, soca, and reggae.
GariŽfuna musical enculturation begins at an early age, usually with children playing the spiked vessel rattle and later with rhythm ensembles of children and youths on the garaoŽn segunda. The principal methods of teaching are imitation and example. The development of a clear vocal quality is prized, and singers are usually the composers of their songs. Makers of musical instruments, who often play the instruments, are recognized for their public function during traditional festivals and rituals.
Ladinos are people who primarily speak Spanish, tend to live in urban areas and engage in nonmanual occupations (such as teaching students, keeping shop, driving a
Ladino music flourishes in Guatemala City, in the urban centers of the south coast and eastern lowlands, and among smaller enclaves of Ladinos who live in the predominantly Maya towns of the central Cordillera. It does not include Maya ritual music or instruments, but the two cultures share the diatonic keyboard or double marimba, and much of the marimba repertoire of sones guaternaltecos and popular music.
In the 1800s, popular music with traditional or local rootsparticularly local forms of the corrido, the pasillo, the son, and the valsdeveloped as entertainment in the homes of the elite. Eased by the arrival of printing, songs and dances circulated in elegant salons in Guatemala and other Central American cities, and gradually became differentiated from a pan-Spanish-American style into more or less discrete national styles. Popular music in the early twentieth century included the corrido, the fox-trot, the mazurca (or ranchera), the pasodoble, the polka, the schotiŽs, and the vals. By the 1920s, the influence of African rhythms was notable in the danza (or habanera), the merengue, the samba, and other popular styles. The popular music of Guatemala transcends national boundaries, as do the media that transmit it. Nightclubs, restaurants, and hotels support popular styles for urban Ladinos and tourists. Ladinos and urban Maya enjoy latino disco music in clubs. Performances of popular music played by Guatemalan marimba bands can be heard in U. S. cities where numerous Guatemalan immigrants live.
The Spanish Roman Catholic missionaries who accompanied the colonists introduced Spanish religious musical traditions (predominantly of Seville) to the native peoples (Stevenson 1964). Instruction in singing and the playing of wind instruments for the performance of the sacred polyphony of Western Europe began early in the Audiencia de Guatemala. In the 1540s, provision was made for an organist and a cantor at the cathedral of Guatemala (in present-day Antigua, Guatemala), and books of plainchant and polyphony from Seville were acquired. The composer Hernando Franco, the first choir director at the cathedral in Guatemala (1570-1575), had a choir that included paid singers and indigenous instrumentalists. Later, the choir director Gaspar Fernandes copied works of Palestrina, Morales, Victoria, and Pedro Bermudes (chapel master from 1598-1603) for use in the cathedral of Guatemala. In 1645, cathedral musicians were performing polychoral music, and Marcos de Quevedo, choir director in 1698, is credited with the composition of polychoral pieces for their use. An exchange of musical resources among Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru began early and was carried on during the colonial period. Choirbooks containing music by Spanish, Flemish, Italian, and Guatemalan composers for voices and wind instruments circulated in remote villages in the 1500s and 1600s, testifying to a musical life similar to that in the city, developed by churchmen among the Maya in the outlands.
In the early 1700s, the cathedral's collection of music included works by Spaniards Francisco Guerrero, CristoŽbal de Morales, and TomaŽs LuiŽs de Victoria, plus Loyset Compe`re, Jean Mouton, Claudin de Sermisy, and Philippe Verdelot (Stevenson 1980). The Guatemalan-born composers Manuel JoseŽ de Quiroz (chapel master from 1738 to 1765) and his nephew Rafael Antonio de Castellanos, who succeeded him, composed villancicos, jaŽcaras, and negros that have many ethnic and popular stylistic features. In the mid-1700s, the cathedral orchestra maintained fifteen
The publishing of music in Guatemala began in 1750 with Fray Antonio MartiŽnez y Coll's Suma de todas las reglas del canto llano, which contained music notation. JoseŽ Domingo Sol was the first published Guatemalan composer, with the publication of his composition for guitar in 1829 in England. Guatemala's first musical press was that of Domingo Toyotti, who in 1897 began to publish so-called national music by Guatemalan composers. Benedicto SaŽenz de A., appointed organist at the cathedral in Guatemala City in 1802, composed religious and secular music, including Guatemala's first waltzes and polkas for the piano. He directed the first local orchestral performances of operatic works, and did much to advance musical appreciation.
Guatemala's national anthem, with music composed by Rafael Alvarez to a text written by RamoŽn P. Molina, was selected in a competition in 1887. Other composers of the late 1800s were Lorenzo Moras (polkas), Rafael Castillo (valses, gavottes, mazurkas, sones, two-steps), and FabiaŽn RodriŽguez (marches).
In the Teatro Oriente in 1853 and 1855, Anselmo SaŽenz directed the national premiere of Gioacchino Rossini's L'Italiana in Algieri, La Cenerentola, and La gazza ladra. The Teatro Carrera was opened in 1859, and thereafter the music season in Guatemala usually consisted of the visit of a traveling Italian opera troupe. The National Conservatory of Music, which opened in 1875, was headed first by Juan Aberle, a violinist and conductor from Naples, and later by Guatemalans, many of whom had been trained in Europe. In 1941, JesuŽs Castillo (1877-1946) of Ostuncalco, Quezaltenango, composed the first Guatemalan opera, QuicheŽ Vinak, which debuted in the Teatro Abril in 1925, and from which selections were played in New York, Washington, and Seville. Other noted composers of the period include JoaquiŽn Orellana (b. 1933 in Guatemala City) whose String Quartet and Trio were premiered at the Inter-American Festivals of 1960 and 1965, and Jorge AŽlvaro Sarmientos de LeoŽn, whose Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra was premiered in 1953.
In the late 1990s, Guatemala has an active symphonic orchestra and folkloric troupe (baile folkloŽrico); the latter presents traditional indigenous and early colonial music and dance, stylized for theatrical performance. Public performances in the central park of Guatemala City by one of the national bands or orchestras are seasonal events. Except when dance music is played, audiences participate passively.
Ethnomusicological research began with JesuŽs Castillo's investigations among the Mam and the QuicheŽ, published in La MuŽsica Maya-QuicheŽ in 1927. In the 1940s, Henrietta Yurchenco, working for the Archive of American Folk Song (Library of Congress), documented and recorded Cakchiquel, Ixil, KekchiŽ, QuicheŽ, Rabinal, and Tzutujil music. In the 1950s, recordings were made by Lise Paret-Limardo de Vela for the Instituto Indigenista de Guatemala. These collections mainly include music for dance-dramas and other public rituals or festivals. Recordings of Maya vocal and ritual music in homes and cofradiŽas were made between 1965 and 1975 among the Tzutujil and Cakchiquel of Lake AtitlaŽn by Linda O'Brien-Rothe, resulting in several studies (O'Brien 1975, 1985; O'Brien-Roth 1976). The body of research is significantly expanded by ongoing contributions of the Centro de Estudios FolkloŽricos of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, initiated by Manuel JuaŽrez Toledo.
The Guatemalan marimba has been researched by the ethnomusicologist and marimba virtuoso Vida Chenoweth (1964), and by Robert Garfias (1983). These scholars acknowledged a possible African connection for the marimba. O'Brien-Rothe
The major studies of GariŽfuna music in Guatemala have been written by Arrivillaga CorteŽs (1988, 1990), who has focused on drumming ensembles. His anthropological insights and insider status as a Guatemalan scholar make his works particularly useful. Robert M. Stevenson (1964, 1980) has contributed important studies of Guatemalan music in the colonial and preindependence periods. Of particular interest are his analyses of the relationships between the musics of the native people of Guatemala and the Roman Catholic Church.
Native Americans
Afro-Hondurans
GariŽfuna
Mestizos
European-Derived Art Music
About two-thirds of the 112,000 square kilometers that make up the Republic of Honduras are mountainous. The remaining one-third consists of valleys, savannas, and low-lying coastal plains. Honduras has a long northern coastline on the Caribbean, a long border with Nicaragua running from the Caribbean southwest to the Atlantic Ocean, a small Atlantic coastline along the Gulf of Fonseca, and shorter borders with El Salvador to the southwest and Guatemala to the west.
The current population, of about four and a half million, is almost 95 percent mestizo, a mixture of indigenous American and European peoples and cultures. During the colonial period, a small number of Africans were brought into what is now Honduras, but this group has mixed so thoroughly with the mestizo population that it no longer exists as a distinct group and is not generally recognized as part of the national makeup. Though the marimba and probably the musical bow (caramba) are of African origin, no identifiable retentions of African musical styles currently exist in mestizo music.
The native American population of Honduras represents less than 5 percent of the national total. There are six groups; listed by geographical location from west to east, they are Chorti, Jicaque-TolupaŽn, Lenca, Paya, Sumu, and Miskitu. These groups are identified as separate from the majority mestizo culture and have retained elements of indigenous culture to varying degrees. All have undergone increased contact with mestizos and national culture in recent years, and this has greatly accelerated acculturation into the majority mestizo population and indigenous language loss.
Chorti
About two thousand Chorti inhabit the department of CopaŽn, on the western edge of the country; more live across the national border in Guatemala. The Chorti are descendants of a Maya group whose state, centered in CopaŽn, disintegrated with the Classic Maya collapse, around A.D. 1000. No research on their music is available.
Jicaque-TolupaŽn
One group calls itself TolupaŽn, a name that is gradually replacing the mestizo-given name of Jicaque. In the early 1500s, the TolupaŽn inhabited a large area possibly extending to the northern coast, but European contact forced survivors to retreat into the interior (Healy 1984:116). There are estimates of five thousand to eight thousand TolupaŽn located in the department of Yoro (ChaŽvez Borjas 1984; Cruz Sandoval 1988:36). In the mid-1800s, a small group of TolupaŽn resettled in Montan~a de la Flor, in the neighboring department of Francisco MorazaŽn. Despite missionaries' efforts, this group has maintained TolupaŽn indigenous culture more thoroughly than the major TolupaŽn population, which has been strongly affected by mestizo culture (Chapman 1984a, 1984b). No systematic research has been done on TolupaŽn music.
Lenca
The Lenca have moved further along a continuum toward mestizo culture than any other indigenous group in Honduras. The Lenca language was lost earlier in the twentieth century (Campbell 1976), and any ethnic boundary between native American and mestizo is increasingly irrelevant. The most recent figures remain a 1950 estimate of fifty thousand "modified Lenca" and 28,400 Lenca in the process of becoming mestizo (Adams 1959:629). This population is found in the southwestern departments of Santa BaŽrbara, La Paz, Lempira, and especially IntibucaŽ, and across the border in northern El Salvador. As in the rest of mestizo Honduras, the pipe and tabor (pito y tambor) accompany saints-day dances (Chapman 1984b:550). The long music bow (caramba, onomatopoetically named bumbum) is played. Doris Stone noted the use of maracas, three- and four-holed bamboo flutes, and drums to accompany dance during annual festivities (1963:214-215). A greater understanding of Lenca music awaits further research.
Paya
About fifteen hundred Paya (calculated from Cruz Sandoval 1984:427) are located in the central eastern part of the country, in the northwestern part of the department of Olancho. Increased encroachment of mestizos into their territory has accelerated the mestizo acculturation of the Paya. Already in the 1920s, Eduard Conzemius had noted that the Paya dressed like mestizos and had adopted the guitar and accordion (1927:283). His descriptions remain the only published documentation of Paya music. He noted the use of a musical bow with a metal string, played with the bow held in the mouth in the same manner as the Miskitu lungku [see MISKITU:
Sumu
It is estimated that fewer than four hundred Sumu live in Honduras (Cruz Sandoval 1988:36). This population forms several small settlements along the RiŽo Patuca, mostly within the Department of Olancho. Prominent among Sumu instruments are flutes (bra-tara). These are a meter long, have four finger holes toward the end, and produce low tones. Early in the twentieth century, Francisco MartiŽnez Landero described long flutes that matched the bra-tara. His account of a funerary ritual is undoubtedly that of the sikro ceremony (1980:15). Bra-tara were seen by Conzemius in the 1920s, though his Sumu encounters possibly occurred in Nicaragua (1932:112-113). No contemporary documentation of the contextual use of the bra-tara
Miskitu
About fifty thousand Miskitu live in Honduras (calculated from Ashby 1976:6 and VelaŽsquez 1979:11), located along the coast and major tributaries in the area known as Mosquitia [see MISKITU].
Since the 1890s, West Indians, primarily Jamaicans, came to Honduras as contract laborers on banana plantations along the northern coastal plains. Afro-Hondurans are concentrated in the larger Caribbean ports. No research on their music has been published.
About one hundred thousand GariŽfuna live in Honduras (calculated from MeleŽndez 1988:73). Like all GariŽfuna, they are descendants of the five thousand "Black Caribs" removed by the English from St. Vincent in 1797 and relocated to RoataŽn Island, in what is now Honduras. Within a generation, the GariŽfuna had crossed to the Central American mainland and soon spread along the Caribbean coastline. Later migrations established GariŽfuna communities in Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and more recently, the United States.
Currently, GariŽfuna live along the northern Honduran coast from Puerto CorteŽs near the Guatemalan border as far east as Plaplaya, near the mouth of the Paulaya River in the northeastern part of the country. They are concentrated in forty villages along the coast; men often work in nearby ports. For their participation in the struggle for Honduran independence, they were in 1825 granted the status of morenos libres moradores de los puertos 'free black residents of the ports'a condition that helped secure their political and cultural autonomy. Massive conversions to Roman Catholicism in the 1850s blunted the efforts of subsequent Protestant missionaries; currently, the GariŽfuna in Honduras espouse a mixture of Roman Catholicism and an earlier amalgam of West African and Carib beliefs.
Most significant research on GariŽfuna music has been conducted with GariŽfuna in other Central American countries, despite the GariŽfuna's historical connection with Honduras and the fact that the bulk of the population still resides there [see BELIZE; GUATEMALA; NICARAGUA]. Published research on the Honduran GariŽfuna is limited. The most thorough treatment is by Crisanto MeleŽndez (1988), who presents photos, drawings, and summary descriptions of instruments. Ghidinelli and Massajoli confirm the vibrancy of songs and dances found in GariŽfuna communities in Belize and Guatemala (1984:507-509), and the iancunuŽ (dance of masks) are remarked on by Manzanares (1967:128). The only published recordings of traditional GariŽfuna music in Honduras date from 1953 (Stone) and show a close congruence with similar GariŽfuna music in other parts of Central America.
The GariŽfuna in Honduras were the first to organize a folk-oriented troupe of
Punta, a genre once part of GariŽfuna funerary ritual, developed into a new style of popular music in the mid-1980s. Usually sung in GariŽfuna, it includes at least part of the garavoŽn drum ensemble. As it became more popular, it took on non-GariŽfuna Afro-Caribbean musical influences. In a scenario resembling that of the creole palo de mayo in Nicaragua, punta became popular with Honduran urban mestizo youth in the late 1980s. The eleven-piece GariŽfuna group Banda Blanca had tremendous national and international success with their 1990 punta hit "Sopa de Caracol" ('Snail Soup'), which achieved the highest level of worldwide exposure of any Honduran music (Banda Blanca 1991; Miller 1991).
The penetration of Spanish musical culture since European contact has provided the essential foundation for musical expression among the mestizo population. Research on music before independence remains to be done in colonial government and church archives, though the low level of economic enterprise during the colonial period probably limited state and church sponsorship of musical activity. Some ecclesiastical correspondence sketchily documents popular expression during religious festivals. The first mention of festivities that include the dance called el guancasco (see below) dates from 1788, when JoseŽ Ortiz de la Pen~a wrote of the need to suppress the use of masks and other local expressions (quoted in ArdoŽn MejiŽa 1987:138).
Beginning in the 1800s, writings by foreign travelers offer another source for information on local musical performances. These data tend to be limited in detail and usually stand as incidental commentary to descriptions of dancing. Nineteenth-century travelers noted an affinity for stringed instruments throughout the country and documented the acceptance and transformation of imported European dances. William Vincent Wells stated that the fandango, danced to solo guitar without the use of castanets, had long been accepted as a national form by 1855, when he witnessed a performance in the eastern area of Olancho (1857:215). Violin, flute, and guitar accompanied singing and dancing atop boards placed on cratesa popular format at the time called la maroma 'the acrobatic performance' (Charles 1890:76-79). La lanza, a shortening of la cuadrilla de lanceros 'the lancers' quadrille' was popular among semiurban middle classes in the early 1880s (Soltera 1884:296-298); it has now entered the local repertoire of peasants' dances.
Traditional mestizo instruments
Several mestizo dances are accompanied with small percussion instruments. The ayacaste (ayakaste), a wooden handle around 25 to 30 centimeters high, opens into a Y, across which stiff wires lie. Metal spangles, such as metal bottle caps, are strung along these wires, and they vibrate together when the ayacaste is shaken. One example of the use of the ayacaste is the dance of the little devils (baile de los diablitos), annually performed in Comayagua.
Maracas (sonajas) are made from a gourd filled with tiny stones or dried seeds, into which a stick is inserted. Chinchines, also called jiŽcaras, are rattles used in the dance el guancasco. Another small idiophone is the carrasca (also called raspador), a
Marimbas of different sizes are found throughout the western, central, and southern highlands. As in the Central American nations to the south, the large chromatic double marimba (marimba doble) was first imported from Guatemala and southern Mexico around the beginning of the twentieth century [see GUATEMALA]. Between then and about 1950, double-marimba ensembles enjoyed substantial popularity in the country's major urban areas. Instrumentation centered on a double marimba whose keys followed the Mexican marimba's piano-keyboard arrangement, not the off-centered Guatemalan one. This marimba was played by four musicians, and a contrabass doubled the bass part. A trap set and a second, smaller marimba doubling the parts of the three musicians with the highest registers on a double marimba were commonly added. This instrumentation was often expanded to include saxophones, trumpets, and/or guitars. The coming of affordable record players and other sound-amplification equipment in mid-century severely contracted the popularity of marimba ensembles. In the late 1990s in the capital, Tegucigalpa, marimba ensembles are reduced to playing in hotels catering to tourists; in the nation's second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, the marimba has disappeared entirely.
Smaller chromatic marimbas, played by one or two musicians, are still common in parts of the highlands, especially in the Comayagua area and the western edge of the country bordering Guatemala. These ensembles can integrate various percussion instruments and continue to provide recreational entertainment and dance in small towns and rural areas. Frequently a guitar and accordion or violin accompanies the marimbain which case the accordion or violin is usually restricted to doubling the melodic line. These marimba groups accommodate a wide range of repertoire, occasionally even providing music for Roman Catholic and Protestant religious services.
One or more small drums (tambores) play with small flutes to accompany several mestizo dances. The tambor is always played with sticks, and the head is covered with goatskin, cowskin, or deerskin.
The sacabuche or zambomba is a friction membranophone constructed from a large gourd, cut and covered with a skin at one end. A stick is inserted through the middle of the skin. Pushing and pulling the stick produces a strong, low tone.
A pito, a three- or four-holed end-blown cane duct flute, is used with a small tambor to accompany mestizo dances, as in the performance of el guancasco in southwestern departments of the country. Peasants use button accordions and piano accordions for song-and-dance music; the button accordion is more popular. The harmonica has found wide acceptance among peasants and is used in various musical contexts.
The impact of Iberian musical culture is evidenced in the prevalence of stringed instruments throughout the mestizo-populated part of the country. By far the most popular instrument in Honduras is the six-stringed Spanish guitar. It is locally manufactured in the more rural parts of the country, where wooden tuning pegs are utilized. Guitar variants include the requinto, a smaller, six-stringed instrument found in the central and northwestern parts of the country. Tuned a fourth above the guitar, it primarily serves a melodic function. The guitarrilla or cuatro is a four-stringed small guitar of local construction. It is featured in the dance la correa. The mandolin (mandolina), with eight strings in four courses, and the three-stringed tiple are used in combination with guitars in various ensembles.
The local violin is most commonly played held at the chest, rather than tucked under the chin. In remoter areas, strings have been made from the mescal fiber, producing unique sonorities.
The caramba or zambumbia is a monochord more than two meters long. A single string, running from end to end of the long wooden bow, is made from metal in contemporary instruments, but in earlier times a fiber from the kankulunko or caramba vine was used, hence the instrument's name. The string is stopped close to a midpoint by a tuning noose, another short cord, wrapped around the wooden bow. The nonsymmetrical division of the main string allows for the two principal notes, usually a fifth apart, that sound when the player strikes the string with a small stick in his right hand. The tuning noose holds a small, hollow gourd against the wooden bow. The gourd faces away from the string, toward the player, allowing him to mute the open end of the gourd with the palm of his left hand. Through this muting, he can control the sounding of overtones sufficiently to produce a full range of notes, though always secondarily in volume to the main two pitches created from the string. In addition, the instrument rests upon a cucurbitaŽcea, another larger gourd, or open resonator, which amplifies the sound and can be manipulated by one of the player's feet or by an assistant (Manzanares 1967:125-127; Mun~oz TaŽbora 1988:139-140).
The caramba has usually been considered of African origin, though Manzanares maintained an American origin for it, and Boile`s considered this possibility valid (1966). It is related to the extinct Nicaraguan quijongo and the nearly extinct Costa Rican quijongo. Its presence is slowly fading, but it is still used in the western area, and in 1970 it was being used in the southern Department of Valle (Manzanares 1972:4). In the far western department of CopaŽn, it accompanies several dances solo; and with an accordion and a guitar, it provides music for the dances el coyote, la polka, and el xique (Ministerio de EducacioŽn PuŽblica 1983)
Musical genres and contexts
Two of the oldest mestizo dances and accompanying music are el guancasco and the Moors and Christians (los moros y cristianos). Both dances are performed in small communities where a strong component of indigenous culture survives. El guancasco is danced in the southwestern part of the country during saint's-day celebrations. The music enjoys a variety of instrumentations. In Yamaranguila, Department of IntibucaŽ, music for the dances is provided by combinations of sonajas, small drums, and cane flutes that produce five tones. In nearby IntibucaŽ, two small cane flutes with beveled mouthpieces accompany four pairs of dancers honoring the image of Vara Alta de MoiseŽs, and to the northwest in the city of Gracias, department or Lempira, dancers honoring Saint Lucy (Santa LuciŽa) are accompanied by violins and guitars (Manzanares 1963:71, 1972:2). Guancasco can also refer to festivities held to reaffirm the friendship and social ties between two neighboring communities or villages. Also termed paisanazgo, these celebrations often revolve around the physical
The dance los moros y cristianos originates from the introduction of the Spanish dance-drama depicting the historical struggle between Moors and Christians but has been transformed over time and frequently integrates other material. The dance-drama, found in several locales, is usually performed during the annual festivities for Saint Sebastian (San SebastiaŽn) on 20 January. The dancers are accompanied by a small tambor and a pitonever a shawm (chirimiŽa), contrary to RamoŽn y Rivera and Myers (1980:678). A different instrumental piece (son) from the tambor and pito begins each choreographed section of the dance, cues the entrance of main characters, and announces the beginning of important speeches (for discussion and choreography documented in the villages of Ojojona and Lepaterique, Comayagua, located in the central part of the country, see Ardon MejiŽa 1987:139-149). In the city and environs of Comayagua, the dance is also called the little devils (los diablitos) and includes ayacaste rhythmic accompaniment (Manzanares 1972:2).
El xique (also spelled xike and sique) is the most popular and widely dispersed mestizo dance of Honduras. Stone stated that the name was reduced from the word quisique (1955:2), but Manzanares maintained that the full name is xixike, onomatopoetically derived from the sound of the dancers' sandals sliding on the ground (1965:201-202). The xique, in triple meter, is accompanied by varying instrumentations of vocals, accordion, guitar, and other stringed instruments. The music, like that for the overwhelming majority of mestizo dances, has a strongly Iberian musical foundation.
Mestizo dance music is almost uniformly in a major key. Harmonies rarely extend beyond the compass of tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords. Modulation may occur between sections. In the xique, the dancing may abruptly halt when a dancer interrupts by crying "Ąbomba!" The same dancer then declaims two to four couplets (coplas, locally termed bombas), octosyllabic quatrains rhyming abcb. Traditional bombas with humorously romantic themes are used, or the content is improvised to refer directly to other participants [see COSTA RICA].
Currently, the bulk of mestizo dance forms and their corresponding musical accompaniment carry the titles of European salon dances that took root throughout the mestizo population during the colonial and early independence period. These dances, found especially in more remote rural areas, often bear only a token similarity to their ostensibly European origins. The most popular include cuadrilla, contradanza, danza, mazurca, pereke, polka, vals, varsoviana, and zapateado (for more examples, see Manzanares 1972, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c). At least one such dance, the fandango, was probably introduced directly from Spain around three centuries ago. Major tonality, 3/4 or 6/8 meter, and a sectional structure with corresponding changes in meter or tempo are general characteristics of mestizo dances.
Since the city of Omoa once served as an important port of entry from the Caribbean, foreign influences have left their mark on the dances of the area. Notable among these are localized versions of the tango and the rumba, also found to some degree in other northern port cities and their surrounding areas. Coplas interjected during a dance are called valonas in Omoa but bombas in the rest of the country (Manzanares 1972:28, 31).
Prominent among musical forms is the corrido. As elsewhere in Spanish-speaking America, the Honduran version is descended from the Spanish romance. The lyrics, structured within the format of the copla, usually praise the attributes of local towns or recount the life of major historical figures. "El Torito Pinto" ('The Little Painted Bull'), a corrido found throughout Central America, conserves lyrics from the Iberian Peninsula and accompanies a dance of the same name. In rural areas, songs with religious
Though music of the colonial period in Honduras is a subject that awaits further research, some information, mostly biographical, is available on musical practices in urban areas after independence. JoseŽ Trinidad Reyes (1797-1855) was a key figure in the early independence period. Besides composing several masses and villancicos, he founded the National University and initiated the first school of music in 1834 in the then capital of Comayagua (Valle 1981:192). In the last decades of the 1800s, extending the success of military bands, the central government promoted the development of civil brass bands in major cities across the country. In 1877, the national government contracted the German musician Gustavo Stamm to create an elite concert band, La Banda de los Supremos Poderes (Band of the Supreme Powers) (Adalid y Gamero 1972 [1940]). The fame of this band throughout the Central American region was due in great part to the efforts of Manuel Adalid y Gamero (1872-1947), organist, composer, and director of the band for several years. His output of polkas, valses, mazurkas, and marches reflects the musical environment of the Honduran middle class in the first decades of the twentieth century. His major band compositions"La suita tropical" ('Tropical Suite') and "Los funerales de un conejito" ('Funeral of a Rabbit')received international exposure. Ignacio V. Galeano (1885-1954) was noted for an extensive output of religious music, and Rafael Coello Ramos (1877-1967) wrote many children's and patriotic songs that are still used in schools; however, the first large-scale compositions were by Adalid y Gamero's student Francisco RamoŽn DiŽaz Zelaya (1896-1977), who wrote four symphonies in romantic style, and Roberto DomiŽnguez Agurcia (1917-1989), recognized for his violin concerto (Cargalv 1983). Leading contemporary composers include Norma Erazo (b. 1947), also an accomplished pianist, and Sergio Suazo (b. 1956), both of whom studied in Quebec and have written in various idioms.
After failed attempts to establish a national conservatory, the current Escuela Nacional de MuŽsica in Tegucigalpa was founded in 1953 to offer training for primary and secondary music instructors. There are currently two lower-division conservatories, the Escuela de Artes Musicales Francisco DiŽaz Zelaya in Tegucigalpa and the Escuela de MuŽsica Victoriano LoŽpez in San Pedro Sula. More advanced study in European classical music is offered in the Facultad de MuŽsica in the Universidad Nacional AutoŽnoma de Honduras; however, no course of study on Honduran or other music is available in the country (ArdoŽn MejiŽa 1990:63). The DireccioŽn General de Cultura and the Departamento de Investigaciones CientiŽficas del Instituto Honduren~o de AntropologiŽa e Historia have sponsored small research projects into local music since the mid-1970s (Alonso de Quesada 1978:67).
The largest of the Central American republics at 130,000 square kilometers, Nicaragua is bounded by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the south and west. It has two broadly defined cultural regions: the eastern Caribbean coastal region (known as the Atlantic Coast) and the Pacific Coast. This geographic division provides the organizational structure of this essay. Sparsely populated, the Atlantic Coast is the home of native Americans (Miskitu, Rama, Sumu), the GariŽfuna, and some Creoles and mestizos. The national population is estimated at more than 4 million. Nearly 90 percent of the people live on the Pacific Coast and are overwhelmingly mestizo. Virtually all archaeological and historical documentation of music within Nicaragua has been limited to the Pacific Coast. The following sections are drawn from that material; references available on the music of groups on the Atlantic Coast are included in the sections devoted to those groups.
Music before and during the period of initial European contact
Our primary sources for knowledge of the music of the peoples that inhabited the land within the current borders of Nicaragua are archaeological findings and the writings of early Spanish writers (cronistas 'chroniclers'). Both sources cover almost nothing but the southern lowlands of the Pacific Coastal region. They account only for musical instruments and make vague references to actual musical practices.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the two principal groups that occupied the lowland region of the Pacific Coast before European contact had different histories. The larger group were the Chorotega, a Mangue-speaking group that may have migrated from Soconusco, Mexico, and established themselves in the Pacific littoral by A.D. 800. The Nicarao, a NaŽhuatl-speaking group from central Mexico, forced a displacement of the Chorotegans along the Rivas Peninsula beginning about A.D. 1200. Less definite is the place of origin or time of arrival of the Matagalpan people, a smaller group dispersed in the central highland region (Lange et al. 1992; Newson 1987; Stone 1966). Throughout the lowland region, archaeologists have found small
In 1524, Hernando de CoŽrdoba was the first Spaniard to penetrate the Pacific coastal plains. Soon afterward, Spanish writers made the first descriptions of indigenous musical performances and interviewed high-ranking members of the Amerindian societies on musical practices that Spanish authorities had already prohibited or, because of the destruction of native social structures, were no longer being performed. From these sources, we know that in 1523 the chieftain DiriangeŽn greeted the Spanish conquistador Gil GonzaŽlez DaŽvila with an ensemble of five flutists before driving him back to Costa Rica (Oviedo 1977:171).
Chorotega and Nahua communities marked the ending of each calendar year and other occasions with large-scale celebrations that included musical accompaniment for thousands of costumed dancers. In 1540, Giralmo Benzoni witnessed a large celebration and described the musical instruments as trumpets (excoletes), flutes of reeds and clay, drums, and whistles; he also mentioned chilchil, which he termed small bells, similar to chischiles, the current name for small bells sewn onto dancers' shoes for use in several dances (Brinton 1883: xxvii-xl). Also present in parts of the Pacific Coast was the teponaztli, a log idiophone used by NaŽhuatl-speaking peoples in central Mexico, the Nahua homeland.
Colonial and independence periods
During the four centuries of the colonial period, institutionally supported musical activity in colonial Nicaragua was probably at a low level due to the province's lack of economic importance and activity. Whatever records might have existed from the colonial period appear to have been lost during the wars and earthquakes that ravaged the cathedrals, the central repositories for written materials from this period. However, we know that over the centuries, religious musical instruction (primarily from Spanish hymnals) and continuous contact with secular forms strongly inculcated European musical structures and aesthetics. Coupled with the weakening and dismantling of Amerindian culture, Spanish musical practices subsumed previous musical expressions and have formed the foundation for all subsequent music making on Nicaragua's Pacific Coast. Colonial documents record a steady payment to priests for masses and other religious services that no doubt required musical performance. One of a handful of musical references to be found in colonial documents indicates that in the late 1600s the village of El Realejo on the Pacific Coast used its community chest (caja de comunidad) to purchase a chirimiŽa, an imported Spanish double-reed instrument, probably for liturgical use. The penetration of Spanish instruments throughout the Pacific Coast was noted by the traveler Morel de Santa Cruz, who in the early 1750s encountered, deep in the countryside, an instrument he described as a chirimilla (Romero Vargas 1987 [1977]:98). Nevertheless, some pre-European practices were retained during this period. In the early 1730s, the English traveler John
Travelers who crossed Nicaragua beginning in the 1850s with the discovery of gold in California have left scattered references to folk music. They documented the widespread use of the guitar and the marimba de arco (see below) along the lowland region, from Telica to Rivas. Brass bands were a primary medium for urban musical performance, and interrelated brass and wind orchestras performed for the upper strata of society. European brass and wind instruments gradually became adopted by larger sectors of the population, eventually forming the bandas de chichero that are omnipresent in the lowland Pacific Coast. Music schools that promoted the European classical tradition were founded around 1900 in the major cities, and the first documentation of Nicaraguan compositions for wind and brass ensembles dates from this period. The introduction of intensive coffee cultivation helped erode the remaining cultural autonomy of indigenous enclaves on the Pacific Coast. In the 1880s, the United States linguist Daniel Brinton reported that with the death of the previous generation, indigenous languages had disappeared as functioning idioms (1883:xii). Brinton published notations of sones that had been performed on pipe and tabor during musical interludes of the play El Gušegušence (see below)pieces that show a marked Spanish-derived musical content.
The estimated current population of 472,000 on the Atlantic Coast contains six distinct ethnic groups. Positioned along a continuum that runs from native American to African, they are mestizos, Sumu, Rama, Miskitu, GariŽfuna, and Creoles. A large number of mestizos have migrated from the Pacific Coast. This subarticle examines the music of the Atlantic Coast, excepting the mestizos (see Pacific Coast, below) and the Miskitu [see MISKITU]. The Miskitu are evenly divided between the nation-states of Honduras and Nicaragua; their estimated current population within Nicaragua is 120,000.
Historically, the Atlantic Coast's primary cultural and economic relationship with the outside has been with the greater Caribbean basin. Early attempts by the Spanish to control the area effectively were frustrated by resistance from local peoples, competition from the English, and the apparent lack of natural resources that could justify the investment necessary to overcome these obstacles. Beginning in the 1600s, English buccaneers and traders brought African slaves and entered into alliances with the Miskitu. Under the Treaty of Versailles (1787), most of the English population was obliged to depart, but English influence continued, and Spanish authority was never fully exercised. The culture of the various groups on the Atlantic Coast developed with little contact from the Pacific Coast until the end of the 1800s.
Native Americans
Rama
The most recent estimate places the Rama population at fewer than seven hundred (Hale and Gordon 1987:10). Most live on Rama Cay, south of the city of Bluefields, the survivors of a Chibchan-speaking group that once occupied the southern half of the Nicaraguan coast and parts of Costa Rica. European contact and subsequent warfare with Europeans and Miskitu reduced the Rama drastically in numbers, leading to comprehensive deculturation (Loveland 1975). No published studies on their music exist.
The term Sumu 'uncivilized Indian' is Miskitu. It has been used since the mid-1800s to describe related groups of peoples that currently inhabit tributary headwaters of main rivers on the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua (part of the northernmost group is also found in Honduras). The Sumu and Miskitu languages are descended from a Macro-Chibcha language, whose speakers once occupied the greater part of the Atlantic Coast (Holm 1978:298; Stone 1966:210). The groups now identified as Sumu shunned contact with the Europeans and Africans who began to arrive in the late 1500s. Their insularity led to the military superiority of the people that because of trade and association with Europeans and Africans became identified as a separate group, known as the Miskitu. Attacks and slaving by the Miskitu over the centuries and repeated incursions in the twentieth century by mestizo and foreign gold prospectors, rubber tappers, and others have driven the groups collectively known as the Sumu upstream.
The current Sumu population in Nicaragua, of about ten thousand, divides into three major communities. From north to south, these are the Twahka, the Panamaka, and the Ulva. Smaller communities include the Bawihka and the Kukra. The Bawihka, located in the central part of the Atlantic Coast, are few and in a process of losing their ethnic identity to that of the Miskitua process that has already been completed for the Kukra community, just south of Bluefields (Helms 1971:16-19; Smutko 1985). A small community of Sumu lives upriver in Honduras, along the RiŽo Patusa (Mun~oz TaŽbora 1988:126-136). Despite the divergence of their histories, several elements of Sumu and Miskitu music show marked similarities.
Musical instruments
The Sumu employ rattles made from round or egg-shaped gourds. These are principally played by women during the funerary ritual (sau), performed for a deceased woman (see below). In their construction, a stick handle is inserted into the small end of a gourd, or is attached with fiber strings wrapped through perforations made in the gourd. A jaws harp (yusap), introduced by Europeans, is popularly used to induce a soothing or tranquil mood in the performer.
Membranophones are played only by men. The most widely used one was introduced by contact with the English, as revealed in its name, durum. It is struck with a drumstick (tin~ni). The indigenous pantan~ or panatan~ is an upright hourglass drum, hollowed from a solid block of mahogany or cedar. The ends are of differing diameters, and the smaller end is placed on a pedestal base, bringing the larger end to a height of one meter off the ground. The drumhead can be made of various animal skins, including deer, tapir, toad, and iguana. The skin is secured with a rope and struck with an open palm. The pantan~ or panatan~ is used exclusively for the sikro, a funerary ceremony for a deceased man (see below).
The lun~ku, a musical bow, is usually played by women. A thin string of silk grass is attached to both ends of a 70-to-90-centimeter length of bamboo or a tough, pliable wooden bough. The player strikes the string with a pick of wood and presses the bow against the mouth, which acts as a resonator.
A single-tone flute made from the femoral bone of a deer, tapir, or other large animal is used in hunting to lure the agouti, for which the instrument is named: malka kun~in (Twahka), malaka kun~ini (Ulva), and malaka kun~kana (Panamaka). A similar flute, the nawa-wakal, is made from jaguar bone but is used only in the sikro. Also used during this ritual are bara, two- to four-holed bamboo flutes about 30 to 40 centimeters long with mouthpieces formed from beeswax. A short fife (una) is also used in funerary celebrations. The bra-tara, a large bamboo flute that can be up to 2 meters long, is played only by the shaman (sukia). With one end resting on the
Collective singing plays an important part in the Sumu life cycle and daily activities. Women's collective singing accompanies important rituals, as shown in examples collected by Grossmann (1988:74-75). The following text is an excerpt from a women's song to greet men returning from a hunting expedition:
A similar text is used for collective singing during the initiation of prospective husbands. After the initiate has passed a test of manhood that includes endurance of a whipping without complaint, the virgin girls of the village greet him with a song that begins:Handsome man, strong man,
Who goes to the jungle and brings meat to the house,
We thank you, we wish to follow your steps.
The most important Sumu ceremony is the funerary ritual, called sau when held for the death of a woman and sikro for a man. It is still celebrated by the Twahka and Panamaka Sumu (Conzemius 1932:112-113; Grossmann 1988:78-81). The sau and sikro (which mean 'ground, world') help guide the departed's spirit to itwana, the land of the hereafter. The sau, held at the deceased woman's place of residence, involves drinking fermented maize (puput) and dancing with the participation of both sexes. The sikro is more elaborate, the exclusive domain of men. In the early stages of the ceremony, lasting from two to four days, the village shaman (sukia) takes a thin, black thread, spun by the community's women, and unravels it from the grave back to the house of the deceased. The soul of the departed will travel along this thread, which must therefore never touch the ground, and is suspended on tree limbs, and even propped up to cross waterways. The men disguise themselves with black paint, and wear elaborate headdresses, made from bark covered with brightly colored bird feathers, thus preventing the soul of the deceased from forcing them to accompany him to itwana. The first night, the shaman sings incantations that invoke the spirit of the deceased. The spirit's arrival along the thread is announced with the sound produced from spinning a pole with an attached bamboo strip (see above). The ritual proceeds to dancing and the inebriation of all the males. No singing takes place, but the dancing is accompanied by reed flutes (bara), cedar drums (pantan~ / panatan~), and short fifes (una). After two or three days, a break in the thread is observed, signaling the departure of the soul of the deceased and its entry into itwana.Handsome man, strong man,
Who can endure pain,
Handsome man, strong man,
Who knows no fear,
We want to be under your protection.
GariŽfuna
GariŽfuna, sometimes called Black Caribs, are descendants of a mixed Carib and African people, exiled from St. Vincent to the island of RoataŽn, Honduras, in 1797. Within forty years most GariŽfuna had left RoataŽn and settled along the Caribbean coast. GariŽfuna migrated to Nicaragua from Honduras and Belize during the economic boom on the Atlantic Coast in the later half of the 1800s (Holm 1978:418-419; Davidson 1980:36-38). With the economic downturn that began in the 1920s, some GariŽfuna returned north and others mixed with Creoles and Miskitu, leaving reduced communities in the area of Pearl Lagoon (Conzemius 1928:183). The most recent population estimate, two thousand, includes several families in the city of Bluefields (calculated from Hale and Gordon 1987:23). The total GariŽfuna population in Nicaragua is small in comparison to that in Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras, where more research on their music has been done [see BELIZE; GUATEMALA; HONDURAS].
Salient among the musical practices of the Nicaraguan GariŽfuna is the curative ritual, walagallo. The following description is taken from Suco Campos (1987), the only published study of Nicaraguan GariŽfuna music. The walagallo is held to cleanse a sick member of the community, and lasts from Friday dawn until Sunday morning. It contains the strongest African retentions found in expressive culture in Nicaragua. The music centers on the shaman's singing and a three-drum ensemble (garavoŽn). GariŽfuna shamans are called sukia; their having the same name as Miskitu and Sumu shamans demonstrates the closeness of the relationship among these three peoples. The drums and their corresponding dimensions are libiama garavoŽn 'first drum, chosen drum' (26 centimeters in diameter and 39 centimeters high), lingigui garavoŽn 'main drum, drum of the heart' (30 centimeters in diameter and 45 centimeters high), and luruvan garavoŽn, 'third drum, helping drum' (27 centimeters in diameter and 40 centimeters high). The first drum is made from a hollowed trunk of a tree, and the other drums are made from vertical wooden slats held in place by three metal hoops. Deerskin, used for the heads, is rolled at the edges around a circular bent branch and fitted over one end of the drum. Cords laced through holes in the bottom of the drum are wrapped around a second wooden hoop, placed above the first to secure the skin. The performer can adjust the pitch by twisting wooden pins that thread between pairs of these cords. The drums, always played with the hands, produce a range of tones from different positions and placements of the hands on the drumhead. Each drum is assigned a principal rhythmic pattern (
As is typical of many African drum ensembles, the lowest-pitched drum, the lingigui garavoŽn, plays the leading role. Its player begins the music, and during the series of performances that make up the ritual his improvisations interact with the shaman and/or the dancers. The other two drums, providing accompaniment to the first drum, vary little from their respective patterns.
Toward the end of the second day of the ritual, when the sickness has been exor-
Creoles
The Creole population on the Atlantic Coast totals about forty thousand persons, concentrated primarily in urban areas. Almost half of the Creoles currently reside in the largest city, Bluefields; the remainder live mostly on Corn Island and Pearl Lagoon, and in Puerto Cabezas. A small, growing number reside in Managua (on the Pacific Coast), and many more have migrated to the United States. Unlike the Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic Pacific Coast population, Creoles are Protestant, and speak a unique Creole English, sometimes termed Misquito Coast Creole (Holm 1978). Most Creoles also speak Spanish and/or standard English.
English traders arrived in the mid-1600s, bringing the first African slaves taken to the Atlantic Coast from the parts of West Africa that today are Benin, Gambia, Ghana, and Togo (Holm 1978:187). In 1787, when the English evacuated the Atlantic Coast, many slaves escaped and stayed behind, joining others of African descent who were already established as "free men of colour." This population was no longer purely African but the result of extensive genetic mixing with Europeans and some of the indigenous population. The economic boom of the late 1800s attracted a new wave of immigrant workers, most of whom came from Jamaica. Only since the 1940s have the more mixed-race Creoles, already established on the coast, fully accepted these arrivals (Gordon 1987:139). The West Indian culture of these more recent immigrants has had a strong impact on Creole culture, including musica connection further strengthened through continual contacts with the islands by Creole sailors and itinerant workers. Beyond occasional reporting on annual festivities in the national press, there are no published studies of creole music.
West Indian influence is reflected in the most common musical form, usually called mento, which resembles Jamaican mento. These songs have duple meter, moderate tempo, major tonality, syncopated rhythmic accompaniment, open vocal style, and a basic structure of alternating verse and chorus. The chorus consists of single lines sung by the lead singer, lines immediately repeated by the chorus in a responsorial fashion. The instrumentation reflects the Creoles' common cultural links with other parts of the English-speaking Caribbean: banjo, ass?s jaw, washtub bass, scraper, guitar, and more recently, accordion. Claves, bongos, and congas are also occasionally added. Lyrics typically describe an actual local event, frequently laced with satire. The lyrics to the song "Judith Drowned" (
Creoles hold to a number of Protestant faiths, but the Moravian Church has the strongest presence. German Moravian missionaries first arrived in Bluefields in 1849 (Hale 1994:40) and by the end of the 1800s had established several parishes along
The maypole is the most widely known traditional dance. Dancers hold on to ribbons attached to the top of a tall pole and twine the ribbons around the pole. In Nicaragua, the dance dates from the 1800s or before, possibly having spread from Pearl Lagoon to other Creole communities. It occurs during festivities that reach their zenith in May, celebrating the earth's fertility. The festivities close with another traditional dance, the tulu lulu (or tulululu), accompanied by the song of the same name. Dancers pass one at a time under a couple's extended arms while onlookers sing out their names in the song's lyrics.
The chorus of "Mayaya-o" in the traditional mento "Mayaya Lost 'im Key" was the basis for the name Mayo-ya (Spanish mayo ya 'it's May now') given to the state-sponsored events begun in 1980 to enhance traditional May celebrations. Throughout the 1980s, Mayo-ya became a national event with the additional participation of Pacific Coast music groups and outside tourism. The change of government in 1990 and economic pressures canceled most aspects of Mayo-ya, and current May celebrations more closely resemble those staged before the 1980s.
In the 1960s, dance movements from the maypole were transformed into a sensual couple dance that emphasized pelvic movements and close body contacta development attributed to Bluefields native Harold Hodgson. The sensual aspects of this dance were accentuated in the 1970s when stylistic elements of soca were integrated into the musical accompaniment [see TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO]. The new dance music conserves much of the acoustic, mento-based style, including lyrics, basic melodies, and chordal patterns. However, it transforms the earlier style by increasing tempos and replacing the banjo, the washtub bass, and the accordion with a popular-music instrumentation of trap set, horn sections, and electric instruments, including electric bass, organ, and/or synthesizer. When the song "Judith Drowned" is performed in modern style, the melody and lyrics shown in
Under the Spanish appellation palo de mayo, the new dance and music made inroads with mestizo youth on the Pacific Coast. With the success of the Sandinista revolution (1979), palo de mayo exploded in popularity nationwide as a symbol of politically and sexually liberated youththe only time an Atlantic Coast style has
Along with African-American popular music from the United States, Jamaican reggae (locally called rasta) has a strong following. The socially committed reggae group Soul Vibrations toured and recorded internationally in 1991the only Atlantic Coast popular music group to have done so.
Mestizos
The Nicaraguan state's assertion of political control in 1894 and the development of the banana and other industries accelerated the growth of Spanish-speaking mestizo population and influence. About three hundred thousand mestizos currently live on the Atlantic Coast. They are the area's largest group, accounting for 65 percent of the population. Mestizos have established a major presence in the Atlantic littoral urban centers, but 90 percent of them are peasant farmers on the western boundaries of the region (Hale and Gordon 1987:25), mostly migrants from the Pacific Coast's northern area. Uprooted by big economic projects and strong population pressures on the Pacific Coast, they continue to encroach on Miskitu and Sumu territory. During the Sandinista period (1979-90), previously sporadic links between nonmestizo Atlantic Coast communities and the Pacific Coast intensified; these have abated since 1990, in great part because of the nation's economic crisis. The growth of the mestizo population and closer ties to the Pacific Coast have resulted in the increased influence of Hispanic Nicaraguan culture and music.
The subjugation and near-destruction of the Chorotega and Nahua peoples allowed for the subsequent pervasive Spanish acculturation in the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. Currently, even the isolated pockets of indigenous communities on the Pacific Coast have experienced strong mestizo influences. During the colonial period, Africans were brought to replace the exhausted indigenous population for agriculture and mining (Romero Vargas 1987 [1977]). Over time, this African blood has in some sections of the Pacific Coast so thoroughly blended into the general population that it is not generally recognized as part of the national makeup.
No identifiably African musical stylistic retentions currently exist on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, though one prominent local instrument, the marimba, is clearly African in origin. Nicaragua's majority mestizo culture belongs to the general mestizo Pacific Coast culture of Central Americaa tradition that runs from southern Guatemala to Costa Rica's meseta central. With its neighbors, Nicaragua maintains strong cultural contact with the United States, and especially through the media, with Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
Traditional folk instruments
The sonaja is a hand-held semicircular wooden tambourine with metal jingles but
The marimba doble is a large, chromatic marimba developed in Chiapas (Mexico) and central Guatemala around 1900. Marimba dobles were imported and imitated in Nicaragua soon afterward. Sometimes joined with wind and percussion instruments to form dance-accompanying bands, the marimba doble has steadily declined since the 1950s and is now rarely heard [see GUATEMALA].
The marimba de arco 'hooped marimba', whose epicenter is the region around Masaya and MonimboŽ, is the only lowland Pacific instrument of African origin. Often touted as Nicaragua's national instrument, it is distinctive from other Latin American marimbas in its construction and national prominence, despite its diminutive size and diatonic limitations relative to other marimbas. The name is derived from a hoop (made from a thick, woody vine and attached to the frame) that makes the instrument easily portable and within which the musician sits to play. The tone of each hardwood slat is reinforced by a resonator, originally made from gourds sized for each slat as in Africa, but later replaced by bamboo and now by hollow cedar cylinders. All Nicaraguan marimbas preserve the mirliton of African marimbas, the buzzing membrane stretched over a hole in each resonator, most commonly derived from dried pig's intestine. The marimba de arco is played solo by a single marimbero flanked by two stringed instruments positioned to add support to the appropriate register: a guitarra, a six-stringed Spanish guitar with metal strings, sometimes modified with extra bass strings, is situated on the bass end of the marimba, and a guitarrilla, a four-stringed guitar with metal strings, is placed on the treble side (
Several membranophones share a similarity both with Spanish folk instruments and with sixteenth-century descriptions by Spanish chroniclers of indigenous instruments in use in Nicaragua at the time of the Encounter. Two examples of this possibly double origin are the juco, a small friction drum once found in the Masaya area (and now extinct), and various sizes of tambor, a double-headed drum, still found in Indian enclaves. All Nicaraguan folk drums are double headed and played with two sticks, never by hand.
A medium-size tambor (20 to 25 centimeters in diameter) is still used in the indigenous community of MonimboŽ, played exclusively by the mayordomo, the community's elected leader. Until the 1980s, certain rhythms were widely understood to signify specific messages, such as calling the populace to perform particular communal tasks or alerting them to fire or other calamities, but this form of musical communication has fallen into disuse.
Two small drums and one medium-size drum are the traditional accompaniment for la gigantona, a primarily verbal performance and the principal folk expression of LeoŽn, the nation's second-largest city. The drums announce the beginning of the performance and intersperse their sounds with the calling out of coplas, four-line rhymed verses shouted by the performer from inside an oversized representation of a female figure, originally derived from the Spanish tradition depicting Queen Isabella.
The largest Nicaraguan drums are the atabales, the size and shape of a standard snare drum but made of wood, and the bombo, a bass drum. One bombo and up to a dozen atabales form the type of folk ensemble known as los atabales, found exclusively in the city of Granada and performing only in October, during a month-long religious celebration.
By far the most popular and widely distributed instrument throughout Nicaragua (on both coasts) is the six-stringed Spanish guitar (guitarra). Throughout the nation, this guitar accompanies solo lyric songs or, especially in the mestizo cultural area, appears in pairs playing parallel thirds and sixths.
The use of the guitar in instrumental settings has been cultivated in Las Segovias and neighboring northern regions of the Pacific Coast more than in other parts of the country. Duo-guitar instrumental pieces are especially associated with the northern region. The most common instrumentation calls for the two guitars to divide the chordal accompaniment and melodic line. The most popular form for these instrumental guitar duos is the mazurka, the triple-meter music and associated dance introduced into the northern coffee-producing regions by Central European immigrants in the latter half of the 1800s. Though found in other departments to the south, it is commonly called la mazurka segoviana 'the Segovian mazurka' and remains a vital music-and-dance complex in the northern zone.
Another instrumental music proper to the northern regions of Nicaragua consists of a violiŽn de talalate (named for the soft, white talalate wood, famed for the ease with which it can be carved into the appropriate shape), accompanied by one guitar or more. Groups featuring a violiŽn de talalate, most notably in the EsteliŽ area, perform various musical genres including mazurkas. The musical style of this violin, matching that of the region's vocal aesthetic, avoids vibrato and emphasizes glissandos. The sound of the instrumentthin, sometimes raspyrealizes an aesthetic common to other Latin American violin performances.
The quijongo, a monochord of African origin, is made from a wooden bow up to three meters long with a single metal string. To provide rhythmic and melodic
In the southern coastal zone, a pito, a small, straight, wooden fipple flute, is played with one or more tambores to accompany traditional dances. Each tambor averages 15 centimeters in diameter. Usually considered a Spanish importation, the pipe-and-tabor instrumentation may also have American origins (Boile`s 1966). Though references to the local use of the shawm (chirimiŽa) survive from the colonial period, this aerophone fell out of use at least a century ago and is no longer found in Nicaragua.
Folk-musical genres and contexts
On the Pacific Coast, one surviving Spanish form is the romance, a vocal genre usually sung solo with guitar accompaniment. About twenty romances closely retain the original Spanish melodic and lyrical form, though most occur in more than one version. Romances in Nicaragua roughly adhere to the standard form of four octosyllabic lines per stanza and range from four to twelve stanzas in length. They can be divided into three categories: secular, religious, and children's songs. Most extant examples are from the first category and recount stories of love, almost invariably with tragic endings.
The Nicaraguan corrido, sometimes called the corrido nacional, follows the same basic form as the Spanish romance, though with greater variation in lyric structure. Romances and corridos are frequently identified by other names, including versos, historias, coplas, and canciones. The lyrics of corridos can be grouped into four categories: those that treat themes of love; those whose main characters are animals, often as a metaphorical reference to humans; those that propound nationalism and patriotism; and those that give accounts of specific political events that have taken place in the country. Some corridos in the last category can be dated to the first half of the 1800s. All romances and corridos are in a major key throughout, with a narrow melodic range and a descending melodic ending typically leading to the tonic.
Some of the most widely known corridos stem from the military and political struggle of Augusto C. Sandino in the northern regions (1928-1933). Denied access to institutional forms of communication and appealing to an illiterate population, these songs popularized the goals and accomplishments of Sandino's movement. Corridos about Sandino survived repression by successive reŽgimes of the Somoza family, and a few regained national prominence with the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution.
The most famous corrido about Sandino exists in different variations and under several titles, including "Que se derraman las copas," "A cantarles voy, sen~ores" (Belausteguigoitia 1934:164) and "Los dueles de Sandino" (
Pongan cuidado, sen~ores, | Pay attention, gentlemen, |
lo que les voy a cantar, | to what I sing to you, |
brindaŽndole los sonores | making this musical offering |
a un valiente general. | to a valiant general. |
Que se derramen las copas; | Let's drain our glasses; |
que se aumente maŽs el vino, | Let's have more wine, |
y brindemos porque viva | And toast because |
Augusto CeŽsar Sandino. | Augusto CeŽsar Sandino lives. |
"ĄQue libere a Nicaragua!" | "Liberate Nicaragua!" |
el pueblo de Sandino grita, | Cry Sandino's people, |
"y aquel traidor de Moncada | "And rid us of the traitor Moncada, |
se vendioŽ hasta la yegušita." | Who's even sold off the mare." |
Dijo Sandino una vez, | Sandino once said, |
apretaŽndose las manos: | making his hands into fists, |
"Yo vendo a diez por centavo | "At ten to the penny |
cabezas de americanos." | I sell Americans' heads." |
Sacasa dijo a Sandino: | Sacasa said to Sandino, |
"Yo me voy a retirar; | "I'm going to give up; |
a los Estados Unidos | we can't defeat |
no les vamos a ganar." | the United States." |
El valiente le contesta, | The courageous one answered, |
"Andate para tu casa; | "Go back to your home. |
pues no les tengo miedo: | I don't fear them: |
son puritas calabazas." | They're all pumpkinheads." |
Que se derramen las copas.... | Let's drain our glasses.... |
The impact of the Mexican revolutionary corrido is clearly evident in the versification and particularly the music of these songs. Several corridos about Sandino utilize the melody of the Mexican corrido "La Adelita." The propensity to substitute lyric content using the same music, a trait of the modern Mexican corrido, marks other Nicaraguan corridos. In the northern regions, a strong commonality with Mexican folk music is noticeable in the thin, nasal vocal quality and the parallel harmony in thirds of melodic lines with descending glissandos at the end of stanzastraits illustrated in
The southern zone of the Pacific Coast is rich in musical expressions. Different combinations of the flute (pito) and a small tambor accompany traditional dances, performed exclusively during a given locality's saint's-day celebrations. For these dances, religious fulfillment is an important part of the context, and the music is considered to have a sacred quality. Though flute-and-drum instrumentation may have originated
Nearby, in the Diriamba area, musical interludes for the folk dramas el gigante and el gušegušence are provided by a flute and a tambor, played by two musicians or with both instruments played by a single musician in pipe-and-tabor fashion.
The pipe-and-tabor instrumentation has also served to accompany folk dances that have begun to disappear. Two important examples are el baile de moros y cristianos 'the dance of Moors and Christians' from the area of Boaco and la vaquita '[the dance of] the cow' of Managua. La vaquita was once performed by a single elderly female dancer in a stylized imitation of a bull's goring onlookers. The only remnants of the tradition are groups of young men dressed in rudiments of the original costume, who carouse through the crowds during the city's annual saint's-day celebrations.
The marimba de arco trio accompanies a flirtatious couple dance known under various titles depending on the costumingel baile de las inditas 'the dance of the female Indians', el baile de las negras 'the dance of the dark-skinned women' (see Okada 1995: example 8), and so on. These dances, generically called el baile de la
For those outside the tradition's immediate practitioners, and even for many nonmusicians actively involved in el baile de la marimba, authorship of the traditional repertoire is considered anonymous, as befits a supposedly genuine folk tradition. Nevertheless, several important pieces were composed in the last two generations (by marimba musicians) or can be traced back a couple of generations to adaptations of popular songs. For expressly secular contexts, marimba de arco musicians may augment
Brass and wind bandscalled bandas de chicheros (from chicha, a fermented corn beverage), or more infrequently, bandas filarmoŽnicas 'philharmonic bands'perform important musical functions in rural and urban communities throughout the southern coastal zone. The instrumentation commonly consists of two trumpets, a sousaphone, and a percussion section of snare drum, bass drum, and handheld cymbals; a clarinet, a saxophone, and a trombone may be added. During rodeos and the dance segments of saints-day festival processions, chicheros play sones de toro 'bull sones' or sones de cacho 'bull's-horn sones', raucous traditional dance-and-bullfight songs in a quick duple meter. These sones may vary from anonymous traditional pieces to military marches to adaptations of popular songs. Chicheros provide music for funerary masses and processions, customarily utilizing repertoire written by local composers expressly for brass band. Despite the indispensability of these bands in official church ceremonies and important folk-religious celebrations, the musicians are held in low esteem, as their name indicates.
The greatest outpouring of religious music on the Pacific Coast takes place in early December with the singing of puriŽsimas, songs praising the Virgin Mary (see Okada 1995: example 5). The title refers to the Immaculate Conception (celebrated by the
Less popular are villancicos naviden~os, songs praising the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, sung during the Christmas season. Nicaraguan villancicos are exclusively religious and show a remarkable retention of their (originally Spanish) melodic and lyrical form and content. More widely heard during this season are Christmas songs (sones de pascua), sometimes called villancicos. Most of these compositions are products of local composers, dating back two to four generations, played by brass and other wind ensembles of varying instrumentations.
Popular music
The development of foreign and local popular musical forms corresponds to the growth of a local music industry. Outside musical forms became heavily disseminated in Nicaragua because of two factors: the country's small size limited the extent to which local musical production could compete with the overpowering music industries of more industrialized nations; the Somoza dynasty, which came to power in the mid-1930s, ruled throughout the period when mass media were developing. The elite adopted an outward orientation that gives preference to foreign cultural models, especially those from the United States. As a result of these factors, outside forms had a great impact on Nicaraguan musical culture. The dissemination of Mexican popular music, one of the strongest and most enduring influences, came from radio and records, but movies played a central role. The availability and popularity of Mexican movies that regularly included musical performances began with the 1940s, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. As a result, throughout the Pacific Coast, the cancioŽn ranchera (a folk and popular sung genre) and other central and northern Mexican forms have become deeply rooted. The Mexican trio style of guitar- and requinto-accompanied singing first popularized in the 1940s is still well accepted. Contemporary trios, including the famous Los Girasoles, integrate local Nicaraguan interpretation and musical sensibilities. Mariachis, in various instrumental combinations, are now found throughout the Pacific Coast. Trios and mariachi musicians available for hire continue to gather nightly in the Bello Horizonte Plaza in Managua.
A series of Afro-Cuban dance musics (rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chaŽ) has achieved wide success in urban areas since the 1940s. The Sonora Matancera, an Afro-Cuban group originally popular in the 1950s, still remains a source for programming on radio in Managua. More recently, Mexican and Colombian versions of the cumbia have been the most popular styles of dancing. The influence of U.S. popular music has consistently increased over the decades from radio and more recently from television. A host of mostly derivative Nicaraguan rock-playing bands proliferated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. War and economic decline spurred migration to the United States during the 1980s. Ongoing communication with this expatriate population has heightened the profile of North American popular culture in general. In the 1990s, the return of "Miami boys"children educated in the United Stateshas had an important cultural impact beyond their actual numbers.
The son nica (from nicaragušense), whose popularity was cemented in the 1940s, was deliberately created as a Nicaraguan antidote to Mexican musical influence. The composer Camilo Zapata (b. 1917) is attributed with inventing it by adapting the marimba de arco tradition's major tonalities, melodic phrasing, and 6/8 rhythm. A guitar-accompanied genre, it has achieved recognition as a national idiom, though it is found mostly in the populous lowland region. Important performing composers in this style include Zapata, Victor Manuel Leiva (b. 1925), Jorge Isaac Carvallo (b. 1927), and Otto de la Rocha (b. 1936). Northern musical forms were introduced to the majority population in the lowland area through the immense popularity of recordings by Salvador Cardenal Argušello in the 1950s. The most influential singer-songwriter in the latter half of the century is Carlos MejiŽa Godoy (b. 1943). His lyrics adroitly draw from peasant culture, and he remains the only composer to set verses to the (traditionally instrumental) northern form of the mazurka.
The nation's political upheavals beginning in the mid-1970s paralleled the rise in the local importance of Latin American nueva cancioŽn 'new song', sometimes dubbed volcanto (combining volcaŽn 'volcano' and canto 'song'). Carvallo's son nica "Campesino" ('Peasant') was the first recorded protest song (1964), but Carlos MejiŽa Godoy established political song as an important genre in the early 1970s. His version of a liberation-theology-inspired Roman Catholic mass set in folk-musical style, the Misa Campesina (Peasant Mass) (1980), served as a model throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. The musical style of his younger brother, Luis Enrique MejiŽa Godoy (b. 1945), typifies that of a younger generation of volcanto musicians in his eclectic array of continental musical influences and electric instrumentation. The years just before and after the overthrow of the Somoza government witnessed an explosion of cultural activity that included an outpouring of music with political commentary and social commitment from many short-lived musical ensembles. A milestone was "Guitarra Armada" ('Armed Guitar') (1978), a recording of sones nicas and other Nicaraguan songs by the MejiŽa Godoy brothers. The album, recorded in Costa Rica and smuggled into Nicaragua, used humorous lyrics couched in local vernacular to instruct civilian combatants how to use weapons during the final stages of the military struggle. The popularity of volcanto ebbed with the fortunes of the Sandinista Revolutiona decline that perhaps was aided by a certain insularity of the new-song movement, which became increasingly based in Managua. Despite the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, interest in socially committed song remains high in comparison to the situation in most other Latin American nations. The MejiŽa Godoy brothers' musical careers have continued, and they remain the nation's most prominent musicians.
On the whole, the classical idiom has remained uncultivated in Nicaragua. The first important secular composers came with the flourishing of the salon tradition in the
A more fully developed nationalist use of folk materials began with Nicaragua's most widely known composer, Luis A. Delgadillo (1887-1962), the first to write large orchestral works. Educated in Italy at the Milan Conservatory, he lived for many years in the United States, where he had some success in popularizing his works. Though he often claimed the inspiration for his symphonic and shorter works came from indigenous sources (from Nicaragua and other Mesoamerican countries), his output betrays a superficial familiarity with those idioms. More successful in this vein was Juan Manuel Mena Moreno (1917-1989), who arranged dozens of folk melodies for chamber orchestra and especially for the Coro Nacional Nicaragušense (Nicaraguan National Choir) which he directed for many years until his death. His abiding concern with creating a nationally rooted classical repertoire is shown in his last composition, "SonnequeriŽa No. 2," a short concerto scored for the Nicaraguan marimba de arco and chamber orchestra. Except for incidental music for film by Pablo Buitrago (b. 1952) in the early 1980s, virtually all Nicaraguan classical music, including the handful of contemporary compositions not already mentioned, is characterized by an essentially romantic style.
Media
Nicaragua's economic infrastructure developed slowly, compared with most of Middle and South America. That and Nicaragua's dependent relationship with the United States were reflected in the creation of media and cultural institutions. The first radio station appeared in 1931, constructed by then-occupying U.S. Marines to meet their own communication needs. By the late 1940s, most of the nation's major urban centers had small radio stations, but the national recording industry was never able to meet the demand for Nicaraguan music for broadcasting. A telling example of the tardiness of the development of the nation's music industry is that the two principal national labels were still producing ten-inch 78-rpm records as late as the early 1960s. Major radio stations were forced to rely heavily on live performances by local musicians for Nicaraguan musical material well into the 1960sa practice still common in stations in smaller towns.
The 1972 Managua earthquake destroyed much of the nation's recording industry, but the Sandinista Revolution initiated several new institutional structures that had a significant impact on musical production and consumption. The nation's first Ministry of Culture coordinated a new state recording label, ENIGRAC, Empresa Nicaragušense de Grabaciones ArtiŽsticas y Culturales (Nicaraguan Company for Artistic and Cultural Recordings). In the first years of the 1980s, ENIGRAC more than doubled the previous output of Nicaragua's private record industry, featuring traditional folk music and volcanto. Musics from the Atlantic CoastCreole palo de mayo and Miskitu folk songsreceived their greatest degree of exposure at that time. Nevertheless, the new supply of recordings by Nicaraguan musicians did not translate into a qualitative increase in radio programming of Nicaraguan music, even on state-controlled stations with large national audiencesa subject of much debate during the Sandinista period. In the 1990s, severe contraction from the economic crisis has
Other institutions
Founded on the heels of the Revolution, the ASTC, AssociacioŽn Sandinista de Trabajadores de la Cultura (Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers), offered logistical and limited financial support to politically engaged musicians and other artists located in Managua. Outside the capital, the Ministry of Culture sponsored the creation of a network of CPCs, Centros Populares de Cultura (Centers of Popular Culture). CPCs played a key role in the country's smaller cities and towns, serving as a locus for various cultural activities, including musical instruction and performance.
Folkloric troupes of dancers proliferated during the early 1980s; as many as six were once in regular operation and conducting international tours. As part of the Sandinista project of national integration, folkloric troupes included stylized representations of dance and music from all parts of the country, including the Atlantic Coast. After intensive cultural activity, the ASTC and Ministry of Culture closed in the late 1980s, replaced in part by the Instituto de Cultura (Institute of Culture). In the post-Sandinista period, the CPCs reorganized as autonomous units under the name Casas de Cultura (Houses of Culture) and continue to function on a smaller scale.
The RubeŽn DariŽo Theater has served as the nation's central performance venue since the 1960s and was the only significant indoor theater to survive the 1972 earthquake. It was formerly restricted to classical concerts for the nation's richest patrons, but after 1979 it opened its doors to a larger audience and a wider repertoire. Since then, it has offered regular presentations by the nation's folkloric troupes. Large outdoor events are held at La Pin~ata in Managua, especially annual music festivals and concerts of touring bands. During the 1980s, Managua hosted many continentwide new song (nueva cancioŽn) festivals. The annual GastoŽn Festival (named after Rafael GastoŽn PeŽrez, a Nicaraguan composer of popular songs) continues to stimulate the performance of romantic popular songs (canciones romaŽnticas) with a national competition for new material. Most of the nation's clubs that feature local popular musicians, including new song performers, continue to be located in Managua.
The Managua-based Orquesta de CaŽmara Nicaragušense (Nicaraguan Chamber Orchestra) is virtually the sole organization dedicated to performances of classical music. Some semiclassical works are included in the repertoire of the Coro Nacional Nicaragušense (Nicaraguan National Choir). The Banda FilarmoŽnica de Managua (Managua Philharmonic Band) at times continues the tradition of outdoor concerts, a tradition that dates from the early twentieth century.
The bulk of musical education takes place on a private basis and is not found within an institutional framework. Music education in primary and secondary schools suffers from a severe shortage of instruments and teachers. The classically oriented Escuela de MuŽsica (School of Music) in Managua offers instruction up to university entry level. There is no regular musical instruction at any of the nation's universities. The Orquesta Nacional and the Escuela de MuŽsica received regular stipends under the Somoza and Sandinista governments but now face a precarious economic future.
Beginning in the 1930s, writers and intellectuals involved with the costumbrista and vanguardia movements turned their attention toward local themes and material for their writings. This inward focus also led to the first attempts at collecting folklore, including traditional music and dance (Cuadra and PeŽrez Estrada 1978; Delgadillo 1950; Pen~a HernaŽndez 1968; also see reprints in the BoletiŽn Nicaragušense de BibliografiŽa y DocumentacioŽn 1982). Ernesto MejiŽa SaŽnchez compiled an excellent selection of northern corridos and romances (1946).
Salvador Cardenal Argušello was the principal investigator of Nicaraguan music. His pioneering accomplishments were many: he made the first field recordings in the 1950s; he contributed writings to the publications of the Granada-based literary circle known as the Taller de San Lucas; he produced records featuring folk music on his own labels; and through broadcasts on his radio station (reaching most of the Pacific Coast) he fostered an urban awareness of more rurally based music. His recordings remain the most comprehensive sources of the nation's folk music and contain a synthesis of his previous writings (Cardenal Argušello 1977, 1992).
Recordings of marimba doble ensembles in the 1950s and recordings of marimba de arco trios from the 1950s through the 1970s were released by labels based in Managua and Masaya. Luis Felipe Andino released several albums of folk music at this time, primarily marimba de arco trios and bandas de chichero. These recordings were of variable quality and are now mostly out of print, but more recent recordings of marimbas de arco and chicheros, and video selections of music and dance traditions are currently available (Scruggs 1988, 1995).
The trio of doctors that performed under the name Los Bisturices HarmoŽnicos (The Harmonizing Scalpels) (1971) stimulated interest in folk music in the 1960s with their collection and popularization of traditional songs. Carlos MejiŽa Godoy and Wilmor LoŽpez collected substantial amounts of material in their investigations into folk music in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Their results have yet to be published, though MejiŽa Godoy has used the material in his own creative work. Nicaraguan new song has received some scholarly attention (Pring-Mill 1987; Scruggs 1991), and a handful of recordingsCarlos and Luis Enrique MejiŽa Godoy (1988), Luis Enrique MejiŽa Godoy and Mancotal (1988), Nicaragua...Ąpresente! (1989)have been released in the United States.
Nicaragua was neglected by outside academic inquiry before the mid-1970s, but the Sandinista period generated a plethora of publications by foreign authors. Only a few studies offer a comprehensive overview of the nation's history relevant to an understanding of the place of expressive culture in it (Burns 1991; Walker 1991; Woodward 1983). Little attention has been given to music or other forms of expressive culture outside of literature. Marimba traditions and other folk and popular music and dances on the southern Pacific Coast are covered in Scruggs (1988, 1994). Craven (1989) provides good information on governmental agencies that impacted Nicaraguan musical production in his comparison of Cuban and Nicaraguan cultural institutions.
Nicaragua has no central musical archive. Original manuscripts of religious and secular compositions are scattered in uncatalogued private collections. Recording companies have not kept systematic accounts of their past production, and copies of recordings are not available in libraries. After failed initiatives in the first half of the 1980s, contemporary musical investigation has not gone beyond topical reporting in the daily press.
Ethnic Populations and Regional Music
Musical Instruments, Ensembles, and Contexts
Music-Dance Genres and Contexts
Festivals
Electronic Media
Further Study
For almost five hundred years, Panama has suffered from a special anonymity, though it has shared its entire history with European, Central American, North American, and South American development. From the 1500s, when Spanish conquistadors landed on its Caribbean shores, to the 1800s and construction of its interoceanic canal, and finally to political independence in the early twentieth century, the isthmus of Panama has served as the so-called Bridge of the Americas. It has been the stage on which millions of people have played out their lives as they crossed the isthmus from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and back.
This land has served as a sociopolitical fulcrum. It has provided the means for building empires in the Americas and Europe; yet rarely has it received attention for its beauty, diversity, and traditions. Few outsiders appreciate the variety of its flora, fauna, peoples, material culture, and music. Few recognize the role that the isthmus of Panama has played in the development of other areas of the world or even in modern history. For people who have spent time in Panama and relished its culinary delights and everyday life, the country presents an exciting and ever-changing social and cultural panorama, a vista through which to enjoy the differences and similarities of the world's musical traditions.
In the form of an S lying on its side, Panama divides into ten provinces. Each province boasts unique traditions, food, music, festivals, and peoples. Customs and genres have been associated with particular towns and provinces, though recent internal migration has fostered a dispersion of traditions across Panamanian territory and a concentration of peoples of different regions in the capital, PanamaŽ (Panama City).
Rodrigo de Bastidas, having received a royal license from Spain to explore in the New World, sailed from CaŽdiz in October 1501 and late in the year touched the easternmost sector of the isthmus of Panama, near the Atrato River and the Gulf of UrabaŽ, an area now part of Colombia. Columbus sighted the Caribbean coast of PanamaŽ only on his fourth voyage (1502), when he arrived at the western end of the isthmus and the Laguna de ChiriquiŽ. The areas he explored and namedPortobelo and Bastimentos, later called Nombre de Dios (both now in ColoŽn Province)were to play important roles in the first wave of colonization and the economic boom that drew Europeans to the New World. With economic growth and prosperity, the cultural
El Camino Real (The Royal Road) was constructed for trans-isthmian travel in the 1500s. Now a collection of cobblestones and streams hidden among luxuriant undergrowth, this road was once the most important highway in Panama, the major route connecting the Caribbean coast (Portobelo) and the Pacific (Panama City). All goods and people who arrived from Spain, the Caribbean islands, and Colombia used the road as a means of communication with Panama City. Traffic, trade goods, and cultural traditions were transported to and from western South America via the Camino Real. Slaves brought from Africa to Portobelo served as muleteers on the roads and oarsmen on the Chagres River, transporting human cargo, gold, silver, wood, manufactured goods, and travelers. Vasco NuŽn~ez de Balboa's meeting with native Americans on the isthmus and his sighting the Pacific Ocean encouraged the development of this route, starting the growth of Spanish traditions in this part of the Americas.
The movement and settlement of Spaniards, captive slaves, fugitive slaves, and indigenous populations during the colonial era set the stage for current Panamanian cultural regions and traditions. The strongest manifestations of Afro-Panamanian traditions appear on the Costa Arriba and the Costa Abajo (ColoŽn Province) in the DarieŽn area and on the islands of the Gulf of Panama. The coastal sector of the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro, site of important banana plantations, is also an area of African descendants. Native American cultures include the Kuna, who reside in the San Blas Islands [see Kuna], the Choco in DarieŽn Province, and the GuaymiŽ and Teribe on the Atlantic side in Veraguas Province. Climatically more temperate, the central provincesCocleŽ, Herrera, Los Santos, and Veraguasbecame the center of mestizo development and settlement with farmland and cattle ranches. ChiriquiŽ, the westernmost province, has mountains and an extinct volcano with a mean altitude higher than most of the country; suitable for growing vegetables, it is the home of wealthy landowners and mestizo farmers.
The construction of the transisthmian railroad (in the mid-1800s) and the completion of the interoceanic canal (at the end of the nineteenth century) profoundly affected the ethnic mixture and regional identity of Panama. The workforce needed to construct these wonders of engineering was not available in sufficient numbers on the isthmus, so thousands of contract workers from many parts of the world were brought in. Chinese, Greeks, Lebanese, Italians, and others became a new wave of pilgrims to cross the Bridge of the Americas in search of a better life. Communities of their descendants remain in Panama, still practicing ethnic cultural traditions. Among the most numerous contract workers and most visible today are Antilleans, people of African descent from English- and French-speaking Caribbean insular communities, including Antigua, Barbados, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Tobago, and Trinidad.
Self-identification in Panama does not follow regional lines and alliances to rural beginnings. For music, dance, and verbal traditions, associations and personal preferences are often based on ethnic origins and cultural traditions associated with a particular group. Every ethnic group that forms part of the fabric of Panamanian cultural identity has added something of importance to the mixture. Amerindians, Spaniards, and African slaves constituted the principal ethnic groups in colonial Panama; their interaction and exchange in music, dance, and verbal folklore has taken forms that are singular to Panama.
Cultural influences cannot easily be ascribed to the relative numbers within
The Kuna in Panama
Among Amerindian peoples in Panama, the only group for whom any important study and documentation of music and dance exists is the Kuna [see KUNA]. For years, Kuna expressive culture has attracted the interest of European and American researchers. The people have continued to maintain a degree of independence from the center of Panamanian society; a large portion of their population remains in the San Blas Islands, ColoŽn Province. Kuna musical performances and dances are uncommon outside of their own communities. Kuna who reside in urban areas of Panama City or Colon, or in towns within the central provinces, maintain a somewhat separate existence.
The National Museum in Panama City exhibits a small collection of Kuna musical instruments and ceremonial artifacts, as does the Goštenberg Museum in Sweden (Izikowitz 1970 [1935]). However, some of these instruments no longer seem to be in use in Kuna society. Folkloric performances at national events, cultural fairs, and regional celebrations (especially in Panama City) often include Kuna traditional music and dance to represent Panama's Amerindian populations. The colorful costumes, especially the women's blouses, multicolored skirts, and golden earrings and nose rings, attract attention.
Spanish heritage
Spanish influence in traditional Panamanian music is strongly represented by the language of lyrics and such instruments as the guitar, the violin, and castanets. Many dances and especially religious celebrations owe their origins to European festivals. Among the most significant folkloric events are carnival, secular holidays that commemorate foundations of towns, and religious commemorations (including Corpus Christi, Holy Week, local patronal feasts, and regional holidays) when music, dance, traditional theater, costume, food, and examples of the plastic arts (traditional masks) all mingle. Though it is often difficult to ascribe a dance or song to one ethnic origin in Panama, dances such as the punto, the waltz (vals), and the deŽcima are important representations of Spanish culture and cultural mixing.
When a Panamanian is asked where to find folklore, often the first response is to refer to the folkloric traditions of the central provinces (CocleŽ, Herrera, Los Santos, Veraguas). There, the singing of deŽcimas is most strongly maintained, the mejorana (an instrument and a dance) finds its home, hordes of costumed devils dance, musical parades (tunas) move through the streets during festivals, military bands play in the central plaza, and festivals of many varieties fill the calendar. Carnival celebrations in the town of Las Tablas (Los Santos Province) and the roving musical bands that represent its barrios, queens, and entourages are famous throughout the country, attracting thousands of people who have never lived in the region. The central
African heritage
The influence of Africans and the traditions that characterized the cultures from which they came is best portrayed in the congo tradition and in such other danced genres as los diablos de los espejos of GarachineŽ (DarieŽn Province), the music and dance of the people of the Pearl Islands, and genres such as bullerengue, bunde, cuenecueŽ, cumbia, and el tamborito, the national dance. Most performing groups within Panama use African-derived drums, though the ensembles are different and the manner of playing varies for each.
Calypso, a Caribbean genre frequently allied with social commentary and criticism, is usually associated with countries such as Trinidad and Jamaica, but a Panamanian variety is performed in Spanish by Antilleans. Undocumented and virtually unstudied, this Panamanian genre seems to have been popular years ago. It had a resurgence in the 1970s as part of a black awareness and solidarity campaign initiated by bilingual Antillean intellectuals. Though the genre is neither diffused nor performed widely in Panama, it was important in its social context, as it seemed to represent an attempt to build a cultural bridge between English speakers and their Spanish-speaking environment. Calypso is accompanied by guitar, and its text has the same deftness of thought and social commentary that distinguishes calypso in other areas of the Caribbean.
English heritage
Though virtually nonexistent now, except in self-consciously retrospective cultural presentations by clubs or other organizations, English dances, including the quadrille and the contra dance, once flourished among the residents of Antillean towns within the Canal Zone and in the city of ColoŽn. Today, they are but a memory.
Regionalism
The provinces of ColoŽn, DarieŽn, and PanamaŽ, plus the central provinces, have been the focus of important studies of Panamanian music and folklore. Though varied musical customs occur in other areas of Panama, there has been little systematic study. It is common for persons who were born and raised in the interior of the country to preserve a lifelong identification and allegiance to their natal province. Frequently, people now living in the capital return to small towns in the interior to celebrate family occasions, local patronal feasts, national holidays, and regional or local festivals.
Archaeologists have dug deep into the soil of Panama to uncover secrets of its pre-Columbian peoples. They have excavated many archaeological sites, though there are no large pyramids or hidden cities to be found as have been in other parts of Middle and South America. Nevertheless, it is clear that for hundreds of years Panama was a major conduit between North and South American Amerindian populations. Researchers have unearthed golden amulets and jewelry; bone, stone, and pottery artifacts; and ceramic tubular and globular flutes. All these objects indicate a flourishing trade and exchange among peoples of different regions over many centuries.
The people of Panama have no traditional system for classifying musical instruments. Native American groups favor idiophones and aerophones, Panamanians of African heritage often employ membranophones, and Panamanians of European
Idiophones
The idiophones of Panama are associated with particular ensembles, genres, or occasions, adding an important percussiveness to the music and dance. Included within ensembles (conjuntos) are maracas and guširos, shaken and scraped idiophones, respectively (
Though widely dispersed within Latin American customs, the most unusual among Panamanian percussive instruments is the vejiga, an inflated animal bladder worn by devils as part of their costume; when struck with a stick, it functions as a percussion instrument. Because of its material and construction, it is a sort of combination membranophone and idiophone, being made from nonstretched skin. Devils' slippers or shoes (cutarras) also function as percussive instruments: the dancers, as they dance, articulate rhythms, with each foot parallel to the ground, accompanied by their castanets.
Membranophones
Drums are the most widespread instruments in traditional Panamanian musical performances. Though the shapes and sizes vary somewhat from town to town and region to region, most are similar in construction and use. Few musical performances could take place if drummers and singers were not available. The excitement created by drummers and their sonic punctuation of dancers' movements are the main source of the dynamism of performances. A drum ensemble may use drums of various kinds and sizes but usually consists of three or four instruments. The caja is played with two sticks, on one head and the side. Most often it is placed on the ground and held with one foot while the performer plays (
Other drums, played with the hands, may be held between the knees of a seated player or suspended from a cord around his shoulder or neck. Musicians use the latter method to move through streets in parades. All major musical genres and dances are supported by an individual drum with another instrument (such as a guitar or an accordion) or a drum ensemble. The national dance of Panama, el tamborito, is the most important drum-accompanied dance within the republic and is danced by couples.
The names of drums vary widely from one town or region to another, but they reveal something important. Pujador 'pusher', repicador 'chimer', caja 'box', jondo 'deep', and seco 'dry' are names that indicate relationships and timbral affinities within the ensemble, though they do not seem to make much sense in English translation
The congo ensembles share some of the naming conventions and playing techniques of drummers in other ensembles in Panama (
Though far less commonly today, congo queens, their drum consort, and members of the court travel throughout the Caribbean coastal region in visits (visitas) to other so-called kingdoms and palaces (palacios). Such visits can be made in cars on the highway, but in earlier days these journeys were quite difficult, as they had to be made in small boats or by walking through the forest.
Chordophones
In most instances, chordophones provide melodies within instrumental ensembles. Traditionally, the violin, and in rustic communities the rabel, served in this capacity. The violin is still the instrument of preference for the punto because the sweetness and softness of its sound match the elegance and grace of the dance and its participants, but in rural and traditional Panama it has lost much of its importance. More important is the mejorana.
The mejorana is a small, five-stringed, fretted, guitarlike instrument that in shape and size resembles the Hawaiian ukulele and the Venezuelan cuatro. Older instruments used animal material for the strings, but newer ones use synthetics, such as nylon. Its body is made of one piece of fairly soft wood. The front (tabla 'table'), with its round sound hole, is carved from another flat piece of wood, affixed to the
Panama has a set of commonly named mejorana tunings, though there does not appear to be any clear relationship between the names given to tunings and the notes that distinguish their configurations. The most common tunings are known as por veinticinco 'by twenty-five' and por seis 'by six'. Strings are named in a unique pattern: the two outer strings (1 and 5) are designated firsts (primeras), the next two strings on each side (2 and 4) are designated seconds (segundas), and the fifth string (3, in the middle) is called third (tercera).
The mejorana is important within the musical traditions of mestizos from the central provinces and the capital. Performers (mejoraneros) accompany singers of deŽcimas and the dance that bears the same name. Players learn from their friends, family, and relatives, and by observation within traditional contexts, and they must master a complex set of torrentes 'scales' for the accompaniment of deŽcimas. The mejorana is played with the fingers and can yield single-line melodies, melodic-rhythmic patterns, and chords. Most players do not read staff notation.
Aerophones
Within the mestizo tradition, a flute (pito) is sometimes heard playing with drummers and accordionists that travel the streets with the dirty little devils (see below). The pito is a small, high-pitched, side-blown flute made from cane. Its tone, being somewhat shrill, easily cuts through the din created by the dancers, other musicians, and the crowd.
The accordion has become an important melodic instrument within many ensembles of traditional Panama; in typical ensembles (conjuntos tiŽpicos), it carries the major share of musical performance (
Dance
Dance and song are usually linked in Panama: song rarely occurs without dance. Several Panamanian dances require no sung lyrics, but melodies used for those dances may in fact have texts that members of the community know, though these texts may not be sung during the dancing. Each named dance is accompanied by a particular kind of ensemble and is often associated with a specific ethnic group or region.
Among the more popular couple dances, el tamborito 'the little drum' is by far the most important. A spectacular drum-accompanied dance, it is considered the Panamanian national dance. Drums play an essential part in the choreography: they communicate with dancers and with each other, and they enter in rhythmic counterpoint with the dancers and their movements. In each region, specific steps (pasos) have names that elicit specific patterns from solo drummers. An important part of the performance, after the entrance of each new couple, is the couple's address to the
Close behind the tamborito in popularity is the cumbia, a dance featuring grouped couples, popular also among Panama's Colombian neighbors. It is distinguished by the dancers' counterclockwise movement, describing a circle. The group divides into couples, but men or women may dance as two circles moving in tandem, each partner facing the other. A typical ensemble (
Other important traditional dances include the mejorana and the punto. The mejorana (which gets its name because it is accompanied by the mejorana) features 6/8 or 9/8 rhythms that oscillate between duple and triple pulses. The punto, though also in 6/8 duple and triple oscillation, is slower. It is an elegant and graceful couple dance, found mostly in the interior of the country. It affords one of the few occasions where the violin finds a significant role within traditional musical ensembles; in the absence of a violin, an accordion is used. The bunde and the bullerengue, both of Afro-Panamanian origin, are danced in GarachineŽ and the towns of the region. The bunde is performed at Christmastime in honor of baby Jesus, represented by a doll. Each of these dances is related to the traditions of other Afro-Panamanian groups, especially congos, and each is accompanied by drums, a chorus of women, and clapping.
Dance theater
Although most dances in Panama do not have an underlying or background story, there are several important manifestations of dance theater in Panama, namely congos and various devils (diablos).
Congos
Congos, originally Afro-Panamanian secret societies during colonial days, today perform a kind of dance theater featuring brilliant costumes, drumming (
Mimetic dance is difficult for the uninitiated to understand on a deep level.
The big devils (gran diablos, also diablos de los espejos 'mirror devils') portray variants of the Christian theme of the battle of good and evil.
GarachineŽ, a small town on the gulf of San Miguel, is almost inaccessible except by air or water. The people and traditions of this region are related to descendants of runaways who fled to the jungles and the Pearl Islands of Panama. The diablos de los espejos tradition is related to the big-devil tradition of Chorrera (Panama Province), but the style of the mask is distinctive, and the theatrical subtext from which they perform their drama is quite different.
Musicians (
Vocal music
Song and dance are intimately intertwined in the traditional musics of Panama, but song is probably the most important part of the equation. Once, when recording
DeŽcima
A solo vocal tradition called deŽcima is the province mainly of male singers. It is performed to the accompaniment of the mejorana. The singer (decimero) must have a powerful voice, but there is an emphasis on the clear and exact enunciation of the text. As one of the singers said, the textual message is the most important part of the deŽcima.
The deŽcima is a poetic form that encompasses elaborate rhymes and melodic improvisation. The following text is an example of a vocal improvisation by the male singer Santo DiŽaz. It represents just a section of a longer piece, "Me duele tu corazoŽn."
Me duele tu corazoŽn. | Your heart gives me pain. |
Tierra, tuŽ me vas matando. | Land, you are killing me. |
Si acaso me oyes cantando, | If by chance you hear me singing, |
Yo no grito el mismo son. | I don't shout the same song. |
Voy llorando el pasioŽn | I go crying the passion |
Que el recuerdo resucita, | That memory revives, |
Saber que fuiste mansita | Knowing that you were gentle |
Cuando yo te socolaba, | When I rocked you, |
Ay, amor, ĄcoŽmo te amaba! | Oh, my love, how I loved you! |
Tierra, tierra, ĄqueŽ bonita! | Land, my land, how beautiful! |
Saloma
The saloma, a vocal melody of undetermined length, appears at the beginning and end of a deŽcima. It is a subdued, deeply rhapsodic vocal line, often associated with the torrente llanto, used for performances of lyrical themes of sadness and intimacy. It exhibits a striking resemblance to the deep song (cante jondo) of AndaluciŽan Spain. It is sung in almost a recitative style, often using vocables and closely following the emphasis of spoken verbal rhythms. Most salomas are slow. Their major musical cadences coincide with significant textual phrasal endings. Some singers believe that individuals have characteristic salomas or manners of performance. They feel that one must sing a saloma at the beginning of a deŽcima to release the voice and set the mood.
Shouts
Shouts (gritos) ordinarily occur during agricultural activities when it is necessary to communicate in the field. For personal entertainment, men engage in such oral display in homes, on the streets, and in bars. A measure of skill is needed to produce a grito, and a degree of stamina is needed to continue it for a concentrated time. It has more musical attributes when men exchange loud, high-pitched yodels. Two or more men sit face to face, or side by side, alternating their gritos. Often, after making four
Verbal arts
Texts within musical compositions are important in Panama's traditional music. Declamationsdramatic recitations of poems, narratives, and deŽcima textsare often part of public celebrations and family occasions. Little has been collected of the texts of dance-theater presentations, and this is a fertile area for potential research.
For many Panamanians, festivals (fiestas) are times of release and abandonoccasions to reestablish ties with the supernatural world, families, and regions, and to make public displays of faith. Some festivals, celebrated on a small scale, involve small numbers of people; others involve neighborhoods, towns, or regions. When a festival is shared by the national community, it permits even more possibilities for creative activity and expression. All festival occasionssecular, religious, nationalare commemorated with musical ensembles and singing.
Religious festivals
In the interior of Panama on various occasions during the year, especially the Christian holiday of Corpus Christi, dirty little devils roam the streets in brilliant red and black striped costumes and musical ensembles (
National festivals
Independence Day, 3 November, occasions great musical activity, especially in the capital. Thousands of citizens crowd the streets in anticipation of parades that feature marching bands and drum-and-bugle corps from the secondary schools of the city and military units of the government. So many people march that the parades last for about five hours. There are two routes, which the musical organizations exchange on the second day, so each has the opportunity of marching and performing for the maximum number of people and showing its prowess on the main street, Avenida Central. The itineraries, organizational names, and pertinent information on each group are published daily in the local papers. Though the bands are composed of instruments common to military bands in most countries, the percussion sections are greatly enlarged, and the rhythms used for the march are more related to el tamborito and other drum-accompanied dances of Panama than to those of John Philip Sousa.
A marching band's line resembles a large group of dancers. To discover the more spectacular movements and playing styles, one has only to listen to and watch the bass drum. During each pattern, drummers vigorously lift their drums high in the air, rotating them back and forth so they can alternately strike the heads on opposing sides. Apart from carnival (celebrated in Panama and throughout much of Latin
Folkloric festivals
In the early 1970s, Manuel F. ZaŽrate, Panama's most prominent researcher in folklore, with Dora PeŽrez de ZaŽrate was instrumental in helping to promote an annual event in his natal province, Los Santos. Each year during the Festival de la Mejorana, performers within the province and from many other cities throughout the country come to GuarareŽ to perform and share their traditions for a week.
The impact of radio in Panama has been heavy. For some people who live in isolated areas, radio is the only means of contact with urban areas. Panama has a long history of radio broadcasting. Popular programs still commonly feature traditional singers, musical ensembles, reports of folkloric events, and declamatory presentations. The importance of television and the recording industry is more difficult to ascertain, since they have grown in the recent past, and no studies of these media have been made. There is some indication that recordings of traditional musical performances do reach the public, and it is not difficult to find, on tape and disk, commercial recordings of the more popular conjuntos tiŽpicos.
There has been no critical research into musical archaeology and the musical practices of ancient Amerindian groups in Panama. Almost no research has been accomplished in the area of music in colonial Panama. The author has searched in Spanish archives for documents and musical materials that might elucidate this lacuna. It is clear, however, that musical activities were connected to religious brotherhoods (cofradiŽas) affiliated with churches: references to musical practices and officers in charge of musical matters appear in their constitutions.
Because the reality of ethnic origins is still strong and provides a basis for a Panamanian worldview, musical terms, musical instruments, and concepts on which people construct interaction, regionalism is an important focus in the study of Panamanian music. Several studies of general interest highlight folkloric traditions in certain regions and among specific ethnic groups, including Amerindian tribes. What is known has been collected by anthropologists and folklorists (Carmona Maya 1989; Densmore 1926; Hayans 1963; McCosker 1974; Sherzer 1983) from such contemporary groups as the Kuna, the Choco, the GuaymiŽ, and the Teribe. These data focus largely on ritual traditions and musical instruments. There are also studies of communities of African descent (Drolet 1980, 1982; Joly 1981; Smith 1976, 1985, 1994), African-derived and mestizo traditions (Cheville 1964, 1977), and mestizo traditions (Garay 1930; D. ZaŽrate 1971; ZaŽrate and ZaŽrate 1968).
Recordings of traditional music from Panama have been collected for many years, but most are not publicly available. Recordings that may be consulted are those deposited at the archive of the National Museum of PanamaŽ, the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University (Ronald R. Smith collections), and the INIDEF Archive, created by Drs. Isabel Aretz and Felipe RamoŽn y Rivera in Caracas, Venezuela. Archival field collections contain a wealth of documentation and musical examples that provide the inquisitive listener with an in-depth view of a range of Panamanian genres (Cheville 1964). Since the 1980s, several commercial recordings
Though linguistic studies in Panamanian folklore are not at the center of musical research, a few studies provide important support for, and insights into, the study of musical traditions of Panama (Joly 1981; Lipski 1989; Sherzer 1983).
The art-music world is probably the most unexplored in the history of the arts in Panama. Though Panamanian artists of international reputation are currently presenting concerts around the world, and though Panama supports a national symphony, many choruses, and a conservatory of music (in the capital), musicology and ethnomusicology do not have an academic home or a cadre of trained Panamanian specialists. The study of folklore, and often folk music, is found within the faculty of history at the University of Panama. There is no university degree program to prepare professionals in this area. Nevertheless, the Panamanian Ministry of Culture has long supported traditional singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and producers of traditional costumes within small schools of performing arts, concentrating their efforts on the teaching of these arts and crafts.
Panamanian musical composition, often the arena in which fine-art music and traditional musical genres and styles interact, has not been studied with serious attention. The lure of Panama its dances, songs, and festivalshas long been a source of inspiration for Panamanian composers and others in North America.
The term Caribbean creates many images. It is familiar to all as a tourist haven, the setting for "fun in the sun," the home of "island music," mostly stereotypes created by the tourist industry. In reality, economic, ethnic, meteorological, and political situations have often created many hardships for its people, often reflected in its music. There is much cultural and musical diversity, though certain traits, such as the slave trade to appease the sugar barons' greed, have created superficial similarities in music and dance.
By Caribbean we mean the island cultures that lie within the Caribbean Sea and the fringes of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. This large maritime region is bordered by the United States of America, Mexico, and countries of Central and South America. Though the Caribbean lies within a large area of water, often called the Caribbean Basin, its island polities (some of them departments of France or protectorates of other foreign powers) have had tremendous influence on neighboring mainland countries. Many continental coastal regions share cultural traits with islands in the Caribbean Basin. Sometimes the coasts of those adjacent countries are called Circum-Caribbean regionsa useful term because of cultural and historical similarities.
The photo captures one of the most popular Caribbean musical occasionscarnival in Trinidad. This extremely colorful and elaborate festival several weeks before Easter, like Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnaval in Brazil, is a time of merriment, cutting up, and letting loose. It is also a time of great national pride, economic hardship for some, profit for others, and the culmination of months of preparation in the perfecting of musical and dance performances.
Economics
Cultural Composition
Musical Culture
The insular Caribbean region is centered on the islands of the Caribbean Sea, bordered by North, Central, and South America and the Atlantic Ocean, with a total landmass of about 235,700 square kilometers and a current population of about 30 million (map 11). According to some views, the region also includes circum-Caribbean areas, the tropical lowlands bordering the Caribbean Sea. (Those areas are treated separately in this volume.) Because of ecological and sociocultural similarities, especially an African presence, it may even be argued that the circum-Caribbean area reaches down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America and up to southern Florida and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda.
The heart of the region is the 3,200-kilometer-long arc-shaped archipelago called the Antilles or the West Indies, stretching between the YucataŽn Peninsula and Venezuela. It consists, on the northern side, of the Greater Antilles and the large, mountainous islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico (map 12); and, on the eastern side, of the double arc of the Lesser Antilles, comprising the Leeward Islands (northern group) and the Windward Islands (southern group) (map 13). A westward extension of the latter includes Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba and the western Netherlands Antilles (Bonaire and Curacžao), and many small islands off Venezuela. The main islands and groups of the Lesser Antilles, north to south, are the British and American Virgin Islands, St. Martin, Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Barbados, and Grenada; many small islands and islets join this chain. Another major group is the Bahamas, north of Cuba.
Unlike those of the Pacific, the Caribbean islands are close together, though some are separated by deep troughs and treacherous currents. The climate is tropical and subtropical (temperate in highlands), with a marked difference between rainy and dry seasons (June-October, November-May). The region is prone to hurricanes and volcanoes. On larger islands, the soils were once rich and supported notable lowland hardwood forests, but the forests have been cut for lumber and the lands cleared for planting sugarcane, depleting the soils.
The Caribbean was the first region of the New World conquered and settled by Europeans, starting in 1492 with the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. By about 1530, the original population of several million Arawak and Carib (for whom the Caribbean was named) had been exterminated by disease, warfare, and suicide. To replace them, African slaves were brought to the Americas in the early 1500s, largely for cultivating sugarcane to produce sugar, molasses, and rum. Sugar became the basis of wealth on these "sugar islands." The raising of cattle became an industry in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Other tropical cash cropstobacco (indigenous, starting in the 1500s), cacao (from Central America, starting in the 1500s), coffee (from Arabia, starting in 1714), and copra (dried coconut for oil, of South Pacific origin)were added later. Vegetables, fruits, and spices are important exports today. Mining, originally of gold on Hispaniola, now includes bauxite (Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica), oil (Curacžao, Trinidad and Tobago), nickel, and other minerals.
Agriculture today remains differentiated into peasant and plantation systems, in highlands and lowlands, respectively, the former entailing diversified subsistence agriculture, and the latter taking the form of "factories in the fields," raising monocrops. The extractive-based economies of the colonial Caribbean differentiated into so-called economic foci (areas of intensive activity), surrounded by economic backwaters. Caribbean plantation economies are also characterized by annual harvest- and off-season boom-and-bust cycles, moderated or exaggerated by trends in world markets. Peasants in the marginal, mainly highland, areas, who may be sharecroppers, sometimes combine their subsistence agriculture with fishing or animal husbandry, cooperatively marketed cash-crop ventures, or seasonal employment on plantations during the harvest season.
Since the mid-twentieth century, tourism and, secondarily, light manufacturing and assembly, first in Puerto Rico and now in free-port zones elsewhere, are becoming the main sources of national and personal revenue. Like agriculture, tourism and industry are economic foci, subject to fluctuating markets. Tourism is also affected by seasonal demand. Caribbean enterprisesmining, cash-crop agriculture, and now tourism and manufacturinghave largely been directed by absentee owners and have often required foreign capital. The allure of cities and urban enterprises, which provide salaried jobs (especially for women), is altering the demographics, socioeconomics, and culture of the region. At the same time, inequities, instability, and psychological insularity have led to large-scale twentieth-century migration to Europe and North America. EŽmigreŽs, highly patriotic, send remittances (a substantial source of revenue) and intend to return home with accrued wealth. Post-1959 Cuba provides a variant on this pattern, with its revolutionary expropriations and state ownership of lands and businesses, socioeconomic restructuring for equitability, sugar-price stability (formerly guaranteed by the Soviet market), restrictions on citizens' travel, and regulation of culture, including the arts.
Political structure
It was from Hispaniola that the thrusts of conquest toward the mainlands were launched. The discovery of greater mineral riches in Mexico and the Andes caused Spain to neglect the Caribbean, leading to the loss of much of its territory in the 1600s to France, England, the Netherlands, Denmark, in 1898 to the United States (after the Spanish-American War), and in the 1900s to liberation movements. Many islands have changed hands several times. The consequent ideological pluralism and linguistic fragmentation of the region has continued, with islands grouped politically by governing or former governing powers and culturally by the official colonial lan-guages
Modern political history started with the Haitian Revolution, which led to the founding in 1804 of the first sovereign republic south of the United States. The Dominican Republic was established in 1844. In contrast, other components of the Insular Caribbean did not gain independence until the twentieth century, mainly mid-century, and some are still governed by, or are actually part of, Europe or the United States. Martinique and Guadeloupe are departments of France, the western and eastern Netherlands Antilles and Aruba are governed by Holland, and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are respectively a commonwealth and territories of the United States. Former British colonies are members of the British Commonwealth, and some minor island groups are still governed by Britain.
Despite political fragmentation, the region is unified by its African heritage. The development of Creole languages has provided cultural continuities despite changes in governance. Contemporary Caribbean culture is best characterized as creole, a hybrid that has evolved in the New World of Old World influences tempered by New World circumstances. Simultaneously, certain Old World cultural traits, from Europe and Africa continue, especially in contexts of expressive culture; however, a correlation between race and culture, typical of long-inhabited areas, is increasingly inapplicable in New World societies, which are simultaneously bicultural or multicultural.
The cultural composition of the region is complex and changing. Immigration from Europe has been motivated by a quest for wealth or escape from overpopulation, poverty, and occasionally religious persecution. In addition to emigration from colonial powers and their colonies (as with the Irish to British islands), Sephardic Jewish and Canary Island immigrants have been significant since the early days. The first Africans in the New World, arriving about 1502, were Christians from southern Spain, followed shortly by immigrants directly from Africa. African slaves during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries were drawn from increasingly southerly points on the West African coast: first Senegambia, later the Bight of Benin, and finally the Congo-Angolan area. However, variations in African sources, the numbers of slaves introduced, the ethnic ratios among them, the ratios of blacks to whites, the continuum between urban and rural locations and opportunities, the kinds of work and crops, and other factors led to the rise of different cultural configurations in different sites. Slavery was abolished throughout the Caribbean during the nineteenth century, last in Cuba in 1886; but the need for cheap labor continued, leading to indentured servitude from colonial powers' other holdings, mainly by Britain from India to Trinidad and Guyana, and by the Netherlands from Java to Surinam. Today's East Indian-derived populations of Trinidad and Guyana are almost 50 percent of the totals. Seasonal workers are currently imported from Haiti to the Dominican
Republic under conditions described as neoslavery, and more than a quarter million Haitians live in Oriente Province, Cuba.
Later musical migrations
Internal migration within the nineteenth-and twentieth-century Caribbean has been caused by flight from political turmoil and persecution and the attraction of economic foci. Pertinent political events have included the Haitian Revolution (1804), SimoŽn BoliŽvar's liberation of northern South America (1821), the Cuban Revolution (1959), and dictatorships (such as the Dominican Trujillo era, 1930-1961). Important economic events have included the building of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) and booms in the sugar and tourist industries.
Twentieth-century and current immigrants include Spaniards (mainly from Asturias and Galicia) and Portuguese (to Venezuela); Christian Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians, collectively called Turks because they emigrated from the Ottoman Empire; Jews fleeing Nazism; Chinese to nineteenth-century Cuba to build the railway, but today from the mainland and Taiwan for business; and secondarily, Japanese as agriculturalists (most importantly in Brazil). These groups have played a tremendous role in twentieth-century commerce and agriculture, but not in musical traditions.
Today's cultural configurations vary by country, island, location (rural or urban), and class. Many of the Lesser Antilles are largely black societies; the black and East Indian societies of Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana are "segmented societies." The hispanophone islands are characterized by substantial white and mulatto populations: the oligarchy (landed elite) and other sectors of the urban upper class, including recent immigrants as merchants, and the subsistence farmers of the mountains, are largely white, though the coastal areas of plantations and former plantations are populated by blacks and mulattos, and urban middle and lower classes are mulatto. Except among endogamous elites, there is a notable trend toward racial and cultural mixture.
The local histories of the Caribbean Islands are embedded in expressive and material culture, including music, dance, ritual, instruments, styles, genres, and texts, all of which serve as cultural artifacts. Collective consciousness of origin and cultural identity is often revealed in music, as with the big-drum dance of Carriacou, a satellite island of Grenada, with its national dances representing various African ethnic groups, followed by its more hybrid and modern creole dances. This patternof sacred and European or African components (or both, in that order), followed by secular and hybrid componentsis common in the Caribbean, but often the memory of origins is lost, and what exists does not necessarily imply consciousness of what used to exist. Though the flight from the Haitian Revolution may be forgotten, the event is documented in the French rosary in Puerto Rico and the tumba francesa, a ballroom dance of Santiago, Cuba.
As an aspect of Caribbean history and reality, music reflects ecology and consequent modes of production. Urban areas provided critical masses to perpetuate culture-specific African religious cults (such as SanteriŽa), whereas the mixed ethnic compositions of plantations were more subject to intra-African syncretism or reversion to musical common denominators.
In rural areas, African-derived work-accompanying songs are particular to ecological zones and crops. The entire Caribbean was deforested to the sound of chopping songs. Other work-related songs reinforce the rhythms of labor: digging, pounding, transplanting rice, hauling nets, and so on. They are also sung during
Life in particular ecological zones supports special musical cultures: the "cockpit" (sinkhole) country of interior Jamaica is home to Maroons (descendants of runaway slaves) and the birthplace of Rastafarianism; the sugarcane plantations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are known for their raraŽ religious societies; and so forth. The geographic isolation of certain areas leads to the conservation of musical traits, including the sung rosary and other liturgical texts conserved in the Roman Catholicism of areas inaccessible to, and underserved by, priests.
Music and politics
Caribbean musical culture reflects the European political hegemony in civil, military, and religious spheres. To avoid persecution, slave society constructed a Christian facžade to camouflage non-Christian beliefs and practices, especially those that honored ancestors and gods. Ritual and musical practices, especially drumming, became the subjects of proscriptive edicts and actions, including a drum-burning campaign in Haiti as late as the 1930s. In seeming contradiction to this policy, masters urged their slaves to participate in African-derived recreational events as an escape valve, an antidote to revolution. These events included patronal and personal saints' festivals, many of which are still celebrated. Certain creole recreational dancesbamboulaŽ, calenda, jubawere well-known throughout the Caribbean, albeit with local differences. The Protestant counterparts of religiously proscribed dances are ring games ("plays").
At the same time, European hegemony has been incorporated into local Roman Catholic rituals honoring the saints and the dead with the rosary (such as the Haitian cantique) under the guidance of a nonclerical man in a priestly role. In Protestantism, hymns of the literate tradition are juxtaposed with spirituals ("anthems") of the non-literate tradition, and certain hymnsespecially "Sankeys," evangelical North American hymns of the late 1800sare used for lay rituals for the dead and other occasions.
Aspects of African society potentially threatening to European hegemony, including political organizations with royalty and sacred masks, were reinterpreted within playful contexts, including carnival, with its common motifs of a king and a queen, masks and costumes, and the street poetry of mummers. Political structures of colonial or slave society may also be reflected in such organizations as the social structure of the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican raraŽ societies of cane communities, whose carnivalesque movements are cued by police whistles and whips.
Slaves' and peasants' emulation of high-class society included eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European-derived ballroom dances: the contredanse, quadrille, mazurka, polka, waltz, and others. Musiciansof lower classes than the members of social clubsserved as conduits of these dances into rural areas, where they have been retained in oral tradition for a century or more after they passed from vogue in urban ballrooms. Musicians also contributed to the development of nineteenth-century creole ballroom dances, including the Puerto Rican danza, the Cuban danzoŽn, the Haitian meringue, the Martinican biguine, and others. Bands served, and still serve, as conduits for social mobility and an interface among classes and localities.
Political criticism is rendered more innocuous and political praise more noteworthy if sung, rather than spoken. In this function, the African-influenced man of words has merged in some contexts with the Mediterranean troubadour. The latter's poetic medium is the deŽcima, ubiquitous in the hispanophone Caribbean (extending to Venezuela, Veracruz in Mexico, and elsewhere), but with various settings and
Musical evolutions
The creole society of the Caribbean is continually changing and evolving. Creole dances of the twentieth century, including the Cuban son, the Puerto Rican plena (also used for commentary), and the Dominican merengue, represent creative hybrids of European textual with African-derived rhythmic structures. An example of twentieth-century creativity, the steelband, originated in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, but is now associated with territorially based musical competition in carnival and has become diffused throughout the anglophone Caribbean. It was developed by lower-class young men in the context of social-cultural-sports clubs, using oil drums obtained from Trinidadian oil refineries and tuned to tempered scales. As multi-toned instruments played in ensemble, these are reminiscent of the multi-toned marimbas and marimba orchestras of East Africa, suggesting an African musical retention based on collective memory; but the musical style and repertoire are essentially European.
Other contemporary developments in Caribbean music culture include the newly acquired function of traditional genres as symbols of national and regional identity. In Trinidad, this function is promoted by the annual Best Village competition. The ubiquitous ballet folkloŽrico, characterized by inauthentically staged stylization with uniform and flashy costuming, serves as a symbol of national identity. Such genres, with folk-based festivals and other national events, are particularly significant for expatriate communities. A notable example of these activities, the Caribbean Carnival held on Labor Day in New York City, reprises the genuine carnival, held "down home" in the Caribbean five or six months earlier.
Another new development is the increasing commodification of Caribbean expressive culture for export as a new type of extractive industry. Starting in the 1930s or before, Cubans led the way in hispanophone areas, popularizing the son even in Africa; based in Miami since the revolution, they still control hispanophone Caribbean popular music. The popular-music enterprise is now larger than the region itself, with recording hubs and performance venues at the site of expatriate communities, not only in Miami, but also in New York and other North American and European cities.
New York is the crucible of encounters between people from countries of the hispanophone Caribbean, divided in the twentieth century by ideology, between the
Popular Music of the 1700s and 1800s
The Twentieth Century
Antigua and Barbuda, with areas of 280 and 161 square kilometers, respectively, are situated in the Leeward Islands. In 1493, Columbus sighted Antigua, which he named after Santa MariŽa La Antigua, the cathedral of Seville. Except for a six-month French occupation in 1666, the islands were exclusively under British rule from 1632 to 1981, when they became independent as a united nation.
The present population of about seventy-two thousand (including fifteen hundred persons on Barbuda) is descended mostly from enslaved West Africans. No descendants of aboriginal settlers (Arawaks or Caribs) remain, and except for a few mixed-race descendants of colonizers (Scottish, Irish, English), Antigua and Barbuda remain devoid of the interracial minglings that typify the populations of other Caribbean islands.
Portuguese indentured workers arrived in Antigua in 1860 and soon became shopkeepers. After 1880, when they immigrated to the United States, Lebanese immigrants took their places.
On Sunday afternoons in the 1780s, as many as a hundred enslaved Africans would participate in open-air dances and exhibit their "fondness of the discordant notes of the banjar and the hollow sound of the toombah" (Luffman 1788). The toombah, a drum with tin jingles and shells, accompanied songs and dances of Africans on Antigua.
A report in 1844 mentions the "tum tum" (toombah) and the "bangoe" (banjar), and the new practice of biweekly subscription balls (Lanigan 1844). At these fancy dress balls, fiddles, a tambourine (employing a "particular way of performing"), and a triangle ("played without any regard to time or melody") reinterpreted the music of European quadrilles.
The musical influence of the colonial churches was overwhelming in its displacement of African music. Acting with similar intensity, postemancipation missionary movements continued adding diverse intonations. Among these were the Salvation Army's brass-ensemble style, and in the late twentieth century, American Baptists'
Systematic musical research has not yet been undertaken on Antigua, but novels, essays, and editorials allude to the loss of indigenous ethnic forms. Current musical styles appear to have their origins or influence in Europe, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the United States. The highland fling, performed during carnival, survives as a relic of the colonial past, as does the figure-eight quadrille. Young Antiguan choreographers revitalize and Africanize fragments of antique colonial dances by infusing, for instance, the staid dance movements of the maypole (accompanied by a traditional piece, "Country Gardens") with more fluid ones.
Explanations for the loss of African styles may center on peculiar circumstances in Antigua's history:
Exclusive British colonial rule (1632-1981), the absence of French culture, and late Roman Catholic presence (1860); islands that underwent periods of French cultural influence show some adherence to African dance, plus ritual syncretisms with Roman Catholic religious forms. The British naval base at Shirley Heights, housing West Indian regiments that guarded against external invasion; the military presence possibly intervened psychologically against internal freedom. The single, dominant sugar proprietorship of the Codrington family. The absence of late-arriving Africans. A unified African ethnicity with little outside cultural competition; on many Caribbean islands with diverse ethnic populations, interracial tension is masked in culturally appropriate ways such as carnival competitions, which work toward the projection of ethnic identity and the revitalization of ancient musical forms. A contemporary climate of an uncertain economy amid charges of governmental corruption.
A Trinidad-inspired carnival, introduced in 1957 to inspire the tourist industry, takes place during the season of celebrations of emancipation. It replaced the Old Time Christmas Festival, some of whose historic themes were adopted by the carnival. To the frustration of older Antiguans, many of the following revered Old Time Christmas masquerade bands are lost to them:
Carol treeslantern-decked poles, carried by carolers, whose singing was accompanied by a concertina; John Bullparticipants costumed in banana leaves with animal horns on their heads; Highlanderdancers dressed in Scottish kilts, wearing wire masks, and armed with cowhide whips; Long Ghosts, Moko Jumbie or Jumpa-Benrobed stilt dancers, accompanied by fife, triangle (cling-a-ching), boompipe (made from a meter-long plumbing joint), and two drums (kettle and bass).
Frank Manning (1977:274) interprets the changing symbolic forms of Antiguan carnival as culturally dissonant with the past in its imitation of North American moral values and consumer ethics introduced by "visitors." The price paid for cultivating the tourist industry is seduction by a culturally imperialistic system that relegates Antiguans to positions as service personnel and "mimic men," robbing the culture of its natural integrity and cultural history.
Calypso
The contemporary Antiguan calypso models its style after the formula set by the Grenadian-Trinidadian calypsonian Mighty Sparrow, but the origin of the early Antiguan calypso is the satiric folk song, the benna (or bennah). It was sung responsorially by a leader and an audience.
Quarkoo, the legendary traveling singer, is known to have helped generate and popularize the original style of calypso. Performing in the streets, he was the foremost itinerant balladeer and peddler of pencils, matches, and printed songs. He published scandalous texts in a print shop whose owner became a patron of calypso. A satiric benna, "Cocoatea," brought about his imprisonment because it broadcast the news that the daughter of a high-placed citizen had become pregnant while living in a convent.
Like the daughter in "Cocotea," Millie was most likely a young woman who, without proper clothing, absented herself, saying she was going to Brazil.
Short Shirt, in his 1977 album Harambee, was influential in an attempt to revitalize the benna. In the new form, political and racial consciousness comes to the fore. Mighty Swallow, in "Freedom," sang about the oppression in Angola, Rhodesia, and Antigua.
The contemporary political and economic climate has produced a musical reactionthe creation of a direct, humorless type of calypso, the antigovernmental song, as in this example:
Jamaica Kincaid (1988:59) accuses the leadership of the small place, Antigua, of "smallness"corruption, nepotism, oppressive tactics, and trafficking in arms and drugs. Harsh and direct, this chastisement, often sung in calypsos, and less often experienced in print, caused the government little embarrassment. Like Manning, who points to the opposition between carnival economy and cultural continuity, Kincaid reveals the destructive contradiction between the fantasy created for tourists and the reality of local life, the continuing inhibition of culture by greedy politicians, and people's inability to claim power.When they have power and authority,
They don't give a damn about nobody.
Prostituting this land, to all and sundry,
They making my people starve.
Music and Society
Musical Instruments
Religious Music
Secular and Recorded Music
Dance
Festivals
Further Study
The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is an archipelago of some seven hundred islands and more than two thousand cays and rocks, situated in the Atlantic Ocean about 100 kilometers southeast of Florida. The archipelago stretches about 1,224 kilometers toward the northeastern coast of Cuba and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Only thirty of the islands of the Bahamas are inhabited, and more than 50 percent of the country's 255,000 inhabitants live on New Providence, an island 11 kilometers wide and 34 kilometers long, on which Nassau, the country's capital, is located. Except for New Providence and Grand Bahama, the inhabited islands of the Bahamas are known collectively as the Family Islands. Ninety percent of the country's inhabitants are of African descent; the remaining population is primarily of European heritage.
The principal industry of the Bahamas is tourism. More than 3.6 million tourists visit the country each year, primarily from North America. Tourism brings in revenue of about $1.3 billion annually. The tourism industry has had a great effect on local music. Besides sun, sand, and sea, music has always been a form of entertainment made available to visitors at the hotels constructed expressly to accommodate them. In the early years of tourism, these hotels were owned and operated by foreign concerns. Before 1949, most entertainers at these hotels came from the United States. Bahamian musicians performed in nightclubs outside the areas in which the hotels were located. Though the nightclubs catered primarily to the Bahamian population, tourists often found their way to them through the guidance of Bahamian taxi drivers and tour operators. These night spots burgeoned and provided creative outlets for Bahamian musicians. In 1949, a musicians' union was formed. This entity, now known as the Bahamas Musicians and Entertainers Union, protects the interests of Bahamian musicians and establishes employment and salary guidelines.
In 1967, the Bahamas achieved majority rule, and the new government put into place a policy of Bahamianization of jobs and businesses. The government bought many of the large hotels, enabling black musicians to obtain jobs, with the result that each hotel now has a resident group of musicians. Since 1967, the construction of hotels to accommodate increasing numbers of tourists has provided employment for many Bahamian musicians; however, these musicians' moving to the hotels resulted
Through the 1980s, the boom in tourism led musicians to perform and record songs familiar to tourists, or covers of songs from other Caribbean countries, limiting the creation of Bahamian music and the development of a local recording industry. It is far more common to hear music from the United States, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago than it is to hear the music of the Bahamas. It is not unusual to hear renditions of country, rock, or rhythm-and-blues songs from the United States, to which Bahamian-like rhythms have been added. Bahamian musicians repeatedly perform for tourists the calypsos made famous in the United States by non-Bahamian performers. Nevertheless, the 1990s have seen a move toward the creation and recording of more original Bahamian music.
Musicians in the Bahamas are usually men, and dancers can be men or women. Men, women, and children may make music whenever they wish. There is no caste system in the Bahamas, but a subtle class system permeates Bahamian society. Musicians have traditionally been perceived as belonging to the lower stratum of society, so that persons belonging to the upper and upper-middle classes generally did not choose to become performers of Bahamian music. Many members of the upper classes considered Bahamian music to be unworthy of study or practice. These persons usually opted to learn and play European instruments and European classical music.
A major reason for the disdain of Bahamian music was that it was closer in essence to African than to European musical forms. The similarity to African music was evidenced in the percussiveness of the music, often considered noise. Second, as it was transmitted orally, Bahamian music was not considered "high" art. Furthermore, the development of tourism, the increase in the number of hotels and visitors to the Bahamas, and the subsequent increase in the number of musicians associated with tourism have led to the identification of male musicians as womanizers and drifters.
Despite the stigma locally attached to music, the Bahamas experienced a surge in interest in its traditional music in the 1970s and early 1980s. This interest was due primarily to the country's move toward nationhood, culminating in 1973 with political independence from the United Kingdom and the concomitant nationalism and search for a Bahamian national identity. Since independence, persons from professions such as banking, law, and education have become part-time musicians. Their presence has served to attenuate the stigma formerly attached to musical performers.
Bahamians create their traditional musical instruments from simple, everyday materials. The dominant musical instrument is the goombay, a drum that Bahamian legend says received its name from the sounds made when its head is struck: the goom depicts the deep, resonant sound made when the head is struck near the center, and the bay (or bah) resembles the sound that occurs when the head is struck nearer the edge. However, the term goumbeŽ is also found in such West African countries as Senegal and Co^te dIvoire: in Senegal, goumbeŽ is a traditional women's dance associated with the planting season; in Co^te d?Ivoire, goumbeŽ is a dance popular among young people. Both dances are accompanied by frame drums.
The goombay evolved from a frame drum similar to those used in West Africa and in some Caribbean countries. Rarely used in the Bahamas today, the frame drum is made by fashioning a strip of wood into a square or a circle and attaching a skin to one edge. Likewise the goombay, which comes in various sizes, is made by stretching the depilated skin of a goat or a sheep over one end of a cylinder. The drum is tuned by heating its skin over or near a firean action called bringing the drum up.
Lacking large trees from which to make drums, Bahamians had to be resourceful in finding materials. Before 1971, musicians made drums from wooden kegs that had held imported nails, cheese, or rum. With advances in technology and transportation, foreign manufacturers began shipping their goods in cartons, eliminating the Bahamians' source of materials. Since 1971, Bahamians have used metal barrels to make their drums (Wood 1995:249-250). The use of metal instead of wood has changed the tone of the drum so that it is now slightly less resonant and mellow.
Bahamians have also added new drums, used principally in junkanoo music. In 1985, junkanoo drummers began using the tenor drum from the Western trap set. Lead drummers usually beat this drum, which they call a tom-tom. It does not have to be heated and consequently allows the drummer to perform without interruption. Drummers have also introduced the bomber, a drum made by stretching a goatskin over one end of a washing-machine barrel, and the B-52, made from a 55-gallon oil drum. Though smaller goombay are used to play bass rhythms, the bomber and the B-52 provide a more powerful bass.
Other traditional Bahamian instruments include cowbells, a carpenter's saw, a hair comb, a ridged bottle, shak-shaks, and a washtub bass. Before the 1950s, musicians used bronze cowbells imported from Germany. In the 1950s, Bahamian welders began fashioning their own cowbells, making them lighter, longer, and narrower. Cowbells are played in pairs and are shaken in a rhythmic pattern or rung in a sixteenth-note pattern. Cowbell players are known as bellers. In 1993, musicians introduced the concept of multiple cowbells: each bell has two or more heads and two or more clappers, reducing the number of cowbell players needed in an ensemble. Furthermore, since the heads are of varied shapes and sizes, these bells produce various timbres.
The carpenter's saw is a scraped idiophone. The player, holding the handle in one hand and placing its tip against his body, scrapes the serrations with a piece of metal held in the other hand. For tonal variety, he flexes the saw while playing it. The comb and the ridged bottle are scraped with a piece of metal. Sometimes a strip of paper is inserted through the teeth of the comb, over which the player blows to create various tones.
Shak-shaks are dried, seed-filled pods from the poinciana tree, or plastic bottles and tin cans filled with small stones. Both types of shak-shaks are shaken in the same manner as maracas. The washtub bass is a plucked chordophone. It consists of a metal tub, usually turned upside down, to which a staff and a string are attached. Variations in sound are obtained by depressing the string near the upper portion of
Bahamian musicians also utilize Western instruments including banjos, guitars, accordions, pianos, drum sets, and modern electronic instruments. These are sometimes incorporated into ensembles that include the traditional instruments.
The religious music of the Bahamas has its roots in Africa and Europe. African influences are evident in layered voices and polyrhythms, and European influences are in the source of texts, primarily early Wesleyan and Baptist hymns (Bethel 1978:59). The major forms of traditional religious music are the anthem and the rhyming spiritual.
The anthem
The Bahamian anthem is closely related to the spiritual of slaves and other blacks in the southern United States (Hedrick and Stephens 1976:8). This relationship reflects the fact that enslaved Africans came to the Bahamas with whites loyal to Britain in the late 1700s, at the time of the American Revolution.
The Bahamian anthem, performed primarily in the Family Islands, tends to focus on biblical characters and in particular, their relationship to the sea. The anthem is optimistic, creating feelings of joy and celebration by emphasizing life after death. This contrasts with the African-American spiritual of the antebellum South, which was pessimistic and leaned more toward problems being encountered in mortal life.
The most common form of the anthem features a sequence of stanzas containing up to eight lines, held together by a single-line refrain that may be sung after each stanza or after each line in each stanza. It may also comprise four-lined stanzas followed by four-lined choruses sung in multipart harmony. The tenor, which carries the melody, is typically placed between the other parts. Each voice is free to improvise melodically and textually, thus making the anthem highly textured and harmonically varied. The improvisation of the anthem leads to the production of unorthodox chords. Clapping and foot tapping usually provide accompaniment.
The anthem may be performed as a rushin' song. Rushin'marching or dancing with shuffling stepsis associated with the junkanoo parade, but some congregations rush around their churches on New Year's Eve or during special services. During the rush, the participants sing anthems before performing responsorial chants. The rush recalls the ring shouts performed by slaves in the southern United States.
The rhyming spiritual
The rhyming spiritual, an outgrowth of the anthem, was closely related to the sponging industry, especially on Andros Island. Spongers often sang anthems while performing their tasks. Out of these anthems they created a modified genre of songs that came to be known as rhyming spirituals. Since sponging is locally no longer a viable industry, the art of rhymingthe creation and recounting of sung verseis gradually disappearing. Rhyming spirituals may sometimes be sung at wakes.
The rhyming spiritual is usually sung unaccompanied by at least two men, but women sometimes participate in the performance. The rhyming spiritual involves singing in parts that may include alto, bass, and more than one tenor. The two most important singers are the lead tenor and the bass. The former, called the rhymer, sings the melody, provides the narrative of the song, and starts and ends each song; the latter, known as the basser, provides an eighth-note ostinato that keeps time and serves as the foundation on which the other parts improvise. The other parts sing
Though the rhyming spiritual is highly improvised, it is more harmonically restricted than the anthem, and singers tend to adhere to the tonic (I), subdominant (IV), and dominant (V). It consists of stanzas and refrains; each of the singers freely provides rhythmic improvisations in the stanzas, though the refrains are rhythmically uniform. Because of the improvisation in each part and the overlapping of phrases, the rhyming spiritual is performed without evident pauses.
The texts of the rhyming spiritual center on biblical characters and stories, though a rhyming spiritual may recount the story of something that has happened in the community. One of the most famous Bahamian rhymers was the late Joseph Spence. Contemporary performers of the rhyming spiritual include the Dicey Doh Singers.
Before 1970, the secular music of the Bahamas was generically known as goombay, a name borrowed from the drum, the primary instrument for this type of music. Today, goombay is no longer used to define the entirety of Bahamian music. Instead, the secular music of the Bahamas is divided into several categories, most accompanied by the goombay drum. These categories include rake 'n' scrape, goombay, and junkanoo.
Rake 'n' scrape
Rake 'n' scrape historically accompanied quadrilles. The current name, first used publicly in the 1970s by Charles Carter, a radio DJ, derives from the raked and scraped idiophones used to perform this music. A basic rake-'n'-scrape ensemble typically includes a goombay, a carpenter's saw, and an accordion to provide melodic interest (
The definitive trait of rake 'n' scrape is the rhythm usually produced by the carpenter's saw or ridged bottle (
The music now known as goombay is that which many non-Bahamians call calypso. It is primarily sung dance music with lyrics that address current affairs or extol male sexual prowess or libido. Unlike in rake 'n' scrape (in which rhythm dominates), melody is important; consequently, melodic instruments such as the Western banjo, electric guitar, and piano are dominant. Goombay is the primary form of recorded music in the Bahamas, the music that visitors to the Bahamas are likeliest to hear. Another trait of goombay is the continuous strumming of the banjo or the electric guitar to complement the rhythm of the drums.
Famous recording artists and performers of goombay included Alphonso "Blind Blake" Higgs, George Symonette (the "King of Goombay"), and Charles Lofthouse. Though these performers are deceased, their tradition continues, thanks to performers including Ronnie Butler, Eric "King Eric" Gibson, and more recently Kirkland "K. B." Bodie and Cyril "Dry Bread" Ferguson.
Junkanoo
Junkanoo is actually traditional goombay performed by acoustic instruments within the context of the junkanoo parades at Christmastime. The number of instruments in each junkanoo group may range between ten and five hundred. The traditional instruments used in the parade include the goombay, divided into three sectionslead, second, and bass. The lead drums play the more complex rhythm; the second drums match parts of the lead and bass rhythms; and the bass drums carry a steady, metronomic rhythm. The other traditional junkanoo instruments are cowbells, police whistles, foghorns (long black metal horns that emit a sound similar to that of a semi trailer), bicycle horns (which emit a higher-pitched sound) and conchs. A horn blower may often play two or more foghorns together to make a fuller sound and give added reach. Sometimes foghorns and bicycle horns are combined to produce a mixture of textures and a contrast in timbres.
Junkanoo instruments are all played rhythmically to satisfy the Bahamian aesthetic for a dense mosaic of textures, timbres, and rhythms. Through the use of these instruments, Bahamians continue the African orientation toward intensity in music performance through volume and noise.
Since 1976, junkanooers have also used wind instruments, including trumpets, trombones, saxophones, sousaphones, and clarinets. The wind instruments, which play popular melodies, have replaced the traditional practice of singing during the junkanoo parade. A principal reason for the decline of singing was that the junkanoo groups grew to such large numbers that it was impossible to hear human voices over the sounds of the instruments. The use of wind instruments has spawned controversy between those who feel that junkanoo should become a more modern cultural manifestation and those who believe the addition of such instruments removes junkanoo from its tradition and transforms it into an event that too closely resembles carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.
Junkanoo music is multilayered and polyrhythmic (
Junkanoo musicians stagger their entries into the overall music performance. In most groups, the leader of the drum section starts the music. Once he has set the tempo, the other drums start to play. After the drummers have settled into a steady rhythm, the leader of the bellers begins to play, followed by the other bellers. Once the drums and cowbells have jelled, the foghorns, bicycle horns, and whistles join in. The brass instruments do not usually begin to play until the entire rhythm section has come together and has established a steady tempo.
Junkanoo music is not limited to the Christmastime parades. It is used in times of celebration or at other important times. Junkanoo bands accompany political rallies and beauty-pageant motorcades. In 1993, they accompanied the Davis Cup match in North Carolina, in which a Bahamian tennis team played against their U.S. counterparts. Junkanoo music broke out each time the Bahamian team scored a point.
The influence of traditional junkanoo on popular recorded music is strongly felt, and the music has evolved from one in which basic rhythms undergirded calypsolike songs to a new form of highly electronic music called junkafunk. Junkanoo's influence on the recorded music of the Bahamas was keenly felt around 1973, when a newly independent nation saw a return to what was perceived as authentic, traditional Bahamian culture. Artists such as Tony "The Obeah Man" McKay and Eddie Minnis and Da Brudders released songs that married, in the case of McKay, traditional junkanoo elements (such as instruments and the imitation of the horns' dominant-tonic melodic intervals) to songs that depicted Bahamian culture. Minnis used an electronic rhythm section to duplicate traditional junkanoo rhythms. The music supported lyrics that addressed contemporary social problems or praised Bahamian traditions. In the early 1980s, a group of musicians led by Tyrone "Dr. Offfff" Fitzgerald and comprising a Western rhythm section, brass players, and traditional junkanoo instruments continued the use of junkanoo in recorded music.
The common denominator in Eddie Minnis' and Dr. Offfff's music was their rhythm sectiona six-member group known as High Voltage, which, in 1992, changed its name to "Bahamen." It is responsible for transforming junkanoo music from music of the streets to music of the studio and dance floor. Bahamen has toured the United States, and its recordings have been released around the world. Promoted as junkafunk, their music reproduces traditional junkanoo rhythms on modern electronic instruments. Goombay rhythms are reproduced on a Western drum set and bass guitar, whereas whistle and horn patterns are produced by synthesizers. Performances sometimes involve traditional goombay drums and cowbells. Despite the use of electronic instruments, junkafunk retains the highly percussive, multilayered character of traditional junkanoo music. Its lyrics sometimes come from traditional goombay or rake 'n' scrape songs.
The Bahamas has been highly influenced by modern dances from the United States and the Caribbean, but some of its folk dances, such as the quadrille and ring dances, continue to be performed. This is especially true in the Family Islands, which remain somewhat outside the sphere of direct international influence.
Quadrilles
Bahamian quadrilles derive from an African interpretation of nineteenth-century European set dances. The quadrille, whose format may be a square or two parallel lines, is performed by mixed couples and is accompanied by a traditional rake-'n'-scrape band incorporating a goombay, a carpenter's saw, and an accordion or guitar. Drummers and dancers improvise freely, but male dancers tend to be more vigorous than their female counterparts.
A trait of quadrille music is a loud syncopated slap on the goombay. The male dancer stamps his foot at the same time as the slap. Foot tapping by each musician also provides rhythmic accompaniment and helps to keep time. Some rake-'n'-scrape bands may add vocal accompaniment.
Ring dances
Ring dances, with roots in Africa, were originally performed in the Bahamas by enslaved Africans. As their name implies, ring dances are done in the center of a ring made by the dancers. Each dancer usually performs alone inside the ring. Traditionally, there would be a fire in the center of the ring, or just outside it; today, a fire is no longer requisite. The goombay is the most important instrument used to accompany ring dances.
Three types of ring dances are performed in the Bahamas: the fire dance, the jump-in dance, and the ring-play. The first two are performed by adults; the third, primarily by children.
Originally the fire dance was a form of recreation in which a performer danced in and around a central fire (
The jump-in dance, also known as the jumping dance, involves solo dancers who use highly individualized and often sensual movements. The sensuality is particularly evident
Jump-in dances are usually accompanied by a goombay, on-beat claps, and rhythmic chants (
Though adults on a few of the islands of the Bahamas such as Cat Island perform ring-plays, these dances are usually performed by children. The ring-play is African derived but heavily influenced by European children's games. As in the jump-in dance, the children form a ring in whose center individuals take turns performing solo. There is no instrumental accompaniment, though adults may use a goombay. Adults and children clap on each downbeat.
Ring-plays take the form of a mild jump-in dance, but the songs that accompany them are melodic and longer than those used in jump-in dances (
Junkanoo
Junkanoo is a carnivalesque parade in which costumed participants (called junkanooers) rush to the accompaniment of junkanoo music. The parade originated as a celebration by enslaved Africans, who received two days off for Christmas, and they often spent a portion of this time performing music and dances. After full emancipation (1838), they continued their celebrations. Those on New Providence Island later moved their celebrations to the downtown area of the city of Nassau. The celebrations included the wearing of costumes and the provision of spontaneous music; they were principally the domain of the working class until 1958, when large numbers of middle-class persons began taking part in the parade.
In the 1920s, the government of the Bahamas realized that these celebrations were a possible means of entertaining tourists. They thus sought to organize the celebrations by offering cash prizes for the best costumes to encourage greater participation. As a result, junkanoo and tourism have been closely linked for most of the twentieth century. The costumes and music have been used in television, radio, and print advertisements around the world to attract visitors to the Bahamas. Junkanoo itself has also been exported, with junkanooers taking part in Mardi Gras and the Jazz Festival in New Orleans and at the Orange Bowl parade in Miami. Tourists are encouraged to participate in junkanoo, and it is no longer unusual to see tourists amid the paraders.
With the extensive promotion of junkanoo for the tourist market and the move toward stricter organization, junkanoo has become a spectator event. Bleachers are set up along the sidewalks, and tickets must be purchased for seats. This regimentation has diminished interaction between junkanooers and spectators, but it has allowed more people to view the parade in comfort and safety.
The increased involvement of the government throughout this century and the widespread participation on the part of persons of all colors and classes have made junkanoo the premier cultural manifestation in the Bahamas. Junkanoo parades take place on 26 December and 1 January, between two and eight o'clock in the morning. Junkanoo may be seen on several of the islands, but the most elaborate performance takes place in Nassau. Today, junkanoo is an intensely competitive event involving music, dance, and elaborate costumes made from fringed crepe paper. Several groups of up to a thousand persons each vie for cash prizes and the acknowledgment of being the best performers. The latter acknowledgment is valued far more than the financial reward.
Most junkanooers are men, who were the sole participants until 1946, when women began to participate, primarily as dancers. Women's participation waned after 1958, when the stigma attached to junkanoo began to dissipate. Few women were junkanooers in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was not until 1988 that women began to participate in large numbers, again primarily as dancers. Today, there is only a smattering of female musicians.
There are two kinds of junkanoo groups: scrap and organized. Organized groups became a part of junkanoo in 1958. Before then, participants were loosely organized,
Members of scrap and organized groups perform in costumes. Scrap groups comprise only musicians, but the organized groups also include dancers and large costumed pieces similar to floats but carried by a single performer. About half the members of the organized groups are musicians. All groups receive financial support from business concerns. These funds help defray the expenses of participating in the parade; however, the organized groups receive a higher level of funding, since they are more likely to win the parade and thus provide positive advertising for their sponsors.
The study of Bahamian music, which has been quite limited, includes an early work by Charles L. Edwards (1895), and articles by Daniel J. Crowley (1958), Zora Neale Hurston (1930), and Elsie Clews Parsons (1928). More recently, in-depth studies have been conducted by Basil C. Hedrick and Jeanette E. Stephens (1976), E. Clement Bethel (1978), and Vivian Nina M. Wood (1995). The works by Hedrick and Stephens, Bethel, and Wood serve as the primary sources for this article. General articles on music in the Bahamas have appeared in local magazines and newspapers, but no official record or archives of Bahamian music exists.
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Social Structure and Change
Sugar plantations and chattel houses perched on coral stones dug from quarriesthese are characteristic features of the landscape of Barbados, the most easterly island of the Lesser Antilles chain in the Caribbean. First settled by native Americans (about A.D. 380) who were soon replaced by Island Arawak (about A.D. 1200) and later the Carib, it had a colonial history that included Portuguese settlement before the early 1600s, when England laid claim to it. Barbados has an area of 430 square kilometers and a population of about 260,000 inhabitants, predominantly of African descent but including heritages from Europe (mainly British), China, India, Lebanon, and Syria.
The first Englishmen landed on the island in 1620, when John Powell disembarked from his flagship, Olive Blossom, and claimed Barbados for England. In 1627, the ship William John brought eighty settlers, including ten African slaves. Sir William Courteen and the Earl of Carlisle were later rivals to the claim of the island, and agreement by law was in favor of the Earl of Carlisle, after whom Carlisle Bay was named. Settlers soon arrived from England, and by 1643 there were thirty-seven thousand whites and about six thousand blacks in residence. Locally grown crops included indigo, cotton, tobacco, and later, sugarcane. More African slaves were brought to work on the plantations, and by 1669 about forty thousand blacks were living on the island. Barbados remained under British rule, producing a rich sugar-export market for England.
Creolization developed a society with Barbadian traits from the 1750s onward. In 1834, Parliament emancipated the slaves, but the plantation system still continued to rule the island's economy and society. Barbadian culture can be detected in the island's cuisine, its architecture, folk music, and language. The blend of African and European elements created a uniquely Barbadian experience. The official language is English, but the popular speech is Bajan, a form of expressive communication combining African grammar and an English lexical base to produce a language commonly used by all Barbadians living in Barbados. Bajan is also the term used locally for a person from Barbados.
Because of the lack of archaeological and historical records, the ancient indigenous music of Barbados has not been identified, and the music of immigrants from
African slaves were prohibited by laws and circumstances from practicing their traditional customs, including dances, songs, and life-styles of West Africa. Though no record of early African Barbadians and their music survives, there is reference to a group who were roused to battle by lively African music performed on animal horn and conch trumpets and skin drums in a struggle against slavery between 1627 and 1638 (Watson 1979:8-9). In 1675, slave codes banned the playing of any loud instruments and the beating of drums by people of African descent, and by 1688 the use of musical instruments was outlawed among the slaves. This ban, however, did not prohibit the clandestine use of drums for funerals, dances, wakes, and other rituals by the African descendants. Music for them was essential for recreation and dancing and as a part of the life cycle for communication and religious meaning.
Though the British had little expertise in instrumental performance, they encouraged balls and formal parties in the plantation's "great house," using African musicians for entertainment. In 1688, workers emerged at a "crop over" festival, singing in call-and-response fashion to the accompaniment of banjo, bones, struck bottles containing different levels of water, and shak-shaks. The blending of African and British cultural practices created new expressions that were to put their stamp on Barbadian musical development, and today the musical instruments used in performing Barbadian music are varied because of African and British influences. Some instruments are imported from other Caribbean islands.
The most diverse musical instruments in Barbados are idiophones, which include struck instruments such as gongs made from hollow tree trunks, hit with sticks; bottles (with different levels of water inside them to produce differing pitches), tapped with sticks; bones (two bones held between the forefinger and middle finger and struck together); cymbals; triangle; and xylophone. Shaken idiophones include the shak-shak, named after the sound of the mahogany tree pod when shaken with its seeds inside, and de shot and rattle, made from a calabash filled with stones and fitted
Membranophones include rural drums called the pump (a hollow tree trunk with goatskin or sheepskin on either end) and the tum-tum (a long, hollow tree trunk with skins over each end), played by two men. These instruments are of African inspiration and are made locally.
Also made locally are a double-headed bass drum and a side (snare) drum, the central instruments of the musical ensemble known as the tuk band (
Chordophones include the banjo, the acoustic guitar (often called the box guitar), the electric guitar and bass (used in contemporary performances), the violin (sometimes called the bow-fiddle, often held against the left side of the chest when played in folk music), and the shukster (made with guitar string stretched from end to end on the side of a wooden house). The bow-fiddle was used in tuk bands but has largely been replaced by the pennywhistle.
Aerophones include instruments made from local materials, though many have been replaced by metal instruments. Once common were the conch trumpet, a bamboo flute with holes for fingering burned into its tube, and a pipe made from the
Anglican hymns and the practice of the British militia, which provided "security for the free population [while] their regular drills served to intimidate the enslaved group" (Watson 1979:8-9), led to parodies in songs, calypsos, tea meetings, tuk bands, and the Barbadian Landship (see below), landmarks for the ratification of Barbadian culture.
Religious forms
With British colonial settlement in Barbados, the Church of England was introduced. In 1641, the island was subdivided into parishes, with a church and a minister for each. This agreement gained acceptance by the locals, and the Bishop of London was named Chief of the Church. Meanwhile, local priests were influenced by the plantocracy, an elite that deemed Christianity unsuitable for slaves. Missionaries, therefore, were sent out by the Church of England to work with the slaves, using religion for building character. All religious routines of African origin were displaced, and slaves were soon converted to Christianity. In 1836, laws were passed to forbid parties on Sundays. The popular Jean and Johnnie dance (a fertility dance, usually performed in the open at plantation festivals and fairs) was forbidden. An energetic dance, it allowed women to show off to admiring men, who often had a chance to do the same. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African ideals, religious beliefs, and practices were suppressed, and even missionaries from the Methodist and Moravian churches taught that on Sunday it was incorrect to dance to secular songs with rhythmic beats, saying that such acts suggested worship of the devil. Links, fusion, and tension between African and British cultural expressions are still currently manifested.
Anglican services offer opportunities for performing historical selections of
Pentecostal music was introduced in the 1920s. Musical performance techniques that became a regular part of church services included tambourines, clapping, and loud, free, spontaneously emotional expression. The Spiritual Baptist religion, whose music and ritual is based on the African-derived Shango cult of Trinidad and Tobago, came from that country in the 1960s. Black American gospel music and work songs have provided new directions and expressive alternatives for Afro-Barbadians. Rastafarianism is currently an alternative to the religious experience for blacks seeking ideas about their ancestral heritage and an aid to redefining themselves in the new global village.
Secular forms
Music as entertainment has been the basis for participation in the artistic and cultural circles of Barbados. Entertainment by Afro-Barbadians was not accepted by the Anglican Church after 1837, and not until World War II was it revived with music for weddings, funerals, tea meetings, plantation fairs, Christmas practices, and Landship parades.
Tea meetings include prolonged solo and group concerts and refreshments; they are held in a school hall or the lodge of a friendly society. Though not popular after the Great War (1914-1918), the tea-meeting concept was revived and is presently popular. Tea meetings begin at 9:00 P.M., when the audience is addressed by the vice-chairman and chairman of the society. At midnight, there is a two-hour break for refreshment. Then songs and speeches resume until daybreak.
The British used music as an enrichment and a reminder of activities at home in the British Isles. Music also provided entertainment at balls, dances, and formal gatherings at the great house. Conversely, African descendants often played drums, sang, and danced. For them, artistic behavior was not separated from life, the universe, or social activity. Many newly created songs were associated with social pastimes and daily workloads. These are now embedded into a rich folk song repertoire, sung individually and during community sings. Dances were held on weekends, at crop over, during Landship festivities, and at major celebrations such as Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and public holidays.
Barbadian folk songs are highly influenced in thought by English practice. Often songs were composed about coronations of the sovereign. Pieces were written about Queen Elizabeth I, King George V, Queen Victoria, and the emancipation of slaves. This tradition dates back to 1650. The stories of "Inckle the English Sailor" and "Yarico the Indian Maid" became topics for English plays. A 1981 collection of narrative, social, and children's songs, Folk Songs of Barbados (Marshall, McGeary, and Thompson 1981), belies notions that no indigenous or oral tradition exists in Barbados. The heart of Barbadian song, however, lies with the lower and laboring class of society, which holds onto its social and cultural pasts and traditions. Cultural and dramatic groups now carry on these traditions with performances in concert and tourism settings (
Crop over was originally a celebration held to mark the end of the sugarcane harvest. At the end of the harvest, which provided lucrative returns for the planters and hard work and daily subsistence for the slaves, a party was permitted in the plantation yard. Plantation managers themselves would participate in a drinking competition and a greased-pole climb, singing, dancing, and eating. Slaves participated in song and dance, playing fiddles, guitars, drums, and triangles. They even climbed the greased pole, ate such delicacies as pudding and souse, cassava pone, and homemade bread; they drank rum punch and enjoyed entertainment, mimicry, and abandon. These practices continue, with newspaper articles telling of choices of venues where dances are organized by a local who is popular and credible in the eyes of the village. Since the 1990s, crop-over singing has been performed during festivals by folk groups wearing sugarcane-cutter costumes (
The Landship Movement, known as the Barbados Landship, was begun in 1837 in Britton's Hall in Seamen's Village by a certain Moses Ward or Moses Wood (oral tradition is not clear about his surname). Its organizational structure, which provided village entertainment from its inception, mirrored the activities, dances, and disciplines of the British navy; its movements and maneuvers depicted the difficulties of a naval ship's passage through rough seas. Landship parades were held, and audiences
The Landship Society, advertised as "the only ship that does not sail," patterns its structure on that of the British navy. The Lord High Admiral, the Admiral, Captain, Boatswain, and Blues are representative of ranks and functions within the organization. The "ship" moors to the "dock," which may be a wooden house similar to a chattel house, and meetings of this society are held three times per week at night. All activity begins from the dock. Each unit has a captain, with names like those of seagoing shipsDirector, Vanguard, Iron Dukeand names of British ships or places in the Commonwealth. Members are governed by the Council of the Barbados Landship Association and are representatives of a ship on the council. Dances during Landship parades and other maneuvers typify European-African fusion: the British military march, jig, hornpipe, and maypole dance of the village green combine with African cross-rhythms and improvisation.
During the Christmas season, scrubberssmall bands of strolling musicians singing hymns and hoping for rewards from householderswere often seen in the 1960s going from house to house. This practice was discontinued and has been replaced by concerts at churches or concert halls, where people dress to go and hear caroling. Christmas practices today include community singing of traditional carols and popular North American standards such as "White Christmas" and "Silver Bells." In addition, church choirs sing anthems, oratorios, and works by the English composers William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Sir Henry Walford Davies, and others. In the 1990s, attempts are being made to use calypso and reggae rhythms and local themes.
Popular music
Before the 1930s, banja, as calypso was called, was practiced by laborers and confined to village-tenantry areas. Strolling minstrels, including Shilling Agard, Mighty Jerry, and Slammer, were the precursors of calypso; their songs included a combination of free speech, humor, theater, African emotional expression, and lyrics about the feelings of the people. Calypso had its roots in the work of minstrels like them who were not embraced by the community at large but persisted into the 1960s with the commitment to topical song accompanied by guitar or banjo.
In the 1950s, broadcasts on radio introduced Trinidadian and other American musics (samba, merengue, rumba, cha-cha), making calypsonians and their music seem inferior. Efforts by the Mighty Dragon and Lord Silvers to promote shows at the Globe Theatre in 1954 showcased pioneers such as Sir Don Marshall, Mike Wilkinson, Lord Radio and the Bimshire Boys, and Mighty Romeo, who set the style for the development of calypso in the 1960s. Mighty Gabby, Viper, and the Merrymen followed, as did the start of calypso competitions, beginning with five persons in 1960 and expanding to eighteen in 1963 and twenty-one in 1964. The Merrymen established themselves from 1975 to 1985, promoting a Caribbean beat and using folk music and traditional ballads to promote the country as a tourist destination. Their calypso style, known as blue beat, also fused American blues and country with local accents and themes, using harmonicas, guitars, and banjos to identify their particular sound.
The years 1974-1980 gave rise to stage-presented kaiso (calypso) and a new concept of crop-over revival in the form of a national festival. Calypsonians increased from twenty-five to two hundred, and with the formation of the National Cultural
British culture (including Welsh, Scottish, and Irish), transmitted through literature and poetry (Shakespeare and Milton), rhymes, folk songs, sea shanties, classical music, hymns, and other songs of praise, has been constantly available, providing entertainment, edification, and general education to all people of Barbados. North American love songs, parlor songs, African-American spirituals and folk hymns, and hillbilly music have also contributed to a cultural mixture in which the love of a song, the expression through movement, and demand for theater continue to be of paramount importance. All of these elements influenced the development of spouge, a Barbadian-styled sound created by the local entertainer Dalton "Manface" Bishop, alias Jackie Opel, who in the 1960s fused the ska beat of Jamaica with calypso rhythms of Trinidad. Spouge employed a special rhythm, played on the cowbell, bass guitar, trap set, and other rhythm and electronic instruments. Added to this were trumpets, a trombone, a saxophone, and vocalists. In the 1960s, there were different types of spouge: the Cassius Clay style (or "dragon spouge") and Draytons Two style (or "raw spouge").
The era from the early 1960s to 1979 saw a sizeable output of spouge recordings by locals, leading to an awareness of a local musical and cultural idiom and the provision for a framework allowing popular bands to grow. Groups such as Lord Radio and the Bimshire Boys, Jiggs Kirton, Antonio "Boo" Rudder, Blue Rhythm Combo, Shirley Stewart, Norman Barrow, Wendy Alleyne and the Dynamics, the Troubadours, and the Draytons Two are all part of the Jackie Opel school. Familiar tunes such as "G-O-Go" and "Play that Spouge Music" (Draytons Two), "Do You Like Sweet Music" (Blue Rhythm Combo), "Are You Sure?" (Troubadours), and "Dance with Me" (Bimshire Boys) all helped advance the work in the popular culture field. In 1989, Calypsonian Commander recorded "Bring Back the Spouge," a song that became a hit.
Other entertainments include performances of North American pop ballads, gospel, and folk songs fused with local practices. Since the early 1980s, the effect of digital technologies on live and studio performances has been important. Major consequences include the proliferation of live bands operating on fairly low budgets, and an unprecedented output fromand growth in numbers ofrecording studios, many of which are run by musicians themselves (Michael Alleyne, personal communication). Though little is documented, the contribution of music to the entertainment field in Barbados is significant.
Bajan performers are mainly men, though women participate in calypso music as background vocalists, in folk music, and in classical music (
Few schools exist for training the general public, and learning by oral tradition is a common method of transmission. This situation has made the guardians of the cultural heritage within the community especially revered.
With the changing focus of world markets and global awareness, a fusion of local cultural expressions is evolving, yet musicians are profoundly aware of heritage development and identity consciousness. Barbados in its present state of cultural evolution is open to musical changes and the impact of other cultures but remains a strict guardian of its heritage.
Historical Background
Afro-Cuban Music
The Emergence of Cuban Music
Musical Genres
Vocal and Instrumental Ensembles
Musical Education
Administrative Structures and Institutions of Music
About 11 million people inhabit the Republic of Cuba, a nation of more than sixteen hundred keys and islands located in the northwestern Antilles. The main island, Cuba, with a surface area of 105,007 square kilometers, is the largest of the Antilles. Most of the national population is descended from Spaniards (mostly from AndaluciŽa and the Canary Islands) and Africans (mostly Bantu and Yoruba). Small populations derive from Caribbeans of other islands, French, and Chinese. Spanish is the official language, but some Cubans still speak several African-derived languages. Local religions include several derived from African religions, but the largest in membership is Roman Catholicism.
Aboriginal culture
Before Europeans arrived, aboriginal groups occupied the archipelago. Economically and socially, the most developed were an Arawak people, known to later scholars as Taino. According to accounts by early European chroniclers and travelers, the most important cultural activity of the Taino was the feast known as areito (also areyto), the main social event for the practice of music and dance. We know only a few specifics about Taino music, including the fact that Taino music used jingles, maracas, and the guamo, a snail shell opened at its pointed end. But the evidence does not include notated music. Apparently, none of the artistic elements of Taino culture became a part of what centuries later was to be known as Cuban music, though some cultural traits (such as foods and domestic architecture) survived in latter-day Cuban culture.
Beginning at the period of conquest (1492) and during the colonization of the island by Spain, Cuba's autochthonous population died out as a result of exogenous diseases (for which the aborigines had no natural antibodies), the forced labor to which they were subjected (in the quest for nonexistent gold and silver), and mass suicide in response to this labor. About a hundred thousand Amerindians were living in Cuba at the time of its discovery by Spain. Information from fifty to seventy-five years later places the aboriginal population of the island at no more than two thousand.
Early European immigration
The convenience of Cuba's geographical position made it a mandatory way station for Spanish ships traveling to Mexico and South America. Cuba provided facilities for repairing ships and supplies of food and water. The demand for provisions fostered the local development of agriculture, which, since Indian workers were rapidly declining in numbers, necessitated new sources of labor: slaves, brought from Africa. By about 1550, these slaves had replaced indigenous laborers to become the decisive factor in the colony's economic development.
During the colonial era, Spanish settlers and visitors brought music from Spain. The military bands that came over with Spanish troops played an important role in musical life, as did musicians who came to settle. They brought their musical instruments, including the lauŽd, the bandurria, and the guitar. A revival of Spanish poetry in meter, such as the cuarteta and the deŽcima, took place, and even the whole romancero espan~ol played an important role in the texts of songs.
The most important African ethnic groups that participated in the amalgamation of the Cuban population were the Yoruba, different groups of Bantu linguistic stock, and some groups from the former area of Calabar (Dahomey). There is little documentation of early African music in Cuba. The music of African people and their descendants in Cuba was played on instruments fashioned after African prototypes. African music found fertile soil for development, particularly as part of the slaves' reorganization of their religions and beliefs. Because all African religions have their own music, the religions brought by African groups to Cuba enriched the art of the entire region. Even now, we often find musical instruments, characteristic ways of playing them, songs, rhythms, dances, and even the use of music for magical functionsall practiced in a way resembling their New World beginnings, much as they must have been when Africans brought them to Cuba, hundreds of years ago.
Yoruba heritage and SanteriŽa religion
In Cuba, slaves of Yoruba origin were generally known as LucumiŽ. Yoruba music has remained, as a rule, more authentically preserved in western Cuba than in eastern Cuba, because most Yoruba slaves (including Egbado, Ijesha, Ketu, Nago, Oyo, and other Yoruba-speakers) were landed on the western coast, mainly in Matanzas, Havana Province, and the city of Havana. The survival of Yoruba music and dance can be partially attributed to the fact that the Yoruba arrived late in the slave trade, between 1820 and 1840 (Marks 1994).
Many African traditions were preserved in Cuba because the Spanish masters allowed slaves to use their traditions of drumming and dance to worship as they had in Africa. The Spanish also allowed the slaves to organize mutual-aid societies so they could better handle their new way of life. These societies often had a king, a queen, and a complex social hierarchy with different levels, conferring prestige on the members of the group who held offices. This relative leniency, combined with compulsory baptism into Roman Catholicism, resulted in the syncretism of West African deities with Christian saints. In this sense, the Yoruba-Cubans went so far as to name their religion SanteriŽa, in a frank allusion to the Christian saints. Other Cuban names for this religion are Regla de OchaŽ (Doctrine of the deity OchaŽ) and LucumiŽ (GonzaŽlez-Wippler 1973:1).
Many Yoruba and their descendants congregated around temple-homes (ileocha), headed by a religious godfather (tata-nganga) or godmother. These buildings usually had a room (igbodu) that held the magical objects devoted to orishas 'gods'. It is in these rooms that believers still perform the rhythmic patterns that invoke
The most important musical instruments used in SanteriŽa rituals are two-headed bataŽ drums (
Also rebuilt by the Yoruba in Cuba were the iyesa, a set of four cylindrical, different-sized double-headed drums. The tension of the skins is maintained with tensors that stretch from one skin to the other. Other Yoruba drums in Cuba are the bembeŽ, made in differing sizes from hollowed tree trunks. The skins are nailed on and tightened by heat from a fire. BembeŽ are not used for religious purposes (Ortiz 1954).
Another group of instruments used by the Yoruba in Cuba is a set of shaken idiophones, the abwe or shekere. These instruments are made from three large gourds covered with bead-studded nets. Each net fits loosely. When the instrument is shaken, the beads (made from seeds) strike the exterior of the gourd. This set of gourds is usually accompanied by a steel hoe blade (hierro), struck with an iron bar. In
Bantu heritage and Congo secret societies
Slaves from the geographical areas of Africa where the Bantu-speaking nations lived contributed heavily to Cuban musical culture. The zone from which most Bantu-speaking slaves were taken is the Congo Basin and both sides of the Congo River. In Cuba, these slaves were generically known as Congos. It would be hard today to identify traits that would distinguish the ethnic groups of this linguistic complex, but the Loango, the Bavili, the Bacongo, the Mayombe, and the Ndongo have provided the greatest contribution to Cuban culture. The Congos also organized mutual-aid societies (cabildos) like those of the Yoruba. Like the Yoruba, they congregated around godfathers' temple-homes, creating nuclei of godchildren.
The Congos brought not only their religion but also the feasts, dances, and music with which they were familiar. They reconstructed many instruments in Cuba. Among these were several wooden idiophonic percussion instruments, of which the guagua (or cataŽ) is the only survivor. It is a hollowed trunk, struck with two sticks. Membranophonic drums introduced in Cuba by the Congo constituted the ngoma ensemble (Ortiz 1954). Ngoma drums, made of wooden staves, are single headed and barrel shaped. The drums are usually played alone, but sometimes they are accompanied by the kinfuiti, another drum introduced in Cuba by the Congo. The Congo also introduced makuta beats and dances, employed in a celebration that is no longer observed. The last record of that festivity is in the early twentieth century, around Sagua la Grande. The Congo instruments that had the greatest cultural impact were yuka, drums made from hollowed fruit-tree trunks, with a skin nailed to one end and usually played in a set of three (
CarabaliŽ heritage and AbakuaŽ secret society
The Calabar area of the western coast of Africa, between the Niger and Cross rivers along the Nigeria-Cameroon border, is the place of origin of slaves known as CarabaliŽ. Their cabildos were known as CarabaliŽ cabildos, and their mutual-aid societies came to be known in Cuba as AbakuaŽ secret societies or AbakuaŽ powers. These organizations were strong among harbor workers, especially in Havana, Matanzas, and CaŽrdenas, and they greatly influenced the development of Cuban music. The first of these societies, the Potencia Efik-Buton, consolidated an Apapa CarabaliŽ cabildo founded in the township of Regla in 1836. The members of these societies were called n~aŽn~igos in Cuba.
For feasts and ceremonies, the AbakuaŽ followers use two sets of instruments. One set consists of four drums that make a series of isolated sounds having symbolic importance. The other set, the biankomeko ensemble, is made up of four drums, each with single heads of goatskin, played only with hands (Courlander 1942:233): bonkoŽ-enchemiyaŽ, biankomeŽ, obi-apaŽ, and kuchiŽ-yeremaŽ. These drums are accompanied by a cowbell (ekoŽn), sticks (itones), and two rattles (erikuŽndi).
Ewe and Fon heritages and AraraŽ secret society
From the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (the present-day Republic of Benin) came slaves who founded the AraraŽ cabildos in Cuba. They were representatives of several peoples, the most important of which were the Ewe and the Fon. Many Africans enslaved in Dahomey were taken by the French, so French coloniesmainly Haiti and Louisianareceived a large number of Ewe and Fon slaves. The slave rebellion headed by Toussaint L?Ouverture forced many people to flee, and from 1789 to 1804, large numbers of French planters and their faithful slaves emigrated to Cuba. A resulting musical form of this time was the tumba francesa 'French drum', referring to Haitian music and dance (AleŽn RodriŽgues 1986). Today, this survives only in performances by national dance troupes (see Okada 1995: example 4).
The most direct transposition from Africa to Cuba, however, was achieved by the AraraŽ, who transferred their festive and religious activities just as they had been performed in Africa. The AraraŽ cabildos preserved an ensemble made up of four drums. Their names vary greatly from community to community, but the most frequent names are hunguedde, huncito, hun, and hunga (see also Courlander 1942:236).
Other West African heritages
The Mina, Manding, and Gange cabildos had a much smaller impact on the development of Afro-Cuban music. The Mina cabildos took in Ashantis, Fantis, Guaguis, Musinas, and others taken from the former Gold Coast, now the Republic of Ghana. The Manding cabildos took in slaves that had come from present-day Sierra Leone and parts of Guinea, representing the Alogasapi, the Bambara, the Lomba, the Sesere,
In social and economic spheres and the forms of artistic expression, a distinctively Cuban nationality is thought to have emerged between 1790 and 1868, when there appeared musical genres that, despite having their roots in Spain and Africa, displayed elements of Cuban origin. There occurred a great surge of music played by Spanish musicians with academic training, who evidenced solid technical foundations in composition and in performance. Musical ensembles were organized around the churches, particularly in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. This period also witnessed the immigration of people of French descent from Haiti, and later from Louisiana.
Another important influence during this period was the introduction of opera and zarzuela companies that came from Italy and Spain. In urban areas, genres such as the Cuban contradanza and later the habanera were born. Traditional Cuban song took shape, as did the orquestas tiŽpicas that played dances. In rural areas, the musical genres that were later to be known as the punto campesino (in central and western Cuba) and the son (in eastern Cuba) also emerged. In the chapels of Santiago de Cuba and Havana, musicians such as Esteban Salas y Castro (1725-1803) and Juan PariŽs (1759-1845) modernized the compositional techniques of Cuban ecclesiastical music.
The period 1868-1898 was marked by rebellions against Spanish rule. The Spanish government abolished slavery gradually in 1880 and definitively in 1886, freeing about a quarter of a million landless blacks, many of whom migrated to urban outskirts and margins. Before 1871, an estimated 150,000 Chinese laborers were brought over, mainly from Canton; though they eventually organized their own Chinatown in Havana and spread throughout the country, their tendency to stick together in closed groups limited their contribution to the common musical culture.
Important Cuban folkloric genres appeared on the urban peripheries during this period. Notable among these were the rumba and the comparsas (see below).
A vast migration from rural to urban areas, especially to Havana, contributed to the integration of many local traditions that had developed in different areas of the country. The effects of this migration were complemented by the movement of troops resulting from the wars for independence. Concert music changed considerably, particularly piano music in the city of Havana. Outstanding musicians appeared, such as Manuel Saumell (1817-1870), whose cortradanzas for piano gave rise to Cuba's own concert music.
In 1898, in the last of the three wars for independence, U.S. intervention on behalf of the rebels helped free Cuba from Spanish rule. But U.S. military occupation (1 January 1899 to 20 May 1902) brought North American capital investments in Cuba, and with them came the influence of North American lifeways on Cuban cultural expression.
The republican period, 1902-1959
Under the republic, a national consciousness based on Cuba's position as a politically independent nation began to arise. People became increasingly aware of the need to develop a Cuban musical culture, and simultaneously the music of Cuba began to have influence outside Cuba. The early contacts of Cuban musical genresparticularly the sonwith American jazz left marked effects on the Cuban genres and jazz, and on the popular music of the United States. In turn, the rumba and the son, and later the cha-cha-chaŽ and the mambo, had impact on Europe during this period.
Concert music, particularly symphonic music, also developed. With the emergence of a strong nationalistic awareness came musicians such as Alejandro GarciŽa Caturla (1906-1940) and Amadeo RoldaŽn (1900-1939), who used the most up-to-date compositional techniques of the times to create works of a marked national character. The most important contribution to this musical nationalism was through folkloric music.
Professional popular music, with deep roots among the population and intimate links to dance, left its mark too. Professional popular music differed from folk music by the use of technical elements in composition and interpretation that were taken from the music of Europe. This music became easily commercializable because of its ready adaptation to radio and television, the media of mass communication. These media, in turn, affected the development of the Cuban folkloric ensembles of the times. Dance music was by far the most popular, with roots deep in tradition.
Cuban music was nourished by waves of immigrants from the Caribbean, mainly from Haiti and Jamaica. These immigrants were brought to remedy the shortage of manpower in the sugar industry and in the growth of the railroads. The increased importance of radio, the introduction of television (in 1950), the appearance of several small record companies, and the construction of important musical theatersall fostered a boom in Cuban music, mostly limited to Havana.
By about 1950, the nationalistic movement in musical composition was replaced by a neoclassical trend that centered on the Grupo de RenovacioŽn, headed by a composer of Catalonian origin, JoseŽ ArdeŽvol (1911-1981).
After 1959
The revolution of 1959 began the transition to a socialist society. The government instituted a free educational system whose curriculum included the arts. The National Council of Culture was founded under the Ministry of Education, and in 1976, the council was elevated to the rank of Ministry of Culture. The National Council of Culture aimed to rescue Cuba's folklore. It allocated significant resources to the development of professional music and the Amateur Movement, which eventually produced many professional musicians.
Musicological research was organized, and a cultural policy was designed to find and preserve, in every municipality, the country's musical culture. A national system of music schools was organized, and elementary music schools were opened in practically every important city. A system of enterprises was organized to include all the country's soloists and musical ensembles. These enterprises saw to the contracting and programming of musicians, who were guaranteed steady employment and stable salaries.
The Musical Publications and Recording Studios (EGREM), Cuba's musical publications and recording enterprise, was organized and given the responsibility of producing recordings and publishing scores of Cuban music. One of the spinoffs of EGREM was the National Music Publishing House (Editora Nacional de MuŽsica).
A factory was established to mass-produce autochthonous musical instruments that until then had been produced only by individual craftsmen. Consequently, there was an increased availability of bongos, rattles (cheŽqueres), drums of the AbakuaŽ secret society, and other African-Cuban musical instruments. Instruments such as bongos, tumbadoras, guitar, and tres, which had been produced on a limited scale, were turned out in greater numbers.
The Ministry of Culture fostered the development of institutions that were
From its inception, the National Council of Culture and later the Ministry of Culture organized festivals dedicated to music. They included the National Son Festival, the Rumba Festival, the Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in Varadero, the Chamber Music Festival in Camagušey, the National Choral Festival in Santiago de Cuba, and others. Based on the Amateur Movement, a system of casas de cultura ('houses of culture') was developed in all the country's municipalities. These institutions not only foster the organization of musical groups of all kinds but also teach music and follow up on amateurs' musical education.
During this period, contemporary music took shape. It accommodated a broad range of aesthetic perspectives, including conventional neoromantic techniques for orchestral work and bold experiments in electroacoustic music. The tendencies that most contributed to the contemporary music of the period were aleatorism and neoserialism.
Professional popular music saw a marked development of the son, particularly in connection with nueva trova, a nationalistic movement, founded in 1962. The son, particularly its urban variants, became practically synonymous with Cuban popular dance music and had a far-reaching impact on the music later known as salsa. The influence of the son on the creation of salsa has been so far reaching that many specialists have mistaken one for the other.
Folkloric music became stronger in urban areas. People of central and western Cuba continued singing songs of the punto guajiro complex (see below), and the variants of the son (including the one called changušiŽ) retained their predominance in the rural areas of the eastern provinces. The rumba remains a broadly practiced genre, particularly in Havana and in Matanzas Province. Cuban musicians still compose boleros, cha-cha-chaŽs, contradanzas, danzones, and guarachas, but none of these is as popular as the son.
The history of Cuba's musical culture reflects a complex pattern of migrations and cultural confluences, leading to the emergence of widely differing musical traditions in remote areas of the country. These factors contributed to the development of a variegated national musical culture with local musical types. Communication among these areas and among the strata of the population has helped some local traditions gain national popularity and become typical expressions of a Cuban national identity.
The genres of Cuban traditional music divide into five complexes (son, rumba, cancioŽn, danzoŽn, and punto guajiro), each comprising related musical genres based on common musical aptitudes and behaviors. These complexes are determined by style, instrumentation, and the makeup of traditional ensembles.
The
The combination of plucked strings and African-derived percussion instruments gave birth to a musical genre called son, first popular among peasants of eastern Cuba. During the twentieth century, the son complex, because of its influence on dance music and its projection into practically all social and functional spheres of musical activity in the country, has been the most important musical genre in Cuba. Its earliest manifestations, perhaps dating as far back as about 1750, were among the first Cuban musical genres or styles about which information survives.
The son took shape in rural easternmost Cuba. Its oldest genres include the son montuno (from the Sierra Maestra range) and the changušiŽ (from the area of GuantaŽnamo). The formal structure of the oldest sones is the constant alternation of a soloist with a refrain, typically sung by a small group. When the son emerged from rural areas, it acquired another important structural element: the inclusion of an initial closed structure in binary form, followed by a montuno, a section in which a soloist alternates with a small choir.
The instrumental ensembles (
Within the context of the son, musicians exploited two important instruments for Cuban musicthe tres (a variant of the guitar) and bongos (
The rumba complex
Another important generic complex in Cuba is the rumba, whose name probably derives from African-Caribbean words (such as tumba, macumba, and tambo) referring
In the beginning, the instruments that played rumbas were different-size wooden boxes. Eventually, they evolved into three barrel-shaped drums, first called hembra 'female', macho 'male', and quinto 'fifth', and later called salidor 'starter', tres-dos 'three-two', and quinto. In African musical cultures, female drums, also called mother drums, are tuned in the lowest registers. Male drums are in the mid-registers, and quintos are tuned in the upper registers. The salidor is the first drum that plays. Tresdos indicates that the drum will normally be beaten in a combination of three and two beats. These drums were generically called tumbadoras. With their appearance, the instrumental format of the rumba was fixed. This ensemble is often complemented by a small cataŽ, a hollowed tree trunk, struck with two sticks.
All genres of the rumba have the same structure. The lead singer starts with a section that rumberos (rumba players) call the diana. The singer then goes into a section of text that introduces the theme, and only after this does the rumba proper begin, with more active instrumental playing and a section alternating between the soloist and the small choir.
Of the genres that make up the rumba complex, the guaguancoŽ, the columbia, and the yambuŽ are the most popular in Cuba. The guaguancoŽ has most deeply penetrated into other functional spheres of Cuban music, and is most generally identified with the concept of the rumba. The performance of guaguancoŽ may include couple dancing, and the music and the dance have elements that reflect Bantu traits. The ensembles (primarily drums and idiophones) are called comparsas.
The
A third generic complex is the cancioŽn 'song', embodied in Afro-Cuban forms and styles of singing. References to songs written by Cuban composers appear as early as about 1800. These songs, written in the Italian style of the day, had no features that could identify them as Cuban, but they gave rise to Cuban lyrical songs. The earliest appearance of Cuban elements took place in the texts. By about 1850, many songs of this type (such as "La Bayamesa" by Carlos M. de CeŽspedes) were in circulation.
The development of lyrical songs in Cuba led to a new genre, the habanera, which became an important generic prototype after Eduardo SaŽnchez de Fuentes composed his habanera "Tu." A well-known habanera occurs in Georges Bizet's Carmen, premiered in Paris in 1875.
Songs for two voices in parallel thirds and sixths and using the guitar as the instrument of preference have been in frequent use since the 1800s. They laid the foundation for the emergence of another genre of the Cuban song, the cancioŽn trovadoresca, a genre that takes its name from the name its most important interpreters gave themselves: trovadores 'troubadours'. Personalities such as JoseŽ "Pepe" SaŽnchez, Sindo Garay, Manuel Corona, and Alberto VillaloŽn decisively shaped the musical genre that has come to be known as the traditional trova.
The distinguishing feature of this genre in Cuba is the way the song became closely associated with the singer, who moved around accompanying himself on the guitar, singing about things he knew or whatever struck his fancy. The word trovador was probably an attempt by these artists to establish a relation between what they did and the functions they attributed to the troubadours of medieval Europe. This genre developed greatly in Cuba after the 1960s, giving rise to a new movement, nueva trova, that developed its own administrative structure and gained throughout the
Before the 1850s, this tradition was intended primarily for listening, not dancing. The situation changed with the rise of the important musical genre known as bolero, born in Cuba from antecedents in the Spanish bolero. Rhythms taken from those played by the Cuban percussive instruments of African origin were added to the traditional forms of the Spanish dance and melody. The creators of the new genre were a group of trovadores from Santiago de Cuba who performed the cancioŽn trovadoresca. They gave the bolero stylistic elements and rhythms from the son, then popular only in rural eastern Cuba. JoseŽ "Pepe" SaŽnchez is considered the composer of the first Cuban bolero, a genre cultivated by many songwriters and musicians abroad. In some Caribbean countries, it is one of the most important genres of popular music (see PUERTO RICO).
During the 1800s, societies whose only objective was to make music came into being. This is the case with clave choirs (coros de clave), which originated in Matanzas and Havana. These organizations had repertoires of songs called claves, composed by its members. They lost favor and disappeared early in the 1900s, but they contributed to the Cuban musical heritage a genre that preserves the original name.
Another musical genre of the cancioŽn complex is the criolla. It resulted from the continued development of the clave. The composer of the first criolla was Luis Casas Romero, who wrote his "Carmela" in 1908. Criollas are songs written in urban forms and style, with texts referring to rural themes. The tempo is slower than in the clave, and the meter is 6/8. The form is binary, and the harmonies are often modal.
With the clave appeared another genre, the guajira. It is written in 6/8 meter alternating with 3/4, and often includes musical affectations evocative of the rural peoples' plucked stringed instruments. The texts of the guajira centered on the beauty of the countryside and pastoral life.
Cuban songs in general, but particularly the bolero and the cancioŽn trovadoresca, have joined with other Cuban musical genres, such as the son, to produce mixed genres that have influenced Cuban dance music.
The
A large migration of French people and Haitians with French customs arrived in Cuba at the end of the 1700s, when the character of the Cuban nation was taking shape. This migration gave rise to the fourth generic complex, the danzoŽn, which had its origins in the early Cuban contradanzas, and projects forward in time to the cha-cha-chaŽ.
The interpretation in Cuba of French contredansesespecially with the violin-piano-flute formatled to the development of a contradanza that may be considered Cuban, especially with the later introduction of percussive instruments taken from Afro-Cuban music. The earliest contradanzas were played by two different musical ensembles: the charanga (a Cuban popular music orchestra consisting of two flutes, piano, pailas, claves, guširo, two tumbadoras, four violins, and eventually a cello) and the orquesta tiŽpica 'folkloric orchestra'. The development of these orchestras, and the evolution and change experienced by the French and local contredanses in Cuba, gave rise to musical genres such as the danza, the danzoŽn, the danzonete, the mambo, and the cha-cha-chaŽ.
The contradanza acquired its distinctive profile during the 1800s and became the first genre of Cuban music to gain popularity abroad. It had four well-defined routines: paseo 'walk', cadena 'chain' (taking of hands to make a chain), sostenido 'holding of partners', and cedazo 'passing through' (as some couples make arches with their arms while others pass under them). Its structure is binary, and each section
Danzas cubanas were the result of the evolution of the older contradanzas. Played by ensembles known as French charangas (charangas francesas), they evidenced greater contrast between the first and second parts of the overall binary structure. These pieces gave rise to the most important member of the complex, the danzoŽn, of which Miguel Failde composed and premiered the first example, "Las Alturas de Simpson," in Matanzas in 1879.
Like the contradanza, the danzoŽn was a square dance, but its figurations were more complex. The transformations brought about in it, particularly through the addition of new parts, gave it the structure of a five-part rondo. This might have been the origin of its name, since the addition of parts enlarged the piece, making it a "big danza" (the -oŽn suffix in Spanish is augmentative). The danzoŽn is an instrumental genre usually written in 2/4 meter. Once considered the national dance of Cuba, it enjoyed enormous popularity during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In 1929, another musician from Matanzas, Aniceto DiŽaz, combined elements from the son and the danzoŽn, added a vocal part, and created a new style of danzoŽn called the danzonete. His first composition in this style, "Rompiendo la rutina 'Breaking the Routine'," established the danzonete as a new musical genre. During the 1950s, further transformations of vocal danzones and the danzonetes, with the addition of new instruments to typical charangas, paved the way for Damaso PeŽrez Prado and Enrique JorriŽn to create two new musical genres: the mambo and the cha-cha-chaŽ.
The
The punto guajiro and the entire complex of rural musical genres it embraces make up the fifth generic complex of Cuban music. This complex has developed largely within the framework of rural music in central and western Cuba, where country tonadas, puntos fijos, puntos libres, seguidillas, and other forms remain common. Tonadas are tunes or melodies sung to recite deŽcimas. The punto can be fijo 'fixed' or libre 'free': if the accompaniment of the lauŽd and guitar is always present, then the punto is fijo; if the accompaniment stops to let the singer sing his melody and deŽcima alone, the punto is libre. In the seguidilla, the singer uses versification that gives the impression of a never-ending strophe. The zapateo or Cuban zapateo is the dance used for the punto. Guateques campesinos was the name given to the typical parties of the farmers where the puntos were sung.
Dances for these genres and the Cuban zapateo developed during the 1800s. The zapateo is no longer danced. It has been replaced by dance forms borrowed from the son and other country dances of the eastern end of the island. The transformation and modernization of the genres of this complex have been slower than in the other complexes of Cuban music, perhaps because it is limited to the rural population. Professional musicians have adopted some of these genres, though usually when combining them with elements of other generic complexes, as in the son and the cancioŽn.
The accompanimental requirements of certain musical genres fostered the creation of distinct types of musical ensemble. Plucked stringed instruments, with the guitar and the tres as the most central ones, produced the typical sound of most Cuban music. Also important were rhythmic patterns borrowed from the music of the Spanish bandurria and played by Cuban rural people on the lauŽd. The bandurria and the lauŽd are plucked stringed instruments brought by the Spanish settlers.
To the sound of the plucked strings was added that of African-derived percussion instruments. Ensembles took in bongos, claves, the guširo (and the guayo, its metallic counterpart), maracas, and the jawbone rattle (quijada), the botija (jug), and the mariŽmbula. The mariŽmbula is made from a large wooden box. Two metal bars are fixed to the side of the box so that metal strips can be inserted and held fast to serve as tongues (languettes), which the performer plucks with his fingers. The tuning of the tongues is done by loosening the bars and adjusting the length of the tongues. The performer usually sits on the box with his legs on either side of the languettes [see DOMINICAN REPUBLIC]. The acoustic principle of the mariŽmbula has antecedents in the idiophone known as mbira, which belongs to many Bantu peoples of Africa.
The most important percussive membranophones that developed included the tumbadoras (also called congas), timbales (big hemispheric drums played with two sticks covered with cloth or leather), and pailas (cylindrical metal drums played with two wooden sticks). Many variants of the cowbell (cencerro) also developed. In performance, these instruments were often combined with instruments brought from Europe and assimilated into Cuban music in their original organological forms, as happened with the piano, the flute, the violin, the guitar, and other instruments.
This blend of instruments created the instrumental formats that give Cuban music a distinctive character. The most important among them are the duŽo, the triŽo, the cuarteto, the septeto, the conjunto, the charanga tiŽpica, the orquesta tiŽpica, the piquete tiŽpico, the oŽrgano oriental, the estudiantina, the coro de clave, the guaguancoŽ group, the comparsa, and the gran combo or gran orquesta.
The duŽo consists of two guitars or a guitar and a tres. The artists sing two parts or melodic lines, called primo and segundo. This combination often serves for boleros, canciones trovadorescas, claves, criollas, and guajiras. In the eastern provinces, the duŽo serves frequently for performances of sones montunos.
The triŽo retains the two vocal melodic lines. The third performer often sings the primo while playing claves or maracas. The repertoire of the triŽo resembles that of the duŽo because both are closely related to the cancioŽn trovadoresca. When this type of ensemble reached the cities, it took the son into its repertoire. Today, triŽos appear throughout the nation. One of their most outstanding representatives was the TriŽo Matamoros, famous during the 1940s.
The cuarteto format includes two guitars (or guitar and tres), claves, and maracas. Sometimes, rather than claves or maracas, the fourth instrument is a muted trumpet. These groups retain the two melodic lines (primo and segundo), and base their repertoire on mixed genres such as the guaracha-son, the bolero-son, and the guajira-son. This ensemble was popular during the 1930s.
The instruments of the septeto de son are guitar, tres, trumpet (usually with mute), maracas, claves (played by the vocalist), bongos, and mariŽmbula or botija. In its most recent version, a string bass replaces the mariŽmbula. The septeto resulted from adding a muted trumpet to the sexteto de son. This combination crystallized in the
The conjunto, another type of ensemble, consists of piano, tres, guitar, three or four trumpets, bongo, bass, and singers. The singers often play maracas and claves, or jawbone and guširo. The repertoire of the conjunto includes boleros, guarachas, and cha-cha-chaŽs, and it sometimes plays mixed genres such as guajira-son and bolero-son. The Cuban conjunto enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1950s, especially after the introduction of television in Cuba. Among the most outstanding representatives are the conjuntos of ChappotiŽn, Pacho Alonso, Roberto Faz, and Conjunto Casino.
The charanga tiŽpica includes a five-key transverse flute, a piano, a string bass, pailas, two violins, and a guširo. It emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century; after 1940, it doubled the number of violins, and added a tumbadora and (later, sometimes) a cello. Some charangas have replaced the pailas with a complete set of drums and have included electric instruments such as electric bass, electric piano, and synthesizer. The term orquesta 'orchestra' has been commonly used since about the 1960s. Foremost in the repertoires of these orchestras was the danzoŽn, but now the son is the most frequently played genre. During its popularity, these ensembles had no vocalists, but with the creation of the cha-cha-chaŽ in the 1950s, they began to feature singers or a small choir. Arcan~o y sus Maravillas and the Orquesta Gris are among the most important representatives of the instrumental phase of the charanga, and Orquesta AragoŽn and Enrique JorriŽn's orchestra are probably the most important of the phase that included vocalists. One of the most successful charangas with electric instruments is Los Van Van.
The orquesta tiŽpica, a historical ensemble no longer popular, consisted of two clarinets, two violins, a string bass, a cornet or a trumpet, a valve or slide trombone, an ophicleide (bombardino), pailas, and a guširo. The oldest European-derived instrumental ensemble in Cuba, it has fallen into disuse. Its repertoire included contradanzas, habaneras, rigadoons (rigodones), lancers, danzas, and danzones. In 1879, Miguel Failde, a musician from Matanzas, composed and played the first danzoŽn with one of these orchestras, which he directed.
During the 1800s, wandering musicians organized piquetes tiŽpicos to play in amusement parks and circuses throughout the country. These ensembles were made up of a cornet or a trumpet, a trombone, a clarinet, an ophicleide, two pailas, and a guširo (or guayo). Their usual repertoire included danzas, pasodobles, danzones, rumbitas, and other genres that proved difficult to adapt to other types of ensembles. These groups may have been born of the orquesta tiŽpica when economic adjustments reduced the number of employed musicians.
The oŽrgano oriental is the type of large crank organ imported from Europe to the areas of Manzanillo and HolguiŽn in eastern Cuba beginning around the mid-1800s. Later manufactured in those locations, it served for public dances. The organs were accompanied by pailas, a guayo, and, at a later stage, tumbadoras. Their repertoire included the danza, the danzoŽn, the polka, and the son. The building of such organs became a family tradition in the east of the country. The Borgollas were the most important builders in Manzanillo, and the Ajo de Buenaventura family was the most outstanding in HolguiŽn.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the estudiantina was made up of two singers who sang primo 'first' and segundo 'second' while playing maracas and claves, plus others performing on a trumpet, two treses, a guitar, pailas, and a string bass. Some estudiantinas also included a mariŽmbula. Their repertoire was based mainly on the son, but they also played danzones. Their tradition centered in Santiago de Cuba.
The coro de clave was a choral ensemble with a repertoire based on a musical
The guaguancoŽ group has a soloist and a small choir, three tumbadoras, claves, and occasionally a small cataŽ. Its repertoire includes the genres that make up the rumba: guaguancoŽ, columbia, and yambuŽ. One of the most important groups is Los Mun~equitos, in Matanzas (see Okada 1995: example 3).
The instrumentation of comparsas has never been stable. They usually require instruments that can be carried and played at the same time. The most frequently used are tumbadoras, congas, bass drums, galletas 'cookies' (big drums in the shape of a cookie, played with a stick covered with cloth or leather), bocus (long, conical drums hung from the player's neck and shoulder and beaten with bare hands), cowbells, plowshares, steel rings, and other improvising instruments. In later phases, comparsas have included a trumpet as a solo instrument.
Comparsas accompany dancers who parade through the streets during carnivals. They had their origins in the celebration of Epiphany, 6 January, during the colonial period. (The slaves were treated like children in many ways, and 6 January was Children's Day in the Spanish colonies.) Carrying lanterns and flags, slaves would take to the streets in the typical attire of their homelands. They would dance and parade to the governor's palace, where they would revel in African-derived dramatic presentations, songs, and dances.
Finally, the gran combo or gran orquesta is another important type of ensemble, influenced by jazz bands in the United States. Particularly after the 1950s, jazz bands began to be organized in Cuba, with repertoires that included guarachas, boleros, and sones montunos. The instrumentation of these bands consisted of trumpets; trombones; alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones; piano; bass drums; and Cuban percussion. They occasionally included a flute and a clarinet. It was with these bands that the mambo, an important musical genre, was born. One of the most important jazz bands was the Benny MoreŽ Band, which became popular in the 1950s.
Music was taught in Cuba by settlers who arrived in the 1500s. Historical documents say a musician named Ortiz, living in the town of Trinidad in the 1500s, opened a school to teach dancing and the playing of musical instruments. Manuel VelaŽsquez, the first organist of the cathedral of Santiago de Cuba, taught singing to children who participated in the religious services. Havana's first professor of music was Gonzalo de Silva, who taught singing and organ around 1605.
During the 1700s, the teaching of music was centered in the chapels of the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba and in the Parroquia Mayor of Havana. Near the end of the 1700s, Esteban Salas y Castro, an important Cuban composer of ecclesiastical music, founded and headed a music chapel at the Cathedral of Havana. Capilla de muŽsica 'music chapel' was the name given to groups of musicians who performed for Roman Catholic services. They composed church-oriented pieces, including cantatas, villancicos, and pastorelas, and taught music within the church. Salas y Castro's patience and dedication turned his chapel into Cuba's first real school of music. The
In a steady flow throughout the 1800s, Spanish musicians came to Havana to play and teach. One of the earliest was JoseŽ M. Trespuentes, who from the 1830s taught violin, harmony, counterpoint, and composition. The second half of the century saw considerable growth in piano instruction. Piano virtuosos sojourned in Havana and taught talented pupils. Visiting from North America, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) organized spectacular concerts in Havana and Santiago de Cuba and gave piano lessons to NicolaŽs Ruiz Espadero and others, but eventually left Cuba. Espadero, a great maestro himself, taught the distinguished virtuosos Cecilia Aristi, Gaspar Villate, and Ignacio Cervantes. The last taught the ensuing generation of pianists, represented by his daughter, MariŽa Cervantes, and Eduardo SaŽnchez de Fuentes. In 1885, the Dutch master Hubert de Blanck settled in Cuba and founded the conservatory that bears his name. He designed its curriculum to include the most advanced techniques of the times.
Early in the 1900s, private conservatories were founded in Havana and other important cities. Changes taking place in the teaching of music in the United States spurred changes in Cuba. Eminent musicians such as Amadeo RoldaŽn taught at these conservatories, where many musicians of the period were trained, particularly those who played in the country's chamber-music ensembles and symphony orchestras.
Military bands played an important role in the teaching of music from the late 1800s. Apprentices trained in them later replaced their teachers or joined the bands. This system was particularly important in the larger cities of central Cuba. Remedios, Sancti Spiritus, Cienfuegos, and CaibarieŽn became important musician-training centers.
Under the direction of Guillermo TomaŽs, the Municipal Conservatory of Music was founded in coordination with the Municipal Band of Havana. This institution has trained several generations of important musicians. It is named after Amadeo RoldaŽn, its director in the middle of the century, who guided the introduction of important changes in the programs and curricula.
Until 1959, the Municipal Conservatory of Havana was the only government-sponsored center for the teaching of music. Since then, provincial schools have been opened in Pinar del RiŽo, Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Camagušey provinces. Two other municipal conservatories were opened in the city of Havana: one in Marianao, named after Alejandro GarciŽa Caturla, and another in Guanabacoa, named after Guillermo TomaŽs.
The need for instructors to satisfy the major demand created by the Amateur Movement led to the founding of the School of Arts Instructors in 1961. The National School of Art, with its School of Music, was founded in May 1962; it has trained the most important performers, composers, and musicologists of the late twentieth century. The Higher Institute of Art, founded in 1976, immediately opened its School of Music, Cuba's first university-level school of music. In 1978, to provide facilities for working musicians to take their degree, the National Center for Higher Professional Education was opened. In the 1990s, the progress made in Cuban musical education has led to important results in piano and guitar performance and in musicology.
Between 1959 and 1976, musical activity in Cuba was the responsibility of councils, departments, or divisions of the Ministry of Education. In 1976, the Ministry of Culture was organized and took responsibility for musical activity. In 1989, the Cuban Institute of Music was organized to administer all musical activity within the
The National Center for Concert Music concerns itself with concert musicians and chamber-music groups. It attends to the programming and promotion of these artists within the country and abroad. The Philharmonic Organization of Havana oversees programming and promotion for the symphony orchestra, other important chamber-music groups, and the country's most important conductors. The National Center for Popular Music, taking responsibility for soloists and ensembles that play popular Cuban music, programs and promotes these artists nationally and internationally.
The Center for the Research and Development of Cuban Music (CIDMUC) was founded on 26 December 1978 in Havana with the primary objective of fostering knowledge, research, and general information on Cuban music. It has two musicological-research departments and an information department. Its Basic Research Department oversees historical and ethnomusicological research, including organological studies and the transcription of Cuban music. Its department of development does research in the fields of the psychology and sociology of music. It also does statistical studies related to professional music activities in Cuba.
The National Museum of Cuban Music, founded in 1971, has a collection that includes valuable musical instruments, old scores of Cuban music, and other documents of historical value. It has hosted research in the field of restoration and has organized lectures, exhibits, concerts, and lecture-recitals based on the documents in its collection.
The Musical Publications and Recording Studios (EGREM) has the responsibility of producing records, cassettes, Cuban musical instruments, and musical scores. It has several recording studios, a record factory, a musical instrument factory, and the National Music Publishing House. In 1986, in cooperation with the last, it founded a quarterly musical magazine, Clave.
The Musical Institute for Folk Music Research, founded in 1949 in Havana under the direction of the eminent musicologist Odilio UrfeŽ, was later renamed the Popular Music Seminar, but in 1989 it became the Odilio UrfeŽ Center for Promotion and Information on Cuban Music. It has a huge store of information on the danzoŽn, the teatro bufo, the teatro liŽrico, and Cuban vaudeville.
The Ignacio Cervantes Professional Music Upgrading Center, a teaching institution for professional musicians who want to complete their academic training, was founded in Havana in 1964. It has branches in every province.
Major studies of Cuban music before 1960 include those by Alejo Carpentier (1979 [1946]), Emilio Grenet (1939), and Fernando Ortiz (1981 [1951]). Musical instruments
Cuban scholars have written many accounts about their own music, especially since the 1970s. One of the most important compendiums about Latin American music is Ensayos de MuŽsica Latinoamericana, edited by Clara HernaŽndez (1982). It includes eight essays on Cuban music. Studies about socialization and music in Cuba are by Ageliers LeoŽn (1984) and MariŽa Teresa Linares (1974). Odilio UrfeŽ (1984) published a valuable chapter on Cuban music and dance in the book Africa in Latin America. Olavo AleŽn RodriŽguez (1986, 1994) has written books on Afro-Cuban music, specifically on tumba francesa and salsa, respectively. The most widely distributed journal devoted to Cuban music is Clave, published in Havana. Its issues contain essays and news about Cuban folk and art music and musicians.
Since the 1980s, North Americans have written numerous studies of Cuban popular music, including salsa and its precursors in Cuba and development in New York City. Vernon W. Boggs (1992b) compiled a book entitled Salsiology, which includes chapters by Larry Crook (1992) and Vernon W. Boggs (1992a) about particular aspects of Cuban music. Important studies about Cuban music in the United States are by Steve Cornelius and John Amira (1992), Peter Manuel (1990), James Robbins (1990), and Roberta Singer (1983).
Until the mid-1980s, the ruggedness of Dominica's terrain and coastline made transportation difficult throughout the island. As a result, five distinctive musical culturesnorthern, southern, eastern, western, centralevolved almost independently. Though each region has unique cultural traits, they all share one heritage, that of the peoples who settled Dominica: French, West Africans, and English.
A sixth region is the northeast coast (including the villages of Wesley and Marigot), whose inhabitants are direct descendants of settlers who arrived from Antigua and Montserrat during the 1800s. Uninfluenced by the French colonial reŽgime, these people speak English, not Dominica's vernacular, French Creole (KweŽyo`l). Although it is the most distinctive region, it has only marginally influenced Dominica's musical traditions.
Caribs, the aboriginal population of Dominica, survive in small numbers on a reserve on the eastern side of the island. They have influenced many local traditions, but have made little or no contribution to the music of the country (Caudeiron 1988:48).
Until the late 1950s, no efforts were made to document, preserve, or promote Dominican culture. As in most other Caribbean islands until then, Dominicans were stigmatized by the colonial reŽgime and the authority of Roman Catholicism, which for more than two centuries had taught them to believe that African-derived traditions were "uncultured," "demonic," and "evil" (Phillip 1986:25). A crusade against these notions was taken up in the 1950s by Mable "Cissie" Caudeiron, who, by organizing productions based on local language, songs, and dances, brought African-derived arts to public recognition (Wason 1987:18).
In 1965, the year England granted to Dominica the political status of associated statehood, Edward Olivier Leblanc, then Chief Minister, inaugurated the National Day Celebrations (later called the National Independence Competitions), which released a new wave of cultural energy and brought governmental recognition to the arts. This day was dedicated to African-and European-derived traditions, both publicly acknowledged as having contributed to Dominica's cultural makeup. For the first time, musicians, dancers, and singers from different regions were introduced to
In 1978, Dominica's government created a cultural division whose mandate was to plan educational and cultural programs for the public, and to document and promote local culture. This division has organized festivals and set up workshops and cultural exchanges dealing with educationally related cultural studies. Out of these efforts has developed a sense of pride in Dominican musical culture.
All local traditions are passed on orally and learned through observation. Characteristically, instrumentalists are male, but lead singers (chantwe`l) are mainly female. In 1987, most performers of local traditions were fifty years old and over, or below thirty-five (Phillip 1987:10)evidence of renewed interest in local arts.
Most local genres include dancing, singing, and playing musical instruments. Lyrics are usually in French Creole, except in the northeast, where they are exclusively in English. All regions emphasize participation through responsorial singing, rhythmic clapping, and the frequent exchange of words between performers and audiences. Improvisationin lyrics, dancing, and rhythmic accompanimentis valued and encouraged.
A singer's talent is evaluated by her ability to respond on the spot to any incident and to stimulate the participation of audiences. Players' and dancers' virtuosity is established less by the quantity of new material they introduce than by the impact they achieve. They typically get maximal aesthetic effects by an unexpected breaking away from a steady melodic or rhythmic pattern or dance movement.
Percussion dominates musical ensembles, whether European-or African-influenced, and in both traditions, syncopated rhythmic patterns are prized.
Principal musical genres
Dominican musical genres include song-dances (beŽleŽ), the quadrille, work songs, storytelling songs, children's musical games, masquerade songs (chanteŽ mas), and late-twentieth-century developments such as calypso, chorales, and cadence-lypso. Few local musical traditions, however, serve a single purpose.
These were usually performed for amusement on full-moon evenings after work but were also performed at wakes (lave`yeŽ). Though these traditions have nearly disappeared, beŽleŽ are still performed on major holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, Jounen KweŽyo`l (International Creole Day), and annual parish festivals (held on the anniversary of patron saints). Associated with the lower classes, beŽleŽ play an important part in Fe`t St.-Pierre (fisherman's feast) and the workers' holiday, Fe`t St.-Isidore.
Traditionally performed outdoors, these song-dancesincluding the beŽleŽ soteŽ, the beŽleŽ djouba, the beŽleŽ prio`riteŽ, the beŽleŽ rickety, the beŽleŽ pitjeŽ, and the beŽleŽ contredanseare said to have their roots in rites of mating and fertility (Honychurch 1988:63). All beŽleŽ are accompanied by a drum of the same name (tanbou beŽleŽ, a small, single-headed drum barrel about 75 centimeters tall and 30 in diameter, covered at one end by a goatskin stretched by fiber cord and tightened with wooden pegs, and played barehanded by one or occasionally two players), a triangle (tingting), and maracas (chakchak). The generic term for "drum" in Dominica is lapo kabwit 'goatskin'.
The song leader starts, followed by the chorus (lavwa). After a few lines, the drummer enters with a steady rhythmic pattern, and the dance begins. The male
This is a dance formerly performed by four couples from the same social networkfamily and friends in private homes, at subscription dances, or at daylong subscription picnics. These practices have been abandoned, replaced by public performances on patron saints' anniversaries and national holidays.
The quadrille usually has four compulsory figures: pastouwe`l, lapoul, leŽteŽ, and latrinitez. The last of these, simply called quadrille, comes from Petite Savanne (Phillip 1986), but other regions have variantssharp, slow, caristo (also aristo), French, Irish, and Polish. These names differ from community to community, though the versions of the dance may be almost identical. Lancers is another quadrille performed in Dominica, but because its traits are distinctive, it is never confused with the others (Wason 1987:47).
After dancing in a square without joining hands, dancers perform a variable number of closed-couple dances: the merengue (mereng), the Viennese waltz (vals o vyenn), the mazouk (a local form of the mazurka, in many versions), the schottische (sotis), the beguine (bidjin), and pure polka (polka pil).
Musical accompaniment is provided by four instruments (
This musical ensemble also accompanies the circle dances called flirtations
Usually accompanied by the drum tambou twavay, work songs were sung by workers to make their task easier, whether maintaining roads, gathering fruit, sawing wood, moving a house, or drawing a fishing boat or fishing net onto the shore. These songs, most of which have disappeared with the use of new technology, were usually short and repetitious, the words and rhythm directly bearing on the work at hand. The tambou twavay is a short barrel covered at one end by a goatskin stretched by a circular frame and tightened with cords; a cord with a bead in the middle is attached across the skin to add a buzzing quality to the instrument, which is played with bare hands.
The following is a typical example of a formerly popular wood-sawing song. The leader sings the first line, and the chorus responds with the second (Marie 1977:11).
Papisson ka siyeŽ bwa-la. | Papisson cuts the wood. |
SiyeŽ, siyeŽ bwa-la. | Cut, cut the wood. |
Storytelling (kont) was performed for entertainment on religious feasts and moonlit nights, and during funeral wakes. Today, storytellers are most often heard during National Independence competitions. Kont deal with historical facts or local legends and usually conclude with a moralistic message. Most include a short, fixed theme song of no more than one line that recurs throughout the tale, usually in the form of a duet between characters (Caudeiron 1988:52).
Children's musical games, once sung mostly in French Creole, were influenced by French settlers' games. After more than a century of British rule, songs accompanying children's ring games are of English and Scotch-Irish origin, with texts almost entirely in English (see Okada 1995: examples 8 and 9). Nevertheless, they differ from their models in having circle dancing, clapping, and thigh-slapping movements (Stubbs 1972:6).
Masquerade songs (chanteŽ mas) consisted of responsorial songs enjoyed by carnival revelers before the calypso era. During two days of masquerading in the streets, each lead singer danced backward in front of her drummer, playing a tanbou leŽleŽ. The songs sung at masquerades, since they exposed personal shortcomings and commented on events that had taken place during the past year, were loved and feared. Important personages, afraid of scandals, attended rehearsals to pay money to ensure the lead singer's silence. The tanbou leŽleŽ is a small wooden cylinder drum covered at one end with a goatskin and held by a strap passed around the shoulder; it is played with two sticks.
In the early 1960s, calypso was integrated into the Dominican carnival, taking its place alongside masquerade songs. With a fire at carnival in 1963 and the subsequent banning of traditional carnival, calypso and steelband overtook the older genres (Rabess 1989:7). Whereas calypso's rhythmic patterns and instrumentation stood in sharp contrast to the former carnival music, its lyrics continued the social-commentary tradition of masquerade songs. Its success was immediate. The local production of calypsos quickly became, and continues to be, the most important source of musical creativity in the island.
During the same period, choralessuch as SifleŽ Montan?y, Dominica Folk
The following year, Dominica saw the emergence of a new musical form, cadence-lypso, created by the group Exile One and developed by other local bands and musicians. Cadence-lypso is a fusion of Trinidadian calypso and Haitian cadence-ram-pa (a genre also popular in Guadeloupe). In the 1970s, cadence-lypso, sung mainly in French Creole, dominated the annual fetes, local dances, parish festivals, village feasts, and local airwaves. Its popularity went beyond the confines of the eastern Caribbeanto include Nicaragua, France, French and Portuguese West African countries, and the Cape Verde islands, where a group developed a carbon copy of Exile One and its music.
Though the early 1980s saw a decline of Dominican bands and a loss of popularity for cadence-lypso, the genre left its mark on the Dominican people: it gave Dominica a musical identity, as did reggae in Jamaica and calypso in Trinidad (Rabess 1989:9).
Like other small Caribbean islands, contemporary Dominica is striving to counterbalance with local creations the invasion of foreign cultural products via satellite. The governmental radio station, Dominica Broadcasting Station (DBS), has assumed the mandate to encourage local talent by including in its weekly broadcasting a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of local music (out of 60 percent Caribbean music), versus 40 percent North American music.
Educational activities and festivals organized throughout the year carnival season, the Blue Notes Jazz Festival (launched in 1989), Dominica Art Festival, Traditional Arts Festival, National Independence Competitions, Jounen KweŽyo`l have played important roles in promoting Dominica's national identity and demonstrating its cultural dynamism.
The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, but the two countries are culturally and musically quite different. When Spain discovered the high cultures and treasures of Mexico (1519) and Peru (1532), it left Hispaniola to languish as a colonial backwater. This policy allowed France to gain a foothold in the island, leading to the 1697 treaty that ceded to France the western third of Hispaniola, called Saint-Domingue as a translation of Santo Domingo, the name of the Spanish colony, which became the Dominican Republic on achieving independence (1844). France commenced to develop Saint-Domingue as the jewel in its colonial crown. By about 1530, with the island's exploitable gold exhausted and the indigenous population drastically reduced, the basis of the accrual of wealth shifted to agriculture, primarily sugarcane cultivation, carried out by African slaves. The millions of Africans brought by the French into Saint-Domingue and their ethnic origins led to the development of a society more densely populated than and culturally different from neighboring Santo Domingo.
The racial and cultural contrast between these neighbors lies at the core of Dominican national cultural policy. In 1804, St. Domingue, through slave revolution, became the second free country in the Americas (the first being the United States), taking on the Taino name of Haišti and defining itself as a black republic. The Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo (1822-1844) is used by the twentieth-century Dominican elite as justification for the official affirmation of hispanidad (Hispanic racial and cultural purity) and the repulsion of all that is black, African, or Haitian. This policy, promoted by dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1930-1961), has continued under successive governments.
Despite this policy, most members of the intellectual elite would find Spanish and African-derived extremes of Dominican nonliterate music to sound so foreign as to seem "un-Dominican." This is because of the marked gulf in Latin America between rural and urban and between literate and nonliterate cultures. All modern countries, including the Dominican Republic, are culturally heterogeneous with
Since the 1970s, nonelite urban youths have opposed hispanidad through their ethnographic search for and artistic expression of an Afro-Dominican identity, at home and in New York (Davis 1994b). At the same time, erudite scholarship, filling a niche in the post-Trujillo era, has documented Afro-Dominican history. Eventually, Dominican scholars, musicians, and the public will probably arrive at a realistic view of Dominican culture as essentially a Creole composite, born in the New World of the fusion and evolution of multiple cultural components.
As elsewhere in the Americas and the world, three principal sources help piece together Dominican musical history: archaeology, the written record, and ethnography (using the living tradition as a key to an unwritten past). The Taino were a sub-group of the Arawak, one of the four huge language families of tropical South America. Seafaring Arawak from the Amazon and the Orinoco populated the Antilles one by one, arriving at Hispaniola (which they called Quisqueya) more than four thousand years ago. When Europeans arrived, the Taino of Borinquen (Puerto Rico) and Quisqueya were being conquered by the bellicose Caribs, another of the four main tropical South American language families.
Taino musical culture is represented by little material evidence, since much of it was vocal. Las Casas (1958) describes the singing of large groups of Taino women when they gathered to grate manioc for toasted cassava cakes (casabe). They had neither skin-covered drums nor stringed instruments. Flutes made of clay, bone, and perhaps cane were described, yet few specimens survive. The most important instrument was a hollow log idiophone (mayohuacaŽn), struck for the areito (also areyto), a ritual in which dancers played maracas and may have worn rattles tied to their ankles. The Taino used conch trumpets (fotutos) for signaling, as they are still used in some rural areas to announce meat for sale, danger, or death.
The areito was the main musical event of Quisqueya, Cuba, and Borinquen. Despite variations based on region and social occasion, it was a large-scale sung dance ritual that could last for hours or days, with a vocal or dance leader and a chorus or dance group of as many as three hundred men or women or both, accompanied by a struck log idiophone. It could be performed for various occasions: to make a petition (as for the fertility of a crop or protection from hurricanes), to render homage (as in Princess Anacaona's areito for the governor of Hispaniola, with her three hundred maidservants as dancers), to celebrate an important marriage or a victory in war, to solemnize a funerary memorial, or to foster recreation. The text of the areito conserved, reiterated, and commemorated the past and the ancestors and their deeds, sometimes mentioning how each had died. There were also lighthearted, seemingly
The vocal chorus and dancers were positioned in a linear, circular, or arch formation, maintaining close contact with one another by holding hands or linking arms. The soloist and chorus moved forward and backward in rhythm with impeccable precision, the dancers playing maracas and perhaps wearing ankle-tied rattles. The leader (tequina), a man or a woman (and probably a shaman), sang responsorially with the chorus, who repeated the leader's every line, but at a lower or higher pitch, while the leader kept dancing in silence. A soloist could be replaced but no break would occur until the narrative song was finished; this could take three or four hours, or even from one day to the next. The tune and movements could alter when a new soloist took over, but the narrative had to continue; yet the tune for a new sung story could be the same as the former one.
Spain itself was not monolithic at the time of the conquest of the New World; its culture represented the fusion of Sephardic Jewish, Arab, and Celtic-Iberian elements. An impetus toward the New World was the Reconquest, with the final and definitive expulsion of Jews and Arabs from Spain in 1492, only about a month before Columbus began his first voyage. One destination of their flight was the New World. Evidence of Jewish and Arab influence in Hispaniola appears in architecture, dialect, and the oldest musical styles and genres. Other early Spanish immigrants were mainly peasants from Extremadura and AndaluciŽa. In the late 1600s, an important wave of immigrants arrived from the Canary Islands.
Like much Taino music, the first music that Europeans brought to Hispaniola was vocal. On the first voyage, when land was at last sighted, Columbus wrote that his sailors fell to their knees and sang a musical setting of the Salve Regina, a Marian antiphon antedating the eleventh century:
The Dominican Salve Regina (Davis 1981b), the sung rosary and other pious prayers, music, iconography, and ritual procedures were introduced by the clergy and thenDios te salve, Reina y Madre de Misericordia;
Vida, dulzura y esperanza nuestra, Dios te salve.
A ti llamamos los desterrados hijos de Eva;
A ti suspiramos, gimiendo y llorando en este valle de laŽgrimas.
Ea, pues, Sen~ora, abogada nuestra; vuelve a nosotros esos tus ojos misericordiosos;
Y despueŽs de este destierro, mueŽstranos a JesuŽs, Fruto Bendito detuvientre.
ĄOh clemente! ĄOh piadosa! ĄOh dulce Virgen MariŽa!
Ruega por nosotros, Santa Madre de Dios,
Para que seamos dignos de alcanzar las promesas de Nuestro Sen~or Jesucristo. Amen.
Hail, Queen, mother of pity:
Life, sweetness, and our hope, hail.
To you we cry, Eve's exiled children.
To you we sigh, groaning and weeping in this vale of tears.
So ah! our Advocate, turn toward us your pitying eyes.
And after this exile, show us Jesus, blessed fruit of your womb.
O gentle, O devout, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Pray for us, holy Mother of God,
That we may be made worthy of Christ's promises. Amen.
The Dominican salve is the musical cornerstone of the saint's festival (velacioŽn, noche de vela, velorio de santo; vela is Spanish for 'candle'), the most frequent and ubiquitous event of Dominican folk Christianity (
Other Dominican traditional musical genres of Hispanic heritage are also vocal, unaccompanied, unmetered, melismatic, and antiphonal. Sung high in male and female registers with tense vocal production, they are often in the minor mode or with a neutral third but are unornamented. The genres include other types of ritual song of folk Christianity for saints' or death ceremonies the (partially) sung rosary, altar and procession songs other than salves (generically called versos), songs for children's wakes (baquineŽ), such as the almost extinct mediatuna of Cibao, the northern region; romances or Spanish ballads (Garrido Boggs 1946); children's songs and games (Garrido Boggs 1980 [1955]); antiphonal, unmetered work songs (plenas, not to be confused with Puerto Rican plenas); and various improvisatory sung conversations or debates (desafiŽos 'challenges'), performed within the context of agricultural labor (such as the chuin of BaniŽ) for social commentary, expression of devotion, or courtship in a festive context, even at the periphery of a wake (such as the deŽcima), or as ritual (such as the tonadas de toros of the east).
The improvisatory sung conversation or debate (desafiŽo), a Mediterranean phenomenon, is a mode of male expression, but in courtship, a woman may use it wittily to evade or metaphorically to accept a man's advances. On the whole, in the Dominican repertoire, improvisatory verbal dexterity in song and the poetic genre of the deŽcima are not nearly so important as elsewhere in the Hispanic Caribbean, though their social function is the same. The Dominican deŽcima is usually spoken, rather than sung, and when sung is never instrumentally accompanied.
Instrumental music of Spanish influence formerly accompanied largely creole social-dance genres with Spanish-derived stringed instruments: the now extinct treble guitar (tiple); the cuatro with four double courses of strings (not to be confused with Puerto Rican and Venezuelan cuatros); the tres, traditionally triangular or guitar-shaped, now only the latter, with six strings in three double courses, tuned E-G-C with the G strings of different thicknesses (Coopersmith 1976 [1949]) (
The native American population of Hispaniolaat least a million personswas so rapidly reduced by warfare, disease, and suicide that its replacement by an African workforce began as early as 1502. The first Africans (ladinos) were Spanish-speaking Christians from Spain, present there in servitude for a century before 1492. They were soon joined in Hispaniola by bozales, direct imports from the African continent, starting with Wolof (golofes) from the Senegambian region. Later shipments embarked from increasingly southerly points on the West African coast until they were coming from the Congo-Angolan region. In 1822, the Haitian occupation ended the local slave trade. Before the 1540s, notable contact occurred between Tainos and Africans in their flight from bondage. In contemporary rural society, Afro-Dominican enclaves are important conservators of Taino material culture.
The black population of the Dominican Republic was enriched in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by three immigrations: in 1824-1825, when the whole island was the Republic of Haiti, six thousand Afro-North-American freemen arrived as part of the same initiative that founded Liberia (Davis 1980b, 1980c, 1981a, 1983); in the late 1800s, laborers, stevedores, teachers, and pastors were attracted from the anglophone Lesser Antilles to the booming sugar industry in the Dominican southeast around San Pedro de MacoriŽs (where they are pejoratively called cocolos); in the mid-twentieth century, the sugarcane business in many areas required the seasonal importation of thousands of Haitian seasonal workers (braceros) under conditions described as neoslavery. Many, estimated up to a million, have stayed and sometimes have intermarried, their children becoming bicultural Dominicans. These components of the population have contributed to the fabric of contemporary national culture, especially nonliterate musical culture.
Genres
Dominican genres of notably African heritage (Davis 1980a) include metered, responsorial work songs (plenas), such as wood-chopping songs (plenas de hacha); stories about animals, with their characteristic little sung responses (Andrade 1930, 1976); the semi-sacred music of longdrums (palos, atabales) associated with Afro-Dominican brotherhoods (Davis 1976) and used in saints' festivals and sometimes voduŽ ceremonies (Davis 1987a) (
Musical contexts
Musical societies, events, and activities of African influence represent a New World continuity of elements of African political or religious societies, a pan-African polytheism, the attribution of causes and cures of disease and luck to divine forces, the
African polytheism, which syncretized with the polytheism of the Roman Catholic Church, is represented in the configuration of saints served by folk-religious ritual activities, mainly saints' festivals, processions, and pilgrimages. Devotion to
These rituals are related to folk medicine, for they can be undertaken in payment of a vow (promesa) after divine healing. If the mortal does not fulfill the vow of undertaking a devotional act promised, the saint may claim his or her due by sending illness or death. Divine healing and counseling may be sought through consultation with a medium (servidor or servidora de misterios), then publicly celebrated; the initiation of new mediums and patron saints' days of the spiritualist center ("altar") and the medium (its "owner") are also celebrated (with longdrums or nonliturgical salves). The gagaŽ societies, allied with Haitian Vodoun and protected by its magic, use the gagaŽ drum and aerophone ensemble to express death-and-resurrection and celebration-of-life fertility motifs of the Lenten and Easter season (
Instruments and ensembles
Musical instruments and ensembles of the Dominican Republic include various idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, and aerophones.
A metal scraper (gušira or guayo 'grater',
A recently introduced, definite-pitched, plucked idiophone is the marimba (also mariŽmbola), a lamellaphone derived from the African mbira but much larger and with fewer metal tongues. The player sits on its plywood box. It was probably imported in the 1930s with the popular sexteto of the Cuban son and was adopted by the folk-merengue ensemble (
Except in central Cibao, large membranophones include longdrums (palos, atabales), hand played throughout the country (
Regional variants of longdrum ensembles occur throughout the country except in central Cibao. In the east, two drums have wide, pegged heads and up to three metal scrapers (guširas), or one drum plus a pair of maracas in the transitional Monte Plata area, single maracas in the enclave of Los Morenos (
Two longdrum special enclaves exist. The Afro-Dominican enclave, the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit (CofradiŽa del EspiŽritu Santo) in Villa Mella has two drums (congos), one a third the size of the other (with dual goatskin laced heads), one pair of canoiŽta and many single maracas as idiophones. The brotherhood's activities entail mainly death rituals: the ninth and final novena (rezo 'prayer') and the anniversary of death (banco, probably a Bantu term, meaning unknown). The Afro-Dominican enclave, the Brotherhood of St. John the Baptist from west of BaniŽ (Province of Peravia), now also in town, has three squat drums of dual goatskin-tacked heads; tambores, held between the knees for dance accompaniment or under the arm for procession; one gušira; dance and music generically called sarandunga; dance rhythms are sarandunga (pieces include capitana for the dead and many others), jacana, and bomba-e, A procession genre is morano, in which drums accompany fixed solo and response quatrains. This brotherhood's rituals entail mainly daytime vows sponsored by devotees.
Smaller membranophones include various squat drums, varying in length from some 25 to 75 centimeters and in diameter from some 23 to 38 centimeters, used as the key instruments in social-dance ensembles; the tambora of the northern folk merengue, the horizontal, heel-damped tacked head (balsieŽ) of the pripriŽ ensemble of the east and central south (the Caribbean juba drum); the vertical balsieŽ (same name, different instrument, with a laced head); and the large, laced frame drum (pandero) of the pripriŽ (same name, different ensemble) of the southwest. The nonliturgical salve ensembles of the central south and east use smaller membranophones: the cylindrical mongoŽ or bongoŽ, played singly with a polyphonic ensemble of round frame drums; panderos (with tacked heads, some 23 to 25 centimeters in diameter and 4 centimeters high), similar to the tambourine but with few and irrelevant jingles, representing syncretism between Spanish (Arab heritage) and African instruments.
Descendants of British immigrants in San Pedro de MacoriŽs favor the ensemble of mummers (momiŽs, guloyas), consisting of a fife, a bass drum, and a triangle (
A Central African-derived chordophone, the earthbow (gayumba, called tambour maringouin in Haiti, though it is almost extinct in the island) resembles the American gutbucket, but its resonating chamber is a palm-bark-covered hole in the ground. It plays any kind of music at festive, social occasions.
The conch trumpet (fotuto), used for signaling, represents syncretism between a Taino and an African instrument. Aerophones are also used in the following Haitian-Dominican membranophone and aerophone-idiophone ensemble of the gagaŽ society: petroŽ cult drums and an assortment of single-pitched bamboo trumpets (vaccines in Haiti, bambuŽes or fotutos in the Dominican Republic), whose players beat little sticks on their bamboo tube as they play; plus other metal aerophones (
Today's Dominican culture is best characterized as creole, the product of a process of adaptation and creative evolution that began in the earliest days of the colony. In recent decades, the evolutionary trend within the creole hybrid has been away from the Spanish heritage and toward greater African influence, marked by the gradual loss
The saint's festival
In the religious context of the saint's festival, certain musical genres, as part of the ritual, have been slow to change. These genres include the sung rosary, the liturgical salve, and sacred drumming. This festival is thus a living museum of the most archaic practices of Spanish and African origin. It shows that "traditional" musical culture and its performers may be bimusicala common Caribbean occurrence (Davis 1987b, 1994a).
Musical activities in the saint's festival have specific spatial and temporal placement, and they often have gender associations. The rosary and the salves are performed at the altar, the sacred European site (erected for the festival against one wall of the folk chapel or of the sponsor's living room), the domain of women's responsibility and authority. Men may participate, but the salve is essentially a women's genre. Drumming (palos), a male activity, and the drum dance are situated in the center of the room around a center post (the sacred African site), temporally interrupted with salves (in the southwest), or outside in a covered patio, with the drums being hauled toward the altar for three sacred pieces after each rosary (in the east). If the festival of the east is a nightlong stop along a pilgrimage route, a separate room with a freestanding table is prepared for sung conversation (tonadas de toros 'bull songs') among members of a pilgrimage-associated brotherhood, who take donated alms and bull calves to Higušey, Bayaguana, and three other pilgrimage sites. If, as seldom happens, the sponsor is a voduŽ medium, spirit possession by deities will occur, and while palos or salves are being played in public, spiritual consultations may take place in an adjacent private room.
Depending on the region of the country, social dance music may be interspersed with drumming, played in a separate site on the festival grounds or played in the morning after the fulfillment of the vow. Rural social-dance genres practiced through the mid-twentieth century included variants of the Spanish zapateado called zapateo (sarambo in Cibao, guarapo in El Seybo) or derivatives of the English country dance (the tumba dominicana, displaced about 1850 by the merengue: the carabineŽ of the south; and the Haitian-derived bambulaŽ in SamanaŽ). In contemporary rural society, social dance includes the merengue from Cibao, the perico ripiao; the merengue redondo of the east (called pripriŽ in the central-south,
The salve
In today's salve, musical elements of different historical origins coexist and have become merged. In the central-south and eastern regions, the salve has evolved into two coexisting subgenres: the Hispanic, sacred, liturgical Virgin's Salve (Salve de la Virgen) and a less sacred salve with added text (salve con versos). The latter exhibits an appended text and a different, African-influenced musical style: metered and rhythmic, instrumentally accompanied, and responsorial, with a relaxed, mid-register vocal production. Its versos entail a secular response inserted between sacred phrases plus
The
Social-dance music, represented today by the folk merengue (merengue tiŽpico or perico ripiao) as a musical symbol of national identity, epitomizes the creolism of Dominican culture. The melodic instrument, formerly strings of the guitar family (
Since the rise of cities and of literacy, a dialectical relationship of musical exchange bridges rural and urban traditions, as it does literate and nonliterate ones. Cities and towns have literate and nonliterate musical genres, the latter shared among virtually all social classes.
Dominican cities vary in their treatment of literate music. The larger cities and regional capitals have a sizeable educated elite and institutions that support fine-arts education and practice. The most musically active and prolific cities in the country are Santiago and Puerto Plata, and secondarily the capital (Santo Domingo) and San Pedro de MacoriŽs. Smaller and newer towns, especially around sugarcane mills, are largely conglomerations of peasants-turned-proletarians. Since 1965, large numbers of peasants have left the countryside, so the rural-urban dichotomy is now also found in the cities.
Educational institutions
Education, including musical education, is nationally centralized, administered from the capital. The Ministry of Education, Fine Arts, and Religion is housed in a neoclassical complex built in 1956. The Ten-Year Plan for Education, announced in 1992 by presidential degree and in 1996 awarded a loan of $100 million loan from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, does not mention music education in its four-volume initial document (Congreso Nacional de EducacioŽn 1992) but refers to national culture, art, and folklore. Teacher training in music is still poor: only one music-appreciation class occurs in the teacher-training program at the public university. Public-school teachers, especially of elementary classes, have poor and declining skills and are poorly paid; their classrooms lack audiovisual facilities, materials, instruments, and often electricity.
The National Conservatory of Music was founded in the capital in 1942. Each regional capital has a conservatory that serves elite and middle-class men and women. Young men of the middle and lower classes learn theory and band instruments in public academies of music located in practically every one of the provincial capitals by the 1920s ("MuŽsica" 1978:5:77); these academies are in decline because of underfunding. Their purpose is to train musicians for municipal bands. They were supported by Trujillo, whom they honored with military marches on his visits. There are private academies too. Literacy in music provides income and social mobility for musicians of municipal and military bands, as does military service. During the colonial occupation, the military band represented an arm of military conquest and occupation. Since 1844, the municipal and military bands (most notably of Santiago, Puerto Plata, and the capital) have served as training grounds and laboratories for the great conductors and composers of art music and popular song and dance.
Municipal bands also serve public education by providing public access to music. In their regular Thursday and Sunday evening public concerts (retretas) in the bandstand (glorieta) of the public square (parque)a custom now almost extinctthe band opens the program with the national anthem, then plays musical arrangements, especially of operatic overtures, and then dance music, traditionally ending with a merengue and a reprise of the national anthem.
Contexts for performance
Performances in the capital occur in the theater at the Palace of Fine Arts (built in 1956) and the amphitheater Agua y Luz of the Feria de la Paz government-building complex (1956), the National Theater (1973), neighborhood-club-administered indoor stadiums (including the Mauricio BaŽez Stadium in the barrio of San Carlos), the national outdoor Quisqueya Stadium (seating about thirty thousand), public basketball courts (including the Sports Palace), the private Casa de Teatro (1974) for counterculture arts, numerous nightclubs, elite social clubs, and public neighborhood cultural-sports clubs. In the southeast near La Romana, the tourist complex Altos de ChavoŽn has a large amphitheater for commercial shows for people mainly from the capital. Venues in Santiago include the ColoŽn Theater, the Centro de la Cultura (about 1982, currently semiprivatized and being expanded into a four-unit Plaza de la Cultura), the Gran Teatro Regional del Cibao (1995, seating eighteen hundred), the Amphitheater of the Pontificia Universidad CatoŽlica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM, seating fewer than a thousand), the Cibao Stadium (seating about twenty-five thousand), public basketball courts, and a weekly pen~a (a nocturnal musical gathering in a southern Spanish context, associated with the counterculture in modern Latin America) at the Casa del Arte (in a patio behind the "Alianza Francesa," the French language institute), elite social clubs, and popular neighborhood clubs.
The elite socialize and dance in a town's exclusive social club (club, casino). A major event is the fiesta quincean~era, the coming-out party for fifteen-year-old girls.
The neighborhood social-cultural-sports club is a Caribbean urban phenomenon found in cities and towns, and perpetuated in the expatriate community of New York. The club may be the sponsor and organizational site for a carnival group (comparsa) or a sports team; it also serves as a site for dances, parties, and men's domino games. Clubs may have a unit of young people dedicated to research on local popular traditions, or a folk-dance ensemble (ballet folkloŽrico), often with the same members.
Taverns (bares), often open-air and with no restrictions of gender or age, are popular venues for dance parties. Whole families may enjoy a daylong, daytime Sunday event, called a pasadiŽa.
Protestants, who do not participate in Roman Catholic festivities, sing hymns (currently from hymnals from Puerto Rico, translations of U.S. hymns) and present entertainment programs in their churches, including dramatizations of biblical events and performances of choral poetry. Traditional English-speaking Protestants of Afro-U.S. and British descent, as in SamanaŽ, end church services with spirituals, called anthems. Seasonal events, such as church anniversaries, include band-accompanied processions; the dead are carried to the cemetery in a corteŽge with the band.
Public music
Public musical events include biweekly concerts of municipal bands and seasonal eventspatronal festivals, carnival (in some towns), and Christmas. Local patron saints may have little to do with actual devotion. Patronal feasts require masses and several days of dances played by bands from other towns. They are traditionally prefaced by the alborada, a Spanish-derived predawn procession of a local musical ensemble.
Christmas in rural and urban contexts is characterized by parrandas, door-to-door singing for money or liquor. Parrandas, not so developed in the Dominican Republic as in Puerto Rico, are more African, with drum-based rather than string-based ensembles. A similar door-to-door circuit is undertaken at Christmas by the momiŽs or guloyas of the "cocolo" enclave of San Pedro de MacoriŽs, accompanied by a fife, a bass drum, and a triangle, and in cane settlements (bateyes) by the Haitian-Dominican gagaŽ groups, with musical ensembles and baton-twirling routines of costumed mayores.
Throughout Roman Catholic America, carnival is another season for merriment, musical performance, and artistic creativity with masks, costumes, and musical motifs for parade groups. It is celebrated only in Santo Domingo, Santiago, La Vega, CotuiŽ, Monte Cristi, and Cabral, Barahona. Its date is associated not with the start of Lent, but with the political holidays of 27 February (independence from Haiti) and secondarily 16 August (independence from Spain) except in Cabral, where it is celebrated during the three days after Good Friday. The gagaŽ societies also celebrate a carnival these same days in cane communities, at least in those near Barahona. Dominican masking on a national scale emphasizes a bovine motif, perhaps representing a syncretism between horned creatures of two different origins: the Christian devil and the Central African ox.
Musical genres
Social dances, concert bands, and dance bands are major vehicles of musical exchange between localities, social classes, and traditions. Since 1844 at the latest, dance-band
At the same time, the orchestrated merengue continues to evolve. Since the 1920s, band instruments have been added to the traditional ensemble, starting with the alto saxophone, the most characteristic instrument of the ballroom merengue band after the tambora. During Trujillo's time, the orchestrated merengue was adapted for the ballroom. An initial "stroll" (paseo) was added to situate partners on the dance floor. After Trujillo's fall, arrangers added other band instruments to the merengue and made stylistic changes in it, including a marked acceleration. The contemporary merengue bandleader Johnny Ventura (b. about 1940) is credited with compositions and recordings intended for a broader, international audience. Currently, the modern orchestrated merengue is enjoying popularity throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the trendiest Latino dance rhythm (Alberti 1975; Austerlitz 1997), but within Dominican musical culture, the ballroom merengue coexists with its unchanging progenitor, the folkloric perico ripiao. The vitality of the merengue is due to its role as a symbol of national identity. The folk merengue represents a rural, traditional identity, and the orchestrated merengue represents an urban, modern one.
Merengues were composed for dance bands by composers seeking inspiration in rural, nonliterate genres for the creation of songs and dances of the literate tradition with piano or band accompaniment directed toward urban audiences. Leading composer-conductors of this century included Julio Alberto HernaŽndez (b. 1900) (HernaŽndez 1969) and Alberti (1906-1976). Several songs, including "Quisqueya" and danceable merengues such as Alberti s "Compadre Pedro Juan," have passed from the literate to the oral urban tradition, and are taken as collective musical symbols of national identity.
Another type of urban music is the sentimental song of trovadores, crooners of serenades and parties, who strum acoustic guitars and sing amorous courtship songs in settings where alcohol is consumed. Their songs are transmitted largely orally from person to person, and more recently through recordings and broadcasts. Their medium and function, and certain of their genres (especially the bolero and the vals), are shared with their counterparts in other Latin American cities and towns. Other genres are Hispanic Caribbean (such as the Cuban-influenced son) or specifically Dominican (such as the criolla, a lyrical song in 6/8 time, virtually unknown outside the country). The son tradition is maintained in Afro-Dominican sectors in the capital by the old Soneros de Borojols and ensembles of younger musicians in Villa Mella.
Two urban musical genres affirm national identity through the performance of folk-
Dominican protest songs share the pan-Latin American style of nueva cancioŽn or nueva trova. They are typically guitar-accompanied and as descendants of the deŽcima (the old trova) explicitly articulate its ideology. Members of Convite, the group founded about 1975 by Dagoberto Tejeda, were jailed. The lead singer, Luis DiŽas, probably the most authentic and creative of Dominican popular-music composers, was persecuted and now lives in New York. His compositions, based on his rural musical background and later observations, tap Hispanic and Afro-Dominican heritages, fused with the human-rights ideology of nueva cancioŽn. His compositions have nourished numerous commercial and new-song musicians, including the singer Sonia Silvestre (1994?). Others, mainly of urban origin, have fused Afro-Dominican traditions with new-song verbosity and ideology; they include, in Santo Domingo and New York City, groups led by Toni Vicioso, JoseŽ Duluc, Edis SaŽnchez, and William AlemaŽn.
Paralleling the role of yesteryear's bandsmen, the recording and broadcast media serve as conduits between urban and rural areas, and between international and national arenas. The first foreign recordings entered the Dominican Republic in 1913, and the first recordings done there were made by Victor in 1928. The first radio station, HIX, was founded in 1928, and its first live broadcast was by the great baritone Eduardo Brito (InchaŽustegui 1988). HIN, La Voz del Partido Dominicano (The Voice of the Dominican Party), started broadcasting in 1936. Trujillo's absolute dictatorship stunted the recording and broadcast industries, since he promoted or stymied musicians at will.
During the Trujillo Era, musical broadcasts favored pieces composed in honor of the dictator. Trujillo's fall (1961) allowed a flourishing of broadcast and publishing media. The event virtually coincided with the Cuban Revolution, when Cubans involved in the music industry fled Cuba; some went to the Dominican Republic. At present, there are more than a hundred radio stations in the country, some with local and others with virtually national range. About three, operated by the Roman Catholic Church, transmit educational programs.
The most popular station among the rural and marginal urban sectors is Radio Guarachita, which has almost national coverage and includes a recording enterprise. Its programming focuses largely on folk merengues and the Mexican bolero and ranchera, as beloved locally as if they were home-grown genres. Since the 1980s, the station has recorded and promoted a newly commercialized genre, bachata, a steel-stringed-guitar-accompanied whiny male lament (Pacini Hernandez 1995). Bachata, derived from the deŽcima tradition, has probably been in oral traditions for a century, but has only recently been marketed. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Juan Luis Guerra reinterpreted the perico ripiao and the bachata for marketing to the urban elite. All social sectors enjoy broadcasts of the romantic boleros of trovadores and the gentile
In the 1980s and 1990s, television, especially live variety shows, has played an important role in disseminating merengue. TV has promoted the showy, nightclub bolero (now called balada) of pan-Hispanic big businessa far cry from the romantic sincerity and acoustic accompaniment of the trovador. Currently, cable television, which brings international broadcasting to the capital, Santiago, and other cities, is a new dimension in broadcast media; it will undoubtedly have some impact on musical taste.
Further basic ethnographic research is needed on nonliterate rural musical traditions, with the publication of texts and particularly audio and visual recordings, with excellent annotation, preferably in English and Spanish, addressed to Dominicans (many of whom are unfamiliar with the panorama of their national musical culture) and non-Dominicans, and intelligible for the public and specialists.
Folkways published several recordings of various genres by Verna Gillis (1976a, 1976b, 1976c, 1978), but she did not have the ethnographic background to prepare in-depth notes; the one on Haitian raraŽ and Dominican gagaŽ has been republished with the notes revised by Gage Averill (1991). Republishing needs to be done for the other recordings. Morton Marks published a Folkways recording of a longdrum festival in San CristoŽbal Province (1983), and John Storm Roberts published recordings with reliable but short notes (recorded in early 1970s). The field collection of Dominican tales by Manuel J. Andrade (1930, 1976) has been crying for classification; this work should be followed with a restudy with audio recording. Ethnographic work should not merely emphasize the trendy Afro-Dominican traditions; it should include the Hispanic heritage, which represents the oldest folk-European continuities in the New World, including Hispanic or Creole dance genres that are virtually extinct. The field collections of Garrido Boggs (about 1947 and following) and J. M. Coopersmith (1944) in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress should be annotated, guided by Coopersmith's book and Garrido Boggs's publications, an unpublished manuscript (about 1953), and memory.
There is a need to take down oral histories of song-and-dance composers of the written and oral traditions, bandleaders, and trovadores, focusing on the history of popular musical culture through life history. Bernarda Jorge's book (1982) does not do this, missing an important source. The study of brass bands is also needed. This work would entail the collection and conservation of scores of compositions by local bandleaders; this could be the job of the National Archive of Music, but it has no operating budget. Scores and recordings of Dominican art-music compositions also need to be published and recorded.
History of Grenada
Historical Musical Genres of Grenada
Contemporary Grenada
History of Carriacou
Musical Contexts and Genres of Carriacou
Called Camerhogne by Carib settlers and renamed ConcepcioŽn Island by Columbus on his 1498 voyage, Grenada (named by the British for the ancient Iberian kingdom of Granada) is an independent country with two dependencies, Carriacou and Petit Martinique. Carriacou is the first in the chain of small islands that links Grenada and St. Vincent, called the Grenadines. The southernmost of the Windward Islands, Grenada and its dependencies lie northwest of Trinidad. Its population is about a hundred thousand; its main exports are cocoa, nutmeg, and bananas.
In 1650, over British objections, Grenada was claimed by France. Caribs, its aboriginal inhabitants, also objected, and armed conflicts arose over a French-Carib agreement. The events of 1652, a dramatic part of Grenada's history, include the French pursuit of Carib warriors to a cliff, where, rather than submitting, they jumped to their deaths. The cliff, Morne des Sauteurs (Leapers' Hill), and a northern village are named after the incident. After this conflict, most local Caribs were expelled or killed, but archaeological sites under excavation document their existence and the extent of their culture of pottery.
France ruled Grenada for more than a century, after which a period of colonial tug of war ensued. After the Seven Years' War (1763), Grenada was awarded to Britain, but in 1779, the island was restored to France. Britain reclaimed Grenada through the Treaty of Versailles (1783) and ruled until 1974, when Grenada became independent. Though France ruled in the distant past, Grenadian culture continues to reflect that past in minor linguistic retentions and other cultural traits.
A few enslaved West Africans were imported from the commencement of France's interest in Grenada, but soon Africans were shipped in great numbers to cultivate indigo and sugar. Beginning at the period of apprenticeship (1834) and after full emancipation (1838), Africans (liberated from slavers' ships), Portuguese, and East Indians served as indentured workers, filling the places of migrating ex-slaves. The system of indenture on Grenada continued to 1885.
A major part of the island's lore centers around historic battles fought over land, alliance, and politics. The modern Marxist struggle, which ended with the ousting of
Two ancient genres, belair and kalenda, were filled with metaphors similar to those above. Further parallels with the old forms are found in the musical structure, and more important, in the function. Like the belair and the kalenda, the modern calypso disseminates information, keeps history, bonds people, and molds behavior.
The nineteenth-century belair (bele) was a dance formed in two lines or in a circle. It was accompanied by two open-bottomed, goatskin-headed drums fashioned from tree trunks or barrels. The first drum, called tambou or ka (Hearn 1890:143), measured 90 to 120 centimeters tall and 38 to 41 centimeters wide; the second drum (baboula), of the same height, was 20 to 23 centimeters wide. The player of the larger drum beats "in time," while the player of the smaller drum beats "as fast as he can and hardly in time" (Bell 1893:32).
Because the colonists considered these dances, especially the kalenda, objectionable and related to rebellion, they banned their performance. In teaching more officially acceptable dances (such as the quadrille), they sought to replace the drum with fiddles. The Grenadian quadrille ensemble consists of a fiddle ("scraped with the utmost disregard to tune or time"), a tambourine, and a triangle (whose player used his foot and the floor to drum); dances came to be associated with class, and elegant-dress quadrille parties were hosted by upper-class blacks and "coloureds" (Bell 1893:36).
The belair, the kalenda, the quadrille, and African rituals from the era of slavery do not survive on Grenada; however, Yoruba ceremonies from a subsequent era are common. The local existence of Yoruba-Shango rituals is attributed to liberated Africans who entered the colony during the mid-1800s as indentured servants. Likewise, the popularity of other Africanesque religions, such as the Spiritual Baptists, grew out of the presence of African-born immigrants receptive to evangelism.
Rituals and religion
M. G. Smith's transcription (1963) of Norman Paul's autobiography, The Dark Puritan, outlines the dynamic between three Grenadian rituals in practice about 1900: the nation dance, Shango, and the Spiritual Baptist religion. After about 1850, the nation dance, the established ceremony of creoles born of enslaved Africans, was overtaken by the newly transplanted Yoruba-based ritual, Shango. At the establishment of the Baptist religion (formerly called Shouters on Grenada), a continuing cycle of syncretic exchange commenced; in it, items and practices were borrowed from and lent to the Shango religion.
A few of the oldest generation, active in Grenada's Shango religion, remember African-born foreparents and preserve a fragmented knowledge of Yoruba learned from them. Grenadian Shango, with specific differences in ritual form and without East Indian ritual contributions, resembles that of Trinidad. According to Pollak-Eltz (1970:823), many Grenadan deities (orisha) have Christian counterparts that include Shango (St. John the Baptist), Ogun (St. Michael), Osain (St. Mark), Shakpana or the healer Omolu (Christian counterpart uncertain), Emanya (St. Anne), Oshun (St. Mary), Oshossi (St. Paul), Obatala-Orisanla or Oshala (Jesus Christ, God), Olorun (God), Legbara (Satan), Beji or the Twins (Christian counterpart uncertain), and Egungun (Spirits, or so-called zombies).
Colonial music
Newspaper announcements report the activity and sophistication of musical life of Grenadian colonists. In 1790, an opera in three acts, The Magnifique, composed in 1773 by AndreŽ Ernest Modeste GreŽtry (1741-1813), was performed by the French and Italian Comedians. It portrayed a "procession of slaves with their redemption and delivery." A comic opera in three acts, Le Diable a Quatre 'The Double Metamorphosis', completed the bill. A month later, two operas by "Duny," probably Egidio Romualdo Duni (1709-1775), were staged (St. George's Chronicle & New Grenada Gazette 1790).
Advertisements testify to whites' musical activities in Grenada, as in 1827, with an announcement that J. T. Hitchcockorgan builder, piano tuner, music teacherhad become a resident. Shortly after his arrival, invitations for the subscription to a musical society for the purpose of engaging in chamber music (marches, waltzes, quadrilles, strathspeys, reels, overtures, rondos, voluntaries, sonatas, and airs) appeared (Grenada Free Press and Public Gazette 1829). This repertoire, especially the dance tunes, influenced all aspects and classes of Grenadian social life.
Carnival
The historic Grenadan carnival (mas) included Moko Jumbie 'Stiltdancer', Jab 'Devil' (outfitted with long nails, cattle horns, and a flowing chain), Shango (belair dancers), and Donkeyman (accompanied by a drum and a flute). Clowns and pierrots continued as carnival favorites for years; the most popular were Pierrots Grenades 'Grenadian Clowns', who recited soliloquies and historical narratives in mnemonic contests.
During the 1930s, the string orchestra (guitar, clarinet, triangle), the drum and the flute, or the tamboo-bamboo (bamboo cylinders of varying lengths, struck on the ground and together) were the major instrumental ensembles of carnival. In processions, female songsters marched with special privilege and without harassment (Redhead 1985:107). Each troupe of women, carrying a banner and wearing uniforms, sang a new repertoire, produced expressly for the occasion. The leader, who sang walking backward and facing her ensemble, used maracas (chac-chac); when her troupe responded with the chorus, she would turn to march forward. These women were sometimes accompanied by a cuatro (a four-stringed Venezuelan guitar).
Apparently, whips rather than weapon-sticks (bois, associated with carnival in Trinidad) were the predominant weapon of challenge and symbol of power. One may imagine that whips served as a metaphor of slavery. Social aggression in the guise of physical domination in the prewar carnival was later transmuted to aesthetic supremacy in musical competitions of calypso, pan (steelband), and competitions for king and queen.
Carnival has taken on a new season (early August), a new function (in the interest of tourism), and realistic means of support. Rather than individuals (as was the custom in the earlier form), industriesrestaurants, the Grenadian rum distillery, banksbear the financial burden. Bands dressed as "Arabs," "a restaurant menu," and "sea creatures" march between steelbands mounted on mobile carts of framed steel. The steelbands, pushed by human locomotion, play the winning piece of the pan competition, while engine-powered trucks loaded with high-tech sound equipment disseminate winning calypsos. Participants' costumes are elaborate (
In the calypso "Grenada," the Grenadian-Trinidadian Mighty Sparrow, whose style is the prototype of the Caribbean calypso, spoke from an unpopular perspective on the 1983 American invasion of Grenada. Linguistic prowess is essential to the performance
Sparrow describes the characters in the political action, giving them biblical personas: Maurice Bishop, the revolutionary Marxist (painted as a Christ figure), is thought to have been deceived by his closest allies; Bernard Coard, his assistant and Deputy Prime Minister, is cast as Judas, General Hudson Austin as Lucifer, and Coard's wife, Phyllis, as Jezebel.La manera que tengo mi corazoŽn [From my perspective]
żViva, viva la revolutioŽn! [Long live, long live the revolution!]
But if Cuba had arrested Coard and Austin,
America would not have an excuse to come in.
ĄLleŽvame a Grenada, lleŽvame! [Take me to Grenada, take me!]
Judas, Lucifer, and Jezebel mustn't get away.
In 1991, calypso themes seemed strangely apolitical and nonhistorical, probably reflecting intentional decisions. Because of the special weight and influence projected by song, calypsonians rejected the impulse to parody the life-or-death decision of the case in session: for the assassination of Maurice Bishop and members of his cabinet, local courts were trying, and ultimately sentencing to life imprisonment, five persons (including Bernard Coard).
Carriacou lies between Grenada and St. Vincent. It measures 4 kilometers by 12, and its population, mainly West-African-derived people, is about five thousand. Its name (spelled Karyouacou on early maps) is most likely of Carib origin. No Caribs remain, however, and neither East Indians nor liberated Africans were brought to it.
The mixed-race people of Windward Village and neighboring Petit Martinique Island descend from enslaved African women and Scottish shipbuilders or French settlers, who left their genetic print and knowledge of shipbuilding. Carriacou's physical tininess, historical isolation, and absentee proprietorship are among the factors that contributed to the perpetuation of traditional practices among its people.
France occupied Carriacou from 1650 to 1763, when Britain was granted ownership. Except for a four-year period (1779-1783) when it reverted to French domination, Britain had control from 1763 until 1974. Late-twentieth-century political struggles include a bloodless Marxist revolution in 1979, led by Maurice Bishop, and the U.S. invasion, after Bishop's murder, in 1983.
The current music and dance genres include the historic African-derived dance-ritual, the big drum, the quadrille, the parang, the passplay, game songs, music for stringed instruments, ballads, shanties, calypsos, cantiques, sankeys, and the vocal styles of the Spiritual Baptist Church. Each musical type is dominated by people of a single age or gender or is owned by a particular district with exclusive domain and function. Colonialism left marks on all musical types, including the big drum. European dances lost in Europe survive in Carriacou.
The big drum, traditionally associated with older people, is controlled principally by women. Middle-aged couples engage in the quadrille, and young men dominate the composition and performance of the parang, inspired by Venezuela. The passplay remains a play-song repertoire of children in the southern district of L?Esterre, and string ensemble music, ballads, and shanties are found mainly among mixed-race people in Windward Village. A few cantiques remain within the memory of the oldest generation as fragmented remnants of French hymnody, but sankeys, nineteenth-century North American evangelical hymns, form a beloved repertoire, nurtured and reworked by the people for Carriacouan wakes and services. A more recent foreign-church influence is found in the repertoires of the Spiritual Baptists, whose evangelism entered Carriacou via St. Vincent and Trinidad [see TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO].
Contemporary events are documented in Carriacou's modern calypsos, People's Revolutionary Army songs, and parang. These songs narrate recent news with the same spirit and intent as big-drum texts once broadcast in patois the great events of the past.
The big drum
Carriacou is known for its big-drum tradition, which not only perpetuates the practices of past societies but may have had a role in the formation of the present social structure, beliefs, and behavior. Established by enslaved African people, this event (also called the nation dance) celebrates ancestral spirits, family reorganization, and changes in social status. It teaches and reinforces knowledge, family lineage, and tradition. It continues to reinforce the current generation's memory of national origin and kinship.
Most likely conceived as a social-religious ceremony, the big drum functions as a family ritual that stimulates the rehearsal of genealogies through song and dance. In this way, the family sponsoring the dance fosters the revival of ancestral memories, not only of their own lineage and nation (African cultural and ethnic tradition), but among neighbors and acquaintances from distant villages.
A two-hundred-item repertoire extant in the 1950s divides into three categories: nation songs, creole songs (hallecord, beŽle` kaweŽ, gwa beŽle`, juba, old kalenda, old bongo), and frivolous songs (chattam, lora, cariso, chirrup, pikeŽ, man bongo, Trinidad kalenda, chiffoneŽ). The nation repertoire, the oldest and most instructive in matters of historical significance, was classified by the people in the nine discrete ethnic groups that represent the origins of the present population: Cromanti, Igbo, Manding, Chamba, Kongo, Arada, Temne, Moko, Banda (Pearse 1956:2).
The Cromanti nation, though principally Akan, was made up of various Gold Coast peoples shipped by the British from the formerly Dutch fort, Cormantine, who received their name from their port of departure. The Igbo, taken from the Bight of Biafra, retained their ethnic title, as did other national groups. The Manding were taken from Senegambia, the Chamba from the Bight of Benin, the Kongo from Kongo, the Arada from Dahomey, the Temne from Sierra Leone, and the Moko from the Bight of Biafra (McDaniel 1986). Because several West African Banda nations exist, there is a problem in pinpointing the origin of the Carriacou Banda. The Banda nation of Carriacou probably came from the Gold Coast interior.
Many nation songs from the era of slavery exhibit themes of supplicating and venerating ancestors. The creole songs, especially the women's beŽle` kaweŽ and gwa beŽle`, project competition and envy between women. The bongo of the creole songs are songs of loneliness and alienation, while the hallecord texts most often lament death. The frivolous songs, including satirical songs that speak of social conflict, control, and pleasure, were appropriated from Trinidad and other neighboring islands.
The big drum differs from most other African-based rituals in the New World in persisting as a plural, international type that resists absolute ritual integration. Besides the significance of the classification of the patois songs, data in the African words, places, and ancestral names appear occasionally in the texts that answer historical questions on affiliation, migration, and social structure of the enslaved people. The repertoire is therefore an archive of oral lore.
Donald C. Hill's analysis (1977) of Carriacou migration as a cultural expectation gives meaning to the historic practice of protracted travel for work. Since 1838, sugarcane workers traveled to Trinidad, Grenada, Barbados, Venezuela, Dominica, and Aruba; these names in big-drum texts evidence the people's movements. Hill's thesisthat Trinidad had the longer and greater economic input to Carriacouis disputed by some but supported by musical evidence. Lyrics mention cities in Trinidad many times, but Aruba (an equally popular magnet since the 1930s) only once. The more recent port of entry for Carriacouans, Aruba is not often coded in the big drum, for which textual composition ended in the 1920s.
The patrilineal code of descent, unusual in the British Caribbean (Smith 1962), is clearly mirrored in the hierarchic musical organization of the big drum, with a musical program that gives preference to agnatic ancestry in the choice of nation songs. The historical matrilineality of the Cromanti is in conflict with the system of patrilineality supported by the big drum, and for this reason Smith contends a non-African origin of the Carriacou system of lineage. For some groups (Cromanti and Kongo), matrilineality probably gave way to patrilineality without losing the essential concepts of Akan inheritance.
For the ritual concert, a standing crowd, including the troupe comprising five to twelve female singers and dancers, surrounds three male drummers. The troupe is
Dancers formerly wore flowing outer skirts (douiettes), modeled after nineteenth-century French colonial fashions. Each skirt was split in the front to expose a luxuriant white, starched petticoat made from bleached flourbags, with ribbon woven through an embroidered hem. Dancing barefoot, women integrated an African head-tie and dangling earrings with the colonial gown. Today, women wear a simplified and modified version of this costume. Male dancers do not wear elaborate costumes but use a towel in each hand as extensions of their arms.
Instruments
The full musical ensemblelead singer, chorus, three drums, maracas, old hoe (a metal idiophone, providing a timeline)accompanies the ritual libation, which summons ancestors to partake in the festivities. Only in the first of the three Cromanti songs that open the dance is the old hoe played. The names of the drums, boula and cutter (kata), imply a Congolese origin. Two boulas accompany each song with single, specific, reiterative beats that with the style of dancing distinguish the musical category. The cutter drummer, flanked by two boula players, improvises multimetric statements that sound above the vocal lead, the chorus, and the rhythm of the boulas.
Open-bottomed drums were formerly made from barrels in which rations (salted beef, salted fish) had been imported. Now, using the same techniques, builders take the materials for making drums from empty rum casks. They dismantle the barrel, plane the slats to 1.5 centimeters in depth, and reassemble the slats as a smaller barrel to serve as the body of the drum. A reed hoop wrapped in cloth secures a goatskin head that drummers tighten and tune by tapping the hoop.
The dimensions of drums vary, but the usual height of both types is about 52 centimeters, and the central circumferences are 113 (kata) and 104 (boula). The kata drum is often wider in head diameter than the boula. The boulas are tuned lower than cutter drums, and their positionheads tilted away from the drummers and the groundlengthens its body to lower the pitch further. The kata drum, sitting squarely on the ground, delivers the higher-pitched part, and the voice of its head, fixed with a snare (straight pins tied to a string), has a bright, distinctive quality. Though the curved-stick technique associated with Yoruba styles of drumming is prevalent in neighboring islands, a stickless, open-palmed style of performing continues on Carriacou to support demographic information offered by the local classification of songs.
The first song performed is appropriate to the family of the host, who leads a procession of his relatives into the dance ring. He pours jack-iron rum (the national drink, high-proof and powerful), his wife sprinkles water, and other participants scatter corn and rice. In the musical exposition of each piece, the lead singer intones the song, the chorus answers on the second statement, and the drummers enter in staggered succession. The boulas enter next, and finally the cutter responds. With the entire ensemble playing, the dancer enters the ring. As the performance progresses, the movement is cyclical, the texture is multilinear, and the style is improvisational.
With the loss of knowledgeable drummers, people who sponsor big-drum celebrations express concern over the survival of the nation rhythms and the indifference of the young to the ritual. Because of this concern and with the goal of perpetuating the idiom, a second troupe was formed, made up of young female students and working women. Though traditional performances were mounted in exchange for offerings of food and rum, these ensembles receive token payments from the hosts of the events at which they perform.
Parang
In contrast to the depth of the social organization of the big drum, men and boys sing parang (from Spanish parranda) without an obvious formal plan. At Christmastime, they form an ensemble of serenaders, visiting porches and yards for impromptu concerts, receiving gifts and rum in return. Their instruments, the dup (cardboard barrel used as bass drum), the biscuit tin, and the baha (a 1.5-meter-long cardboard tube aerophone), are disposable. With rough pieces of wood and string, boys imitate the guitar and the cuatro (a four-stringed small guitar of Venezuela), usually high-quality, handmade instruments, played by leaders. Some boys who follow older musicians become useful to them; others form their own ensemble.
New parang, composed during the year, outline the foibles of antisocial persons. At year's end, these satires are presented in open competition, to the delight of the informed public. Probably functioning in similar ways as the big drum, their texts aim at social control through the process of shaming.
Quadrille
The quadrille, a partner dance deriving from square dances of France and England of the eighteenth century, is still practiced by residents of L?Esterre. It has taken on extensive indigenous meaning and stylistic reinterpretation. One of its movements, the paisade (or huit), imitates, in name and structure, the in-and-out technique of weaving baskets, used in constructing the frame of wattle-and-daub homes. Buildings aptly called mud or African houses have vanished on Carriacou, but these movements keep the memory of the architecture alive.
Each suite has six musical figures. The first two are English tunes, Scottish jigs, or Irish reels. By an accretive process, the others have come to include selections of merengues, French steps (passe, castian, paseo), boleros, polkas, mazurkas, waltzes, traditional Caribbean tunes, modern composed tunes ("Whispering Hope"), and a single big-drum tune ("Congo Malabu").
Today, the quadrille is usually held to celebrate the opening of a new shop, as part of an islandwide festival, or as a private anniversary fe^te. Carriacouans perform the quadrille with violin, bass drum, large tambourine, and triangle (
Other genres
The lancers, an extinct dance, was popular in the central section of the island, where it was performed to an independent repertoire for violin, guitar, banjo and cuatro. Formerly, a quadrille and a lancers was a community affair, hosted by a single family. At the end of each event, a bouquet was tossed and caught to designate the next host for the dance.
"Dancing the cake" occurs at weddings, when solo dancers balance the bride's and groom's cakes with their hands over their heads. A white cake symbolizes the bride, and a taller, tiered, pink cake symbolizes the groom. Despite pelvic windings and gyrations, the dancers safeguard the cakes, assuring the ascendancy of the pink cake, which must alwaysin local notions of husband-wife relationshipsdominate the white cake.
"Fighting the flags," a second dance that occurs at weddings, represents conflict between the bride's and groom's families. Two fighters carry flags, with which they duel; the groom's flag must never be allowed to touch the ground, and after the mock-battle, it must wave, symbolic victory of male supremacy. The music that accompanies these dances is played by any combination of violins, guitars, and banjos.
Musical Contexts and Genres
Unity in Diversity
Since 1946, Guadeloupe has been a department of France, and its official language is French, though the most commonly spoken language is Creole (KweŽyo`l). Today, its population is about 375,000 persons. The colonization of Guadeloupe, which began in the 1600s, brought together African slaves and European planters and administrators. The 1800s saw the arrival of East Indians, who have played an important role in the local economy. Long ignored by the majority, East Indian musical traditions have recently been acknowledged as a constitutive part of the Guadeloupean heritage. They have yet to be documented.
Beginning with the period of colonization, musical practices in the island can be divided into two main groups: bamboulas, nocturnal sessions of African dancing by slaves, and soireŽes, in which masters and their friends performed European regional dances (Bertrand 1968:6). The division between these traditions and the social classes sustaining them did not remain static. The sugar-plantation system introduced the possibility of social mobility among slaves, allowing some to develop close cultural contacts with their masters, who tried to maintain racial and social segregation.
The effect of this situation was twofold: whereas segregation provided most slaves with the conditions necessary for a culture of their own, contact between masters and slaves fostered the emergence of a hybrid cultural system. In the context of segregation and a black majority, this system eventually came under the control of the slave population. As a result, European musical traditions were reinterpreted according to African cultural schemes (Lafontaine 1983:2134-2136).
In Guadeloupe, an observer can clearly tell African-derived musical traditions from European-derived traditions but can also locate shared features, easily establishing family resemblances among them. Yet, for generations, questions of what Guadeloupean music is, and what it is not, have been controversial. Since music is part of the power structure (Rosemain 1986:12) and historically served to control slaves, the definition of Guadeloupean music has always had great political significance for the local population. Appropriated by separatist parties and associated with
The problem remains: by which criteria does one distinguish between traditional and modern music, and between local and imported music? Everyone agrees that drumming is an essential element of Guadeloupean music. But how to evaluate the local quadrilleas a relic of a European tradition? or as a new reality, with a new local meaning? And the beguineas a variant of European ballroom dances? Instead of engaging in this debate (which would center more on political orientations than on musical practices), I will examine how musical traditions in Guadeloupe show unity in diversity. Since little research has been done in DeŽsirade and Les Saintes, my description concerns mainly Guadeloupe proper and Marie-Galante.
The
The terms leŽwo`z and gwoka commonly denote the same musical phenomenon: drumming. For practitioners, however, leŽwo`z is the name of a genre, and gwoka is the general name of the accompanying drums. The term leŽwo`z (la rose) itself includes two other realities: the evening during which this genre is performed and one of seven basic rhythms characteristic of the genre.
Originally the leŽwo`z was performed outdoors on plantations, just after the workers had received their wages. Since the 1970s, however, it has been adopted by Guadeloupean society at large, and leŽwo`z soireŽes (swareŽleŽwo`z) organically related to the work cycle have become rarities, replaced by informal meetings of musicians (kout tanbou 'drum strokes'). The performance of leŽwo`z was formerly associated with specific social functions and meanings that had traits in common with another local tradition, the balakadri.
The leŽwo`z consists of a series of songs and dances accompanied by gwoka drums (boula and makye`): the boula produces the lower sounds and steadily plays the basic rhythmic pattern, and the makye` produces a higher pitch and engages in a dialogue with a solo dancer by responding in sound to his or her movements. The performance of leŽwo`z used to require one boula and one makye`; later, it required two boulas and one makye`; today, it allows a variable number of boulas, but only one makyeŽ. The leŽwo`z often includes other percussive instruments, such as a large hollowed calabash (chacha) filled with seeds, and two little hardwood sticks (bwa) struck against the side of the drum (
The lead singer (chante`, vokal), usually male, invariably uses a responsorial form, accompanied by a chorus (reŽponde`). The leader, by starting a theme, chooses the basic rhythm. The boula begins to play this rhythm, which it maintains until the end of the piece. Only after the boula has been playing a while does the makye` enter.
Like most local traditional music, the songs of leŽwo`z are sung in French Creole.
Improvisation plays an essential role in performance. While singing familiar tunes, the leader most often composes lyrics on the spot. The makye` improvises because it reproduces the dancer's movements, which, though based on a series of defined steps, are mostly improvised.
A successful leŽwo`z requires the participation of an audience. To this end, a leader often invites the crowd to mark the beat by clapping (fwapeŽ lanmen). After two or three songs, to rest or dance a little, he may solicit another singer to perform a song (ladjeŽ on mo`so). By the same token, if someone in the audience feels inspired and wants to sing, he or she will ask to trade places with the main soloist. All these dialogues are integrated with the music and enliven the performance. Spontaneous exchanges also occur between or among the drummers. The dancing is done mostly by individuals from the audience.
The leŽwo`z as a musical genre is acknowledged to comprise seven basic rhythms: graj, kaladja, leŽwo`z, menndeŽ, padjanbe`l, toumblak, and wouleŽ. All these rhythms are binary, except that of the wouleŽ, which closely resembles that of the waltz (Lafontaine 1988:75). People in some parts of Guadeloupe believe the menndeŽ and the padjanbe`l are new rhythms, wrongly included in the leŽwo`z. Nevertheless, everyone agrees that the performance of a leŽwo`z ideally includes, in any order, the graj, the leŽwo`z, and the wouleŽ before the other rhythms can be added.
Music at wakes (ve`yeŽ boukousou) is traditionally performed inside and outside the deceased's house. The music outdoors, which reaches the greatest number of people, consists of songs accompanied by human instruments: the drum is replaced by throat sounds (bouladje`l 'mouth drum'). Music accompanied by throat sounds, clapping, and stamping is called waka in the region of Basse-Terre, and sonora in Grande-Terre (Gabali n.d.:45). Most melodies at wakes rely on a scale similar to that of gwoka music (Lafontaine 1988:76).
As in the leŽwo`z, a male lead singer usually controls performances during wakes. He begins songs and introduces responses, which the chorus sings in return. In contrast to the leŽwo`z, however, the exchange of singers takes the form of a competition, during which singers challenge and answer each other, frequently begging the audience for support. The element of play is fundamental to outdoor celebrations, which
The music performed indoors during wakes follows a different set of rules. The singers outdoors have come on their own, but the singers from indoors, most of whom are women, have been invited. They gather around the coffin, singing canticles for the dead (kantikamo`) throughout the night. Whether sung or psalmodized, the lyrics are traditionally performed responsorially and are also konmandeŽ, led by one person in the same way as songs of the leŽwo`z tradition (Rey-Hulman 1988:132). Songs performed outdoors support the mourners, but songs performed indoors invoke the spiritual world, dedicated to the dead.
Music at wakes is performed on the evening and night following the death, and during veŽneŽreŽs, the eleventh night after the death. This custom is observed only in certain communities in Marie-Galante.
Work songs and other genres
Work songs, especially common in Marie-Galante, include fishermen's songs, which marked the rhythm of paddling in canoes (Bertrand 1968:14), and farmers' songs (chants-charrue), sung to keep the draft animals moving (Rey-Hulman 1988:133). Most lyrics dealt with themes related to the land and current events. To perform these songs, at least two reŽponde` were required in addition to the leader, who walked in front of the others.
Stylized games of wrestling (soveŽyan, be`naden, mayole`), each with a unique repertoire and specific rhythms, traditionally involve two boula and one makye`, a leader, and a chorus (
Carnival music (mizik videŽ, mizik a mas) is cheerful, fast, intense. It includes mizik a mas a Sen Jan, mizik a mas VyeŽ Fo`, and mizik a mas a Kongo. In addition to their respective responsorial songs and typical rhythms, these musical genres have distinctive percussive instruments (the number varying according to the number of players available). The mizik a mas a Sen Jan is accompanied by several large, laced, single-headed, barrel-shaped drums (tanbou bas a yon fas) and small, high-pitched drums (tanbou chan), both played with sticks; the mizik a mas VyeŽ Fo`, by double-headed bass drums (tanbou bas a deŽ fas) played with sticks, a large tambourine (tanbou
Quadrille-music balls (
This music, deeply influenced by mid-nineteenth-century European traditions, is played by a set orchestra and includes not only the quadrille au commandement, which refers to the instructions (commandements) that guide the dancers, but also ballroom dances, such as the beguine (biguine), the mazurka, the waltz, and the tango.
Like leŽwo`z music, quadrille music can be played during an improvised session or a formal ball. Balakadri are held throughout the year, except during Lent. Unlike leŽwo`z, they are always held indoors and are organized by associations (called societies).
Quadrille orchestras (
The dance has four compulsory figures: pantalon, leŽteŽ, lapoul, and pastoure`l, with leŽteŽ as final repeat (Lafontaine 1988:77). These figures are performed by four couples arranged in a square. Though the performance of the compulsory figures follows a predetermined choreography, it allows room for individual improvisation. After the compulsory figures, the same dancers optionally perform couple dances. These include at least the beguine, to which two or three other dances (such as the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka) can be added.
The meter of the compulsory figures is binary except for the third figure, played in 6/8 time. Highly syncopated, the melodies (played on an accordion or a violin) use the Western tempered scale. New compositions are constantly added to the standard repertoire.
Many believe that, because almost every member of the younger generation stays away from quadrille-music balls, this music is disappearing. In fact, it has always been a music for people over forty. When younger people did attend a ball, they
Quadrille au commandement is a prime example of the reinterpretation of European traditions, but the beguine stands out as the only ballroom music to have originated in the island. Until the debate brought up by nationalist movements in the late 1970swhich questioned whether the quadrille and the beguine, because of their European influence, should be considered Guadeloupean music at allthe beguine was uncontestedly recognized as the national popular music of Guadeloupe.
Though the origin of the name of the genre (beguine, biguine, bigin) remains obscure, the music became internationally famous soon after World War II. The lyrics are sung mostly in French Creole, occasionally in French. The basic rhythm is maintained throughout the piece, whereas the melody, based on a stanza-refrain form, is sometimes sung by the soloist and sometimes played by a saxophone or a trumpet (Benoit 1993:53-67). From the 1940s to the 1980s, ensembles playing beguines varied and included different instrumentsin the percussion section, for example, from timbales to bongos to congas, depending on the main influences of the time. In nightclubs, the beguine in the 1960s was typically performed by an orchestra of two trumpets, one alto saxophone, one tenor saxophone, a guitar, a bass, maracas, claves, and a drum set (
Balakadri and leŽwo`z have similar meanings, social functions, and performative structures. The societies that organize quadrille balls depend on a network of social relations and cooperative support. When participants pay entrance fees for the evening,
This system, still operative in quadrille societies, functioned the same way in leŽwo`z until the 1980s. But even today, a kout tanbou is never solely an entertainment. It follows the same principle: that to receive money, one must spend it. On a structural level, quadrille and leŽwo`z are connected: both are based on a series of dances, performed according to a specific order that varies by region.
Through the extensive use of percussive instruments and vocal effects (bouladje`l 'syncopation'), all the musical traditions mentioned above feature the preponderance of rhythm over other musical elements. Similarly, improvisation in playing, singing, and dancing is typical.
After being invaded by foreign music (Latin and U.S. jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Haitian music for the next twenty years) and while feeling overwhelmed by this invasion, Guadeloupean musicians of the early 1980s succeeded in creating their own music, zouk ('party'), which embodies the influences of nationalist movements that in the late 1970s promoted local cultural identity. It is sung in French Creole rather than in French and draws on local rhythms from mizik videŽ and the beguine, and from Martinican mizik chouval-bwa (merry-go-round music), which give the music a distinctive character (Guilbault 1993).
By integrating musical elements from compas direct, Trinidadian calypso via Dominican cadence-lypso (itself a mixture of compas direct and calypso), American funk, and French African soukous, zouk reflects influences of the musical genres that have marked local musicians' experience and knowledge. Because of its reliance on high technology and its primary existence as a recorded music (few live performances occur), it differs from any other local music previously produced in Guadeloupe. It has enjoyed a phenomenal success in the Caribbean, Europe, and French Africa.
Its local success must be viewed in relation to important cultural changes that took place locally during the early 1980s. After Francžois Mitterand's election as president of France (1981), the French government decided to reverse thirty-five years of state monopoly and grant licenses for the private operation of radio transmitters. Virtually overnight, twenty-nine stations (radios libres) sprang up. Local DJs, eager to boost home-grown products, featured zouk.
Recording studios contributed to the rise of the genre. They have had a long history in the island. By the 1960s, Guadeloupe had six studios and a corresponding number of producers, one of whom, Raymond CeŽlini, was the first producer to record traditional music. (From 1966 to 1983, he developed what still constitutes the most important line of commercial recordings of local traditional music.) From the early 1980s, to supply the demand for zouk, the studios multiplied their annual production. In parallel, tighter enforcement of copyright laws in the island helped increase the genre's economic success.
For the Guadeloupean music industry, the 1980s were a revolutionary period. With more money at stake and with greater opportunities for success on the transnational market because of zouk's success, the need for greater professionalism and specialization in the music business became an important issue. Youth organizations sponsored workshops on the rights and responsibilities involved in music-related professions. Schools of music grew in number, acquiring a new social meaning in the Antilles.
The development of the Antillean music industry through zouk was accompanied
The international success of zouk played a major role in the deghettoization of Antillean music on radio. Antillean music is no longer confined to special programs but competes with other international musics on the hit parade. Including women in zouk bands helped advertise women's presence in artistic milieus and other marketplaces and hence raised awareness of women's roles in Antillean sociopolitical, cultural, and economic development. All these advancements have played a major role in transforming the status of musician in Guadeloupe into a respected occupation.
Neo-African Effects
Traditional Music and Migration
Urban Popular Musics
Musical Style
Musical Education
Music and Public Policy
The earliest known inhabitants of Haiti were the Ciboney, but by 1492, when Columbus arrived, the Arawak had driven them into the southwestern peninsula. Spanish settlers rarely visited the Ciboney, and their fate is unknown. The tools they left say little of their social life and religion, and no musical instruments of their manufacture are known.
Of the Arawak (the first group the Europeans met in Hispaniola), the Taino subgroup was predominant. The Taino used songs to record myths and history, to commemorate the chiefs' marriages and funerals, to tout military victories, and to accompany dancing (Rouse 1948:522-539). Chiefs presided over dances, leading movement and song. Corn beer and snuff fueled Taino areito (music and dance events featuring songs that lasted from three to four hours eachor until participants collapsed in exhaustion). Chiefs and their assistants played drums, stone-filled gourd rattles, and castanets made of metal plates, while dancers' kinetic energy generated percussive clattering from strings of snail shells encircling their arms and legs. Songs, drumming, and dances marked an annual procession to the temple to feed the chiefs' sacred stones (zemi), and shamans utilized song and sacred rattles in healing.
The Spanish system of exploitation (repartimiento) put all male Taino to work in gold mines and on plantations. Many died from overwork and malnutrition, some committed suicide, and others died of smallpox. Fifty years after the Spanish arrived, only a few thousand Taino survived; secure in mountainous retreats, they intermarried with African Maroons (runaway slaves).
Did Taino culture have an impact on that of later Haiti? Linguistic and mythical data may support the argument that some traits of Haitian religion are more readily explained in Arawak than in African terms (Deren 1984:271-286). Early reports of contact between Africans and Taino invite speculation about shared musical concepts and practices. The sacred rattle (tchatcha, like a maraca) of the Petro rite of Haitian Vodou probably descended from its Amerindian counterpart. But aside from these traces, Taino culture essentially vanished with its people.
As the Taino population waned, the Roman emperor, Charles V, authorized the
Despite the role of African belief systems in the Haitian revolution, Roman Catholicism became the state religion. The bourgeoisie's eagerness to appear civilized (a` la France), negative international press vis-a`-vis Vodou (as the religion came to be called, after a Fon word for "spirit"), and the proselytizing activity of Rome explain the outlawing of neo-African worship in the 1800s. Politico-religious Maroon societies (Sanpwe`l, Bizango) trained guerrillas to protect land from seizure by the eliteand, in the 1900s, by U.S. marines.
In the mid-1900s, president-for-life Francžois "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1907-1971) manipulated the ideologies of neŽgritude and Vodou to secure power over the masses. In 1986, when his son and successor, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, fled the country, Vodou priests and priestesses who had openly participated in Duvalierist politics became targets of popular vengeance, and a vitriolic debate between followers of Vodou and Christian leaders ensued. In that climate, the constitution of 1987 became the first to legalize Vodou cults.
The following discussion examines Haiti's neo-African music and dances, with particular attention to Vodou. Because specific African nations (Dahomean, Congolese) became associated with particular geographic niches within colonial Haiti, the regionality of Vodou should be uppermost in the reader's mind. The variety of Vodou discussed below prevails in western Haiti, including Port-au-Prince. Many Haitians maintain that "the real Vodou" is exclusive to rural Haiti, and some believe that Vodou in Pott-au-Prince has been commercialized for tourists. The persistence of Vodou in urban Haiti, despite the collapse of the tourist industry in the early 1980s, casts doubt on this claim. In the city, as in the country and in the Haitian diaspota, the structures necessary to Vodou are in place, and Vodou is thus a "vehicle of spiritual, cultural, socioeconomic, and political exchange between urban and rural sectors" (Dauphin 1986:23).
Vodou
Theories and practices of neo-African religion in Haiti (Deren 1984; MeŽtraux 1972) place emphasis on serving the lwa (loa), a term that comes from a Bantu word for "spirit" (Courlander 1973:19). Devotees acknowledge a supreme being, but only spirits play an active role in human life.
The Vodou lwa are organized into nations (nasyon in KweŽyo`l 'Creole', the dominant language of rural Haiti), corresponding loosely to ethnic groups (of West African and Congolese origin) from which the slaves of colonial Haiti came. Ritual
The national lwa are grouped under two major branches, Rada and Petro. The lwa of the Rada branch are cool, beneficent, hierarchical, and formal, and relations between these spirits and their servants are balanced and mutually beneficial (Fleurant 1996). The lwa of the Petro branch are hot, aggressive, decentralized, and informal, and they often demand more of their servants than they give.
Music and dance are part of the symbolic web that represents the spirits and calls on them to possess devotees (Wilcken 1992). Dances, songs, percussive patterns, instruments, and performance practices distinguish the nations. Music is most prominent in the evening ceremony (seremoni or dans), in which a lwa may be fed or an individual initiated.
Deren (1984) and MeŽtraux (1972) give details of ritual forms and occasions, personnel, and temples. A priest (oungan) or a priestess (manbo) officiates over a ceremony, assisted by initiates (ounsis) who sing and dance to the accompaniment of a battery of three drums (manman, segon, boula, all led by a master drummer) plus a struck iron idiophone (ogan). The battery is sometimes embellished by a bas or tanbourin, a frame drum of low pitch, which keeps a slow pulse. In Rada rites, the priest or priestess keeps time with one type of rattle (ason), and then for Petro rites changes to another type (the tchatcha). The poto mitan, a column in the center of the temple, is a focal point for dancing. The battery is positioned where the master drummer can keep watch over the event.
Vodou percussive instruments intimately interweave to fashion cyclical patterns, in which rhythm and sonority are salient features. A slow pulse, usually defined by the frame drum or the rattle, underlies the patterns, whereas the interrelationships of individual instruments generate a fast pulse. The drums are capable of a range of sonority, colored by the material and construction of the instruments (
Music expresses relationships among the nations, and between the Rada and Petro (Petwo) branches.
The break (kase) of Vodou drumming, a pattern played by the master drummer, cues the dancer to execute a movement also known as a kase. Drummers and adepts claim it is an agent of spirit possession. A master drummer is attuned to the kinetics of the ritual. When he sees the onset of possession in an adept, he plays a kase to bring the spirit fully to the adept's head. The structure of the master drummer's kase is oppositional to the structure of the main pattern. The effect is one of displacement within a continuously cycling pattern.
Haitians group Vodou songs according to the spirits whom they address, and the songs in a given group may share melodic features, such as scale, contour, and intervallic content. A common triadic motif may typify songs for the Rada spirit Ezili Freda (Dauphin 1986:82-83), but more evidence is needed to confirm what the
Singing is customized to events. To accompany a specific ritual activity, singers exploit the brevity of phrases, the flexibility of responsorial singing, and the possibility of concatenating more than one song. Phrases tend to be two or four ogan patterns in length. A priest, a priestess, or a musical specialist (onje`nikon) sings several phrases, repeated by the chorus of initiates. Before singers change to a new song, they usually alternate the final phrase between soloist and chorus. The number of calls and responses depends on the time necessary to complete whatever ritual action the song accompanies. Many drummers mark with a kase the transition from one song to the next.
Servants of the lwa incorporate Christian elements into their practice, not to deceive church authorities but because they believe in the efficacy of these elements (MeŽtraux 1972:358). The Christian constituents of Vodou range from superficial to substantial. Chromoliths of saints (imaj), representing lwa by virtue of superficial resemblances, synchronize the Christian and the Vodou calendars. The practice of baptism has been incorporated wholesale into Vodou, which baptizes not only servants but all ritual objects as well.
The most striking Christian component of Vodou ceremonies is an opening litany, or priye` ginen 'African prayer'. It begins with several Christian songs in French, followed by a long, chanted litany in Creole of saints, and then of Vodou spirits. Steadily intensifying drumrolls accompany it. The officiating priest or priestess leads a prayer and adds a shimmer to the drumrolls by shaking a rattle. The repetition of the chant and the uninterrupted, random percussion keep the congregation in a state of suspense and anticipation, so when the drums break into yanvalou (rhythm and
Since the 1930s, Roman Catholic composers have spearheaded a movement to incorporate elements of African-Haitian folklore into their liturgy. In the late 1940s, they began using drums in it, and they worked with Vodou drummers to determine which rhythms were most appropriate to accompany singing in church. In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council nourished the ideals of their movement. Many folkloric dance companies have been formed under the aegis of local parishes.
Collective labor
Haitians have applied the traditions of collective labor in various contexts, but most notably in agriculture. About 80 percent of the population is rural. Local collective-labor associations have parallels in West Africa (Paul 1962:213-220), and the lack of technological sophistication in the Haitian countryside has fostered the continuity of the associations.
The term konbit (possibly deriving from the Spanish convidar 'to invite') refers equally to a collective-labor association and to the event it organizes. In some regions, the association is called sosyete kongo (Herskovits 1975:70). Most often, the konbit meets to till the fields, but it may gather for other activities that benefit from cooperative effort, such as building houses and sorting coffee.
A konbit emphasizes music as a propelling force (Courlander 1973:117-118). In the early morning hours, song leaders (sanba) and musicians with drums, trumpets, bamboo trumpets (vaksin), conch trumpets (lanbi), and hoe blades struck with stones signal the konbit; they continue to accompany the labor of the day. The leaders and workers sing responsorially. Some songs are old, but newly invented texts use topical material. The rhythms derive from rural dances, including djouba. The traditional konbit culminates in singing, dancing, and drinkinga party centered on a meal prepared by women. Regional variations of collective-labor parties exist (Paul 1962:205-213).
Secular Songs
Secular songs constitute a major part of Haiti's musical traditions. The composer of the folkloric song is a sanba (the same term applied to the song leader of the konbit). Haitians classify folkloric songs by social rather than aural criteria. One collector (Dauphin 1981) classifies children's songs by scalar structure, using the KodaŽly method. Haitian children who grow up with this repertoire identify everyday, calendrical, and occasional songs. A French influence is more pronounced in children's songs than in other categories of folkloric song, possibly because they are diffused by schools in urban and suburban areas (Paul 1962:42).
Songs of social sanction complain of adultery, abuse, duplicity, and so on. Others feature gossip. Many, utilizing Vodou rhythms and melodies, may stem from possession in the Vodou temple (Paul 1962:42-43). This category also incorporates political commentary (Courlander 1973:148-162) typical of rara processionals.
Rara is a seasonal ritual of the countryside (and of lower-class urban neighborhoods). It begins after carnival and builds to its conclusion on Easter weekend (Caribbean Revels 1991). Membership in the processional bands (bann rara) may be coterminous with membership in a Vodou temple, a secret society, or residence in a particular neighborhood or extended-family compound (lakou). The bands demonstrate a widespread African- American predilection for intricate social hierarchies in carnivalesque celebrations that mimic military, governmental, and royal hierarchies. A typical roster might include
A me`t or pwezidan: the "owner" (sometimes a Vodou priest), who made a "promise" to the lwa to organize a rara. A ko`lone`l: the director, who carries a whip and a whistle (ritual media, also used by the second in commandthe laplasin a Petro ceremony) ( Majo` jo`n: twirlers who handle and throw batons, dance, and honor important members of the group and onlookers ( Renn: 'queens' who wear fancy dresses (often red), parade, dance, and collect money for the band.
Rara also has secular features, including an exuberant and sensual celebratory ethos, plus usually topical, bawdy, critical, and allusive musical texts. However, the ritual fulfills an important sacred duty and is connected to issues of life, death, and rebirth. Rara bands are dedicated to lwa such as those from the Petro or the Gede families. Bands "incorporate" during Gede days (around Halloween and All Souls Day) or just after carnival and hold ceremonies to consecrate the band and its instruments. For the lwa, they draw maize symbols (ve`ve`s) on the ground; they sing and pray for the band's protection. In the peristil (an open area for dance in a temple), a band will put to sleep (kouche) its musical instruments and batonsa ritual also performed for Vodou drums. Most processional activity occurs at night, with the temple as a point of origin. Because the rara traverses public roads and cemeteries, bands invoke lwa such as Baron Samdi, Papa Gede (ruler of cemeteries), or Legba (guardian of gateways and crossroads).
Staged folklore
The issue of Haitian cultural identity has been strongly contested since early in the U.S. occupation (1915-1934). During the 1940s, the government institutionalized neŽgritude and created the Bureau of Ethnology. New possibilities for the expression of Haitian identity precipitated a folkloric movement. The tourist market also stimulated the development of folkloric companies and their repertoire. In 1949, the intersection of these internal and external forces led to the creation of a government-backed ensemble, La Troupe Folklorique Nationale.
Folkloric companies spotlight dancers, a drum ensemble modeled after the Vodou battery, and a chorus. In choreographies based on carnival and rara dances,
The choreography elaborates and varies the basic movements of a given dance and utilizes ve`ve` designs on the floor. Dancers and choreographers continually spin out variations of source material. The master drummer creates accompanying patterns that bind sound and movement. The music on stage is further distinguished from its sources in its use of the kase. During a Vodou ritual, the drummer decides when to play a kase, and he bases his decision on the psychosocial dynamics in progress. In staged folklore, the points of kase are fixed during rehearsal.
Staged folklore replaces the open-ended structures and religious function of Vodou drumming with predetermined forms that function as entertainment. It introduces the notion of ve`ve`; however, it maintains the instrumentation and the songs of its sources. Though the function of the kase changes, its form stays intact. Dance, though elaborated, maintains its centrality andwith music and costumingprojects a selected cultural identity.
Since the Duvaliers came into power, about one million Haitians have emigrated. Haitians in the diaspora tend to cluster in urban neighborhoods, where they seek mutual support. Music and dance can be a means of recreating the familiar and strengthening the support system.
Haitian immigrants include Vodou priests, priestesses, initiates, and drummers. Some have established societies with stable memberships; others fulfill their obligations to the lwa as they wait to accumulate the capital to return to Haiti and build temples there. To insure privacy, practitioners often conduct their rituals in basements. Because space is limited, they can only rarely dance around a potomitan. In such enclosed spaces, the drumming sometimes overwhelms the singing. Despite
Throughout the 1970s, folk-dance companies appeared regularly in Haitian festivals in New York; but in the 1980s, performances for Haitian audiences declined. Haitian folklore found a more receptive audience among outsiders. Meanwhile, a popular music that incorporated folkloric elements into a commercial framework won Haitian listeners. Both phenomena suggest that the cultural isolation of Haitians in the diaspora was diminishing.
In the early 1800s, peasants fled plantations and established homesteads in inaccessible rural hinterlands, escaping federal oppression and reestablishing neo-African practices of settlement and agriculture. The elite settled in Port-au-Prince and a few small provincial cities, where they managed the country's political system and dominated its economy.
Like rara, many ostensibly rural genres made the transition to urban Haiti. Parties (bambo`ch) held in makeshift thatched huts (tone`ls) in poorer neighborhoods, Vodou ceremonies in family compounds, rara bands in carnival, and Christian religious musicall resemble their rural counterparts. As in most of the world (including countries without highly developed industrial sectors), a particularly urban music of syncretic origins depends, for form and coherence, on urban dance contexts, middle- and upper-class patronage, foreign influences, the recording industry, and broadcast media.
Poverty, the gulf between the social classes, and the separation of city and countryside have had important consequences for Haitian urban popular music. Low incomes (in 1997, about U.S. $300 per capita annually) have made development of a highly capitalized music industry impossible. Instead, small businessmen predominate, there is little in the way of development or promotion, and producers focus on short-term gain. For sales, musicians rely on markets in the French Antilles, the American diaspora, and France (Averill 1993). Despite undercapitalization and a depressed market, hundreds of aspiring commercial bands struggle for success. The economics of Haitian music have worked against widespread penetration of foreign-music markets and have kept the technology and standards of recording and performance lagging behind international pop.
Though urban musics are produced in urban areas and disseminated through urban-based media, their impact is felt nationwide. Radio blankets all areas of Haiti, and most Haitians have access to it in some form or another. Because the majority of Haitians are illiterate and more than sixty stations broadcast within the country, radio is critical as a source of news and cultural information. As Haiti urbanizes and children of peasants move to the cities, more and more families have personal connections to the urban environment.
In the early 1900s, urban Haitians gathered at public dances, douz edmi ('twelve and a half,' from the men's price of admission in centimes). The standard ensemble for these events was o`ke`s bastreng, a French-style string and wind ensemble. After 1945, Port-au-Prince had a lively calendar of gran bals for elite classes in hotels, restaurants, and private clubs (such as the Cercle Bellevue and Portauprincienne). Many hotels and restaurants sponsored orchestras such as the Ensemble Riviera, the Ensemble Ibo LeŽleŽ, and the Ensemble Aux Calabasses. Nighttime dances (sware) took place in boi^tes de nuit and clubs. At prostitutes' balls (bal bouzen) in the brothels of Carrefour, patrons danced with prostitutes to live or recorded music. A type of dance known as ke`me`s grew out of the bazaars and family socials that followed religious services
For excitement and impact on commercial music, no single urban event in Haiti can compete with carnival. An informal carnival had taken place since colonial times. In addition to commercial and governmental floats, there are always large, popular masques, including batonye` 'stick dancers', trese riban 'maypole dancers', chaloska 'a spoof of military officers' (named after General Charles Oscar), gwo te`t 'large heads' (fashioned after famous politicians), djab 'devils', Endye`n Madigra 'Mardi Gras Indians', and many others.
At carnival, percussion and vocal bands (and many rara bands) provided acoustic processional music; but since the 1950s, electrified konpa bands on floats with massive speakers have dominated the event. Mereng koudyay (or mereng kanaval), a genre of fast, marchlike konpa similar to the biguine videŽ of Martinique and the samba enredo of Brazil, has developed as the typical carnival rhythm, the basis for the annual competition for best song at carnival.
In 1949, on the waterfront, as part of a bicentennial celebration of the capital, the TheŽa^tre Verdure was built. It was home to weekly concerts of the orchestra Jazz des Jeunes, which accompanied the Troupe Folklorique Nationale. Rebuilt and renamed (TheŽa^tre National), it is used for large concerts. Other concerts take place in movie theaters. In the 1960s, Sunday concerts at movie theaters in Port-au-Prince became a major venue for emerging student mini-djaz groups. Gala concerts, featuring a mix of folk-dance troupes, romantic singers, dance bands, and comedians, are held there. In the diaspora, this type of concert (spe`ktak, or gala) is popular with well-to-do Haitians.
In the summer, a period of many patronal festivals (fe`t patwonal), urban bands tour the countryside. The festivals feature ceremonies in church, roving troubadour groups (twoubadou), dances under the arbor (anba tone`l), and food and drink sold on the street.
Media and the Recording Industry
The first radio station in Haiti, Radio HHK, went on the air in 1927 as a project of the U.S. Marines. In general, however, radio remained a toy of the wealthy until after 1945. A private station, Radio HH3W (later 4VRW, Radio d'Haišti), was launched in 1935; after 1945, it began a series of live radio-theŽa^tres from the CineŽ Paramount, and eventually from its broadcast-studio auditorium. Radio d?Haišti, owned by Ricardo Widmaier, was the site of the first recordings made in Haiti. In 1937, Widmaier issued a limited-edition recording of Jazz DuvergeŽ, but Joe Anson's label, called Ibo Records, made the first commercial Haitian recordings, beginning with the Ensemble Aux Calabasses in the mid-1950s.
The most active Haitian labels have been a series of four companies based in the diaspora but recording and marketing in Haiti and the diaspora, starting with Ibo
In Haiti, sales of five thousand are considered respectable. Outside the country, especially in the diaspora and in the French Antilles, Haitian artists have done much better. By exploiting the global market through tours and agreements with French labels, some have sold more than fifty thousand albums.
In the 1970s, the pirate-cassette industry dominated the production of music within the country. Record stores marketed copies of legitimate recordings and unauthorized recordings of live concerts. Similar cassettes were sold on the streets. By all estimates, the cheap cassettes (U.S. $2 to $5 typically) vastly outsold the approved ones. In the 1980s, the Haitian music industry typically produced fifty to eighty albums a year.
In 1989, Haitian producers began to market compact discs of current releases and selected previous releases. Few in Haiti itself own CD players, and the Haitian industry is converting only slowly and cautiously to the CD format. Since 1988, many artists with hit records have released videos for Haitian television programs, Creole-language programs in the United States, and programs on French and French-language stations in West Africa and the French Antilles. In the 1990s, musicians such as Emeline Michel and the mizik rasin group Boukman Eksperyans have secured international recording contracts.
Many Haitian performers belong to SACEM, the French society of musicians and composers. In 1995 Haiti became a signatory nation of the Berne Convention governing intellectual property.
Commercial genres and ensembles
The Haitian elite traditionally patronized the mereng-lant 'slow meŽringues' played by pianists or chamber ensembles (Fouchard 1988). After the popularity of North American jazz in urban Haiti in the 1930s, jazz bands began to arrange meŽringues too. The meŽringue was also performed by troubadour (twoubadou) groupssmall guitar and percussion bands, patterned after the Cuban son trios and quartets (
In Port-au-Prince and Cap Haištien, an influx of tourists after World War II
In the mid-1950s, the saxophonist Nemours Jean-Baptiste and his ensemble began to restructure the popular Dominican merengue perico ripiao or merengue cibaen~o to produce the konpa-dire`k (French compas direct), or simply konpa. Within a few years, they had established it as Haiti's first commercially successful dance music. The saxophonist and bandleader WeŽbert Sicot had created a nearly identical dance called kadans ranpa (French cadence remparts, originally creolized as rempas). The contest between these genres and bands enlivened Haitian music for a decade; theirs was the first music to be widely distributed in Haiti on records (78-rpm disks; later, long-playing disks). From their positions on floats, these bands dominated carnival with amplified music.
A younger generation of middle-class boys who played imported rock and roll, locally called yeye (from "yeah, yeah, yeah," a refrain by the Beatles), picked up konpa and kadans. Their konpa-yeye hybrid ensembles became known as mini-djaz, a term that distinguished them from big bandsand made an analogy with an English term first used in 1965: "miniskirt," the name of a women's fashion style. Instrumentation consisted of two electric guitars, electric bass, conga, bell-and-tom, and tenor saxophone; keyboards and accordions were occasionally added. Groups like Shleu-Shleu, Les Ambassadeurs, Les Fantaisistes de Carrefour, and Les Loups Noirs played in the mid-to-late 1960s at movie theaters for Sunday concerts, student parties, and the like. The most popular bands began to record after 1967. Within a few years, many had emigrated to the United States to perform for Haitian audiences in the diaspora. By 1974, Shleu-Shleu, Tabou Combo, Skah Shah, Volo Volo, Magnum Band (
In the 1970s, mini-djaz borrowed instrumental resources from Caribbean dance bands of Trinidad, Dominica, and Martinique, adding drum sets, extra wind instruments, and finally synthesizers. By the late 1970s, they were no longer so mini: an average band had about twelve or thirteen members.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, more and more Haitian bands and performerssuch as Manno Charlemagne, Les Fre`res Parent, Ti-Manno (Roselin Antoine Jean-Baptiste), and Farah Justetook part in opposing the Duvalier dictatorship; they produced mizik angaje 'politically committed music'. Frustration with a perceived stagnation in popular musics and the search for post-Duvalier cultural forms resulted in new musical directions. A youthful technological-music movement (the nouve`l jenerasyon new generation') and mizik rasin, a neotraditonal music (mixing Vodou, rara, and electrified commercial pop), emerged (Averill 1997).
In the production of urban and commercial musics, men are much more involved
Mini-djaz emerged as a phenomenon of youth: an expression of school-age, middle-class boys in Port-au-Prince and a handful of cities in Haiti. The most fervent fans aged with the musicians who invented the genre; by 1995, the bulk of them had reached their forties. The nouvel jenerasyon was a reaction to this situation by a younger audience. Musical hits serve as markers of personal and collective history, and older audiences in Haiti and in the diaspora tend to be conservative about the musics that accompanied and helped define their adolescence. A striking change is evident among Haitian teenagers in the diaspora, who readily adopt African-American subcultural norms, disparaging less-acculturated Haitian immigrants as newcomers. Rap and Jamaican-style ragga (dance-hall style of chanting) have become popular among immigrants of this age.
Haitian urban genres carry associations of class, but few genres are exclusive in this way. Most genres appeal to more than one social class, and genres can be subdivided by differences in style that subtly articulate class origins and affiliations. Mediating against a mechanical linkage between style and class is the potential for symbolic upward and downward social mobility through music. Indigenous movements in popular music (vodou-jazz and mizik rasin) effectively reach downward in class symbolism, aligning musicians and audiences with aspects of peasant or lower-class culture. Music also serves as a means for musicians to socialize with members of elite classes, though this socialization usually occurs within the context of musical employment.
Haitian popular music is structured along principles common to many African-Caribbean urban musics. Multiple percussive instruments of different sonorities and pitch levels interact to form a cyclical pattern. In konpa, certain melodic instruments play ostinati that articulate changes of chords, and others serve as solo instruments. Harmonic progressions are variable, but most dance sections settle down to a two-chord pattern, often V-I (the tonic is often minor). Most songs begin with an instrumental introduction, progress to a lyrical song section, and end with an ostinato-dominated "groove section," featuring short, responsorial vocals.
Haitians base aesthetic judgments on the singers' vocal quality, the "sweetness" of the overall sound, the subtlety of timing in the rhythm section, but more than any single feature, the degree to which the band moves an audience and creates the proper ambience: cho 'hot' for certain occasions, te`t kole 'cheek-to-cheek' for others. At large, outdoor events, audiences prefer music that is lively, that gets an audience antyoutyout 'carried away' or anraje 'worked up'music with which to mete de men nan le` 'put one's hands in the air'. At clubs, the music accompanies close konpa dancing, often kole-kole 'glued together' or ploge 'plugged' together.
Urban commercial music has become nearly ubiquitous in the soundscape of Haitian cities. On cassette and on radio, it provides background music in stores, in restaurants, and on public transportation. On radio and television, it sells commercial products and candidates for public office. Because most Haitians cannot read, urban popular musics serve as part of the technology of advertising, promotion, education, and information.
Formal musical training in Haiti was hard to get. Schooling was reserved for children of the elite, some of whom continued their studies in France or the United States. As part of a French-influenced upbringing, trained musicians provided private lessons for upper-class children. Training was also provided to immediate members of families; and for this reason (until about 1950), parlor, orchestral, and dance-band music was the primarily the province of a limited number of families. Members of other classes could develop musicianship in military brass bands (fanfa 'fanfares'), and could parlay their skills into a position with a meringue band when they left the armed services. Bandleaders disproportionately came from musical families and brass bands, because it was they who had mastered solfe`ge, a mark of literate musicians. With expansion of religious and public education for the middle classes, musical education became somewhat democratized, though the lack of money, teachers, and instruments marginalized the process. A few lyceŽes (equivalent to high schools), such as the LyceŽe PeŽtion and the LyceŽe Saint Louis de Gonzague, have brass bands, and the episcopal school L'Ecole Ste. TriniteŽ has a full orchestra. The main fare for these programs consists of European-American classical music, supplemented by Haitian "autochthonous-school compositions," but some students play jazz or Haitian popular music on their own.
Schools and churches typically have choirs, which serve as another training center for musicians, especially female vocalists. Most women in commercial folk music and popular music received training in religious choirs. Little instruction in anything resembling Haitian traditional music takes place outside of the ethnology program at the UniversiteŽ de l'EŽtat (state university).
In 1949, Haiti's first major tourist-oriented extravaganza, the bicentennial of Port-au-Prince, employed folkloric music-and-dance groups. It began a long tradition of government-sponsored performances of these groups, under administrations of varying political ideologies. Many neŽgritude-influenced musicians supported "Papa Doc" Duvalier's quest for the presidency and composed folkloric songs in his praise. But the bulk of Duvalier patronage and promotion went to the konpa groups, whose popularity was more or less coterminous with his. His government and his private militia (Tonton Macoutes) commissioned pieces from konpa bands and mini-djaz, promoted the groups at carnival, and hired them for private parties. In addition, local political rallies were considered incomplete without local konpa bands or rara groups to enliven the occasion and to create an effervescent, koudyay 'carnival-like' ambience.
Duvalier's son, "Baby Doc," ardently admired mini-djaz; under his rule, as part of an effort to promote a new, more modern, middle-class image of Haiti, these groups received government patronage and commissions. In post-Duvalier Haiti,
The years under de facto military rule (1991-1994) produced a deepening of the gulf between musicians who supported President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (a Roman Catholic priest and proponent of liberation theology, himself a guitarist and songwriter) and those who favored the military and its supporters. Aristide's election (1990) and the restitution of civilian government (1994) inspired some angaje 'politically engaged musicians' to participate in the political process as candidates for elected office and advisers to the governmentone of whom, Manno Charlemagne, was elected mayor of Port-au-Prince in 1995.
In 1494, when Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World came to Jamaica, he found it inhabited by Arawak Indians. These people did not long survive Spanish colonization. Research has provided us with artifacts and knowledge of their era, but it has not unearthed evidence of their musical culture. As the Arawak work force diminished (mainly from overwork and introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance), the Spanish began augmenting these laborers by importing slaves from Africa. By the mid-1600s, the Arawak had virtually been eliminated.
In 1655, a British expedition captured Jamaica from the Spanish. Before fleeing the island, the Spanish released their slaves, many of whom took to the mountains and became known as Maroons. During the ensuing years, the British established large sugarcane plantations with the continued use of African slave labor. Some laborers were already in the system; others were imported. All were encouraged to produce children, who automatically inherited their parents' status as slaves.
The Emancipation Act of 1 August 1834 freed all children born after that date and slave children under six years of age. Other slaves became apprentices for varying lengths of time. All were completely free by 1 August 1838. Not all freed Africansby this time considered Jamaicanschose to work on plantations, and missing workers had to be replaced. This was done by bringing in indentured laborers, first Central Africans, then (East) Indians, Chinese, and people from Britain. In 1995, according to the governmental census, 76 percent of Jamaicans were of African descent, and 18 percent more of African mixed with European or Asian.
Laborers on plantations could not communicate in their masters' languages, a situation that was to the masters' advantage. Africans had in most cases come from societies in which oral tradition accounted for most learning. Circumstances in Jamaica therefore dictated the development or the continuation of oral traditions in the arts and culture.
Because of Jamaica's ethnic diversity and dependence on the oral tradition in its cultural development, many musical instruments are found.
Idiophones
Many idiophones are used, with or without voices, in the performance of Jamaican traditional music. Until the 1940s, most of these instruments were handmade or improvised from available materials and items. Maracas, locally called shakkas, were and still are made from dried calabashes with seeds put inside and fitted with wooden handles. The long, dry seed pod of the poinciana tree is sometimes substituted.
The rhumba box, still used in village bands, could be described as a bass mbira (similar to the mariŽmbula in Cuba and the marimba or mariŽmbola in the Dominican Republic). Borrowed from the kitchen is the grater, stroked by a large nail or old spoon in syncopated rhythmic patterns or continuously in the manner of a tambourine tremolo. Triangles are made from metal rods bent by heating, or are bought from music shops. Here, too, a large nail serves to beat continuous sounds. If the spirit moves a bystander at a traditional event, he or she is welcome to join in the performance by using a stone, a key, or any such object to tap a striker bell or an empty glass bottle.
In most traditional bands, whether playing for religious or secular purposes, male percussionists predominate. Only occasionally does a woman play a drum, though she may be an expert grater, triangle, tambourine, or maracas player. Clapping, stamping, snapping the fingers, and even thumping the chest sometimes augment percussive sounds with variations of rhythm and pitch. Maroon bands sometimes include a stick, called aboso, beaten intermittently against the side of a drum being played; the kwat, a length of bamboo, beaten with two sticks; and an adawo, a machete, struck with a piece of metal. East Indians in Jamaica make frequent and widespread use of an instrument they call mangera, metal cymbals about 10 to 14 centimeters wide.
Membranophones
The drum inherited from Africa is the most significant musical instrument in traditional Jamaican culture. Names and styles of playing vary according to the history of the groups that make and use drums. Dimensions of traditional drums of pre-twentieth-century origin were decided according to the sound produced by various woods in different states of porosity, age, and dryness, rather than by measurements.
The Maroons regard their drums, the prenting and the goombeh, as having great historic significance for the part they played with the abeng (a cow horn) in passing messages and helping to liberate their people from British oppression in 1839.
The prenting, a long, cylindrical drum, may be accompanied by a kwat and the adawo. The goombeh is a square goatskin frame drum, tuned with a second wooden frame under the skin. When the correct pitch is achieved, the goombeh is seasoned with white rum. Goombeh and prenting are played with the fingers. Goombeh rhythms are quick and sharp. Heavy-pulsed additional patterns are provided by two cylindrical drums, played with unpadded sticks.
Some Maroons also use the grandy, similar to the prenting and the goombeh; the Maroons of Scott's Hall call their cylindrical drums monkey and saliman. They consider the goombeh (or saliman) male and the grandy (or monkey) female.
The Kumina cult includes beliefs and life-styles that are known to have been brought to Jamaica by indentured laborers from the Congo area of Africa in the 1840s. One historian, H. O. Patterson (1973), however, states that it existed in Jamaica as early as 1730. He quotes from New History of Jamaica (Leslie 1740), which mentions Dahomean ancestral beliefs and practices of the Kumina cult.
The goombeh drum of the Maroons from Accompong Town is normally used only once a year, to celebrate the birthday of Cudjoe (Kojo), their revered warrior.
Otherwise, it is heard on special occasions, such as a leader's funeral. It was Cudjoe who signed on behalf of the Maroons the treaty giving them autonomy over particular areas of Jamaica and formalizing certain conditions. The treaty was also signed by the British Colonel Guthrie in 1739, a full ninety-nine years before African-Jamaican slaves were emancipated. By design, for secrecy, the names of some Jamaican traditional instruments confuse persons from outside the group or location in which they are used.
Drums that appear different to visitors or outsiders may be simply called the drum or the skin. At other times, a similar looking and sounding drum is called by two different names, for example, grandy in the hilly eastern interior and prenting in similar terrain some 30 kilometers farther east. Each group jealously guards the identity and usage of its drums; for example, in Moore Town the prenting, in Accompong the goombeh, and in Scotts Hall the saliman and the monkey.
Kumina cult drums
According to Hazel Carter (1986), a former linguist of the School of African and Oriental Studies in London, rituals and ceremonies of the Kumina cultists in Jamaica maintain cosmological and linguistic links with the Kikongo people of Central Africa.
The cultists use two kinds of drum. The kbandu, about 35 to 40 centimeters in diameter and 50 centimeters long, is a single-headed, cylindrical drum. It has a goatskin head stretched over hollow or hollowed-out wood. It invokes the presence of the supreme god of Kumina, King Mzambi, with an ostinato rhythm. The player moves the heel of his foot on and off the stretched skin to alter the pitch.
The cyas, a smaller version of the kbandu, produces various rhythms chosen to suit the occasion, much as a doctor prescribes medicines. Both drums are played by palms and fingers, with heels changing the pitch. Their combined rhythm controls singers and dancers, invokes spirits, and sometimes induces possession. The players straddle the drums, which face each other at a distance of about one meter. Usually the beating of two sticks (catta) on the side of the kbandu helps build rhythmic excitement.
Drums used for authentic heritage events, as distinct from those used for festival and stage performances, still are handmade. Some stages of their preparation might even be secretconsidered crucial for the successful use of the instrument in healing rituals. Many of these drums are consecrated away from the eyes of the public.
Rastafarianism, a twentieth-century African-Jamaican cult, uses three wooden membranophones, adaptations of traditional buru, drums used in Christmas masquerade processions. The drum of lowest pitch, the bass, is played while positioned on its side. About 50 to 75 centimeters in diameter and 50 centimeters long, it is made from barrel staves with goatskin heads at each end, tuned with metal braces and pegs. The player holds it against his body and produces a deep, sonorous tone by striking the center of the drumhead with a heavily padded stick.
The fundeh, a Rastafarian drum 23 or more centimeters in diameter, is held between the player's calves, barely touching the ground. Fingers are held together as both hands strike the center of the single goatskin head. The body is made of staves, of strips of wood, or occasionally of a hollowed tree trunk.
The repeater, a short version of the fundeh, is held similarly, but it does not touch the ground. Unlike the bass and the fundeh, the repeater is played nearer the rim. Fingertips are separated to produce a large variety of rhythms. Rastafarian drums
Indian membranophones, all with goatskin heads, include the large, low-toned dhool, played with sticks or hands; the higher-pitched, double-headed dholak, played mainly with fingers; the small twin, single-headed tabla set; and the bowl-shaped tasa, played with sticks or fingers. The tasa is tuned by being held, skin down, over an open fire. Its bowl is of clay or metal. For playing, the dhool is suspended from the shoulder. All the other drums may be played in that position by a drummer sitting cross-legged on the floor or, in some theatrical situations, sitting on a chair or a stool. Indians also use a tambourine called tambourina.
Aerophones
A bamboo fife (
Bamboo has also been used for making the Jamaican boompipe, a trumpetlike aerophone or stamping tube. A one-and-a-half- to two-meter length of mature bamboo 10 to 15 centimeters wide, it is buzzed into or pounded against the earth so as to produce a particular note. If two are used in the same band, two different notes are produced.
A bamboo saxophone was once crafted from growing a young, pliable length of bamboo into the shape of the desired instrument. When the right size and maturity were reached, the chosen section of the stalk was cut from the plant, the mouthpiece was fashioned and the other end was sometimes attached to a funnel-shaped length of metal or stiff material. Such instruments are now obsolete. Factory-made saxophones, clarinets, flutes, piccolos, and brass instruments are now sometimes used in village bands and school ensembles. Brass instruments, including bugles and sousaphones, are popular in military and marching bands.
In the 1600s and 1700s, Maroons used the abeng (
The only aerophone used by people of Indian heritage is the harmonium, a multiple single-reed portable organ, whose bellows is pumped with one hand while the other hand fingers the keyboard. The harmonium usually accompanies solo or group singing.
Chordophones
A bamboo violin was once an important instrument in traditional Jamaican bands, but the last expert performer died in the 1980s. This instrument has been relegated to museum collections and souvenir shops. A joint of bamboo with about an additional five centimeters at each end was used. A slit about one centimeter wide was cut, and on the opposite side three or four separate fibers were carefully loosened and raised from the main stalk by means of a short bridge, also of bamboo. It took an expert using a 30- to 35-centimeter length of bamboo as a bow, usually moistened with saliva, to produce tunes, some quick and rhythmic, from this instrument. No such experts survive.
Another chordophone that no longer exists in Jamaica is the merrywang. It was occasionally used in one area of the island up to the 1950s but has vanished. A lute made of half a gourd with skin across it, it had six gut or wire strings that were supported by a wooden bridge.
Some Jamaican village or mento and quadrille bands have included a fiddle. These were formerly handcrafted from local woods. They produced a pleasing sound, though played by rough-looking bows made of waxed hemp fibers. Only one traditional self-taught fiddler remains in the 1990s. He has a wide repertoire, including tunes, or parts thereof, that have been traced to Scotland. This man's ancestors are said to have arrived three or four generations ago from a ship that ran aground off the south coast near where he and his family live. He now plays a factory-made violin.
The four-stringed banjo has been a popular village instrument. Oral accounts state that field hands used to make and play this instrument in the early 1800s, even before emancipation. These banjo men were often required to play for social gatherings in plantation great houses, the homes of landowners and their associates. Nowadays, few young persons learn to play the banjo, so its music is in the hands of elderly musicians. Each year their number decreases through frailness and death.
The one-stringed bass is now virtually extinct. The bass line in village bands is now played on double bass, rhumba box, and occasionally bass guitar.
Acoustic guitars continue to hold their own, in spite of the prevalence of electronic
The sitar, an Indian plucked lute, and the sarangi, an Indian bowed lute, are in frequent use, exclusively by Indians, who alone have mastered the techniques for playing them.
Religious beliefs and practices
Religious beliefs permeate all levels of Jamaican society. All its ethnic groups participate in religious observances, whether adopted as in the case of Christianity, which embraces people of European, African, and Asian origins, or traditional as in the case of Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim observances.
Christian
The music of Christian ecclesiastical traditions is prominent in Jamaica. Serving the Christian community are denominations including Anglican, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Moravian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist, and derivatives, plus American-influenced evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Music of the Protestant churches consists of Western traditional hymns and nineteenth-century American "Moody and Sankey" gospel hymns. Organs and pianos are used in most churches having a formal choir to accompany lead singing and occasionally to perform special instrumental pieces. Recitals of sacred music, especially at Easter and Christmas, are normal features of church calendars and often spill over into community activities. A growing trend in the evangelical and Pentecostal churches is the use of bandsdrums, guitars, synthesizer or piano, and tambourinesto accompany upbeat singing in American popular gospel styles.
Assisted by the Caribbean Council of Churches, some composersforemost is the classically trained Jamaican musician Noel Dexterhave created a new and growing genre of religious music in Jamaica. For many Jamaicans, this music satisfies a deep-seated need for spiritual and physical expression in worship. By providing this music, the established churches have inspired Jamaicans to embrace their own, long-rejected traditional expressions, such as Revival and Kumina, in present-day worship.
Though Christianity is the mainstream religious influence, Jamaican cults use religious concepts and practices inherited from African ancestors. These they sometimes mix with Christian beliefs. Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are also practiced by small sections of the society. Music and sometimes movement are included in most religious services. Even in some churches from the European side of Jamaica's heritage (Roman Catholic and low-church Anglican), religious choruses and hymns are accompanied by bodily movements and clapping.
Cults demonstrate the African-inherited tendency to integrate song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment into the religious experience. Their members believe that ancestral spirits, "the dead," are part of the living world; hence, a god or a spirit can take over or possess the body, the mind, and the character of the living. The leader of the cult mediates between the human and spiritual worlds, using the musical experience as the primary channel of communication to restore lost harmony. These songs, movements, and instrumental accompaniments are sometimes shared by secular and religious activities. The main cults are the Maroon, the Kumina, the Ettu, the Nago, the Tambo, and the Goombeh. Revival and Rastafarianism, also African-based, contain significant European and European-American influences. In all these groups, the membranophonic drum is the significant instrument for musical expression, with the type of drum and the style of drumming dependent on the cult's origins.
The four main Maroon communities in Jamaica have varying ethnic backgrounds: Africans from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and the slave coast (Burkina Faso to Benin); creoles, born in Jamaica; and Arawak and Miskito Indians from Central America. These peoples intermingled and created a distinct Maroon culture based on African retentions, a common history of resistance to enslavement, and a sense of the independence for which they fought and which was made real by the signing of the treaty with the British in 1739. This spirit still endures.
Despite the increasing encroachment of mainstream cultures, a distinct Maroon culture exists, particularly in music, dance, and to a lesser extent in linguistic remnants of African languages such as Twi, the language of the Ashanti of Ghana. The strongest survival is in the kromanti play or the kromanti dance, the main ritual for summoning ancestral spirits to intercede with the supreme being, Nyangkipong. Maroon ceremonies are for healing and cleansing, and the dance involves the spirits through singing, dancing, and drumming to possess a specific person. He or she becomes the channel for diagnosing and treating the malady. The men and women who dance know the properties of herbs for physical and mental cures; each type of medicinal herb has its corresponding type of song and drum rhythm.
Religious dances, which the Maroons call business dances, include songs and music"Papa" (Ewe), "Mandinga," "Ibo"named after the particular ethnic groups that brought them (Bilby 1992). These songs and dances have distinctive styles, used to invoke ancestral spirits for instruction and advice and to induce spirit possession. For reasons not shared with outsiders, Maroons call secular salo songs jawbone, sale-one, tambu, and ambush. These songs may be sad or happy (
The most important Maroon drums, the prenting (oprenting in Twi) and the goombeh (gumbe), are used by separate groups on religious and secular occasions. At ceremonies of healing, the prenting complements the singing of songs in Cromantin language, used by Cromantee Africans, who came from the Gold Coast in the 1500s (probably Akan; Bilby 1992). For brief periods, a stick called aboso is struck against the side of the drum, providing a shifting pulse. The goombeh produces quick, sharp rhythms in keeping with the darting, angular dances being accompanied.
The Kumina cult is practiced by the descendants mainly of postemancipation indentured laborers from Central Africa. Songs possibly including African-language texts (Kikongo and Kimbundu), complex rhythms, and distinctive dancing are used to honor, appease, and evoke the help of ancestral and other spirits for healing, thanksgiving, memorials for the dead, entombment, and celebrations such as weddings, births, and anniversaries.
Kumina ceremonies use the kbandu and cyas drums. The kbandu rhythm invokes King Nzambi, the supreme god. The complex rhythms produced by the cyas drummer invoke other spirits, excite the singers, and induce possession. While the dancers' feet reproduce the kbandu rhythm, the cyas drummer's improvisatory patterns
The Kumina prayer, responsorially sung and accompanied by drums and other percussive instruments, signals the start of every ritual. Songs in ancestral African languages are used for the more sacred sections of the rituals in which communication with the spirits is sought and achieved. Baila, songs using Jamaican Creole, are sung after spirit possession subsides and at recreational events. Singing is in unison or antiphonal unison, usually including high-pitched, loud, forceful tones, improvised contrapuntally (
Ettu, Nago, Tambo, and Goombeh are small, fading cults found in different parts of the island. They share the African-based belief or ancestral intercession on behalf of the living, and they ceremonially use drumming and dancing to seek assistance for the healing and well-being of individuals and the community.
Ettu and Nago practitioners are descendants of Africans from Abeokuta and the surrounding southwestern area of Nigeria, brought to Jamaica as slaves until about 1700. One of the villages in their part of Jamaica is called Abeokuta. Two musical instrumentsthe tin (an empty kerosene oil container) and the skin (a double-headed goatskin drum)are used in Ettu. The tin is also used in Nago events.
Tambo groups describe many of their songs as laments, despite the speed and crispness produced by the catta. The drummer communicates with the dancers and singers in phrases of different lengths that build to a climax. Tambo songs are short and repetitive, many lamenting separation from loved ones and from mother Africa. The Goombeh cult uses a goombeh similar to that used by Maroons.
Revival is Jamaica's main African-Christian cult, embracing Revival Pukkumina (also Pukko) and Zion (also Zion Way). Blending Christian and West African concepts, Revival includes singing, dancing, instrumental and percussive accompaniment, healing, divination, and spirit possession. Revival activities may include street meetings to win converts; baptismal baths and fasting for purification; feasts for thanksgiving tables; mourning or memorial rites; and invocations of the spirit world for help.
Revival music that sets the scene for and induces spiritual trance and possession is usually performed with melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic improvisations. Many songs are adaptations of Western-style hymns, but there is also chanting and responsorial singing. Pukko tunes are usually in duple and quadruple time; Zion tunes are sometimes in triple or compound time. The music utilizes syncopation against contrasting rhythmic patterns provided mainly by membranophones and idiophones, and by rhythmic body sounds such as clapping, stamping, moaning, and loud over-breathing (called groaning or trumping). Many Revival songs are based on "Moody
Originating among the poor urban class in the 1930s, Rastafarianism is a modern manifestation of the dream of Africa. Its development was influenced by the teachings of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), who urged black people to look to Africa as their motherland. By the 1970s, the sociocultural influences of Rastafarianism began to be felt among the middle and upper classes, as the tenets (peace, love) and lifestyle (self-expression, self-reliance, dignity) demonstrated by its practitioners attracted a new generation of nationalistic youth. Rastafarianism has affected national life in significant ways, especially the development of the popular music style known as reggae.
A most interesting and significant feature of Rastafarian cult music is nyabingi drumming (Bilby 1992). Instrumentalists, playing the three types of wooden membranophones and other percussive instruments (repeater, fundeh, and bass), also sing, and with the exception of the drummers, become quite mobile, at times dancing intricate steps (see Okada 1995: example 14). Tunes are sometimes borrowed and adapted from Western hymns, Negro spirituals, or local traditional songs, but the Rasta repertoire is also full of melodies created by devotees, as well as improvised chants.
Indians first came to Jamaica as indentured laborers in 1845 and in these circumstances were able to practice their religions. Since then, links with India have been maintained and strengthened physically by others who have continued to come as farmers, professionals, merchants, and holy men. They have integrated closely into Jamaican society while retaining strong spiritual links with their ancestral land. The Prema Satsangh was formally established as a religious organization in 1994.
Other social contexts and genres
In addition to music associated with religion, there is a repertoire of songs for a variety of social occasions. Lullabies, play songs, love songs, work songs, and funeral songs are common. Clear identification of a certain traditional song with a particular social event, though, is not always possible. Some lullabies are called work songs, since they were identified with work in the plantation's great house, especially caring for the masters' children. Play songs can be work songs also, and some adult games are meant to influence children's development. People have no self-consciousness about using songs for other than their original purposes.
Lullabies can be enhanced by clapping, bouncing the knees, tapping the toes, miming, and any other movement that might amuse and distract an infant from its
Many play songs have been adopted from other cultures, mainly African and English, and Jamaicanized by syncopation, improvisation, dramatization, and the use of movements progressing from mime to dancing. The emphasis is on participation and having fun. Songs like "Sally Water," "I Come to See Janie," and "Jane and Louisa" might have been learned through contact with the great house. There are versions of many other well-known English play songs.
Ring games are played by children and adults. The latter might use them at wakes for the dead, or at moonshine dahlinsyard entertainment and recreation on moonlit nights. Games with stones evolved out of the task of breaking stones by hand. They allow the players to show off their dexterity and concentration, since any deviation from the rhythm of the song puts one in danger of getting a mashed finger, as in the perennial favorite "Manuel Road."
Jamaica inherited Anansi (also Anancy and Nancy) the spider man from Gold Coast ancestors. Numerous stories are told of his exploits with other animals and human beings. Many Anansi stories incorporate music, mainly songs that comment on the action or are a part of the dialogue. The term cante-fable has been applied to some Jamaican traditional stories, but this name is not familiar to Jamaicans, especially storytellers. Like most Anansi stories, cante-fables include singing.
Slavery did not permit the establishment and growth of stable relationships. Traditional love songs, few in number, appear to come from the postemancipation period.
The main occupation of the slaves was work, and the slaves used a significant number of chants and songs to lighten their labor. Work songs vary stylistically, since they had to fit in with many different types of work. They were also used to pass on messages about secret meetings, to laugh at the master's foibles, or to protest against evil treatment without arousing the suspicion that would have earned punishment. The song "Chi chi bud," for example, appears to be about birds, but really comments on persons such as the overseer, who works for the land master and, like the John crow, as a scavenger, picks at the workers' bones (
Most songs used for digging, hoeing, and other agricultural labor are responsorial (
The social rituals of death include gathering at the home of the bereaved to assist them through the period of mourning. Wakes, from the setup on the night of death to periods from three to forty nights after, saw people coming together to sing hymns and adaptations of hymns, play ring games, tell stories and riddles, and feast. The most popular wakes are the setup and the nine night, the latter being when the spirit of the dead returns, and if satisfactorily entertained, leaves for the home of the spirits.
Music is an integral part of these wakes, with hymns and solemn tunes being interspersed with lively choruses, Bible readings, and speeches. As the night progresses, secular songs become more prominent, and the mood lightens into ring games and storytelling. Voices and clapping suffice, though a banjo, if available, will be used. Boompipes and small drums are sometimes used.
Many forms of music in Jamaica are linked to dancesocial dancing and ceremonial dancing for display and entertainment. Most Jamaican music has a movement dimension, expressed spontaneously by Jamaican people of all social strata and ethnic origins. Ritual and deeply traditional music may have characteristics and stylized movements and steps that those outside the particular group find difficult to do. Tapping the toes and clapping the hands often suffice for participation.
The vocal timbres and scalar patterns of some music (like Indian, Maroon, and Kumina) also help maintain their exclusiveness at certain levels. However, this usually applies only to ritual and traditional ceremonial genres. Beyond that, no one cares whether or not the right sounds are being made. Socializing and participation are far more important.
Mento
Mento, Jamaica's indigenous sung, played, and danced style, maintained widespread popularity up to the 1940s. The music is slow and in quadruple time, with a strong accent on the last beat of the bar. Mento tunes are usually in major keys, with regular, neatly balanced phrases that lend themselves to harmonization with the primary chords. International pop beats and the popular contemporary dance-hall beat, a close derivative of mento, have been influencing the performance of mento music and dancing.
In mento performance, a great deal of florid ornamentation is improvised, especially when the fife or piccolo is used. Guitar and banjo soloists sometimes embellish the basic tunes to great effect. Nowadays, mento bands play most frequently for maypole dancing. Maypole came to Jamaica via the English great house. Music is provided by a village band playing set pieces that dictate to the dancers which style of ribbon plaiting must be done. Tunes range from Jamaican mento songs to "Rule Britannia" and "The Bluebells of Scotland." These latter are barely recognizable because of the rhythmic Jamaicanization and florid ornamentation on banjo, fiddle, or fife.
The band consists of three types of instruments. Melodies can be played by a clarinet, a fife, a harmonica, a piccolo, a saxophone, a trumpet, or an electronic keyboard; harmonies by a banjo and a guitar (which may also be played melodically), with a rhumba box or a string bass for the bass; and rhythms by drums, maracas, a grater, concussion sticks, and a variety of improvised instruments. The length of an old-time mento ranges from five to twenty minutes, depending on the interplay and excitement generated between dancers and musicians (see Okada 1995:example 16).
Bruckins
Music and dance are central to the annual event known as Bruckins, begun on 1 August 1938 as a celebration of emancipation from slavery. More than just music and dancing, it is a competition in skill and endurance, beginning at nightfall on 31 July and continuing till dawn on 1 August.
The music, played by the side drum (snare drum, often used for marching) using military-sounding beats and accompanying a small group of singers, dictates the sequence of dances. The main characters in the dance are the king, the queen, and courtiers. Each band, one dressed in costumes of red and the other in blue, shows off its skill at playing and dancing. Steps are stylized, and the dance typically has stately dips and glides and exaggerated posturing with swords.
The last practicing traditional group no longer functions, the few remaining members being unable to carry out the demanding dance movements and sustain the necessary energy levels through the night. Young groups now perform the music dance for village festivals and theatrical entertainment.
Jonkunnu
Jonkunnu is the phonetic spelling of what elders called this Christmas masquerade. The British anglicized it as John Canoe, and in more modern times it has been spelled junkanoo in commercial settings.
The slaves celebrated their three- to seven-day Christmas holiday with feasting, music, dancing, and masquerades. A prominent feature was jonkunnu or its variant, horse-head or buru processions, the terms used interchangeably by participants. The members of the band were men, costumed to represent a variety of male and female characters.
In the variant buru or horse head, the main mask was made from the skull of a horse covered and elaborately decorated. It snapped its jaws at anyone nearby, in the manner of the English midwinter hodening horse and Welsh mari lwyd of Christmas to twelfth night. Jonkunnu music was provided by bamboo, and later plastic, homemade fifes and side drums. Styles varied to represent the character whose music was being played. The characters known as Jackna Green and Pitchy Patchy danced differently from Devil or Bride. The fife played short, repetitive snatches of melody in a quick, agitated manner, interspersed with trills accompanied by frequent rolls on the drums (see Okada 1995: example 13).
The variant buru or horse head used three drums: bass, fundeh, and repeater, playing in quadruple time with a marked accent on the fourth beat of each bar. Melodic lines were provided by mouth organs, paper-covered combs, or singing. The texts were topical, earthy, and often derisive. Jonkunnu bands are now occasionally seen in parades. Those most popular by reputation or judged to be best through national competitions are sponsored for performances in Jamaica's Independence Festival each year on the first Monday in August. Through the tourist industry, jonkunnu bands entertain visitors.
Jamaica quadrille
Jamaica quadrille is a creolization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European ballroom dances that the slaves must have learned while serving in the great house. Most of its music is based on European melodic and harmonic styles, with typically Jamaican improvisations, embellishments, and syncopation accenting the upbeat.
The fiddle, merrywang (a now obsolete chordophone), guitar, banjo, maracas, rhumba box, bamboo fife, drums, piccolo, trombone, clarinet, saxophone, harmonica, and mandolin have been used in various combinations. The groupings are flexible and depend on the instruments and the players available at any one place or time.
The annual August Independence Festival commemorating the 1962 political independence of Jamaica has helped keep maypole, quadrille, and jonkunnu alive in the arena of public performance. Quadrille dancers may be seen performing mazurkas, waltzes, polkas, and schottisches in suites, ending always with a Jamaican mento. There are two styles of dances: ballroom, more formal and favored by adult and sometimes quite elderly performers; and camp style, less stylized and performed by adults and by children as young as eight years of age.
Indian festivals
From arrival, Hindus have held their spring Pagwa or holy festival and autumn Diwali festival of lights. Muslims celebrate Hosay in the summer in commemoration of the victory of good over evil as evidenced in the fatal fight between Hussein and Hassan, grandsons of the prophet Muhammad.
Hosay (Hussein), Pagwa (Pagwah), and Diwali (Divali), though based in ancestral Indian religious observances, include festive features of entertainment. Indian instruments provide music complemented by voices often accompanied by harmonium. Hussein featured stick dancing until discontinued by police because of the possibility of injury to bystanders. Diwali, with its hundreds of lights, whether in private homes or public venues, always includes music and dancing, as does Pagwa, which adds the lighthearted dousing of fellow attendees with colored powders and liquids after the more formal and religious aspects of the occasion.
These festivals are celebrated by all Indians, Hindu and Muslim, plus many Jamaicans of African and other ethnic origins. A deep religious thread runs through all Indian festivals, but they also have value as entertainment. The music of voices and various stringed and percussion instruments, usually accompanied by harmonium, enhances all these occasions. Traditional dances are also featured.
Creole Jamaicans also join in Hosay, the Muslim celebration brought to Jamaica by Indian laborers. Celebrated mainly in the parish of Clarendon, Hosay has seen some Jamaicanization over more than a century of existence on the island. Aspects of its dancing have spilled over into Revival and jonkunnu.
Other dances and theater
Calypso is popular in entertainment circles, as are steelbands, both having been imported from Trinidad and other southern and eastern Caribbean islands. Caribbean students at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica have given life to and improved the quality of these genres. Neither comes naturally to Jamaican musicians but they bring tremendous enjoyment to people of all ages and social strata. Soca, the 1990s combination of soul music and calypso, has become popular but has probably not yet superseded calypso.
Limbo is accompanied by music in various styles, but usually in duple time with vigorous beats. Dancers propel themselves one at a time, knees first, under a pole, sometimes lowered to a height of a third of a meter or less. It is often not realized that this movement was born in slavery, when it was safer to attempt to escape under, rather than over, enclosing fences.
Though Jamaica's modern-dance theater is strongly influenced by the traditional experience, incorporating folkloric music, rituals, gestures, and body movements, contemporary dance uses local and international music. This reflects the mixed influences of Africa and Europe on the culture. The interpretive portrayal of folkloric ceremonies reveals a strong sense of theater, combining music, movement, timing, acting, and in some cases costuming into an integrated experience (see Okada 1995: example 15).
Formal theater has seen a shift from the almost exclusive presentation of foreign companies or plays to more locally written productions. One outstanding example is the annual Christmas pantomime, begun on the British model. Local writers have moved away from that tradition, and the themes, characters, music, and dances are now totally indigenous. Productions of dance and theater draw heavily on local music, traditional and popular.
Musical enculturation takes many forms in Jamaica. Among the cults, the secrets of their African retentions, language, styles of drumming, and meaning of rituals are not passed on to young people until or unless they are regarded as ready. An individual may spend years learning to play the rhythms on the special drums. If the teacher, usually an old person, dies before lessons are complete, authenticity can be lost, as only partial learning has occurred.
Aural tradition in learning music is important among Jamaicans, and knowledge of musical notation has not been widely recognized as a requisite to musical participation, even for European-derived musics. A group leader or choirmaster sometimes teaches an hour-long program of choral music, including excerpts from oratorios and cantatas by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European composers, entirely by rote. A few reading members of vocal ensembles are considered a help but by no means a necessity.
Until the 1950s, schoolteachers and church choirmasters were expected to master Tonic Sol-fa, using syllables, such as taa ta-te ta-fa-te-fe for the rhythmic pattern of a quarter note, two eighths, and four sixteenths. However, few Jamaican musicians outside the field of the classics read music. The better pop and jazz musicians master musical notation, but many rely heavily on their ability to memorize and to improvise.
Since few Jamaican pop musicians can read music, most have tended to copy what they have heard. Copyright infringement has not yet been recognized, but the inability to readand even more, to writemusic has led to widespread exploitation of nonliterate Jamaican musicians' musical ideas. Those who work within controlled management situations record their tunes, motifs, and rhythmic patterns for professional transcribers and arrangers to develop. Others are easy prey to pirates.
Formal music education usually ranges from instrumental lessons (often in piano or guitar) given by unaffiliated, individual teachers in their living rooms, to better-organized studios with teachers belonging to the Music Teachers Association, entering students for annual external music examinations leading to diplomas from Trinity College (London) and the Royal Schools of Music (London), to some classroom teaching, usually in secondary schools. A few schools, notably Alpha Boys School (Kingston), have for many years maintained teaching programs that have produced
Music education is organized at the highest level at the Jamaica School of Music (JSM), a postsecondary institution, one of four schools forming the Cultural Training Centre in Jamaica, now named the Edna Manley Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts, in honor of one of Jamaica's most revered artists and sculptors. The JSM seeks to fill the demand for training for professionalsperformers and arrangers of popular music, music teachers in schools, and instrumental specialists who teach privately. Special attention is given to folkloric music, Caribbean and African-American studies, and the use of Caribbean instruments, materials, and indigenous sources of sounds. In addition to a full-time, four-year diploma program, there are part-time courses and individual tuition for children aged seven to seventeen in the junior department. Much learning by individuals occurs outside these systems. Many musicians, especially in popular music, are self-taught. Jamaica's economic problems of the 1990s tended to cause a return of general pre-1960s attitudes to music making. In the intervening years, electronic media and musical instruments seemed to be hustling music making and acoustic instruments off the Jamaican scene. There now appears to be a resurgence of interest, and to a lesser extent activity, in more traditional attitudes to playing. Violins, recorders, guitars, and band instruments lead the way in school, community, and church programs.
Jamaicans expect musicians and students specializing in classical music to read music fluently and write it rudimentarily. By international standards, several Jamaican performers and teachers have excelled. Most seek careers in larger countries or the international music industry.
Traditional music has influenced the development of modern popular music. From ska, to rock-steady, to reggae and dub, contemporary popular beats have recognizable roots in Revival and mento. Rhythms typical of some cults are discernible in the music of enterprising bands such as Third World and Chalice. Jamaica's reggae music gained international recognition mainly through its most popular proponent, Robert (Bob) Nesta Marley (1945-1981), a Rastafarian.
Radio and television
Radio was introduced into Jamaica in 1938, greatly expanding the audience and extending the range of easily accessible musical styles. In 1996, eight full-time stations were operating, and one part time (in the University of the West Indies). For decades, HCJB, a station in Ecuador, has regularly been heard on medium-wave radio sets in Jamaica; Venezuelan stations can be picked up on local shortwave sets. Medium-wave, long-wave, and FM receivers are inexpensive. Cuban stations, North American stations, and a few stations in the Dutch Antilles can be tuned in. A few people use shortwave radios to extend their listening to virtually all areas of the globe.
Increased exposure has influenced not only tastes in listening but also the types of music composed and produced locally. Commercial stations take popularity into account. Methods of production and styles of presentation have been drawn more in line with international standards and, to a large extent, the content of programs also veers in that direction. This trend has had a negative effect on the tapping of Jamaica's rich store of traditional music styles, with the notable exception of reggae.
Jamaica has two television channels, the first of which began transmission in August 1962. Many of its programs are imported, and a wide selection of material originating in North America is available to households, hotels, and businesses via satellite dishes and cable. This medium has intensified the changes in musical presentation and in programming initiated by radio. Local programming is growing and sometimes attains high standards. Unfortunately for the continuity of Jamaican musical traditions, people have tended to imitate even the instrumentation of foreign musical groupsa practice that can be more accurately done from visual models than from radio.
Recordings
Devices for recording sounds were at first in the hands of a small minority of musicians and lovers of music in Jamaica. Reel-to-reel tape recorders were used in Jamaica by media houses, the music industry, scholars, and individuals. By making easy recording, copying, and playback of sounds readily available to a large cross-section of the public, small, battery-operated cassette tape recorders changed this situation.
Analog recordings were in use before the coming of radio. They and the means to play them were expensive and available to a small but growing minority. The cassette tape recorder now enables most Jamaicans to possess and play at will the music of their choice, by means of purchased or copied tapes. It is a much-used tool of researchers. Composers, especially of pop music, most of whom cannot write music, record their works for professional transcription and arranging.
The production of long-playing and 45-rpm records began in Jamaica in 1954. Publicly placed sound systems had earlier dispersed overamplified sounds from imported records, annoying many but creating in others a demand for owning the records. Entrepreneurs such as Clement Dodd, Ken Khouri, Byron Lee, and Duke Reid grasped the opportunity to replace foreign performers with local ones. These performers at first specialized in imported music, but gradually the soundscape changed, and Jamaican composers were encouraged to provide locally inspired material. This led to the development of a Jamaican music industry and the emergence and dissemination of reggae.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the increase in radio ownership and listenership, plus the proliferation of public sound systems, set the stage for the commercialization of music in Jamaica. The program content of radio and sound systems was predominantly imported popular music; however, there was simultaneously a marked and increasing interest in live performances as popular entertainment. The same was true for jazz, which had a smaller but more constant following. The foundations were foreign, but Jamaican musicians, partly responding to audience tastes and demands, introduced deeply ingrained Jamaican modes of musical expression: tunes, rhythmic pulses and patterns, ornamentation, and African-derived responsorial vocal styles. Local music was also influenced by country. This phase of pop music produced brilliant and internationally accepted Jamaican instrumentalists such as Ernie Ranglin (guitar), Monty Alexander (piano, keyboard), and Don Drumond (trombone). These and other talented local musicians formed bands or played as soloists in a thriving music industry.
Other aspects of the Jamaican music industry are related to the trade of imported discs, cassettes, and videotapes, mainly from Britain and North America. By the 1970s, as local entrepreneurs prospered, they set up studios and record-manufacturing plants. Some procured state-of-the-art equipment, run by talented technicians. Consequently, Jamaica has three or four studios of such high quality that they have attracted performers such as the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon.
Also by the 1970s, Jamaica's music industry had become known and recognized
Reggae, however, went far beyond these fans. It gained widespread popularity around the world because of the performances of Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, the Third World Band, and others, but it was the music, the message, and the unique communicative skills of Bob Marley (1945-1981) that crowned their efforts. His music astonished listeners, captured imaginations, and won the admiration of fans around the world, including people of diverse political persuasions, religions, ages, and languages. His death left a huge gap, but his musical style and message have been carried on by his children, his widow (Rita Marley), Judy Mowatt, Marcia Griffiths, Bunny Wailer, and others. Jimmy Cliff may not have enjoyed the local chart success that Marley did but continues to be popular internationally. Toots and the Maytals, who emerged from the ska period beginning in 1962, still command a significant following and are prominent in the renewed interest in ska and rock-steady.
Ernie Ranglin, a Jamaican guitarist considered for three to four decades in international circles as one of the finest jazz guitarists in the world, has returned to Jamaica. He now enriches the local scene with his playing, at once virtuosic and expressive. He also has been, and is, a much sought-after arranger, one of the first to take Jamaican folk music into the realms of jazz.
Many other musicians, including Byron Lee, the bandleader, and Peter Ashbourne, the violinist, keyboard player, composer, and arranger, continue to contribute to the local pop scene.
Dance-hall music, with its folk-based rhythms, earthy lyrics, and abandoned movements, which started with youth and people of the lower socioeconomic classes within the 1990s, has become widely popular. Deejayscalled rappers in some countriesare the most prolific exponents of dance-hall music. Their messages vary widely, from risqueŽ to humorous, concentrating on local social commentary. Whereas lyrics of traditional mento and work songs, for instance, used veiled references and symbolism in commenting on social situations, modern pop songs are direct in their expression.
Music, song, and dance have always played a major role in Jamaica's heritage, but there are comparatively few recorded sources of Jamaica's musical history. Researchers have found that human sources of this knowledge often jealously guard their traditions. When bearers of culture have imparted this knowledge, scholarsmost of whom have been foreigners, unacquainted with the local language, speechways, and culturehave often misunderstood or misinterpreted it.
Musical records appear in the published works of researchers such as Walter Jekyll (1907), Martha Beckwith (1928), Ivy Baxter (1970), and Olive Lewin (1973). The research procedure was mainly observation involving individuals and groups. Great care was needed to ensure that the meanings of these sources of speech, styles, and symbolism were understood, and that Western notation maintained as much as possible the rhythms and the melodies used.
There are no definitive scholarly studies of Jamaican pop music since the 1980s, but several introductory articles, chapters, and texts can be pointed out. Kenneth Bilby's chapter on Jamaica in Peter Manuel's Caribbean Currents (1995) is a good place to begin. For a specific study of reggae, the book by Johnson and Pines (1982) is useful. Studies of more contemporary styles during the mixing and digital age of Jamaican music are by Hebdige (1987) and Jahn and Weber (1992).
Music and the Quest for a Cultural Identity
Contemporary Trends
Cultural Identity
Martinique, an island of the Lesser Antilles, is a young society formed by immigrants from the Caribbean, France, South Asia, and West Africa. Its population is about 320,000, composed largely of the descendants of West African slaves and other cultures that have mixed.
Martinique had been a French colony since the 1600s, but in 1946 it gained the status of an overseas department of France. The island's official language is French, but Creole (KweŽyo`l) is used in everyday communication. This type of bilingual society, in which a vernacular tongue remains in active use without an official status, has encouraged the emergence of a parallel culture based on oral tradition. The use of Creole, notably in public contexts, has become a symbol of identification and assertion for the people of Martinique, setting them culturally apart from metropolitan France.
Racial and cultural mixing (meŽtissage) has specifically transformed Martinicans' daily life by creating a multiple frame of reference for identity. French, African, Asian, or creole elements might be present during a musical event, depending on where and when it occurs. This phenomenon has caused anthropologists specializing in Creole culture to speak of "cumulative identities" (Fuma and Poirer 1994) and "situational-contextual belongings" (Benoist 1994). Musical practices are also influenced by these processes. The island's traditional and popular music not only contributes to a trend that emphasizes identity, but for many has become a symbol of the quest for a Martinican sense of belonging.
Like other Creole-speaking areas, Martinique is marked by interculturalism, and its musical practices are complex and drawn from multiple sources, old and new:
Despite changes and adjustments, the music of Martinique has maintained expressive elements that distinguish it from other Creole traditions. On a more global level, itThe Caribbean serves as a kind of crucible in which the elements of interculturalism can be clearly identified.... The extreme healthiness of the culture is the result of the crossbreeding of the diverse elements which have shaped the sensitivity and the reasoning of the people in this region. (ReneŽ Depestre, quoted in Berrouešt-Oriol and Fournier 1994:19)
My aim is to shed light on these questions by surveying musical development in Martinique from 1946 to 1996, and by examining the influence music has on the local identity-seeking process. To understand the links between music and the Martinican quest for identity, one needs to pay special attention to performance contexts and factors that have contributed to the popularity of certain musical genres.
In Martinique, music serves above all to describe the environment, not only in sound, but also in social and cultural aspects. A symbolic universe unto itself, music reflects simultaneously that which binds people together and that which sets them apart. Beyond the rifts that can be traced back to the times of slavery, Martinique has always been a melting pot of ethnic heritages.
Martinican musicians could always choose from five options: conservation of traditional practices, abandonment of traditional practices, adoption of new practices, innovation, and creation (Desroches 1992). However, the choice among these options is not made randomly. While Martinicans have delved deeply into their traditions, they have reinterpreted them in accordance with current contexts and in the light of their quest for cultural identity.
The musical borrowing and reinterpretation characteristic of creole regions is an integral part of the creative process; thus, the term creolization was born. The transformation of original elements and the substitution of others, changes in function, attempts to retain ancestral customs, the borrowing of some expressions of modernity and the denunciation of others, the reinterpretation and consequent recreation of certain musical genresall these traits serve as reminders of how deeply Martinique is anchored in a creole identity. Through Martinicans' style of social expression, oral tradition lives on, from the krik-krac tales told at funeral wakes to the vwa of the beŽle` dance singers, and from the parades that occur spontaneously during carnival to
A comparison of contemporary musical practices with descriptions of early practices reveals that Martinique's musical traditions have followed regional and insular trajectories. This history can be seen as a process through which musical practices have evolved around social, cultural, and economic changes, particularly since 1946.
Beguine, a referential genre
In identifying an authentically Martinican musical genre, discourse on musical tradition singles out the beguine (biguine, bigin) because of its early origins and frequent use. The beguinemusic and dancecan be distinguished by a binary rhythmic pattern (
The instrumentation in contemporary musical practice identifies two main types of Martinican beguine: drum beguine (bigin beŽle`) and orchestral beguine. Each of these refers to contexts of a specific origin. The drum beguine comes from a series of beŽle`, dances performed since early colonial times by the slaves who lived in the heart of the great sugar plantations.
Musically, the drum beguine can be distinguished from the orchestral beguine in four ways: its use of a cylindrical single-headed drum (beŽle`) and rhythm sticks (tibwa), responsorial singing, soloistic improvisation, and a nasal vocal quality. The beguine figured in fertility rituals practiced in West Africa, the motherland of most
The orchestral beguine has taken a different route. Its ancestry can be traced to Saint Pierre, an urban center that since the 1800s has harbored a notable number of residents of French descent. It keeps the syncopations of the drum bigin but takes on an almost Dixieland flavor by virtue of the complexity of its instrumentation (
By highlighting the stylistic elements of both beguines and indicating the place of origin, the table in
For many years, the musical environment with which the population of Martinique identified itself was essentially defined by the two types of beguine (and the mazouk
To the urban centers of the French West Indies the Haitians brought the kadans 'cadence', a musical genre already familiar to some Martinicans via radio. Kadans makes a subtle use of musical accents, syncopation, and instrumental color, derived from the mini-jazz orchestras of Haiti (featuring brass, lead and bass guitar, bell, and drums) [see HAITI]. The vocal technique used in kadans also contributes to its flavor by the use of onomatopoeia and long, drawn-out tones reminiscent of bel canto singing.
This new music upset the relationship that Martinicans had maintained with their music, former ties to island history, and the traditional music of their ancestors; however, the arrival of a popular music from another island served to highlight a sociocultural commonality between the cultures, with their shared history of slavery and a common language. So it was that the island's cultural landmarks were no longer based mostly on Martinican history and society but became something vaster, embracing a larger part of the Caribbean region.
Most music that had previously been produced in Martinique had come from groups formed on the spot at events of an equally spontaneous nature, but kadans set a new dynamic into motion with new players, production values, and socioeconomic settings. Here were groups whose status approached the professional, among whom the majority had already recorded commercially and whose success had been transmitted by the media throughout the Creole-speaking Caribbean, setting a standard that local musicians aspired to meet.
Kadans swept the country, and most Martinican musicians turned to its performance and composition, recording on French and West Indian labels, and for the first time the Creole-speaking Caribbean moved to the same music. Singer David Martial and the group La Perfekta are examples of this development.
The result of this upheaval was that the islanders' quest for cultural identity had to be considered creole, not solely Martinican. In the early 1980s, the founding of International Creole Day (JourneŽe Internationale du CreŽole), held annually on 28
The musical hegemony of kadans dominated the musical scene until the mid-1980s, when zouk (perhaps glossable as 'dance party') arrived on the scene. Much more than a new concept or a fad, zouk reaches beyond the borders of the West Indies to the continents of Africa, Europe, and North America. Its essential expressive elements are drawn from French West Indian traditions, using the beŽle`, the make`, or the boule` drums to maintain, with the ti-bwa and the rattle chacha, a rhythm whose basic pulse comes from the drum beguine. Pierre-Edouard DeŽcimus and Jacob Devarieux, the founders of Kassav' (the band that epitomizes the sound of zouk), added the festivity and release that mark the spontaneity of the street parade (videŽ), integrating into the new music and dance some rhythmic elements of the old.
After the fashion of the balakadri (from the French bal a` quadrilles) and the bal granmoun (old-time evening balls), a zouk then featured the new sound in alternation with dances such as beguines, "slows," and mazurkas to punctuate the evening's ambience. On top of this formula, the creators continued to creolize by slipping in the syncopation of calypso, putting the bass in the foreground (as in reggae), emphasizing guitar solos, and adding staccato brass, all solidly anchored in the ostinato figures of the drums as heard in the contemporary sound of Congo (formerly Zaišre).
The popularity of zouk lay in its inventors' ability to engineer and balance its borrowed musical elements so effectively that the resulting atmosphere of joy and release became associated with the genre. Zouk gave the region a second wind, perhaps even a new life, and became the common ground, the moment of exchange and synthesis, where all could meet. It could be seen not only as the reinterpretation but as the creation of a music that now expresses Martinican identity.
With zouk, Martinican music entered fully into European and American markets, where the recording industry responded to the laws of supply and demand. Unlike kadans, in which Martinicans drew their inspiration from foreign musical genres, zouk proposed a musical model that united first the entire West Indian community and eventually musicians and fans of African-American music the world over.
In addition, following the example of North American and European rock, Martinican musicians began to take a growing interest in the visual dimensions of performance, in which the stakes had become as important as those of the aural. Into Martinican musical experiences they incorporated theatrical staging: choreography, costumes, lighting. They shifted the appearance of the presentation from that of a dance to that of a spectacle. When one compares the beguine of the 1950s to zouk it is clear that a significant transformation took place over thirty years, creating new values and relationships between the people and their music, where the latter is no longer simply intended to be danced to, but also to be watched.
Zouk is a result of the fusion of musical genres from the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, but it represents Martinicans' desire to put forth an image of the French West Indies that would remain creole while meeting up with modernitya new identity that followed musical, commercial, and aesthetic trends, and would ultimately characterize a transnational culture.
Tamils came to Martinique from India after the local abolition of slavery (1848), providing labor that had formerly been supplied by slaves. Most came to stay and continued certain of their traditions, including rituals and ceremonial music for rituals (Desroches 1983, 1987, 1992).
Besides the Tamil enclave, three main avenues remain available to today's Martinican musician. The first is the continuation of the trajectory taken by zouk in the mid-1980s: the main foundations of the Creole identification process still remain rooted in rhythm, dance, and the employment of Creole, but musicians now cloak themselves in new sounds (such as richer harmonies and orchestral diversity), which I call post-zouk. The group Kwak fits into this category.
Return to the source
The second main musical path I call a return to the source. It advocates the return to musical beginnings by favoring music that draws from the past, emphasizing common musical roots. The distinctions formerly made between traditional and popular music are becoming increasingly fine as the latter incorporates more elements from musical practices that are growing progressively rarer because of massive urbanization and migration. These elements include melodic and rhythmic expression, traditional content, and performance context.
This new approach seems to be the chosen avenue or many contemporary musicians, some of whom have revived, at times almost completely, music from ancestral traditions or music from the era preceding Martinique's departmentalization. The group Racines ('roots') is an example of this phenomenon; their 1988 recording Kali became a bestseller, hitting the top of the local charts soon after its release.
Other musicians use traditional Martinican rhythms (beguine, mazurka) as a foundation. They sing in Creole but develop and integrate foreign instrumental techniques and harmonies, such as those of jazz and other genres. The success of Mario Canonge's recording Retour aux sources (1991) belongs to this category, which could be seen as a continuation of a trend begun as far back as the 1960s by Marius Cultier and the group Fall Fret.
Today, recording companies and distribution and marketing networks alike accept music with an ever-diversifying signature, in which traditional music figures strongly; good examples are the groups BeŽle` nou and Racines and the singer Max Cilla.
Rap and raggamuffin
The third musical avenue is some people's passion for rap and raggamuffin, adopted part and parcel without having passed through the filter of reinterpretation. Here, identity is linked with black culture, and a variety of concerns are addressed, especially the denunciation of the unequal sharing of power and resources. It will be instructive to follow the progress of these genres in the years to come, to see in which directions the movement will evolve and whether the historical elements of the music are wiped out or forgotten.
The coexistence of diverse musical aesthetics suggests that Martinican music is at a crossroads in the search for a cultural identity. The choice of performance space, the selection of sonic material, the creation of new musical directions, music that is at once nationalistic and transnationalall these factors indicate a profound preoccupation with the quest for an identity, a search for a musical space that would be simultaneously Martinican, creole, and contemporary.
In Martinique, following the evolution of the dominant musical practices of successive periods amounts to following the island's political, social, and economic history. Haitian immigration has contributed to shaping musical traditions in Martinique, as has emigration to France.
Building up a cultural identity through a musical product is a dynamic, selective process. In Martinique, each genre has defined itself in reaction to the previous one, and musical traditions have been adopted, transformed, abandoned, and revisited. Through this process, Martinicans have gone from an ethnic identity (evidenced in the cleavage between the bigin beŽle`, linked to Africa, and the orchestral beguine, associated with Europe) to a cultural identity, residing in something of an Antillean consciousness. This is what the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant called antillaniteŽ, a concept that in zouk reached out to encompass Caribbean, African, and European features. In reference to earlier AntillaniteŽ, the post-zouk movement is called creŽoliteŽ.
In Martinique, the main debate about identity is found in music. But contrasting with what has happened elsewhere, this debate takes place not only in lyrics (with notable exceptions, such as Mona), but in rhythm, dance, and language. Beyond a product and a process, music must be seen as an issue. In Martinique, cultural identity is deeply rooted in praxis.
The music of Martinique has been little researched by English-writing scholars. Works in French, however, include two studies by Monica Desroches: La musique traditionnelle de la Martinique (1985) and Les instruments de musique traditionnelle (1989). Beguine music, which has been studied in neighboring Guadeloupe by EŽdouard Benoit (1993:53-67), has not been researched in Martinique, even though that French department has produced a number of well-known beguine composers (Benoit 1993:243). Jocelyne Guilbault, in her book Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993), presents brief but important information about music in Martinique, especially as it relates to music in other French-speaking islands of the Caribbean. She explains that French-produced radio has been influential in introducing African popular music into Martinique (and Guadeloupe): "the musics of Zaire, Congo, and Cameroon were listened to regularly from the late seventies and are still part of the local repertoire" (1993:16). She also explains that certain Caribbean musics such as calypso and reggae were introduced by radio and touring musicians from Trinidad and Jamaica. Likewise, touring groups from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico also influenced the development of popular music in Martinique, as did popular musical traditions from Argentina and Brazil (Guilbault 1993:17). All of these, and especially Dominican cadence-lypso and Haitian konpa-dire`k, were influential in the development of zouk in Martinique (and Guadeloupe).
Social Backgrounds
Musical Contexts and Genres
Jumbie
Carnival, Boxing Day, and Jump-up Day
Montserrat, the southernmost of the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, embraces about 63 square kilometers of mountainous terrain. It had a population of about 12,500 people, of whom one-fifth resided in the capital, Plymouth; the remainder inhabited forty-one villages located mostly along the leeward coast and in the interior. Montserratians were mainly subsistence farmers and migrant laborers in Plymouth. Since the 1960s, many nationals of Canada, England, and the United States had settled in Montserrat, and tourism became a major industry.
Because of the devastating eruptions of the Soufriere Hills Volcano on July 18, 1995, over 8,000 people have left Montserrat, most going to the United Kingdom and Antigua. In 1998 the southern part of the island was almost completely destroyed and is now uninhabited; only about 3,200 people have remained on the northern part of Montserrat. Most of this essay describes the happier days of Montserrat in the 1970s, before the forced out-migration of the late 1990s.
In prehistoric times, the island was occupied sporadicallyfirst by Arawaks and then by Caribs. The first permanent settlers were Irish, who, because of conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants, emigrated from St. Kitts and Virginia in 1632. Though Montserrat has been an English and British colony since that date, it is largely self-governing, with the British connection maintained by local referendum. The first census (in 1678) listed 1,868 Irish, 761 English, and 992 African slaves. By 1805, the slave population had grown to about 9,500, and the white had dwindled to a thousand. A demographic survey conducted in 1946 called 95 percent of Montserratians Negro. Though African phenotypes are dominant in the population, there is much evidence of intermixture, especially among the Black Irish (or "Montserrat Irish"). They are maybe a thousand strong and live in the north, claiming descent from slaves and Irish who married in the 1700s. To maintain Caucasoid phenotypic traits and the Irish heritage, they tend to intermarry.
The culture of Montserrat is an amalgam of African, Irish, and British retentions and reinterpretations, regional borrowings, and internal innovations (Dobbin 1986; Messenger 1968; Philpott 1973). Local culture, largely maintained by the rural
Modernization since the 1970s has dramatically altered the culture. The major modernizing agents have been returning migrant laborers, returning trainees for schools and the civil service, a large real-estate development program (to attract expatriate residents), the enlarging of the airport (built in 1957), governmental plans to emphasize tourism, the establishment of a medical school (serving three hundred fifty students, mostly North Americans), and two local radio stations. Only in the 1960s did traditional patterns of music, song, and dance give way to imported musicsteel drums, reggae, and soca. One impetus for this change was provided by a recording studio built in the 1980s. It attracted musical ensembles from all over the world, including the Rolling Stones.
African and possibly Irish proverbs and African spider-trickster tales (anansi) are common in Montserrat, but folk songs and their texts are far more widespread. Many of these melodies and at least sixty lyrics are usually performed at rituals involving jumbies, ghosts of the dead (good and evil). Islanders love this music and are proud of it as an expression of their cultural identity. Most are experts on the subject, and fights erupt over the proper rendition of tunes and lyrics.
Many tunes, popular with locals and tourists, have been recorded by the Emerald Community Singers (named after an epithet for Montserrat, "Emerald Isle of the Caribbean"), a group formed in 1971. Its first record (1973) featured five traditional songs in highly interpretive performances, somewhat removed from earlier styles. Discussing morality, love, courtship, work, amusing incidents, and magic (obeah), the lyrics recount historical events and singular deeds of historical figures on the island.
Two songs of historical significance"Nincom Riley" and "All de Relief"are among those often heard. The former heralds emancipation:
Here, Nincom Riley reads the proclamation that advocates that freed slaves reply in kind by nackingkickingfor physical abuse by their former masters. This song combines Irish and African elements: Riley is an Irish surname; Nincom probably derives from the Gaelic nine 'rogue'; buckra, a common New World black term for whites, may derive from the Nigerian Ibibio mbakara 'he who conquers'. The other song reflects favoritism in the distribution of relief after the hurricane of 1924:De fus' o' Agus' is cum 'gin.
Hurrah fo' Nincom Riley!
If buckra nack, me nack 'ee 'gin.
Hurrah fo' Nincom Riley!
Other than those involving jumbies, songs sung in the 1960s were calypsos presented by competitors during carnival and Irish melodies voiced by a few Black Irish elders.All de relief dem sen' from town,
All de relief dem sen' from town,
Some git some, an' some git none.
The jumbie dance, probably last performed in 1980, is central to local culture, possibly its focus: "No other single event on the island ... brings together at one place and one time so much of the culture and historical heritage.... No other event ... contains so much of the traditional lifewaysmusic, dance, folklore, wisdom, kinship, and friendship values" (Dobbin 1986:153).
Central to this dance is belief in jumbies, who dominate local religion, just as fairies do Irish traditions. Though most Montserratians are members of Christian churches and have been since emancipation, most continue to hold unorthodox beliefs in the supernatural. In addition to jumbies, they recognize a multitude of spirits: the sukra and the jabless, African spirits, harmful to humans; the Irish mermaid who lives atop a mountain; the animal spirit, resembling the Irish puca, who roams the road adjacent to the Roman Catholic church in St. Patrick's Village; and the Jack Lantern, a spirit more menacing than its counterpart in Ireland.
The jumbies of Montserrat are treated much like the fairies of Ireland: when people open a bottle of rum, they spill a few drops in the corner of the room; before they throw water out of a house at night, they direct "Pardon me" to any passing jumbie; on Christmas Eve, people set a table and put out food for ghosts to eat while the family is atttending Mass. At sundown, to prevent evil jumbies from entering, most rural houses close their doors and windows, sometimes marked with white crosses. Ghosts not only leave their graves and voluntarily walk about, but can be called out by obeahmen, at whose command they perform good and evil "tricks" (acts); the jumbie dance can summon them, and they can possess dancers.
Some Montserrat-Irish elders hold that the jumbie dance originated before emancipation, when slaves observed and emulated dancing in the "big houses." The jumbie dance differs from the country dance (also called drum dance and goatskin dance), even though both dances are identical as to musickers (musicians), the instruments played, the songs and dances performed, and the merriment that prevails. The country dance is done for entertainment, "for a spree," and may take place in a home, in a rum shop (a combined provision-and-drinking establishment), even at a hotel as an exhibition. But the jumbie dance is for "dee dead." Danced in a home after a fe^te, it includes the sponsor's kin and close friends. It is held at times of personal crisis (christenings, weddings, emigrants' departures and returns) and affliction (illness, disputes over property, marital problems). In it, dancers "turn"become possessed by jumbies, who to those in trance reveal "secrets" that foretell the future, cure sickness, and solve problems.
The musickers, four in number, play a fife or a "pulley" (accordion, concertina, or melodeon), a triangle, and two flat, goatskin-covered drumsone large, called a jumbie drum or a woowoo or a French reel, and the other smaller, with or without discs on the edge, called a babala or a tambourine. The drums are identical with the Irish bodhran in shape and manner of playingwith the back of the hand, the palm, and the fronts of the fingers. When rubbed with the heel of the hands or with a moistened finger, the jumbie drum makes a sound that attracts jumbiesas do (some claim) certain jumbie songs.
Four pairs of men and women dance a series of five quadrilles ("sets") played at
Music, song, and dance also abound during carnival (locally called Festival), which occurs between Boxing Day (26 December) and Jump-up Day (1 January). During carnival, and for a fortnight before, masqueraders from various villages parade about the island in colorful costumes, accompanied by musickers (
On Boxing Day, islanders gather at Sturge Park (adjoining Plymouth) to witness a series of musical events, some of them competitive: music played by steelbands, routines danced by costumed groups from villages and sponsored by local businesses, appearances by ensembles of masqueraders, and the antics of costumed mummers. Between that day and Jump-up Day, organizers produce a beauty pageant, a calypso contest, and nightly dancing in the streets of the capital behind a lorry-drawn platform with a band or the amplified recordings of such. Jump-up Day commemorates emancipation, and its highlight is a parade of brawny weightlifters, carrying chains and dancing to steelband music. From time to time, to symbolize breaking the chains of slavery, they jump high in the air. Masqueraders move about the streets, where thousands of spectators mill about, singing and dancing. During carnival, people do little work; eschewing sleep, they drink heavily.
Music, song, and dance also prevail on other important occasions. People meet in rum shops for gossiping, singing, dancing, and drinking. Musicians often play accordions, guitars, banjos, and ukuleles (cuatros) to entertain the customers and furnish music for dancing. Sometimes on Boxing Day, string bands perform impromptu in rum shops. During carnival, choral and instrumental groupsusually small in size and made up of childrenvisit homes and hotels, where they perform for food and money. Christmas carols are a staple. A disco in Plymouth, popular with youths, challenges traditional expressions. Though most calypsos satirically single out political and economic ills, singers sometimes lament the passing of traditional ways, forlornly calling for cultural revitalization.
Musical Traditions
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Popular Music
Art Music
Further Study
Six islands make up the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, located in the Lesser Antilles chain of the Caribbean Sea: Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, and Saba in the northern, windward island group, east of the Virgin Islands; and Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacžao in the southern, leeward group, off the coast of Venezuela. Christopher Columbus sighted the northern islands during his 1493 voyage, and his successors subdued the local Carib population. The Spanish navigator Alonso de Ojeda landed on Curacžao in 1499. In 1527, Spain claimed Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacžao as its own and the Arawak inhabitants as its subjects. After a period of struggle for control among several European colonial powers, all six islands became Dutch possessions in the early 1600s and for the most part remained so thereafter. In 1845, they were officially organized as the Netherlands Antilles, and in 1954, they became an integral part of the Netherlands. In 1986, Aruba separated from the other five islands, attaining equal status as an autonomous part of the Netherlands.
Culturally and geographically, the islands are marked by similarities and regional and local distinctions. Dutch is universally the official language, though the longstanding influence of neighboring islands has made English important in the north and Spanish common in the south. In Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacžao, the most commonly spoken language is Papiamento, a Spanish-dominant creole with borrowings from Dutch and Portuguese. The northern three islands are quite small in area (85 square kilometers total), with diminutive populations: Sint Maarten, twenty-five thousand; Sint Eustatius, fifteen hundred; Saba, one thousand (1989). Sint Maarten shares its island with the French dependency St. Martin.
The southern islands are much larger, and account for most of the Netherlands Caribbean population: Curacžao, 462 square kilometers with 187,500 people (1989); Aruba, 181 square kilometers with sixty-six thousand (1995); and Bonaire, 291 square kilometers with ten thousand (1989). The windward climate is tropical and wet, with lush vegetation; the leeward islands are tropical and arid, with sparse vegetation. The people of the windward group are largely Protestant; the leeward population is predominantly Roman Catholic, with Curacžao being home to the Caribbean's longest-established Jewish community.
People of African ancestry, mostly descendants of slaves imported in the sixteenth
In general, the major currents of musical life in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba have reflected the islands' historical cultural influences and social divisions. As native populations became extinct or were absorbed into the new colonial cultural majority of Africans and Europeans, so did their musical traditions pass away. Little is known of the music of the local Carib, who long ago disappeared from the northern islands, or of the Arawak inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, who lost any sense of a separate cultural identity as they intermingled with the African majority. The gourd rasp (raspu) may be a descendant of a similar Arawak instrument, though it could as likely have been modeled on rasps imported from elsewhere in the Caribbean. Clearly, African, European, and, more recently, Venezuelan, Colombian, Cuban, other Latin American, and North American musical models have prevailed in the evolution of Dutch Antillean musical practice.
African-derived music
Firmly transplanted in Dutch Caribbean cultural soil, African-derived musical style has profoundly shaped virtually all musical expression in its New World domain. Martinus Joannes Niewindt, the first apostolic vicar of Curacžao (1842-1860), wrote in a letter describing his new see that "the island has become Africa with whites now and then encouraging the wildly drumming and dancing Blacks by passing round the rum bottle" (Walle 1954; quoted in Stevenson 1975:61). Curacžaoan musician and educator Edgar Palm saw the most direct link to his island's African heritage in five stylist traits of the tambuŽ music-and-dance complex: the centrality of the tambuŽ (from Spanish tambor 'drum') to certain rituals and dances, the dance named tambuŽ, and the musical group named tambuŽ; the separated, individuated style of dancing with the tambuŽ; the polyrhythmic relationship between the tambuŽ, the singing, and the other instruments; the style of singing, accompanying the dance with improvised, satirical texts; and the highly developed sense of musical rhythm (Palm 1978:1921).
There are several important African-derived musical instruments, genres, and performance occasions in the Dutch Leeward Antilles.
Idiophones
Among the idiophones are the agan, two metal rods struck together. A water drum (bastel, seoe) is half of a large gourd placed open side down in a water-filled tub; a squatting player hits it with his hands (Lekis 1956:224). Other idiophones, though not clearly of African origin, are often used in music of African-derived style. Developed in the Dutch islands from gourd and cow-horn predecessors, the wiri rasp is made from an elongated piece of steel, serrated and scraped with a metal rod, producing a louder, sharper sound than its precursors. The wiri was originally invented to accompany the ka?i (also kaha di musika, tingilingibox), an instrument made in Spain and Italy and introduced via Venezuela to Aruba. It spread to Curacžao between 1880 and 1900. The ka?i is constructed in the shape of a hand-cranked organ, but instead involves a rotating cylinder with pins that activate hammers, which in turn strike strings. One other instrument distinctive of Dutch Antilles music and that plays in a rhythmic style is the matrimonial, a thin plank measuring 60 by 5 centimeters, with four or more sets of copper or tin discs nailed loosely to it. It is held on the knee and beaten, producing a sharp, percussive sound (Lekis 1956:226).
Membranophones
The tambuŽ (called bariŽ in Bonaire), a membranophone, is the most important African-derived instrument in the Dutch islands of the Leeward Antilles. An earlier, single-headed version made from a hollowed log has been superseded by a double-headed drum made from a herring barrel with sheepskin or goatskin heads struck with both hands.
Chordophones
Resembling African mouth-resonated bows is the benta, made on Curacžao from a local hardwood and strung with coconut fiber. Its string is hit with a small wooden stick, and the pitch and timbre are modified by stopping one end of the string with a piece of metal and holding the other end of the string near the oral cavity and changing its shape.
Aerophones
The cachu, a cow-horn trumpet, is apparently derived from an antelope-horn Bantu predecessor used for signaling. Pitch may be varied by embouchure tension and/or stopping the open end with the hand, and by interjecting sung pitches. In Curacžao, the cachu has been used to call for water to be brought to workers during the sorghum harvest. The becu is a transverse double-reed aerophone cut from a sorghum stem and played mainly on the occasion of Simadan (Harvest Festival). In Burkina Faso, a similar instrument has the name biko (Gansemans 1982). On Bonaire, stamped tubes (bamba) may accompany celebrations of the feasts of St. John and St. Peter.
The tambuŽ complex of music and dance emerged in the 1800s or earlier. Musically, the tambuŽ is generated from a basic repeated rhythmic cycle, with interlocking polyrhythmic patterns providing a framework for an improvising lead drum. The tambuŽ dance is traditionally performed by couples, though not touching, except that the man may occasionally put his hand briefly on his partner's shoulder or may briefly hold the ends of her scarf (Lekis 1956:221). When the tambuŽ moved to the port of Willemstad, Curacžao's capital, it evolved into an increasingly erotic dance, associated with houses of prostitution and the consumption of alcohol.
Simadan, the sorghum-harvest festival, is another time when the cachu might be played, with the agan (also used in tambuŽ music), beating on pails, and responsorial singing. This music may also have accompanied ceremonial competitive dancing, in which the leaders of two groups of harvest workers would vie for onlookers' favor (Lekis 1956:227), and the wapa line dance (see Okada 1995:examples 5, 6, and 7).
European and Latin American marks on Netherlands Antillean musical life are strong, with social dancing, salon music, and the ka?i and its music being among the most important influences (Palm 1978:21). European holidays such as Christmas, New Year's, Epiphany, carnival, and patron saints' days are universally important times for music making. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous European and Latin American forms of music and dance were laid over the cultural and stylistic base, and some evolved into distinctively local hybrid forms. European dances such as the waltz, the mazurka, the polka, the schottische, and quadrille came into vogue in the 1800s, usually accompanied by European-style string-based ensembles. The waltz in Curacžao maintained its European 3/4 time and harmonic and melodic style, but polyrhythmic additions made for a much more active rhythmic feel. Social dances introduced from Latin American countries included the moderated duple-meter danza, derived from the Haitian contredanse via nineteenth-century Cuba, and the syncopated duple-meter tumba, resembling the Cuban ballroom dance guaracha and popular in many parts of the Antilles. The danza is danced by two couples with patterns taken from the quadrille; after an introductory polka-time section, the couples curtsy and dance two-step patterns (Lekis 1956:231). Around the mid-twentieth century, the tumba, identified with Afro-Caribbean musical tastes since the late 1800s, was the most popular dance and rhythm in all the Netherlands Antilles. It often included socially satirical verses and functioned similarly to Trinidadian calypso in this regard. Proximity to South America brought the joropo, the pasillo, and other forms from Venezuela, Colombia, and beyond.
With these imported musical genres came several European and Latin American musical instruments that, excepting the tambuŽ, have been central to the performance of these forms. Most significant is the cuatra, derived from the Venezuelan cuatro, a four-stringed guitar strummed rhythmically to accompany a wide range of music. The "standard" six-stringed guitar is also quite common. With the mandolin, string bass, and occasionally other stringed instruments and percussion, these were long the preferred accompaniment to social dance-music, but by the latter decades of the twentieth century, they were more often limited to self-conscious grupos folkloŽricos performing creolized dance-music thought to represent the past more than the present. The cuatra, played in the rapid, syncopated triple meter resembling that of the joropo, remained central to much social music in traditional contexts, including the annual celebrations for the feasts of Saint John and Saint Peter on Bonaire. In addition, accordions, Cuban congas (single-headed barrel drums), the triangle, and other instruments made their way into social dance ensembles.
The 1930s and 1940s saw the beginnings of an unending invasion of popular music models from Cuba, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere in the circum-Caribbean region. Cuban-style orchestras often included Cuban musicians but were composed primarily of Curacžaoans and Arubans dressed in Cuban urban rumbero costumes with ruffle-armed shirts. The Cuban instrumentation included trumpet, claves (two wooden rods struck together to mark the basic meter), bongos, congas, mariŽmbula (eight metal tongues attached to a deep resonator box and plucked like the African mbira), maracas, and guitar. These ensembles played Cuban dance pieces. Other ensembles, called jazz bands, took after North American dance bands
Art music has for more than two centuries maintained a significant niche in Dutch Antillean musical life. Protestant church music has been performed on pipe organs in Curacžao since the late 1700s (Palm 1978:24). AgustiŽn Bethencourt, born in Tenerife in 1826, moved to the island in 1860, organized the first string quartet there, and in 1879 took the lead in founding Harmonie, the first symphonic orchestra on Curacžao (Stevenson 1975:62). Romantic-style art music has been the most influential, particularly that of Spain and Austria, and local composers created a significant repertoire of European salon music. Curacžaoan Jan Gerard Palm (1831-1906), who served as organist for both Fort Amsterdam Church and MikveŽ Israel Synagogue, founded a major musical dynasty through his descendants, including Edgar Palm, author of Muziek en Musici van de Nederlandse Antillen.
Art music in the leeward islands has been documented in a small number of publications, including Edgar Palm's book and in Rudolf Frederik Willem Boskaljon's Honderd jaar muziekleven op Curacžao (1958) and his article "Het Muziekleven" (1948). Robert M. Stevenson offers a generous gloss of leeward-island music-related references in these and other general publications in his A Guide to Caribbean Music History (1975). Although these works offer numerous references and brief descriptions of folk and popular music, and in Palm's book, several chapters devoted to the African and creolized social dance music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, description and analysis of Dutch Antilles folk and popular music from an ethnomusicological perspective is severely limited, especially regarding the musical culture of the smaller windward islands. Notable exceptions are "The Origin and Development of Ethnic Caribbean Dance and Music" (1956), an unpublished doctoral dissertation by the dance ethnologist Lisa Lekis, and the annotated recording ArubaBonaire-Curacao: Volksmuziekmusique populaire, resulting from research and ethnographic recordings made in 1982 by the Belgian Centre Ethnomusicologique Paul Collaer, with notes in Dutch and French credited to Jas Gansemans. This recording was reissued as Tumba Cuarta & Ka?i on the Original Music label, with a modified version of the descriptive notes by John Storm Roberts.
Musical Instruments
Musical Contexts and Genres
Teaching and Learning
Further Study
Puerto Rico is a small Caribbean island just east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands. Like the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico is a colony (commonwealth) of the United States, to which it was ceded by Spain in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. It became the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in the 1950s. But unlike the people of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Ricans traditionally speak Spanish, though many speak English in urban areas. As a former Spanish colony, Puerto Rico shares much history and culture with Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
Archaeological excavations have yielded evidence that thousands of years ago, native Americans inhabited Puerto Rico. Early inhabitants may have used these and other Caribbean Islands as a bridge in their travels south from North America or north from South America. Later, Arawak Indians from northern South America migrated from Paria Bay into the Caribbean Antilles.
By the time Christopher Columbus came to the Caribbean, the Arawak-speaking Taino were firmly established in the island they called Borinquen, the present Puerto Rico ('Rich Port'). Excavated pottery, domestic items of wood, and stone sculptures of deities confirm their existence. Examination of Arawak middens has revealed evidence of gourd rasps with scrapers (guširos); conch trumpets (guamos); wooden trumpets; pieces of a hollowed log with an H-shaped slit (similar to the teponaztli, an ancient Mexican hollowed log idiophone); shell, clay, wood, and gourd rattles (maracas); clay ocarinas; clay and bone whistles; and a bone flute.
Around 1510, the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico forced the Taino into hard labor. Many succumbed to European diseases to which they had little or no natural immunity. In official records by the early 1600s, the Taino no longer appeared as a distinct people; however, small bands of them survived by taking refuge in remote and inaccessible hills, areas later called indieras.
From the descriptions of Arawak musical activities in the writings of the chroniclers (CaŽrdenas 1981; Casas 1965; LoŽpez de GoŽmara 1965; PaneŽ 1974), it seems that the areyto (also areito)a celebration that combined poetry, songs, and dances, with accompanying instrumentswas the most important social activity of Taino life. Areytos had a historical, religious, ritual, or ceremonial nature. The chroniclers
Astoundingly, though friars' training in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries required some knowledge of music, particularly Gregorian chant and polyphonic choral music used in the Roman Catholic Church, chroniclers' reports contain no extensive descriptions, quotations, or analyses of indigenous melodies. We find only three facts pertaining to music: the elderly sang the low voices, while the young sang the upper voices; women sang the soprano, alto, and tenor voices; and indigenous singing was not harsh to European ears.
In Seville, in the Casa de ContraccioŽn (Contract Clearinghouse), sixteenth-century inventories detailing items sent to Spanish colonies include jingle bells, vihuela strings, clavichord strings, and fifes. Alfonso de Buenan~o, boatswain, brought the first vihuela to Puerto Rico aboard the ship Santiago on 19 September 1512. A Mr. Quintana also brought a vihuela to Puerto Rico on 25 December 1512, when he arrived aboard San Francisco. Subsequently, other vihuelas arrived. Juan MartiŽn, a passenger aboard San Juan, brought the first guitar to Puerto Rico on 11 December 1516 (Tanodi 1971).
The 1520s and 1530s were chaotic and disastrous for Puerto Rico, as the discovery of gold in New Spain (Mexico), Peru, and Venezuela lured settlers away. The Spanish population shrank by half. The island became isolated from other colonies; for those who remained, life became austere, and social events were limited. The Roman Catholic Church sponsored the official music activities of the island. Family parties and other informal activities with music were organized by the African slaves and enslaved Indians (encomendados 'charges') officially in Spanish hands. In this populationSpaniards, enslaved Africans and Indians, free Arawaks in the indieraslay the foundation for the creolization of Puerto Rico.
By the 1540s, the island was no longer commercially important within the Spanish New World. Most of its merchandise, including musical instruments, was secondhand. For accompaniment to dancing by creole Puerto Ricans, the absence of instruments created a preference for singing, rather than solely instrumental music, and stimulated local craftsmen to build their own instruments.
Idiophones
Most hard-surface percussive instruments used in Puerto Rico are also found in other Spanish-speaking Caribbean cultures. These instruments include the claves, cowbell, and guširo scraper used in salsa and other dance musics, and the maracas used in jiŽbaro music (with the others just listed). Many instruments are machine made, but there are still local makers of the guširo, fashioned from a gourd (
One distinctly African instrument common in Puerto Rico, as in many parts of the circum-Caribbean area, is the mariŽmbula, an idiophone similar to the African mbira and kalimba, with several tuned metal lamellae mounted over a hole in a wooden box. As is still the practice in Cuba, the player would sit atop the box and pluck the lamellae with his fingers, supplying the bass for a small instrumental ensemble. The mariŽmbula and its associated musical tradition arrived with slaves between 1800 and 1880 but quickly dissipated at the beginning of the 1900s. The mariŽmbula has not been part of the rural tradition of Puerto Rico since the 1950s,
Membranophones
The distinctly Puerto Rican bomba drum is a single-headed cylindrical instrument resembling an open-ended straight barrel. The drumhead is about 40 centimeters in diameter and about 75 centimeters long. Originally, the tension of the drumhead was fixed by six pegs. However, after Mr. Aquino, the lone drum builder at LoiŽza Aldea, discontinued making drums in the 1970s, bomba drumheads were fixed by screws, just as on commercial drums. Since 1994, JesuŽs Cepeda has opened a shop in LoiŽza Aldea, where he builds pegged bomba drums, reestablishing the tradition.
The bomba drum is placed between a seated musician's knees and played with the hands only. Two bomba drums are usually at the center of an ensemble including rattles, responsorial singers, and often other percussion instruments. One bomba plays a relatively fixed pattern, and the other plays a more variable one, improvising in the style of West African drumming.
The pandereta is a round frame drum, like a tambourine without jingles. The traditional grouping in Puerto Rico is three panderetas of graduated sizes playing three different interlocking parts, with the highest-pitched one having an improvising role. One or more melodic instruments, singers (in a responsorial style with choral refrain), and other percussion instruments are often added.
Many other membranophones are found in Puerto Rico. Most are a part of the latino tradition, with origins or parallels in Cuba and/or the Dominican Republic. From Cuban background or influence, for example, are the bongos and congas, and from the Dominican Republic is the tambora [see CUBA; DOMINICAN REPUBLIC].
Chordophones
There is no published research on the origins, history, and construction of early European-derived Puerto Rican rural instruments. Notable were four plucked-lute chordophones: tiple, tres, cuatro, and bordonuŽa (
Most of these instruments are hourglass shaped, with occasional regional variations. Respondents mention a three-stringed instrument called requinto, with the tuning e1-a1-c?2. This instrument is a variant of the common tres, similar in size, but with three triple-stringed courses (for a total of nine strings) tuned to A-d-f?. The tiple 'treble' appears to derive from the timple, a single-coursed vihuela from AndaluciŽa, Spain. It is 56 centimeters long, with a 24-centimeter body, a 16-centimeter neck (brazo), and a 14-centimeter pegbox (pala or mano). The tuning of the five strings is A-e1-B1-G-B.
The cuatro is the most popular and common of the melodic instruments. Its earlier, four-double-stringed form gave way to its current, five double-stringed courses. The strings of the cuatro are tuned in octaves, except for the first two courses (tuned in unison). The present tuning, B1-E-A-d-g, is the same as that of sixteenth-century vihuelas and lutes. The cuatro is about 90 centimeters long, with a 50-centimeter body, a 20-centimeter neck, and a 20-centimeter pegbox.
The name of the bordonuŽa comes from the word bordoŽn (similar to the French bourdon), roughly meaning 'bass'. It resembles late-seventeenth-century Spanish instruments on which low-pitched, double-stringed courses include a thick string tuned an octave lower than its companion. The modern tuning of the bordonuŽa is
Though craftsmen carve instruments from any native hardwood, they prefer guaraguao, jagušey, or maga. For the soundboard, they use yagrumo, a light softwood. To avoid difficulty attaching the neck to the sound box, native makers carve the entire instrument, except the soundboard, from a single block of wood, and then sand the instrument down to the appropriate dimensions and thickness.
Religious forms
The rosario cantao 'sung rosary' is an important set of songs, practices, and beliefs that have developed in Puerto Rico around the rosary, a cycle of prayers marked with a circular string of fifty-nine beads. Following Spanish flight from the island around 1530, local versions of Roman Catholic practices began to take shape among the non-Spanish majority population, entirely outside ecclesiastical settings.
There are three types of rosario cantao: the rosario de promesas 'rosary of promises' (to the Virgin Mary or to a saint), the rosario a la Santa Cruz 'rosary to the Holy Cross', and the rosario para los muertos 'rosary for the dead'. These sung rosaries are similar to the ecclesiastically sanctioned one, though they are not sung inside a church. Each cycle of fifty-nine prayers (a tercio del rosario 'third of a rosary'), corresponds to the two-month lunar cycle of fifty-nine daysa reference to the femininity of the Virgin Mary. The Hail Mary dominates the rosary.
The most common poetic forms found in the sung rosary are couplets (coplas), deŽcimas, and decimillas. The typical jiŽbaro (of the country people) musical ensemble tiple or cuatro, guitar, guširooften accompanies all three types. During the novenario de difuntos, it performs only between tercios, when the singers take a break.
The rosario de promesas is the most common category of these rosaries. The organizer of the ritual offers to the Virgin or to a saint a promise in return for the solution to a probleman exchange between the metaphysical world and the material world.
The devotee keeps an image of the Virgin or saint on an altar at home. Treated as a member of the family, this image receives prayers, petitions, and supplicationsand when necessary, scolding and punishment. The devotee may formally present a
The rosary of promises begins at vespers the night before the promise is made. It lasts all night. When it ends (usually between six and seven A.M.), the participants say a short daybreak rosary before disassembling the altar. If the organizers have funds left, they will pay the musical group that accompanied the rosary throughout the night or contract a new group to play at a party that will last until noon. Obviously, carrying out a promise can require a lot of effort and money.
The rosario a la Santa Cruz follows a similar plan; however, it is performed particularly in Maya remnant of a long-standing Christian tradition of dedicating the month of May to Mary, possibly representing fertility as celebrated in pre-Christian rites of spring (see Davis 1972).
The rosario para los muertos is a ritual related to death or dying. It requires thirty-three tercios, two novenaries (novenarios), and the wake (velorio).
This rosary begins with a novenary (nine tercios), followed by the wake (thirteen tercios). The third section, the novenary for the dead (novenario de difuntos), is held for nine consecutive nights after the day of the burial. A tercio is said on each of the first eight nights, and three tercios are said on the last night. The total of thirty-three tercios corresponds to Jesus' supposed age at his death.
Secular forms
Bomba
The first written record of an African musical tradition in Puerto Rico dates from 11 November 1797, when AndreŽ Pierre LedruŽ, a visitor to the island, witnessed an African dance called bomba at a party in the farmhouse of a Don Benito in the town of Aibonito (LedruŽ 1971:47). Another substantiation is found in a letter dated 9 October 1840 in the Reports of the Spanish Governors of Puerto Rico (entry 23, box 66), whereby Ciriaco Sabat, "King of the Blacks of the Congo Nation," formally requested permission to perform bomba dances on the plaza during religious feasts in honor of St. Michael (29 September) and Our Lady of the Rosary (7 October) and reminded the governor that since time immemorial permission to play bombas had annually been granted. This suggests that the tradition was then at least a few generations oldwhich could reasonably date it to the period of 1700-1750. This dating coincides with the belief of the people of LoiŽza Aldea, who say their tradition of dancing and drumming the seis de bomba at the cathedral of San Juan dates to the 1600s as part of the original series of seises.
The bomba dance was slaves' and free blacks' most important social event and
Over time, immigration and cultural change led to musical change. African master drummers associated rhythmic patterns with the words they closely paralleled; the patterns served as mnemonic devices for learning and remembering. The loss of African languages meant the demise of this system. From the 1690s to the 1790s, the promise of freedom for African slaves on their arrival in Puerto Rico attracted slaves from around the Caribbean and resulted in musical acculturation. Consequently, cunyaŽ, leroŽ, yubaŽ, sicaŽ, grasimaŽ, holandeŽs, and calindaŽ are among the types of bombas brought to Puerto Rico, thus making bomba a generic name.
Each type of bomba directly relates to the basic ostinato rhythmic pattern on the second drum (sonador). The essence of the bomba dance was reduced to a challenge between the improvised beats of the first drum (repicador) and the dancer's improvised steps. Since about the 1960s, many drummers have felt the economic necessity of performing in salsa, merengue, or guaguancoŽ ensembles and have begun to mix rhythms of these musics with those of bomba, drastically adulterating the style.
Today in LoiŽza Aldea in the north and Guayama in the south (Dufrasne-GonzaŽlez 1996) the bomba is danced by men and women who move separately, within a circle formed by the audience. On one side of the circle are two bomba drums. The elders of the community stand to the right of the drums or sit behind the drums. The second drummer begins to play the basic rhythmic pattern, while the first drummer is idle. The singer begins the song, and the dancer approaches the drums from the opposite side of the circle to get the first drummer's attention and challenge him. The dancer now begins his improvised dance, which consists mostly of steps, jumps, abrupt body movements, stamping of feet or heels, and/or shoulder movements and whirls. Male dancers seem to prefer jumps, with exaggerated foot and leg movements. Female dancers favor whirls and arm movements. The central idea is that drummers should be able to synchronize a beat to each dance movement. Naturally, the improvisation is due to the present lack of a drum language. It is not known if a drum language was ever established.
DeŽcima
The deŽcima is one of the oldest, commonest, and most popular creole traditions of the rural people (jiŽbaros) of Puerto Rico. Its performance usually combines poetry and music. A poet, according to rural respondents, is a person who can not only compose on a theme according to certain rules of rhetoric, but one who can also improvise. Similarly, a cantaor is a person who memorizes deŽcimas to sing them. Most esteemed is the trovador, who can sing improvised texts on a given topic at the spur of the moment.
The deŽcima is the metric combination of ten eight-syllable lines, usually rhyming abba:accddc. A pause follows the fourth line (marked by the colon); otherwise, the rhymes of the last five lines mirror those of the first five. This strophe is associated with the Spanish poet Vicente MartiŽnez Espinel (1550-1624), and many people call it the espinela.
Another musical-poetic form, the decimilla 'little deŽcima', has a similar structure, though with only six syllables per line. In Puerto Rico, decimillas are almost as popular
There are no restrictions on the number of stanzas a poet may join into one text on a single theme. One-stanza deŽcimas and deŽcimas of dozens of stanzas occur. Most common, though, are four-stanza deŽcimas based on a four-line poem called cuarteta 'couplet'. The last line of the stanzas are respectively the first, second, third, and fourth lines of the cuarteta. The jiŽbaros call this strophe deŽcima cuarenticuatro 'forty-four deŽcima', but it is known elsewhere in the Hispanic world as glosa 'gloss'. In some deŽcimas with an indefinite number of stanzas, the tenth line is always the same; this structure is known as pie forzado 'forced foot'.
In the verse endings of deŽcima, Puerto Rican classical poets prefer consonant rhymes, whereas jiŽbaros seem to be more tolerant of assonantal rhymes. Rural people also show mastery of the inner rhythms of the versesthe syllabic accents at the beginning and middle of the line. Poetic meter is mostly trochaic, dactylic, or mixed. The inner rhythm synchronizes the poetry to the musical form, the seis.
Seis
There is no comprehensive or scholarly publication treating the history of the seis, the most important creole musical genre. Most published articles are speculations by historians or literary scholars who lack musical training. The seis is by far the largest corpus of creole music. The tradition includes names, rhythms, instruments, and possibly styles of singing that manifest the historical amalgamation, probably begun in the 1520s and 1530s, of African, Indian, and Spanish traditions.
The instruments that accompanied the seis in earlier times were the cuatro, the bordonuŽa, and the Indian gourd rasp now called guširo. The tres or the tiple sometimes replaced the cuatro; respondents insist that neither the tres nor the tiple played simultaneously with it. Eventually, the guitar replaced the bordonuŽa. A second cuatro and bongos joined the group, probably in the 1930s (
In broad terms, there are two types of seis: one, for dancing, is fast and lively; the other, for singing, is slower. Some names of the former type are related to the choreography of the dance: zapateado (with fancy footwork, from zapato 'shoe'), amarrao
The seis con deŽcima is the most common slow seis for singing. Some seises are known by the names of the towns in which they originate: orocoven~o (from Orocovis), bayamoneŽs (from BayamoŽn), and cagušen~o (from Caguas). Others are named after the person who composed or popularized a particular example: seis fajarden~o (after Mateo Fajardo), seis de Andino, seis de Pepe OrneŽ, seis PortalatiŽn, and seis VillaraŽn. Seises influenced by Latin American folk music include seis de milonga, seis gaucho, and seis tango from Argentina; seis montuno and seis habanero from Cuba; and seis joropo and seis llanero from Venezuela.
Seises with African influences probably go back to the mid-1500s. The rhythmic pattern of the melody in the seis mapeyeŽ (in the minor mode) and the seis montebello (in the major mode) resembles the Ghanaian Akan mpintiŽn, which comes from the Dagombas of Burkina Faso. The word bomba is not of Spanish origin, yet there are a seis bombeaoan instrumental example, in which people yell "bomba!" and exchange pleasantries in coupletsand a seis de bomba, the oldest African dance and drumming tradition in Puerto Rico (discussed below).
The seis tradition may have begun in the mid-1500s (LoŽpez Cruz 1967, Rosa-Nieves 1967). The number of distinct seises extant is probably between about ninety and 117. Each seis has its own melody, with which its name is most closely identified. The melody is short, usually a phrase or two. The structure of the seis con deŽcima is as follows: the instruments play the traditional theme (or melody) twice as an introduction; the singer starts his or her deŽcima right after the introduction; the instruments play the theme only once between stanzas and twice to end the performance.
In the modern seis ensemble, the first cuatro plays the theme and the second cuatro plays a duet with it during the introduction and the ending. During other sections of the seis, the first cuatro improvises, and the second cuatro repeats the theme as an ostinato while the cantaor sings memorized deŽcimas or the trovador improvises deŽcimas and melodic lines. Proficient cuatro players may alternate roles of ostinato and improvisation. The guitar primarily plays a basso continuo, sometimes chordally reinforcing the rhythmic and harmonic framework. The guširo player improvises on four basic rhythmic patterns.
Plena
The plena, a genre of dance and music, originated in Ponce around 1900. It was first heard in Ponce in the neighborhood Barriada de la Torre, whose population consisted mostly of immigrants from St. Kitts, Tortola, and St. Thomas, who had settled on the island since the late 1800s. At the beginning, sung texts were not associated with the plena, which was rendered by guitar, concertina, and tambourine; eventually, in 1907, singing was added.
The first known ongoing plena group consisted of Joselito Oppenheimer, tambourine player and leader; Bernabe Aranzamendi, guširo player and singer; and Alfredo (last name not known), concertina player. From their base in the neighborhood of Joya del Castillo, the plena spread to southern Ponce (San AntoŽn, El Palo de Pan, La Bomba del Agua, los PaŽmpanos). It became popular in Guayama and Mayagušez about 1906, and reached its peak popularity between 1918 and 1924, when the most famous plenas were "El temporal" ('The Storm'), "Submarino alemaŽn" ('German Submarine'), "Mamita, llegoŽ el obispo" ('Mommy, the Bishop Has Come'), "Tanta vanidad" ('Such Vanity'), and "Juana Pen~a me llora" ('Juana Pen~a Cries for Me'). The plena became so popular that people throughout the island sang and danced itespecially at planned or impromptu get-togethers on the street and at nightclubs (casinos).
In the late 1990s, its popularity is still in evidence. New plenas appear, in many cases with a new sophistication. Often, they are played by an orchestra with a large percussion sectionconga, snare, and bass drum added to or replacing the tambourine. Influential groups, such as El Quinto Olivo and Los Pleneros de la VeintitreŽs Abajo, increased the number of tambourines and their patterns, and other ensembles have followed suit, including three tambourines in a typical instrumentation.
Popular commercial musics
Other than folk musics, popular commercial music in the 1800s was mostly Spanish dance and march music. Migration to and from Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba influenced Puerto Rican music. The Cuban danzoŽn and contradanza especially influenced the Puerto Rican danza. The Cuban bolero, son, and son montuno have influenced the music of professional jiŽbaro ensembles (see Okada 1995: example 19).
The arrival of the U.S. army in 1898 brought American concepts of marching bands, dance bands, and other music, which was locally most obvious in the 1910s. The predominant influences on Puerto Rican music in the twentieth century have been the following, listed chronologically: recruitment of Puerto Ricans by the U.S. army exposed them to dance-band music and big-band music; economic conditions beginning in the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s caused migration to New York, where prominent musicians and composers heard Cuban, Mexican, North American, and other musical traditions; the immigration of Dominicans in the 1950s brought Dominican musical traditions to Puerto Rico; finally, in the 1960s, third- and fourth-generation Puerto Ricans' return to the island brought North American commercial music traditions.
Today, jazz, merengue, rap, rock, and salsa have strong followings. Stadium or beach concerts featuring any of these traditions are common. Nightclubs present artists from all these traditions every night. Most local radio stations program one particular tradition, though many broadcast four or five hours of country (jiŽbaro) music daily.
The universities of Puerto Rico are teaching institutions. The FundacioŽn de las Humanidades, the local partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has a humanist-in-the-community program and a video series on rural traditions; copies of these videos are deposited in libraries and cultural centers in towns throughout the island.
The Casa Paoli Folk Research Center in Ponce sometimes sponsors research. The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture sponsors cultural clubs in every town on the island. Hence, towns or regions can generate festivals and other activities according to their
Supplementing the seis tradition in rural areas, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture sponsors annual town, regional, and national competitions of all the major folk-music traditions.
An important bibliography for the study of Puerto Rican folk music has been compiled by Donald Thompson (1982), who wrote the only study of the mariŽmbula in Puerto Rico and the Caribbeanan instrument he calls "the poor man's bass fiddle" (p. 147). Other studies of African-derived music in Puerto Rico are by Hector Vega Drouet on the bomba and plena (1969, 1979) and James McCoy (1968) on indigenous and European influences on Puerto Rican music. An important study of a Roman Catholic event, the rosario or Fiesta de Cruz in San Juan, was made by the ethnomusicologist Martha E. Davis (1972).
In his annotated bibliography, Thompson (1982) writes: "Recently... [ethnomusicological] study has expanded in Puerto Rico to incorporate a growing body of thought concerning urban, as contrasted to rural, folk music" (p. 14). Indeed, since the 1980s, numerous authors have written about Caribbean popular music, including salsa and plena in Puerto Rico and New York City. The book Salsiology (Boggs 1992) has important chapters by Jorge Duany (1992), Juan Flores (1992), and Quintero Rivera (1992), about salsa, plena, and danza, respectively.
Principal Musical Traditions
Calypso: A Class of Its Own
Late-Twentieth-Century Developments
The political campaigns preceding St. Lucia's independence from Britain in 1979 focused not only on increasing political awareness but also on promoting culture as the symbol of St. Lucian identity. The recognition and celebration of St. Lucian values and cultural practices (advocated in political speeches as a prerequisite for self-determination) reflected the influence of social and ideological forces at the local, regional, and international levels.
These included the black-consciousness movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, which had fueled the civil-rights movement in the United States; the shift of attitude of the Roman Catholic Church (still predominant and influential in St. Lucia) from condemnation of local non-Christian culture to "a radical reappraisal of the theological significance of local culture" after the Second Vatican Council in 1965 (Anthony 1986a:38); and the ensuing inauguration of the Caribbean Ecumenical Consultation for Development in 1971, which called on the forces of the region to foster and disseminate Caribbean cultural values through seminars, exhibits, and cultural programs. All these developments helped nurture a sense of pride in local traditions and to instill in key people the notion that culture is an intrinsic part of a country's development.
Many local initiatives have promoted culture since the 1970s, for the most part under the aegis of the Folk Research Centre (FRC, a nongovernmental organization created in 1973), whose goal has been "to promote research into St. Lucian culture" and "to explore and clarify the role of culture in the development of our people." These initiatives have been concerned with promoting the use and appreciation of local arts and of Creole (the vernacular but unofficial national language) "as a weapon for change and integral development" (Anthony 1986a:42).
One of the most effective mobilizations of public support for oral traditions has been the annual observance since 1983 of Jounen KweŽyo`l (International Creole Day) on 28 October. This occasion is celebrated by Creole-speaking peoples throughout the world, grouped into Bannzil KweŽyo`l, an international organization. Organized by FRC in collaboration with the National Research and Development Foundation and Mouvman KweŽyo`l Sent Lisi (St. Lucia Creole Movement), this day of festivities has known such success that it has become a national event (Charles 1986:58).
Besides paying tribute to local skills (such as weaving sisal and building houses), Jounen KweŽyo`l celebrates the island's musical traditions. Organized at a different location each year, it honors the master musician, singer, dancer, and other artists from the selected village for their roles in promoting local expression and knowledge.
Excepting musical genres closely associated with a particular season or occasion (such as carnival and wakes), most local musical traditions described below are performed as part of daily activities.
Activities of leisure (
JweŽ are performed mostly in rural areas at beach parties, full-moon gatherings, deŽbo`t evenings (in which the main dance, deŽbo`t, accompanied by drumming, is based on two sections, aleŽ liwon [introduction] and deŽbo`t [the dance proper, consisting of a blo`tjeŽ movement every four beats]), and occasionally at wakes. They provide a source of entertainment, an opportunity to demonstrate verbal and dramatic skills, and a chance to make public commentaries in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Participants laugh at social conventions, criticize laws, and gossip. To minimize the possibility of offending anyone, participants perform all jweŽ with spontaneity and high spirits.
JweŽ that use musical elements include storytelling (listwa), play-song-dance (jweŽ danseŽ 'danced play song'), pantomime (jweŽ chanteŽ 'sung jweŽ'), and song-game (geŽm). Sung in Creole, all the songs but listwa are responsorial, performed by a leader and a choir. The lyrics, usually improvised, are based on humorous stories or social commentaries. Listwa and jweŽ chanteŽ are performed without instrumental accompaniment or dancing, but jweŽ danseŽ and geŽm involve dancing, typically accompanied by a ka (a hollow, barrel-shaped drum, covered at one end with a female goatskin tightly fastened by a cord passed around the edge of the body, and played with bare hands, the drum held between the player's legs in a sitting position) and occasionally by tibwa (a pair of hardwood sticks, struck against the rim of the drum) (Guilbault 1993).
In most local traditions, men and women may act as lead singers, but instrumentalists are usually men. The success of jweŽ is typically measured by the degree of participation of the audience, who react by clapping hands in rhythm, interjecting comments, and joining in the singing or dancing (
JweŽ danseŽ include four play-song-dances: deŽbo`t, yonbo`t, jweŽ po`teŽ, and solo. Except for solo (danced by a couple who undulate their hips and sway their pelvises forward and backward), jweŽ danseŽ are performed in a circle, and include the famous blo`tjeŽ, a movement consisting of thrusting the pelvis forward and "doing a toucheŽ" (making contact) with the neighboring dancer.
JweŽ chanteŽ, also called chanteŽ kont, are usually performed during wakes. In them, the leader uses pantomime to translate visually the meanings of the text. Often the play consists of enacting not the story itself, but the double entendres it may suggest.
In geŽm, all do not play in the same way. The leader plays with language by punning or using ambiguous phrases or metaphors. By adding some personal touch to the choreographed movements while following the rules of the game, other participants demonstrate their agility, imagination, and playfulness.
Not everyone likes to be associated with jweŽ. Many educated people, and those from the higher social class, criticize such activities for their sexual overtones and the singers for singing whatever they please. Most of these critics, though embarrassed to take part, recognize the value of jweŽ. Yet like everyone else in the country, they daily
Most kwadril evenings, each organized by one person, take place in private houses or rented halls. Invitations specifying the location, date, hour, and fees are sent to prospective guests. The organizer hires and pays essential musicians. Except during Lent, a kwadril evening can be organized anytime during the year.
The word kwadril is written here in Creole spelling, to differentiate it from the European counterpart from which it originated and to indicate that in St. Lucia the concept of "quadrille" has developed an identity of its own.
A kwadril heightens the prestige of every participant. Unlike most other performances (typically based on a few easy steps, allowing room for spontaneity and improvisation), the choreography of kwadril has to be learned, memorized, and practiced (see Okada 1995: example 22). These stages of apprenticeship, which do not correspond to the usual norm of learning through doing, are highly valued. They symbolize a particular type of knowledge, believed by many to be of higher quality and more complex than other local traditions. The choreographywhich, if performed correctly, is traditionally thought to demonstrate control over behavior, manners, and skillssymbolizes for the executants a set of special values linked with a higher social class.
The kwadril tradition is now losing popularity. Especially around the time of independence, European dance styles were seen as out of fashion. The general belief, particularly of youth, was that the traces of colonialism and of colonial values had to be relegated to the past. Only later did some people realize "that certain elements of tradition may play a positive role in the process of change, and should therefore be protected, even promoted and integrated into the development process" (Lutz and El-Shakhs, quoted in Guilbault 1984:179). Since then, in addition to Jounen KweŽyo`l, some organizations have actually tried to promote the tradition of kwadril by organizing an annual fiddle competition and shows featuring kwadril music and dancing.
A kwadril set consists of five compulsory dances: pweŽmyeŽfidji, deŽzye`m fidji, twazye`m fidji, katwiye`m fidji (first, second, third, and fourth dance, the fourth also called avantwa or lanmen dwe`t), with a final dance named gwan won 'grand round', to which two or three ballroom dances of the musicians' choice are added. These last dances usually include a polka, a schottische, and a lakonme`t. Also called mazouk, the lakonme`t is the only closed couple dance said to have originated in St. Lucia (see Okada 1995: example 21). Whereas the compulsory dances are performed in a square by four couples not joining hands, the other dances are performed freely around the room by the same dancers in a closed-couple position.
The most typical kwadril ensemble (
The La Rose and La Marguerite societies
La Rose (Lawo`z) and La Marguerite (Lamargrit), social-support societies that have existed at least since the early 1800s, are competing Roman Catholic organizations found in almost every St. Lucian village (Guilbault 1993). Though they have always declared themselves rivals, they share features. They call themselves societies, as their members enact roles reproducing an elaborate hierarchical system. Following an English model, each society has a king and a queen, a prince and a princess, members of various vocations (such as chief of police and nurses), and lower-class citizens. As members of an idealized society, they share one religion and economic status. They celebrate their respective patron saint annually with a one-day festival.
Except during Lent, both groups meet weekly, La Rose on Saturdays and La Marguerite on Sundays. On these occasions, members of La Marguerite sing together, seated; their lead singer (chantwe`l) stands. Members of La Rose dance and play musical instruments. La Rose instruments include a tambourine (tanbouwen), a chakchak, a baha (long, hollow tube, blown like a trumpet), sometimes a scraper (gwaj), and a guitar. Through these meetings, the members of both organizations enjoy camaraderie and strengthen their will to support each other in case of sickness or death.
The songs of both societies share similar musical genres in stanza-refrain forms, sung by a leader and a chorus. These genresincluding omans (a type of waltz), manpa (a lively dance in duple rhythm), and marchesdeal with the same topics: the societies' origin, their patron saint, their flower, and their rival, the other society (see Okada 1995: example 20). The La Rose members perform two other genres, kwadril and lakonme`t, both rhythmically similar to the dances found in kwadril music (
No historical document describes the origins of the two organizations or the circumstances that initiated the rivalry between them. One can only observe the profound differences between the two: whereas in performance members of La Marguerite favor reserved behavior, a controlled pace of events, discipline, and order, members of La Rose encourage exuberance, movement, and innovation. The rivalry of these organizations is said to crystallize major tendencies in St. Lucian society. After independence, the government recognized these organizations as symbols of St. Lucian cultural identity by sponsoring every local chapter of La Rose and La Marguerite, and by allowing the societies to meet at central locations on the day of their respective annual celebrations.
Musical traditions for specific occasions
ChanteŽ siay are work songs that accompany sawing wood. Performed by a leader and usually no more than two responders, they are accompanied by a ka and the tibwa, instruments played in a way that differs from the conventional: instead of holding
ChanteŽ abwe` 'drinking songs' are rarely heard. These were performed mainly during the Christmas season on evenings called wibo`t. Everyone in a circle of friends took turns receiving the others at home and paying for the food and drinks. The singing of chanteŽ abwe` was organized as a game in which everyone sitting at a long table in the middle of a room had to sing a new song every time around. Those who could not remember or improvise new songs were sent away. Singers who lasted until the end of the evening won a bottle of rum or other small prizes.
There was no musical accompaniment at a wibo`t. The entire performance relied on complete participation, since every two lines of text sung by a soloist were repeated by the others. In addition to this form of singing, chanteŽ abwe` distinguished themselves by their lyricsFrench words mixed with Creole expressions. Many lyrics dealt with topics of French origin.
Masquerade and serenade
The masquerade and the serenade (seŽwinal) are nearly extinct. The musical genres played for both activities were the same: merengue, march, and maynan (another name for manpa).
The masquerade was a celebration organized around holidays such as Christmas, New Year's, and Easter. The orchestra, which included the same instruments used in merry-go-rounds, cockfights, and seŽwinal (a tanbou tenbal, a snare drum here called kettledrum, a chakchak, and a bamboo flute), left home early in the morning to play, sing, and dance. While the musicians walked around the village playing their instruments, two costumed male dancersone playing a woman's role (female mas), the other a man's (male mas)entertained the crowd by performing contortions. Besides
The seŽwinal was usually performed during the four weeks of Advent and, except for Lent, at any other time of the year. Unlike the masquerade, it was performed solely at night or dawn, and no one wore a mask or a costume. It was organized for pleasure, with no expectation of earning money.
Wakes are performed on the first and eighth nights after a person has died. (Why wakes are celebrated on the eighth instead of the ninth night, as in most other Caribbean islands, remains a mystery.) Depending on the musical tastes and religious affiliations of the deceased, celebrations are accompanied by different kinds of music (drumming or singing hymns), or with no music at all.
When wakes follow the traditional format, however, music is performed inside and outside the deceased's house. In the house, a group of men and women sing hymns and gospel songs (sankeys). Since these songs have been learned at church, all the texts are in English. One person, usually a male singer, lines out the words for the audience. The delivery of the improvised choir is slow, in unison, and without syncopation.
The music performed outside can include kont, drumming, or both. Based on local traditions, the lyrics are in Creole. Kont, as opposed to listwa, are unaccompanied responsorial songs, sung by a leader and a choir. They deal mostly with death, reporting the deceased's last words, or relating various events surrounding the death. Drumming can involve deŽbo`t and beŽle`. In both instances, song-dances are accompanied by a ka and sometimes accompanied by zo or tibwa. In addition to receiving food and drink, the players, since there are only a few of them and the accompaniment for the whole evening and night depends entirely on them, usually receive money.
In several villages of the southwest (including La Grace, Laborie, and Piaye), a funeral song-dance called koutoumba was always performed when a member of the djineŽ died. DjineŽ are people descended from Africans who arrived in the island around the mid-1800s; koutoumba also denotes the wake in which the song-dance of the same name is performed. In 1986, with the death of the last drummer who could play this genre, the tradition disappeared. The koutoumba differed from all the traditional dances by being performed by only one dancer at a time and by using only two to four lines of text (sung responsorially) to evoke a mood, rather than to recount a story.
L | Kouman mwen k?aleŽ fe`? | What am I going to do? |
Mwen pa ni manman. | I don't have a mother. | |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | Manman mwen fini. | My mother is finished [dead]. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ katapolo. | eŽ katapolo [untranslatable]. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ yangi yanga. | eŽ yangi yanga [untranslatable]. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ nou pa ni papa. | Hey, we do not have a father. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | An pe`yi beŽkeŽ. | In the country of whites? owners. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ manman nou fini. | My mother is finished [dead] |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ nou pa nio seŽseŽ. | Hey, we do not have a sister. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
L | eŽ seŽseŽ mwen fini. | My sister is finished [dead]. |
C | Kouman nou k?aleŽ fe`? | What are we going to do? |
The term beŽle` denotes a category of Creole song-dances (including beŽle` ate`, beŽle` anle`, beŽle` matjeŽ, and beŽle` anlawis), typically performed by one couple at a time. All four kinds of beŽle` are sung by a leader and a chorus. Except for the beŽle` anlawis (which uses a stanza-refrain form), all are responsorial. Their lyrics usually deal with daily preoccupations and miseries in life, such as unhappy relationships and unacceptable behaviors.
The keŽleŽ religious tradition is particular to another group of people from the Babonneau region, who also call themselves djineŽ. Though keŽleŽ concerns not one deity, but three (Ogun, Shango, Eshu), it is reminiscent of the Ogun festival in Nigeria (Anthony 1986b: 114). Rejected by the Roman Catholic Church until the early 1960s, it has been practiced underground since its introduction in the island. It was held "at the New Year or the anniversary of the death of a recent ancestor" (Crowley 1957:8) or to ask African ancestors for protection in all matters of importance, including "good crops, good health, and good fortune" (Simpson 1973:110).
In all of St. Lucia, only one family from Resina, in the Babonneau region, holds keŽleŽs, claiming "to have authority to perform the ritual and to pass on that authority to their kin" (Anthony 1986b: 106). The ritual includes the display of smooth stones (Shango's emblem) and iron and steel tools (in honor of Ogun), the washing of the ram to be offered to Shango, the smashing of a calabash at the end of the ritual (to appease the Yoruba deity Eshu), prayers and incantations (mostly addressed to Ogun), eating, singing, dancing, and the playing of two drums, tanbou manman 'mother drum' and tanbou ich 'child drum' (
Calypso has been part of the St. Lucian soundscape since the 1940s. Compared to traditional music, it is now considered at the center of the musical environment because it has kept up to date with new technology and arrangements. It is the genre in which St. Lucians express social commentary.
The jump-up, walking steps, and hands in the airthe typical calypso choreographyhave become a reflex, performed at the sound of any dynamic, calypsolike music, including soca. All St. Lucian steelbands and nightclub bands compose and perform calypsos, about fifty new ones a year. In the 1980s, a few, usually no more than five, were released on 45-RPM disks. In 1988, an album included songs from several calypsonians, but composite albums remain rare (Charles and Hyppolite 1990:34).
The local business of recording has been hindered by the unavailability of funding and sponsorship, the absence of producers ready to assume the responsibility of recording and marketing, and the few studios available. These conditions are themselves
Since the 1980s, for the preservation and promotion of the St. Lucian cultural identity, much effort has been made to develop and incorporate educational material on local culture into the school system and mass media. This effort has led to the collection and analysis of traditions, the compilation and publication of information through newspapers and publications sponsored by FRC, the production of a thirty-minute video on keŽleŽ (1983), several fifteen-minute programs on traditional music for broadcast on radio, photographic exhibits with bilingual texts (English and Creole), and slide presentations in primary schools and colleges.
An audio-visual package of material on St. Lucia's cultural heritage has been prepared under the supervision of FRC, whose five-year cooperative project with the Institut fušr Vošlkerkunde of the University of Vienna (1983-1988) and partnership with other institutions since 1988 have laid the groundwork for scientific training in archival and ethnographic work and publications. Since 1987, a kaiposium (short for "kaiso symposium") has become an annual event. In 1990, to celebrate forty years of local calypso, FRC launched a new journal, Lucian Kaiso.
Since 1989, the local radio stations (Radio St. Lucia and Radio Caraišbe International) have aired more presentations in Creole and more short programs on local music. The political campaigns of the late 1970s (which emphasized the need for developing a greater awareness of St. Lucian identities), and the continual efforts by some institutions and individuals to use culture for change and development have helped redefine the meaning and importance of culture in St. Lucian society.
Musical Contexts and Genres in History
African Influences
East Indian Influences
National Forms
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, a double-island nation of more than one million people, is a culturally diverse society. In 1990, its populations were recorded as about 40 percent East Indian, 40 percent African, 19 percent mixed, and 1 percent white. Its major religions are Roman Catholic, Hindu, Spiritual Baptist, Orisa (Sango), Anglican, and Muslim.
In 1496, when Columbus sailed to the southernmost limits of the Caribbean Sea and passed through the Gulf of Paria, he sighted an island with three mountain peaks, for which he named the island in honor of the Holy Trinity. Until 1688, the Spanish enslaved the original inhabitants, the Arawak, in encomiendas (villages benefiting from Amerindian labor) and agricultural enclaves. Though the missions were closed in 1708, Roman Catholic priests continued to rule the local religious system, and the magistrate (corregidor) maintained the right to distribute Amerindian labor to Spanish settlers.
Under Spain, Trinidad never evolved into a colonial plantocracy but remained isolated and economically fragile. There was a minor export business in tobacco and cocoa before a crop disaster in 1725. Settlers were devastated by the smallpox epidemic of 1739. The outcomes of slavers' raids, assaults by Caribs, epidemics, and armed confrontations contributed to the decline of the Arawak population. Of an estimated thirty thousand to forty thousand in 1498, only 649 Arawak remained in 1777 (Brereton 1981:5-6). In 1783, under Spanish domination and with a dwindling Amerindian population, Trinidad's local government issued a plan that welcomed white and "free coloured" Roman Catholic colonists.
Before 1793, French Creoles from Dominica, Grenada, Martinique, and St. Vincent embraced the prospect of immigration to Trinidad because their lives had been disrupted by revolution, by the threat of revolution, and by the hostility French subjects experienced on islands ceded to Britain. The influx of Creoles was so rapid that a Francophone culture quickly developed within Trinidad (Wood 1986:32). Gifts of fertile land were offered to the settlersa practice that continued long after 1797, when British troops invaded and captured Trinidad. Spanish, French, English, and Creole immigrants from the French Antilles and islands formerly owned by Franceall continued to expand the local frontier.
Despite a wave of Creole immigrants to Trinidad, overall population growth in the early 1800s was sluggish. In 1807, the slave trade became illegal, and the resultant need for agricultural workers led slave owners to ship enslaved people to Trinidad disguised as planters' servants. The illegal influx, however, could still not meet the demand exacerbated by the emancipation of enslaved Africans in 1838. Soon thereafter, canefield laborers from the Windward Islands were encouraged to immigrate by job offers that included rent-free cottages with small plots of land. Starting in 1845 and ending in 1917, major entries of indentured workers from Africa, China, India, Portugal, and Syria provided the energy to expand the area's economy. Many of these workers became permanent residents, adding further layers of religious practices, languages, and music.
A small, early migration that influenced the musical character of Trinidad was that of about eight hundred African-American enslaved soldiers who had fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812. After their service, they were manumitted and settled as farmers in the Company Villages of southern Trinidad, where they continued Baptist religious rituals and singing developed in North America. Many of their songs have enhanced the musical repertoire of the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad.
In 1888, the colony of Trinidad merged with the colony of Tobago, an island lying about 30 kilometers northeast of Trinidad. In 1962, the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, now oil rich, received independence within the Commonwealth of Nations; it became a republic in 1974. Despite the union, Tobago's history and culture are distinct. Over a span of two centuries, innumerable Dutch, French, and English colonial contestations were waged over possession of the island, but a predominantly African population remains, preserving untapped reservoirs of musical and linguistic traditions within seaside villages.
In the 1950s, the musics of Trinidad and Tobago, excluding East Indian elements, included the categories beŽle`, bongo, calypso, chanty, congo, fandang, pass-play, rada, reel-dance, parang, quesh, Sankey, Sango (a later spelling of Shango), steelband, trumpet, work song, veiquoix, yarraba, and music for masquerades in carnival (Pearse 1955). The multiculturality of Trinidad is revealed in the names of genres that bear the name of the country of origin and in Spanish genres of Venezuela. The Congo, Rada, Sango, and Yarraba songs had African origins, and the fandang, the parang, and veiquoix had Spanish origins or influence. The fandang, which includes the mazanare, the joropo, and the galleroŽn, are frivolous songs sung at the end of wakes. The parang comprises songs such as serenades and aguinaldos, accompanied by a tiple, a cuatro, a bandol, a guitar, and a chac-chac (maraca) and sung by an ensemble that roves from house to house during the Christmas season. The veiquoix, sung at wakes, is accompanied by the same ensemble as the parang. Many of these genres are found in Grenada, Carriacou, St. Vincent, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, where they first appeared in the New World. Since the 1950s, they have come to public notice through cultural activities directed by the ministries of cultural affairs.
Under Prime Minister Eric Williams' leadership, the Best Village Competition sponsored the staging of dance, literary, and musical events. Begun in 1963 to enhance cultural awareness, this competition inspired Trinidad and Tobago's music festivals, which grew to include the Annual Classical Indian Singing Competition, the Calypso Competition, the Tassa Competitions, Panorama, the Parang Competition, the Steelband Music Festival, and the Tobago Heritage Festival.
Orisa (Sango)
Trinidad's most powerful African-derived religious movement is Orisa, documented as the "Shango cult" (Herskovits 1964 [1947]; Simpson 1965). The communicants worship personal powers (orisas), but the religion has been identified with Sango, thunder god and patron of Trinidad and Tobago. An effort to gain acceptance of the name Orisa was launched in 1988, during the sesquicentennial celebration of emancipation. An integrated worship service (ijosin) was held in honor of the Ooni of Ife, the spiritual head of the traditional religion in Nigeria. The event fostered unity in the organization of the religion and promoted cultural, educational, and economic development, not only by consolidating individual shrines but also in the relationship between Trinidad and Nigeria.
George Simpson (1965) lists the orisa and their favorite foods, color codes, and dance implements, describes their personalities, and catalogues their counterparts among Christian saints and mythological figures. Findings of Herskovits' 1939 field studies in Toco, a northern village of Trinidad, bear similarities with Simpson's findings, and with rituals mounted as far south as Oropuche and experienced by me as late as 1989. A contemporary listing of the orisas prominent in southern Trinidad's rituals, formulated by practitioners in the Orisa Yin Cultural Organization, is included below. The practitioners' interest in Yoruba orthography and documentation reveals Afrocentric thinking and a commitment to cultural revitalization (Kekera 1988).
Orisa | Christian and other counterparts, as believed by practitioners |
Ogun | Saint Michael |
Oranyan | Saint George |
Aganju | Saint Gabriel |
Osoosi | Saint Raphael |
Soponna | Saint jerome |
Onile | Mother of the Earth (Mama La Terre) |
Osanyin | Saint Francis |
Ibeji | Saint Peter and Saint Paul (twins) |
Dada | Saint Anthony |
Erinle Ajaja | Saint Jonah |
Sango | Saint John |
Orunmila | Saint Joseph |
Yemanja | Saint Ann |
Osun | Saint Philomena |
Oya | Saint Catherine |
Oba | Saint Theresa |
Several orisa, including Elefon, Obalufon, Obatala, and Oduduwa, are related to the highest god, and hence have no named Christian counterparts. They reflect various aspects of the deity.
Among Trinidad's population of Yoruba descent, the system of worship centers on calling and celebrating these gods. Formal ceremonies (the Ebo) include the calling of the orisa by drumming; singing; sacrificing fowl, goats, and bulls; and showing the arrival of the deities in possession dances. The ritual feast is a religious duty, a seasonal undertaking by the leader of the temple. It invites worshipers' communities to participate in thanksgiving, the exchange of healing energies, and the welcome and
The Ebo and the Elefon occur at the shrine compound, a straw-roofed palais (a simple, tentlike structure lined with benches), and within the chapelle (a small structure housing "tools," the wands used in dancing. Several stools or altars, commemorating various gods, are scattered throughout the compound. Colorful flags, commemorating the deities that commune with members of the congregation, fly on bamboo poles over the stools. Candles burn on the ground near the stools and at the four corners of the room. Before the ritual starts, participants dress the compound in flowing bolts of white cloth, bathe the sacrificial animals in special herbal water, and before the sacrifice, wrap three bulls in white capes.
Music is continuous and essential during the feast, which lasts all night. Three drummers play double-headed drums that rest on their thighs or, in the case of the smallest drum, sit on a stool. In the 1960s, the cylindrical drums with laced double skins, in order from largest to smallest, were named bemba (bembe), congo, and oumalay (omele) (Simpson 1965:40). With fingers applying pressure to the drumhead, the drummer strikes one head of the bembe or congo with a curved stick. The smallest drum is beaten with two sticks, in continuous fast and repetitive rhythms. The bembe is played with dramatic slams and virtuoso cross-rhythmic statements above the sound of several rattles (chac-chac). This ensemble accompanies the lead singers call and the participants' monophonic response. The Sango calling song (
Melville and Frances Herskovits describe the dance at an Orisa feast and the physical manifestations of possession as the power enters the head and rides the devotee. According to them, the preliminary signs of possession are "the perceptible 'freezing' of the muscles of the face, the sightless stare, the twitching of shoulders and shaking of the knees" (1964:335). Each devotee dances with a wand as a symbol of the orisa's power: the dancer represents Sango's appearance with a shepherd's crook; Ogun's with a sword; Soponna's (Sakpata's) with a knife; Yemanja's with a miniature oar; other deities' appearances, with a wooden anchor, a whip, a broom, or a turtle.
Female and male devotees dance beneath a single deity (who enters the head of the dancer) while bearing its symbol and manifesting the personality and dance characteristic of the rider of the orisa. Though possession dances are not directed to an audience, observers appreciate the artistry of the exhibition of transcendental postures where the body, with back erect, suddenly becomes supple; or when, with bent torso, the dancer takes long strides or whirls in a stylized movement. The dancer may stop and look forward with wide, sightless eyes, and may then, with extended limbs, advance toward the drum. Expressing intelligence, beauty, defiance, or anger, the devotee's face is transformed, mirroring the orisa that has overtaken her or him. At the end of each manifestation, the dancer, under the deity's control, falls unconscious. Water is poured on her or his head as a rite of consecration to the power that governs the devotee. The participants wear simple white dresses or, less often, red dresses (the color associated with Sango) of African fabrics. Sometimes the outfit is a douiette, a ruffled skirt open in the front with a white petticoat exposed, recalling nineteenth-century French Creole attire. Every woman in attendance wears a wrap on her head.
Studies of the Trinidadian Orisa religion have noted that most members were
Sometimes there is a total absence of musical syncretism, not only in Orisa feasts but in many repertoires. Despite long cultural contact, extant syncretisms may be imperceptible or appear manipulative, self-conscious, and commercial. The more obvious syncretisms include Indian calypsos and the use of tassa drumming in steelband performances.
Spiritual Baptists
The history of the the Spiritual Baptists ("Shouters") is unclear, and the dates of the sect's inception remain unknown. It traveled to Trinidad and Grenada from St. Vincent, where followers were known as Shakers because of the ecstasy of the religion's worship. This religion endures, though in self-contained and secretive ways, for its practice has resulted in social discrimination and legal suppression. Interdictory laws, particularly against drumming, and the Shouter Prohibition Ordinances (1917) were drawn up against practices seen as related to obeah 'magic, witchcraft'. Between 1917 and 1951, police raids of Shouter services were legal.
Cultural amalgamation is obvious in the theology and music of the religion, with its integration of Roman Catholic ritual and many distantly related vocal musical styles including Yoruba songs, Hindu chants, Chinese vocalizations, American spirituals, and Anglican hymns. These styles are superimposed layers of sound during the prayer ritual, the search for trance ("power"), and mental flight. Trance accompanies 'doption singing, which guides participants in mystical journeys to Africa, India, and China. The songs point the direction of travel, and the knowledge of the international repertoire is explained by a supernatural meeting, gained through the practice of mental travel.
Spiritual Baptists are known for their dress, including head ties and monochrome gowns with belts, sashes, and aprons in colors that represent status. Usually led by a male "shepherd," the female majority serves, by rank, as mothers, teachers, pointers, nurses, warriors, healers, and preachers. Status is achieved through initiation ("mourning ground"), which delivers visions, secret gifts of inspiration, and spiritual tests. After each test, an initiate ascends in the hierarchy. Candles, flower-filled gourds, vials of perfumes and oils (altar fluids), a nautical steering wheel laden with candles, a metal Indian plate (lota), and a bell are the most distinctive symbols of the movement. These symbols surround the center pole of the room. Spontaneous libations of altar fluids and bell ringing occur there and at the cardinal points or in the corners, punctuating and shaping the progress of the service. The essential symbol, the center pole, "derived from the Ancient African church, represents the timber of Lebanon, which was used for the construction of Solomon's temple" (Thomas 1987:31). The compatibility of the Spiritual Baptist religion with the African Orisa religion made possible the creation of a Sango-Baptist type of worship and other religions that could be placed along a continuum of syncretic styles. The resemblance among the groups is manifest in their vocal styles and borrowed repertoires.
Songs and chants accompany a great portion of the Spiritual Baptist service, and often two songs flowing simultaneously may be joined by a third to form a distinctive polyphonic texture. Traditionally, only claps and stamps occur (see Okada 1995: example 28), though Sango-Baptist services may use drums. The several musical types and practices of the Spiritual Baptist repertoire include lining out, 'doption, trumpets, and spiritual shouts. "Lining out" is a practice in which words of a traditional hymn are intoned by a tenor lead singer as a prompt for the congregation, which responds with melodic variations.
'Doption, a mode of spiritual experience nurtured as part of the initiation practices of the church (Pearse 1953:21), uses vocables to adapt an Anglican tune or a nineteenth-century Sankey hymn into a fast-moving, harmonized, rhythmically
Trumpets are rousing choruses, which may be sung in any of the 'doption styles described above. Of a typical trumpet (
Many traditional songs and tales in the Bhojpuri language of northern India survive within the East Indian musical cultures of Trinidad. These celebrate marriage, childbirth (sohar), agricultural festivals (khajri, after planting rice), and seasonal cycles (chowtal, in spring). Others, including songs from the Ramayana, songs from Madras, and the fire-walking ceremony of immigrants from southern India, are no longer performed. Like older classical singing, game songs, and dramatic forms, they once created essential cultural ties for East Indian workers on Trinidad's plantations.
A segment of the Indian population still speaks Bhojpuri, but many sing their traditional songs in Trinidadian Creole or learn Hindi hymns (bhajan) taught in schools. A bellows-powered harmonium accompanies these hymns along with a double-headed drum (dholak), an iron rod idiophone (dandtal), clappers with jingles (kartal) and small cymbals (manjira). Vedic chant, sung in Sanskrit, is accompanied by a harmonium or a traditional plucked lute, the tambura (Myers 1980:149).
East Indian films and recordings have swayed the popular musical taste of Indians in Trinidad more than their schools or oral traditions have. Film scores featuring an American combo accompaniment (electric guitars, organs, bongos, congas, drum set) have diffused East Indian film music to Trinidadian East Indian society. Combos that perform live at traditional weddings and festivals may, depending on the occasion, include various American styles. Because of the depth and ritualized usage, these internationalized styles, instruments, and songs of the combo style are considered by the people to be East Indian.
Besides the Indian Trinidadian combo orchestras and the traditional Hindu and
Drumming on a goatskin kettledrum (tassa) is done primarily at the yearly Muslim Hosay (Hosein) ritual that celebrates the martyrdom of the grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed. Lavishly ornamented miniature bamboo-framed temple-tombs are carried in procession through the streets of St. James Village to be ritualistically thrown into the river. Traditionally, women followed the procession singing laments (marseehas). Vigorous tassa drumming and stick fighting (gatka), which accompany the procession, symbolize the fierce battle (jihad) of KarbalaŻ'. The ensemble, usually made up of three drums (tassa), one bass drum, and a cymbal (jhaŻn~jh), has historically included Afro-Trinidadians, and the style, though of Indian origin, is considered an indigenous national type, attracting members of the entire population (see Okada 1995: example 23). In 1993, the religious significance of the event was overshadowed by a carnivalesque atmosphere. Apart from Hosay, the main Indian festivals celebrated in Trinidad are the festival of lights DiwaŻliŻ (locally Divali) and the spring festival Gud?hiŻ PaŻd?waŻ (locally Phagwa).
Reel
Tobago, with its separate culture and unified ethnic history, preserves the reel, derived from Scotland, as a vehicle for ancestral contact and veneration. Performed as a prenuptial or healing event, the dances entertain ancestors and ask them to validate a couple's union or remedy a patient's illness. The dances are supported by a violin, a tambourine, and drums, or by any combination of singers, tambourines, triangles, and chac-chacs. Though possession and dance are akin to those of Orisa ceremonies, the Yoruba pantheon of divinities is not a part of this practice.
BeŽle` are dances stemming from the secular French traditions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Carriacou. They are sometimes mixed with the calling of ancestors and the pouring of libations. Preserved by festivals and staged productions throughout Trinidad and Tobago, they feature elegant solo and ensemble performances (see Okada 1995: example 24).
Stick fighting, a martial art in Trinidad and Tobago, is often accompanied by singing kalenda, dancing, and drumming (
Throughout Trinidad and Tobago, people perform a musical genre known as parang (from parranda in Spanish) that has been borrowed from the mainland [see VENEZUELA], Originally comprising from two to five male singers accompanied by a cuatro and maracas (
In the Venezuelan Christmas parang tradition, an ensemble performs aguinaldos to serenade families; musicians are received and rewarded with food and drink. In Trinidad, the parang serenade has evolved into a national tradition, perpetuated and celebrated in state-sponsored comperitions. The late Daisey Voisen, lead singer and founder of the award-winning ensemble La Divina Pastora, stressed in her compositions fine Spanish poetry, traditional musical style, and religious fervor (see Okada 1995:example 29). Sung as entertainment before playful crowds, parangs center on the Christmas story and scenes from the life of Jesus.
Steelband
Steelbands, found in much of the Caribbean, achieve their most brilliant applications in Trinidad. An individual instrument, known as a pan, is usually constructed from a 55-gallon metal oil drum. The builder, originally often the player, cuts off the top of the drum, and keeps the length of the side (the skirt) consistent with the range of the instrument: a lead pan has a short skirt, and a bass has a full skirt made from the full length of the barrel. The builder reforms the remaining end by heating and hammering ("sinking") itan elaborate process that includes depressing the playing head into concavity, chiseling grooves to separate the notes, and hammering in each note. He hammers each bump into the top of the drum from underneath to form a series
Because of the acoustic properties of the hammered metal surface, pitches are not ordered chromatically but are disjunct, creating a distinctive arrangement or pattern unique to each instrument. One of the most important player-builders who has worked toward standardizing the patterns of pitches (into a circle of fifths) is Ellie Mannette, now a teacher of pan at the University of West Virginia. No national standardization has been agreed on, however, because makers prefer to put their personal stamps on instruments they make. Other innovators include Winston "Spree" Simon, Bertie Marshall, and Anthony Williams.
In the late 1940s, names for pans included tock-tock (the dominant instrument, today the name for claves in parang music), followed by the belly, the base-kettle, and the base-bum (Fermor 1950:171). Because the instruments have continued to develop, there have been wide variations in their construction and use. Today, pans are divided into sections determined by their range and role within the ensemble. Melodic instruments include the tenor pan (formerly called the ping-pong, also known as the lead, the single tenor, the soprano, and the melody pan) and the double tenor (a set of two drums), though other pans will occasionally play the melody. Strumming pans, in imitation of the acoustic guitar, may include the double second, double guitar, quadraphonic, triple guitar, and cello (a set of three drums). The bass, formerly called tuned booms (a set of six to nine drums) and the tenor bass (a set of four drums) play the bass.
Using rubber-tipped mallets, musicians play single notes, double stops (two notes at once), and tremolos (rolls). A traditional parade style, "pan around the neck," gives players mobility, as each instrument is fixed to its player by a harness. For greater mobility in modern parades, the instruments are sometimes placed on car chassis, floats, or trucks. In concerts, the pans are arranged on metal stands or racks (
Efforts toward the instruments' tonal enhancement, evolution, systematization, and historical documentation continue. National industries sponsor pan orchestras
Tales surrounding the discovery of pan abound (Stuempfle 1995). Ownership of its invention is contested throughout the Caribbean and Guyana wherever pan is evident. The earliest record of pan connects it with carnival of the late 1930s, when metallic idiophones joined tamboo-bamboo ensembles (bamboo tubes, struck on the ground and against one another). Because masking at carnival provided the anonymity that encouraged uprisings and membranophonic drumming was associated with revolt, membranophones were outlawed as early as 1797 in Trinidad, especially during carnival. Their twentieth-century replacement, tamboo-bamboo, filled the vacuum and inspired the addition of such tonal resources as bottles, garbage can lids, kettles, oil tins, biscuit pans, and other metal idiophones (see Okada 1995: examples 25 and 26).
No single inventor of the steelband has been ascertained, but the slum environment of Port of Spain, Trinidad, is considered its place of maturation. Its primary nurturers are young African Trinidadian males (Elder 1969:17, 19). By the 1950s, with the support of governmental offices and the sponsorship of Trinidadian industries, pan had begun to be recognized, legitimized, and embraced by all communities and classes. Many pan organizations, once exclusively African descended and male, include East Indian and female participants, though in small numbers.
In state- and industry-sponsored steelband events (most commonly the national competitions Pan is Beautiful and Panorama), classical, new, and popular musical repertoires are performed. Virtuoso interpretations of pieces such as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Hoist's Planets (the Mars and Jupiter movements), Rimsky- Korsakov's ScheŽheŽrazade, Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien and Marche Slave, and Wagner's Rienzi overture are created by large orchestras of steel. In formal competitions, besides the Western pieces of choice, each band must play a test piece and a calypso (see Okada 1995: example 31). For carnival, a particular calypso is selected, orchestrated, and used by each steelband as its road march during parades.
Besides a wide choice of fixed and new repertoires, there is experimentation in jazz improvisation, with panist Len "Boogsie" Sharpe as the major contributor. The
Calypso
Calypso is the Caribbean musical genre usually identified with Trinidad. Growing out of the kalenda and related to the beŽle`, it is in constant revision. New compositions, fulfilling cultural expectations and festival needs, appear yearly. The etymology of the word calypso is multiple and international. The term was at one time associated with the Hausa word kaiso 'serves you right, you deserve no pity', and with its translation in the patois term sans humaniteŽ. Kaiso may have been further confused with the Venezuelan Spanish word caliso 'a topical, local song', possibly related to the patois term wuso 'to carouse' (French carrousseaux) (Hill 1967:364).
The word kaiso served as a shout of delight and encouragement after expressive singing; similarly, the response sans humaniteŽ was offered by crowds at the closure of early patois-text calypsos and in English and macaronic (English and patois) calypsos of the early 1900s. A portion of Lord Executor's "Landing of Columbus," published in 1926, illustrates the use of this tag (after Errol Hill, 1972:63):
Lord Executor's delivery of the same song elicited from the audience an ecstatic unison shout: "Kaiso-o-o!" (Quevedo 1983:37).Were you not told what Columbus saw
When he landed on Iere shore?
Were you not told what Columbus saw
When he landed on Iere shore?
He saw the Caribs so brave and bold,
The hummingbirds with their wings of gold.
He was so glad that he called the island Trinidad.
Sans humaniteŽ.
Like the kalenda, the calypso deploys militant language against political oppression and social infringements; like the beŽle`, it airs public and individual misdemeanors. Its narrative, while seeking to control social behavior through the dissemination of scandal, informs society, gives lessons in ethnic pride, and parodies and shames exploitative acts. Many texts are fun-loving picong (from French piquant 'insult'); some belong to the genre known as the war, a battle of words (Warner 1985:13). Others, with sexual double-entendres, employ symbolic metaphors to belittle and insult women. The outrage of maligned religious minorities, like Hindus at the insulting "Om Shanti Om" by Shorti, and the Spiritual Baptists by Blue Boy's "Soca Baptist," invited censorship and rewording of the items.
For forty years, the Mighty Sparrow (Francisco Slinger) has reigned as the most impressive and sophisticated modern practitioner of the art of calypso. His topics exploit international and internal political events, and his musical and linguistic sensibilities have influenced pan-Caribbean calypso styles. His 1956 calypso "Jean and Dinah" ranks as a classic, as does Lord Invader's (Rupert Grant's) "Rum and Coca Cola," a hit during the Second World War.
Inventor (Henry Forbes), Roaring Lion (Hubert de Leon), Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo), Lord Executor (Phillip Garcia), Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), Growling Tiger (Neville Marcano), Lord Pretender (Alric Farrell), Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore), King Radio (Norman Span), Lord Caresser, Small Island Pride, and Houdini lead the list of past practitioners (see Warner 1985:15-16). Titles such as "Lord" and "King" are avoided by younger artists, who choose noncolonial-sounding
In the international climate of the 1980s, a new calypso form (soca), with danceable rhythms and pan-African texts, became popular (see Okada 1995: example 30). Though several antiquated calypso forms (Hill 1993:4) and terminologies are revisited by modern calypsonians from time to time, older practitioners fear the complete loss of the fast-moving call-and-response kalenda type; the dramatic narrative of the ballad type; the witty, satirical, text-centered, and extemporaneous delivery of the oratorical calypso; and especially the humorous-language duel in duets of an earlier age.
Carnival
Carnival is the major cultural focus and the "national theater" of Trinidad. In its modern form, artists and theatrical professionals assist in a nonstop artistic revelry of parades, dances, concerts, and competitions. Carnival's performances capture the attention of most Trinidadians, children as well as adults (
The drinking and carousing that sometimes overtake celebrants belie hidden and historically significant aspects of the celebration. This play mirrors society and defines groups while permitting uncloaked behavior. In some way, and among social, cultural, artistic, and even spiritual expectations, Trinidadian carnival still provides the escape valve it did in slave society (Hill 1993: 212) to relieve anxiety, now caused by current economic problems. The economic impact of the festival is huge.
Preparations for carnival include the cultivation of the national music of Trinidad (pan and calypso) in prescribed ways. Performers introduce newly composed calypsos in tents (urban venues) whose origins were simple thatched structures. Steelbands introduce their repertoires in their pan yards months before the carnival period. In this way, people reach the carnival grounds musically alert and prepared for a season of national artistic involvement.
The carnival parade includes string bands, pan orchestras, and nonmusical troupes of costumed participants, comprising an individual player or groups of hundreds of people whose costumes recreate historical, mythological, or newly created figures (
Costumes of the 1800s included the negre jardin, a favorite disguise of aristocrats who, well before 1860, adored imitating agricultural servants. This attire was borrowed in the twentieth century by stick-fighting bands, some wearing headbands,
The music that accompanied carnival in the 1800s most likely comprised kalenda songs, string music, membranophonic ensembles, and speech mas' (a vignette involving poetry or language). In these carnivals, women costumed as bawdy street-walkers (jamettes) wore overdressed outfits embellished with flowers and feathers, imitating the high fashion of nineteenth-century France. The word jamette, widely used before the turn of the twentieth century, evolved from the French diame`tre, meaning people below the diameter, the lower half (Pearse 1988:31). They were considered obscene, and their participation was proscribed as was that of the raggedly dressed comic transvestite pissenlit, in practice before 1884. The stilt dancer (moko jumby) came from Africa, as did congos (Sango bands), which parodied the ritual prayers with mock-African language and drumming. Cattle bands, often played by Venezuelans, used cow horns as part of their costumes.
Each "fancy" or "pretty" band of the era before the Great War marched with a king, a queen (
Sailors and "Indian" bands were once the favorite types of organized troops. Originally, "Wild Indians" were probably the so-called Warrahoons of Venezuela, who frequented southern Trinidad until their entry was banned in the 1920s (Crowley 1988:63) [see WARAO]. Colors in names such as "Red Indians," "Blue Indians," and "White Indians" refer to the specific color costuming of the groups. The origin of the "Red Indians" seems to have been Grenada, for that band is the favorite of Grenadians participating in the Trinidad carnival. With unified costuming, language united the "Indian warrior" band fraternities. Phrases taught at rehearsals were incorporated in skits and in the mock stick duels that frequently included utterances of challenges (Crowley 1988:65).
"Black Indians" (played by African Trinidadians), who wear black costumes and use paint to darken their faces, use phrases to imitate African languages. Ritualized language pervaded many old-time portraits and especially that of the old-time clown, the effete Pierrot Grenade. Dressed in an outfit made from burlap bags ornamented with playing cards, old tin cans, and discardable scraps, with erudite, scholarly, and confusing language, he poked fun at Grenadians, at patois, and at English Creole (Carr 1988:197, 204). The pretty-devil band (jab-jab) is preferred by East Indians, as is the little donkey (burroquite), derived from the Hindu goddess Durga. She is portrayed by her symbol, a horse or donkey whose rider stands behind the head of the animal, surrounded by drapes forming the body. The donkey and the rider dance to a Hindi song. A similar band, called by the same Spanish name, evolved among Venezuelans.
The costumes of fancy bands created from history, images in comic books, folklore, films, military uniforms, National Geographic magazines, mythology, and creative fantasywere fabulously feathered constructions of papier ma^cheŽ, fiberglass, and molded wire. Today, brilliant costume extensions are constructed from modern, lightweight materials with unimaginable variety (
Cowley (1992) lists the first historical period of carnival (Planter's Carnival, 1797-1833) as being controlled by the upper class, which presented elegant masked
Captain Baker manday pou mois | Captain Baker is asking for me |
Ah ya ya, Jo Talmana. | Here I am, Jo Talmana. |
Modern carnival is charged with new, thought-provoking, universal messages, transmitted with modern effects and high-tech stagecraft. Projecting the future, it reflects the past. Though masks are no longer worn and personal enmities are no longer openly contested, bands must be seen as not only nationalistic and ethnic but also as charged with a spirit of rebellion against ordinary rules of conduct. Mediating racial antipathies and defining social class, carnival bonds its participants in a fierce, competitive nationalization of culture.
Musical Traditions
Further Study
In 1493, during Columbus's second voyage to the Caribbean, the fleet briefly dropped anchor at the mouth of what is now the Salt River on St. Croix Island. The local inhabitants Carib Indians, who had long before displaced their Arawak predecessors discouraged an extended visit, though not enough to keep Columbus from claiming for Spain the island and its neighbors, the westernmost Lesser Antilles. He named these islands Santa Ursula y Las Once Mil ViŽrgenes (St. Ursula and The Eleven Thousand Virgins), later abbreviated to the Virgin Islands.
By 1600, the Spanish had eliminated or driven out most of the Indians. Over the next five centuries, various of the islands were controlled by as many as six European nations and the United States. Most prominent of these in their impact on modern local culture were the British, the Danish, the Dutch, the French, and the North Americans. Enormously influential in cultural terms were African peoples, brought as enslaved canefield workers as early as 1673, part of the triangle of trade in rum, slaves, and sugarcane. Slavery existed locally until 1848, when it was outlawed in Danish territories.
Today, the Virgin Islands are divided politically into two units: the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands. The U.S. territory, larger and much more populous, consists of about fifty uninhabited small islets and cays and three principal islands St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas with a total population of 101,809 (1990). The British crown colony is made up of thirty-two partly inhabited islets and four larger islands Anegada, Jost Van Dyke, Tortola, and Virgin Gorda with 16,749 inhabitants (1991). Related to them is the small crown colony of Anguilla, just east of Virgin Gorda. The U.S. portion was a Danish possession for most of the time from the founding of St. Thomas as a colony (in 1671) to its purchase by the United States (in 1917). The other portion was colonized by Britain in 1672. Despite the division between different colonial powers, cultural and economic ties among the islands have long been close. An English-based Creole dominates in both political domains, and the official currency for both is the U.S. dollar.
A shared sense of cultural history and a modern receptivity to English-language popular culture imported especially from the United States and other English-dominant Caribbean islands underlie a clear degree of cultural unity, compared
In the mid-twentieth century, Virgin Islands musical traditions were mostly stable, practiced by all generations. Efforts to expand the tourist industry and the diversion of the American tourist trade from Cuba following its 1959 revolution spurred a substantial increase in immigrant labor to fill the service jobs that resulted. At the same time, the growth of television, radio, and the popular music industry brought greater prominence of popular music from the United States and the English Caribbean. These changes served both to dilute local traditions and to divert younger generations from taking them up, favoring the more prestigious and lucrative forms of popular music.
By the 1980s, popular musics such as merengue, reggae, rock, and soca dominated the airwaves, social dances, and record stores. Centers for the performing arts, including the Reichold Center on St. Thomas and the Island Center on St. Croix, offered concerts of jazz, classical music, musical theater, pop stars, and other nonlocal fare. Young people formed Trinidad-style steelbands (pan orchestras), dance bands (with electric guitars, horns, and percussion, playing reggae, rock, and soca), and dance troupes (performing pan-Caribbean genres). Virgin Islanders of Puerto Rican background, accounting for nearly half of St. Croix's 50,139 population (1990), kept an eager ear turned toward Latin Caribbean pop from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and a few continued to perform music of the Cruz de Mayo and sets traditions and domestic music, such as lullabies [see PUERTO RICO].
Musical instruction in schools continues to focus on performance in Western orchestral and concert-band music, with exposure to local traditions through quadrille instruction in several St. Croix schools and a student scratch band (see below) at Charlotte Amalie High School on St. Thomas. The international orthodoxy of Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and other Christian church music has left little room for distinctively local developments.
Scratch bands
Important exceptions to the near-total eclipse of long-standing Virgin Islands traditions occur. Locally based ensembles, called scratch bands (or fungi bands, probably named for fungi, a local African-derived stew), have survived by adopting contemporary popular instrumentation and repertoire and identifying with a movement to maintain native cultural traditions. The normal presence in these groups of a squash the local term for a hollow, open-ended gourd idiophone with notched grooves carved into one side and scratched with a multipronged metal scraper (similar to, but larger than, the Puerto Rican guširo) apparently led the groups to be
Previously, these ensembles were known as string bands to distinguish them from membrane-based bands, which made more use of drumming. In the more distant past, the precise instrumentation of scratch bands probably varied, but they all included some form of melodic instrument (a violin, a cane flute, or even an accordion) and some form of percussive instrument (a squash, a triangle called "steel," a tambourine, or a locally made double-headed barrel drum, possibly derived from the tambora of the Dominican Republic). A six-stringed guitar and a banjo or a ukulele might have supplied rhythmic chords. A car-exhaust tube (known to some as an ass pipe), about 1.2 to 1.5 meters long and played by lip concussion like a tuba, often furnished a bass. These combinations of instruments are not unique to the Virgin Islands and have probably been used in other regions of the anglophone Caribbean.
By the 1980s, the instrumentation had become more standardized (
Scratch bands are most common on St. Croix, where groups such as Blinky and the Roadmasters, Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Knights, and Bully and the Kafooners perform at social dances, festivals, fairs, private parties (such as christenings and wedding receptions), church services of various Christian denominations, "cultural" presentations for tourists, and quadrilles. Their repertoire is eclectic virtually all dance music. Pieces commonly played range widely: jigs, waltzes, mazurkas, and other European-derived genres generally associated with past generations; boleros, calypsos, merengues, and other English and Latin Caribbean dance music; international American ballads and dance favorites; and locally originated musical genres.
On St. Thomas, the more urban and second most populous island (48,166 in 1990), scratch bands are scarcer than on St. Croix, and their instrumentation and
Quelbeys and quadrilles
Scratch bands have been central to the continuity of two other musical traditions: quelbeys and quadrilles. Quelbeys are topical songs of local origin. In earlier generations, they were sung most often by individuals in informal gatherings or public celebrations. Their texts "usually contained hidden meaning and sexual innuendo, ridiculed individuals for the words or actions, or immortalized political events such as a boycott or a workers' revolt" (Soule 1993:6). One quelbey, "LaBega Carousel," chastises a carousel owner, Carl LaBega, for having opposed a wage increase for local workers in the early twentieth century (Soule 1993:18):
On St. Croix, the quadrille still enjoys a modest following (I rather walk and drink rum whole night,
Before me go ride on LaBega Carousel.
I rather walk, man, and drink rum whole night,
Before me go ride on LaBega Carousel.
You no hear what LaBega say,
"The people no worth more than fifteen cent a day."
You no hear what LaBega say, man,
"The people no worth more than half cent a day."
Other traditions
Several other older Virgin Islands musical traditions persist in the memories of older generations or as reconstructed performances by advocates of traditional cultural forms. On St. Croix in the 1990s, a few elderly singers, including Ethel McIntosh and Leona Watson, continued to sing carisos dating to the decades just after colony-wide emancipation. Their texts often resembled those of quelbeys in its social censure and commemoration of past events. Carisos differ, though, in having a more African-origin melodic style, with more sustained syllables and traditional manner of performance, by women singing in call-and-response fashion. The group sings a fixed refrain, and a male drummer accompanies them.
Cariso continues as a representation of deep Crucian tradition in educational cultural presentations and for special holidays. One famous cariso recounts the freedom proclamation of 3 July 1848, ending slavery. The chorus sings a refrain, and a soloist then sings (after Soule 1993:13):
The chorus then sings the refrain again.Clear the road, all you clear the road,
Clear the road, let the slave them pass,
We a go for a-we freedom.
Hardship in the morning, suffering at night.
No one ever help us, it is only Father Ryan.
They bring we ya from Africa, that we bornin' land;
Bring we ya in slavery, in the land of Santa Cruz.
Many older U.S. Virgin Islanders still remember three traditions of probable origin in the British West Indies: the masquerade jig, the David and Goliath play, and tea meetings. The first two combined theater, oratory, music, and dance to provide
Bamboula, an extinct or reconstructed tradition of African-style dance, drumming, and song, is associated with St. Thomas. In the early twentieth century, before it ceased to exist in its traditional form and social context, it apparently consisted of two drummers playing a single drum (one with the hands and heel, the other with two sticks), dance movements (probably of African derivation), and men and women singing songs with collective refrains punctuating often improvised solo texts.
Major holidays, such as festival on St. Croix (Christmas through Three Kings Day, 6 January) and carnival on St. Thomas (after Easter), have for generations provided opportunities for musical performances. Up to the late 1950s, masquerading ("mas'ing") was an important tradition, occurring on several holiday celebrations. Costumed groups with traditional themes, such as "Wild Indians" or "Mother Hubbard," would play instruments, rhythms, and melodies that signified their special identity as they moved from locale to locale, performing as they went. The fife-and-drum ensemble of cane fife, snare drum ("kettledrum"), and double-headed bass drum ("boom-boom," "keg") were often participants. Shortly after the institution of a formal parade and "festival village" (which became the annual focus of such celebration on St. Croix), the older local masquerading traditions there became largely dormant.
Throughout the American Virgin Islands, masquerading of a distinctively local character was gradually replaced at festival and carnival by Trinidadian-style calypso, moko jumbie stilt dancers, pan-Caribbean popular music, and performances by music and dance troupes visiting from other parts of the Lesser Antilles.
The scholarly documentation of music in the Virgin Islands is not copious. In 1979 and the early 1980s, the sound recordist Mary Jane Soule documented a variety of local traditions and later produced a thoroughly annotated compact disc, Zoop Zoop Zoop: Traditional Music and Folklore of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John (1993). The German ethnomusicologist Margot Lieth-Philipp, who collaborated on the descriptive notes for this recording, carried out earlier research that yielded two European publications on Virgin Islands music (1989, 1990). A team of folklorists and other researchers from the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies and the Virgin Islands collected musical material in 1989-1990, but except for articles in festival-program booklets (Cadaval 1990; Sprauve 1990), little of it has been published.
Page numbers in italics indicate pages on which illustrations appear.
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1. Yanomamoš male shaman's curing song, excerpt (1:32)
Performed by the headman Iyašwei, who is chanting to hekura under the influence of ebena
Recorded by Pitts (from Coppens Collection, Caracas) on 20 May 1969 in Iyašweiteri, a Yanomamoš village, Boca del Ocamo, Amazonas, Venezuela
2. Yekuana male shaman's curing song, excerpt (1:02)
Performed near a Yekuana village, Amazonas, Venezuela
Recorded by Walter Coppens
3. Warao male wisiratu shaman's curing song, excerpt (1:33)
Performed by Bernardo Tobal, accompanying himself with his hebu mataro rattle
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 25 August 1972 in Yaruara Akoho, Delta Amacura Federal Territory, Venezuela
4. Warao male hoarotu shaman's curing song, excerpt (0:49)
Performed by JoseŽ Antonio PaŽez
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 1 August 1972 in Yaruara Akoho, Delta Amacura Federal Territory, Venezuela
5. Sikuriada (music for siku panpipes) (1:30)
Performed by musicians from Jachakalla, Charkas, PotosiŽ, Bolivia
Six siku (zampon~a), including one sanka (eight tubes plus seven tubes); two ch?ilis (small, one octave higher: eight tubes plus seven tubes); and bombo (bass drum)
Recorded by Henry Stobart in November 1986 in Charkas Province, northern PotosiŽ Department, Bolivia
6. "Kulw" (kupla, cobla) (1:19)
Approximately forty male musicians from Wapaka community kneel while playing their julajula panpipes (five sizes, tuned in octaves)
Recorded by Henry Stobart in October 1986 in Charka Province, northern PotosiŽ Department, Bolivia
7. Lichiwayu notch flutes (1:36)
Notch flutes of two sizes: jatunta (big) and juch?uycito (small), a fifth apart, and caja drum (played with two hard beaters)
Recorded by Henry Stobart in August 1987 in Alonso de Iban~ez Province, northern PotosiŽ Department, Bolivia
8. "Walata Grande" ('Great Walata') huayn~o (1:21)
Performed by the Tocamarka tropa (ensemble) from Walata Grande
Eighteen musin~u duct flutes (four sizes playing in parallel fifths, octaves, and dissonant intervals); two clarinetos (wooden clarinets); clariŽn (with clarinet mouthpiece); and four tamboras (military side drums)
Recorded by Henry Stobart in December 1986 in Lahuachaka, Aroma Province, La Paz Department, Bolivia
9. Tarkeada (music for tarka flutes) (2:17)
Performed by musicians from Zona Sud
Twenty-six tarka duct flutes (two sizes tuned in parallel fifths), three tamboras (military side drums), and one bombo (bass drum)
Recorded by Henry Stobart in March 1987 in Lahuachaka, Cercado Province, Oruro Department, Bolivia
10. "Lunesta, martesta" ('Mondays, Tuesdays') (2:02)
Performers from Ayllu Sikuya, Chayanta Province, PotosiŽ Department, Bolivia
Two female singers accompanied by charango
Recorded by Henry Stobart in May 1987 in Chayanta Province, northern PotosiŽ Department, Bolivia
11. Folia de Reis (Folia of the Magi) (1:52)
Performed by members of the Folias de Reis Unidos dos Marinheiros, from ItauŽ, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Acordeon (accordion), three pandeiros (tambourines), viola~o (guitar), viola (small guitar), male singer, and chorus
Recorded by Welson A. Tremura on 16 August 1997 in Olimpia, Sa~o Paulo, Brazil, during the Thirty-third Folkloric Festival of Olimpia
12. Mocžambique (1:19)
Performed by members of the Mocžambique de Nossa Senhora do RosaŽrio, from Uberla^ndia, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Five bumbos (bass drums), 3 chocalhos tipo prato (plate-shaped shakers), apito (whistle), grupo de figurantes (dancers)
Recorded by Welson A. Tremura on 17 August 1997 in Olimpia, Sa~o Paulo, Brazil, during the Thirty-third Folkloric Festival of Olimpia
13. "EŽ bonito cantar" ('Singing Is Beautiful'), cantoria of the embolada genre (1:30)
Performed by Carlito de Arapiraca and FurioŽ on a street corner in Alagoas, Brazil.
Two pandeiros played by the singers
Recorded by Larry Crook on 13 July 1984 in Arapiraca, Alagoas, Brazil
14. ForroŽ do pife (forroŽ for banda de pifanos) (1:53)
Performed by the Bandinha Cultural de Caruaru Severino: Pedro da Silva and Joa~o Manuel da Silva, pifanos (cane fifes); Anto^nio do Nascimento, tarol (thin snare drum); Manuel dos Santos, zabumba (bass drum); MauriŽcio Anto^nio da Silva, surdo (tenor drum); and Joa~o Alfredo dos Santos, pratos (hand cymbals)
Recorded by Larry Crook on 19 April 1987 in Caruaru, Pernambuco, Brazil
15. ForroŽ de sanfona (forroŽ for accordion) (1:26)
Performed by Toninho de Caldera~o, keyboard accordion, and unknown musicians playing zabumba, tarol, pratos, and triangle
Recorded by Larry Crook on 19 September 1987 in Caruaru, Pernambuco, Brazil
16. "Boa noite todo povo" ('Good Night Everyone'), a maracatuŽ rural (rural maracatuŽ) (1:46)
Performed by the group Maracatu Lea~o Brasileiro, featuring a mestre de toadas (lead singer) and other anonymous musicians, at a street performance during carnival celebrations
Trumpet, tarol, congueŽ (iron bell), oncža (large friction drum), and ganzaŽ (metal shaker); one microphone shared by the lead singer and the trumpeter
Recorded by Larry Crook on 27 February 1988 in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
17. Canto a lo pueta ('song of the poet'), also called deŽcima (1:47)
Performed by Santos Rubio, a blind musician who accompanies himself on the guitarroŽn
Recorded by Daniel E. Sheehy in 1973 in Pirque, Puente Alto, Santiago Province, Chile
18. "Tengo que hacer un barquito" ('I Have to Make a Little Boat'), cueca dance-song (1:43)
Sung by Eufrasia Ugarte, who accompanies herself on button accordion. She is accompanied by Benito Aranda, who strikes carefully loosened slats of a wooden box with his fingers
Recorded by Daniel E. Sheehy in 1973 in San JoseŽ, Algarrobo, ValparaiŽso Province, Chile
19. Song by blind rondador (panpipe) player (0:59)
Performed by a beggar-musician in the Ibarra market
Recorded by Charles Sigmund in 1975 in Ibarra, Ecuador
20. Song in Quechua about a young man, alone in the world, looking for a wife (2:14)
Performed by Pedro Tasiguano, who accompanies himself on the harp
Recorded by Charles Sigmund in 1975 in Llano Grande, 24 kilometers north of Quito, Ecuador
21. Huayno (Andean dance-song) (2:35)
Performed by Narciso Morales Romero on roncador y caja (pipe and tabor)
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 1 September 1979 in Huaylas, Ancash Department, Peru
22. Festival de la Virgen del Carmen (patronal festival dedicated to the Virgin of Carmen) (1:30)
Performed by local musicians and people from Alto Otuzco, Cajamarca, Peru
Female vocalists, flauta y caja (pipe and tabor), two clarines (clariŽn trumpets)
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 16 July 1979 in Alto Otuzco, Cajamarca, Peru
23. "No lo cuentes a nadie" ('Don't Tell Anyone'), huayno (2:42)
Performed by the orquesta tiŽpica SeleccioŽn del Centro, directed by Julio Rosales Huatuco
Harp, two violins, clarinets, alto and tenor saxophones
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on Sunday, 24 June 1979 in Acolla, JuniŽn, Peru, during a private party for the festival of San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist)
24. "Quien a visto aqueŽl volcaŽn" ('Whoever Has Seen this Volcano' [El Misti]), yaraviŽ from Puquina, Arequipa (2:44)
Performed by Nicanor Abarca Puma on charango
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 12 August 1979 in Arequipa, Peru
25. "Zancudito," hatajo de negritos (2:02)
Performed by Amador Vallumbrosio, caporal (director), and JoseŽ Lurita, violin
Recorded by William David Tompkins in 1976 in El Carmen, Chincha Province, Peru
26. "La Catira" ('The Light-Haired Woman') (2:42)
Performed by JoseŽ LeoŽn (Venezuela), bandola, and musicians playing cuatro (small guitar), maracas, and string bass
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 17 March 1982 at the School of Music, Florida State University, Tallahassee
27. Festival de San Juan (patronal festival of Saint John) (1:41)
Private performance during a party on Sunday afternoon
Mina (large drum), curbata (small drum), and laures (sticks struck on sides of mina drum)
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 24 June 1974 in Curiepe, Barlovento, Venezuela
28. "Cuaulleros" (1:47)
Performed by Nicandro Aquino, harp; JoseŽ MariŽa Isidro and TeoŽdulo Isidro, violins; and Eleazar
Arrollo, jarana, with uaultl (palos or sticks) and xauanillsll (sonajas or bells)
Recorded by Arturo Chamorro on 1 October 1984 in PoŽmaro, MichoacaŽn, Mexico
29. Danza de corpus (Corpus Christi dance) (1:22)
Recorded by Arturo Chamorro on 2 October 1984, in PoŽmaro, MichoacaŽn, Mexico
30. "SiquisiriŽ," son jarocho (3:31)
Performed by a trio of jarocho musicians: Isidoro GutieŽrrez, jarana and pregonero (lead singer); Luis "Huicho" DelfiŽn, requinto jarocho; and Gregorio (last name unknown), harp
Recorded by Danel E. Sheehy on 22 February 1978 in the cantina Las Palomas (The Doves) in Alvarado, Veracruz, Mexico.
31. "AŽmalihaniŽ," the central rite of ancestor placation in a Garifuna family dušguš ceremony (2:16)
Performed in the dabuyaba (ancestral temple) in Dangriga, Belize, by the shaman (buyei) John Mariano (playing siŽsara), three drummers (playing three garawoun segunda drums), a song leader, and singing family members and relatives
Text: "My grandmother, we are quieting you down. My grandmother, the cock is crowing. It is silent now. I am for you; you are for me. Grandmother, water."
Recorded by Oliver Greene on 16 July 1996 in Dangriga, Belize
32. "El Corredizo" (refers to running, moving) (1:34)
Music to accompany chinegros performance; the second of several sones played between the ritual duels of pairs of dancers
Pito (vertical, wooden flute) and two tambores (small, double-headed drums)
Recorded by T. M. Scruggs in July 1987 in NindiriŽ, Nicaragua
33. "Los Novios" ('The Sweethearts') (2:27).
This is one of the approximately thirty-six pieces in the Nicaraguan folklore repertoire that accompany the series of dances generically known as el baile de la marimba ('the dance of the marimba').
Marimba de arco trio: Marco MartiŽnes, marimba de arco; Angel MartiŽnes, guitarrilla; and Omar "Bigote" MartiŽnes, guitarra
Recorded by T. M. Scruggs on 9 March 1989 outside Masatepe, Nicaragua
34. "Los Coros de San Miguel" ('The Choruses of Saint Michael'), salve with drums in the style of the southwest Dominican Republic (0:53)
One palo mayor (master drum) and two alcahuetes (accompanying drums)
Recorded by Martha E. Davis in 1979 in Azua, Dominican Republic
35. "Dice Desidera Arias" ('According to Desidera Arias'), merengue (2:30)
Performed by a peŽrico ripiao (typical merengue ensemble): male vocalist accompanying himself on tres (Cuban small guitar), gušira (metal scraper), mariŽmbola (large lamellophone), and tambor (drum), and chorus (the other musicians)
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 17 December 1979 in a hotel courtyard in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic
36. Song for Legba, dance for Ogoun (2:02)
Performed at the ounfo` (temple) "Kay Nicole"
Recorded by Lois Wilcken on 31 July 1985 in La Plaine, Haiti
37. Rara instrumental music (1:41)
Performed by Rara Sanbout
Recorded by Gage Averill on 19 February 1991 in Les Salines, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
38. Afro-Martinican street music (2:16)
One male singer (chacha player), two boula drums, one suru drum, one bambuŽ idiophone, one chacha rattle, and male chorus (the other musicians)
Recorded by Dale A. Olsen on 21 December 1977 in La Savane Park, Fort-de-France, Martinique
39. "Koumen non k'aleŽ fe`," koutoumba music (1:30)
Recorded by Jocelyne Guilbault on 25 June 1981 in St. Lucia
Page numbers in italic indicate pages on which illustrations appear. | |
AbadiŽa Morales, Guillermo, | |
Abarca Puma, Nicanor, | |
Aberle, Juan, | |
Abreu, Zequinha de, | |
Academia Nacional de MuŽsica (Colombia), | |
Academia Nacional del Tango, | |
Academia Porten~a del Lunfardo, | |
acculturation, | |
Andean region, | |
Argentina, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Bahamas, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Brunka and Teribe cultures, | |
French Guiana, | |
GuaraniŽ cultute, | |
Honduras, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
of songs, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Peru, | |
Q'ero music, | |
South America, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Acevedo, Jorge L., | |
Acevedo, MariŽa Luisa, | |
AcheŽ-GuayakiŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Acosta, Victor, | |
Acun~a JimeŽnez, Hugo, | |
Adalid y Gamero, Manuel, | |
aerophones, | |
accordions | |
Argentina, | |
in cuarteto music, | |
Bahamas, | |
bandoneoŽn, | |
Barbados, | |
Belize, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
button, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
concertina, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
gaita, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Honduras, | |
keyed (piano), | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Montserrat, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, | |
sanfona, | |
South America, | |
Surinam, | |
Uruguay, | |
Yuma culture, | |
bagpipes, Trinidad, | |
Colombia, ancient, | |
combs, paper-covered, Jamaica, | |
double-reed | |
bajoŽn (bassoon), | |
becu, | |
biko, | |
chirimiŽa, | |
chirisuya, | |
orlo (krummhorn), | |
flutes, |
|
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
Cuba, | |
distribution of, | |
French Guiana, | |
h'chul, | |
Honduras, | |
Lenca culture, | |
mangangan ra'anga, | |
Mexico, | |
Peru, | |
pira ra'anga, | |
pre-Columbian predominance of, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tairona culture, | |
tarutaru ra'anga, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
flutes, bamboo, | |
Barbados, | |
Carib culture, | |
Dominica, | |
Guyana, | |
flutes, bone, | |
Bolivia, | |
Carib culture, | |
Caribbean, | |
Colombia, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
Moxo culture, | |
Peru, | |
Sumu culture, | |
TupinambaŽ culture, | |
Venezuela, | |
Warao culture, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
flutes, cane | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
flutes, ceramic, Panama, | |
flutes, deer-skull, cacho, | |
flutes, duct | |
Colombia, | |
mitote, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
yurupariŽ, | |
flutes, end-blown | |
Argentina, | |
Aztec culture, | |
malka kun~in (also malaka kun~ini, malaka kun~kana), | |
nawa-wakal, | |
Peru, | |
pipimemyra, | |
talacabe, | |
tura, | |
Venezuela, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
flutes, end-blown duct | |
alma pinkillu, | |
'ama (also xul; zu; zubac), | |
calambo, | |
chiska, | |
ch'utu, | |
Costa Rica, | |
dolo, | |
flauta, | |
flawta, | |
gaita, | |
gorgigala, | |
hiŽto (also wiŽchu; fhidyu), | |
irasu, | |
kuiŽsi, | |
lawatu, | |
lueŽ, | |
lueŽ ko^riroŽ, | |
Maya culture, |
aerophones (continued) | |
mimby pukuŽ, | |
mulagala, | |
musin~u (also mohocen~o), | |
Nicaragua, | |
OtomiŽ culture, | |
pennywhistle, | |
pincullo (also pincullu; pingollo; pingullo; pinkillo; pinkillu; pinkullo; pinkullu; pinquillo), | |
pito, | |
pito (also pitu), | |
quri pinkillu, | |
rayaŽn, | |
recorder, | |
rollano, | |
roncador, | |
saripalka, | |
silbadora, | |
sobre requinto, | |
sulupgala, | |
supe, | |
sur, | |
tarka: | in Bolivia, |
temišmbi-puŽku, | |
tlapitzalli, | |
tzijolah, | |
tzijolaj, | |
uasgala, | |
xul, zu; zubac (See under 'ama) | |
flutes, end-blown duct (multiple duct) | |
dru nošraŽ, | |
Guatemala, | |
Mexico, | |
flutes, end-blown ductless (See also panpipes; whistles) | |
etka talacabe, | |
gammu suid, | |
kawadi deješ, | |
mimby, | |
nipjiiht, | |
so?o kangwera, | |
flutes, end-blown notched, | |
bara, | |
Bolivia, | |
bra-tara, | |
can~a, | |
chokela, | |
chuqila, | |
El Salvador, | |
hekunukabe, | |
lichiwayo (also lichiguayo), | |
mimby kueŽ, | |
muhusemoi, | |
mukululu, | |
mullu, | |
nhimia miti, | |
nhimia mytare, | |
pinculu, | |
pulipuli, | |
qina, | |
qina-qina, | |
quena (also kena), | |
quenaquena, | |
shakuhachi, | |
so'o kangwera, | |
suara, | |
flutes, multiple-tubed | |
El Salvador, | |
Mexico, | |
flutes, nose | |
kuripeawa, | |
Peru, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
flutes, piston, El Salvador, | |
flutes, reed | |
Colombia, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
nausuneusun, | |
flutes, side-blown | |
Brazil, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
falawatu (also falawita), | |
fife: in Antigua, | |
flauta, | |
galabigbili, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
karakukua, | |
kuripeawa, | |
liku, | |
Moche culture, | |
musin~u (also mohocen~o), | |
Peru, | |
phalahuita, | |
piccolo, | |
piŽfano, | |
pinkui, | |
pinkullwe, | |
pito, | |
pito (also pitu), | |
quena, | |
temimby ie piasaŽ, | |
una, | |
xul, | |
flutes, tubular, | |
Central America, | |
Colombia, | |
Mexico, | |
Peru, | |
flutes, vessel, | |
Argentina, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bolivia, | |
Caribbean, | |
Central America, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
dede, | |
dru mugata, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
liban, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
ocarinas, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
Tairona culture, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
flutes, vine, Barbados, | |
free, pole with attached bamboo strip, spun, | |
free-reed (See accordions; harmonicas; harmoniums) | |
harmonicas | |
Argentina, | |
armoŽnica, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
dulzaina, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
Honduras, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
rondiŽn, | |
sinfoniŽa, | |
Uruguay, | |
Wayana culture, | |
harmoniums, | |
Jamaica, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
horns (See trumpets) | |
jugs, botija, | |
Mexico, ancient, | |
mouth organs, Jamaica, | |
multiple-reed, jawarun ra?anga, | |
ocarinas (See flutes, vessel) | |
organs | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guatemala, | |
Jamaica, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
organs, barrel, oŽrgano oriental, | |
Otopame culture, | |
panpipes, | |
Andean regions, | |
antara (also andara), | |
Argentina, | |
ayarachi, | |
Bolivia, | |
canchis sipas, | |
Carib culture, | |
carrizo, | |
chiriguano (also chiriwanu), | |
Colombia, | |
consorts of, | |
distribution of, | |
Ecuador, | |
erebo, | |
flauta, | |
flautone, | |
French Guiana, | |
gammu burui, | |
goke, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
guli, | |
julajula (also julujulu), | |
kantus, | |
laquita (also lakita), | |
maremare, | |
Mexico, | |
mimby puŽ, | |
moraŽo, | |
Nasca culture, | |
Peru, | |
piloilo, | |
pito, | |
pitucahue, |
pre-Columbian, | |
rondador, | |
rondadorcillos, | |
siku, | |
sikuri, | |
Spanish views about, | |
suduchu, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
veoŽ-paŽme, | |
zampon~a, | |
Peru, Andean region, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
resonating tubes, krywaŽ, | |
single-reed | |
can~a de millo (also pito), | |
clarinet, | |
erke (also irki), | |
erkencho, | |
gaita, | |
indigenous, | |
isimoi, | |
saxophones, | |
tekeyeš (also tekeya; wanna), | |
tropical-forest cultures, | |
tureŽ (also ture`; tuleŽ), | |
terminology for, | |
trombones | |
Argentina, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
trumpets, circular | |
cacho, | |
wak'rapuku, | |
trumpets, conch, | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
atecocoli, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
caracoles, | |
Carib culture, | |
Caribbean, | |
ChaviŽn culture, | |
churu (also quipa), | |
dutu, | |
fotuto, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
guamo, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
guarura, | |
Guatemala, | |
hanawkwa, | |
heresemoi, | |
hub, | |
kepu, | |
Kuna culture, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
lanbi, | |
masi, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Peru, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
pututu, | |
Taino culture, | |
t'ot', | |
trompeta de caracol, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
trumpets, gourd | |
chile frito, | |
instrumentos de calabazo, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
nung-subaldaŽ, | |
pululu, | |
puro, | |
trumpets, snail-shell, yošcsoro, | |
trumpets, sucked | |
lolkin~, | |
nolkiŽn, | |
trumpets and horns, | |
abeng, | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
ass pipe, | |
baha, | |
bajoŽn, | |
bajones, | |
bakohi, | |
bambuŽe, | |
Barbados, | |
bicycle horn, | |
bocina, | |
Bolivia, | |
boompipe, | |
boumboum, | |
Brazil, | |
bugle, | |
cachu, | |
can~a, | |
ceramic, | |
clariŽn: | in Argentina, |
Colombia, | |
corneta, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
erke (short trumpet), | |
erque (long trumpet), | |
excoletes, | |
foghorn, | |
fotuto, | |
French Guiana, | |
Guatemala, | |
Haiti, | |
huarumu, | |
k?epa, | |
ko`ne`, | |
kullkull, | |
llungur, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
nhimia poku, | |
Nicaragua, | |
ophicleide, | |
pampa corneta, | |
Peru, | |
pulilitu, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
putu, | |
pututu, | |
saxhorns, PureŽpecha culture, | |
siwo, | |
tepuzquiquiztli, | |
titiru (also tiroro), | |
trompa, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
trutruka, | |
tun, | |
turuŽ, | |
uatapuŽ, | |
upawa~, | |
Uruguay, | |
vaksin, | |
tuba, PureŽpecha culture, | |
Tukano culture, | |
voice modifiers, Kuna culture, | |
whirled plaques | |
nuraŽ-meše, | |
palo zumbador, | |
whistles | |
Argentina, | |
cancan ra?anga, | |
Costa Rica, | |
huiŽbiju, | |
huilacapiztli, | |
kiviŽ, | |
mataco, | |
Nicaragua, | |
pifušlka, | |
police, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Wayana culture, | |
whistling jars, Maya culture, | |
aesthetics, | |
Afro-Brazilian music, | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, cuarteto, | |
art-music styles, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Aztec culture, concepts of music, | |
Bahamas, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, Afro-Brazilian, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
El Salvador, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
Haiti, | |
ideal sound quality, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Martinique, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
Panama, vocal, | |
Peru | |
Afro-Peruvian music, | |
Indian vs. mestizo, | |
popular music and, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
Quichua culture, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Uruguay, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, |
aesthetics (continued) | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
Africa in Latin America, | |
African descendants. See also GariŽfuna culture; Maroon cultures; specific cultures listed below | |
in Anglophone areas, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Aruba, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Central America, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Cuba, | |
dance and movement of, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
emigration to Angola and Liberia, | |
in Francophone areas, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Haiti, | |
identity issues of, | |
instruments of, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Martinique, | |
in Mexico, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
in Netherland Antilles, | |
in Panama, | |
in Paraguay, | |
popular music of, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
relations with Amerindians and European descendants, | |
religions of, | |
rhythmic style of, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Venezuela, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
African slaves | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Belize, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Central America, | |
Christian conversion of, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Martinique, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Panama, | |
in Peru, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in United States, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Afro-Bolivian culture, saya praise songs of, | |
Afro-Brazilian culture, | |
afoxeŽs, | |
associations in, | |
blocos-afros, | |
capoeira, | |
choro, | |
dance in, | |
dramatic traditions, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
religious traditions of, | |
samba, | |
secular traditions of, | |
urban popular traditions of, | |
Afro-Caribbean culture, in Costa Rica, | |
Afro-Colombian culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
popular music of, | |
religious traditions of, | |
research on, | |
secular traditions of, | |
Afro-Cuban music, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
Afro-Ecuadorian culture | |
currulao in, | |
instruments of, | |
research on, | |
Afro-Honduran culture, | |
Afro-Mexican culture, | |
Afro-Peruvian culture, | |
African heritage of, | |
children's wakes, | |
Creole genres, | |
influence on cueca, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres, | |
research on, | |
revival of, | |
Spanish heritage of, | |
Afro-Venezuelan culture | |
festival of Saint Benedict the Moor, | |
festival of Saint John the Baptist, | |
instruments of, | |
joropo styles in, | |
research on, | |
urbanization of, | |
Agerkop, Terry, | |
agriculture | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Caribbean, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
Surinam, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Aguaruna culture, | |
Aguilar, Ignacio, | |
Ahyoung, Olivia, | |
Ahyoung, Selwyn, | |
Ajo de Buenaventura family, | |
Akan nation, | |
Akawaio culture, religious music of, | |
Akumo (Ocomayana) culture, | |
Alacaluf (Halakwalup) culture, | |
Alberti, Luis, | |
AlcalaŽ, JeroŽnimo de, | |
Alcazaba, SimoŽn de, | |
Alcides, | |
alcohol | |
aguardiente, | |
can~a, | |
ceremonial use of, | |
chicha (corn beer), | |
hiu, | |
jack-iron rum, | |
manioc beer, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
puput, | |
tesgušino, | |
trago, | |
in Venezuelan religious celebrations, | |
AlegriŽa (chicha group), | |
AlemaŽn, William, | |
Alencar, Edgar de, | |
Alencar, JoseŽ de, | |
Alexander, Monty, | |
Alexander VI, Pope, | |
Alexander's Ragtime Band (steelband), | |
Alf, Johnny, | |
Alfaro, Daniel, | |
Alfredo (concertina player), | |
Allen, George, | |
Allende, Pedro Humberto, | |
Allende, Salvador, | |
Alleyne, Wendy, | |
Almada Roche, Armando, | |
Almeida, Bira (Mestre Acordeon), | |
Almeida, Renato, | |
Alonso, Pacho, | |
Alpha Boys School (Kingston), | |
Altamirano, CristoŽbal, | |
Altinho, Jorge de, | |
Aluku culture, |
|
Alvarado, Pedro de, | |
Alvarenga, Oneyda, | |
Alvares Lo^bo, Elias, | |
AŽlvarez, Rafael, | |
Alves, AtauŽlfo, | |
Amateur Movement (Cuba), | |
American Folklife Center (Washington, D. C.), | |
Amerindian Museum (Guyana), | |
Amerindians. See also specific cultures and countries | |
Christian conversion of, | |
identity issues of, | |
relations with European and African descendants, | |
rhythmic style of, | |
Amira, John, | |
Amoco Renegades, | |
Amuzgo culture, | |
funerals in, | |
Anacaona (Cuban all-woman orquesta), | |
Anacaona (Taino princess), | |
Anataka (Wayana singer), | |
Anchieta, JoseŽ de, | |
Andino, Luis Felipe, | |
Andrade, Manuel J., | |
Andrade, MaŽrio de, | |
Anegada, | |
An~ez, Jorge, | |
AngaiteŽ culture, | |
Anglicans | |
in Argentina, |
in Barbados, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Angola, Afro-Brazilian immigrants to, | |
Anguilla, | |
musical genres, steelbands, | |
AniŽbal, ReneŽ, | |
animal sacrifice | |
Argentina, | |
Bolivia, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Peru, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Trinidad, | |
Annals of the Chakchiquels, The, | |
Anson, Joe, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
geography of, | |
immigrants to Dominica, | |
musical genres | |
calypso, | |
soca, | |
steelbands, | |
population of, | |
Antunes, Jorge, | |
Apapocuva culture, | |
Aparai culture, | |
Appleby, David P., | |
Aquelarre (musical group), | |
Aquino, Mr., | |
Arab-AndaluciŽan culture | |
influence on Chilean music, | |
influence on Venezuelan music, | |
Arab people | |
in Belize, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Araca la Cana, | |
Arada nation, | |
Araketu (bloco afro), | |
Arancibia, Mario, | |
Aranzamendi, Bernabe, | |
ArauŽjo, Alceu Maynard de, | |
Arawak culture, |
|
in Barbados, | |
in Central America, | |
ceremonies of, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
extermination of, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Haiti, | |
instruments of, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
relation to Warao culture, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
vocal music of, | |
Arawete culture, | |
Aican~o y sus Maravillas, | |
Arcaraz, Luis, | |
archaeology, | |
Argentina, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Belize, | |
Bolivia, | |
Caribbean, | |
Central America, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
Grenada, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
Jamaica, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
architecture | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Brazil, temporary structures, | |
Carriacou, | |
Colombia | |
marimba house, | |
Tairona culture, | |
Ecuador, marimba house, | |
Guarijio culture, | |
Q?ero culture, | |
South America, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
archives | |
audio, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama, | |
Archives of Andean Traditional Music of the Catholic University (Peru), | |
Archives of Traditional Music (Indiana University), | |
Arciniegas, Ismael Enrique, | |
ArdeŽvol, JoseŽ, | |
Arecuna culture, | |
Aretz, Isabel, | |
Argentina, | |
aboriginal inhabitants of, | |
Afro-Brazilian cults in, | |
Andes region, harvest celebrations, | |
art music in, | |
Aymara-speaking peoples, | |
Buenos Aires | |
music conservatory, | |
tango in, | |
Catamarca province, | |
Chaco, | |
harvest celebrations, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Chinese people in, | |
CoŽrdoba province | |
CosquiŽn folkloric festival, | |
cuarteto music in, | |
Cuyo, | |
folkloric music in, | |
geography of, | |
German people in, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
immigrants in, | |
influence on Uruguayan music, | |
instruments of, | |
Italian people in, | |
Japanese people in, | |
Jujuy province, | |
La Rioja province, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
military regime in, | |
Misiones, | |
Misiones province, | |
musical genres | |
baguala, | |
chamameŽ, | |
cifra, | |
cuarteto, | |
estilo, | |
milonga, | |
murga, | |
muŽsica tropical, | |
nueva cancioŽn, | |
ranchera, | |
rock, | |
Roman Catholic, | |
tango, | |
pampas region, | |
Patagonia, | |
population of, | |
religion in, | |
RiŽo de la Plata, | |
Salta province, | |
San Juan province, | |
Santiago del Estero province, | |
secular music in, | |
shamanism in, | |
sound recording industry, | |
Spanish people in, | |
Tierra del Fuego, | |
tourism in, | |
Argentine people, in Brazil, | |
Arguedas, JoseŽ MariŽa, | |
Arhoolie (record company), | |
Arias Larreta, Abraham, | |
Arias Larreta, Felipe, | |
Aristi, Cecilia, | |
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, | |
Arnaz, Desi, | |
Arrivillaga CorteŽs, Alfonso, | |
Arrow (calypsonian), | |
Arroyo, Joe, | |
art music, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Colombia, | |
concept of, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
European, | |
French Guiana, | |
Grenada, | |
Guatemala, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Honduras, | |
Jamaica, | |
Maya culture, European Renaissance genres, |
art music (continued) | |
Mexico, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama, | |
research on, | |
South America, | |
Artigas, JoseŽ Gervasio, | |
Aruba, | |
art music in, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres, tambuŽ, | |
musical traditions, | |
political status of, | |
popular music in, | |
research on, | |
Arvizu, Juan, | |
Ascuez, Augusto, | |
Ascuez, EliŽas, | |
AserriŽ culture, | |
Ashanti culture, | |
instruments of, | |
Ashbourne, Peter, | |
AsociacioŽn Aires Costarricenses, | |
AsociacioŽn de Grupos e InteŽrpretes de la Cultura Popular (Costa Rica), | |
assimilation. See acculturation | |
AssociacioŽn Sandinista de Trabajadores de la Cultura, | |
associations. See societies and organizations; specific names | |
Assuncžao, Fernando, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
instruments of, | |
religious rituals and genres, | |
Atahualpa (Inka ruler), | |
Ateneo Paraguayo, | |
Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo; calypsonian), | |
Atlacatl (marimba ensemble), | |
Atlas DuraŽn, | |
Atria, Jaime, | |
Auca culture, | |
audiences | |
Andean region, | |
Argentina | |
for cuarteto, | |
for folkloristic music, | |
for rock, | |
for tango, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, for cantoria, | |
Carriacou, for big-drum dance, | |
Colombia | |
for cumbia, | |
for deŽcima competitions, | |
for dueto bambuquero, | |
Dominica, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
Guadeloupe, for leŽwo`z, | |
Guatemala, for bambuco, | |
Guyana, for calypso, | |
Haiti, for popular music, | |
Jamaica | |
participation of, | |
for popular music, | |
Kuna culture, | |
mass media and, | |
Peru, for jazz, | |
for popular music, | |
preference issues, | |
PureŽpecha culture, |
|
religion and, | |
St. Lucia, for jweŽ, | |
social class of, | |
tourists, | |
United States, for Haitian folklore, | |
Uruguay | |
for carnival, | |
for payada, | |
preferences and participation of, | |
Audiencia de Guatemala, | |
Augustinian order | |
in Mexico, |
|
in South America, | |
Austerlitz, Paul, | |
Austin, General Hudson, | |
Averill, Gage, | |
Awatin~as (musical group), | |
Ayala, Maria Ignez Novais, | |
AyestaraŽn, Lauro, | |
Aymara culture, | |
aesthetics of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical contexts, | |
musical genres | |
tono y rueda, | |
tonos de sikuri, | |
religious rituals and genres, | |
Aymers, Black Sam, | |
Ayoreo culture, | |
Azevedo, Geraldo, | |
Aztec culture and empire, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
iconographical record of, | |
instruments of, | |
B. G. Militia Band (Guyana), | |
bachata, | |
Badaue^ (bloco afro), | |
Bahamas, The, | |
dance of, | |
Family Islands, | |
festivals in, | |
geography of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
anthem, | |
goombay, | |
junkafunk, | |
junkanoo, | |
rake 'n' scrape, | |
rhyming spiritual, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
religious music of, | |
research on, | |
secular music of, | |
Bahamas Musicians and Entertainers Union, | |
Bahamen (musical group), | |
Bahamonde, Luis, | |
BahiŽa (Valdivia) culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Baja culture, | |
balada, | |
Ballet FolcloŽrico Nacional (Costa Rica), | |
Ballet FolkloŽrico (El Salvador), | |
Ballet FolkloŽrico Nacional (Dominican Republic), | |
Banco Central de Costa Rica, | |
Band, Heinrich, | |
Banda Blanca, | |
Banda FilarmoŽnica de Managua, | |
Banda Mel, | |
Banda Nacional de BogotaŽ, | |
Banda Para?iŽ, | |
Banda Reggae, | |
Bandinha Cultural, | |
bands. See instrumental ensembles | |
Bannzil KweŽyo`l, | |
Bantu culture, | |
Baptists | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Paraguay, | |
BarandiaraŽn, Daniel de, | |
Barbados, | |
art music in, | |
Bridgetown, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
instruments in, | |
Landship movement, | |
musical genres | |
calypso, | |
folk songs, | |
spouge, | |
steelbands, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
religious music of, | |
secular music in, | |
tea meetings, | |
Barbosa, Rui, | |
Barbuda. See Antigua and Barbuda | |
Barral, Basilio MariŽa de, | |
Barrios MangoreŽ, AgustiŽn, | |
Barroco Andino, | |
Barros, Raquel, | |
Barroso, Ary, | |
Barrow, Norman, | |
Barrow, Steve, | |
Bartholomew, Doris, | |
BartolomeŽ, Miguel Alberto, | |
Baryshnikov, Mikhail, | |
Basalenque, Diego, | |
Basilio, TomaŽs, | |
Bastidas, Rodrigo de, | |
Batuque, | |
Baucke, Florian, | |
BaureŽ culture, | |
Bausch, Pina, | |
Bauve, Adam de, | |
Bawihka Sumu, | |
Baxter, Ivy, | 913 |
Beatles, | |
Beaumont, Pablo de, | |
Becerra Casanovas, Rogers, | |
Beck, Ervin, | |
Beckwith, Martha, | |
Beethoven, Ludwig van, | |
beguine, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Martinique, | |
BeŽhague, Gerard H., | |
BeŽjart, Maurice, | |
Bekker Codex, | |
BeŽle` nou (musical group), | |
BeliŽ y sus Muchachos, | |
Belize, | |
creole music, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
map of, | |
Maya culture, |
musical genres | |
brukdown, | |
cungo, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
Belize National Folklore Company, | |
BeltraŽn, Lola, | |
Belzner, William, | |
Bemelmans, Ludwig, | |
Bennett, Wendell Clark, | |
Benny MoreŽ Band, | |
Benoit, EŽdouard, | |
Benzoni, Giralmo, | |
Bergquist, Charles, | |
Bermudes, Pedro, | |
BermuŽdez, Egberto, | |
BermuŽdez, Lucho, | |
Bertoni, MoiseŽs, | |
Bertonio, Ludovico, | |
Betancourt, Helia, | |
Bethel, E. Clement, | |
Bethencourt, AgustiŽn, | |
biguine. See beguine | |
Bilby, Kenneth, | |
Bimba, Mestre (capoeira master), | |
Biocca, Ettore, | |
Bishop, Dalton "Manface" (Jackie Opel), | |
Bishop, Maurice, | |
Bisnauth, Dale, | |
Bizet, Georges, | |
Black Stalin (calypsonian), | |
Blaise, Michel, | |
Blanck, Hubert de, | |
Blanco, Ricardo, | |
Blinky and the Roadmasters, | |
Blue Boy (calypsonian), | |
Blue Rhythm Combo, | |
blues, | |
Bob Marley and the Wailers, | |
Bocanegra, Juan PeŽrez, | |
Bocca, Julio, | |
Bodie, Kirkland "K. B.," | |
Boggs, Garrido, | |
Boggs, Stanley, | |
Boggs, Vernon W, | |
Boile`s, Charles, | |
Boislaville, Loulou, | |
Bolan~os, CeŽsar, | |
bolero, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Chile, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Ecuador, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Peru, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
BoliŽvar, SimoŽn, | |
Bolivia, | |
acculturation in, | |
aesthetics in, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
copyright issues in, | |
dance in, | |
early cities of, | |
geography of, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Japanese people in, | |
Moxo culture, | |
musical genres, | |
huayn~o, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
Roman Catholic, | |
saya, | |
taquirari, | |
tropical music, | |
performers' roles, | |
population of, | |
PotosiŽ, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples, | |
Sucre (La Plata), | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
Bolivian people, in Chile, | |
Bonaire, | |
Bonamore, Alessandra, | |
Bonet, Carlos, | |
Bonfiglioli, Carlo, | |
Boni (Maroon) culture, | |
BordoŽn, LuiŽs, | |
Borgolla family, | |
Borinquen, | |
Borinquen culture, | |
Boskaljon, Rudolf Frederik Willem, | |
bossa nova, | |
Botocudo culture, | |
Boukman Eksperyans, | |
Boulton, Laura, | |
Bozzoli, MariŽa E., | |
Brahms, Johannes, | |
Braithwaite, Barrington, | |
Branda~o, Carlos Rodrigues, | |
Brandt, Max H., | |
Braun, BartholomeŽ, | |
Bravo, Soledad, | |
Bravo, Uriel, | |
Brazil, | |
African brotherhoods in, | |
Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in, | |
Afro-Brazilian traditions in, | |
Amerindian cultures, relations with European and African descendants, | |
Argentine people in, | |
art music in, | |
Bahia | |
Afro-Brazilian popular music in, | |
CandombleŽ rituals, | |
marujada genre, | |
Brasilia, | |
carnival in, | |
central and southern, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Chilean people in, | |
Chinese people in, | |
copyright issues in, | |
dance traditions of | |
baile pastoril, | |
batuque, | |
bumba-meu-boi, | |
capoeira, | |
chegancža, | |
co^co, | |
maculele^, | |
marujada, | |
reisado, | |
Saint Goncžalo dance, | |
ternos, | |
Ge^-speaking Indian groups, social organization of, | |
geography of, | |
German people in, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
immigrant clubs in, | |
instruments of, | |
Italian people in, | |
Japanese people in, | |
Manaus, Teatro Amazonas, | |
Maroon cultures in, | |
migrant communities in, | |
military regime in, | |
Minas Gerais, | |
musical genres | |
axeŽ, | |
bossa nova, | |
bra~o, | |
cantoria, | |
carangueijo, | |
caterete^, | |
charm, | |
choro, | |
cururu paulista, | |
dobrados, | |
embolada, | |
folia de reis, | |
forroŽ, | |
frevo, | |
frevo-baiano, | |
fricote, | |
ijexaŽ, | |
jongo, | |
lundu, | |
maracatuŽ, | |
maracatuŽ rural, | |
moda-de-viola, | |
modinha, | |
MPB, | |
muŽsica caipira, | |
muŽsica sertaneja, | |
porfia, | |
religious songs, | |
samba, | |
timbalada, | |
toada paulista, | |
trio eleŽtrico, | |
tropicaŽlia movement, | |
xaŽcara, | |
northeastern, | |
Afro-Brazilian culture in, | |
caboclo musical tradition, | |
parafolclore movement, | |
Pernambuco, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
Rio de Janeiro, | |
colonial paintings from, | |
economics, | |
music conservatory, | |
samba schools, | |
Teatro ColoŽn, | |
Salvador, | |
African-Brazilian culture in, | |
Sa~o Paulo | |
Afro-Brazilian culture in, | |
Japanese descendants in, | |
sound recording industry, | |
southeastern, Afro-Brazilian culture in, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
tourism in, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Tupi-GuaraniŽ culture in, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, |
Brazil (continued) | |
Waiwai culture in, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Xingu region, | |
women's Iamuricuma~ ceremony, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
Brazil-Paraguay War, | |
Brazilian people, in French Guiana, | |
Brazilian Society of Contemporary Music, | |
Bredda David and Tribal Vibes, | |
Bribri culture, | |
instruments of, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
ritual music of, | |
secular music of, | |
Bricen~o y An~ez (Colombian duo), | |
Briggs, Charles L., | |
Brinton, Daniel, | |
British Guiana. See Guyana | |
British Honduras. See Belize | |
British Institute of Recorded Sound, | |
British people, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Central America, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Panama, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
British Virgin Islands, | |
British West Indies, | |
Brito, Eduardo, | |
Brown, Carlinhos, | |
Brunka culture, | |
Brušnning, Heinrich, | |
Bry, Theodor de, | |
Buarque, Chico, | |
Buenan~o, Alfonso de, | |
Buitrago, Pablo, | |
BuitroŽn, AniŽbal, | |
Bully and the Kafooners, | |
Burnham, Pres. Forbes, | |
Burns, E. Bradford, | |
Burucac culture, | |
Bustos Valenzuela, Eduardo, | |
Butler, Ronnie, | |
Byrd, William, | |
Ca?aguaŽ culture. See CainguaŽ culture | |
Caballero, Juan JuliaŽn, | |
CabeŽcar culture, | |
instruments of, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
ritual music of, | |
secular music of, | |
cadences | |
Brazil, | |
cantoria, | |
Chile, verso, | |
Colombia, bambuco, | |
Maleku culture, curijurijanapuretec, | |
Maya culture, ritual music, | |
SuyaŽ invocations, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, shamanic songs, | |
Yanomamoš culture, shamanic songs, | |
Cadogan, LeoŽn, | |
CaŽgaba culture. See Kogi culture | |
CainguaŽ culture, | |
instruments of, | |
Cajas Castro, Juan, | |
Cakchiquel Maya, | |
instruments of, | |
songs of, | |
Caldas, LuiŽs, | |
Caldas, Waldenyr, | |
Caldas Barbosa, Domingos, | |
CalderoŽn, Juan Bustillo, | |
CalderoŽn de la Barca, Frances, | |
Calinago culture, | |
Caliponau culture, | |
Callado, Joaquim Antonio da Silva, | |
Callawaya culture, | |
CaloŽ, Miguel, | |
Calvo, LuiŽs A., | |
Calvo, Luz MariŽa, | |
calypso, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Barbados, | |
blue beat and kaiso styles, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
development of, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
links to Belize brukdown genre, | |
links to Martinican zouk, | |
links to Surinam kaseko genre, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Panama, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
sound recordings of, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Indian, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Calypsonian Commander, | |
Camacho Fajardo, Gema, | |
Camargo, Jorge, | |
Ca^mbio Negro, | |
Cameu, Helza, | |
Caminha, Pero Vaz de, | |
Campa, Gustavo, | |
Campa culture, | |
Campos, Augusto de, | |
Campos, Carlos M., | |
Campos, Ronaldo, | |
Canada, Japanese people in, | |
Canaro, Francisco, | |
Canary Islanders, in Dominican Republic, | |
CandombleŽ | |
in Argentina, | |
in Brazil, | |
instruments in, | |
transvestite performers, | |
use of drums, | |
Congo-Angola groups, | |
de Caboclo groups, | |
Ge^ge-Nago^ groups, | |
in Paraguay, | |
Sergipe groups, | |
CaŽnepa, Gisela, | |
Caninha (samba performer), | |
Canonge, Mario, | |
Cantares (musical group), | |
Canyon Records, | |
Cape Verde Islands, | |
Capiba (Lourencžo Barbosa), | |
Capuchin order, Venezuela mission schools of, | |
Cardenal Argušello, Salvador, | |
Cardenas, Jenny, | |
CaŽrdenas Pinelo, Augusto "Guy," | |
Cardozo, Felix PeŽrez, | |
Cardozo Ocampo, Mauricio, | |
Carib culture, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Central America, | |
ceremonies of, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
extermination of, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guyana, | |
instruments of, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Caribbean. See also specific countries and cultures | |
Amerindian ceremonies, | |
Anglophone areas, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
cultural composition, | |
economics, | |
folklore of, | |
Francophone areas, | |
geography of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
immigrant groups of, | |
immigration in, | |
maps of, | |
musical culture of, | |
native peoples of, | |
politics in, | |
popular music of, | |
population of, | |
tourism in, | |
Caribbean Council of Churches, | |
Caribbean Ecumenical Consultation for | |
Development, | |
Caribbean people | |
in North America and Europe, | |
in Panama, | |
Carlisle, Earl of, | |
Carlos, Roberto, | |
Carmona Maya, Sergio Ivan, | |
carnival, | |
Andean regions, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Bahia, | |
Rio de Janeiro, | |
samba in, | |
Caribbean, | |
Colombia, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Haiti, | |
Martinique, | |
Mixtec culture, |
Montserrat, | |
OtomiŽ culture, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, | |
son de los diablos performances, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
United States (New York), Caribbean Carnival, | |
Uruguay, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Carpentier, Alejo, | |
Carrasco, Gonzal, | |
Carrasco, ReneŽ, | |
Carreras, JoseŽ, | |
Carriacou, | |
history of, | |
homemade instruments of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
big-drum tradition, | |
game songs, | |
parang, | |
passplay, | |
quadrille, | |
vocal, | |
Carricarte, Pedro, | |
Carrillo, JuliaŽn, | |
CarrioŽn, Isabel V., | |
Cartagena, Antonio, | |
cartas anuas, | |
Carter, Charles, | |
Carter, Hazel, | |
Carvalho-Neto, Paulo de, | |
Carvallo, Jorge Isaac, | |
Casa de la Cultura (Ecuador), | |
Casa Paoli Folk Research Center (Puerto Rico), | |
Cashibo culture, | |
cassettes. See sound recordings | |
Castan~eda, Daniel, | |
Caste War, | |
Castellanos, Rafael Antonio de, | |
Castilla, Alberto, | |
Castillo, JesuŽs, | |
Castillo, Rafael, | |
Castro, Francisco, | |
Castro, RauŽl, | |
CatiŽo culture, instruments of, | |
Caudeiron, Mable "Cissie," | |
Cavour, Ernesto, | |
Cayapa culture, instruments of, | |
Cayetano, Pen, | |
Cayetano, Sebastian, | |
Caymmi, Dorival, | |
Cayulef, Gregorii, | |
Ceballos, Carlos, | |
Ceden~o Morales, Antonio, | |
CeŽlini, Raymond, | |
censorship and bans, | |
of Amerindian music, | |
Argentina, | |
of cuarteto, | |
Barbados | |
Jean and Johnnie dance, | |
on instruments, | |
Brazil, of cantoria, | |
Caribbean, on drums, | |
Chile, | |
of nueva cancioŽn, | |
Colombia, of bunde, | |
Dominica, on African traditions, | |
of drum playing, | |
Grenada, on African dances, | |
Guyana, of African drumming, | |
mass media and, | |
of popular music, | |
of secular dance, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
of calypso, | |
carnival participants, | |
on drumming, | |
in Wayana culture, | |
Center for the Research and Development of Cuban Music (CIDMUC), | |
Central America, | |
Amerindian cultures of, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
colonial era in, | |
cultural syncretism in, | |
folklore of, | |
geography of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
immigrant groups of, | |
instruments of, | |
maps of, | |
population of, | |
tourism in, | |
Centro de Cultura Popular (Uruguay), | |
Centro de Estudios FolkloŽricos (Guatemala), | |
Centro Nacional de Artes (El Salvador), | |
Cepeda, JesuŽs, | |
ceremonies. See also courtship rituals; festival funerals; shamanism; weddings | |
agricultural, | |
Andean regions | |
fertility, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
Arawak culture, | |
Argentina | |
Chaco region, | |
fertility rituals, | |
n~emongaraiŽ, | |
novena, | |
rutichico, | |
topamiento de comadres, | |
Atacamen~o culture | |
cauzuŽlor, | |
talaŽtur, | |
Aymara culture | |
enfloramiento, | 361 |
pachallampe, | 361 |
Aztec culture, | |
human sacrifice, | |
Barbados, African descendants, | |
birth and christening, | |
Bolivia | |
child's first haircut, | |
dance in, | |
initiation, | |
k?illpa, | |
Misa de Ocho Dias, | |
music's role in, | |
tinku, | |
vespers service, | |
Brazil | |
caboclo wakes, | |
CandombleŽ initiation, | |
ifaŽ, | |
novena, | |
XinguŽ iamuricuma, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures | |
healing, | |
life-cycle, | |
sula`r, | |
Caribbean, African-derived, | |
Chichimec culture, wakes, | |
Chile, wakes, | |
Chorotega culture, | |
human sacrifice, | |
Colombia | |
adult wakes, | |
Afro-Colombian traditions, | |
children's wakes, | |
Kogi culture, | |
municipal band's role in, | |
novenaria, | |
Costa Rica | |
novena, | |
quincean~o, | |
Spanish religious, | |
volador, | |
wakes, | |
Dominica, lave`yeŽ (wakes), | |
Dominican Republic | |
banco, | |
baquineŽ (wakes), | |
fiesta ?uincean~era, | |
novena, | |
wakes, | |
Ecuador | |
chigualo, | |
children's wakes, | |
currulao, | |
n~avi maillai, | |
El Salvador, life-cycle, | |
fifteenth-birthday (quincean~era), | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
amuyadahani, | |
arairaguni, | |
beluria, | |
chuguŽ, | |
dušguš, | |
novenarios, | |
walagayo (also walagallo), | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe | |
veŽneŽreŽs, | |
ve`yeŽ boukousou (wake), | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
puberty and initiation, | |
Guarijio culture, tuŽmari, | |
Guyana | |
healing, | |
mashramani, | |
que-que, | |
wakes, | |
Haiti | |
baptism, | |
rara band consecration, | |
seremoni (also dans), | |
Jamaica | |
Kumina cult, | |
wakes, | |
Kalina culture, mourning, | |
Kuna culture, | |
puberty, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Maleku culture, caza de la tortuga, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
kataŽn kawil, | |
?illipuŽn, | |
Maroon cultures, | |
Martinique, wakes, | |
Maya culture | |
pig-slaughtering, | |
rainmaking, |
ceremonies (continued) | |
Tenebrae services, | |
wakes, | |
Mexico | |
Amerindian cultures, | |
la rama, | |
life-cycle events, | |
Miskitu culture | |
isingni ulan, | |
kwal taya (wakes), | |
upla pruan barn (wakes), | |
Mixtec culture | |
childbirth, | |
initiation, | |
wakes, | |
Montserrat, involving jumbies, | |
Nicarao culture, | |
Otopame culture, | |
wakes, | |
Pame culture, wakes, | |
Paraguay | |
children's wakes, | |
masses, | |
quincean~era, | |
Paya culture | |
katik-ka, | |
maihnewa, | |
Peru | |
animal-marking (marcacioŽn; wylancha; herranza), | |
ayahuasca, | |
building construction (pirkansa), | |
child's first haircut (corte de pelo), | |
cleaning of irrigation channels, | |
communal labor, | |
fertility, | |
labor day, | |
Piaroa culture, warime, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
Puerto Rico | |
rosario a la Santa Cruz, | |
rosario de promesas, | |
rosario para los muertos, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
levantamiento del Nin~o, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
fertility rituals, | |
St. Lucia | |
keŽleŽ, | |
wakes, | |
shamanic, | |
South America, rropical-forest region, | |
Surinam | |
slametan, | |
vodu (also papagadu), | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
mouse, | |
Taino culture | |
areito (also areyto), | |
curing, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
bakaŽnawi, | |
korima, | |
nawesari, | |
tutuguri, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, Orisa, | |
Tukano culture | |
dabucuriŽ, | |
yurupari, | |
Uruguay, IemanjaŽ devotion, | |
Venezuela | |
children's wakes, | |
mampulorio, | |
velorio, | |
Waia~piŽ culture | |
bumblebee, | |
cannibalism, | |
Warao culture, curing, | |
Wayana culture, | |
marake, | |
Yanomamoš culture | |
amoamo, | |
cannibalism, | |
curing, | |
Yekuana culture, curing, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Cervantes, Ignacio, | |
Cervantes, Laura, | |
Cervantes, MariŽa, | |
CeŽspedes, Carlos M. de, | |
CeŽspedes, Francisco de, | |
cha-cha-chaŽ, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Chile, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
ChacaloŽn y la Nueva Crema, | |
Chaco War, | |
Chacobo culture, instruments of, | |
Chagnon, Napoleon A., | |
Chalice (Jamaican band), | |
Chalkdust (calypsonian), | |
Chamakoko culture, | |
Chamba nation, | |
Chamorro, Arturo, | |
ChanaŽ-CharruŽa culture, | |
Chancay culture | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
ChaŽnguena culture, | |
chant. See also narratives; recitation; vocal music | |
Bahamas, for dances and games, | |
Brazil, | |
Gregorian, | |
Haiti, priye` ginen, | |
Inca culture | |
saynata, | |
uaricza araui, | |
Kuna culture, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
TupinambaŽ culture, | |
Vedic, | |
Yanomamoš culture, waiyamou, | |
Chapin, Norman A., | |
Chapman, Anne, | |
ChappotiŽn, | |
Charanga del Caribe, | |
Charlemagne, Manno, | |
Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, | |
Charles V, king of Spain, | |
Charlevoix, Pierre Francois, | |
Charlton, Hannah, | |
Charters, Samuel, | |
ChaŽvez, Carlos, | |
ChaŽvez, JesuŽs, | |
ChaŽvez, Lino, | |
ChaviŽn culture, | |
CheŽbere, | |
ChemiŽn, Dominique, | |
ChemiŽn Bošssler, Heidi, | |
Chenoweth, Vida, | |
Cheville, Lila R., | |
Chibcha culture | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
in Central America, | |
El Dorado myth and, | |
chicha, | |
Chichimec culture, | |
Chico Science, | |
children's games and songs, | |
Bahamas, ring-play, | |
Carriacou, passplay, | |
Chile, ronda, | |
Colombia, arrullo, | |
Cosra Rica | |
balimbo, | |
ronda infantile, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Mexico, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Chile, | |
administration of Rapa Nui, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, | |
Bolivian people in, | |
children's wakes in, | |
ChiloeŽ Island, | |
German descendants on, | |
emigrants and exiles from, | |
festivals in, | |
geography of, | |
German people in, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Italian people in, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
military regime in, | |
musical genres | |
canto nuevo, | |
chamameŽ, | |
cueca, | |
folkloric music, | |
nueva cancio~n, | |
nueva ola, | |
rock, | |
tonada, | |
nationalism and popular music, | |
Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples, | |
religious contexts and genres, | |
research on, | |
Santiago de Chile, music conservatory, | |
secular contexts and genres, | |
shamanism in, | |
Tierra del Fuego, | |
Selk'nam culture of, | |
Chilean people, in Mexico, | |
Chimu culture, archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Chinese people, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Belize, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Netherland Antilles, | |
in Panama, | |
popularity of karaoke, | |
in South America, |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
ChiŽnipa culture, | |
Chipaya culture, instruments of, | |
Chiriguano-ChaneŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Chiriguano culture, | |
instruments of, | |
ChiripaŽ culture, | |
dance of, | |
instruments of, | |
ChiriquiŽ culture, | |
Chiriwano culture. See Chiriguano culture | |
Chiverton "Primo," Theophilus, | |
Chocho culture, | |
Choco culture, | |
research on, | |
Chol culture, | |
Cholo culture, instruments of, | |
choral music. See vocal music | |
chordophones, | |
banjos (See lutes) | |
basses, one-stringed | |
bajo de caja, | |
Jamaica, | |
tina, | |
basses, string | |
Argentina, | |
Cuba, | |
Honduras, | |
Mexico, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
tololoche, | |
Yuma culture, | |
basses, washtub | |
Bahamas, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
fiddles (See violins) | |
guitars | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
armadillo-shell, | |
Bahamas, | |
bajo sexto, | |
Barbados, | |
Belize, | |
Bolivia, | |
bordonuŽa, | |
Brazilian bossa nova techniques, | |
Carriacou, | |
cavaquinho, | |
charango (also quirquincho; chillador), | |
Chilean performing techniques, | |
cinco, | |
cinco de seis cuerdas, | |
cinco y medio, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
cuatra, | |
cuatro, 30; in Carriacou, | |
cuatro (Puerto Rican ten-stringed), | |
cuatro con cinco cuerdas, | |
cuatro de cinco cuerdas, | |
cuatro y medio, | |
Cuba, | |
discante, | |
distribution of, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guatemala, | |
guitarra, | |
guitarrilla, | |
guitarroŽn, | |
hichoch, | |
Honduras, | |
huapanguera (also guitarra quinta), | |
Jamaica, | |
jarana (also guitarra degolpe), | |
jitarroŽn, | |
K?ekchi Maya, | |
kin, | |
kitarra, | |
k'ullu charango, | |
kuminjareŽ, | |
lira, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
mbarakaŽ, | |
mejorana. | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
quinto, | |
qunquta, | |
requinto: in Argentina, | |
St. Lucia, | |
seis, | |
South America, | |
tabla charango, | |
talachi, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
tiple: in Argentina, | |
tres, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Uruguay, | |
vihuela, | |
vihuela (Mexican), | |
vihuela de mano, | |
viola, | |
viola caipira, | |
viola de cocho, | |
viola dina^mica, | |
viola~o, | |
viola~o-sete-cordas, | |
violo~e, | |
wandora (cuatro), | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
YuŽcatec Maya, | |
Yuma culture, | |
guitars, electric, | |
Argentina, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
guitars, electric bass, | |
Brazil, | |
Nicaragua, | |
harps | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
arpa, | |
arpa aragušen~a, | |
arpa criolla, | |
arpa ecuatoriana-paraguaya, | |
arpa folcloŽrica, | |
arpa grande, | |
arpa imbaburen~a, | |
arpa india, | |
arpa indigena, | |
arpa jarocha, | |
arpa llanera, | |
arpa mirandina, | |
arpa tuyera, | |
Bolivia, | |
central-coastal harp, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
domingacha, | |
Ecuador, | |
Guatemala, | |
K'ekchi Maya, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mayo culture, | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico, | |
paracaŽ, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
South America, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Yaqui culture, |
chordophones (continued) | |
lutes (See also guitars) | |
bandol, | |
bandola: in Chile, | |
bandola andina (also bandurriŽa), | |
bandolim, | |
bandoliŽn, | |
bandurria, | |
banjos: in Bahamas, | |
kitar, | |
lauŽd, | |
mandolin, | |
mandolina, | |
merrywang, | |
Peru, | |
rebec, | |
sarangi, | |
shamisen (also sanshin), | |
sitar, | |
tambura, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
musical bows, | |
Argentina, | |
baka aapa, | |
benta, | |
berimbau de barriga, | |
Bolivia, | |
cajuaveŽ, | |
caramba (also zambumbia), | |
Colombia, | |
cunculcahue, | |
gayumba, | |
gualambau (also guyrambau; lambau), | |
guyrapa-iŽ, | |
hool, | |
lungku, | |
lun~ku, | |
marimba, | |
paruntsi, | |
Paya culture, | |
Peru, | |
quijongo, | |
quinquerche (also quinquercahue), | |
rapaŽ, | |
shukster, | |
tambour maringouin, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
tumank (also tsayantur), | |
Uruguay, | |
pianos, | |
Argentina, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
El Salvador, | |
Jamaica, | |
Mexico, | |
pluriarc, agwado, | |
single-stringed gourd, Carib culture, | |
violins (fiddles) | |
Andean regions, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina, | |
Bolivia, | |
bow-fiddle, | |
Brazil, | |
Carriacou, | |
Cuba, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guatemala, | |
Honduras, | |
Jamaica, | |
keer (also kitiar), | |
K'ekchi Maya, | |
kokyuŻ, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mayo culture, | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
one-stringed, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
rabeca, | |
rabel, | |
rabel, | |
raveŽ, | |
St. Lucia, | |
sarangi, | |
sekeseke, | |
South America, | |
tanpura, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Teribe culture, | |
Tohono O'odham culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
violiŽn de talalate, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
yawera, | |
Yuma culture, | |
violins, bamboo, Jamaica, | |
violoncellos | |
Cuba, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
viols, vihuela de arco, | |
zithers | |
charrango, | |
koto (also kutu), | |
Peru, | |
psaltery, | |
terokaraŽ, | |
zithers, bowed tube, Costa Rica, | |
zithers, tube, caraŽngano, | |
choreography. See also dance and movement | |
African movements, | |
Amerindian movements, | |
Andean region, circular, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, Africanization of colonial dances, | |
Argentina | |
candombe, | |
cuarteto, | |
Bahamas, jump-in dance, | |
Brazil | |
baile pastoril, | |
batuque, | |
for CandombleŽ rituals, | |
capoeira, | |
circular formations, | |
co^co, | |
Saint Goncžalo dance, | |
samba-lencžo, | |
ternos ensembles, | |
Carriacou | |
big-drum dance, | |
"dancing the cake," | |
"fighting the flags," | |
quadrille, | |
Chichimec culture, danza chichimeca, | |
Chile, cueca, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
currulao, | |
mapaleŽ, | |
Costa Rica, punto guanacasteco, | |
Cuba, contradanza, | |
Dominica | |
beŽleŽ, | |
quadrille, | |
Dominican Republic, merengue, | |
Ecuador | |
culebrillando, | |
sanjuaŽn, | |
European movements, | |
Garifuna culture | |
aŽmalihaniŽ, | |
awangulahani, | |
chumba, | |
combination, | |
gunjeŽi, | |
hušngušhušnguš, | |
punta, | |
senbai, | |
ugulendu, | |
Guadeloupe, quadrille, | |
Guarijio culture, tuburada, | |
GuaymiŽ culture | |
bugutaŽ, | |
jehio, | |
Guyana, que-que, | |
Haiti, folkloric dances, | |
K'ekchi Maya, circle dances, | |
Kogi culture, | |
Kuna culture, gammu burui dances, | |
Mapuche culture | |
lonkomeo, | |
puel purruŽn, | |
Martinique, zouk, | |
Mexica culture | |
corpus, | |
danza de cuauileros, | |
Malinche dance, | |
xayaŽcatl, | |
Mexico, conchero, | |
Netherlands Antilles | |
danza, | |
tambuŽ, | |
tumba, | |
Otopame culture, male dances, | |
Panama | |
el tamborito, | |
gran diablos, | |
Peru | |
alcatraz, | |
dance-dramas, | |
escobillada technique, | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
ingaŽ, | |
landoŽ, | |
marinera, |
vals criollo, | |
zapateado technique, | |
Puerto Rico | |
bomba, | |
seis, | |
St. Lucia | |
calypso, | |
jweŽ danseŽ, | |
kwadril, | |
Taino culture, areito, | |
tango, | |
Tarahumara culture, matachiŽn, | |
Venezuela | |
joropo, | |
Saint John the Baptist dances, | |
Virgin Islands, quadrille, | |
Yuma dance, | |
choro, | |
Chorote culture, instruments of, | |
Chorotega culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
ChorotiŽ culture, | |
Chorti culture, | |
Christian, Bradley, | |
Christianity, | |
art music and, | |
Barbados, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, Vodou and, | |
influence on instrumentation, | |
Jamaica, | |
Maya culture, | |
missionaries, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Central America, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in South America, | |
in Venezuela, | |
Moxo people, | |
religious calendar, | |
religious genres and, | |
role in musical enculturation, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
ChubuzuŽ (musical group), | |
ChulupiŽ (ChurupiŽ) culture, | |
instruments of, | |
Church of the Western Evangelical | |
Millennium Pilgrims, | |
chutney-soca, | |
Ciboney culture, | |
CiŽcero, Padre (venerated CearaŽ priest), | |
Cieza de LeoŽn, Pedro, | |
Cifuentes, Santos, | |
Cilla, Max, | |
Clair-Vasiliadis, Christos, | |
Clapton, Eric, | |
Clarke, Anselmo, | |
Claro, Samuel, | |
Clave, | |
Cliff, Jimmy, | |
clothing. See costumes and clothing | |
Coard, Bernard, | |
Coard, Phyllis, | |
Coasters, the, | |
Coba Andrade, Carlos Alberto G., | |
Cobo, BernabeŽ, | |
Cockburn, John, | |
CocleŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Codex Azcatitlan, | |
Codex Borbonicus, | |
Codex Madrid, | |
Codex Paris, | |
Codrington family, | |
Coelho Netto, Marcos, | |
Coello Ramos, Rafael, | |
Cogui culture. See Kogi culture | |
Cohen, Henry, | |
Colegio Seminario de San BartolomeŽ, | |
Collaer, Paul, | |
College of San Pablo, | |
Collier, John, Jr., | |
Collier, Simon, | |
Colombia | |
Afro-Colombian traditions in, | |
Andean region, | |
archaeomusicological research in, | |
children's wakes in, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Kogi culture, | |
Kuna culture, | |
musical ensembles, | |
musical genres, | |
arrullo, | |
art music, | |
bambuco, | |
bullerengue (also tambor; chandeŽ), | |
bunde, | |
cariben~os, | |
carrilera, | |
copla, | |
corrido, | |
cumbia, | |
cumbiamberos, | |
currulao, | |
danza, | |
danza de negro, | |
deŽcima, | |
fandango, | |
folkloric music, | |
galeroŽn, | |
garabato, | |
guabina, | |
joropo, | |
jota, | |
lumaluŽ, | |
mapaleŽ, | |
paseo, | |
pasillo, | |
porro, | |
puya, | |
rajalen~a, | |
reggaespan~ol, | |
sanjuanero, | |
serenata, | |
vallenato, | |
vals, | |
vaqueriŽa, | |
zafra, | |
popular music, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
SinuŽ culture, | |
Tairona culture, | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Yukpa culture, | |
Columbus, Christopher, | |
Columbus, Ferdinand, | |
Committee of Folkloric Investigation, | |
Compe`re, Loyset, | |
competitions, | |
Argentina, at folkloric festivals, | |
Atacamen~o culture, copla de carnaval, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo, | |
band, | |
Barbados, calypso, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil | |
frevo, | |
songwriters', | |
Carriacou, parang, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
deŽcima, | |
guabina, | |
vallenato, | |
Costa Rica | |
calypso, | |
carnival, | |
Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, | |
Dominica, storytelling, | |
El Salvador, | |
popular music, | |
Grenada, carnival, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, la balseriŽa, | |
Guyana | |
Guyana Festival of the Arts | |
(GUYFESTA), | |
during Mashramani, | |
Mass Games, | |
Music Festival, | |
Haiti, carnival, | |
hymn-writing, | |
Jamaica | |
Bruckins, | |
junkunnu bands, | |
Montserrat, | |
Nicaragua, for canciones romaŽnticas, | |
Otopame culture, vocal, | |
Peru, | |
dance, | |
deŽcima, | |
jarana, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
St. Lucia, fiddling, | |
samba, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Best Village, | |
parang, | |
steelband, | |
Uruguay | |
carnival, | |
payada, | |
composition. See also art music; copyright; | |
specific composers and genres | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto, | |
nationalist, | |
of art music, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil | |
art music, | |
dodecaphonic and avant-garde, | |
Chile | |
boleros, | |
folkloric music, |
composition (continued) | |
Colombia | |
art music, | |
of bambuco, | |
folkloric music, | |
Costa Rica, bomba, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
punta, | |
Guatemala, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Mapuche culture, of kantuŽn, | |
Martinique, kadans, | |
Mexico, | |
popular song, | |
ownership issues of, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
pirekua, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
South America | |
art music, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Uruguay, | |
ConcumeŽn, | |
conga, | |
cuarteto and, | |
Congo, FabiaŽn, | |
Congo, GermaŽn, | |
Congo, Republic of, drums of, | |
Congo culture, | |
Congress of Vienna, | |
Conjunto Casino, | |
Conjunto llumaŽn (Ecuador), | |
Conjunto Nacional de Folklore (Peru), | |
Conservatorio Castella (Costa Rica), | |
Conservatorio Municipal (Argentina), | |
Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica (Colombia), | |
Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica (El Salvador), | |
Conservatorio Nacional de MuŽsica (Uruguay), | |
Conservatory and School of Fine Arts (Colombia), | |
Conti, Manuel, | |
contredanse (contradanza, contra dance), | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Guarijio culture, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Panama, | |
Contursi, Pascual, | |
Convite, | |
Conzemius, Eduard, | |
Coopersmith, J. M., | |
copla. See poetry; vocal music | |
Copland, Aaron, | |
Coppens, Walter, | |
copyright, | |
Argentina, cuarteto, | |
El Salvador, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Cora culture, | |
Cordel, Nando, | |
CoŽrdoba, Hernando de, | |
Cornelius, Steve, | |
Coro Nacional Nicaragušense, | |
CorobiciŽ culture, | |
Corona, Manuel, | |
corpophones, 31. See also hand clapping Guadeloupe, bouladje`l (mouth drum), | |
CorreŽa de Oliveira, Willy, | |
corrido, | |
in Chile, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Venezuela, | |
in Yaqui culture, | |
Cortes, Araci, | |
CorteŽs, HernaŽn, | |
Cortesi, Santiago, | |
cosmology. See also myths | |
Bolivia, | |
history of, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Brunka and Teribe cultures, | |
DiquiŽs region, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
instruments of, | |
Maleku culture, | |
map of, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
musical genres, Spanish and mestizo, | |
performance contexts in, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
Spanish, criollo, and mestizo music, | |
costumes and clothing | |
Andean regions, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, Old Time masquerade bands, | |
Argentina, cuarteto performers, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, machetero dancers, | |
Brazil | |
caboclos de lancža, | |
northeastern, | |
Caribbean, carnival, | |
Carriacou, for big-drum dance, | |
Chile | |
baile troupes, | |
huaso, | |
Chorotega culture, | |
Colombia | |
for bambuco, | |
danza de negros congos, | |
for folkloric music, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, carnival, | |
Ecuador, for San Juan festival, | |
El Salvador, dance, | |
Garifuna culture, waŽrini, | |
Grenada, carnival, | |
Guyana | |
Jordanites, | |
for masquerades, | |
Haiti, | |
carnival, | |
rara, | |
Jamaica, jonkunnu (also buru; horse head), | |
Kuna culture, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Martinique, zouk, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexica culture, for xayaŽcatl dance, | |
Mexico, conchero, | |
Montserrat, | |
Netherlands Antilles, Cuban-style orchestras, | |
Nicaragua | |
for la vaquita, | |
los chinegros, | |
Panama, | |
congos, | |
devil dancers, | |
Paraguay | |
for folkloric dances, | |
promeseros, | |
Peru | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
for son de los diablos, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
St. Lucia, masquerade, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
carnival, | |
Orisa participants, | |
Spiritual Baptists, | |
tropical-forest peoples, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Wayana culture, okoma, | |
Co^te d'Ivoire, goumbeŽ dance, | |
Coto culture, | |
Coudreau, Henri Anatole, | |
country music | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
Christian, | |
El Salvador, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
Courlander, Harold, | |
Courteen, Sir William, | |
courtship rituals, | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
Bolivia, | |
dance in, | |
use of charango, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
Mexico, |
In Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
Cowley, John, | |
Craven, David, | |
Crawford, Neelon, | |
Creighton, Al, | |
Crisanto MeleŽndez, Armando, | |
CrisoŽstomo, Juan, | |
Croatian people, in South America, | |
Cromanti nation, | |
Crook, Larry, | |
Crossley-Holland, Peter, | |
Crowley, Daniel J., | |
Cruz Mena, JoseŽ de la, | |
Cruz-SaŽenz, Miche`le S. de, | |
Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, | |
cuarteto, | |
electronic amplification of, | |
Cuarteto Imperial, | |
Cuarteto Leo, | |
CuauhteŽmoc (nephew of Moctezuma), | |
Cuba, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, | |
carnival in, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Chinese people in, | |
education in, | |
geography of, | |
governmental patronage, | |
Haitian people in, | |
Havana, | |
history of, | |
industries of, | |
influence on African music, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres, | |
bolero, | |
bolero-son, | |
cancioŽn, | |
cancioŽn protesta, | |
cancioŽn trovadoresca, | |
cha-cha-chaŽ, | |
claves, | |
Columbia, | |
comparsas, | |
contradanza, | |
criolla, | |
danza, | |
danzoŽn, | |
danzonete, | |
guaguancoŽ, | |
guajira, | |
guaracha, | |
guaracha-son, | |
guarija-son, | |
habanera, | |
nueva trova, | |
punto campesino, | |
punto guajiro, | |
rumba, | |
son, | |
tumba francesa, | |
yambuŽ, | |
musical links with Venezuela, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
SanteriŽa in, | |
Santiago de Cuba, | |
Cuban Institute of Music, | |
Cuban people | |
in Panama, | |
in United States, | |
Cuban Revolution, | |
CubanacaŽn, | |
Cubeo culture, | |
mourning ceremony of, | |
CucapaŽ culture, | |
instruments of, | |
cueca | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Chile, | |
in Mexico, | |
CueŽllar, Augusto, | |
CueŽllar, Fernando, | |
Cuevas Maldonado, RubeŽn, | |
Cugat, Xavier, | |
Cuicatec culture, | |
dance of, | |
festivals of, | |
Culina culture, | |
Cultier, Marius, | |
cultural policies. See politics | |
Cumanana, | |
cumbia, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Chile, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Ecuador, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Panama, | |
in Peru, | |
in Uruguay, | |
cumbia andina. See chicha | |
Cuna culture. See Kuna culture | |
Curacžao, 789, 927. See also Netherlands | |
Antilles | |
industries of, | |
musical links with Venezuela, | |
Curime (musical group), | |
Currasco, ReneŽ, | |
CurrirabaŽ culture, | |
CuscatlaŽn, | |
Dadey, Father JoseŽ, | |
Dahlgren de Jordan, Barbro, | |
Dampier, William, | |
dance and movement. | See also choreography; specific international genres, such as polka, schottische, vals |
African | |
chica, | |
kalenda, | |
Aluku culture, aleke, | |
Andean region, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
wiŽfala, | |
Antigua and Barbuda | |
highland fling, | |
maypole, | 799 |
open-air dances, | |
stilt dancers, | |
subscription balls, | |
Argentina | |
candombe (also charanda; ramba), | |
chacarera, | |
Chaco, | |
chamameŽ, | |
cuarteada, | |
cuarteto, | |
cumbia, | |
gato, | |
gato polceado, | |
polka, | |
ranchera, | |
rasgueado doble, | |
schools for, | |
tango, | |
vals, | |
zamba, | |
Aruba, tambuŽ, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bahamas, | |
ring dances, | |
rushin', | |
Barbados | |
African descendants, | |
British people, | |
hornpipe, | |
Jean and Johnnie dance, | |
jig, | |
maypole, | |
military marches, | |
Belize, brukdown, | |
Bolivia, | |
during carnival, | |
chiquiŽt, | |
ch?unchu, | |
chuqila (also chokela), | |
cueca, | |
diablada, | |
European genres, | |
huayn~o, | |
julajula dances, | |
machetero, | |
morenada, | |
Moxo people, | |
suna, | |
takirari, | |
tinku, | |
waka tokori, | |
zapateo, | |
Brazil | |
abaianada, | |
aldeia, | |
arrasta-peŽ, | |
baiano (also baia~o), | |
bailados, | |
baile pastoril, | |
barca, | |
batuque, | |
bumba-meu-boi, | |
capoeira, | |
carimboŽ, | |
caterete^, | |
caxambu, | |
chegancža, | |
chegancža de marujo, | |
co^co, | |
congada, | |
congo, | |
dramatic dances, | |
emboscada, | |
fandango, | |
forroŽ, | |
fricote, | |
habanera, | |
jongo, | |
lambada, | |
lundu, | |
maculele^, | |
maracatuŽ rural, | |
marujada, | |
maxixe, | |
mocžambique, | |
nau catarineta, | |
quadrilba, |
dance and movement (continued) | |
quilombo, | |
reisado, | |
Saint Goncžalo dance, | |
samba folk dance, | |
sarambeque, | |
social, | |
toreŽ, | |
xote, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcat cultures | |
bulsique, | |
muakuke, | |
sošrboš, | |
sula`r, | |
Carib culture, | |
Caribbean | |
ballet folkloŽrico, | |
bamboulaŽ, | |
calenda, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
juba, | |
limbo, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
ring games, | |
Carriacou | |
big-drum dance (nation dance), | |
chumba, | |
"dancing the cake," | |
"fighting the flags," | |
lancers, | |
Chichimec culture, danza chichimeca, | |
of children, | |
Chile | |
bailes de paso, | |
bailes de salto, | |
cachimbo, | |
ChiloeŽ Island, | |
cueca, | |
cueca chilenera, | |
cueca porten~a, | |
for festival of Virgin of the Candelaria, | |
tango, | |
trote, | |
zamacueca chilena, | |
zamba, | |
Chiriguano-ChaneŽ culture, | |
Chorotega culture, mitote, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
conquest dances, | |
contradanza, | |
cumbia, | |
currulao, | |
danza de negros, | |
danza de negros congos, | |
fandango, | |
joropo huilense, | |
pasillo, | |
rajalen~a, | |
sanjuanero, | |
torbellino, | |
vals, | |
contexts for, | |
Costa Rica | |
callejera (also parrandera), | |
cuadrille, | |
danza (also contradanza), | |
fandango, | |
jota, | |
punto guanacasteco, | |
sarocla, | |
son suelto (also baile suelto), | |
tambito, | |
zarabanda, | |
Cuba | |
danzoŽn, | |
folkloric genres of, | |
guaracha, | |
makuta, | |
son, | |
tumba francesa, | |
zapateo, | |
Dominica | |
beŽleŽ, | |
flirtations, | |
Dominican Republic | |
baile de palos, | |
ballet folkloŽrico, | |
bambulaŽ, | |
carabineŽ, | |
danza (also vals), | |
drum dance, | |
mangulina, | |
merengue, | |
merengue redondo, | |
merengue tiŽpico (also perico ripiao), | |
pripriŽ, | |
sarandunga, | |
social dances, | |
tumba dominicana, | |
zapateo, | |
Ecuador | |
aruchicos, | |
baile de respeto, | |
bambuco, | |
bomba, | |
culebrillando, | |
currulao, | |
el yumbo, | |
pareja, | |
sanjuaŽn, | |
El Salvador, | |
baile de la chabelona, | |
baile de la garza, | |
baile de la partesana, | |
baile de la soguilla, | |
baile de los chiraguaquitos, | |
baile de los diablitos, | |
bailes de los emplumados, | |
bailes de los herodes, | |
bailes de los moros y cristianos, | |
bailes de los pastores machos, | |
bailes de los pastores o machines, | |
baile del zope, | |
bailes burlescos, | |
bailes de caceriŽa, | |
bailes de cortejo, | |
bailes de ofrenda, | |
bailes festivos, | |
bailes guerreros, | |
bailes naviden~os, | |
bailes propiciatorios, | |
bailes taurinos, | |
chapetones, | |
dance of Saint Benedict, | |
dance of Saint Tingo, | |
dance of the big box, | |
dance of the flea and the louse, | |
giganta, | |
tapujeados, | |
European or North American genres, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, | |
Charleston, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
in French Guiana, | |
gavotte, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Mapuche culture, | |
in Mexico, | |
minuet, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
one-step, | |
pasodoble, | |
in Peru, | |
square dance, | |
tarantela, | |
in Uruguay, | |
French Guiana | |
belya, | |
grageŽ, | |
kamougeŽ, | |
kaseŽko, | |
leŽrol, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
abeimahani, | |
aŽmalihaniŽ, | |
awangulahani, | |
charikanari, | |
chumba, | |
combination, | |
culeado, | |
gunjeŽi (also gunyei), | |
hušngušhušnguš, | |
paranda (also parranda; zarabanda), | |
pia manadi, | |
punta, | |
sambay (also senbai), | |
seti, | |
ugulendu, | |
waŽrini, | |
yankunuŽ (also iancunuŽ; John Canoe; wanaragua), | |
Grenada | |
belair, | |
big-drum dance (nation dance), | |
chumba, | |
kalenda, | |
Guadeloupe | |
bamboula, | |
beguine, | |
compos direct, | |
leŽwo`z, | |
GuaraniŽ culture | |
n~embo?eŽ kaagušy, | |
soul dances, | |
tangaraŽ, | |
Guarijio culture | |
pascola, | |
tuburada, | |
Guatemala | |
baile de los veinticuatro diablos, | |
baile del tun, | |
baile del venado, | |
deer dance, | |
son chapiŽn, | |
son guatemalteco, | |
GuaymiŽ culture |
bugutaŽ, | |
jehio, | |
Guyana | |
que-que, | |
stilt dancers, | |
Haiti | |
anba tone`l, | |
djouba, | |
folkloric companies, | |
kadans ranpa, | |
ke`me`s, | |
konpa, | |
konpa-dire`k, | |
lancers, | |
mereng (also meringue), | |
meŽringue, | |
for Vodou, | |
Honduras | |
baile de los diablitos, | |
el guancasco, | |
fandango, | |
honoring Santa LuciŽa, | |
la correa, | |
la lanza, | |
la maroma, | |
moros y cristianos, | |
xique, | |
Inca (Inka) culture, | |
cashua taki, | |
uaricza araui, | |
Indian people, chutney dances, | |
Jamaica | |
business dances, | |
genres of, | |
kromanti, | |
in Kumina cult rituals, | |
lancers, | |
limbo, | 909 |
maypole, | |
mento, | |
modern dance, | |
Rastafarian music, | |
stick dancing, | |
K?ekchi Maya, | |
Kogi culture, | |
animal imitation, | |
chicote, | |
Kuna culture, | |
dramatic dances, | |
gammu burui dances, | |
Lenca culture, | |
Maleku culture | |
nakikonaraŽjari, | |
napuratengeo, | |
Mapuche culture | |
lonkomeo, | |
puel purruŽn, | |
Maroon cultures, se^ke^ti, | |
Martinique | |
bal granmoun, | |
balakadri, | |
bigin beŽle`, | |
biguine, | |
Maya culture, | |
baile de moros y cristianos, | |
baile del tun, | |
cabeza del cochino (also okot pol), | |
dance of the conquest, | |
deer dance, | |
mestizo influences, | |
xtoles, | |
Mayo culture | |
deer dance, | |
pascola, | |
Mexica culture | |
corpus, | |
danza de cuauileros, | |
danza de Malinche, | |
son, | |
xayaŽcatl (also xayacates), | |
Mexico | |
conchero, | |
danza azteca, | |
jarabe, | |
jarana, | |
maromero acrobats, | |
polca, | |
vals, | |
Miskitu culture, Krismis, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
baile del volador, | |
Montserrat | |
country dance, | |
jumbie, | |
Jump-up Day, | |
Nahua culture, cuauh-panco, | |
Netherlands Antilles | |
joropo, | |
pasillo, | |
tambuŽ, | |
tumba, | |
wapa, | |
Nicaragua | |
baile de la marimba, | |
baile de las inditas, | |
baile de las negras, | |
cristianos y moros, | |
el gigante, | |
el toro huaco, | |
la mazurka segoviana, | |
la vaquita, | |
los chinegros, | |
maypole, | |
moros y cristianos, | |
palo de mayo, | |
tulu lulu (also tulululu), | |
yegušita, | |
OtomiŽ culture | |
concheros, | |
rayados contra franceses, | |
Otopame culture, topadas, | |
Palikur culture, kausikman, | |
Pame culture | |
malinche, | |
mitote, | |
monarca, | |
ropa del muerto y el arco, | |
xancaa (also mitote), | |
Panama | |
bullerengue, | |
bunde, | |
congos, | |
contra dance, | |
cuenecueŽ, | |
cumbia, | |
deŽcima, | |
el tamborito, | |
gran diablos(also los diablos de los espejos), | |
los diablicos sucios, | |
marching bands, | |
mejorana, | |
punto, | |
quadrille, | |
vals, | |
Paraguay, | |
danza de las botellas, | |
galopa, | |
genres of, | |
golondriana, | |
polca, | |
polca paraguaya, | |
toro candil, | |
Peru | |
agua 'e nieve, | |
alcatraz, | |
bailes, | |
cachua, | |
carnaval, | |
carnival dances, | |
choquela, | |
dance-dramas, | |
dansaq (also danza de tijeras), | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
ingaŽ (also ungaŽ; baile del mun~eco), | |
los majen~os, | |
marinera, | |
moros y cristianos, | |
penalivio (also panalivio), | |
polka, | |
resbalosa, | |
son de los diablos, | |
tondero, | |
vals criollo, | |
zamacueca, | |
zapateo criollo (also pasada), | |
Puerto Rico | |
bomba, | |
danza, | |
plena, | |
seis, | |
PureŽpecha culture | |
parakata uarakua, | |
zapateado, | |
Q'ero culture | |
chunchu, | |
corn beer festival, | |
kius, | |
tinquy, | |
ukuku, | |
ritualized movements, | |
St. Lucia | |
deŽbo`t, | |
jweŽ danseŽ, | |
lakonme`t, | |
manpa (also maynan), | |
omans, | |
social dances, | 62 |
Spain | |
jota, | |
moros y cristianos, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
pantomimes, | |
Taino culture, | |
areito, | |
Tarahumara culture | |
ceremonial, | |
matachiŽn, | |
pariseo, | |
sontaŽrusi, | |
yuŽmari, | |
Teribe culture, pasodoble, | |
Toba culture, in Pentecostal worship, | |
Tohono O'odham culture, pascola, | |
Totonac culture | |
danza de los voladores, | |
huahua, | |
los voladores de Papantla, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
beŽle` | |
kalenda, | |
reel, |
dance and movement (continued) | |
Uruguay | |
candombe, | |
carangueijo, | |
chimarrita, | |
creolization of, | |
polka, | |
ranchera (mazurka), | |
at religious festivals, | |
tango, | |
tirana, | |
Venezuela | |
fandango, | |
joropo, | |
"La Batalla," | |
la perrendenga, | |
masked devil dancers, | |
Parranda de San Pedro, | |
Saint John the Baptist dances, | |
tamunangue, | |
vals criollo, | |
video preservation of, | |
Virgin Islands | |
bamboula, | |
masquerade jig, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, aisilili, | |
Warao culture | |
habi sanuka, | |
nahanamu, | |
Wayana culture, okoma, | |
Xavante culture, dan~o?re, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
Yaqui culture | |
danza del venado, | |
deer dance, | |
matachiŽn, | |
pascola, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
nimbeŽ, | |
dance-drama. See dance and movement; theater | |
dance hall, | |
Danish people, in Virgin Islands, | |
Dannemann, Manuel, | |
Danzas Negros del PeruŽ, | |
danzoŽn, | |
Darnuchans, Eduardo, | |
Dauphin, Claude, | |
Davidson, Harry C., | |
Davies, Sir Henry Walford, | |
Davis, Martha E., | |
De Caro, Julio, | |
deŽcima. See poetry; vocal music | |
DeŽcimus, Pierre-Edouard, | |
deculturation, | |
Deixa Falar (samba association), | |
del Barco, Miguel, | |
del Barco Centenera, MartiŽn, | |
del Carmen, Guadalupe, | |
Delgadillo, Luis A., | |
Delgado Aparicio, Jaime, | |
demography, | |
Denmark, Caribbean territories, | |
Densmore, Frances, | |
Deren, Maya, | |
Desana culture, | |
Despard, George Pakenham, | |
Desroches, Monica, | |
Devarieux, Jacob, | |
Dexter, Noel, | |
d'Harcourt, Marguerite, | |
d'Harcourt, Raoul, | |
Di Sarli, Carlos, | |
Diaguita culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
DiŽas, Luis, | |
DiŽaz, Aniceto, | |
DiŽaz, Porfirio, | |
DiŽaz, Santo, | |
DiŽaz de GuzmaŽn, Ruy, | |
DiŽaz del Castillo, Bernal, | |
Diaz Gainza, JoseŽ, | |
DiŽaz Zelaya, Francisco RamoŽn, | |
Dicey Doh Singers, | |
Diego, Juan, | |
Difficiles de PeŽtion-Ville, Les, | |
d'Indy, Vincent, | |
DiriangeŽn (Chorotegan chief), | |
disco, | |
Guatemala, | |
Montserrat, | |
Uruguay, | |
Djuka culture, 438. See also Auca culture | |
drumming in, | |
D'Leon, Oscar, | |
Dobrizhoffer, Martin, | |
Dodd, Clement ("Sir Coxsone"), | |
Dodo^ (Bahian musician), | |
Dois Irma~os, | |
Dolorier Abregu, Fausto, | |
Domingo Sol, JoseŽ, | |
DomiŽnguez, Francisco, | |
DomiŽnguez Agurcia, Roberto, | |
Dominica, | |
geography of, | |
musical genres | |
beŽleŽ, | |
cadence-lypso, | |
cadence-rampa, | |
chanteŽ mas, | |
quadrille, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
Dominica Folk Singers, | |
Dominican order | |
in Mexico, | |
in South America, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
African heritage, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, | |
BaniŽ, | |
children's wakes in, | |
creole culture, | |
geography of, | |
Haitian people in, | |
history of, | |
industries of, | |
military regime in, | |
musical genres, | |
bachata, | |
balada, | |
merengue, | |
merengue tiŽpico, | |
salve, | |
musical links with Venezuela, | |
popular music in, | |
Puerto Plata, | |
raraŽ societies of, | |
research on, | |
San Pedro de MacoriŽs, | |
Santiago, | |
Santo Domingo, | |
Siboney culture of, | |
Spanish heritage, | |
Taino culture, | |
urban music, | |
Villa Mella, | |
Donga (Ernesto dos Santos), | |
d'Orbigny, Alcides, | |
Drake, Francis, | |
Draytons Two, | |
Dresden Codex, | |
Drifters, the, | |
Drolet, Patricia Lund, | |
drone | |
Andean music, | |
Brazil, in desafio, | |
Q'ero music, | |
drugs (hallucinogens and narcotics). See also alcohol | |
cocaine, | |
datura, | |
epena, | |
music and, | |
Peru, | |
peyote, | |
shaman's use of, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Drumond, Don, | |
Duany, Jorge, | |
dub, | |
Duda (Carlos Eduardo Cardoso Silva), | |
Duen~as Perilla, LuiŽs, | |
Duluc, JoseŽ, | |
Duncan, Quince, | |
Duni, Egidio Romualdo, | |
DuraŽn, Alejo, | |
DuraŽn, Anselmo, | |
DuraŽn, Diego, | |
Durand, JoseŽ, | |
Dutch Guiana. | See Surinam |
Dutch people | |
in Guyana, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Dutch West Indian Company, | |
Duvalier, Francžois "Papa Doc," | |
Duvalier, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc," | |
Duverger, Marc, | |
Dvor?aŽk, AntoniŽn, | |
Easter Island. See Rapa Nui | |
Eastern Timbira culture, music and dance of, | |
Ebony (bloco afro), | |
economics. See also agriculture; sound recordings | |
Amerindian cultures and, | 45 |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto performances, | |
urbanization and, | |
artifacts and, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia | |
of fiestas, | |
mining communities, | |
Brazil, | |
central and southern regions, | |
coffee growing, | |
gold mining, | |
northeastern region, | |
popular music and, | |
sound recording industry, | |
sugarcane growing, | |
Caribbean, | |
sound recording industry, | |
Colombia, | |
municipal budgets, |
copyright issues, | |
Costa Rica, | |
pop orchestras, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, fundraising, | |
education and, | |
employers of musicians, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Haiti, | |
immigrant labor forces and, | |
Jamaica, | |
sound recording industry, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Montserrat, | |
musical innovation and, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, | |
popular music and, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
sound recording industries, | |
South America, | |
pre-Columbian trade routes, | |
tropical-forest immigrants, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Surinam, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
tourism, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Venezuela, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Ecuador, | |
aesthetics in, | |
archaeomusicological research in, | |
children's wakes in, | |
composition in, | |
festival of Saint John the Baptist, | |
geography of, | |
instruments of, | |
Japanese people in, | |
musical genres | |
albazo, | |
currulao, | |
harvest songs, | |
jaway, | |
pareja, | |
pasacalle, | |
pasillo, | |
Passion songs, | |
sanjuaŽn, | |
vacacioŽn, | |
New Year's in, | |
performers, | |
processions | |
Corpus Christi, | |
Holy Week, | |
Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples, | |
Quito, music conservatory, | |
research on, | |
shamanism in, | |
Shuar culture of, | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
weddings in, | |
Eddie Minnis and Da Brudders, | |
Editorial Freeland, | |
Edna Manley Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts, | |
Edwards, Charles L., | |
Edwards, John, | |
Edwards, Norman, | |
Efik culture, | |
El Ballet GariŽfuna, | |
El Conjunto Murrietta, | |
El Cuarteto (Venezuelan group), | |
El Quinto Olivo, | |
El Salvador, | |
archaeological background of, | |
dances of, | |
geography of, | |
instruments of, | |
Lenca culture, | |
map of, | |
Maya culture, | |
musical genres, son, | |
musical life in, | |
population of, | |
religious music in, | |
research on, | |
electrophones, | |
Colombia, | |
drum machines, Bahamas, | |
in El Salvador, | |
electric organ, | |
keyboards, | |
Bahamas, | |
Cuba, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Venezuela, | |
synthesizers, | |
Bahamas, | |
Bolivia, | |
Nicaragua, | |
EliŽas, Manuel de, | |
Elie, Justin, | |
Elmo and the Sparkplugs, | |
Emerald Community Singers, | |
Emerillon culture, | |
vocal music of, | |
EmigreŽ, Viviane, | |
enculturation, 67-70. See also pedagogy | |
Andean regions, | |
Argentina, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
ENIGRAC (Nicaraguan recording label), | |
EnriŽquez, Manuel, | |
Ensayos de MuŽsica Latinoamericana, | |
Ensemble aux Calabasses, | |
Ensemble Ibo LeŽleŽ, | |
Ensemble Nemours Jean-Baptiste, | |
Ensemble Riviera, | |
Ensemble WeŽbert Sicot, | |
Epulef, Tomasa, | |
EpullaŽn, AndreŽs, | |
Erazo, Norma, | |
Escamilla, Carlos "El Ciego," | |
Escobar, Alberto, | |
Escuela de Bellas Artes (Paraguay), | |
Escuela de MuŽsica (Nicaragua), | |
Escuela de MuŽsica Victoriano LoŽpez (Honduras), | |
Escuela Nacional de MuŽsica (Honduras), | |
Escuela para Instrumentistas de MuŽsica | |
Popular de AmeŽrica Latina (Argentina), | |
Espinosa, Eladio, | |
Espinosa, Guillermo, | |
Espinosa, Isidro FeŽlix de, | |
Esteva, JoseŽ MariŽa, | |
Estornudo (periodical), | |
Estrada, Julio, | |
Estudiantina An~ez, | |
Estudiantina Murillo, | |
ethnomusicology | |
approaches to art music, | |
Chile, | |
tropical-forest research, | |
Ethnomusicology (periodical), | 16, |
Ettu cult, | |
Europe, Chilean people in, | |
European descendants. See also specific groups | |
in Argentina, | |
relations with Amerindians and African descendants, | |
rhythmic style of, | |
in South America, | |
Ewe culture, | |
Exile One, | |
Expreso Imaginario (periodical), | |
Ezar culture. See Chichimec culture | |
Fagner, | |
Failde, Miguel, | |
Fajardo, Emidio, | |
Falkland Islands, | |
Fall Fret, | |
Falla, Manuel de, | |
FaluŽ, Eduardo, | |
fandango, | |
Fantaisistes du Carrefour, Les, | |
Faron, Louis, | |
Favre, Gilberto "El Gringo," | |
Faz, Roberto, | |
feasts. See festivals, religious | |
Fedon, Julien, | |
Fefita la Grande, | |
Ferguson, Cyril "Dry Bread," | |
Ferguson, Walter "Mr. Gavitt," | |
Fernandes, Gaspar, | |
FernaŽndez, LeoŽn, | |
FernaŽndez Guardia, Ricardo, | |
FerreŽ, Father, | |
Ferreira, Nelson, | |
Ferrer, Horacio, | |
Ferrero, Luis, | |
festivals, religious, |
See also ceremonies |
African brotherhoods' roles in, | |
Andean regions, | |
All Saints, | |
competitions in, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
Santiago, | |
Argentina, | |
Child-Mayor celebration, | |
Holy Week, | |
patronal, | |
performance of cuarteto, | |
Saint Balthasar, | |
Saint James, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
Virgin of Punta Corral, | |
Virgin of Rosario de Andacollo, | |
Aruba, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Barbados, Christmas, | |
Bolivia | |
All Saints, | |
Saint Michael, | |
timing of, | |
Brazil | |
Christmas, | |
Epiphany, | |
patronal, |
festivals, religious (continued) | |
Pentecost, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
saints' days, | |
use of caterete^, | |
Caribbean, | |
Chile | |
ChiloeŽ Island patronal festivals, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
Cruz de Mayo, | |
Our Lady of the Rosary, | |
Saints Peter and Paul, | |
venerating Virgin Mary, | |
Virgin of Carmen, | |
Virgin of Guadalupe, | |
Virgin of Las Pen~as, | |
Virgin of the Candelaria, | |
Colombia | |
Afro-Colombian traditions, | |
dance in, | |
Holy Week, | |
municipal band's role in, | |
murga in, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
Saints Peter and Paul, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
patronal, | |
Virgen de los Angeles, | |
Cuba, Epiphany, | |
Dominica, patronal, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
velacioŽn, | |
Ecuador | |
Corpus Christi, | |
Holy Week, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
Saints Peter and Paul, | |
El Salvador | |
DiŽa de Santa Cruz, | |
patronal, | |
Saint Ursula, | |
electronic recordings of, | |
Guyana | |
Christmas, | |
Hindu and Islamic, | |
Haiti, | |
Maya culture, | |
Christian, | |
Holy Week, | |
Saint Sebastian, | |
San LuiŽs, | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Virgin of Guadalupe, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Muslim Muharram festival, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
OtomiŽ culture, Saint Michael, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay | |
Holy Week, | |
patronal, | |
Saint Balthazar, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
San Blas, | |
Virgin of CaacupeŽ, | |
Peru, | |
Christmas, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
DiŽa de los Muertos, | |
Huanchaco patronal festival, | |
Los Ban~os del Inca, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
San Salvador, | |
Santiago, | |
Virgin of Carmen, | |
PureŽpecha culture, Corpus Christi, | |
St. Lucia, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Surinam, Ramadan, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Holy Week, | |
Uruguay, | |
San Cono, | |
Virgin of Verdun, | |
Venezuela, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
Parranda de San Pedro, | |
Saint Anthony of Padua, | |
Saint Benedict the Moor, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
Virgin Islands, Cruz de Mayo, | |
festivals and celebrations. See also carnival | |
Aluku culture, | |
Andean regions | |
agricultural, | |
brass bands at, | |
flute consorts in, | |
life-cycle, | 209 |
north-south distinctions, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, Old Time Christmas Festival, | |
Argentina, | |
festivales de folklore, | |
jineteada, | |
minga, | |
National Folklore Festival, | |
performance of cuarteto, | |
rock, | |
sen~alada, | |
Atacamen~o culture, carnaval, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Aztec culture | |
Xochilhuitl, | |
Xocotl Huetzi, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo, | |
Barbados | |
crop over, | |
holidays, | |
national festival, | |
birthday parties, | |
Bolivia, | |
fiestas, | |
seasonal, | |
Brazil | |
June celebrations, | |
nativista, | |
Rock-in-Rio, | |
Bribri culture, | |
Brunka and Teribe cultures | |
fiesta de los diablitos, | |
fiesta de los negritos, | |
Brunka culture, chichadas, | |
Colombia, | |
Cartagena Festival, | |
Festival Nacional del Bambuco, | |
rajalen~a performance, | |
street ensembles in, | |
VeŽlez guabina festival, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Carnaval de LimoŽn, | |
Somos Como Somos, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Fe`t St.-Pierre and Fe`t St.-Isidore, | |
Jounen KweŽyo`l, | |
National Day Celebrations, | |
Ecuador | |
Fiesta del Coraza, | |
New Year's Eve, | |
radio festivals, | |
French Guiana, | |
Guadeloupe, balakadri, | |
Guyana, | |
Caribbean Festival of the Arts (CARIFESTA), | |
Guyana Festival of the Arts | |
(GUYFESTA), | |
Haiti, rara, | |
Honduras, guancasco (paisanazgo), | |
Jamaica | |
birthday of Cudjoe, | |
Bruckins, | |
Hindu and Muslim, | |
Independence Festival, | |
Jonkunnu, | |
Reggae Sunsplash, | |
Japanese people, | |
Mapuche culture, ramada, | |
Martinique, International Creole Day, | |
Mexico, Encuento del Mariachi, | |
Miskitu culture, Krismis, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat | |
Boxing Day, | |
Jump-up Day, | |
national holidays, | |
Netherlands Antilles, Simadan, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Pame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Carnaval de ColoŽn, | |
Festival de la Mejorana, | |
Independence Day, | |
Peru, | |
Amancaes, | |
Festival Negroide, | |
Palchasqa, | |
watermelon harvest, | |
Puerto Rico, bomba performances, | |
PureŽpecha culture, chanaŽntskua, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
Ahata Uhuchichis, | |
St. Lucia | |
Jounen KweŽyo`l, | |
masquerade, | |
shawm's use in, | |
Spain, Fiesta de los Diablos, | |
street music in, | |
Taino culture, harvest, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
Hindu and Muslim, | |
Indian, | |
Tukano culture, cachiriŽ, | |
United States | |
Festival of American Folklife, | |
Haitian festivals in New York, | |
Inter-American Music Festivals, | |
Uruguay | |
folk-music, | |
tango, | |
Venezuela, | |
Yekuana adaha ademi hidi, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
visual depictions of, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, Warikena, | |
Warao culture |
habi sanuka, | |
nahanamu, | |
Yanomamoš culture, reaho, | |
Yoruba culture, egungun, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Fierro, Pancho, | |
Figueres, JoseŽ, | |
Figueroa, JoseŽ MariŽa, | |
film | |
Argentina, tango accompaniment for, | |
Central America, | |
Indian music for, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Finland, tango in, | |
Fitzgerald, Tyrone "Dr. Offfff," | |
Flannery, Kent V., | |
Fletcher, Francis, | |
Florentine Codex, | |
Flores, Bernal, | |
Flores, Celedonio, | |
Flores, JoseŽ AsuncioŽn, | |
Flores, Juan, | |
Flores del Campo, Francisco, | |
Flores Dorantes, Felipe, | |
Flores GarciŽa, Lorenza, | |
Flores Solano, MariŽa Isabel, | |
FloŽrez, Julio, | |
Fock, Niels, | |
Foley, Kenan, | |
Folk Research Centre (St. Lucia), | |
Folk Songs of Barbados, | |
Folklore (periodical), | |
Folkways Recordings, | |
Fon culture, | |
Fonseca, Julio, | |
Fontana, Bernard, | |
form and structure | |
Andean music, | |
Bahamas | |
anthem, | |
rhyming spiritual, | |
ring-play, | |
Belize | |
brukdown, | |
creole music, | |
Bolivia, Moxo machetero, | |
Brazil | |
Afro-Brazilian genres, | |
in CandombleŽ music, | |
of cantoria, | |
for capoeira songs, | |
central and southern genres, | |
frevo de rua, | |
marches, | |
marujada songs, | |
in religious music, | |
samba, | |
samba campineiro, | |
samba de roda, | |
samba-lencžo, | |
call-and-response, | |
Carriacou, big-drum songs, | |
Chile | |
cueca, | |
romance, | |
verso, | |
for Virgin Mary festivities, | |
Colombia | |
African-derived traits, | |
arrullo, | |
bambuco, | |
danza, | |
guabina velen~a, | |
pasillo, | |
Costa Rica | |
balimbo, | |
romance, | |
song-dances, | |
Cuba | |
contradanza, | |
criolla, | |
danzoŽn, | |
rumba, | |
son, | |
Ecuador, currulao, | |
Garifuna culture | |
beŽrusu, | |
paranda, | |
punta, | |
punta-rock, | |
vocal music, | |
wanaragua, | |
Guarijio culture | |
contradanza, | |
son principal, | |
Haiti | |
konpa, | |
Vodou songs, | |
Honduras, mestizo dance music, | |
Jamaica, mento, | |
Kuna culture, gammu burui music, | |
Mapuche music, | |
Martinique, beguine, | |
Maya culture | |
chaconne, | |
sarabande, | |
Mexico | |
canciones rancheras, | |
children's songs, | |
corrido, | |
cumulative stories, | |
son michoacano, | |
sones, | |
Nicaragua, mento, | |
Otopame culture, minuete, | |
Peru | |
dance-dramas, | |
harawi, | |
huayno, | |
Indian vs. mestizo aesthetics, | |
landoŽ, | |
marinera, | |
resbalosa, | |
tondero, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
Puerto Rico, seis, | |
repetition in shamanic ceremonies, | |
St. Lucia, koutoumba, | |
South America, tropical-forest genres, | |
Surinam, kaseko, | |
SuyaŽ songs, | |
Tarahumara culture, tutuguri, | |
Uruguay, murga, | |
Venezuela | |
Amerindian music, | |
in folk music, | |
fulia, | |
joropo, | |
revuelta (also pasaje), | |
Virgin Islands, cariso, | |
Warao culture, shamanic songs, | |
Yuma vocal music, | |
Fornaro Marita-DiŽaz, Antonio, | |
fox trot, | |
France | |
Caribbean territories, | |
French Antillean peoples in, | |
tango in, | |
Francini, Enrique Mario, | |
Franciscan order, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Peru, | |
role in music education, | |
in South America, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Francisco de San JoseŽ, Fray, | |
Franco, General Francisco, | |
Franco, Hernando, | |
Freitag, LeŽa Vinocur, | |
French Antilles. See also Guadeloupe; | |
Martinique | |
popular music in, | |
French Creoles, in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
French Guiana, | |
Amerindian cultures of, | |
Asian descendants in, | |
Creole culture of, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Maroon cultures in, | |
musical genres | |
musique folklorique, | |
musique typique, | |
musique veŽhiculaire, | |
videŽ, | |
population of, | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
French people | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominica, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Fresedo, Osvaldo, | |
FreŽzier, AmeŽdeŽe Francžois, | |
Frigerio, Alejandro, | |
Fueguino cultures, | |
Fuentes, Cecilia, | |
Fuentes, Edgardo "Gary," | |
Fuentes, RubeŽn, | |
Fuentes C., Aurelio, | |
Fulano (rock g~roup), | |
FundacioŽn de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore (FUNDEF) (Venezuela), | |
FundacioŽn de las Humanidades (Puerto Rico), | |
FundacioŽn Interamericana de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore (Venezuela), | |
FundacioŽn Tango (Uruguay), | |
funerals, | |
Aluku culture, | |
Argentina, Santiago del Estero, | |
Barbados, African descendants, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Caribbean, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, fiesta de sufrimiento, | |
Mapuche culture, |
funerals (continued) | |
Martinique, | |
Maya culture, | |
Miskitu culture, sikru, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Paraguay, | |
Paya culture, tasnewa, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
St. Lucia, | |
shawm's use in, | |
Sumu culture | |
sau, | |
sikro, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
funk, | |
Brazil, | |
Furlong, Colonel Charles Wellington, | |
Furst, Peter, | |
Gabb, William M., | |
Gabilondo Soler, Francisco, | |
Gabriel, Juan, | |
Gabriel, LeŽona, | |
GalaŽn, Pacho, | |
Gale, Marina, | |
Galeano, Ignacio V., | |
Galibi culture. See Kalina (Galibi) culture Galo Maigua, Segundo, | |
Gamboa, Emma, | |
Gamboa, Sarmiento de, | |
Gandhi, Mahatma, | |
Gansemans, Jas, | |
Gante, Pedro de, | |
Garabito culture, | |
Garay, Narciso, | |
Garay, Sindo, | |
GarciŽa, Aleixo, | |
GarciŽa, Charly, | |
GarciŽa, Digno, | |
GarciŽa, Fulgencio, | |
GarciŽa, JesuŽs, | |
GarciŽa, JoseŽ MauriŽco Nunes, | |
GarciŽa, Silvia P., | |
GarciŽa Caturla, Alejandro, | |
GarciŽa Flores, RauŽl, | |
GarciŽa JofreŽ de Loaisa, Fray, | |
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, | |
Gardel, Carlos, | |
Garfias, Robert, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture in Belize, | |
in Guatemala, | |
history of, | |
in Honduras, | |
musical genres | |
chumba, | |
jungujugu, | |
jungujugu de Chugu, | |
parranda (or paranda), | |
punta, | |
punta rock, | |
sambay (or senbai), | |
yankunuŽ, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
research on, | |
ritual music of, | |
secular music of, | |
Garrido, Edna, | |
Garrido, Nelson, | |
Garrido Lecca, Celso, | |
Garvey, Marcus, | |
Gary (and his band), | |
Garza Marcue, Rosa Maria, | |
GarzoŽn y Collazos (Colombian duo), | |
GastoŽn PeŽrez, Rafael, | |
Gatica, Arturo, | |
Gatica, Lucho, | |
gender | |
chimbanguele sets, | |
of Cuban drums, | |
instrument classification, | |
instrument pairs | |
clarinets, | |
drums, | |
flutes, | |
panpipes, | |
rattles, | |
Gente (Afro-Peruvian group), | |
Gentry, Howard S., | |
geography, classification problems of, | |
Gerard, Charlie, | |
German people, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Central America, | |
identity issues of, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in South America, | |
Germano, Claudionor, | |
Gero, Lorenzo, | |
Gershwin, George, | |
Ghana, drums of, | |
Ghidinelli, Azzo, | |
Gibson, Eric "King Eric," | |
Gil, Gilberto, | |
Gilbert, William S., | |
Gilberto, Joa~o, | |
Gillis, Verna, | |
Ginastera, Alberto, | |
Gismonti, Egberto, | |
Glissant, Edouard, | |
GlobeStyle (record company), | |
Gobbi, Alfredo, | |
Godoy Aguirre, Mario, | |
Gomes, AntoŽnio Carlos, | |
Gomes, Edson, | |
Gomes da Rocha, Francisco, | |
Gonzaga, Chinquinha, | |
Gonzaga, Luiz, | |
GoŽnzales, Augusto, | |
Gonzales, Micky, | |
Gonzales HolguiŽn, Diego, | |
GonzaŽlez, Ernesto, | |
GonzaŽlez DaŽvila, Gil, | |
GonzaŽlez MalbraŽn, Armando, | |
GonzaŽlez "Piporro," Lalo, | |
GonzaŽlez RodriŽguez, Luis, | |
GonzaŽlez Sol, Rafael, | |
Good, Kenneth, | |
Goombeh cult, | |
Gordon, Milton, | |
gospel music, | |
Gossen, Gary H., | |
Goštenberg Museum (Sweden), | |
Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, | |
Goyenche, Roberto, | |
Gradante, William J., | |
Gran Nicoya culture, instruments of, | |
Granadino, David, | |
Grebe, MariŽa Ester, | |
Greek people | |
in Panama, | |
in South America, | |
Green, John, | |
Greenberg, Joseph, | |
Gregor, Thomas, | |
Grenada, | |
art music in, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
musical genres | |
belair, | |
calypso, | |
kalenda, | |
Petit Martinique, | |
population of, | |
religious music and rituals, | |
Grenet, Emilio, | |
GreŽtry, AndreŽ Ernest Modeste, | |
Grever, MariŽa, | |
Grieg, Edvard, | |
Griffiths, Marcia, | |
Griles, Isidore, | |
Grossmann, Guido, | |
Growling Tiger (Neville Marcano; calypsonian), | |
Grušnberg, Friedl, | |
Grušnberg, Georg, | |
grunge, | |
Grupo da Velha Guarda, | |
Grupo de RenovacioŽn, | |
Grupo Ecuador de Los Hermanos Congo y Milton Tadeo, | |
Grupo Niche, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Marie-Galante, | |
musical genres, | |
balakadri, | |
carnival music (mizik videŽ; mizik a mas), | |
leŽwo`z, | |
zouk, | |
political status of, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
Guajiro culture, instruments of, | |
GuamaŽn Poma de Ayala, Felipe, | |
Guambiano culture, instruments of, | |
Guana culture, | |
Guangala culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
guaracha, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
music and dance of, | |
research on, | |
shamanism in, | |
singing of, | |
Guarao culture. See Warao culture | |
Guarauno culture. See Warao culture | |
Guarco culture, | |
Guarijio culture, | |
musical genres | |
contradanza, | |
son principal, | |
research on, | |
tuŽmari ceremony, | |
GuariŽn, JoseŽ JoaquiŽn, | |
Guarnieri, Camargo, | |
Guasapa culture, | |
Guatemala, | |
Antigua, cathedral in, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, |
early cities of, | |
emigrants to United States, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Ladino culture, | |
map of, | |
Maya culture, | |
musical genres, son guatemalteco, | |
research on, | |
saints-day celebrations in, | |
GuaykuruŽ culture, | |
instruments of, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, | |
research on, | |
Guerra, Juan Luis, | |
Guerra-Peixe, CeŽsar, | |
Guerrero, Francisco, | |
Guerrero, RauŽl G., | |
Guilbault, Jocelyne, | |
Gurrufio (Venezuelan group), | |
Gusinde, Father (priest), | |
Guthrie, Colonel, | |
GutieŽrrez, EfraiŽn, | |
GutieŽrrez, Pedro EliŽas, | |
GutieŽrrez Villa, Ricardo, | |
Guyana, | |
African traditions in, | |
Amerindian cultures in, | |
Asian descendants in, | |
British traditions in, | |
East Indian people in, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Maroon cultures in, | |
musical contexts and genres, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
Warao culture, | |
Guyana Police Force Band, | |
habanera, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Mexico, | |
Haeberli, Joerg, | |
Haiti, | |
African influences, | |
art music in, | |
ban on drums, | |
carnival in, | |
Creole language of, | |
folklore of, | |
history of, | |
industries of, | |
military regime in, | |
musical genres | |
kadans ranpa, | |
konpa-dire`k, | |
mereng koudyay, | |
mereng-vodou (also vodou-jazz), | |
meŽringue genres, | |
mini-djaz, | |
mizik angaje, | |
mizik rasin, | |
nouve`l jenerasyon, | |
raraŽ, | |
musical links with Venezuela, | |
popular music in, | |
Vodou in, | |
Haitian people | |
in Belize, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in New York, | |
in United States, | |
Haitian Revolution, | |
hallucinogens. See drugs (hallucinogens and narcotics) | |
Hammond, Norman, | |
hand clapping, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
Colombia, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guyana, | |
Jamaica, | |
Maroon cultures, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, | |
St. Lucia, | |
Trinidad, | |
Harmonie Orchestra (Curacžao), | |
harmony | |
Andean regions | |
flute ensemble music, | |
panpipe ensemble music, | |
Aztec culture, | |
in bossa nova, | |
Brazil | |
acculturation in, | |
bossa nova, | |
caboclo music, | |
central and southern genres, | |
dupla, | |
in religious music, | |
samba-lencžo, | |
ternos songs, | |
Chile | |
cueca, | |
romance, | |
tonada, | |
urban tonada, | |
verso, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
danza, | |
Costa Rica, romance, | |
Cuba | |
cancioŽn, | |
criolla, | |
Garifuna culture | |
beŽrusu, | |
paranda, | |
Guarijio culture | |
contradanza, | |
son principal, | |
Haiti, popular music, | |
Hondutas, mestizo dance-music, | |
Jamaica, mento, | |
Mexica culture, in sones, | |
Mexico | |
corrido, | |
son, | |
Miskitu culture, tiun, | |
Nicaragua | |
corrido, | |
guitar music, | |
Peru | |
Indian vs. mestizo aesthetics, | |
tondero, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
PureŽpecha culture | |
pirekua, | |
son regional, | |
tropical-forest regions, Western-influenced, | |
Venezuela | |
harp music, | |
two-part, | |
Harner, Michael J., | |
Harris, Roy, | |
Harrison, Regina, | |
Harry, Debby, | |
Hawaii, Okinawan people in, | |
Hayans, Guillermo, | |
Hayre, Carlos, | |
heavy metal, | |
Hebdige, Dick, | |
Hedrick, Basil C., | |
Hellmer, JoseŽ RauŽl, | |
Henderson, Donald, | |
Henwood, Major S. W., | |
HernaŽndez, Clara, | |
HernaŽndez, Daria, | |
HernaŽndez, Julio Alberto, | |
HernaŽndez TziandoŽn, JesuŽs, | |
Herskovits, Frances S., | |
Herskovits, Melville J., | |
Herzog, George, | |
heterophony | |
Andean regions, | |
Peru, Amazonian region, | |
Q?ero music, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Higgs, Alphonso "Blind Blake," | |
High Voltage, | |
Higher Institute of Art (Cuba), | |
highlife, | |
Hill, Donald C., | |
Hill, Donald R., | |
Hinduism, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Hinton, Thomas B., | |
hip-hop, | |
Hispaniola (Island), | |
historiography, | |
Hitchcock, J. T., | |
Hodgson, Harold, | |
Hodgson, Samuel "Sabu" (Nicaraguan Creole singer), | |
holidays. See festivals and celebrations | |
Holmer, Nils M., | |
Holst, Gustav, | |
Holzmann, Rodolpho, | |
homophony, Brazilian art music, | |
Honduran people, in Belize, | |
Honduras, | |
Chorti culture, | |
dances of, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
geography of, | |
instruments of, | |
Jicaque-TolupaŽn culture, | |
Lenca culture, | |
map of, | |
Maya culture, | |
Maya murals in, | |
mestizo culture, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
musical genres, son, | |
Omoa, |
Honduras (continued) | |
Paya culture, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
Sumu culture, | |
Hornbostel, Erich M. von, | |
Houdini (calypsonian), | |
house music, | |
Howe, James, | |
Huambaly, | |
HuaraijioŽ culture. See Guarijio culture | |
Huari culture, | |
huayno (also huayn~o; wayno), | |
in Argentina, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Chile, | |
form of, | |
influenced by cumbia, | |
in Peru, | |
sound recordings of, | |
Huerta RiŽos, CeŽsar, | |
Huesca, AndreŽs, | |
Huetara culture, | |
Huichol culture | |
folklore of, | |
narratives of, | |
Huitoto culture, | |
Hunt (companion of Despard), | |
Hurston, Zora Neale, | |
Hurtado, SebastiaŽn, | |
Hutchinson, Edgar "PituŽn," | |
hymns, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
Caribbean, | |
Carriacou, sankeys, | |
Chile, for Virgin Mary festivities, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
Guyana, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
Quechua, | |
St. Lucia, | |
Toba culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
bhajan, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Waiwai culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
IbagueŽ Conservatory, | |
Ibo culture, | |
Ibo Records, | |
iconography, | |
ChaviŽn culture, | |
Ecuador, ceramic vases, | |
Huari culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, colonial codices, | |
Moche culture, | |
OtomiŽ culture, instrumental ensembles, | |
Paraguay, instrument depictions in mission towns, | |
PureŽpecha culture, Christian imagery, | |
Tiwanaku culture, | |
iconology, music, | |
idiophones, | |
Andean regions, | |
animal bladders, struck, vejiga, | |
bamboo, struck, | |
kwat, | |
Martinique, | |
tamboo-bamboo, | |
bells, |
|
adjaŽ (also sineta), | |
Argentina, | |
Aztec culture, | |
campana, | |
campanilla, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guatemala, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
ogan, | |
Wayana culture, | |
bells, animal (cow or llama) | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
cencerro, | |
ekoŽn, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
kaway, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
sinsiru, | |
bells, double, agogo^, | |
bones, zo, | |
bottles, struck | |
Bahamas, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
boxes, struck | |
cajita, | |
cajoŽn, | |
cajoŽn de tapeo, | |
tormento, | |
brass cups, majira, | |
broomsticks, Belize, | |
castanets | |
castan~uelas, | |
Taino culture, | |
clappers with jingles, kartal, | |
conch shells, struck, Mexico, | |
concussion | |
felu-ko-felu, | |
mesa de ruidos (also tamborete; tormento), | |
concussion sticks, | |
aboso, | |
Argentina, | |
bones, | |
Brazil, | |
bwa, | |
canoiŽta, | |
catta, | |
claves, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guatemala, | |
itones, | |
popygua'i, | |
tibwa, | |
tock-tock, | |
Venezuela, | |
cymbals | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
high-hat, | |
jhaŻnŻjh, | |
mangera, | |
manjira, | |
platillos, | |
pratos, | 330 |
Uruguay, | |
domestic utensils, | |
palmetas, | |
prato-e-faca, | |
spoons, | |
drums, sides of, Venezuela, | |
drums, steel (pans), | |
Grenada, | |
Guyana, | |
Montserrat, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Venezuela, | |
drums, water | |
ba kubahe, | |
baa weŽhai, | |
bastel (also seoe), | |
friction | |
blur cue armadillo shell, | |
oticonte (also bote del diablo; arcuza), | |
sacabuche, | |
toaŽ, | |
tortoiseshells, | |
kodedo, | |
zambumbia, | |
gongs, | |
Surinam, | |
gourds (See also rattles, container) ageŽ, | |
angara, | |
checo, | |
hoes, struck | |
Carriacou, | |
Cuba, | |
Haiti, | |
jawbones | |
aras napat, | |
Belize, | |
Costa Rica, | |
cumbamba, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
quijada (also carraca; carachacha; charassga), | |
Jew's harps | |
Argentina, | |
trompa (also birimbao), | |
trompe, | |
yusap, | |
jugs, struck, Mixtec culture, | |
jugs, tuned, caŽntaro, | |
lamellaphones, | |
benta, | |
mariŽmbola (also marimba), | |
mariŽmbula (also marimba), | |
rhumba box, | |
Barbados, | |
cataŽ, | |
Central America, | |
Colombia, | |
El Salvador, | |
guagua (also cataŽ), | |
ke'e, | |
kiringua, | |
maguay (also mayohuacaŽn), | |
Maya culture, | |
mayohuacaŽn, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tairona culture, |
teponahuastle, | ||
teponaztli (also teponaztle), | ||
tepunahuaste, | ||
tingo, | ||
toaŽ-toreŽ, | ||
tun (also t'ent'en; c'unc'un), | ||
tunkul, | ||
tuntui (also tunduy), | ||
machete, struck | ||
adawo, | ||
ispara almuk, | ||
marimbas, | ||
Bolivia, | ||
Colombia, | ||
Costa Rica, | ||
Ecuador, | ||
El Salvador, | ||
Guatemala, | ||
Honduras, | ||
marimba criolla, | ||
marimba cuache, | ||
marimba de arco, | ||
marimba de ceras, | ||
marimba de cinchos, | ||
marimba de mesa, | ||
marimba de tecomates, | ||
marimba doble, | ||
marimba en escuadra, | ||
marimba grande, | ||
marimba sencilla, | ||
marimba simple, | ||
marimba tenor, | ||
Maya culture, | ||
Mexico, | ||
Nicaragua, | ||
Peru, | ||
metal (misc.) | ||
Cuba, | ||
Trinidad and Tobago, | ||
metal rods | ||
agan, | ||
dandtal, | ||
dantal, | ||
Mexico, ancient, | ||
music boxes, ka'i (also tingilingibox), | ||
pestle and mortar | ||
Bolivia, | ||
Colombia, | ||
Venezuela, | ||
rasps (See scrapers) | ||
ratchets (See rattles, cog) | ||
rattles | ||
Andean regions, | ||
Argentina, | ||
kuwai, | ||
tropical-forest cultures, | ||
Waia~piŽ culture, | ||
Wayana culture, | ||
rattles, basket | ||
caxixiŽ, | ||
ka:lawa:si, | ||
Warao culture, | ||
rattles, bell | ||
Andean regions, | ||
Argentina, | ||
cascabeles, | ||
chaworoŽ, | ||
chilchil, | ||
chischiles, | ||
chorimori, | ||
coyole, | ||
coyolim, | ||
coyolli, | ||
Guatemala, | ||
kaskawilla, | ||
Mixtec culture, | ||
paiaŽ, | ||
Panama, | ||
PureŽpecha culture, | ||
Taino culture, | ||
Venezuela, | ||
rattles, bone, TupinambaŽ culture, | ||
rattles, bottle, GariŽfuna culture, | ||
rattles, cocoon | ||
chairiŽgoa, | ||
teneboim, | ||
rattles, cog (ratchets) | ||
batidorcito, | ||
carraca, | ||
matraca, | ||
rattles, coin, Guatemala, | ||
rattles, container | ||
abwe, | ||
Argentina, | ||
ason, | ||
ayacachtli, | ||
ayam, | ||
Brazil, | ||
Carib culture, | ||
chac-chac, | ||
chacha, | ||
chacha-leŽrol, | ||
chakchak, | ||
cheŽqueres, | ||
chilchil, | ||
chinchin (also jiŽcara), | ||
chiquiŽt, | 291 | |
Colombia, | ||
de shot and rattle, | ||
Ecuador, | ||
erikindi, | ||
guaya, | ||
habi sanuka, | ||
Haiti, | ||
hali?, | 553 | |
hebu mataro, | ||
huada, | ||
insuba (also simbaika), | ||
madaka, | ||
makich, | ||
malakach, | ||
maracas, | ||
maraka (also marari), | ||
Maya culture, | ||
mbarakaŽ, | ||
Mexico, | ||
Mixtec culture, | ||
nasis, | ||
nyahsaŽnu, | ||
paichochi, | ||
Puerto Rico, | ||
sha-sha, | ||
shak-shak, | ||
shaka, | ||
shakap, | ||
shakka, | ||
shakshak, | ||
shekere, | ||
siŽsira (also chiŽchira; magara), | ||
sonaja (also chin-chin), | ||
Sumu culture, | ||
Surinam, | ||
Taino culture, | ||
tani, | ||
Tarahumara culture, | ||
tchatcha, | ||
thermos bottle, | ||
tošn, | ||
to^ndaŽxin, | ||
tošnoš, | ||
wada, | ||
waw, | ||
xekeres (also shekeres), | ||
xichat, | ||
Yuma culture, | ||
rattles, deer-hoof | ||
rihhutiam, | ||
Yuma culture, | ||
rattles, friction, mele^ (also afoxeŽ), | ||
rattles, rattlesnake, Guatemala, | ||
rattles, sistrum | ||
Argentina, | ||
ayacaste, | ||
senasawim, | ||
senasum, | ||
rattles, strung, | ||
Andean regions, | ||
Aztec culture, | ||
Bolivia, | ||
chunan, | ||
Colombia, | ||
El Salvador, | ||
Garifuna culture, | ||
hwin kra~, | ||
illacu, | ||
jalajala, | ||
Maya culture, | ||
Mexico, | ||
Otopame culture, | ||
Paraguay, | ||
quiribillo (also quirivin~o, piribique, trivin~o), | ||
sewei, | ||
Taino culture, | ||
uaituŽge, | ||
rattles, tin, Haiti, | ||
rattles, tortoiseshell, Yuma culture, | ||
rattles, tube | ||
alfandoque, | ||
Argentina, | ||
caraŽngano, | ||
chocalhos, | ||
chucho, | ||
Colombia, | ||
Ecuador, | ||
ganzaŽ (also guaiaŽ), | ||
guacho (also gauche), | ||
guasaŽ (also guacho; guazaŽ), | ||
gwaj (also syak), | ||
Mexico, | ||
sonaja, | ||
wasaha, | ||
Yaqui culture, |
idiophones (continued) | |
rattles, vessel stick, soot, | |
scissor blades, Peru, | |
scrapers, | |
armadillo shell, | |
Brazil, | |
cacho, | |
cadacada, | |
carpenter's saw, | |
carraca llanera, | |
carrasca (also raspador), | |
charrasca, | |
coconut grater, | |
El Salvador, | |
graj, | |
grater, | 897 |
guacharaca | |
Guatemala, | |
gušira (also guayo), | |
guširo: | in Colombia, |
gwaj (also syak), | |
hair comb, | |
hirukiam, | |
krita, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Nicaragua, | |
notched stick, | |
omichicahuaztli, | |
Peru, | |
raspu, | |
re^co-re^co, | |
ridged bottle, | |
rook jaw, | |
squash, | |
Venezuela, | |
wiri, | |
shakers (See rattles) | |
shoes, cutarras, | |
sistrums (See rattles, sistrum) | |
spurs, metal, suila jut?as, | 285 |
stamping tubes | |
bamba, | |
boompipe, | |
boreŽpudeariŽyuhkeš, | |
Peru, | |
quitiplaŽs, | |
takuapuŽ, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
stool, struck, kwakwa, | |
tins | |
Carriacou, | |
Jamaica, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
tops, humming, Kuna culture, | |
tortoiseshells, rasped, El Salvador, | |
tortoiseshells, struck | |
ayotl, | |
French Guiana, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
kuswa taya, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
tiyoo, | |
tortuga, | |
triangles, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Carriacou, | |
ch'in~isku, | |
cling-a-ching, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Jamaica, | |
Montserrat, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
steel, | |
tingting, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Venezuela, | |
Tukano culture, | |
woodblocks, redova, | |
wooden noisemakers, Argentina, | |
wooden planks, matrimonial, | |
xylophones (See also marimbas) | |
Barbados, | |
demung, | |
gende`r, | |
saron, | |
Igbo nation, | |
Iglesias, Julio, | |
Ignacio Cervantes Professional Music Upgrading Center, | |
Igneri culture, | |
Igualada, Francisco de, | |
Ika culture, | |
IleŽ Aiye^ (bloco afro), | |
Illapu (musical group), | |
Im Thurn, Sir Everard, | |
Imbaquingo, EliŽas, | |
improvisation, | |
Aluku culture, of songs, | |
Argentina, secular vocal music, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
copla de carnaval, | |
Bahamas | |
anthem, | |
quadrille, | |
rhyming spiritual, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil | |
in CandombleŽ music, | |
cantoria, | |
co^co songs, | |
forroŽ, | |
maracatuŽ rural, | 337 |
samba verses, | |
textual, | |
Bribri culture, ajkšyošn_uk, | 634 |
Chile | |
canto a lo pueta, | |
contrapuntos, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
copla, | |
cumbia, | |
murga, | |
on marimba, | |
Costa Rica, text, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, currulao, | |
El Salvador, text, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
chumba, | |
in dušguš ritual music, | |
gunjeŽi, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
leŽwo`z, | |
quadrille, | |
Jamaica, | |
mento, | |
quadrille, | |
Kuna culture | |
songs, | |
text, | |
Mapuche culture, of songs, | |
Martinique, bigin beŽle`, | |
Maya culture | |
of ancestral songs, | |
text, | |
Mexico | |
copla, | |
MichoacaŽn region, | |
son jarocho, | |
Miskitu culture, text, | |
Mixtec culture, text, | |
Netherlands Antilles, tambuŽ, | |
Panama, vocal, | |
Paraguay, dance, | |
Peru | |
dance, | |
marinera, | |
of text, | |
Puerto Rico | |
bomba, | |
seis, | |
Spain, joropo, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, verbal duels (picong), | |
Uruguay | |
payada, | |
text, | |
Venezuela | |
joropo music, | |
tonos, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Wayana culture, flute music, | |
Inca (Inka) culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
ceremonies of, | |
in Chile, | |
empire of, | |
harvest songs, | |
high-pitched aesthetic of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
instruments of, | |
military bands of, | |
Indian (South Asian) people, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Belize, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Martinique, | |
in Netherland Antilles, | |
religions of, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Indian Theater of Sa~o Lourencžo, | |
Indo, Berta, | |
Indonesian people, | |
in French Guiana, | |
religions of, | |
in Surinam, | |
Infante, Pedro, | |
Ingano culture, instruments of, |
Inka culture. See Inca culture | |
Institut fušr Vošlkerkunde (Vienna), | |
Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, | |
Institute Salvadoreano de Turismo, | |
Instituto de Investigaciones del Folklore Musical (Chile), | |
Instituto Indigenista de Guatemala, | |
Instituto Interamericano de EtnomusicologiŽa y Folklore (INIDEF) (Venezuela), | |
Instituto Nacional de AntropologiŽa e Historia (Mexico), | |
Instituto Nacional de Folklore (INAF) (Venezuela), | |
Instituto Nacional de MusicologiŽa "Carlos Vega" (Argentina), | |
Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico), | |
instrumental ensembles. See also instrumental ensembles, solo; instrumentation; steel-bands | |
all-women ensembles, | |
Andean folkloric ensembles, | |
Andean regions | |
flute ensembles, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
panpipe ensembles, | |
Argentina | |
conjuntos, | |
cuarteto groups, | |
orquestas caracteristicas, | |
panpipe ensembles, | |
for tango, | |
Aymara culture | |
brass bands, | |
lichiwayo, | |
orquesta, | |
sikuri, | |
tarkeadas (also tarqueadas), | |
Bahamas | |
junkanoo, | |
rake 'n' scrape, | |
bands, 50 (See also under specific country) | |
Barbados | |
military bands, | |
tuk band, | |
use of trombone and trumpet, | |
Belize, brukdown ensemble, | |
Bolivia | |
brass bands, | |
conjuntos, | |
consorts, | |
flute-and-drum, | |
grupos autoŽctonos, | |
grupos folkloŽricos, | |
guitarrilla ensembles, | |
julajula ensembles, | |
musin~u ensemble, | |
panpipe-and-drum, | |
panpipe ensembles, | |
pinkillo ensembles, | |
tropa recto, | |
brass bands, | |
Brazil | |
banda de piŽfanos (also zabumba), | |
bands, | |
baterias, | |
batucada, | |
brass bands, | |
for bumba-meu-boi, | |
caipira band, | |
for capoeira, | |
choro, | |
conjunto nordestinos, | |
conjuntos regionais, | |
folias de reis, | |
forroŽ ensembles, | |
for frevo de bloco, | |
for frevo de rua, | |
gagaku orchestras, | |
for Saint Goncžalo dance, | |
samba ensembles, | |
town bands, | |
trio eleŽtrico, | |
trios nordestinos, | |
Brunka culture, | |
Carriacou | |
for big-drum dance, | |
quadrille, | |
Chile | |
brass bands, | |
for cueca, | |
for nueva cancioŽn, | |
panpipe ensembles, | |
urban tonada, | |
for Virgin of Las Pen~as festival, | |
Colombia | |
banda municipal, | |
brass bands, | |
chirimiŽa bands, | |
conjunto de cumbia, | |
conjunto de gaita, | |
conjunto de pito, | |
conjunto guabinero, | |
conjunto llanero, | |
currulao ensemble, | |
duetos bambuqueros, | |
estudiantina, | |
Kogi conjunto de carrizos, | |
murgas, | |
national bands, | |
orquestas, | |
rajalen~a, | |
salsa, | |
tunas, | |
vallenato, | |
Costa Rica | |
cimarrona, | |
mariachi, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
military bands, | |
municipal bands, | |
pop orchestras, | |
for song-dances, | |
triŽos, | |
Cuba | |
biankomeko, | |
chamber ensembles, | |
charanga, | |
charanga francesa, | |
charanga tiŽpica, | |
comparsa, | |
conjunto, | |
cuarteto, | |
danzoŽn ensembles, | |
duŽo, | |
estudiantina, | |
gran combo (also gran orquesta), | |
guaguancoŽ, | |
military bands, | |
municipal bands, | |
ngoma ensemble, | |
orquesta tiŽpica, | |
piquete tiŽpico, | |
septeto de son, | |
sexteto de son, | |
son ensembles, | |
symphony orchestras, | |
triŽo, | |
Dominica, jing ping band, | |
Dominican Republic | |
brass bands, | |
canuto, | |
congo ensemble, | |
dance bands, | |
fife-and-drum ensemble, | |
gagaŽ ensemble, | |
longdrum ensembles, | |
merengue ensembles, | |
merengue tiŽpico (also perico ripiao), | |
military bands, | |
mummers (also momiŽs; guloyas), | |
municipal bands, | |
pripriŽ, | |
salve ensembles, | |
Ecuador | |
banda mocha, | |
brass bands, | |
currulao ensemble, | |
flute-and-drum, | |
orquesta de tons, | |
El Salvador | |
brass bands, | |
chilamate, | |
fife and drum, | |
for little devils dance, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
municipal bands, | |
electronic amplification of, | |
estudiantinas, | |
European genres, orquestas tiŽpicas, | |
flute-and-drum, | |
flute-and-rattle, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
brass bands, | |
dangbu, | |
drum ensembles, | |
flute-and-drum, | |
garavoŽn ensemble, | |
punta-rock, | |
Gaudeloupe, for carnival genres, | |
Grenada, for carnival, | |
Guadeloupe, quadrille ensembles, | |
Guatemala | |
marimba ensembles, | |
for son, | |
Guyana | |
masquerade bands, | |
military bands, | |
Haiti | |
brass bands, | |
konpa bands, | |
meŽringue band, | |
mini-djaz, | |
o`ke`s bastreng, | |
rara bands, | |
twoubadou groups, | |
Honduras | |
concert bands, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
pipe and tabor, | |
Jamaica | |
big bands, | |
brass bands, | |
junkunnu bands, | |
mento bands, | |
quadrille bands, | |
K?ekchi Maya, harp ensembles, | |
Kuna culture, gammu burui ensemble, |
instrumental ensembles (continued) | |
Mapuche culture, pifušlka ensembles, | |
Martinique, beguine orchestra, | |
Maya culture, | |
for baile del tun, | |
bandas, | |
brass band, | |
flute and drum, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
for saint's day processions, | |
string trio, | |
trumpet and drum bands, | |
Mexica culture, conjunto azteca, | 558 |
Mexico | |
bandas, | |
bandas del pueblo, | |
bandas sinaloenses, | |
brass bands, | |
chilena, | |
conchero, | |
conjunto de arpa grande, | |
conjunto norten~o, | |
dance orchestras, | |
mariachi, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
orquesta tiŽpica, | |
for son, | |
son guerrerense, | |
tamborazos zacatecanos, | |
military bands, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
bandas, | |
pre-Hispanic, | |
Montserrat, string bands, | |
Netherlands Antilles | |
Cuban-style orchestras, | |
jazz bands, | |
Nicaragua | |
bandas de chicheros, | |
bandas filarmoŽnicas, | |
brass bands, | |
guitar duos, | |
los atabales, | 757 |
mariachi ensembles, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
OtomiŽ culture, | |
tunditos, | |
Otopame culture | |
for huapango arriben~o, | |
muŽsica de golpe, | |
pipe-and-tabor, | 572 |
Panama | |
congo ensembles, | |
conjuntos tiŽpicos, | |
drum-and-bugle corps, | |
drum ensembles, | |
marching bands, | |
military bands, | |
Paraguay | |
banda koyguaŽ, | |
brass bands, | |
conjuntos, | |
rock bands, | |
Peru | |
ayarachi ensembles, | 35 |
banda tiŽpica, | |
bandas de guerra, | |
brass bands, | |
chiriwano ensembles, | |
College of San Pablo band, | |
conjunto, | |
conjunto de cuerdas, | |
Cusco dance bands, | |
estudiantina, | |
fiesta orchestras, | |
flute-and-drum, | |
flute ensembles, | |
herranza, | |
Inca military bands, | |
orquesta tiŽpica, | |
panpipe ensembles, | |
roncadora, | 210 |
tarkeadas, | |
tunas, | |
use of accordion, | |
Puerto Rico | |
bands, | |
jiŽbaro ensembles, | |
plena, | |
PureŽpecha culture | |
brass bands, | |
for pirekuas, | |
for sones, | |
St. Lucia | |
dance bands, | |
kwadril ensemble, | |
South America, brass bands, | |
speculative groupings of, | |
Surinam | |
gamelan angklung, | |
gamelan ensembles, | |
Tarahumara culture, violin ensembles, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
American congos, | |
congos, | |
Orisa drum ensembles, | |
parang ensembles, | |
soca bands, | |
string bands, | |
tamboo-bamboo bands, | |
Uruguay | |
bands, | |
canto popular uruguayo, | |
fife-and-drum corps, | |
for tango, | |
Venezuela | |
aguinaldo ensemble, | |
arpa llanera ensemble, | |
central-coastal harp ensembles, | |
chimbanguele, | |
mina ensemble, | |
redondo ensemble, | |
tambora, | |
tamunangue, | |
tura ensembles, | |
Virgin Islands | |
dance bands, | |
fife-and-drum bands, | |
scratch bands (also fungi bands), | |
Yaqui culture | |
conjuntos, | |
mariachi, | |
triŽos romaŽnticos, | |
instrumental ensembles, solo | |
pipe and rattle, | |
Mexico, | |
Panama, | 16, 17 |
pipe and tabor (flute and drum), | |
Bolivia, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
OtomiŽ culture, | |
Peru, | |
Spain, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
instrumentation | |
acculturation and, | |
aguinaldo ensemble, | |
Andean ensembles, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
Antillean jazz bands, | |
baile de la marimba, | |
banda de guerra, | |
banda tiŽpica, | |
bandas de chicheros, | |
beguine ensembles, | |
Brazil, central and southern genres, | |
brukdown ensemble, | |
Brunka culture, various ensembles, | |
canto popular uruguayo, | |
charanga, | |
charanga tiŽpica, | |
chirimiŽa bands, | |
cimarrona ensemble, | |
comparsas, | |
conjunto (Cuban), | |
conjunto azteca, | |
conjunto de cuerdas, | |
conjunto de cumbia, | |
conjunto llanero, | |
Costa Rica, pop orchestras, | |
cuarteto groups, | |
Cuban-style orchestras, | |
cueca ensembles, | |
currulao ensembles, | |
dance bands, | |
duŽo, | |
estudiantina ensemble, | |
frevo de bloco ensembles, | |
frevo de rua ensembles, | |
golpe ensemble, | |
gran combo (also gran orquesta), | |
guaguancoŽ, | |
herranza ensemble, | |
jiŽbaro ensemble, | |
kwadril ensemble, | |
mariachi, | |
marimba ensembles, | |
mento bands, | |
mereng-vodou ensembles, | |
mini-djaz, | |
murga ensemble, | |
orquesta tiŽpica (Cuban), | |
parang groups, | |
pirekua ensembles, | |
plena ensembles, | |
in popular music genres, | |
punta-rock, | |
quadrille ensembles, | |
rajalen~a ensemble, | |
rake ?n? scrape, | |
Saint Goncžalo dance ensemble, | |
scratch bands, | |
septeto de son, | |
soca bands, | |
son ensembles, | |
son jarocho, | |
tango ensembles, | |
trio eleŽtrico, | |
tropical music ensembles, | 266 |
vallenato ensemble, | |
instruments. See also aerophones; chordophones; electrophones; idiophones; instrumental ensembles; membranophones | |
amplified, | |
ancient, |
Argentina, | |
Aruba, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Caribbean, archaeological finds, | 8 |
Carriacou, | |
Chile, | |
classification of, | |
Andean regions, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Tzutujil-Maya culture, | |
collections of | |
Argentina, | |
Ecuador, | |
museums containing Kuna instruments, | |
Colombia, | |
archaeological finds, | |
composite flute-rattles, Maya culture, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
locally made, | |
used in SanteriŽa, | |
dating methods for, | |
distribution of, | |
Ecuador, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
El Salvador, | |
European, | |
French Guiana, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
Guatemala, | |
Guyana, | |
inventory lists of, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kogi culture, | 184-85 |
Kuna culture, | |
Lenca culture, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Moxo culture, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Paya culture, | |
Peru, | |
pre-Hispanic, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
locally crafted, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
Quechua culture, | |
South America, archaeological finds, | |
Sumu culture, | |
Surinam, | |
symbolic interpretations of, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
terminology for, | |
Tukano culture, | 152-53 |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Western | |
in Aymara culture, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in GariŽfuna culture, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Jamaica, | |
made by GuaraniŽ, | |
made by Mexican native peoples, | |
made by Moxo people, | |
made in Costa Rica, | |
made in El Salvador, | |
in Mapuche culture, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Mixtec culture, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Peru, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Inti Illimani, | |
Inventor (Henry Forbes; calypsonian), | |
Irish people | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Isaacs, Jorge, | |
Isabel de Bragancža, Princess, | |
Isamitt, Carlos, | |
Isla de Pascua. See Rapa Nui | |
Islam, | |
in Guyana, | |
Jamaica, | |
music and, | |
Islas Malvinas, | |
Italian people, | |
in Brazil, | |
identity issues of, | |
music preferences of, | |
in Panama, | |
in South America, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Ituarte, Julio, | |
Ivoti (musical group), | |
Iwami, Tsuna, | |
Ixcatec culture, | |
Ixil Maya, | |
Izikowitz, Karl Gustav, | |
Jaap Kunst Museum (Netherlands), | |
Jacobo, Cruz, | |
Jaegerhuber, Werner A., | |
Jaen, Tomasa, | |
Jahn, Brian, | |
Jai, Rikki, | |
Jaime (Warao elder), | |
Jairo Varela y Grupo Niche, | |
Jalq?as culture, instruments of, | |
Jama-Coaque culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Jamaica, | |
art music in, | |
dance and festivals in, | |
education in, | |
history of, | |
industries of, | |
instruments of, | |
Maroon cultures, | |
musical genres | |
dance hall, | |
mento, | |
reggae, | |
religious, | |
secular, | |
ska, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
sound recording industry in, | |
Yamaye culture of, | |
Jamaica Orchestra for Youth, | |
Jamaica School of Music, | |
Jamaican people | |
in Belize, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
Japanese people, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, | |
musical genres of, | |
in Paraguay, | |
popularity of karaoke, | |
religions of, | |
in South America, | |
Jara, Victor, | |
Javae culture, | |
Javanese people. See Indonesian people | |
jazz, | |
Brazil, | |
Cuba, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Latin, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
Surinam, | |
Jazz des Jeunes, | |
Jazz DuvergeŽ, | |
Jean-Baptiste, Nemours, | |
Jekyll, Walter, | |
Jenkins, Carol, | |
Jenkins, Travis, | |
JeruŽ culture, | |
Jesuit order | |
in Argentina, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Chile, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Ecuador, | |
GuaraniŽ culture and, | |
instruments introduced by, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Paraguay, | |
role in music education, | |
role in musical enculturation, | |
in South America, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Jewish people | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Curacžao, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Jamaica, |
Jewish people (continued) | |
in South America, | |
in Surinam, | |
Jicaque-TolupaŽn culture, | |
JijoŽn, IneŽs, | |
Jilguero del HuascaraŽn, el, | |
JimeŽnez, Carlos "La Mona," | |
JimeŽnez, JoseŽ Alfredo, | |
JimeŽnez Borja, Arturo, | |
JiŽvaro culture, | |
Joa~o, king of Portugal, | |
Jobim, Anto^nio Carlos, | |
Johnson, Howard, | |
Joly, Luz Graciela, | |
Jones, Pedro K., | |
Jordan, Nathaniel, | |
Jorge, Bernarda, | |
JorriŽn, Enrique, | |
JoseŽ JoseŽ, | |
Jost Van Dyke, | |
Joventango (Uruguay), | |
Juan de San Miguel, | |
Juana IneŽs de la Cruz, Sor, | |
JuaŽrez Toledo, Manuel, | |
Juarros, Domingo, | |
Judaism, | |
ju`juŽ, | |
Junaro, Emma, | |
Juste, Farah, | |
Kagaba culture. See Kogi culture | |
Kaiabi culture, | |
Kalapalo culture, spirit languages, | |
Kalina (Galibi) culture, | |
instruments of, | |
vocal music of, | |
Kanoboism, | |
Kardec, Allan, | |
Kardecism, | |
Karsten, Rafael, | |
Kashinaua culture, | |
Kassav?, | |
Kayabi culture, | |
Kazadi wa Mukuna, | |
Kechua culture. See Quechua culture | |
K?ekchiŽ (Kekchi) Maya, | |
Keller-Leuzinger, Franz, | |
Kelly, William, | |
Khouri, Ken, | |
Kiefer, Bruno, | |
Kikongo culture, | |
Kiliwa culture, | |
Kincaid, Jamaica, | |
King, Cyprian, | |
King Radio (Norman Span; calypsonian), | |
Kino, Eusebio Francisco, | |
Kirton, Jiggs, | |
Kjarkas (musical group), | |
Koch-Grušnberg, Theodor, | |
Koellreutter, Hans-Joachim, | |
Kogi culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
shamanism in, | |
vocal music of, | |
Kolla Suyu, | |
Kongo nation, | |
konpa-dire`k (compos-direct), | |
Koorn, Dirk, | |
Korean people, | |
in Belize, | |
in Paraguay, | |
Kotosh culture, instruments of, | |
Kubitschek, Juscelino, | |
Kukra Sumu, | |
Kumiai culture, | |
instruments of, | |
Kumina cult, | |
Kuna culture, | |
aesthetics of, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical contexts and genres, | |
narratives of, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
Kuss, Malena, | |
Kuti, Fela Anikulapo, | |
Kwak (post-zouk group), | |
La Banda de la Corona, | |
La Banda de los Supremos Poderes, | |
La Cuadrilla Morena de Pancho Fierro, | |
La Divina Pastora, | |
La Ley, | |
La Lira Colombiana, | |
LaPerfekta, | |
La Poasen~a, | |
La Troupe Folklorique Nationale (Haiti), | |
LaBega, Carl, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Lajenn Etwal, | |
lambada, | |
laments | |
Bolivia, | |
Carriacou, hallecord, | |
Colombia, guabina, | |
Ecuador, on Atahualpa, | |
French Guiana, | |
Guadeloupe, kantikamo`, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Miskitu culture, inanka, | |
Peru, penalivio (also panalivio), | |
Trinidad and Tobago, marseeha, | |
Lampia~o (Brazilian bandit), | |
Landa, Diego de, | |
Lange, Francisco Curt, | |
language and music | |
Kuna culture, | |
Nicaragua, drum signals, | |
tropical-forest discourse on music, | |
tropical-forest oratory, | |
languages | |
African, | |
Amuzgo, | |
Andean phylum, | |
Araucanian, | |
Arawak, | |
Aymara, | |
Bajan, | |
Bhojpuri, | |
Carib, | |
Central Amerind family, | |
Chibchan, | |
Chibchan-Paezan phylum, | |
classification of, | |
Creole, | |
Cuicatec, | |
drum, | |
Dutch, | |
English, | |
Equatorial phylum, | |
Equatorial-Tucanoan phylum, | |
Esselen-Yuman, | |
Fon, | |
French, | |
French Creole (KweŽyo`l), | |
Garifuna, | |
Ge^ family, | |
Ge^-Pano-Carib phylum, | |
German, | |
GuaraniŽ, | |
Guarijio, | |
GuayakiŽ, | |
Hindi, | |
Hokan, | |
JoparaŽ, | |
Karib, | |
Kiowa-Tanoan phylum, | |
Kuna, | |
Kunza, | |
Lenca, | |
lunfardo dialect, | |
Macro-Arawakan phylum, | |
Macro-Carib phylum, | |
Macro-Chibchan phylum, | |
Macro-Ge phylum, | |
Macro-Panoan phylum, | |
Macro-Tucanoan phylum, | |
Maipuran family, | |
Mangue, | |
Mapudungun, | |
Maskoy family, | |
Mataco-Mataguayo family, | |
Matako family, | |
Maya, | |
MbišaŽ-GuaycuruŽ family, | |
Mexican Amerindian, | |
Miskitu, | |
Mixteco, | |
Mochica, | |
Moxo, | |
NaŽhuatl, | |
native American, | |
Oto-Mangue phylum, | |
Pano, | |
Papiamento, | |
Penutian, | |
Portuguese, | |
Pukina, | |
Quechua (Kechua), | |
Saranantogo, | |
Spanish, | |
Sranan, | |
Sumu, | |
Taki-taki, | |
Tarascan, | |
Toba, | |
Trinitario, | |
Trique, | |
Tucano family, | |
Tupi-GuaraniŽ family, | |
Twi, | |
Uruqilla, | |
Uto-Aztecan phylum, | |
Venezuela, | |
Warao, | |
Yanomamoš, | |
Yaqui, | |
Yotuba, | |
YurakareŽ, | |
Zamuko family, | |
Lara, AgustiŽn, |
Lares, Oswaldo, | |
Las Casas, Father BartolomeŽ, | |
Las Chicas del Can, | |
Las Musas, | |
Latin American Music Review (periodical), | |
LaviŽn, Carlos, | |
Lavista, Mario, | |
Leader Music (recording company), | |
Lebanese people | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Netherland Antilles, | |
in Panama, | |
in South America, | |
Leblanc, Edward Olivier, | |
LedruŽ, AndreŽ Pierre, | |
Lee, Byron, | |
Leeward Islands, | |
Lehmann-Nitsche, Robert, | |
Leiva, Victor Manuel, | |
Lekis, Lisa, | |
Lemmon, Alfred E., | |
Lenca culture, | |
Lengua culture, | |
instruments of, | |
LeoŽn, Ageliers, | |
Lerdo de Tejada, Miguel, | |
LeŽry, Jean de, | |
Les Ambassadeurs, | |
Les Fantaisistes de Carrefour, | |
Les Fre`res Parent, | |
Les Loups Noirs, | |
Leslie, Charles, | |
Lesser Antilles, | |
Levy, Alexandre, | |
Lewin, Olive, | |
Lewis, J. Lowell, | |
Liberia, African-American immigrants to, | |
Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), | |
Lieberman, Baruj, | |
Lieth-Philipp, Margot, | |
Lillo, Baldomero, | |
Lima, Emirto de, | |
Linares, MariŽa Teresa, | |
Linton, Ralph, | |
Lira Colombiana, | |
Liscano, Juan, | |
List, George, | |
Literatura guaraniŽ del Paraguay, | |
Lithuanian people, in South America, | |
Liverpool, Hollis Urban, | 93 |
Lizardo, Fradique, | |
Lizot, Jacques, | |
Lobo, Edu, | |
Lobo de Mesquita, JoseŽ Joaquim EmeŽrico, | |
Lockel, GeŽrard, | |
Lofthouse, Charles, | |
Lomax, Alan, | |
Lopes de Souza, Pedro, | |
LoŽpez, Anselmo, | |
LoŽpez, Braulio, | |
LoŽpez, Eduardo, | |
LoŽpez, Wilmor, | |
LoŽpez de GoŽmara, Francisco, | |
Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore; calypsonian), | |
Lord Caresser (calypsonian), | |
Lord Cobra (calypsonian), | |
Lord Executor (Phillip Garcia; calypsonian), | |
Lord Invader (Rupert Grant; calypsonian), | |
Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts; calypsonian), | |
Lord Pretender (Alric Farrell; calypsonian), | |
Lord Radio and the Bimshire Boys, | |
Lord Rhaburn (Gerald Rhaburn), | |
Lord Rhaburn Combo, | |
Lord Silvers (calypsonian), | |
Los Arlequines, | |
Los BaŽrbaro del Ritmo, | |
Los Bisturices HarmoŽnicos, | |
Los Caifanes, | |
Los Cantares de DzitbalcheŽ, | |
Los Corraleros de Majagual, | |
Los Cuatro Huasos, | |
Los Frejoles Negros, | |
Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, | |
Los Girasoles, | |
Los Guaraguaos, | |
Los Hermanos Cuatro, | |
Los Huasos Quincheros, | |
Los Huastecos, | |
Los Jairas, | |
Los Jaivas, | |
Los Lobos, | |
Los Masis, | |
Los Mun~equitos, | |
Los Panchos, | |
Los Peniques, | |
Los Piratos del Centro, | |
Los Pleneros de la VeintitreŽs Abajo, | |
Los Prisioneros, | |
Los Provincianos, | |
Los Queretanos, | |
Los Son~adores de Sarawaska, | |
Los Tres, | |
Los Van Van, | |
Los Veracruzanos, | |
Los Yuras, | |
L'Ouverture, Toussaint, | |
Loven, Sven, | |
Loy, Kim, | |
Loyola, Margot, | |
Lozano, Pedro, | |
Lubin (French Guianese songwriter), | |
Lucaya culture, | |
Lucian Kaiso, | |
LucumiŽ. See SanteriŽa | |
lullabies, | |
Chile, ChiloeŽ Island, | |
Costa Rica, arrullo, | |
El Salvador, | |
French Guiana, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico | |
Amerindian cultures, | |
arrullo, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
Yuma culture, arrullo, | |
Lumholtz, Carl, | |
Lyra, Carlos, | |
Llerenas, Eduardo, | |
Macumba | |
in Brazil, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Macushi culture, | |
Maderna, Osmar, | |
Madero, Francisco, | 616 |
Magenta (recording company), | |
Magnum Band, | |
MakaŽ culture, | |
instruments of, | |
Makushi culture, religious music of, | |
Male^ Debale^ (bloco afro), | |
Maleku culture, | |
Malm, Krister, | |
Mam Maya, | |
mambo, | |
in Chile, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
ManaŽ (musical group), | |
Manding nation, | |
Mannette, Ellie, | |
Mannheim, Bruce, | 231 |
Manning, Frank, | |
Manten~o culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Manuel, Peter, | |
Manzanares Aguilar, Rafael, | |
Manzanero, Armando, | |
Mapa de los Instrumentos Musicales de Uso Popular en el PeruŽ, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
acculturation in, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
acculturated, | |
vocal, | |
religious rituals and genres, | |
research on, | |
shamanism in, | |
Maravilla, Ricky, | |
Marc Records, | |
Marcus, Joyce, | |
MariŽa EscaloŽn de NuŽn~ez Foundation, | |
mariachi, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
Mariachi Vargas de TecalitlaŽn, | |
Mariano, John, | |
Marimba Centroamericana, | |
Marimba la Tica, | |
Mariz, Vasco, | |
Marks, Morton, | |
Marley, Bob, | |
Marley, Rita, | |
Maroon cultures, | |
in Belize, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Haiti, | |
instruments of, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Surinam, | |
Maroyu (musical group), | |
MaŽrquez, Samuel, | |
Marre, Jeremy, | |
MarroquiŽn, Salvador, | |
Marshall, Bertie, |
Marshall, Sir Don, | ||
MartiŽ, Samuel, | ||
Martial, David, | ||
martial arts | ||
Brazil | ||
capoeira, | ||
maculele^, | ||
Trinidad and Tobago | ||
gatka, | ||
kalenda, | ||
MartiŽn, Juan, | ||
MartiŽnes, Angel, | ||
MartiŽnes, Marco, | ||
MartiŽnes, Omar, | ||
MartiŽnez Compan~oŽn, Baltasar Jaime, | ||
MartiŽnez Espinel, Vicente, | ||
MartiŽnez Landero, Francisco, | ||
MartiŽnez Montoya, AndreŽs, | ||
MartiŽnez y Coll, Fray Antonio, | ||
MartiŽnez Zepeda, Jorge, | ||
Martinique, | ||
cultural identity, | 920 | |
history of, | ||
musical genres | ||
beguine, | ||
kadans, | ||
mazouk, | ||
mizik chouval-bwa, | ||
rap and raggamuffin, | ||
zouk, | ||
political status of, | ||
popular music in, | ||
population of, | ||
research on, | ||
Martins, | JoseŽ de Souza, | |
Marzano, Leonor, | ||
masks | ||
Bolivia, | ||
Caribbean, | ||
Dominican Republic, | ||
Ecuador, blanco, | ||
El Salvador, | ||
GariŽfuna culture, | ||
waŽrini, | ||
Guarijio culture, | ||
Guyana, in masquerades, | ||
Jamaica, buru, | ||
Kogi culture, | ||
Mixtec culture, | ||
Panama, | ||
gran diablos, | ||
Peru, for son de los diablos, | ||
PureŽpecha culture, | ||
Trinidad and Tobago, | ||
Tukano culture, | ||
Venezuela, for devil dancers, | ||
Yaqui culture, | ||
mass media, | ||
See also popular music; radio; sound recordings; television | ||
acculturation and, | ||
Argentina, | ||
Colombia, | ||
Costa Rica, | ||
Dominican Republic, | ||
El Salvador, | ||
French Guiana, | ||
GariŽfuna culture, | ||
Guatemala, | ||
Haiti, | ||
Honduras, | ||
Jamaica, | ||
Nicaragua, | ||
Peru, | ||
rock and, | ||
South America, tropical-forest region, | ||
Uruguay, | ||
Wayana culture, | ||
Massajoli, Pierleone, | ||
Mata, Eduardo, | ||
Mata GuzmaŽn, Nicomedes, | ||
Mataco culture | ||
instruments of, | ||
Protestantism of, | ||
Matagalpan culture, | ||
Matos Guerra, GregoŽrio de, | ||
MauriŽcio, JoseŽ, | ||
Maya culture, | ||
archaeomusicological studies of, | ||
in Belize, | ||
ceremonies of, | ||
in Guatemala, | ||
highland groups, | ||
history of, | ||
in Honduras, | ||
iconographical record of, | ||
instruments of, | ||
lowland groups, | ||
narratives of, | ||
outmigrations to United States, | ||
research on, | ||
Mayer-Serra, Otto, | ||
Mayo culture, | ||
Mazatec culture, | ||
mazurka, | ||
in Argentina, | ||
in Brazil, | ||
in Caribbean, | ||
in Dominica, | ||
in Dominican Republic, | ||
in French Guiana, | ||
in Guadeloupe, | ||
in Guatemala, | ||
in Honduras, | ||
in Jamaica, | ||
in Martinique, | ||
in Mexico, | ||
in Netherlands Antilles, | ||
in Nicaragua, | ||
in Peru, | ||
in Uruguay, | ||
in Virgin Islands, | ||
MbyaŽ (Mbiša) culture, | ||
instruments of, | ||
religious genres of, | ||
McAllester, David P., | ||
McCosker, Sandra Smith, | ||
McCoy, James, | ||
McGowan, Chris, | ||
McIntosh, Ethel, | ||
McIntosh, Sylvester "Blinky," | ||
McKay, Tony "The Obeah Man," | ||
Medeiros, Anacleto de, | ||
Medina Silva, RamoŽn, | ||
Mehinaku culture, | ||
music and dance of, | ||
MejiŽa, Libardo, | ||
MejiŽa Baca, JoseŽ, | ||
MejiŽa Godoy, Carlos, | ||
MejiŽa Godoy, Luis Enrique, | ||
MejiŽa SaŽnchez, Ernesto, | ||
Mekoro people. See Boni (Maroon) culture | ||
MeleŽndez, Carlos, | ||
melody | ||
Andean music, | ||
Argentina | ||
candombe, | ||
secular music, | ||
Atacamen~o culture, | ||
Bahamas, goombay, | ||
Belize | ||
brukdown, | ||
creole music, | ||
Bolivia, Westernization of, | ||
Brazil | ||
bossa nova, | ||
caboclinho genres, | ||
in CandombleŽ music, | ||
cantoria, | ||
central and southern genres, | ||
co^co songs, | ||
folia de reis, | ||
marujada songs, | ||
for religious music, | ||
samba campineiro, | ||
ternos toadas, | ||
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, ritual songs, | ||
Chile | ||
cueca, | ||
flautones music, | ||
verso, | ||
for Virgin Mary festivities, | ||
Colombia | ||
African-derived traits, | ||
bordoŽnes, | ||
guabina velen~a, | 391 | |
rajalen~a, | ||
Costa Rica | ||
"La sangre de Christo," | ||
ornamentation of, | ||
romance, | ||
Cuba, tonadas, | ||
Ecuador | ||
pingullo, | ||
responsorial Passion song, | ||
vacacioŽn, | 424 | |
Garifuna culture | ||
beŽrusu, | ||
eremuna eŽgi, | ||
Guadeloupe | ||
quadrille, | ||
ve`yeŽ boukousou, | ||
Guarijio culture | ||
contradanza, | ||
son principal, | ||
Haiti, Vodou songs, | ||
Kuna culture | ||
chants, | ||
gammu burui, | ||
lullabies, | ||
paired flute, | ||
Maleku culture, curijurijanapuretec, | ||
Mapuche culture, | ||
tayil, | ||
Martinique, beguine, | ||
Maya culture | ||
of ancestral songs, | ||
flute melodies, | ||
multiple names for, | ||
shamanic songs, | ||
Mexico | ||
"Canto de San SebastiaŽn," | ||
gusto, | ||
"La Rama," | ||
sones, | ||
Miskitu culture, inanka, | ||
Moxo culture | ||
machetero, | ||
vespers, |
Nicaragua | |
baile de las marimba, | |
corrido, | |
Otopame culture, minuete, | |
Panama | |
mejorana, | |
violin, | |
Paraguay, coritos, | |
Peru | |
in courtship activities, | |
festejo, | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
landoŽ, | |
vals criollo, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
Puerto Rico, seis, | |
PureŽpecha culture | |
abajen~o, | |
pirekua, | |
son regional, | |
torito, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
pinculu, | |
St. Lucia, kwadril, | |
Shuar culture, | |
SuyaŽ unison songs, | |
Tarahumara culture | |
matachiŽn, | |
tutuguri, | |
Teribe culture, pasodoble, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, in steelband music, | |
Uruguay | |
milonga, | |
murga, | |
Venezuela | |
Amerindian music, | |
golpe, | |
joropo, | |
Warao culture, shamanic songs, | |
Wayana culture, flute music, | |
Yanomamoš culture, shamanic songs, | |
Yaqui culture | |
deer songs, | |
matachiŽn, | |
son, | |
sonim, | |
Yekuana culture, curing songs, | |
Yuma vocal music, | |
membranophones, | |
drum sets | |
Argentina, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
drums (See also specific types below) | |
Andean regions, | |
Arawak culture, | |
Argentina, | |
baydam, | |
biankomeŽ, | |
distribution of, | |
durum, | |
Guyana, | |
hari kawina, | |
hun, | |
huncito, | |
hunga, | |
hunguedde, | 826 |
jochana, | |
jumbie drum (also woowoo; French reel), | |
ke`s, | |
koti kawina, | |
kuchiŽ-yeremaŽ, | |
made from human skin, | |
makawa, | |
mugongue^, | |
obi-apaŽ, | |
sacred, | |
segon, | |
tanbou ich, | |
tanbou kongo, | |
tanbou manman, | |
tanbou petro, | |
timbal, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
drums, barrel, conical, or cylindrical | |
agida, | |
alcahuete (also aduloŽn), | |
Argentina, | |
atabales, | |
atabaque, | |
B-52, | |
baboula, | |
balsieŽ, | |
bass drum: | in Antigua, |
bedug, | |
beŽle`, | |
bemba (also bembe), | |
bembeŽ, | |
bhoom, | |
bocus, | |
bomba, | |
bomber, | |
bombo: | in Andean regions, |
bongos: | in Barbados, |
bonkoŽ-enchemiyaŽ, | |
boom, | |
botijas de barro, | |
boula, | |
boule`, | |
bumbo, | |
burro, | |
buru, | |
cachimbo, | |
caixa, | |
caj, | |
caja: | in Argentina, |
caja chapaca, | |
caja chayera, | |
Carib culture, | |
chimbanguele, | |
chinki, | |
chivita, | |
condonqueiro, | |
conga (also tumba, tumbador): | in Barbados, |
congo, | |
Costa Rica, | |
coupeŽ, | |
cruzao, | |
cumaco (also tambor grande), | |
cununo, | |
curbata, | |
cutter, | |
cyas, | |
dholak, | |
dhool, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
dup, | |
fouleŽ, | |
fundeh, | |
gaan doon, | |
garaoŽn, | |
garavoŽn, | |
garawoun, | |
goombay, | |
grande, | |
grandy, | |
gumbeh (also boom drum), | |
huancar, | |
hueŽhuetl, | |
iyesa, | |
jondo, | |
ka, | |
ka (also gwoka), | |
kata, | |
kbandu, | |
kendang, | |
kittle, | |
Kogi culture, | |
k?ojom (also tampor), | |
kungbi, | |
lanigi garawoun, | |
le^, | |
llamador, | |
make`, | |
makye`, | |
manman, | |
Maya culture, | |
mba'e pu ovava'eŽ, | |
Mexico, | |
mina, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
mongoŽ (also bongoŽ), | |
monkey, | |
mula, | |
ngoma, | |
nimaj k?ojom (also tamboroŽn), | |
oumalay (also omele), | |
oŽuu, | |
pailas, | |
palo, | |
petroŽ, | |
phutu wankara, |
membranophones (continued) | |
pikin doon, | |
pipa, | |
prenting, | |
prima, | |
pujador, | |
pump, | |
pumpu, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
quchana, | |
quinjengue, | |
quinto, | |
redoblante, | |
repeater, | |
repicador, | |
repico, | |
repique, | |
rem, | |
rumpi, | |
sabak, | |
salidor, | |
saliman, | |
sambula, | |
samhuŽda, | |
seco, | |
skin, | |
snare drum, | |
sonador, | |
surdo, | |
suru, | |
tabla, | |
taja, | |
tali, | |
tam-tam, | |
tambor, | |
tambor mayor (also tambor macho), | |
tambor menor (also tambor hembra; llamador), | |
tambor simple, | |
tambora: | in Brazil, |
tamboril, | |
tamboril afrouruguayo, | |
tamborita, | |
tambou (also ka), | |
tambou twavay, | |
tambuŽ, | |
tambu, | |
tamunango, | |
tanbores, | |
tanbou bos a deŽ fas, | |
tanbou bos a yon fas, | |
tanbou beŽleŽ, | |
tanbou chan, | |
tanbou leŽleŽ, | |
tarol, | |
tarola, | |
timbaletas, | |
tin drum, | |
tom-tom, | |
tres-dos, | |
tum-tum, | |
tumao, | |
tumba; tumbador (See conga) | |
tun, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
wancar, | |
wankara, | |
yuka, | |
zabumba, | |
zambumbia (snare drum), | |
drums, ceramic, Peru, | |
drums, frame | |
adufe, | |
Argentina, | |
babala, | |
bas (also tanbourin), | |
bombo (See under drums, barrel, conical, or cylindrical) | |
caja (See under drums, barrel, conical, or cylindrical) | |
galleta, | |
goombeh, | |
Haiti, | |
pandareta, | |
pandeiro, | |
pandereta, | |
pandero, | |
tamborim, | |
tambourin, | |
tambourina, | |
tambourine: | in Antigua, |
tanbou dibas, | |
tanbouwen, | |
tinya, | |
toombah, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
drums, friction | |
cuiŽca, | |
eltzagor, | |
furruco (also furro), | |
juco, | |
kinfuiti, | |
llamador del tigre, | |
oncža, | |
puerca (also marrano), | |
puiŽta, | |
rommelpot, | |
sacabuche (also zambomba), | |
tambor oncža, | |
ximbomba, | |
zambomba (also zambumbia), | |
drums, goblet | |
apentemma, | |
apinti, | |
drums, hourglass | |
bataŽ, | |
ehuru, | |
itoŽtele, | |
iyaŽ, | |
Maya culture, | |
okonkolo, | |
pantan~ (also panatan~), | |
redondo, | |
drums, water | |
Argentina, | |
Paraguay, | |
kettledrums | |
angu?aŽ, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina, | |
atabales, | |
El Salvador, | |
k'nyum, | |
kultruŽn, | |
nagara, | |
tambor, | |
tassa, | |
timbales, | |
Mexico, ancient, | |
mirlitons | |
cobweb, | |
Guatemala, | |
klisang, | |
Nicaragua, | |
turu-turu, | |
zumbador, | |
Mena Moreno, Juan Manuel, | |
Mendes, Gilberto, | |
MeŽndez, Juan, | |
Mendoncža, Newton, | |
Mendoza, Pedro de, | |
Mendoza, Vicente T., | |
Mendoza Cruz, Luciano, | |
Mendoza de Arce, Daniel, | |
Menezes, Margareth, | |
Menezes, Sister Noel, | |
Mennonites, | |
in Belize, | |
in Paraguay, | |
mento, | |
in Belize, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
Mera, Juan LeoŽn, | |
Mercury, Daniela, | |
merengue, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
cuarteto and, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Merino, Ignacio, | |
Merino, Luis, | |
Merino de Zela, Mildred, | |
Merrill, William L., | |
Merrymen (calypsonian), | |
Mes, Florencio, | |
metamorphosis and transformation | |
Bolivia, | |
shamanism and, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
in tropical-forest ceremonies, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
meter. See rhythm and meter | |
Methodists | |
in Barbados, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
MeŽtraux, Alfred, | |
Mexica culture, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres, son, |
Mexican people, in United States, | |
Mexico, | |
Amerindian cultures of, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, | |
cathedral choirs in, | |
ChamulaŽ, | |
Chiapas, | |
Maya murals, | |
Chihuahua, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Chilean people in, | |
Colima, | |
figurines of musicians, | |
colonial period of, | |
Costa Chica region, | |
cultural syncretism in, | |
early cities of, | |
El Norte region, | |
folklore of, | |
geography of, | |
Guarijio culture, | |
Guerrero, | |
history of, | |
Huasteca region, | |
iconographical record in, | |
immigrant groups of, | |
independence period in, | |
instruments of, | |
colonial era, | |
Jalisco, | |
Japanese people in, | |
maps of, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mayo culture, | |
Mexica culture, | |
Mexico City, music conservatory, | |
MichoacaŽn culture, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
music printing in, | |
musical genres | |
aires nacionales, | |
arrullo, | |
balada, | |
black satirical, | |
bolero ranchero, | |
cancioŽn romaŽntica, | |
cantos de nana, | |
children's games and songs, | |
chilena, | |
corrido, | |
cumbia, | |
jarabe, | |
mariachi, | |
minuetes, | |
muŽsica norten~a, | |
nueva cancioŽn, | |
ranchera, | |
rock, | |
son, | |
son guerrerense (also son calentano), | |
son huasteco, | |
son istmen~o (also son oaxaquen~o), | |
son jalisciense, | |
son jarocho, | |
son michoacano, | |
sonecitos del paiŽs, | |
Spanish-derived, | |
valona, | |
native peoples of, | |
NayariŽt, | |
figurines of musicians, | |
Oaxaca, | |
Otopame culture, | |
popular music, | |
population of, | |
pre-Encounter music in, | |
Puebla, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
research on, | |
sain's-day celebrations in, | |
San Luis PotosiŽ, | |
shamanism in, | |
Sinaloa, | |
Sonora, | |
sound recording industry in, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
tourism in, | |
Veracruz, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
YucataŽn, | |
Yucatec culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Meyer, Augusto, | |
Michel, Emeline, | |
Michelsen, Ralph C., | |
Mighty Chalkdust (calypsonian), | |
Mighty Dragon (calypsonian), | |
Mighty Gabby (calypsonian), | |
Mighty Jerry (Barbadian minstrel), | |
Mighty Romeo (calypsonian), | |
Mighty Sparrow (Francisco Slinger; calypsonian), | |
Miguel, Luis, | |
MilaneŽs, Pablo, | |
MillaŽn, SauŽl, | |
Mini All Stars, | |
Mini Records, | |
Minnis, Eddie, | |
Minshall, Peter, | |
Miranda, Carmen, | |
Miranda, Marlui, | |
Miskitu culture | |
history of, | |
in Honduras, | |
instruments of, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
population of, | |
missionaries. See Christianity; specific denominations and orders | |
Mitterand, Francžois, | |
Mixco, Mauricio, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
festivals and celebrations of, | |
history of, | |
immigrants to California and Mexico City, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
Afro-mestizo, | 567 |
Euro-mestizo, | 567 |
flor de nube, | |
flores, | |
katikubi, | |
tarantela, | |
research on, | |
Moche (Mochica) culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
iconographical record of, | |
instruments of, | |
MocoviŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Moctezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, | |
Mode`le d'Haišti, | |
modinha, | |
Moedano, Gabriel, | |
Mohave culture, | |
Moko nation, | |
Moldes, Rhyna, | |
Molina, JoseŽ, | |
Molina, RamoŽn P., | |
Molinare, Nicanor, | |
Moluche culture, | |
Mona, Euge`ne, | |
Moncada, JoseŽ MariŽa, | |
Monge, MariŽa Eugenia, | |
Monophony | |
Brazil, in CandombleŽ music, | |
SuyaŽ unison songs, | |
Montan~eŽs, Washington, | |
Monteiro, Alcymar, | |
Monteros, Raimundo M., | |
Montes de Oca J., Ignacio, | |
Montoya, Edwin, | |
Montoya, LuiŽs, | |
Montoya, Rodrigo, | |
Montserrat, | |
celebrations, | |
geography of, | |
immigrants to Dominica, | |
jumbie, | |
musical contexts and genres, | |
population of, | |
soca in, | |
MopaŽn Maya, | |
Moraes, ViniŽcius de, | |
Morales, Cristobal, | |
Morales, JoseŽ Alejandro, | |
Morales, Melesio, | |
Morales Pino, Pedro, | |
Moras, Lorenzo, | |
Moravians | |
in Barbados, | |
in Central America, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
Mordisco (periodical), | |
MoreŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Morel de Santa Cruz, | |
Morena (Afro-Peruvian group), | |
Moreno Andrade, Segundo Luis, | |
Moreno Rivas, Yolanda, | |
MorlaŽs GutieŽrrez, Alberto, | |
Moser, Brian, | |
MotiloŽn culture, instruments of, | |
MotoliniŽa, Toribio de, | |
Mouton, Jean, | |
movement. See dance and movement | |
Mowatt, Judy, | |
Moxo culture, | |
harmony of, | |
research on, | |
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, | |
MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), | |
Municipal Conservatory of Music (Havana), | |
Munizaga, Carlos, | |
Mun~oz Camargo, Diego, | |
Mun~oz TaŽbora, JesuŽs, | |
Muquinche, Don CeŽsar, | |
Muriel, IneŽs, | |
Murillo, Emilio, | |
Museo ArqueoloŽgico (Ecuador), | |
Museo ArqueoloŽgico del Instituto National de Seguros (Costa Rica), | |
Museo HistoŽrico Nacional (Uruguay), | |
Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, | |
Museum of the Belgian Congo (Belgium), | |
Music Conservatory (Brazil), | |
MuŽsica Viva, | |
Musical Institute for Folk Music Research, | |
Musical Publications and Recording Studios (Cuba), |
musicians. See performers | |
musicology, in Cuba, | |
Muslims, in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Mussorgsky, Modest, | |
Muzenza (bloco afro), | |
Myerhoff, Barbara, | |
Myers, Helen, | |
myths, 16-21. | See also cosmology; narratives; recitation |
Bolivia, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Caribbean, | |
Central America, | |
creation, | |
Cubeo culture, | |
Datura Person, | |
Desana culture, | |
El Dorado, | |
El Salvador, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
K?ekchi Maya, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Mataco culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
origin of sacred flutes, | |
South America, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Trique culture, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Nacaome (musical group), | |
Nago cult, | |
Nahua culture, 550, 563, 576, 707. See also | |
Mexica culture | |
narratives of, | |
Narin~o culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
narratives. See also corrida; recitation; vocal music | |
Brazil, seafaring stories, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, siwa? paŽkošl, | |
Carriacou, genealogies, | |
Dominica, kont (storytelling), | |
Guadeloupe, storytelling, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, mboraheŽi pukuŽ, | |
Guyana, African storytelling traditions, | |
Jamaica, storytelling, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Martinique, krik-krac tales, | |
Mexico, corrida, | |
Montserrat, storytelling, | 923 |
Nahua culture, | |
Nicaragua, corrido, | |
Otopame culture, | |
St. Lucia, listwa (storytelling), | |
Trinidad and Tobago, Indian, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Nasca culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
Nascimento, Milton, | |
National Academy of Tango (Argentina), | |
National Academy of Tango (Uruguay), | |
national anthems, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Colombia, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Guatemala, | |
National Archives of Music (Dominican Republic), | |
National Center for Concert Music (Cuba), | |
National Center for Higher Professional Education (Cuba), | |
National Conservatory (Bolivia), | |
National Conservatory of Music (Dominican Republic), | |
National Conservatory of Music (Guatemala), | |
National History and Arts Council (Guyana), | |
National Lyric Opera (Brazil), | |
National Museum (Panama), | |
National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico), | |
National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (Peru), | |
National Museum of Cuban Music, | |
National Music Publishing House (Cuba), | |
National School of Art (Cuba), | |
National School of Dance (Guyana), | |
National Symphony Choir (Costa Rica), | |
National Symphony Orchestra (Bolivia), | |
National Symphony Orchestra (Costa Rica), | |
nationalism. See also politics Argentina, | |
art music and, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
samba and, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Martinique, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
popular music and, | |
St. Lucia, | |
South America, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
visual arts and, | |
Nava L., E. Fernando, | |
NayariŽt culture | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
iconographical record of, | |
Nazareth (NazareŽ), Ernesto, | |
Neff, Francžoise, | |
Negrete, Jorge, | |
NegroŽn Rivera, Julio, | |
Nepomuceno, Alberto, | |
Netherlands, Caribbean territories, | |
Netherlands Antilles, |
See also Aruba; Bonaire; Curacžao |
art music in, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical traditions, | |
political status of, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
tambuŽ in, | |
Neukomm, Sigmund, | |
Neves, JoseŽ Maria, | |
Nevis, musical genres, steelbands, | |
New Music Group, | |
New Spain, | |
Nicaragua, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
art music in, | |
Atlantic Coast, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Creole people, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
geography of, | |
Granada, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
LeoŽn, | |
map of, | |
mestizo people in, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
MonimboŽ, | |
musical genres | |
mento, | |
nueva cancioŽn, | |
palo de mayo, | |
puriŽsima, | |
romance, | |
son, | |
son nica, | |
sones de cacho, | |
sones de pascua, | |
sones de toro, | |
villancico naviden~o, | |
volcanto, | |
musical life, | |
Pacific Coast, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
Rama culture, | |
research on, | |
Sumu culture, | |
Nicarao culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Nicholson, Ruby, | |
Nicola, Jean, | |
Nicola, Narat, | |
Niewindt, Martinus Joannes, | |
Nima Quiche, | |
No SeŽ Quien y No SeŽ Cuantos, | |
Noanama culture, instruments of, | |
Nobre, Marios, | |
NoŽbrega, Manoel da, | |
Noelia (cuarteto singer), | |
Nordenskiošld, Erland, | |
Norte de PotosiŽ, | |
notation charango, | |
Colombia, of popular music, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Peru, of pre-Hispanic music, | |
staff, of bambuco, | |
nueva cancioŽn, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Chile, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
nueva trova, | |
Nuevo Mundo (marimba ensemble), |
NuŽn~ez, Evangelina de, | |
NuŽn~ez de Balboa, Vasco, | |
NuŽn~ez del Prado, Oscar, | |
N~ahn~uŽ culture. See OtomiŽ culture | |
N~usta Huillac (Inca princess), | |
Obi, Bredda David, | |
O'Brien-Rothe, Linda, | |
Ochoa, Angeles, | |
Ochoa, Calixto, | |
Ochurte, Sen~or don Trinidad, | |
ODILA (Orquesta de Instrumentos LatinAmericanos), | |
Odilio UrfeŽ Center for Promotion and Information on Cuban Music, | |
Ojeda, Alonso de, | |
Okinawan people, in South America, | |
Old Time Mas', | |
Oller y Cestero, Francisco, | |
Olmec culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Olodum (bloco afro), | |
Olsen, Dale A., | |
Ona (Selk'nam) culture, | |
vocal music of, | |
On~ate, CristoŽbal, | |
On~ate, Pedro de, | |
one-man bands. See instrumental ensembles, solo | |
opera. See also tonadilla; zarzuela | |
Chinese, | |
European, | |
Guatemalan, | |
Italian, | |
Latin American, | |
Mexican, | |
operetta, | |
Oppenheimer, Joselito, | |
oral history, 22. See also narratives | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Grenada, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
oral tradition and transmission, | |
See also pedagogy | |
Argentina, | |
secular vocal music, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, tropical-forest region, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Guyana, of Hindi bhajan, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Martinique, | |
Mexico, children's songs, | |
of myths, | |
Panama, | |
role in preservation, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Warao culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Orchestre Casino Internationale, | |
Orellana, JoaquiŽn, | |
organizations. See societies and organizations | |
Original Music (record company), | |
Original Turtle Shell Band, | |
Orisa, 952, 954-57. | See also Shango |
Orquesta AragoŽn, | |
Orquesta de CaŽmara Nicaragušense (Nicaragua), | |
Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (Bolivia), | |
Orquesta Gris, | |
Orquesta Nacional (Nicaragua), | |
Orquesta SinfoŽnica de la Ciudad de AsuncioŽn (Paraguay), | |
Orquesta SinfoŽnica Nacional (Colombia), | |
Orquestra TiŽpica Pixinguinha-Donga, | |
Orrego-Salas, Juan, | |
OrsuŽa, Arzans de, | |
Ortega, Aniceto, | |
Ortiga (musical group), | |
Ortiz (Cuban musican), | |
Ortiz (violist), | |
Ortiz, Alfredo Rolando, | |
Ortiz, Fernando, | |
Ortiz, Manuel Antonio, | |
Ortiz de la Pen~a, JoseŽ, | |
Ortiz de ZaŽrate, Juan, | |
Os Oito Batutas, | |
Oscar, General Charles, | |
Osmar (Bahian musician), | |
Osorio y Ricaurte, Juan CrisoŽstomo, | |
Ospina, SimoŽn, | |
Otavalo culture, 379, 413. | See also Quichua culture |
OtomiŽ culture, | |
Otopame culture, | |
dances of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
huapango arriben~o, | |
huapango huasteco, | |
mestizo, | |
minuete, | |
son arriben~o, | |
research on, | |
songs of, | |
Oviedo y ValdeŽs, Gonzalo FernaŽndez de, | |
Owen, Roger C., | |
Pacaca culture, | |
Pacha (musical group), | |
Pacheco Areco, Jorge, | |
Pacini HernaŽndez, Deborah, | |
Padilla, Rafael, | |
PaŽez culture, instruments of, | |
Pai-pai culture, | |
PaiŽ-TavyteraŽ culture, | |
Pajelancža, | |
Palacio, Andy, | |
Palacios, Carlos, | |
Palacios, Juan, | |
Palestinian people, in Caribbean, | |
Palikur culture, | |
instruments of, | |
vocal music of, | |
Palm, Edgar, | |
Palm, Jan Gerard, | |
Palmer, Paula, | |
Pame culture, | |
Pan American Union, | |
Panama, | |
African brotherhoods in, | |
African descendants, | |
archaeomusicological research in, | |
art music, | |
Aztec, Maya, and Chibcha cultures in, | |
Bocas del Toro province, | |
children's wakes in, | |
ChiriquiŽ province, | |
Choco culture, | |
Chorrera, | |
CocleŽ province, | |
ColoŽn province, | |
Cuban people in, | |
DarieŽn province, | |
English people, | |
festivals of, | |
GarachineŽ, | |
geography of, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, | |
Herrera province, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
instruments of, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Los Santos province, | |
map of, | |
music and dance of, | |
musical genres | |
calypso, | |
congo, | |
cumbia, | |
deŽcima, | |
el tamborito, | |
punto, | |
PanamaŽ province, | |
Pearl Islands, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
San Blas Islands, | |
Spanish heritage in, | |
Teribe culture, | |
Veraguas province, | |
PanamaŽ la Vieja, | |
Panamaka Sumu, | |
Panare culture, | |
Papago culture. See Tohono O'odham culture | |
Paracas culture, instruments of, | |
parades. See processions and parades | |
Paraguay, | |
Afro-Brazilian cults in, | |
AsuncioŽn, | |
Chaco region, | |
children's wakes in, | |
dances of, | |
geography of, | |
German people in, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Japanese people in, | |
Jesuits in, | |
musical genres" | |
cancioŽn (also puraheŽi), | |
galopa, | |
guaraŽnia, | |
musiqueada, | |
polca, | |
serenata, | |
performers, | |
popular music of, | |
population of, | |
religious contexts in, | |
research on, | |
secular contexts in, | |
YapeyuŽ, | |
Paramaka culture, | |
Pardo Tovar, AndreŽs, | |
Paret-Limardo de Vela, Lise, | |
PariŽs, Juan, |
Paroliers Musique, | |
Parra, AŽngel, | |
Parra, Isabel, | |
Parra, Violeta, | |
PaŽrraga, Manuel MariŽa, | |
Parreiras Neves, Ignacio, | |
Parry, Milman, | |
Parsons, Elsie Clews, | |
Pascoal, Hermeto, | |
pasillo, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Ecuador, | |
in Guatemala, | |
Pasquet, Alix "Dadou," | |
Pastorcita Huaracina, | |
Patagone (Tehuelche) culture, | |
Patamona culture, | |
religious music of, | |
Patterson, H. O., | |
Paucke, Florian, | |
Paul, Fred, | |
Paul, Norman, | |
Paula Aguirre, Francisco de, | |
Pavlova, Anna, | |
Paya culture, | |
Pearl Jam, | |
Pearse, Andrew, | |
pedagogy, |
See also enculturation; oral tradition and transmission; specific institutions |
Argentina, | |
for cuarteto performers, | |
art music, | |
Aztec culture, cuicalli schools, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
of African slaves, | |
capoeira, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Chile, tango, | |
Colombia, | |
art music, | |
bambuco, | |
currulao, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
electronic preservation and, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guyana, | |
British traditions of, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kogi culture, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Maya culture, apprenticeship, | |
Mexico, | |
mission schools, | |
missionary music schools, | |
Nicaragua, | |
mission schools, | |
Paraguay, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
St. Lucia, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, | |
Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, | |
Pedro Pablo Traversari Collection of Musical Instruments (Ecuador), | |
Pelo (periodical), | |
Pen Cayetano and the Turtles, | |
Pen~a, Jorge, | |
Pena Branca and Xavantinho, | |
Pen~a HernaŽndez, Enrique, | |
Pentecostals | |
in Argentina, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Paraguay, | |
Perdomo Escobar, JoseŽ Ignacio, | |
Perea, Lilia, | |
PeŽrez de Arce, JoseŽ, | |
PeŽrez de Ribas, AndreŽs, | |
PeŽrez de ZaŽrate, Dora, | |
PeŽrez Estrada, Francisco, | |
PeŽrez JimeŽnez, Marcos, | |
PeŽrez Prado, DaŽmaso, | |
performance spaces, |
See also theaters |
Argentina, | |
bailantas, | |
cantinas, | |
for muŽsica tropical, | |
for tango, | |
Bahamas, nightclubs, | |
Barbados, plantation homes, | |
bars and brothels, | |
Belize, for punta-rock, | |
Bolivia | |
for fiestas and dances, | |
machetero dance, | |
music clubs, | |
Brazil | |
for cantoria, | |
forroŽ clubs, | |
nightclubs, | |
pickup trucks, | |
social class and, | |
temporary structures, | |
Colombia | |
bailaderos, | |
casetas, | |
discoteca, | |
for folkloric music, | |
piqueteaderos, | |
for serenata, | |
Costa Rica, | |
town plazas, | |
dance halls, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
bars and brothels, | |
Guadeloupe, nightclubs, | |
Guarijiio culture, pascola ramada, | |
Guatemala, | |
for popular music, | |
Haiti | |
peristil, | |
for popular music, | |
for public dances, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Martinique, | |
street music, | |
MbyaŽ culture, | |
Mexico | |
quioscos, | |
street performers, | |
Montserrat, rum shops, | |
nightclubs, | |
Paraguay | |
kermese, | |
parrilladas, | |
Peru | |
chicoŽdromos, | |
coliseos, | |
pen~as criollas, | |
pen~as folkloŽricas, | |
salsoŽdromos, | |
for popular music performances, | |
popular music venues, | |
Q'ero corn beer festival, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
street, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, calypso tents, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Uruguay | |
cafeŽs, | |
dance halls, | |
for popular music, | |
tablados, | |
tangueriŽas, | |
Virgin Islands, for quadrille, | |
Performers | |
age of, | |
Andean regions, | |
north-south distinctions, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, Old Time masquerade bands, | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto groups, | |
locutor, | |
payadores, | |
professionalization of, | |
Bahamas, | |
basser, | |
rhymer, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil | |
alabe^ drummers in CandombleŽ rituals, | |
caboclinhos, | |
caboclos de lancža, | |
for carnival, | |
choro~es, | |
emboladores, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
StsošŽoškošl, | |
Caribbean, mummers, | |
Carriacou, chantwell, | |
cathedral musicians, | |
Chile, bailes, | |
Colombia | |
band director, | |
bordonero, | |
dueto bambuquero, | |
tiplero (also requintador), | |
Costa Rica, payasos, | |
Cuba | |
censor, | |
church musicians, | |
clarina, | |
decimista, | |
tonista, | |
trovadores, | |
Dominica | |
chantwe`l, | |
danm, | |
kavalyeŽ, | |
lavwa, | |
Dominican Republic, trovadores, | |
Ecuador | |
danzantes, | |
glosador, | |
golpeador, | |
paki, | |
respondedoras, |
El Salvador, | |
Garifuna culture, gayusa, | |
gender of, | |
Guadeloupe | |
chante`, | |
konmande`, | |
reŽponde`, | |
Guar?io culture, tureŽlo, | |
Guyana, calypsonians, | |
Haiti | |
bandleaders, | |
onje`nikon, | |
sanba, | |
twoubadou, | |
Jamaica, bomma, | |
kinship and, | |
Kuna culture, chanters, | |
Martinique, kadans musicians, | |
Mexico | |
conckeros, | |
depictions of, | |
maestros cantores, | |
Mixtec culture, tejorones, | |
Montserrat, musickers, | |
Nicaragua | |
dance troupes, | |
national institutions, | |
occupation and, | |
Panama | |
cantalante, | |
decimero, | |
gran diablos, | |
mejoraneros, | |
revelliŽn, | |
segundas, | |
Paraguay, | |
galoperas, | |
Peru | |
Afro-Peruvian genres, | |
black dance masters, | |
chunginos, | |
harawiq, | |
responseros, | |
semiprofessional creole groups, | |
tamborero, | |
tunantadas, | |
popular musicians, social backgrounds of | |
Puerto Rico | |
cantaor, | |
trovador, | 937 |
St. Lucia, chantwe`l, | |
social context of, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Surinam | |
dalang, | |
dukun, | |
le`de`k, | |
Taino culture, tequina, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, chantwells, | |
Uruguay, murgas, | |
Venezuela, | |
guiŽa, | |
maraquero, | |
paleros, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, specialists, | |
Yuma culture, | |
PeroŽn, Juan, | |
Perrone, Charles A., | |
Perry, Hubert, | |
Peru, | |
Afro-Peruvian traditions of, | |
Amazonian region | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres of, | |
Andean area | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres of, | |
Andean migrants in urban areas, | |
archaeomusicological research in, | |
art music in, | |
children's wakes in, | |
Chinese people in, | |
Christian holidays in, | |
coastal region, musical genres of, | |
early cities of, | |
geography of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
immigrant clubs in, | |
instruments of, | |
Japanese people in, | |
Jesuits in, | |
Lima, | |
Andean music in, | |
mingas (work parties), | |
music printing in, | |
musical genres | |
carnaval (also wifala; puqllay; araskaska; pumpiŽn, pasacalle), | |
chicha, | |
cumbia, | |
festejo, | |
folkloric, | |
harawi, | |
harp performance styles, | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
haylli, | |
huayla, | |
huayno (also wayno), | |
kasbwa, | |
kh?ajhelo, | |
landoŽ, | |
marinera, | |
muliza, | |
nueva cancioŽn, | |
polka, | |
pre-Encounter, | |
salsa, | |
Santiago, | |
tondero, | |
triste, | |
turn kasbwa, | |
vals, | |
vals criollo, | |
walina, | |
wanka, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
zamacueca, | |
popular music in, | |
population of, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples, | |
religious processions, | |
research on, | |
social organization in, | |
sound recording industry, | |
tropical-forest region of, | |
urban Andean migrants, | |
PeruŽ Negro, | |
Peruvian people, in Mexico, | |
Pessanha, Ricardo, | |
Peteke (Paraguayan band), | |
Peters, Wilfred, Jr., | |
Philharmonic Organization of Havana, | |
Philip III, king of Spain, | |
philology, | |
Phonogramm-Archiv Berlin, | |
Pianoi culture, | |
Piaroa (Wothuha) culture, shamanism in, | |
Piartal culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
Piazzolla, Astor, | |
Picaflor de los Andes, | |
Picard, Bernard, | |
Pierre Rassin Orchestra, | |
Pigafetta, Antonio, | |
Pikunche culture, | |
PilagaŽ culture, instruments of, | |
Pilgrim, Philip, | |
Pima culture, | |
matachiŽn dance of, | |
Pin~eiro, Ignacio, | |
Pin~eros Corpas, JoaquiŽn, | |
Pines, Jim, | |
Pinnell, Richard, | |
Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, | |
Pinto, JoaquiŽn, | |
Pixinguinha (Alfredo da Rocha Viana), | |
Pizarro, Francisco, | |
PlaŽ, Josefina, | |
Plebs, Milena, | |
Plotkin, Mark J., | |
PocociŽ culture, | |
PocomiŽa, | |
poetry. | See also song texts |
Argentina, | |
payada, | |
Bolivia, Quechua, | |
Brazil | |
cantoria, | |
sextilha, | |
Caribbean, deŽcima, | |
Chile | |
cogollo, | |
copla, | |
deŽcima, | |
pareado, | |
quintilla, | |
romance, | |
seguidilla, | |
tonada, | |
verso, | |
Colombia, | |
copla, | |
deŽcima, | |
romance, | |
Costa Rica | |
bomba, | |
retahila, | |
Cuba | |
cuarteta, | |
deŽcima, | |
Dominican Republic | |
deŽcima, | |
poesiŽa coreada, | |
Guyana, | |
calypso, | |
Honduras, copla, | |
Jamaica, chanted genres, | |
Mexico | |
copla, | |
deŽcima, | |
quintilla, | |
seguidilla, | |
sextilla, | |
Nicaragua | |
copla, |
poetry (continued) | |
romance, | |
Otopame culture | |
copla, | |
deŽcima, | |
valona, | |
Panama, deŽcima, | |
Peru | |
amor fino, | |
cumanana, | |
deŽcima, | |
Puerto Rico | |
copla, | |
cuarteta, | |
deŽcima, | |
decimilla, | |
Spain | |
AndaluciŽan zejel, | |
deŽcima, | |
romance, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
parang, | |
speech mas? | |
Venezuela, deŽcima, | |
Yaqui culture, corrido, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Pokoman Maya, | |
Polish people | |
in Mexico, | |
in South America, | |
politics | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Argentina, | |
cuarteto and, | |
cultural policies, | |
music and, | |
tango and, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, cultural policies, | |
Belize, | |
cultural policies, | |
Bolivia, | |
cultural policies, | |
Brazil, | |
cantoria and, | |
cultural policies, | |
Movimento Negro Unificado, | |
samba and, | |
Caribbean, | |
Central America, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
cultural policies, | |
Dominica, | |
cultural policies, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
cultural policies, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
cultural policies, | |
French Guiana, | |
Grenada, | |
Guadeloupe, cultural policies, | |
Guatemala, | |
native American movements, | |
Guyana, cultural policies, | |
Haiti, | |
cultural policies, | |
Indonesia, relations with Surinam, | |
Jamaica | |
reggae and, | |
social protest, | |
Martinique, | |
Mexico, | |
cultural policies, | |
independence period, | |
native American movements, | |
music and, | |
Nicaragua, | |
cultural policies, | |
Sandinista period, | |
Panama, cultural policies, | |
Paraguay, cultural policies, | |
Peru, | |
popular music and, | |
rallies, | |
St. Lucia, | |
cultural policies, | |
South America | |
cultural policies, | |
identity and, | |
independence movements, | |
wars in, | |
Spain, | |
Surinam, | |
relations with Indonesia, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
calypso and, | |
during carnival, | |
cultural policies, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, cultural policies, | |
polka, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Mapuche culture, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Peru, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Pollak-Eltz, Angelina, | |
Pombo, Rafael, | |
Ponce, Manuel M., | |
Ponce de LeoŽn, JoseŽ MariŽa, | |
Pondler, Barry, | |
Poole, Deborah A., | |
Popol Vuh, | |
Popoloca culture, | |
popular music. See also rock; specific genres | |
Africa, | |
age and preference issues, | |
Argentina, | |
cuarteto, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Belize, cungo, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
African traits in, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
British, in Barbados, | |
Caribbean, | |
Anglophone areas, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Chile, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
Francophone areas, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Martinique, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in New York, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Peru, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
dissemination of, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
economics of, | |
El Salvador, | |
French Antilles, | |
French Guiana, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
Guadeloupe | |
beguine, | |
zouk, | |
Guatemala, | |
Haiti, | |
internationalization of, | |
issues in, | |
Jamaica, | |
karaoke, | |
Latin, in New York, | |
Martinique, | |
orchestral beguine, | |
zouk and post-zouk, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexican | |
in Chile, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
Mexico, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
North American | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Peru, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
research on, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Spanish-American, | |
transnational influences on, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
United States, Latin American influences, | |
Uruguay, | |
Venezuela, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Portugal, Marcos, | |
Portuguese people | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, |
in Grenada, | |
in Guyana, | |
identity issues of, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Potes, TeoŽfilo, | |
Powell, Baden, | |
Powell, John, | |
power and status | |
of art music, | |
Bolivia, of instruments, | |
Ecuador, of musicians, | |
Guadeloupe, of musicians, | |
Haiti, musical genres, | |
of instruments, | |
Kogi culture, of musical knowledge, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Martinique, kadans musicians, | |
Maya culture | |
of music, | |
of musicians, | |
Mexica culture, of dancers, | |
of music, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
St. Lucia, of kwadril participants, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, Spiritual Baptists, | |
Yuma culture, of musicians, | |
Prema Satsangh, | |
Presbyterians, in Jamaica, | |
PrestaŽn, Arnulfo, | |
Price, Enrique, | |
Price, Jorge W., | |
Prieto, Arturo, | |
Prieto, Emilia, | |
printing, music, | |
processions and parades, | |
Argentina, religious, | |
Aymara culture, for patronal festivals, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo parade, | |
Barbados, | |
Landship parades, | |
Bolivia, | |
Moxo people, | |
pilgrimages, | |
suna, | |
Brazil, | |
for carnival, | |
dance in, | |
fife-and-drum bands in, | |
folios de reis, | |
pilgrimages, | |
religious processions, | |
samba, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Colombia, municipal band's role in, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Afro-Caribbean people, | |
Carnaval de LimoŽn, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
Virgen de los Angeles festival, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
alborada, | |
morano, | |
parranda, | |
Ecuador, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
Grenada, carnival, | |
Guatemala, | |
Haiti, rara, | |
Jamaica | |
Christmas masquerade, | |
jonkunnu (also buru or horse head), | |
Martinique, | |
videŽ, | |
Maya culture, | |
posadas, | |
for saints' days, | |
San LuiŽs patronal festival, | |
Mexico | |
Chiapas, | |
Virgin of Guadalupe festival, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
movement in, | |
Muslim Matkor procession, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama | |
congo visits, | |
dirty little devils, | |
Independence Day, | |
tunas, | |
Paraguay | |
Holy Week, | |
patronal festivals, | |
promeseros, | |
Peru | |
in children's wakes, | |
cofradiŽas in, | |
Corpus Christi, | |
pilgrimage to Collariti, | |
religious, | |
St. Lucia, masquerade and seŽwinal, | |
shawm's use in, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
parang, | |
road march, | |
steelbands, | |
United States, Bahamian junkanoo groups in, | |
Uruguay, role of Black Lubolos, | |
Venezuela | |
parranda, | |
Parranda de San Pedro, | |
Saint John the Baptist, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Warao culture, traveling music, | |
ProŽspero, Salvador, | |
Protestants, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Central America, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
evangelical groups, | |
Hallelujah sect, | |
in Jamaica, | |
Maya culture, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
music and, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Surinam, | |
Pueblo culture, | |
Puerto Rican people | |
in United States, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
Borinquen culture of, | |
children's wakes in, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
industries of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
bomba, | |
danza, | |
deŽcima, | |
plena, | |
seis, | |
musical links with Venezuela, | |
political status of, | |
popular music in, | |
religious contexts and genres, | |
research on, | |
Pugliese, Osvaldo, | |
Pukko, | |
punk, | |
punta-rock, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
Christian rituals of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres | |
abajen~o, | |
pirekua, | |
son regional, | |
research on, | |
secular rituals of, | |
Qantati Ururi, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
instruments of, | |
musical genres, chunchu, | |
research on, | |
Qolla culture, | |
quadrille, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Bahamas, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in Panama, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Quarkoo, | |
Quechua culture, | |
aesthetics of, | |
instruments of, | |
musical contexts, | |
song traditions of, | |
Quepo culture, | |
Quevedo, Marcos de, | |
Quevedo Rachadell, NicolaŽs, | |
QuicheŽ Maya, | |
songs of, | |
Quichua culture | |
aesthetics of, | |
children's wakes in | |
Holy Week processions of, | |
instruments of, | |
male performers in, | |
New Year's Eve celebration, | |
shamanism in, | |
weddings in, |
QuilapayuŽn, | |
Quintana, Manuel, | |
Quintana, Mr., | |
Quintanar, HeŽctor, | |
Quintero Rivera, Angel G., | |
Quinteto Contrapunto, | |
Quiroz, Manuel JoseŽ de, | |
Quisqueya, | |
Rabinal culture, | |
Racines (Martinican group), | |
Rada, RubeŽn, | |
radio, | |
Argentina, | |
Barbados, | |
Belize, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Brunka culture, | |
Central America, | |
Chile, | |
Colombia, | |
copyright issues and, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
educational role of, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guatemala, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maleku culture, | |
Martinique, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
St. Lucia, | |
Surinam, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Uruguay, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Warao culture, | |
Rafael (Spanish singer), | |
ragga, | |
ragtime, | |
Rama culture, | |
Ramalho, Elba, | |
Ramgoonai, Drupatee, | |
RamiŽrez, Ariel, | |
RamiŽrez de Arellano, Enrique, | |
Ramkhelawan, Kries, | |
RamoŽn y Rivera, LuiŽs Felipe, | |
ranchera, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Chile, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Ranglin, Ernie, | |
rap, | |
Brazil, | |
cuarteto and, | |
Haiti, | |
Martinique, | |
Peru, | |
plena-rap, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
Rapa Nui, | |
RaraŽmuri culture. See Tarahumara culture | |
Rastafarianism, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Belize, | |
in Jamaica, | |
Rauni (Brazilian Indian leader), | |
Ravicz, Robert S., | |
RCI Productions, | |
recitation. See also narratives | |
Guyana, in healing rituals, | |
Maleku culture, poora and jalacomapacuaper, | |
Nicaragua, la gigantona, | |
Panama, declamations, | |
Warao culture, in shamanic songs, | |
Recuay culture, instruments of, | |
Red Plastic Bag (calypsonian), | |
Redfield, Robert, | |
Reeks, Dori, | |
Reflexu's (samba-reggae group), | |
reggae, | |
in Belize, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Guatemala, | |
influence on Brazilian samba music, | |
in Jamaica, | |
links to Martinican zouk, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Nicaragua, rasta, | |
in Peru, | |
reggae resiste^ncia, | |
sound recordings of, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Regla de OchaŽ. See SanteriŽa | |
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, | |
Reid, Duke, | |
Reily, Suzel Ana, | |
Reis, SeŽrgio, | |
religion. See also CandombleŽ; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism; Orisa; Rastafarianism; SanteriŽa; Shango; TenrikyoŻ; Vodou; specific Christian denominations | |
African-derived, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Belize, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Amerindian, | |
Arawak culture, | |
Argentina, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
audiences and, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bolivia, | |
Carib culture, | |
Colombia, | |
ethnic identity and, | |
Garifuna culture, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, mamanchiŽ, | |
Guyana, syncretic, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kogi culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mayo culture, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
myth and, | |
Paraguay, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
role in musical enculturation, | |
spirit communication (See shamanism) | |
spirit possession, | |
in Belize, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Surinam, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
Surinam, Maroon cultures, | |
Tairona culture, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Winti, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Rennock, Mrs. Marie, | |
Rephann, Richard, | |
Restrepo Duque, HernaŽn, | |
Restrepo L., Pablo, | |
Reuter, Jas, | |
Revista Musical Chilena (periodical), | |
Revival cult, | |
Revueltas, Silvestre, | |
Reyna, Cornelio, | |
Reyna, Fredy, | |
rhythm and blues, | |
rhythm and meter | |
acculturation and, | |
in African music, | |
in Amerindian music, | |
in Andean music, | |
Argentina | |
candombe (also charanda; ramba), | |
tunga-tunga, | |
Bahamas | |
junkanoo, | |
rake 'n' scrape, | |
Barbados | |
African influences, | |
spouge, | |
Belize, brukdown, | |
Bolivia, vespers music, | |
Brazil | |
Afro-Brazilian genres, | |
baia~o de viola, |
bossa nova, | |
caboclinho genres, | |
caboclo music, | |
in CandombleŽ music, | |
cantoria, | |
capoeira songs, | |
caterete^, | |
co^co songs, | |
embolada, | |
forroŽ, | |
frevo de rua, | |
habanera, | |
ijexaŽ, | |
maxixe, | |
samba, | |
samba campineiro, | |
samba-lencžo, | |
samba-reggae, | |
ternos songs, | |
toque afro-primitivo, | |
zabumba patterns, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, ritual songs, | |
Carriacou, big-drum dance, | |
Chile | |
cueca, | |
romance, | |
tonada, | |
Colombia | |
African-derived traits, | |
bambuco, | |
cumbia, | |
for currulao, | |
danza, | |
pasillo, | |
valknato, | |
Costa Rica | |
son suelto, | |
song-dances, | |
zarabanda, | |
Cuba | |
criolla, | |
danzoŽn, | |
makuta, | |
in SanteriŽa | |
Dominican Republic | |
bomba-e, | |
criolla, | |
jacana, | |
palo abajo and palo arriba, | |
palo corrida, | |
palos de muerto, | |
salve con versos, | |
sarandunga, | |
Ecuador | |
bomba, | |
currulao, | |
pareja, | |
in Passion songs, | |
French Guiana, kamougeŽ, | |
Garifuna culture | |
chumba, | |
combination, | |
in dušguš ritual, | |
eremuna eŽgi, | |
of garavoŽn drum music, | |
gunjeŽi, | |
hušngušhušnguš, | |
punta, | |
senbai, | |
wanaragua, | |
Guadeloupe | |
beguine, | |
carnival music, | |
leŽwo`z, | |
quadrille, | |
zouk, | |
Guarijio culture | |
contradanza, | |
son principal, | |
Guatemala, son guatemalteco, | |
Haiti | |
kase, | |
mereng koudyay, | |
Vodou ritual music, | |
Honduras | |
mestizo dance music, | |
xique, | |
Jamaica | |
for buru, | |
cult rhythms, | |
goombeh rhythms, | |
in Kumina cult drumming, | |
limbo, | |
mento, | |
in Revival music, | |
ska, | |
Mapuche culture, pifušlka music, | |
Martinique | |
beguine, | |
kadans, | |
mazouk, | |
Maya culture | |
of ancestral songs, | |
jota, | |
Mexica culture, | |
sones, | |
Mexico | |
Amerindian music, | |
canciones rancheras, | |
compaŽs, | |
corrido, | |
gusto, | |
habanera, | |
polka, | |
son, | |
son jalisciense, | |
son jarocho, | |
zapateado, | |
Miskitu culture, tiun, | |
Netherlands Antilles | |
tambuŽ, | |
waltz, | |
Nicaragua | |
baile de la marimba, | |
mazurka, | |
mento, | |
son nica, | |
Panama | |
el tamborito, | |
mejorana, | |
punto, | |
Paraguay | |
guaraŽnia, | |
polca, | |
Peru | |
cumbia, | |
festejo, | |
huayno, | |
landoŽ | |
marinera, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
Puerto Rico | |
bomba, | |
seis, | |
PureŽpecha culture | |
abajen~o, | |
cuatrillo, | |
pirekua, | |
son regional, | |
torito, | |
St. Lucia | |
kwadril, | |
La Rose musical styles, | |
Shuar music, | |
SuyaŽ unison songs, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, Orisa drumming, | |
Uruguay, tango, | |
Venezuela | |
Amerindian music, | |
chimbanguele, | |
cyclic, | |
joropo, | |
"La Batalla," | |
malembe, | |
Yekuana curing songs, | |
Yanomamoš culture, shamanic songs, | |
Yuma culture, dance-songs, | |
Ricardo Palma (Peruvian ensemble), | |
Riedel, Johannes, | |
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, | |
Rinaldi, Susana, | |
RiŽos YaŽn~ez, Ovaldo, | |
Rita, Jacinto, | |
Ritmo y Juventud, | |
rituals. See ceremonies | |
Rivas, IneŽs, | |
Rivas de DomiŽnguez, Celia Ruiz, | |
Rivera, Danny, | |
Rivera y Rivera, Roberto, | |
Rivero, Edmundo, | |
Roaring Lion (Hubert de Leon; calypsonian), | |
Robbins, James, | |
Roberts, John Storm, | |
Robinson, Ken, | |
Rocha, Otto de la, | |
Rochefort, Cesar de, | |
rock, | |
Argentina, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Chile, | |
Christian, | |
Costa Rica, | |
El Salvador, | |
Haiti, | |
Mexico, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
Puerto Rico, | |
Uruguay, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Rock & Pop, | |
rock en espan~ol, | |
rock-steady, | |
Rodrigues, Jair, | |
RodriŽguez, Fabian, | |
RodriŽguez, JesuŽs, | |
RodriŽguez, JoseŽ LuiŽs (El Puma), | |
RodriŽguez, JoseŽ NapoleoŽn, | |
RodriŽguez, Miguel Angel, | |
RodriŽguez, Olavo AleŽn, | |
RodriŽguez, Sylvio, | |
RodriŽguez, Wesceslao, | |
RoldaŽn, Amadeo, | |
Rolling Stones, | |
RomaŽn, Father (Jesuit priest), | |
Roman Catholics, | |
Andean regions, | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Argentina, |
Roman Catholics (continued) | |
in Aruba, | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Brazil, | |
syncretism with African religions, | |
in Caribbean, | |
censorship of traditional music and ceremonies, | |
in Central America, | |
in Chile, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Ecuador, | |
in El Salvador, | |
GariŽfuna culture, | |
gender issues, | |
Guarijio culture, | |
in Guatemala, | |
GuaymiŽ culture, | |
in Haiti, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Jamaica, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexica culture, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Paraguay, | |
in Peru, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Venezuela, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Romero, Fernando, | |
Romero, Luis Casas, | |
Romero, SiŽlvio, | |
Roncal, SimeoŽn, | |
Roos, Jaime, | |
roots music (mizik rasin), | |
Rosa, Noel, | |
Rosas, Juventino, | |
Rossini, Gioacchino, | |
Roth, Walter E., | |
Rouse, Irving, | |
Royal (marimba ensemble), | |
Royal Schools of Music (London), | |
Rubio, Miguel AŽngel, | |
Rudder, Antonio "Boo," | |
Rudder, David, | |
Ruffinel (French Guianese songwriter), | |
RuiŽz, Eduardo, | |
Ruiz Espadero, NicolaŽs, | |
rumba, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
Rumillajta, | |
Russian people | |
in Paraguay, | |
in South America, | |
Saba, | |
Sabas (French Guianese songwriter), | |
Sacasa, Juan Bautista, president of Nicaragua, | |
Sachs, Curt, | |
SaŽenz, Anselmo, | |
SaŽenz, Guido, | |
SaŽenz de A., Benedicto, | |
SaŽha culture, | |
SahaguŽn, Bernardino, | |
St. Croix, | |
St. Croix Heritage Dancers, | |
St. John, | |
St. Kitts, | |
musical genres, steelbands, | |
St. Lucia, | |
African brotherhoods in, | |
history of, | |
La Rose and La Marguerite societies in, | |
musical genres | |
calypso, | |
jweŽ, | |
kwadril, | |
masquerade, | |
seŽwinal, | |
popular music in, | |
research on, | |
tourism in, | |
St. Lucian people, in French Guiana, | |
St. Martin, | |
St. Thomas, | |
St. Vincent, | |
GariŽfuna emigrants from, | |
Salas y Castro, Esteban, | |
Salasaca culture, | |
Salazar, Rafael, | |
Salazar, Rodrigo, | |
SaldiŽvar, Gabriel, | |
Salesian order, | |
SalgaŽn, Horacio, | |
SalmeroŽn, Francisco, | |
salsa, | |
in Argentina, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, | |
ensemble members, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Peru, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
in Uruguay, | |
Salvatierra, Juan MariŽa, | |
Salvation Army, | |
Salve Regina, | |
Samaroo, Jit, | |
samba, samba schools, | |
in Barbados, | |
in Brazil, | |
electronic amplification of, | |
folk genres of, | |
in Guatemala, | |
influence on Umbanda music, | |
samba baiana, | |
samba campineiro, | |
samba-cancža~o, | |
samba carioca, | |
samba carnavalesca, | |
samba-choro, | |
samba corrido, | |
samba da cidade, | |
samba de breque, | |
samba de gafieira, | |
samba de morro, | |
samba de partido-alto, | |
samba de roda, | |
samba de terreiro, | |
samba de viola, | |
samba-enredo, | |
samba-lencžo, | |
samba rural, | |
sound recordings of, | |
samba-reggae, | |
San MartiŽn, JoseŽ de, | |
San Pedro culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
Sanapana culture, | |
SaŽnchez, Edis, | |
SaŽnchez, JoseŽ "Pepe," | |
SaŽnchez, Walter, | |
SaŽnchez de Fuentes, Eduardo, | |
SaŽnchez Labrador, Joseph, | |
Sancho DaŽvila, Bartola, | |
Sandino, Augusto C., | |
Sandoval, Alfonso, | |
Sandro (Argentine singer), | |
Sanima culture, | |
Sankey, Ira David, | |
Santa Anna, Cosme, | |
Santa Cruz, Nicomedes, | |
Santa Cruz, Victoria, | |
Santana, Carlos, | |
SanteriŽa, | |
use of drums, | |
Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, | |
Santoro, ClaŽudio, | |
Sa~o Vicente Captaincy, | |
Sapper, Carl, | |
Saramaka culture, | |
Sarmientos de LeoŽn, Jorge AŽlvaro, | |
Sas, AndreŽs, | |
Saumell, Manuel, | |
Savia Andina, | |
scales and intervals. See also tuning and temperament | |
Andean music, | |
of panpipes, | |
Argentina, | |
pentatonic, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Bolivia | |
panpipes, | |
Westernization of, | |
Brazil | |
caboclo music, | |
cantoria, | |
frevo de bloco, | |
in religious music, | |
Chile, for Virgin Mary festivities, | |
Colombia, bambuco and bunde, | |
Ecuador | |
pentatonic, | |
for pingullo melodies, | |
Guadeloupe, leŽwo`z songs, | |
Guarijio culture, | |
Haiti, Vodou songs, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kogi songs, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Mapuche music, | |
Panama, torrentes, | |
Peru | |
Amazonian region, | |
landoŽ, | |
of panpipes, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, for calypso, | |
Venezuela, Yekuana curing songs, | |
Warao culture, shamanic songs, | |
Yuma vocal music, |
Schanachie (record company), | |
Schechter, John M., | |
Schmiedel, Ulrich, | |
School of Arts Instructors (Cuha), | |
schottische, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Dominica, | |
in French Guiana, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Mapuche culture, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Netherlands Antilles, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
Schreiner, Claus, | |
Scott, Gina, | |
Scottish people | |
in Antigua and Barbuda, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Scruggs, T.M. | |
Secundino, Agapito, | |
Selassie, Haile, | |
Selk'nam culture. See Ona (Selk'nam) culture | |
Seminario de MuŽsica Popular (Cuba), | |
Senegal, | |
goumbeŽ dance, | |
Sepp von Reinegg, Anton, | |
Septeto Nacional, | |
Sequera, Guillermo, | |
Serbian people, in South America, | |
serenades | |
Carriacou, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Garifuna culture, paranda, | |
Mexico, | |
to Virgin of Guadalupe, | |
Paraguay, | |
PureŽpecha culture, | |
St. Lucia, seŽwinal, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, parang, | |
Serenata Guayanesa, | |
Sermisy, Claudin de, | |
Serradell, Narciso, | |
Setti, Kilza, | |
Seven Years' War, | |
Seventh-Day Adventists, in Jamaica, | |
sex and music | |
Barbados, calypso texts, | |
bars and brothels, | |
Bolivia, courtship songs, | |
Brazil, in Afro-Brazilian popular genres, | |
Colombia | |
copla texts, | |
currulao symbolism, | |
Tukano culture, | |
instrument sounds, | |
instruments as fertility symbols, | |
St. Lucia, in jweŽ genre, | |
transvestites, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
calypso song texts, | |
transvestites, | |
Virgin Islands, innuendos in song texts, | |
Sexteto Mayor, | |
sexual differentiation. See also gender | |
AcheŽ-GuayakiŽ culture, of instrumentalists, | |
Andean regions | |
of instrumentalists, | |
of performers, | |
of singers, | |
Argentina, of cuarteto performers, | |
Bahamas | |
of junkanoo participants, | |
of performers, | |
Barbados, of performers, | |
Bolivia, of instrumentalists, | |
Brazil, of ternos membership, | |
Carriacou, of songs, | |
Chile, of instrumentalists, | |
Dominica, of performers, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, of instrumentalists, | |
El Salvador, of musicians, | |
French Guiana | |
of Amerindian repertoires, | |
of French Guiana, | |
Garifuna culture | |
of performers, | |
of song genres, | |
Grenada, of carnival performers, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, of instrumentalists, | |
Haiti, of performers, | |
Jamaica, of instrumentalists, | |
Kogi culture | |
of dancers, | |
of instrumentalists, | |
Kuna culture, of musicians, | |
Mapuche culture | |
of shamans, | |
women's songs, | |
Maya culture, of musicians, | |
Mexico, of son musicians, | |
Mixtec culture, of instrumentalists, | |
of performers and ceremonies, | |
Peru, of genres, | |
Puerto Rico, of bomba choreography, | |
Q'ero culture, of instrumentalists, | |
Quichua culture, of songs, | |
South America, of performers, | |
Sumu culture | |
of collective singing, | |
of instrumentalists, | |
Surinam, of instrumentalists, | |
SuyaŽ culture, of ceremonies, | |
Uruguay, of instrumentalists, | |
Venezuela, of instrumentalists, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, instrumentalists, | |
Warao culture | |
of instruments, | |
of singers, | |
Yanomamoš culture, of songs, | |
Seyewailo, The Flower World: Yaqui Deer Songs, | |
Seymour, A. J., | |
Shak Shah, | |
shamanism, | |
Argentina, | |
Pentecostalism and, | |
Tierra del Fuego, | |
Aymara culture, | |
Bolivia, | |
Bribri culture, | |
Carib culture, | |
Chiriguano-ChaneŽ culture, | |
Costa Rica, | |
French Guiana, | |
Garifuna (GariŽfuna) culture, | |
GuaraniŽ culture, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
Moche culture, | |
musical knowledge and, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
pre-Columbian, | |
Quichua culture, | |
Shuar culture, | |
South America, tropical-forest region, | |
special training for, | |
Sumu culture, | |
Surinam, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Taino culture, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Venezuela, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yanomamoš culture, | |
Yekuana culture, | |
Yuma culture, | |
Shango. See also Orisa | |
in Barbados, | |
in Grenada, | |
Shapis (chicha group), | |
Sharpe, Len "Boogsie," | |
Sheehy, Daniel E., | |
Sheller, Marty, | |
Sherzer, Joel, | |
Shilling Agard, | |
Shipibo culture, | |
Shleu Shleu, | |
Shondoube, Otto, | |
Short Shirt (benna performer), | |
Shorti (calypsonian), | |
Shortpants (calypsonian), | |
Shuar culture, | |
instruments of, | |
shamanism in, | |
Sibelius, Jean, | |
Siboney culture, | |
Sicot, WeŽbert, | |
SifleŽ Montan'y, | |
Sila Godoy, Cayo, | |
Silva, Bezerra da, | |
Silva, Francisco Manuel da, | |
Silva, Gonzalo de, | |
Silva, Horondino, | |
Silva, Rodrigo, | |
Silva Callado, Joaquim Antonio^da, | |
Silvestre, Sonia, | |
Simon, Paul, | |
Simon, Winston "Spree," | |
Simon and Garfunkel, | |
Simonal, Wilson, | |
Simpson, George, | |
Sindici, Oreste, | |
Singer, Roberta, | |
singing. See also vocal music | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Bolivia, high-pitched style, | |
Brazil | |
aboio style, | |
for religious music, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, timbre, | |
Dominican Republic, salve con versos, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, | |
Guyana, African-derived practices, | |
Haiti | |
timbre, |
singing (continued) | |
Vodou songs, | |
Jamaica, timbre, | |
Kogi culture, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Martinique | |
kadans, | |
timbre, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexican Amerindian music, | |
Mexico, falsetto, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
Nicaragua, timbre, | |
Panama | |
aesthetics of, | |
yodeling, | |
Peru | |
Andean area, | |
hatajos de negritos, | |
Indian vs. mestizo aesthetics, | |
South America, high-pitched aesthetic, | |
Sinho^ (samba performer), | |
Sint Eustatius, | |
Sint Maarten, | |
SinuŽ culture | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
Siqueira, Baptista, | |
ska, | |
Skatalites, | |
Skinner, Alanson, | |
Slammer (Barbadian minstrel), | |
Small Island Pride (calypsonian), | |
Smetana, Bedr?ich, | |
Smith, M. G., | |
Smith, Ronald R., | |
soca, | |
in Belize, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
social organization | |
age definitions in, | |
Andean societies, | |
Arawak culture, | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto groups, | |
tango and, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
class structure, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, | |
Caribbean, | |
Carriacou, | |
class structures, | |
El Salvador, | |
pre-Encounter, | |
Emerillon culture, | |
ethnic identity and, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Kalina culture, | |
kinship roles, | |
Mapuche culture, | |
Martinique, | |
Montserrat, | |
music and, | |
Palikur culture, | |
Panama, | |
Peru, Andean region, | |
South America, tropical-forest groups, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, | |
steelband membership, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Venezuela, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Sociedad FilarmoŽnica de BogotaŽ (Colombia), | |
Sociedad FilarmoŽnica de Santa Cecilia (Colombia), | |
Sociedad LiŽrica (Colombia), | |
societies and organizations | |
African brotherhoods, | |
Argentina, doctrinas, | |
Barbados, Landship Society, | |
Brazil | |
afoxeŽ, | |
Bahia black associations, | |
blocos afro, | |
carnival clubs, | |
frevo clubs, | |
irmandades, | |
samba schools, | |
ternos, | |
Chile | |
cabildos, | |
confraternidades, | |
hermandades, | |
tango clubs, | |
Colombia | |
art music presenters, | |
cabildos, | |
Costa Rica, | |
cofradiŽa de Nuestra Sen~ora de los Angeles, | |
cofradiŽas, | |
Cuba | |
AbakuaŽ secret society, | |
AraraŽ secret society, | |
Congo secret societies, | |
Mina, Manding, and Gange cabildos, | |
mutual-aid societies, | |
Dominican Republic Brotherhood of St. John the Baptist, | |
Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit, | |
cofradiŽa, | |
gagaŽ, | |
raraŽ, | |
social-cultural-sports clubs, | |
El Salvador, cofradiŽas, | |
Grenada, chamber music, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
quadrille and le`wvo`z societies, | |
Haiti | |
konbit (also sosyete kongo), | |
Maroon societies, | |
raraŽ, | |
immigrant clubs, | |
Kuna culture, gammu burui dancers, | |
Nicaragua, | |
occupational, | |
Panama, cofradiŽas, | |
Paraguay, pasioneros (also estacioneros), | |
Peru, cofradiŽas, | |
St. Lucia, La Rose and La Marguerite, | |
Tarahumara culture | |
Holy Week, | |
matachines, | |
Uruguay, | |
Black Lubolos, | |
criollas, | |
Venezuela, Los diablos danzantes de Yare, | |
Society for Ethnomusicology, | |
Soda Stereo, | |
Sojo, Juan Pablo, | |
Sojo y Pen~aranda, Diego de, | |
Solovera, Clara, | |
Somoza family, | |
son, | |
in Argentina, | |
changušiŽ, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in El Salvador, | |
in Guatemala, | |
in Honduras, | |
in Mexico, | |
in Nicaragua, | |
in Peru, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
regional genres of, | |
son montuno, | |
Soneros de Borojols, | |
song. See vocal music | |
song texts. See also poetry | |
Antigua and Barbuda, calypso, | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto, | |
muŽsica tropical, | |
tangos, | |
Bahamas | |
goombay, | |
junkafunk, | |
rhyming spiritual, | |
Barbados, calypso, | |
Belize, popular brukdown, | |
Bolivia, | |
Quechua, | |
boss anova, | |
Brazil | |
bendito, | |
desafio, | |
forroŽ, | |
fricote, | |
jongo, | |
samba de viola, | |
Carriacou, parang, | |
Chile | |
contrapuntos, | |
cueca, | |
for Virgin Mary festivities, | |
Colombia | |
bambuco, | |
danza, | |
guabina velen~a, | |
pasillo lento, | |
rajalen~a, | |
sanjuanero, | |
vals, | |
Costa Rica | |
bomba, | |
calypso, | |
Cuba, guajira, | |
Dominica, wood-sawing song, | |
Dominican Republic, merengue, | |
Ecuador | |
bomba, |
Passion song, | |
sanjuanito, | |
El Salvador, baile de caceriŽa, | |
Grenada, calypso, | |
Guadeloupe | |
kantikamo`, | |
leŽwo`z, | |
for work songs, | |
Honduras, mestizo dance music, | |
Jamaica | |
for junkunnu, | |
mento, | |
metaphor in, | |
popular music, | |
Kuna culture, improvisation of, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Mapuche culture, kantuŽn, | |
Maroon cultures, se^ke^ti, | |
Maya culture, from Popol Vuh, | |
Mexico | |
aguinaldo, | |
corrido, | |
cumulative stories, | |
las posadas, | |
pin~ata melodies, | |
son, | |
Mixtec culture, katikubi, | |
Montserrat, | |
Nicaragua | |
corrido, | |
son nica, | |
Panama | |
calypso, | |
congos, | |
deŽcima, | |
Paraguay, guaraŽnia, | |
Peru | |
festejo, | |
marinera, | |
PureŽpecha culture, pirekua, | |
Q'ero culture, | |
floral song, | |
St. Lucia | |
jweŽ, | |
koutoumba, | |
Sumu culture, women's song, | |
Surinam | |
aleke, | |
kawina, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Taino culture, areito, | |
Trinidad and Tobago | |
calypso, | |
kalenda, | |
Uruguay | |
canto popular uruguayo, | |
murga, | |
payada, | |
Venezuela, Amerindian, | |
Virgin Islands | |
cariso, | |
quelbey, | |
Warao culture, shamanic songs, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Yanomamoš culture, women's songs, | |
Yuma culture, vocal music, | |
Sonia and Myriam, | |
Sonora (marimba ensemble), | |
Sonora Matancera, | |
Sordo Sodi, Carmen, | |
Sosa, Julio, | |
Sosa, Mercedes, | |
Soto, Felipe, | |
Soto Borda, CliŽmaco, | |
soukous, | |
soul, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
Soul Vibrations, | |
Soule, Mary Jane, | |
sound recordings, | |
African genres, | |
Argentina | |
cuarteto, | |
folkloristic music, | |
muŽsica tropical, | |
rock, | |
Bahamas, | |
junkanoo, | |
Barbados | |
folk songs, | |
spouge, | |
Belize, | |
Bolivia, | |
cassettes, | |
Brazil, | |
of fife-and-drum bands, | |
forroŽ, | |
lambada, | |
moda-de-viola, | |
samba, | |
Caribbean, | |
popular music, | |
Chile, | |
rock, | |
Colombia | |
folkloric music, | |
popular music, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
economics and, | |
educational role of, | |
El Salvador, | |
French Guiana, cassettes of African music, | |
Guadeloupe, | |
Guatemala, | |
Haiti, | |
cassettes, | |
Honduras, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
cassettes, | |
Martinique, | |
kadans, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Miskitu culture, | |
Mixtec culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
by native Americans, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Nicaragua, | |
Otopame culture, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, cassettes, | |
Peru, | |
Afro-Peruvian music, | |
Andean music, | |
jarana, | |
popular music, | |
rock, | |
traditional music, | |
role in preservation, | |
St. Lucia, | |
sampling techniques, | |
of Spanish popular music, | |
steelbands, | |
Surinam, kaseko, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, calypso, | |
Uruguay, | |
traditional music, | |
Venezuela, | |
of Amerindian music, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Waia~piŽ culture, | |
Warao culture and, | |
wax cylinder | |
Argentina, | |
Peru, | |
Yaqui culture, | |
Yekuana music, | |
Sousa, Gabriel Soares de, | |
Soustelle, Jacques, | |
South America. See also specific countries, cultures, and topics | |
Andean region | |
folkloric ensembles, | |
native music of, | |
archaeomusicological studies in, | |
colonial era in, | |
cultural syncretism in, | |
European communities, acculturation in, | |
folklore of, | |
geography of, | |
historical accounts of, | |
history of, | |
iconographical record in, | |
immigrant groups of, | |
instruments of, | |
languages of, | |
maps of, | |
native peoples of, | |
population of, | |
research on, | |
sain? s-day celebrations in, | |
tourism in, | |
tropical-forest region, | |
acculturation in, | |
geography of, | |
immigrant groups in, | |
music and dance of, | |
population of, | |
South American Troubadours, | |
Souza, William Santos de, | |
Spain | |
cante jondo, | |
children's wakes in, | |
influence on Costa Rican music, | |
influence on Mayan music, | |
influence on Venezuelan music, | |
loss of Caribbean territory, | |
song genres of, | |
Spanish-American War, | |
Spanish Arawaks, | |
Spanish chroniclers, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Central America, | |
in Mexico, | |
in South America, | |
Spanish conquistadors | |
in Bolivia, | |
in Colombia, | |
in Peru, | |
Spanish people | |
in Argentina, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in Costa Rica, | |
in Cuba, |
Spanish people (continued) | |
in El Salvador, | |
identity issues of, | |
in Panama, | |
in South America, | |
in Uruguay, | |
in Venezuela, | |
Spanish Warao, | |
Spence, Joseph, | |
Spicer, Edward H., | |
Spinetta, Luis Alberto, | |
Spiritual Baptists | |
in Barbados, | |
in Carriacou, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
sports | |
Argentina, soccer, | |
Bahamas, soccer, | |
Brazil, soccer, | |
Colombia, music at sporting events, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Ecuador, volleyball, | |
Guadeloupe, wrestling (soveŽyan; beŽnaden;mayole`), | |
music and, | |
Paraguay, bullfights, | |
Squeff, Enio, | |
Staden, Hans, | |
Stamm, Gustavo, | |
Stanford, E. Thomas, | |
Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Knights, | |
steelbands, | |
in Dominica, | |
in Grenada, | |
in Guyana, | |
in Jamaica, | |
in Montserrat, | |
in St. Lucia, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
in Virgin Islands, | |
Steinen, Karl von den, | |
Stephens, Jeanette E., | |
Stevenson, Robert M., | |
Stewart, Shirley, | |
Sting (rock singer), | |
Stone, Doris Z., | |
storytelling. See narratives | |
Strachwitz, Chris, | |
structure. See form and structure | |
Stuempfle, Stephen, | |
Suazo, Sergio, | |
Suco Campos, Idalberto, | |
Suerre culture, | |
Sukay (musical group), | |
Sulca, Antonio, xx | |
Sullivan, Arthur, | |
Sumu culture, | |
Surinam, | |
Amerindian cultures in, | |
Asian descendants in, | |
Boni culture, | |
Chinese people in, | |
East Indian people in, | |
geography of, | |
history of, | |
instruments of, | |
Javanese people in, | |
Maroon cultures in, | |
musical genres | |
aleke, | |
kaseko, | |
kawina, | |
population of, | |
Wayana culture, | |
Susnik, Branislava, | |
SuyaŽ culture, | |
history of, | |
mouse ceremony of, | |
music and dance of, | |
oratory of, | |
song ownership in, | |
Swallow (soca singer), | |
swing, | |
symbolism | |
animal, in instruments, | |
dualistic, | |
fertility, | |
Symonette, George, | |
syncretism, | |
Syndicat des Auteurs Compositeurs et des Artistes Musiciens, | |
Syrian people | |
in Barbados, | |
in Caribbean, | |
in South America, | |
in Trinidad and Tobago, | |
taboos, |
|
on musical performance, | |
Ecuador, on musical performance, | |
Tabou Combo, | |
Taino culture, |
|
in Central America, | |
in Cuba, | |
in Dominican Republic, | |
in Haiti, | |
instruments of, | |
in Puerto Rico, | |
Tairona culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
Taiwanese people | |
in Belize, | |
in Caribbean, | |
Talamanca culture, |
|
Taller de la CancioŽn Popular (Bolivia), | |
Taller de San Lucas (Nicaragua), | |
Taller Latinoamericano de MuŽsica Popular (Argentina), | |
Taller Uruguayo de MuŽsica Popular (Uruguay), | |
Tallis, Thomas, | |
Talmana, Joe, | |
Talolingas, | |
Tambo cult, | |
Tambor de Mina, | |
Tambor Urbano, | |
tango, | |
in Argentina, | |
bandoneoŽn in, | |
in Brazil, | |
in Chile, | |
in El Salvador, | |
ensembles for, | |
in Guadeloupe, | |
in Honduras, | |
immigrants' role in, | |
in Peru, | |
sound recordings of, | |
tango cancioŽn, | |
tango caracteriŽstico, | |
tango romanza, | |
in Uruguay, | |
worldwide popularity of, | |
Tango Argentina (tango show), | |
Tapara, Juan, | |
Tarahumara culture, | |
dance of, | |
instruments of, | |
research on, | |
Tarascan culture. See PureŽpecha culture | |
Tariaca culture, | |
Tavares, BrauŽlio, | |
Tawantinsuya. See Inca (Inka) culture | |
Taylor, Donald, | |
Taylor, Douglas, | |
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, | |
Tehuelche culture, vocal music of, | |
Tejeda, Dagoberto, | |
television, |
|
Argentina, | |
Barbados, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Central America, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
educational role of, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guatemala, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Mexico, | |
music videos, | |
Netherlands Antilles, | |
Panama, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, | |
United States, MTV, | |
Uruguay, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
Temne nation, | |
TeŽmori culture, | |
Tempo | |
Andean music, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo, | |
Brazil, in religious music, | |
Chile, cueca, | |
Cuba, criolla, | |
Dominican Republic, merengue, | |
Guarijio culture | |
contradanza, | |
son principal, | |
Guatemala, son guatemalteco, | |
Haiti | |
mereng koudyay, | |
Vodou ritual music, | |
Jamaica, mento, | |
Martinique, beguine, | |
Mexico, son jarocho, | |
Miskitu culture, tiun, | |
Montserrat, quadrille, | |
Nicaragua, mento, | |
Panama | |
punto, | |
saloma, | |
Peru | |
fuga sections, | |
yaraviŽ, | |
Puerto Rico, sets, | |
PureŽpecha culture, abajen~o, | |
St. Lucia, manpa, | |
Venezuela, joropo, |
Tenetehara culture, | |
TenrikyoŻ, | |
Teribe culture, | |
tessitura | |
Andean music, | |
Atacamen~o culture, | |
Mexican Amerindian music, | |
Mexico, vocal, | |
Texeira, Humberto, | |
texture | |
acculturation and, | |
Bahamas, junkanoo, | |
Ecuador, contrapuntal, | |
falsobordone, | |
interlocking (hocket), | |
Andean regions, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil, | |
Chile, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Kuna panpipe music, | |
Peru, | |
pifušlka ensembles, | |
Waia~piŽ tureŽ music, | |
Wayana flute music, | |
Jamaica, in Kumina cult songs, | |
multipart | |
Aztec culture, | |
Bahamas, | |
Central America, | |
Inca culture, | |
Mexico, | |
Tukano culture, | |
Warao culture, | |
Peru, Indian vs. mestizo aesthetics, | |
Venezuela | |
Amerindian music, | |
polyphonic, | |
theater. See also dance and movement | |
Andean region, dance-drama, |
|
during carnival, | |
Passion dramatizations, | |
Bolivia, dance-dramas, | |
Brazil, | |
autos, | |
casamento de matuto, | |
dance-dramas, | |
pastoril de ponta-de-rua, | |
religious plays, | |
ternos, | |
congos, | |
Cuba | |
teatro bufo, | |
teatro liŽrico, | |
dance-dramas, | |
Andean region, | |
Ecuador, pantomimes, | |
El Salvador, dance-dramas, | |
France, varieŽteŽ, | |
Garifuna culture, dance-dramas, | |
Guatemala, Rabinal AchiŽ dance-drama, | |
Guyana, British, | |
Jamaica, | |
Maya culture, dance-dramas, | |
Mexico | |
las posadas, | |
tonadilla esceŽnica, | |
Nicaragua | |
El Gigante. | |
El Gušegušence, | |
Otopame culture, pastorelas, | |
Panama | |
congos, | |
gran diablos, | |
Peru | |
auto, | |
Corpus Christi plays, | |
dance-dramas, | |
Del |
|
Surinam, shadow-puppet plays, | |
Trinidad and Tobago, carnival, | |
Uruguay | |
murga, | |
tango productions, | |
teatro callejero, | |
teatro de revista, | |
Venezuela, Parranda de San Pedro, | |
Virgin Islands, David and Goliath play, | |
Theater Guild of Guyana, | |
theaters | |
Argentina, Teatro ColoŽn, | |
Barbados, Globe Theatre, | |
Bolivia, | |
Brazil | |
Manaus opera house, | |
native American, | |
opera houses, | |
Colombia, Teatro ColoŽn, | |
Costa Rica | |
Teatro Melico Salazar, | |
Teatro Nacional, | |
Cuba, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
El Salvador, | |
Guatemala | |
Teatro Abril, | |
Teatro Carrera, | |
Teatro Oriente, | |
Haiti, TheŽa^tre Verdure, | |
Mexico, Gran Teatro Coliseo de la MetroŽpoli, | |
Nicaragua, Ruben DariŽo Theater, | |
Peru, Teatro Municipal of Lima, | |
Virgin Islands, | |
TheŽbault, FreŽd eŽric, | |
Third World Band, | |
Thomas, Lloyd, | |
Thompson, Donald, | |
Ti-EŽmile, | |
Ti-Manno (Roselin Antoine Jean-Baptiste), | |
Ti-Raoul, | |
Tia~o Carreiro and Pardinho, | |
Tiawanaku culture, | |
archaeomusicological studies of, | |
instruments of, | |
timbre | |
Andean music, | |
arpa india, | |
Brazil, vocal, | |
Bribri and CabeŽcar cultures, vocal, | |
buzzing, in Afro-Peruvian instruments, | |
Chile, vocal, | |
Ecuador, vocal, | |
falsetto, | |
Brazil, | |
LacandoŽn Maya, | |
Mexico, | |
GariŽfuna (Garifuna) culture, vocal, | |
Haiti, vocal, | |
Jamaica, vocal, | |
lip buzzing, Yanomamoš culture, | |
Martinique, vocal, | |
Maya culture, vocal, | |
Miskitu culture, vocal, | |
Nicaragua | |
violiŽn de talalate, | |
vocal, | |
Peru | |
Indian vs. mestizo aesthetics, | |
singing, | |
pinculu, | |
roncador, | |
sexual symbolism and, | |
silbadora, | |
voice masking, Warao culture, | |
time and music | |
Bolivia, fiesta cycles, | |
Colombia, for serenata, | |
musical function and, | |
rehearsals, | |
shamanic ceremonies, | |
South America, tropical-forest genres, | |
technology's affect on, | |
tourism's affect on, | |
Tinhora~o, JoseŽ Ramos, | |
TirioŽ (Trio) culture, | |
Titiev, Mischa, | |
Title of the Lords of TotonicapaŽn, The, | |
Tiwanaku culture, | |
Tlapanec culture, | |
toasting, | |
Toba culture, | |
circle dances of, | |
instruments of, | |
Tobago, |
|
Tobosi culture, | |
Tohono O'odham (Papago) culture, | |
Toltec culture, archaeomusicological studies of, | |
TolupaŽn culture. See Jicaque-TolupaŽn culture | |
TomaŽs, Guillermo, | |
tonadilla, | |
Toor, Frances, | |
Toots and the Maytals, | |
Tormo, Antonio, | |
TorrejoŽn y Velasco, TomaŽs de, | |
Torres, Diego de, | |
Torres, Jaime, | |
Torres, Rodrigo, | |
Tortola, | |
Tosh, Peter, | |
TotoŽ la Momposina y Sus Tambores, | |
Totonac culture, |
|
tourism, | |
Antigua and Barbuda, | |
Bahamas, | |
Barbados, | |
Brazil, | |
Caribbean, | |
Colombia, | |
Costa Rica, | |
Dominican Republic, | |
Ecuador, | |
El Salvador, | |
Grenada, | |
Guyana, | |
Haiti, | |
Honduras, | |
Jamaica, | |
Kuna culture, | |
Maya culture, | |
Montserrat, | |
musical genres for, | |
Paraguay, | |
Peru, |