Photo Credits: David Hiser/ Getty Images
Our knowledge of music-making in Guatemala dates back to the era before the collision of Europeans and the indigenous Mayan peoples of the region.
Archaeological evidence on the material culture of Maya music dates from the late Classic Period (C.E. 600-900). Grave goods from aristocratic tombs near the present-day Belize border include drums, maracas, flutes, and anthropomorphic and animal-figurine ocarinas. Moreover, wind and string instruments, drums, rattles, shakers, and rasps have been documented throughout the Maya region from Classic Period into the present.
Several indigenous documents represent the earliest written sources on music, song, and dance in the present-day Republic of Guatemala. The Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices portray pre-Colombian instruments, ensembles, and musical events, as do various figurines, painted ceramics, sculptures, and murals. Two Quiché Maya texts (The Title of the Lord of Totonicapán and Popol Vuh), and The Annals of the Cakchiquels, all written in the sixteenth-century, note conch trumpets, bone flutes, drums, and rattles. All underscore the ritual and symbolic character of Maya music.
Spanish colonial documents, journals, and correspondence by explorers, government officials, priests, and travelers complement indigenous texts, although generally these sources reveals more about musical context and European attitudes than they do about early Maya music aesthetics and techniques. In highland Maya settlements today, flute, chirimía (a double-reed shawm introduced during the colonial era), and drum music, often with guitar and woodwind accompaniment, continues to be performed publicly during patron saint feasts and other celebrations related to the Christian calendar; marimba and brass band ensembles are also common. Dance dramas include the Rabinal Achí, the deer dance, the dance of the conquest, and el baile de los moros y cristianos.
Western European music and notation came with the Spaniards, styles well documented in the form of manuscripts from colonial Guatemala and Mexico, and from Spain. Following independence in the 1820s, writings by ruling Ladino (Mestizo), religious, and foreign commentators, and ethnographic accounts from the late nineteenth century onward, offer a general sense of how indigenous, African, and European influences evolved and acted upon one another.
Historically, contemporary Maya have lived in rural agricultural communities, constituting a majority of the Guatemalan population. However, government genocide against the Maya from the 1960s forward, combined with the massive creation of political and economic refugees, ongoing emigration to Mexico and the United States, extensive conversion efforts by U.S. evangelicals, and the impact of Ladino cultural dominance and international popular culture, have adversely impacted the practice and intergenerational transmission of traditional music. However, the whistles, flutes (of cane, clay, or metal), and drums of contemporary Maya music continue to reflect pre-Columbian roots, augmented by the adaptation of the marimba (first noted in late seventeenth-century reports) and indigenous variations on European stringed instruments including guitar, violin, and harp.
Slavery introduced small numbers of West African peoples into colonial Guatemala, furthered by a policy of granting freedom to those escaping slavery in neighboring British Honduras (today, Belize), and the late nineteenth-century development of banana plantations and railroads on the Caribbean coast, which brought English-speaking blacks from the West Indies.
When the Guatemalan Congress declared the marimba to be the national instrument in 1978, it belatedly if obliquely acknowledged the instrument's sixteenth-century African origins and subsequent Mayan adaptations. Paradoxically, by the twentieth century, the politically dominant Ladino ethnic group had successfully appropriated the marimba as representative of Guatemalan national identity. Retooled as a European chromatic instrument, the modern marimba, developed in Quetzaltenango in the late nineteenth century, proved adaptable to classical and European salon and ballroom fashions (gavotte, mazurka, polka, schottische, waltz, marches, etc.), and twentieth-century popular dances (danza, fox-trot, habanera, merengue, pasodoble, salsa, samba). The resulting hybrid repertoire-a staple of police, military, and government ministry ensembles-remains prominent today, and is emblematic of the marimba in contemporary Guatemala.
The customary ensemble consists of four players on the 78-key marimba grande, plus three players on the smaller, higher-pitched 59-key marimba tenor, accompanied by string bass, drums and-reflecting Afro-Cuban influence-claves, maracas, and güiro. In tropical and big-band settings, this formation may be augmented by woodwinds and brass. Marimba ensembles typically play for weddings, baptisms, communions, birthdays, parties, dances, and festivals.
In the early nineteenth-century, the arrival of the African-Amerindian Garifuna people to Caribbean Guatemala from nearby Honduras introduced another important traditional music into the national repertoire. Garifuna music features communal call-and response vocals with a fiercely percussive underpinning, rooted in the sacred context of ancestral invocations and spirit possession. Important archival recordings exist, although world-music tastes have tended to elevate Garifuna-inspired popular dance styles intended primarily intended for non-Garifuna and international audiences. However, Garifuna punta rock (named after and based on a traditional rhythm), with electric guitar, bass, and Garifuna percussion, has become widely popular in Caribbean Central America.
In both the Maya and Garifuna cases, scholars began to document indigenous music in detail only after World War II. Salient anthropological field recordings from the 1950s onward are archived in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, while others have been issued privately. Nonetheless, scholarship on the indigenous music of Central America's northern Caribbean coast is far less developed than ethnomusicological studies elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Regional pan-Maya and Garifuna activism (the latter informed by a growing engagement with African Diaspora identity politics) has energized discussions of indigenous identity within the Guatemalan national formation. Recognizing the threat to Garifuna culture, in 2001 UNESCO proclaimed Garifuna language, dance, and music as one of the "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity." UNESCO's intervention has reinforced efforts to promote Garifuna expressive culture, bringing renewed dedication (at home and in expatriate communities) to teaching language, dance, and music, particularly to young Garifuna at home and abroad. A handful of North American, European, and regional producers has brought Garifuna artists to global audiences, with international tours and recordings that have topped the European world-music charts, while winning major world-music awards from BBC Radio 3 and WOMEX (the Berlin-based World Music Expo).
European traditions also persist in Guatemala, inspired by nineteenth-century European country dances, and by local and regional scholarship on classical music and opera composed in Central America. Important institutions include the Universidad Rafael Landívar's Musicology Institute, the Metropolitan Orchestra, and the National Chorus of Guatemala. Simultaneously, international pop, pan-Latin dance music, and rock en español are ubiquitous, while evangelical missionary work has popularized Protestant hymns among converts.-Michael Stone
