Music is an essential component of most celebrations and ritual ceremonies of the indigenous Mapuche people of Argetnina and Chile. Mapuche music is rhythmic but also features poetically lyrical vocals that often focus on themes relating to honor the ancestors.
COUNTRY: Argentina, Chile
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Cultrun, Trutruca
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The trutruca is a circular trumpet-like wind instrument that appears in music made by the Mapuche of Argentina and Chile. It is loud and doesn’t offer too many tonal possibilities, but it’s certainly a great-looking instrument.
COUNTRY: Argentina, Chile
KEY GENRES: Mapuche
The cultrun is a drum used in ceremonies and other forms of music among the Mapuche people of Argentina and Chile. The machi (healer) may play the cultrun during religious rituals or during the annual Ngillatun fertility ceremony. Some play cultrun on the floor with sticks, others hold it in the hand and strike it to make a beat.
The tonada is a form of poetic song created to captured the spirit of traditional South American rural life. Most popular in Chile, though present in many countries around Latin America, it is a deceptively simple form of music that tells deep and rich tales with its lyrics. In the 1960s and ’70s Chilean artists like Violeta Parra and Victor Jara infused tonadas with political commentary to form a new genre known as Nueva Canción.
More information: GuitarraChilena.cl extols the virtues of female tonada singers (cantoras)
COUNTRY: Chile etc.
INSTRUMENTS: Guitar
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The quena is a traditional bamboo or wooden flute used in many kinds of music found in the Andean mountains. A common quena has six finger holes and one hole for the thumb. The musician controls the airflow with both his or her mouth and fingers, creating a naturally rich tone.
COUNTRY: Andes (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela)
KEY GENRES: Cumbia (Andean Cumbia), Nueva Cancion
FEATURED ON: Niño Colla (AATW: Latin America), Tambobambino (AATW: Latin America)
In the ’60s and early ’70s, Chilean songwriters like Victor Jara and Violeta Parra used the tonada as a foundation of the “Nueva Canción,” explicitly political music that blended Chilean folk with progressive politics, similar to the way Bob Dylan and Joan Baez led a political folk revival at the time in the U.S. The Nueva Canción movement spread quickly all over Latin America and even back across the Atlantic in Spain and Portugal, providing leftists movements of the time with a melodic yet explicitly political soundtrack.
COUNTRY: most prominently Chile, but all over Spain, Portugal and Latin America
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Guitar
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