This is Daniel Piper, curator for Latin America at the Musical Instrument Museum.
We’re excited to bring you some content directly from our galleries to your home.
Music is a basic human need, and we’ve created a lot of wonderful stories here.
Each instrument here is rich, full of background and I can share with
you some of my times. This is a country, Guatemala, which early on in my career at
MIM I got to go there and travel into these rural, Mayan villages and
collect instruments, creating video and photography to create a
musical portrait of this country. So, of course, everyone is
familiar with the marimba. It is not just the marimba because there are
a lot of different types of marimbas. Here we have this marimba doble.
This is actually one half of a marimba doble because there
would be two instruments of slightly different size and you would have seven
people between the two. So this one-half of it would be played by three and
then you would have another one a little bit larger with four other guys playing.
It has a piano key layout. If you think of
a piano, here are the white keys of the piano and here are the black keys.
So for those of you that are into music and scales,
you can play the twelve tones and you can play diatonic
major and minor scales as well as all kinds of other, as they call it, chromatic music.
So I want to show you another marimba, a different type of marimba.
It’s still sometimes played in villages in Guatemala.
This is the marimba de tecomates. So the marimba de tecomates has these wonderful
gourd resonators at the bottom there. Then, on the gourd resonators,
you see these little holes there and they have a membrane across each one.
It is a pig intestine membrane and that creates this wonderful buzzing sound.
When you hit the keys you also not only get the sound of the wooden
slat keys there, but you also get this buzzing sound coming from that pig
intestine membrane. This is more like the instrument that the Africans
would have brought in the earlier colonial period.
That instrument was adopted by Mayans very early, way before the Hispanics really
cared about the instrument at all. So for a couple hundred years, you had Mayans
in Guatemala and other parts of Central America making and playing this African
descendant instrument. Then all of the sudden, in the twentieth century,
the elites and the mestizos, the people that are of
Hispanic or partially Hispanic descent started to take more interest in the
instrument and then developed it. So, of course,
they are not just playing marimbas. Maya music involves a lot of
different instruments. On one of my trips, I went to a town called Rabinal.
They have a festival there called Rabinal Achí because
the Achí is the dialect or the ethnic group of Maya people.
They have this dance drama, you can see a little bit in some of the photos here.
Here is a photo of one of the dance drama characters and then over
here on the other side you have some musicians that are playing these natural
horn trumpets and then they are playing a
slit drum. We have some examples of this in the exhibit. This slit drum here
is from the nineteenth century. The Maya people have had slit drums before
the Spanish arrived. So this is a pre-Columbian-type instrument,
although this one is from the nineteenth century. They say that they
originally had these gourd trumpets. We’re not really quite sure exactly what
materials the trumpets were made of and when, but we do know that closer to
the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century they started using these
European horns kind of like these. This coach horn and cavalry trumpet that we have up here.
So this festival, just to kind of give you an idea,
it’s amazing. It’s a festival that combines marimbas, music from marimba,
music for this dance drama with the slit drum and the horns.
Also, there is music played with these small little flutes and then large drums like this that they
carry in procession. Twelve different groups carry these large
drums on their backs and each one is accompanied by a flute player.
This drum and flute ensemble at the very back of it is has, it’s part of a religious
procession, it has a giant effigy of the Catholic saint which inevitably has
some kind of syncretism with some Maya deity or spirituality as well.
So we are going to insert a little bit of a video here
in which you are going to see a procession going from the
church in the center of town to the Maya brotherhood that’s
associated with this festival Rabinal Achí. So enjoy the video
and I hope you enjoyed some of our content from the Musical Instrument Museum.
Have a great day everybody.