Music of Guatemala

The music of Guatemala is diverse. Music is played all over the country. Towns also have wind and percussion bands that play during the lent and Easter-week processions as well as on other occasions. The Garifuna people of Afro-Caribbean descent, who are spread thinly on the northeastern Caribbean coast, have their own distinct varieties of popular and folk music. Cumbia, from the Colombian variety, is also very popular. Dozens of Rock bands have emerged in the last two decades, making rock music quite popular among young people.

Guatemala also has an almost five-century-old tradition of art music, spanning from the first liturgical chant and polyphony introduced in 1524 to contemporary art music. Much of the music composed in Guatemala from the 16th century to the 19th century has only recently been unearthed by scholars and is being revived by performers.

Much of what is known about how the ancient Mayans created and played music comes from the iconography that is preserved in the ceremonial pieces of mural art, or codices. One example is found in the ancient Maya archaeological site of Bonampak, Mexico, where there are walls showing artwork of a group of Mayan warriors playing long trumpets, as portrayed in the Mayan theatrical play Rabinal Achí.

Many kinds of instruments were used, but they essentially broke down into two categories, being wind instruments (aerophones) and percussion instruments (idiophones). The wind instrument family consisted of cane and bone flutes, different types of whistles, ocarinas of various designs, and other sibilant vessels. For percussion instruments, the Mayans crafted wooden drums with membranes made from the hides of deer or jaguar. They also made rattles, güiros, and other idiophones using the shells of snails and tortoises. One of these percussion instruments called the “tunkul” (or sometimes just “tun”) is still seen in Guatemala today. It is made from a hollow tree trunk with an H-shaped incision whose resulting tongues are hit with rudimentary drumsticks.

The music the Mayans played was performed and danced to during festivities and rituals, usually in celebration of (or to communicate with) the gods that they worshiped. It appears that each god had their date or holiday, with its accompanying ceremonies and special music.

The marimba's first documentary evidence of existence comes from an account of a performance in front of the cathedral of Santiago de Guatemala, present-day Antigua Guatemala, in 1680. Later, historian Juan Domingo Juarros mentioned and described it in his Compendium of the History of Guatemala. The instrument may be probably much older, as an attempt at recreating an older West African instrument, and could have been introduced by Afro-Caribbean slaves as early as 1550. [1].

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