Música Prehispánica / Terminología Musical en Nahuatl / Terminología Musical en Maya Yucateco

Perdón..... traducción en proceso

Prehispanic Music --Introduction

A veil of mystery and speculation separates the world of music among pre-Columbian civilizations in Mexico from our own time. The Spanish conquerors of fifteenth century looked on the indigenous peoples of the Americas as barbarians who lived in a world of darkness governed by demons. Buttressed by this sublimely ethnocentric assumption, it was easy for Europeans to rationalize destroying [in the name of God, of course] all symbols of idolatry that they discovered in temples and books; sacred plants; and religious and artistic manifestations in general.

During the second half of the twentieth century, serious studies among both native Mexican and European scholars have brought to light a rather different world view of this earlier age as a sacred universe inhabited by distinguished philosophers, wise rulers, and a great splendor. Music in pre-Hispanic Mexico was a tradition wich started thousands of years ago with the arrival of the Olmecs who established their cultural centers along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and are considered to be the Mother-Culture in Mexico. For the pre-hispanic societies, music was an expression used in their daily observations tied to religion, education, life and death.

Our knowledge of this traditions comes from several sources; representations of musical instruments in mural paintings and ritual ceramics, written history or codexes, and stone and clay sculptures of musical artifacts found in burials and buildings dedicated to the practice of music and song, as well as the descriptions of; dance, music and instruments as witnessed by the first Spanish informants who recorded this testimonies in books known as “ chronicles,” of great value are also the collections of Nahua poems compiled by Spaniards in books such as “Cantares Mexicanos” romances de los Señores de la Nueva España.

Some of the artifacts preserved today are still in use along with their musical rites among isolated indigenous groups, but this expressions can not be considered pure due to the centuries of struggle in order to preserve their cultural identity, however, the descriptions of Aztec music by early Spanish historians Bernal Diaz del Castillo or Fray Bernardino de Sahagun are detailed and of great value but untrustworthy.

Without a formal musical education or with knowledge limited to continental Spanish music, they were ill-equiped to understand, much less to describe, the Nahoa music, songs and dance that they heard and saw. Thanks to their great imaginations, it is as if they have heard “Sinfonia India” by Carlos Chavez or “La Noche de los Mayas” by Silvestre Revueltas wich are two great musical works by two distinguished Mexican composers; but we know that from the European perspective, Aztec or Maya music was much less symphonic and definitely; totally different from a European aesthetic point of view. From the depiction of music ensembles in Maya murals, Aztec codexes or west Mexican clay figurines, we can only imagine in terms of sonic espectrum, how could an ensemble of percussion with it`s wide variety of timbre qualities like for instance; the somber sound of the turtle shell along with the bright pitch from bone scrapers, rattles, clay and wooden drums tuned up to meet the pitch of the low tone generated by globular flutes along with double and triple flutes creating the harmonic background for the high pitch flutes and whistles to play on melodies, while the powerfull and explosive hom-tah from the Maya, or the Aztec and Teotihuacan clay trumpets and conch shells would brake onto that realm of massive structures might have sounded like, not to mention the vocal groups.

Unfortunately no written pre-Columbian music exists for us to specify a define style from the many different groups or how music evolved and changed from region to region during the archaeological periods of time throughout Mesoamerica, we know of the many musical scales that can be produced from the actual aerophones found in excavations, but in what context or how were they incorporated into a musical production? of course, it is possible to recreate this types of environments with archaeological artifacts and reproductions of instruments not preserved due to the fragile materials wich could not resist the weight of time but, as it often happens in archaeology, we cannot see or try understand the past with modern eyes, our present needs in terms of artistic expression are very different from those of the people who inhabited this same land thousands or even hundreds of years ago, the fact is that because of the absence of musical notation we can`t tell and perhaps we never will how the music that came out of this splendid artifacts sounded like. We simply have nothing unconventional notation on which to base our reconstructions.