The lilt of a birdsong fluttered in the air, or so it seemed. The puckish piper grinned, knowing he had enthralled us with his lovely song. Gustavo León Flores, an avid scholar of ancient Peruvian musical instruments, played one flute after another. Each opened a window to the past.
Surely the voices of birds first inspired humans to make music. Perhaps followed by the melodies of flowing water, the whistle of wind through leaves. Gustavo’s ancient instruments paid tribute to their muses.
“The earliest musical instruments,” Gustavo told us, “were made from shells. Then, clay, and later bird and animal bones. Even feathers. Finally, wood, stone, and bamboo.” Gustavo’s collection included examples of flutes and other instruments of every material and shape, many resembling animals in the natural world, such as turtles, birds, and frogs.
Music has long, deep roots in Peruvian culture. Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady, who excavated the oldest known city in the Americas at Caral, found a large collection of musical instruments. Built with great architectural finesse on the northern coast of present-day Peru between 2700 and 2100 BC (the same era as the pyramids in Egypt), Caral’s Great Pyramid was part of a multi-use complex of about 30 buildings that included temples, government offices, living spaces for the elite, a market area, and a large amphitheater for public gatherings and performances. Interestingly, Shady found ample evidence of extensive trading and musical performances, but no fortifications or weapons. Her findings suggest that Peruvian civilization grew from a peaceful ancestral culture. While later cultures continued Caral’s musical traditions, sadly they did not remain peaceful.
Gustavo played a tiny clay flute with high-pitched tones fashioned after ones found in Caral. The Caral flute combined a series of tubes of different lengths, which produced sounds by the vibration of air blown across open holes at the end of the tubes. The varied lengths of the tubes produced different frequencies. While resembling a Greek pan flute in appearance, Gustavo emphasized that Greek flutes used a different musical scale than Peruvian flutes. Still, the instruments presented another example of humans on opposite sides of the globe reaching similar solutions.
Moving forward in time, Gustavo picked up a flute from the Chavín culture of the central highlands region (1200-200 BC). First he blew on the mouthpiece of the handsome bird-shaped ceramic flute. While the music sounded pleasant, it soon became clear that this was not the best way to play the instrument.
Gustavo added water to the flute, and then rocked the instrument back and forth to produce truly melodic birdsongs and music.
Next Gustavo treated us to the beauty and inventiveness of Moche musical instruments. The high artistry of the Moche culture (northern coast 50-700 AD) encompassed engineering, architecture, and visual and performance arts. We had already seen fine examples of Moche building, sculpture and pottery in museums in Lima, Chiclayo, and Trujillo — most notably at the Pyramids of the Sun & the Moon, the largest adobe structure in all the Americas.
Like their ceramics, some Moche flutes looked finely crafted to reflect the natural world, while others seemed more stylized and geometric. One of the Moche instruments Gustavo played combined a drum and flute in one. Perhaps the most moving of Moche instruments, though, was a funereal piece — a large, sad-faced figure that a musician wore like a mask or helmet while blowing a horn from inside. The sounds resonated to produce a deep, melancholy tune.
I felt even sadder when Gustavo told us that archaeologists have found few Moche instruments because this culture considered a musician and his instrument one. When a musician died, they destroyed his instrument as if it, too, had died.
Music remains a vital current in modern Peru. Certainly, music with new influences fills the airwaves, but traditional music played on traditional instruments also remains vibrant. Throughout our journey in Peru, we often enjoyed the stirring sounds of bamboo flutes played by young men dressed in traditional Peruvian garb. At some point in every concert, we heard the soaring strains of “El Cóndor Pasa.” While Americans know the melody from Simon and Garfunkel’s “If I Could,” Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles wrote the orchestral composition in 1913 based on traditional Andean music, particularly Peruvian folk music. Today, more than 4,000 versions of “El Cóndor Pasa” exist throughout the world, performed by such artists such as Placido Domingo, Celia Cruz, and Marc Anthony. Thankfully, El Cóndor — and the Andean music that gave it flight — persist in our world today.