Sacred mountains speak

A recent edition of The Early Music Show on Radio 3 focused on the music of Latin America and had a segment on the soundscapes of ancient meso-American and Andean cultures. Music archaeologists Matthias Stöckli and Alexander Herrera described the way musical instruments were drawn from the landscape - llama hoof drums, bone flutes, turtle shells - and used in rituals to encourage fertile crops. Sixteenth century dictionaries describe a Mayan shell horn trumpet that would promote the "greening of the fields". In the Andes, music and dance were associated with the changing seasons. They provided a way of communicating with ancestors, particularly through echoes. 

"...So the echoes of the instruments in the landscape are a way of communicating with the landscape, of making those sacred mountains speak to you. We find it in caves, we find it in spaces with rock art, which have a particular sound to them. They also have names. [One of these denoted] a place with a very special soundscape and that soundscape was made to resonate at specific times of the year with specific instruments..."

Andean musical instruments
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Andean Culture History by Wendell Clark Bennett)

Whenever I come across something like this, from a field of knowledge I know nothing about, I find myself trawling the internet for information and hoping it will lead to unfamiliar intersections between culture and landscape. You can find a lot online about the wind and percussion instruments of Latin America but what interests me is the way that the wider landscape would have featured in performance. The Met website has an article on ancient Andean music and mentions the ceremonial centre of Chavín de Huántar, where 'engraved stone slabs surrounding a sunken circular court show elaborately dressed figures walking in procession and carrying ritual objects such as spondylus shells, hallucinogenic cactus stalks, and shell trumpets.' There is website devoted to the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics project where you can watch a short video and hear the sound of a pututu conch shell trumpet. But these shells were not taken from the local landscape, they were obtained through long-distance trade. So really this would have been the opposite of music attuned to nature: the sound of the conch shell has been a means of summoning people in many cultures (as readers of Lord of the Flies are aware) and here it would have cut across the soundscape, collapsed distance and, like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee, taken dominion everywhere.

One writer I have come across with help from Google is Henry Stobart, a Reader in Music and Ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway, who has written about traditional music in Bolivia. I will quote here one interesting paragraph, pointing to the importance of landscape features. Stobart has a whole chapter on Andean sirenas in an anthology of essays, Music of the Sirens.

During feasts people may also dance for many miles across the landscape, singing and playing instruments as they go, as they make a tour of community boundaries, undertake pilgrimages, or visit particular homesteads. The lyrics of the songs they perform on such journeys may also reference a range of features of the landscape. Links between music and landscape are made especially explicit in rural discourses about sirinus or sirenas, spirit beings that are typically associated with specific places in the landscape, such as waterfalls, springs, rocks or caves. While living over several years, during the 1990s, in the rural community of Kalankira in the Macha region of Northern Potosí, I was often told that all music ultimately comes from the sirinus. And, just as music comes from these spirit beings of the landscape, it was also often played back as consuelo or “consolation” to the powers of the “animated” landscape that ensure human welfare. On many occasions I joined friends in Kalankira to play music in the landscape, focusing our attention on particular rocks, corrals or other places that were seen to ensure the welfare and reproduction of the herds, rather than on any human audience.