The Music of Guatemala

The music of Guatemala is diverse. Music is played all over the country, even in the remotest corners. Towns also have wind and percussion bands -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.

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 however 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. The arch marimba was probably the first, followed by a simple instrument with a diatonic row of wood bars played with mallets, with gourd resonators, placed on a wooden a stand. In 1894 came a major breakthrough, when Julián Paniagua Martínez and Sebastián Hurtado developed the chromatic marimba, by adding to the diatonic row of sound bars, comparable to the white keys of the piano, a second row equivalent to the black keys. By the early 20th century, wooden-box resonators had replaced the gourd resonators. Modern marimba bands include a smaller marimba for three players, a larger marimba for four players, plus a drum kit or other percussion and a string bass. Some bands have occasionally employed one or two saxophones, as well as one or two trumpets and a trombone. Much of the older repertoire of salon music was learned and adopted by the marimba bands, while a sizable amount of new dance pieces was newly composed for the marimba by such composers and marimba players as Domingo Bethancourt (1906–82), the Ovalle brothers, the Hurtado brothers, as well as the famous Mariano Valverde (1884–1956), Wotzbelí Aguilar (1897–1940) and Belarmino Molina (1879–1950), to name but a few. Singer Paco Pérez (1917–1951) was catapulted to fame with his waltz "Luna de Xelajú", one of best-known marimba pieces which is regarded by many Guatemalans as a sort of unofficial national anthem.