Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Early Peruvian Folk Music

1960; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 288 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/537892

1535-1882

Robert Stevenson,

Latin American history and culture

O UR best informant on sixteenth-century indigenous folklore-Huaman Poma de Ayala-enjoyed the double advantage of being himself an egoistic Andean of pure blood and of being an adept illustrator of his own text. His 1179-page Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (finished in 1613) reeks with the pride of a native who considers his own Lucanas lineage worthier than even that of the Incas: for after all the Incas were but parvenus unjustly seizing power in a land with a pre-Inca history which stretches back to 6000 B.c.1 Only as fanatical an Indian purist as he would perhaps have considered the folk music nurtured in his native soil sufficiently important to merit a full dozen pages of connected text and illustration (316-327), not to count numerous other pages on which he makes passing allusions. He frames his chapters on canciones and musica by loudly proclaiming that the dances and song of his aboriginal brethren hide no idolatries or wizardry.2 On the contrary, they serve only the innocent purposes of diverting and refreshing the common folk. True, they often end in drunkenness. Except for this unfortunate aftermath, they would be the most precious surviving testimonial of his people's greatness, he insists. Because he stands so close to pre-Conquest times, and because he so sympathetically enters into the spirit of aboriginal music, his description merits a synopsis in English.