Maya music

The music of the ancient Mayan courts is described throughout native and Spanish 16th-century texts and is depicted in the art of the Classic Period (200–900 AD).

The Maya played instruments such as trumpets, flutes, whistles, and drums, and used music to accompany funerals, celebrations, and other rituals.

Important archaeological evidence of pre-Columbian Maya aerophones has been found in locations such as Tabasco, Campeche, and Jaina.

[2] Deceased rulers were often buried with musical instruments to help them pass through the underworld and to eventually be reborn.

A common type of Mayan flute had a goitre chamber on the side which was used to deflect the air going into the instrument from taking a straight path.

Certain studies and excavation reports of ancient Maya sites speculate that ocarinas were played during small cult rituals and burial ceremonies.

The Dresden Codex, a book that dates to the thirteenth or fourteenth century which contains 78 pages of ancient Maya hieroglyphs, depicts images of people playing drums and flutes.

Two of the three surviving pre-Columbian Mayan manuscripts in European libraries discuss the kayum, an upright single-headed cylindrical or kettle-shaped drum, played barehanded.

The top and bottom panels in side 63 (34) of the Dresden Manuscript depict deities playing drums whose clay frames look like two arms of a candelabra.

The Dresden Manuscript also shows an image of a deity shaking a large perforated rattle and another playing an end-blown flute.

The much lower standing kettle drums that have been found - often shaped like a bulbous jar on a pedestal, single or double - are earthenware.

[16] Maya dictionaries, both ancient and more recent, contain many words and distinctions related to music, such as, for example, Chʼortiʼ lahb "stroke [a drum] with the dexterity of a tortilla maker.

"[19] According to Cogolludo, the holpop was not only "the principal singer who sets the key and teaches what is necessary to sing," but also the keeper of the musical instruments, first of all the [horizontal] tunkul drums.

[20] In the Rabinal Achí, a Highland Maya 'tun-dance' drama dating back to the 16th century, the stage and music director is usually the one who plays the ancient wooden slit-drum (tun), accompanied by two trumpets.

According to Bishop Diego de Landa groups of men and women danced separately and had particular musical ceremonies in which they specialized.

Landa also witnessed a sacred war dance, in which as many as 800 men carrying small banners followed a complex pattern of steps in perfect unison.

Combined with music and the fragrance of burning offerings, dance was often regarded as the direct manifestation of supernatural forces.