PLATE XLIX.
PANPIPES
The pan-pipes are the simplest of all instruments of Amazonian music to make, and are the most universally popular. They consist of a bundle of reeds—three, five, six, seven, ten, or even seventeen in number—bound together with palm-fibre, or, on the Napo, with finely split cane. Although the pipes are cut to lengths yielding the necessary musical intervals, the number seems to be purely arbitrary. They are used in concert with all other instruments, and mark so much of tune as the Indian orchestra strives to attain. The pan-pipes shown in the accompanying illustration are Witoto instruments contrasted with the neater finish of one made on the Napo. The latter has the greater number of pipes, and all relatively smaller. There is nothing complicated about the make of either set. The cane pipes are cut immediately below the natural joint, and the node is thus made to serve as a stop.[337]
The ubiquitous bamboo also furnishes the material for a larger flute, and flutes or fifes are made out of the arm-bones of prisoners taken in battle. After the victim is killed and eaten the humerus is cleaned, its extremities opened, and the soft matrix scooped out. Finger-holes are bored in the shaft of the bone, usually three in number, but occasionally five. When human bones are not forthcoming the tribesman uses the leg-bone of a jaguar. This is opened at the end and furnished with a wax stop that leaves a small canal open to a three-cornered air-hole. Occasionally one of these flutes is made with both ends open, in which case a square or semicircular hole is cut out from the upper rim. The flute is held against the lower lip, and commonly has three, or more rarely four, sound-holes. Flutes are also made of heron-bones, open at the lower end, with a square air-hole, and generally four sound-holes. These have mouthpieces made of leaves, and their tones are exceedingly shrill. But the most curious instruments of which I have note are flutes made from skulls of animals, by covering them with pitch, and only leaving open the holes of the nose and the occipital bone. One hole is blown through, the other is the sounding-hole. Many of the Indian instruments, especially the bone flutes, are gaily ornamented with elaborate incised patterns that are dyed black and red with vegetable extracts. The flutes are also adorned with tassels of cotton or palm-fibre.
The flute or fife is played from the extremity that is rudely fashioned into a mouthpiece. No native trumpets are provided with sliding tubes like the familiar trombone, and there is no plug in the mouth-hole. Nor are any of the Amazonian wind-instruments fitted with a vibrating reed. There are no bagpipes, and, in the regions I traversed, no stringed instruments. Certain tribes north of the Japura, notably the Desana, use whistles made of clay, which they employ both as alarm signals and as adjuncts to the dance.
Trumpets of bark and bamboo have an irregular distribution. Many tribes dispense with them on all ordinary occasions, and confine their use to Jurupari music. These sacred instruments constitute one of the most profound mysteries of the Amazon. They are lengthy affairs, made from the hollow stem of a palm, and fitted with a trumpet mouthpiece. The note is akin to that of the bassoon. These trumpets are tribal possessions, and are kept concealed at a distance from the maloka, in a hut which the women are never permitted to enter, and where the various secret paraphernalia connected with boy initiation—such as the whips of tapir hide—are stored. It is a capital crime for any woman even to set eyes upon them. The Jurupari trumpet is as tabu to Indian women as the bull-roarer of the Australian native is to his women-folk.[338] The Indian girls are brought up in the belief that the music of the trumpets is an essential element in the exorcism of the evil spirit from the body of the youthful initiate, and that any interference on their part must lead to the eternal residence of such spirit in the novice, to the consequent disaster of the tribe, and this belief holds good all their lives.[339] No sooner is Jurupari music heard approaching the maloka than all the women and uninitiated hurry to the bush, and remain in hiding until the ceremony is concluded and the trumpets have been returned to their tabernacle. What the ceremony may be is held a profound secret, and the punishment for infringement is death.[340] As a rule two of these sacred trumpets are used, and they are tuned to the same pitch, though differing in their tone according to their length. They are only used north of the Japura; south of that river the tribes have no Jurupari music and only know them as employed ceremonially by their neighbours in connection with initiation secrets to frighten their women.
The Tukana when dancing use a trumpet alternately with their rattles; and the Indians north of the Japura have regular castanets, made of blocks of hard wood, which are manipulated with one hand, much in the manner that the nigger-minstrel plays the “bones.” All the tribes make rattles of small gourds by the simple method of partly filling the calabash with dried seeds, or fruit stones, and inserting a wooden handle so that they can be shaken in time to the dance. Some of these are of the roughest, the stick of the handle quite untrimmed; others are more finely finished, and the polished black surface of the gourd may be ornamented with designs in colour, or incised patterns. But these are by no means the only rattles used at a dance. The Indians have them of many kinds and descriptions. The smaller are worn as armlets, wristlets, leglets, and anklets. These are made of nuts, strung with coloured beads on palm fibre, and very carefully fashioned. The leg rattles are frequently handsome ornaments, the rich brown of the glossy nutshell making a splendid contrast with the blue or red of the Brummagem beads. The finest are made from a nut not unlike the Brazil nut of commerce in shape, but less angular. That shown in [Plate XLIII.] has natural groovings and marks which give the polished sections the appearance of being engraved. A section of the shell is cut off, thoroughly cleaned and polished, then attached by a short string of beads to the main leg- or arm-band from which these nut sections hang bell-like. The arm rattles are made of smaller nuts, some are not unlike an oval hazelnut, flat on one side, cut in half and highly polished. The nut is, roughly speaking, some three-quarters of an inch across and long. These also are hung on threads of beads pendant a quarter of an inch apart from the connecting beaded string. Leg rattles are made of larger nuts, and one variety is made in the form of a bunch, not a band or chain. The beads used for these are blue and red in colour, and the bunch of nuts on their beaded strings is fastened with plaited palm-fibre beneath the knee. The whole effect is most distinctly ornamental. The jangle of two or three of these nutshell bells is not unpleasant: there is almost a tinkle in their clatter, but the volume of sound obtainable from a number of them is remarkable, and so is the precision with which they accentuate the rhythm of movement.
The Indians have no cymbals, gongs, or bells; but the drum is an important factor not only in native music, but in native life. The drum is the telegraph of the Amazons. In fact, the most remarkable of all the native instruments is the manguare or signal drum. Although the primary use of this drum is to signal, it is utilised on great occasions as an addition to the aboriginal orchestra. To make this important adjunct of the maloka two blocks of hard wood are chosen, some six feet in length, and about twenty-four inches in diameter. These blocks are very carefully hollowed out by means of heated stones that are introduced through a narrow longitudinal slit, and char the interior. Instead of endeavouring, however, as would be the case with an ordinary drum, to contrive as nearly perfect a cylinder as possible, the object of the signal-drum maker is to obtain a husk of varying thicknesses, so as to secure differences in note. Accordingly, with his rude implements, hot stones, capybara-tooth borer, and stone axe, he fashions the interior of the drum in such a manner that the outer shell, the sounding-board, varies in thickness from half an inch to four inches. Two blocks are used; the smaller is called the male, and the larger the female. The ends are simply the wood of the tree which is not removed, all the hollowing being accomplished by means of the grooved slit. When finished these are suspended by withes at an oblique angle, one end much higher than the other—say six feet and three feet respectively from the ground. They hang from the rafters of the maloka, or from an upright frame, and present the appearance of two barrels surmounted by a narrow slit.[341]
