On Music: Marimba September 29, 2021
The Marimba is played everywhere in Chiapas. I hear it daily, the hammering on those wooden slats descending in size while rising in frequency. The device is a long drum kit with musical notes, like the xylophone or Trinidadian steel pan. Chiapas is particularly famous for its Marimba players. One well-dressed family in Comitán entertained an appreciative audience at the city arts festival when we were there, in front of copious cameras. Chiapanecos play the Marimba in the cavernous parlors of Franciscan convents, they play in public plazas and along the Andadores of Guadalupe and El Carmen, they play everywhere. Someone plays one near my house. Whoever it is plays and plays and plays.
This rhythm instrument originates in Africa, but there are 16th-century accounts of slaves playing them in Guatemala, and gradually the Maya took an interest. By the 19th-century, the Marimba was being used to provide the mood music at indigenous celebrations, and it even became utilized in sacred rituals. At its founding of independence, in 1821, the Marimba was designated as the official instrument of Guatemala.
The wooden “bars” of a Marimba are arranged like a piano, with groups of 2 and 3 black keys interspersed with the white. However, no virtuoso is about to tickle the tunes of Chopin or Bach, unless they have hard rubber mallets for fingertips. The best players carry two mallets in each hand, enabling them to strike two notes with each hand, or 4 with two, creating a small tinkly orchestra of melody and harmonies, which players, both indigenous and mestizo, use to perform such classics as El Manisero, Lamento Borincano, and the ever popular Corazón de Melón.
The Marimba has a storied history in the Americas, leading scholars to pursue evidence in ancient codices regarding the possibility that the Maya invented the instrument before the Spaniards ever arrived. It is not as if the Spaniards ever favored the instrument, as it was banned in the 18th century along with religious ceremonies in order to suppress Maya culture. One had to store illicit Marimbas like contraband, which is like trying to hide a pool table. Owning one was dangerous. When the Guatemala government attempted cultural genocide again in 1981, the Marimba again had to go underground. But not anymore. Once the Guatemalan tyrants had been driven off, the instrument was exalted once more, being placed next to the anthem and the flag as indelible heritage symbols. Chiapanecos, like their Guatemalan cousins, love the Marimba equally. And so they play and play and play.
I hate the Marimba. Truly. I have done my best for these past months to hold my tongue and just give it a chance. Perhaps it might grow on me like the steel pans in Port of Spain. Alas, no, the clanging sounds like a children’s instrument, even when being played by three generations of family masters in pressed guayaberas and polished black shoes. A Marimba and its inane canon of songs cover 2 chords, 3 max, and they invariably sound like Hannah Barbera on cocaine, sort of comic, sort of cartoonish, sort of homicide-inducing. When I hear one, my fillings ache. This, of course, is only my own humble appraisal, and reasonable people can disagree. But they have been warned.
The Marimba is a dangerous thing, its master places himself at great risk to perform. I appreciate the history. I feel it. This morning I am waking up on my last day in Mexico City before I return to San Cristóbal, and I hear him playing outside my window, five stories down, right there, playing shamelessly. The wooden bars soar as if they are calling to me, the throbbing compression of air in my eardrums vibrating with resonant fury. I approach the window and find that the master is looking up at me, smiling, beckoning. I suddenly feel the urge of a tyrant from Guatemala or Spain, wondering if I might reach the gentleman’s forehead with a 5-peso coin to put an end to all of this.