Music of El Dorado: The Ethnomusicology of Ancient South American Cultures (review)

The musics of pre-Columbian civilizations have fascinated musical scholars since the nineteenth century. Significant works include the d'Harcourts' 1925 study that combined information from instruments recovered in archeological sites along with folk tunes. Their interests covered parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. André Sas (1935, 1938), a Belgian-Peruvian composer and scholar, studied ancient instruments of the Inca and Nazca to refute the d'Harcourts' claims of exclusive pentatonicism. Jiménez Borja (1951) included iconic sources in his study of instruments. Stevenson (1968) combined the study of ancient instruments with analysis of literary sources, including colonial chronicles and dictionaries of Indian languages. Music of El Dorado: The Ethnomusicology of Ancient South American Cultures represents the culmination of Olsen's years of scholarship on the music of ancient cultures in South America. In the introduction the author focuses on all the cultures prior to the Spanish conquest that spanned the length of the Andes mountains from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego. In practice, however, the data are generally limited to information from Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. About ancient music, Olsen hopes to understand "who made music, where it was made, how was it made, and why was it made" (Olsen 2002, 7). To uncover this information, the author has developed a methodology rather unique to ethnomusicology: ethnoarchaeomusicology. Visually, the model is a cross with four areas of inquiry: music archeology, iconology, history, and ethnographic analogy. Each area focuses on a different kind of data and consequently each area has its own methodology.

Music archeology refers to a study of the material artifacts, that is, the instruments and their sounds. By focusing on data from measurements, photography, x-rays, measurements of pitches, and carbon dating, this area appears to be the most descriptive and objective. Iconology is the description and analysis or interpretation of representations on artifacts that include paintings, sculptures, and the exterior design of artifacts. The history component comprises all musical information gathered by the chroniclers, including Garcilaso de Vega and Huamán (or Guamán) Poma de Ayala. Olsen warns against taking historic information at face value since it can be subjective or objective, and also because the chronicles as colonial documents are removed by time and place from ancient cultures. In the final area of inquiry, ethnographic analogy, contemporary cultures and musical practices are used as a cross-check of interpretations and conclusions drawn from the other three areas. Given the time and distance of contemporary practices from ancient cultures and, more importantly, given the immense variety found today in an area as large and diverse as the Andes, a rigorous methodology for data verification is needed because in practice Olsen seems to use the ethnographic data not as a cross-check, but to confirm his interpretations of musical archeology or iconology.

For example, in discussing the possible shamanic flights of ecstasy found in Peruvian ceramic (the two examples cited are from the Recuay [north of Lima near Chavín, ca. 200 B.C.-A.D. 550] and the Chincha [south of Lima close to Ica]), Olsen interprets these figures playing notch flutes as representing "shamanistic musical flights of ecstasy, often accompanied by hallucinogens and whistle sounds, the latter represented in ancient Peruvian iconography by a tubular notch flute" (Olsen 2002, 54). This ecstatic flight connects to Olsen's main theme for end-blown notch flutes: transcendence. Exactly what the theme or category of transcendence means is unclear. Of interest here are the ethnographic examples cited by Olsen and how they are used. First he cites a work by Douglas Sharon (1978) concerning one of his main informants, Eduardo Calderón, a shaman from Las Delicias, Peru (near sites of the ancient Moche culture) (Olsen 2002, 13). Calderón, as part of shamanic rituals uses hallucinogenics, but...