Traditional Music and Folklore: The Three Roots of a Long Country (16th–20th Centuries)

What unites all that diversity are three roots that the Chilean folklorist recognizes as foundational: the indigenous heritage — Mapuche, Atacameño, Aymara, Rapa Nui of Easter Island — the Hispanic heritage that arrived with the conquest and the colony, and the African heritage that the slaves brought to the continent deposited in the rhythms and dances of American mestizaje. From the combination of those three roots, in different proportions depending on the geographical area, everything that Chile has produced musically was born.

The Indigenous Root: The Drum and the Flute

Before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, the Chilean territory was inhabited by dozens of peoples with their own musical traditions. The most numerous and those who left the greatest mark on subsequent music were the Mapuche — the people who inhabited the central and southern zone of the country and who resisted the Spanish conquest with an effectiveness that no other indigenous people in the Americas managed to sustain for so long.

Mapuche music is essentially ritual: it does not exist apart from ceremony, healing, or communication with the spirits. Its central instruments are the kultrun — a wooden drum with a leather head that the machi (spiritual healer) plays during healing rituals and nguillatún ceremonies — and the trutruca — a wooden trumpet several meters long that produces a deep and powerful sound, associated with solemn occasions and warfare.

The pifilka is a wooden or bone flute that produces sharp, penetrating sounds. The trompe is a metal rod instrument placed between the teeth and made to vibrate with a finger — a kind of jaw harp that produces intimate and meditative sounds.

All Mapuche music is functional in the deepest sense of the word: it does not exist to be listened to as entertainment but to do something — to heal, communicate, celebrate, bid farewell to the dead, ask for rain. That integration between music and ritual life is what makes it irreducible to any Western category of art.

In the north of the country, the Aymara and Atacameño peoples had their own musical traditions connected to the broader Andean world — the same sonic universe as the Quechua and Aymara people of Bolivia and Peru, with their panpipes, their drums, their songs that described the relationship between humankind and the Pacha Mama. Those traditions survived the conquest and the colonial period in the indigenous communities of the altiplano and have remained alive to this day in the religious festivities of northern Chile — the Fiesta de La Tirana, the Carnival of Arica, the feasts of the patron saints of Andean villages.

And at the opposite end of the country, on Easter Island or Rapa Nui — a territory of Polynesian origin incorporated into Chile in 1888 — there exists a completely different musical tradition, with instruments, scales, and songs that have nothing to do with the American continent and that connect the island to the cultural universe of Polynesia.

The Hispanic Root: The Guitar and the Zamacueca

The Spanish conquistadors and colonizers who arrived in Chile in the 16th century brought with them the guitar, the harp, the violin, and the musical forms of Golden Age Spain: the romance, the seguidilla, the jota, the habanera that had arrived from Cuba. That music blended with the rhythms and melodies of indigenous peoples and with the African contributions of enslaved people to produce the mestizo folklore that would define Chilean popular music for centuries.

The most important result of that mixing was the cueca — Chile's national dance since 1979, officially declared by a decree of the Pinochet regime, though its history is far older and far more democratic than that official declaration.

The cueca arrived in Chile as the zamacueca — a rhythm that came from the Viceroyalty of Peru and which in turn blended Spanish with African influences — brought by the soldiers of San Martín's Army of the Andes when they returned from Peru after independence, in the early 19th century. In Chile it was transformed: it became faster, more festive, with the characteristic footwork that distinguishes it from its Peruvian and Argentine relatives.

The cueca is a danced courtship: a man and a woman each holding a handkerchief in their right hand dance with the structure of a seduction ritual in which he pursues, she evades, and the resolution is always left in suspense. Historian Karen Donoso states that the cueca is a musical style and a dance that is "very versatile": "There are nationalist, left-wing, rural, revolutionary, romantic, heartbreak, revenge, and fantasy cuecas." What they all share is the poetic form — its verses, syllables, seguidillas, and closing refrain — and the unmistakable rhythm.

The tonada is the other great form of Chilean folk music from the central region: a song with a freer structure than the cueca, with lyrics that tell stories of love, of landscape, of everyday life in the countryside. The tonada was the vehicle of Chilean popular music before the recording industry and radio existed, and its principal practitioners were women — tonadas were frequently songs by women for women, passed down from generation to generation.

La Paya: Poetic Improvisation

One of the most extraordinary phenomena in Chilean musical tradition is the paya — oral poetic improvisation in décimas in which two payadores take turns in a verbal duel that can last for hours. The payador challenges his opponent with a stanza, which must be answered following the same metric rules and rhyming with precision.

The paya comes directly from the Spanish tradition of improvised poetry — the troubadours who competed in medieval courts — and blended in Chile with the Mapuche oral tradition to produce something specifically Chilean. The great payadores of the 19th and 20th centuries were popular celebrities who traveled through the countryside and villages challenging each other in markets and patron saint festivals.

The paya is alive today: there are national payador championships, décima schools, and a community of improvisers who uphold the tradition with the same technical rigor as their 19th-century predecessors.

Margot Loyola: The Researcher Who Saved Folklore

The most important name in the history of the documentation and preservation of Chilean musical folklore is Margot Loyola Palacios — born in Linares in 1918, died in 2015, active as a folklorist, performer and educator for more than seventy years.

Loyola began collecting folk music in the rural areas around Santiago in 1936, when the director of the National Conservatory invited her to start that work — she was eighteen years old. What she found in that fieldwork stayed with her for the rest of her life: songs that were not written in any book, dances that were passed on only through practice, instruments that would disappear if no one recorded them.

For decades she traveled Chile from north to south documenting cuecas, tonadas, religious dances from the north, music from Chiloé, Mapuche music — building the most complete archive that exists of traditional Chilean music. She published dozens of books and recordings. She taught at the Catholic University for forty years. She trained generations of musicians and researchers who would carry her work forward.

When Violeta Parra began her own project of rescuing Chilean folklore in the nineteen fifties — the project that would open the door to the Nueva Canción — it was Margot Loyola who had prepared the way, who had demonstrated that Chilean popular music was as valuable as any musical tradition in the world and deserved the same rigor in its documentation.

The Cueca Chora: The Folklore of the Margins

Not all Chilean folklore came from the countryside. The cueca chora or cueca brava — also known as cueca urbana — was born in the working-class neighborhoods of Santiago and Valparaíso in the 19th century: the cueca of the tenements, the markets, the bars, the urban working class that had no access to the bourgeois salons where the "respectable" cueca was danced.

The cueca chora was faster, rougher, more sensual than the rural cueca. Its lyrics were more direct, with dark humor and references to everyday life in working-class neighborhoods. Its dancers were the rotos chilenos — the name the upper class gave to the urban poor, adopted with pride by those who were called that.

During the 20th century the cueca chora was marginalized in favor of the more "respectable" rural cueca — the one Los Huasos Quincheros performed in their impeccable huaso costumes for middle-class audiences. But it survived in the tenements and the markets, and in the eighties and nineties it was reclaimed by young musicians who turned it into a symbol of resistance: during Pinochet's dictatorship, which had declared the cueca the national dance in 1979, appropriating the symbol for its own purposes, the "cuecas solas" — women dancing alone instead of with a partner, to denounce the disappearance of their husbands and sons — were one of the most powerful and most silent acts of protest in Chilean cultural resistance.

Los Huasos Quincheros and the Folklore Industry

The most commercial and institutional side of Chilean folk music found in Los Huasos Quincheros — formed in 1937, active to this day — its most visible representatives: a four-voice ensemble with guitars and harp that performed cuecas and tonadas with a production polish and an image of elegant huasos that proved irresistible to radio, television, and the record market.

Los Huasos Quincheros brought the cueca and the tonada to audiences who would not have heard them otherwise — and in doing so, they inevitably domesticated them, stripping away the roughness and social complexity that the cueca chora had carried in its origins. That tension between "official" folklore and living folklore is one of the constants of Chilean musical history.

Editorial note: Pinochet's dictatorship decision to declare the cueca the national dance in 1979 was also, inevitably, its appropriation as a symbol of the regime. The response that the resistance found was of a poetic elegance that no political manifesto could match: the women of the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos danced the cueca alone — without a partner — in public spaces, turning the absence of the partner into the most direct possible denunciation of enforced disappearance. The courtship dance, without its object of courtship, said what could not be said in words in the Chile of the nineteen-eighties. Folklore used to silence, answered with folklore used to denounce. The cueca outlasted them all.

Editorial selection

Top 10 of Traditional Music and Chilean Folklore

1. 1

   La Cueca (complete tradition)

   The national dance. The courtship dance that synthesizes the three roots of Chilean folklore — indigenous, Hispanic and African — in a form that survived colonization, the republic and the dictatorship.

   19th century–today
2. 2

   La Cueca Sola

   Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared

   The most powerful and most silent act of resistance in Chilean culture under Pinochet. The partnerless dance as a denunciation of forced disappearance. Folklore turned into a political weapon.

   1978–1988
3. 3

   Kolilleo

   Traditional Mapuche music

   The Mapuche ritual chant in its purest form: the voice and the kultrun communicating between the human world and the spirit world. Music as a sacred act before it was art.

   immemorial
4. 4

   Margot Loyola Archive

   compilations 1936–2000

   The most important documentation work in Chilean musical history. Without Margot Loyola, dozens of traditions would have disappeared without being recorded. Chilean folklore owes its survival to her.

   1936–2000
5. 5

   La Tonada

   central zone tradition

   The narrative form of Chilean popular music. Songs of love, landscape, and everyday life passed down from woman to woman before records existed.

   19th century–today
6. 6

   La Paya

   payadores tradition

   Oral poetic improvisation in décimas: the verbal duel that combines the Spanish troubadour tradition with Chilean orality. An art that requires years of learning and is performed in real time.

   19th century–today
7. 7

   Fiesta de La Tirana

   music and dances of the north

   Religious syncretism in northern Chile at its most spectacular: dances of Andean indigenous origin in honor of the Virgin of Carmen, with costumes, masks, and music that blend the pre-Columbian with the Catholic.

   colonial tradition
8. 8

   La Sirilla

   Chiloé

   The dance of Chiloé in its most characteristic version. The great island at the southern end of the world, with its own musical traditions that exist nowhere else in Chile.

   19th century–present
9. 9

   Los Huasos Quincheros

   cuecas and tonadas

   The most polished and most commercial version of Chilean folklore. Debatable in their domestication of the genre, but undeniable in their role of bringing the cueca and the tonada to mass audiences for decades.

   1937–present
10. 10

    Trutruca y Kultrun

    Mapuche instruments

    The two instruments that best encapsulate the Mapuche musical worldview: the kultrun as the axis of the ritual world, the trutruca as a voice that reaches the sky. The sound of Chile before the conquest.

    time immemorial

Next chapter — Chile Series: Violeta Parra — the founder, "Gracias a la Vida" and the most radical project in twentieth-century Chilean music.