Stephen Houston (Brown University)
In the third-quarter of the 16th century, a Nahuatl-speaking scribe compiled the Cantares Mexic.os [Mexicanos], a set of “Mexican songs” lush with metaphors of beauty, glory, and loss (Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, MS 1628; Peñafiel 1904). More than just songs, the Cantares implied vigorous drumming and even dance: “Here begin log-drum songs [Nican ompehua Teponazcuicatl]…Tico, tico, toco toto, and when the song ends [auh icontlantiuh cuicatl] Tiquiti titito titi” (Bierhorst 1985:219; Figure 1). The drums were the vertical huehuetl, struck with the hands, and the horizontal teponaztli, hit by mallets tipped with rubber or resin. The finest, most artfully prepared ones appear to have been made of rosewood, a tree now endangered in Mexico, and their intervals did not follow western tunings. For the teponaztli, often equipped with two tongues or sounding boards, the opposed notes tended to be “slightly below a major third, to slightly above a fifth” (Herrera-Castro et al. 2019:1).
The syllables in the quotation — Tico, tico, toco toto…Tiquiti titito titi — are less well understood (Bierhorst 1985:74–79). Known to scholars as “vocables,” sequences like toco, toto appear at the start and close of certain songs or divide the stanzas within them. Clustering into CV or CVC forms, they offer contrasts between alveolar (t) and velar (c) stops joined to close frontal (i) and close-mid back (o) vowels. Thus: ti, to, qui, co, along with the less common tih, tin, toh, ton, con, and coh (Lewy 2015:100). Some occur as disyllables (tico), others as trisyllables (titito).
What do the sounds mean? Most scholars believe they specify drum beats (Nowotny 1956:186–87; Schultze-Jena 1957; Tomlinson 2007:42, 44). Perhaps they were fills, rhythmic passages between stanzas, with each syllable matching a pitch or beat. “Play this sequence of strikes now, before singing ensues.” More likely, however, they established and reinforced the pitches and beats of a whole song or stanza. In this respect, they resemble a percussive solfège, a way of using syllables to signal pitch or rhythm, if somewhat imprecisely. The vocables tease out, not so much a definite series of pitches, as the relation of one sequenced note or beat to another. There is no exactitude of a tuning fork, an invention waiting until 1711, only a reminder of a song “meant to go with words…[in which] the basic unit of music-writing is not the note but the syllable” (Kelly 2015:12, writing of early Medieval Europe). The singer, so nudged, understood what to do and how to perform. Properly cued, the audience would know which song was to come. That the singer and drummer were often the same person is confirmed by a performance in 1551 of what may be an unrelated song (Bierhorst 1985:78). The writer who witnessed it had to watch closely. Otherwise he would miss how the vocalist, Don Francisco Plácido, hit the drum.
The vocable system must have been widespread. John Bierhorst, translator of the Cantares, refers to comparable syllables, apparently sung rather than drummed, among the Cora of Durango, Mexico (Bierhorst 1985:74, 78). An audio from 1968 attests to a reduced number of syllables, alternating between ti and to, ki and ko, but the similarity is too strong to be a coincidence. (Like Nahuatl, Cora is an Uto-Aztecan language, so the roots may go deep.) The same “pattern of percussion,” with exactly the same syllables, occurs in Zapotec texts of the Colonial period, along with (evidently) non-lexical vocalizations between separate stanzas of music (ayao, hiya, hoya, etc., Tavárez 2006:420, 429, 433, 436, 437; ibid. 2017:46).
By one view, the variation in syllables express where a beat was struck. According to an early Franciscan missionary, Toribio de Benevente Motolinía, the vertical drum, the huehuetl, was hit at both the center and edge of its drumhead, which could be tuned by adjusting its tautness (Haly 1986:97). In this way, some of the syllables, with their percussive initial sounds (t, qui, k) and high and low vowels (i, o), might have correlated with different sonorities of drums (see Lelis de Oliveira 2024:133, for similar ideas). This area emitted that sound, over here, struck just so, came another, with two hands at play to create two or three beats. The importance of such “strike zones” and what to label them recall the bol syllables of paired tabla drums in India (Shepherd 1976:65). A fusion of speech and sound, bol derives from Hindi bolnā (बोलना), “to speak.” The syllables, which include tā, te, ra, ka, along with combined forms for two hands, dhe, din, etc., are tied to drum sounds by listeners familiar with the tabla (Patel and Iversen 2003:928; see Mehrabi et al. 2019). A marked degree of onomatopoeia or sound symbolism probably operated behind them (Rowell 1992:141–42).
Of great complexity, the bols are taught not so much individually, but as sequences learned during initial stages of training. For masters like Zakir Hussain, these can be enunciated at staggering speed (view 28:00). Thereafter come decades of intensive practice. Songs or song cycles are identified by long sequences of bols, to be memorized by performers. In Japan, shōga, a series of chanted kana syllables, are also used to transmit orally, with subsequent memorization, how to play Japanese flutes within the centuries-long tradition of nō theater (Anno 2010:132–33, fig. 4). Doing this with a master, as part of ensemble, is crucial to sorting out subtleties and indicating where embellishments might be possible or permissible. Such syllables are just as central to learning the art of bagpiping in Highland Scotland, where musicians used a system of chanted vocables known as canntaireachd (Dickson 2013:46–47). In all cases, syllables and muscle memory work together to fix songs in musicians’ minds. Tabla in particular is notable for its schools, oral transmission, and, for prominent musicians, lines of descent by family and master-pupil relations (Shepherd 1976:table II). In sum, vocables reflect a domain of oral recitation. Records of them appear to have been unusual or incidental to the principal emphasis, that of in-person training by master musicians. Similar kinds of training, oral transmission, memorization, and inheritance may have informed the Cantares and those who performed them.
Maya drums seldom survive in anything but stone, although rare examples are known in wood, if of uncertain date (e.g., a single-tongued teponaztli or tunk’ul shaped as a recumbent figure, its “chest” the resonator, the piece probably a cave-find; Kerr# 7905, now in the Fundación Ruta Maya, Guatemala; see Figure 2a). Most are simply painted, and of varying size. There is a suspicion that, in a pinch, ceramic bowls, covered by skin or jaguar pelage, bound around the rim, could function as drums (Figure 2b, c). Improvised in this way, such instruments could have been far more prevalent—indeed, at least one figurine from Copan documents the use of ceramic bowls or vases (even gourds?) as resonators or amplifiers for percussion; turtle shells struck with mallets could thereby intensify their sound (Figure 3; Zalaquett Rock 2021:fig. 20; for use with a small tunk’ul, albeit in a non-Maya context, see Chinchilla Mazariegos n.d.). Notably, Ch’orti’ Maya describes some drums in terms of their skin or hide covering, pächil te’, from pächij, “skin, hide” (Hull 2016:176–77).
Paintings on Maya drums are little studied, but two may appear with vertical bars that could reflect, by visual evocation, a pulse of regular rhythms (Houston et al. 2006:163, fig.4.24). Recordings of songs in highland Guatemala leave little doubt that drums could also have two or three distinct notes, played in combination with other instruments (Yurchenco 1985:48; de Gandarias Iriarte 2013:76). A binary tone is evident in double drums joined into a single object, allowing the hand to play on each with different fingers and, because of divergent size in the drums, resulting in two pitches (Adams 1971:fig. 70c; Inomata et al. 2010:fig. 91a–c, d). The dating seems to be towards the final decades of the Classic period, hinting at some shifts in playing style or instrumentation. That pre-Conquest music had a history should go without saying. Timeless, unchanging practices are inherently implausible: Baroque music and instruments are far from Stravinsky or the agile, jazzy violin of Stéphane Grappelli; Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo lies distant from Madame Butterfly. Why should early Maya music be treated as a synchronic totality? Most doubled drums show attention to ergonomics as well, in that they are at oblique angles to one another. One hand could grasp the drum while the other tapped on the two surfaces. Larger drums would have been far less restrained in audio output. The sonic reach of sizeable examples could have been some kilometers, to judge from the size of painted depiction of a tunk’ul at Ek’ Balam, Mexico, an example in stone found at Copan, Honduras, K4120 in the Kerr Database of images, and colonial-era reports of their acoustic range (Houston et al. 2006:263, fig. 8.14; Carrillo González et al. 2014).
Drums with glyphs are exceedingly rare. A shattered instrument from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, bears a text that names the object, lajab, “thing for clapping, touching lightly,” a drum that seems to have belonged to Yat Ahk, the last major ruler of the city (Holley 1983:530, fig. 69; Houston et al. 2006:fig. 8.11b; for relevant lexical entries, Hull 2016:247). Found on the floor of Structure J-11 in the palace, it provides direct evidence of royal performance (or a claim to it) and points to further proof that, as noted before, drum-strikes could range from solid pounding to lighter taps with fingertips (Ch’orti’ Maya applies the verb t’ojt’i to less robust activities like ringing a bell and tapping a drum; Hull 2016:434).
A drum from Yalloch (Yaloch), Guatemala, doubtless acquired by Thomas Gann, who resided nearby in (then) British Honduras, is remarkable for its Teotihuacan-inflected design and, in the middle of the text, a possible self-reference, the outline of a drum (Figure 4a). Teotihuacan-linked performance and dance are documented on some Late Classic vases from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala, and there may have been a similar connection here to a particular genre of music: the blats, dissonance, and unsettling babble of foreigners, but impressive or amusing nonetheless (e.g., K5418, K6315; for musical ambivalence, see Ross 2020, on the pervasive love and loathing around the music of Richard Wagner).[1] The other drum is so large, at 42.8 cm in height, that it would have to rest upside down. Its bottom is of precarious, narrow size, impossible to place in a stable position (Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017; Figure 4b). That necessity, to park or store the drum without toppling, probably led to the orientation of its paintings of youthful, male musicians and dancers. (In use, the drum would show them head-down, almost illegibly so.) Some youths hold small rattles, and possibly there is one with a drum, although the image is indistinct (“Individual 6,” Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017:figs. 3, 5). Yet the ceramic itself functions as an ancillary, outsized complement to an image of less noisy, diminutive rattles and turtle-shell resonators. It supplements and out-booms that percussion, appearing to overwhelm the singing by the figures just off-image, to lower right, on the wide body of the drum. It also affirms the role of the young in such performance, their voices, perhaps, higher, piercing, clearer. The owner of the drum was a “great youth,” a chak ch’ok, the others of yet lesser age, seemingly (‘i-tz’i, “younger [brother]”).
But the most relevant drum, from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, is incised rather than painted (Figure 5). At this city, almost all legible texts are inscribed, as here, in a style consistent with the ruler named on the shattered drum from Structure J-11 (Houston 2016:419–20). Indeed, this drum comes from a late floor in that very building. The text consists of readable glyphs: wa, ku, possibly infixed with a k’a (see insert for comparison, from a bench-back from Pomona, Mexico, if lacking in the thumb common to that sign). Yet the repetition is nonsensical. The syllables do not spell any possible term for “drum” in Mayan languages. They may be pseudo-glyphs, signs deployed as placeholders for writing but without sense, but the incised texts of this place and ruler trend towards legibility.
A tantalizing possibility is that these are vocables, that the Classic Maya, like Nahuatl singers and drummers of 750 years later, used non-lexical syllables to audiate—to conceptualize rather than hear—a sequence of two-part or three-part drumbeats near the time of the Maya Collapse. The variance from Nahuatl and Zapotec practice accords with the temporal and geographic diversity of notational systems in early Medieval Europe (Rankin 2014:360–61). Comparisons elsewhere, with Nahuatl drummers, Medieval European musicians, Japanese flute-players, and Scottish bagpipers, make such syllables unsurprising or at least conceivable. Syllables, not notes, jibe with human perceptions and segregations of sound; they guide and energize the core task of memorization (e.g., for a Medieval context, see Rankin 2012:387, “le lecteur doit avoir en tête la mémoire du dessin mélodique”; for a phonological explanation related to where vowels are formed, see Hughes 1989:7–9).
Maya vocables fit also with the oral setting in which such music was likely taught and learned. As noted for the Indian bol: it could have been a system that “preserve[d] the music in skeletal form as a spur to memory, but impart[ed] its full details in face-to-face instruction, by demonstration and imitation, teacher seated across from student”…and was hence rare in written form (Rowell 1992:141). Further, the proposed vocables sit well with a writing system suffused by syllables. Their play in readable texts, composed into words, bestowed, perhaps, an intrinsic musicality of cadenced, aesthetically pleasing sound. Was this, in fact, the motivation behind some of the Maya pseudo-glyphs with their readable signs but seeming lack of intepretable words? Regrettably, there is no other direct evidence to buttress the find at Piedras Negras. It stands mute, in ways, during the Classic period, that the drum did not.
[1] Musicians dressed in Teotihuacan costume, “Tlaloc-mask,” and the dark body paint often associated with that city occur on a vase, whereabouts and photographer unknown, but almost certainly from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala (the pink glyphs and quality of line point to this attribution). The players employ aberrant instruments, including curved rattles of gourd and large spiked trumpets. A fire from criss-crossed paper or sticks radiates curls of flame near the main dancers/singers, consistent with the rituals linked by the Maya to that central Mexican civilization.
Acknowledgements My thanks go to Felipe Rojas, David Stuart, Paul Tamburro, and Haicheng Wang for discussing these ideas with me. Haicheng reminded me of Zakir Hussain’s brilliance with tabla bol, and Paul drew my attention to the essay by David Hughes on a comparative explanation for such syllabic sequences. Ann McMullen at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, helped with accession information about the drum from Yaloch, Guatemala.
References cited
Adams, Richard E. W. 1971. The Ceramics of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 63(1). Cambridge, MA.
Anno, Mariko. 2010. Nōkan (Nō Flute) and Oral Transmission: Cohesion and Musicality through Mnemonics. Asian Theatre Journal 27(1):130–48.
Bierhorst, John. 1985. Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Carrillo González, Juan, Francisca Zalaquett Rock, and Laura Sotelo Santos. 2014. Los sonidos del Tunkul: Códigos acústicos mayas de la península de Yucatán. In Entramados sonoros de tradición mesoamericana: Identidades, imágenes y contexto, edited by Francisca Zalaquett, Martha Nájera, and Laura Sotelo, pp. 111–48. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mayas, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. n.d. Un instrumento musical en el arte de Cotzumalguapa ¿Variante del tecomapiloa? Unpublished ms.
Danien, Elin C. 2006. Paintings of Maya Pottery: The Art and Career of M. Louise Baker. Report submitted to FAMSI, accessed May 1, 2025.
de Gandarias Iriarte, Igor. 2013. El son Guatemalteco tradicional: Caracterización, tipos y distribución étnico-geográfica. Guatemala City: Instituto de Investigaciones Humanísticas.
Dickson, Joshua. 2013. Piping Sung: Women, Canntaireachd and the Role of the Tradition-Bearer. Scottish Studies 36:45–65.
Haly, Richard. 1986. Poetics of the Aztecs. New Scholar 1/2:85–133.
Herrera-Castro, Mariano, Alejandra Quintanar-Isaías, Felipe Orduña-Bustamante, Bertina Olmedo-Vera, and Ana Teresa Jaramillo-Pérez. 2019. Wood Identification and Acoustic Analysis of Three Original Aztec teponaztli Musical Instrument. Madera y Bosques 25(1):e2511690.
Holley, George R. 1983. Ceramic Change at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Illinois University.
Houston, Stephen. 2016. Crafting Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Painters and Sculptors. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, pp. 391–431. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
—————, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hughes, David W. 1989. The Historical Uses of Nonsense: Vowel-Pitch Solfege from Scotland to Japan. In Ethnomusicology and the Historical Dimension: Papers Presented at the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, London, May 20-23 1986, edited by Morgot L. Philipp, pp. 3–18. Ludwigsburg: Philipp Verlag.
Hull, Kerry. 2016. A Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Mayan–Spanish–English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Inomata, Takeshi, Daniela Triadan, and Estela Pinto. 2010. Chapter 9: Complete and Reconstructible Drums. In Burned Palaces and Elite Residences of Aguateca: Excavations and Ceramics, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, pp. 362–68. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Kelley, Thomas F. 2015. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York: W.W. Norton.
Krempel, Guido, and Sofía Paredes Maury. 2017. An Exceptional Classic Maya Polychrome Drum of Unknown Provenance in the Fundación La Ruta Maya. Mexicon 39(4):74–80.
Lelis de Oliveira, Sara. 2024. Traducción de un canto al toque del teponaztle de los Cantares Mexicanos: Desafíos, problemas y estrategias. Nova Revista Amazônica 12(1):124–34.
Rowell, Lewis E. 1992. Music and Musical thought in Early India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lewy, Matthias. 2015. Ti qui to co: The Combinations of Syllables in the Cantares Mexicanos–A Comparison of Sound Reconstruction. In Flower World Music Archaeology of the Americas, Mundo Florido Arqueomusicología de las Américas vol. 4, edited by Matthias Stöckli and Mark Howell, pp. 99–123. Berlin: ēkhō Verlag.
Mehrabi, Adib, Simon Dixon, and Mark Sandler. 2019. Vocal Imitation of Percussion Sounds: On the Perceptual Similarity between Imitations and Imitated Sounds. PLoS One 2019 Jul 25;14(7):e0219955.
Nowotny, Karl Anton. 1956. Die Notation des “Tono” in den aztekischen Cantares. Beiträge zur Völkerkunde, Neue Folge 4/2:185–89.
Patel, Aniruddh D., and John R. Iversen. 2003. Acoustic and Perceptual Comparison of Speech and Drum Sounds in the North Indian Tabla Tradition: An Empirical Study of Sound Symbolism. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Barcelona:925-928.
Peñafiel, Antonio. 1904. Cantares en idioma mexicano: Reproducción facsimilar del manuscrito original existente en la Biblioteca Nacional. Mexico City: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento.
Rankin, Susan. 2012. Écrire les sons: Création des premieres notations musicales. Cahiers de civilisation médiévales 55:379–92.
—————. 2014. Identity and Diversity: The Idea of Regional Musical Notation. In ‘Nationes’, ‘Gentes’ und die Musik im Mittelalter, edited by Frank Hentschel and Marie Winkelmüller, pp. 375–94. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Ross, Alex. 2020. Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Satterthwaite, Linton, Jr. 1938. Maya Dating by Hieroglyph Styles. American Anthropologist, n.s., 40:416–28.
Schultze-Jena, Leonhard. 1957. Alt-aztekische Gesänge, nach einer in der Biblioteca Nacional von Mexiko aufbewahrten Handschrift übersetzt und erläutert. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Shepherd, Frances A. 1976. Tabla And The Benares Gharana. Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University.
Tavárez, David. 2006. The Passion According to the Wooden Drum: The Christian Appropriation of a Zapotec Ritual Genre in New Spain. The Americas 62(3):413–44.
—————. 2017. Performing the Zaachila Word: The Dominican Invention of Zapotec Christianity. In Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, edited by David Tavárez, pp. 29–62. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Tomlinson, Gary. 2007. The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yurchenco, Henrietta. 1985. The Rabinal Achí: A Twelfth Century Drama of the Maya-Quiché of Guatemala. Acta Musicologica 57(1):37–50.
Zalaquett Rock, Francisca. 2021. Instrumentos sonoros prehispánicos mayas, Tomo I: Idiófonos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.