Ecuadorian Folk Music

Que Doloroso by Arany Zoltán is an Ecuadorian style folk song played with
the panpipe, guitar, mandolin, shaken percussion, voice and struck, non-pitched rattle.

From Arany’s website:

Arany Zoltán was born in 1976 Debrecen, Hungary. He began to play music at the age of four. Later studied cello and guitar. At 20 years of age he turned to folk music and medieval music. At first he played mandolin and later learned to play multiplicity of instruments. In these last fifteen years he played in many groups exploring various different styles. He has experience in many styles of folk music and medieval music as well.

One of the issues that music teachers face in a musically prolific and diverse culture is giving students the ability to listen critically to music in such a way that they can discern what they are hearing and then be able to recreate the sound when needed. Ethnomusicologists have paved the way by helping to classify musical sound into categories that help discern what instrument is being utilized. There are many different systems throughout the world. The ancient Chinese system was based on eight sounds, depending on the material of which the instrument is constructed. The Indian system centered around what part of the instrument vibrated to create sound—the body, a membrane, a string or column of air. The European system, of which I am most familiar, was based on the parts of the orchestra—strings, winds, percussion and keyboard. Simple systems developed in Africa and in ancient Greece placed instruments into two categories. No matter the construct, all of these systems have the same goal: to adequately describe and categorize instruments of similar sounds. The most extensive of these systems is based on Victor Mahillon’s four categories, expanded by Sachs and Hornbostel to include subcategories. Air, membrane, strings and the instruments body serve as the major categories—aerophone, membranophone, chordaphone and idiophone. More recently electronically generated sounds have been added to the system, electrophones. The ability to identify, adequately describe and categorize an instrument is a tremendous benefit to the creation and sustaining of musical tradition. The excellent diagram below shows the basis for each category and subcategory along with how each is differentiated.

In the piece above you hear a shaken, non-pitched rattle instrument enter at 0:34. At the same time, and in the background, there is also another non-pitched struck rattle sound that at first sounds like distortion due to the fidelity of the recording but upon continued listening we recognize that it comes in at specific points of the piece in tempo. Also, in the plucked chordaphones you can hear the timbre of two different instruments, the guitar and a mandolin style, small body guitar. Being able to hear and classify these instruments help us better enjoy, understand and document the piece.

Taxonomy of Musical Instruments Mind Map by James Kennedy, Beijing,
based on the Hornbostel & Sachs (1914) method of classifying musical instruments.