A Riddle of Cultural Diffusion: The Existence of Inverted Reed Clarinets among the Indians of the Goajira Peninsula

Extract

The existence at the Peninsula de la Guajira—shared by Venezuela and Columbia— of a type of clarinet with simple, inverted reeds, similar to those found in the north of Africa, poses an interesting problem of cultural transmission. The first question one must ask is, I think, at what moment in history the diffusion of such instruments towards the above-mentioned peninsula took place. I speak of diffusion and not of parallelism for an important reason: the fact that similarities, not only organological but also melodic, exist between the Goajiro music and that of other peoples referred to below.

The Goajiro instrument I describe in the present paper I saw for the first time at the Caracas Science Museum in 1947. A Goajiro Indian woman who happened to be staying there had been in contact with members of the museum's staff for some time. She informed me that the name of the instrument was uótoroyó