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The Charango

Its beginnings go back to colonial Bolivia in Potosi, a mountain once fabulously rich in minerals as well as the city that prospered around it before the earth was stripped of its wealth. The name became part of the Spanish expression "todo un Potosi" (an entire Potosi), used to indicate something of immense value. In the 1600's Potosi was a city of 160,000 inhabitants, huge for its time and certainly for its place. Such a metropolis drew adventurers and fortune-seekers in large numbers, and with them musicians and entertainers who sought the favors of its wealthy audiences. In the streets and plazas they played the popular Spanish guitars of the time, the vihuelas and bandurrias. The latter made their way to the creoles, the mestizos, and ultimately to the native americans, who contributed to theplaying of the charango their traditional melodies and musical vocabulary. The charango thus was born as the local version of the Spanish stringed instruments. From Potosi, its popularity extended to the surroundings valleys and other cities. Eventually it became a typical instrument of what are now Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru', and part of northern Chile and Argentina.

The first charangos no doubt were made of wood in the style of a vihuela. But the Andes, while rich in minerals, are poor in forests. Over time, the charango came to be made from the shells of the quirquincho, the abundant Bolivian relative of the armadillo, or, in the valleys, carved from solid wood. Although charangos are made in a variety of sizes, the instrument best known today is small enough to be cradled in the musician's arms. It carries five double strings, the third, or middle, of which includes the base string and its octave, an arrangement that at least one author traces to 1780.

The same author, Campos Iglesias, traces the name to the quechua charaancu (dried tendon) and the aymara chara ancu (leg tendon), and relates it also to the quechua words chajhuancu (noisy) and chajhuncu (joyful). The charango is strummed with the middle finger or plucked, for different effects--accompanying a lead musician or carrying the melody. It is often played together with andean flutes (the quena, or wooden flute, and the pan-pipe made from reeds, the zampona--or, in Ecuador, rondador), guitar, large drum (bombo), and small percussion such as chajchas, a rattle made from goat hooves. A charango is highly portable, however, and is also played by itself. One of the most striking memories of this writer's long-ago travel in Peru is from the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman, near Cuzco. Lying among the boulders of the old construction, an elderly man, wrapped in woven cloth and protected by his ear-flap hat, sang to himself in quechua, accompanied by his charango and the ever-present winds of the altiplano. Clearly, the Spanish origin of the charango did not keep the indigenous andean peoples from making the instrument their own.