Music, Dance and Recreation in the Inca World

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, music and dancing accompanied farming celebrations, royal ceremonies and gatherings over food and maize beer throughout the Inca world. At Cusco, the imperial capital in present-day Peru, performers sang about rulers’ achievements and danced before the court. Communities also had dances associated with their own work and customs. Alongside these performances, children spun tops, adults played dice and board games, and young nobles competed in physical trials.

Song, movement and instrumental music often formed one performance. The Quechua word taqui could mean singing and dancing together: a group might sing while stepping in time, with a drummer supplying the beat. Some dances celebrated a harvest; others praised a ruler, marked a religious occasion or accompanied mourning.

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Flutes, panpipes and percussion

Wind instruments supplied melodies and signals. The quena was a flute made from a length of cane, open at both ends, with a notch at the mouth and holes for the fingers. A player blew across the notched edge and opened or covered the holes to change the note. Bone flutes were also made. Panpipes worked differently: several short tubes of unequal length were joined side by side, and the musician blew across their open tops. Each tube produced its own note, with the shorter tubes sounding higher than the longer ones.

Drums kept time for singers and dancers. A huancar consisted of a hollow wooden body covered at both ends with stretched llama hide. The drummer struck it with a single stick, sometimes decorated with coloured wool. Both men and women played drums, and instruments ranged from small ones that dancers carried themselves to large drums used in major performances. In one court dance, a man carried the large drum on his back while a woman played it, allowing the music to move with the dancers.

Rattles and bells added sound to the movement of the feet. Dancers wore strings of shells or seed-pod rattles around their ankles, as well as small bells made from copper or silver. Conch-shell trumpets produced a strong single note and were used for military signalling. Flutes also accompanied more intimate music: the writer Garcilaso de la Vega, whose account appeared in 1609, associated the quena with love songs.

Singing and remembering rulers

Performances could alternate a lead singer with a responding group. Bernabé Cobo’s account, completed in 1653, describes songs in which one person began and the others answered, praising an Inca ruler or recounting past deeds. The repeated response allowed a group to take part while a singer led the words and the rhythm.

Trained singers also preserved accounts of earlier rulers. Pedro de Cieza de León, who gathered information at Cusco around 1550, explains how these songs were prepared. After a ruler died, elders considered his achievements, including campaigns and the territories he had gained or lost. Record keepers and skilled speakers helped assemble an account, which composers turned into songs for ceremonies and gatherings. Singers taught the repertoire to their sons and to other selected learners.

At major assemblies, performers stood before the reigning Inca and sang about his ancestors. A ruler remembered as successful received extensive praise; one judged cowardly or negligent might receive little more than a place in the succession list. The songs thus presented the court’s chosen account of its past, teaching an audience the deeds for which particular rulers were to be remembered.

Agricultural dances and court performances

The haylli, or farmers’ dance, brought agricultural work into a performance. Men carried tacllas, the foot-ploughs used to break the ground, while women carried wooden implements for breaking clods and levelling the soil. Their tools identified the work being celebrated. Such dances accompanied gatherings connected with the agricultural year and with public ceremonies.

Cobo describes several other forms. In the cachua, performed at major festivals, men and women joined hands in a circle and danced as they moved around it. The guacones dance was performed by masked men who jumped while carrying animal skins or small dried animals.

A dance of the royal lineage, called guayyaya, followed a slower procession. Men and women joined hands in long lines, with the royal standard and other insignia carried ahead of them. To the beat of a large drum, they took one step backwards and two forwards, gradually approaching the seated ruler. Cobo describes occasions with two or three hundred participants, sometimes in mixed lines and sometimes with men and women in separate rows. Admission was restricted to royal descendants, while the man carrying the drum came from outside that privileged group.

Dice and board games

Pichqa, named from the Quechua word for five, was a dice game. Players threw a single marked die, and its result determined their score. Dice could be made from wood or pottery; small pottery examples were recovered at Machu Picchu. In Cobo’s description of pichqa, the highest value on the die was five.

One story that Cobo records about the emperor Túpac Inca Yupanqui gives a clearer picture of play. The ruler was gaming with nobles in the Yucay valley near Cusco and had almost won, but still needed a throw of one to finish. Another result would leave him without the win. He cast the die in the name of a favoured woman, and the spectators called out for the required result. The roll came up one, and he gave her his winnings. Players sometimes wagered cloth and livestock, which Cobo names among the stakes in his descriptions of gaming.

Dice were also used with playing boards. Cobo describes chuncara as a game played on a flat stone or wooden board with five small holes. Beans of different colours served as markers, allowing the players’ pieces to be distinguished. The holes had values of ten, twenty, thirty, forty and fifty. After casting the die, players moved the beans between the positions according to the result, progressing towards the end of the board.

Spinning tops and physical contests

Children’s play included spinning tops. A top called piscoynu was kept turning by whipping it: repeated strokes maintained its spin as it balanced on its point.

Competitive physical trials also formed part of warachikuy, the ceremony admitting boys of royal lineages to adult status at Cusco. Candidates underwent foot races, throwing contests and mock fighting. One race ran from the top of the hill of Anahuarque to its foot. An older sponsor accompanied each boy, and noble girls waited at the finish with maize beer for the runners.

The contests belonged to a longer sequence of preparations, visits to sacred places, dancing and family gatherings. Relatives presented the boys with adult clothing, shields, slings and maces; their ears were pierced for the ornaments worn by the Inca elite. Running and martial skill therefore formed part of becoming a recognised member of that group, alongside receiving its dress and equipment.

Maize beer, usually called chicha, accompanied meals, dancing and ceremonial hospitality. Boys preparing for the royal initiation helped chew the maize used to brew the drink for their celebrations. Chewing introduced enzymes from saliva that broke the grain’s starch into sugars. The prepared mash was then left to ferment, turning sugars into alcohol.

Drinking together could follow a formal exchange. Cobo describes a person taking two cups of chicha to someone he wished to honour, offering one and drinking the other alongside him. His account of public banquets places groups in long rows in a square or a governor’s courtyard, with the governor seated at the head and families bringing their food.

Performance after the Spanish conquest

Collective performances continued under Spanish rule in altered settings. In August 1550, after the harvest, Cieza saw people enter Cusco with their wives, carrying farming implements and maize stalks while singing and reciting. Spanish religious authorities were already restricting the public performance of older rites, but this gathering still brought the work and songs of the harvest into the city.

Cobo later describes Indigenous dances within Catholic festivals. At a Corpus Christi procession in the Collao region around Lake Titicaca, he counted forty different dances whose clothing, songs and movements represented different communities. He also noted that imported European bells were replacing some older shell and seed-pod rattles. In these processions, communities performed dances originating elsewhere as well as their own.

For the wider setting, see Daily Life in the Inca World.