It turns out, the history of Peruvian popular music sung in the indigenous Quechua is sort of wild. One of my first hits was Yma Sumac, a coloratura soprano with a career spanning two decades and a vocal range spanning four and half octaves. If you want your mind blown, search up the song “Chuncho” from her 1953 album Inca Taqui, where she covers nearly her entire range in a single piece. Sumac would go on to Hollywood and work with some of the biggest names of her age. She truly seems like a legend and an icon. I wanted to choose “Chuncho” for this assignment really badly, but I couldn’t in good conscience pass off a song from 1953 as contemporary popular music, which has been my consistent focus since the start of the semester. So, I looked to a modern singer who was heavily inspired by work of Yma Sumac, Sylvia Falcón. While Falcón’s music is far less experimental, I can definitely hear the influence of Sumac’s vocal agility and frank delivery. She is the rightful successor of the style of Andean lyrical singing that Yma pioneered. 

Quechua is natively spoken by 13.9% of Peruvians, making it firmly a minority language. There have been efforts to revitalize the language by searching it in schools, an initiative that has been building for some time. However, it seems like when it comes to music, the popular music of Peru has always has a bilingual tinge to it. The language is only becoming more and more mainstream, as hip hop and rock singers have picked up the torch. Some of them are even creating songs that switch languages part way through, requiring subtitles be added to their music videos. In Falcón’s second-generation renditions of Quechua language pieces sung in a Western operatic style, we see a continuing traditions of Quechua songs as a staple of the Peruvian music scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irc2_gsjtLA