vely of reeds, there remain several variations in style. For example, the number of tubes often ranges three to fourteen; some pipes have beveled resonators, while others do not.
The siku appears to be associated generically with "the most characteristic types of Aymara music,"«FN1«LM8»«RM73» Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d., s.v. "Peru, Folk Music."
» which are instrumental and said to be based on a five-tone or pentatonic scale, although it appears from the variety of semitone instruments found in indigenous groups throughout Peru that indigenous music is not solely pentatonic. Other panpipe varieties, associated with specific tribes, include the oribe (Witoto tribal group), urusa (Omagua group), jonkari (Ashaninka/Campa), and antaras (Quechua).
Both Aymara and Quechua musical elaborations are said to be acculturated with dominant European musical forms, with Quechua forms the more influential.«FN1«LM8»«RM73» Britannica.
» Some ethnomusicologists have lamented the decline of the distinctive style of Andean music, speculating that the marked social disadvantages of the indigenous groups have aggravated the problem: "Perhaps the frustration affecting the Aymara as a people debilitates their music."«FN1«LM8»«RM73» Marguerite and Raoul d'Harcourt La musique des aymara sur les hauts plateaux boliviens (Paris: Societe des Americanistes [Musee de l'Homme], 1959), translated and abridged in Stevenson, 334.
» Chacon identifies the siku equally with Quechua and Aymara, both of which are situated in the Altiplano,«FN1«LM8»«RM73» America Valencia Chacon, The Altiplano Bipolar Siku: Study and Projection of Peruvian Panpipe Orchestras (Lima, Peru: Artex, 1989)m, 28.
» and considers the siku and the musical forms associated with to be not only a dominant remnant of indigenous culture but also the agent of the expansion of Andean music. As for the pentatonic scale, Chacon asserts that the Altiplano siku in use t...