The berimbau, the leading instrument in the ensemble that accompanies the Brazilian martial art known as capoeira.
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Although the indigenous cultures used numerous percussion and wind instruments, stringed instruments arrived with the colonists. The rich Iberian tradition of stringed instruments—guitarand guitarlike instruments, lute, mandolin, harp, and violin—spread rapidly through all of Latin America. Yet in practice these instruments respond to different aestheticoutlooks. In the Andean area, for example, the common charango is a lutelike or guitarlike instrument of five courses of multiple strings, frequently with a body made of an armadillo shell; it sounds quite differently among Indians, who use thin metal strings, and mestizos, who use nylon strings. The Spanish classical guitar and the Portuguese viola (a guitarlike instrument with five courses of double strings, as a rule) have become the characteristic folk instruments of Hispanic America and Brazil, respectively. The berimbau, a type of musical bow, probably of African origin, became the foundation of music for the Brazilian capoeira. Combinations of instruments in ensemble performance frequently integrate the tri-ethnic heritage, as, for example, in the Guatemalan ensemble of chirimía, marimba (of African origin), and Mayandrum (tun or tunkul).
