What Are the Traditional Instruments in Latin American Music?
The traditional instruments in Latin American music vary by country, since different regions have different indigenous peoples. These people contributed their musical culture to Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The resulting blend gives rise to different musical flavors, including instruments. Slavery, too, brought important contributions to traditional Latin American music. Spanish colonization meant that many Latin American countries composed and performed Western classical music: Baroque, Classical, Romantic. Traditional in this article refers to folk music. Puerto Rico The Taíno lived in Puerto Rico before Spanish colonization. Their contribution Puerto Rican musical instruments is the güiro, a ridged, hollowed-out gourd scraped with a stick (a pua) to produce sound, and the maracas, made from putting pebbles in the dried shell of higuera fruit and attaching a handle. They come in pairs. Several kinds of instruments were developed from the classical guitars brought over by the Span
