The people of Q'eros live isolated in the Andes of Peru. Carnival in Q'eros: Where the Mountains Meet the Jungle is produced and directed by John Cohen, who serves as the film's narrator. Juan Núñez del Prado also collaborated in directing the film. Carnival in Q'eros follows the Q'eros people during the time of year they call Carnival season. In this article I will apply Titon's “Four Components of a Musical Culture” to the musical culture of the Q'eros people in the film Carnival in Q'eros. The film begins with the start of the Carnival season, when the Q'eros send a despacho, a "message to the gods." The despacho contains many smaller offerings directed at evil spirits, the Earth, or friendly spirits who dwell in the mountains. One of the offerings contains a red and a white thread representing the colors of the Peruvian flag. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe Q'eros then chew coca leaves to complete this part of the ritual, waving them towards the spirit they are intended for. Alpacas are sacred to the people of Q'eros. Every year, during the Carnival season, the Q'eros celebrate the alpacas with a ritual called Palcha. Palcha is also the name of a flower that grows in the Andes, which is an important part of this ritual. This celebration begins with a ritual in which the Q'eros place corn beer, chicha, and animal statues on a cloth. Then they perform the “compeungph”, a ritual song. After this song, the Q'eros head to the enclosure to celebrate the alpacas directly. To do this, the Q'eros play songs on a flute, called a pinculu, and throw palcha flowers at the alpacas. These actions are a request to the Gods to ensure the health and fertility of the alpacas. After this ritual in the film we see a ritual dedicated to women. We see the women of Q'eros loudly lament the things that have happened to them over the past year, scattering palcha flowers as they do so. A woman blames herself for her son's death, saying: “I couldn't save him. I couldn't protect him” while another mourns the financial situation of the Q'eros: “we are poor. Now we are eating our poverty." This lament allows women to release the pains of the past as they move into the next year. The film then continues with the most important event of the carnival period: the gathering of the ayllus at the ceremonial center. Each ayllu is a division of the entire Q'eros population, and the families with the ayllus each have their own homes at the ceremonial center, which are only used during the Carnival season. The authorities of Q'eros greet each other by blowing conch shells as they arrive on horseback, a demonstration of their power. On the night of their arrival, the Q'eros gather to sing and meet each other. The Q'eros conclude the festival the next morning with dancing and consumption of coca and chica leaves. When we first met the Q'ero at the beginning of the film, Cohen said they were in financial trouble with their bank. This was due to the fact that a group of alpacas purchased by the Q'eros were unable to produce offspring, providing no return on the investment. At the end of the film, Cohen offers to buy alpacas for the Q'eros people to repay them for their cooperation in the film. Each ayllu agreed to pass the alpacas to another ayllu after a few years. The film ends as the Q'eros gather alpacas in Ocongate, a nearby town, and bring them back to their village. Titon defines a musical culture as “a group's total involvement with music: ideas, actions, institutions, material objects”. These four categories of engagement connect to what Titon considers the four components of a culturemusical: ideas about music, activities involving music, musical repertoires and the material culture of music. “Ideas about music” refers to how music relates to religious practices, what is considered music, how it should be performed, and how music changes over time. An activity involving music is any musical event. “Musical repertoires” include not only specific musical genres and lyrics, but also musical style and the way music is composed and transmitted. Finally, the material culture of music refers to all objects that are part of a musical event. The first component of Titon musical culture, ideas about music, can be seen in the frequent rituals the Q'eros participate in and in the interesting nature of their music. The pinculu, a flute, makes a frequent appearance in Q'eros rituals. The pinculu has only four holes, which limits the number of notes it can produce, but its religious significance to the Q'eros is evident through its frequent use in ritual practices. She appears in the film when the Q'eros women express their problems from the past year and when they throw palcha flowers into the alpaca enclosure. The flat sound produced by both the singers and the pinculu flute displays the aesthetics of the Q'ero culture. Few of their musical performances have a melody comparable to that of Western music. Instead, Q'eros play and sing repeated, closely spaced groups of notes that create a spiritual atmosphere for the ritual in which they are played, allowing them to connect with the Earth and the spirits around them. This “pulsating sound” can be heard in the film when the ayllus socialize on the first night of the ceremonial gathering. This music is not something that is meant to be listened to, as there are no audience members, but it is meant to allow everyone in attendance to connect spiritually with each other. Contexts for music in Q'ero society are almost always ritual-based. The two most important rituals in the film are Palcha, the annual ritual for the alpacas, and the ceremonial gathering, including the nightly musical gathering and the ceremonial dance the following morning (Cohen 6:10, 15:25). As for the history of Q'ero music, most of their music appears to be traditional ritual practices passed down from generation to generation. The Q'eros people live mostly isolated from the outside world so it is unlikely that their musical traditions have changed significantly over time. Similar to Q'ero music contexts, activities involving music in Q'ero society all have ritual characteristics. The main goal of these activities is to connect to the Earth and ask something of the spirits who live among and around the people of Q'eros. Activities shown in the film include the alpaca ritual, women lamenting the problems of the past year, carnival gathering and dancing. The first characteristic of the “musical repertoires” component of a musical culture is style, which Cohen defines as “everything that concerns the organization of the musical sound itself”. The style of Q'ero music is unique in that it is an ambient sound meant to represent something instead of a melodic piece of music for entertainment. Cohen says the ambient sound produced by Q'ero music "resembles the sound of jungle celebrations." This musical style falls into a genre called "ambient music" for a reason. The people of Q'eros do not keep written copies of their music but compose and transmit it entirely orally. Most of the music we hear in the film doesn't even have a clear beginning, end, or name, with the exception of the carnival song “Serena.” The physical movement of the performers of Q'ero music matches the throbbing and spiritual nature of the music,.