This article focuses on the music of the ritual known as Yurupari, based in an ethnography of the Ye’ pâ-masa, a Tukanoan group from northwestern Amazon. The analysis is rooted in the native cosmology, and it aims to work with the expressive level of this musical genre, and to show the various significations which emerge during the performance. The symbolic complex of Yurupari is seen here as a constituent of a preventive social system that assures to men the power of creation as well as other capacities of the sacred instruments.
ethnomusicology; gender; indigenous music