Harawi

Harawi (also written jarawi) is an ancient genre of Andean lyric song, surviving from the Inca Empire in the Quechua-speaking highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. It is a slow, monophonic song in minor pentatonic melody, sung unaccompanied or with quena flute, on themes of unrequited love, farewell, orphanhood and death. By tradition its keepers are older women, who sing it in a high, nasal style at weddings, funerals, house-raisings and agricultural work. Harawi is the oldest documented layer of Andean music and the source from which the mestizo yaraví later developed.