The Bard Music Festival

Leonora Saavedra, Leonora Saavedra

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400874200
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) is the central figure in Mexican music of the twentieth century and among the most eminent of all Latin American modernist composers. An enfant terrible in his own country, Chávez was an integral part of the emerging music scene in the United States in the 1920s. His highly individual style—diatonic, dissonant, contrapuntal—addressed both modernity and Mexico's indigenous past. Chávez was also a governmental arts administrator, founder of major Mexican cultural institutions, and conductor and founder of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. Carlos Chávez and His World brings together an international roster of leading scholars to delve into not only Chávez's music but also the history, art, and politics surrounding his life and work.Contributors explore Chávez's vast body of compositions, including his piano music, symphonies, violin concerto, late compositions, and Indianist music. They look at his connections with such artistic greats as Aaron Copland, Miguel Covarrubias, Henry Cowell, Silvestre Revueltas, and Paul Strand. The essays examine New York's modernist scene, Mexican symphonic music, portraits of Chávez by major Mexican artists of the period, including Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, and Chávez's impact on El Colegio Nacional. A quantum leap in understanding Carlos Chávez and his milieu, this collection will stimulate further work in Latin American music and culture.The contributors are Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Amy Bauer, Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Helen Delpar, Christina Taylor Gibson, Susana González Aktories, Anna Indych-López, Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, James Krippner, Rebecca Levi, Ricardo Miranda, Julián Orbón, Howard Pollack, Leonora Saavedra, Antonio Saborit, Stephanie Stallings, and Luisa Vilar Payá.Bard Music Festival 2015:
Carlos Chávez and His World
Bard College
August 7-9 and August 14-16, 2015

PART I

Chávez’s Musical World

Chávez, Modern Music, and the New York Scene

CHRISTINA TAYLOR GIBSON

No other musical magazine of our century can possibly have the place in history, either as monument or as source material, that “Modern Music” already occupied, because no other magazine and no book has told the musical story of its time so completely, so authoritatively, so straight from the field of battle and from the creative laboratory. Its twenty-three volumes are history written by the men who made it.

—Virgil Thomson, New York Herald Tribune, 12 January 1947

As Virgil Thomson noted in his obituary for Modern Music, which ran from 1924 through 1946, the magazine served as the central chronicle of the New York new-music scene during the years it was in existence.¹ Although technically the house organ of the League of Composers, it was the only publication of its kind—none of the other new-music organizations produced a periodical—and, like many “little magazines” of the early twentieth century, its small circulation belied its influence. Its editor and manager during the entire run was Minna Lederman, who used her considerable personal and intellectual resources to shape the publication. Intended as a critic’s gateway into contemporary music, the articles it published were not of a highly technical nature, yet most of the participating authors were themselves composers intent on sharing their worldview. In this way the publication served as a central text for both new-music participants and its would-be observers. If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, communities are often “imagined” in the pages of periodicals, then Modern Music offers the most detailed available map of New York musical modernists’ identity.²

Carlos Chávez’s views and music figure prominently in the magazine. During Modern Music’s run he was an integral part of the New York new-music scene, first as a young ultra-modernist and then as an established composer-conductor with a transnational career. Chávez’s self-concept as a modernist can be traced in Modern Music’s pages, beginning with his article “Technique and Inner Form,”³ which places the composer in an intellectual music avant-garde, and continuing through the very last issue of the magazine, in which Salvador Moreno published an encomium to the Orquesta Sinfónica de México’s (OSM) performance of new music in Mexico. More importantly, Modern Music situates Chávez within the new-music community scene of New York, revealing his alliances, status, and identity within the group. In other words, it conveys key information about the politics governing the performance and reception of his music, especially as it pertains to his U.S. career and legacy.

Methodology

Although scholars have long recognized that Chávez’s reception in the United States was inextricably intertwined with politics—both of the small-scale interpersonal variety and that of large populations tied together by virtue of race, nationality, or status—here I apply a network-derived analysis that is deeply indebted to approaches found in several recent ethnomusicological texts. Perhaps most pertinent is Ingrid Monson’s book on jazz improvisation in New York, Saying Something. Like her, I examine “the interactive shaping of social networks and communities that accompany musical participation” while recognizing that “participation” may take a very different form when the musical practice is less “interactive” in its performance practice.⁴

Chávez’s experience in the New York modernist music community during the years in question, 1927–46, varied; in part it was dependent on his own understanding of the culture’s strictures and his navigation of them to better his status. The community was also in flux and responsive to outside forces. Chávez’s network in New York was extensive, and it would not be possible to document the entirety of it in a short essay. Instead, I seek new insight into the ways in which friendships with men like Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee, and Aaron Copland affected his work for and with Modern Music, as well as his access and influence within the New York music community.⁵

Chávez’s Modernisms in Modern Music

Modern Music arose out of a nascent but vibrant new-music culture in New York City. By the year of its first publication, 1923, sectors of the city had fallen under the spell of Leo Ornstein and Edgard Varèse. Pro-Musica, the International Composers’ Guild, and the League of Composers presented contemporary music with much attention in the local press.⁶ But, as Minna Lederman describes it, critics were inclined toward sensational objections rather than genuine engagement with the music; the League conceived of the magazine as a response and a literary charm campaign. In this respect, they met with near instant success: “The immediate target was the press, whose critics at once fell in love with the Review. Not only W. J. Henderson (New York Sun), Lawrence Gilman (New York Tribune), and Olin Downes (New York Times) but reporters all across the country hailed our journal.”⁷

Over the next few years the community around the magazine expanded, so that when Chávez was living in New York (1926–28), its intended public included the new-music community of the city, their counterparts on the West Coast, and those within that circle of influence, including critics, scholars, intellectuals, and artists in other fields.⁸ They drew this diverse and attentive readership by offering something that no other periodical had with such regularity: straightforward analysis of contemporary music written by composers active in the scene.

It was in this guise that Chávez’s name first appeared in the publication. In an article titled “New Terms for New Music,” Henry Cowell referred to the composer’s Energía as an example of “contrapuntal polytonality.”⁹ To illustrate his point, he provided half of measure 19 from the first movement of the work (see Example 1) and explained that “‘contrapuntal polytonality’ can be formed by setting more widely related keys against each other in such fashion that each one will stand out independently.” Thus, though none of the keys are firmly established, the viola part approaches G-sharp/C-sharp major, the cello line C major, and the bass A major. There is also a two-against-three motion between the viola/bass and the cello, which contributes to the sense of independence among the lines. Unseen in the example, but apparent in the complete score, are the multiple levels of “contrapuntal polytonality,” made stark by the idiosyncratic instrumentation: piccolo, flute, bassoon, horn (F), trumpet (B-flat), bass trombone, viola, cello, and double bass. Surrounding measure 19, each group of instruments has a different melodic and harmonic identity. Chávez notes that the brass should play “neither softer nor louder than winds and strings,” emphasizing equity among the parts. Such a technique is not sustained throughout the movement; it is followed by several measures in which the winds and strings trade melody while the brass is confined to brief interjections and moments of unison or tonal harmony that offer respite from the rigorous dissonance found elsewhere.

Example 1. Carlos Chávez, Energía, mm. 19–23.

Readers unfamiliar with Chávez and his work would have had little context to evaluate the composer’s use of “contrapuntal polytonality.” Cowell provided no information beyond the one-measure example and basic definition cited above. For those who had heard Chávez’s music performed or seen the scores he was lending to and playing for friends in the New York music community, the reference would have resonated. Absent knowledge of the Energía score, which had not yet been performed in public in New York, Modern Music connoisseurs would have been familiar with the fourth movement of H.P. (Horsepower or Caballos de vapor), Otros tres exágonos, the three sonatinas, and the Third Sonata, all of which had been performed in the city over the past few years.¹⁰ These scores are similar to Energía in their use of machine imitations, creative approaches to timbre, and, most relevant here, employment of dissonance and counterpoint. Indeed, both the piece and Cowell’s analytic approach to it were apt representatives of Chávez’s desired aesthetic and image at the time.

The portrayal of Chávez as an experimenter was supported by the composer’s article printed just a few pages later in the magazine. Titled “Technique and Inner Form,” the essay proposes an entirely new approach to composition pedagogy; it suggests that composition schools should stop asking students to adopt the styles and techniques of the past, even as practice exercises.¹¹ Instead, they should focus on new approaches so that the music is more likely to reflect the time, place, and personality of the composer. In primitive societies, Chávez wrote, “The young were taught the musical elements, to set their problems (which were almost always of a magical nature), and to solve them.” Today, he argued, a different approach was called for: “Let him see the elements of the problem … but let him in no way be taught to solve the problem. The known devices and rules for solution lead to results that are too much alike, and therefore useless.”

The article reflected Chávez’s self-taught approach, and it suggested the reforms he was trying to make as head of the Mexican National Conservatory, a post he held from 1928 until 1933, and again for a few months in 1934. Several years later Chávez refined these ideas in another article for Modern Music, “Revolt in Mexico”:

We no longer believe that music is beautiful because it contains unique and absolute truths according to unique and quite immutable laws. We believe that technic is the concrete means of artistic expression, and that consequently each example of authentic music implies its own particular technic. No type of music is the music, and there is no absolute truth containing the whole truth of all music. ¹²

The modernist stance of “Technique and Inner Form” and “Revolt in Mexico” characterized Chávez’s writings for Modern Music. He was particularly concerned with the practical, systemic obstacles to the creation and performance of new music. In the articles quoted above, his primary concern was pedagogy; in “The Function of the Concert”¹³ and “Music for the Radio,”¹⁴ he turned his attention toward avenues for performance of new music. The first of these articles is concerned with patronage and the implications of the contemporary economics of music making. Although he concluded that “the concert has lent itself to increasing the importance of the performer at the cost of the composer,” he believed the situation was reversible: “The big symphony societies, the university, school, and college departments of music, and all the concert-giving societies in general music realize that they should round out the musical organization assigned to them by once more making the encouragements of creation the nucleus of their functions.”¹⁵

Although Chávez does not refer to his professional life in “The Function of the Concert,” it is clear that his role as both a composer and performer informed his views. His most influential platform for reforming musical life was not through composing, but in his position as conductor and musical director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, from 1928 to 1946. Under his guidance, the OSM developed a repertoire with a great degree of modernism and nationalism.¹⁶ In recognition of this feat, Virgil Thomson reprinted several OSM programs in the New York Herald Tribune. By studying that concert repertoire next to a set of New York Philharmonic programs from the same year (to which Thomson was surely making an implicit comparison), one can see the relatively large amount of time and space accorded new and American works at the OSM (Table 1). Although other U.S. symphony orchestras like the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions and Credits
• Part I Chávez’s Musical World
• Part II Biographical and Analytical Perspectives
• Part III Chávez’s Greater World
• Index
• Notes on the Contributors