Early Chamber Works of Carlos Chávez

Carlos Chávez was born in Potpola, a northwest suburb of Mexico City in 1899. By the time he was coming to adulthood, the Mexican Revolution was nearing its end and the country was finding stability. The new leaders of the government promoted the arts and wanted to create a sense of nationalism with them. Chávez was inspired by this nationalism and was commissioned to write new “Mexican” works. As Mexican heritage and genealogy is a mixture of native American (“Indian”) and Spanish culture, much of Chávez’ and others’ nationalistic writings are influenced by “Indian” culture and music. His music, however, is beyond nationalistic; it is beyond European; it is what some might call Universalist. Chávez created a style that was inspired by things that came before him but that was all his own. It is at once primitive and modern. In the chamber pieces of his decided to write about, there exist drastically different compositions, yet there is an underlying personal style that is inherent in them all.

Xochipilli an Imaginary Aztec Music, is a great example of Chávez’ nationalistic writing that is informed by pre-Colombian culture. Because Aztec music and culture was almost completely destroyed by Hernando Cortés and his army in 1519, it is impossible to know how Aztec music was performed. Chávez did extensive research before composing this piece. He visited many museums in Mexico looking at any instruments that survived. He studied Cortesian era documents of Bernardino de Sahagún and Juan de Torquemada that described Aztec music. He analyzed pre-Colombian art and sculpture and drew influence from it that he applied to musical form. Chávez also remembered going to the “Indian” town of Tlaxcala as a child and hearing their music. Through these methods he recreated what he thought could be the sounds of an Aztec festival or ritual.

The instrumentation is for six percussionists and four wind players. The percussion instruments that he calls for are huehuetls(single-headed drums), teponaztles ( log drums with two pitches a minor third apart), and an assortment of bells, rattles, and scrapers. The wind instruments are piccolo and flute (to recreate the sounds of the Aztec bone or clay flutes), Eb clarinet (to recreate the sound of the clay ocarina), and trombone (to recreate the sound of the conch shell) While the percussion timbres of Xochipilli give the piece a rustic and natural sound, the complex overlapping rhythmic structure that Chávez uses makes it an enjoyable rubix cube of a listen. Also, the pentatonic scales and short repeated melodic motives that Chavez gives the woodwinds are at once beautiful and ritualistically repetitive. By the third movement all three woodwinds are playing contrasting scales giving the listener a mind warp. Are we in the pre-colombian fifteenth century in the poly-tonal twentieth century? I appreciate the percussive textures that Chavez creates by interweaving hemiolas and phrases of different lengths for each instrument. Through this work he brings the percussion family of instruments to a new level of awareness and acceptance in the concert hall. Also, because Xochipilli invokes the Aztec god of music, and because it contains very little that is obviously European, it played a role in developing Mexican nationalism through the arts.

In 1923 and 1924, Carlos Chavez wrote six short songs called Tres Exágonos y Otros Tres Exágonos with poetry written by Carlos Pellicer. These exágonos (hexagons) are named this because each poem has six lines. I think it’s interesting that Chavez and Pellicer ended up collaborating on six of them. While both artists were sympathetic of indigenismo, that topic could not be further from that of these poems. The first three are about a romantic love similar to the story of Rapunzel, and the second set alludes to travelling through space and water with very colorful imagery. The original songs were written for voice and piano, but later Chávez orchestrated the piano part for a modified string quartet: flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, viola, and bassoon. Tonally and structurally they remind me of Shoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, though not quite as dark. In these songs the vocalist sings with an operatic bel canto style mostly and half-sings certain words when it seems appropriate. There is one line that is spoken and works so incredibly well because nothing else is in that tone. I don’t think that Chávez is trying to be atonal or pan-tonal, but rather he wants the music to support the text with the appropriate colors and textures. While there are small elements of Wagnerisms in these songs, it seems that Chávez was successful in not “sounding” like anyone else. The unique combination of timbres with the continually interesting vocal melodies and instrumental counter-melodies make these songs among the best of the “new” short pieces written in the early twentieth century. I would include these song cycles in the canon, except for the fact that they may not have been so influential at the time they were first written and performed.

NB

Bibliography

Conklin, Dorothy Rice. Percussion Instruments in Two Compositions by Carlos Chavez: Xochipilli: An
Imagined Aztec Music (1940) and Chapultepec: Three Famous Mexican Pieces (1935). Ann Arbor:
UMI, 1995.
Parker, Robert L. Carlos Chavez: Mexico’s Modern-Day Orpheus. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.
Saavedra, Leonora. Carlos Chávez: Symphony No. 1, Sinfonía de Antígona (1933). http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogue.php?id=80&season=2006-2007. 17 March, 2009.

Response to Victoria Brown’s Journal on the Etudes and Nocturne of Maria Szymanowska

Being a lover of the music of Chopin, the timbre of the piano, and Romanticism in general I took great pleasure in listening to the short Etudes and Nocturnes of the Polish-born, Maria Szymanowska. Of any “pre-romantic” composers, she may have had the most impact on Chopin, the celebrated composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who was also from Poland. In her journal article, Victoria Brown notes the parallel between Szymanowska and the Irish composer John Field. There is a lineage here. Field was the first to adapt the “Nocturne” to a single movement character piece for piano. In turn, Szymanowska used the form and made it her own and subsequently Chopin did the same. The nocturne was not the only form that Chopin took for inspiration from Szymanoska and others. Their Etudes and Polonaises also show close similarities in form, technique, and melodic phrasing, however Chopin’s works are more developed, more chromatic, and essentially more expressively “Romantic.”
No composer creates from nothing; there is always something that came before that informed. Maria Szymanowska was influenced by her piano tutors(one of whom was trained by Haydn), musicians that were invited to her home by her parents, and the traditional music of Poland. Essentially her music was informed by “Classical” styles and local dance music. From these and the infusion of ideas from Field and poets such as Goethe she began to create something new. We can hear this in her Etudes and Nocturne. While the Etudes are short and developmentally simple, they demonstrate inventive techniques for the piano. I especially like the second “Etude in C Major.” The “bubbling” arpeggio technique is quite impressive and texturally exciting; almost Lisztian. The “Nocturne in Bb Major” included on this recording is my favorite of hers. As Brown points out, it demonstrates her compositions a bridge between the Classical and Romantic periods. I do not feel, however, that the change is apparent from one section to the other. Rather, I hear the lightness of the Classical style. With the Nocturne as well as the Etudes, Szymanowska uses the major mode to give a tender lightheartedness. If the music is any indication of her mood, it seems she is jovial and “in love” with the act of music making and living life. While the expressiveness “could be in part because of the performer’s interpretations” I tend to think that certain compositions and compositional styles lend themselves better toward the expression of the performer. This is the magic of the “Nocturne in Bb Major.” It is available for creative interpretation of expression. This may be another facet of her influence on Chopin and other composers and performers of the nineteenth century.
Brown comments on the fact that Szymanowska was referred to as the “feminine Field” and brings up good points about how sexism may have played a role in the shape of her career. While it may be possible to entertain the idea of a female vituosa, could the nineteenth century European mind allow for a “feminine Beethoven?” Did Szymanowska really cut back on composing because she performed so much? Did her taking care of her children take away that time? Or did European society at the time frown on women taking up composing and directing? These are questions that will not be answered here, but they are important to consider when pondering this issue. I cannot help but think that if she had been able to compose more during her life that her influence may have been on par with that of Shubert, or Chopin.
I would indeed love to hear more of her compositions and agree with Brown’s affirmation that Maria Szymanowska’s “works are simply wonderful!”


Spiegl, Fritz. Lives, Wives, and Loves of the Great Composers. New York, Marion Boyars Publishers, 1997.
Dobrzański, Sławomir. Maria Szymanowska and Fryderyk Chopin: Parallelism and Influence. Polish Music Journal. Vol. 5, No. 1, Summer 2002.
Dobrzański, Sławomir. Maria Szymanowska & the Evolution of Professional Pianism. http://chopinfound.brinkster.net/ip.asp?op=MariaSzymanowska