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.

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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.