Carlos Chávez and His World

WORLD

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 Concert¹³ 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 were more adventurous in their programming, none superseded the modernism and nationalism found in the OSM programs.¹⁷

Music for the Radio explores the utility of radio as a medium to re-invigorate contemporary musical life. Once again, Chávez’s advice to composers is of a practical nature: Since the process of transmission is dependent primarily on the microphone, it seems inevitable that music written for the radio ought to be planned with that basic consideration. He goes on to enumerate the various approaches to amplifying an ensemble and ways in which composers might use the process to create new sonic experiences. As in The Function of the Concert, Chávez expresses optimism about the future of music for radio: Up to now no compositions have appeared which even begin to use the specific instrumental resources of electrical transmission. Surely, sooner or later, such music must come.¹⁸

Table 1. Seven Concert Programs from the 1938–39 Season

By 1940, the year he wrote Music for the Radio, the relationship between modernism and modern technology had absorbed Chávez for almost fifteen years. First seen in the mechanical sonic environment evoked in works like Energía, it also motivated tours of the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in 1932, a series of articles for the Mexican newspaper El Universal that same year, and his first published book, Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (1937).¹⁹ Although Chávez wrote an entire chapter on radio in Music and Electricity, that piece dealt with the new realities of employment and dissemination in a technological age. By examining the best methods for composing for the medium in Music for Radio, he extended the implications in his earlier writings.

According to correspondence with Lederman, there was a more immediate inspiration for the Modern Music article. In May 1938, Chávez sent a telegram to her, ostensibly referring to an earlier conversation: I am experimenting writing for radio. I think it is better to write article later.²⁰ A year later they revisited the topic: As a matter of fact, what I want to say in the proposed article will be more or less the result of my experiences in writing my Harp Concerto for Radio, in which I will be working in the course of this year.²¹

The experiment of the Harp Concerto was not successful—at least the composition was not preserved in Chávez’s files, and there is no trace of it in his catalogue—but his exploration of the topic was timely. In the 1930s and ’40s classical composers were being commissioned to write for radio, resulting in several works composed especially with the medium in mind. Chávez’s own Sinfonía india (1935) had been written at the invitation of William Paley, the president of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Of particular influence was Deems Taylor’s series of commissions for CBS radio, which produced William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Aaron Copland’s Music for Radio, Roy Harris’s Time Suite, and Louis Gruenberg’s Green Mansions, all written and performed in 1937.²²

All four of Chávez’s articles for Modern Music situate the composer as an innovator, with practical solutions to some of the most entrenched problems plaguing modern composers. In every case Chávez agitated for reforms that might further the creation, performance, and acceptance of new music. His solutions were rooted in his own experiences working to change musical life in Mexico. It is probably true, as several authors claim, that Chávez used knowledge gained during his New York trips in the 1920s to create the foundation for a modernist music scene in Mexico City.²³ But it is equally true that during the 1930s and ’40s Chávez regarded his accomplishments in Mexico City as a model for his colleagues in the United States, and many of them, including Thomson, agreed with such an analysis.

Criticism, Connections, and Aesthetic Intersections

As Chávez became more closely identified with Mexican musical life and cultural identity, writers and reviewers for Modern Music could hardly avoid analyzing aspects of Mexicanness in his music and career. Unlike the profiles and reviews in the popular press, however, the Modern Music community was most concerned about Chávez’s avant-gardism; that is, the marriage of nationalism and modernism absorbed these writers, not the exotic mexicanidad so readily profiled elsewhere. Such attributes were first praised in 1928 by Aaron Copland in the pages of The New Republic and Paul Rosenfeld in his book By Way of Art.²⁴ Yet, before 1932, none of Chávez’s overtly nationalist works had been performed in the United States. While building the OSM and serving as head of the National Conservatory, Chávez continued to pursue opportunities to premiere works in the States, particularly his nationalist ballets. When he asked Copland for help, the composer responded:

Why don’t you write to Minna Lederman to ask her to do the publicity you need? I doubt if she will refuse if you ask her personally. Or possibly, someone like Miss [Anita] Brenner could do the actual work and Minna could advise how, where and when to send it out. Or possibly, you could have all the material written and typed in Mexico City and Minna could send it out for you up here.²⁵

In his reply Chávez expressed interest in the idea, but there is no evidence that Lederman became his publicist in a formal capacity. She did demonstrate investment in his career, however, when Chávez returned to the United States in 1932 to promote the performance of his ballet H.P. The performance featured costume and stage designs by Diego Rivera, and was to be executed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.²⁶ In a letter written about two months before the premiere, Lederman fretted about the upcoming issue:

It is unfortunate that you won’t be here before the first of March. Paul Rosenfeld, as I wrote you, will write an article about you and, moreover, it is important that he have an opportunity of looking over any new music you have…. You see this is for the March issue which is to come out about a week and a half before the performance of your ballet. This will give the newspapers and other magazines an opportunity to quote from Paul’s article after it appears in our magazine and in time to add publicity to your ballet.²⁷

For various reasons, including his own health and Chávez’s busy schedule, Rosenfeld was unable to complete the article in time for the March–April issue alluded to above. Two of Rivera’s sketches were included, one featuring the coconut costume and another the stage design for the second scene. In the same issue, Marc Blitzstein reviewed a performance of Energía in a concert under the auspices of the Pan American Association of Composers. The next issue, May–June 1932, included a sizable profile by Rosenfeld as well as a review of the H.P. production by Blitzstein.

In his review of Energía, Blitzstein noted that the music undergoes no development, almost no change. It would be hard to imagine music fresher, more candid and engaging than that of Chávez; but either he has not yet found a form which will enable him to grow, or it is not the sort of music which is meant to grow.²⁸ H.P. certainly provided a change in aesthetic, if not the type of growth for which Blitzstein searched. The work’s synopsis deals with interactions between the North and South with the hard-edged modernism found in Energía representing the North and a folk music–infused lyricism representing the South. Blitzstein observed that this approach also proved problematic for the composer: Since Chávez’s music is hard, not soft, literal, brutal and unperfumed, we were offered the paradox of a ‘Southern’ composer dealing most successfully with the ‘Northern’ aspects of his theme.²⁹

Although H.P. was Chávez’s first public venture in a more accessible, nationalist direction, it was Sinfonía india, his second orchestral work performed in the United States, that ensured the composer’s place in U.S. musical life. This time, rather than using folk music to represent the Southern, the composer turned toward native music and an ancient past, aligning himself with the primitivism made famous by Stravinsky in Rite of Spring and subsequently found in so many works of the period. Sinfonía india premiered on CBS radio in 1936 in a program of Mexican music constructed and led by Chávez. Collectively the program—which included nationalist Indianist works by his students and protégés, and suggested a new direction for the public face of Mexican music—appeared to impress traditionalists and modernists alike. Canadian composer Colin McPhee reviewed the performance for Modern Music, and his prose is nothing short of breathless:

Example 2. Carlos Chávez, Sinfonía india, mm. 34–42, entrance of Mexican percussion in measure 37.

One feels on hearing this music first of all a primitive energy that has nothing of the exotic but is a clear and forceful expression of racial vitality both useful and healthy…. There are no tricks in the workmanship—no preoccupations with problems. It races along like a runner happy in his strength and with energy to spare in the end. We need such music as we need fresh air and exercise.³⁰

Much of McPhee’s description of Sinfonía india could easily apply to his own orchestral masterpiece, Tabu-Tabuhan, which was composed later the same year. Both are large-scale symphonic works that draw on non-Western traditions—ancient Mexico in the case of Chávez and contemporary Bali in the case of McPhee—and are simultaneously suffused with a modernist musical language. These basic similarities place both compositions in a larger complex of non-Western modernisms found in works by Stravinsky, Bartók, and Varèse, among others, and it is likely that both men were subject to a variety of influences. Yet the convergences in approach found in Sinfonía india and Tabu-Tabuhan extend more deeply than those found with other composers, providing a musical documentation of the cross-influence possible within the Modern Music network.

Example 3. Colin McPhee, Tabu-Tabuhan, mm. 147–56, entrance of gamelan-like instruments (reduced score).

The most obvious similarities relate to the instrumentation, structure, and texture of the compositions. Both works are written for an enlarged symphony orchestra with a small ensemble of foreign instruments embedded therein. The smaller groups are largely percussive. Chávez calls for drums and rattles, requesting Native American instruments where possible. McPhee uses a six-person battery of percussionists playing marimba, xylophone, drums, and cymbals; within the composition the percussion often plays with the two pianos to evoke the sound and texture of the Balinese gamelan. McPhee subtitled his work Toccata for Orchestra and 2 Pianos, and Chávez referred to his as a symphony, but both use elements of the concerto grosso in their treatment of the sub-ensembles. For example, in Sinfonía india the entrance of the Mexican percussion in measure 37 is analogous to the first solo portion of a concerto grosso. The full orchestral sound quiets, highlighting the smaller group, with a continuo of clarinet and bass, gradually morphing into a tutti at rehearsal number 9 (see Example 2). The entry of the Balinese elements in Tabu-Tabuhan is much more subtle, but there are long stretches of alternation also recalling concerti grossi, with the pianos serving as a kind of Balinese-inspired continuo (see Example 3).

Most of McPhee’s Balinese melodies are taken from the composer’s own transcriptions of gamelan works and contain the musical characteristics familiar to that genre, including a narrow range of melodic motion, usually only four or five notes, syncopated rhythm, and frequent ostinati. The additive texture, particularly in the first movement, recalls the field recordings of gamelan performance. Such attributes conveniently bridge the divide between the Western styles McPhee admired—classical, jazz, and Latin American popular music—and the music of Bali that he wished to exhibit. They also suited European expectations of the exotic, making the work part of a larger body of twentieth-century symphonic music to evoke the primitive. In this way, Tabu-Tabuhan was closely linked to Sinfonía india, in which Chávez also used transcribed melodies, pentatonicism, and ostinati.

Although both the source material and the approaches used to recontextualize it are very different, one suspects that the connections between the two works and the techniques used in them were not lost on Chávez. That is why in his article Revolt in Mexico, Chávez argued that modernism could and should be pan-ethnic, as long as it was also highly individualistic: The music of Bach and Palestrina is beautiful—and so is that of a Chinese, Mexican, or Balinese musician. They are different, however, and the difference is one of complexion of technic. If a Mexican musician uses Bach’s technic, he is selling his birthright for a mess of pseudo-Bach.³¹ It might seem odd that Chávez listed Bali alongside China and Mexico, but interest in Bali was very much in the air at the time: we find it realized in Margaret Mead’s scholarly writings and Miguel Covarrubias’s drawings and writings, as well as a host of travelogues.³² Covarrubias was a close friend of both Chávez and McPhee; surely he shared his experiences and field research. In addition, recordings of gamelan were among the first world music to be widely distributed and were part of Henry Cowell’s collection, which he shared with Chávez.³³ But the most avid advocate for Balinese music in the New York community was McPhee. During the 1930s, McPhee shared his knowledge, often playing his transcriptions for friends in New York.³⁴ Such performances must have influenced Chávez, who was in the midst of his Aztec period and was searching for a way to make modernist primitivism appealing to Mexican audiences.³⁵