. 9 My selection and ordering varies from Hess’s own because I am at pains here to list only the critic22 This is not to say that there are no blind spots in Hess’s narrative. In her quest for sameness she relies on a few critics who find themselves inclined in a felicitous direction for a moment in time. These critics are, roughly in order of appearance, Paul Rosenfeld, Olin Downes, Virgil Thomson, Elliot Carter, Gilbert Chase, Irving Lowens, and John Rockwell.

Carlos Chavez and His World Leonora Saavedra Published by Princeton University Press Saavedra, Leonora. Carlos Chavez and His World. Princeton University Press, 2015. CARLOS CHAVEZ: A CATALOGUE OF THE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 1915: Symphony: 30 minutes 1921: Aztec Ballet “El Fuego Nuevo” for female chorus and orchestra: 30 minutes 1925: Indian Ballet “Los Cuatro Soles” for chorus and orchestra: 30 minutes 1926: Ballet “Caballos de vapour” (“Horsepower”) (and Ballet Suite: + (RCA.

Hess tells us that these are “critics of the first rank”, (p. 8) and that is precisely the trouble with using them to trace an over-arching narrative about the reception of Latin American composers in the U.S. Most of the critics have musical training, are culturally knowledgeable, are based in New York, and are gainfully employed either as critics or composers; in other words, they have all the markers of that forbidden category in the U.S. Lexicon: class. It is unclear how this vantage point influences their evaluations, but one suspects that familiarity with European cultural and concert norms, for example, could shape a narrative about cosmopolitanism or universalism. The bias also endangers a frank evaluation of the role of difference in reception; when one examines press material Stokowski prepared for the H.P. Premiere and the results of it made manifest in smaller papers across the U.S., for example, one realizes that there can be quite a distance between what might be understood or preferred amongst the middle-class of smaller towns versus the elite of New York. I suspect, based on this research (which is admittedly limited) that the narrative of sameness to which the critics emphasized in Hess’s text remain dedicated pushes against a larger cultural narrative of difference unexamined in this text.

That larger narrative might also explain why studies more concerned with individuals and the shaping of identity see and hear more difference in the same cultural milieu. That is not to say that Hess is obligated to study that larger narrative of difference, or that emphasizing this largely forgotten sameness narrative is somehow invalidated, but that the limitations on the scope of sameness should be explained more carefully in the structure and articulation of her overarching methodology and its expected results.23 In a similar fashion, Hess’s description of an “epistemological chasm” between scholarly texts of the last forty years and music criticism of the previous decades seems to be an overstatement. Some circles at some moments looked for aspects of sameness in certain composers’ works; in their search for sameness, critics were influenced by overt political movements and cultural shifts. As suggested above, part of the trouble is that, although the cultural context she provides absolutely justifies a hypothesis that sameness governed the Good Neighbor discourse where difference occupied the Post-Cold War period discourse, we hear most about a certain class of critics of the Good Neighbor Period and area study musicology scholars of the Post-Cold War period, which is not a balanced comparison.

Mexico offers a different periphery in several respects. By virtue of its postcolonial condition, independent Mexico, like the rest of America, positions itself with regard not only to Europe’s hegemonic cultural centers, but also to Europe as a whole. In the early twentieth century Mexican art-music composers were already riding on a second or even third wave of musical nationalism, and the idea that nations must (or naturally do) turn to their own folk music was for them received wisdom. Moreover, the double bind that haunted them was compounded by established discourses on nationalism and universalism, validated in their eyes by European scholarship. For decades, the musicological literature on nationalist music in Mexico took the binary nationalism/universalism as paradigmatic. Also from 1925 is another work related to energy, machines, speed, and chaos: 36, a short, fast piano composition originally called HP, and once aptly described in Mexico as a piece “that shakes one up with the unleashed energy of a fast train.

The rhythm bounces around like a racing car on an obstacle course.” Indeed, 36 exhibits a constant flow of rushing triplets, arrested only occasionally and unpredictably by sudden changes in rhythmic figuration. Moreover, at times the music gives the impression of accelerating uncontrollably through the unexpected presence of sixteenth notes, and through the polymeter created by the melodic patterns and the placement of accents (see ).

Indian tunes ( sones mariaches) will be found in my music, not as a constructive base, but because all the conditions of their composition—form, sonority, etc.—by nature coincide with those in my own mind, inasmuch as both are products of the same origin. I believe that in art the means of exteriorization used are distinct and proper to each manifestation of an individual mind and that, in so far as these manifestations coincide with the manifestations of the national or universal mind, their means of exteriorization will coincide or differ also. Confounding mixture of Mexican folk-tunes with sounds that suggest the whirring, the clicking, the roaring of machines. Jangling out of the chamber orchestra come the mangled fragments of Mexican ditties, gone mad, as it were, with the revolving age.

The audience listened and laughed. Perhaps the composer laughed, too. Goossens, conducting the odd piece of Chavez, had suddenly pirouetted and turned like a whirligig on his pedestal, it would not have been surprising. “H.P.” indeed! The Stravinsky “Sacre du printemps.” The Honegger “Locomotive No. Despite their differences, the Copland-Sessions Concerts and the PAAC made explicit their intention to encourage the emergence and development of both young composers and a non-European style of composition. Consider the opening manifesto of the Copland-Sessions Concerts: “Our only wish is to stimulate composers to more prolific activity and to develop a stronger sense of solidarity among the creators of a growing American music.” The PAAC, for its part, hoped that its activities would “stimulate composers to make still greater effort toward creating a distinctive music of the Western Hemisphere.” And though the programs of his New Music Society were international in scope, in 1933 Cowell held that “American composition up to now has been tied to the apron-strings of European tradition.

To attain musical independence, more national consciousness is a present necessity for American composers. The result of such an awakening should be the creation of works capable of being accorded international standing.”. Equally important was the need of young composers to determine the basis on which to build a distinctive, non-European sound.

The received wisdom concerning the formulation of a national style called for the elevation of regional folk music to the status of the national and for its use in the composition of art music. But for better or worse, and owing largely to sustained and enforced differences of race and nationality in the population of the United States, composers had not settled on the regional or minority music that was to be recognized as the national. In the United States, the 1920s was a period of intense concern with the possible nature of an identifiably “American” style, of an almost desperate search for a “great American composer,” and of a persistent preoccupation with the weaknesses of institutions and, indeed, of the American character, both collective and individual, that seemed to prevent the achievement of an American music that was on a par with the quality and originality that was produced by Europe’s best composers, or, closer to home, by America’s best writers. He is one of the few American musicians about whom we can say that he is more than a reflection of Europe. Hello kitty desktop icons. We in the United States who have long desired musical autonomy can best appreciate the full measure of his achievement. We cannot, like Chavez, borrow from a rich, melodic source or lose ourselves in an ancient civilization, but we can be stimulated and instructed by his example. As for Chavez it is not too soon to say that his work presents itself as one of the first authentic signs of a new world with its own new music.

Strictly on the external plane of things, Chavez’s recent piano sonata and ballet The Four Suns persuade in their precision, architecturality and green reserve. “Classical,” they do not embody a return, like the precise, architectural and “pure” composition of the Strawinskies; or lean on theories; or preach existing orders and societies in musical terms. Where the great mass of their European companions and competitors merely chill and disaffect, these most characteristic works of the sturdy young Latin from Mexico move by an eminent involuntariness and virginity. Undeluded, bony and dry as his own high deserts, and peppery as chilis, sonata and ballet constitute a veritable classic music: form and expression of commencing cultures.

Central to Rosenfeld’s imaginary of a music for the United States were two topoi. One was the modern lifestyle and cities: machines, engineering, skyscrapers, city noise, the symphony of New York. The other was the American soil: the architecture of mountains and plains, the aridity, the challenge presented by the harshness of its nature.

His approach to them was one neither of total celebration nor of resistance. Rather, for Rosenfeld “an act of imagination is the process of perceiving an objective verity, and looking long into the face of the truth.” The topos of the modern city was present throughout his criticism of the 1920s. But the American soil was a revelation to him during a trip to New Mexico in 1926. Copland and Rosenfeld were not, of course, working in a cultural or political vacuum.

They were writing as a shift in cultural relations between Mexico and the United States was taking place in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mexico achieved political stability, the United States gained economic ascendance, and a burgeoning cultural nationalism existed in both countries. Mexican art, artists, culture, and even post-revolutionary politics obtained increasing visibility and popularity in the United States, as Mexican art “invaded” New York. Artists and intellectuals from the United States in turn made pilgrimages to a Mexico they saw first as an experiment in leftist politics and social justice and then as a pre-industrial, culturally rich, centuries-old utopia.