In the booklet there
are six portraits of Chàvez by
different artists and photographers.
No two look anything alike. At least
one of them looks hauntingly like Samuel
Barber in profile.
When I first got this
disk, I very much looked forward to
hearing it. I was familiar with Chàvez’s
Symphonies and the Toccata
for Percussion; but this music was
so startlingly different, it almost
frightened me. I was afraid of this
disk, afraid to listen to it again.
Well, my mind must have been accomplishing
something in the interim because when
I recently listened again, the familiar
friendly face of a composer I had known
looked out at me, and I found myself
entranced. It’s the only situation where
Aaron Copland and I agree, for Copland
was a good friend and admirer of Chàvez.
Lou Harrison said, "...[Chàvez]
will probably be more important than
Stravinsky..."
Chàvez is a
good example of what Vaughan Williams
in an essay referred to as "...the
non-Germanic school." Other non-Germanic
composers are William Byrd, Edward Elgar,
Dvořák*,
Liszt, Mayuzumi, Glazunov, Messiaen,
and, of course, Vaughan Williams. Some
of Debussy doesn’t qualify**, the West
Franks and the East Franks have never
been as far apart as they would have
you believe. I don’t remember whether
Vaughan Williams actually used
the following image in his essay or
not, but it has always been associated
with my memory of the essay:
A stone drops
into a pond. The splash produces ripples.
Each ripple is centred on the stone,
yet they move further and further
away and never return. The Germanic
school insists that the ripples must
re-coalesce into the original splash
and catapult the stone back into the
air, that is to say, sonata form with
a recapitulation. But in the non-Germanic
musical aesthetic, the ripples continue
out until they break as waves upon
the shore.
When he was invited
to give the Norton lectures at Harvard
University in 1958 (Stravinsky had done
so in 1940 {in French}, but Leonard
Bernstein wasn’t invited until 1971),
Chàvez titled one of them "Repetition
In Music" which I suspect dealt
with this same aesthetic concern.
The name Carlos Chàvez
is so common in Mexico that in Anglo-Saxon
countries he might as well have been
named ‘John Smith’. In a country filled
with a mass of anonymous poor people,
a man with an ordinary name must be
obsessed with the need to be uniquely
himself, and Chàvez has achieved
that brilliantly. Even compared to Villa-Lobos,
many think he is the greatest composer
Latin America has yet produced. Mexico
— like Brazil — is officially a Catholic
country, but it doesn’t take much imagination
to see where the sympathies of the population
lie. In downtown Mexico City the national
Catholic cathedral, a huge dreary grey
building about as interesting as a taco
stand faces an excavated Aztec Pyramid
site about twice as big decked out in
brilliant colours.
The Invention I
for solo piano reminds me a lot of the
Berg Piano Sonata, except that
I think the Chàvez is a better
work overall. One’s first reaction to
both works, of course, is of someone
randomly pounding on a piano. With a
little careful attention this resolves
into fascinating patterns and motions.
The resemblance to
Alban Berg, both in style and quality,
is even greater in the Invention
II for String Trio. This is not
twelve tone music although at times
it sure sounds like it; but we never
leave a sense of attraction to a tonal
centre. This work will come as a real
shock to those who, like me, are familiar
with Chàvez’s other more ethnic
sounding scores. At one point the violin
quotes his own more popular style and
the other instruments react in mock
horror for a nice musical joke on himself.
The Invention #3
for solo harp was a birthday present
to Nadia Boulanger. Besides the fact
that Berg never wrote a harp sonata,
this work is closer in feeling to Chàvez’s
earlier music but still deliciously
abstract, almost spooky at times.
The Suite for Double
Quartet in five short movements
was originally intended as part of a
ballet "The Daughter of Colchis"
commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
for Martha Graham, and is more conventional
in style. There is nothing the slightest
bit "Mexican" sounding about
it. It could easily be taken for music
by Cowell or Barber. After a classic
imbroglio, the music was at first rejected,
and then later successfully re-choreographed
and presented as "Dark Meadow."
Upingos for [solo]
Oboe is hauntingly like some
of Chàvez’s Indian style music.
Beginning solemn and elegiac in mood,
it moves into a dance evocative of a
shepherd’s pipes.
I for one can hardly
wait to hear Volume 2!
The trendy packaging
is one of those where you are supposed
to force the disk back into a tight
fitting cardboard sleeve guaranteed
to scratch the playing surface; my advice
is that you store the disk in a protective
envelope in the centre pocket along
with the program booklet.
*Dvorak copped out
and wrote a Germanic symphony, #9 in
e, "From the New World." But
it is actually the most old-fashioned
of all his works.
**Prélude
a l’après-midi d’un faun
is arguably in sonata form.
Paul Shoemaker
CAMBRIA CD8850 [68.43]