Musical Identities The Western Canon and

Musical Identities, the Western Canon and Speech about Music in...
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hispanic/saavedra1.html
Musical Identities, the Western Canon and

Speech about Music in Twentieth-Century
Mexico
Leonora Saavedra
The so-called "History of Music" component of our
conventional music study is, then, not a true history
of music at all, but the history of a musical "fine art"
made for the dominant minorities of only one small
region of the earths surfaceWestern Europe.
Charles Seeger
We all know just how difficult it is to teach a two-term
survey of Western art music. There is hardly any time to
help the student get acquainted, even superficially, with
the great musical masterpieces of the past and their
composers, but also with the set of values that help us
decide what pieces may belong to a canon that is worth
transmitting from generation to generation. Mexican
conservatories usually teach music history in two separate
one-year surveys: "historia de la msica universal" and
"historia de la msica mexicana." But last year I had the
enriching experience of having to compress both surveys
into one. For this course, I combined one of the standard
textbooks written in the United States with a handful of
the available histories of Mexican music. I would like to
share with you some of the thoughts about music, the
musical canon, and tools such as books and textbooks that
resulted from this experience.
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Mexican art music has a long history which starts in 1524

with the foundation of the first Spanish school by the
Franciscan missionary Pedro de Gante, close to what
remained of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan. The instructor
needs, therefore, to introduce the student to "msica
virreinal" at the time when she reaches Spanish
Renaissance music in the Western art music curriculum.
This is, of course, not a problem, because composers such
as Morales, Victoria or Guerrero, whose music was sung
and imitated in the Spanish colonies, have a
"legitimate"although maybe increasingly shortplace in
our music textbooks and anthologies. The problems begin
when we need to account stylistically for the music of
Mexican composers Francisco Lpez Capillas (Mexico
City, ca. 1608-1674) and the earlier periods of Manuel de
Sumaya (Mexico City, ca. 1678 - Oaxaca, 1775). At this
point we need to piece together from various sources a
stylistic description of the Spanish Baroque that does not
usually come in our textbooks, and we must gather as
well the scores and recordings of representative
compositions that are missing from our anthologies. In
order to explain the stylistic changes in the music of
Sumaya, we need to refer our students to the impact of the
late Italian Baroque music on Spanish culture, and this is
also easy to teach. But the interesting thing is that by the
time the instructor has finished teaching Mexican
Baroque, not only she has not taught J. S. Bach, or Handel
but she has not needed to. So far our standard curriculum
has ignored the music we are trying to teach, but the
reverse is also true: in the cultural horizon of the
Habsburg and Bourbon dominated Spanish colonies
(which comprise most of our continent) the music of the
German Late Baroque composers had no value at all.
Moving on to the early nineteenth century, we teach that
Haydns keyboard music was valued and performed
among composers, professional and amateur performers,
and audiences in Mexico, and that composers chose to try
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their hand at writing theme-and-variation pieces, rather

than sonatas, in the classical style. But we must admit that
what really caught the minds and spirits of Mexican
musicians and audiences for most of the century was
Italian opera and, to a lesser degree, salon piano pieces.
No symphonies, hardly any chamber music. Once again,
what we have is a culture that places value on styles,
works and media that do not entirely coincide with what
we transmit as the musical canon, and we need to start
explaining why: did all European cultures equally value
opera, public performances of symphonic music and
domestic music making? or is music history a
compoundmade by whom?of the individual music
histories of some nations? Should Mexico have had
prominent composers in all of these fields?
Whatever the questions of our very alert students may be,
so far in the course we have been teaching the musical
history of a culture relatively at peace with its own
choices. But in the last third of the nineteenth century
things change. Mexican composers turn their eyes to
France as the musical culture they should emulate, while
they begin to lament lacking the orchestras that would
allow them to perform Beethoven. A little later our
discipline, musicology, is bornin Germanyand in the
early 20th-century Mexican scholarship on music begins, a
scholarship modelled on its European counterparts. A
dissonance begins to take place between what composers
actually wrote and what critics, scholars, and composers
themselves thought their predecessors should have
written: large-scale developmental forms in the Germanic
tradition that is portrayed in speech about musicto use
Charles Seegers terminologyas universal. So when we
teach late nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, we
have, along with our strictly musical sources, written
documents that not only re-interpret the past but play a
significant role in the shaping and modelling of what was
composed from then on. Thus, if so far in the course it had
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been relatively easy to keep musicological discourse at a

distance from what we can tell really happened in
Hispanic cultures, things at this point become muddled
because musicological discourse itself begins to have an
impact on music production.
Some important and historiographically interesting texts
have been written wondering why Spanish and SpanishAmerican composers do not write symphonies, or do not
write them well. Among these texts are the liner notes for
a recording of Carlos Chvezs (1899-1978) six
symphonies written by Julian Orbn, a Spanish-Cuban
composer who was Chvezs teaching assistant in Mexico
City in the 1960s and a mentor for many living Mexican
composers. In these notes Orbn recalled a conversation
between himself and Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier about
the possibility of there ever being a Spanish Brahms. This
conversation took place in the year of 1944, a year in
which, taking Stravinskis Musical Poetics as their guide,
"young composers stubbornly rejected the expansion of
the symphonic form from Brahms to Mahler." Since then,
Orbn wrote, he had been wondering whether the
conception of sonata allegro itself may be something
foreign to the Hispanic creative being. He concluded that
variation, which illuminates a theme by ornamenting it, is
congenial to the Spanish soul and comes naturally to a
Hispanic composer, while organic motivic development
must be learned by studying the works of the great
masters, such as Chvez did in order to write his
symphonies.
The idea that Hispanic composers do not write organic
developmental forms because of a lack of discipline, a lack
of proper training, or their refusal to engage their minds
in the kinds of reasoning that motivic development
requires, crops up in different guises in the literature on
19th- and 20th-century Mexican music. For example,
composers in the first few decades of the 20th century
Chvez among themlamented how late Mexican
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composers had gotten to the symphonic genre, thus

leaving them no tradition to build upon within what they
now had come to regard as the music of the highest value,
and Spanish musicologist Otto Mayer Serra suggested in
1941 that if Mexican composers wanted nationalism to
become a universal style they needed to be able to
integrate the national references into a greater, organic
stucture.
However, as we music instructors of the 1990s know, the
extreme value that Western culture places on organicism
as an aesthetic ideal is place- and time-bound, related to
central European naturalism and bourgeois scientific
beliefs. The idea that all parts and elements of a whole
should derive from an initial kernel or seed and behave
functionally within a system that resembles a natural
organism has had a dialectical relationship with musical
artifacts themselves, which are at the same time
embodiments of these ideas and values, and models for
their formulation through philosophical, aesthetic and
musicological discourse. The fact that these values have
been considered universal and applicable to all times and
cultures is a function of the strength of this discourse.
Finally, the strength of the dicourse in turn, has been a
product of and a tool for the establishment of hegemonic
and peripheral cultures.
To summarize what I have said so far: the challenge for
the scholar and teacher of Spanish and Spanish-American
music, music from cultures that have been non-hegemonic
for so long, or at least have been peripheral during the
time that musicological discourse has been in place, is, I
believe, to distance ourselves from our own musicological
discourse and to sort out the received Western
canonwhich is a national canon or in the best case a
compound of the national canons of successive hegemonic
culturesfrom the real canon of the times and places that
we research and teach. The challenge for the historian and
teacher of 20th-century music is to sort out not only
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hegemonic and peripheral values and ideals and their

corresponding canons but to sort out discourses as well,
and here of course I am talking about the books, textbooks
and writen documents in general, that help us do our
teaching. This is especially difficult because SpanishAmerican composers and scholars have internalized
hegemonic discourse to such a degree that there are
contradictions between what they do and what they write,
between what they do and think ought to be done,
andmost importantlybetween the many directions that
individual composers, styles and even single pieces may
take.
I would like to illustrate some of these challenges with an
example taken from the music of and literature on Carlos
Chvez, the only Mexican composer whose music appears
almost regularly in survey books, classified, of course,
under the subheading "national styles" or, even worse,
"world music." Things become interesting when,
following Malena Kuss, we understand the opposition
universal vs national as a dichotomy that marginalizes de
facto the so-called national musics, and begin to
understand history in terms of hegemonic and
non-hegemonic cultures. In my view the battle between
German musical hegemony and other cultures of the West
that took place at the turn of the 20th-century and
between the two world wars is one of the most amazing
cultural events of the century. The history of what
happened has been rewritten several times according to
different political and theoretical agendas. In any case, it
has become increasingly clear that we cannot understand
the first half of this century only in musical terms such as
the opposition between ultrachromaticism on one side
and diatonic modality on the other. It is clear too that its
political aspects must be understood in terms of the clash
of cultures as a whole, complete with compositional
systems, theoretical discourses, value systems and
musical organizations, and not only in terms of the armed
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conflict of 1914.
Composers in the American continent saw the 1920s and
30s as the time to break loose from European leadership in
general and German hegemony in particular, and they
stated this in very clear binary oppositions, some of which
they shared with their French and Eastern European
counterparts: modern objectivity versus romantic
subjectivity, conciseness versus ampoulosity, dark Gothic
chromaticism versus Mediterranean luminous
diatonicism, European decadence versus American fresh
authenticity. The search for the so-called national styles
was but an aspect of this opposition between hegemonic
and non-hegemonic cultures. In 1928, Aaron Coplands
discourse on Chvez was full of value-charged terms
along those lines: Chvezs music, he wrote in the New
Republic, is modern "not merely because he can contrive
...intricate rhythms...prefers linear to vertical writing,
or...composes ballets instead of operas...but...because he
uses his composers gift for the expression of objective
beauty of universal significance rather than as a mere
means of self-expression...[His music] exemplifies the
complete overthrow of nineteenth-century Germanic
ideals which tyrannized over music for more than a
hundred years...[it is] healthy, clear and clean sounding
without shadows or softness." Copland finished by stating
that Chvez "is one of the few American musicians about
whom we can say that he is more than a reflection of
Europe...one of the first authentic signs of a new world
with its own new music." In the same year, the New York
critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote about Chvezs music as "a
veritable classic music: form and expession of
commencing cultures."
Chvezs own ideals and political agenda werent far from
Coplands and Rosenfelds. Opposition to Germanic
hegemony wasnt as clear-cut in Chvez and his fellow
citizens because Mexicos musical pedagogy was
modelled after Frances conservatory system. On the other
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hand, Chvez did envision an American leadership of

Western culture, especially since the strong nationalist
political ideology formulated by Mexicos intellectual
leaders after the 1910 Revolutionan ideology that was to
reshape Mexican identity through the artshad already
been constructed as an internationally successful artistic
trend in the work of the Mexican muralists, especially of
Diego Rivera. Thus Chvez as well as his colleagues
North of the border understood the battle over leadership
to be between national cultures, or continental cultures, if
you wish, and began to deconstruct, albeit in a tangential
way, the idea of universal music.
The reception of Chvezs music abroad as distinctly
Mexican, on the one hand, and Mexicos
postrevolutionary ideology, on the other, pointed to the
Indian roots of Mexican culture as the best source for
developing a style that could be simultaneously modern
and primitive, new and ancient, and a real alternative to
what composers wanted already to understand as the
decadent culture of central Europe. Chvezs style has
actually turned out to be a real puzzle for music scholars.
Lets take as an example Gerard Bhagues Music in Latin
America: An Introduction. Among the many merits of this
book is the way Bhague hints at the contradictions
implicit in Latin-American musical nationalism while
being cautious not to question its ideological agenda. Of
the music of Chvez, for example, he writes: "Some
generalizations can be made about Chvezs use of what
he considers to be indigenous musical features, keeping in
mind that many of them can also be found in several of
his non-Indianist works or even in some modern
European music" and further: "Seven Pieces for piano was
at first subtitled Piezas Mexicanas, however, most of the
individual titles are abstract ... and the music is in a
complex, international avant-garde style. Yet it can also be
related to Chvezs Indian ideals." Finally, Bhague
analyzes Chvezs music both in the chapter on
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nationalism and in the one devoted to the countercurrents that appeared simultaneously and in opposition
to it.
Chvez surrounded himself with the pioneers of
ethnomusicology in Mexico and founded in the 1930s
research academies that were in charge of collecting
Indian melodies as well as examples of all possible scales
of the world. But he was never a systematic collector of
folk melodies himselfthe way Bartk was, for example
and had actually very little 20th-century Indian music and
none that could be called Aztec to work with. As he
himself said, his reconstruction of Aztec music and rituals
was imaginary. Consider the Sinfonia India, composed in
New York in 1935 and premiered in a CBS broadcast
performance the following year. The whole symphony is
in one sonata allegro movement in which the second
theme is in the key of the subdominant and the finale in
the dominant. The development section has its own theme
and is meant to be some sort of middle slow movement
inserted in the sonata allegro structure. Each theme is
presented and developed immediately, but not by means
of traditional motivic and harmonic work but by the
many repetitions of each theme with changing
instrumentations and textures. Thus Chvez subverts
some of the structural principles of a sonata allegro
movement without, however, questioning the value of
such large-scale formal constructionsin fact, composer
Julio Estrada has shown how the India is modelled upon
the first movement of Beethovens Fifth Symphony. The
structural peculiarities of the Sinfona India can be then
understood as Chvezs way to insert himself in the
tradition of symphonic writing while trying to lead it into
an American modernity.
Chvez used real Indian tunes from Northern Mexico for
most of the main sections of the symphony, melodies
which as Bhague wrote, "ironically, are not pentatonic."
Why ironically? As I said, Chvez did not spend much
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time collecting and studying Indian music, but, following

European theories on non-European musical cultures, he
theorized that primitive musics of the world are
pentatonic and assumed that Indian music, being
primitive, must be pentatonic too. Thus, in contrast with
the modal Indian tunes that are used as the main themes
of the symphonyas a matter of fact, one of them is
squarely in B-flat majorChvez built the introduction on
pentatonic collections based on B-flat and E-flat, which, in
addition, fit nicely into the B-flat major collection that
serves as the main key of the whole symphony. Thus
Chvez internalized a European conception of the
non-European as primitive and built some of his most
famous Indianist music on that assumption. In fact, other
resources such as the repetition of melodic rhythmic
motives, the driving rhythmic impulse and the crescendi
at the end of each sectionresoures that drove critics in the
United States to call this piece "powerful" and
"barbaric,"helped Chvez to construct the Indiansuch a
central icon in the new Mexican identityas primitive and
exotic in this symphony. This musical representation of
the Indian was supported by discoursive means such as
program notes, press interviews and even the explanatory
letters that Herbert Weinstock, acting as Chvezs
secretary, sent to the very baffled manager of Bostons
Symphony Orchestra just before their concert
performance of the India.
There is rather little in Chvezs music that is Mexican a
priori, or inherently Mexican. Chvezs Western-art-music
Mexicanness was constructed by him and became real
only later, when his music was eventually received as
Mexican by Mexicans themselves. And because it is a
construct, we must teach it to our students not only in
terms of its folk sources but also in terms of its thick
ideological and historical context. Finally, however, lets
not forget that the primitive, the barbaric, the
non-European Other was, in turn, being constructed in
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Western culture as the new and the modern in the years in

which Chvez was writing his nationalist music. In the
end, asagainBhague said, Chvezs "attempts at
reconstructing pre-Conquest Indian music constitute
ultimately a pretext...for writing music of a specifically
new character." The polyrhythmic layering, the
mechanistic fabric, the emphasis on rhythm and color, the
non-functional modal and pentatonic collections of
Chvezs music are among his contributions to the
explosion of alternative art musics in Western culture that
took place in the first half of our century.
Some conclusions: integrating Hispanic music into the
Western curriculum means integrating the music of
peripheral cultures into the discourse of hegemonic
cultures and we need to address it as such. Otherwise our
efforts will result in a token, politically correct
multiculturalism that will not explain why things
happened the way they happened and why we speak
about them the way we do.
Bibliography and Recordings

Chvez, Carlos, Toward a New Music, New York: Norton,
1937.
_____________, Musical Thought, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1961.
_____________, "La Msica en Mxico 1900-1950," Mexico
City, El Universal, February 8-May 30 1952.
Copland, Aaron, "Carlos ChavezMexican Composer,"
The New Republic, May 2 1928.
Estrada, Julio, ed., La Msica de Mxico, I. Historia, 5
vols., II. Gua Bibliogrfica, III. Antologa, Mexico City:
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Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1984.

Mayer-Serra, Otto, Panorama de la msica mexicana
desde la Independencia hasta la actualidad, Mexico City:
El Colegio de Mxico, 1940 (facs. ed., CENIDIM, 1996).
_______________, The Present State of Music in Mexico,
Washington, D.C.: OAS, 1946.
Mata, Eduardo, "Julin Orbn I, II, III," Pauta 5/19 (July
1986): 15-24; 5/20 (October 1986): 39-48 ; 6/21 (January
1987): 31-49.
Moreno Rivas, Yolanda, Rostros del nacionalismo en la
msica mexicana: un ensayo de interpretacin, Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1989.
_____________________, La Composicin en Mxico en el
siglo XX, Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y
las Artes, 1994.
Orbn, Julin, "Las Sinfonas de Carlos Chvez I, II, III,"
Pauta 6/21 (January 1987): 63-73; 6/22 (April 1987): 81-91;
6/23 (July 1987): 67-80.
Rosenfeld, Paul, By Way of Art, New York: CowardMcCann, 1928.
The Six Symphonies of Carlos Chvez. London Symphony
Orchestra; Eduardo Mata, cond. LP, Vox cum laude
digital, 3D VCL 9032.
Carlos Chvez: 6 Obras Maestras. London Symphony
Orchestra, New Philarmonia Orchestra and Orquesta
Filarmnica de la UNAM; Eduardo Mata, cond. CD, RCA,
74321-24090-2.
Msica de Feria: Silvestre Revueltas. The String Quartets.
Cuarteto Latinoamericano. CD, Albion, NA062CD.
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Sensemay: The Unknown Revueltas. Camerata de las

Amricas; Enrique Diemecke, cond. CD, Dorian,
DOR-90244.
Manuel Enrquez: Los Cuartetos de Cuerda. Cuarteto
Latinoamericano. CD, Mexico City, INBA-SACM.
Joaqun Gutirrez Heras: Msica de Cmara. Judith
Johanson, fl; Ana Mara Tradatti, piano; Bozena
Slawinska, vc, et al. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM.
Mario Lavista: Cuaderno de Viaje. Msica de Cmara.
Luis Humerto Ramos, cl; Roberto Kolb, ob; Marielena
Arizpe fl, et al. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM.
Julio Estrada: Chamber Music for Strings. Arditti String
Quartet and Stefano Scodanibbio. CD, France, Audivis
Montaigne, MO782056.
Federico Ibarra: Diez Aos de Msica de Cmara
(1982-1992) Edison Quintana, piano; Carlos Prieto, vc;
Jess Suaste, baritone, et al. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM.
Daniel Catn: Homenaje a Octavio Paz. Fernando de la
Mora, tenor; Encarnacin Vzquez, mezzosoprano, Jess
Suaste, baritone; Orquesta Filarmnica de la Ciudad;
Eduardo Diazmuoz, cond. CD, Mexico City, CNCA,
SCD-10166.
Javier lvarez. Papalotl: Transformaciones Exticas.
(Music for solo instruments and tape) Hugh Webb, harp;
Luis Julio Toro, maracas; Philp Mead, piano; Inok Paek,
kayagum; Simon Limbrick, tenor steel pan. CD, England,
Saydisc, CD-SDL 390.
Msica Sinfnica Mexicana. Orquesta Filarmnica de la
UNAM; Ronald Zollman, cond. CD, Mexico City, UNAM
Voz Viva de Mxico/Urtext JBCC 003/4. Music by
Silvestre Revueltas, Federico Ibarra, Gabriela Ortiz,
Manuel Enrquez, Jos Pablo Moncayo, Joaqun Gutirrez
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Heras, Mario Lavista, Marcela Rodrguez, Arturo

Mrquez and Carlos Chvez.
Imgenes mexicanas para piano. Alberto Cruzprieto,
piano. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM. Music by Jos Roln,
Joaqun Gutirrez Heras, Miguel Bernal Jimnez, Alicia
Urreta, Gabriela Ortiz, Manuel M. Ponce, Mario Lavista,
Eduardo Hernndez Moncada and Jos Pablo Moncayo.
Msica mexicana para flauta de pico. Horacio Franco,
recorder. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM. Music by Gabriela
Ortiz, Daniel Catn, Marcela Rodrguez, Mario Lavista,
Ana Lara, Juan Fernando Durn and Graciela Agudelo.
Tro Neos: Msica Mexicana Contempornea. Luis
Humberto Ramos, cl; Wendy Holdaway, bn, and Ana
Maria Tradatti, piano. CD, Mexico City, CENIDIM. Music
by Roberto Medina, Gabriela Ortiz, Hermilio Hernndez,
Ramn Montes de Oca, Francisco Nez, Luis Jaime
Cortz, and Graciela Agudelo.
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Musical Identities, the Western Canon and Speech about Music in...

Musical Identities, the Western Canon and

Mexican art music has a long history which starts in 1524

their hand at writing theme-and-variation pieces, rather

been relatively easy to keep musicological discourse at a

composers had gotten to the symphonic genre, thus

hegemonic and peripheral values and ideals and their

hand, Chvez did envision an American leadership of

time collecting and studying Indian music, but, following

Western culture as the new and the modern in the years in

Bibliography and Recordings

Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1984.

Sensemay: The Unknown Revueltas. Camerata de las

Heras, Mario Lavista, Marcela Rodrguez, Arturo

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