Music: Chokopul's Travels

From one Mexican village to another this winter a white man traveled, asking for and intently listening to music. A swart Mexican accompanied him, explained to Aztecs and Tarascans that it was their own native music the stranger wanted to hear, not the imported hodge-podge played in Mexican cities. The stranger was interested in the rude, primitive sounds made by the chirimia (clay pipe), the marimba made of gourds, the teponaztle, which is the Mexican Indians' drum, the noisy basis for all their music. Indians took to calling the white man Chokopul which means "one of wandering wits."

Chokopul (Conductor Leopold Stokowski) returned to his own people six weeks ago and as a souvenir of his travels he presented with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company last week the world premiere of H. P., a "ballet-symphony" written five years ago by Carlos Chavez, the Mexican who guided him on his musical tour. Ravel's L'Heitre Espagnole served as curtain-raiser, a naughty opera concerning a clockmaker's insatiable wife, never intended for the literal English translation in which it was given. Then the curtain went up on a drop topped by the letters H. P., with a heavy, everyday horse on one side, an everyday electric battery on the other. Mexico's Artist Diego Rivera claims that the lowest intellect can grasp the meaning of his paintings. Certainly no one had to scuttle for his libretto last week to discover that H. P. stood for horsepower.

Dancers in Diego Rivera costumes proceeded to enact the story of H. P. Russian Alexis Dolinoff appeared first, wearing an electric coil or two and a welder's visor. On his back the letters H. P. identified him like a football player. The libretto said he was "in the plenitude of his intellect, sentiments and physical powers."