Music: Mexican in Manhattan

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Poets and painters have swarmed over Mexico, inordinately praised its crude-colored landscapes, its dark, slow-moving Indians, its Aztec remains. They were so impressed with Mexico's cultural heritage that they helped Mexicans make the most of it. In painting, no one has done more to work out a native style than Diego Rivera. In music, no one has done so much as his good friend Carlos Chavez, the swart young mestizo who can make a full orchestra suggest swishing gourds and shrill clay pipes. Excitement ran high in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall last week when Composer Chavez faced the New York Philharmonic for the first time and led it through two of his works never played there before : a suite from his ballet H. P. and his wierd, strident Symphony of Antigone.

H. P. stands for horsepower. Chavez tried therein to contrast the luxurious, banana-laden tropics with the hard commercialism of the North and to show how each needs the other. When Stokowski gave the ballet its world premiere in Philadelphia five years ago (TIME, April 11, 1932), he had dancers to take such roles as a coconut, a mermaid with a guitar, a swordfish, a gasoline pump, a ventilator. Last week's audience had no dancers to explain what was happening or to whom it was happening. They heard only music to express life aboard ship, a hot-blooded tango where the mermaids are supposed to interrupt ship routine, two catchy tunes to convey tropic abandon. Critics suspected that H. P. contained more South American hotcha than it did authentic Indian music.

Chavez wrote the Symphony of Antigone because French Poet Jean Cocteau needed music in his "contraction" of the Greek tragedy. The Symphony does not describe what happens in the play, aims only to be elemental and barbaric. Listeners found its odd harmonies impressively elemental, shivered at the wailing strings and dark, discordant brasses.

When Carlos Chavez began to write music he was barely out of his teens. A seventh child, he was born near Mexico City in 1899, first studied piano with his brother Manuel, later with teachers like Asuncion Parra and Pedro Ogazón. At 22, Chavez met José Vasconcelos, the radical Secretary of Education who hired Rivera to paint the famous murals in his Secretariat. Vasconcelos gave Chavez the commission for his first ballet, The New Fire.

When the Musicians' Union in Mexico City decided to form a symphony orchestra, they asked Chavez to head it. They gave their first concert in September 1928, soon won a subsidy from the Government. In his nine years with the Mexican Symphony, Chavez has built up a crack 90-man personnel and the most open-minded audience in the world. Workers flock to the free concerts he gives for them on Sundays.

Chavez was made director of the National Conservatory of Music in December 1928. He instantly set about cleaning up teaching methods, saw that students learned to play accurately, built a chorus, organized research in native Indian music. From March 1933 to May 1934 Chavez served as Chief of the Department of Fine Arts. There too he pressed for an autonomous Mexican style, resigned his post only because of political changes.