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Carlos Chavez: Energía for nine instruments (1925)

From the album Xochipilli, La Hija de Colquide Suite, Tambuco, Energia, Toccata

Along with Julián Carrillo and Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chavez was one of the leaders of Mexican musical modernism in the early 20th century. Chavez was a spirited “public intellectual” of modern music, writing copiously for the popular press, collaborating with Edgard Varèse in organizing the Pan-American Association of Composers, and conducting for 21 years the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, the country’s first permanent symphony orchestra. As director of the national conservatory in Mexico from 1928-1933, Chavez oversaw wide-ranging reforms in curriculum, including the study of indigenous musical traditions and a compositional focus on “new musical possibilities.”

Chavez’s position as an visionary of musical modernism was cemented by his 1937 book Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity, which stemmed from a series of writings first published in El Universal in Mexico City in 1932. Although Chavez wrote compellingly of the unlimited possibilities of “electric music,” he did not make use of them in his own work. In this respect, Toward a New Music can be compared to Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetics of Music (1907), another influential piece of writing on music technology by a composer who never touched the stuff himself.

Composed for an unconventional chamber ensemble of piccolo, flute, bassoon, horn, trumpet, bass trombone, viola, cello, and double bass, Energía was commissioned in 1925 by Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild, but not premiered until 1931. Evoking by turns the raw outbursts of German expressionism and the dissonant counterpoint of the American “ultra-modernists,” Energía is strikingly unique in its complete disavowal of repetition. The work fulfill’s Chavez vision of “a music that continually evolves from itself, the entire piece constituting a single, long, main theme.”

March 28, 2011, 12:28pm

Carlos Chavez, Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (1937)

“The present age, with its fertile agitation, its incredible social injustices, its portentous scientific development, is perfecting, in electricity, its own organ of expression, its own voice.  This, clarified and matured, will become the legitimate art of our era, the art of today.”

October 09, 2009, 5:49pm