Carlos Chávez’s music is generally read as infused with twentieth-century Mexican identity, a position introduced by Aaron Copland and Paul Rosenfeld. However, this reading discounts Chávez’s diverse stylistic choices, especially those apparent in his earlier works. In his earliest compositions, Chávez emulated the model of the Russian Five in using folk material to create novel music. Later, he ventured into modernism and primitivism with his 1921 ballet Toxiuhmolpia: El fuego nuevo, which represented an imagined Aztec religious ceremony. Chávez’s early nationalist pieces like his 1924 Sonatina for Violin and Piano exhibit an unconventional form of musical nationalism, borrowing traditional melodies but distorting them to achieve a more modernist sound. With his first forays into the international music scene in the mid-1920s, Chávez leaned into his modernist image, presenting works in an energetic mechanical style like his European contemporaries Varèse and Stravinsky. By the late 1920s, Chávez was also composing works with neoclassical influence as well as ultramodern works. Aaron Copland’s article “Carlos Chavez—Mexican Composer” praised Chávez for his unique modernist style and set a critical precedent for reading Mexican and Indian identities in his music that was quickly taken up by Paul Rosenfeld. These American interpretations of Chávez’s music, shaped by a Pan-Americanism movement in the United States, constructed Chávez as essentially Mexican and his Mexican identity as essentially Indigenous.

Works: Carlos Chávez: Jarabe (113-114), Sonatina for Violin and Piano (114-15)

Sources: Traditional: Jarabe Tapatío (114), El Atole (114), El Palomo (114), L’Inasia (115)

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet