Carlos Chávez and Ur-Classicism
Carlos Chávez and Ur-Classicism
This chapter proposes that critics of music by the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez rejected difference and embraced sameness by classicizing the Indianist qualities of his works. Opposing Chávez’s style to Stravinskian neoclassicism, Paul Rosenfeld, Henry Cowell, and Aaron Copland effectively conceived of an “ur-classicism” unique to the Americas and invested with the universal authority of an ancient past. These critics echoed their counterparts in architecture, journalism, and anthropology who also extolled the Mexican Indian as having values commonly understood as classic (timelessness, transcendence, universal validity, restraint, organicism), as writings by the architect Robert Stacy Judd, the author Stuart Chase, and the anthropologists Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict show. Some even dubbed the Aztecs and Mayans the ancient Greeks of the hemisphere, adopting a classicizing stance that defied the modernist ferment of 1920s New York and helped situate musical Pan Americanism in U.S. concert life.
Keywords: Copland-Sessions concerts, Carlos Chávez in United States, primitivism, Paul Rosenfeld, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, “true classicism”, Mexican music, modernism, tabula rasa, ur-classicism
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