Composers: The Way to Write Music

All week, the rotund, grey-haired man in the rumpled brown suit guarded the decrepit-looking envelope as if it were stuffed with gold. “It’s always on my mind,” he said, quietly aware that the envelope contained what everyone hoped might prove a musical triumph. An evening or so later, Carlos Chávez, Mexico’s top music man and a major composer in any hemisphere, joined some 2,600 concertgoers to hear his Symphony No. 6 performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Leonard Bernstein in its world première. Nearly everyone was disappointed.

A latecomer among ten works commissioned to mark the opening of Lincoln Center’s year-and-a-half-old Philharmonic Hall, the Chávez symphony won respectful applause. But critical hosannas did not follow. The piece is bold, ruggedly impressive in spots, yet oddly ineffectual—a virile epic with all its bones removed.

At 64, however, Chávez is a pioneer modernist who seldom lets a setback take him by surprise. He believes that a new work must mature in the minds of maestro, musicians and public. His patience has often been rewarded. In 1928 he became the founder and conductor of Mexico’s first major symphony orchestra. Giving free concerts, he taught his musically illiterate audiences the wonders of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Chávez. His own early compositions, such as the brilliant, flavorful Sinfonia India, in which indigenous folk tunes were distilled with impressive originality, earned him a reputation for localism that Chávez now frankly deplores. To critics who affect to hear the wind through the mesquite or the flapping of scrapes in everything he writes, he has often protested that “I am Mexican, Beethoven was German —but music is international.”

Though he often returns to his home, Chávez has freed himself from more than two decades of dedication to his country’s culture. Just back from Germany, this week he will conduct a concert in Portland, Ore., and is slated for another in Chicago. But his lively performances on the podium do not stanch his virtually uninterrupted flow of symphonies, concertos, ballets, string quartets, songs and toccatas. While New York reconsiders the merits of his Symphony No. 6, Chávez is polishing off a new percussion piece and is halfway through Symphony No. 7. “When you solve one problem,” he says, “go on to the next. That’s the way to live life—and the way to compose music.”