Music: Aztec Music, Reconstructed

Thousands of years ago, somewhere on the warm seacoasts of the North American continent, an Indian picked up a sea snail’s shell, blew a tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail’s shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes), huehuetls (tree-trunk drums), pipes and flutes of clay, rattles and rasps of many materials. All the Aztec instruments of definite pitch were tuned to the five-note sea shell’s scale. As early Spanish chroniclers noted, the Aztecs played and sang ballads, war songs, dance rituals. But no one ever wrote down a note of their music.

Last week Manhattan audiences heard something which might have been Aztec music. As a side show of the exhibit of Mexican art at the Museum of Modern Art (see p. 57), a program of Mexican music was worked out by Mexico’s swart, amiable, unruly-locked Composer-Conductor Carlos Chavez. A collection of ancient instruments in the Mexican National Museum, and such tomes of conquistador times as the Codex Florentinus (a compilation of Indian folklore, with many a crude illustration-see cut), were all the proof Composer Chavez could give that his fanciful reconstruction called Xochi-pili-Macuilxochitl after the Aztec god of music, the dance, flowers, love-was the real stuff. But it really sounded like an Aztec jam session. Flutes and pipes shrilled and wailed, a trombone (subbing for the snail shell) neighed an angular melody, to the spine-tingling thump-and-throb of drums, gourds, rattles. Xochipili-Macuil-xochitl sounded almost as primitive as Stravinsky.

Carlos Chavez, 40, has been Mexico’s No. 1 musician ever since he wrote a ballet in 1921 for radical, art-loving Secretary of

Education Jose Vasconcelos. In 1928 he began building the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico for the Mexico City musicians’ union, made it a crack 90 man outfit-now subsidized by the Government-to whose free concerts workers flock. On his musically illiterate audiences Chavez has ceaselessly experimented, discovering that where the simplicities of Haydn leave peasants cold, the complexities of Stravinsky roll them in the aisles.

For the Modern Museum concerts, Carlos Chavez aimed to capsule Mexico’s Indo-Spanish music in a 90-minute program. He trained a pickup, 23 piece Manhattan orchestra, reinforced with a few Mexican guitarists and including five men to bang the tablefuls of kitchenware in the percussion section. Conductor Chavez, with a precise, clean beat and an extraordinarily contented look, led off with three concerts last week, then turned the orchestra over to his assistant, Eduardo Hernandez Moncada, who will lead the same program twice daily until May 29.