Mexican Maestro

When the U. S. man in the street thinks about Mexican music, chances are he thinks of two songs:

1) La Paloma and 2) La Cucaracha.

Yet La Paloma, though once tremendously popular in Mexico, was written by a Spaniard who lived in Cuba, and both it and La Cucaracha are more Cuban than Mexican in rhythm. Today most of Mexico's music is Spanish in origin. But ancient instruments dug from Aztec tombs prove that Mexico was musical long before Cortez & his Spaniards conquered it.

Last week Mexico's No. 1 musician, wiry, dynamic Carlos Chavez, entered NBC's Studio 8-H to conduct the first of two Saturday night broadcasts. First to follow famed Maestro Toscanini at the head of NBC's new $600,000-a-year radio orchestra, Conductor Chavez drew a studio audience in which the mink coats and white ties of previous broadcasts were conspicuously absent. Programmed were two of Conductor Chavez' own compositions: the energetic, Stravinsky-influenced Sinfonia de Antigona; and the Sinfonia India, in which Composer Chavez uses several authentic Mexican Indian themes.

Mexico is backward and primitive, but Mexican Chavez is the most futuristically minded of contemporary musicians. He has a firm faith that the development of electrically controlled instruments will bring about a musical golden age. In a recent book,* he predicted the invention of vast music-creating engines, envisioned a musical art in which present-day musical instruments and "interpretive" musicians would no longer be necessary. What this music of the future would sound like, and why anyone should want to create it or listen to it, Prophet Chavez left to his readers' imagination.

* Toward A New Music--Norton.

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