Carlos Chavez

A Guide to Research

Robert L. Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135594930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book is the first extensive guide to the life, music, and writings of Carlos Ch vez (1899-1978), Mexico's most influential musician of the 20th century. The chapter on biography also presents a characterization of his compositional styles. This work provides a comprehensive listing of Ch vez's compositions and arrangements by genre and performance medium, and reviews the composer's own abundant writings on a broad range of musical subjects. Subsequent chapters address other authors' writings about his multi-faceted career as composer, conductor, teacher, and arts administrator that contributed to his international reputation. A chapter on Research Aids includes annotations of pertinent general reference works, catalogs, and collections of letters that will assist both the general reader and the music specialist.
Introductory narratives illuminate the bibliographic entries in each section, and cross references facilitate access to literature that extends beyond a single relevant topic. The book includes three indexes, which cover compositions and arrangements, authors and titles, and subjects.

II. List of Compositions and Arrangements

The urge to compose at a very early age led Chávez to start writing down his musical ideas by about age ten. A few examples of these first attempts, some of which he admitted were somewhat perfunctory, are preserved among his manuscripts in the Special Collections Section of the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center. The earliest examples, from 1910, are for piano, the instrument he began studying two years earlier. But he soon added pieces for violin and piano, unison chorus and piano, and by 1915, at age sixteen, he wrote and orchestrated a three-movement symphony. The Lincoln Center collection, consisting mainly of pencil holograph sketches, piano scores, and completed and re-worked drafts, encompasses most of his output through 1976. According to daughter Ana Chávez, the composer wanted these materials to be preserved in the library at Lincoln Center, where he felt they would be most readily accessible to the public. He was well acquainted with the library and its Music Division chief Frank Campbell at the time this decision was made. (The New York apartment Chávez maintained until shortly before his death was on Broadway just across from Lincoln Center.)

Chávez turned over the first group of music manuscripts to Campbell on September 10, 1977. Ana Chávez, as executor of her father’s estate, delivered a second set of manuscripts to the library on May 19, 1979. She arranged for delivery of a third set through her New York representative Miguel Coelho on June 5 of the same year,¹ and both transactions are acknowledged with Frank Campbell’s signature in the typescript manifests that number and describe each item in the collection. This inventory manifest was integrated into the library’s catalog as JOB 84-11. Ana Chávez apparently withheld certain pieces she was considering for publication through her newly formed Carlanita Music Company.² Several of these have since been issued by her firm, and others are still pending publication. Isolated manuscripts are scattered in other repositories: the Music Division of the U.S. Library of Congress; the Edwin J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall at the University of Akron (Ohio); and the Miguel Covarrubias Archive at the University of the Americas in Cholula, Mexico. Others are either lost or repose in undetermined locations.

In 1971, the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de Música de México published a definitive catalog of the musical works authored by Chávez. It was preceded by two earlier “complete” catalogs, bo...