Carl van Vechten/Library of Congress  Carlos Chávez (pictured in 1937) is by most rankings Mex-ico’s most important composer.  Each summer for the last quarter-century, the Bard Music Festival has taken a deep dive into the life, music, and cultural context of a single composer. With the planning of this year’s 26th iteration came a sense that “it’s time to leave Europe and North America, to explore the riches of classical music in Latin America,” says Leon Botstein, the festival’s artistic codirector, and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, in residence at the festival.  Having considered more popular contenders such as Ginastera and Villa-Lobos, Botstein and his colleagues settled on Carlos Chávez (1899-1978), whose works and milieu will be the subject of two weekends of discussion and performance. For Botstein, the choice was not only intellectual, but personal: As a child, he spent many summers with his grandparents in Mexico City, where he saw Chávez conduct and studied violin with members of the National Conservatory, which the composer led for six years after the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920.  Botstein’s interest, though, is not confined to his own autobiography. Chávez is by most rankings the most important composer in Mexico’s history, yet he lacks a readily identifiable musical profile, even among literate listeners. Though a few of his pieces, such as the “Sinfonía india,” gained popularity during his lifetime, none of them induce the sort of immediate recognition that those by his better known Latin American contemporaries do.  He makes a perfect subject for Bard, therefore, precisely because he lends himself so readily to the kind of intense interdisciplinary investigation the festival prizes: not just of Chávez, but of an entire nation’s modern culture.  “What you’re dealing with, the essential theme, is the invention of modern Mexico,” said Botstein by phone from Bard College, where he has served as president since 1975. “The history is this crossroads of European, North American, indigenous, so that the varied character [of the music] is at the essence of the hybrid syncretism of what Mexico is all about. So Chávez becomes a kind of doorway to connecting musical culture to visual culture, a doorway to the politics [after the revolution]. It’s a real crossroads.”  Those strands emerge in three characteristics that define Chávez’s music. There is what Botstein called “a kind of imaginary indigenous music,” whose only sources are instruments of the pre-Columbian era; a nationalist vocabulary of popular Mexican song and dance; and an abstract modernism derived from Chávez’s knowledge of European composers of the time.  The balance of these components varied throughout Chávez’s career, but their union played a major role in the creation of a specifically modern Mexican musical culture. There was an undoubted political dimension to this invention, just as there was in the Soviet Union. It was “a way of breaking with a past that was associated with oppression,” Botstein explained, comparing it to the radical modernism that flourished in the 1920s under Soviet patronage. “[It] had its mirror in Mexico too. And Chávez was part of that. They’re not only fighting a political revolution; they’re trying to emancipate themselves from being a client of the Europeans. And modernism is a way out of the long arm of history.”  The Bard concerts and panels will track all this through performances not only of Chávez’s own works, but also of his more conservative predecessors (Julián Carrillo, Ricardo Castro), protégés (Silvestre Revueltas), transplants (Conlon Nancarrow), influences (Ravel, Stravinsky), and other Latin American composers (Ginastera, Villa-Lobos). Chávez traveled extensively in the United States and the web of US composers that surrounded him includes Copland, Varèse, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison.  Together, the programs sketch a vast canvas over which different species of modernism grew at different paces and in varying shapes. Yet unlike many festivals illustrating this process, “Carlos Chávez and His World” is notable for the fact that “this is the first time in the 26 years that we’ve put on the festival where there isn’t a single piece of music that is familiar to the audience,” Botstein claimed.  Fittingly, he has been a persistent critic of a musical culture that presumes listeners are only comfortable attending concerts at which they already know everything they will hear.  “This is a completely different kind of experience,” Botstein said. “You’re going to spend one concert after another hearing something that sounds like things you’ve heard, they’re in an idiom that you understand, but you don’t know how they go. And suddenly, you have this wonderful experience of reacting to the discovery of so much rich music that doesn’t get a chance to be heard. It’s like reading a great novel you’ve never read before. Do we always have to read books that we’ve read before and we know how they end? Do we only watch films where we know every line?”  BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL: Carlos Chávez and His World  At: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., Friday-Sunday and Aug. 13-16
Carlos Chávez, a composer, performer, and pedagogue who helped to modernize music in his native Mexico, is the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival.