Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was born on June 13, 1899, and died on August 2, 1978. He was a Mexican composer, conductor, music expert, teacher, writer, and founder of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra. He was inspired by traditional Mexican cultures. Among his six symphonies, the second one, called Sinfonía india, which includes instruments used by the Yaqui people, is likely the most well-known.
Biography
Carlos Chávez was the seventh child of a criollo family. He was born on Tacuba Avenue in Mexico City, near the suburb of Popotla. His grandfather, José María Chávez Alonso, was a former governor of the state of Aguascalientes. He was killed by the French Army in April 1864 during their second invasion of Mexico. His father, Augustín Chávez, died when Carlos was three years old. Augustín invented a plough that was used in the United States.
Carlos first studied piano with his brother Manuel. Later, he learned piano from Asunción Parra, Manuel Ponce, and Pedro Luis Ozagón. He also studied harmony with Juan Fuentes. His family often traveled to Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, and other places where Mexican indigenous culture was strong.
In 1916, Chávez and friends started a cultural journal called Gladios. This led to him joining the staff of El Universal, a newspaper in Mexico City, in 1924. Over the next 36 years, he wrote more than 500 articles for the paper.
After the Mexican Revolution and the election of Álvaro Obregón as president, Chávez became one of the first composers to create Mexican nationalist music. His ballets often focused on Aztec themes.
In September 1922, Chávez married Otilia Ortiz. They traveled to Europe for their honeymoon from October 1922 to April 1923. They spent two weeks in Vienna, five months in Berlin, and about a week in Paris. During their time in Paris, Chávez met Paul Dukas. Later, in December 1923, he visited the United States for the first time and returned to Mexico in March 1924. He went back to New York City in September 1926 and stayed there until June 1928.
After returning to Mexico, Chávez became the director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana, later renamed the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. This was the first permanent orchestra in Mexico, created by a musicians’ union. Chávez helped take the orchestra on tours throughout rural parts of the country.
In December 1928, Chávez was appointed director of Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music. He held this position for five years until March 1933 and again for eight months in 1934. During his time there, he started three projects: two to collect and study indigenous music and its literature, and one to research old and new musical scales.
In 1937, Chávez published a book titled Toward a New Music, one of the first books by a composer about electronic music. In 1938, he conducted concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra when its regular conductor, Arturo Toscanini, was away. In 1940, he produced concerts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. By 1945, he was widely recognized as Mexico’s leading composer and conductor.
From 1947 to 1952, Chávez served as director-general of the National Institute of Fine Arts. In his first year, he created the National Symphony Orchestra, which replaced the older orchestra and led to its disbanding. During this time, he also traveled internationally.
In May 1953, Lincoln Kirstein, director of the New York City Center of Music and Drama, commissioned Chávez to write a three-act opera based on a story by Boccaccio. The opera was first called The Tuscan Players but was later renamed Pánfilo and Lauretta and El amor propiciado. It was finally performed in 1957 under the name Panfilo and Lauretta at Columbia University. The opera was later revised and renamed Los visitantes for performances in 1968 and 1973.
From 1958 to 1959, Chávez taught at Harvard University. His lectures there were published as a book titled Musical Thought.
From 1970 to 1973, Chávez was the music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. His orchestral piece Discovery (1969) was commissioned by the festival and first performed there.
Because of poor health and financial problems, Chávez sold his home in the Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City and moved in with his daughter Anita in Coyoacán. He died quietly on August 2, 1978, in Coyoacán. His wife had died earlier that year in April.
Chávez’s manuscripts and papers are stored in the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and in the National Archive of Mexico in Mexico City.
Musical style
Chávez's music does not fit into clear time periods with specific styles, but instead combines different elements over time. His early works, up to 1921, mostly include piano compositions and are influenced by the Romantic style, with Robert Schumann as a key inspiration. In 1921, Chávez began creating music with national themes, starting with the Aztec-themed ballet El fuego nuevo (The New Fire), followed by Los cuatro soles (The Four Suns) in 1925.
Between 1924 and 1928, while living in New York City, Chávez became interested in modern, abstract music that was popular at the time. This influence is seen in the titles of his compositions from 1923 to 1934, such as Polígonos for piano (Polygons, 1923), Exágonos for voice and piano (Hexagons, 1924), 36 for piano (1925), Energía for nine instruments (Energy, 1925), Espiral for violin and piano (Spiral, 1934), and an unfinished orchestral piece titled Pirámides (Pyramids).
The peak of this period was the ballet H. P. (Horse Power), also known as Caballos de vapor in Spanish (1926–31). This work features rich orchestration and a full, dense atmosphere, showing the influence of Stravinsky while also incorporating folk and popular music elements, such as the sandunga, tango, huapango, and foxtrot. These national themes continued into the 1930s, especially in the Second Symphony (Sinfonía índia, 1935–36), one of Chávez’s few works that includes actual Native-American melodies. Diego Rivera designed the sets and costumes for the ballet’s premiere in Philadelphia in 1932.
Although Chávez composed the Sonatina for violin and piano in 1924, he returned to traditional musical forms—such as the sonata, quartet, symphony, and concerto—in the 1930s. He wrote six numbered symphonies. The first, Sinfonía de Antígona (1933), was based on incidental music for Jean Cocteau’s Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy. In this piece, Chávez used traditional musical scales, harmonies built on fourths and fifths, and a focus on wind instruments to create an ancient atmosphere.
In his fourth Norton lecture of 1958–59, titled “Repetition in Music,” Chávez described a method of composing that he had used since the 1920s. He explained that “repetition and variation” could be replaced by the idea of “constant rebirth,” comparing it to a stream that never returns to its source but keeps flowing forward. An early example of this approach is Soli I (1933), the first work Chávez acknowledged as being organized using this principle. This method became more common later, especially in pieces like Invención I for piano (1958), Invención II for string trio (1965), Invención III for harp (1967), Soli II for wind quintet (1961), Soli III for bassoon, trumpet, viola, timpani, and orchestra (1969), Soli IV for brass trio (1966), Cinco Caprichos for piano (1975), and late orchestral works such as Resonancias (1964), Elatio (1967), Discovery (1969), Clio (1969), and Initium (1970–72).
Recordings
Chávez created many recordings, including his own compositions and works by other composers. One of his earliest recordings was made in the 1930s for RCA Victor. It included his Sinfonía de Antígona and Sinfonía India, along with his orchestration of Dieterich Buxtehude’s Chaconne in E minor. This recording was a 4-disc 78-rpm set, labeled Victor Red Seal M 503. His most famous recording was a stereo version of his Sinfonía India, Sinfonía de Antígona, and Sinfonía romántica, conducted by Chávez with the Stadium Symphony Orchestra. This orchestra was the summer name for the New York Philharmonic. The album was first released in 1959 by Everest Records on LP SDBR 3029. It was later released again on CD in 1996 by Everest as EVC-9041 and also by Philips Records. In 1963, Chávez conducted the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in two recordings with pianist Eugene List for Westminster Records. These were released on LP: one was his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Westminster WST 17030, reissued in 1976 as Westminster Gold WGS 8324), and the other was a recording of two piano concertos by Edward MacDowell (ABC Westminster Gold WGS 8156).
In the 1950s, Chávez released two recordings with US Decca Records, where he conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. In 1951, a 10-inch mono LP was released (Decca Gold Label DL 7512, reissued in 1978 by Varèse Sarabande on side 2 of a 12-inch LP). It included his Suite from La hija de Cólquide, which was originally recorded in 1947 for the Mexican label Anfión as a 3-disc 78-rpm set (Anfión AM 4). In 1956, Decca released an album titled Music of Mexico, featuring three of Chávez’s works and José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango (Decca Gold Label LP, DL9527).
Chávez also made recordings for Columbia Records, which were released on 78-rpm discs and LPs (Columbia 4-disc 78-rpm set M 414, reissued in 1949 on Columbia 10-inch LP, Columbia ML 2080, and Mexican Columbia DCL 98, reissued on Columbia 12-inch LP, LL 1015; CBS Masterworks 3-LP set 32 31 0001 (mono)/32 31 002 (stereo); CBC Masterworks LP 32 11 0064; Columbia LP M32685; Odyssey LP Y 31534). In 1961, he recorded Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with the Orquesta Sinfónica de México and narrator Carlos Pellicer. This recording was released on Mexican Columbia MC 1360.