Article, “Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in Anti-lynching Songs by Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 76/2 (Summer 2023)
Mexican composers Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez each wrote one song that execrates the lynching-murder of Black persons in the United States. In them, the composers pit a Mexican aesthetics of death against violent spectacle and social inequities to assert a universal dignity of life and to situate an antiracist position within the context of a broader inter- national class struggle. In the process of airing fresh interpretations of the songs, I imply that the composers’ divergent experiences in the United States—Chávez’s relative proximity to establishment structures of power and Revueltas’s intimacy with working-class struggle and race-based discrimination—informed their translation of Black suffering into the (differently historically colonized) context of Mexico. Both composers effected an artful indirection: a displaced deictic center from which to mediate their social thought concerning Mexico’s own problems of penal excess and extrajudicial lynching. Bracha Ettinger’s aesthetically activated Matrixial dimension sets a theoretical and analytical stage for an exploration of these anti-lynching songs and offers a way of understanding aesthetic expressions of allyship in a transhistorical mode.
Essay, “The Pan-American Modernisms of Carlos Chávez and Henry Cowell,” in Carlos Chávez and His World, edited by Leonora Saavedra. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.)
From the editor’s preface: Carlos Chávez was the most powerful Mexican artist of the twentieth century…[His] cultural agitation—for indigenous music, for modernism, for a place for Mexican music in the world, and for a Mexican culture widely supported by the state—started early, in the years of the revolution (1910-21)….Chávez’s innovative programming of twentieth-century music polarized audiences and critics. Subject to debate were questions such as how modern or modernist Mexican music should be, and how it was to represent Mexico.
Abstract: In this essay, I opened a new area in Carlos Chávez’s U.S. connections by exploring his affinities to and differences with fellow composer Henry Cowell’s ideas on music, non-Western cultures, and the future of music. Here I also initiated my exploration of Chávez’s understanding of and empathy with African-American culture.
Program Notes, Bard Festival 2015, “Carlos Chávez and His World” (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College)
The percussion ensemble works of the 1930s and ’40s on the program tonight provide ample evidence of an era of playful technical innovations and self-conscious explorations of rhythm and timbre. In them, one can find qualities both ancient and modern, quantifiable and mystical, cosmopolitan and parochial, programmatic and abstract. Percussion instruments, with their enormous variety of materials and sound production methods, must have seemed to modern composers a vast uncharted territory of new possibilities. In the works featured in this concert, such instruments hold the power to evoke machine-age technological mastery or archaic, primal urges—and sometimes bring to mind both. Certainly, the use of so-called primitive materials to invoke tangible remnants of prehistory (especially as such remnants were recognized among living populations) made both modernity and modernization more visible. . . .
White Paper, “Developing a Common Framework for Public Engagement in the Arts” (With Bronwyn Mauldin). Los Angeles County Arts Commission, 2016.
This report, informed by a review of practitioner and academic literature, charts the concerns of arts stakeholders surrounding public arts engagement since about 2000, beginning with the discovery of a statistically significant decline in benchmark attendance as observed in the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). It also traces the role of the “informal arts” (folk, traditional and avocational arts) in broadening the definition of arts and cultural participation.
Book Review, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music, by Joel Sachs. ARSC Journal 44/1 (Spring 2013): 126-127, 135.
As the first complete biography of one of America’s leading modernist composers, Joel Sachs’s Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music has been long awaited. I can attest, having worked with thousands (and yet only a small portion) of the documents in the New York Public Library’s Henry Cowell Collection, that writing this book faithfully must have been a monumental task. Sachs began the arduous process in 1988, which gives the reader an idea of the anticipation those in the American music community experienced while waiting for this biography. The resulting book in six parts spans Cowell’s entire life. His early years, recounted in part one (“Child to Man”), will be mostly familiar territory to Cowell scholars. His mother, Clarissa Dixon Cowell, and later his stepmother, Olive Thompson Cowell, both collected every shred of evidence they could find and wrote extensively to document Henry’s existence. The “third hoarder,” as Sachs puts it, was Henry’s wife Sidney Robertson Cowell. . . .
Book Review, Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, by Carol A. Hess. Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (3): 870–873.
Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award of the American Musicological Society, Representing the Good Neighbor vividly recalls a time of optimism and cooperation between the United States and its American neighbors. After examining US reception of works by the “big three” Latin American composers of the mid-twentieth century—Carlos Chávez, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Alberto Ginastera—Carol A. Hess maintains that the most perceptive critics of contemporary music, rather than fetishizing musical or cultural differences, emphasized similarities with the composers’ counterparts in the United States through the universalizing discourse of classicism. In doing so she reveals an arc of pan-American sentiment in the musical and artistic world characterized by empathy, like-mindedness, hope, and mutual understanding, and spanning more than six decades. . . .