Carlos Chávez's 'Xochipilli-Macuilxóchitl': Exploring an Imagined Aztec Music Exhibition

This entry details 'Xochipilli-Macuilxóchitl: An Imagined Aztec Music (1940)' by Carlos Chávez, a pivotal work of the Mexican Aztec Renaissance. Created for the 1940 MoMA exhibition 'Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art', it aimed to evoke a remote past through abstracted indigenous aesthetics and reconstructions of ancient instruments.

The artwork 'Xochipilli-Macuilxóchitl' by Carlos Chávez is a significant piece from the Aztec Renaissance in Mexican arts. Faced with the impossibility of retrieving preserved ancient musical sources, the aesthetic of these compositions served as an evocation of a distant past. Through an abstraction detached from ancient indigenous cultures (particularly Aztec and Maya), the aim was to express, in Chávez's own words, 'the deepest part of the Mexican soul.' 'Xochipilli-Macuilxóchitl' was performed twice daily for two weeks during the major exhibition 'Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art' held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The score was composed for an instrumental ensemble featuring copies of ancient Aztec instruments, with the exception of a trombone used to imitate the sound of a marine conch shell trumpet. These instruments were constructed based on painted representations in the Florentine Codices. The program for the MoMA concert listed some of these instruments, including the teponaztli (a wooden idiophone), huehuetles (membrane idiophones), and omichicahuaztlis (scraper-type idiophones). Notably, the subtitle of the 1940 work, 'Music for Pre-Conquest Instruments,' differs from the definitive subtitle published much later in 1964, 'An Imagined Aztec Music.' With this latter subtitle, Chávez intended to distance the work from any essentialist connotations.