Chokopul's Travels

From one Mexican village to another this winter a white man traveled, asking for and intently listening to music. A swart Mexican accompanied him, explained to Aztecs and Tarascans that it was their own native music the stranger wanted to hear, not the imported hodge-podge played in Mexican cities. The stranger was interested in the rude, primitive sounds made by the chirimia (clay pipe), the marimba made of gourds, the teponaztle, which is the Mexican Indians' drum, the noisy basis for all their music. Indians took to calling the white man Chokopul which means "one of wandering wits."

Chokopul (Conductor Leopold Stokowski) returned to his own people six weeks ago and as a souvenir of his travels he presented with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company last week the world premiere of H. P., a "ballet-symphony" written five years ago by Carlos Chavez, the Mexican who guided him on his musical tour. Ravel's L'Heitre Espagnole served as curtain-raiser, a naughty opera concerning a clockmaker's insatiable wife, never intended for the literal English translation in which it was given. Then the curtain went up on a drop topped by the letters H. P., with a heavy, everyday horse on one side, an everyday electric battery on the other. Mexico's Artist Diego Rivera claims that the lowest intellect can grasp the meaning of his paintings. Certainly no one had to scuttle for his libretto last week to discover that H. P. stood for horsepower.

Dancers in Diego Rivera costumes proceeded to enact the story of H. P. Russian Alexis Dolinoff appeared first, wearing an electric coil or two and a welder's visor. On his back the letters H. P. identified him like a football player. The libretto said he was "in the plenitude of his intellect, sentiments and physical powers."

The next three scenes described the contrasting influences of North & South. Sailors on a southbound cargo ship jumped about in brisk, energetic fashion until plump sirens with fishlike feet got aboard, started playing guitars and wriggling their hips. Officers forgot to give orders then, left the bridge. In a tropical port even the luxuriant, overgrown pineapples and coconut trees abandoned themselves to jogging amiably about. But back north again the dancing took on new, hectic energy. Drably uniformed workmen hopped about automatically, rebelliously, before a stock ticker largely labeled. A gasoline filling station, two bathtubs and a ventilator took part in this materialistic orgy. For the finale a bland, fat-faced Mexican sun descended to blot out the noxious stock ticker, a sun whose face bore a flattering likeness to Painter Rivera's. For this triumphant scene the noisy music was at its noisiest--hard, galvanic, rasping--as if Composer Chavez were trying to make up for having allowed his tropical dancers a comparatively pleasant tango. A cultural renaissance is having its start in obsidian Mexico. Rivera represents the painter's side. His frescoes all about Mexicans have been chosen to adorn governmental walls in Mexico City. Composer Chavez, director of the National Conservatory of Music and of Mexico City's leading symphony orchestra, heads the group trying now to develop an authentic Mexican music from purely native sources. In his own music Chavez makes the winds of the modern orchestra shrill stridently like primitive chirimias. He has added swishing gourds to the conventional percussives. But most of H. P.'s music was too obtrusively harsh and loud for listeners on first hearing to detect the Indian tunes which he claims to be part & parcel of his work. It costs Mary Louise Curtis Bok a tidy sum to finance the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company's carefully prepared productions. When Stokowski conducts, the bills are still higher because he likes to use the full Philadelphia Orchestra. But Stokowski asked nothing for his tense, vital leadership last week. He returned from his Mexican travels in the best of humor, magnanimously announced that he would contribute his part of H. P. free, "as an expression of his admiration for Mexican culture."

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