Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T17:08:15.108Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Identity and the Neoclassical Ideal in Martha Graham and Carlos Chávez's Dark Meadow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2020

CHRISTINA TAYLOR GIBSON Open the ORCID record for CHRISTINA TAYLOR GIBSON [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

If the ideal artistic collaboration is one of shared vision, open communication, and exquisite professionalism then Martha Graham and Carlos Chávez strayed far from it in the making of Dark Meadow (1946). As this article documents, their relationship was full of antagonism, misunderstanding, disdainful gossip, and regret on both sides. Three sources of conflict are examined: 1) a misunderstanding between the two collaborators on the meaning and utility of Greek allusions in art created conflicting aesthetic expectations for a dance with a plot derived from Greek mythology; 2) both artists defied the modernist community's expectations about how each of them should perform their gender identity as artists; and 3) similarly, the press's consistent Othering of Chávez in racist, nationalist terms was contagious, influencing Graham's beliefs about what Mexican music could or should be. Despite significant obstacles, Chávez and Graham produced a work that continues to represent the mid-century Modernist aesthetic.

Type
Article
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 95 - 124
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I was privileged to receive wonderful, generous advice in the research and writing of this article. Among those who read or talked through drafts are Rachel Barham, Christopher Bruhn, Alejandro L. Madrid, Libby Smigel, K. Mitchell Snow, and Susan Wiesner. Others commented on various presentations of this material in thought-provoking ways including: Ana Alonso-Minutti, Chelsea Burns, Kassie Hartford, Marisol Quevedo, Leonora Saavedra, Grayson Wagstaff, Andy Weaver, and Julia Young. Thank you to the anonymous peer reviewers for constructive guidance.

References

Bibliography

Blitzstein, Marc. ‘Forecast and Review’. Modern Music 9/4 (May–June 1932), 166.Google Scholar
Burt, Ramsay. ‘Dance, Gender, and Psychoanalysis: Martha Graham's “Night Journey”’. Dance Research Journal 30/1 (Spring 1998), 34–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burt, Ramsay. The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Carr, Maureen. Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Chávez, Carlos. Sinfonia Antígona. New York: Schirmer, 1948.Google Scholar
Chávez, Carlos. Suite for Double Quartet. From the Ballet Dark Meadow. New York: Mills Music, 1967.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron. ‘Carlos Chávez–Mexican Composer’. The New Republic, 2 May 1928, 322–3.Google Scholar
De Mille, Agnes. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. New York: Random House, 1991.Google Scholar
Foulkes, Julia. ‘Pioneer Women’. In Modern Bodies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 27–50.Google Scholar
Frank, Gerold. ‘There Shall Be Music’. Cleveland News, 30 March 1937.Google Scholar
Franko, Mark. Martha Graham in Love and War. New York: Oxford, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentry, Philip. ‘Leonard Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety: A Great American Symphony during McCarthyism’. American Music 29/3 (Fall 2011), 308–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Google Scholar
Hess, Carol. Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan-American Dream. New York: Oxford, 2013.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199919994.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirkland, Sean D. ‘Speed and Tragedy in Cocteau and Sophocles’. In Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, ed. Wilmer, S. E. and Zukauskaité, Audroné. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 313–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kosstrin, Hannah. Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199396924.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krippner, James. ‘Carlos Chávez and Paul Strand’. In Carlos Chávez and His World, ed. Saavedra, Leonora. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 220–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landau, Ellen G. ‘Body Si(gh)ting: Noguchi, Mexico, and Martha Graham’. In Mexico and American Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 2–33.Google Scholar
Levitz, Tamara. Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone. New York: Oxford, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd, Margaret. The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Brooklyn, NY: Knopf, 1949.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan. ‘The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze’. In Meaning in Motion, ed. Desmond, Jane C.. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 152–65.Google Scholar
Martin, John. ‘“Cave of the Heart” Danced by Graham’. New York Times, 28 February 1947.Google Scholar
Martin, John. ‘The Dance: “Dark Meadow”’, New York Times, 27 January 1946.Google Scholar
Martin, John. ‘The Dance: “Graham”’, New York Times, 16 March 1947.Google Scholar
McPhee, Colin. ‘Forecast and Review’. Modern Music 13/3 (March–April 1936).Google Scholar
Prickett, Stacey, sel. and intro. ‘Reviewing on the Left: The Dance Criticism of Edna Ocko’. In Of, By, and For the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s. Studies in Dance History 5/1, ed. Garafola, Lynn. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press for the Society of Dance History Scholars, 1994. 65–103.Google Scholar
Oja, Carol J. Colin McPhee: A Composer in Two Worlds. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Paddock, John. ‘Carlos Chávez and the Dance’. Chrysalis 7/5–6 (1954), 3–13.Google Scholar
Parker, Robert L. ‘Carlos Chávez and the Ballet: A Study in Persistence’. Dance Chronicle 8/3–4 (1994), 179–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.Google Scholar
‘Programs of the Week’, NYT, 4 January 1931.Google Scholar
Radano, Ronald. ‘Hot Modernism: The Idea of Black Rhythm’, in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Radano, Ronald and Bohlman, Philip. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 459–80.Google Scholar
Reynoso, José Luis. ‘Choreographing Politics, Dancing Modernity: Ballet and Modern Dance in the Construction of Modern México (1919–1940)’. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2012.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Paul. ‘American Composers VIII: Carlos Chávez’. Modern Music 9/4 (May–June 1932), 153–9.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Paul. ‘Musical Chronicle’. The Dial, December 1926, 529.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Paul. ‘New American Music’. Scribner's Magazine, June 1931, 624–32.Google Scholar
Saavedra, Leonora. ‘Carlos Chávez y la construcción de una alteridad estratégica’, in Diálogo de resplendores: Carlos Chávez y Silvestre Revueltas, ed. Bitrán, Yael and Miranda, Ricardo. México City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2002. 125–36.Google Scholar
Saavedra, Leonora. ‘Carlos Chávez's Polysemic Style: Constructing the National, Seeking the Cosmopolitan’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 68/1 (Spring 2015), 99–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saavedra, Leonora. ‘Of Selves and Others: Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics of Modern Mexican Music’. PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2001.Google Scholar
Sears, David. ‘Graham Masterworks in Revival’, Ballet Review 10 (1982), 31.Google Scholar
Shirley, Wayne. Ballet for Martha: The Commissioning of Appalachian Spring/Ballets for Martha: The Creation of Appalachian Spring, Jeux de printemps, and Hérodiade. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997.Google Scholar
Snow, K. Mitchell. ‘Martha Graham, Mexico and the American Gesture’. Dance Chronicle 40/1 (2017), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soares, Janet Mansfield. Louis Horst: Musician in a Dancer's World. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Soloski, Alexis. ‘Simon Stone Faced the Unthinkable: He Thinks You Should Too’. New York Times, 1 January 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/theater/simon-stone-medea-bam.html (accessed 19 July 2020).Google Scholar
Taylor Gibson, Christina. ‘The Music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez in New York, 1925–1932’. PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2008.Google Scholar
Taylor Gibson, Christina. ‘The Reception of Carlos Chávez's Horsepower: A Pan-American Communication Failure’. American Music 30/2 (Summer 2012), 157–93.10.5406/americanmusic.30.2.0157CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thoms, Victoria. ‘American Dance Pioneer and the Ghosts of Feminism’. Women: A Cultural Review 23/3 (2012), 346–67.Google Scholar
Thoms, Victoria. Martha Graham: Gender and the Haunting of a Dance Pioneer. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013.Google Scholar
Tomko, Linda J. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Tortajada Quiroz, Margarita. Danza y Poder I (1920–1963). México: CONACULTA, 2006.Google Scholar
Vanasco, Jennifer. ‘Review: A Starry “Medea” at BAM is Stylish – But Bloodless’. WNYC, 1 February. www.wnyc.org/story/review-medea-bam/ (accessed 19 July 2020).Google Scholar
Woolf, Janet. ‘Reinstating Female Corporeality’, in Meaning in Motion, ed. Desmond, Jane C.. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 81–99.Google Scholar
String Quartet No. 3. On Complete Chamber Music, vol. 4. Southwest Chamber Music, Lorenz Gamma, violin, Mitchell Newman, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, Peter Jacobson, cello. Recorded 19 October 2005. CD, Cambria 8853A/B, 2005.Google Scholar
String Quartet No. 3. Performed by Cuarteto Latinoamericano. CD, Urtext Digital Classicas, JBCC109, 2005.Google Scholar
Suite for Double Quartet. On Complete Chamber Music, vol. 1. Southwest Chamber Music, Dorothy Stone, flute, Stuart Horn, oboe, Jim Foschia, clarinet, Leslie Lashinsky, bassoon, Christine Frank, violin, Agnes Gottschewski, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, Maggie Edmondson, cello, Jeff von der Schmidt, conductor. Recorded 26 May 1999. CD, Cambria 8850, 1999.Google Scholar
Suite for Double Quartet. Conducted by Eduardo Mata. CD, Dorian DOR-90215, 1994.Google Scholar
String Quartet No. 3. On Complete Chamber Music, vol. 4. Southwest Chamber Music, Lorenz Gamma, violin, Mitchell Newman, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, Peter Jacobson, cello. Recorded 19 October 2005. CD, Cambria 8853A/B, 2005.Google Scholar
String Quartet No. 3. Performed by Cuarteto Latinoamericano. CD, Urtext Digital Classicas, JBCC109, 2005.Google Scholar
Suite for Double Quartet. On Complete Chamber Music, vol. 1. Southwest Chamber Music, Dorothy Stone, flute, Stuart Horn, oboe, Jim Foschia, clarinet, Leslie Lashinsky, bassoon, Christine Frank, violin, Agnes Gottschewski, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, Maggie Edmondson, cello, Jeff von der Schmidt, conductor. Recorded 26 May 1999. CD, Cambria 8850, 1999.Google Scholar
Suite for Double Quartet. Conducted by Eduardo Mata. CD, Dorian DOR-90215, 1994.Google Scholar