About Carlos Chavez: Some Notes and Thoughts on an Unfinished Career

Abstract

Carlos Chávez is a composer before he is anything else. Although he has become known, in his native Mexico and elsewhere, as a conductor, administrator, and writer as well, he himself has regarded those other activities as adjuncts to, necessary extensions of (rather than substitutes for), his composing. For the academic year 1958–59 he is Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University. He will deliver the six required lectures. He is arranging concerts as part of his tenure of the honored professorship. But he undoubtedly regards the concerts, the lectures, and the book that will come out of them as integrally relevant to his continuing education and development as a composer.