Nahuatl, the most common indigenous language in Mesoamerica, existed only as a spoken language until after the Spanish conquest, at which time, Nahuatl adopted the Latin alphabet, enabling the language to be transcribed to the page. Now let's consider music. It's a complicated language to notate, even in the Old World, where notation evolved into what most trained musicians read today. Alas, of all the many cultures who populated the pre-conquest Americas, no evidence has been found of a written musical language. This is not absolute, but it certainly is true when applied to writing down melodies and harmonies.
Carlos Chavez, who often wondered how the music of the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Mayans, might have sounded, reveals some of his inclinations with his concise Cantos de Mexico, the four-minute piece is divided into three parts, the first given over to indigenous percussion instruments, which were numerous. Chavez then shifts gears and speculates what Aztec melodies and harmonies might have sounded like. And finally, Chavez throws it all together into an energetic coda of uninhibited, nationalistic writing sure to have appealed to Silvestre Revueltas, to whom Cantos de Mexico was dedicated.
Dr. David Bowles has cultivated a thorough knowledge of Nahuatl over the years, and even teaches the language at UT Rio Grande Valley. He is well aware of the difficulty of identifying what Nahuatl might have sounded like as song in those pre-colonial years, decades, even centuries. When Columbus arrived, followed by conquistadores in full armor, Spanish began to replace the indigenous languages, creating an amalgam of the two.
"Regional Mexican music is a blend of indigenous traditions and Western traditions, but it's really difficult to tease out the indigenous strands and try to sort of recreate what that music would have sounded like," Bowles says.
"Oh, we can do this an approximation, but when I'm translating it, there is clearly rhythm. And so that is one of the things that I utilize the most as a device of prosody, trying to maybe not replicate the rhythms, but replicate the impact those rhythms would have in English. They wouldn't use rhyme schemes the way we do now, but there was internal rhyme and playfulness with sound and stuff like that. So you can take those things from the original novelty and try to transfer them, just to give the general gist, to recreate a kind of feel that those original songs have. 'Cuicatl' is the Nahuatl word for song, and then when you combine cuicatl with the word for flower, you get 'xochicuicatl...' a term that was used to mean kind of like lyricism or poetry writ large."
"Xochicuicatl," one of the many mysteries of the Nahuatl and Spanish languages, was sung by Ixya Herrera. Be sure to tune in tomorrow as David Bowles returns, revealing a few more mysteries of Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
PLAYLIST:
Anon: Teponazcuicatl (Procession of the Drum)
SAVAE
IAGO 214
Carlos Chavez: Cantos de Mexico
Batiz, OSEM
Brilliant 8777
Anon: Teponazcuicatl (Procession of the Drum)
SAVAE
IAGO 214
Fermin Herrera: Xochicuicatl
Ixya Herrera
Herrera Music Corporation
