José Pablo Moncayo
"As composer, José Pablo Moncayo represents one of the most important legacies of the Mexican nationalism in art music, after Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez.
José Rolón, who had studied under Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas in Paris (and also met Arnold Schoenberg), taught harmony, counterpoint and fugue.
[9] According to Robert L. Parker, this new composition class was originally called Class of Musical Creation and later, Composition Workshop; Chávez had some colleagues as pupils, such as Vicente T. Mendoza, Candelario Huízar and Revueltas, and "there were four students under twenty years of age: Daniel Ayala and Blas Galindo (both pure blooded Indians), Salvador Contreras and José Pablo Moncayo.
"[9] Jesús C. Romero suggests that Chávez conducted a selection process among young students of the conservatory before admitting anyone and relates that Daniel Ayala was chosen thanks to his "incipient renown as composer, Salvador Contreras, for his violin skills, and José Pablo Moncayo, on account of his ability to do sight reading at the piano.
There was a change in executive positions in the federal government, and Ignacio García Téllez, former dean of the National University, was now appointed Secretary of Education.
García Téllez appointed José Muñoz Cota as chief of the Department of Fine Arts; as a result Chávez was removed from the head of the National Conservatory and was replaced by his enemy Estanislao Mejía.
A review from José Barros Serra calls the students "The Group of Four," with the aim to promote the nationalistic spirit of Mexican music.
[20] They adopted the epithet given to them the previous year in a newspaper review by José Barros Serra, the "Group of Four," and this was the first public appearance where they intentionally used it.
During the seventh program of the season, Chávez gave Moncayo the opportunity to conduct the opening work of the evening, the Prelude of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.
The same month, in another program of the children's concert series, the one of 26 September 1936, another arrangement by Moncayo, La Valentina, was premiered by the OSM, conducted by Carlos Chávez.
In 1941 Chávez organized a concert of Mexican music with the OSM that included some of the works presented the previous year in New York and requested Moncayo and Contreras to write compositions for such program.
According to the notes prepared by Herbert Weinstock for the concerts arranged by Chávez in New York (1940), the program then included a work called Huapangos by Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster.
[24] Programs of the 1942 season list Eduardo Hernández Moncada as assistant conductor and José Pablo Moncayo at the piano as well as in the percussion section.
[27] The two Mexicans also had the opportunity to meet two other fellow composers and conductors who attended the courses at Tanglewood that summer, Lukas Foss and twenty-four-year-old Leonard Bernstein.
[31] Chávez, as general director of the Fine Arts Institute, appointed Moncayo as music director/conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra (Mexico) on 1 January 1949.
It was a memorial concert held at the Palace of Fine Arts to honor a distinguished music professor, Don Luis Moctezuma, recently deceased.
José Pablo Moncayo is best known as the composer of Huapango, a bright, short orchestral arrangement of popular dances from the eastern state of Veracruz, that is sometimes included in concerts by American orchestras.
Despite being highly regarded in his own country, Moncayo has been the subject of scant academic research, restricted to some program notes; magazine, newspaper and journal articles; and short paragraphs in music dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Although the major contribution of Moncayo to Mexican music has been in the field of composition, he also played a relevant role in the national stage of culture during the ten years of his conducting career (1944–1954).
[32] José Antonio Alcaraz, musicologist and leading music critic of Mexico, assesses that: Mexican nationalism vigorously encompasses a period whose chronological limits may be fixed for study purposes with some precision in 1928: the year of the founding of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and ending three decades later, in 1958 with the death of José Pablo Moncayo, a composer born in 1912.
Yolanda Moreno Rivas concludes: The death of Moncayo in 1958 tangibly marked the end of the Mexican nationalist composition school.
In the same way that his work without followers surpassed and abolished the innocent use of the Mexicanism theme, his death closed the predominance of a composition style whose imprint marked musical creation in Mexico during more than three decades; although only at the beginning of the sixties would it be possible to talk about the definitive abandonment of the great Mexican fresco, the oblivion of the epic tone, and the search for new structural factors in composition.
[34]Moncayo's best-known work continues to be his colorful orchestral fantasy Huapango (1941), but his production also includes many other pieces of a high quality, notwithstanding their lesser fame.
