Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Imagine the Rockettes filing into New Lecture Hall-Harvard Stadium transformed into an Aztec hot dog stand--a football team which pulls the line out of the game because they get in the road of the backs--and you have Pottawatomic University at stop Gap, New Mexico, the cultural center of our great south-West. This is the setting of George Abbot's play, which--amply supplied with Hart-Rodgers songs, oh-so-pretty coeds, and nearly half the gags good for a laugh--is well worth seeing...
...pattern of reformers and optimists, the cause-&-effect patterns of rationalists. He sees each culture-Classical, Chinese, Arabian, etc.-as an organic entity which is born, flourishes, wanes, dies, like plants and animals. As organisms, cultures have a uniform morphology, except where accident intrudes (as in the ruin of Aztec culture by a band of adventurers). Lifetime of a culture is about 1,500 years. Western culture of 1940 is at about the same stage of its life cycle as the Egyptian of 1600 B.C., Chinese of 250 B.C., Classical of 100 B.C. For proof Spengler waved his learned pointer...
Cortes tricked the Aztec Montezuma by posing as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, and then methodically subdued the Indians with blunderbuss and broadsword. For the next 200-odd years New Spain, ruled from Mexico City but extending for a time as far as South Carolina, experienced what some historians have called a Golden Age. The Spaniards brought with them horses (but used the Indians as men of burden), wheat (the Indians still eat maize tortillas), such things as woolen blankets, armchairs, caps (for which the Indians exchanged jewels, silver, gold). The only things the Spaniards gave the Indians were smallpox...
...tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail's shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes), huehuetls (tree-trunk drums), pipes and flutes of clay, rattles and rasps of many materials. All the Aztec instruments of definite pitch were tuned...
Last week Manhattan audiences heard something which might have been Aztec music. As a side show of the exhibit of Mexican art at the Museum of Modern Art (see p. 57), a program of Mexican music was worked out by Mexico's swart, amiable, unruly-locked Composer-Conductor Carlos Chavez. A collection of ancient instruments in the Mexican National Museum, and such tomes of conquistador times as the Codex Florentinus (a compilation of Indian folklore, with many a crude illustration-see cut), were all the proof Composer Chavez could give that his fanciful reconstruction called Xochi-pili-Macuilxochitl after...