This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Carlos Chávez's Sinfonía India (Symphony No. 2).

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), one of the leading figures of Mexican 20th-century classical music, composed Sinfonía India in 1936 while working as a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

During the 1920s and 1930s, 30s, the Mexican government actively promoted a new national identity. Artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros glorified indigenous heritage in murals; composers such as Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas did the same in music.

Chávez, as conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, was at the center of this cultural nationalism, believing Mexican music must not only adopt modernist European styles but reflect indigenous and folk traditions. Chávez sought to integrate indigenous music, pre-Columbian rhythms, and Mexican folk material into modern classical forms.

Chavez conceived Sinfonía India as a single-movement symphony, as a musical emblem of Mexican identity for an international audience. The symphony premiered in 1936 in New York, with Chávez himself conducting.

Chávez avoided the traditional four-movement symphonic form, writing instead a compact, single-movement work that was highly rhythmic and colorful, designed to make a strong impression in a single hearing.

He wove in authentic indigenous melodies, and added an expanded percussion section with indigenous instruments. This gave the piece an exotic, raw energy — different from European modernism but still modern. Chávez wanted the symphony to be rooted in indigenous melodies and rhythms rather than European ones. He collected the material from ethnographic sources and oral traditions, then reworked them into a modern symphonic structure.

Chávez described the work as a “symphony written with Indian themes of Mexico”; hence the title Sinfonía India. It was a musical vision of mestizo Mexico--a modern orchestra channeling the ancient indigenous voices.

At the same time, it was a statement to international audiences: Mexico is modern and cosmopolitan, but proudly rooted in its native heritage. Chávez created a Mexican counterpart to Bartók’s folk modernism. To this day, it remains the most widely played Mexican symphonic work internationally.

In this performance from 2016, Andrés Valero-Castells conducts Banda Municipal de Música de A Coruña from Spain.