After spending three years in Paris, from 1921 to 1924, studying with the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and immersing himself in European musical culture, the American composer of Russian descent Aaron Copland returned to the United States with the idea of playing a central role in American music, in the triple facet of composer, music promoter and audience educator. He fulfilled it at length. As a composer of popular scope, his Fanfare for the Common Man, from 1942, attests to this. As a promoter and educator, he is the author of the short volume How to Listen to Music, a gem of popularization published in 1939, which had been reprinted five times by 1975.
In 1932 he traveled to Mexico and among many other activities he visited a dance hall. The salon had opened its doors in April 1920 and included a hall of mirrors and three dance floors classified according to the social class dancing there: "Mantequilla" for the upper class, "Manteca" for the middle class, and "Sebo" for the poor, who also like to dance, of course. Curiously – despite the current political situation or, perhaps, because of it – they all gathered in the same place, dancing, let's say, together but not scrambled.
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| Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990) |
"It was not the music I heard but the spirit I perceived there that attracted me," he would later say when he finished the work based on popular Mexican themes that he decided to write after his experience in the ballroom. Completed in 1936, he titled it with the name of the venue, El Salón México, a symphonic work in one movement incorporating fragments of recently published Mexican music, such as the popular tunes El Palo Verde, La Jesusita, El Mosco, and El Malacate.
The rhythm
Rhythmically, the piece makes extensive use of the "huapango", a Mexican rhythm consisting of a 6/8 time followed by a slightly more accentuated 3/4 time.
The rendition is by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Mexican maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto.
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