Today, Moncayo is revered as one of the leading exponents of Mexican nationalism in musical style, important in the first half of the twentieth century. \u00a0While his name is not as familiar to US audiences as perhaps that of Carlos Ch\u00e1vez and Silvestre Revueltas, he played an important part in the musical life of Mexico until his premature death in 1958 at the age of 45.\u00a0 In addition to his activities as a composer, he also played percussion and piano with symphony orchestras, and was a well-respected and active conductor until his death.\u00a0 He entered the National Conservatory of Mexico in 1929 and received a thorough formal education in music, becoming, along with three of his compatriots, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Ch\u00e1vez.\u00a0 Turning to musical composition early on, he premi\u00e8red some of his compositions by 1931, subsequently joined several symphony orchestras, and finally took the baton as a conductor in 1936 at the age of twenty-four.\u00a0 He went on to attend the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts on scholarship in 1941.\u00a0\u00a0 There he met such luminaries as Aaron Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, and the young Leonard Bernstein.<\/p>\n
About that time his well-known and most performed composition, Huapango, <\/em>received its first performance.\u00a0\u00a0 It is based upon popular themes from the Mexican state of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. Ch\u00e1vez had sent Moncayo there to collect music indigenous to the area, and the orchestra fantasy based upon some of those themes was the result.\u00a0 A huapango<\/em> is a Mexican folk dance and a musical style, played by a small group of instrumentalists, a violin and two different sizes of guitars.\u00a0 And, of course, the varying rhythms of the traditional huapango<\/em> match the complex dance steps of the dancers.<\/p>\n Moncayo, like all good composers, demonstrates a formidable mastery of making much of little material.\u00a0 The challenge here is especially large in pulling together a medley of pre-existing tunes, and making a coherent whole of them.\u00a0 His sparkling and imaginative orchestration keeps the interest up\u2014its light and colorful palette is strongly redolent of much French music, and why not, so much great Hispanic music was written by Frenchmen, it seems.\u00a0\u00a0 The lilting, galloping rhythm, with familiar Mexican syncopations, unstintingly carries us through a series of charming solos until a softer and slower middle section, initially carried by the woodwinds, provides some contrast.\u00a0 After a bit, the tempo kicks up again, and an exciting, breezy drive to conclusion ensues.<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a9 2018 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[122],"class_list":["post-306","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-jospablomoncayo"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}