Aaron Copland
El Salón México
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 and died in Peekskill, New York in 1990. He composed this work in 1934 and orchestrated it in 1936. It was premiered the following year by the Orquesta Sinfonica of Mexico City, Carlos Chavez conducting. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings.
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After his visit to Mexico in 1932 Copland wrote:  “Any composer who goes outside his native land wants to return bearing musical souvenirs.  From the very beginning, the idea of writing a work based on popular Mexican melodies was connected in my mind with a popular dance hall in Mexico City called ‘Salón México.’  No doubt I realized then that it would be foolish for me to attempt to translate into musical sounds the more profound side of Mexico, the Mexico of the ancient civilization or the revolutionary Mexico of today.  In order to do that, one must really know a country.  All that I could hope to do was to reflect the Mexico of the tourists, and that is why I thought of the ‘Salón México.’”
Copland used a wide variety of authentic Mexican melodies culled from collections and his own memory.  The problem, as he saw it, was that “composers have found that there is little that can be done with a folk tune except repeat it.  Inevitably there is the danger of producing a mere string of unrelated ‘melodic gems.’  In the end I adopted a form which is a kind of modified potpourri, in which the Mexican themes and their extension are sometimes inextricably mixed for the sake of conciseness and coherence.”  You might find the melody of one folk tune deftly combined with the harmonies of another, with both supported by a rhythmic figure from another still.
In lesser hands such a collage might have done violence to its sources, but Copland’s desire was “to heighten [them] without in any way falsifying their natural simplicity.”  This is why the work sounds so genuine.  As Copland said, “It wasn’t the music that I heard there, or the dances that attracted me, so much as the spirit of the place.  In some inexplicable way, while milling about in those crowded halls, one felt a really live contact with the Mexican people—the electric sense one sometimes gets in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people—their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.”