Tambuco (Chávez)

Tambuco
by Carlos Chávez
Portrait of Carlos Chávez by Carl van Vechten (1937)
Composed	1964 (1964)
Published	1967
Movements	1
Premiere
Date	11 October 1965
Location	Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Conductor	William Kraft
Performers	Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble

Tambuco is a percussion-ensemble work for six players, written by the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in 1964. The score is dedicated to Clare Boothe Luce, and a performance of it lasts approximately thirteen minutes.

The impulse to compose Tambuco came about in an unusual way. In 1950, Clare Boothe Luce had commissioned Chávez's Third Symphony, completed in 1954. Their unlikely friendship continued for nearly three decades and, after Luce began working in mosaics in 1963, they agreed to exchange commissions for works from each other. For Chávez, Luce created a 4' x 5' mosaic titled Golden Tiger, which he hung in his Lomas de Chapultepec studio in Mexico City. In return, he created Tambuco (Parker 1984, 63; a photograph of the mosaic is reproduced in Parker 1984, 62).

The premiere took place on 11 October 1965 in the Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, performed by the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble conducted by William Kraft (Anon. 1965; Peterman 1986, 35). Both Chávez and Luce were in the audience (Parker 1984, 63).

Each of the six performers plays a battery of at least six different instruments. Melodic (pitched) instruments are found in each of the players' groups, which also each include wood, metal, and membrane instruments (Peterman 1986, 36–37). The total array is:

Instead of the conventional procedures of thematic repetition and development, Tambuco unfolds in what the composer describes as "a constant process of consequent evolution. That is to say, an initial idea serves as an 'antecedent' to a 'consequent', which in turn immediately becomes an antecedent to a new consequent, and so on until the end of the piece" (Chávez 1967, 1). Chávez elsewhere characterizes such a procedure as being "like a spiral" (Chávez 1961, 84)