Listening for Alida Vázquez: A Life in Electronic Music between Migration, Race and Gender
By TERESA DÍAZ DE COSSIO
This article examines the life and work of the composer, teacher, and pianist Alida Vázquez Ayala (1923-2015) and explores how Vázquez navigated race, gender, and transnational networks in her work between Mexico and New York, and the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC). The investigation is based on oral history from CPEMC figures such as Kitty Brazelton (b.1951), Eric Chasalow (b.1955), alcides lanza (b.1929), Carlos Rausch (b.1924) and Pril Smiley (b.1943), friends such as Gloria Steinem (b.1934), Gena Raps (b.1941), and Jeannie Pool (b.1951), and Vázquez’s nephews Jorge (b.1945) and Alejandro Martínez Vázquez (b.1947). The archives of the Women Philharmonic Orchestra and Institute for the Study of Women in Music have provided scores and recordings of Vázquez’s works.
These sources are crucial because, other than 45 photographs, most of Vázquez’s personal belongings were disposed of at the end of her life as those around her were not aware of the significance of her creative work. Vázquez is currently unknown in the narrative of Mexican American performers or composers, and I only learned about her by coincidence a year ago, upon reading Esperanza Pulido’s chapter on Mexican women composers from 1983:
Among current Mexican women composers of fine art music, Alida Vázquez, who became an American citizen but never forgot Mexico, is undoubtedly the best-prepared. She is now finishing her dissertation at Columbia University, where she has been studying for two years and has won several grants and a prize. She studied electronic music with Davidovsky and Ussachevsky. Some of her already-performed compositions are Suite for the Piano, Electronic Moods and Piano Sounds, Acuarelas de México for Voice and Piano, Piece for Clarinete and Piano.
Esperanza Pulido’s paragraph prompts critical elements to start reconstructing Vázquez’s life and work, to which will be circling back in this paper. Pulido also reminds us of the challenges faced by women composers, particularly in Mexico:
To understand the very belated acceptance of Mexican women as composers and performers and in other intellectual areas, one should be aware of at least two facts: a certain atavism and an undesirable male trait. Both held a grip on women for centuries. They are known as malinchismo and machismo.
These challenges remain relevant to the reality faced by Vázquez. Through her history, we will learn about some of the problematic situations she faced as a woman and the diverse techniques used to respond to the oppressive system she and other women musicians encountered.
Early Years in Mexico City (1931–1948): Influences on the Beginning of Her Musical Journey
Vázquez’s childhood and early musical education took place in Mexico City. Born to a family of three daughters, her father, Mateo Sergio Vázquez was a freemason. Her mother Rosalia Ayala was an avid singer, who was expelled from the house and separated from her family in the early years of her daughters’ lives.[1] Nevertheless, their mother’s voice seems to have remained in the memories of the three girls, and Vázquez and her sister Dora found ways to connect singing to all aspects of their lives. Vázquez sang while accompanying herself on the guitar, conducted a choir in a church, and song influenced her compositions, always lyrical in style and quality, ranging from serialism to polytonality. The sisters were raised by her freemason father, from whom they learned kindness, as shown in Vázquez’s care for those around her (including homeless animals), and a sense of self-improvement. These aspects informed her feminist ideas and drove her desire to pursue graduate degrees in her forties.
As a child, Vázquez was enrolled at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City. Vázquez met Claudio Arrau at this institution—impressed with her piano abilities, the Chilean pianist took Vázquez under his wing and brought her to New York City in 1948. The connection with Arrau and the Jewish Community built important bridges for Vázquez; among them, by means of Arrau’s friendship with pianist and contemporary music expert Grete Sultan. Later, in the 1970s, Sultan became a good friend and mentor to Vázquez during a key period in which Sultan collaborated with John Cage and taught pupils such as Christian Wolff and Lucia Dlugoszewski. The importance of this friendship can be seen in Vázquez’s dedication to Sultan of her 1974 septet.
Life in New York City, Introduction to Feminism: Taking on Music Education, Networking Among Women
In a life driven by curiosity and persistence, Vázquez broke expectations. During her first decade in New York, Vázquez explored new avenues for music education. In the early years following her arrival, she studied piano with Claudio Arrau, Dalcroze method and improvisation at the Diller-Quaile Music School between 1948 and 1951, and music and dance therapy with Marian Chace in the early 1950’s. Years later, Vázquez met Gena Raps, who was a colleague at Mannes, and they became close friends. Raps has this to say about Vázquez’s approach to teaching: “She had a very unique way of teaching and her own system of teaching theory. Mannes was very famous for its theory program, and she was not teaching [sic] that way… she was an outsider wherever she was, she was an outsider at Mannes, and she was an outsider at Columbia, because she had her own way of doing things.”[2] This determination, here observed between 1964 and 1974, left a profound mark on Vázquez’s life a decade later when she was working on her DMA.
Raps says that she and Vázquez became friends because both “were arch-feminists and bonded as feminists. We all knew that we were not able to make the careers that we wanted to make—you know, she was close to Gloria.” Raps refers here to Gloria Steinem, a friend and neighbor of Vázquez at 73rd St who became a kind of a family during Vázquez’s last years, serving as her legal guardian. When interviewing Steinem, she remarked that Vázquez was “very devoted to music –its teaching and composing.” Steinem also noted regarding equality: “I had the impression that she and other women musicians and composers were marginalized when compared with their male counterparts… She once invited me to go with her to a large conference of women composers, and it was the first time I glimpsed their numbers and all their problems of getting their work performed by symphony orchestras.”[3] The conference in question was the International Congress for Women Composers (ICWM), an event that took place in 1981, led by Jeannie Pool, another of Vázquez’s friends. Another important friend was Esperanza Pulido. The director of Heterofonía, a Journal in Mexico, Pulido published Vázquez’s scores and letters, feeling there was a gap in recognition for Mexican composers. Jeannie Pool described Esperanza as “the spiritual mother” of many Mexican composers and a kind, generous, and loving woman. The friendship of strong women had a long-lasting influence on Vázquez; they understood feminism as a culture and created networks of support and empathy among each other.
A New Journey as a Composer: Institutions, Aesthetics, and Mexican Heritage
In 1966, Vázquez was 35, a woman with an established career as a piano and music theory teacher at the preparatory program of Mannes School. That summer, claiming she was tired of playing other people’s music, she composed her first work,[4] a piano suite in four movements: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue. The movements have a binary form, adhering to the baroque tradition, and the piece’s total length is eight minutes. Dynamic markings were added later. Between 1966 and 1973, Vázquez composed seven pieces ranging from string quartets to solo piano works, duets, and vocal works. These works were performed at different venues, such as the Benning Composers Conference, the New York City Town Hall, or the Mannes School.
Following her desire to study composition, Vázquez pursued a master’s program in music composition under the tutelage of Mario Davidovsky at City College from 1973 to 1976. In her thesis, Vázquez outlines the three movements of her string quartet no. 2 from 1975, emphasizing the continuity achieved “without the help of a principal tonal center and other adjacent ones.” It is important to point out that the vocabulary Vázquez uses to describe her music is free of gender associations, and focuses on describing technical elements. Only in the very last paragraph does Vázquez speak of her influence: “I am aware that certain aspects of this quartet indicate my Mexican heritage. This is particularly evident in the first movement through the rhythmic patterns and the natural ease of the changing meter.” Overall, Vázquez’s vocabulary and discursive strategy give us a glimpse into her conception of music and pinpoints the importance of rhythm in her work. Vázquez used rhythmic patterns to connect new vocabularies, such as polytonality and serialism, with her Mexican heritage as expressed in her music’s rhythmic quality. Rhythm holds a very important place among the compositional elements Vázquez used, an element that she would still be referring to a decade later, as an tool for expressing herself.
The String Quartet no.2 was premiered at Columbia in 1975, with Harvey Sollberger directing, a contact perhaps facilitated by Davidovsky. Thereafter, between 1977 and 1984, Vázquez pursued the degree of Doctor of Music Arts at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC). While completing the coursework and writing a thesis project for the DMA, Vázquez also taught the use of the equipment to undergraduate students as a Teaching Assistant. Vázquez supported herself by working as an organist and conducting the choir at the Church “Smokey Mary,” while teaching and studying at Columbia.
Alongside Vázquez, other Latin American Students arrived through outreach efforts of CPEMC professors such as Ussachevsky and Davidovsky. They traveled more than once to El Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) in Argentina. alcides lanza was among the students who walked the path between CLAEM and the CPEMC. In 1965, after arriving at the CPEMC, alcides wrote “Interferences I,” using the same instruments that the group in Downton were using at that time, and handed it to the directors of the Contemporary Music Group of Columbia University. The piece wasn’t performed, and alcides described this as a local problem: uptown versus downtown.[5] Referring to the aesthetic and geographical division that took place in Manhattan starting in 1960, the uptown scene focused on the academic music created by composers at Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia, while the downtown scene consisted of experimental composers and their works. Vázquez moved between the uptown and downtown scenes, with her connections to Columbia and the CPEMC; but continued her piano lessons with Grete Sultan in parallel while a student at Columbia.
The CPEMC seems to have had fairly clear aesthetic expectations of its students and allowed them a certain creative freedom at Columbia. For example, Carlos Rausch and Kitty Brazelton were graduate students at Columbia University during the late ’70s and ’80s, respectively. Discussing the matter with them, both mentioned that there were unspoken rules about aesthetics they had to follow, and Rausch referred to “aprender lo que nadie le dice” (“learn what nobody talks about”).[6]
At the CPEMC, Pril Smiley was both a composer and an instructor at the Center. Smiley was also one of Vázquez’s mentors, teaching her the technical side of the equipment, which was not digital at the time and didn’t yet involve synthesizers. Smiley taught Vázquez how to splice tapes, use the recording machines, use the tape recorders, and supplied her with tape. Smiley recalls Vázquez was one of the first female composers studying in the electronic music field at CPEMC— one of her few contemporaries was Ursula Mamlock. Smiley remembers Vázquez as short in stature, always using a little footstool, about ten inches high, underneath the tape recording consoles, moving it around to work with the mixing channel or the tape recorder. The footstool somehow became part of Vázquez’s charm. Smiley had this to say in regards to Vázquez’s personality:
A charming person with a great sense of humor… A great composer, she was a great combination, a wonderful personality, because she was very, very serious and she felt like every minute, all the time she spent in the studio it was a privilege, to be there and be able to have this sound research, and she soaked up as much learning as she could.[7]
Eric Chasalow, Vázquez’s classmate at Columbia, knew Vázquez as a friend and as part of the group of students from the CPEMC. He remembers her as one of the few women working in the studio:
“I would show up and she would be you know, this is a very gendered thing… is that the men who used the studio would be like, just leave stuff all over the place and Alida would clean things up and curse at the men, you know, and say, why do you guys leave all this stuff around? And I would agree with her because it was terrible.”[8]
In 1977 Vázquez created Electronic Moods and Piano Sounds, a piece for piano and electronics. Pril Smiley helped to deconstruct how the electronic sounds were created by the machines available in the studio in this work:
1) A white noise generator and sound wave generators were used as the source material to produce pitches, especially the sine wave generators.
2) To modify the sounds, various sound-multiplication devices were used to create textures, band-pass filters, envelope controls (to “chop” the sounds into rhythms), and an echo chamber.
3) Additionally, “classical analog studio” tape recording techniques were used, including speed control, backward playback, and feedback loops.[9]
Collaborations with Dance and Her DMA Thesis Project
In 1977, Vázquez was finishing her DMA at Columbia and working on her thesis, a collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Claudia Gitelman. Vázquez won a grant from the National League of American Pen Women Inc to realize the project. In her application, Vázquez wrote:
I finished the work last year under the supervision of Prof. Jack Beeson at Columbia University; it consists of a small group of orchestral dances. Aware of my interest in dance music, Prof. Beeson suggested putting in a complete ballet for my thesis. For this, I contacted the dancer and choreographer Claudia Gitelman. We have both agreed on the immediate need to have the ballet performed and recorded (once complete) so that the dancers can listen to the music. For this purpose, I propose to use the grant. For my work, I will use the traditional orchestra and electronic music. The latter I will compose at Columbia University under the direction of Mario Davidovsky. Later I will seek additional help to produce the ballet.
The prize of 1,000 dollars allowed Vázquez’s graduation project to be realized.[10]
Vázquez described the experience of the composition process for electronic works to Esperanza Pulido in a letter from September 1979:
It has been most fantastic, in terms of all the problems and possibilities of dance music and dance. It has been a great experience to discuss with her [Claudia Gitelman] and entirely depends on natural electronic sounds to complete a music structure with form and everything. I am gradually discovering and organizing a visual and more exact way of notating electronic music, which is very important – I have an insatiable concern about the form of music in contemporary music. I don’t know if I thanked you, that from Mexico, you have a genuine interest in what I am doing. It has given me much courage. Thanks again.
A courage that was needed for what would follow. It’s important to recall that Gena Raps observed that Vázquez had her own way of doing things; and elaborated by turning to Vázquez’s work at the CPEMC:
And I don’t know if she ever completed her PhD because they had asked her to do it a specific way and she was not going to do it their way. So do you know if she ever got it? I know she did a lot of work for it. I know she was quite frustrated because she had put in all that energy to take all the courses. And then when it came to doing the dissertation at the paper, you know, they turned her down and she was very, very frustrated about that.[11]
Jeannie Pool offered another striking account:
Alida always had a gift for melody that meant they really didn’t like her because she was very sentimental and wrote music of the heart, so even when she was trying to meet their demands her melodic gift came out and they were just really against melody. I think she was discriminated against because of her age, she spoke with an accent, and she was very definitely a Mexican American woman in her 40s in the 1970s.[12]
This melodic intuition that Jeannie Pool is referring to permeated Vázquez’s electronic works. While I do not have accounts from her committee, her friends point towards a rejection of her dissertation project. Vázquez’s last year at the CPEMC was 1984, and she stopped composing afterwards. When Jeannie Pool was asked why, her answer was, “what I loved about it was that she didn’t get cynical, and she was just always “well, that’s where it is, let’s do our best”, she was always like that and later in life it became just overwhelming to her…I mean, how much discouragement can you endure?” The same year, Vázquez stated in a Mexican newspaper in 1984, “Now I no longer adhere to any of these techniques [serialism to polytonal]– I try to express what I feel with my own style. I have composed many works in which my Mexican origins are recognizable, especially in the rhythms.”
In 1984 the International Congress of Women Musicians took place in Mexico City. In this environment foregrounding women, Vázquez flourished: she moderated panels, conducted her own works, led presentations on electronic music, helped with administrative work and did translations of newspaper articles or reviews in Spanish. This network of feminist activists and artists enabled Vázquez to become part of efforts to create spaces that portrayed the work of women composers. After the congress, in a Mexican Newspaper Vázquez wrote:
It is of great importance that women participate in the field of music, but unfortunately, there are very few opportunities for them. However, we are struggling to obtain a prominent position in this branch of the Beaux Arts. The importance of this nature, asserting that this international movement of Women In Music which was initiated by Jeannie Pool has extended itself far and wide: consequently, there now exists an exchange of ideas, knowledge, and instruction pertaining to the ‘universal language’: music… My heart is brimming with pride because to be in my country listening to my music is the utmost gratification.[13]
Vázquez and other women composers faced conditions that challenged the inclusion of their works in a predetermined canon (Citron). The following outline put’s Vázquez’s life into perspective, especially her efforts to make a space for herself in the field of academic composition in New York during the 1970-80’s:
- She had access to diverse music education. Vázquez’s first composition teacher was Bernard Wagenaar from the Juilliard School. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees at CCNY and Columbia, studying with Mario Davidovsky and Chou Wen-Chung, some of the foremost composers of their time.
- Publication is key to keep music circulating and performed. Vázquez managed to publish her piece for Clarinet and Piano (1970), and Music for Seven Instruments (1974), both at Seesaw Music Corp, N.Y.
- Performance of one’s works and recording are important keys to bringing the music alive. Vázquez was able to get her music premiered and recorded at a range of venues in New York and Mexico City.
- Most of Vázquez’s works were for chamber ensembles, except her thesis project, which was an orchestral piece with electronics. According to Marcia Citron, throughout history, “large forms tend to hold greater value than small forms.”
- Vázquez’s music tended to be lyrical, including her thesis work which she may quite possibly have been asked to change for this reason.
Vázquez’s age, and aesthetic voice, took her away from the dominant narratives of twenty-century composition, and her story deserves to be revived. For her flexibility to move in diverse aesthetics (both uptown and downtown scenes) and her unique voice that separated her from the canon at certain institutions. Vázquez’s life and work may still be virtually unknown, but this article seeks to draw attention to her extraordinary efforts as both a Mexican American Women, and as a pioneer in electronic music.
[1] Jorge and Alejandro Martínez Vázquez, interview by author, telephone, June 10, 2020.
[2] Gena Raps, interview by author, telephone, February 12, 2021.
[3] Gloria Steinem, interview by author, email, October 19, 2020.
[4] Naomi Lehman, interview by author, telephone, May 14, 2020.
[5] alcides lanza, interview by author, email, June 20, 2020.
[6] Carlos Rausch, interview by author, telephone, May 2020.
[7] Pril Smiley, interview by the author, December 6, 2020.
[8] Eric Chasalow, interview by the author, November 19, 2020.
[9] Pril Smiley, interview (email) by the author, February 22, 2021
[10] Pulido, Esperanza. 1980. Cartas: Una compositora de grandes méritos. Heterofonía. April-May-June, 1980.
[11] Gena Raps, interview by author, telephone, February 12, 2021.
[12] Jeannie Pool, interview by author, zoom, February 11, 2021.
[13] Pool, Jeanie. 2009. Passions of Musical Women: The Story of The International Congress on Women In Music. La Cresenta: Jaygale Music.
References
Citron, M. J. (1993). Gender and the musical canon. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
McClary, S. (1991). Feminine endings: Music, gender, and sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pool, Jeanie. 2009. Passions of Musical Women: The Story of The International Congress on Women In Music. La Cresenta: Jaygale Music.
Pulido, E. (1983). Mexican Women in Music. Latin American Music Review / Revista De Música Latinoamericana, 4(1), 120-131. doi:10.2307/780282
Teresa Díaz de Cossio is a flutist, a DMA student at UC San Diego, and flute teacher at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Díaz de Cossio has been inclined to reach out for meaningful engagements with communities through her creative practice from the beginning of her musical endeavors, firstly through Música para la Paz, and now as the coordinator of Neofonía, Festival de Música Nueva, Ensenada. Díaz de Cossio’s present research examines the life and work of the composer, teacher, and pianist Alida Vázquez Ayala (1923-2015) and explores how Vázquez navigated race, gender and transnational networks in her teaching, performance and compositional work between Mexico and New York.