INGUESU
by Enrico Chapela

Composer’s notes
The Orquesta Sinfonica Carlos Chavez commissioned me to write a piece of symphonic music, I decided to play homage to the great Mexican composer after whom the orchestra is named, by writing a contemporary version of nationalistic music.

Accordingly, I began by posing myself the question what was my ultimate expression of nationalism; I concluded that it was witnessing Mexico’s national soccer team winning an important match. Thus, I chose the greatest achievement in the history of Mexican soccer as the main theme for my piece; that is the victory of Mexico against Brazil in the FIFA Confederation Cup, held in Mexico City in 1999. I downloaded the official match report and assigned the woodwinds as the Mexican players, the brass as the Brazilian team, the percussion as the replacements, the strings as the crowd packing theAztec Stadium, and the conductor as the referee. Afterwards, I drew a graphic showing the most important events of the game, such as the scoring of goals, the replacement of players, the drawing of cards by the referee, and of course the sending-off of a Brazilian defender after a nasty foul. One of the trombones -the assigned instrument for that player- is first warned with preventive yellow card by the conductor before he is thrown out of the stage with the red card near the end of the match-piece.

The musical themes are based on both Mexican and Brazilian folk music ostinatos, as well as on very-well-know-to-every-Mexican courses and chants that are used in soccer stadium throughout the country. Among the recurring courses stand out “La mentada”, “El leero, leero”, “El Q-lero”. These musical items are truly popular themes that you can often hear in traffic-jams, quarrels and demonstrations. Hence their nationalistic and contemporary nature.