Tlaloc (2024)

Composer note
Tlaloc (2024) is a seven-minute orchestral overture commissioned by the Plano Symphony Orchestra, Héctor Guzmán, Music Director. The work celebrates the ancient Aztec god of rain, hail, lightning, thunder and fertility. The Aztecs and Mayans created some of their most impressive temples in Tlaloc’s honor to ensure plenty of rain for the next year’s crops. Visual artists delighted in portraying his fearsome countenance, with huge, round eyes, a curved lip, sharp jaguar-like fangs and an impressive helmet of horns. The score includes multiple percussion instruments and dramatic echoes of pre-Hispanic Mexico.

The music opens with a mighty invocation of Tlaloc featuring a contrapuntal brass fanfare. A rain dance follows, with the timpani announcing the main theme. The dance begins quietly, with a solemn, ritual quality. After it reaches its climax, there is a moment of quiet anticipation; then, percussion, harp and strings announce the rain. At first, the rain is gentle, even lyrical, but, gradually, it grows into a wild storm, abetted by multiple layers of antiphonal brass and massive percussion. At the peak of the storm, all the themes appear together in a grand musical layer cake as the work roars to a close.

My musical language creates a post-modern synthesis of ancient modes, traditional tonality, the lyricism of the Second Viennese School and the octatonic scale of alternating half steps and whole steps that Stravinsky favored in The Rite of Spring. Here, I combine Aztec motives with driving Latin rhythms, playful references to storm music by Rossini and Beethoven, and, as a surprise in the coda, a jubilant, multi-rhythmic burst of mariachi.

© Robert Xavier Rodríguez

Tlaloc vessel (Mexica/Aztec), c. 1440-70, found Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, ceramic
(Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City)