Music
Welcome to the Music link. After living in three states, you might consider me a nomadic navigator of sorts. No. But it's been a charted journey of music experiences, characterized by diverse genres, different forms and landscapes ... connecting music styles and heartbeats to local communities and adapting to new music horizons. [Two TM factoids]
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"Someone who trains to be a musician will create stronger neural connections that link the two hemispheres of the brain in order to be musically creative."​​
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"I am just another voice in this complex society we live in ...​ and in the Internet music trends of today.​ Hard to say who is right - and who is wrong."
Arrangements
In my Austin Texas opinion, there is always space and time to change the composition of any music arrangement; from an old classic hit of the 1950s to the new trends of today. Music is in the realm and state of infinity. I say that in total music context and free-style form because music is unlimited and unending - it is close to us, yet distant. This state of mind depends on your own music creativity and intellectual consciousness to write and bring new media to your audience, and the world if possible.
​Furthermore, my own conclusion also tells me that music always has the upper hand to dominate the new and old, to change our lives at times, and is one universal language we can all understand. Many authorities have suggested definitions, but defining music turns out to be more difficult than might first be imagined, and there is ongoing debate.
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Several explanations start with the notion of music as organized sound, but they also highlight that this is perhaps too broad a definition and cite examples of organized sound that are not defined as music, such as human speech and sounds found in both natural and industrial environments. The problem of defining music is further complicated by the influence of culture in music cognition.
Originals
Original songs, as well as new music arrangements, can start with many life elements around you, past and present. To me an initial idea can be what a person said, what I heard from a song in a jukebox, from reading a book or even an article on the Internet. An idea on a song can originate from driving to Texas on the I10, and/or even how you are treated at times. Not joking!
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Why are original songs so important you might ask? Quite honestly folks, I've always felt that our tejano music industry needs more, "songwriters and music arrangers" ... and another important factor in all of this is, "to create new standards of profitability for all our tejano conjuntos, groups, and bands."
So, future songwriters of tomorrow, don't be afraid to take that first step in writing your own song because once you do that everything else will fall into place and rhythm. Songwriting is sequential. Ideas can also come from hearing excellent groups and great musicians, and good singers too.
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Realistically, your own life and path can contribute to original ideas in music compositions and to the gift of songwriting. Works for me. My input. Dream. Escape the norm. Be you. Write original songs.
How would you describe ... "love and music?"
Love and music are two concepts that have been explored by many artists, philosophers, and poets throughout history. They are both forms of expression, communication, and emotion that can transcend language, culture, and time. Some possible ways to describe love and music are:
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Love is the melody of the soul, and music is the harmony of the heart.
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Love is a song that never ends, and music is the rhythm that keeps it alive.
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Love is the sound of two hearts beating as one, and music is the echo of their feelings.
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Love is the harmony of two souls, and music is the symphony of their dreams.
These are just some examples of how love and music can be described. There are many more ways to express these ideas, depending on one’s perspective, experience, and creativity.
Writing love songs is an art that requires creativity, skill, and emotion. Love songs are a way of expressing one’s feelings and experiences in a musical form that can touch the hearts of others. Writing love songs is not easy, as it involves finding the right words, melodies, and rhythms to convey the message and mood of the song.
There are different types of love songs, such as those that celebrate new love, those that declare eternal devotion, and those that lament lost or unrequited love. Each type of love song has its own challenges and techniques to master.
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Some steps that can help you write a love song are:
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Choose a topic that inspires you and reflects your personal experience or perspective on love.
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Decide on the tone and style of your song. Do you want it to be slow and romantic, upbeat and cheerful, or sad and melancholic?
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Think of a catchy title or hook that summarizes the main idea or emotion of your song.
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Write the lyrics for your song, using rhyme, imagery, metaphor, and other poetic devices to make your words memorable and meaningful.
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Add music to your lyrics, using chords, melodies, and harmonies that match the mood and message of your song.
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Revise and refine your song until you are satisfied with the result.
Writing love songs is an art that can be learned and improved with practice. You can also get inspiration from listening to other love songs and studying how they are written.
Finally, as a musician and part-songwriter, I try to write songs that mean something in human terms and in life - to both me and the listener. That statement can be hard to understand in its simplicity. By that I mean, I want my original songs and arrangements to be able to stand on their own, to be of sufficient quality that any decent singer could sing them.
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Few of the truly timeless, transformative classic songs have "weak spots" that a singer must "sing around." In my opinion, it is the songwriter's job to take their inspiration and wrap it in a package that magnifies; that enhances the final song. A "poorly wrapped" song conveys little or none of its original magic, no matter how genuine the inspiration. And a song with no "guts" is just a wrapper. The craft of songwriting is like cutting a gem. Bad songwriting hides or distracts from the inspiration, good songwriting amplifies it without overpowering it.
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In my opinion, all this information is true. Yes. But, writing tejano songs for our genre and tejano music industry is somewhat ... let's use the word, "different". How can that be? "I think it's because of our tejano music roots and diversity, including our culture and the history of our pioneers, conclusively, it makes our storytelling and songwriting techniques more meaningful, more honest, more heartfelt, and truthful and genuine. Our songs come from the heart."
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If you are writing a song now, and as a precaution, don't write if you're not thinking about anything related. Or at least, don't get attached to what you're coming up with. Wait for the inspiration - for the right second - wait for the right minute - or go get it somewhere else. Work on it a little. Do a great job on it. Finally, think about what music has meant to you, what new songs mean to the tejano audiences across the country, and to the world.
[Written in part with Mike Raghead/Living Music / TM]
The 'TEJANOmike' Corner
My Voice?! No Grammy yet or a TTMA award either, nothing in my music shelf. I sing on all my original song tracks NOT as a lead singer or trying to compete with Jay Perez or Andrea Bocelli, nope.
I only sing on them to have some kind of MIDI demo for singers, groups, or bands that might be interested in my music and original material. Karaoke?! I enjoy singing out there.
Here are four tracks below of the many different sounds of the Carmona horns/bands - my dad,
my brother Chris, and TM - from Austin Texas to San Jose California.
​​Pedro Carmona Sr.
I would honestly say that nothing in our Carmona music and history would have been possible without my great grandfather, Pedro. He married Loretta Camarillo, and they had six sons and three daughters. Out of the six boys he taught Feliciano, Rosendo, Nemecio, Francisco, and Pedro Jr. to play multiple instruments: with Feliciano writing all the music arrangements for the orchestra.
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​​​​From what I know from my parents, Feliciano was an excellent alto saxophone player and music arranger that he managed to play with La Orquesta Falcon; toured in Texas. In later years Pedro passed on the band to my dad, Nemecio and us kids - Chris, Mack, and me joining his band. All three of us got music lessons from our tio, Feliciano "Chano" Carmona.
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​​​In the early 1950's, my tio 'Chano' came back to Austin and started playing with my dad's orchestra. For a few years, all of us were playing together in Austin, and personally, it was quite a music learning experience for me. In the mid 1950's, my dad passed the band to my brother Chris; then we moved to California; Mack stayed behind in Austin; like 'Chano', I wrote all the music arrangements for my brother Chris.
"We've come a very long way Tejanos and Tejanas."
Tejano music is a complex business enterprise that is not commercialized to any standard. On top of that it cannot be understood by both young and old on the same playing field, or even together in unity. If you add the battle between the indie record artists and labels against the galactic big boys from LA, NY, and Nashville, the boxing arena gets a little bit more crowded folks!
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And why is that? There is only one answer I can think of: Our tejano music is evolving, it is changing, it is moving forward ever so slowly. If we go back to the history of music for example, from the Gothic years of 1100 to the present, tejano music changes have occurred gradually and to a more advanced state in 2024.
Our tejano music falls into the Modern Times category as most of us know it today. There is plenty of room here to discuss our heritage and roots but let us move on. Today, there is so much talk about the fact that our music is changing and dying, yet most people cannot comprehend WHY it's changing and to what degree or direction we are heading in.
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Seems like most of us want to go back where we were, nostalgically, and/or keep the sounds of today, but we are unwilling to accept the realistic paradigm and factoid that we are in the center of a tejano transformation. It is here already, and we cannot cope with it and refuse to let go of our past and present artists. Perhaps we are unwilling to see what is across that hill; maybe we are afraid of this monumental tidal wave heading our way.
[A TM Commentary 04/2005 - Rev April 2024]
A Word or Two About Tejano Music
During the 1930s and 1940s a music developed which mirrored the evolution of Hispanics in southwestern cities into Mexican Americans, a bicultural community emerging from Mexican roots within the United States. This was the first generation of Americans of Mexican descent to aspire for inclusion in Anglo-American life. Popular dance band ensembles catered to this generation's biculturalism by playing genres chosen from both the Latin and the American traditions: bolero, danzón, guaracha, and rumba alternating with boogie, swing, and fox-trot, among others.
After World War II, a type of fusion of the traditions took place that developed into a distinctive sound, especially among the orquestas and conjuntos in Texas, where the largest Hispanic recording companies existed at that time. The result was a music that came to be known as Tejano. As orchestras became more professional and ballroom dance circuits extended throughout the Southwest, the Texas recording artists became the greatest in demand and spread their new music throughout the Southwest and northern Mexico.
Among the first prominent big bands were Beto Villa's from Falfurrias, Texas, whose leader is sometimes called the father of the Mexican American orquesta. Villa popularized a folksy, "country"-style polka; this polka, in particular, came to be known as "Tex-Mex," especially when compared with the more sophisticated urban sounds of danzones, guarachas, fox-trots, and swings.
Villa's influence was so strong that many followers appeared throughout the Southwest, most noteworthy of them being singer-saxophonist Isidro López, also from Texas, who is known for adding the working-class canción ranchera to the Tex-Mex repertoire. Balde González of Victoria, Texas, and Pedro Bugarín of Phoenix, Arizona, smoothed out the musical deliveries and broadened the repertoire of genres included in Tex-Mex.
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The peak years for the Mexican American orquesta were the 1960s and 1970s, during which emerged Little Joe Hernández, one of the greatest all-time performers and popularizers of Tex-Mex.
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Little Joe led a band made up of family members and friends under a series of names and struggled to get studios to record his music and radio stations to play it in Texas. Finally, he had to form his own recording and distribution companies. Little Joe, in addition, fused the Tex-Mex ranchero sound with American jazz and rock within the same musical number to achieve a unique bi-musical sound which came to be called "La Onda Chicana" (The Chicano Wave).
Little Joe's first experiment in this Chicano Wave occurred on his hugely successful '1972 LP Para La Gente' (For the People).
Backing Joe and his brother Johnny's harmonic duet were the usual instruments of a well-organized Mexican American band of those years: two trumpets, two saxophones, a trombone, and a rhythm section of bass, electric guitar, drums, and keyboards. On the album, many of the arrangements were augmented with strings from the Dallas symphony - a novelty for Tex-Mex music - and with the interlacing of jazz riffs. Even at the turn of the century, many of the numbers included on this historic LP are standard fare among dance bands in Mexican American communities.
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Texas continues to be the center for Tejano music, from whence dance bands and recording artists tour to as far north as Chicago and New York City and as far south as Mexico City. The advent of the three Spanish-language television networks further popularized the music into the Caribbean and South America.
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Younger generations of Mexican Americans further infused the music with rock influences in the 1990s and took it far afield from its country roots, mirroring the overwhelming concentration of Hispanics in big cities today.
[Written by Nicolás Kanellos / Internet sources.]
Who are Tejanos?
Tejanos are descendants of the Spaniards and Mestizos – Spanish, Native American, and other groups – so they are largely a mixed-race people. As a group, they are identified as a Hispanic people. Texas history and the Southwest are very intricately linked to the Spanish colonial period. Initially, Spanish settlers referred to themselves as “vecinos,” meaning citizens of Spain. The general requirements to be a vecino were that you were male, that you were over 21, that you were an adult, a property owner, and that you lived in a fixed residence in a town. The Spanish settlers in Texas lived in a small part of what they called “New Spain.”
In the beginning, Tejanos were the older generations of people in Texas or descendants of this Spanish vecinos. At one point they use the word Tejano as a self-designation or Tejana for women. They even used [Tejano] in a formal document in the early 1800s, but they still saw themselves as citizens of Spain just as everyone else within this Spanish empire here in the New World.
When Spanish rule ended in 1821, Mexico was born as a new nation. Overnight, these people who were Spaniards had new sovereignty, a new authority. Their allegiance is now to the United States of Mexico, and so they call themselves “Mexicano” meaning Mexican. Because they are resilient, the Tejanos went along with the changes in government and became citizens of Mexico.
The word Tejano is still in use to the present day and so the older generations of the descendants of the Spaniards and the Mexicanos in Texas refer to themselves as “Tejanos.” If you go to California, there will be a Tejano community there, and if you go to Wisconsin there will also be people from Texas who say, “we’re originally from Texas, we’re Tejano people.” So, Tejano is still a popular term of identity. It’s not a race, but it’s a social construction of identity.
What made you interested in studying Tejano history?
I am trained as a U.S. historian, but I began to take courses in the histories of Mexico and Latin America and then basically self-trained in the history of the U.S. and Mexico, the Spanish borderlands, and now the Mexican borderlands. There wasn’t a natural discipline for these fields that I work in.
On a personal level, I knew that I wanted to undertake a graduate program in history. I grew up in South Texas in the lower valley and I would see some of my relatives including my great grandmother. One day I said, “Abuela, where are you really from?” She said, “We’re from the river valley,” referring to the Rio Grande Valley. From then on, I had an interest in finding out more about my own personal history and the roots of the people, not just of me and my family but the roots of what we call the Tejano people and the Mexican American people - I’m using both terms interchangeably here. This got me interested in the research that I do, so I began to research and write about it and did a dissertation that focused on the settlers in South Texas, both the Tejanos and the non-Tejano people, the Anglos, and the Europeans that came to settle in what is now South Texas.
What made you interested in studying the history of Texas and Northern Mexico in the period of 1700-1865 specifically?
I became interested in understanding how the history of Texas is very strongly connected to the history of northern Mexico. We had small rail lines in the Houston area before the Civil War, the railroad mileage in Texas was very small. After the Civil War, the railroads expanded, and then in the 1880s, we had the national railroads move into Texas and expand to the Rio Grande, to the border. At the same time, the American capitol in Mexico built railroads in Mexico, which cemented this connection between Texas and northern Mexico.
It wasn’t really to let people get on the train and move to Texas; Mexico had riches, particularly very valuable minerals like silver, magnesium, zinc, lead, copper. The American nation was industrializing very strongly at the end of the Civil War, so we needed all those minerals, and merchants wanted to sell in Mexico because they had money and were the leading producer of silver in the world. So, the merchant class in the U.S. and Europe wanted to trade with Mexico, but because Texas had no significant railroads, the links are all overland from Texas to northern Mexico and northern Mexico to Texas and the goods go out through ports like Galveston, Corpus Christi, Brownsville and then ports below Brownsville.
For this whole period, in the late 1800s, the bulk of the trade went to the Atlantic world economy. Northern Mexico and Texas are linked through this Atlantic world and of course, the merchant class in Texas profits a great deal from that. No state in the union had more economic links than Texas.
In a nutshell, Texas and Mexico are very closely linked because we have historical ties, cultural ties, economic ties, and at times, political ties. Texas has always been the number one state to receive the benefits of our connections with the modern nation-state of Mexico.
What are some of your favorite moments in Tejano history?
Tejano history is complicated, like a lot of history, and depending on what time you look at, you’re going to see Tejano leaders. For example, when we look at the Texas revolution of 1835-36, we see there were Tejano heroes on both sides. Some of the Tejanos sided with the revolution against the dictator Santa Ana. Yet, there were a few folks in Texas that fought on the side of Santa Ana.
Another famous Tejano was Juan Seguin who was the leader of the Tejanos at the battle of San Jacinto and was a mayor of San Antonio. He became quite controversial because, during the period of the Texas Republic, he then left San Antonio with an army saying he was deeply disturbed and bothered by the behavior of Anglos in San Antonio. But later, he came back to live the rest of his life in Texas. He was truly a Tejano hero and political leader even though others saw him as a traitor to Texas.
And then, if you look at political history, some of the Tejanos in the early 20th century began to organize civil organizations to advocate for their community. Eventually, they formed the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) at Corpus Christi in 1929, which is the oldest civil rights advocacy group. Their basic ideology was assimilation into American life and politics and even though they hired lawyers and would go into court, they hardly won anything.
It took a long time before LULAC, and another organization got a very important victory in the supreme court case Hernandez v. Texas 1954. It was the first case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Mexican American lawyers who worked on it were hailed as heroes. The main significance was that treating Mexican Americans as a class apart from others was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Why is it important to study Tejano and Mexican history?
It’s important to study the history of our homeland; Texas in this case. It gives us a vantage point to see what it is that took place in the past, what people were able to do, and what struggles and successes they had. Whether it was in the colonial period or the period of the Texas revolution or in the 20th century, history is a good way to look at that. It also allows us to understand how people sometimes must struggle to see themselves as equal citizens in this evolving, complex society. It gives us an opportunity to learn about the past and issues that took place and how leaders- social, political, and educational leaders- can resolve those problems and move forwards. This is a story that continues to evolve.