Manuel M. Ponce's Chapultepec and the Conflicted Representations of a Contested Space

Abstract

Manuel M. Ponce has been inscribed in the history of music in Mexico as the most important composer of the early nationalist movement, the one who opened the door for the more decidedly Mexicanist and modernist music of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas. Less well known is the fact that he is also considered the father of Mexico's vernacular song, and that his early popularity and commercial success, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, were due to his advocacy of the rural Mexican canción, or song, among the urban middle classes. Ponce's symphonic poem Chapultepec: Tres bocetos sinfónicos (1921, 1934), the focus of this essay, is one of the most popular and beloved compositions in the Mexican symphonic repertoire. As I shall suggest, the long and complex compositional history of Chapultepec, a re-presentation, or re-creation, of the emblematic woods and castle of Chapultepec park, now in Mexico City, is partly the result of Ponce's contestation of claims advanced by other historical agents to the representation of the national during the decades-long construction of the modern Mexican identity.1 Finally, as we shall see, Chapultepec was for Ponce also a means to work out what it is to be a Mexican composer of Western art music.