Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

In this compact and insightful book, Alejandro Madrid examines an elite group of early twentieth-century Mexican composers at a critical time in the nation’s cultural history, the 1920s. Focused principally on Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez, Madrid considers how these artists took part in a musical and intellectual dialogue aimed at determining what exactly nationalism and “modernity” meant musically after the revolution. For the author, these concerns became closely connected “as part of complex processes of power negotiation” (p. 3).Given the cataclysm of civil war and its aftermath, Madrid argues that the 1920s musical scene supported a complex, “multi-ideological” set of perspectives espoused by a number of individuals. In contrast to what ensuing canonical interpretations would attest, avant-garde composition and performance at this time was not necessarily or immediately realized in programmatic lockstep with the emerging revolutionary state. Instead, the author shows how composers “repositioned themselves within a changing society that contested pre-revolutionary ideology and social order and produced new institutions of power and codes for social interaction” (p. 4).Take the example of Julián Carrillo. Born in 1875, Carrillo was slightly older than either Ponce (1882 – 1948) or Chávez (1899 – 1978). Trained in European and particularly German music, Carrillo was a contemporary of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker. Working with concepts borrowed from his European contemporaries, Carrillo infused them with his own ideas in seeking to create something new. Carrillo did not shy away from acknowledging his admiration for German music, and this did not ingratiate him with those who, in the growing nationalist fervor of the mid-1920s, increasingly criticized him. In fact, it was Carlos Chávez who turned out to be one of Carrillo’s most virulent antagonists as the two faced off in an exchange that took place in the pages of El Universal and La Antorcha in 1924, and later at the pivotal 1926 First National Congress of Music in Mexico City. Needless to say, Carrillo lost out to the younger composer’s more ideologically “correct” anti-European discourse, despite the fact that, as Madrid describes, Carillo was in the midst of developing an exquisitely modernist, microtonal system (“Sonido 13”), which quite possibly could have (and probably should have) gained him recognition not as a presumed “imitator” of European music but rather as an innovator in realizing a truly original, personal style.Ponce, as Madrid reminds us, has most often been incorporated into the official postrevolutionary nationalist discourse as an early promoter of Mexican folklore. Here, Madrid goes against previous considerations of the composer’s career to argue that modernist and nationalist aesthetics did not flourish at different “stages” of his professional life, in seeming contradiction, but rather were “continuously intertwined in his music, synthesizing in a style that combined traditional rhetorical elements often disregarded by Modernist composers with some of their preferred grammatical elements” (p. 84).Well known as an influential player in helping to crystallize what would later be identified as the official discourse about Mexican identity and culture after the revolution, Chávez was, in Madrid’s assessment, an important composer at “the intersection of tradition and modernity at a critical moment in Mexican history” (p. 125). Yet, in contrast to Carrillo and Ponce, it is Chávez who would prove most savvy in relation to the emerging postrevolutionary culture as he worked to position himself as a more authentic exponent of a new musical nationalism and as part of what the author terms a “hegemonic pact” eventually consolidated in the 1930s. Toward this end, Madrid’s fascinating chapter on the 1926 First National Congress of Music in Mexico City tells of “intense ideological exchange” representative of the larger “cultural and social crisis” occurring at the time (p. 112). Further, the author details the changing reception of Ricardo Castro’s 1900 opera Atazimba, a work based on a legendary tale of a Tarascan princess who falls in love with a Spanish captain. Here, Madrid tells how prerevolutionary ideas regarding Mexico’s native past could be, and sometimes were, “re-symbolized” to fit the new nationalist discourse. In the end, the author relates how Atazimba “could not transit that path [because] Castro’s opera was too heavy to sort through [that] kind of symbolic transition” (p. 153). Indeed, the making of this artistic history was not so much about revealing a “true” or “correct” interpretation of Mexican culture but rather exploring how the negotiation (even struggle, at times) between people espousing diverse ideological strains came to determine how and by whom the nationalist canon would be constructed. In the end, Sounds of the Modern Nation reveals much not only about the politics of culture but also about the often contentious process of writing national history.