Silvestre Revueltas at the Dawn of His "American Period"

Revueltas (1899-1940) is widely recognized as one of the most important composers of the Mexican nationalist movement, perhaps second only to his coeval Carlos Chavez (1899-1978). Otto Mayer-Serra's Silvestre Revueltas and Musical Nationalism in appearing just six months after the composer's death on October 5, 1940, is the earliest article in a major English-language music journal (The Musical Quarterly) to call attention to his importance on the contemporary scene of Mexican art music. Revueltas, in Mayer-Serra's assessment, not only produced some of the most significant musical works of his country, but had begun to open up new vistas for the development of a contemporary Mexican musical idiom.1 Drawing inspiration from primitive indigenous cultures, folklife in contemporary Mexico, and a modernist aesthetic that favored complex plays on meter and rhythm, the works Revueltas produced in a tremendous burst of activity during the last decade of his life-Janitzio (1933), Sensemaya (1938), and La noche de los mayas (1939), to name a few-came to form the basis of his nationalist image. That image was further enhanced by collaborations in later life with Chavez and the Orquesta Sinf6nica de Mexico (1929-35), and involvement with the leftist Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios in the mid-1930s. But at odds with our received notion of Revueltas as a Mexican na

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · Demography · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Music History and Culture

• Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in Anti-lynching Songs by Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez

  Stephanie N Stallings•Journal of the American…•2023

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