The Sounds of the Nation

For decades, political, social, and (lately) cultural historians have successfully challenged the orthodox history of the Mexican Revolution: a teleology of progress achieved through the beneficence of the postrevolutionary state. The official history of nationalist aesthetics and national identity — with its essentialist claims to mexicanidad or lo mexicano, its iconization of (male) cultural caudillos, and its close association of cultural nationalism with the state — has received less attention. The critical assessment of aesthetics now underway has focused on the relationship between indigenismo and the plastic arts, rather than music.1 The orthodox history of music iconizes a few great men (for example, Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez) and links cultural nationalism to government sponsorship; such prevailing views bear reexamination. The cultural production and consumption of music is an arena for the dynamic interplay of power in particular historical contexts.2 This article seeks to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that reexamines musical production in such a light.I will focus on the First National Congress of Music, celebrated in Mexico City’s Palacio de Minería in September 1926. I understand the congress as a site for uncovering distinct visions of the relationship among national identity and music, modernity, and modernism, at a moment when the postrevolutionary atmosphere of Mexico City fostered an intense interest in national culture. The diverse positions put forth at the congress, to and by its organizing and evaluation committees, represented distinct understandings of modernism as a broad, multifaceted aesthetic movement that originated in turn-of-the-century Europe and served as a powerful tool in the construction of nationalist aesthetics in the Americas.3 An examination of the congress shows contention, rather than consensus, concerning the nature of a national music and thus reveals the constructed nature of national identity. An analysis of debates over the nature of a Mexican “national music” also elucidates dissension within and about the cultural nationalist crusade launched in 1921 by José Vasconcelos as minister of education. At the same time, it highlights the role of the private sector in fostering cultural nationalism: the congress was not sponsored by the government but by the newspaper El Universal.The First National Congress of Music was an unprecedented event. It brought together musicians from a wide variety of fields — composers, music educators, performers, impresarios, musicologists, musical theorists — and aesthetic tendencies to discuss the state of musical affairs in postrevolutionary society. More than 90 people registered for the congress, and approximately 36 papers were presented, discussed, and evaluated during the eight days of the meeting. The first forum of this kind ever organized, the congresss allowed musicians from different generations to voice their opinions about the future of music in their country. The issues discussed ranged from the National Conservatory curriculum to the role of folk music in the development of a “true” national music; from the lack of regular concert seasons to more radical modernist proposals, such as the need to reform the foundations of the Western music system.The congress took place just six years after the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution. The year 1920 marked the shaky beginnings of national reconstruction organized around President Álvaro Obregón’s tentative alliance with selected worker and agrarian organizations, as well as the cultural and educational crusade led by Vasconcelos from the Ministry of Education. It was a period of persistent ideological, social, and political confrontation over state and nation building. The socialist and anticlerical projects of several state governors, and the opposition such campaigns engendered, represented a challenge to central authority. A major military rebellion against the central government and radical regional experiments wracked Mexico in 1923 – 24. In 1927, Catholics protesting the postrevolutionary state’s attack on religious rights launched a fierce rebellion (the Cristiada) that engulfed western Mexico until 1929.Inevitably touched by these political and social upheavals, Mexican musicians experienced their own professional uncertainties and challenges. Those who belonged to the intellectual elite had witnessed the crisis and collapse of many prerevolutionary musical institutions that had nurtured them and had fostered the development of an active musical life in Mexico City. In 1919, the need to revitalize institutions and redefine their roles prompted composer Manuel M. Ponce (1882 – 48) to call for a congress that would discuss “the causes of our music’s backwardness and the best ways to fight that decadence.”4 Ponce was one of the early advocates of musical nationalism. In 1913, as part of the activities of El Ateneo de la Juventud, he had given a lecture on “La música y la canción mexicana” (Music and Mexican Song), in which he urged composers to take vernacular songs as the foundation of a national music style. Ponce’s project attempted to “dignify” and “elevate [these songs] to the category of works of art” by harmonizing and arranging them according to contemporary European musical practices.5 The composer’s 1919 call recycled his ideas from 1913 and labeled current musical practices in Mexico “backward,” since they were unconcerned with the development of a decidedly national music style.Ponce’s call did not receive immediate response, but six years later Carlos Chávez (1899 – 78) rekindled the idea when he published an ironic article entitled “Un congreso sin rigor” (A Congress without Rigor). He called for a meeting that would acknowledge the problems of Latin American music, which he labeled “Indo-Spanish.”6 A former student of Ponce, Chávez had gained notoriety in Mexico City through his association with foreign avant-garde and modernist composers (including Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger), whose music he presented in Mexico in a series of concerts called Conciertos de Música Nueva (1924 – 25). Such endeavors gave Chávez an aura of enfant terrible. By referring to Latin American music as Indo-Spanish, Chávez echoed an increasing interest in indigenismo among Mexican intellectuals and private entrepreneurs. In fact, such an interest had already made its way, in the form of dramatic plots or imaginary soundscapes, into a few of Chávez’s scores — mainly El fuego nuevo (1921), Tres piezas para guitarra (1923 – 54), and Los cuatro soles (1925).7A year later, Carlos del Castillo (1892 – 1957), then dean of the National Conservatory, called for a meeting of “serious” Mexican composers that would “put an end to the despicable music pompously called Mexican.”8 Del Castillo’s criticism targeted both Julián Carrillo’s Grupo 13 and the composers of popular music who arranged vernacular folk songs (del Castillo called them “arregla-dores,” or arrangers).9 Like Ponce, Carrillo was one of the most important figures in the Mexican music scene. He received his musical training in fin-de-siècle Leipzig, and as one of the first Mexican composers trained in Germany he struggled to introduce the German organicist musical paradigm to Mexico.10 After 1924, when Carrillo and his Grupo 13 presented a concert of modernist music based entirely on a microtonal scale based on 1/16ths of a tone, he and his followers proposed that such alternative temperaments, or tunings, were a “natural” system that, according to the evolutionary, teleological flow of history, was destined to replace the dominant Western music system.11 Carrillo’s futuristic microtonal project infuriated conservative, moderate, and even avant-garde musicians. A heterogeneous group of conservative and moderate musicians led by Manuel Barajas (1895 – 1956), Daniel Castañeda (1899 – 1957), Alba Herrera y Ogazón (1885 – 1931), Estanislao Mejía (1882 – 1967), and Jesús C. Romero (1893 – 1958), among others, formed the Grupo de los 9 and used the pages of El Universal to challenge the viability of Carrillo’s microtonal music. The more radical Chávez dismissed Carrillo’s project as a mere imitation of European and Hindu musical practices.12Del Castillo was also enraged by the arregladores, a group of musicians that included Alfonso Esparza Oteo, Ignacio González Esperón “Tata Nacho,” and Mario Talavera. They followed Vasconcelos’s criollista guidelines — in turn inspired by Ponce’s nationalist calls from 1913 and 1919 — in transcribing and arranging Mexican vernacular songs in an unsophisticated, romantic, and sentimental style.13 By attacking Carrillo and the arregladores, del Castillo sought to distance himself from two of the most visible and polemical musical discourses in Mexico at the time. However, as Ricardo Miranda notes, del Castillo’s diatribe created a climate that weakened his candidacy as organizer of the congress, while forcing the music community to acknowledge the need to discuss the current state of Mexican music.14In June 1926, a small organizing committee made up of conservatory professor Manuel Barajas and two young musicians, Daniel Castañeda and Fran-cisco Domínguez (1897 – 1975), invited “all Mexican musicians, composers, and musicologists to attend the second organizing meeting for the National Music Congress.” The first draft of the convocation letter was signed by them, as well as by Estanislao Mejía, Jesús C. Romero, and Ignacio Montiel y López (1889 – 1947). When the bulletin and call for papers were published in July 1926, the committee also included Alba Herrera y Ogazón and the young musician Juan León Mariscal (1899 – 1972). Once a collaborator and supporter of Carrillo, Herrera y Ogazón had joined Barajas, Castañeda, Mejía, and Romero in orga-nizing the Grupo de los 9 that had criticized Carrillo. They formed the core of the newly founded Grupo Nosotros, a heterogeneous mix of established musicians and younger students from the National Conservatory. Some members could trace their musical activity back to the Ateneo de la Juventud, a movement of young intellectuals and artists that, coterminous with the eruption of the 1910 revolution, rebelled against then-dominant positivism in favor of a more spontaneous, intuitive, and spiritualist expression of creativity.15 In their oppositional stance, they had drawn from the Bergson’s and Schopenhauer’s brand of musical modernism, associated with the irrational. On the other hand, they eventually became vociferous opponents of the path of European modernism pursued by Julián Carrillo in Mexico. As discussed below, the reasons behind the Grupo de los 9’s attack on Carrillo were as varied as the group’s heterogeneous membership.The ideological heterogeneity of the organizing committee informed its call for papers. One concern was “the inability of the people to appreciate works of art and their beauty because they lack musical culture.”16 This idea had been fundamental to the Ateneo, whose members had helped to found the Universidad Popular in 1912 as a civilizing forum for bringing “culture” to the “masses.”17 The civilizing drive also inspired ex-Ateneista José Vasconcelos to launch a national educational crusade that included a massive publication and distribution of European literary classics. The civilizing project permeated the group around Alba Herrera y Ogazón, who had made a mission out of inculcating nineteenth-century European aesthetics in Mexican musical performers and the listening public. On the other hand, the call for papers stressed the need to “organize a systematic study of Mexican folklore” and to dignify Mexico’s national art-music tradition, which according to them was “nothing but a reflection of Europe.”18 This position reflected the interests of the younger members of the organizing committee, Francisco Domínguez and Daniel Castañeda. Domínguez had studied vernacular and indigenous music in Michoacán for a project sponsored by the Ministry of Public Education. Castañeda was both an engineer and a musician who joined the Grupo de los 9 in its 1924 crusade against Carrillo not because he found the maestro’s ideas unfeasible, but rather because he thought that Carrillo’s approach was unsystematic and lacked scientific rigor. In fact, his interest in microtonality would be clear not only in the works he submitted to the congress but also later in his life, when he collaborated with Augusto Novaro, a Mexican theorist who developed a microtonal system different from Carrillo’s.It would be simplistic to reduce the aesthetic and philosophical tendencies in the committee to an Europeanist-versus-folklorist dichotomy. In fact, there were very important differences among the members of each faction. Such differences informed their contradictory positions on the role of European music in the formation of a Mexican art music (for example, that of Romero versus that of Herrera y Ogazón) and radically different understandings of the notion of folk music, its role in the development of a national music, and its relationship to the idea of modernity (for example, Romero versus Castañeda versus Domínguez). Yet, they stood united with del Castillo against the arregladores’ songs, which enjoyed a broad audience and had been promoted as essentially Mexican by Vasconcelos. This trend has its origin in Manuel M. Ponce and his 1913 Ateneo lecture, which recommended that popular tunes be refined through the canons of the European art-music tradition. His aesthetic values derived from a strain of late nineteenth-century literary modernismo associated with poets such as José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and others who sought the renovation of the Spanish language through cross-fertilization with foreign models and local elements.19 Ponce’s adoption of organicist compositional techniques from the German tradition (such as developing variation and thematic transformation in his 1912 Piano concerto) and his interest in Mexican folk music expressed a modernist desire to expand the inherited European music language and triggered a process of renovation similar to that proposed by José Enrique Rodó’s Americanismo: a specifically American way to search for a place in the modern world.20 In the modernistas’ view, modernity, modernism, the nation, and the local became inseparable notions. As minister of education, Vasconcelos applied Ponce’s ideal to his educational program in order to foment a sense of national identity based upon the perceived Hispanic heritage. This project encouraged an indiscriminate arrangement of popular Mexican songs following very simple harmonic procedures, the composition of original songs, and their performance in schools and at public events. Such practices generated a body of musical arrangements that neither “dignified” folk music, according to Ponce’s prescriptions, nor presented a worthy basis for a distinct Mexican art music.21 One of the most important elements in the 1926 call for papers was its questioning of the equation of the vernacular song with Mexican folk music, such as Ponce’s own “Estrellita” and “Por ti mi corazón,” which he arranged for solo guitar, along with “Cuiden su vida,” “Pajarera,” and “La Valentina” in a cycle of Canciones mexicanas (ca. 1925) dedicated to Andrés Segovia.While the congress was cosponsored by the National University (at this time still part of the Ministry of Public Education), it was organized largely through private support. Historians are just beginning to recognize the fundamental role played by the nongovernmental media in the development and dissemination of intellectual discussions of national identity, modernity, and modernism. The first radio program broadcast by La Casa del Radio, a station affiliated with the newspaper El Universal, captured the eclecticism of Mexican cultural life in the early 1920s. On that occasion, the estridentista poet Manuel Maples Arce shared the airwaves with Manuel M. Ponce,22 the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the Orquesta Típica of Juan N. Torreblanca: the iconoclastic avant-garde, the old, sentimental modernista aesthetic, the European music tradition, and the popular criollo song were all vital elements in the negotiation of national identity.23 As noted above, El Universal was also the public forum for the debate between Carrillo and the Grupo de los 9, a discussion that prompted Carrillo to offer the first recital of his microtonal music (which he considered a uniquely modern, futurist, and decidedly Mexican music) at Casa del Radio. Further, the media was quick to show an interest in the indigenous as an iconic symbol. El Universal had organized the India Bonita beauty pageant in 1921 in conjunction with the Centennial of Independence. El Buen Tono, the cigar company that owned CYB (later XEB), the other radio station of the day, used indigenous imagery in its advertisements. The media was thus a competing actor in the race to represent the nation, its heritage, its modernity, and its trajectory.On May 1926, in to del Castillo’s idea of a congress that would “put an end to the despicable music pompously called the young Carlos Chávez “Un congreso sin rigor” in the one of many cultural that up in these years of and He an that criticized del congress I had it would have a of and ideas that would have musicians and music not that national Mexican music as as a Mexican a congress that a A that and the of a Mexican music that it out of the congress as from the of In a few Chávez the congress as a site and it could in the of a of Mexican music. However, he to recognize that the of the congress would not in but rather in distinct discourses that would into First National Congress was a site from which who to national sought to a variety of different and even contradictory On the one hand, a of the organizing committee y Ogazón, Barajas, and to the congress to the projects they had for over On the other hand, the younger members and attempted an ideological from the They were to this by and and by to a Mexican modernism that would to the nationalist music other members of the organizing committee, such as Jesús C. Romero, had of and national music that did not with call for papers a from the music with 36 papers submitted and the most and composers, Carrillo and Ponce, were and to the of registered included established musicians such as Carlos del – 1956), – and José – 1957), as well as young – and José – The enfant Carlos Chávez to have registered for the congress, but he to it and did not The to the around the desire to the issues in the of a Mexican music. However, the organizing committee a when of the papers did not the in the original the study of and composition into or and The variety of papers made clear the need for the The congress has to be as a the in which ideas about music and nation could be First National Congress of Music took place on September through September 1926. the the organizing committee established for each category in the call for and in members for their papers to the as a for each was also submitted to its evaluation committee, which and or its committee submitted its to the which could or the evaluation committee the recommended the of the in the different music schools of the in the of the Universidad de show that the evaluation approximately of the papers papers presented by members were as discussed below, of the most radical followed alternative (including of The of papers with problems in music that did not issues as as questioning the of the dominant musical stressed the lack of music among the or the of that would them to rather than elite with the musical interests of the The papers the of the prerevolutionary civilizing However, it is also clear that they a Herrera y on the need for a for musicians an had presented in 1913 at the Universidad had Mexican views of music as a mere social and on in musical education. on an of music from had that European art music was an part of Music, had the and of the For the to and understand the beauty of European art music would in 1926, on the great of a civilizing program the mission of our official art schools is to the nation more and For and who thought art music from the European tradition, and Mexican musical training to at the of European music For Herrera y was not people created on a basis but a and to be This position the of local cultural production the of European Herrera y Ogazón the congress as a site for their prerevolutionary The of papers reflected this They were by the evaluation and their recommended by the one on were as as they did not from the ideological For example, neither Ignacio Montiel y López nor Carlos challenged European understandings of in their and even for their their papers were both and their ideas recommended for at the Such was not the with the more which had to many or It is these papers that show the to which the dominant civilizing project was of Jesús C. shows of among members gave to He submitted a entitled “La de la de la música de la de (A on the Music in Mexico as to National which challenged about music and Romero for a of Mexican composers one could of national music, and he that a on the history of Mexican music be into the conservatory In a questioning the focus of musical study on the European and he it be that students could to and be a part of their tradition when the program and their rather than them, a program that on the as the best and students to them as one of a on the evaluation committee had a by the of the history of Mexican music at the However, proposed that Mexican be into the Western already Romero, on the other hand, for the of a on the history of music in Mexico. The evaluation committee music history not even it is to a broad on it in the history that has already been by the that the was based on a series of that their he noted that his had been given to who in order to his own and the of the evaluation the the evaluation In this the evaluation important about the nation and national music. that Mexican music history was not more than years The evaluation position to an of Mexican music as an of and European techniques and as at the National Conservatory and to the activities of the de from the – By such a is only with institutions and For Romero, the notion of a Mexican nation was to the particular historical cultural of the people the national The music they made was from relationship to a particular Romero himself was in music from Mexico and to this into a of Mexican musical of national identity was also central to the papers of Francisco Domínguez and to the role of vernacular music in Vasconcelos’s cultural crusade and called for a of the idea of However, each presented distinct understandings of the of Mexican folk music. to Ponce’s early call for a national music based upon the popular In a essentialist he proposed that music not to and harmonizing these songs, but to them in order to and elements that popular music in order to them and the ideal of and through which the of the in his in Mexican than He criticized the of vernacular music and the back to Ponce He the of the of all the to of them about “true” Mexican as had and had experienced indigenous music. As the Ministry of Public had sponsored Michoacán in proposed the of a that would and indigenous music. The of his were publication of this folk is of not only for the dissemination of our but also the of such need to with this of music; then it by until it is our The will only In other not only did Domínguez for a of the of to focus on rather than popular music; he Mexican musicians to indigenous music as their own in order to be to works of “true” Mexican He

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