Of the Decade of the Cincuentas at 1970

During the decade of the cincuentas he/she transforms the character of the Mexican society deeply: the industrial sector of the economy is affirmed and it emerges as the most dynamic, displacing to the traditional agricultural activities as axis of the economic life of the country; the population begins to concentrate on the cities and to move away from the field, and the external trade, the best communication roads and the modern massive means of information -the press, the cinema, the radio and, something later, the television - they open the national community to the world.

This causes an expression crisis in the art of Mexico, because there being you consolidated the sense of the character and the national autonomy to a certain extent, an affirmative nationalist attitude of those values seems rather unnecessary and even other people's if it is that not opposed to the artistic restlessness that shake to the munco and that they have already penetrated to the country; the folclor loses importance like form of collective expression before the growing urbanization and the concomitant phenomenon of the biggest penetration in the commercial radio and, besides everything it, Mexico has already been identified itself and now it aspires to be identified with the world.

For who is more serious this situation is for the composers in formation process and that they are emerging in that moment to the artistic life, because its fundamental back is a national school that still operated in the immediate past but that now it seems inadequate and until obsolete given the historical moment that one lives and, on the other hand, the restlessness that could give expression to the new industrial, urban and cosmopolitan society are still too vague and diffuse as to serve as effective orientation. And this way, an entire generation in which certain talents militate is torn by a fundamental aesthetic disorientation that makes it hesitate among diverse and until opposed roads, practically ineffective all because after all the moment that one lives is of transition, and that it condemns finally many from their members to the perplexity and the silence, and to other, to write a music that already before being composed it is obsolete and ineffective. Few, very few they are those that survive grace to the single force of their talent. For it you could consider this as the lost generation of the Mexican music.

On the other hand, the oldest teachers draw with better success the reef; their artistic approach already formed and their biggest musical and human maturity allows them to be renewed and to write a music that won't only be valid during the historical transition that the country lives, but rather he/she will also take a place in the future that you grieve it blunts, and it without being betrayed themselves, denying its own personality. This way, Halffter it is the first one in making music dodecaf�nica in Mexico, but that music doesn't sound as if it came from the school vienesa but on the contrary, because the dodecafon�a you latiniza and he/she acquires an unmistakable Andalusian accent; the rhythmic impulse of the music of Galindo it is moderated, but on the other hand he/she expands their tonal language until touching the limits of the dodecafonismo and their polyphony becomes much richer and more complex, and Carlos Ch�vez-the great old man of the national music - he/she gives tests from an incredible youth when rushing for an on the way to cont�nua experimentation that although he/she gives fruits that differ much to each other in their external appearance, in the bottom they show a great unit: the one that gives them a temperament and an underlying artistic philosophy that stay unharmed.

But even more: Ch�vez and Halfter assured the continuity from those results when continuing their pedagogic work and to transmit their experiences to the subsequent generation, of which you/they are exponents Francisco Sav�n, H�ctor Quintanar and Eduardo Mata. These composers, definitively incorporate to the world musical corientes, they write music of " vanguard " in anything inferior to the one that one makes in Germany, France, Poland, England and Spain, and it is certain that they modeled the future of the concert music in Mexico. Using a cosmopolitan language and leaving the nationalist attitude very behind, and however, be for the influence of the teaching and the works of the old teachers, or for the presence of elements idiosincr�ticos to those that is not possible to escape, their music presents a series of features that, in spite of its cosmopolitismo, they define it as an art rooted in these lands.