Of the Revolution to the Decade of the Cincuentas

It happened to the previous composers a group that you could consider of transition, since it begins their activities a little before the Revolution of 1910 and of the full emergence of the musical nationalism in Mexico. In fact, one of them: Manuel M. Ponce (1882-1948) it is the one that inaugurates, to the heat of the Revolution, the mentioned current and it contributes to that the street conquers the palace when achieving that the folclor, appropriately treaty, entered true and decisively in the room of concerts. Although this first form of nationalism has been in more than a frank sense and until immature, it reached validity so much social as artistic, for what could end up meaning the musical emancipation of the country that he/she found this way its own voice. He/she doesn't stop to be a feat of Ponce having carried out with success the difficult traffic from the romanticism of century end to the musical nationalism in such a late historical moment as the beginning of the XX century.

Their generation partners Jos� Rol�n (1883-1945) and Candelario Hu�zar (1883-1970) that their respective artistic careers began as composers of pure romantic stump -the first one very influenced by Caesar Franck and Gabriel Faur�, and the second following Massenet - they also took the step toward a nationalist music of the signal type. But as long as Rol�n used popular topics as a subtle way of enriching its personal expression, Hu�zar underlined -on everything in its big ones fresh orchestral - programmatic contents and melodies of indigenous origin, with what became one of the precursors of that current of our musical nationalism known by " indigenismo ".

The rebel of this generation was Juli�n Carrillo (1875-1964) who -due to their cosmopolitan attitude - he/she refused to use popular topics in their music, since it seemed him that it implied it an undue regression to the primitivism. However, their sharp intelligence and talent allowed him to escape to the dilemma of the moment, consistent in already insisting in a romantic musical language of European court obsolete or to rush to the adventure of the musical nationalism, for the road of an experimentalismo with the help of microtonos, this is, of smaller intervals that the semitono of the scales to that we are habituated.

What continues is current, alive and panting history: the Revolution sweeps to the country, shaking the consciences and demolishing old socioeconomic structures. They arise new men everywhere with new ideas; many forms of living, of thinking and of feeling decim�nonicas they are eliminated. And in they are not it the peasants and the military ones the only actors; the intellectuals also intervene with great enthusiasm that you/they are the corresponsables of much of what is gestated then. In the field of the art the national pictorial movement arises with Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), Jos� Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros; the narrative acquires a great impulse and in music what you can already qualify arises like a truly national school of composers.

The Revolution is essentially a nationalist movement, of taking of conscience of the own personality, and it represents in last term the aspiration of Mexico to be a modern country, in sum, its aspiration to the development. Under the conditions of that time this meant unavoidably to worry about the field, for the agrarian question, and -position that the surviving indigenous nuclei are located fundamentally in the rural areas - to discover then that the country has an indigenous problem that should be resolved by means of the incorporation of so rich human element to the active life of the nation.

Musically, these aspirations find their expression for the first time in the work of Carlos Ch�vez (1899-1978) who goes to the sources of the folclor -that, as all we know, he/she finds their natural refuge in the field - and of the archaeology or the document etnomusical, with what gives full validity to that current of our musical nationalism that is denominated " indigenismo " and that it is characterized to use with special sound material emphasis of real Indian origin or supposition. (This last he/she refers, certainly, to the doubtful reconstructions of the prehispanic music).

This artistic tendency obeys the basic idea that the most characteristic element, and for ende the most vital and important in our nationality and culture, is the native. Such an ideological posture is inserted perfectly in that phase of social reaction that precedes to the definitive national synthesis and that it consists on the elimination, conscious and deliberate, of the intellectual yoke that imposed the colonial stage and that he/she has still survived under the form of mental attitudes and characteristic prejudices operantes. On the other hand, as everything in this life, once this tendency has completed its function, it will be overcome and abandoned still for its own exponents.

Now then, although for the logged reasons when speaking of the prehispanic time is necessary to be asked the question it is what can be qualified rightfully of indigenous in the music, for what the musical indigenismo will always have a character an artificial and synthetic point of what, and even until it can be considered as an exotismo, it completed there of its social and ideological implications - an artistic function of great transcendency. Indeed, and I eat it was already indicated, the Revolution was nationalist and it aspired to the development, what means that the romantic nationalism of a Ponce didn't express it sufficiently in spite of its certain value art�sticao and social, since it already followed bundle to the attitudes characteristic of a stage passing that was wanted to overcome and -also - it depended on composition procedures that idiosincr�ticamente was unaware to the national community of that moment. On the other hand, the resource to sound materials that -artificial or not, synthetic or not - they didn't adapt easily to a treatment of traditional type but rather rather they demanded new focuses and procedures, he/she had the virtue that, apart from the whole ideological superestructura that accompanied him, not alone it allowed but until he/she forced to develop a form of very own artistic expression and characteristic that, additionally, he/she had a great modernity. In other words, this artistic current gave place to a simultaneously national and contemporary music.

What Ch�vez achieved following the road of the indigenismo was carried out for Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) appealing to the mestizo, even alive folclor and for the same thing able to wake up a favorable reaction and enthusiast more easily in the auditory.

The abundant, spicy and flavorful anecdotario and perhaps not always authentic of Silvestre Revueltas, the man, it is an element that conspires against the best knowledge in Silvestre's work, the composer, because it has displaced the public interest toward their figure a picturesque point in the memory of many instead of focusing it that is to say on what it cares really, their music.

This situation favorable true malentendidos and he/she makes possible that circulates thoroughly and without discussion a deformed image of their work, result of the superficial knowledge of some few ones his scores something pupularizadas seasoned with diverse histories about him same. This way, it has been ended up sustaining that practically it didn't evolve as artist and that their works, dissonant for mere desire of modernism, they are a simple amalgam of " pedals ", this ed, of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic designs that repeat indefinitely, and of melodies that have the character of the popular Mexican ballads of the north of our country.

However, anything is more far from the truth that so excessive simplification. Perhaps it happened something of everything it at the beginning of the composer's career, but one would also have to add that, not having converted -as Bartok - the material folcl�rico in a musical language of nature very singled personaly, he/she had the necessary sensibility to discover that, being the nationalism an essentially romantic attitude and decimon�nica, one had to already overcome their basic anachronism giving him an appearance different from which would grant him the traditional molds, wornout and untimely in the year of 1930 in that he/she gives beginning in systematic form to their work as composer. In consequence, he/she took borrowed of their restless European colleagues of the years twenty and thirty -Stravinsky, Beach you, the young Hindemith, Them Six - resources and procedures that, being maybe something superficial and perhaps more a game that a true musical possibility, not for they were it less effective and they had, on the other hand, to their music with the prestige and the brightness of a contemporaneidad -also understood - in way an ironic point. In other words, Revolts were everything less the frank one musical that have wanted to present us.

Also, Revolts didn't remain static but rather it derived toward very interesting and refined solutions of their problem as composer: the pedals before mentioned they become reiterated musical reasons and obsessive that don't only end up changing bell, but rather they combine and they superimpose in very varied ways, forming a rich and suggestive musical fabric in the one that you imbrican some melodies perhaps less openly national or of popular nature that those of previous scores, but always of great expressive effectiveness. To the phase of more purification works like " Planos " or " Sensemay� " correspond.

The artistic temperaments so opposed of Ch�vez and Jumbled -the severely intellectual and austere of the first one in front of the mightily moving and exuberant of the second - they represent in certain form the two faces of that Jano bifronte that it is, from the Conquest, the Mexican nation, and they have given origin to one of the highest musical expressions in the same one. The two composers -so different in their form of being - they were supplemented excellently perhaps by that same cause, and they modeled the musical life of the country in that crucial phase. Not alone they wrote music or they directed concerts, but rather they formed a wide public musical conscience and they assured the continuity of their work modeling new generations of artists.

Among their pupils of the following generation it highlights with special shine another couple of equally opposed and complementary composers: Blas Galindo and Jos� Pablo Moncayo. The first one makes a mightily lyrical music and of a very dense and rich sound matter, always of intimate character and even intovertido that doesn't make concessions and he/she doesn't hesitate in appealing to difficult rhythmic combinations, chords dissonant and rough sound overlappings in order to communicate their message in the possible more direct way. Certainly, this reserved and austere nature of the work of Galindo, unaware to any espectacularidad efectista, is one of its biggest aesthetic virtues, but, for obvious reasons, it has also been the biggest reef for its diffusion. Moncayo, on the other hand, composed a music of great transparency and brightness, clear and without roughness and if, on the contrary, rather incisive that, for its near spirit to Ravel (although not for it less national), it represents -front to what you could consider as the essentially indigenous expression of Galindo - the Latin element, Creole, of the Mexican soul.

For the time in that Ch�vez, Jumbled, Galindo and Moncayo are building the musical reality of the country, he/she incorporates to the artistic life of the same one a Spanish composer of German origin that goes away that the fratricidal passion that shakes and it tears to their homeland: Rodolfo Halffter. Its integration to the activity musical Mexican represents a contribution of great transcendency, because he/she is not only an excellent composer but rather it injects the most recent European restlessness to our means and, through its works as educator, critical, organizer of concerts and music editor, he/she becomes one of the most effective factors to impede any relapse of the music of Mexico in the provincianismo and the coloniaje that he/she drowned it in another time.