In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 0190215798, 9780190215798

Table of contents :
Cover
Series
In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Music Examples
Acknowledgments
About the Companion Website
1. Introduction: The Non-Linear Story of a Cultural Complex
2. Imitation, Ideology, Performativity, and Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1
3. “… y hermosísima patria será”: National and Post-National Transfigurations in Matilde
4. Modernism, Teleology, and Identity: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Early Sonido 13
5. Reading Carrillo: The Future That Never Was
6. Continuities and Discontinuities in an Imaginary Cycle: The Thirteen String Quartets
7. Experimentalism, Mythology, the Intermundane, and Sonido 13 after Julián Carrillo
8. Estrangement, Performance, and Performativity: Musicking Sonido 13
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music

Walter Clark, Series Editor Nor-tec Rifa!

Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World Alejandro L. Madrid From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions Craig H. Russell Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila D. R. M. Irving Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, & Performance Ruth Hellier-Tinoco Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain Susan Boynton Whose Spain? Negotiating “Spanish Music” in Paris, 1908–1929 Samuel Llano Federico Moreno Torroba: A Musical Life in Three Acts Walter Aaron Clark and William Craig Krause Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream Carol A. Hess Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore Agustín Lara: A Cultural Biography Andrew G. Wood In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 Alejandro L. Madrid

In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 Alejandro L. Madrid

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madrid, Alejandro L. In search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 / Alejandro L. Madrid.  pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–19–021578–1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978–0–19–021579–8 (companion website)— ISBN 978–0–19–021581–1 (ebook) 1.  Carrillo, Julián, 1875–1965—Criticism and interpretation.  2.  Microtonal music—History and criticism.  3.  Music—Mexico—20th century—History and criticism.  I.  Title. ML410.C329M33 2015 780.92—dc23 2014048057

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Para Marina Alejandrovna, por llegar cuando llegas In Memoriam Alejandro Madrid Solís. Thanks for the example. Thanks for the music. Thanks for setting the bar so high. In Memoriam Omar Hernández-Hidalgo. Violist extraordinaire and irreplaceable ally whose untimely death reminds us of the madness Mexico has become.

CON TEN T S

List of Figures   ix List of Music Examples   xi Acknowledgments   xv About the Companion Website   xxi 1. Introduction: The Non-Linear Story of a Cultural Complex  1 2. Imitation, Ideology, Performativity, and Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1  32 3. “… y hermosísima patria será”: National and Post-National Transfigurations in Matilde  70 4. Modernism, Teleology, and Identity: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Early Sonido 13  103 5. Reading Carrillo: The Future That Never Was  136 6. Continuities and Discontinuities in an Imaginary Cycle: The Thirteen String Quartets  166 7. Experimentalism, Mythology, the Intermundane, and Sonido 13 after Julián Carrillo  213 8. Estrangement, Performance, and Performativity: Musicking Sonido 13  255 Bibliography  287 Index  299

FIGURE S

1.1

Julián Carrillo in the early 1960s.   15

1.2

Stamp of Julián Carrillo. The back includes a brief biographical sketch. Ediciones RAF.   22

1.3

Plate of Mexican composers. Julián Carrillo appears in the second row of the second column. Ediciones Sun Rise.  23

1.4

Cover of Biografías para niños. Julián Carrillo.  24

2.1

Composers included during the 1899–1902 seasons of the Gewandhausorchester.  43

2.2

Musical examples in Julián Carrillo’s Tratado sintético de harmonía.  45

2.3

Comparative chart. Form in the manuscript and printed version of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1, first movement.  56

2.4

Form in the piano reduction of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1, first movement.   62

3.1

Program of the 2010 premiere of Julián Carrillo’s Matilde.  72

3.2

José Luis Ordóñez and Zaira Soria as León and Matilde during the premiere of Matilde in 2010. Copyright by Fernando López/SCGSLP, 2010. Used by permission.   83

3.3

José Luis Ordóñez and Zaira Soria as León and Matilde acting the suicide scene during the premiere of Matilde in 2010. Copyright by Marina Cruz Martínez, 2010. Used by permission.   86

4.1

Microtonal notation used in Julián Carrillo, Preludio a Colón (1924).  113

4.2

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Formal design.   113

5.1

Julián Carrillo in the mid-1920s.   148

6.1

Matrix for Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 5 in the composer’s handwriting.  190

6.2

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 7, third movement. Analytical chart. Letters identify motives used.   197

6.3

Dolores Carrillo, Alois Hába, Mrs. Fokker, Adriaan Fokker, Julián Carrillo, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky. Paris, 1958. Photo Courtesy of Martine Joste.   199

6.4

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 8, third movement. Formal chart. Letters identify the three main sections.   203

6.5

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 9. Use of motives and material in the first movement.   204

7.1 Música de las estrellas (2009). Cover designed by Marisa de Lille. Used by permission.   216 7.2

Oscar Vargas Leal (left) and David Espejo (right) on the jacket of Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973 (1973).  224

7.3

Ramón Guerrero, Dolores Carrillo, and Jorge Echevarría in Julián Carrillo’s piano room in Mexico City. Used by courtesy of José Ramón Guerrero Asperó.   235

8.1

Third-Tone Carrillo Piano at the 13 Sonoro Exhibit, Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum. Mexico City, September 30, 2010.   258

8.2

An example of numerical notation. First page of Julián Carrillo’s Capricho (1928) for solo viola in quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones; a work transcribed into standard notation and recorded by Omar Hernández-Hidalgo in 2007.   269

8.3

Estrella Newman playing a Sonido 13 Harp.   276

[x] Figures

MUSIC E X AMPLE S

2.1

Julián Carrillo, Symphony No. 1 (1902), first movement. Generative cell from the introduction.   51

2.2

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. First theme.  51

2.3

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Second theme.  51

2.4

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement. First theme.  52

2.5

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement. Second theme.  52

2.6

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement. Motivic material used in the bridges.   52

2.7

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third movement. First theme.  52

2.8

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third movement. Second theme.  53

2.9

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement. First theme.  53

2.10

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement. Second theme.  53

2.11

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Beginning of the first ending (from the piano reduction).   59

2.12

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1. Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from theme A to theme B from the printed version.  61

2.13

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1. Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from theme A to theme B from the manuscript.  61

2.14

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Beginning of the development (from the piano reduction).   64

2.15

Carrillo. Symphony No. 1. Symmetric harmonic relation in the transition from theme A to theme B.   65

2.16

Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Idealized voice leading of the re-transition to the recapitulation.   66

3.1

Julián Carrillo, Matilde (1910). Insurgents’ anthem.   88

3.2

Carrillo, Matilde. Theme of dignity.   88

3.3

Carrillo, Matilde. Church subtheme 1.   88

3.4

Carrillo, Matilde. Church subtheme 2.   88

3.5

Carrillo, Matilde. Love motif.   90

3.6

Carrillo, Matilde. Two versions of the Hate/Don Juan motif.  90

3.7

Carrillo, Matilde. Warning motif.   90

3.8

Carrillo, Matilde. Beginning of Act I, Scene 3.   90

4.1

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Component Aiia.   113

4.2

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Different presentations of segment AI.  114

4.3

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Forms of prolongation in Aiia and Aiib.   117

4.4

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Component Aiib.   117

4.5

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Segments BI and BI'.   118

4.6

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Final cadence in section B.   120

4.7

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. First part of segment CI.   121

4.8

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. First part of segment CII.   122

4.9

Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Structural level graphic.   123

4.10a

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2 (1926), mm. 25–53, piano reduction. Juxtaposition of blocks.   130

4.10b

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2, mm. 25–53, piano reduction. Juxtaposition of blocks … continuation.  131

4.11

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3 (1928), second movement, “En secreto,” mm. 1–4.   132

4.12

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3, second movement, “En secreto.” Structural level.  132

[xii]  Music Examples

6.1

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1 (1902), first movement. Head motive made out of generative motives A and B.  173

6.2

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, first movement. First theme.  173

6.3

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, first movement. Second theme.  173

6.4

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, second movement. Main theme.  173

6.5

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, second movement. Contrasting theme.  173

6.6

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, third movement. Main theme.  175

6.7

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, fourth movement. Fugue subject.  175

6.8

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, fourth movement. Fugue countersubject.  175

6.9

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2 (1926). Basic non-tonal synthetic scales.  178

6.10

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2. Symmetric scale used in the bridge of the Scherzo section of the second movement.  178

6.11

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3 (1928), first movement, “Meditación.” Harmonic prolongation.   180

6.12

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4 (1932), first movement. First theme.  184

6.13

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. Second theme.  184

6.14

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. Third theme.  184

6.15

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, fourth movement. Instance of metric modulation, mm 130–131.   187

6.16

Basic synthetic scale of Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 5.  188

6.17

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 5 (1937), first movement. Identifying motives.  188

Music Examples  [ x i i i ]

6.18

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 5, portion of the first movement. Numbers throughout the score identify scale transpositions in use.  191

6.19

Basic non-tonal scale of Julián Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 6 (ca. 1937).   193

6.20

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 7 (1955), first movement. Main themes and motives.   196

6.21

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 8 (ca. 1959), first movement. Main thematic motive.   202

6.22

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 9 (1959), first movement. Main motives.  204

6.23

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 10 (ca. 1959), fourth movement. Head motive of the fugue.   205

6.24

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 10, second movement. Last three bars.   205

6.25

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 11 (1962), second movement, mm. 1–9.   207

6.26

Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 12 (1964). Basic cyclic motive.  208

6.27

Carrillo, String Quartet No. 12. Use of synthetic hexatonic scale.  209

[xiv]  Music Examples

ACKNOW L ED GMEN T S

It has been almost twenty years since I unsuspectedly attended a Sonido 13 happening organized by Estrella Newman and David Espejo in Mexico City that forced me to re-assess what I  thought I  knew about Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13. Soon after, I started visiting the Julián Carrillo Archive; Dolores Carrillo, the daughter of Julián Carrillo and who had been in charge of the archive since his death, was already ill—she would pass a few years later, in 1998—but she and her family were very generous with their time during my early visits to the archive, at a difficult moment in their lives. Throughout these years I have encountered countless people who have supported, questioned, or responded to my work; to every one of them I owe a debt of gratitude. I would like to start by thanking the Carrillo family, especially the late Dolores Carrillo, Angel Carrillo Soberón, and Carmen Carrillo de Viramontes, for graciously granting me access to all the materials I requested. At the Julián Carrillo Archive I am indebted to Gabriela Barrón and the late Omar Hernández-Hidalgo in Mexico City, and to Iván Sánchez Martínez in San Luis Potosí. Early writings to come out of this project benefited from the suggestions and advice of Arved Ashby, Ignacio Corona, Jill Lane, Gregory Proctor, Margarita Mazo, and Dina Lentsner (the A  flat, tovarishch!). An early version of Chapter  2 received the Samuel Claro Valdés Award for Latin American Musicology in 2002; the input from the award committee (Juan Pablo González, Bernardo Íllari, and Víctor Rondón) was very constructive and welcomed. Likewise, an early version of Chapter 4 was included in my book Los sonidos de la nación moderna (2008), which was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Latin American Musicology; I am also grateful to the prize committee (Miriam Escudero, Marita Fornaro, Juan Pablo González, and Rubén López Cano) for their enthusiastic support. I have been invited to share the historiographic ideas at the core of this book at several conferences and study groups. I want to thank their members and constituencies for patiently listening to my concepts as they were

taking shape and for providing much needed feedback. I am particularly thankful to Pilar Ramos López and the Grupo de Investigación Historia Cultural de la Música at Universidad de la Rioja (especially the members at the group’s 2008 meeting, including Juan José Carreras, Omar Corrado, and Belén Vega Pichaco). My participation as a keynote speaker at the 2010 meeting of the Asociación Argentina de Musicología in Córdoba was particularly productive and I would like to thank Héctor Luis Goyena, Héctor Rubio, Leonardo Waisman and other colleagues in attendance for their comments and suggestions. In 2011, Caroline Polk O’Meara welcomed me to the Music and American Geographies Lecture Series of the Center for American Music at the University of Texas at Austin; Rimantas Astaruskas and Darius Kučinskas invited me to speak about Carrillo at the 2011 Druskininkai Summer with M. K. Čiurlionis in Lithuania; in 2009, Drew Davies asked me to share my ideas with the members of the Seminario de MUSICAT at UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in Mexico City; in 2007, Ana Alonso-Minutti invited me to present my research at the Hispanic Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society in Québec City. I am deeply thankful to all of them; the discussions generated by these invitations were critical in helping me refine the ideas in this book. As the project was progressing I also shared partial findings at several professional conferences, including annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for American Music, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Latin American Music Seminar of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London, and the 2001 Microfest in Pomona College. I  am grateful to the scholars who attended these sessions and engaged with the materials I presented. When I was revising the final manuscript of this book I was invited to share my work with faculty and students at Cornell University’s Composers’ Forum; I also would like to thank them for listening to Carrillo’s music in detail with me and for candidly commenting on my interpretation of those sounds; their suggestions were particularly helpful when polishing the ideas I present in Chapter 6. I spent the 2010–2011 academic year as a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago conducting research related to this project. I  want to acknowledge the members of my cohort, Ainsworthe Clarke, Susan Levine, Rama Mantena, Steven Marsh, and Colleen McQuillen for their wonderful feedback, as well as Ruth Rosenberg, who also provided thougtful comments about my work during the institute’s sessions. I am also indebted to Mary Beth Rose and Linda Vavra for their advice and support through the application process. In 2013, I had the privilege of teaching a series of seminars at the

[xvi] Acknowledgments

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and would like to thank Alejandro Vera, Daniel Party, and Rafael Díaz as well as their students at the musicology program for welcoming me and for their intellectual camaraderie. Also in 2013, Alvaro Díaz invited me to participate at the IX Festival de Música y Musicología in Ensenada; and in 2010, Rubén López Cano asked me to talk about this project to his students at Escuela Superior de Música de Catalunya. Meeting my colleagues’ students offered wonderful occasions that presented plenty of opportunities for debate and intellectual exchange. A number of archives, libraries, and their personnel facilitated my research and deserve special thanks here. They include, in the United States, Bonna Boettcher and the staff at the Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance, the John M. Olin Library, and the Uris Library, all at Cornell University; the staff at the Edwin A.  Fleischer Collection of Orchestral Music of the Free Library of Philadelphia; the staff at the Music Division of the Dorothy and Lewis B.  Cullman Center of the New  York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the staff at the Willis Library of the University of North Texas; the staff at the Nettie Lee Benson Collection of the University of Texas at Austin; and the staff at the Thompson Library and the Music and Dance Library at the Ohio State University. In Mexico City, I  offer thanks to the staff of the Biblioteca del Centro Nacional de las Artes; the staff of the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Difusión e Información Musical “Carlos Chávez” (CENIDIM); the staff of the Hemeroteca Nacional; the staff of the Biblioteca Lerdo de Tejada; the staff of the Centro de Estudios Sobre la Universidad; and the staff of the Archivo Julián Carrillo (when it was in Mexico City as well as now that it is in San Luis Potosí). In Germany, my deep appreciation goes to Ingrid Jach at the archive of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig and to Dr.  Claudius Böhm from the Gewandhausorchester; and in Belgium to Dr. Roos Van Driessche and Cindy Colman from the archive at the Conservatorium Gent. Likewise, countless individual friends and colleagues contributed to my research by pointing me toward specific archives, publications, recordings, or music scores; by doing archival work on my behalf; by digitizing music examples; by introducing me to elusive contacts; by vehemently opposing my ideas; or simply by patiently listening, remembering with me, and providing feedback. To all of them I owe a great debt. They include Kurt Aanensen, Bill Alves, Jacky Avila, Alejandro Barceló, Elbio Barilari, Graeme Bailey, Natalia Bieletto, Saúl Bitrán, Susan Campos Fonseca, Alejandro Cárdenas, Claudia Carretta-Beltrán, José Damián Carrillo, Ireri Chávez Bárcenas, Miguel Cordero, Daniel Cruz, Rodrigo de la Mora, Marisa

Acknowledgments  [ x v i i ]

de Lille, Jorge Echevarría, Huáscar García, León García, Milton García, Iliana García García, Pablo García Valenzuela, Jimena Giménez Cacho, Ana Bertha González, Bernard Gordillo Brockmann, Stephanie Griffin and the Momenta Quartet, Wim Hoogewerf, Paul Hwang, Martine Joste, Darius Kučinskas, Juan Sebastián Lach, Beth Levy, Pablo Maldonado Sánchez, José Antonio Martín Salinas, Brian McLaren, José Miramontes Zapata, Robin Moore, Victoria Moreira and the Kaia String Quartet, Jaime Moreno Villarreal, Roger Moseley, Armando Nava Loya, José Luis Navarro, Rodrigo Navarro, Estrella Newman, Matanya Ophee, Froylán Padrón Zárate, Gabriel Pareyón, Robert Parker, Alexandre Pirojenko, Ekaterina Pirozhenko, Angélos Quetzalcóatl, Johnny Reinhard, Fernando Ríos, José Antonio Robles Cahero, Pepe Rojo, Antonio Ruiz, Luz María Sánchez, Iván Sánchez Martínez, Rodrigo Sigal Sefchovich, Zaira Soria, Henry Stobart, Deyanira Torres, Sarah Town, Leticia T. Varela Ruiz, Luisa Vilar-Payá, and Oscar Zapata. Special thanks to Walter Clark, Carol Hess, Cristina Magaldi, Fred Maus, Carol Oja, and Leonora Saavedra for supporting my applications for funding with letters of recommendation at various stages. I owe a special debt of gratitude to musicologists Ralph Lorenz, Ricardo Miranda, Leonora Saavedra, and Christina Taylor-Gibson for kindly sharing their scholarship with me, and to Marina Cruz Martínez, Marisa de Lille, Ramón Guerrero Asperó, Fernando López García, and Temple University Press for giving permission to use copyrighted materials. I am especially grateful to friends and colleagues who have provided generous and detailed comments and feedback on specific chapters of the book at various stages; they include Ana Alonso Minutti, Arved Ashby, Juan Sebastián Lach, Jonathan A. Neufeld, Anna Ochs, Benjamin Piekut, Annette Richards, Roberto Sierra, Susan Thomas, Hebert Vázquez, and Javier Villa-Flores. I remind the reader that I am solely responsible for any errors and oversights throughout the book. Finally, I would like to thank Walter Clark, Adam Cohen, Daniel Gibney, Suzanne Ryan, and others at Oxford University Press for their interest in my project and their work in seeing it through to publication. I am also deeply thankful to Brigid Cohen and Daniel Party, the anonymous reviewers who graciously revealed their identity to me as the book was going into production; they read my manuscript in great detail and provided invaluable suggestions to improve it. And thanks to Norm Hirschy for help in designing and supporting the OUP website accompanying this book. An earlier, Spanish version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Transculturación, performatividad e identidad en la Sinfonía No. 1 de Julián Carrillo,” in Resonancias, No. 12 (2003). It has since been substantially revised and

[xviii] Acknowledgments

expanded. A version of Chapter 4 was published as “Modernism, Teleology, and Identity. Toward a Cultural Understanding of Julián Carrillo’s Sonido 13,” Chapter  1 of my book Sounds of the Modern Nation:  Music, Culture and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2009); it appears here in a revised, corrected, and slightly expanded version.

Acknowledgments  [ x i x ]

A B O U T THE   COMPA NION W EBSITE

W W W.OUP.COM/US/INSEARCHOFJULIANCARRILLO

Oxford has created a password-protected website to accompany In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13, and the reader is encouraged to take full advantage of it. The website includes historical pictures and documents, newspaper clips, programs, and videos of the music and instruments discussed in the book, as well as images from the author’s fieldwork. The author hopes these materials will prove a useful complement to the text that follows. Website materials that relate directly to the author’s argument are signaled throughout the text with Oxford’s symbol  . You may access the companion website by typing in username Music2 and password Book4416.

In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

CH AP TER   1

Introduction The Non-Linear Story of a Cultural Complex

W

hy write a book about Mexican composer Julián Carrillo? I  could begin with a grandiose personal statement:  “I firmly believe him to be, if not the most important Mexican composer of all times, undoubtedly the most original and innovative.” Nevertheless, beyond my personal aesthetic judgment, I should make clear that my intention in writing this book is not to incorporate Carrillo into the Western, Latin American, or Mexican music canons, nor to reconfigure those musical bodies with new meanings by inserting his name, nor to reproduce the aesthetic criteria of any canon where he may occupy a position of privilege. Julián Carrillo is one of the most intriguing figures in Mexican music history and arguably one of the most technically accomplished Mexican composers of his generation—at least by standards of the late nineteenth-century Western art music tradition. His life is one of superlatives. His was a dominant presence on the music scene of Mexico City before the 1910 revolution; he was a polarizing artist during the period of the civil war; he was the most controversial musical figure in the decade immediately following the end of the armed struggle; and he was a utopian, relentless, and highly prolific marginal musical activist during the last three decades of his life. However, these characteristics alone would not justify this project. Reporting about the lives of “great men” and their accomplishments, uncovering hidden “truths,” or discovering forgotten “geniuses” and lost “masterworks” is not what stimulates my academic endeavors. And yet, in light of the superlatives about Carrillo, the myth of the man and the world around him begs to be exposed, as he is described as a misunderstood genius, charlatan,

miracle worker, raving lunatic, ahead-of-his-time visionary, or source of national pride. This book is an exploration of how Carrillo created discourses of self-representation and mediated between cultural worlds, and how he and his ideas have been used by his followers in the fifty years since his death to create new discourses of their own self-representation and mediate between their own cultural worlds. On October 17, 2013, El Colegio Nacional (an elite, state-sponsored cloister of Mexican intellectuals) organized a public conversation about the current status of music composition in Mexico among composers Mario Lavista, Aurelio Tello, Javier Alvarez, and Hebert Vázquez. Although the discussion centered on nationalism and the development of Mexican cultural institutions, the topic of Carrillo and Sonido 13 was unexpectedly prominent. First, Carrillo was mentioned in relation to the nationalistic rhetoric that permeated Mexican musical life during the first half of the twentieth century; later, the panel assessed his musical production. Lavista argued that “Carrillo started as a ‘German style’ romantic musician. … [L]‌ater he developed his theory of Sonido 13 and started composing works for [the special microtonal] pianos and harps he had built. But he did not modify his musical rhetoric. He kept the same turns of romantic music, only in quarters of a tone.”1 To this, Tello reacted, “A new system [and] new tools, required new constructive principles. As simple as that. Carrillo could not see it.”2 These opinions come from expert musicians who have had access to the few available recordings of Carrillo’s music as well as some of his scores. However, I would argue that they reflect the misinformed, teleological assumptions that have surrounded the critical reception of his music. Some of these assertions may be adequate to describe certain aspects of the composer’s output or may be correct when his music is assessed within a particular aesthetic teleology; however, they reflect an overall lack of knowledge about his compositional practices and about the depth and shortcomings of his theoretical musings prevalent in the Mexican musical mainstream today. They are also evidence that his music, in scores and recordings, is not widely available. Throughout this book I question the label of “Romanticism” applied to Carrillo’s music and argue that detailed analyses of his works show that he indeed developed a musical rhetoric specific to his microtonality; I argue that opinions about Carrillo are incomplete or reflect an inadequate knowledge of his work. 1.  Mario Lavista quoted in Mario Lavista, Aurelio Tello, Javier Álvarez, and Hebert Vázquez, “Setenta años de música: una charla sobre la composición en México,” Revista Tierra Adentro 186 (2013): 16. All translations from Spanish, French, German, and Italian throughout the book are by the author unless otherwise noted. 2.  Aurelio Tello, quoted in “Setenta años de música,” 17.

[2]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Nevertheless, what I find most intriguing about this conversation is that these composers, notwithstanding their evaluation of Carrillo as a failed case of musical Modernism, continued to talk about him, as if compelled to understand him better. Carrillo’s case is indeed fascinating. He is a composer many people have heard of, often in relation to the mystery and mysticism that surrounds his microtonal system, El Sonido 13 (The Thirteenth Sound). Yet in reality very few people know his music, the extent of his catalogue, or anything substantial about him or his ideas. In this book, I am interested in exploring the historical, social, and cultural meaning of the representations and misrepresentations of Carrillo through an analysis of his music and a proposal about how to listen to it more productively. I  explore the reasons that have made him invisible for the Mexican musical mainstream, the counter-discourses that have made him a pervasive phantom in Mexican cultural imagery, and the sounds that generate this rhetoric. However, this book is not intended as an uncritical celebration of Carrillo’s life and works; instead, it is a cultural critique that takes him, his works, and his reception as points of departure for a study of cultural change, experimentalism, distinction, marginality, and cultural capital in twentieth-century Mexico. Carrillo’s active artistic life spans a period of almost seventy years, cutting across Mexico’s turbulent twentieth century. His life and artistic production, his radical microtonal music project as well as the passions that surround them are both witnesses, soundboards, and windows into better understanding the Mexican century of mercurial contrasts, of light and shadow that accompanied the shift from the quasi-feudal liberal Porfirian society of the late nineteenth century to the pinnacle of the Mexican Miracle of the 1960s and beyond.3 However, my concern with studying Carrillo and his works is not to write a partial cultural history of twentieth-century Mexico through them; I am not interested in creating a sense of the past for contemporary readers. Instead, I explore questions of representation in a transhistorical way to account for Carrillo’s works and ideas not only in relation to the moments in time when they came to fruition but also through a variety of cultural projects that kept them alive and re-signified them through the beginning of the twenty-first century. I am concerned with understanding how Carrillo adopted and used the musical ideologies and technologies he found throughout his life as much as in how his followers use him and his music today, decades after 3.  The Mexican Miracle is the name given to the country’s successful strategy for continuous economic growth between 1940 and the late 1960s.

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his death. Thus, when I use music analysis, I do not do it in an attempt to extract an unlikely univocal meaning from Carrillo’s compositions or to prove the alleged universality of the analytical tools I employ. Instead, I do it to trace the composer’s possible routes when dealing with a variety of musical ideologies—ideologies that are often intrinsic to the analytical methods I have chosen to use. In sum, I am as interested in his works and his strategies of self-representation as I am in their reception since this is the cultural lens through which we look at and make sense of Carrillo’s music and ideas in the present as part of a larger transhistorical cultural complex. Furthermore, I would suggest that these cultural lenses should be understood as indexes of the type of retro-causality that may inform the fabric of representation, self-representation, historical narrative, and subjective meaning that make up this Carrillo-centered cultural performance complex.4 Instead of aspiring to the type of detachment traditional historians and musicologists strive for, this project embraces the unavoidable subjectivity of any research project in the humanities. Placed at the center of this intellectual endeavor are my own affective responses to this music and to Carrillo and Sonido 13 as cultural symbols in Mexican popular culture. The ideas I had about Carrillo were shaped throughout my life through Mexican media, school textbooks, and a variety of alternative experimental artistic projects that have invoked him or Sonido 13 at different times. In this book I argue that in engaging these representations and a critical assessment of the past as parts of one and the same performance complex we are able to better understand their cultural meaning. The study focuses on how these narratives and representations, contradictory as they may be, allow us to make Carrillo, his music, and his ideas about Sonido 13 meaningful in the present; from his often contradictory writing about himself (frequently embellishing the truth) to how his followers have constructed him and his musical project in the present and recent past, to how the performance of his music in the present (within a political atmosphere that is completely different from when it was composed) may affect how we hear and make sense of it. I rely on those narratives and performances, putting 4. A  cultural performance complex may be explained as the diachronic social, political, intellectual, and artistic habitus in which people—in this case Carrillo, his teachers, his critics, his followers, and even scholars interested in him—live, develop emotional and affective responses to ideas and artistic manifestations, and perform notions of self, distinction, cultural capital, and so on in relation to each other. In that sense, as explained later in more detail, a cultural performance complex is a transhistorical space that allows for performative processes to occur as networks of relations between experiences, events, and actors in the past, present, and future are continuously established and re-established.

[4]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

them in conversation in order to establish new, transhistorical relations based on present experiences as central in the ascription of musical meaning. I suggest that this is the best way we can make sense of Carrillo and Sonido 13, as a cultural complex, a space of performative yearning that transcends moments of production and discourses of poiesis, emphasizing instead that the construction of its meaning over time is determined by the many ways in which music is used to inform Carrillo’s life—preand post-Sonido 13—,the trajectory of his microtonal system, and his followers’ affective attachments to it. In my analysis, combining seemingly unconnected events in the past-present-future continuum helps us see how this cultural complex acquires meaning at different historical moments. The concept of performance complex challenges historical teleology as it proposes that the meaning of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 is performed multivocally as different worlds of interpretation enter into intermundane dialogues. Discussing the work of contemporary musicians who have embraced Sonido 13, a loyal follower of Carrillo complained that everyone who speaks about Sonido 13 introduces his or her own ideas—from anarchism and Christianity to neo-indigenism and UFOs—as if they were central in defining this music; he argued that such approaches detract from the true meaning of Sonido 13.5 I disagree. I do not think Sonido 13 has a single true meaning. I propose that all of those opinions about Sonido 13 are in fact what makes Sonido 13; they all are part of the same performance complex. They are the uses of Sonido 13 that continuously make it significant and meaningful. Approaching Carrillo and Sonido 13 as a cultural performance complex implies not only trying to understand who the composer was and what he was attempting, but also how he was performed as both a musical visionary and an artistic failure, and how doing that allows those who do it to perform themselves. Thus, I inquire into the politics behind these practices of representation and self-representation. I also explore the notion of cosmopolitanism in relation to Carrillo’s different musical projects to discover how he developed a sense of distinction during a highly politically contested time. I relate this to the way his current underground followers attain cultural capital by validating a variety of seemingly bizarre artistic projects through the man and his ideas. Furthermore, I analyze Carrillo’s unlikely renaissance in twenty-first-century Mexican cultural life by examining the political views that ostracized him during the last forty years of his life and the conservative turn in Mexican politics experienced in the last twenty years. 5.  Angélos Quetzalcóatl, electronic conversation, May 29, 2014.

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One of the difficulties of attempting a project about Carrillo is distinguishing between historical facts and propaganda in his own writings. I am not saying that one should be privileged over the other since I believe that Carrillo’s tweaking of historical facts to develop the mythology of his Sonido 13 along with his public persona is a fundamental aspect of the performance complex under study. However, to properly assess his texts one must identify these propagandistic elements and scrutinize them in relation to the artistic and intellectual developments taking place around the world at the time, particularly those he felt he was responding to. This is a very difficult task since Carrillo kept writing, rewriting, and reinventing his own past throughout his life. Moreover, not only did he keep reworking and editing his articles and autobiographical narratives but he also did that with his music. Thus, one may find slightly different versions of the same articles published or rewritten according to the changing circumstances of the composer’s life. One can as well find copies of the same music with different titles, conflicting dates of composition, or different dedicatees, as well as serious inconsistencies in the lists of his works depending on what each particular catalogue attempted to emphasize—for example, sometimes he would group pieces together as part of one musical cycle, and sometimes list them as parts of different ones. Another problem is the grandiloquence of Carrillo’s prose, especially when referring to himself or his works; the arrogance, egotism, and sense of superiority, disguised in a tone of modesty that often characterizes his writings, have been offensive to musicians, scholars, and audiences alike, as I corroborated myself both in the archive and in the field. Untangling Carrillo from his affected rhetoric without disregarding the value of that language as material for rich critical analysis was a painstaking but fundamental aspect of this project.

A LINEAR PREFACE TO A NON-LINEAR STORY: A BIOGR APHICAL SKETCH OF JULIÁN CARRILLO

I have noted that my intention is not to write a biography of Julián Carrillo in the musicological tradition of a composer’s “life and works.” Nonetheless, I am aware that most readers are probably unfamiliar with Carrillo’s basic biographical information. To provide a foundation upon which to develop this cultural study, I offer a concise biography of the composer at the outset. I narrate these events in chronological order, but that does not mean that I believe such linearity predetermines the meaning of Julián Carrillo’s life and artistic production or that I even think they have

[6]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

one single meaning. However, a chronological presentation offers a good point of departure to familiarize the reader with the composer, aspects of his life, and some of his artistic achievements. In the end, a chronological, linear sequence is only one of many possible relational models to make sense of moments in the composer’s life. I should note that this biographical account is a first attempt at deconstructing Carrillo’s mythology. Thus, I try to set the record straight regarding problematic dates and facts in his life by avoiding taking the composer’s narratives of self-representation at face value.6 Instead, I base my biographical account on a critical assessment of his autobiography based on surviving archival evidence. Julián Antonio Carrillo Trujillo (1875–1965) was born into an indigenous family in Ahualulco, San Luis Potosí, a small village twenty-four miles northwest of the city of San Luis Potosí, the capital of the state. He started his musical studies at the age of ten in San Luis Potosí, under the tutelage of Flavio F. Carlos, with whom he learned to play the kettledrums, the flute, and the violin. Soon, he was playing those instruments at dances, masses, and other local secular and religious celebrations as a member of his teacher’s orchestra. Carrillo’s earliest compositions (salon 6.  The great majority of biographical texts about Carrillo are in Spanish. For example, Biografías para niños: Julián Carrillo (San Luis Potosí: Gobierno de San Luis Potosí, 1992); E. R. Blackaller, La revolución musical de Julián Carrillo (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1969); José Rafael Calva, Julián Carrillo y microtonalismo: “la visión de Moisés” (Mexico City: SACM-CENIDIM, 1984); Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, Catálogo integral del archivo Julián Carrillo (San Luis Potosí: Editorial Ponciano Arriaga, 2000); Ernesto Solís Winkler, “La revolución del Sonido 13: un ensayo de explicación social” (Master’s thesis, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 1996); there are also biographical sections about the composer in Dan Malmström, Introducción a la música mexicana del siglo xx (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), 46–51; Guillermo Orta Velázquez, Breve historia de la música en México (Mexico City: Joaquín Porrúa, 1970), 416–422; and Gabriel Pareyón, Diccionario enciclopédico de la música en México (Guadalajara:  Universidad Panamericana, 2007), 190–195. In English, the work of Gerald R.  Benjamin in “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” Yearbook, Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Vol. III (1967), his entry about Carrillo in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 5, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 193–196; Alfred Pike, “The Discoveries and Theories of Julián Carrillo, 1975–1965,” Inter-American Music Bulletin 55 (1966), 1–4; as well as the section dedicated to him in Gerard Béhague, Music of Latin America: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1979), 225–232; provide comprehensive biographical information about the Mexican composer. However, all of these works, in Spanish as well as in English, uncritically reproduce the biographical information provided by Carrillo himself, first in Julián Carrillo, Pláticas musicales (Mexico City: Wagner y Levién, 1913) and later expanded in José Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra (Mexico City: Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1943). For decades, these two books were the main source of biographical information about Carrillo; they were recycled later in his life in a wide variety of texts, including the posthumously published autobiography edited by Dolores Carrillo, the composer’s daughter, as Testimonio de una vida (San Luis Potosí: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992).

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pieces such as danzas, mazurkas, polkas, and schottisches, the repertory in vogue in late nineteenth-century Mexico) were written to expand the band’s repertory.7 When his studies with Carlos ended abruptly in 1894 due to personal differences, Carrillo was already a local celebrity of sorts both as a violinist and composer. In 1895, Carrillo moved to Mexico City to attend the National Conservatory. There he studied violin with Pedro Manzano, composition with Melesio Morales, and acoustics with Francisco Ortega y Fonseca. His growing reputation as a reliable violinist allowed Carrillo to make a decent living as an orchestral musician during his years as a student. In 1899, he was invited to perform Ovide Musin’s Mazurka de Concert (1893) during the award ceremony for Mexico City’s best students in higher education. At the event, presided over by Joaquín Baranda, minister of education, President Porfirio Díaz was a guest of honor. According to Carrillo’s autobiographical accounts, it was after his successful performance that Baranda announced President Díaz’s apparent unilateral decision to grant the musician a special scholarship to continue his studies in Europe.8 Later that year, Carrillo sailed for Europe, first to Paris, where he was unable to enter the conservatory since he was beyond the school’s official age limit, and later to Leipzig, where he registered at the Königliches Konservatorium der Musik on October 9, 1899, with the intention of pursuing a degree in violin performance.9 There, he studied violin with Hans Becker, theory and composition with Salomon Jadassohn, and piano with Johannes Merkel. Several biographers state that Carrillo was a member of the Gewandhausorchester while he lived in Leipzig although the orchestra records show that he was never a formal member of the Gewandhaus. However, it is likely that as a Konservatorium student he may have been sent to practice or act as a 7.  In the series of interviews that make up José Velasco Urda’s book and in Carrillo’s autobiography, largely based on that book, the composer states that he was asked to compose a mass for solo voices and orchestra in 1894, before moving to Mexico City. He even mentions his acceptance of this request as one of the reasons for the deterioration of his relationship with Flavio Carlos. There is no copy of such a work among his manuscripts at the Julián Carrillo Archive in Mexico City; however, a work that fits Carrillo’s description, a Misa for two tenors, baritone, bass, and symphonic orchestra, from 1896 is kept at the archive. This might be the work he refers to in Velasco’s book and in his autobiography. Maybe he was indeed asked to write it when he was in San Luis Potosí as he claims, although it is unlikely that he actually started working on it before 1895, when he was already a student at the National Conservatory. 8.  Julián Carrillo, A través de la técnica musical (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1949), 114. 9. The conservatory enrollment form required students to specify the branch of music they wanted to pursue; Carrillo’s response was “Geige” (violin). “Inskriptionsregister,” Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Bibliothek/Archiv (A, I.2, 7774).

[8]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

substitute musician with the Gewandhaus.10 Carrillo remained in Leipzig until 1902, where he composed Requiem Op. 1 (1900), Suite No. 1 (1901) for orchestra, Sextet (1902), and Symphony No. 1 (1902).11 In 1900, he presented a paper about the conflicting names for musical pitches in different Western music traditions at the Paris International Music Congress. Two years later, in 1902, Carrillo left the Königliches Konservatorium12 ( 1.1) and moved to Belgium to continue violin lessons, now with Albert Zimmer, a former pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe, and to finish his degree at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Gand ( 1.2). In 1904, he graduated with distinction from the Conservatoire with a bachelor of music degree in violin performance.13 While in Belgium, Carrillo continued composing and

10. Claudius Böhm, archivist with the Gewandhausorchester, confirms that Carrillo “was at no time a member of the Gewandhaus Orchestra,” but he also suggests that “Carrillo may have played as a ‘student substitute’ at [the] Gewandhaus Orchestra [as] that was usual in Leipzig.” Claudius Böhm, electronic communications, January 6 and 8, 2014). 11.  According to the concert programs from the Konservatorium, two movements from the Sextet were premiered in 1902, not in 1901 as many of Carrillo’s biographies claim. “Konzertprogramme 14 Marz 1902,” Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Bibliothek/Archiv (A, III.1). 12.  The final report from the Königliches Konservatorium includes assessments of Carrillo as a composition student by Jadassohn and Carl Reinecke (who had to supply the last assessment since Jadassohn had died a year earlier), and as piano and violin student by Johannes Merkel and Hans Becker respectively. Although Jadassohn speaks highly of Carrillo’s accomplishments in composition and music theory while at the conservatory (“Mr. Carrillo is exceptionally talented; he works very hard, ambitiously, and diligently in the development of his craft […] Mr. Carrillo is currently one of my best students and has achieved a very high level of artistic maturity. One can predict a bright musical future for him if he continues his studies”), Merkel and Becker were not equally impressed with his performance as pianist and violinist. About his piano progress, Merkel wrote: “Despite his talent, Mr. Carrillo was not able to make any real progress because he spent too little time with [the piano] and attended lessons [only] sporadically. During the last semester he failed to take lessons altogether.” Regarding his violin development, Becker explained: “Mr. Carrillo is a better musician than he is a violinist. At the beginning he worked eagerly and regularly; later, however, he experienced continuous illness and was too occupied with his composition studies, and therefore was unable to significantly improve his ability.” See “Lehrer-Zeugniss 26 Marz 1902,” Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Bibliothek/Archiv (A, I.3, 7774/1). I thank Ekaterina Pirozhenko for the English translation of this document. 13. Carrillo’s biographies usually state that he won a violin competition in Belgium in 1904. This is a mistranslation of the Belgium official academic titles and credentials. In fact, Carrillo obtained a 1er Prix avec distinction at the 1904 concours of Albert Zimmer’s class. However, in the Belgium conservtory system, the concours is not a competition but rather the yearly obligatory examination for each class of performance students; the 1er Prix avec distinction refers to the bachelor’s degree with distinction, as opposed to the Hoger Diploma, which refers to the advanced diploma. This means that Carrillo was placed first, with a mention for distinction, among the students of Albert Zimmer’s 1904 class. Albert Jacobs also received a

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finished his first opera, Ossián (1902), String Quartet No. 1 in E flat major (1903), and Suite No. 2, “Los Naranjos” (1903). Upon his return to Mexico in 1904, Carrillo was appointed professor of harmony at the National Conservatory. For a few years, he focused on his teaching duties and avoided embarking on large-scale compositional projects. With the exception of his Symphony No. 2 (1907), most of the works he composed between 1904 and 1909 were small instrumental pieces (several written as tests for end-of-term examinations at the conservatory) and chamber music. In 1908, with the support of Casa Wagner, an important local music publishing house, Carrillo organized the Beethoven Orchestra (of which he was general director and conductor) and the Beethoven String Quartet (of which he was first violin); this marked the beginning of his career as a conductor. In 1909, he started composing his second opera, Matilde o México en 1810 (1910), a work to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican war for independence. The result was a patriotic drama meant to be premiered at the newly built National Theater as part of the great national celebrations of 1910 (see Chapter 3). But this was not meant to happen; the theater was not finished on time for the occasion and the social and cultural changes that came out of the Mexican Revolution that started at the end of that year prevented the work’s premiere.14 The nationalist fervor of 1910 also helps to explain the government decision, promoted by Justo Sierra, minister of education, to create a Canto a la bandera (Flag Anthem), a patriotic song to be sung by elementary schoolchildren around the country. Carrillo was chosen to set to music a poem by Rafael López, and thus he created an anthem that many Mexicans have sung ever since, although few know he is the composer. Even after the collapse of Porfirio Díaz’s regime in 1911, Carrillo remained a central figure in Mexico City’s cultural life. He was chosen to represent Mexico at the 1911 International Music Congress in Rome, where he presented a paper entitled “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica.” The essay explained the compositional ideal of motivic organicism that informs some of the works he had composed in the previous decade, including his first string quartet, the sextet, and

1er Prix avec distinction at the 1904 concours of Zimmer’s class ( 1.3). I am thankful to Dr. Roos Van Driessche, librarian at the Conservatorium Gent, for providing this information and clarification. Roos Van Driessche, electronic communication, January 17, 2014. 14.  Matilde was performed for the first time on September 30, 2010, during the celebrations for the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence, more than 100 years after its original scheduled premiere. See Chapter 3.

[10]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

his first two symphonies (see Chapters  2 and 6). Upon his return to Mexico, Carrillo threw himself into the composition of a large-scale work, Misa de Santa Catarina (1912), which would end a hiatus from composition of almost five years. After the military coup of February 13, 1913, against President Francisco I.  Madero, the new government headed by Victoriano Huerta appointed Carrillo as director of the National Conservatory. However, increasing opposition against Huerta’s undemocratic regime meant that Carrillo’s project to reform the school’s curricula had little support. Once Huerta was ousted from the presidency in 1914, Carrillo had to resign and eventually left the country in an exile of sorts. He and his family moved to New York City in December of that year, where he organized an orchestra with the almost “proto-Pan American” ideal of performing exclusively music by composers from the Americas.15 The American Symphony Orchestra played its first and only concert to mixed reviews on January 6, 1915, just weeks after Carrillo’s arrival in the city.16 Although he had great plans for himself and the orchestra, his inability to find a financial sponsor forced him to abort them. Carrillo also had difficulty securing ongoing work as a violinist and music teacher, a situation that damaged the family economically and eventually forced them to return to Mexico City in 1918. Back in Mexico he accepted a position as principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra (until 1924), and two years later the directorship of the National Conservatory again (until 1923). Between 1913 and 1918, Carrillo had spent most of his time dealing with administrative duties, navigating a politically charged territory, trying to make a living as a conductor in New  York City, and preparing for publication his Pláticas musicales (1913), Tratado sintético de contrapunto (1914), Tratado sintético de harmonía (1915), and Tratado sintético de instrumentación para orquesta y banda militar (1916). Only after his return to Mexico did he have time again to devote himself to composition. He 15.  María Cristina Mena describes Carrillo’s idea as follows: “In a waking vision he [Julián Carrillo] saw the Americas, North and South, become spiritually federated by the free evolution and jealous nurture of a music neither of North nor South, but of America; and he felt a prescience that that music of the Western world would assert its fountainhead, by the force of logic, in the United States.” See María Cristina Mena, “Julián Carrillo: The Herald of a Musical Monroe Doctrine,” Century Magazine 89 (November 1914–April 1915): 759. 16. For a study of Carrillo’s critical reception in New  York, see Christina Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez in New York, 1925–1932” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland-College Park, 2008), 27–30.

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composed his Misa del Sagrado Corazón in 1918, a number of chamber works in 1920, and his third opera, Xulitl, in 1921. In 1923, Carrillo published his article “Teoría del Sonido 13” (“Theory of the Thirteenth Sound”), the first public presentation of his ideas about microtonal music, a system he called Sonido 13 not after a specific sound beyond the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale at the core of the Western music system but rather as a metaphor for the subdivision of this system’s basic semitone interval; this subdivision implied scales with more than the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, thus the metaphoric name of Sonido 13. An English translation of this essay also appeared that year in the American journal Musical Advance and was republished in the Mexican newspaper El Universal on September 17, 1924. The newspaper version of the article was brought up in the midst of a heated public debate between Carrillo and an antagonistic group (Grupo de los 9 or Group of the Nine) of musicians and intellectuals who questioned his ideas and later challenged him to offer a practical example of them (see Chapter 5). As a result, Carrillo composed Preludio a Colón (1924) for soprano and chamber ensemble (see Chapter 4); the work was premiered at a concert organized by the newspaper El Universal. On February 15, 1925, Carrillo and a group of loyal students from the National Conservatory presented a concert of music based on quarters, eighths, and sixteenths of a tone. In order for microtonal intervals to be feasible, Carrillo had new instruments constructed, including a guitar fretted in quarter tones and an arpa-cítara (harp-zither) tuned in sixteenth tones. The concert featured music composed by Carrillo’s students Rafael Adame, Elvira Larios, and Soledad Padilla, as well as his own compositions, among them Preludio a Colón. In 1925, Carrillo and his group of musicians, which he named Grupo 13, toured the Mexican countryside playing concerts of microtonal music and promoting his ideas.17 Later that year, Carrillo decided to move his family back to New York City, a place whose vibrant musical life he thought would be ideal to promote what he, in tune with the rhetoric of the new revolutionary Mexican regime, came to call his Revolución del Sonido 13 (Thirteenth Sound Revolution).

17. The members of Carrillo’s first Grupo 13 included Rafael Adame, María Sebastiana Ahedo, José López Alvés, Manuel Ascencio, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, Flavio Carlos, Santos Carlos, Elvira Larios, Manuel León Mariscal, José López Flores, Vicente T. Mendoza, Tomás Ponce Reyes, Enrique Rodríguez, Marcelina Solís, Carlos Solís, Guadalupe Solís, Amalia Tamayo, José María Torres, and Ana María Valderrama. Most of them were students of Carrillo at the conservatory; many of them would achieve recognition as performers, composers, or musicologists in their own right.

[12]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

The publication of his theories by the Musical Advance had generated a certain interest in Carrillo’s microtonal music in New York City. Thus, a few months after the composer arrived in January 1926, the League of Composers invited him to present one of his works at a concert that would also include the premiere of Emerson Whithorne’s Saturday’s Child: An Episode of Color (1926), and the American premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s second twelve-tone composition, the Wind Quintet Op. 26. For the occasion, Carrillo composed a chamber work entitled Sonata casi fantasía (1926). The first movement was premiered at that concert, on March 13, 1926. Sometime after the event, the renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski asked Carrillo to organize a private performance of this piece for him; following the audition, the conductor requested that Carrillo compose a work for a microtonal ensemble and orchestral accompaniment in twelve tone equal temperament (12tET) to be played at one of the concerts of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra during the 1927 season. Carrillo re-arranged the first two movements of the Sonata casi fanasía into a concertante work for microtonal chamber ensemble and standard orchestra, and titled it Concertino (1927). The work was premiered by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Stokowski at Philadelphia’s Music Academy, on March 4, 1927, and played again three days later at Carnegie Hall in New York City ( 1.4). Despite this early success and Stokowski’s support, Carrillo’s dream of creating a long-lasting interest in his microtonal ideas never materialized. Worth noting is that in early 1930 Angel Reyes and the Grupo 13 de La Habana, the first group founded outside of Mexico to promote Carrillo’s ideas, gave a series of public and private concerts in New York.18 The group presented microtonal works by Reyes as well Carrillo, including Preludio a Colón, which Reyes’s group recorded for the first time that year for the Columbia Phonograph Company.19 Later in 1929, when the economic situation once again worsened for Carrillo and his family, they moved back to Mexico City. The 1930s was a decade of musical and technical exploration for Carrillo. Most of his compositions from those years show a composer trying to investigate the technical possibilities of his microtonal instruments, attempting to better theorize and systematize his microtonal ideas, struggling to develop a strong and well-defined musical style within 18.  Carrillo helped Reyes with the organization of these concerts. See letters from Angel Reyes to Julián Carrillo, June 3, 1928, and December 21, 1928; and a letter from Julián Carrillo to Angel Reyes, December 26, 1928. Letters kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 19. 13th Sound Ensemble of Havana, Preludio a Colón. Columbia Phonograph Company, 50216-D (1930).

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the new microtonal idiom, or experimenting with a variety of non-tonal scales (see Chapter 6). Also in that decade he began entertaining the idea of constructing a set of fifteen pianos tuned at different intervals, from whole tones down to sixteenth tones. This idea would take many years to realize; the first piano of the set, an instrument in third tones, was built by Federico Buschmann and presented in Mexico City on September 29, 1949. The complete set of what came to be known as Carrillo Pianos—also often called pianos metamorfoseadores (metamorphoser pianos)—was produced by Carl Sauter, a German piano-making company, and were only ready in 1958, when Carrillo presented them at the Brussels World’s Fair (see Chapter 8). Later that year, Carrillo offered a concert in Brussels that included his Concertino (1945) for cello in quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones and orchestra, as well as his Concertino (1958) for piano in third tones and orchestra, which was premiered on the occasion with his daughter, Dolores Carrillo, at the piano. Earlier in 1951, Carrillo reignited his collaboration with Leopold Stokowski who premiered Horizontes (1951), a symphonic poem for violin and cello in quarter and eighth tones, harp-zither in sixteenth tones, and orchestra with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on November 30 ( 1.5). Carrillo proposed Stokowski to play the American premiere of his Concertino for cello and orchestra; however, Stokowski, at the time involved with the Contemporary Music Society, replied that for the concert series of the society he needed a work for a smaller ensemble.20 Two years later, Carrillo composed Balbuceos (1960) for piano in sixteenth tones and chamber orchestra, which was premiered by Dolores Carrillo and Stokowski at a concert of the Contemporary Music Society of Houston that year. Figure 1.1 shows Carrillo in the early 1960s, towards the end of his life. In 1960, Carrillo traveled back to Paris to arrange for the recording of a series of LPs that included a wide spectrum of his musical output, from early works such as the first symphony and the first string quartet, to some of his latest compositions, such as his multi-movement microtonal string quartets (the recording project started in 1960 and finished in 1963). After returning to Mexico City, Carrillo embarked on the composition of several works for solo instruments, a series of atonal canons for undetermined instrumental ensembles, a second concerto for violin in quarter tones and orchestra, his last two string quartets in quarter tones, and his last major work, Segunda misa “a capella” en cuartos de tono (1965).

20.  Leopold Stokowsky, letter to Julián Carrillo, March 7, 1958. Archivo Julián Carrillo. Mexico City [San Luis Potosí].

[14]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Figure 1.1  Julián Carrillo in the early 1960s.

Carrillo died of cancer at his home in Mexico City on September 9, 1965 (  1.6).

PERFORMATIVE COMPOSITION AND SHIFTING EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODELS IN MUSIC RESEARCH

Knowledge is relational. We understand and make sense of the world around us by relating events and cultural and artistic manifestations to previous experiences that are already meaningful or at least familiar to us. This is true for our learning of everyday practical skills as well as our attempts to make sense of musical practices from the past. There is always a filter from the present that shapes this process. Recent critical scholarship has been concerned with attempts in traditional musicology to understand musical practices from the past according to how they fit contemporary musical ideologies, often creating the past retrospectively to validate the present. If such academic exercises have been crucial in

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privileging certain European musical repertories and practices while marginalizing others, it could not be otherwise in the case of musical scenes from the former colonies of Europe. The existing scholarship about Julián Carrillo is a good example of how assessing a postcolonial musical practice with mainstream academic criteria may lead to deep misunderstandings. Both scholars and music critics have referred to Carrillo’s early works as Romantic in the tradition of Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, or even Wagner and Richard Strauss; sometimes such statements were meant as paternalistic compliments (as if saying “Carrillo’s music is good because it follows the models and aesthetic criteria of the great German masters”); other times they were meant as critiques (as if saying “he is not an original composer,” “he was just imitating European models,” or “he is not quite Brahms”).21 The problem with such scholarship is its assumption that Carrillo’s music is either a good or bad imitation of Austro-German models; it fails to consider consumption as an active process that transforms what is consumed (Austro-German music aesthetics in the case of Carrillo) into different cultural artifacts whose meaning should be understood in relation to their specific cultural and historical circumstances, not in relation to how faithfully they follow (or if they follow) a specific aesthetic criteria. I argue that this is true for Carrillo as for most Latin American composers accused at one point or another of being imitators of European models—from Heitor Villa-lobos to Alberto Ginastera to Leo Brouwer. This is not to say that Carrillo did not share a musical rhetoric with late nineteenth-century European composers; he did, and it is obvious in the style of his early music, but he also transformed the modes of expression of that musical language into something that responded to his own musical, intellectual, cultural, and even political experience. These are instances of bricolage and performative composition that traditional musicological models do not account for. In the 1990s, Mary Louise Pratt and Diana Taylor reevaluated Fernando Ortiz’s classic notion of transculturation to describe “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture,”22 and to propose that “the theory of 21. See Benjamin, “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” 38–39; Béhague, Music of Latin America, 225; Otto Mayer-Serra, Panorama de la música mexicana:  desde la Independencia hasta la actualidad (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1941), 93; Robert Stevenson, Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952), 227–229. For journalistic reviews of the New York premiere of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1, see Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez,” 30–36. 22.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.

[16]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

transculturation is a political one in that it suggests the consciousness of a society’s own, historically specific, cultural manifestations [and] exemplifies the political positioning and repositioning of collectivities in their pursuit of empowerment.”23 I  subscribe to Pratt and Taylor’s notions of transculturation in order to look at the personal aesthetic choices of Julián Carrillo as individual exercises of agency within a larger quest for political, social, and cultural capital. I interpret his individual searches for aesthetic identity not only as a reflection of the specific social, cultural, and economic conditions he faced in Mexico but also as a sort of cognitive mapping that engaged individual consciousness, mainstream European aesthetic criteria, and artistic networking. As part of this reading, I take his compositional processes as performative acts in Judith Butler’s sense. Thus, the act of composition is understood as a performance of agency and an act of transfer that is both the expression of an idea and a form of conduct: the content of such a performative act can only be understood as the transculturizing action that makes it possible.24 According to J. L. Austin, the term performative “is derived, of course, from ‘perform,’ the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something.”25 It is after this early definition that I articulate my own endeavor to bring the notion of performativity into the act of composing musical works. I suggest that a musical text is the utterance of an individual consciously or unconsciously resolving the tensions within the web of ideologies that surrounds him or her, and also that individual’s actual, if temporary, meaningful solution to those conflicts. As such, the musical text becomes a map of an individual’s articulation of larger collective transculturation processes, while the individual composer could be taken as a “contact zone” in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense, a site where conflicting cultural paradigms meet and resolve their differences.26 The process of creating such a map is what I call “performative composition.” I argue that Carrillo at his desk, working out the details of a particular composition, was not only elucidating a unique musical style that resolved for him the contradictions of the musical discourses he was educated in, but also performing his musical persona by engaging and resolving these contradictions according to the 23.  Diana Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” Performing Arts Journal 38 (1991): 91. 24.  See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech:  A  Politics of the Performative (New  York: Routledge, 1997), 72–73. 25.  J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 6–7. 26. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6–7.

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unique cultural and historical circumstances, networks of identification, aspirations, and desires that gave meaning to his life.27 The concept of performative composition finds a precursor in Della Pollock’s notion of “performing writing.” For her, the act of writing “answers discourses of textuality not by recovering reference to a given or ‘old’ world but by writing into a new one,” taking “its value from the context-map in which it is located and which it simultaneously marks, determines, transforms.”28 In her interpretation, performing writing is the result of individual agencies that challenge the assumptions of dominant hegemonic discourses. The idea of performative composition rests on the premise that music is a system of signs that carries culturally produced meaning. When a composer writes a musical composition, his or her works become an individual solution to the aesthetic/ideological conflicts that surround him or her, making the composition meaningful not only as the aesthetic reflection of a sociocultural condition but also as the individual’s answer to the ambiguities of this condition. However, performative composition does not describe the development of an individual style within a mainstream aesthetic tendency; it rather illustrates the development of a style that contests tradition in ideologically contradictory or contested settings. Paraphrasing Pollock, performative composition writes the composer into a new world; it is the negotiation of an individual position in the multi-ideological context of a liminal condition. In sum, the idea of performative composition engages the notions of transculturation and performativity within a larger circuit that emphasizes their power in producing cultural meaning and identity in changing sociocultural circumstances. What is at stake in this project is an understanding that talking about the music of a composer like Julián Carrillo in terms of successful or failed imitation of European models reproduces the colonialist epistemological models that gave birth to musicology as a discipline and neglects to engage individual agency and consumption as the powerful, meaning-producing acts they are. In fact, Carrillo’s case is a prime example of how consumption, imagination, desire, and fantasy intersect in the development of a cosmopolitan style beyond the great European milieu.29 If Carrillo’s 27.  My use of the notion of “musical persona” as the nexus between subjectivity and performativity derives from Philip Auslander’s scholarship. See Philip Auslander, “Musical Personae,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 100–119. 28. Della Pollock, “Performing Writing,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 75 and 79. 29. For a discussion of the need to take into account consumption, imagination, desire, and fantasy in understanding less exclusive brands of cosmopolitanism, see Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style:  Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 13.

[18]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

cosmopolitanism—his sense of belonging to a cultural network beyond the nation or polis—is a postcolonial practice that, as Camilla Fojas would argue, “indulge[s]‌in the pleasures of experimentation, exploration, and discovery … and in creative practices spurred by ambitions for international cultural impact, [and] cultural independence,”30 it is precisely due to his productive consumption of European ideas. Those who criticize Carrillo for “not quite being Brahms” got something right—precisely, that Carrillo is not Brahms; and therefore it is as wrong to evaluate his music in terms of what Brahms’s music does as it would be to evaluate Brahms’s music in terms of what Carrillo’s does. Knowledge is relational, but passing scholarly judgment based on an injudicious relational model only reproduces the ill-informed power relations implied in the criteria of such a model. Thus, talking about Carrillo’s music in terms of imitation of Brahmsian models, although seemingly relevant according to an epistemological model that privileges the aesthetics of the Austro-German music traditions, not only misses what is actually important in Carrillo’s music but it also tacitly trivializes the unique cultural contingency that gives meaning to Brahms’s music. This book suggests that by establishing new relational interpretative networks that break away from the unidirectionality of the Eurocentric model (or that at least look at it critically) one can find new ways of understanding how the elements in these models acquire meaning in relation to each other as opposed to one in relation to the other. Such new relational models help one interpret seemingly unconnected events as parts of larger cultural complexes.

TOWARD A NON-LINEAR STUDY OF SONIDO 13 AS A CULTUR AL COMPLEX

In his critically acclaimed film The Mirror (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky offers a beautiful account of life and human relations as a kind of speculum memoriae, a mirror of memories in which ideas from the present, past, and future are reflected upon each other, collapsing into a non-diachronic yet not quite synchronic complex. In the film, as the narrative voice remembers his mother and himself as physically identical to his ex-wife and his 30. Camilla Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press, 2005), 3. Fojas argues this about Latin American modernista writers who, as I have argued elsewhere, shared Carrillo’s aesthetic concerns about renovation of language and cosmopolitanism; see Alejandro L. Madrid, Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2009), 88–89.

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son, respectively, Tarkovsky shows an almost oneiric world in which the past and its imagined future are impossible to remember without input from the present. Not only that, none of them can exist independently; they occur only in relation to each other. In The Mirror, isolated moments from the past, distant past, future, or present only make sense as memories created relationally to form a larger complex, a speculum memoriae embodied in the narrative voice’s account and imagination of his life. My approach to Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 is similar. It takes as point of departure the idea that one cannot make sense of the past without taking its imaginary futures and our present into consideration, and that even formulating questions that may eventually intend to help us understand that past is an action determined by a variety of cultural circumstances and events that have taken place after the phenomena we intend to study. In this conception, past and present are part of a complex that is performed as we establish the types of intermundane relations between them that our own experiences afford. What I call Tarkovsky’s speculum memoriae may find a parallel musical allegory in the technique of counterpoint and in the speculum musicae it often entails. Julián Carrillo’s use of cyclic motives that are continuously transformed into new musical material in his String Quartet in E flat major (see Chapter 6) could be heard as a metaphor of how ideas acquire new meanings according to their new contexts. Just as the same intervals and harmonic sequences create different moods and atmospheres in the different musical contexts of Carrillo’s multi-movement quartet, one could argue that musical works and musical ideas also lend themselves to different interpretations and emotional associations at different moments of reception. Carrillo’s adoption of European ideas was not simply an imitation; it was an appropriation that transformed them into new cultural forms that respond to the composer’s unique artistic and cultural milieu and that also allowed him to perform himself in the process. In a similar fashion, like the motives in his string quartet, Carrillo’s ideas, music, and legacy have been resignified in contemporary reception. These transformations are different levels of the cultural complex of Carrillo and Sonido 13. I  suggest approaching the study of this complex as one approaches the study of musical counterpoint, through fragmentation and re-assembling. Anyone who has studied counterpoint knows that the seemingly continual, unbroken flow of a piece of contrapuntal music is the result of careful and skillful assembling of motives and melodic sequences that are created as fragments. I propose to try to understand Carrillo and Sonido 13 by fragmenting it into small motives and establishing new relationships among them. To fully comprehend how a piece of contrapuntal

[20]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

music makes sense it is important not only to examine how the composer arranged the building blocks in the final version but how these building blocks may also be put together in different musical relations. I propose that a similar approach would allow us to better understand the ways in which different events in a cultural complex may relate to each other in our own understanding of them. Growing up in 1970s Mexico, I  was familiar with Julián Carrillo’s name. I also knew about his Sonido 13 through a very vague description in my junior high school music textbook and the educational cards and plates about Mexican music and musicians that, in our pre-Internet childhood, my friends and I used to buy at paper stores to illustrate our schoolwork (Figures 1.2 and 1.3);31 I also vaguely remember reading a biography of Carrillo for children when I was an adult (Figure 1.4). Nevertheless, it was a series of seemingly unconnected events in those years that allowed me to develop a more grounded idea of what Sonido 13 could mean. The first happened in the early 1980s when Guillermo Ochoa, the host of Hoy Mismo, a popular morning TV show, became the center of a media polemic. After broadcasting a musical performance of Sonido 13 music, Ochoa announced that the producer of the show had received a series of telephone calls from the audience, claiming that their pets went wild while the music was playing: dogs would not stop howling and canaries kept flying into the walls of their cages.32 In the second event, a high school trip to Mexico City’s Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium during my freshman year turned into a unique experience as the projection of moving quasars, clusters, and galaxies on the dome was accompanied by 31.  Musicologist Ricardo Miranda has taken these stamps and the mythologies they help create and reproduce as points of departure to critique the state of music research in Mexico and the absence of a musicological canon. See Ricardo Miranda, “Tesituras encontradas: canon y musicología en México o tres reflexiones sobre un juego de estampas,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 86 (2005): 95–96. Miranda dismisses these stamps as misinformation and laments that “those who make [them]—and what is worse, those who consume and reproduce them—will keep imagining anything” (96). I, on the contrary, take them as valid pieces of information precisely because they shape and guide the imagination of regular folks regarding these composers and their music. I am interested in these stamps and plates not for the accuracy or inaccuracy of the information they contain but for their power in informing the processes of resignifying these composers in the present, in guiding how people make them emotionally meaningful in their everyday lives, and, unavoidably, in coloring these individuals’ perception of the past when they eventually embark on journeys of historical discovery that often imply self-discovery. In sum, I am interested in these stamps and other forms of popular representations for their role in shaping Sonido 13 as a performance complex. 32. Severo Mirón, “Estrella Newman, Memo Ochoa, don Julián Carrillo y el escándalo de los animales excitados y muertos,” El Sol de México, February 5, 1982.

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Figure  1.2 Stamp of Julián Carrillo. The back includes a brief biographical sketch. Ediciones RAF.

the unexpected live sounds of two microtonal harps. The third event was a performance I attended by pure chance in Mexico City in which a harpist and a guitarist played a set of Sonido 13 pieces in a bizarre, almost New Age, neo-Aztec spiritualist setting that included copal burning and paintings of Carrillo wearing Moctezuma’s headdress. These events were fundamental cultural filters that gave me a very specific conception of Sonido 13—similar to the response of many other youngsters from my generation, as I would learn later during my fieldwork; this early impression could never be completely erased even when my later research showed me Carrillo’s musical project in a completely different light. In Mexico, where one may hear Sonido 13 proudly referred to as a “Mexican invention” in the belief that Sonido 13 is actually a specific sound, one should ask how the relationships of these moments generate an imaginary meaning of Sonido 13. Some of these events would not be considered part of a traditional, chronological, linear history of Mexican music; and those that may acquire meaning for their listeners [22]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Figure 1.3  Mexican composers. Julián Carrillo appears in the second row of the second column. Ediciones Sun Rise.

in relation to the events that precede and follow them in space and time, consciously or unconsciously establish relationships in our memories. I suggest that a new way to look at and relate these moments to each other and to Carrillo’s own aesthetic discourse would help scholars question the linear narratives of traditional musicology, where meanings for specific events are viewed as being contiguous through

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Figure 1.4  Cover of Biografías para niños: Julián Carrillo.

time and filtered through Eurocentric aesthetic criteria. Associating events separated in space and time would not only force us to question the meaning of these moments themselves but also to re-imagine our very objects of study. These new relational strategies require a different approach to musicology. Instead of asking about the nature of music and its “intrinsic” meaning, this strategy inquires about the types of relationships necessary for “the musical” to happen, and the places and moments when it acquires meaning. I argue that such questions look into the social processes that define musicians and audience members both in their individual actions and their relations through time. A non-linear relational model would consider musical phenomena in terms of cultural performance complexes and would study what occurs in the many moments and circumstances when music happens instead of restricting the musical experience to works and composers. Considering music in this new way takes in the multiplicity of spaces and instants when music happens and acquires meaning, from the locus of production or composition and performance to its reception, the

[24]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

marketing processes that regulate its circulation, and the different relational networks among them. In other words, this is a story about how, as Tia de Nora would put it, “music comes to be significant in relation to particular moments, under particular circumstances.”33 By changing the focus from the study of historical musical figures and musical texts with absolute value and meaning to examining the processes by which sounds and their makers produce meaning through time and under very specific social and personal circumstances, I suggest that the space-time continuum in which these practices occur is also an invention of the historical narratives under question. Dissecting these narratives is fundamental to understanding how musical meaning is created transhistorically and relationally. I propose a transhistorical method of analysis that relates events in non-linear ways and in which narrative structure emanates from the complexity of the process being studied. This type of narrative not only tries to tell a story about a cultural performance complex from within that complex but it also brings the reader into the sometimes chaotic relation of events and materials that create it, showing how narrative and reading give it contingent sense, cohesion, and meaning. Music and musical experience are shaped by production, consumption, and distribution, a milieu often richer than perhaps intended by composers or performing musicians. To understand them, one needs to approach their analysis in non-linear ways, trying to establish relations between events that seem unconnected in the space-time continuum. The idea of this transhistorical method was inspired by Julián Carrillo’s own practices of writing about his music. Carrillo kept rewriting his articles, recomposing and re-cataloguing his music throughout his life—for example, going back and changing musical compositions ten, twenty, or thirty years after they were first composed or premiered. As a consequence, it would be quite hard to consider any versions of these articles or music as definitive. In fact, to consider any of them as definitive would obscure something very important about how these changes made that music or the ideas presented in those articles meaningful for Carrillo at different moments of his life. Carrillo’s artistic and intellectual practice pointed toward an ongoing creation of meaning that could not be explained through traditional synchronic or diachronic approaches. This finding inspired me to develop a narrative technique that moves through the past, present, and future of Carrillo as a cultural performance complex 33.  Tia de Nora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.

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to reflect how their meanings at different historical moments become filters through which we look at that cultural manifestation in the present. A transhistorical approach emphasizes that in the construction of the meaning of a cultural performance complex, past, present and future disappear when the reader is situated inside the narrative of that complex. This is a fundamental difference between my approach and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s in In 1926, where he also places the reader within the object of study.34 For him, the goal was to re-present an environment from the past in the present; the central point of my approach is to destabilize the space-time of the chronological history. The transhistorical approach does not attempt to re-present the past; instead, it proposes that in every transhistorical dynamic system future, past and present inform each other mutually and continuously. The type of temporal relations that this approach deals with are even more complex in the case of music since, as Carl Dahlhaus suggests, music in a historical context is not just a document from the past; it has a life as music in the present.35 A transhistorical approach may help the reader understand that it is precisely the re-signification of artifacts and ideas from the past in the present that makes them so emotionally powerful and relevant. It is in this sense that I consider this project to be informed by the so–called affective turn in the humanities and social sciences.36

JULIÁN CARRILLO AND SONIDO 13 AS A PERFORMANCE COMPLEX

Many cultural narratives shape how individuals understand their present as well as their past. The narratives about Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 that some Mexicans have inherited or created through their exposure to popular culture (such as the events I mentioned previously) condition how moments in the past, in which Carrillo was a main actor, are understood and imagined today. I have suggested that instead of trying to eradicate these narratives in an attempt to “truly” understand events in the past we should read them through these narratives in new ways in order to understand Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 as a performance complex. The 34. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926:  Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), xi–xii. 35. Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B.  Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4. 36.  See Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[26]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

narrative organization of the chapters in this book reflects these ideas; they all start from assessments of contemporary reception and representations of Carrillo and Sonido 13 and move backward to put past and present into new productive dialogues. Before providing brief summaries of each of the chapters I would like to offer a few words about the use of music analysis throughout the book. With the exception of Chapter 6, in which music analysis is part of the argument in determining style and in suggesting listening strategies, the analysis is intended to provide evidence in support of larger intellectual arguments and should not detract readers unfamiliar with this specific musical vocabulary from following these discussions. The chapters are structured so that any reader having difficulties with the analysis may skim through or skip certain parts without losing the main ideas and evidence informing the argument or its trajectory. This is not to say that such passages are unimportant; clearly, a full comprehension of the analytical discussions of the music will significantly enrich the readers’ experience and understanding of the materials. In the historiography of Mexican music, Carrillo’s early works have been accused of being mere imitations of European models. These allegations have resulted in his exclusion from the post-revolutionary Mexican music canon and are fundamental in the assessment of him and his tonal music as unoriginal that has prevailed for over a century. Chapter 2 begins with a critical genealogy of these allegations, taking them as points of departure to show the development of the composer’s musical style as tacitly contesting traditional models from the Austro-German art music tradition. After its Mexican premiere, Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 was criticized for being “too European.” Throughout the twentieth century, critics and scholars with this view prevented Carrillo’s work from being discussed in relation to Mexican or Latin American identities. However, a detailed textual analysis of the music score and a comparative study of Carrillo’s writings at the time show the complex socio-historic circumstances that surrounded the symphony’s composition and prove it is not a mere copy of European models as it has been argued. Invoking the notion of performative composition as an analytical tool, this chapter shows that the representations of Carrillo and his music as inauthentic were products of the political and ideological circumstances that pervaded Mexican society in the early twentieth century, and they have been reproduced thereafter by music critics and musicologists to support equally essentialist discourses in politics and in the arts. Chapter 3 centers around Matilde, the opera Carrillo composed for the celebrations of the 1910 centennial of Mexican Independence. A patriotic

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work in the tradition of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Carrillo’s opera tells the story of a forbidden love between Matilde, the daughter of a Spanish captain, and León, a young patriot plotting against the Spanish crown, that ends tragically with both characters dying. This dramatic tale of love and death is used by the composer as an allegory of the symbolic struggles Mexicans had to go through for their country to be born. Matilde was meant to play a central role in the celebration and solidification of the liberal mythology of fin-de siècle Mexico; however, the advent of the Mexican revolution in 1910 (itself another transformation of the national imaginary) put an end to these efforts. Taken as a symbol of pre-revolutionary Mexico, the opera was not performed until the celebration of the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence in 2010. This celebration was organized under the aegis of the conservative government that took power back from the revolutionary regime at the 2000 elections. Carrillo composed Matilde to interpellate his audience as Mexican within the positivist ideology of “order and progress” favored in early twentieth-century liberal Mexico. However, its production in 2010, along international calls to label the country a “failed state,” speaks of a more contested understanding of Mexican identity and the relation between citizenship and the neo-liberal nation-state under globalization. Based on music analysis and informed by the history of ideas, this chapter takes Matilde as a musical ritual that allows for the metaphorical re-articulation of a variety of national imaginaries in the processes of composition, performance, and reception. It argues that if the death of Matilde and León was a symbolic sacrifice necessary for imagining the birth of a nation in 1910, its 2010 premiere could be read as a distressed call for its post-national transfiguration. The fourth chapter explores the position of Carrillo’s microtonal system within the general crisis of language that characterized Modernism in the early twentieth century, but also within particular searches for collective and individual modern identities in 1920s Mexico. The study centers around an in-depth analysis of Preludio a Colón that borrows from post-Schenkerian theory in an attempt to show that stylistic development in Carrillo’s microtonal music is a direct consequence of the problems of style and ideas that permeated the Modernist music of the German tradition in the early twentieth century (a tradition that had nurtured Carrillo as a student) but also how some of these early microtonal compositions already start deviating from that tradition. The chapter proposes that Carrillo’s position as an outsider to the German tradition allowed him to conceive his microtonal style as a continuation of that tradition—even when critical analysis of stylistic features in his music may contradict this discourse—but also as a reflection of his individuality and his position

[28]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

in a non-European society. If, in his writings, Carrillo presented himself as continuing the Austro-German tradition, a close reading of his music reveals a process more complex than mere imitation. This chapter returns to the idea of performative composition to show that creative appropriation played a determinant role in the development of Carrillo’s microtonal system. It shows that although the creation of Sonido 13 responds to a search for distinction within changing local political circumstances in Mexico City, its early stylistic development responded mostly to personal aspirations of cosmopolitanism. While Carrillo’s egotistic and confrontational personality was detrimental in his securing the interest of the Mexican mainstream for Sonido 13, it has also worked as a powerful magnet to attract new, unconventional followers after his death, followers who often admire in him a sense of idealism, integrity, and conviction. Instead of focusing on the philosophical and aesthetic implications of Carrillo’s rhetoric—as done in Chapter  4—Chapter  5 has a twofold goal:  to explore his personality through an assessment of his rhetorical strategies and to provide a description of the place of Sonido 13 among other alternative tuning and microtonal systems developed during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter opens with an exploration of Carrillo’s current currency on the web and blogosphere to show the power of his rhetoric among contemporary followers before moving into a historical exploration of how that same oratory prevented the composer from developing artistic and intellectual networks during his lifetime. An exploration of the debate between Carrillo and the musicians who criticized his early microtonal ideas in 1924 is the point of departure for a study of Carrillo’s rhetoric about science, rationality, and progress in relation to the ideas of nature, natural “law,” and revolution that dominate the composer’s apology of microtonalism. The chapter also offers an explanation of the technical intricacies of Sonido 13 as a way to discuss Carrillo’s ideological differences and similarities with other branches of microtonalism and just intonation systems. The sixth chapter focuses on an exceptional body of works within Carrillo’s large output, his thirteen string quartets. This is a repertory that has received little attention from performers and musicologists even though it is a unique collection of major works for string quartet. Written between 1903 and 1964, these quartets are multi-movement works that show the diversity of aesthetic tendencies developed and embraced by the composer during his long artistic career. From the conservative tonal idiom of his early music at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Modernist atonal works of the 1930s and 1940s to the arguably

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uncompromising microtonal avant-gardism of his last compositions in the 1960s, Carrillo’s many artistic voices speak loud and clear through this music. Furthermore, being a violin player, Carrillo knew perfectly well how to write for strings and was able to push the technical limits of the ensemble while remaining always distinctly idiomatic. These compositions show the transformations of Carrillo’s musical language and its continuities and discontinuities with the mainstream Western art music tradition, especially early twentieth-century composers like Schoenberg, Debussy, and Scriabin, and mid-twentieth-century avant-gardists like Xenakis and Ligeti. Music analysis is central in discussing these ideas, but rather than using it as a tool to identify a type of univocal musical meaning emanating from the music scores, my intention is to suggest possible routes for productive listening that defy the uninformed reductionist critique Carrillo’s music conventionally receives. Chapter  7 studies three Mexican subcultures developed by former pupils of Carrillo that have resignified the composer’s rhetoric about microtonality within new artistic and philosophical contexts, thus shaping how Sonido 13 has been imagined in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century. Based on oral histories and archival work, this chapter analyzes the activities of David Espejo, Oscar Vargas Leal, Armando Nava, Estrella Newman, Jorge Echevarría, Ramón Guerrero, Tino Contreras, and Marisa de Lille in taking Sonido 13 out of the classical concert halls and developing new audiences by offering recitals at alternative venues such as public squares, rock festivals, planetariums, popular morning TV shows, or neo-indigenist spiritual happenings. By analyzing the trajectories of Sonido 13 after the death of its founder, this chapter shows how these musicians took a musical oddity, a sort of footnote in Mexican cultural history, transformed it into a significant living experience, and gave it a completely new and different meaning in the process. The chapter closes with an intermundane exploration of the past that borrows Robert Solomon’s notion of naturalized spirituality to bring together Carrillo’s discussion about rationality and natural law with the neo-indigenous spirituality of Newman, de Lille, Contreras, and Echevarría, and the link between cosmos and microtonalism in Vargas, Espejo, and Nava’s concerts at Mexico City’s planetarium. I argue that it is precisely the notion of spirituality in the musical activities of Newman, de Lille, Contreras, Echevarría, Vargas, and Nava that explains and ties together the ambiguous place of religious music in Carrillo’s catalogue, some of the most puzzlingly mystical reviews of his music, and the seeming contradictions between a positivistic rhetoric and curious moments of transcendentalism in the composer’s writings.

[30]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Finally, Chapter 8 takes Carrillo’s microtonal pianos as a point of departure to explore the experiences of contemporary musicians  —Martine Joste, Jimena Giménez Cacho, José Luis Navarro, and Carmina Escobar among others— who have recently performed on these instruments or played the composer’s music. By analyzing the ways in which these musicians had to challenge their instrumental and vocal techniques and re-educate their ears in order to play this music, the chapter theorizes the materiality of Sonido 13 in relation to the musicians’ sensory experience and the performing body. The argument pays particular attention to the corporeal experience of performing and relating to Carrillo’s music and what acquiring such proficiency means in terms of expanding the epistemological limits of traditional Western music training. The discussion engages the ways in which such performances re-articulate existing representations of Sonido 13 in the Mexican imagination and work as canvases upon which young audiences can project their own desires and fantasies about this music.

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CH AP TER   2

Imitation, Ideology, Performativity, and Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1

C

ritics as well as contemporary musicians and musicologists have often referred to Julián Carrillo’s pre-microtonal music as duplicative of late nineteenth-century Austro-German symphonic formalist music. These opinions are expressed from various perspectives, sometimes as harsh criticism against a perceived lack of originality, sometimes as paternalistic praise for Carrillo’s compositional talent. In his 1979 survey of Latin American music, Gerard Béhague states that Julián Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 was just “an example of a work modeled on Brahms.”1 Béhague’s opinion was probably based on one of the few studies of Carrillo’s music available to him in English in the 1970s, Gerald Benjamin’s essay “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece’ ” (1967) in which the author states that the symphony’s movements are “typical of Brahms, the romantic classicist.”2 The Mexican musicologist Yolanda Moreno Rivas somehow echoes this reading when she states that the same symphony “seems to suggests a mestizo Mendelssohn or sweetened Wagner.”3 A casual listening of Carrillo’s early music would support this assessment; not only does Carrillo make use of the classical forms and compositional devices of the Austro-German music tradition, but indeed, the contour, shape, and gestural characteristics of his melodies often remind the listener of Wagner. However, by providing 1.  Gerard Béhague, Latin American Music:  An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 225. 2. Gerald Benjamin, “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” Yearbook of the Inter American Institute for Musical Research, Vol. 3 (1967), 39. 3. Yolanda Moreno Rivas, La composición en México en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 36.

an analysis of tonal and formal structural relations in his Symphony No. 1, this chapter shows that these similarities are superficial façades that mask important ideological differences. Two sections precede, anticipate, and provide a framework for the musical analysis of the symphony. The first one offers a genealogy of the representations of Carrillo as an imitator of Austro-German models that shows the political character of these discourses within the process of post-revolutionary canon construction. The second one explores the ideologies Carrillo encountered in Leipzig during his years of study to illuminate the aesthetic struggles that may have influenced the development of musical style in his Symphony No. 1 (1902).

A GENEALOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS

We can trace the origin of the representation of Carrillo as a composer solely interested in copying imported models to Melesio Morales’s review of the Mexican premiere of his first symphony. Morales, who had been Carrillo’s composition teacher at the Conservatorio Nacional prior to his training in Leipzig, published this review in El Tiempo on June 27, 1905: Julián Carrillo, a hard-working man and a musician full of dreams, is following a laudable ideal that deserves better luck; he cultivates serious music con amore—and what a mistake! He keeps in his briefcase several compositions based on the narcotic, thematic symphonic development of musical discourse, divided in the three or four typical “movements,” in the classical style. Regarding the author’s predilection for German instrumental music, having studied in Leipzig, it is clear that the music is filled with such style; which fortunately is not Wagner’s, since this composer did not write any chamber music. The compositions I heard at the Arbeu Theater reveal and denounce a composer interested in imitating the great masters of the classical school. … Of course, Carrillo’s music is not totally original nor is it the result of plagiarism, it is merely a deliberate “imitation of style.” The will of the author accomplished most of it, the rest was the result of his inspiration, which is, naturally, melodic and Creole, with a national flavor. When composing in the German style, the Mexican maestro involuntarily discovers that the pronunciation and the accent of the language itself are as unfamiliar to him as they are to his fellow Mexicans; it is music they can neither taste nor enjoy.4

4.  Melesio Morales, “Julián Carrillo,” El Tiempo, July 27, 1905. Reprinted in Aurea Maya, ed., Melesio Morales (1838–1908):  labor periodística (Mexico City:  CENIDIM, 1994), 147–151.

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Morales belonged to a long tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican composers, trained in Italy and France, who preferred salon music (waltzes, mazurkas, gavottes, marches) and the bel canto style of Italian opera over the organicism of formalist German symphonic compositions. Morales’s distaste of German music was a bias that necessarily influenced his criticism of Carrillo’s symphony. Although Morales’s review acknowledged a certain degree of originality in Carrillo’s music, it was the idea that he had imitated the German style that gave birth to the mistaken discourse that has since developed for a variety of political and artistic reasons. The difficult personal relationship between Carrillo and Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) in the 1920s and 1930s, the period of national and institutional reconstruction that followed the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), is also fundamental in reproducing the discourse about the former composer as an imitator of foreign styles. In fact, the first public confrontation between Carrillo and Chávez took place around 1920, when Carrillo was conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. According to Carrillo’s recollection, the problem started when José Vasconcelos, then minister of education, requested his permission for Chávez to rehearse one of Chávez’s new compositions with the orchestra. Carrillo wrote the following: Chávez had more than twenty rehearsals and was still unable to conduct the orchestra. His lack of ability was evident; a boy with mediocre knowledge could have done it in two rehearsals. I was disturbed by the waste of time and told him: “look young man, I believe it would be practical if you first take some conducting lessons, then you can go on with your work.”5

The relationship between Carrillo and Chávez was problematic from the outset, but it reached its most tense moments in the early 1930s, when Chávez, excused and sheltered by the post-revolutionary enthusiasm for nationalistic compositions, viciously attacked Carrillo and other pre-revolutionary composers, questioning their musical representation of national identity. In 1930, embracing the nationalist spirit expressed in the guidelines of the Partido Nacional Revolucionarios (Mexico’s ruling party and the forerunner of the later Partido Revolucionario Institucional), Carlos Chávez published an article in the weekly Domingos Culturales6 that both established publicly the ideological basis of the new 5.  Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, ed. Dolores Carrillo (San Luis Potosí: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992), 172. 6.  The party’s official guidelines emphasized that “foreign music whose morbid character depresses the spirit of our people must be eliminated absolutely. We do not

[34]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

nationalist Mexican music and rejected the aesthetic credo of the older generation of composers: Today, after living the new phases of the 1910 Mexican revolution that have been decisive in establishing our own criteria and culture, musical nationalism in Mexico could be determinedly channeled. [Mexican nationalism] should be considered the fruit of a balanced mestizaje in which the personal expression of the artist is not absorbed by Europeanism or by Mexican regionalism. We should recognize our own, temporally eclipsed tradition. We should get soaked in it, having personal contact with the indigenous and mestizo expressions of our soil, without forgetting European music—which is universal human culture—but not through the perception of German and French conservatories as it has been done up to this day, but through its multiple manifestations, since antiquity. We deny the professionalist [sic] music composed in Mexico before us because it is not the fruit of a true Mexican tradition.7

Chávez’s rejection of pre-revolutionary music was even more specific in an article he published in 1932. The target of Chávez’s attack could not be more specific considering that Carrillo was the only Mexican composer trained in Leipzig: It is not true that we are trying to destroy the academicians. What destroys them is the indifference of our times towards them. In Mexico, we no longer buy that; outside of Mexico, who in Germany would be interested in the music of a Mexican who imitates the German masters? Our eminent academicians have spent the best years of their lives studying in Leipzig, learning to write suites and symphonies in the German style; here and in Germany we prefer Bach, we prefer the genuinely German; that is all.8

In these two articles, Chávez reproduced the core of Melesio Morales’s 1905 criticism of Carrillo’s post-Leipzig compositions, repeating the idea that his music was nothing but an imitation of foreign models with find sufficient reason to prefer foreign genres when we possess a unique richness in national arts, songs that have no equal and that are the direct expression of popular soul.” Partido Nacional Revolucionario, Domingos Culturales, July 8, 1930, 6. Quoted in Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 119. 7.  Carlos Chávez, “La música propia de México,” Música. Revista Mexicana 1, no. 7 (1930). Reprinted in Carlos Chávez, Escritos periodísticos (1916–1939), ed. Gloria Carmona (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional, 1997), 168. 8.  Carlos Chávez, “Composición musical,” El Universal, January 23, 1932. Reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, 195.

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the addition of a few new elements that allowed him to support a political agenda based on an essentialist understanding of Mexican identity. Artists, intellectuals, private entrepreneurs, and government officials alike adopted this essentialist perspective to support the idea that Mexico’s indigenous heritage was the true, authentic source of Mexican identity. This new argument attempted to sever the obvious links and continuities between the past and the revolutionary regime, and create a new discourse of nationality. Carrillo’s music (which refused to adopt the folklorist tone that made the music of composers like Manuel M. Ponce, Carlos Chávez, and Silvestre Revueltas so popular) and the composer himself (whose music education in Europe had been financed by the pre-revolutionary regime) did not have a place in the new ideology and were systematically excluded from concerts and academic discussions. In 1941, Otto Mayer-Serra published Panorama de la música mexicana. At the time, this book was the most important history of Mexican music written after the Mexican revolution. The text, following a teleological understanding of history, claims that the nationalist movement reflected the maturity reached by Mexican music through its affiliation with the nationalist ideology of the revolution. The book became an apology for the hegemonic discourse current in Mexico at the time, and as such, it reproduced the older criticism against Carrillo by largely excluding him from the history of Mexican art music. Mayer-Serra’s book has only this mention of Carrillo: Foreign influences on Mexican music culminated with [Ricardo Castro]. The composers that followed him on that path, such as Julián Carrillo, Rafael J. Tello, and others, did not do anything but introduce new European elements—the style of Wagner and Strauss, or French Impressionism—without achieving a genuine and representative art.9

It is important to notice three things: first, Mayer-Serra had lived in Mexico for only three years at the time he wrote his book; second, the majority of his informants were composers who in one way or another were associated with post-revolutionary musical culture (Silvestre Revueltas, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, Luis Sandi, Blas Galindo, among others); and third, the book was written under the auspices of Alfonso Reyes and El Colegio Nacional—the former Casa de España, an institution created by Republican Spaniards in exile, whose revolutionary ideology resonated 9.  Otto Mayer-Serra, Panorama de la música mexicana: desde la Independencia hasta la actualidad (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1941), 93.

[36]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

with the leftist discourse of the Mexican government. Considering all these circumstances, Mayer-Serra’s endorsement of the dominant ideology in his adopted country and his exclusion of a composer frequently associated with the pre-revolutionary regime should not come as a surprise. Mayer-Serra’s interpretation excludes Carrillo from the history of Mexican music on the same basis established by Chávez ten years earlier and Morales thirty-five years before that: for not being “Mexican” enough, at least not according to the folklorist-essentialist canons that dominated Mexican political life in the 1930s and 1940s. If it is uncanny that these representations of Carrillo’s output and activities survived for almost a century, it is more astonishing that current scholarship has failed to reevaluate his production in light of contemporary social and cultural criticism. In her doctoral dissertation, Leonora Saavedra explains her decision to exclude Carrillo from her discussion of identity and Mexican music in the 1920s: Carrillo chose not to participate in the processes around nationalism and modernism. At the end of the day, Carrillo is also different from the Mexican composers whom I  discuss [Manuel M.  Ponce, Carlos Chávez, and Silvestre Revueltas] in that he is not a multi-centered subject: he belongs in the history of German music. Or rather I should say: he belongs in the history of Mexican music precisely because he is a Mexican composer who belongs in the history of another country’s music.10

Saavedra still denies Carrillo a place in the nationalist and Modernist fervor that pervaded the Mexican arts in the 1920s and 1930s on the basis of his music being “German” and not “Mexican.” Saavedra’s assessment is particularly intriguing as it leaves a door open for understanding Carrillo’s cosmopolitan aspirations—as expressed in the way he engaged the Austro-German music tradition and how he used it to carve a unique niche for himself in early twentieth-century Mexican musical life—as a fundamental aspect of Mexican culture. In other words, when Saavedra states that a Mexican composer could not have a place in the history of Mexican music because he belongs in the history of another country’s music, she tacitly recognizes the narrowness of a nationalist rhetoric that defines mexicanidad as an authentic essence devoid of foreign influences. Ultimately, this genealogy shows that what may have prevented Carrillo’s

10.  Leonora Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others:  Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics of Modern Mexican Art Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 16.

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music from having a lasting presence in the Mexican music scene (both in academia and the concert hall) was a combination of specific political miscalculations and the fact that the composer’s aesthetics (first his German formalism and later his Modernist Sonido 13)  remained consistently at odds with those privileged by the country’s mainstream.

ENCOUNTERING AND MAKING SENSE OF AUSTRO - GERMAN MUSICAL IDEOLOGIES

During the second half of the nineteenth century, two philosophical and aesthetic positions polarized the Austro-German musical discourse. On the one side, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and their followers—considered by some to be the progressive wing of this debate—championed music based on extra-musical meaning and associations, such as the opera and symphonic poem. This group of composers and musicians understood musical form as contingent to narrative and representational elements beyond the pure sonic experience of the music. On the other side, Johannes Brahms and the formalists—labeled as the “classicist” wing of the controversy—preferred music not subordinated to “words (as in song), to drama (as in opera), to some representational meaning (as in program music), and even to the vague requirements of emotional expression.”11 Although Richard Wagner coined the term “absolute music” in 1846,12 it was in the writings of Romantic German philosophers like E.T.A. Hofmann, J. G. Herder, Ludwig Tieck, and W. H. Wackenroder that it was first described and developed as a type of purely instrumental music of alleged eternal relevance.13 For them, absolute music was the ideal state of musical art; their creed emphasized that formal structures were the basis for a “purely musical” experience in which form stood for the only content of music. In the mid-nineteenth century, heated controversies, personal accusations, and conflicting political positioning made almost impossible to reconcile the two groups. However, by the end of the century this debate was cooling off throughout the German-speaking world; the symphonic works of composers like Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Max Reger 11. Roger Scruton, “Absolute Music,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. I, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 36. 12.  Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 18. 13.  Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 6.

[38]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

(1873–1916), and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) show how composers transcended and came to terms with many of these apparently irreconcilable positions. As Arnold Schoenberg would put it, “What in 1883 seemed an impassable gulf was in 1897 no longer a problem.”14 Nevertheless, the debate still informed the more conservative musical life in Leipzig when Carrillo arrived there as a student in 1899. Leipzig’s musical life had been largely defined under the influence of the formalist Brahmsian tradition, a tendency that continued even toward the end of the nineteenth century. At the Königliches Konservatorium der Musik, the two more influential composition professors were Carl Reinecke (1824–1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1831–1902), well-known champions of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, and largely indifferent to the music of Wagner.15 Besides his post at the Konservatorium, Reinecke was also the director of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig from 1860 until 1895, when Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922), a Hungarian-born conductor equally interested in Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, and Wagner, replaced him. The programs of the Gewandhausorchester show that change was coming slowly but steadily to the Leipzig music scene of the late 1890s.16 At the Konservatorium, Carrillo studied with Jadassohn. Although today, Jadassohn is a rather obscure reference in German music history texts, he was one of the most respected and popular pedagogues in fin-de siècle Leipzig.17 Beate Hiltner affirms that “his classes and those [offered] by his colleague, Ernest Friederich Richter, had the largest number of [enrolled] students in the conservatory.”18 According to Julián Carrillo, one of the basic textbooks in Jadassohn’s harmony class was his own Harmonie Lehrbuch (1883).19 This book sheds light on Carrillo’s training while he studied in Leipzig.

14.  Arnold Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive,” in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 53. 15.  Beate Hiltner states that “Jadassohn’s enthusiasm for Richard Wagner’s music was rather passive and [Wagner’s music] did not have much effect on him.” See Beate Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn:  Komponist, Musiktheoretiker, Pianist, Pedagogue. Ein Dokumentation über einen vergassen Leipziger Musiker des 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1995), 150. 16. The programs are reproduced in Johannes Former, Andreas Göpfert, Fritz Hennenburg, Brigitte Eichter, and Ingeborg Singer, Die Gewandhaus-Konzert zu Leipzig (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag, 1981), 413–418. 17.  Beate Hiltner states that “during his lifetime, Jadassohn had an entry in the dictionary Literary Leipzig. His entry was as long as that of his colleague Reinecke.” See Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn, 151. 18. Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn, 151. 19. Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 86.

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Harmonie Lehrbuch is not just a harmony manual in the technical sense but also a powerful defense of formalist and absolute music, as observed in the last two chapters: “On the Musical Hearing” and “Subject-Matter and Form.” In the latter, Jadassohn remarks: We have grown accustomed to accepting the terms “subject-matter and form” solely in this sense, and thus they serve both the teacher and the musical reporter as makeshift in the critical analysis of a piece of music. Still, on examining the matter with closer attention, the question first forces itself upon us:  Can the “form” and the “subject-matter” really be distinguished in this manner, and can we conceive them, let us say, as something external and internal? The answer will of course be negative. Both naturally belong together; for how and where can form and subject-matter be separated—what makes the subject-matter, what is the form—is the subject-matter not itself the form or, reversely, is the form not itself the subject-matter?20

Jadassohn’s argument reminds the reader of the ideas that German philosophers had emphasized in developing the notion of absolute music. His apology of form as content is a clear articulation of the ideas that Eduard Hanslick, the most prominent German formalist critic, had formulated in Von Musikalisch-Schönen (1854): If now we ask what should be expressed by means of this tone-material, the answer is musical ideas. But a musical idea brought into complete manifestation in appearance is already self-subsistent beauty; it is in no way primarily a medium or material for the representation of feelings or conceptions. The content of music is tonally moving forms.21

As a student of Jadassohn, in the very conservative environment of the Konservatorium, Carrillo was likely educated within a culture of absolute music. His later writings in favor of a supposed superiority of instrumental music over opera are clearly informed by the formalist ideas of his teacher. The following passage from “Sinfonía y ópera” (1909) reflects this influence: Assuming—and this is no small assumption—that symphony composers and opera composers are equally good musicians, OPERA MUSIC WILL ALWAYS 20. Salomon Jadassohn, A Manual of Harmony, trans. Th. Baker (New  York:  G. Schirmer, 1896), 242. 21. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986 [1854]), 28–29.

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BE INFERIOR TO THE SYMPHONY because it has to follow the requirements of a plot, while the symphony is ENTIRELY FREE. Fantasy is good enough for opera but will never be sufficient for a symphony.22

Such an argument affiliates Carrillo with Jadassohn, Hanslick, and the German apologists of absolute music. However, Carrillo’s purpose is not to criticize Wagner or Richard Strauss—as German formalists did—but rather the Italian and French styles of Rossini and Meyerbeer. Later in the article, Carrillo amends his position by stating that opera composers have always failed when trying to compose symphonies, while “THERE IS NO symphonist who has tried to write an opera and has not succeeded.”23 Carrillo offers the examples of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Hector Berlioz as unsuccessful symphony composers. On the other hand, another statement in the essay problematizes his position as a pure formalist: I affirm that [the symphony] is the highest manifestation of pure music, because several types of musics are exemplified in it, from the elegiac to the triumphal, without excluding eroticism and drama.24

Carrillo’s article may appear contradictory. If the symphony was the greatest example of absolute music precisely because it was not subordinated to “the vague requirements of emotional expression,” how can it also exemplify the wide range of human emotional expression Carrillo attributes to it? When one interprets Carrillo’s discussion within the mentality that permeated the musical mainstream in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, one has to dismiss his claims as inconsistent:  while proselytizing for absolute music, Carrillo’s text apparently ends up embracing values of representational music. However, Carrillo’s attitude is understandable when one reads him as a newcomer to German musical life who resignified the polemics he encountered there through the lens of his early training in Mexico, a scene that privileged completely different musical values (the melodic inventiveness of Italian opera and the immediate charm of salon music over the structural complexity of symphonic music from the Austro-Germanic tradition). True, a statement like that would be a contradiction for a German composer actively involved in the politics 22.  Julián Carrillo, Pláticas musicales (Mexico City:  Wagner y Levín, 1913), 112. This book includes a reprint from the original article, which was published in El Heraldo, June 30, 1909. Capital letters are used in the original. 23. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, 113. 24. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, 111.

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between these two realms, but it would not necessarily be an inconsistency for a composer like Carrillo, who had a Brahmsian training of the kind the Leipzig Konservatorium offered but was also an admirer of the expansive operatic melodies in the music of Wagner, Liszt, and their followers, including Richard Strauss. By not being invested in radical long-standing politics between these camps, Carrillo did not feel he had to stick to the dogmas of one or the other; instead, he was able to fully embrace both ideals. Like other composers from the periphery (Russians, Lithuanians, Czechs, etc.) were doing at the time, by engaging both of these traditions, Carrillo reinterpreted and reconfigured German symbolic codes according to the musical ideologies that prevailed in his native country.25 Thus, Carrillo’s is not a process of “picking and choosing” that would trivialize German culture; rather, it re-articulates the cultural meaning of German music ideologies beyond the boundaries of the German experience. Meaning is constructed through experience, and Carrillo’s reconciling attitude was as much a result of his Mexican upbringing as it was a reflection of the cultural context he experienced during his years in Leipzig. Traces of Carrillo’s ideological re-articulation are evident when one outlines a map of his musical experiences in Leipzig and analyzes it in relation to the music and aesthetic criteria he chose to privilege on his return to Mexico as well as in the style of the music he composed at the time.

MUSIC IN CARRILLO’S LEIPZIG

There is no doubt that Carrillo was well indoctrinated by Jadassohn while at the Konservatorium; his interest in the symphony and the aesthetic concerns surrounding the genre is proof of that. However, his belief in music as a representation of specific feelings and emotions (elegy, triumph, eroticism, drama)—unthinkable for a pure “music absolutist” follower of Hanslick—are also evident in his musical thinking. The academic environment in Germany was not the only intellectual and aesthetic inspiration for the Mexican composer while in Germany; as a frequent attender of its concerts and possibly as a substitute student musician with 25. As mentioned earlier, a number of German-speaking composers were also invested in bridging these musical camps. However, the political pressures they might have felt by embarking on such a project had to be necessarily different from those confronted by a non-local composer. My argument emphasizes that composers from the periphery could feel free from those politics, embrace both camps, and produce a musical style that synthesized their ideas with the musical ideologies prevailing in their countries.

[42]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Composer

Number of concerts including their works

Beethoven

35

53%

Brahms

25

38%

Schumann

21

32%

Schubert

18

27%

Wagner

12

18%

Mendelssohn

10

15%

Liszt

8

12%

Tchaikovsky

7

11%

Mozart

7

11%

R. Strauss

6

9%

Haydn

4

6%

Berlioz

3

5%

Figure 2.1  Composers Gewandhausorchester.

included

during

the

Average

1899–1902

seasons

of

the

the Gewandhausorchester, he was also influenced by Arthur Nikisch, one of the most progressive musicians in fin-de-siècle Leipzig.26 A closer look at the programs of the orchestra between 1899 and 1902 give us a sense of some of the music Carrillo may have experienced most directly, an occasional violinist with the orchestra, while in Germany. Figure 2.1 shows a statistical chart of the repertoire performed by the Gewandhausorchester in the 1899–1900, 1900–1901, and 1902–1902 seasons;27 these were the years Carrillo spent in Leipzig. A total of sixty-six concerts were offered during this period; as the city’s musical life was 26.  José Velasco Urda quotes Carrillo as saying that he was a member of the Gewandhausorchester during the years he lived in Leipzig; see José Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo:  su vida y su obra (Mexico City:  Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1943), 179. This is reproduced by Gerald Benjamin, who adds that Carrillo served as the orchestra’s concertmaster; see Gerald R.  Benjamin, “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” Yearbook, Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Vol. III (1967), 38. This information is erroneous; Claudius Böhm, the archivist of the Gewandhaus confirms that Carrillo was never a formal member of the orchestra; Claudius Böhm, electronic communication, January 8, 2014. The Leipzig Konservatorium had the practice of sending talented students to rehearse with the Gewandhaus and sometimes as substitute musicians. This may have been Carrillo’s case; but that did not make him a member of the orchestra as he implied or as his biographers assumed. 27.  See Former, Göpfert, Hennenburg, Eichter, and Singer, Die Gewandhaus-Konzert zu Leipzig, 413–418.

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considered a bastion of formalist music, it is no surprise that the composers most often programmed were Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert. The orchestra played the complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies every year; Brahms’s second piano concerto, violin concerto, violin and cello concerto, and the Haydn Variations were performed repeatedly. Among the composers considered progressive, Wagner was programmed in 18% of the concerts, Liszt in 12%, Richard Strauss in 9%, and Berlioz in 6%. 28 The orchestra played Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser and prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Till Eulenspiegel; and Liszt’s Les Préludes. Composers usually associated with formalist aesthetics and absolute music outnumber progressive ones in the programs of the Gewandhausorchester. Nevertheless, the statistics do not necessarily mean that conservative composers exerted a larger influence on Carrillo, they simply tell us what music he may have heard and experienced while in Leipzig. To make a fair evaluation of how this repertoire might have impressed Carrillo, I  have prepared a chart that accounts for the composers he chose to use and quote musical examples from in his own Tratado sintético de harmonía [sic] from 1915 (Figure 2.2). There are forty-two musical examples in Carrillo’s harmony book; works by Wagner and Beethoven represent 38% (19% each), and Bach, Richard Strauss, and Jadassohn together 30% (10% each). Several other composers make up the remaining 32%. It is revealing that Carrillo did not include a single example by Brahms, while the music of Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss make up 38% of the total examples. As mentioned earlier, Gerald Benjamin and Gerard Béhague have described Carrillo as a Brahmsian, formalist composer, due to his interest in classical formats like the symphony and string quartet; but this is not borne out by the evidence. Apparently, an overwhelming majority of the music experienced by Carrillo in Leipzig belongs to the Austro-German formalist camp, as we observed in the programs of the Gewandhausorchester and as we may surmise from Jadassohn’s lack of interest in Wagner’s music. 29 Nevertheless, the music of Wagner and his followers had a great impact on Carrillo. Among the examples found in his book are fragments from

28.  To avoid working with decimals I rounded numbers to the closer figure. Thus, 9.52 became 10 and 2.38 became 2, etc. 29.  See footnote 15.

[44]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Composer

Number of Examples

Average

Wagner

8

19.04%

Beethoven

8

19.04%

Bach

4

9.52%

Mozart

2

4.76%

Meyerbeer

1

2.38%

Bizet

1

2.38%

Palestrina

2

4.76%

Liszt

2

4.76%

Berlioz

2

4.76%

Jadassohn

4

9.52%

Frank

1

2.38%

Debussy

1

2.38%

Ordóñez

1

2.38%

Verdi

1

2.38%

R. Strauss

4

9.52%

Figure 2.2  Musical examples in Julián Carrillo’s Tratado sintético de harmonía.

Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Till Eulenspiegel. 30 A comparison of the music experienced by Carrillo at the Konservatorium and the Gewandhausorchester and the music from which he drew examples in his Tratado sintético de harmonía illustrates his embrace of distinctly different repertories. The contents of the Tratado suggest a composer whose personal interest remained closer to the melodic creativity in the music of Wagner and Liszt; theirs was a style that resonated with Carrillo’s musical training in Mexico, one that emphasized melodic development over formal considerations (“the result of his inspiration, which is, naturally, melodic and Creole, with a national flavor” as Melesio Morales put it)31 and set the stage for a process of cultural appropriation. However, as a student and

30.  Note that Wagner’s music had been known in Mexico since 1891, when the Italian opera company of Napoleon Sieni premiered Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Die Walküre in the country. See Karl Bellinghausen, ed., Melesio Morales:  mi libro verde de apuntes e impresiones (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes 1999), 45. That was not the case with Richard Strauss’s music, which was not performed in Mexico until the twentieth century. 31.  Morales, “Julián Carrillo.”

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musician in Leipzig, Carrillo had to position himself within the dominant ideology of the city’s musical mainstream, one championing formalism and absolute music. Synthesizing both traditions was a way for Carrillo to gain access to the mainstream while remaining faithful to his intellectual and emotional interests. The seemingly contradictory statements about the symphony found in Carrillo’s “Sinfonía y ópera” can be explained as the ruminations of a decentered artist, aware of the problems of German musical ideology and choosing to contest some of its conventions as he made it meaningful to his own musical interests. Carl Dahlhaus stated that composers of symphonies at the end of the nineteenth century faced a musical predicament: whether to continue with the formal characteristics of the genre (a multi-movement structure and the use of sonata allegro form) or to incorporate the formal conceptions of the symphonic poem (freer forms and harmonic relations that did not respond to pre-set or conventional structures). It could not be otherwise, since the procedures of thematic transformation followed by progressive composers and conventional formal structures preferred by traditionalists were all concerned with the issue of cohesive unity across large musical forms, be it the symphony or the symphonic poem. It would be normal for younger composers to be interested in both genres, especially if, like Carrillo, they did not feel culturally pressured to be faithful to one aesthetic tradition over the other. Thus, it is not surprising that Dahlhaus turns to musicians peripheral to the German tradition to exemplify this shift:  Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Dvořák.32 I  would argue that although the solutions developed by non-German composers are not unique in the larger context of change that German music was experiencing at the end of the nineteenth century, they are indeed distinct responses that take new cultural milieus as filters to reinterpret the controversy between the two antagonistic aesthetic positions that were current in German musical life.33 Carrillo’s intellectual concern with the symphony and his interest in the type of organic-melodic developments in Wagner’s music led him to combine these seemingly irreconcilable trends both in his music and in his rhetoric. Proof of this fascination is found in his essay “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica” (Ideological unity and tonal variety), a talk that Carrillo presented at the International Music Congress of Rome in 32. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 268–269. 33.  With “antagonistic aesthetic positions” I  wish to refer not only to formalist and programmatic preferences among composers but also preferences of genre (the symphonic tradition versus composers of symphonic poems) and technique (the tradition of thematic return versus thematic transformation).

[46]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

1911. According to Carrillo, the great classical masters had developed the sonata, symphony, and the concerto as monumental forms that should be integrated by tonal unity; however, he claims that unfortunately, these forms have remained unchanged and that in order to continue being artistically relevant they need to evolve via more tonal variety and ideological unity.34 He goes on to describe the sonata, symphony, and concerto as multi-movement works whose internal movements present no relation of character, themes, or rhythm, and therefore lack “ideological unity.” Carrillo argues that as such, these compositions tend to resemble three or four unrelated small pieces (depending on the number of movements) rather than one single large unity. Furthermore, Carrillo observes that tonality was used to unify the different movements but that bringing tonal unity without ideological [unity] necessarily resulted in an excess of tonal stability—generally that of the main degrees of the four movements—and therefore today, by requiring more unity in the ideology, it is necessary to demand “tonal variety.” … [T]‌he balance remains perfectly stable in this formula: “Variety in unity through ideology, and unity in variety through tonality.”35

Carrillo’s explanation is rather vague and does not fully clarify how his intention varied from the motivic and thematic transformation and derivation procedures that characterize the music of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, or Brahms. Gerald Benjamin explains “unidad ideológica” (ideological unity) as the use of thematic derivation and motivic variation to attain a certain cyclic effect; and describes “variedad tonal” (tonal variety) as the use of many passing modulations. According to Benjamin, the goal of Carrillo’s idea is to invoke sensations more easily from the listener.36 An analysis of Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 1 in E flat major (see Chapter 6), which the composer considered the perfect example of these ideas, may lead one to speculate that for him “unidad ideológica” may have meant that themes and motives throughout all of the movements in a particular composition should be traced back to the same motivic and thematic cell. In sum, the notion of “unidad ideological y variedad tonal” is simply a 34. Julián Carrillo, “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica,” paper presented at the Congresso Internazionale di Musica in Rome, April 4–11, 1911. A copy of this paper, in Italian and French, is kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. This is the only transcript that I have been able to locate. My description here paraphrases from that version of the text. A later article published by Carrillo in 1925 recycles some of the ideas and even fragments from his early essay. See Julián Carrillo, “Las formas musicales,” El Sonido 13 2, no.12 (1925): 3–8. 35.  Carrillo, “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica.” 36.  Benjamin, “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” 39.

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radicalization of the ideas of developing variation and thematic transformation already in vogue among Germanic composers in the nineteenth century and applied systematically to traditional multi-movement genres and forms beyond the boundaries of individual movements.37 A passing comment in Carrillo’s writings regarding this paper sheds light on our attempt to understand when these concerns were born. When in 1899, Jadassohn, who taught the class of musical forms at the conservatory, told us about the sonata, the concerto, and the symphony, I immediately understood that something was missing, although I could not exactly grasp what needed modification, and I could only understand it after long and hard hours of study. I asked myself in silence many times, without being able to enlighten my brain! The riddle of the Sphinx from Greek mythology was less obscure and intricate than the solution to those questions, where I thought I could find the seed of new and necessary doctrines in the world of Art.38

This quotation shows that by 1913, when the first edition of Pláticas musicales was published, Carrillo had been meditating over the issue of classical forms for several years. The fact that he embarked on the composition of a string quartet, a string sextet, a piano quintet, and a second symphony between his student years with Jadassohn and the writing of his book—forms that were not particularly popular within the Mexican music scene of the time—is evidence that he maintained a sustained interest on this issue throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. The following analysis of thematic derivation in Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 shows that Carrillo was already concerned with these issues when he composed this early work.

ST YLE IN CARRILLO’S SYMPHONY NO. 1: ISSUES OF THEMATIC DERIVATION AND TR ANSFORMATION

On March 21, 1902, the Königliches Konservatorium der Musik in Leipzig presented its last concert of the season. It was an event devoted to orchestral works by composition students that included music by the American 37. Evidence of this is also found in Carrillo’s marginalia to Arnold Schoenberg’s article “Brahms the Progressive.” In commenting on a paragraph in which Schoenberg explains the Wagnerian leitmotif as “the grandiose intention of unification of the thematic material of an entire opera, and even of an entire tetralogy” (Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive,” in Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 61) Carrillo writes “Igual que mi tesis de unidad ideologica para la sinfonía” (Just as in my thesis about ideological unity for the symphony). Carrillo’s copy of Schoenberg’s book is kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 38. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, 64.

[48]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

George E. Simpson, the Germans Hans Mohn, Carl Osterloh, Rudolf Dost, and the Mexican Julián Carrillo. On that occasion Carrillo premiered three movements from his Symphony No. 1. Regardless of Carrillo’s optimistic recollection of the event, as expressed in his memoirs, the German reception of the event was not exactly warm. A couple of weeks after the concert, on April 3, Musikalisches Wochenblatt published a short review of the event signed by an F. Wilfferdot. It stated: Of course, most of the works were of only moderate interest and should be viewed as tentative pieces of no higher value. … The last piece to be presented was the Symphony in D major composed by Mr. Julián Carrillo from San Luis Potosí (Mexico). Although I  noticed some unsymphonic characteristics, this work was more refreshing than the preceding compositions. Its three movements do not lack life and color, and they show a variety of attractive ideas that are correctly presented, giving an overall impression of good proportion. 39

Wilfferdot praised the “refreshing” quality of Carrillo’s work only to put in evidence the poor quality of the other music performed that evening. Despite acknowledging attractive ideas and good compositional craft in the Mexican composer’s symphony, he was quick to point out that he felt it showed some “unsymphonic” features. I take this review not to try to figure out exactly what Wilfferdot may have meant but rather to call attention to the ideas and stylistic elements in Carrillo’s symphony that may conform to but also deviate from conventional symphonic writing in fin-de-siècle Leipzig. If the German critic was rather cold toward Carrillo’s symphony, the reaction from some of his classmates seemed to have been quite different. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), a Lithuanian composer and artist who attended the Königliches Konservatorium between 1901 and 1902, wrote a letter to Eugeniu Moravskiu after the premiere in which he stated that the symphony was a wonderful work in all aspects. A  lot of fire, fantasy and poetry. From the beginning until the end, in a delightful disorder; first an ample melody, then something that resembles a cry only to return to brilliant and sonorous pearls … then the trumpets, and everything acquires a melancholic tone; after a few minutes the sun returns and the idyll resurfaces … and like that until the end.40 39.  F. Wilfferdot, “Leipzig,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 33, no. 15 (1902): 235. 40.  Letter from Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis to Eugeniu Moravskiu (March 21, 1902). The letter was originally written in Polish but has been published in Lithuanian in Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Apie Muzika ir Daile. Laiskai,

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It would be difficult to know exactly why Čiurlionis enjoyed Carrillo’s music so much; it could have been just a matter of personal taste. However, I would like to take Čiurlionis’s own cultural marginality as an excuse to suggest that it was easier for someone who had been trained outside central European traditions to appreciate and recognize the musical negotiation between conventional and peripheral styles that Carrillo’s music exemplified. Čiurlionis’s laudatory statement gives me a pretext to advance my critique of the reception of Carrillo as a mere imitator of Austro-German Romantic music. Against the conventional opinions about Carrillo’s early tonal music, I argue that his Symphony No. 1 is not an imitation of Brahms or Mendelssohn but rather an example of how he heard, interpreted, and processed sonic Leipzig and the ideological disputes that animated its music scene. Carrillo’s symphony is what the Leipzig music scene sounded like to him through the filters of a different musical culture, through the ears of his education in fin-de-siècle Mexico. As such, the symphony is an example of bricolage and performative composition; it transforms the aesthetic ideas Carrillo received in Leipzig through those that prevailed in the cultural milieu of his native Mexico, making them meaningful in relation to his previous musical experience while performing his own musical persona. Composed at the end of his studies under Jadassohn at the Königliches Konservatorium, Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 has four movements (Largo-Allegro, Andante sostenuto, Scherzo, and Final) with thematic material related by common rhythmic and melodic motives and gestures. Gerald Benjamin noticed that the thematic material of all the B themes throughout the symphony derive from the material in the introduction of the first movement.41 However, I argue here that in fact all of the thematic material in the composition is related motivically and gesturally, making it a thorough organicistic display that reflects the strict contrapuntal techniques of thematic derivation emphasized in Jadassohn’s lessons. The first movement, in an altered sonata allegro form as explained later, is in D major. The melodic material in the introduction of this movement presents a rising leap of a minor third or perfect fourth followed by the descending unfolding of a triad (example 2.1). This generative gesture or cell or its constituent motivic material (segment I: the ascending minor third leap, and segment II:  the descending unfolding harmony, and the variants of the rhythmic cell that characterize segment I) lay the structral basis of all the melodic material in the symphony. The first Uzrasai ir Straipsniai (Vilnius:  Valstybine Grozines Literaturos Leidkla, 1960), 108–114. The letter was also quoted in Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 96. 41.  Benjamin, “Julián Carrillo and ‘Sonido Trece,’ ” 39.

[50]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

theme of the first movement (example 2.2) is an expanded version of the material in example 2.1. The theme is made of two phrases: the first one presents a measure-long extension of segment II before the arrival on the tonic; in the second phrase an added fragment embellishes the melodic descent to G and displaces it an octave higher before repeating the gesture in a more chromatically embellished fashion. The second theme of the first movement (example 2.3) also features the basic contour of the generative gesture, but segment I  is expanded into an octave and segment II is cleverly camouflaged by octave displacement and pitch switching (E6-A6-C sharp6-G sharp6-F sharp6-D6 instead of E6-C sharp6-A5-G sharp5-F sharp5-D5; see mm. 4–5 in example 2.3). In this way, Carrillo offers melodic variety and novelty while maintaining motivic unity. The second movement, in B flat major, is a slow and nostagic andante sostenuto. The first theme (example 2.4) is based on the generative cell (segments I and II), but in this case, in the first phrase of the theme (mm. 1–5) the minor third leap is expanded by beginning on the upper pitch and Example  2.1  Julián Carrillo, Symphony No. 1 (1902), first movement. Generative cell from the introduction.

Example 2.2  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. First theme.

Example 2.3  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Second theme.

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repeating it, while segment II is ornamented through a descending scale into the tonic. The second part of the theme (mm. 5–9) presents the basic contour of the generative gesture, in this case an octave leap that moves back to the tonic via a descending scale that foreshadows the second theme of the movement. The second theme (example 2.5), is also based on the contour of the generative cell, a leap of perfect fourth and a descending scale (this time, to the tonic) although Carrillo displaces the descending scale with an octave leap in the third measure of the theme. In this movement the motivic material in the bridges between themes is also based on segment I of the generative gesture (example 2.6). The third movement is a scherzo in G minor with a tempo marking of allegro non troppo. The first theme of the scherzo (example 2.7) disguises its origin in the generative cell by presenting its beginning octave ascent not as a leap but rather as an arpeggiated harmonic unfolding followed Example 2.4  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement. First theme.

Example 2.5  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement. Second theme.

Example 2.6  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second movement.  Motivic material used in the bridges.

Example 2.7  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third movement. First theme.

[52]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

by a slow descent over the next five measures. The use of the rhythmic motive from the beginning leap of the generative gesture throughout the scherzo’s first theme brings another link to the thematic material in the rest of the movements. The second theme of the scherzo is in D major (example 2.8) and relies on segment II from the second measure of the generative cell but skips the characteristic leap from the beginning of the motive. The transformation of the generative gesture into this Wagnerian theme foreshadows the melodic contour of the second theme from the fourth movement. The fourth movement, in sonata allegro form, is back in D major. The first theme (example 2.9), which starts with an octave leap and embellishes the following descent with a repeated sequence over each of the pitches of the unfolding chord, is also clearly based on the generative gesture. The first few notes of the theme are used throughout the movement as sequential material to connect the first and second themes. The second theme (­example 2.10) begins with a perfect fourth leap and immediately descends by a minor sixth to the third degree of the scale where it sits for two measures before descending to the first degree via a chromatic extension to the sixth degree of the scale. This extension transforms the generative cell into a melody reminiscent of the opening theme from the Example 2.8  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third movement. Second theme.

Example 2.9  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement. First theme.

Example 2.10  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement. Second theme.

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overture to Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Such motivic recollection is not accidental but rather an index of the conflicting musical ideologies Carrillo was trying to reconcile in this work. Carrillo’s interest in thematic derivation is clear in the thematic material of his symphony. However, an analysis of the symphony vis-à-vis a critical appraisal of his writings about thematic derivation and the opera versus symphony debate in fin-de-siécle Leipzig during his time prevent us from concluding that he was simply imitating German models. A closer look at the formal structure in the symphony offers further evidence of the process of cultural synthesis that gave birth to this work.

ST YLE IN CARRILLO’S SYMPHONY NO. 1: ISSUES OF FORM IN THE FIRST MOVEMENT

Formal idiosyncrasies in Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 are particularly evident in his use of sonata-allegro form. For instance, Christina Taylor-Gibson has called attention to the “false recapitulation” in the fourth movement—the second theme returning in A  major as opposed to the expected D major—and the subsequent unexpected harmonic modulations throughout the end of the movement.42 Here, I focus on the exceptional challenges to conventional sonata-allegro form in the symphony’s first movement. A quick glance at the version of the first movement of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 published by Editions Jobert reveals some inconsistencies to the standard sonata-allegro format. Until the end of the second theme (in A major), the first part of the exposition presents no problems; it is at this moment that the complications start. The second part of the second theme moves away from A major, first tonicizing the second degree (B minor), then moving to F sharp minor through a brief D major passage in measure 105. The F sharp minor section quickly modulates to A major in measure 117, which as a dominant area prepares the movement back to the original tonic (D major) in measure 125. At this point one would expect a repeat of the exposition or at the very least, a preparing motion toward the development; however, the D major section, which is the goal of the tonal excursion, does not represent a return to the exposition but rather the preparation for the recapitulation. This is not to say that the first movement lacks a development, although it 42. Christina Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M.  Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez in New  York, 1925–1932” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland-College Park, 2008), 31.

[54]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

raises questions as to where the development starts and what its role may be in the overall tonal drama expected in a sonata-allegro form. A possible way to hear the work in relation to the sonata-allegro form model may be to acknowledge the harmonic motion at the end of the second theme and place the development in one of three different places: measures 91, 113, or 125 (see the lower portion of Figure 2.3). Every one of these three interpretative choices has different musical implications in how we listen to the work as a whole. If we choose the first possibility, then the modulatory sequence that arises at the end of the second theme would make a nice—although rather conservative—tonal exploration that would satisfy the harmonic purpose of a development section. However, in this interpretation the second theme would be part of both the exposition (in a thematic sense) and the development (in a harmonic sense). If we prefer the second option, we would respect the position of the second theme as an autonomous entity, independent from the development. The problem with this choice is that we would have an extremely short harmonic exploration (comprising only two keys: F sharp minor and A major). This would be clearly unbalanced with the lengthy transition into the recapitulation in D major. If on the other hand we feel inclined toward the third possibility, then we would have a development section that would not fulfill the harmonic implications of a proper development, since it would be a mere connection between the end of the second theme and the recapitulation. In other words, the first movement of the symphony would lack a development. This would even question its being a sonata-allegro form and would point toward a sonatina form, indeed an odd way to begin a symphony that, as has been argued, supposedly follows in the steps of Brahms. Are there any justifications for Carrillo’s license? A look at the symphony’s orchestral manuscript shows that the work was originally conceived with a more evident and complete development section and only later did the composer decide to remove it from the final version of the composition. An analysis of these sources and an interpretation of them in relation to the musical ideologies Carrillo encountered in Leipzig shed light on the possible reasons he may have had to remove this passage from the final version of the symphony. After comparing the manuscript to the published edition of the symphony I found two lengthy passages that were crossed out in the manuscript with the Spanish inscriptions “no se toca” (not to be played) and “esta página no se toca” (this page is not to be played) in the composer’s own handwriting. These passages do not appear in the published version of the work. The first fragment comprises eight measures between what in

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[55]

Figure 2.3a and b  Comparative chart. Form in the manuscript and printed version of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1, first movement. (a) Formal chart according to the orchestral manuscript (with 41 measures missing from the development). Tempo

Largo

Allegro

Section

Intro.

Exposition

Development

Recapitulation

  bridge    transition

      re-transition

           bridge

Subsection Motive

A   B

Theme

     B’  C

CODA

       C

1  1’    2

1    ? 1

1    1’     2

1

Key

D

D      A (ii, vi, IV) F# A

V7/A E    ?  D

D          D

D

mm

2   23

34  57 66 89 121

133–141 ? 133

171   191 200  201 224

232  261

CODA

(b) Possible formal interpretations according to the Jobert edition. Tempo

Largo

Allegro

Section

Intro.

Exposition

Development

Recapitulation

       bridge

      re-transition

           bridge

     B’  C

      C”

       C    C   C’

1  1’    2

       1

1   1’     2

1

Subsection Motive

A  B

Theme Key

D

D       A

(ii, vi, IV) F#   D   D

D          D

D

mm

2  23

34  57 66 81

 92    113 125 152

157  177 186 190 210

219  243

Tempo Section

Exposition (cont.) Development

Subsection

      Re-trans.

Motive Theme

       1

Key

(ii, vi, IV) F#   D   D

mm

92    113 125 152

Tempo Section

Exposition (cont.) Dvpt. (?)

Subsection

      Re-trans. (?)

Motive Theme

       1

Key

(ii, vi, IV) F#   D   D

mm

92   113 125 152

the published version are measures 65 and 66; they are measures 66 to 74 in the manuscript. Formally, this fragment is part of the transition from the first to the second theme in the exposition. The second fragment is incomplete in the manuscript. The first two pages out of a total of four are preserved but the last two are missing. These pages are the first and second ending of the exposition (4 measures, 3 for the first ending and 1 for the second ending) and the beginning of the development (20 measures, without taking into account the number of measures from the two missing pages). According to the piano reduction of the symphony (discussed later), this section included eighty-nine measures of music, which made it almost as long as the preceding exposition, and longer than the development that was to follow it. Example 2.11 shows the first twenty-one measures of the first ending. The first version of the exposition as outlined in the piano reduction (before the edits in the orchestral manuscript) further emphasizes the odd choices outlined in Figure 2.3. To discuss the structure of the work I should clarify a specific aspect in the organization of Carrillo’s score. Both the manuscript and the published version are divided in different sections that the composer labeled with letters from A to R. These are rehearsal letters that, as often the case with these markings, sometimes coincide with structural formal points. For example, rehearsal letter D corresponds to the presentation of the second theme, M corresponds to the beginning of the recapitulation; yet no letter labels the beginning of the exposition. The first deduction we can draw from the recovered fragments is that the process of editing the work was done in at least two phases. In the first phase, Carrillo eliminated only the first and second endings and the first seven measures of the development (example 2.11), which included a cadence to E major, the beginning key of that section. On top of measure 129 of the manuscript one can read “a H” (to H) in a pencil different from the rest of the score. Since K is only eight measures into the development, we may safely assume that Carrillo’s first idea was just to eliminate the repeat of the exposition by going from E major, the dominant of the first ending that prepares a return to D major through A major, right into the development. The process connected an E major chord that was meant to resolve to A major, to the cadential resolution eight measures into the development, which was itself a resolution to E major. Carrillo later decided that change was not enough and wrote at the end of measure 129, in larger letters, “A la vuelta K” (to K at the turn of the page), a decision that eliminated sections H, I, and J, and thus got rid of three pages of music that included most of the development section. The composer might have had two reasons for deleting this section. First, he might have thought that the repetition of an exposition that already

[58]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 2.11  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Beginning of the first ending (from the piano reduction).

presented an interesting harmonic exploration would overemphasize that tonal excursion, overshadowing any harmonic exploration he might have followed in the development—especially when the extension between the end of the second theme and the repetition of the exposition was longer than the development and highly complex harmonically, as shown in example 2.11. Hence, his first cut: the first and second endings and the beginning of the development. Later, Carrillo may have decided that the

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Example 2.11 continued

development was, as a matter of fact, harmonically redundant after the harmonic sequence at the end of the second theme and may have chosen to eliminate the development altogether. One of the more distinctive stylistic features in the first movement of Carrillo’s symphony is the harmonic behavior of the transitional material between the first and second themes of the exposition. Since there are two different versions of the transition—in the printed version and in the manuscript—a comparative study is necessary. I  prepared a contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition based on the printed version that shows that Carrillo’s development of the melodic material pushed him in a harmonic direction different from that conventionally established by sonata-allegro form. Instead of progressing from the end of the first theme toward the dominant area (A major), Carrillo moves toward the area of the minor subdominant (G minor) (example 2.12). The area is never clearly established since Carrillo is well aware that he is moving in the “wrong” direction and continuously struggles to find his way back to what the conventional sonata-allegro model prescribes. When we compare the printed version and the manuscript we find that the material Carrillo cut from the final version of the symphony shows this struggle clearly. In my own contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from the manuscript (example 2.13) we observe that the movement toward the minor subdominant is clear between measures 65 and 67 and is further emphasized from measures 71 to 78 (example 2.13). In both cases we witness Carrillo’s struggle to force his music back to the conventional model (mm. 68–69 and 72) without abruptly breaking the smooth

[60]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 2.12  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1. Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from theme A to theme B from the printed version.

Example 2.13  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1. Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from theme A to theme B from the manuscript.

flow of his melodic material, and every time we see him falling for the temptation to move toward the minor subdominant. Particularly interesting is the harmony in measure 68, where we find a chord of the following pitches, G sharp-B-D flat-F (a harmony that also appears in measure 156 of the first ending in the piano reduction, see Figure 2.4). This is a German sixth spelled as a double diminished fifth, with a G sharp instead of an A flat—a Freudian slip that shows the composer unconsciously reminding himself of the prescribed goal of his tonal excursion: A major. In other words, these chords are indexes of the struggle between the tonal trip the composer’s imagination requests and the tonal obligation that the form imposes on him. Eventually, Carrillo chose tradition over fantasy and decided to erase the traces that betrayed his original impulse.43 Carrillo made a piano reduction of the symphony in July 1901. As noted earlier, the composer prepared the piano version before he extracted this 43.  Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky controversially affirmed in his Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony that the German sixth chord, which is traditionally interpreted as a harmony built on the sixth degree, could also be thought of as a chord built on the lowered second degree. The suggestion of C minor in measure 71 may also imply that the “misspelled” German sixth could be thought of, in a Tchaikovskian way, as a chord built on D flat rather than on A flat (see Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony, trans. from the German of P. Juon by Emil Krall and Jame Liebling [Canoga Park: Summit, 1971], 106). This appears as another suggestive connection between Carrillo and the late nineteenth-century peripheral symphonic traditions mentioned by Carl Dahlhaus.

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[6 1]

Tempo

Largo

Allegro

Section

Intro.

Exposition

Development

    bridge    transition    1st ending

       re-transition

    B’    C            A-C

A

1  1’       2           1

1 1

Subsection Motive

A    B

Theme Key

D

D       GER A (ii, vi, IV) F#  V7/A  A    V/A vii/A vii/E V/E e GER E A

V7/A E  F#   D   vii/IV A   d

mm

2    24

34 56 66 68 90       134 135  138        156 224

135—144 159 177 186  200 204

Section

Recapitulation

CODA

Subsection

bridge

Motive

      C

Theme

1   1’      2

1

Key

D        D

D

mm

209 229 238 242 267

271 302

Tempo

Figure 2.4  Form in the piano reduction of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1, first movement.

portion of music from the orchestral manuscript and before its premiere in Leipzig. This piano score offers a glimpse into what the earliest version of the symphony may have sounded like (see Figure 2.4).44 This version shows that eighty-nine measures of a first ending before the repetition of the exposition (mm. 135–224 of the first ending) as well as forty-two measures between the beginning of the development and the transition to the recapitulation (mm. 135–177) were removed from the final orchestral version. The two passages begin very similarly, with a melodic sequence based on segments I and II from the generative gesture on the dominant of A  major. The first ending presents a highly chromatic sequence that features a series of auxiliary diminished chords and the German sixth on A flat (spelled as G sharp, as explained earlier) that eventually leads to A  major (m. 224). The sequence of diminished chords and their prolongation over several measures gives the passage a very static quality. The development section moves from the dominant of A major to F sharp major through a series of auxiliary dominant chords (see example 2.14). The section in F sharp major prepares a return to D major, the transition to the recapitulation kept in both the manuscript and final printed version of the symphony. The harmonic sequence in this section, although interesting in its motion by major second (from E major to F sharp major), seems rather artificial. It does not follow the unaffected flow that accompanies the development of thematic material in the exposition. The use of the motivic material from the generative cell also seems forced; it does not flow smoothly from the material in the preceding section nor does it present the tonal struggles between themes that would be found in conventional sonata-allegro form. The harmonic relations and the use of thematic material in these sections supports the interpretation that the music taken out was redundant and even inconsequential considering the harmonic and melodic sequences in the section preceding the development. The main question in analyzing these sections should not be why Carrillo decided to cut this passage, but rather why he decided to retain the 44.  The piano reduction surfaced among a series of unrelated papers during my work at the Julián Carrillo Archive in 2009. It was not mentioned in any of the earlier catalogues of Carrillo’s works prepared by himself or his daughter (Dolores Carrillo), nor is it noted in the most recent and comprehensive catalogue of the archive prepared by Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, Catálogo integral del archivo Julián Carrillo (San Luis Potosí: Instituto de Cultura de San Luis Potosí, 2000). Although it is unclear when Carrillo decided to edit the symphony, it is evident that he made this piano reduction before determining to get rid of the discussed passage from the final orchestral score. This piano reduction is the most complete source for trying to figure out what the earliest version of the symphony may have sounded like.

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[6 3]

Example 2.14  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Beginning of the development (from the piano reduction).

evidence of his harmonic temptation in the final version. When Carrillo hesitates between where he wants his music to move (the minor subdominant) and where the music ought to move if it is to strictly follow the conventional model (the dominant), he creates a symmetrical harmonic relationship (example 2.15). The fact that Carrillo sticks to this move to the minor subdominant in the final version of the symphony—even though as a stylistic feature it contradicts the sonata-allegro form model—suggests that he is fond of the conceptual overtones created by

[64]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 2.15  Carrillo. Symphony No. 1. Symmetric harmonic relation in the transition from theme A to theme B.

this harmonic motion. In fact, Carrillo’s early interest in the tonal possibilities of symmetrical scales can also be observed in his Tratado sintético de harmonía (1915), where he dedicates an entire chapter to the harmonization of whole-tone scales.45 This analysis of the stylistic practices of Carrillo, as reflected in the form and harmonic sequences of the first movement of his Symphony No. 1, reveals a synthetic musical thought, a style that brings together two very distinct German music ideologies: a harmonic and a thematic understanding of sonata-allegro form that usually contradict each other but that are blended by Carrillo into a style that tacitly displays and offers a possible solution to these contradictions. The result is a formal structure that lacks the dramatic crux of a sonata-allegro form, the development as thematic exploration expanded to its limits. Instead, the last version of Carrillo’s symphony offers a rather long as well as harmonically and thematically static bridge that connects the exposition and the recapitulation; especially motionless is the re-transition section, which features two secondary diminished chords in the middle of the passage, lasting for fifteen measures, almost half of the entire section (example 2.16, which corresponds to mm. 125–152 in the chart of the Jobert edition from Figure 2.3). I propose to understand Carrillo’s cuts and the static quality in the “development” of the first movement of his Symphony No. 1 as a manifestation of his personal negotiation with the ideological webs that surrounded him in Germany. As such, these fragments could be interpreted as Carrillo’s attempts to negotiate his particular position within the contradictory discourses that he was exposed to. Let us look into these musical ideologies. Carrillo composed his Symphony No. 1 after studying for three years under Salomon Jadassohn at the Königliches Konservatorium.46 Thus, 45. See Julián Carrillo, Tratado sintético de harmonía (New  York:  G. Schirmer, 1915), 67–71. 46. Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 was premiered only a month and a half after Jadassohn’s death.

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[6 5]

Example 2.16  Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first movement. Idealized voice leading of the re-transition to the recapitulation.

the work illustrates Carrillo’s adoption of the artistic values he learned from Jadassohn as well as the other musical influences he had in Leipzig during those years and shows how he articulated these with an emphasis on the melodic expression of fin-de-siècle Mexican music. By analyzing the symphony vis-à-vis a critical reading of the seeming contradictions found in Carrillo’s article “Sinfonía y ópera” one realizes that these contradictions are not only reflected but are the very source of the style developed in this composition. This makes the process of composition an act that not only situates the composer within these contradictions as he made sense of them, but also suggests a possible resolution of the conflict according to the composer’s unique ideological and cultural milieu. Upon his return to Mexico in 1904, Carrillo understood that he needed to build a unique niche for himself that would allow him a place of distinction within Mexico City’s musical scene. Embracing German musical ideologies offered such a position, a particularly effective one considering the sympathies for anything European that characterized pre-Revolutionary Mexican cultural life. However, rather than merely an imitation of German models, the style in Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 shows the most salient Germanic features as elements of the music’s foreground level, with the composer even crossing German ideological boundaries—such as the presence of a very “Wagnerian”-sounding theme within the most formalist of musical structures (the second

[66]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

theme of the symphony’s sonata-allegro in the fourth movement). As the analysis makes evident, there are several important stylistic deviations from standard German symphonic practice at the structural level in Carrillo’s music that further challenge his representation as simply an imitator of German models.

CARRILLO AND ROMANTICISM: PRE-MICROTONAL ASSESSMENT

Most of the criticism about Carrillo’s early tonal works has advanced the idea of the composer as an imitator of nineteenth-century Austro-German masters; the preceding analysis puts this assessment into question. Ricardo Miranda’s recent scholarship, produced under a revisionist look at Carrillo’s œuvre, argues for a more nuanced position—that the Mexican composer was in fact a Romantic because “the organicist craftsmanship and deliberate use of ‘secondary parameters’ in [the Symphony No. 1, the String Sextet, and the Suite ‘Los naranjos’] are two characteristics that identify Carrillo with the Romantic style.”47 Miranda’s project is to trace the continuities in Carrillo’s musical style from his tonal to his microtonal works and to interpret them as indexes of a Romantic spirit that the composer somehow betrayed by attempting the systematization of his Sonido 13.48 Further discussion about ideology in Carrillo’s writings (in Chapter  5) and about issues of spirituality (in Chapter  7) clearly show the Mexican composer as a non-Romantic artist. Still, in discussing Carrillo’s tonal works, when one may be tempted to label him a Romantic because of his use of technical procedures followed by Romantic composers and his engagement with Austro-German musical ideologies born out of the Romantic milieu, the issue must be examined. Indeed, as the previous sections argue, the composition of Symphony No. 1 is the result of a bricolage-like process in which Carrillo incorporates some of the ideologies that characterized late nineteenth-century German music; under those circumstances it would seem almost natural to claim him as a Romantic composer. However, this assumes that Romanticism is purely a matter of style when it would be better understood as a culturally and geographically contingent aesthetic/political project; it would also assume that Romanticism is a homogenous and uncontested artistic category or convention; and it would ultimately 47.  Ricardo Miranda, “Romanticismo y contradicción en la obra de Julián Carrillo,” Heterofonía 35, no. 129 (2003): 72. 48.  Miranda, “Romanticismo y contradicción en la obra de Julián Carrillo,” 75.

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neglect a serious assessment of Carrillo’s particular engagement with those Romantic musical ideologies. With roots in the German Sturm und Drang, Romanticism as an artistic and literary movement had its origin at the intersection of that unique German culture and the advent of the industrial revolution in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. As such, its emphasis on emotion, intuition, and untamed nature was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and an escape from reality through imagination. These are the characteristics that music as stylistically and technically dissimilar as the works of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, or Liszt came to embody in European Romanticism and the Romantic Spirit. Regardless of European culture’s claims to universality, one could argue that Romanticism as such can only exist within specific historical, geographic, and cultural coordinates since they give meaning to the movement as an intellectual endeavor and also shape its historical trajectory throughout the European—and most specifically, Austro-German—nineteenth century. This is not to say that artists from other latitudes could not engage these ideas, appropriate them, and resignify them in powerful and meaningful ways. However, I would argue that although composers like Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Sibelius, or Grieg had an impact on the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century European music, they remain always in the margins of the mainstream discussion about Romanticism because they were not a part of the unique geographical and cultural intersections that gave birth to Romanticism as an intellectual trend. And even though musicologists have claimed for decades that Western European culture is universal, this does not make it so. Instead of searching for labels perceived as universal to classify composers of such varied backgrounds and experiences as the ones mentioned, I argue that European culture should be understood as non-universal and the product of very specific local circumstances. When artists and, in this case, musicians engaged with these localized European cultures they did it through their own cultural lenses and experiences, in accordance with the local audiences they were writing for, and in doing so they transformed European culture to make it their own. As such, composers like Grieg, Tchaikovsky, or Carrillo took the ideas, techniques, styles, and aesthetic creeds of composers conventionally labeled as Romantic and changed them into new cultural idioms. The convention of reducing musical Romanticism to a few stylistic features (be it organicism, use of chromatic harmonies, use of large orchestral ensembles, etc.) and indiscriminately labeling composers as dissimilar as Wagner, Borodin, Verdi, or Alberto Williams as Romantics, without taking into account the intellectual and

[68]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

artistic milieu that produced and made Romanticism culturally significant, belittles the very idea of Romanticism. In a similar light, the claims about the universality of Western European culture in general, and Romanticism in particular, in fact end up trivializing both. Accordingly, by simply reducing Julián Carrillo’s articulation of nineteenth-century Austro-German music ideologies to an alleged acculturation into Romanticism, one would miss the nuanced ways, both in rhetoric and musical style, in which he deviates from the conventions of those ideologies and makes them into cultural forms relevant to his own musical development in Germany as well as in Mexico. Far from the intuitive and Romantic composer Miranda describes, Carrillo was a child of the positivist philosophy that permeated Mexican political, social, and cultural life at the end of the nineteenth century. He believed in order, structure, and science as conducive to progress; as such, he was closer to the spirit of Classicism than to Romanticism. His passionate involvement with classical idioms such as sonata-allegro form and compositional principles such as organicism are precisely the result of a rational search for clarity, balance, unity, and structure that could identify him with anything but Romanticism. The edits one witnesses in the three different versions of the first movement of his first symphony can be thought of as indexes of the composer’s struggle to maintain the proper balance of sonata-allegro form in his symphony. It is this passion with order and rationality which informs Carrillo’s musical path and his lifelong obsession with systematization. Far from contradictions, the composer’s musical styles and methodological anxieties are avenues through which we can interpret his musical works as instances of performative composition.

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CH AP TER   3

“… y hermosísima patria será” National and Post-National Transfigurations in Matilde

T

he stage is Modernist in design and although it is not big, its emptiness makes it look larger than it is. The theatrical scenery consists solely of a background screen showing a drawing of downtown Mexico City as it looked in the eighteenth century. On the stage a tenor and a soprano dressed in historical costumes sing a passionate duet. The tenor character, León, sings his love to Matilde; but she constantly interrupts his lyrical melody to express her doubts both about his professed love and the kinds of friends he has been keeping lately. Dramatic diminished chords cast a somber shadow over León’s amorous declaration, illustrating Matilde’s dubious mood. Suddenly, what began as a soaring love song becomes a vehicle for praising the virtues of León’s faceless friends. While Matilde’s highly chromatic line refers to them as traitors who have rebelled against Spain, León calls them “loyal patriots,” people ready to die for their Mexican motherland. As León confesses to share his friends’ feelings and the belief that dying for their homeland will bring them eternal glory, the orchestra quotes a fragment of the Mexican national anthem in the background. The atmosphere in the theater is quite intense and the audience breaks into a long, standing ovation as the stage curtain lowers after León’s final utterance: “The only thing I need in my agony is the luminous shroud of my flag.”1 This is my memory of the final scene of the first act of Julián Carrillo’s opera Matilde (o México en 1810) (1910) during its second performance, on 1.  “Tan sólo necesito en mi agonía / el sudario de luz de mi bandera.”

Friday, October 1, 2010, at the Teatro del Centro Cultural Universitario “Bicentenario,” in San Luis Potosí, Mexico (see Figure 3.1). The premiere had taken place the night before, more than a hundred years after its planned opening. Throughout the scene, I found myself frantically jotting field notes in a small notebook. I wanted to find the correct words to capture the feelings and emotions that those melodies and the singing exchange produced and awakened among the theatergoers that evening. Years later, when preparing to write this essay, I had a hard time reproducing what I  scribbled that night. The theater was too dark, the music too passionate and overwhelming, the spectators greatly enthralled, and my notebook too small. As I go over those notes now, years later, I can only make sense of isolated words both in English and Spanish:  “love,” “death,” “maldición” (curse), “religion,” “independence,” “la patria futura” (the future homeland). But as meaningless as these jotted words may seem out of the proper context, reading them while listening to Carrillo’s operatic music in the background helps me clearly remember the moment when that orchestral crescendo brought the scene to an end, the audience jumped to their feet, and my skin broke out in goosebumps. Surprised by my own physical reaction I  could only think that the nationalist education we received in Mexican elementary school apparently did its work quite well. This chapter takes these emotions as a point of departure to explore Matilde, the variety of national imaginaries the opera may invoke, and the ways the opera and its composer may have tried to interpellate citizens in the moments of performance and composition, respectively. Given that in fact such moments took place more than one hundred years apart, the crux of this story is in the production of meaning and the signification and resignification of nationalist values that music allows, reflects, and reveals. The premiere of Matilde was intended to be an organic part of the spectacular festivities of Mexico’s independence centennial in 1910, a celebration that, as Mauricio Tenorio Trillo has argued, “was consciously planned to be the apotheosis of a nationalist consciousness; it was meant to be the climax of an era.”2 Carrillo’s opera tells the story of a forbidden love between Matilde, the daughter of a Spanish captain, and León, a young patriot plotting against the Spanish crown, that ends tragically with the death of both characters. The composer uses this story as a metaphor of the political, social, and cultural struggles that had to happen before Mexico could become an independent country. Carrillo composed Matilde expecting it to be a major event at the celebration and solidification of the liberal 2.  Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996): 76.

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Figure 3.1  Program of the 2010 premiere of Julián Carrillo’s Matilde.

mythology of fin-de-siècle Mexico that the centennial festivities were meant to be; however, a series of unforeseen events and the advent of the Mexican revolution in 1910 put an end to those efforts and plans. Taken as a symbol of pre-revolutionary Mexico, the opera remained unperformed for more than one hundred years, until it was premiered in 2010 as part of the bicentennial celebration of the country’s independence—a commemoration organized under the aegis of the conservative government that took the power from the revolutionary regime in the 2000 elections. Carrillo composed Matilde to identify his audience as Mexican within the liberal/ positivist ideology prevalent in early twentieth-century Mexico; however, its production in 2010, along international calls to label the country a “failed state,” speaks of a more contested understanding of Mexican identity and the relationship citizens have to the neo-liberal nation-state under globalization. This chapter is a transhistorical study of Matilde as a performance complex rather than a bounded text with univocal or historically determined meaning. It focuses on the opera as a musical ritual that allows for the metaphorical re-articulation of a variety of national imaginaries, arguing that if the death of Matilde and León was a symbolic sacrifice necessary for imagining the birth of a country in 1910, its 2010 premiere could be read as a distressed call for its post-national transfiguration. In doing this, I necessarily revisit some of the words I jotted on the tiny pages of that notebook and explore how changing notions of religion, independence, love, and secularism inform the way we can understand Matilde as a metaphor of nation-building in changing ideological worlds. As a point of departure, this chapter offers an examination of the political circumstances surrounding the genesis of Matilde and its failed premiere in 1910. It is followed by a scene-by-scene explanation of the plot that pays particular attention to the moments that may be read as having a symbolic role in the type of interpellation expected from the opera. A  musical analysis of themes, leitmotifs, and key symbolism in relation to late nineteenth-century operatic compositional conventions shows the glocal character of Carrillo’s compositional process, the articulation of local desires and cosmopolitan aspirations at a very specific moment of Mexican history. Furthermore, by linking Matilde to canonical operatic models and sanctioned modes of listening—which the analysis shows Carrillo clearly had in mind when composing this work—this chapter shows the type of musical codes the opera may have shared with informed turn-of-the-century elite Mexico City audiences. A detailed interpretation of Matilde’s symbolic power as a performative utterance follows; it focuses on the opera’s symbols as doubly coded, making them operate as hinges between the imagined past represented in the plot—1810—and the present and future that the 1910

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Centennial ought to celebrate. The last part of the chapter explores the contested political climate that surrounded Matilde’s 2010 premiere; it argues that the patriotic music and the centrality of Catholic rituals in the opera may have prompted feelings of nostalgia in relation to deeply embedded and naturalized—although critically questioned—ideas of national identity among Mexican audiences, but also a renewal of links between politics and religion severed by a century-long tradition of secular liberalism.

MATILDE IN 1910

After completing his studies in Germany and Belgium, Carrillo went back to Mexico in 1904; upon his return he was appointed professor at the National Conservatory. As mentioned in Chapter  2, Carrillo was a true believer in the positivist and liberal ideologies that characterized Porfirio Díaz’s regime; his own life was an example of how education and hard work could be the foundation for an against-all-odds social success. The composer’s genuine gratitude toward Díaz for having sponsored his studies in Europe is evident not only in the musical works he dedicated to the president and his family members but also in the pages the composer devoted to him in his autobiography and other writings throughout his life.3 Díaz and some of his ministers (especially Justo Sierra) reciprocated Carrillo’s deference, often attending his concerts. By the end of the 1900s, the composer was one of the key figures of the Mexican music scene. In 1908, Carrillo met the Italian conductor Eduardo Trucco who, after hearing a rehearsal of the composer’s first symphony, apparently encouraged him to compose operas.4 Probably due to the many difficulties 3. Some of these works include Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1 (1902) and Himno patriótico (1910) for military band, both dedicated to Díaz; and Stella (1899) for chamber ensemble, dedicated to Díaz’s wife. See also Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, ed. Dolores Carrillo (San Luis Potosí, Mexico: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992), 71–77; and Jose Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra (Mexico City:  Edición del Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1945), 200–209. A  letter from Díaz to Carrillo, written in 1914, when Díaz was no longer president of Mexico and was exiled in Paris, is kept in Carrillo’s epistolary. In this letter, Díaz expresses his gratitude after receiving a copy of one of Carrillo’s most recent publications. The Carrillo Archive also keeps the draft of an unpublished celebratory note about the possibility of bringing Díaz’s remains back to Mexico. The note is in Dolores Carrillo’s handwriting but it is possible the composer may have dictated it to her, as it is dated September 4, 1965, just five days before his death. 4.  Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo, 234. Dolores Carrillo retells this anecdote in an entry of her journal written in Paris on the occasion of the recording of her father’s Sextet (1902) in 1961. There she writes: “My father says that when the Sextet was played in Mexico for the first time, Trucco, an Italian living there at the time, said

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encountered to produce Ossián (1902), which Carrillo had composed in Europe to a libretto by Henri Albert but had been unable to premiere, he had remained uninterested in composing another opera. However, Trucco’s praise and a call from the Comisión Nacional del Centenario (National Commission for the Centennial, a group in charge of organizing the celebrations of the Mexican Centennial) in 1909 piqued his curiosity first and his pride later. In his Pláticas musicales (1913), Carrillo mentions how, upon the commission’s call for the composition of a commemorative opera to be premiered as part of the celebrations of the Mexican Centennial, he and Trucco had a public debate about whether there was enough time to compose such a work.5 Trucco and Carlos J.  Meneses, conductor of the Conservatory Orchestra, argued “a year and a half was not enough [time] to compose an opera, adding that Mexican composers—including Gustavo E. Campa and Julián Carrillo—lacked the basic training [needed] to write it with any possibility of success.”6 Things got even uglier when some members of the Comisión Nacional suggested the work should be commissioned to a foreign composer instead. With this prospect, the challenge for Carrillo was not just about having the proper skills to do the job but also a matter of “patriotic” honor and proving these critics wrong. The composer’s response came in the form of an article, “Sinfonía y ópera” (1909), in which he claimed that it was not only possible to compose the opera in time but that someone used to writing symphonies would have no apprehensions about tackling “an infinitely inferior” genre like opera.7 In saying this, Carrillo, Mexico’s most vocal proponent of the symphony in the 1900s, was clearly putting his name forward as the most qualified Mexican composer for the task. On March 1909, it was announced that Carrillo would write an opera to be premiered at the inauguration of the National Theater as part of the celebrations of Mexico’s Centennial. The note emphasized that by taking this assignment, the composer showed that “art, duty, and patriotism have not died in the Mexican soul.”8 that if he applied all those lyrical abilities toward composing operas not even the most famous Italians would be able to compete with him”; entry for May 27, 1961. Dolores Carrillo, unpublished journal written in Paris between May 26 and June 3, 1961. Julián Carrillo Archive. 5. Julián Carrillo, Pláticas musicales (Puebla:  Wagner y Levien, 1913), 109. The original article where Carrillo told this story, “Sinfonía y ópera,” was published in El Heraldo, 30 June, 1909. 6.  The story is told in Melquiades Campos, “El maestro Julián Carrillo ha terminado la ópera para el centenario” (March 1910). Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 7. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, 109. 8.  “El maestro Carrillo hará la ópera para el Centenario” (March 1909). Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive.

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Carrillo worked almost exclusively on the composition of Matilde for seven months; he interrupted these efforts only to prepare the season of the Beethoven Orchestra in September 1909. By the end of February 1910 he had finished the actual composing, and he completed a draft of the orchestration early the following month. A few Mexico City newspapers and periodicals announced that the composer had finished writing an outstanding four-act opera. In an article celebrating the occasion, El Entreacto stated that “Carrillo has not only proven his patriotism but also his artistic prowess and the great respect for his public pledge; with this, he gains the admiration and applause of those who know the value of his efforts.”9 Melquiades Campos’s journalistic note celebrating Carrillo’s completion of the opera is of a similar patriotic tone, but warns the composer that given the heated debates surrounding the birth of the work, he should be careful with envious people who may be just waiting for the right moment to betray him.10 Javier Garciadiego argues that the festivities of the Centennial were more than just a celebration of national pride; they were also “a personal recognition of Porfirio Díaz, hero of war and peace, and architect of national progress [since] the political stability brought by him was the initial condition for [the] socioeconomic growth [of Mexico].”11 Thus, for Carrillo, taking on the opera project was as much a personal challenge and a patriotic contribution to the celebration of independence as it was a way to renew his allegiance to the regime and his loyalty and obligation to President Díaz. He dedicated Matilde to him and his minister of education, Justo Sierra;12 and although Díaz was particularly determined to see the work premiered, the government’s unconditional support waned almost inexplicably in the following months.13 After all the hard work put 9.  “Está concluida la ópera nacional. El maestro Julián Carrillo cumplió la palabra empeñada,” El Entreacto, March 1910. Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 10.  Campos, “El maestro Julián Carrillo.” 11.  Javier Garciadiego, “1910:  del viejo al nuevo Estado mexicano,” in México en tres momentos: 1810–1910–-2010, Vol. I, ed. Alicia Meyer (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), 42. 12.  There is no dedication in the surviving copy of the manuscript or the drafts of the opera. However, as part of one of the conversations which make up Julián Carrillo. Su vida y su obra, Velasco Urda tells Carrillo a story in which he affirms that the work was dedicated to Díaz and Sierra without the composer denying the information. Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo, 246. 13.  By the time Carrillo completed Matilde, Rafael J.  Tello had also finished an opera to celebrate the Centennial. Tello’s work was titled Nicolás Bravo and was based on a poetic drama written by Ignacio Mariscal in 1900. A former member of Benito Juárez’s administration and deputy during the 1857 Consitituent Congress of Mexico, Mariscal acted as minister of foreign affairs for Porfirio Díaz until 1910, when he passed away on April 17. It is possible that the death of a hero of Mexican

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into composing the opera and the widespread excitement generated by its completion, Carrillo must have been baffled and disappointed to face a series of obstacles that ended with the cancellation of the performance. Soon after Carrillo announced he had finished composing Matilde, it was revealed that the opera would not be premiered at the Teatro Nacional as had been advertised. This first setback was caused by a delay in the construction of the theater;14 however, the public was assured that the work would still be premiered as announced, on September 1910, only at a different hall.15 Nevertheless, as if Melquiades Campos’s words had been a premonition, after the initial presidential order to prepare the premiere of the opera, Sierra’s Ministry of Education issued a number of mysterious and perplexing counter-orders that prevented the work from being rehearsed. Velasco Urda suggests that Sierra may have acted on the recommendation of his musical advisors, composers and musicians who may have been part of the earlier debates about the composition of the opera.16 Eventually, Matilde was taken out of the official Centennial program without ever having been rehearsed; the Mexican opera enthusiasts who had been waiting for it had to settle for a gala featuring the popular verismo combination of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at the Arbeu Theater on September 11, 1910.17 What Carrillo had anticipated as his moment of glory and contribution to the great national celebration was reduced to a brief fleeting moment, when his Canto a la bandera (Song to the Flag)—also commissioned by the government for the occasion—was sung at an honoring of the flag by a large group of elementary schoolchildren.18

liberalism and a personal friend of Porfirio Díaz may have influenced the shift in Mexico City newspapers during the summer of 1910, when Carrillo’s Matilde was quickly replaced by Tello’s Nicolás Bravo as the favorite among Mexican intellectuals. See “La ópera nacional ‘Bravo,’ ” La Patria, June 13, 1910; “El estreno de la ópera del Señor Mariscal,” La Patria, August 22, 1910; “En el Teatro Arbeu,” La Patria, August 29, 1910. 14.  The opening of the Teatro Nacional was meant to be one of the great events of the Centennial; however, it was not finished on time. Later, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 prevented its completion; not until 1934 was it inaugurated under its current name, Palacio de Bellas Artes. For a study about music, opera, and the long process of construction of this theater, see Alejandro L. Madrid, Los sonidos de la nación moderna: música, cultura e ideas en el México post-revolucionario (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2008), 141–156. 15.  “Julián Carrillo terminó su ópera” (March 18, 1910). Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 16.  Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo, 246–249. 17.  Crónica oficial de las fiestas del primer centenario de la independencia de México, coord. by Genaro García (Mexico City: Talleres del Museo Nacional, 1911), 105. 18.  Crónica oficial, 190.

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In 1911, a massive popular uprising overthrew Díaz’s regime; this marked the beginning of a long period of political, social, and economic upheaval in the country. Just as the prospect of finishing the construction of the Teatro Nacional faded, the interest in Matilde, with its close associations to the old regime, also vanished. In the early 1920s, Carrillo premiered the prelude to the first act and a few arias and choruses from the opera with Mexico’s National Symphony Orchestra. The audiences’ good reception of these fragments re-generated a minor interest in the work but not enough to bring it to the stage. The passions, misadventures, and sounds of Matilde would remain trapped in the pages of a dusty libretto and an elusive set of orchestral and piano scores until its premiere at the Teatro del Centro Cultural Universitario “Bicentenario” on September 30, 2010, more than one hundred years after Carrillo announced its completion.

MATILDE IN LIBRET TO AND SCORE

In the summer of 2001, I  spent many weeks at the Carrillo Archive in Mexico City and was given the opportunity to go over materials that were not usually available to the public. For many years I had had access to the catalogued music scores kept in a large wooden cupboard on the first floor of the house, but I had wanted to explore Carrillo’s library on the second floor, which up until then had remained largely off-limits to researchers. Finally, after some negotiations with the family I  was granted access, and along with violist Omar Hernández-Hidalgo—who was working on a revised catalogue of the composer’s music at the time—I spent one of my most thrilling evenings at that archive, going through the uncatalogued papers and drafts kept in the library’s old cabinets. Among the many things we discovered in those timeworn drawers was a very detailed and thorough piano reduction of Matilde that may have been lying dormant there for decades. The copy of the somehow incomplete score that had been available with the rest of the composer’s music for years,19 the original libretto, an independent orchestral version of the prelude to the first act, individual orchestral parts, and the newly found piano reduction were the only scraps left of what Carrillo imagined as a magnificent opera. These scores plus an earlier vocal and piano draft found later were the basis for the 2010 reconstruction of the work for its premiere. Matilde is a substantial opera in four acts with extended and often technically demanding virtuoso orchestral passages. Particularly outstanding 19.  The manuscript of the orchestral score largely lacks lyrics.

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are the prelude to the first act, an intermezzo in the third act, and a shorter introduction to the fourth act in which Carrillo fully shows his compositional skills: vivid musical imagination, splendid melodic creativity, direct harmonic language, and an extensive mastery of counterpoint. However, there are a few discrepancies between the surviving drafts and manuscripts of the opera. The libretto, in Spanish, is noticeably longer than the actual opera, as several portions (especially from the third and fourth act) were left out as early as the first piano and vocal draft, finished in 1909. That first draft is also in Spanish and still presents a few extended vocal sections in the third and fourth act that Carrillo later re-arranged, shortened, or omitted from the final work. The final orchestrated version, from 1910, is in Spanish only at the beginning of the first act; after that, the majority of vocal parts appear without text, although the composer sporadically introduces lyrics in Italian throughout the manuscript. In the second piano reduction—the one I stumbled across among Carrillo’s library papers—the vocal parts are incomplete but in Italian; this version also presents minor musical differences with the orchestral score.20 The libretto was written ex profeso by Leonardo S. Viramontes, a poet, writer, lawyer, and literary scholar from San Luis Potosí known for his biography of nineteenth-century Mexican president Benito Juárez and an essay about Mexican novelist Federico Gamboa.21 Written in verse, the libretto shows the sensualist and exotic imagery, the concern with form, rhythm, and balance—with an emphasis on hendecasyllabic, octosyllabic, heptasyllabic, and pentasyllabic lines—as well as the elegant and refined use of language typical of modernista poetry of the time.22 One could say that, given the popularity of Italian opera in turn of the century Mexico 20.  The presence of Italian lyrics may be due to the interest of an Italian opera company in producing the work in the early 1920s. The Julian Carrillo archive keeps an undated newspaper clip in which an Italian impresario named Pacetti tells of his interest in the opera after having long conversations about it with Eduardo Trucco. “Se cantará a fines de la temporada de ópera del Centenario la ‘Matilde’ de Julián Carrillo,” El Entreacto. The clip does not include a date but the mention of a “Centennial Opera Season” suggests it was published in 1921, the year of the Centennial of the end of the war for independence. 21.  See Leonardo S. Viramontes, Biografía popular del benemérito de América (Mexico City: Tip. de la Vda. de F. Díaz de León, 1906); and Leonardo S. Viramontes, A través de “Reconquista,” último libro del Sr. D. Federico Gamboa (Mexico City: A. Carranza e hijos, 1909). 22.  Modernismo was a Latin American literary movement from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century inspired by French symbolism and parnassianism; it attempted a renovation of language and forms of expression. Poets Salvador Díaz Mirón (1853–1928), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859–1895), Luis González Urbina (1864–1934), and Amado Nervo (1870–1919) are among the most prominent Mexican modernista authors.

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and Carrillo’s admiration for the creator of the gesamtkunstwerk, Matilde is the curious hybrid of verismo filtered through the ears of a Wagnerian and uttered in the words of a modernista. The story takes place in 1810, during the celebration of Corpus Christi and the days that follow.23 The depiction of Catholic rituals like Corpus Christi is a standard convention in verismo operas. Its presence within Carrillo’s Matilde is another example of how the composer engaged European musical conventions and made them meaningful in new cultural settings. The opera’s opening prelude juxtaposes two rather martial themes; the first one, in a major tonality, expresses a kind of optimistic heroism (I hereafter label it the “insurgents’ anthem”); and the second one, in a minor tonality, has a more dignified character (I call it the “theme of dignity”).24 In Act I, León and his friend Antonio, both active in the movement of independence against Spain, have come to Mexico City to follow Matilde, with whom León has fallen in love. León and Antonio walk on Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor,25 across from the Palacio de Virreyes,26 and discuss the building as a symbol of Spanish tyranny and despotism, hoping that the desire to break away from the crown will soon bring freedom to the people of Mexico. Nearby, a Spanish nobleman pushes a beggar, lecturing him about how the poor should always give way to noblemen. León, incensed, tries to intervene but Antonio stops him; together, they lament how Spaniards often humiliate Mexicans in such a way. León sings of his love for Matilde, but the song soon becomes a desperate cry. He feels that loving the daughter of a Spanish captain is betraying not only his comrades and his country, but also God: “¡Española, tu amor es un incendio / que por los tuyos vela, cual custodio! / Yo, el hijo del dolor y el vilipendio / vengo a pedirte ¡Ay Dios, todo tu odio!” (Spaniard, your love is a fire/that cares for your kind like a guard/I, the son of pain and vilification/have come to ask, ¡Oh God, for all of your hate!). Don Juan, Matilde’s father, comes out of the cathedral and approaches León, asking what he is doing there. León sarcastically replies that he came

23.  Corpus Christi is one of the movable festivities of the Catholic calendar. In 1810, it took place on June 21, roughly two and a half months before the date of the actual historical uprising for independence, which occurred on September 16. It is important to note this anachronism as it puts at odds the patriotic claims in Viramontes-Carrillo’s fictional plot and those in the historical record. These discrepancies are central in understanding the proleptic character of Matilde. 24.  Both of these labels reflect how the composer signifies these themes in later scenes of the opera, particularly during the insurgents’ meeting in Act III, Scene 3. 25.  This was the name given to Mexico City’s main square during colonial times. 26.  Mexico City’s presidential palace was called Palacio Virreinal [Viceroyal Palace] during colonial times.

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to see the Corpus Christi celebration and Don Juan’s invincible army. Don Juan, who knows León is after Matilde, orders him to stay away from her; he also informs León that he knows he is an insurgent and wishes he had an excuse to shoot him. When things between them begin to heat up, the Corpus Christi procession coming out of the cathedral interrupts them. The processional scene features two choirs in a virtuosic polyphonic display that stresses the social tension between the institutions of the Spanish Crown and the people of the New Spain. The first choir is a religious group made up of friars and the congregation. Their prayer celebrates Corpus Christi, the incarnation of God in human form to save humanity (“Hoy es la fiesta sublime / la fiesta del hombre-Dios … tu descendiste sobre el orbe impuro / santificaste tu la humanidad” [Today is the sublime feast/the feast of the man-God … you descended over the impure world/you sanctified humanity]). The second choir is made of persons whose plea is more mundane than spiritual, reflecting the increasing turmoil among the people of the New Spain and even the circulation of Enlightened ideas (“Tu pueblo cautivo / llorando en tu atrio / un asilo patrio / te pide, Señor. … La razón del hombre / cual águila sube / la lágrima es nube / la lágrima es luz / libre el pensamiento / volar ambiciona …” [Your captive people/crying at your atrium/a patriotic haven/ asks from you, Lord. … The reason of men/rises like an eagle/a tear is a cloud/a tear is light/free thought/ambitions to fly …]). After the procession ends, Matilde comes out of the cathedral and encounters a poor woman on the street. The woman is a fortune-teller (the libretto calls her “the sorceress”) who offers to tell her the future in exchange for alms. She takes Matilde’s hand and tells her she is in love with a man who loves her dearly. However, she assures Matilde that she won’t be happy because “mares de odio” (seas of hate) separate them: “Un mundo contra otro mundo / un batallar de infierno. … Y el fin dará a la tumba dos cadaveres / y un bautismo de sangre al nuevo mundo” (A world against another world/a hellish battle. … And the end will offer a grave with two corpses/and a baptism of blood to the new world). Terrified, Matilde wanders aimlessly through the plaza until she encounters León and Rosario, a friend who is trying to help the lovers meet without Don Juan finding out. But the jealous Matilde misinterprets the situation, thinking that León is trying to seduce Rosario. León sings his love to Matilde, who remains upset about the affair she believes León is having with Rosario. She tries to hide her jealousy by pretending that her father being nearby is the cause of her distress. Matilde’s mention of Don Juan reminds León of their recent encounter. León tells Matilde of her father’s threat to kill him and how he has insulted his friends by calling them

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“perverse villains.” Instead, León insists, his friends are patriots fighting for a world without chains. Matilde believes these actions to be offenses against God and Spain, and tells him that his words are a death sentence for them and their love. León dramatically replies that he wishes nothing more than to die for his homeland, but when Matilde offers him her open arms León embraces her, stating that “morir en tu regazo / es la ventura eterna / porque tu de mi Patria / eres radiosa enseña” (to die in your lap/ would be an eternal fortune/because you are my homeland’s/radiant banner). Don Juan arrives at this moment, breaks the lovers’ embrace, and strikes León’s face with his glove, telling him that he will have his daughter only when she is dead. León takes out a small flag that reads “Free Mexico” and waves it while singing “tan sólo necesito en mi agonía / el sudario de luz de mi bandera” (The only thing I need in my agony/is the luminous shroud of my flag), to close the first act. Act II takes place in Mexico City’s Alameda Park. A group of gardeners optimistically sing of the imminent defeat of Spanish tyranny; their song sets the stage for a scene in which Rosario and Matilde take a walk in the park. Matilde wants to confront Rosario about her belief that she and León are betraying her, but before she can do this Friar Lorenzo, Matilde’s confessor, arrives. Friar Lorenzo is sad about the way the people are rebelling against Spain and warns Matilde that such actions will bring back the barbaric bloodbaths of Cuauhtémoc’s times.27 He advises Matilde to stay away from those insurgents because “alzados contra España / se yerguen contra el cielo” (fighting against Spain/they stand against heaven). Matilde feels anxious and believes the friar’s words may be a warning or judgment from God. When Friar Lorenzo leaves, León arrives singing a beautiful love song for Matilde. She joins him and the aria becomes an ambiguous duet that stresses both love (“Amor es vida / amor es luz” [Love is life/love is light]) and death (“Venga la muerte / siempre al oirte … he aquí la hora / de eterna luz” [let death come/every time I hear you … this is the time/of eternal light]). But Matilde’s jealousy breaks the harmony of the moment when she questions León’s declaration of love. She claims there is an “eco traidor” (echo of treason) in his words and reminds him that the day before, he was kissing another woman’s hand. León reveals that Rosario is Antonio’s lover and swears for “heaven and country” that his passion for Matilde is sincere. Matilde gives León a rose and a kiss, and tells him “con ellos te entrego mi vida” (with them I give you my life). Antonio interrupts the couple’s intimate moment to inform León that they should return 27.  The last Aztec emperor.

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to Querétaro at once because their brothers in arms are finally prepared and ready for war. Figure 3.2 shows Zaira Soria and José Luis Ordóñez as Matilde and León singing their love duet during the 2010 premiere of the opera. León and Matilde continue their duet, but the overall emotion shifts from romantic love to desperation and patriotism. León tells her that he should leave to help a friend in distress, but Matilde realizes that the real reason behind his sudden decision is linked to those friends her father calls “perverse villains.” While Matilde’s song becomes a tragic cry of fear and distress (“Justo Dios en mi amor me castiga … Quiera Dios que en tu senda no encuentres / el cadaver de aquella que amaste” [Righteously, God punishes me in my love. … God forbids you will find in your path/the cadaver of the woman you once loved]), León, equally troubled, states “No soy un hombre / soy una quimera” (I am not a man/I am a chimera) but transmutes his anguish into a final patriotic gesture (“Que en el campo de honor la bandera / brilla más si de sangre está roja” [A flag in the field of honor/is brighter if blood tinges it red]).

Figure 3.2  José Luis Ordóñez and Zaira Soria as León and Matilde during the premiere of Matilde in 2010. Copyright by Fernando López/SCGSLP, 2010. Used by permission.

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In the third act, Luis, a Spaniard who has infiltrated the rebel group, has led Matilde into a house in Querétaro where the insurgents will hold a meeting. She still hopes that León will not come and thus their love will be saved. Luis asks her to hide; otherwise the rebels would kill her. In her hideaway, Matilde sings an emotional aria, a prayer to the Virgin asking for pity: “porque adoro a mi padre y a mi Patria / más clama también mi cariño de esposa / ¡Virgen, vuélveme a aquel que idolatro / o se siempre Altísima y mátame ahora!” (Because I adore my father and my homeland/ but my love of being a wife also calls/Virgin, give me back to the one I idolize/or be always High and kill me now!). An orchestral intermezzo follows this scene. The libretto is very specific about the emotions the orchestral passage is to convey. It requests the music to reflect on Matilde’s emotional state but also to comment on the desires of the insurgents who are about to meet and the drama of the war to come. In the text, Viramontes states that the music should express “the deep pain of a people struggling for their freedom, the living ideals in their souls, flashes that have been born out of a century of philosophers and that arrive in the New World with the tragic fury of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars … the piercing emotion of a bloody conflict, of a very painful contrast between Matilde’s loving sweet desires, the bellicose cornets, and the suffering and solemn notes of a religious prayer.”28 Carrillo is able to translate these emotions into sound by writing an intermezzo in the form of a collage that quotes musical material from earlier moments in the opera: from Matilde’s aria at the beginning of the third act (her prayer to the Virgin), the patriots’ anthem (which up to this moment had only appeared in the prelude to the first act in an instrumental version but that will take center stage in the rest of the opera), Matilde and León’s duet from the end of act two, a series of leitmotifs associated with love, doubt, hatred, and Don Juan, and brief quotations form “La Marseillaise” and the Mexican national anthem. The result is a sonic mosaic that creates the emotional illusion requested by the librettist by reminding listeners of the emotions they have already experienced through the opera as well as by quoting well-known nationalistic anthems.

28.  “Los hondos dolores de un pueblo en lucha por su libertad, los ideales latentes en las almas y que han nacido a la luz de un siglo de filósofos, destellos que llegan hasta el Nuevo Mundo con todos los trágicos furores de la Revolución francesa y la epopeya napoleónica […] la emoción punzante de un conflicto sangriento, de un contraste dolorosísimo entre los dulces anhelos amantes de Matilde, las clarinerías belicosas y las dolientes y solemnes notas de la plegaria religiosa.” In Leonardo S. Viramontes, Matilde o México en 1810 (unpublished libretto, 1909), 31.

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The following scene is the meeting of conspirators. The libretto is clear that among these men there are several priests wearing modest clothing. The scene starts with a choir singing the insurgents’ anthem to the lyrics “Decid todos: ‘¡La patria ya sea!’ / y hermosísima patria será / con su llanto, haga un límpido cielo / con su sangre, haga un sol de bonanza” (Let us all say: “Let the homeland be now!” / and a very beautiful homeland it will be / with its tears, let it make a clean sky / with its blood, let it make a sun of bonanza). The president of the session continues the patriotic rhetoric but switches to the theme of dignity before the choir comes back with the insurgent’s anthem to state “Sea este canto la gran sinfonía / de la fé, del amor y el martirio … Y que al sol de la patria futura / nuestra sangre sin mancha ha de arder” (May this song be a great symphony/of love, faith and martyrdom. … And under the sun of the future country/our stainless blood will burn). At the outset of the insurgent session, Tomás, an older patriot, admonishes his comrades to be alert about possible traitors within the group; he tells that his son was killed when an infiltrated spy denounced an early conspiracy in which they both took part. Angered, the assembly of insurgents asks for revenge. Antonio walks to one of the insurgents and accuses him of being the traitor, claiming that he has a letter written by Tomás’s son right before his death in which he reveals the name of the spy. The assembly condemns the traitor to death but gives him the opportunity to knife himself, which he dramatically does. After the corpse is removed from the room the session continues with the president asking León to swear his loyalty to the cause of independence. León starts to pledge his allegiance but is abruptly interrupted by Matilde, who comes out of hiding asking him not to swear and not to condemn himself. Outraged, the insurgents think León is another traitor and ask for his execution. León, thinking aloud, realizes that telling his comrades who she is or pretending he does not know her would result in her death. He declares her to be a crazy woman who has fallen in love with him. Luis, the spy planted by Don Juan, also addresses the assembly to corroborate León’s story. The president orders her to be freed if they can prove she is really crazy, or to kill her if she is found to be a spy. The act finishes with the assembly singing the insurgents’ choir to new lyrics, “Jurad todos del cielo delante / tener patria hasta el ultimo instante / y a los cielos juremos, ¡Oh hermanos! / que en México no habrá más tiranos” (Let’s all swear before heaven/to have a homeland to the very last instant/and let’s swear for heaven’s sake, oh brothers!/that in Mexico there will be no more tyrants). Act IV starts with a prelude in fugato style based on a variation from Matilde’s prayer. The action takes place on the main square of Dolores, Guanajuato, across from the church where, according to Mexican

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mythology, the war of independence began. The setting is early in the morning, before dawn, finishing in a symbolic dramatic gesture, right after sunrise. Very agitated, Antonio explains that Don Juan and his soldiers liberated Matilde when she was being taken prisoner. He tells of the bloody fight between the realista army and the insurgents, and claims it to be the beginning of the war that will bring a country to the Mexican people; “¡Salve Dolores, de la patria cuna!” (Hail Dolores, cradle of our homeland!), he cries. Don Juan and a small group of soldiers arrive in Dolores; Matilde is with him, and they go into one of the houses on the main square. León arrives and Antonio warns him that staying there is dangerous as Don Juan is already waiting for them. They go inside the church’s curacy as people begin to gather for early mass, among them the sorceress from the first act. An insurgent soldier tells León that to prove his innocence, he should capture Don Juan by himself. León and the insurgents, followed by the people of the town, go to the house where Don Juan and Matilde have spent the night. Matilde comes out and asks León what he wants. When León requests Don Juan to come out, Matilde waves a knife, stating that if he moves she will kill herself. León orders the insurgents to hold her, but before they can get to her, she stabs herself (see Figure 3.3).

Figure  3.3  José Luis Ordóñez and Zaira Soria as León and Matilde acting the suicide scene during the premiere of Matilde in 2010. Copyright by Marina Cruz Martínez, 2010. Used by permission.

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León is petrified before Matilde’s dead body when Don Juan comes out and furiously buries his sword in León’s chest. He is quickly unarmed and captured by the insurgents. Another group of insurgents arrives, carrying a banner with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and stand behind León. The sorceress, a witness to the scene, sings her damning prophecy again: “un mar de odio entre los dos / un mundo contra otro mundo” (a sea of hate between the two of them / a world against another world). Matilde’s last words are to León, “Ya tu crueldad no me desdeña / amor en tus cantos vibre” (Your cruelty does not deceive me anymore / let love vibrate in your song). León’s last sight, however, is “¡Mujer, no tengo amor! / Patria, en tu enseña escribo con mi sangre / que eres libre” (Woman, I  have no love! / Homeland, I  write with my blood on your flag / that you are free). The final scene features Antonio and the conspirators singing the insurgent anthem “Sangre augusta / de gloria y martirio / que haz de darnos hogar legendario / haz un árbol brotar milenario / del patíbulo triste de ayer” (Sublime blood / of glory and martyrdom/you will give us a legendary home/make a millennial tree spring / from yesterday’s sad gallows).

REPETITION AND PL ACEMENT IN MATILDE

In preparation for the musical analysis of Carrillo’s opera I  spent many weeks listening to Matilde almost exclusively. I  would hear the music while jogging, driving, as background music while conducting wearying non-music tasks, and at any opportunity I had. Sometimes my listening was very focused but often it was rather laid back. I did this before actually looking at the work’s score in an attempt to become familiar with the sounds of Matilde but also to understand what musical elements would seem more obvious and salient to someone watching the opera for the first time. After a few weeks I was able to identify similarities among repeating melodies and what I thought were the main themes in the opera—at least, those someone would possibly remember more easily after one or two hearings. My overall impression was that there were two dominant musical themes (the insurgent’s anthem, example 3.1, and the theme of dignity, example 3.2), and a secondary one that was central to a couple of key scenes in the metaphorical transformation the characters go through throughout the opera (the church theme, formed by two interrelated sub-themes, example 3.3 and ­example 3.4). These themes had a few common traits; they were all catchy melodies, choral, sung in a loud tutti style

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Example 3.1  Julián Carrillo, Matilde (1910). Insurgents’ anthem.

Example 3.2 Carrillo, Matilde. Theme of dignity.

Example 3.3 Carrillo, Matilde. Church subtheme 1.

Example 3.4 Carrillo, Matilde. Church subtheme 2.

with lush orchestral accompaniment, and, I was sure, pervasive throughout the opera. When reading reviews of Matilde’s premiere, I  was able to corroborate that I was not alone in finding these themes prominent and memorable. In his account, Hugo Roca Joglar praises Carrillo’s “clear and direct melodies,” and quotes conductor José Miramontes Zapata as saying that “the choir is in charge of the most beautiful lyrical passages in the work.”29 In describing Matilde’s most memorable musical moments, based on the opera’s commercially available recording, Raúl López Collera highlights the “heroic prelude” to the first act, the “solemn and angelical” music in the Corpus Christi celebration in the first act; the “dramatic” choral melodies in the third act; the organ of the morning mass, and the “solemn” choral finale in the fourth act. He also mentions León’s “beautiful and expressive” aria from the first act, and León and Matilde’s duets from the first and second acts.30 There is some consensus as to the prominence of the choral themes. They clearly stand out among Matilde’s many tunes and melodies, somehow appearing almost ubiquitous throughout the opera. Much to my surprise, when I analyzed the score I found that these themes appear only two or three times within the two-hour opera. However, Carrillo manages to instill them with a sense of importance and prominence through the magnificence of the musical setting—chorale texture, full orchestration, memorable melodies—and placement. They are not limitlessly repeated; instead, they are properly placed at key dramatic moments in the opera; in the case of the insurgent anthem and the dignity theme, they appear in the opening prelude, whose music is almost entirely reprised (with only a change in tonality) during the insurgent session scene in the third act and the patriotic final song. The church music appears only at the Corpus Christi procession in the first act and briefly in the fourth act, right before the tragic deaths of Matilde and León. Repetition and placement play a crucial role in the intelligibility of a musical text as well as its power to do something discursively. When understood against the dramatic text, the theatrical moments they underpin, it is clear that musical repetition and placement in Matilde do not solely facilitate musical clarity; they also refer to the type of interpellation that Carrillo tried to achieve with his opera—to imbue his listeners with nationalist ideology. I  would argue that by themselves, the most easily recognizable, visible, and superficial themes and musical elements in the opera speak 29. Hugo Roca Joglar, “Estreno mundial:  la resurrección de Matilde, de Julián Carrillo,” Pro Ópera 19, no. 1 (2011): 13. 30.  Rubén López Collera, “Julián Carrillo: Matilde o México en 1810,” Julián Carrillo Trujillo Blog, http://es.netlog.com/JulianCarrilloTrujillo/blog (posted February 1, 2012, accessed February 2, 2013).

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broadly of the “what” of Matilde: the type of performativity the composer attempted with this work. On the other hand, the complex musical, thematic, and motivic fabric of the opera, achieved through the repetition and placement of musical materials along specific dramatic moments speaks of the “how”: the way in which Carrillo tried to achieve such interpellation. Rather than complete individual themes, a number of musical motives related to specific emotions and dramatic circumstances appear more frequently throughout the opera. Most notable are the love motif (explained below, example 3.5); the hate/Don Juan motif (example 3.6), which appears frequently to illustrate the antagonism of León and the insurgents against the Spaniards but also Don Juan’s feelings toward León and his desire to keep him apart from Matilde; the warning motif (example 3.7), which appears as Friar Lorenzo advises Matilde to stay away from the insurgents, and when the insurgents discover the traitor; and the sequences of diminished chords that constantly interrupt the love duets representing Matilde’s desperation and doubt. The use of these leitmotifs is just one example of the many Wagnerian tendencies in Carrillo’s score; some “tristanisms” in the form of harmonic sequences, often representing melancholy or transitional emotional moments, surface at different moments in the opera—such as the

Example 3.5 Carrillo, Matilde. Love motif.

Example 3.6 Carrillo, Matilde. Two versions of the Hate/Don Juan motif.

Example 3.7 Carrillo, Matilde. Warning motif.

Example 3.8 Carrillo, Matilde. Beginning of Act I, Scene 3.

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beginning of Act I, Scene 3 (example 3.8), when León remembers Matilde and prepares to sing his confession of love for her. Furthermore, typical of the score is the association of characters to specific tonalities or sonic qualities. León sings his arias in D major while Matilde’s most memorable melodies are in A flat major (in her duet with León in Act II, Scene 3), and F minor (in her prayer from Act III, Scene 2); her tonalities are located in opposite sides of the circle of fifths from León’s, thus symbolizing the impossibility of their encounter, the hopelessness of their love. Don Juan is surrounded by diminished tonalities or the hate leitmotif, and the two appearances of the church music show a similar harmonic motion from E flat minor (example 3.3) to E flat major (example 3.4), the latter being traditionally associated in Western music with the Holy Trinity. The love motif (example 3.5) appears for the first time as an orchestral introduction to León’s confession aria in the first act, which ends up as a patriot song. It comes back when the sorceress tells Matilde “amais y sois amada” (you love and you are loved), which precedes her curse over their love in Act 1, Scene 10. It reappears in the orchestra to counterbalance Matilde’s doubts as she attempt to ask Rosario about what she believes is her love affair with León in Act II, Scene 2; it returns in a similar role at the end of that scene, when, after hearing Friar Lorenzo’s warning, Matilde is uncertain what their love will bring. At the end of the love duet in Act II, Scene 3, the love motif is played by the orchestra as Matilde sings “Keep this flower and this kiss, with them I give you my life”; it is heard again in an expanded version toward the end of the intermezzo in order to express Matilde’s emotional struggle between love and desperation. The orchestra plays the motif once more, to underscore León psychological battle between his love for Matilde and his loyalty for the insurgent cause as he learns that Don Juan and her daughter are in Dolores at the end of Act IV, Scene 4. León’s struggle is represented by a juxtaposition of the love motif and the hate motif in Act IV, Scene 7, as Matilde tries to stop him from taking her father prisoner. Finally, the orchestra offers one last utterance of the love motif as Matilde and León sing their death song. Ambiguity is the common trait in the use of the love motif. In León’s case, the sequence always accentuates erotic love morphing into patriotism; his song is about a desire for transcendence that would be fulfilled by dying in his lover’s lap or dying for his country. Such uncertainty illustrates León’s odd love declaration, when he accepts Matilde’s arms and sings “to die in your lap would be an eternal fortune because you are my homeland’s radiant banner.” This moment collapses lover and homeland, the objects of ambivalent desire, into a single entity, a key act in

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understanding the symbolic struggle at stake in the opera as explained later. In the case of Matilde, the love motif signals the ambiguity between love, her fears (born out of jealousy), and her desire for her lover, her father, and her country—as heard in her painful prayer: “Because I adore my father and my homeland but my love of [being a] wife also calls.” The presence of the love motif at the tragic finale of the opera puts in evidence the duality love-death, the Wagnerian Liebestod, at the center of Matilde that ultimately informs León and Matilde’s singing and desire. Thus, the lover’s singing is a perfect example of the Freudian death drive, the repetitive traumatic chant of the impossible relation that would only find their sublimation in a love sacrifice that allows for their transcendence.

PERFORMATIVIT Y, MEANING, AND MATILDE

In analyzing Wagner’s operas, Slavoj Žižek affirms that “the Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. The death drive does not reside in Wagner’s heroes’ longing to find peace in death; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying—a name for the undead state of eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless, repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The final passing of the Wagnerian hero … is therefore the moment of [his] liberation from the clutches of the death drive.”31 Furthermore, Elisabeth Bronfen suggests that representations of female death reveal the complex interplay between pathology and power in Western culture. She claims these depictions involve two forms of violence; “firstly a violence that produces strife, conflict, perturbation but also dynamisation (the feminine body); secondly, a violence that puts a forceful closure on to such disruption, that recuperates instances of destability into stability (the sacrifice of the feminine body).”32 In Matilde, the female body ignites a desire in León that sets up a struggle between erotic love and nation but also signals the suspension of the traditional symbolic order; the world no longer makes sense and its crisis is reflected in the sorceress’s inevitable prophetic words, “a world against another world, a hellish battle.” In fact, as the moment in which León conflates lover and country indicates, 31. Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘I Do Not Order My Dreams.’ The Death Drive and the Wagnerian Sublime,” in Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), 106–107. 32. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body:  Death, Femininity, and Aesthetic (London: Routledge, 1992), 193.

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Matilde’s body acts as a metaphor of the motherland to be possessed. In a patriarchal system, under normal circumstances, the father would give away the female body to the husband; but in this case, the hate between the father and lover makes this transfer impossible. The motherland cannot change owner peacefully as the Spaniards resist giving it away to the Mexicans. Therefore, the struggle over the control of Matilde’s body is the struggle over the possession of the homeland and its symbolic representation. Under such circumstances, it is Matilde’s death that will bring a sense of stability to a world in turmoil, but only when followed by León’s own sacrifice, as it is his own death drive, channeled through destructive erotic desire, the force that has destabilized the symbolic world around him. In that sense, just as León is precisely the type of Wagnerian hero described by Žižek, the lovers are a perfect example of the Lacanian impossibility of the sexual relation; thus, their death operates as a point de capiton, a moment of symbolic suture that re-fixes into a new unified symbolic field the meaning of the signifiers that the moment of crisis had de-articulated.33 Therefore, death in Carrillo’s opera works as a performative moment of interpellation; it is the sublimation of the impossibility of love in the possibility of the lovers’ life beyond death in the nation-state that their sacrifice makes possible. In interpreting how Matilde was meant to interpellate his audience in 1910 I articulate Žižek and Bronfen’s ideas about death and its representation in relation to indexes in the opera that tell us of the historically located ideologies informing its composition and miscarried premiere. Since the idea of the redemptive ritual sacrifice is central to Matilde it is no coincidence that the drama begins to unfold precisely with the celebration of Corpus Christi. As Linda Curcio-Nagy states, due to religious, civic, and political reasons, Corpus Christi was the most important celebration in colonial Mexico City.34 As a purely religious occasion, Corpus Christi celebrates the mystery of transubstantiation: the incarnation of God in a human being in order to save humanity from its sins and His presence in the bread and wine during mass. It is “the feast of the man-God,” Christ, and a celebration of His triumph and victory over death through resurrection.35 The idea of God coming down from the heavens to earth, only

33.  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1989), 87. 34.  Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, “Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H.  Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E.  Fenech (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 3. 35.  José Antonio Abad Ibáñez and Manuel Garrido Bonaño, Iniciación a la liturgia de la Iglesia (Madrid: Pelícano, 1988), 282.

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to go back there after fulfilling His sacrificial deed as a human being, is reflected in the shape of the repeated melody of the Church music in example 3.4; the melody moves from the high to the low and back to the high register. However, in New Spain, the mystical importance of Corpus Christi was matched by its civic and political performative power. In civic terms, the occasion “served a myriad of functions, encouraging integration, instilling the seeds of civic pride, promoting popular welfare, and providing [the state] a symbolic means to legitimacy.”36 Politically, Corpus Christi was a symbol of Catholicism; it marked Catholic identity as fundamentally different from Protestantism. At a moment of crisis within Christianity, this festivity was a sign of Catholic Christianity’s triumph “over heresy and Catholic Christians over nonpapists.”37 It was a ritual that celebrated God’s sacrifice in order to free His flock while articulating a sense of loyalty with the head of the church and reinforcing the social fabric of the New Spain. Carrillo and Viramontes chose to place this festivity at the center of the opera precisely because it is a metaphor for the type of ritualistic performativity they meant their opera to engage. However, their performative interpellation was meant within the tradition of Mexican liberalism that incorporates and re-signifies religious imagery into new secular contexts. It is in the polyphony of the Corpus Christi scene that the composer first shows the tensions between the church-centered world of the colony (“Today is the sublime feast / the feast of the man-God”) and the secular, freethinking society he retroactively imagines to be born out of the struggle for independence (“The reason of men / rises like an eagle / a tear is a cloud / a tear is light / free thought / ambitions to fly”). Within this rhetorical transfiguration one can reinterpret the melodic shape of the church music in ­example 3.4 not as the eventual return of Christ to the heavens but rather as the rise of reason and free thought as the imagined foundation of the liberal nation-state Carrillo wanted to celebrate in 1910. For Carrillo, the sacrifice of Matilde and León was a type of metaphorical ritual that allowed for the birth of the nation-state that he lived in and wished to celebrate at its Centennial. At the same time, the opera was a way of showing allegiance to his own object of desire, Porfirio Díaz and the liberal regime that commissioned the work and that organized the Centennial. From the notion of free thought to the unequivocal references to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the intermezzo to the 36.  Curcio-Nagy, “Giants and Gypsies,” 20. 37.  Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 12.

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critique of despotism and its call against oppression, liberal ideas abound in Viramontes’s libretto for Matilde. The liberal tradition of adopting religious speech into secular discourse is also evident throughout the opera; especially in homologizing treason with impurity, heroism with holiness, and resignifying notions like virtue, martyrdom, and sacrifice beyond their pious connotations in Christian rhetoric into tools of worldly cleansing in secular oratory. As Pamela Voekel argues, this type of discursive secularization of church imagery is at the core of the social transfiguration that made early modern Mexico possible, informing the epistemic links between Catholicism and liberalism among Mexican intellectuals and transferring religiosity from the church to the state.38 Furthermore, as Brian Connaughton claims, the discursive relationship between the image of the body of Christ and the body politic was central to the success of a secular state.39 Clearly, it is no accident that Carrillo and Viramontes chose the Corpus Christi festival to foreshadow the new metaphorical liberal transfiguration of the body politic represented in the lovers’ death. Although liberal ideas entered the New Spain toward the beginning of the nineteenth century and influenced the development of the first important insurgent actions against the Spanish crown in 1810, it was only the intervention of a counterinsurgent movement whose aim was to stop the spreading of liberal ideas through Spanish America that made the proclamation of independence possible in 1821. Secular liberal ideas did not have a political impact on the Mexican project of nation-building until midcentury, with the signing of the 1857 Constitution; and only translated into true political action with the restoration of the Republic under president Benito Juárez in 1867. In that sense, the preeminence of secular liberal ideas in Matilde and their invocation as the foundation of “the beautiful homeland that will be” could be seen as historically inaccurate. However, Carrillo’s opera is not an attempt to depict history or restore a historical moment; the plot is fictional and only mentions historical places and moments in order to validate itself. Instead, Matilde is a story that has as its teleological goal the Mexican liberal nation-state of 1910. In a way, Matilde is the result of a reflective nostalgia that creates the past according to the present,40 as if knowing or prophesying what the future would be. This proleptic character of the opera is evident in many 38.  Pamela Voekel, Alone before God. The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 169. 39. Brian Connaughton, Entre la voz de Dios y el llamado de la patria (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2010), 107–109. 40.  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.

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anachronistic moments throughout its plot as well as its music: from the very title of the work, using a name of Germanic origin (Matilde) that was not used in Mexico until the 1850s,41 to mentions of the village of Dolores as the homeland’s cradle (when, as mentioned earlier, the action takes place at least two and a half months before the Dolores uprising),42 and from quotations of the Mexican anthem (which was not composed until 1854)  to the continuous references to a shining flag and a “patria futura.” These are all elements that did not exist as such in the historical past where the plot is supposed to be taking place or did not yet have the symbolic meaning the opera assigns them. Regardless, they are central to Carrillo and Viramontes’s sonic construction of an imaginary past on which they could see their own present reflected and prefigured. Matilde was meant to be part of the celebration of the liberal imaginary of the nation-state in 1910, a state made possible by thirty years of Porfirian rule. As such, the opera was intended as part of a festivity that looked at the past in a proleptic way, a celebration that understood the past as the beginning of a teleological history that would end up in 1910, at “the climax of an era.”43 In that sense, Matilde was as much a figurative confirmation that the country patriots dreamed of in 1810 (“y hermosísima patria será”) was the country delivered by the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz in 1910, as it was itself meant as a tool in the solidification of the symbols of that nation-state. Ironically, it was precisely at the moment of creation of Matilde that the imaginary model of nation-state it sought to celebrate collapsed giving way to the Mexican Revolution and indefinitely postponing the opera’s premiere.

MATILDE IN 2010

“Seas of hate between you two / a world against another world / a hellish battle … and the end will offer a grave with two corpses / and a baptism of blood to the new world.” This is the sung curse of the sorceress in Act I, Scene 10, which presages the crisis, sacrifice, and martyrdom at the core of the opera. Given our vantage point as listeners from the twenty-first century, aware of the imminent crisis the Porfirian regime was about to 41.  Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Los nombres de pila en México desde 1540 hasta 1950,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 19, no. 1 (1970): 40–45. The fact that the name Matilde has a Germanic origin also speaks to Carrillo’s infatuation with Germanic culture after his studies in Leipzig at the turn of the twentieth century. 42.  See note 23. 43.  Tenorio Trillo, “1910 Mexico City.”

[96]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

face just months after the celebrations of the Centennial, one cannot help interpreting the sorceress’s song as a premonition of the crisis of that regime and the opera itself as a ritual for a very different kind of transfiguration from what Carrillo intended. Moreover, listening to this song at the premiere of the opera in 2010, as part of the contested and ideologically bizarre celebration of Mexico’s Bicentennial, invites the listener to further question what Matilde and León’s sacrifice would stand for in such a different political and historical context. The polyvalence of the imaginary, symbolic, and real work of interpellation of Matilde shows that questions of signification lay outside the musical text and are contingent on the specificity of the aesthetic experience. The 2010 premiere of Matilde took place in a radically different political and historical moment. In 2000, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), the pragmatic and largely liberal party born out of the revolutionary regime, lost the presidential election to the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), a right-wing party founded in 1939 as a space for the agglutination of Catholics and other conservative factions that felt excluded from political power after the Mexican Revolution. For the first time in more than 130 years, a conservative party historically linked to Catholicism took control of Mexico’s executive power. Writing at the onset of this historical occasion, Claudio Lomnitz identified a crisis in the political understanding of the relationship between modernity and nationality. For Lomnitz, this crisis of the revolutionary politics of nationalism was evident in a reduced independence of the country’s upper classes, the democratization of distinction through mass consumption, a decline of Mexico City as the determining locus of national identity, a struggle over the contents of national representation, and an escalating disdain for the ruling political elite and the institutions of the nation-state.44 Nevertheless, instead of clarifying a way out of this crisis, political alternation aggravated this situation. In 2006, after an initial term, the PAN won the presidency for a second time, following a highly contested election that brought pervasive accusations of electoral fraud. In an attempt to gain political credibility, the new president, Felipe Calderón, began a war against drugs that exacerbated the complicated relationship between drug cartels and governmental institutions. The violence generated by this war quickly ran out of control, leaving thousands of deaths as well as large regions of the country practically under 44.  Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico:  An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 121–122.

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the control of the drug cartels. The urgency and serious mismanagement of the situation along with increasing government corruption and social insecurity prompted many international observers to ponder the idea of Mexico as a “failed state,” further congealing the crisis of the nation-state.45 Winning the presidential election again gave PAN the opportunity to shape the representation of Mexican cultural and historical identity at the momentous occasion of the Mexican Bicentennial in 2010. However, several events planned for the celebration revealed the ideological vacuum of the PAN regime and its inability to come to terms with more than 100  years of liberal symbolic representations of the nation. The case of the Colossus of the Bicentennial is symptomatic of the type of ideological vacuity that characterized the festivities. The Colossus of the Bicentennial was a gigantic, mobile, white polyurethane statue used during the official parade on September 15, 2010, to celebrate the heroes of the Independence and Revolution. Soon after its showcase at the parade, sardonic comments and jokes as to the identity of the character started to flood the Internet. Most remarks made fun of the character’s lack of specificity and its stereotypical moustache; people commented it looked like singer Vicente Fernández, murdered PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (1950–1994), and even Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The discussion became more heated when the sculptors confessed they had based the figure’s facial expression on a picture of counterrevolutionary Benjamín Argumedo (1876–1916), a traitor according to the pantheon of official heroes produced by the pre-PAN, revolutionary regime. The secretary of public education, in charge of coordinating the celebration, quickly responded that the Colossus was meant as an unspecific representation of the insurgents and patriots who fought for the country’s independence and revolution. The vagueness of the official representation of the nation led political commentators to sarcastically state that the only thing the PAN government wanted to remember from Mexico’s past was “a moustache.”46 Verónica Zarate Toscano states that the celebration of the

45. See The Joint Operating Environment: Challenges and Implications for the Future Joint Force (Suffolk, VA: United States Joint Forces Command, 2008), 36; Gardenia Mendoza Aguilar, “Parts of Mexico Show Signs of ‘Failed State,’ ” New American Media, September 24, 2010, http://newamericamedia.org/2010/09/parts-ofmexico-show-signs-of-failed-state.php (accessed 10 February 2013); and Gary J.  Hale, “A ‘Failed State’ in Mexico:  Tamaulipas Declares Itself Ungovernable” (Houston: James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy-Rice University, 2011). 46.  For a complete discussion of the event see Ira Franco, “El Coloso del Bicentenario genera controversia en México,” CNN México, September 20, 2010. http://mexico.cnn. com/bicentenario/2010/09/20/el-coloso-del-bicentenario-genera-controversia-enmexico (accessed 10 February 2013).

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Bicentennial “left a sense of dissatisfaction after a failed commemoration full with acts empty of meaning.”47 The official position of the federal government was that “the state did not impose its point of view [but allowed for the reflection] of a new time of pluralism, tolerance, freedom of creativity, thought and criticism.”48 However, the general perception was that the decaffeinated celebration was a reflection of “the weakening of the [Mexican] State, whose presence [up until that moment] had been central in the articulation of [Mexican] society.”49 The Bicentennial celebration in Mexico City showed a state unable to cope with and resignify the symbols that the post-revolutionary regime created and systematically instilled in most Mexicans throughout the twentieth century. In other words, it failed to channel and give new political meaning to the type of deeply embodied nationalist emotions I witnessed and experienced at the 2010 premiere of Matilde. The crisis of the nation-state under globalization and the neoliberalization of economies and politics is not unique to Mexico. Scholars have documented the increasingly reduced margin of political and economic leverage of the contemporary nation-state. This condition has been labeled “post-national,” as it challenges the symbolic order of ideologies and codes that the modern-nation state embodied and was able to project onto its citizens since its inception as a political institution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.50 What does the revival of Carrillo’s Matilde, a failed pre-revolutionary symbol, reveal about the post-national moment of its premiere? How does the sacrifice of the opera’s characters 47.  Verónica Zárate Toscano, “Haciendo patria. Conmemoración, memoria e historia official,” in Centenarios, conmemoraciones e historia oficial, ed. Erika Pani and Ariel Rodríguez Kuri (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012), 77. 48. Silvia Isabel Gámez, “Muestra Villalpando exitoso Bicentenario,” Reforma, January 18, 2011. 49.  Soledad Loaeza, “La historia, la historia patria y la formación de un nuevo consenso nacional,” in Centenarios, conmemoraciones e historia oficial, ed. Erika Pani and Ariel Rodríguez Kuri (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012), 381. 50.  See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 158–168; Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation:  Political Essays (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2001), 58–112; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2000), 137–159; Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, “Introduction,” in The Postnational Self:  Belonging and Identity, ed. Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2002), vii–xxxii. For a discussion about music in relation to the notion of the post-national, see Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid, “Introduction: The Postnational Turn in Music Scholarship and Music Marketing,” in Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario, ed. Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 1–22; and Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20.

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shed light on the contested symbols of nationalism at a moment of severe political, social, and moral crisis? How does this metaphorical sacrifice in the present engage emotions and feelings related to bygone notions of the nation-state? Maestro José Miramontes Zapata states that he became interested in premiering Matilde on the recommendation of Carlos Undiano, a pianist from San Luis Potosí, who suggested the Bicentennial would be a perfect occasion to premiere a forgotten masterpiece about Mexican Independence.51 Miramontes Zapata was fundamental in transforming the ghost of Carrillo’s opera into the living creature heard at the premiere. He took the incomplete orchestral manuscript, the orchestral parts, and the two piano reduction sketches and made sense of them, providing a solution to what he believed were problems of orchestration, vocal texture, and over-repetition, as well as dramatic imbalances among the characters. The result brought to life a work that presented important differences from Carrillo’s unpublished, never-premiered virtual version. The orchestral part was revised to avoid instrumental density and to streamline specific passages. The choral texture was simplified to provide contrast and transparency; this is particularly evident in the polyphonic church music in Act I, as well as the insurgent anthems in Act III and IV, which are shortened and less massive than one would imagine them from looking at the score. Several scenes were condensed, especially Friar Lorenzo’s admonition to Matilde in Act I, the insurgents’ meeting in Act III, and several scenes in Act IV. The sorceress was reintroduced twice: alternating with the choirs in describing Mexico City’s Alameda in Act II, and taking Antonio’s text to tell of the presence of Don Juan in Dolores in Act IV. In the 2010 performance, the sorceress was more than a pythoness; she became a guide helping the audience to navigate the plot. According to Miramontes Zapata, all of these changes were done in an attempt to bring transparency, balance, dynamic contrast, and dramatic coherence to the work.52 The most salient performatic features of Matilde’s 2010 premiere were the sensuality of the vocal lines, the lush sound of the orchestration, the catchiness of the melodies, the emotional content of the patriotic songs, the beauty of the love duets, and the eerie quality of the stage design. All of these elements allowed the audience to emotionally relate to the opera, but they were also absent from it until its premiere for two main reasons. One, the opera only existed virtually; it did not live in 51.  José Miramontes Zapata, personal interview. San Luis Potosí, Mexico. October 1, 2010. 52.  José Miramontes Zapata, personal interview.

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sound and performatic action. Two, every single one of these elements was enhanced in Miramontes Zapata’s editing, arranging, and ultimately, in Miguel Alonso Gutiérrez’s mise-en-scène. The conductor and stage director’s work extensively influenced the shaping of the opera’s representation well beyond the actual performance; his presence was fundamental for a process of signification to take place and, I would argue, for eventually providing the basis for a possible emotional reaction to and connection with the work. In the political climate of a conservative regime that attempted a separation from the symbols of nationalism developed by the post-revolutionary regime, it is clear that reviving a patriotic symbol of the pre-revolutionary era provided a possible avenue for the construction of a new one; in fact, for purposes of re-symbolization, to use an unsuccessful symbol was better, as it was empty of revolutionary signification. Matilde, an empty sign that had not gone through the process of signification experienced by symbols either created to validate the post-revolutionary rhetoric or cleansed from their Porfirian overtones for the same purpose, was an excellent choice. As Miramontes Zapata and Undiano sensed, the neo-liberal Bicentennial was the perfect moment to revive an opera meant to celebrate the achievements of the nineteenth-century liberal nation-state and invest it with new meaning. However, I would argue that the goosebumps and the emotionally charged atmosphere at San Luis Potosí’s Teatro del Bicentenario on October 1, 2010, were in fact indexes of a type of nostalgia. The nationalist nostalgia awoken by Matilde is a type of “imaginary nostalgia”53 that refers to a homeland that never was. It was triggered by the patriotic rhetoric of an opera that awakens the emotional content instilled in the audience after decades of indoctrination through the workings of the machine of nationalistic desire and its association with a Catholic performative ritual. The centrality of the Corpus Christy celebration in Matilde, although meant by Carrillo as a metaphor of transfiguration within a secular-liberal tradition, may have been sensed in performance as a homology of nation-state and church that was impossible in the nationalistic rhetoric of the liberal revolutionary regime but that the new PAN regime made plausible. This is especially important since San Luis Potosí, the city where the premiere took place, is not only one of the most Catholic regions of the country but also a bastion of the PAN. However, the fixed and solid notion of nation put forward by such representation—regardless of the Catholic overtones it may have projected in the 2010 production—only exists in the phantasmatic performances of the nationalistic ideological 53. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 77.

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machine. The post-national reality of the ideologically chaotic contemporary nation-state can only place the audience in a position of nostalgia in relation to the national fantasy they learned to love and honor and believed existed, but which does not have a current match in reality. Thus, Miramontes Zapata’s Matilde could only remind the audience of the ideal nation-state that never was but that lived and lives in the realm of nostalgic desire—even the imagined Catholic one. Under these circumstances, the death of the lovers in Matilde is a symbolic ritual that calls for a transfiguration of the national fantasy that government and civil society have yet to figure out.

“… Y HERMOSÍSIMA PATRIA SER Á …” FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT MATILDE AS A PERFORMANCE COMPLEX

The nation is a continual work in progress; it is shaped not as history unfolds but rather as we look back and nostalgically make sense of moments in the past according to where we imagine our place in the world to be. As implied in the anthem of the insurgent patriots of Matilde (“… y hermosísima patria será”), the beautiful, ideal homeland is always postponed; it is a utopia that can only live in an always-more-perfect and brilliant future. Listening to Matilde as a performance complex means trying to understand it as a musical experience that “exists within unique cultural webs of production, circulation, and signification [that can] be viewed not only as a form of music making but as a space of affect experienced in the minds and bodies of groups of people who share certain conventions”54 instead of a text with fixed meaning. This perspective allows us to focus on what happens when Matilde happens, either as virtuality—in the score as a crystallization of the composer’s musical idea—as performance on a stage, as individual engagement in the listener’s emotional world, or in the discursive realm of the national fantasy. Focusing on Matilde as a performance complex that has allowed composer and audiences to imagine the past, the present, and the future opens the door to examining how the Mexican homeland can be imagined and re-imagined by nostalgically looking back to 1810, 1910, and 2010. In every instance, we can be certain that, as the imaginary patriots from Matilde dreamed, “… y hermosísima patria será.”

54.  Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore, Danzón. Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11.

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CH AP TER   4

Modernism, Teleology, and Identity Toward a Cultural Understanding of Early Sonido 13

I

n an article published on November 29, 1924 in La Antorcha, Julián Carrillo states: How could we eliminate European influences? I  do not understand it. On the other hand, I believe it is possible for our race to produce its fruits within the European culture we have inherited, and within those possibilities, I  do not believe we should deny the Mexican mestizos, nor anyone else in the world, the right to produce something new that Europeans have not found so far. … in this regard I have to clearly state that I understand my musical knowledge as a continuation of the glorious German music tradition [la tradición musical alemana].1

Carrillo wrote this article in response to Carlos Chávez (1899–1978); in a series of articles that appeared between August 24 and October 11, 1924, in El Universal and La Antorcha, Chávez had criticized Carrillo’s ideas about the future of music and described his microtonal system—Sonido 13 (the 13th sound)—as a mere copy of what had already been done in Europe.2 Chávez’s claims reproduced Melesio Morales’s

1.  Julián Carrillo, “El sonido 13,” La Antorcha (November 29, 1924), quoted in Carlos Chávez, Escritos periodísticos (1916–1939), ed. Gloria Carmona (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1997), 52–58. 2.  See Carlos Chávez, “El cruti hindú y el cuarto de tono europeo,” El Universal, August 24 and 31,1924; “La hora:  segundo editorial de música,” El Universal, September 7, 1924; and “La importación en México,” La Antorcha, October 11, 1924. All reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos.

allegation (see Chapter 2) that Carrillo’s music was nothing but a replica of European models. As mentioned earlier, these accusations came to be voiced by many, and such European “influence”—among other political reasons—caused Carrillo and his music to be excluded from the hegemonic discourse supported by the dominant, nationalist ideology of post-revolutionary Mexico. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s quotation works as a point of departure to explore his position within the complex cultural and social relations in Mexico after the revolution as well as to assess the contingency of an idea like “imitation” and its relation to the construction of cultural heritage. In 1924, the same year Carrillo and Chávez made their differences public through the articles in El Universal and La Antorcha, Antonio Caso published El problema de México y la ideología nacional (The Problem of Mexico and National Ideology) a philosophical study about the formation of Mexican identity in relation to the country’s European cultural heritage. In this book, Caso, a former member of El Ateneo de México (or Ateneo de la Juventud),3 re-articulated an idea that many Mexican artists and intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century had embraced, the notion that the appropriation of European models in Latin America was always accompanied by their implicit resignification. Caso, like the modernista poets that preceded him, suggested that European forms should be reflexively appropriated in relation to the needs of those who consume them (“al imitar, inventar un tanto, adaptar,” suggests Caso; “when imitating try to invent, to adapt”).4 Thus, Carrillo’s call “for our race to produce its fruits within the European culture we have inherited” engaged a long-standing Mexican intellectual and artistic tradition, one that also informed the cultural crusade of Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos, another former ateneísta. The ideological affinities between Carrillo and the former members of El Ateneo de México was also evident in the composer’s response to Chávez appearing in La Antorcha, Vasconcelos’s newspaper. Chávez’s criticism against Carrillo was understandable; he came from a sector of Mexican society eager to cut its ties with Europe since 3.  El Ateneo de la Juventud was a group of Mexican intellectuals founded in 1909. Their goal was to promote high art (via recitals and conferences) among elitist as well as lower-class audiences (with the establishment of the so-called Universidad Popular Mexicana in 1912). Members included Antonio Caso (1883–1946), Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976), Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), and José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), among others. Although the group was practically dismantled by the mid-1910s, its influence was very important for the younger generation of intellectuals in the 1920s. 4.  Antonio Caso, El problema de México y la ideología nacional (Mexico City: Editorial “Cultura,” 1924), 67.

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these connections reminded them of the European ideas and mannerisms favored by the country’s elite during the pre-revolutionary regime. However, the relationship of Carrillo’s microtonal system to the European music tradition needs to be understood in terms of both continuity (as suggested by the sentence, “I understand my musical knowledge as a continuation of the glorious German music tradition”) and discontinuity (as expressed in the phrase, “I do not believe we should deny the Mexican mestizos, nor anyone else in the world, the right to produce something new that Europeans have not found so far”)—and not as just a copy of them, as Chávez proposed in his articles in El Universal and La Antorcha. This interpretation recognizes Carrillo’s Sonido 13 as the result of a fluid process of cultural change of the kind suggested by Caso and the former ateneístas, a process that changed European culture as it was reflexively adapted into a new and different cultural context. As suggested in Chapter 2, although Carrillo studied in Germany and early in his career made use of the classic genres from that tradition, it would be unfair to say that Carrillo merely copied them. Néstor García Canclini suggests that in their path toward modernity, late nineteenth-century Latin American societies never understood Modernism as a “mimetic adoption of imported models” since a balance between the local and the cosmopolitan is always fundamental in processes of modernization.5 Considering García Canclini’s statement, the idea of Modernist Carrillo as an imitator of European models should be reassessed. As shown in Chapter 2, even in his early works, Carrillo took classical European models and transformed them into conceptually different forms. However, with the appearance of his first microtonal compositions in 1924, a more radical and personal approach to the ideologies behind Austro-German music tradition became evident. In the quotation that opens this chapter, Carrillo’s preoccupation with establishing a clear link with the European tradition indicates that the issue of identity was already central in the dispute for ideological hegemony in mid-1920s Mexico. I propose that Sonido 13 is the result of Carrillo’s individual search for identity through a process of performative composition and suggest that his microtonal system was an attempt to reposition himself within a changing society where older forms of representation were being contested and new cultural codes formed. It was at this moment of social and cultural uncertainty that Carrillo chose to develop his own Modernist creed creating a subculture based on the 5.  Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989), 79–80.

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microtonal intervals of his Sonido 13 as codes of musical identity. He could not foresee that this bold endeavor would exclude him permanently from the incipient nationalist discourse supported by the revolutionary state. The first part of this chapter deals with Carrillo’s representation of himself and his Sonido 13 and the relationship between this construction and contemporary Modernist musical discourses from the German tradition. The analysis focuses on how Carrillo positioned himself as part of the Austro-German tradition by embracing its teleological principles. The second portion of the chapter examines Carrillo’s production of microtonal codes through a detailed analysis of his early microtonal music. The study emphasizes the technical qualities and compositional style that support aspects of the identity discourse examined in the first section but also pays attention to how they contradict some of these ideas. This analysis of music style shows that Carrillo’s early Sonido 13 compositions mark the beginning of a shift away—even if unconsciously—from the Austro-German music tradition; some of these early microtonal works begin to move toward a more personal style and, contrary to Chávez’s assertion, a more independent conception of self-identity.

CARRILLO AND THE AUSTRO - GERMAN MODERNIST MUSIC IDEOLOGY

Although Carrillo never clearly specified his aesthetic creed, we can extract it from the many books and articles he wrote throughout his life. By tracing his personal relations and analyzing his musical works we can map out the development of that creed. Carrillo’s writings help us understand the Modernist discourse that allowed him to validate his artistic project as a continuation of the German music tradition. To establish ideological links with European Modernist contexts one should compare Carrillo’s ideas with those of two contemporaries: Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker. Musical tastes among the Mexican elites were influenced by Spanish music during the Colonial period and by Italian and French music throughout the country’s history as an independent country. Leonora Saavedra suggests that through the nineteenth century, we could make a case for a history of music in Mexico without having to refer to the organicist paradigm central to Western art music history.6 As explained 6.  Leonora Saavedra, “Musical Identities, the Western Canon, and Speech about Music in Twentieth-Century Mexico,” International Hispanic Study Group Newsletter 4, no. 2 (1998): 25–30.

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in Chapter 2, when he was in Europe, Carrillo felt strongly attracted to organicism as an idea to bring coherence and unity to a musical work, and to a teleological concept of music history that would eventually be used to validate the development of his microtonal theories. However, the ideas and music brought by Carrillo from Europe were not well received in his country. It was only after many years of pedagogical activity to prepare the terrain—both at the conservatory and as a director of the Beethoven Orchestra and head of the Beethoven String Quartet—that his music was better understood. In 1916, the musicologist Alba Herrera y Ogazón published El arte musical en México, where she wrote the following remarks about Carrillo’s Symphony No. 2 (1907): As a demonstration of a first-rate technician and a master of counterpoint this work [Symphony No. 2] is remarkable; with it, Carrillo has fulfilled his ideal—which was also the ideal of Liszt—of preserving the psychological and aesthetic unity in the symphony by means of several metamorphoses and a great variety of treatments, producing a homogeneous and harmonious “wholeness,” derived from one fundamental idea. The vast and majestic composition by Carrillo is a monument to science and intellectuality.7

This organicist principle, presented in his essay “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica,” and put into practice in his Symphony No. 1 (see Chapter 2) and his String Quartet No. 1 (see Chapter 6) lie at the foundation of what Carrillo would later call his “laws of musical metamorphosis,” a technique developed in the mid-1920s to bring thematic unity and coherence to music that combined traditional diatonic instruments and microtonal ones.8 In 1923, Carrillo published in Mexico his “Teoría del Sonido 13” (Theory of the 13th Sound), a preliminary explanation of a microtonal system based on the division of the half step as the beginning of a change that, in his opinion, would transform music. In this article, Carrillo explained the history of music as an evolution from the monophony of the ninth century to the chromatic procedures of the early twentieth century.9 He took a teleological view of historical polyphonic and harmonic trajectories,

7.  Alba Herrera y Ogazón, El arte musical en México (Mexico City:  Departamento Editorial de la Dirección General de Bellas Artes, 1917), 195. 8. See Julián Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales (Mexico City:  Julián Carrillo, 1949). 9.  Julián Carrillo, “El Sonido 13,” in Pláticas musicales, Vol. II (Mexico City: Julián Carrillo, 1923), 255–274; Julián Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” Musical Advance 10, no. 10 (1923): 1–4; and Julián Carrillo, “Teoría del Sonido 13,” El Universal, September 17, 1924.

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one in which new intervals from the basic overtone series are gradually adopted as consonances. This understanding of music history is anchored in the Enlightenment tradition that sought to apply the rigor of natural science to the humanities, and several European music theorists shared some of Carrillo’s assumptions. In 1911, Schoenberg, following similar premises, had come to analogous conclusions to support his atonal style. In his Harmonielehre Schoenberg states: There are, then, no non-harmonic tones, no tones foreign to harmony, but merely tones foreign to the harmonic system. Passing tones, changing tones, suspensions, etc., are, like sevenths and ninths, nothing else but attempts to include in the possibilities of tones sounding together—these are of course, by definition, harmonies—something that sounds similar to the more remote overtones. … There are no limits to the possibilities of tones sounding together, to harmonic possibilities; [the limits are] at most to the possibilities of fitting the harmonies into a system that will establish their aesthetic valence.10

Carrillo’s and Schoenberg’s writings are based on the same teleological postulate. According to it, once the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale are used in a single harmony, the system would need to be revitalized by adding the next overtone in the series, thus moving to the realm of microtonality. For Carrillo, the future of Western art music could only follow the path of microtonality, since that was the logical “next step” in the process of musical “evolution.” The 1924 article clearly shows that Carrillo’s microtonal interest did not develop from the study of non-Western musical systems, as was the case with European composers also interested in microtonality at the time. For Carrillo, microtonality came as the result of a pure theoretical concern based on a historicist view of the Western art music tradition.11 10.  Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E.  Carter (London:  Faber and Faber, 1978), 321–322. 11. Julio Estrada speculates that Carrillo’s indigenous background and a possible exposure to non-Western tunings and instruments as a child may have played a role in the development of his interest in microtonality. See Julio Estrada, Canto roto:  Silvestre Revueltas (Mexico City:  UNAM-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012), 26. Estrada’s thesis is not impossible although there is absolutely no evidence to support it. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence throughout Carrillo’s writings that his curiosity about microtones started out of his intellectual concern with the same type of evolutionist models on which Schenker and Schoenberg validated their musical theories of tonality and the twelve-tone system, respectively. Furthermore, the lack of mention of microtonality in Carrillo’s numerous writings before 1923

[108]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Let us remember that Schoenberg arrived at the same conclusions in the first edition of his Harmonielehre, when, after explaining the origin of the major tempered scale in the overtone series, he points out that this reduction of the natural relations to manageable ones cannot permanently impede the evolution of music; and the ear will have to attack the problems, because it is so disposed. Then our scale will be transformed into a higher order, as the church modes were transformed into major and minor modes. Whether there will then be quarter tones, eighth, third, or (as Busoni thinks) sixth tones, or whether we will move to a 53-tone scale that Dr. Robert Neumann has calculated, we cannot foretell.12

The notion of the overtone series as a “natural” validation of the Western system of music, another influence from the Enlightenment, also gave birth to Heinrich Schenker’s “chord of nature” theory. Schenker’s was another teleologically inspired theory that accounted not only for the origin of the major-minor system, but also for a perceived superiority of Western music on the grounds that it was the system of Nature. It is true that in founding the tonal system the artist was not left by Nature as helpless as in discovering the motif. However, also in this respect, it would be erroneous to imagine Nature’s help to be as manifest and unambiguous as that afforded by her to the other arts. Nature’s help to music consisted of nothing but a hint, a counsel forever mute, whose perception and interpretation were fraught with the gravest difficulties. No one could exaggerate, hence, the administration and gratitude we owe to the intuitive power with which the artists have divined Nature. In broad terms, mankind should take more pride in its development of music than in that of any other art. For the other arts, as imitations of Nature, have sprung more spontaneously—one might even say more irresistibly—from the innate human propensity to imitate.13

For Schenker and his contemporaries, Western music was superior to other types of musical systems because, in terms of the Enlightenment, it was the system that “conquered nature,” and the system that could achieve suggests that a serious interest in this idea flourished only as a response to the specific intellectual, aesthetic, and political challenges explained in this chapter and Chapter 5. 12. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 25. 13. Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, trans. Elisabeth Mann Borgese (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 20.

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[10 9 ]

its ultimate teleological goal. This perspective, found in Schoenberg and Schenker, is undoubtedly one of the basic premises in Carrillo’s ideology:  Up to the almost unknown Leo Ornstein, it is the Russians who have the honor of achieving the greatest [musical] development in modern times. Ornstein’s procedures baffle even the greatest minds in the subject, he has employed more frequently than anyone else the chromatic scale as a chord, in other words: all the sounds at the same time. … What will come after that?. … The evolution will keep its always-ascending march. WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF WITNESSING THE MOST TRANSCENDENTAL EVENT PRODUCED IN MUSICAL TECHNIQUE NOT ONLY SINCE THE RENAISSANCE OR THE MIDDLE AGES BUT ALSO SINCE THE TIMES BEFORE JESUS CHRIST. The 13th sound is coming. … What is the 13th sound? In the logical order of my previous prediction, the thirteenth sound can not be anything else but the subdivision of the half tone.14

In 1924, a public discussion of Carrillo’s theories took place in the pages of El Universal. A group of intellectuals that included Jesús C. Romero, Estanislao Mejía, and Carrillo’s former collaborator, Alba Herrera y Ogazón, questioned Carrillo’s theory and eventually challenged the composer to offer a practical example of it (see Chapter 5). Carrillo responded by writing Preludio a Colón for soprano, flute, two violins, viola, cello, sixteenth-tone harp, and quarter-tone guitar. A closer look into this work would partially corroborate the composer’s assertions of continuity. By showing the conceptual connections between Carrillo’s microtonal music and the Western tradition, I hope to illuminate the diverse reasons behind his personal “microtonal revolution.”15 There is no question that at first hearing, especially in the conservative musical context of late 1910s and early 1920s Mexico, Preludio a Colón may sound like a radical challenge to all the principles of traditional music. Certainly, sixteenth, eighth, and quarter tones may baffle an ear used to the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. It does not come as a surprise that there was a wide spectrum of opinions. Some considered microtonalism the beginning of a musical revolution:  “If Sonido trece currently

14.  Carrillo, “Teoría del Sonido 13.” Capital letters used in the original. 15.  Carrillo referred to his microtonal ideas as “The 13th Sound Revolution”; see Julián Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico: análisis físico-músico “pre-sonido 13” (San Luis Potosí: Editorial del Sonido 13, 1930), 31. This rhetoric not only shows Carrillo’s desire to position himself as a leading Modernist artist in the world but should also be understood as an attempt to appropriate the “revolutionary” discourse of the new Mexican regime.

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means ‘revolution,’ we, guitar in hand, will go around the world singing the ‘Third International’ in eighths of a tone,”16 while others thought of it as “absurd futuristic fantasies.”17 Unfortunately, the historical discourse about Sonido 13 has been dictated by misconceptions as well as political and even personal invectives and agendas. Few analyses have seriously taken into account the musical texts themselves and their relationship to Carrillo’s overall compositional output within his particular cultural experience or in relationship to other explorations of microtonality or tunings of the period.

THE EARLY SOUNDS OF CARRILLO’S MODERNIST REVOLUTION

To grasp a cultural artifact such as a music composition or a music system like Sonido 13, one must understand how the object is technically produced but also how it is made culturally meaningful.18 Understanding the production of new musical codes in Carrillo’s microtonal system is only the first step toward a larger analysis of composition practices as the kind of appropriation and transformation of ideas suggested by Mexican intellectuals like Antonio Caso. The point is to show how these codes presume continuation with the German music tradition, as Carrillo himself stated, but also how they suggest a discontinuity with that tradition reflecting the development of a more personal and independent identity. One cannot explain Sonido 13 solely as a continuation of the German tradition, as Carrillo wants us to believe, since it also exemplifies a personal departure from that paradigm. This separation is clear when we analyze the new musical codes in relation to Schenker’s fundamental ideas of foreground and background proportion. Musical analysis shows that Carrillo uses musical codes to create an increasingly individual style that although born of the Austro-German tradition was finally estranged from it. For the structural and textual part of the analysis I borrow from linguistics the ideas of axis of selection and axis of combination, as proposed by Roman Jackobson and later adopted by Émile Benveniste as paradigmatic and syntagmatic 16.  Manuel G.  Linares, “Las nuevas teorías del “Sonido 13,” en la estación de El Universal y la Casa de Radio,” El Universal, September 20, 1924. 17.  Carlos Chávez, “Consecuencias del movimiento de 1911,” El Universal, December 15, 1936, reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, 306. 18.  See Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies:  The Story of the Sony Walkman (London:  Sage and the Open University Press, 1997), 4.

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axes.19 Encompassing this, my analysis considers pitches on the level of phonemes, which acquire value only through their combination with other phonemes in forming words. Although Carrillo invented a numerical notation for his microtonal music, this chapter makes use of an alternative notation to represent microtonal intervals within a traditional notation system employed by the composer in the printed versions of some of his works, including Preludio a Colón. By adding small lines above the note heads, Carrillo represented the microtonal variation affecting that specific note. An explanation of this notation is offered in Figure 4.1. 20 The overall formal structure of Preludio a Colón is rather conventional, a ternary form (A-B-A'-Coda) based on a regular juxtaposition of internal motivic material that is organized in clear subsections (Figure 4.2). The contrasting character of each of the large sections—the rhapsodic A section, the lamenting B section, and a coda that is more animated and fuller in texture—supports a traditional reading of the form. Nonetheless, it is only when one closely examines and compares the materials that make up these subsections that one can grasp the unique formal details of the composition. The first analytical segmentation considers the syntagmatic (axis of combination) and the paradigmatic (axis of selection) functions in relation to the construction of the larger formal arch of the work. As observed in Figure 4.2, the A  section is divided into two parts, subsections A1 and A2. Two major criteria help differentiate these two subsections: 1) Component “Aiia,” which was only a fragment of segment “AII” in the first subsection, becomes segment “AII” in A2. From then on, Aiia will be the only component of the “AI1” segment (Ex. 4.1). 2) Segment “AI” is composed of only one component, “Ai,” which is continuously transformed every time it returns throughout the piece. As 19.  Émile Benveniste, “The Semiology of Language,” in Semiotics: An Introduction, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 236–237. In my analysis, the paradigmatic axis refers to the type of music elements that could be used (for example, passing notes, suspensions, resolutions, etc.), while the syntagmatic axis refers to the way those elements are put together in combination (for example, a harmonic tone + a passing note + a harmonic tone prolonged into a suspension + resolution = a musical motif). 20.  I have chosen to keep this notation instead of transcribing the music to a more standard system (as I do in Chapter 6) because it is a clear and easy way to notate quarter tones and eighth tones without resorting to a proliferation of special symbols that would make reading the music too complicated. Since the music analyzed in Chapter 6 uses only quarter tones, it made sense to transcribe it to more standard quarter-tone notation.

[112]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

= 1/8 of a tone higher

= 1/8 of a tone lower

= 1/4 of a tone higher

= 1/4 of a tone lower

= 3/8 of a tone higher

= 3/8 of a tone lower

Figure 4.1  Microtonal notation used in Julián Carrillo, Preludio a Colón (1924).

Section

A

B

Subsection

A1

Segment

AI AII

A2 AI

1

AII

AI

2

AII

AI

2’

B1

B2

AII BI

BI’ BI

BI’(inv)

(inv) Components Ai Aiia Aiib Ai1 Aiia Aiib Ai2

Aiia

Ai2’ Aiia Bia Bia’ Bib

Bib’ Bia’

Bib Bib’ Bia Tonal center E

E

B/E E

E

B/E E

(continued) Section

A’

Coda

Subsection

A2

Segment

AI3 AII

AI4 AII

CI

Components Ai Aii2

Ai

Aiia

Ci Cia Cib Cii

Tonal center E

E

B/E

E

3

B/E

4

CII

G/E E

Figure 4.2 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Formal design.

Example 4.1 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Component Aiia.

we may observe in example 4.2, the differences in the four presentations of this segment reside in the different microtonal scales used each time: “AI” is based on a scale of eighths of a tone; a scale of intervals of one tone and a quarter is used for “AI1;” “AI2” is made of intervals of a quarter of a tone (AI2' is only a rhythmic variation of AI2); “AI3” and

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Example 4.2 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Different presentations of segment AI.

Example 4.2 (continued)

“AI4” are both based on a scale made of intervals of three quarters of a tone (I have labeled them differently because they prolong the pitch E through different mechanisms). Segment “AI” plays the same paradigmatic role every time; heard vertically it is used as an introduction to the melodic gesture of segment “AII” (or component “Aiia” accordingly). This level of segmentation allows us to perceive a syntagmatic function based on the juxtaposition of different motivic material, which, projected into the larger structural scale,

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[115]

Example 4.2 (continued)

translates into the overall ternary form of the work. Nevertheless, the most interesting aspect to examine is the paradigmatic role of both segments in a smaller level of segmentation. Paying attention to the foreground level in examples 4.1 and 4.2, shows that the function of both gestures is to harmonically prolong a central pitch. In all examples of “AI” the microtones of the foreground level play the role of neighboring notes that embellish E, and such is also the case with “Aiia.” Example 4.3 shows the details of prolongation. In the case of “Aiib,” the melodic gesture is different but the harmonic role is the same:  the first three

[116]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

pitches of the “Aiia” gesture are used as a sequence to move chromatically down an octave. Thus, the microtones play the role of embellishments for the chromatic passing tones between the head and the goal of the gesture: pitch E (example 4.4). “B2” presents the components heard in “B1” in reverse order. I have labeled these components “BI” and “BI',” the only difference being their rhythmic presentation (example 4.5). As might be observed in example 4.5, the harmonic material consists of a diminished chord with a minor seventh that moves up and down, fulfilling the same paradigmatic function seen in the different presentations of “AI”: the quarter tones work as passing notes between chromatic pitches, embellishing a central note. The difference in texture between sections A and B is quite noticeable; while section A presents melodic fragments on top of pedal notes, the B section is dominated by the diminished sonorities of its harmonic texture (example 4.5). The parallel motion and the tonal ambiguity of the diminished chords both play an important role defining the character of the section. Carrillo resolved these ambiguities by ending this section with a cadence that presents a harmonic diminished fifth moving into a perfect fifth (example 4.6); not to notice the tonal implications of such a paradigmatic function would result in an inadequate analysis of the piece as a whole. The A' section is an abbreviated recapitulation of the opening material, mainly a presentation of “A2” with a slight emphasis on pitch B as

Example 4.3 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Forms of prolongation in Aiia and Aiib.

Example 4.4. Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Component Aiib.

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Example 4.5 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Segments BI and BI'.

the tonal center, especially in the presentation of the melodic fragment “AII,” although the E continues to dominate the spectrum with its role as pedal. The coda section emphasizes a new texture with the introduction of new material presented in contrapuntal lines, which contrasts with the drones and harmonic emphasis in sections A and B. Two clearly different segments form the coda: “CI” (example 4.7) is composed of scales in intervals of three quarters of a tone moving in contrary motion, and the second part, “CII” (example 4.8), introduces diatonic elements and also for the first time a certain emphasis on pitch G, again over an E pedal. This event appears as an extreme surprise, since this confirmation of mode happens only seven measures before the end of the piece—it is almost as if the composer waited until the last minute to show the listener that he was aware of the referential power of the triad. Carrillo nonetheless maintains the modal mystery here by introducing the F sharp as a passing note between the pitches of the E minor triad, producing with this a Lydian inflection that counterbalances the sense of certainty created by the harmony with modal ambiguity. However, in the middle of Carrillo’s

[118]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 4.5 (continued)

modal and tonal interplay, the question of the paradigmatic function of the microtones comes back, and the answer is the same as in the previous sections:  microtones take part only on the foreground level, again as non-harmonic elements, passing notes within larger prolongations of tonal centers. Schenker criticized performing musicians of the early twentieth century for incoherence of interpretation. He stated that performers were only concerned with musical events on the surface of the pieces and would not project the large-scale structure that gave meaning to those

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Example 4.6 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Final cadence in section B.

surface details.21 Based on a reading of Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1906) by Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), Robert Morgan suggests that one of the most important aspects of the main currents of Modernist music is a new relationship between the elements of musical language. While in 21.  Nicholas Cook, “Schenker’s Theory of Music as Ethics,” Journal of Musicology 7, no. 4 (1989): 417–420.

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Example 4.7 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. First part of segment CI.

some cases the grammar remains the same, the syntax—the relationship of those grammatical elements to each other—is radically changed. In other words, what Schenker considered a fundamental aspect of tonal language in music, the prolongation of the major or minor triad at the structural level and its reflection in the events that take place in the

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[12 1]

Example 4.8 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. First part of segment CII.

foreground of a composition, might be replaced by structural elements other than the major triad. For Morgan, nevertheless, coherence between foreground and structural levels is still fundamental to the success of a modern musical language: A solution [to the problem of foreground and background relationships in modern music] demanded a major restructuring of the received musical language. In the broadest terms, it involved a projection of musical phenomena previously considered to belong solely to the foreground—elements that are ephemeral, passing, structurally unessential, and thus, in a sense, accidental (the chance results of voice leading, etc.)—onto the structural background. I have already noted a tendency in this direction in nineteenth-century music, in the increasing emphasis on individual foreground features.22

22. Robert Morgan, “Secret Languages:  The Roots of Musical Modernism,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 43–44.

[122]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 4.9 Carrillo, Preludio a Colón. Structural level graphic.

As the first segmentations of the analysis of Carrillo’s Preludio a Colón show, the presence of microtones at the foreground level of the work could be easily explained as mere embellishments that support longer prolongations of central pitches, prolongations that belong to the first level of middle ground. In the view of Schenker and Morgan the question determining musical coherence that arises from this analysis is whether the elements of the foreground find their way into the structural background of the composition, and if they do, how and under which conditions the background-foreground relationship unfolds. Is this a traditional relationship in the sense proposed by Schenker or does it follow the Modernist principle of coherence discussed by Morgan? Robert Morgan also proposes to apply to late nineteenth-century music and twentieth-century post-tonal music some of the principles of tonal prolongation that Schenker considered fundamental in his comprehensive theory of tonal music.23 Based on Morgan’s idea that Modernist music incorporates structural prolongations different from the major triad, I  have attempted a reading of the background level of Preludio a Colón that looks for the tonal centers that create the structural support of the piece. In example 4.9, I offer a graphic analysis of the background level of Carrillo’s composition. This analysis shows that the work represents a basic prolongation of one central pitch:  E.  Although there are some movements to the fifth degree (mostly melodic), none of them is a true, supported structural presentation of the dominant as it would be in a tonal composition. Example 4.9 shows clearly some of those melodic movements to the fifth degree, especially in the middle of the B section.24 In strict Schenkerian 23.  See Robert Morgan, “Dissonant Prolongation: Theoretical and Compositional Precedents,” Journal of Music Theory 20, no. 1 (1976). 24. Julio Estrada recognizes the structural importance of pitches E and B in Preludio a Colón. However, he explains the presence of structural triads in terms of tonality, failing to acknowledge that the principles that characterize tonality, voice leading, and functional harmony are absent in this work. See Julio Estrada, “Técnicas

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[12 3]

terms, the structural prolongation of a single pitch would automatically deny the existence of a composition. The idea of a piece of music, in the traditional Schenkerian sense, is the variety of harmonic construction around the pitches of the major tonic triad as a fundamental structure as well as the melodic elaboration of a descending line from the third, fifth, or more rarely, the eighth degree. None of these two basic requirements of the Schenkerian model is fulfilled in Carrillo’s Preludio a Colón. Nevertheless, and unlike traditional Schenkerian theorists, we cannot judge Carrillo’s composition with a set of values designed for the analysis of tonal music, since, by abandoning that paradigm, Carrillo’s music entered the realm of atonality.25 If that is the case, one might consider Morgan’s ideas of changing foreground-background relations as a more suitable rule of thumb for this music. Moreover, a comparison of events at the foreground and background levels shows that although microtones do not transfer to the fundamental structure, their function still dominates this level of the piece. Carrillo carefully balanced foreground and background events, projecting the function of the paradigmatic elements of the surface into the deeper level of the piece, its syntagmatic background. The analysis of Preludio a Colón illustrates how Carrillo’s microtones remained at the surface level of his music, as new elements of grammar. However, the analysis also shows that Carrillo clearly understood how the paradigmatic function of the new grammatical material—namely, the fact that the microtones serve as prolongations of certain pitches—had to be reflected in one way or another in the structural level of the composition, in order to effect coherence according to some basic principles of the tradition he stemmed from. Thus, the internal behavior of musical elements in this work seems to validate the composer’s version about his music as “a continuation of the glorious German music tradition.”26 However, that very attempt to develop a Modernist cohesion of sorts led him to create a musical work that breaks away from the fundamental codes of the Austro-German music tradition. The very aspects that offer stylistic continuity in Preludio a Colón also create a break since the static qualities of this work’s background level deny the mobility and change promoted by

composicionales en la música mexicana de 1910 a 1940,” La música de México: historia. Periodo nacionalista (1910–1958), ed. Julio Estrada (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984), 126. 25.  In this case the term “atonal” refers precisely to music in which functional tonality, functional harmony, and traditional voice leading are absent. Carrillo himself labeled his music “atonal” to clearly indicate that such principles were not operational in it. See Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 153–155. 26.  Carrillo, quoted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, 58.

[124]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

the Enlightenment project via one of its more powerfully ideological tools, Western art music as exemplified in the common practice era. Appropriation and consumption always insinuate transformation. The analysis shows this is true in Carrillo’s early microtonal music. We could describe Preludio a Colón as a transitional composition; although the style of the piece is very personal, we still observe that the paradigmatic axis operates much like traditional tonal music, and notwithstanding that the background level could never be compared to a Schenkerian Ursatz, it still prolongs elements that could be traced back to the tonal triad. However, Carrillo’s style, and his further departure from the so-called German paradigm, is clearer in some of the pieces he composed soon after Preludio a Colón—where the structural level shows a completely different approach to sound organization, a mode of configuration based on non-diatonic, non-tonal collections or scales, an angle that places him closer to the Russian Modernist tradition than to the German.27 Hans Rudolph Zeller has stated that the microtonal composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century operated independently of each other.28 In 1924, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) published an article in La revue musicale, where he reviewed the microtonal scene of the time. Wyschnegradsky recognized the efforts of Richard Heinrich Stein (1882–1942), Busoni, Arthur Lourié (1892–1966), and Alois Hába (1893–1973), as well as the intention of Behrend-Senegalden and Willi Möllendorff (1872–1934) to build quarter-tone keyboards.29 Nevertheless, the absence of Carrillo, who by 1924 had already published his “Teoría del sonido 13”—as noted earlier, the text had been translated into English in 1923—indicates that European composers were not familiar with the Mexican’s writings. It is now clear that by the beginning of 1927 Carrillo was already in contact with members of the Leningrad Quarter-Tone Circle and was well aware of the activities of other European microtonal enthusiasts, including Arseny Avraamov (1886–1944), Silvestro Baglioni (1876–1957), Hába, Jörg Mager (1880–1939), Möllendorff, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (1901–1965), Stein, and Wyschnegradsky.30 27.  Namely, the use of non-tonal collections and sets in the music of RimskyKorsakov, Scriabin, and Roslavets. 28.  Hans Rudolf Zeller, “Als Anreger weit unterschätz: Ferruccio Busoni und die musikalische Avantgarde um 1920,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 147, no. 2 (1987): 12. 29.  Ivan Wyschnegradsky, “La musique à quarts de ton,” La revue musicale 5, no. 11 (1924): 231–234. 30. Letters from Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov to Julián Carrillo:  December 31, 1926; [no month] 13, 1927; July 16, 1927; and September 28, 1927. Letter from Julián Carrillo to Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov, January 28, 1927. Letters kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. For more information about the Leningrad Quarter-Tone

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However, there is no evidence that Carrillo knew of any of these developments before 1922, when he encountered an article from Le Menestrel that advocated quarter-tone music.31 After that year it became customary for Mexican opponents of Carrillo’s microtonality to refer to the writings of Busoni and Schoenberg, as well as to the compositions of Hába—in particular his String Quartet (1921)—to try to disqualify Carrillo as an innovator (see Chapter 5). Carrillo would generally object to these accusations by constructing his own myth of origin, and arguing the more detailed and systematic nature of his Sonido 13;32 the premises of his defense were, first, that he had already experimented with sixteenth tones—in one of his typically historicist rhetorical twists, he said he had “conquered” them—as early as 1895. And second, that he went beyond the division of the semitone into two quarter tones—as with Hába—or the tone in six sixth tones—as with Busoni—and built instruments capable of playing sixteenth tones. Nothing substantiates the so-called conquest from 1895 but Carrillo’s word. He did not formulate any theoretical writings until 1920—although an awareness of microtones is in evidence in a couple of articles from his Pláticas musicales (1913). Therefore, taking his word at face value, as many scholars have done, is the only basis on which to assume that Carrillo’s microtonal ruminations actually started at the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 5). Obviously, Carrillo devised his rhetoric to answer to his critics and validate the importance of his system. The point of my argument is that although we cannot be sure whether Carrillo knew Busoni’s microtonal ideas before 1922, it is clear that he was aware of them after that year, and that they became a shadow that would haunt him for the following years. In many of his writings from the late 1920s, most of which appear in both the Spanish and English versions of his propagandistic magazine El Sonido 13, one can find several references and quotations from Busoni’s Ästhetik der Tonkunst. These writings show Carrillo’s constant struggle to come to terms with Busoni’s ideas, which he often dismisses as “purely theoretical speculations.”33 Nevertheless, Circle, see Lidia Ader, “Microtonal Storm and Stress: Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov and Quarter-Tone Music in 1920s Soviet Russia,” Tempo 63, no. 250 (2009):  27–44. It should be noted that Ader is incorrect in speculating that Carrillo may have attended a meeting of composers interested in quarter-tone music hosted by Richard Stein in Berlin in 1922 (28). 31.  E. C. Grassi, “L’orient et la musique de l’avenir,” Le Menestrel 84, no. 19 (1922): 213–214. 32.  The construction of this “myth of origin” is apparent throughout Carrillo’s writings; for an example of his discourse on the origin and originality of the Sonido 13 system, see Julián Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (Mexico City: Ediciones Sonido 13, 1957), 21. 33. See El sonido 13 2, no. 1 (1925), cover.

[126]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Carrillo’s positive connections with Busoni’s rhetoric would appear clearer in later writings and compositional interests. As Schoenberg stated in his Harmonielehre, Ferruccio Busoni had already mentioned the possibility of microtones in his Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Nevertheless, Busoni’s interest in microtones, although an example of a teleological understanding of music history, does not indicate a “blind faith” in the overtone series, as was the case in Schoenberg, Schenker, and Carrillo’s writings. Busoni’s curiosity developed from a preoccupation with new scales and with mystic ideas that would place him closer to the Russian tradition, especially to Scriabin, and therefore would make him a harbinger of Ivan Wyschnegradsky: The unity of all keys may be considered as finally pronounced and justified. A  kaleidoscopic blending and interchanging of twelve semitones within the three-mirror tube of Taste, Emotion, and Intention—the essential feature of the harmony of to-day [sic]. The harmony of to-day, and not for long; for all signs presage a revolution, and a next step toward that “eternal harmony.” Let us once again call to mind, that in this latter the gradation of the octave is infinite, and let us strive to draw a little nearer to infinitude. The tripartite tone (third of a tone) has for some time been demanding admittance, and we have left the call unheeded.34

In Busoni’s rhetoric, one finds the same curious combination of mysticism and determinism, since the “eternal harmony” that was to be attained with the introduction of microtones was both a mystic conception as well as the inexorable goal of a teleological force that characterizes Carrillo’s writings. Busoni’s writings foreshadow the later work of Wyschnegradsky, who, influenced by Scriabin and Lourié, also proposed a teleological history of music that culminates with the dissolution of tonal hierarchy. The absence of tonal hierarchy implied that the notion of “acoustic value” would replace that of “acoustic origin,” where the quality of the interval depends on the number of vibrations and not on their relation to a fundamental pitch.35 Such a shift in intervallic organization de-emphasized a harmonic understanding of music and allowed Wyschnegradsky to re-focus on uniformly divided scales. Based on this principle, the continuum of sound could be marked by using equally divided scales of chromatic or “ultrachromatic” (microtonal) nature.36 34. Ferruccio Busoni, A New Esthetic of Music, trans. Th. Baker (New  York:  G. Schirmer, 1911). Italics are used in the original. 35.  Ivan Wyschnegradsky, “L’enigme de la musique moderne,” Revue d’esthetique 2 (1949); 84. 36.  Wyschnegradsky, “L’enigme de la musique modern,” 84.

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Both Busoni and Wyschnegradsky invoked a theory of non-tonal scales as validation for their microtonal propositions. This finds an echo in Carrillo’s later writings, in his own rhetoric on microtonalism, and most important, in his music. The Mexican composer had shown a concern for non-tonal, symmetric scales since the early 1900s. Chapter XI of Carrillo’s Tratado sintético de harmonía (1915) is entirely dedicated to whole-tone scales, which he traces back to Liszt’s Dante Symphony (1856). As may be expected from a composer still rooted in tonality, in these early writings Carrillo always understood the treatment of the whole-tone scale within the tonal system. He tried to balance the non-tonal nature of the scale with tonality by proposing a harmonization with diminished seventh chords. In his book, Carrillo approached this problem by stating that not a single pitch from a whole-tone scale could be used as a leading tone; therefore [these scales] cannot be used to modulate (when used without accompaniment). This is the reason to assure that a whole-tone scale might or might not be used to modulate; it depends on how it is harmonized. 37

Carrillo’s microtonal interests also caused him to shift focus from the harmonic motion of tonality to an emphasis on scales and their variety. The use of a variety of different microtonal scales on the foreground level of Preludio a Colón shows that this idea is already present, although in a rudimentary form, in this composition. Carrillo clearly addresses these preoccupations in El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (1957), where he states: On July 13, 1895, I  made an experiment in Mexico City where I  achieved the 1/16 of a tone, and with that, the sounds in music grew 800%. Since that date, the conquests of the Sonido 13 revolution have increased in such a way that there is no possibility that more sounds will be achieved in the future, since the only limitations to my revolution are the possibilities of the human ear’s perception. When the interplanetary connection is achieved, it will be possible to find new timbres; but no new sounds.38

Carrillo’s description of his sonic utopia was a curious mix of mathematics, determinist teleology, and an almost theosophist rhetoric that reminds one of Vasconcelos’s La revulsión de la energía (1924). Following a mathematical procedure that foreshadows aspects of Allen Forte’s set theory, Carrillo came 37.  Julián Carrillo, Tratado sintético de harmonía (New York: Schirmer, 1920), 69. 38. Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes, 21.

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up with 1.193,556,232 different scales or chords—he insisted that the presentation of these collections in either melodic or harmonic fashion made no difference—using the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale.39 In a development that reminds us of Wyschnegradsky’s notion of “acoustic value,” Carrillo embraced a conception of music radically opposed to that of a tonal composer. His music is no longer based on harmonic and melodic practices but rather on the notion of collections of pitches that may be used as either melodies or harmonies. If we go back to Carrillo’s early descriptions of the tonal capabilities of the whole-tone scale, as expressed in his Tratado sintético de harmonía, we realize that the later conception is already suggested in his 1915 text. Carrillo was so aware of the radicalism of this conceptual shift that he himself would label his music “atonal.”40 This atonal, collection-centered conception is the reason behind the harmonic stillness of works such as Cuarteto atonal a Debussy (String Quartet No. 2, 1926) and “En secreto” from Dos bosquejos (String Quartet No. 3, 1928). In his Cuarteto atonal a Debussy, Carrillo juxtaposes blocks based on whole-tone and chromatic collections and two related non-tonal scales (D-E flat-F-F sharp-A-B flat-C sharp and D-E flat-E-F-F sharp-A-B flat-C sharp) (­example  4.10). The overall tonal result of the work is one of extreme motionlessness, which the composer tries to conciliate with a loose sonatina form with abbreviated recapitulation.41 A better example of Carrillo’s involvement with non-tonal scales and the concept of “collection” is found in his microtonal work “En secreto,” a piece that shows some of the same type of foreground activity that one finds in Preludio a Colón. The microtonal material works on the paradigmatic level as passing and neighboring notes that prolong structural material at the background of the composition, as can be observed in example 4.11. The difference between Preludio a Colón and “En secreto” is that the middle ground material in the second piece is composed of non-tonal collections: whole-tone and octatonic, and a non-symmetric microtonal scale. The presentation of these collections at the middle ground level is supported in most of the composition by the prolongation of a whole-tone set in the background level of the work (Ex. 4.12). 39. Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes, 23–30. 40. While they were radical ideas for Mexican audiences and composers, it is clear that these “proto-serial” approaches were not new in Europe, especially in Russia, where composers like Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) and Nicolai Roslavets (1881–1944) had experimented with them since the mid-1910s. 41.  There are some similarities in formal approach between the first movements of Carrillo’s Cuarteto atonal a Debussy (String Quartet No. 2) and his Symphony No. 1; however, the shift to a collection-centered paradigm instead of tonality shows Carrillo’s personal deviation from the pre-Schoenbergian German paradigm.

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Example 4.10a  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2 (1926), mm. 25–53, piano reduction. Juxtaposition of blocks.

If analyzed with the same criteria, the microtonal materials of Preludio a Colón and “En secreto” play the same paradigmatic role and do so at the foreground level. However, a closer look at the middle and background levels of “En secreto” shows us a composer working with a structural conception even more removed from tradition, the prolongation of non-tonal collections rather than the prolongation of diatonic pitches. Although Carrillo’s concern with intervals and non-tonal collections could be [130]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 4.10b  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2, mm. 25–53, piano reduction. Juxtaposition of blocks … continuation.

Example 4.11 Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3 (1928), second movement, “En secreto,” mm. 1–4.

Example 4.12  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3, second movement, “En secreto.” Structural level.

traced back to his writings from 1913, they do resonate with Busoni’s understanding of microtonality and Wyschnegradsky’s later theory of “ultrachromaticism.”42 Comparative analysis of some of the first microtonal works of Carrillo shows that his music experienced a true process of transfiguration. Based on aesthetic and historicist postulates borrowed from Western European culture, and especially the Austro-German music tradition, Carrillo developed a microtonal system that, in the earliest works, supports his own representation as a proponent of that tradition. However, soon after he had composed those pieces, he moved away from some of the principles of

42.  In fact, Wyschnegradsky referred to Carrillo as “the first ultrachromatic musician in the modern sense of the word … we should consider him the true precursor of us all.” Ivan Wyschnegradsky, “Una visión de Julián Carrillo,” Pauta 9, no. 36 (1990): 68. Wyschnegradsky wrote the text upon request of Jean-Étienne Marie for an homage to Carrillo celebrated at the Sorbonne in 1965.

[132]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

that tradition. In Carrillo, this process actually helped him shift models and, ironically, move the organicist tradition he wished to develop into a paradigm parallel to the serialist model formulated by other composers from that tradition. In a study that attempts to understand the aesthetic differences between Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1857–1859) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Lydia Goehr proposes criteria based on the relationship between style and idea to differentiate between a Romantic and a Modernist aesthetic tendency in a given musical composition. According to her position, a Romantic tendency “seeks synthesis and absolutism in this relation [while a Modernist tendency] stresses the fracture and failure.”43 I suggest that Goehr’s criteria actually work to discriminate between two contrasting notions of Modernist aesthetics. Drawing from Schenkerian ideals, Robert Morgan argues that the projection of foreground elements onto the background level (stylistic elements in resonance with the deeper idea of the musical work) is still a fundamental aspect of the striving for cohesion in a Modernist work.44 Such a notion resonates with Goehr’s description of the Romantic tendency in Wagner’s Tristan. The fracture between style and idea that Goehr calls the Modernist tendency in Debussy’s Pelléas is a contrasting definition of Modernism, one that rejects the organicist construction of the German musical paradigm by emphasizing a non-organicist principle of foreground-background relationship.45 These concepts illustrate how processes of transculturation reflected in Carrillo’s microtonal works also enact an ideological break with the German tradition. The foreground-background relations featured in Preludio a Colón show the work of a Modernist composer still anchored in an organicist, synthetic principle of musical construction. On the other hand, the stylistic features in String Quartet No. 2 and “En secreto” fail to be projected into the respective musical ideas of the works; style, in these pieces, does not represent the idea but rather a tacit rejection of the German paradigm. The development of style, in Carrillo’s early microtonal works, is a performative impetus that takes place as the result of larger collective processes of transculturation but also as the agent that activates them. In these works by Carrillo, style acts as a

43. Lydia Goehr, “Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style:  Philosophical Reflections on Maeterlinck-Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,” Representations no. 74 (2001): 66. 44.  Morgan, “Secret Languages,” 43–44. 45.  My intention is not to show that a fracture between style and idea takes place in Carrillo’s music, but rather that such gap slowly but continuously gets larger, thus contradicting the composer’s own rhetoric of continuity.

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challenge to hegemony, a place where opposing ideologies collide and negotiate their differences.46 Carrillo’s style is his aesthetic solution to the multi-ideological context that surrounded his development as a composer in Germany and Mexico, but it is also the agent that ultimately breaks away from the German musical paradigm.

CARRILLO, SONIDO 13, AND HEGEMONY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO

Hegemonic discourses are constructed to validate dominant institutions of power and their specific ideologies. It is often through the creation of a “myth of origin” that a dominant ideology authorizes present and future conditions. The hegemonic discourse produced in post-revolutionary Mexico is no exception, and it should be understood as a narrative that, in order to construct a coherent story, had to perform exercises of agency with the many discourses that coexisted in the country in the 1920s. These practices resulted in the exercises of dispossession, exclusion, and preference needed to ratify the myth of origin behind the new institutions in power. Since Carrillo’s microtonalism did not conform to the nationalist aesthetic favored by the post-revolutionary government, it came to be considered a sort of Modernist oddity that remained rarely performed and even less frequently studied or analyzed. Useless in validating the discourse of the new dominant ideology, Carrillo was excluded from its hegemonic narrative. One of the most important and influential musicians of Mexico during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Carrillo exited the musical mainstream of his country in 1926, after a series of political miscalculations and a radical shift in his professional interests. Julián Carrillo felt it necessary to reinvent himself within the cultural institutions of the new state that came to power in Mexico in 1920, after the revolution; Carrillo’s continuous call for a musical “revolution” through microtonality is symptomatic of his conviction that a radical musical movement was needed as cultural validation of the social revolution experienced in his country. At the same time, Carrillo wanted to represent himself as part of the teleological, progressive side of the Western music tradition. This is why he always substantiated his microtonal system as the “natural” goal in a deterministic understanding of music history. For Carrillo, the microtonal system was a direct response to what he considered the highest achievement of functional tonality up to the early 46.  Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 17.

[134]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

twentieth century: the equivalent harmonic use of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. We should interpret Carrillo’s microtonal system as a powerful element of personal agency within shifting institutions of power in his country, as well as a very personal appropriation of the Austro-German music tradition. But the construction of identity is never a one-way avenue; it is never a complete self-construction. One’s identity is also shaped by the “others” and their own necessity to mark difference and create individual and group identity. Carrillo’s discourse was also balanced by the interpretation that “others” made of that discourse, an interpretation that did not necessarily coincide with Carrillo’s attempts at self-representation. This chapter offers a vision of the 1920s in Mexico as a decade of complex social and cultural changes and struggles; it places the composer and his Sonido 13 within these circumstances, as an example of the search for identity and the ideas of modernization that saturated Mexico after the revolution. As such, we should understand early Sonido 13 as the exercise of agency of a composer navigating ideologies, trying to find a niche and develop an identity that could allow him to make sense of a changing world.

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CH AP TER   5

Reading Carrillo The Future That Never Was

T

here are many websites, blogs, Wikipedia and Facebook sites devoted to informing readers about or promoting Carrillo and Sonido 13. Surfing the Internet, one may find YouTube uploads of his music and that of his followers, newspaper reports about activities related to him or his supporters, as well as a wide variety of tribute sites. Some of the most prominent and thorough include one entitled “Julián Carrillo y el Sonido 13” and two Facebook sites, one also called “Julián Carrillo y el Sonido 13” and another labeled “Revista El Sonido 13.” The first two websites offer biographical information about the composer, photographs, chronologies of the development of microtonalism, and lists of works; one of them, which calls itself Sonido 13’s “official website,” also includes a wide variety of texts written by Carrillo and his followers.1 The “Julián Carrillo y el Sonido 13” Facebook site is associated with the official website, which may also be the case with the “Revista Sonido 13” Facebook site, which was created more recently but is largely a mirror site of the latter. They both periodically post selections and fragments from Carrillo’s writings as well as music, opinions by the site administrators, and other types of

1.  The official “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” website was designed and is maintained by Armando Nava Loya, a former student of Oscar Vargas Leal and David Espejo, Carrillo’s last two pupils, and Hugo Vargas, son of Oscar Vargas Leal. The website is accessible at http://www.sonido13.com/ (accessed on January 2, 2014). The other “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” website was created by Milton García and is available at http://sonido13.tripod.com/index.html (accessed on January 2, 2014).

informational notes.2 One of the most fascinating aspects of these websites is that many of the entries and posts one finds there borrow Carrillo’s futuristic rhetoric (many posts in the Facebook sites are quotations from his writings), showing that the extreme utopian, idealistic, and uncompromising character of Carrillo’s style is one of the central aspects in making Sonido 13 meaningful almost fifty years after the composer’s death. The following excerpt shows that Carrillo’s unyielding rhetoric is central in making Sonido 13 significant as a transhistorical performance complex: It is a pity that many of my colleagues do not feel the overwhelming strength of progress since they continue teaching in conservatory and music institutes absurd, anachronistic, and even laughable theories instead of taking advantage of the conquests of my revolution, which have been received with applause by the entire world.3

The revolutionary spirit that informs this text, written by Carrillo in 1964 and published posthumously in 1967, is little different from the lines that the composer published in 1922, at the outset of his Sonido 13 crusade. Let everything created disappear but let not the progress stop its march. Will there come a day when the works of Richard Wagner, Beethoven, and Richard Strauss have only an archaeological value? It may take not years, but centuries, to happen, but there is no doubt that it will happen. The thirteenth sound will be the beginning of the end and the point of departure of a new musical generation which will transform everything.4

2.  “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” is available at https://www.facebook.com/pages/ Juli%C3%A1n-Carrillo-y-el-Sonido-13/194248920630763?ref=profile (accessed on January 2, 2014); “Revista El Sonido 13” is at https://www.facebook.com/pages/ Revista-Sonido-13/315186281836097?ref=profile (accessed on January 2, 2014). 3. Posted on the “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” Facebook site on October 21, 2012. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Juli%C3%A1n-Carrillo-y-el-Sonido-13/ 194248920630763?ref=profile (accessed on January 2, 2014). The original text was first published in Julián Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical (Mexico City: Seminario de Música Mexicana, 1967), 259. 4. Posted on the “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” Facebook site on December 23, 2012. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Juli%C3%A1n-Carrillo-y-el-Sonido-13/ 194248920630763?ref=profile (accessed on January 2, 2014). The website quotes it as having been originally published in 1917; however, the original text was not published until later. See Julián Carrillo, “El Sonido 13,” in Pláticas musicales, Vol. II (Mexico City: Julián Carrillo, 1923), 255–274; and Julián Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” Musical Advance 10, no. 10 (1923): 1–4. The English translation quoted here is taken from this source, which is the composer’s translation of his article in Pláticas musicales, Vol. II.

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The same uncompromising attitude, fervent defiance, and faith in the future of Carrillo’s writings emanate from the messages and texts posted on these websites: Congratulations to those musicians who have started to think [for themselves]! The music of the future belongs to you[;]‌work and study hard, always with truth and love in mind, and never give up if the doors are closed[;] your labor has a first place in history.5

Furthermore, the rebellious imagination that nurtures the Sonido 13 performance complex is clearly stated in the mission of the two “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” websites. In his website, Milton García states: “This web[site] is part of the revolution started by Julián Carrillo,”6 while Nava Loya and Hugo Vargas write that persons who call themselves promoters of Sonido 13 [have] introduced musical styles foreign to the principles of the work [Sonido  13], talking about it without sufficient knowledge, misrepresenting its sense and pretending to “correct” or provide knowledge that has nothing to do with the revolutionary foundation of Sonido 13. … By creating this website, we, who have the immense fortune of being direct artistic descendents of Julián Carrillo, are committed to continue promoting his musical revolution, employing this wonderful modern communications tool called the Internet, which will lead us to provide the world with the true meaning of Sonido 13.7

These posts show the type of relation that these followers have with Carrillo’s writing and ideas and provide an entry into analyzing the performative power of the composer’s rhetoric. Clearly, the qualities in Carrillo’s writings that his contemporary followers find most appealing are the apparent radicalism of his rhetoric about revolution, his uncompromising conviction on the future “victory” of Sonido 13, and his unshakable belief in “the march of history.” These quotations reveal the teleology implied in this utopian music of the future as a powerful cultural fantasy that continues to feed the imagination of musicians and aficionados alike.

5. Posted in “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13” Facebook site on November 22, 2012. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Juli%C3%A1n-Carrillo-y-el-Sonido-13/ 194248920630763?ref=profile (accessed on January 2, 2014). 6. “Julián Carrillo y el Sonido 13,” http://sonido13.tripod.com/index.html (accessed on January 2, 2014). 7.  “Julián Carrillo y El Sonido 13 (Official Website)” http://www.sonido13.com/ (accessed on January 2, 2014).

[138]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

They also reveal the blinkered, dogmatic, and antagonistic character of Carrillo, which, as José Rafael Calva acknowledges, “is what has caused the most damage to [his] work, keeping collaborators and promoters away for years in his country. [This attitude] damaged his image and contributed to his isolation.”8 The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I  acknowledge that Carrillo’s personality and rhetorical strategies played an important role in preventing him from developing a lasting interest in his music among his contemporary mainstream scholars and musicians, but they are also the magnets that attract many of his contemporary fans; therefore, this chapter explores Carrillo’s personality through his writings and some of the important professional debates he was involved with at the onset of his Sonido 13 crusade. Second, by assessing Carrillo’s writings and opinions against the historical record, this chapter provides a basic description of where his microtonal system fits in relation to other alternative tuning and microtonal systems developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Carrillo had an inquisitive mind that led him to question what he saw as the shortcomings within a musical system (the Western music tradition as exemplified in the repertory of the common practice era) that aspired to universality. He was not able to identify this system as a culturally contained and shaped structure entrenched in a discourse that only claimed universality. He continued believing that there was true universality; and his critique of the apparent shortcomings of twelve-tone equal temperament (12tET) and tonality was in fact framed within his search for a universality determined by Nature, which helps to explain his rhetoric about “universal mistakes,” “conquering” Nature, and “overcoming” and “defeating” those whose ideas differed from his. These views are precisely the grandiloquent rhetorical turns his followers reproduce in websites and blogs, telling us of the power still held by the idea of universality and progress Carrillo fostered. In his writings, Carrillo disqualifies opponents often without being fully aware of the specificities of their cultural frameworks—the reasons they say what they say or defend the ideas they defend, and how those discourses may make sense within their own ideological contexts—just as he is unaware of how ideologically located his own rhetoric is. Carrillo’s own claims to universality effectively prevent him from critically assessing the ideological foundations on which his ideas were based; for him, 8.  José Rafael Calva, Julián Carrillo y microtonalismo: “la vision de Moisés” (Mexico City: SACM-CENIDIM, 1984), 32.

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these foundations were unquestionable truths. This is precisely the type of arrogant rhetoric that gained him enemies throughout his life and kept away people who might otherwise have been sympathetic to his efforts. I  myself experienced this kind of arrogance when talking to Carrillo’s contemporary followers, most of whom were ready to engage in passionate arguments over minimal differences in terminology or facts that conflicted with their own narratives about Sonido 13, microtonality, or music history in general. For them, Carrillo’s writings and ideas are incontrovertible; they take them as dogma, as carriers of ultimate musical truth, so questioning them is akin to blasphemy. It is clear by their websites that they see themselves as Carrillo’s rightful artistic heirs and as musical radicals destined to carry on his revolution and realize his futuristic dreams. When dealing with and analyzing the past, we come from the vantage point of the present and know what happened after the events we are studying unfolded. A dangerous temptation would be to judge actions and ideas in the past from a proleptic perspective, that is, to see them solely as harbingers of the culture of the present. In this chapter, I am not interested in this kind of hindsight revisionism. I do not intend a judgmental exploration of how Carrillo’s futuristic ideas may have been “wrong” because they did not materialize in our present. That exercise would reify the past, believing it to be meaningful only as the “origin” of the present. Instead, I am interested in Carrillo’s futuristic ideas precisely because the fact that they were (and still are) very meaningful, even though they never became a reality, reveals teleology as the kind of cultural fantasy it is. The past is not meaningful because it leads to the present but because of its rhizomatic potential; it is meaningful, as Walter Benjamin would say, as a land of still-open promises that allows us to “recognize today’s life, today’s form, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch,”9 in the future of that era that never was.

RHETORIC AS MY THOLOGY, RHETORIC AS DEFENSE

Carrillo published many books, treatises, journal and newspaper articles, and handbooks. The striking forcefulness of the revolutionary language in his writings after the 1920s, a tone that is radically different from that of his early texts, provides a window into the development of the standard mythology about him and Sonido 13, the anxieties this microtonal 9. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eilend and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 458.

[140]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

venture generated in him and among his colleagues, and his times. Most of his writings after 1924 concern the explanation and dissemination of his microtonal concepts, defending these notions from his critics, and establishing the basis for the mythology about himself and his ideas. Carrillo’s narratives of origin and his technical explanations of Sonido 13 were written and rewritten as responses to the changing intellectual and artistic world he lived in and to validate himself to those who questioned him and the viability of his microtonal project. His revolutionary and futuristic tone reflects and resonates with how the political rhetoric of post-revolutionary Mexican politics was received by artists and intellectuals alike. A comparative analysis of Carrillo’s writings shows how he would tweak or alter facts to make them fit the changing development of his mythological narrative. While in Pláticas musicales (1913) Carrillo tells how he benefited from the habit at Leipzig’s Königliches Konservatorium of sending students to practice with the Gewandhausorchester, in a 1945 interview with José Velasco Urda he proudly states that he was a formal member of the Gewandhausorchester.10 While Pláticas musicales reveals Carrillo’s admiration for the music of the Mexican composer Juan Hernández de Acevedo (1862–1894)—including his two symphonies—whom he met while a student in San Luis Potosí in the late 1880s, in an article from his posthumously published Errores universales en música y física musical (1967), he claims not to know of any other composer from the Americas who had written a symphony before him, in a ludicrous attempt at claiming his Symphony No. 1 (1902) as possibly the first such work written by an American composer.11 These are just two minor, almost trivial, instances of Carrillo’s practice of amending historical facts in order to enlarge his figure. However, probably the most lasting of these instances— the one that had a more permanent impact on his narrative of representation—was the myth of Sonido 13’s origin. All biographical sources about Carrillo state that he first discovered the sixteenth tone in 1895 when he was a student at the National Conservatory of Mexico. This affirmation is based on Carrillo’s account of the event 10.  For Carrillo’s description of Leipzig’s conservatory students at the Gewandhaus, see Julián Carrillo, Pláticas musicales (Mexico City: Wagner y Levién, 1913), 29; for his claim of having been part of the section of first violins of the Gewandhaus, see José Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra (Mexico City: Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1943), 179. Claudius Böhm, archivist with the Gewandhausorchester confirms that Carrillo was never a formal member of the orchestra but declares it is possible he was a practicing student or substitute musician since that was usual in Leipzig. Claudius Böhm, electronic communication, January 8, 2014. 11. Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 386–390.

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as presented in a variety of books and articles throughout his life, even though those accounts vary in small but important details. The story was first told in Carrillo’s article “The Thirteenth Sound” (1923), which provides details about discovering the sixteenth tone after an “experiment” conducted when he was a student at the National Conservatory of Mexico. The story states that in the last lustrum of the past century, my disciple and friend Eucario Rodríguez of Guanajuato and myself, as a matter of experiment and in a primitive way—lacking proper equipment—tried to see if it were possible to subdivide the semitone. Subdividing a violin string with a razor, we succeeded in hearing sixteen perfectly well defined sounds between the notes G and A.12

In the Musical Advance version of this article, Rodríguez appears as “my friend and collaborator,” not as Carrillo’s student.13 In November 1924, following a harsh critique in which Carlos Chávez accused him of being an imitator of European music models in both his tonal and his microtonal works and questioned the seriousness of his “experiment” in microtones, Carrillo published an article trying to prove the veracity of his “experiment.” Attempting to support his claim, the composer attached an odd note from César del Castillo—a former acoustics professor at the National Conservatory—who stated that back in 1898  “we had frequent conversations about the subject at stake in which you revealed your profound knowledge; and not only once but on several occasions you talked to me about Sonido 13.”14 The Castillo note is strange not only in that it was written in 1924—clearly at the request of Carrillo, which would question the credibility of the document—but also because it placed the episode in question three years after the date provided by Carrillo at the beginning of the article. In conversations with José Velasco Urda published under the title Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra (1947), Carrillo retells the story, but on this occasion he claims that it was Francisco Ortega y Fonseca, the conservatory professor who taught the acoustics class, who motivated him to do the “experiment,” thus contradicting his statement from 1924. Furthermore, Eucario Rodríguez is completely left out of this version, as Carrillo argues that on a “certain day the idea came to me to use a razor, and I started dividing the G string, fourth in the violin, until reaching the 12. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, Vol. II, 2, 262. 13.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 2. 14.  César del Castillo, letter quoted in Julián Carrillo, “El Sonido 13,” La Antorcha (November 29, 1924). This article is quoted in Carlos Chávez, Escritos periodísticos (1916–1939), ed. Gloria Carmona (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional, 1997), fn. 51–58.

[142]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

note A.”15 The final touch to Sonido 13’s myth of origin appears in a late article written toward the end of Carrillo’s life in which he actually claims that his “experiment” took place on July 13, 1895.16 The apparent random choice of date actually responds to Carrillo’s increasingly mystical obsession with the number thirteen throughout his life—for example, moving to a house on 13 Berlin Street in Mexico City in the 1930s, or scheduling his lectures on the thirteenth of the month. Whether taking a razor and dividing a string at home without providing any type of empirical data, recording the event in any systematic fashion, or following any kind of rigorous scientific protocol could count as an “experiment” is debatable; however, the fact is that other than Carrillo’s word, there is a complete lack of evidence that he conducted such an experiment on July 13, 1895. Between that year and 1923, when he first published his Sonido 13 theory, Carrillo wrote four books, and none of them mention anything about the systematization of microtonality or Sonido 13. It was only after Carrillo had access to a short article about quarter tones as the basis for “the music of the future” written by an E. C. Grassi and published in the French journal Le Menestrel in 1922 that he rushed into putting down on paper some of his ideas about microtonality.17 From the beginning, his project was about establishing priority over European microtonalists, regardless of the lack of factual evidence about his “experiment” or a theorization and systematization of his findings. In an attempt to establish this precedence, Carrillo argued that by 1917 he was already working on the explanation of Sonido 13 published in a second volume to his Pláticas musicales, Vol. II (although this book was not pubished until 1923).18 He also stated that in 1922 he had already published these ideas in an article for a magazine called Acción de Arte. According to the criticism raised by Grupo de los 9, in 1924, all of these articles seemed to have been one and the same. This would indicate that Carrillo’s earliest attempt at describing Sonido 13 was indeed written in response to Grassi’s essay from Le Menestrel.19 The contradictory dating

15.  Carrillo quoted in Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra, 124. 16. Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 421. 17. E. C.  Grassi, “L’orient et la musique de l’avenir,” Le Menestrel, 84, no. 19 (1922): 213–214. A copy of this article, which includes Carrillo’s marginalia, is kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 18. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, Vol. II, 255–274. 19.  I have not been able to locate a copy of Acción de Arte. However, all the versions of this article (in Pláticas musicales, Vol. II; Musical Advance; and El Universal) mention Grassi’s article from Le Menestrel; if they were versions of an early 1922 article published in such magazine, it would indicate that it was also written after Carrillo read Grassi’s essay.

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of Preludio a Colón is also an attempt to establish this priority. Carrillo claimed he had composed the piece back in 1922; nevertheless, its first public performance did not take place until late 1924, when it was played at a concert and radio broadcast of El Universal’s La Casa del Radio.20 Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster mentions a performance of Preludio a Colón as part of an event in which members of Carrillo’s Grupo 13 addressed public criticism against their teacher’s concepts by presenting a lecture and a recital of microtonal music on November 13, 1924; he also declares that the piece had already been played a few weeks earlier at another such event.21 What is apparent is that Preludio a Colón, like most of Carrillo’s production about Sonido 13 of the time, also came about as a response to criticism in an attempt to prove the feasibility of the composer’s ideas. I would argue that beyond the nebulous rhetorical embellishments, exaggerations, and tweaked details, Carrillo’s myth of origin, like most mythologies, has some truth to it. Most likely, inspired by the lectures on acoustics at the conservatory, Carrillo and his friend and classmate Eucario Rodríguez did use a razor to divide a violin’s strings and were able to hear microtones; whether this happened in 1895 as Carrillo claims or later would never be clear due to the lack of evidence he produced to back up the story.22 I  would suggest that although Carrillo may have found this experience enthralling, he never thought seriously about it again until he learned that some French musicians considered microtonalism—specifically quarter tones—to be “the future of music.” At that point, and in the middle of a pressurized atmosphere that pushed artists to reinvent themselves as modern and revolutionary as a result of the Mexican revolution, Carrillo may have remembered his early experience with microtones; he may have thought that he had temporal precedence over the French, and that developing a microtonal system that went beyond the quarter tones proposed by Grassi would place him as the 20.  The conferences and discussions were chosen by El Universal to be broadcast via its radio station, one of the first commercial stations at the outset of radio broadcasting in Mexico; this may indicate how the managers of the Casa del Radio came to imagine Sonido 13 as an artistic counterpart to the type of modernity that radio broadcasting embodied. 21.  Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, “Grandioso éxito de los ‘Grupos 13,’ ” El Sonido 13 2, no. 1 (1925): 18–21. 22.  As Carrillo was a recent transplant from San Luis Potosí to Mexico City in 1895, it would be difficult to imagine him having students when he himself was a student at the National Conservatory. It is more likely that Rodríguez was Carrillo’s friend, as the composer asserts in the earlier versions of this article, or a classmate rather than a pupil, as he states in one of the versions of the story (“I remember that while experimenting with my friend and classmate Eucario González …”). See Carrillo, Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13” (San Luis Potosí: Julián Carrillo, 1940), 15.

[144]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

natural leader in the race to compose in the present the music of the future. Such anxieties are understandable given his training within a Modernist German musical and cultural ideology that strongly emphasized originality and novelty and that encouraged the idea of Germany leading the world toward the “music of the future.” The rhetoric about revolution in Carrillo’s utopian “music of the future” clearly resonated with the political discourse of the revolutionary regime in 1920s Mexico. Besides blindly believing in the revolutionary character of his project, Carrillo may also have seen the time as an opportunity to reinvent himself and his ideas as the musical counterpart of the political revolution the country was going through. A look at some of Carrillo’s central mythologies shows he was as savvy and bold a writer as he was a composer. He was clearly willing to twist facts and rework arguments to secure for himself a more central role in the representation of what he understood to be the art and music of the future. Due to his confrontational character, Carrillo was involved in many polemics throughout his life. The two more important debates he was part of during the 1920s had long-standing repercussions in both his musical career and reputation. They involve the public and heated discussion against the so-called Grupo de los 9, and the animosity between him and a then young composer named Carlos Chávez, who was attaining a reputation as the enfant terrible of Mexican music. In his autobiography, Carrillo remembers the Grupo de los 9 debate as a bitter attack by a number of prominent Mexican musicians—Manuel Barajas (1895–1956), Ernesto Enríquez (1901–1997), Roberto Gutiérrez Arreola, Alba Herrera y Ogazón (1885–1931), Estanislao Mejía (1882–1967), Ignacio Montiel y López (1889–1947), Jesús C. Romero (1894–1958), Pascual H. Toral (1898–1977)—who joined Luis A. Delgadillo (1887–1962), a Nicaraguan pianist whom Carrillo had denied a professorship at the National Conservatory in 1923,23 to “vent all their animosity against me.”24 In that book, Carrillo mostly blamed Delgadillo for igniting a “polemic that unfortunately degenerated from exciting into passionate.”25 23.  Luis Abraham Delgadillo was a Nicaraguan nationalist composer, pianist, and conductor who studied in Milan, Italy, and lived in Mexico between 1922 and 1925. 24. Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, ed. Dolores Carrillo (San Luis Potosí: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992), 222. 25. Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 222. Carrillo claimed that he had helped Delgadillo when he arrived in Mexico by offering him a job as a piano accompanist at the National Conservatory and that for some time he even paid his rent and bills. He argued that Delgadillo’s animosity toward him came about because Carrillo denied him a job as a piano teacher at the conservatory. Furthermore, Carrillo also accused Delgadillo of trying to take Carlos Meneses’s piano professorship away from him; see Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo, 299–305. In a book published in1957, Delgadillo denied these accusations. He wrote that he lived well and was even able to bring his family to Mexico thanks to his salary as conductor at Orfeón No. 5; he confirmed having

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Carrillo is correct in remembering the debate with Grupo de los 9 deteriorating quickly due to insults, misquotations, and crude disqualifications from both sides that should have had no place in a serious intellectual discussion. The musicians were originally members of the Grupo Nosotros, a civil society of artists and scholars interested in “preserving Mexican music tradition and channeling it into the areas of pedagogy, technical improvement, and research.”26 After Carrillo published his first hazy articles about Sonido 13, Delgadillo picked up on the vagueness of his explanation and his bombastic rhetorical style and publicly questioned both the rationale behind the composer’s ideas and his choice of words; he was particularly critical of rhetorical turns such as “surely the psychological transformation that the doctrine of Christianity produced in the world will hardly surpass the tremendous revolution that the thirteenth sound will produce in the arts and music,”27 urging the composer “TO PROVE [his Sonido 13 theory] to everyone with facts and decent reasons for the benefit of his reputation and the dignity of Mexican musicians.”28 Carrillo felt attacked, and in a brief exchange with Delgadillo in which he questioned the real motives of his challenger, he stated that he would not enter any debates before a public lecture in which he would explain his theories.29 Carrillo and his students presented that public lecture and a concert on September 13 and another one on September 19, 1924. The members of Grupo de los 9, unimpressed by Carrillo’s ambiguous rhetoric immediately issued a public statement published in El Universal in which they challenged the composer to answer thirteen very specific questions that ranged from defining whether Sonido 13 was any subdivision of the asked for a job as piano teacher at the conservatory but denied ever wanting to take that job away from Meneses; see Luis A.  Delgadillo, Por mi honor musical:  polémica sobre El Sonido 13: páginas históricas de mi vida artística (Managua: Ministerio de la Gobernación, 1957), 6–9. 26. Gabriel Pareyón, Diccionario enciclopédico de música en México (Guadalajara: Universidad Panamericana, 2007), 455. This was the group in charge of organizing the National Congress of Music of 1926. See Alejandro L.  Madrid, Sounds of the Modern Nation:  Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2009), 111–137; and Ricardo Miranda, Ecos, alientos y sonidos:  ensayos sobre música mexicana (Xalapa:  Universidad Veracruzana-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001), 172–203. 27.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 2. 28. Luis A.  Delgadillo, “Crítica sobre el Sonido 13 del maestro Carrillo,” El Demócrata (May 24, 1924). Reprinted in Delgadillo, Por mi honor musical, 39. Capital letters in the original. 29.  This early portion of the sequence of events between Delgadillo, Grupo de los 9, and Carrillo is summarized in “El Sonido 13 y el Grupo de los 9: Conferencia radiotelefónica transmitida por la estación CYL, de El Universal,” undated newspaper note kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. This is a transcription of the lecture presented by Grupo de los 9 at El Universal’s Casa del Radio. It was possibly published around October 8, 1924.

[146]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

half tone, providing his opinion about ET and the overtone series, disclosing his sources about the existence of a so-called Koening’s harp in the internal ear, and stating whether he considered himself the first musician to have subdivided the half step.30 Given the vague, almost esoteric rhetoric Carrillo used when discussing Sonido 13 (“the thirteenth sound will be the cataclysm that will destroy everything, it will put the finish on music as it exists at present,” or “we shall find the new sound which will give light for future generations in the world”),31 these focused questions seem to be fair game; they arose from the doubts of people who were not able to fully understand the logic behind the composer’s discussion precisely due to the imprecision of his rhetoric. However, instead of simply answering the questions, Carrillo called for a public debate “TO DISCUSS THE THIRTEEN QUESTIONS THEY HAVE FORMULATED”32 and immediately started a campaign to publicly question the credentials of the musicians who challenged him. The following day, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, one of Carrillo’s students, sent a letter to El Universal stating, “For us, the time has already passed for the Byzantine [attitude] of dilettanti who by questioning what they do not understand get at least to see their names in print!”33 Grupo de los 9 responded that without Carrillo first answering their questions there were no grounds for a public discussion,34 to which Carrillo, following on Baqueiro Foster’s earlier tone, arrogantly answered that he refused to debate with “the members of Grupo de los 9 [because they] are mentally unable to understand the wonders that the Sonido 13 theory brings with it.”35 Figure 5.1 shows Carrillo working at his desk in the mid-1920s. Since Carrillo continued to refuse answering their questions, Grupo de los 9 presented a conference on October 7, 1924, in which they quoted from the composer’s available published material to try to answer their questionnaire themselves. Quoting Carrillo as stating that Sonido 13 was indistinctively “the interval of five quarter tones,” “the subdivision of the half tone,” or that it was “produced by Nature between harmonics 6 and 7 and 7 and 8 [in the overtone series]”; the Grupo de los 9 members concluded

30.  “¿El Sonido 13 es música celestial? Un reto al maestro Julián Carrillo para que sostenga su teoría revolucionaria,” El Universal, September 24, 1924. 31.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 2 and 4. 32.  “Trece preguntas sobre el novísimo Sonido 13. D. Julián Carrillo, director de la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, está dispuesto a contestarlas,” El Universal, September 26, 1924. Capital letters in the original. 33.  Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, “El ‘Grupo 13’ espera la arremetida,” El Universal, September 27, 1924. 34.  “Una nueva carta sobre el novísimo Sonido 13. Es necesario, dicen los firmantes, precisar sobre lo que se va a discutir sobre el asunto,” El Universal, September 28, 1924. 35.  “Las última palabra del maestro Carrillo,” El Universal, September 30, 1924.

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Figure 5.1  Julián Carrillo in the mid-1920s.

that it was illogical to describe an interval as a sound (Sonido 13 [the thirteenth sound]) when an interval by definition was made of two sounds.36 Carrillo replied a few days later providing evidence that the members of Grupo de los 9 had intentionally misquoted from his writings to make him look incompetent.37 Clearly, the questions from Grupo de los 9 were either informed by their believing that Sonido 13 was in fact a particular sound (a thirteenth sound)—a matter Carrillo’s imprecise rhetoric indeed 36.  “El Sonido 13 y el Grupo de los 9.” 37.  Julián Carrillo, “El Sonido 13 y la moral en la polémica,” El Universal, October 19, 1924.

[148]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

failed to clarify—or tried to capitalize on what seemed to be a contradiction between the composer’s explanation and his choice of nomenclature. Carrillo also misunderstood the intention behind Grupo de los 9’s challenge, believing they wanted to obstruct his project by questioning not only the existence of microtones but also the ability of the human ear to perceive them. However, as explained by Manuel Barajas, the group’s goal was not to deny the reality of microtones but rather to question Carrillo’s theorization about them and his claim of having “discovered” them. Feeling that the members of the group were being intentionally disparaging, Carrillo intensified his attacks on a personal basis—particularly against Alba Herrera y Ogazón, who reacted by publicly stating her disappointment with Carrillo, a composer she had admired and praised in the past.38 On November 13, 1924, Carrillo and his students presented a conference in which they finally answered the thirteen questions from Grupo de los 9 and presented a series of musical demonstrations of their theories—including, among others, Preludio a Colón.39 Failing to understand each other’s intentions facilitated the types of misunderstandings that first led to professional accusations and disqualifications and ended in vicious personal insults. The unfolding of the polemic between Carrillo and Grupo de los 9 gave Carlos Chávez an opportunity to express his own criticism of the manner in which Carrillo had presented his microtonal project. This moment was Chávez’s chance to settle some of his old quarrels with Carrillo, which were mostly the result of their first encounter back in 1920 (see Chapter 2); it opened the door for Chávez to publicly express his antagonism and add fuel to the anti-Carrillo climate that was forming. On August 24 and 31, Chávez published a thorough article about microtonalism in El Universal. In it, he 38.  This “polemic within the polemic,” between Carrillo and Herrera y Ogazón came about when a fragment of Herrera y Ogazón’s El arte musical en México (1917), in which she celebrated Carrillo, was published as the discussion with Grupo de los 9 was taking place. Herrera y Ogazón felt it was an unnecessary provocation from Carrillo and publicly stated that she no longer admired him and that she even questioned the veracity of some of the material about him that she had published in her book, stating that she had committed the mistake of taking information provided by Carrillo at face value and implying that Carrillo may have lied to her when presenting his biography and list of accomplishments. Carrillo responded in a mocking tone, questioning Herrera y Ogazón’s scholarship, and rudely and disrespectfully threatening to make public the real reason she had changed her mind about him so radically. See Alba Herrera y Ogazón, “El Carrillo de antes y el de hoy,” El Universal, December 1, 1924; and Julián Carrillo, “El maestro Carrillo contesta a la srita: Herrera y Ogazón,” El Universal, December 18, 1924. The quoted fragment appeared originally in Alba Herrera y Ogazón, El arte musical en México: Antecedentes—El conservatorio, compositores e interpretes (Mexico City: Dirección General de las Bellas Artes, 1917), 193–208. 39.  Baquiro Foster, “Grandioso éxito de los ‘Grupos 13,’ ” 18–21.

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surveyed the presence of quarter tones and other microtonal scales in traditional music from India as well as among the activities of European composers and theorists ranging from contemporaries like Alois Hába, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ferruccio Busoni to seventeenth-century English music theorist William Holder.40 Consumed as he was in the debate with Grupo de los 9, Carrillo did not respond to Chávez’s provocations for three months, when he wrote an article published in La Antorcha on November 29, 1924.41 Carrillo may not have considered Chávez—at the time just a young, emerging musician—as worthy an opponent as the well-respected members of Grupo de los 9. As exposed in Chapter 4, the first article by Chávez, Carrillo’s response, and a series of articles published by Chávez in El Universal and La Antorcha between August and October 1924 generated a brief exchange between Chávez and Carrillo about imitation and originality in music.42 One may be tempted to see arrogance in Carrillo’s neglecting to answer the questionnaire and his disdain of Chávez’s challenge—he only answered Chávez’s criticism after Chávez named Carrillo explicitly as an imitator of European styles in his article of October 11. That may indeed be one of the reasons for his behavior; however, I would argue that he might have also postponed replying to the questions because he had not yet completely figured out the answer or simply because he was not academically prepared to properly explain what he was seeking. The answers Grupo 13 finally provided during the conference of November 13 are rather laconic, not particularly insightful, and definitely not very convincing. As will be evident later in this chapter, Carrillo was still struggling—and would continue to struggle for a few years—with many of these questions, especially those related to the overtone series. He knew he had found something important, and in order to establish priority he went public with it even 40.  See Carlos Chávez, “El cruti hindú y el cuarto de tono europeo,” El Universal, August 24 and 31, 1924. Reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, 23–36. 41.  Julián Carrillo, “El Sonido 13,” La Antorcha, November 29, 1924. Reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, fn. 51–58. Gloria Carmona assumes that the debate between Grupo de los 9 and Carrillo happened in response to Chávez’s articles from August 1924. This assessment is incorrect. The first critical comments toward Carrillo’s Sonido 13 came from Luis A. Delgadillo in May 1924; this critique generated the debate between Carrillo and Grupo de los 9. See “Crítica sobre El Sonido 13 del maestro Carrillo,” El Demócrata, May 24, 1924. Reprinted in Delgadillo, Por mi honor musical, 35–39. 42.  Other articles in the exchange between Chávez and Carrillo include Carlos Chávez, “La hora:  segundo editorial de música,” El Universal, September 7, 1924; Carlos Chávez, “La importación en México,” October 11, 1924; Carrillo, “El Sonido 13,” La Antorcha, November 29, 1924; and Carlos Chávez, “Una rectificación,” La Antorcha, December, 6, 1924. All reprinted in Chávez, Escritos periodísticos, 37–39; 51–61; fn. 51–58; and 65.

[150]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

before he fully understood how to systematize and explain it. In an atmosphere of sincere intellectual curiosity, the questions posted by Grupo de los 9 should have been expected and even welcomed. However, Carrillo’s confrontational character combined with a series of honest—and a few not so honest—misunderstandings led to an ugly situation that nonetheless gave the composer the possibility for deepening his knowledge on the matter, the opportunity to compose and premiere his first microtonal works, and the time to set up the basis for an actual systematization and theorization of Sonido 13. One could speculate that the type of questioning he faced—Delgadillo’s early accusation that Carrillo “FELT IMPOTENT TO CONTINUE THE POLEMIC WITHIN THE CONFINES OF STRICT SCIENTIFIC RIGOR”43—and his inability to provide incontestable answers may have marked the beginning of an obsession with the type of scientistic rhetoric that characterizes his later books. The moment is also important because it gave local and international Sonido 13 audiences alike the raw material for a fetish that provided the basis for constructing the composer’s legend.

SONIDO 13: THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

Carrillo’s Sonido 13 is a microtonal system based on equal divisions of the octave; it operates within the tuning boundaries of ET (equal temperament) by further subdividing the whole tones into equal intervals smaller than the half tone. Originally, Carrillo proposed increasing subdivisions of the half tone by halves; thus resulting in quarter-, eighth-, and sixteenth-tone intervals and thus transforming the system into 24tET, 48tET, or 96tET depending on the size of the smaller interval in use. Soon, Carrillo began considering the possibility of partitions based not on the half tone but rather on the whole tone as basic unit, which would enable intervals in third, fifth, and seventh, ninth, eleventh, thirteenth, and fifteenth tones and their subdivisions; this allowed for a wide variety of ET microtonal systems from third to sixteenth tones. In the 1940s and 1950s, Carrillo was finally able to hear the result of his theoretical ruminations with the construction of fifteen pianos, each tuned to a different partition, from whole tones to sixteenth tones.

43.  Luis A.  Delgadillo, “El Sonido 13,” El Demócrata, June 4, 1924. Reprinted in Delgadillo, Por mi honor musical, 45–47. Capital letters in the original.

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To account for the many different pitches that result from these subdivisions, Carrillo developed a pragmatic numerical notation system in which numbers replace note heads. He also dropped the wide variety of clefs as well as signs such as flats, double flats, sharps, double sharps commonly used in Western music notation. Although apparently simpler and more practical than standard notation, Carrillo’s system changes depending on the number of sounds per octave of the particular scale in use (Chapter 8 explores some of the impracticalities of the system). In a quarter-tone system, with 24 pitches per octave (or “cycle” as Carrillo called it in the scientistic rhetoric he consciously adopted after the polemic with Grupo de los 9), the pitches of the scale would be labeled 0 through 23 (beginning with 0 = C, 1 = C+1 quarter tone, 2 = C+2 quarter tones, 3 = C+3 quarter tones, 4 = C+4 quarter tones = D, 5 = D+1 quarter tone, etc.). In a sixteenth-tone system, with 96 pitches per octave or cycle, the pitches of the scale would be labeled 0 through 95 (beginning with 0 = C, 1 = C+1 sixteenth tone, 2 = C+2 sixteenth tones, 3 = C+3 sixteenth tone, etc.). In a quarter-tone system, every four numbers would account for a whole step in ET (0 = C, 4 = D, 8 = E, 12 = F sharp, 16 = G sharp, 20 = A sharp). In a sixteenth-tone system, every sixteen numbers would account for a whole step in ET (0 = C, 16 = D, 32 = E, 48 = F sharp, 64 = G sharp, 80 = A sharp); that relation applies to all different ET systems. C is the absolute pitch and is labeled 0 in all possible scale systems.44 The five-line staff was replaced by a single line with two possible additional lines (usually dotted lines) above and below. The central line represented the octave of the central C in a piano; numbers could be placed across the line, below or above the line as well as across the dotted lines and above or below them; the system provides a nine-octave range. Piano chordal writing used two lines, the lower one representing the central octave and the upper one representing one octave above the central octave. Chords were written by relating pitches in vertical position to the highest positioned number and its location in relation to the two lines. One of the benefits of this notation is that since it is relational and the only absolute pitch is C, it allows for the easy and practical notation of any music in ET, non-ET, microtonal, or non-microtonal scalar systems. One of the disadvantages is that it conceals the tuning system

44.  In writing early Sonido 13 music using quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones, Carrillo coped with this impracticality by returning to the sixteenth-tone numerical notation system, which provides numbers for pitches in the other two systems. However, by the end of his life, when he composed mostly in quarter tones or for the Carrillo Pianos, he abandoned the use of numerical notations in the final scores of his music (see more about this in Chapter 8).

[152]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

and makes music very difficult to sight-read or to hear in the mind by just looking at the score. The challenges he faced in 1924 and the controversy around his microtonal ideas pressed Carrillo into systematizing them, making them practical, and developing a notation to solve the many problems that arose from subdividing the half tone. Elvira Larios, a student of Carrillo, gave the first explanation of Sonido 13 notation at a conference at Mexico City’s Museo Nacional.45 She started the discussion by quoting Carrillo’s critique of the needless complexity of Western music notation as expressed in his Pláticas musicales (1913) before moving into an exposition of the composer’s numerical proposal.46 Carrillo continued refining the details of the notation before publishing its first formalization in Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico (1930); here, the composer is also more specific in explaining his adaptation of rhythmic signs into the new notation.47 Toward the end of the book, Carrillo, in a move that exemplifies the extreme scientistic rhetoric—a subconscious response to Delgadillo’s demand that he “continue the polemic within the confines of strict scientific rigor”—also proposes to replace “ambiguous” tempo and character markings—such as Largo, Adagio, Andante, Allegro—with more objective mathematical speed indications.48 Later, in Teoría lógica de la música (1954), the composer provides another detailed explanation of his numerical notation system in relation to a larger description of Western music theory but fails to provide an alternative to tempo and character markings, offering instead a long list of them in German and Italian with a Spanish translation.49 In 1949, Carrillo published his Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, a treaty about the transformation of melodic and harmonic material by processes of intervallic augmentation and diminution. Carrillo’s system is inspired by traditional contrapuntal augmentation and diminution techniques; but instead of augmenting or diminishing the duration of pitches in a given motive, Carrillo’s transformations modify the intervallic relations of that motive or piece of music by proportionally augmenting or diminishing by the same intervallic relation the distance between pitches both melodically and harmonically. For example, a motive may be transformed by doubling

45.  Elvira Larios, “La teoría del Sonido 13 y la escritura musical,” El Sonido 13 2, no. 2 (1925): 2–10. 46. Carrillo, Pláticas musicales, 55–62. 47.  Julián Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico: análisis físico-músico “pre-Sonido 13” (San Luis Potosí: Comité de los 13, Pro-Julián Carrillo, 1930). 48. Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico, 62. 49.  Julián Carrillo, Teoría lógica de la música (Mexico City: Manuel Casas, 1954).

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the size of its intervals, meaning each half step would be enlarged into a whole step, each whole tone would be enlarged into two whole steps, and so on. It is a system that maintains the overall proportion of the original melody but expands its internal intervallic relations. Carrillo first developed this method in his Concertino (1927) in order to deal with an instrumental ensemble playing microtonal melodies accompanied by a standard orchestra unable to play microtones. His answer was to expand to the double the microtonal melodies in quarter tones, thus making them into melodies within the 12tET chromatic scale.50 Needless to say, the strict systematic application of this process of augmentation transforms tonal passages into atonal ones. In his book, after explaining the augmentation aspect of his “laws of metamorphosis,” Carrillo provided a series of charts in which he offers all possible diminution permutations of a chromatic scale within microtonal scales from third tones to sixteenth tones. Finally, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (1957) marks the apotheosis of Carrillo’s scientistic systematization.51 As explained in Chapter 4, in this book Carrillo provided a classification of scales and chords based on a purely atonal understanding of pitch relations; the result is a list of possible algebraic combination of pitches that resembles Allen Forte’s list of pitch class sets—in a 12tET system, Carrillo’s numeric notation coincides with Forte’s pitch class nomenclature.52 These two books mark the extent of Carrillo’s mathematical organization of the harmonic and melodic freedom implied in the atonal character of Sonido 13, and although his compositional output never fully creatively reflected the extensive artistic possibilities of this codification, the universalist assumption and appeal of his systematization is certainly unprecedented in the Mexican music scene.

OF ERRORS, UNAWARENESS, AND ARROGANCE

As explained in Chapter 4, Carrillo’s belief in the history of music as a teleology realized in the incorporation of pitches from the overtone series into harmonic practices is in consonance with the ideas about the chord of Nature popular in early twentieth-century Europe. For 50.  For a detailed explanation of this process in Carrillo’s Concertino, see Christina Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez in New York, 1925–1932” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland-College Park, 2008), 112–114. 51.  Julián Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (Mexico City:  Ediciones Sonido 13, 1957). 52.  See Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).

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him, Sonido 13 referred to the incorporation of the higher harmonics in the overtone series into the twelve-tone gamut used in the Western music tradition, thus adding new pitches beyond the twelve of the chromatic scale. After briefly discussing the possibility of subdividing the semitone into smaller intervals, Carrillo’s first apology for microtonal music, published in his “The Thirteenth Sound” (1923), largely focuses on providing evidence about the ability of the human ear to hear and distinguish intervals smaller than the semitone. His argument is based on the apparent discovery by German researchers of an organ in the internal ear presumably called Koening’s harp. Carrillo claims that although these researchers argued that Koening’s harp allows humans to hear 10,000 different vibrations or sounds, he is sure that as they continue experimenting “they will certainly find out not only 10,000 but 73,000 or more strings”53 which in his opinion would enable them to distinguish very small differences in audio frequency. Since this terminology is not standard in contemporary neuroscience research, it is unclear what internal ear organ—if any—Carrillo was referring to. The ambiguous description in his article (“an organ that they assert has about 10,000 strings, each of them representing a sound”)54 seems to refer to something similar to stereocilia or hair cells within the organ of Corti. 55 Carrillo’s rather obscure explanation denotes that he may not have fully understood what he was referring to (“I do not need to inquire into the mysteries of the inner ear or interview the scientists in order to find out whether or not Koening’s harp exists because over and above Koening’s harp is our common sense”)56 but he clearly felt that employing a scientific-sounding rhetoric may have somehow helped validate his argument. 57 At any rate, Carrillo’s original theorization of microtonalism did not include a critique of ET or talk about alternate tuning systems. It was only later, in the aftermath of the exchanges with Grupo de los 9 that he realized the problem of invoking the so-called chord of Nature as validation for both the ET system and his Sonido 13 as an extension of it. 53.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 3. 54.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 2. 55.  Carrillo’s description of this so-called Koening’s harp years later echoes more recent descriptions of the organ of Corti. See Carrillo, Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13,” 51–76. 56.  Carrillo, “The Thirteenth Sound,” 3. 57.  Carrillo would continue to refer to Koening’s harp in validating Sonido 13 throughout his life—most notably during the polemic against the Grupo de los 9 in 1924 but even as late as 1965, in an essay entitled “Problemas biológicos” [Biological Problems] published in Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 409–412.

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In 1924, during their public debate, Grupo de los 9 asked Carrillo if his proposed division of the half tone would take place within the ET system. His answer was, “Yes; because it would be absurd to go back to the sixteenth century, losing 400 years of hard work since we understand the tempered system to be a joyful discovery of humanity.”58 It was only later that Carrillo’s first concerns regarding the overtone series appeared in an article published in January, 1925.59 There, the author states:  WE QUESTION THE COMPLETE OVERTONE SCALE. … We doubted first about the fifth harmonic, then we questioned the precision of the third harmonic, and lastly we were forced to question the whole overtone scale when we realized that we had powerful reasons to believe that the inaccuracies begin with the second harmonic; it is evident that the second harmonic being false, then the fourth, eighth, sixteenth, etc., will also be false; in the same way, if the third harmonic is false, then the sixth, twelfth, and twenty-fourth, etc., etc., will also be false. If we were ready to keep accepting approximations we would have no problem neglecting all of the inaccuracies in the overtone scale, but when our spirit has encountered such strong doubts we are bound to exhibit them. … [T]‌he correctness of the overtone scale has been questioned by us, and as far as we know, nobody up until now has doubted its complete [accuracy].60

Months after the debate with Grupo de los 9, Carrillo still failed to acknowledge ET as a tuning system that deviates from “ideal” acoustic phenomena, declaring instead that the harmonics were “false” and in need of “rectification”61 and confirming ET as an extraordinary human achievement. Clearly, Carrillo still held ET as the “natural” measure of all musical things and therefore as the frame of reference for the development of his microtonal revolution. This is further confirmed in an article published a few months later, in which Carrillo discussed the practice among string and woodwind players of modifying the intonation of

58. “Grandioso éxito de los ‘Grupo 13,’ ” El Sonido 13 2, no.  1 (1925):  20. The unsigned article reviews a conference-concert that took place on November 13, 1924, in which Carrillo and his students publicly responded to the questions and criticism of the Grupo de los 9. 59.  “ ‘El Sonido 13’ cumple un año de vida,” El Sonido 13 2, no 1 (1925): 2–4. The article appears unsigned but being the main essay in that issue, it was likely written by Carrillo himself. However, even if Carrillo did not author it, it is clear that as director of the magazine he controlled what was published in it, especially anything related to the ideas that defined his project. 60.  “ ‘El Sonido 13’ cumple un año de vida,” 2. Capital letters used in the original. 61.  “Grandioso éxito de los ‘Grupo 13,’ ” 20.

[156]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

certain pitches—such as the leading tone, for example—thus playing “out of tune.” He argued that “detuning could only be tolerable in direct relation to the size of the smaller intervals being used. While there were only tones and half tones, great detuning was tolerable [since] it was sufficient to just avoid playing the following half tone.”62 It was his contention that the sixteenth tones of his microtonal system would account for those inflections as actual pitches and force musicians to be more careful and precise in their overall tuning and intonation practices. He concluded the article by loftily announcing that “as consuming or as large as [this task] may be we will undertake it without mercy and hesitation, and if no unforeseen problems arise we can say today that, although it may sound pretentious, THE THIRTEENTH SOUND WILL TUNE THE WORLD.”63 A letter sent by Antonio Carrillo, the composer’s son, to El Universal on September 8, 1926, further confirms the conceptualization of Sonido 13 within the equal tuning system by stating that since Sonido 13 operated with fractions of a unity (the whole tone), it requires UNIFORMITY IN THAT UNITY, meaning, the whole tone. For that reason the scale given by physicists, which with its major (9/8) and minor (10/9) tones would make impossible a uniform subdivision, had to be abandoned, and the tempered system had to be necessarily adopted because its twelve uniform intervals (at a 1.059 relation among them all) made the exact subdivision possible.64

By 1927, increasingly aware of the activities of scientists, acousticians, and musicians regarding scales that reflected the overtone series more closely, Carrillo began to change his discourse about ET and therefore his idea about what Sonido 13 would offer Western music. While living in New York, Carrillo was interviewed by Ragini Devi, an advocate of Indian classical music and dance. In the interview, Carrillo argued that current musical systems could be classified in three different groups: the ET system, standard in the Western music tradition since the end of the seventeenth century; a system that he argued scientists were trying to develop at the time (he may have been referring to the recirculation of Pythagorean scales, the use of just intonation, and other attempts to approximate the frequency ratios of the overtone series); and the music 62.  “El Sonido 13 afinará al mundo,” El Sonido 13 2, no. 10 (1925): 4. 63.  “El Sonido 13 afinará al mundo,” 7. Capital letters used in the original. 64. Antonio Carrillo, “Fundamentación científica de la teoría del Sonido 13.” Letter sent to El Universal on September 8, 1926. A copy is kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. Capital letters used in the original.

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of other cultural groups he contemptuously called “primitive races who sing and play following their natural tendencies and where it is impossible to find any symptom deserving the title of musical civilization.”65 Carrillo further stated that Sonido 13 “will give to humanity the infinite pleasure of an absolutely pure music [that] will not permit the disorders to continue into the kingdom of sound.”66 Beyond the clear reverberations from eugenics and other pseudo-scientific racial ideologies of the time, Carrillo’s statement comes across as somehow amending his earlier position regarding ET and the overtone series. Although he does not explicitly reject ET, his characterization of Sonido 13 as the bearer of “absolutely pure music” seems to announce a reversal in his previous idea that the harmonics in the overtone series were “false”; instead, he implicitly argues that the further subdivision of the half tone would allow discrimination of pitches that actually reflect the frequencies of the overtone series. I believe this statement marks an important epistemological shift, from considering ET as a human conquest of Nature to considering its intervals to be “disorders into the kingdom of sound.” From this moment on, Carrillo’s discourse about ET and the history of music—which for him meant the history of Western art music—changed drastically. It is in his Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico (1930) where Julián Carrillo directly criticizes equal temperament for the first time. After enumerating the acoustic differences between intervals in ET and those in the overtone series, the composer disparages “the authors of the tempered system [for agreeing] to deliberately falsify all intervallic relations, supposedly to make them practical! How horrendous! To deliberately stain the purity of natural sounds! What a disgrace that the great Bach was the champion of this outrage!”67 With this affirmation, Carrillo refashioned his Sonido 13 revolution from the source of enrichment of the Western music tradition—with the addition of new pitches into the ET system—into a project to cleanse the system from its historical “errors.” This shift was central in shaping not only the composer’s artistic output for the rest of his life but also the appropriation of his music and ideas after his death (as explored in Chapter 7). It also implies a shift in his understanding of the teleology of music history that had ideologically inspired him throughout his life. Carrillo’s new historicist narrative of musical progress began forty-six centuries ago with pentatonic scales in China; it moved

65. Julián Carrillo, quoted in Ragini Devi, “A New Development in Western Music: A Survey,” Hindustani Review 1, no. 293 (1927): 307. 66.  Carrillo, “A New Development in Western Music,” 307. 67. Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico,13.

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to the sixth century bc and Terpander in ancient Greece as the instigator of the diatonic scale; it continued in twelfth-century Rome and the incorporation of the B flat; and finally continued with the development of twelve-tone equal temperament (12tET) in the seventeenth century.68 It is at this point that Carrillo rhetorically transformed ET, which he previously considered a milestone human achievement, into “the greatest mistake in the history of music, [a source of] impurity and corruption.”69 For a contemporary reader, Carrillo’s teleological narrative, which characterizes musical “progress” as a series of unique, geographically located achievements often instigated by great men, can only be read as extremely naïve, simplistic, and highly problematic;70 being aware of the essentialist ideological context in which Carrillo lived may allow one to better understand why he developed that type of argument. However, his line of reasoning and its rhetorical presentation still show a level of obstinacy, arrogance, and sense of self-grandiosity that, although beneficial when confronting his vicious critics, was offensive to many people who encountered him throughout his life.71 Furthermore, this teleology of progress puts in evidence the composer’s ignorance of the pre-ET music traditions that proposed divisions of the octave in more than twelve pitches or the non-circular uses of modal modulation that actually played or took advantage of the differences between overtone partials and standard singing systems in the sixteenth century. From Gioseffo Zarlino’s theoretical revision of Pythagorean tuning to the practical joke in Adrian Willaert’s “Quid non ebrietas” (1518–1521) to the experiments with 19tET in Guillaume Costeley’s “Seigneur Dieu ta pitié” (1557–1558)72 or Carl Luython’s 68.  Julián Carrillo, Errores universales,156–157. 69. Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico, 11. 70.  José Rafael Calva provides a thorough critique of Carrillo’s teleological narrative. See Calva, Julián Carrillo y microtonalismo, 25–26. 71. An example can be found in Harry Partch’s rather waggish discussion of Sonido 13 as a “maladroit caption [suggestive of] a monotone achieved somehow on the number 13, whatever that would be. That the title was a conscious linking of a ‘tone’ whacked into four and more parts with the “spell” of the number 13 can hardly be doubted.” Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music (New York: Da Capo, 1949), 425–426. 72. For information about Gioseffo Zarlino’s revision of Pythagorean tuning, see Stuart Isacoff, Temperament:  The Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle (New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 2001), 135–138. Further reading about Adrian Willaert’s witty exploration of the shortcomings of Pythagorean tuning can be found in Dorothy Keyser, “The Character of Exploration: Adrian Willaert’s “Quid non ebrietas,” in Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, ed. Carol E.  Robertson (Washington:  Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 185–207. For research about Guillaume Costeley’s music in 19tET, see Ralph Lorenz, “19-tET in a Renaissance Chanson by Guillaume Costeley,” unpublished paper presented at the Microfest 2001 Conference and Festival of Music in Alternate Tunings, Claremont College, Claremont, CA, April 6, 2001.

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Clavecymbalum universal (ca. 1610s),73 musical practice before the standardization of the equal temperament system shows that musicians were well aware of the theoretical and practical problems and particularities that Carrillo thought he was discovering in the 1920s. It is also telling that Carrillo came to this position precisely at a moment of increasing discussions about natural scales and the overtone series in Mexico. This climate may have been heightened by his own presentation of Sonido 13, as he claimed, or not—other researchers may have been interested on this topic independently—but it should be taken into consideration when analyzing the personal significance of Carrillo’s changing perspective regarding the overtone series and ET. Especially noteworthy is Carrillo’s silence about Augusto Novaro (1890–1960), whose work on acoustics and tuning systems began in 1924 and was prominent in Mexico by the late 1920s, and which the composer neglected to acknowledge in most of his writings.74 Novaro’s remarkable Teoría de la música:  sistema natural base del natural-aproximado (1927), does not theorize intervals in terms of pitch distances but in terms of ratios as the basis for acoustic discussion, proposing that “certain equal divisions approximate harmonic proportions better than others.”75 This led Novaro not only to develop new tuning systems—based on 53tET and just intonation—but also to put forward the notion of reciprocal scales, an idea that predates Harry Partch’s tonality diamond.76 Although one may possibly argue that Carrillo remained unaware of Novaro’s experiments and achievements, one could not help but to read some of his actions at the time as somehow reacting to Novaro’s work. For instance, in 1926, Carrillo’s former

73.  Patrizio Barbieri, Enharmonic. Instruments and Music 1470–1900 (Sermoneta: Il Levante Libreria Editrice, 2008), 303–305. 74.  Novaro is mentioned in passing in one of Carrillo’s books only to suggest that Novaro’s interest on the overtone series came about after Carrillo requested him to study this issue. See Julián Carrillo, Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13,” 27. Other than this suggestion, by Carrillo himself, there is no evidence that Novaro had studied or collaborated with him at any time. As explained below, Novaro’s first thorough essay about acoustics and the overtone series was published years before Carrillo published anything that showed him fully understanding what the problem was. Furthermore, Novaro’s approach is clearly completely different from the type of thinking based on 12tET that concerned Carrillo at the time. See Augusto Novaro, Teoría de la música: sistema natural base del natural-aproximado (Mexico City: Augusto Novaro, 1927). In his writings, Carrillo never acknowledged any of Novaro’s truly seminal contributions. 75.  Juan Sebastián Lach Lau, “Harmonic Duality: From Interval Ratios and Pitch Distance to Spectra and Sensory Dissonance” (PhD dissertation, Universiteit Leiden, 2012), 78. 76.  Brian McLaren, “A Brief History of Microtonality in the Twentieth Century,” Xenharmonikôn 17 (1998): 66.

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pupils and collaborators Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster and Daniel Castañeda presented five inter-related papers about microtonality at the National Congress of Music. Clearly influenced by Novaro’s ideas, they proposed “to optimize the possibilities of the twelve-tone gamut [by] readjusting the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale to a system based on intervals of sixteenths of a tone (a ninety-six pitch, tempered scale).” 77 Carrillo’s reaction was to accuse their former associates of trying to steal his ideas and disregard their contributions in all of his later writings.78 After the incident, Baqueiro Foster and Castañeda became ardent public supporters of Novaro’s ideas (which Castañeda later promoted in his classes on music aesthetics at the National University of Mexico).79 Although not impossible, it is very unlikely that Carrillo did not know about these developments. Furthermore, when Carrillo wrote about his experience in New York trying to find a laboratory to perform a series of acoustic tests in 1949, he made sure to mention that neither the Guggenheim Foundation nor the Bell Telephone Company had the technology needed to perform these experiments.80 That these two institutions had sponsored Novaro’s research in New York in the 1930s may be a coincidence but it could also be Carrillo’s attempt to negate those who had supported Novaro. This rhetorical Freudian slip may be understood as an index of the phantasmatic, looming presence of Novaro behind some of Carrillo’s scientistic anxieties. Carrillo’s radical shift, his conception of ET as the “the greatest mistake in the history of music,” reveals a totalizing—almost totalitarian—view 77.  Alejandro L. Madrid, Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 126. In this source I had mistakenly stated it was a scale based on thirty-second tones. It is in fact a 96tET based on sixteenth tones. 78.  During the first years of the Sonido 13 crusade, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (1892–1967) was one of Carrillo’s more combative supporters. He actively took part in the polemic against the Grupo de los 9, presented lectures explaining the principles of Sonido 13, participated in the premiere of Carrillo’s Preludio a Colón, wrote several articles for the magazine El Sonido 13, and worked as one of the organizers of the first Grupo 13 in 1924. It is symptomatic that Carrillo would only obliquely mention him in his writings after 1926, most prominently in Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13.” There, Carrillo refers to a member of the Grupo 13 who, after being confronted by other members of the group, remarked, “The Sonido 13 cause is so great that, if there has to be a Judas [traitor], I want to be at least that Judas.” See Julián Carrillo, Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13,” 26. Although Carrillo does not mention Baqueiro Foster’s name, other evidence suggests he had him in mind when writing this critique. A picture of a notebook on the cover of Testimonio de una vida shows a handwritten text in which Carrillo clearly states “Baqueiro Foster pretendió robarme [illegible] revolución del Sonido 13” [Baqueiro Foster tried to steal from me … Sonido 13 revolution]. See Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida. 79. Pareyón, Diccionario enciclopédico de música en México, 198. 80. Carrillo, Errores universales, 125.

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of music and musical experience. In accordance with the essentialist views dominant at the time, he considered music a universal product of Nature that may be realized only in one way; any variant should be considered the result of underdeveloped mentalities or “impure and corrupted” systems in need of rectification. It is precisely within this ideological framework that we can understand his arrogant and pejorative comments about non-Western musical practices, including long-established elite classical music traditions like those from India or China, but also indigenous Mexican music traditions, which he called a “primitive genre, where there is only intuition but not art in the ideological and philosophical sense of the word.”81 Carrillo’s teleological perspective prevented him from recognizing music as diverse cultural systems and experiences in the same way that it blinded him to the possibility that some aspects put in evidence by his Sonido 13 project may have been thought of and experimented with in the past. The fact that composers from previous centuries developed music systems or composed specific works that contemplated the shortcomings he encountered in ET was for him as impossible as non-Western civilizations developing notions of aesthetic musical value. For him this was out of the question precisely because he understood progress as only moving forward; progress did not look back and therefore there were no alternative futures in the past. The future could only be one, and its path could be no other than the conquest of Nature that Western culture discursively appropriates for itself.

SONIDO 13, L AW, AND THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

Predictions are political acts, meaningful within specific ideological networks and power relations, and Carrillo’s Sonido 13 is no exception.82 One of the composer’s reasons for proclaiming Sonido 13 as the music of the future is that he was convinced the 96tET scales (scales in sixteenth tones) would subsume any ET or non-ET scale system known in the past or the future. In other words, Carrillo believed that all possible pitches in all possible ET

81.  Julián Carrillo in a trivia interview published ca. 1923. Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. These opinions make extremely ironic the contemporary appropriation and resignification of both Carrillo’s figure and Sonido 13 by proponents of Nueva Mexicanidad. See Chapter 7. 82.  In the presentation of The Appendix’s special issue about “Futures of the Past,” the editors state, “Prediction is a political act.” See “Letter from the Editors: Futures of the Past,” The Appendix 2, no.  3 (2014). http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/ letter-from-the-editors-futures-of-the-past (accessed on September 8, 2014).

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and non-ET tuning systems would be available in a 96tET system. From this belief he extrapolated that Sonido 13 would therefore incorporate all possible musical systems. This was precisely the idea that his student, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, proposed at the National Congress of Music in 1926; that a microtonal system would account for the differences in tuning in indigenous Mexican music and therefore would allow for their faithful transcription.83 The political character of Sonido 13 is evident in the type of imaginaries Carrillo invokes to validate his futuristic sonic utopia. In order to provide Sonido 13 with the universalist aura such an all-inclusive project should have, Carrillo returned to the notion of “law” that has been pervasive in discussions about tonality as “natural” since François-Jospeh Fétis’s Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmonie (1841) and Traité de l’harmonie (1844). Carrillo’s discussions about sound and acoustic phenomena after 1926 are replete with enactments of new “laws”: a “law of the relativity of consonances and dissonances,”84 a “law of the node,”85 a “law of noise,”86 a “general law of musical systems,”87 and the “laws of musical metamorphosis.”88 In using this terminology, Carrillo claimed tonality’s “natural” order for his Sonido 13 just as traditional theorists also attempted to naturalize tonality by considering it an “eternal law of music.”89 However, rather than reifying the “objective essence” of law, legality, or tonality, recent scholarship has emphasized their performative character. While Carrillo invokes law in an attempt to articulate its apparent “universal” normative character, contemporary critiques of philosophy of law recognize the enunciation of laws as cultural articulations, and as 83. Madrid, Sounds of the Modern Nation, 125–129. 84.  “The degree of consonance between two neighboring sounds in the harmonic gamut—natural intervals—produced simultaneously is bigger the closer they are to the fundamental.” See Julián Carrillo, Sonido 13: fundamento científico e histórico (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación 1948), 59. 85.  “ ‘The node’ is a dead point in a vibrating length and therefore detracts length, which leads to an increase in the vibrations of the second harmonic and quite possibly all others.” See Julián Carrillo, Dos leyes de física musical (Mexico City: Ediciones Sonido 13, 1956), 101. 86.  “When vibrations are not isochronous they produce noise, and simultaneous beats [batimentos] can not be isochronous since sometimes they are simple, sometimes double, sometimes triple, sometimes quadruple, etc.; thus, noise is necessarily produced with musical sounds.” See Carrillo, Dos leyes, 6–7. 87.  “Based on physical intervals, there are as many musical systems as numbers in progressive order.” See Carrillo, Teoría lógica, 52. 88. In Leyes de metamorfosis musical, Carrillo describes the procedure to “metamorphosize” musical motives, but regardless of the book’s title he never clearly articulates them as “laws” See Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis, 11–39. 89.  This is how Arnold Schoenberg describes the work of theorists of tonality. See Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 27.

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actions that allow something to happen as the actions happen. Following this logic, the importance of Carrillo’s “laws” is that their proclamation does something for his musical project. Arved Ashby argues that “tonality represents a point where the individual composer negotiates her own identity within a socialized world of pitches”;90 this description could be extrapolated to specific instances of prescribed atonality, like Sonido 13.91 As such, Carrillo’s invocation of law in his rhetoric is an attempt at constructing himself within a world of pitch relations in a process of socialization. The ideas about atonal harmonic and melodic construction implied in Carrillo’s Sonido 13 system are also pitch relations that the composer attempts to present as a new cultural paradigm using precisely the type of “natural” principle of physical acoustics that Schenker and Schoenberg summoned before him. Furthermore, with his critique of ET on the basis of the overtone series, Carrillo attempted to place himself one step ahead of these European theorists by locating Sonido 13 closer to Nature than the ET tonality they described. In that sense, Carrillo’s invocation of “law” attempts to be as normative as that of the apologists of “tonal law.” In doing this, and in trying to establish a universal, general prescription of Sonido 13 atonality, Carrillo may have run the risk of replicating Schenker’s shortcoming since closed normative systems preclude future particularization. Among other things, Carrillo’s attempt at making Sonido 13 into a normative practice may in fact have prevented it from becoming the “music of the future” he claimed it was destined to be. But beyond Carrillo’s rhetoric of normativity, the discourse of legality in relation to the atonality of Sonido 13 is also performative. As Ashby would say, discursively, Sonido 13 is a particularization “that involve[s]‌naming and identity formation as much as [it] involves politics, subjective insinuation, 90.  Arved Ashby, “Tonality as Law, Contravention, Performativity,” Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, No. 13 (2009). http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/46/ tonality-as-law-contravention-performativity#_ednref1 (accessed on January 19, 2014). 91.  Carrillo uses the term “atonality” to label music that avoids the major and minor modes, triadic harmony, and traditional voice leading. This concept is evident in his atonal music but also characterizes his mature microtonal works as shown in the set of string quartets analyzed in Chapter  6. Although, Carrillo’s atonality is not centered on the “emancipation of dissonance” as is Schoenberg’s, he did redefine his concept of dissonance. Carrillo’s marginalia to Schoenberg’s Style and Idea (1950) presents an analysis of the tone row used by Schoenberg in his Op.  26. Carrillo concludes that Schoenberg’s music sounds “bad” due to the use of harmonies that combine pitches that are adjacent in the chromatic scale as opposed to those from the whole-tone collection, which he considered to be consonances. Carrillo’s copy of Schoenberg’s Style and Idea was kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive in Mexico City before it was donated to the San Luis Potosí State Government.

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identity, and wishful thinking.”92 In this case, it allowed Carrillo to reinvent himself and negotiate a mined political moment as much as it would allow his followers to reinvent themselves after his death—both on the basis of wishful thinking. Even if Sonido 13 remained the perennial “music of the future,” it would be the shortcomings of Carrillo’s systematization, the unclosed gap between his theorization of a system within ET and his critique of ET as a “corruption” of “natural law” that allowed for the development of the type of nostalgic appropriations of his rhetoric seen in the Internet posts that open this chapter as well as the intermundane economies explored in Chapter 7. If the future Carrillo dreamed of for Sonido 13 never truly materialized, at least his ideas did have a new life in a different future. Carrillo’s grandiloquence and his scientistic rhetoric were the result of his being fully aware of the exceptional character of his musical contribution and believing that the reticence of his peers was the result of their being unprepared to realize or recognize the uniqueness of his artistic project. His tendency to continuously exaggerate, magnify, and eventually overlook or plainly alter facts was a strategy that kept him from being made invisible by an increasingly derisive Mexican music scene. His strategy would often imply a discursive reversal in which he would appear as the character expressing contempt for his peers’ seeming ignorance and lack of theoretical sophistication. But he was not able to realize that such arrogant demagoguery in fact exacerbated this antagonism and further isolated him from the mainstream Mexican music scene. Although political intrigue from his adversaries may indeed have played an important role in marginalizing Carrillo in the Mexican music canon—as Carrillo’s relation with Carlos Chávez shows—it in itself does not explain the generalized animosity toward his ideas among politically unaligned musicians. Instead of uncritically accepting Carrillo’s absence from Mexican mainstream music narratives as the result of outrageous conspiracy theories, I argue that one can find many clues about Sonido 13 as the future that never was in the composer’s own writings.

92.  Ashby, “Tonality as Law, Contravention, Performativity.”

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CH AP TER   6

Continuities and Discontinuities in an Imaginary Cycle The Thirteen String Quartets

M

exican composer Carlos Chávez (1899–1970) was probably one of the most outspoken critics of Julián Carrillo in the Mexican music scene. Earlier chapters describe the animadversion between the two composers. Chávez was not only a prominent musician; he was also an influential political figure through the end of his life; as such, he had numerous heated disagreements with composers and musicians with whom he had fervent ideological and political differences. However, Carrillo was the only composer whose music remained absent from the programs and activities Chávez was involved with as conductor or cultural broker throughout his life. When asked to write an assessment of Carrillo’s work as a composer, Chávez wrote an intensely ironic piece, arguing that Carrillo’s musical output, extremely scarce, to the point that it does not rigorously justify us calling him a “composer,” indicates a desire to imitate the major classical forms. … But unfortunately good intentions are not enough; the few symphonies and quartets by Carrillo are works of very little imagination. … The major task of a composer is to compose; that of a violinist or pianist, to play; that of a conductor, to conduct. … Unfortunately, there are not just a few cases in the musical history of Mexico of composers who do not compose or violinists who do not play.1 1.  Carlos Chávez, “Julián Carrillo,” in La música de México: historia. Periodo nacionalista (1910–1958), ed. Julio Estrada (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984), 69.

In this chapter, I  take Chávez’s critique of Carrillo as a point of departure to question long-held assumptions about style in Carrillo’s music as well as a generalized obliviousness of his compositional output. Given the bad blood between the two composers, it is difficult to determine whether Chávez sincerely believed the opinions he expressed toward the more senior composer. Contemporary musicians often uncritically reproduce statements of the kind written by Chávez, describing Carrillo as a composer who “found the tools but was unable to build an aesthetic [and could not] break away from the older models of composition: [he could not avoid] the sonata [allegro form], the rondo [form], [and] a series of principles that guide a certain type of music.”2 Such statements reiterate his supposed use of microtones within a “Romantic” (or tonal) rhetoric and echo the type of generalized ill-informed or biased assumptions that characterize the reception of his music. These judgments may arguably be appropriate for some of his early microtonal works—such as Preludio a Colón, as shown in Chapter 4;3 however, between 1924, the year he composed his first microtonal work, and 1965, the year he composed Segunda misa “a capella” en cuartos de tono, his last major microtonal composition, Carrillo’s musical language changed drastically, and it would certainly be incorrect to describe his style as “Romantic with microtones.” Furthermore, notwithstanding Chávez’s assessment, Carrillo’s catalogue comprises more than 140 compositions that range from solo and chamber music to symphonic works and operas; and although the quality of his catalogue is uneven, given the many compositions one could consider studies or even just inventories of microtonal possibilities, it would be not only unfair but an important oversight not to acknowledge the dozens of major noteworthy works he composed in tonal, atonal, and microtonal idioms, and how his compositional rhetoric changed throughout his life. An example that challenges these misconceptions is Carrillo’s largely unknown string quartet cycle. Carrillo did not compose just a few works for this instrumental ensemble, as Chávez argued; he composed a set of thirteen. This is one of the most extensive string quartet collections by 2.  Aurelio Tello, quoted in Mario Lavista, Aurelio Tello, Javier Álvarez, and Hebert Vázquez, “Setenta años de música:  una charla sobre la composición en México,” Revista Tierra Adentro 186 (2013):  17. Velia Nieto also reproduces this misconception by stating that “Carrillo, whose concepts of form and melody remained within the European tradition and, paradoxically, within tonality, was not able to apply his findings to composition,” Velia Nieto, “Escuela del continuo en México,” Perspectiva Interdisciplinaria de Música 2 (2008): 63. 3.  The fact that Preludio a Colón is Carrillo’s most popular microtonal work (it has circulated widely as sheet music as well as in a variety of recordings) may have played an important role in shaping this misconception.

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any Latin American composer, almost as copious as Heitor Villa-Lobos’s seventeen-work cycle. Regardless of its exceptional character in terms of stylistic scope, aesthetic significance, and historical relevance, this repertory has received little attention from performers and musicologists alike. A close look at these quartets challenges the mistaken assessments that Carrillo continued composing music in a “Romantic” idiom but just with added microtones. Written between 1903 and 1964, most of these quartets are multi-movement works that show the diversity of aesthetic tendencies embraced and developed by the composer during his long artistic career. From the seemingly conservative idiom of his early works at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Modernist atonal compositions of the 1930s and 1940s to the uncompromising microtonal avant-gardism of his last pieces from the 1960s, Carrillo’s many artistic voices speak loud and clear through this cycle. Furthermore, being a professional violinist, Carrillo knew perfectly well how to write for strings and was able to push the technical limits of the string quartet ensemble while remaining always distinctly idiomatic. These compositions show the transformations of Carrillo’s musical language and its continuities and discontinuities with the mainstream Western art music tradition, especially, early twentieth-century composers like Schoenberg, Debussy, Scriabin, and Stravinsky, and mid-twentieth-century avant-gardists like Xenakis and early Ligeti. Even though Carrillo is a Modernist composer deeply invested in narratives of progress, his stylistic development does not follow the “teleological” progression one might anticipate from a Modernist artist. His atonal style is not a transitional stage between tonality and microtonality as it is for Schoenberg between tonality and twelve-tone music. Instead, Carrillo’s atonal music came about after he composed his first Sonido 13 works as a way to deal with the inconsistencies between style and idea in those early microtonal compositions;4 as this chapter shows, Carrillo’s atonal music conforms to the aesthetic character of his microtonal music, informs it, and is indeed essential in understanding its stylistic trajectory. It is through his atonal quartets that Carrillo developed a musical language that allowed him to use microtones in a more coherent way, avoiding their use as simply foreground elements within tonal or quasi-tonal frameworks (as in Preludio a Colón). The atonal quartets allowed Carrillo 4.  Curiously, these early works (for example Preludio a Colón and Dos bosquejos [String Quartet No. 3]) are precisely the better-known pieces out of his long catalogue. These works indeed show some of the inconsistencies that scholars and musicians refer to when describing his music (see Chapter 4); however, they (especially String Quartet No. 3) also challenge some of those assumptions.

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a space for scalar and modal experimentation and the development of static harmonic structures based on whole-tone collections as the basis and containment for the use of microtones. In the quartets composed at the end of his life, there is a more rationalized use of microtones in relation to a clearly original harmonic language and an avoidance of obvious tonal structures like the sonata-allegro form. A  detailed exploration of Carrillo’s thirteen string quartets offers the key to understanding this stylistic development. However, in analyzing these works I am not interested in a thorough musical description of each quartet or in searching for any type of univocal aesthetic meaning “fixed” in the music score. Instead, my intention is twofold: to track down the development of Carrillo’s musical language and, informed by that trajectory, to provide strategies for a more productive performance and listening of his music, one that transcends the narrow readings that may consider him a composer “trapped” in the anachronistic ruminations of his own “Romantic” rhetoric. I am not oblivious to the fact that listening takes place within specific disciplining and performance traditions. As Jonathan Neufeld argues, performers present audiences with “musical directive[s]‌to hear works in particular ways”;5 thus, these analyses seek to inform possible performers as well as listeners about innovative ways to approach and assess this music in performance and reception. The intention of this chapter is to provide the grounds for new and dialogic performative and critical interpretations of Carrillo’s string quartets in particular, and of his microtonal music in general.6

A CYCLE THAT WAS NOT A CYCLE: THE STRING QUARTETS

Julián Carrillo did not begin composing his string quartets with the idea of grouping them as a cycle. One could argue that such grouping is arbitrary and that it reproduces the type of ideological ethos we often associate with Romanticism. However, although Carrillo may not have started composing quartets with a cycle in his mind, an exploration 5.  Jonathan A. Neufeld, “Critical Performances,” Teorema 31, no. 3 (2012): 99. 6. The notion of “performative interpretation” is conventionally characterized by the performer’s critical authority over the production of sound structures while performing or prior to the performance (see Neufeld, “Critical Performances,” 99, 102). The notion of “critical interpretation” refers to critics and listeners’ “account of a work’s import and functioning”; it engages the interpretation of the ontological meaning of a musical work (see Jerrold Levinson, “Performative vs. Critical Interpretation,” in The Interpretation of Music, ed. Michael Krausz [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993], 34).

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of them as a complete group not only illuminates the development of the uniquely coherent and clearly identifiable musical style that characterizes the major works he composed during the last twenty years of his life but it also demonstrates many of the composer’s idiosyncratic obsessions. In fact, analyzing the numerous inconsistencies regarding the dating and numbering of Carrillo’s string quartets in light of the composer’s numerology fixation seems to indicate that by the end of his life he was indeed absorbed by the idea of leaving for posterity a cycle of thirteen string quartets. The string quartets are among the most difficult works to date with precision in Carrillo’s catalogue; the composer’s tendency to rewrite and change dates of works according to ulterior motives does not facilitate the task. There are two inclusive catalogues of Carrillo’s works, one prepared under the supervision of Dolores Carrillo in 1989; the second one put together by Omar Hernández-Hidalgo in 2000, after Dolores Carrillo’s death. These catalogues contradict each other regarding the dates of composition of the quartets, often showing titles and numbers that also conflict with the many lists of works published during Carrillo’s lifetime. The numbering of the quartets varies drastically from one catalogue to the other, and discerning the logic behind the composer’s classification is tricky. Furthermore, many of the quartets exist in different copies, and given the variety of handwritings, types of papers, inks, and other indicators, it is sometimes difficult to determine if a date on a manuscript corresponds to the composition of the piece or the production of the copy at hand. In trying to determine their dates I have done a critical comparative study of sources, catalogues, and available concert programs. The chapter is organized according to the progressive sequence of numbers I have assigned to the quartets based on the chronology I was able to assemble; however, in writing about them I keep the reader informed of the different titles and numbers Carrillo used to label them. Although doubts about particular works still exist, the chronology I have adopted offers a better understanding than the available catalogues as to when and under which circumstances the quartets were composed. Furthermore, explaining how I reached these conclusions offers possible answers as to why there are so many troublesome classifications in the numerous existing lists of works and catalogues. Although Carrillo, never referred to his string quartets as a set of thirteen works or even mentioned them as a cycle, the trouble he went through to change their numbers and titles, and group them in atonal or microtonal sets shows that he was in a way concerned with them as a group or as a series of groups. Given the circumstantial evidence and his

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documented quasi-metaphysical infatuation with the number thirteen we can safely assume that Carrillo would have been ecstatic at the possibility of seeing them grouped as a cycle of thirteen string quartets.

CONTR AST, UNIT Y, AND TR ADITION: STRING QUARTET NO. 1

In 1902, Carrillo moved from Germany to Belgium to continue his music studies. He wished to take violin lessons from Eugène Ysaÿe, but the famous violinist sent him to study with one of his pupils, Albert Zimmer, at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Gand. Although Carrillo focused on his violin studies, he also continued composing. After finishing his first opera by the end of that year he embarked on the composition of his first string quartet. This was not, however, his initial attempt at writing for string ensembles; he had written a Sextet (1902) during his studies with Jadassohn in Leipzig. With String Quartet No 1 in E flat major (1903), Carrillo renewed his interest in some of the technical and aesthetic questions he was already concerned with as a student of Jadassohn, particularly issues of thematic transformation and cyclic continuity as practiced by Liszt.7 String Quartet No. 1 is a cyclic work in four movements:  Maestoso-Allegretto, Scherzo, Largo, and Final (Maestoso-Allegro). The score was never published during Carrillo’s lifetime but the composition was recorded in France in the early 1960s as part of an expansive recording project sponsored by the composer himself (the recording sessions took place in Paris between 1960 and 1963) that aimed at making available as much of his music as possible in LP format. The composer’s title for this quartet was simply Cuarteto en mi bemol. String Quartet No. 1 is an example of Carrillo’s concerns with balancing contrast and unity within multi-movement works. He often referred to this work as a prime example of the ideas he would later present at the Music Congress of Rome in 1911 as “Varietà tonica e unità ideologica.” The vagueness in describing these procedures in the paper have prompted scholars like Ricardo Miranda to even question Carrillo’s ear-training skills and ask whether he was unable to notice these procedures in many of the Beethoven symphonies he conducted and studied throughout his 7.  The Mephistopheles movement of Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854–1857) is usually mentioned as a prime example of Liszt’s use of thematic transformation. Carrillo’s familiarity with this work is evident in his Pláticas musicales, where he narrates his memories about having played it under Nikisch and Ysaÿe in Leipzig and Brussels, respectively. Julián Carrillo, Pláticas musicales (Mexico City:  Julián Carrillo, 1913), 128.

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life.8 An analysis of this quartet’s thematic construction and development shows instead that Carrillo’s ideas were in fact a radicalization of the type of thematic derivation and cyclic continuity proposed by the composers whose music he studied and became familiar with in Leipzig as described in Chapter 2. Insisting on applying these concepts beyond programmatic music to the multi-movement, sonata-allegro-form-based works (such as the symphony or the string quartet) privileged by composers who followed the Brahmsian formalist tradition was one of Carrillo’s ways of bridging the gap between this practice and the Lisztian tradition as he perceived it in the musical life of fin-de-siècle Leipzig. The first movement, a Maestoso-Allegretto in sonata allegro form, begins with three fortissimo chords in a gesture reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Op.  127, followed by an ascending scalar passage to the third melodic degree (example 6.1). The beginning of this introductory section is the head motive unifying the quartet across movements by reappearing in expanded or shortened versions at the end of the first movement, and the beginning of the fourth movement, and providing the melodic material for the fugato in the largo section of the third movement. The movement’s first theme, in E flat major, is an elegant diatonic tune played by the first violin in contrapuntal dialogue with the rest of the ensemble (example 6.2). It develops out of the second motive from the introduction and unfolds melodically using the rhythmic pattern of that motive. The more lyrical and chromatic second theme, in B flat major (example 6.3), is derived from the first theme by expanding the initial downward leap into an octave and by syncopating its rhythm. The exposition sets the tone of the work as a whole, an intense imitative contrapuntal texture interrupted by brief homophonic moments that often feature virtuosic instrumental displays. Particularly interesting in the development is the fugato section, with viola and cello playing a variation of the head of the first theme and the violins playing a variation of the head of the second theme. The dialogue builds up in volume and character, leading into a dramatic repeat of the chords from the introduction. The movement ends with a coda based on variations and expansions of motive B that lead to a homophonic section of robust-sounding chords reminiscent of the introduction. The main theme of the Scherzo in the second movement (example 6.4) is a fast staccato rhythmic variation in 3/4 of the head of the first theme of the first movement. The theme, presented in fugato style, is only 8.  Ricardo Miranda, “Romanticismo y contradicción en la obra de Julián Carrillo,” Heterofonía 35, no. 129 (2003): 74, fn 20.

[172]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 6.1  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1 (1902), first movement. Head motive made out of generative motives A and B.

Example 6.2  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, first movement. First theme.

Example 6.3  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, first movement. Second theme.

Example 6.4  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, second movement. Main theme.

Example 6.5  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, second movement. Contrasting theme.

interrupted by the abrupt presence of a slow contrasting melody in the first violin. This melody, a 3/2 rhythmic transformation of motive 2 in the head motive from the first movement, alters the homogenous rhythmic flow of the piece and offers a remarkable polymetric moment as it is first played by the first violin and as the rest of the instruments gradually shift from 3/4 to 3/2 (example 6.5). This momentary rhythmic instability provides the joke that characterizes the classical scherzo—here, a familiar melody that is played so slowly and against the rest of the instruments’ fast, continuous, and almost hypnotic restatement of the movement’s main theme that the ear hears it almost like a ghostly presence before it fully recognizes its source.

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The third movement, a Largo-Larghetto in G minor, begins with a slow solo cello line extracted from the chordal section of the head motive from the first movement and expanded through an inversion of the scalar section of the same head motive. This is made into the subject of a slow and soft fugato that leads into the main theme (example 6.6). The movement’s main tune is a variation of the B section of the head subject, thus also referring to the head motive from the first movement but harmonized in order to create a series of expressive suspensions. The main body of the movement, after the introduction, is divided in two sections. The first one unfolds as a free development and variations of the movement’s main theme, borrowing the first theme from the scherzo (third movement) as counterpoint first and as a contrasting melody later. The second section is a variation of the first section with the second violin and viola presenting the theme while the first violin plays improvisation-like contrapuntal passages on top. The Final starts with a variation of the head motive from the first movement as an introduction to a series of brief fugatos that lead into an actual fugue. The subject of the first fugato is a variation of the introductory fugato from the third movement; the second one is based on a tune built as an expansion of the scalar section of the head motive from the first movement (example 6.7). The subject of the fugue is in turn a variation of the subject from the preceding fugato but accompanied by a syncopated countersubject that gives it a strong sense of rhythmic ambiguity (example 6.8). The texture is based on continuous contrast between contrapuntal sections and homophonic sections that lyrically reintroduce the theme of the third movement over sustained harmonies. The climax of the movement arrives in a bright contrapuntal section that superimposes these two themes right before the movement’s short coda leads to a series of strong and grandiose chords that bring the work to an end. All the themes and secondary motives throughout String Quartet No. 1 derive from the same original source. This is a radicalization of Liszt’s idea of thematic transformation and Beethoven’s organicist principles that give the quartet an intense sense of unity but also an uncanny, almost minimalist character. Listening to this work could almost be likened to walking into a house of mirrors in which the same images are multiplied, amplified, distorted, and transformed. String Quartet No. 1 is a true speculum musicae, a mirror of sounds that not only exemplifies Carrillo’s thorough mastery of counterpoint but also shows the powerful interplay of his intellectual concerns and creative strengths.

[174]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Example 6.6  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, third movement. Main theme.

Example 6.7  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, fourth movement. Fugue subject.

Example 6.8  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 1, fourth movement. Fugue countersubject.

SEARCHING FOR A NEW VOICE IN NEW YORK: STRING QUARTETS NOS. 2 AND 3

On December 19, 1925, after touring the Mexican countryside for a few months and introducing audiences to his Sonido 13, Carrillo and his family departed for New York City. He was sure that city would be the ideal place to further his microtonal crusade. Carrillo lived there with his family until the end of 1929, when he decided to return to Mexico once he realized that regardless of a few successes (the premiere of Sonata casi fantasía at Town Hall on March 13, 1926, and Stokowski’s commission of Concertino), the enthusiastic support he expected for his ideas was not going to materialize. However, the three years Carrillo spent in New York were very productive; not only was he able to devote his time to composition but he also had the leisure to better think, theorize, and systematize his ideas about microtonality as well as to search for solutions to the contradictions between style and idea in his early microtonal works. The two string quartets he composed in New York City are two of the results of these searches. String Quartet No. 2 is a three-movement work also composed in 1926 in New York City. There are several versions of this work. The earliest surviving manuscript, although incomplete (only the cover page survives), is from 1926; it lists the piece as Cuarteto para 2 violines, viola y violonchelo en ningún modo mayor o menor (Quartet for two violins, viola, and cello in no major or minor mode). The inscription on this manuscript shows that the quartet is dedicated devotamente (devotedly) to Arnold Schoenberg. It also states that the work was originally composed in numerical notation and later transcribed into standard Western notation. A  second copy, no longer dedicated to Schoenberg but to Lung Lin—whom the

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composer claimed theorized about pentatonic music in China twenty centuries before Pythagoras—is also incomplete; only the cover and the first and last pages of music survive.9 This copy, made in 1928, calls the piece 2o cuarteto (atonal) (Second Quartet, “Atonal”). The Mexican premiere of this work took place on July 13, 1930, at Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. In the program notes, Carrillo provides 1926 as the quartet’s composition year and states that the work is dedicated to a “W. Lee, who, twenty six centuries before Christ, discovered the mysterious relationships of the only five sounds used in the highly cultured China of those remote times.”10 Editions Jobert published this composition in 1970 under the title Cuarteto atonal “A Debussy”; the edition mistakenly dates the composition to 1927. Although the piece is better known by the title given to it in the Jobert edition, the lists of Carrillo’s works published up to 1957 do not refer to it by that name. Only in an article written in 1962 on the occasion of the centenary of Debussy’s birth did Carrillo state, “My first atonal quartet is dedicated to Debussy as a tribute of my admiration.”11 At any rate, it is clear that the quartet’s dedication to Debussy came late in Carrillo’s life and that it was not originally composed in homage to the French composer. The work, avoiding functional harmony, traditional voice leading, and major or minor modes, is the first in a series of five atonal string quartets.12 The only available recording of this piece was also produced as part of the 1963 recording project mentioned earlier—where it appeared as Cuarteto atonal “A Debussy.” Carrillo took 9.  Although Carrillo knew about Schoenberg’s reputation (he had mentioned his opinions about microtonal music in his journal El Sonido 13 the previous year), it is possible that he became familiar with his music only in New  York at this time. The premiere of Sonata casi fantasía took place on the same evening as the American premiere of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet Op. 26. Given Carrillo’s negative opinion of Schoenberg’s music, especially Op. 26 (see footnote 34), it is unclear why he had originally dedicated this quartet to the Austrian composer. It is possible that Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 2 was composed before the premiere of Schoenberg’s Op. 26 in New York and that only after the concert Carrillo decided to change the dedication. It is also possible that Carrillo may have composed his quartet after this concert and dedicated it to Schoenberg (regardless of the fact that he did not enjoy his music) thinking the dedication could open some professional doors for him in the modernist music scene of 1920s New York. 10. Program notes for the concert on July 13, 1930, at Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. Program kept at the Archivo Julián Carrillo. 11. Julián Carrillo, “Honor máximo para Debussy,” in Julián Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical (Mexico City: Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, 1967), 255. 12.  Carrillo’s notion of atonality is defined by the absence of major/minor tonality, functional harmony, and traditional voice leading, which matches how Joseph N.  Strauss understands post-tonal music. See Joseph N.  Strauss, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 89.

[176]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

this work as the basis for a musical experiment entitled Cuarteto metamorfoseado (ca. 1939), which is the cancrizans of String Quartet No. 2.13 The only surviving copy of this version is not in Carrillo’s handwriting. The first movement, a loose sonatina form, juxtaposes or superimposes a series of blocks built with undeveloped motives based on several non-tonal scales: whole-tone, chromatic, and two related synthetic scales, D-E flat-F-F sharp-A-B flat-C sharp and D-E flat-E-F-F sharp-AB flat-C sharp (the second being a subset of the first, see example 6.9). This type of block construction (see e­ xample 4.10), reminiscent of but also different from Stravinsky’s procedures of the time, became a feature of Carrillo’s structural organization in his later quartets (especially from String Quartet No. 4 onward), often providing textural contrast. The second movement, Lento misterioso-Scherzo-Lento misterioso, combines what would have been two independent movements by placing the scherzo at the center of the slow movement. Here, the Lento misterioso is based on a whole tone collection while the Scherzo starts with a fugato based on collection II from example 6.9, continuing with a bridge based on a symmetric collection that alternates minor seconds and augmented seconds (example 6.10) before moving into a section based on the whole-tone scale. The Lento misterioso is restated without changes to close the movement. The third movement, Allegro impetuoso, is based on the juxtaposition of sections based on collection II from example 6.9, the chromatic, and the whole-tone collections. There are a few recognizable motives within each of the movements of the quartet; however, there are no proper themes or developmental sections; this, in combination with non-tonal scales, especially symmetric ones, provides the work with the static quality that characterizes it. The overall texture of String Quartet No. 2 is homophonic, with brief instances of imitation but generally privileging rhythmic doubling between the instruments. Harmonically, the instruments move back and forth between sections in unison or octave doubling, sections in parallel motion in major seconds, and a few harmonies based on perfect fifths. Carrillo had already used this type of harmonic language sporadically (although within a microtonal realm) in portions of Sonata casi fantasía earlier that year. As such, String Quartet No 3 and Sonata casi fantasía foreshadow the preponderance and solidification of the whole-tone clusters (0,2,4,6,8,T; and 1,3,5,7,9,E) or their subsets as the harmonic basis of Carrillo’s new musical language and the stylistic signature of two of his 13.  Each movement is a strict, note-by-note retrograde version of the original model. Both pitches and rhythms are placed in reverse order.

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Example  6.9  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2 (1926). Basic non-tonal synthetic scales.

Example 6.10  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 2. Symmetric scale used in the bridge of the Scherzo section of the second movement.

other atonal string quartets (Nos. 4 and 7) and his six last quartets in quarters of a tone (Nos. 8 through 13).14 String Quartet No. 3 (1928) is Carrillo’s first exploration of quarter-tone writing for string quartet. It is a set of two short, clearly experimental and exploratory pieces, “Meditación” (“Meditation”) and “En secreto” (“In Secret”). The pieces received their Mexican premiere under the title Dos bosquejos (Two Drafts) on July 13, 1930, at Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. The program states that the work was composed in 1928. A list of works published in 1939 includes this piece under the title used for its Mexican premier, Dos bosquejos. Nevertheless, there are several manuscript copies and an edition of this work and they provide different titles and years of composition. A score in numerical notation, dedicated to the Cuarteto de Filadelfia (Philadelphia Quartet),15 is entitled Balbuceos (Babblings).16 This copy shows that the work was composed in New York and provides the date January 28, 1926; however, Carrillo arrived in New York only on January 5, 1926, which would have given him just more than two weeks to compose it. Furthermore, there is not a single mention of this work in Carrillo’s journal from that year, where he provides details about his activities in New York City, including the compositions he was working on. The paper used in the numerical manuscript copy dated

14. In his marginalia to Arnold Schoenberg’s Style and Idea (1950), Carrillo explains this harmonic principle by describing consonant harmonies as made by any combination of pitches from collections of alternate pitches in the chromatic scale (for e­ xample 0-2-4-6 or 1-3-5-7; in other words, he considered consonances pitches belonging to the same whole-tone scale) while considering dissonances the combination of pitches from the two different whole-tone collections. 15. This Cuarteto de Filadelfia is not the famed Philadelphia String Quartet, which was not created until 1959. 16.  The title, Balbuceos, refers to Carrillo’s likening these works to an infant’s babbling while trying to make sense of a new language. Evidently, he considered these works to be the first attempts of an artist at “speaking” in a completely new musical language.

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January 28, 1926, corresponds to the type of paper Carrillo used later during his time in New York—such as that for the copy of the Concertino Stokowski had for its premiere in March 1927. This leads one to believe that the date on the cover of the numerical manuscript of Balbuceos may be either a mistake or a retroactive attempt to claim the work as having been composed earlier than it was. A second copy of the work, in standard notation, made in 1940 and dedicated to José Luis Gómez Ugarte, bears the title Dos balbuceos (Two Babblings). The same name appears in a copy in regular notation made in 1951. This later copy includes an explanation of the musical notation and the sporadic use of eighths and sixteenths of a tone in the first violin and cello parts; it also states that the Cuarteto de Filadelfia premiered the composition under the title Dos balbuceos in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928. However, as Christina Taylor-Gibson tells us, if this performance occurred, “it was not noted in the principal Philadelphia newspapers.”17 The version published by Editions Jobert in 1978 is called Dos bosquejos. Later in his life Carrillo renumbered these short pieces as independent string quartets in quarters of a tone.18 In dating and numbering all of Carrillo’s string quartets I have kept “Meditación” and “En secreto” as two movements of a single work since that is how it was published and how it has been performed and recorded. The pieces were transcribed for a cappella vocal quartet (SATB) as Dos cuartetos para boca cerrada en cuartos de tono (Two Quartets for Closed Mouth in Quarter Tones). String Quartet No. 3 was recorded in France in 1963 as part of the recording project mentioned earlier. This is Carrillo’s most popular work for string quartet. Contrast is essential in Carrillo’s two previous string quartets, and it continues to be in his later ones; however, in these two miniatures, the composer privileges uniformity. Regardless of the presence of repeated motivic gestures, “Meditación” does not feature proper themes. One could argue that the piece’s idea is all about harmony and harmonic development. Thus, the differences between the two sections of the movement are made evident not by textural or motivic contrast but by the distinctiveness of the harmonic material (example 6.11). In the first section, microtones are used mostly as passing tones between clear triadic harmonies that prolong a C major chord through F sharp diminished seventh 17. Christina Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M.  Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez in New  York, 1925–1932” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland-College Park, 2008), 115. 18.  See “Primera copia del catálogo por orden cronológico de las composiciones musicales de Julián Carrillo,” unpublished catalogue (Mexico City:  Archivo Julián Carrillo, 1989), 9.

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Example 6.11  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 3 (1928), first movement, “Meditación.” Harmonic prolongation.

chords. This section ends with a structural movement toward the dominant degree (although in unison, not as a dominant harmony). The second section emphasizes chromatic clusters; it starts with one built on C (C-C sharp-D-E flat) and slowly moves toward the last one, built on G (G-G sharp-A-B flat) above the lowest C in the cello register, through a brief section based on natural harmonics. The fragment in natural harmonics at the end of the movement reflects Carrillo’s concern with the overtone series as described in Chapter 5;19 this feature would become more prominently expressive in the slow movements of some of his later quartets (Nos. 7 and 10). In “Meditación,” the microtones are not central to the piece’s structure but they are essential for the idea of the piece. It could be maintained that the prolongation via microtones is in fact what the piece stands for. The same could be argued for “En secreto.” As shown in Chapter 4, microtones in this piece also work on a superficial level, in this case, prolonging a whole tone collection on C through octatonic partitions before resolving to a non-tonal chord on G (see ­example 4.12). Stylistically, String Quartet No. 3 stands between the Preludio a Colón’s triadic harmonic conceptualization and the non-triadic harmonies of Carrillo’s later works. “Meditación” almost works as a mirror of Carrillo’s harmonic concerns; his realization that he needed to abandon triadic harmonies in order to provide a more logical framework for his 19.  By incorporating natural harmonics Carrillo sought to engage the pitches from the overtone series within an ET context. The first work in which he incorporated this practice was Concertino (1927). Carrillo explains that “enunciating a theory would have little or no effect in providing humanity with the music of Nature, I  started practicing it; in my Concertino, played in Philadelphia in March 1927, I used sixteen natural sounds but it was a triumph to have the cellist play them since he thought they would give the effect of detuning. … Those sixteen natural sounds were used melodically, and later, in my nocturne Misterioso Hudson [Mysterious Hudson River], I used them as harmony.” See Julián Carrillo, Génesis de la revolución del “Sonido 13” (San Luis Potosí: Julián Carrillo, 1940), 142.

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microtonal composition is at the core of the piece’s structure. If the idea of “Meditación” is the movement away from triadic harmonies, “En secreto” offers a possibility to re-conceptualize style and idea through the expansion of synthetic non-tonal harmonies. However, instead of providing a definitive solution, these pieces show a composer actively searching for an answer.

THE ATONAL QUARTETS OF THE 1930S: STRING QUARTETS NOS. 4–6

José Rafael Calva argues that for Carrillo the 1930s were years of silence in terms of compositional output mainly due to his focus on writing theoretical treatises about microtonality.20 Although Carrillo indeed spent a considerable amount of time and energy developing a logical and coherent theoretical validation to his Sonido 13, it is erroneous to state that he composed only “minor works sporadically.”21 In fact, during the 1930s he composed six string quartets, a couple of pieces for chamber ensemble, some music for solo instruments (guitar in quarters of a tone, harp in quarters of a tone, and violin), and even a few larger orchestral works. In 1929, Carrillo returned to Mexico City from an American adventure that did not result in the unanimous success he expected for his Sonido 13 as he failed to generate a sustained enthusiasm for his music. Furthermore, the Mexican music scene changed dramatically in the years he was gone, and the power structure, with Carlos Chávez as the new strongman, did not benefit him. Away from the public posts from which his opinions could reach audiences and generate a lasting influence—as director of the National Conservatory or as conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra—Carrillo and his ideas were de facto marginalized in Mexico. An ideal opportunity to attempt a recovery of the level of leadership he had previously enjoyed came with Leopold Stokowski’s first visit to Mexico in 1931. Frances Flynn Paine sponsored the conductor’s trip as an attempt to ignite his interest in Carlos Chávez’s ballet music. Carrillo and Chávez battled over Stokowski’s attention during his visit; Carrillo, trying to capitalize on the relationship they began in 1926, invited the conductor to lead his Sonido 13 ensemble and honored him with a medal as champion of his microtonal 20.  José Rafael Calva, Julián Carrillo y microtonalismo: “la vision de Moisés” (Mexico City: SACM-CENIDIM, 1984), 53. 21. Calva, Julián Carrillo y microtonalismo, 53.

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revolution ( 6.1). On the other hand, at Chávez’s suggestion, Stokowski was invited to conduct the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (OSM) and was named honorary director of both the OSM and the National Conservatory.22 In the end, Chávez was able to gain Stokowski’s favor, which was an important steppingstone for the development of his international conducting career. Stokowski and Carrillo would not collaborate again until 1951. Left out of government sponsorship and its artistic projects, and clearly overpowered by Chávez, Carrillo was forced to develop new artistic networks. He found them in local governments, private music academies, local commerce clubs, and civic organizations.23 The official renaming of Ahualulco, Carrillo’s native town, as Ahualulco del Sonido 13 in 1932, shows the composer’s ability to convince local authorities, politicians, and local businessmen and professionals—laypeople regarding music or art—to support his projects24 ( 6.2). It was at this time that Carrillo composed his String Quartet No. 4 (1932). The work was played at a chamber music concert series called Festival Carrillo on November 29, 1940; typical of Carrillo, the program announced that the piece (composed eight years earlier) was dedicated “to the gentlemen who have sponsored this festival.”25 String Quartet No. 4 is a four-movement work that survives in two copies, both in the composer’s handwriting. In the first one, a rough draft from 1932, the work is entitled Segundo cuarteto atonal; the second copy is from 1940 and labels the piece Cuarto cuarteto, a ratos a tonal y a ratos politonal (Fourth Quartet, Sometimes Atonal and Sometimes Polytonal).26 22.  Taylor-Gibson, “The Music of Manuel M.  Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez,” 123. 23.  Later in his life, Carrillo was invited to join the faculty at Escuela Nacional de Música (National School of Music), the music department of the National University of Mexico, as well as the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana (Seminar of Mexican Culture), a government-sponsored institution in charge of disseminating Mexican culture through the countryside. However, he was never able to recover the type of uncontested cultural capital he enjoyed before his trip to New  York and the early polemics about Sonido 13. 24.  The renaming of his native town was part of a larger futuristic project Carrillo dreamed of about urbanizing, modernizing, and industrializing the village around the establishment of a Sonido 13 factory and a dam that would provide energy to both the town and the factory. Needless to say, this project never materialized. However, these were the utopian futurist megalomaniac ideas that occupied Carrillo in the early 1930s. The name of the town was changed back to Ahualulco in 1944. 25.  Program for the concert series “Música de cámara. Festival Carrillo,” November 22 and 29, 1940, at Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. Program kept at the Archivo Julián Carrillo. 26.  It is possible that this second copy was made explicitly for the concert on November 29, 1940, and that the work thus may have remained unperformed until this date since the copy from 1932 is clearly a final draft with many deletions and

[182]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

This inconsistency is probably the result of the composer’s considering Balbuceos no longer a two-movement piece independent from the string quartet cycle when he made the 1940 copy. This composition, the second in Carrillo’s series of atonal quartets (as indicated in the title on the 1932 draft), is the basis for his Symphony No. 3, “Atonal” (1945).27 The record of programs in the Carrillo archive shows that String Quartet No. 4 was performed a few times in the 1940s although it was never recorded. The 1940 copy confirms that the work was composed in 1932 and was written in the manner of an improvisation. At first hearing, the uncompromising roughness and aggressive dissonant character of String Quartet No. 4 (as well as its energetic rhythmic drive) set it apart from String Quartet No. 2, Carrillo’s previous work in an atonal idiom. Although with noticeable stylistic and thematic differences, the two works shared a basic similarity: an emphasis on non-tonal scales, predominantly the whole-tone and chromatic collections. In String Quartet No. 4, Carrillo returns to using recognizable themes that tie together the entire multi-movement work. This is a semi-cyclic composition, with themes from all the movements recycled in the collage-like last movement; however, it avoids the use of traditional classical forms. The first movement, Muy agitado, is structured by alternating contrasting themes in an unrelenting succession. Although the materials tend also to contrast the sectional use of whole-tone or chromatic scales, often these are not simply juxtaposed but are actually superimposed. The opening theme of the movement (example 6.12) shows how Carrillo unfolds a whole-tone scale through the repetitive intercession of an almost pedal-like F sharp on the upper register. The contrasting theme in example 6.13 also unfolds out of a whole-tone scale but its variation in example 6.14 is based on the chromatic scale. These are the more prominent themes in the movement and reappear or are referred to throughout the entire composition; nevertheless, a number of less prominent motives used here are also recycled in later movements. The harmonic language, based on the unison or octave parallel motion or whole-tone based chords, resembles that of String Quartet No. 3, although the more contrapuntal texture of String Quartet No. 4 results in a wider variety of dissonant sonorities. Particularly striking is the use of a polyrhythmic section at the climax of the movement, when the contrasting theme from example 6.13, in 6/4, is played by the first

erasures and not a clean final copy. However, the program does not indicate the performance to be the premiere of the work. 27.  The first three movements of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 3 are orchestrated versions of the first three movements of his String Quartet No. 4.

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Example 6.12  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4 (1932), first movement. First theme.

Example 6.13  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. Second theme.

Example 6.14  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. Third theme.

violin and cello as a sextuplet over the 5/4 accompaniment by the second violin and viola.28 The second movement, a Lento entitled “Lejanías Ahualulquenses” (“Ahualulco’s Remoteness”), is dedicated to Ahualulco del Sonido 13. The improvisational character referred to by Carrillo in the 1940 copy of the work is evident here. The movement starts with a slow introduction built over interlocked perfect fifths played by each individual instrument. The following section presents a series of solo lines based on chromatic segments with interpolated augmented seconds that are played in call-and-response style by the two violins while the rest of the instruments provide sustained harmonies based on the whole-tone collection. This structuring pattern continues until an aggressive melody played in parallel minor sevenths by the first violin introduces a more imitative section based on the chromatic gamut that reaches a loud climax before the slow introduction is restated to close the movement. The third movement, Casi scherzo, is an ingenious game of musical retrogrades organized in juxtaposed blocks (A-B-A'-C-B'-Coda). With the exception of the coda, each of the blocks is built as a palindrome: the music unfolds up to an axis and then moves backward from there. Section A is made of a series of sonorous chords of whole-tone collections followed by 28.  In the two surviving manuscripts of the string quartet this section is written as measures of equal length, in 6/4 for the first violin and cello and 5/4 in the second violin and viola. The version in Symphony No. 3 is also written like that. This is clearly not an oversight; however, Carrillo did not intend a polymeter across measures as the superimposition of time signatures may suggest (since in the two manuscripts as well as in the symphonic version he is clear to show that both measures start and finish at the same time); thus, I have interpreted this section as sextuplets in the first violin and cello over a steady 5/4 meter.

[184]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

fast-moving chromatic scales also harmonized with whole tones. The B section is a funky waltz made rhythmically unstable with an added extra beat (written in 7/8 as opposed to 6/8); the retrograde of this section is the only one in which Carrillo does not follow a strict palindrome; he avoids it by adding extra material.29 The C section is a type of motto perpetuo that features a chromatically ascending and descending scalar motive over a chromatically ascending and descending arpeggio-like whole tone motive with a punctuating loud, repeated whole-tone chord in pizzicato. The coda features a series of fast-moving scalar sequences descending by chromatic steps that gradually decrease in volume and slow down until the music fades into silence. Since the 1920s, Carrillo had claimed that his microtonal theorizations had revolutionary implications in terms of rhythm and the rhythmic organization of music, but he was never very explicit about them.30 His later systematization of pitch collections and harmonic structures in Leyes de metamorfosis musicales (1949) makes one wonder if he envisioned a similar quasi-serialization of rhythmic cells and structures. It is possible that his ruminations about rhythm were related to the use of augmentation and diminution, retrogrades, and inversions in the transformation of melodic materials as also described in his 1949 book. 31 The use of retrograde mirrors as a basic structuring and developing principle in the third movement of String Quartet No. 4 shows that he was already concerned with these ideas by the early 1930s. The use of strict retrogrades has obvious rhythmic implications that are featured in the third movement—a systematic reversal of rhythmic cells; however, the real rhythmic uniqueness of String Quartet No. 4 is more evident in the fourth movement as it brings to a radical polymetric edge the polyrhythms from the first movement and the retrograde practices from the third. The fourth movement, Allegro, is a collage of motives, melodies, and technical resources used in the three previous movements. It is the first quartet in which Carrillo chose a collage-like structure for the last movement, a formal device he would return to in some of his later quartets. Here, the sonic mosaic brings a kind of kaleidoscopic, self-referential unity to the composition and allows the composer to create a complex and ear-striking polymetric fabric by superimposing and juxtaposing blocks of recycled material. The surviving draft from 1932 features thirty-eight 29.  In contrast, the B' section features a strict palindrome with no extra material. 30.  “Problemas del Sonido 13,” El Sonido 13 2, no. 14 (1925): 15–17. The article is not signed. 31.  Julián Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales (Mexico City: Julián Carrillo, 1949), 42–45.

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measures—including one more retrograde passage—at the beginning of the movement that were edited out of the 1940 copy. It is in this movement that Carrillo offers the instances of polytonal writing he refers to in one of the subtitles of the work (“a ratos a tonal y a ratos politonal”); however, even though he uses four different key signatures, the atonal character of each of the melodic lines renders the idea of polytonality irrelevant since both the local and general melodic and harmonic contexts continue to be atonal. The two main themes are taken from the first movement (the first one being example 6.14 and the second one example 6.13). The development is structured as a collage of themes and motives from the first and third movements. These quotations are sometimes literal, sometimes variations, while at other times they present new material inspired by events or technical procedures used in previous movements (such as sporadic instances of palindromic writing). The recapitulation shows the themes in reverse order, first borrowing the polyrhythmic climax of the first movement as the presentation of the second theme, and after a series of chromatic sequences briefly presenting the first theme, which is abruptly interrupted by the short, dramatic gesture that closes the movement. By the end of the movement, the extreme juxtaposition and mashup of elements creates an almost chaotic atmosphere in which materials appear to be played at different speeds at the same time. Carrillo comes out of these moments by borrowing a repeated rhythmic unit from the preceding passage that becomes a new rhythmic pulse in the following one, thus creating polymetric textures that resemble what Richard Franko Goldman would later call “metric modulations,”32 as shown in example 6.15.33 Whether these polymetric structures were the kinds of revolutionary rhythmic implications 32.  In discussing certain passages of Elliott Carter’s Cello Sonata (1948), Richard Franko Goldman described metric modulation as “a means of going smoothly, but with complete accuracy, from one absolute metronomic speed to another by lengthening or shortening the value of the basic note unit.” Richard Franko Goldman, “The Music of Elliott Carter,” Musical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1957): 161. 33.  Carrillo did not know how to notate the rhythmic effect he wanted. His score presents violin 1 in a 5/4 time signature but playing fourteen sixteenth notes. Thus, if the tempo of the violin was to remain the same as the rest of the ensemble it would be playing 7/8 bars; however, it is clear that Carrillo meant those to fit within the 3/4 bars of the rest of the instruments). I wrote this passage in a 14/16 time signature to maintain the sixteenth notes as the common pulse between this and the preceding passage. As seen in the example, the pulse of the triplets within the 9:7 polyrhythm in the violin II part are continued by the triplets in the viola and the cello in the following passage. Carrillo wrote that section with violin I and the cello in 6/4 and violin II and the viola in 5/4; but since the composer’s intention was not a polyrhythm across measures but within the bar, I have transcribed the violin I and cello parts as 6:5 in order to keep the triplets as the unifying pulse with the previous passage. The overall effective rhythmic impression of these passages is one of metric modulation.

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Example 6.15  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 4, fourth movement. Metric modulation, mm. 130–131.

of Sonido 13 that Carrillo hinted at in his writings is unclear since he did not explore them further and their appearance in this quartet remains an exceptional occurrence within his oeuvre. String Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 share many stylistic features. One could place them together as sibling-like works, almost a subset within the larger subset of atonal quartets. These similarities suggest they may have been written around the same time in the late 1930s, when Carrillo was exploring the possibilities of non-tonal scales as well as non-thematic writing. String Quartet No. 5 is a four-movement composition (Recitativo-Allegretto, Largo, Scherzo, and Allegro) written in 1937. The only surviving copy of this work labels it Cuarto cuarteto, en escala diatónica de 6 grados (Fourth Quartet, in a 6-pitch diatonic scale). It is the third in Carrillo’s series of atonal string quartets. The inconsistency in the manuscript’s title is probably an indication that the composer did not yet consider Dos bosquejos a proper string quartet when he composed Cuarteto en escala diatónica, thus making it his overall fourth string quartet. Although he labels it a diatonic-based quartet, the basis of the composition is a synthetic non-tonal scale (B-C-D sharp-E-G-A), not one of the diatonic modes (example 6.16). The confusion arises when Carrillo sometimes refers to non-microtonal scales as diatonic simply to emphasize that microtonality is beyond the realms of traditional diatonicism. To this day, this work has not been published or recorded. A note at the end of the manuscript states that it was composed in 1937. Among Carrillo’s set of string quartets, this piece shows unique features. Just like Preludio a Colón, and String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3, String Quartet No. 5 does not present proper themes. A few repeated theme-like motives appear throughout the piece but they are treated more as identifying gestures or motives than proper themes (example 6.17); in fact, the main subject of the composition is the non-tonal scale on Example 6.16  Basic synthetic scale of Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 5.

Example 6.17  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 5 (1937), first movement. Identifying motives.

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which it is based. One could say that the idea of the piece is the presentation of the scale and its sonic possibilities in much the same way that the demonstration of microtonal scales is the idea of Preludio a Colón; however, the composer’s approach in String Quartet No. 5 is much more sophisticated and elaborate, avoiding the types of tonal connections at the structural level that characterize his earlier piece (as explained in Chapter  4). In this quartet, Carrillo uses a matrix that allows him to organize and transpose the basic pitch collection and prepare its use in a manner similar to Schoenberg’s early twelve-tone compositions (Figure 6.1). 34 Pitch organization throughout the work is based on the juxtaposition of blocks of different transpositions of the basic scale or pitch collection of various lengths and durations. This is evident in the surviving manuscript of the piece, which contains numbers and brackets over measures or larger sections with which Carrillo identifies the transpositions of the scale being used (example 6.18). This is the only manuscript of the composer in which pitch organization procedures are made so evident; by doing this, Carrillo provides clues as to how the chromatic melodic motives that identify different sections are thought of as entities independent from the pitch blocks in order to bring a type of contrast to the sonic character of the basic scale. This type of block organization is foreshadowed in earlier works (such as String Quartet No. 2), but String Quartet No. 5 is the first of Carrillo’s compositions in which this procedure reaches such a high degree of systematization and thoroughness. The first movement (Intro-A-A-B-A-Coda) opens with a presentation of the main scale on the eleventh and tenth degrees of the chromatic scale. The A section begins with a series of segments of imitative texture that feature several transpositions of the basic scale before introducing one of the identifying gestures largely built over a 5 transposition (see I  in 34.  As it is clear from the earliest manuscript of String Quartet No. 2, Carrillo was familiar with Schoenberg’s reputation; the presence of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet Op. 26 in the same concert where Carrillo’s Sonata casi fantasía was premiered shows that he had also heard Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. However, it is likely that he did not know the technical details of twelve-tone composition procedures when he composed his String Quartet No. 5. In Carrillo’s marginalia to Schoenberg’s Style and Idea, it is clear that he enormously disliked the latter’s music and in analyzing the pitch relations in the twelve-tone rows of Wind Quintet Op. 26 it is evident that he was not aware of the technical details of the twelve-tone method and how it intended to systematize the notion of “emancipation of dissonance.” However, it is significant that Carrillo analyzed Schoenberg’s rows in relation to whole-tone collections, tellingly imposing on them the kind of musical thinking he had developed throughout his own atonal experiments.

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Figure 6.1  Matrix for Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 5 in the composer’s handwriting.

example 6.17).35 The B section begins with scalar sequences on transpositions before the return of the A section, which is repeated verbatim leading into a chromatic variation of motive II in example 6.17. The coda starts with a palindromic section reminiscent of the retrogrades in the Scherzo of String Quartet No. 4, and ends with a series of scalar sequences on transpositions 11 and 10.

35.  A “5 transposition” indicates a transposition of the basic scale that starts on F (5 in the standard integer notation used in musical set theory and also in Carrillo’s numerical notation).

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Example 6.18  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 5, portion of the first movement. Numbers throughout the score identify scale transpositions in use.

The Largo is of an improvisational, rhapsodic character that avoids any type of thematic presentation or reiteration. The movement is based on juxtaposed through-composed blocks, some exhibiting imitation, others featuring sequential scalar passages. The Scherzo and the Finale are organized in similar ways. They start as fugatos over motives that are either rhythmic variations of the basic scale (motive IV from example 6.17 in the Scherzo) or octave leaps up and down the register (motive V from example 6.17 in the Finale) but do not behave as proper themes. Both these movements are structured by juxtaposing fugato and imitative sections with prolonged scalar sequences.

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As it stands, the only surviving copy of String Quartet No. 6 (ca. 1937)  is a one-movement work; this is Carrillo’s only such quartet. The possibility exists that this was a multi-movement work and the rest of the movements are now lost; however, there is no hard evidence for this. On the other hand, perhaps the contrasting tempo characters within the movement (which sets it clearly apart from the first movements of his other quartets) are an indication that the quartet was indeed intended to be a single movement. The manuscript does not mention a date, but the stylistic features it shares with String Quartet No. 5 suggest that it was also written around 1937; at any rate, it was not composed later than 1939, since it appears in that year’s list of works. Like its sibling quartet, No. 6 is based on a non-tonal scale (C-D flat-E flat-F flat-G-A flat-B double flat) (example 6.19). It is the fourth in Carrillo’s series of atonal string quartets. In the surviving copy, the quartet is labeled 6o cuarteto (en una nueva escala), which indicates that it was composed after Carrillo decided to include Dos bosquejos as part of his string quartet cycle. This quartet was never published or recorded.36 String Quartet No. 6 is in an A-B-A'-Codetta form organized as a succession of contrasting sections (Allegro impulsivo-Tranquilo-Allegro-V ivo-Maestoso). As in other works since 1926, proper themes are absent. The composition unfolds as an exploration of the melodic and harmonic properties of the synthetic scale in example 6.19, first in its original form, then in transposition, and later, combined with chromatic segments. Carrillo accomplishes this by following the model set in his previous atonal string quartets, juxtaposing blocks based on scales or expanded scales (via octave displacement or sequential progression) and contrapuntal textures. In this work, the original presentation of the scale works as a type of pitch-collection center; every major section in the piece begins with long portions built on this form of the scale before moving away via modulation-like transpositions. The A  section features the two most prominent gestures in the composition—a frenetic unfolding of the basic scale in sextuplets that creates a cloud of moving sound, and a contrasting slow homophonic texture that brings brief interspersed moments of rest within the feverish sonic action that characterizes this section. The B section is built as a collage of short fragments of material contrastingly different from that in the A section; some of the blocks in the B section are recycled in the short codetta that closes the work. 36.  The collection kept at the Carrillo Archive does not include any programs in which String Quartet No. 6 was performed.

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Example 6.19  Basic non-tonal scale of Julián Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 6 (ca. 1937).

In favor of emphasizing the harmonic possibilities of the non-tonal scales in use, String Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 abandon the whole tone as the basic unit of harmonic organization, as in String Quartets No. 2 and No. 4, as well as “En secreto” from String Quartet No. 3. When taking the whole tone as the basic interval for harmonic organization Carrillo follows a simple rule: harmonizing even pitch classes with even pitch classes (0,2,4,6,8,T) and odd pitch classes with odd pitch classes (1,3,5,7,9,E). In other words, Carrillo’s basic principle of harmonic organization in those early atonal quartets (and later in most of his atonal and microtonal quartets) is to avoid the harmonic combination of the two whole-tone scales. Furthermore, one could argue that the non-thematic character of these quartets and their scale-based sequential exploration of the continuum by blocks foreshadow the non-traditional approach to listening necessary to appreciate not only his later quartets but also the rest of his late compositional output, both atonal and microtonal works. In trying to listen to these compositions in a more aesthetically productive way one should abandon tonal listening expectations and not anticipate melodic or harmonic development; instead, one should listen for clouds of sound moving through the continuum according to the specific characteristics of their basic non-tonal pitch collections.

SELF-REFERENTIALIT Y, INTERTEX TUALIT Y, AND SYNTHESIS: STRING QUARTET NO. 7

The end of the 1940s and the 1950s brought new international exposure to Carrillo and his ideas after he had spent years working on his treatises and new compositions largely locally, in Mexico. In 1947, Carrillo was reacquainted with Leopold Stokowski and a year later traveled to New York City with his wife and daughter to continue the promotion of Sonido 13. Unfortunately, Carrillo’s wife died in January 1949 and he and his daughter had to return to Mexico to arrange her funeral. However, this new attempt to internationalize his work resulted in the composition of his microtonal tone poem Horizontes (Horizons), which was premiered by Stokowski with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on November 30, 1952. Two years later, in November 1954, Carrillo and his daughter

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traveled to France, where, with the assistance of composer Jean-Étienne Marie, Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 3 (Dos bosquejos) was premiered in Paris at a chamber music concert also featuring works by Igor Stravinsky, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Jean-Étienne Marie among other composers, at the Ecole Normale de Musique on February 28, 1955;37 he also presented a conference and demonstration of Sonido 13 instruments at Paris’s Schola Cantorum on March 9. The only available manuscript of Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 7—which labels it Cuarteto atonal “A Beethoven” (Atonal Quartet “To Beethoven”)—was made in Mexico later that year, on October 13, according to the annotation at the end of the score. There is no mention of any Cuarteto atonal “A Beethoven” in the lists of works published in 1957 and 1958. A Cuarto cuarteto atonal (Fourth Atonal String Quartet) appears in a 1948 list of works; it is conceivable that this work is actually String Quartet No. 6 (6o cuarteto [en una nueva escala], which is Carrillo’s fourth quartet in an atonal idiom); however, a Cuarteto en una nueva escala (Quartet in a New Scale) also appears in that list of works. It is also possible that by mistake the same quartet was included in the list under two different titles; another possibility is that the Cuarto cuarteto atonal is Cuarteto atonal “A Beethoven” and that the surviving manuscript is a later copy made in 1955; yet another probability is that it refers to a now lost additional atonal string quartet (although this is very unlikely). I  tend to accept the explanation that String Quartet No. 7 was composed in 1955 as the date in the manuscript indicates and that the extra atonal string quartet in the 1948 list of works may be an oversight resulting from the composer’s failure to keep a careful record of the number and title changes of the quartets composed up until that year. The 1989 and 2000 catalogues also give 1955 as the date of composition of String Quartet No. 7. The quartet was recorded in France in 1963 as Segundo cuarteto atonal “A Beethoven” and published by Editions Jobert in 1970 under the title Cuarteto atonal “A Beethoven.” String Quartet No. 7 is a three-movement (Allegro apasionado, Muy lentamente-Scherzo-Largo, Allegro scherzoso) cyclic work in which Carrillo revisits the techniques of motivic derivation used in his early tonal works but in a new atonal context. Although earlier atonal works show degrees of cyclic self-referentiality, it is only in String Quartet No. 7 that he comes back to this technique in a more systematic and extended fashion in order to develop the motivic and even thematic 37.  The program announced this work as Deux pieces in quart de ton. It was performed by the Quatuor Villers.

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material of the composition. Formally, the insertion of the scherzo in the middle of the slow movement is reminiscent of String Quartet No. 2, his first atonal quartet. Most of the thematic and motivic material in the quartet is based on a motivic gesture conformed by a minor ninth upward leap followed by a chromatic descent (see ­e xample 6. 20 A, B, E, F, H, I, and K). In the spirit of the work’s dedicatee, one could listen to the contour of this motivic material as an intertextual reference to the theme of Beethoven’s Große Fuge, Op. 133 (the leaps of diminished and minor sevenths followed by chromatic descents in the Overtura). 38 Carrillo’s material seems to be inspired by what Kerman calls “the crucial determinants of the Great Fugue … the tense chromaticism, and the sense of striving always upward.” 39 Carrillo’s use of contrasting ideas from previous movements in the Allegro scherzoso also seems to be a nod to such a practice in the finales of Beethoven’s Opp. 127 and 132. Furthermore, the return to imitative contrapuntal writing could also be heard as another homage to Beethoven’s late string quartets. Moments of self-referentiality are also clear in this work, especially motive D in example 6.19, which refers to the opening motive of “En secreto” from String Quartet No. 3. The first movement is organized in A-A'-Coda form in which each A section is built by a juxtaposition of blocks based on themes A, B, and C from example 6.20. Theme D is used in the bridge between A and A'. The second movement is structured as an A-B-A-Coda, with A as a slow section and B a scherzo built on the juxtaposition of blocks based on imitative counterpoint and whole-tone and chromatic sequences moving through the continuum. The A section is built as a succession of blocks based on themes E and F from example 6.20 as well as a descending chromatic scale. The types of blocks of contrapuntal and scalar textures exploring the continuum that characterize String Quartet No. 7 are shown in Figure 6.2, which offers a listening strategy for the third movement of the quartet. As shown in this graph, the movement starts with a double fugue on themes G and C that leads into a brief exploration of the continuum through scalar sequences on harmonies based on whole tone scale 1. This section precedes a second double fugue episode that is followed by a longer exploration of the continuum also based on sonorities from the whole-tone scale (augmented fourth, minor seventh, and major second intervals). The 38.  I  would like to thank Susan Campos Fonseca for making me aware of these thematic references. 39.  Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 281.

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Example 6.20  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 7 (1955), first movement. Main themes and motives.

fifth section is another double fugue episode, one that introduces theme H from example 6.20 before quoting themes A and B from the first movement. The sixth section returns to exploring the continuum through the juxtaposition of scalar and arpeggio-like sequences organized in a series of blocks (some based on single descending chromatic scales, others based on chromatic sequences of whole-tone sonorities, and one based on whole-tone sound clouds moving down and up the continuum). However, these blocks operate as atmospheric sound masses over which motivic and [196]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Figure  6.2  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 7, third movement. Analytical chart. Letters identify motives used.

thematic material is presented. In a nod to the collage-like character of the last movements in some of his previous quartets, this work ends with a series of quotations from earlier movements (themes E, C, D, and F from example 6.20). String Quartet No. 7 was Carrillo’s last quartet in a properly atonal idiom. It is a crafty example of the stylistic synthesis that the atonal works allowed Carrillo to develop. On the one hand, it successfully bridges the masterful contrapuntal ideas at work in the composer’s early tonal music as well as the motivic constructive techniques developed out of that tradition—his so-called unidad ideológica y variedad tonal—with the static harmonic language developed out of the whole-tone collection and the scalar explorations of the continuum that find their best expression in the quarter-tone sequences of quartets nos. 8–13.

THE FIRST THREE MULTI-MOVEMENT QUARTETS IN QUARTERS OF A TONE: STRING QUARTETS NOS. 8–10.

The presentation of Carrillo’s fifteen microtonal pianos—known as Pianos Carrillo, each one able to produce a different microtonal tuning, from thirds of a tone all the way down to sixteenths of a tone 40 —at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels caught the attention of many Francophone composers and reactivated an interest in his music and ideas in Europe. Carrillo received invitations to play his music and present lectures about Sonido 13 both in Europe and Mexico. During the European tour of that year he met with Alois Hába (1893–1973), Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979), and Adriaan Fokker (1887–1972); a momentous occasion that saw together for the first time, in Paris, four of the most diligent proponents of microtonality of the twentieth century (see Figure 6.3).41 It was at that time that he decided to compose his first large, multimovement quartets in quarters of a tone, String Quartets Nos. 8, 9, and 10. These works may also be considered another subset within the larger set of quartets. As with the atonal quartets from the early 1930s, these

40.  The fifteenth piano is smaller in range and is tuned in whole tones. 41.  The occasion was a conference of the International Music Council on the theme “The Universe of Music and Its Different Cultures—Musical Expression in East and West” hosted by UNESCO in Paris. See Ivan Wyschnegradsky, “Una visión de Julián Carrillo, Pauta 9, no. 36 (1990): 68.

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Figure 6.3  Dolores Carrillo, Alois Hába, Mrs. Fokker, Adriaan Fokker, Julián Carrillo, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky. Paris, 1958. Photo courtesy of Martine Joste.

works share a number of stylistic features that make it logical to group them together and also indicate they may have been composed around the same time. Out of the surviving manuscripts of these quartets, only String Quartet No. 9 (Segundo cuarteto en cuartos de tono [Second Quartet in Quarters of a Tone]) provides a date (August 19, 1959). This information contradicts the dates given in the Catálogo integral del Archivo Julián Carrillo, which states that it was composed in 1925 and dates the first quartet in quarters of a tone (which I call here String Quartet No. 8) to 1924 and the third quartet in quarters of a tone (which I call here String Quartet No. 10) to 1925. On the other hand, the unpublished catalogue prepared under the supervision of Dolores Carrillo dates all of these works to 1940. Furthermore, the list of compositions published in 1939 is the first mention of works labeled first, second, and third quartets in quarters of a tone. These inconsistencies make it difficult to positively assign the date of composition of these works. However, the first text to actually mention anything about the first quartet in quarters of a tone is Dolores Carrillo’s diary of her and her father’s trip to Paris in 1960. There, the composer’s daughter writes that they went to the rehearsal of her father’s Primer cuarteto en cuartos de tono (String Quartet No.

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8), a work “composed by my father about a year ago for Mrs. Mix from New York.”42 This information not only confirms that this quartet was written around 1959—which would then make it plausible that 1959, the year on the score of the Segundo cuarteto en cuartos de tono (String Quartet No. 9), is indeed correct and does not refer to the year when the copy was made—but also suggests that in fact these first three quartets in quarters of a tone were indeed composed around the same time since they were all recorded as part of the 1960–1963 recording sessions in Paris. Tercer cuarteto en cuartos de tono [String Quartet No. 10] could not have been composed later than 1963; however, based on its stylistic similarities with String Quartets Nos. 8 and 9, one could easily argue that No. 10 was also composed around 1959. These quartets synthesize Carrillo’s experimental searches in his atonal quartets, providing the final technical solutions to the questions of pitch and harmonic organization that he was concerned with at the time. They also provide the first coherent examples of microtonal writing systematically framed within the harmonic language derived from those atonal musical experiments while further pushing the envelope for the new type of listening that his earlier atonal quartets require from the audiences. Upon listening to the master of the recording of String Quartet No. 8 (Primer cuarteto en cuartos de tono) in Paris, in May 1961—the quartet had been recorded in October 1960—Dolores Carrillo wrote about its eerie sounds in the following terms: “Dehumanization [sic] of sounds; a desire to transcend the atmosphere and pass beyond the stars! [The] amazement of a man, a single man, during the first space flight.”43 42.  Dolores Carrillo, unpublished journal of Julián Carrillo’s trip to Paris in 1960. Manuscript kept at the Archivo Julián Carrillo. 43.  Dolores Carrillo, unpublished journal of Julián Carrillo’s trip to Paris in 1961. Manuscript kept at the Archivo Julián Carrillo. It is worth mentioning that Dolores’s enthusiasm and her choice of imagery clearly reflect the recent space flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. It is also worth noting how her language here resonates with the type of rhetoric Carrillo’s followers would use in the 1970s and 1980s (see Chapter 7). David Espejo and Oscar Vargas Leal were already students of Carrillo in 1961; it is very likely that Dolores Carrillo’s effusiveness about both her father’s recorded music and space exploration may have carried over to their meetings and conversations with their students in Mexico City on their return later that year. Ironically, Dolores Carrillo’s description, although informed by the specific contingency of an undeniable achievement of human modernity and scientific progress, reverberates with the poem by Stefan George that Arnold Schoenberg chose to describe his own attempt at expressing the uncanny in his String Quartet No. 2 (1910) more than fifty years earlier, “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” (“I feel the air from other planets”). As explored in Chapter  7, regardless of the aesthetic differences between Carrillo and Schoenberg exposed throughout this chapter as well as Chapter 4, their work and ideas on modernism respond to the same philosophical complex.

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The ambiguity and apparent contradiction in Carrillo’s interest in microtonality (the filling in of the gamut) and whole-tone collections (the emptying out of the gamut), which is evident as early as 1924 and 1925—during and after his debate with Grupo de los 9—in the harmonies of the string quartets composed after 1926 and in String Quartet No. 7, is resolved in the style of these string quartets. On the one hand, harmonies based on whole-tone sets provide the composer with a framework that allows him to escape functional harmony (as in his earlier atonal compositions); on the other hand, these harmonies also afford him a successful setting for the use of microtonal scales that overcomes the stylistic ambiguities of earlier microtonal works such as Preludio a Colón and String Quartet No. 3 (Dos bosquejos). The non-thematic style that characterizes string quartets Nos. 2, 3, 5, and 6 is also invoked in these microtonal quartets; here, melodic gestures work as a reason for contrasting timbric and textural journeys through the continuum via blocks based on ultrachromatic sequences that resemble the exploration of scales in his earlier atonal string quartets. Regardless of their similarities, there are some important stylistic differences among these quartets. String Quartet No. 8 is a four-movement work, Poco mosso, Lentamente, Scherzo (Allegretto), Final (Allegro). Carrillo’s title for this composition is Primer cuarteto en cuartos de tono (First Quartet in Quarters of a Tone). Although it presents a few instances of contrapuntal imitation, this work is largely built on the juxtaposition of blocks of homophonic character. There are two thematic motives that appear at different moments throughout the composition or provide the material for sequential elaboration at different moments in the composition. However, although they are clearly identifiable, these motives do not provide the basis for the formal quartet’s organization nor are any melodies developed out of them (although cyclic treatment is evident in the fourth movement, whose main motive is a slight variation of the main motive from the first movement in example 6.21).44 What characterizes this work is block construction and textures moving up and down the continuum within these blocks. The chart of the Scherzo in Figure 6.4) offers a good idea of the kind of structure, block construction, and exploration of

44.  For the sake of clarity, in this chapter I use the microtonal notation that has become standard as opposed to Carrillo’s numerical notation or his alternative use of lines above or below pitches to indicate microtonal inflections (as used in Chapter 4). Here, the reversed flat sign indicates a quarter tone flat, the reversed flat sign plus a conventional flat sign indicate three-quarter tones flat, the sharp sign with one vertical stroke indicates a quarter-tone sharp, and the sharp sign with three vertical strokes indicates three-quarter tones sharp.

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Example 6.21  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 8 (ca. 1959), first movement. Main thematic motive.

the continuum that characterizes not only String Quartet No. 8 but also Nos. 9 and 10. The fugue in the A section offers a microtonal exploration of the continuum between e3 and e7 (the range and direction of these explorations are notated with lines between individual pitches, although they are based on ascending or descending ultrachromatic sequences of distinct motives, not direct movement between these pitches). In section B this exploration is focused on the upper register. This section is built by the juxtaposition of four blocks in which the composer takes advantage of different playing techniques (sautillé and ricochet) to offer timbre contrast. The second block of this section features duets in which the viola and the cello move in the upper register, offering further timbre variety due to the unique sound of instruments playing near the limits of their physical range (especially the cello). The last block of section B is a brief transition that moves away from microtonality to emphasize the chromatic scale. The C section works as a bridge into the coda, which starts with a short exploration of the higher register before moving into a block built over a whole-tone scale presented in imitative counterpoint between all the instruments. Figure 6.4 shows the main stylistic features of Carrillo’s synthetic musical language: harmonies based on whole-tone collections, exploration of the continuum through quarter-tone based scales, and a preference for the chromatic and the whole-tone scales as the basis to melodically break away from tonality in diatonic sections. The juxtaposition of microtonal and chromatic or whole-tone blocks is not uncommon in Carrillo’s subsequent string quartets. Particularly interesting are the tonal references in the final movement—the use of parallel octave and unison motives, a few instances of triadic harmony, and the section in harmonics based on the overtone series of pitches C and G that closes the quartet. Nevertheless, instead of invoking tonality, these elements appear as a phantasmatic evocation of tonality within an otherwise non-tonal context. String Quartet No. 9 survives in a manuscript copy as Segundo cuarteto en cuartos de tono (Second String Quartet in Quarters of a Tone). It is a

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Figure 6.4  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 8, third movement. Formal chart. Letters identify the three main sections.

work in four movements: Poco mosso, Scherzo, Lentamente, Final (Allegro). The first movement, an A-B form, is built on the contrapuntal development of motives I and II in example 6.22 and the juxtaposition of sequential microtonal, whole-tone, and chromatic blocks as shown in Figure 6.5. As in String Quartet No. 8, the fourth movement of this quartet recycles the two main motives from the first movement (example 6.22), using them to frame the explorations of the continuum that make the bulk of the movement. Here, the materials also tend to be presented in juxtaposed blocks; however, the principle of block construction features unique variants, as it not only juxtaposes blocks consisting of chromatic and whole-tone material with those made out of quarter-tone material, but it also superimposes them. It is worth mentioning that this type of block superimposition and vertical simultaneity of different collections is not unique to the highly contrapuntally dense Final (Allegro); it is also a feature of the Poco mosso, and to a lesser degree the Scherzo and the

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Example  6.22 Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 9 (1959), first movement. Main motives.

Figure  6.5 Carrillo, String Quartet No. 9.  Use of motives and material in the first movement.

Lentamente, which sets this quartet stylistically apart from its predecessor in this subset. String Quartet No. 10 or Tercer cuarteto en cuartos de tono (ca. 1959) is a three-movement composition: Allegro agitato, Largo, Allegro agitato enérgico. This work was also recorded in France as part of the 1960–1963 sessions, but the music was not published. The work juxtaposes extended sections based on the twelve-pitch chromatic scale and sections in quarters of a tone. A clear example is the introduction to the first movement, which is plainly chromatic and is re-used throughout the movement as contrast to the quarter-tone-based sequences. In a recourse reminiscent of String Quartet No. 9, this piece sporadically presents chromatic melodies against microtonal backgrounds; however, what is more striking is the construction of melodic motives that begin diatonically and end microtonally (such as the head motive of the fugue from the fourth movement, example 6.23). Although Carrillo’s particular uses of chromaticism melting into microtonality here are unprecedented in his compositional production, what is most strikingly unique is the use of dissonance at the end of the Largo, as he momentarily breaks away from the basic harmonic rule he had developed and established throughout his earlier atonal and microtonal works—considering consonances any harmonic combination pitches in any given whole-tone collection

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Example 6.23  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 10 (ca. 1959), fourth movement. Head motive of the fugue.

Example 6.24  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 10, second movement. Last three bars.

while considering dissonances the combination of consecutive pitches in the chromatic scale. As observed in example 6.24, the second movement ends with a chord made of pitches C, C flat quarter-tone low, B flat quarter-tone low, and D quarter-tone low. This is one of the few instances in Carrillo’s microtonal and atonal music in which a structural consonant harmony is made out of microtonal intervals. It is also a license regarding the logic behind his notion of consonance and dissonance (see footnote 14). In the numerical notation for a 24tET system the final chord would be expressed as 0-23-19-3, a combination of even and odd numbers that Carrillo would most typically consider a dissonance. One could interpret this harmony as a 23-19-3 triad over a C pedal; however, regardless of the explanation, the resulting sonority is a novelty in Carrillo’s harmonic vocabulary.

CARRILLO’S L AST MUSICAL SIGH STRING QUARTETS NOS. 11–13

Carrillo composed his last three string quartets in a span of three years toward the end of his life (1962–1964). In 1960, he and his daughter traveled to Paris to begin an extensive recording project in an attempt to make a large portion of the composer’s output commercially available. The project took almost three years to complete. Although Carrillo expected Philips Records to commercially release all of the recordings, in the end the label only produced one LP (featuring Horizontes, Preludio a Colón, and Concertino for Piano in Thirds of a Tone). This LP was released posthumously in the late 1960s as part of Philips’s Modern Music Series, which also included recordings solely devoted to the music of Alban Berg, Charles Ives, Witold Lutoslawski, Jacques Charpentier, as well as

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LPs of music by composers from the Second Viennese School and Polish composers associated with the Warsaw Autumn Festival (Krzysztof Penderecki, Tadeusz Baird, and Kazimierz Serocki). Carrillo and, after his death, his family, kept the rights to the masters of the Paris sessions, which included recordings of String Quartets Nos. 1–3, and Nos. 7–10. A  self-financed, limited edition of the complete recordings was made available later by the composer’s family, while individual compositions came out commercially subsequently through labels like CRI and SONY.45 As the recording project was under way between 1961 and 1963, and perhaps inspired by the opportunity to finally listen to actual performances of many of his works, Carrillo embarked on composing his last string quartets, another set of three multi-movement works in quarters of a tone. String Quartets Nos. 11–13 do not present any dating problems as the covers of each of the manuscripts state their years of composition. There is a minor problem with Carrillo’s numbering of these quartets as he entitles them Sexto cuarteto en cuartos de tono [Sixth String Quartet in Quarters of a Tone], Séptimo cuarteto en cuartos de tono [Seventh String Quartet in Quarters of a Tone], and Octavo cuarteto en cuartos de tono [Eighth String Quartet in Quarters of a Tone], respectively. In fact, the numbering of these final quartets as “sixth,” “seventh,” and “eighth” responds to Carrillo’s group of microtonal string quartets and indicates how, at some point, the composer revised the sequence of his string quartets to reconsider “Meditación” and “En secreto” from Dos bosquejos his first two quartets in quarters of a tone. Together with his two a cappella masses in quarters of a tone, these works represent the composer’s final aesthetic Modernist statement—as observed in his use of non-tonal scales, non-functional harmony, and microtonal exploration of the continuum—as well as a last negotiation between new ideas and traditional concepts, as seen in his uses of contrapuntal writing in new aesthetic contexts. String Quartet No. 11 was finished in Mexico City on September 2, 1962. It is a massive three-movement work (Allegro agitado, Muy lentamente-Scherzo-Lentamente, and Final [Allegro agitato]); at almost forty minutes long—just the first movement lasts about fifteen minutes, almost as long as the remaining two movements—it is the longest 45.  For decades, the majority of these LPs circulated largely via donations and retail. It was not until 1997 that SONY Mexico re-mastered some of those recordings and commercially released them under the title Música de: Julián Carrillo, SONY Music CDEC2 486131 (1997). However, for SONY standards the edition was small and the CD was never reissued once it sold out.

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of Carrillo’s string quartets. Here, the composer goes back to counterpoint but in much more densely packed writing than he had explored in his previous music, including his early tonal works. The first and third movements are through-composed and de-emphasize the type of block construction as well as the kinds of sequences through the scale or the continuum that Carrillo had privileged since the 1930s (although these sequences do not disappear completely; they show up prominently in the Scherzo, and a few also appear in the Finale); yet, exploration of the microtonal continuum remains the central idea of the composition. This work shows Carrillo seemingly at home in the ambivalent, liminal world between microtonal and chromatic scales and moving with total freedom from one to the other, leaving behind any reservations he may have shown in earlier microtonal compositions. The interaction among instruments is more diverse than in previous string quartets; here, rhythmic homophony and melodic contrast tend to be organized in duets (with each duet playing contrasting contrapuntal lines) or trios (when the composer wants to highlight and isolate a particular melodic gesture) but there are very few moments in which all instruments play in rhythmic unison. The continuously unfolding contrapuntal texture allows for an almost accidental development of harmonies; the harmonic structures happen as the melodic lines move one against the other. However, there are a few homophonic instances at the end of every movement that feature a novel harmonic practice for Carrillo, the use of clusters based on half steps (example 6.25). This practice, which was somehow foreshadowed in the last harmonies of String Quartet No. 10, contravene Carrillo’s code of never combining harmonically pitches from the two different whole-tone scales. Example 6.25 shows how Carrillo moves freely from half tones to whole tones as basic harmonic units. String Quartet No. 12 (1964) is a four-movement composition (Maestoso, Scherzo [Vivo], Lentamente, Final [Maestoso poco mosso]) composed within a couple of days in September 1964, two years after the previous string quartet and only a year before Carrillo’s death. It was never premiered or recorded and the score was never published. Stylistically it is very similar to String Quartet No. 11; it features a combination Example 6.25  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 11 (1962), second movement, mm. 1–9.

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Example 6.26  Julián Carrillo, String Quartet No. 12 (1964). Basic cyclic motive.

of chromatic and whole-tone clusters as the basis of harmonic construction and emphasizes ascending and descending quarter-tone gestures within a dense contrapuntal texture, although it makes use of the type of cyclic principle from earlier quartets. However, the work is non-thematic; the recycled element is the generative motive from the beginning of the first movement, which provides the basic rhythms and contours that inform the first, third, and fourth movements (see example 6.26). The first and third movements are through-composed and also abandon the type of block construction and microtonal sequences through the continuum that had characterized earlier works. However, the Scherzo is thoroughly organized through the juxtaposition of blocks of contrasting material and texture. What characterizes this quartet is the use of sections based on a synthetic hexatonic scale (C-D flat-E-F sharp-G-B flat) along the ultrachromatic scale in quarters of a tone. This material appears for the first time very briefly in the first movement—the melodic gesture lasts for only about two measures before it melts into the microtonal context that surrounds it (example 6.27); it returns prominently in the Scherzo, where it appears by itself at the beginning of the movement and then provides the material (scale fragments) for the contrasting blocks based on microtonal sequences; and finally it is used in the Maestoso poco mosso, where it appears first as a quotation from the first movement, then as the basis for a contrasting section in the middle of the movement, and finally as the basis of the microtonal ascending and descending sequences that bring the work to an end. Example 6.26 shows how Carrillo uses quarters of a tone within a segment of this scale as a basic framework. As such, this quartet provides a unique space within Carrillo’s output for the encounter of two of his apparently opposite aesthetic worlds, the synthetic scale-based atonality of his 1930s works and Sonido 13. String Quartet No. 13 (1964) is a three-movement work:  Allegro, Lentamente, Final (Allegro). One of Carrillo’s last major works, it follows the synthetic style shown in his two previous string quartets. Like them, this composition was never premiered and the music score remains unpublished. Roughly twenty minutes long, this is the shortest of Carrillo’s

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Example 6.27  Carrillo, String Quartet No. 12. Use of synthetic hexatonic scale.

multi-movement string quartets. Harmonically, it returns to the practice of building chords by avoiding the combination of pitches from the two different whole-tone collections although there are a few chords in the second movement that feature pitches from the whole-tone collection and quarters of a tone. The melodic system is based on whole-tone, chromatic, and ultrachromatic quarter-tone scales. However, instead of using these collections in clearly differentiated blocks, as Carrillo did in his works from the 1930s and 1950s, he freely combines them harmonically and even melodically. Like the previous quartet, String Quartet No. 13 is non-thematic, although brief motives are cyclically recurrent throughout the composition. Unlike the previous quartet, this one features a more homophonic texture regardless of the moments of contrapuntal imitation; it also has many more instances of the types of microtonal sequences that characterize earlier quartets. Here, Carrillo does not seem concerned with labels and allows long non-microtonal sections throughout the first and third movements. The Allegro is made from the juxtaposition of different units organized in a large A-A'-Codetta form; each of the A sections starts with the same motivic gesture but unfolds differently, avoiding literal repetitions. The Lentamente is arranged as a series of duos (violins versus viola and cello) in constant dialogue that develops in a through-composed fashion as well. Particularly salient is an expressive motive labeled apasionadamente (passionately) that reappears at the climax of the third movement. The Final is another collage-like movement largely based on recycled materials from the previous movements. It goes back to block construction, especially juxtaposing units from the first movement in different orders; the homophonic character of the microtonal sequences resumes an exploration of the continuum in the manner of his previous five quarter-tone string quartets.

FINAL ASSESSMENT: AGAINST ANACHRONISTIC INTERPRETATIONS

A look at Julián Carrillo’s thirteen string quartets shows a composer whose musical language developed by accumulation. While his music slowly left behind tonal functionality, voice leading, and the formal structures of

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his early works, he never completely disregarded the technical baggage he acquired in his formative years or the idiosyncratic technical novelties he developed and refined as he moved into microtonal and atonal idioms. Instead, he continued building on those foundations, often branching out of them, occasionally developing new contradictory procedures, and sometimes even evoking tonality. Thus, Carrillo’s last quartets show a composer who was not afraid of breaking his own rules in the name of creative freedom and in searching for new sonic possibilities—a remarkable attitude for a composer who was already in his late eighties. Furthermore, the exploration of the complete string quartet cycle shows Carrillo as an extremely practical, even pragmatic, composer who avoids microtonal writing that would be problematic for his hypothetical performers (this is the reason he almost never begins and finishes microtonal sequences with other than harmonies based on pitches from the 12tET scale). A panoramic look at the quartets also allows us to understand the stylistic nuances between seemingly homogenous approaches to microtonality throughout the last forty years of Carrillo’s life. A journey through the quartets permits us to clearly hear the differences between his early and late microtonal styles; it also helps us make sense of Carrillo’s mature microtonality in relation to his idea of atonality. The development of his atonal style, based on the exploration of non-tonal, synthetic scales, allowed Carrillo to establish a logical foundation for the structuring of his late microtonal music, avoiding the evident shortcomings of his early microtonal works (as described in Chapter 4). Indeed, Carrillo’s atonality was the result of his interest in non-tonal scales and collections—which makes him aesthetically closer to late Scriabin than to Schoenberg; however, using the type of scale exploration he devised for his atonal music (as in String Quartet No. 7) within the ascending and descending ultrachromatic sequences of his microtonal music (especially in String Quartets 8–10) translated into a sound that privileged the continuum as opposed to the scale.46 These kinds of sonic explorations bring him closer to the aesthetics that characterized composers like Xenakis and Ligeti in the 46.  Velia Nieto writes of a “Mexican School” of composers interested in “the development of micro-intervals and their evolution into the idea of a continuum in the works of Carrillo, Novaro, [Conlon] Nancarrow, and [Julio] Estrada.” Velia Nieto, “Escuela del continuo en México,” 63. Although conceptualizing a “school” among composers who had little or no contact with each other (not to mention the animosity that may have existed among some of them) is very problematic, Nieto’s understanding of the implications of Carrillo’s ideas in a shift from a scale- to a continuum-based musical episteme is pioneering. She asserts this by stating that “Carrillo devoted himself to the construction of microtonal instruments that … included harps in thirty seconds and sixty fourths of a tone that reach the perceptive realm of the

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1950s, and demand equally open, non-traditional types of listening if one is to productively engage with this music. Furthermore, the continuous use of natural harmonics (especially in the cello parts of the quartets written after 1932) also discloses the type of aesthetic and technical concerns with the overtone series that Carrillo developed as he deepened his understanding of the musical/ontological implications of Sonido 13. Criticizing Carrillo and his music by arguing that he was a Romantic composer who used microtones within a traditional language or by suggesting that he was unable to modify his musical rhetoric and escape the “sonata and rondo form, and other principles of tonal music” to match the revolutionary potential of his microtonal findings is not only incorrect as these analyses show, but also entirely anachronistic.47 Such assessments betray a type of hindsight revisionism that considers troublesome or faulty any type of musical manifestation in the past that does not adjust to teleological narratives that derive in the present. For such critics, Carrillo should have been able to develop systems of pitch or rhythmic organization that responded to the notions of emancipation of dissonance and rhythm that permeated the Western art music composition tradition after Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But such a perspective disregards the fact that the past has a multiplicity of futures and the one we happen to live in is but one among many possibilities. Carrillo’s music should be understood in its own terms as a product of the composer’s specific experiences in Mexico, Germany, and later in his life, in the United States and France.48 sonic continuum” (Nieto, “Escuela del continuo en México,” 63). Nieto is incorrect in saying that Carrillo built instruments in thirty seconds and sixty-fourths of a tone; however, her belief that melodic motion in Carrillo’s small-interval scales could be perceived as sliding through the sonic continuum is corroborated by the musical analyses in this chapter. 47. As seen here, some of the compositional procedures throughout Carrillo’s career point more toward a unique type of neoclassicism than to the Romanticism he is often associated with. 48. Although without completely abandoning a hindsight perspective, Hebert Vázquez acknowledges the problem of judging Carrillo’s music retrospectively. When comparing his musical language to Carlos Chávez’s and Revueltas’s, Vázquez suggests that “it is easy to see it retrospectively. [But] we should understand that Chávez’s and Revueltas’s nationalist cosmopolitanism is based on a model that could make us uneasy to acknowledge but that is there and is noticeable: Stravinsky’s modernism and some of his tools to avoid the principle of nineteenth century discursive development such as ostinati or rhythmic irregularities. … These techniques are there, [Chávez and Revueltas] had a [Modernist] model that Carrillo did not have.” Hebert Vázquez quoted in Mario Lavista, Aurelio Tello, Javier Álvarez, and Hebert Vázquez, “Setenta años de música: una charla sobre la composición en México,” Revista Tierra Adentro, Vol. 186 (2013), 17. Vázquez’s statement may be read as a call to understand and problematize Carrillo within his particular aesthetic world, within the compositional techniques and tradition he had access to and was part of.

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As such, Carrillo is a bridge between several sonic and aesthetic worlds and his musical style is the result of these specific cultural crossings and encounters. Not only is it unfair to judge him according to what composers after him decided to incorporate or not into their musical baggage, but it is also a gaffe not to recognize the significance of his own sonic imagination of the future. Furthermore, these ill opinions about Carrillo’s music are not only anachronistic; they also reveal a series of uninformed assumptions regarding his output and the details of his musical styles. Against conventional interpretation, Carrillo’s string quartets show a composer who actually developed a unique musical language in tune with a vision of musical art that indeed questioned many aspects of the Western art music tradition and its listening conventions. Further detailed study and continuous patient listening of this outstanding imaginary string quartet cycle will provide a better understanding of the continuities and discontinuities of Carrillo’s music with both the common practice of the Western art music tradition and the different Modernist musical projects he engaged consciously or unconsciously throughout his creative life.

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CH AP TER   7

Experimentalism, Mythology, the Intermundane, and Sonido 13 after Julián Carrillo The faithful mirror tells me truth / It tells me that I think of you! —Alfred Tennyson, “Song”1

I had my first contact with the Nueva Mexicanidad (New Mexicanness) scene in 1997, when I  serendipitously attended a happening at Estrella Newman’s house in Mexico City. I was doing research about a composer who was a member of Julián Carrillo’s first Grupo 13 in 1924, when someone informed me that some of Carrillo’s former students were preparing a concert at a private house. As if letting me in a secret, this person advised me that in order to get in I should give his name and mention that he was a friend of Estrella Newman, the owner of the house. The event was in fact a multidisciplinary performance that involved the projection of an experimental film, pre-Hispanic ritual dancing and copal burning, poetry declamation, and improvised microtonal music played by Newman on a harp in sixteenth tones and David Espejo on a guitar in quarter tones. What impressed me the most was that the walls of the hall where the performance took place were adorned by Nueva Mexicanidad art that included the typical images one would expect in such context—paintings

1.  Julián Carrillo set Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Song” to music in I Think of You (1928) for chamber ensemble (soprano, flute in quarters of a tone, violin, viola, guitar in quarter tones, octavina, and harp-zither).

of Mexica pyramids, the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes, and Nueva Mexicanidad symbols—but also, a completely unexpected portrait of Julián Carrillo wearing Cuauhtémoc’s headdress and Mexica warrior clothing ( 7.1). At the time, the performance left me dazzled and confused; and only after years of doing fieldwork, interviewing Sonido 13 practitioners, and digging in my own memory did it all ultimately make sense—both for my understanding of Carrillo and of this unexpected event in 1997. Nueva Mexicandidad is an urban mestizo and heterogeneous spiritual movement, both nationalist and esoteric, developed in the late 1960s and 1970s as an outgrowth of the older Mexicanidad movement that wished “to restore the values and spirituality of pre-Hispanic times through Aztec dance” 2 and expressive culture. Nueva Mexicanidad combines elements from Mexica religious practice, Hindu metaphysics, tantric traditions, and New Age beliefs that apparently bear no relation to the teleology of progress and scientistic rhetoric that informed Carrillo’s Modernist musical practices throughout his life. In this chapter I advance a possible intermundane connection between Carrillo’s work and that of his current followers by exploring a series of musical events and traditions that have been described as Sonido 13 under the light of the New Age spirituality that characterizes Nueva Mexicanidad. 3 I  do not claim that the various types of Sonido 13 musics developed after Carrillo’s death are what marketers or consumers call New Age music. Instead, I argue that the New Age is a generative framework of embodied histories and sensibilities that allows us to make sense of the type of mythologies and intermundane economies that inform these musical and cultural projects’ continuous invocation of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13. Roland Barthes argues that mythology is a semiological system “made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication.”4 As such, mythology is the type of moment

2.  Renée de la Torre Castellanos, “The Zapopan Dancers: Reinventing an Indigenous Line of Descent,” in Dancing across Borders: danzas y bailes mexicanos, ed. Olga Nájera Ramírez, Norma E.  Cantú, and Brenda M.  Romero (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2009), 23. 3.  The New Age is a hybrid type of spirituality that became popular throughout the world in the late 1960s and 1970s. Here, Western and Eastern mystical traditions intersect with theosophy, principles of self-improvement, yoga, transcendental meditation, talk about UFOs and extra-terrestrial aliens, and even popular definitions of and opinions on quantum mechanics. See Nevill Drury, The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 8–10. 4.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2000 [1957]), 110.

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in a chain of unlimited semiosis that, if approached critically, allows us to understand better processes of appropriation and cultural resignification. It is precisely its performative character, with its power to point out and to notify, to “make us understand something and to [impose it] on us,”5 that links Barthes’s semiotic approach to mythology to Diana Taylor’s postcolonial view of it. Taylor argues that the dynamics of signification in mythology-like scenarios offer a “paradigmatic system of visibility [that] also assures invisibility.”6 For Taylor, mythology is a discursive/performative moment that renders something visible in order to resignify and appropriate it as part of a new semiotic field. Leaving aside the ethical overtones of invoking the Native American body in the process of its own cultural erasure—which is what informs Taylor’s postcolonial discussion—her warning about the double performative edge of mythology is important to understand the invocation of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 by the experimental post-Carrillo artistic endeavors explored in this chapter. Something is made visible and something is rendered invisible in the type of experimental discourses and performances that have been linked to Sonido 13 after Carrillo’s death. The notion of the “intermundane,” as termed by Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, provides a rich conceptual link between the semiotic and postcolonial understandings of mythology in Barthes and Taylor; as such, it helps us make sense of the presences and absences entailed in Sonido 13 mythology after Carrillo’s death. The intermundane allows us to think about arrangements of productive “interpenetration between worlds of living and dead [in which] the living do not one-sidedly handle the dead, but participate in an inter-handling, a mutually effective co-laboring.” 7 This chapter is divided in two large sections that describe the dialogic intermundane relation between Julián Carrillo and the mythologies developed by musicians and artists who kept alive the idea of Sonido 13 decades after the composer’s death. The first section describes how Carrillo and Sonido 13 have been used to validate a number of New Agey projects that seem to have no ideological connection to the composer’s scientistic rhetoric and discourse explored in Chapter 5. The second part explores how the type of New Age spirituality that informs those post-Carrillo Sonido 13 projects gives us an excuse to tackle and make sense of something that 5. Barthes, Mythologies, 117. 6.  Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 54. 7. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness:  Technologies of the Inter­ mundane,” TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010): 14.

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most scholarship about Carrillo has neglected, the role of spirituality and the ambiguous place of religious music in the composer’s overall compositional output.

MYTHOLOGY, SONIDO 13, AND NUEVA MEXICANIDAD

Música de las estrellas (Music of the Stars) is a rare and remarkable album of microtonal music recorded in 2009. It is the result of what, from the outset, seems to be the very unlikely encounter of Marisa de Lille, a former Mexican rock star from the 1980s, and Estrella Newman, a painter, poet, and underground musician better known as an advocate of Nueva Mexicanidad. Advertised as Sonido 13, Música de las estrellas (Figure 7.1) was never commercially released and is only available for download at

Figure  7.1  Música de las estrellas (2009). Cover designed by Marisa de Lille. Used by permission.

[216]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Marisa de Lille’s Internet site;8 as such, it is little known even among the most ardent fans of de Lille and Newman. However, the unsuspecting web surfer who stumbles on it is in for an astonishing musical ride. At the beginning of “Ballenas cósmicas” (Cosmic Whales) we hear Estrella Newman playing a series of glissando-like sweeps on the strings of a harp in sixteenths of a tone;9 the glissandi move upward in circular gestures, creating a fascinating resonance with the overtones vibrating in sympathy in the lower register of the harp. This mesmerizing acoustic effect provides a kind of sonic mist from which the voice of Marisa de Lille emerges, almost unnoticed, in slow, caressing descending sighs that eventually move into an impossibly low and deep vocal register. Initially trained as a coloratura soprano, Marisa de Lille (b. 1966) started her professional music career after placing sixth at the 1984 Valores Juveniles Festival, a national competition for young pop singers sponsored by Bacardí y Cía. and Televisa, the powerful Mexican private TV network. Although her participation at the festival/contest was as a balada (romantic love song) singer, de Lille’s first commercial recording, No soy igual (1986), was one of the first rock albums promoted by the mainstream Mexican recording industry at the onset of the Rock en español boom of the 1980s. Her involvement with Televisa led de Lille to alternate her singing career with acting in the network’s soap operas. Those who remember de Lille would usually recall her from those years (the late 1980s and early 1990s), when she became a well-known pop star in the Mexican entertainment industry. As a rock singer, she released two albums and opened massive concerts for popular acts like Mecano, Soda Stereo, El Tri, and Alaska y Dinarama; as an actress she co-starred in soap operas featuring Mariana Garza and Sasha Sokol (former members of the hugely popular Mexican youth band Timbiriche), Adela Noriega, and Ricky Martin, and participated in a few commercially successful musical theater productions, including El violinista en el tejado (Fiddler on the Roof) and Kumán (a legendary rock opera that has become a cult object among Mexican heavy metal fans).10 In the mid-1990s, after experiencing episodes of 8. See http://marisadelille.bandcamp.com/album/m-sica-de-las-estrellas (accessed on September 25, 2013). 9. Although I  am aware that these gestures are not glissandi properly speaking—since they are not one continuous sound increasing or decreasing in frequency—I have chosen to describe them here as such in order to provide readers with a familiar musical reference that would allow them an imaginary approximation of what these gestures sound like. To be fair, they are in fact quickly descending or ascending ultrachromatic (microtonal) scales. 10.  A bio of Marisa de Lille is available at http://www.marisadelille.org/#!biografía (accessed on September 25, 2013).

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sexual harassment, de Lille retired from the mainstream entertainment industry.11 Later, she worked in dubbing production companies, focusing on Spanish versions of the music of Japanese anime series such as Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, and Knights of the Zodiac. The popularity of the songs she recorded for these series made her a cult figure among anime fans throughout the Spanish-speaking world.12 For those who remember de Lille from her years of commercial fame, and even for those who know her as an anime cult icon, it may be difficult to reconcile her artistic persona from those years with the experimental sounds of Música de las estrellas and her image on the cover of the album. In 1988, after quitting her rock career, de Lille spent a year of spiritual searching that led her to question the trajectory of her artistic career, to become a medicine woman or healer of sorts, and to focus on a type of music she defines as “ethnofusion.”13 Philosophically, according to de Lille, ethnofusion is inspired by ideas about the spiritual renaissance of pre-Columbian civilizations, especially the Maya and the Mexica, expressed in two books, Ayocuán’s La mujer dormida debe dar a luz (The Sleeping Woman Should Give Birth), and Antonio Velasco Piña’s Regina. De Lille says that, in her opinion, “the sleeping woman has already given birth, and we, Mexicans, are their children, who have awoken; we are the children of Iztaccíhuatl.”14 The belief in the superiority and re-awakening of a pre-Columbian spirit expressed in these two books lies at the core of Nueva Mexicanidad. In music and dance, one often hears these ideas translated into a combination of pre-Columbian and European idioms and instruments as well as a combination of traditional and modern technologies and rituals. Thus, de Lille’s ethnofusion music is characterized by the use of pre-Columbian instruments including the huéhuetl (a double-headed wooden drum), ocarina (a clay whistle-like instrument), rain sticks, and seashells; Western acoustic instruments like the guitar, cello, violin, and flutes; electronic instruments such as the keyboard, electric guitar, and bass; and new digital technologies, from synthesizers to computer software. Her lyrics often combine Spanish, Mayan, and Nahuatl languages. Influenced by this spiritual renaissance, de Lille also

11.  Tere Estrada, Sirenas al ataque: historia de las mujeres rockeras mexicanas (Mexico City: Editorial Océano, 2008), 169. 12. See http://es.doblaje.wikia.com/wiki/Marisa_De_Lille (accessed on September 25, 2013). 13. Estrada, Sirenas al ataque, 284. 14.  De Lille, quoted in Estrada, Sirenas al ataque, 284. See Ayocuan, La mujer dormida debe dar–a–luz: el despertar de la conciencia (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1968); and Antonio Velasco Piña, Regina: dos de octubre no se olvida (Mexico City: EDAF, 1987).

[218]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

became interested in Eastern cultures and eventually studied Tibetan chanting, Carnatic ragas, and even just intonation singing.15 De Lille affirms that back in the 1990s her voice teacher told her about Estrella Newman and her Arpas del Sonido 13 (Thirteenth Sound Harps).16 However, it was more than twenty years later, when de Lille and a friend were organizing a festival of music and spiritual healing featuring Newman as a guest artist, that the two of them met. De Lille states that their spiritual connection was so strong that after a few minutes of conversation they began playing music together. De Lille’s training in Tibetan chant, ragas, and just intonation enabled her to easily blend in with Newman’s microtonal harp improvisations. Upon realizing de Lille’s ability to improvise in microtones, Newman proposed that they play a few concerts together and eventually make a recording, Música de las estrellas.17 Without noticing it, de Lille entered a very particular branch of Nueva Mexicanidad performance art that summoned Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 in seemingly bizarre ways. Her encounter with Sonido 13 via Nueva Mexicanidad provides a unique entry into understanding the mythological character of the movement’s invocation of Carrillo and his microtonal music system. Particularly telling is de Lille’s own experience with and knowledge of Sonido 13; which she describes as follows: Many years ago I  read a book about physics in the music of Julián Carrillo; it was one of his books. I  am fascinated by mathematics … in fact, before I decided to be a musician I was going to be a mathematician. So, [while reading the book] I was breaking my head trying to imagine how this stuff, which I could understand intellectually, would actually sound … back then there was no Internet and I  did not find any way to access his music. However, when years later, my voice teacher told me about the Sonido 13 harps, for some reason I did not make the connection; I did not realize it was about the same thing I had read about … actually, to this day I have never heard any recordings [of Julián Carrillo’s music] other than something Estrella played for me after we had already made our demo.18

15.  Marisa de Lille, electronic interview, September 14, 2013. 16.  During our interview, Marisa de Lille’s comments made clear that she thought Estrella Newman had inherited the Sonido 13 harps directly from Julián Carrillo. Jorge Echevarría states that, in fact, these instruments were built for her by Oscar Vargas Leal years after Carrillo’s death. Jorge Echevarría, telephone interview, December 1, 2010. 17.  Marisa de Lille, electronic interview. 18.  Marisa de Lille, electronic interview.

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What is truly fascinating in de Lille’s account is not just that she had never heard Carrillo’s Sonido 13 music before recording something she and Newman would also identify as “Sonido 13,” but also how her story reminded me of my and many of my friends’ own relation to ideas about Carrillo’s Sonido 13 when we were growing up. For many of us, Sonido 13 was something we had heard and read about but had never been able to actually listen to in records or live concerts.19 As I explain later, this story shows that de Lille’s and Newman’s invocation of Sonido 13 and Julián Carrillo operates and produces meaning according to the semiotic dynamics of mythology. Estrella Newman (b. ca. 1934–2015) was a Mexican painter and sculptor, musician, poet, sponsor of the arts, native-rights activist, and priestess of Nueva Mexicanidad. Claiming to have been friends with some of the most famous (and infamous) Mexican artists and socialites of the 1950s and 1960s—from Diego Rivera and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano to Agustín Lara, Roberto Cantoral, and Graciela Olmos “La Bandida”20 —Newman was an underground legend in her native country. In the 1970s she founded the Taller Escuela de las Nuevas Artes Julián Carrillo and later the Fundación Ollin Yoleme A.C., venues through which she spread the principles of Sonido 13 and the ideas of Nueva Mexicanidad, and sponsored alternative artistic projects. In the late 1960s, Newman became reacquainted with David Espejo, a friend from her youth who happened to be one of the last pupils of Julián Carrillo. Through him, Newman had access to Dolores Carrillo, the composer’s daughter, as well as other musicians involved in trying to preserve and promote Carrillo’s music and ideas and explore new creative possibilities with his microtonal instruments. Newman was fascinated by the 19.  Here I refer to Carrillo’s own microtonal music, not the microtonal music his students and followers played at TV shows and public venues in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I  have already acknowledged that I  had heard the microtonal music played by his students and that it was fundamental in determining my later reception of Carrillo’s Sonido 13. 20. Newman claims to have been a pupil of the famous painter Diego Rivera (1886–1957), a lover to the famous songwriter Agustín Lara (1900–1970), to have been platonically in love with the painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1896–1971), and to have been the inspiration for one of Roberto Cantoral’s (1935–2010) most popular boleros, “Reloj” (1956); see Federico Chilián Orduña, “Estrella Newman está en Puebla,” Diario Transición, http://diariotransicion.blogspot.com/2009/03/ estralla-newman-esta-en-puebla.html (accessed on September 25, 2013); and Estrella Newman, personal interview, Puebla, Mexico, July 18, 2009. Her relation with Graciela Olmos “La Bandida,” who managed a legendary Mexico City elite brothel in the 1950s, is better documented (Newman has even written an unpublished biography of Olmos); see Leonardo Paez, “A la luz la increíble historia de Graciela Olmos, La bandida,” La Jornada, June 13, 2007.

[220]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

composer, his music, and the verve and utopian idealism of his followers, and she became an enthusiastic supporter and a sponsor of the group herself. She explains her feelings: Mexican culture is unique in the world … it is superior in every aspect … in mathematics it is extraordinary. I think it was because the Maestro [Carrillo] came from that race [sic] that he was able to do it [develop the Sonido 13 system]. … Julián Carrillo and Cuauhtémoc are my gods. Carrillo put Mexico in the first place among the world’s musical cultures. He is a benefactor of humanity because changing things is very difficult. An age can only be changed by the greatest taumaturgos [miracle workers]. … before or after Christ, before the space age, before and after a musical age … [P]‌eople have not understood Carrillo yet; he is at the same level of Christ because that is the word [sic]. … So, just imagine, it is the greatest thing [to be part of the Sonido 13 group]. Besides, wherever we go it is glorious; the memory of this great, extraordinary man, allows us to be and shine wherever we go.21

( 7.2) Newman’s passionate grandiloquence aside, and regardless of the highly ideological character of the statement and her uncritical reception of some of Carrillo’s most ill-fated rhetoric, what may be more intriguing about her description is the tacit recognition of the performative character of the composer as a cultural symbol. According to her, it is the invocation of Carrillo that allows her and her musicians to become something (“the memory of this great, extraordinary man, allows us to be”). The performance of Carrillo’s “memory” through Newman’s performance, whether in agreement or not with Carrillo’s own Sonido 13 project, is the ritual that allows her and her musicians to construct new mythologies and establish real as well as imaginary transhistoric, intermundane networks of belonging. De Lille’s and Newman’s discourses assure Carrillo a visibility that validates the performers and permits them “to be and shine wherever they go”; however, the composer is immediately erased and transformed into something new—a Mexica warrior or a futurist miracle-maker—as a result of the type of resignification brought about by these mythologies.22 I  argue that the invocation of Carrillo and Sonido 13 is a productive 21.  Estrella Newman, personal interview. 22.  I intend no judgment with this statement, only to recognize that culture implies a continuous process of resignification that makes artifacts, symbols, and practices from the past meaningful in the present. I believe that alone makes these discourses culturally powerful, significant, and worthy of scholarly attention, regardless of counterarguments based on notions of authenticity and historical truthfulness.

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economic endeavor at the cultural and affective level. In it, the co-laboring of the dead and the living generates an emotional capital—reflected in the powerful yet intimate deification of the composer (“Julián Carrillo and Cuauhtémoc are my gods”)—as well as a symbolic capital that validates current artistic projects while providing their experimental practices with an aura of aesthetic and moral authenticity that is fundamental in understanding their relation to the mainstream Mexican contemporary music scene. The fact that these cultural and affective economies give us a point of entry in the present to revisit Carrillo and Sonido 13 in the past and make sense of them in novel ways—as explored at the end of this chapter—speaks to the effectively intermundane character of the enterprise.

SONIDO 13 AND THE STARS: THE MYSTIC WORLD OF DAVID ESPEJO, OSCAR VARGAS LEAL , AND ARMANDO NAVA .

During the spring of 1961, when Julián Carrillo was in Paris supervising the recording sessions of his music, he received a letter informing him of the possible locations for a Sonido 13 Institute in Mexico City. This would be the music school Carrillo had been dreaming about for decades. The letter showed his students’ diligence, idealism, and loyalty in trying to secure a space for the school even when their teacher was abroad. Furthermore, the letter also reveals the names of the members of the “Grupo 13 de Julio,” the last cohort of students to work with Carrillo before his death: David Espejo (1936–2007), Oscar Vargas Leal (1936–1993), and Alfonso Ballesteros.23 In 1959, motivated by a newspaper article in which Carrillo explained the simplicity of his notational system, Espejo contacted the composer and asked to be taken as a student. Although Carrillo was already eighty-four years old, he accepted him as well as Vargas Leal and Ballesteros.24 Besides their musical training, the young men also became proficient in the 23.  Alfonso Ballesteros, David Espejo, Oscar Vargas Leal, unpublished letter, April 21, 1961. Julián Carrillo Archive. Hugo Vargas Olvera, Oscar Vargas Leal’s son, affirms that Espejo and Vargas Leal began their studies with Carrillo in 1955. Hugo Vargas Olvera post on Sonido 13 de Julián Carrillo Facebook Group Page. Posted on September 6, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1478206129085435/permalink/1493990610840320/ (accessed on September 20, 2014). 24.  “Pianos microtonales, víctimas del olvido,” El Universal, May 8, 2006. According to Ramón Guerrero, Ballesteros’s role in the group was largely administrative; he was not as musically active as Espejo and Vargas Leal but remained close to the group until the 1980s. Ramón Guerrero, telephone interview, October 16, 2013.

[222]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

technical side of musical instrument building and tuning. With the help of Carrillo, Vargas Leal mastered the design and construction of a series of harps in sixteenths of a tone in different sizes that came to be know as Arpas del Sonido 13; they were the last microtonal instruments built within Carrillo’s circle before his death in 1965.25 Upon Carrillo’s passing, Espejo and Vargas Leal remained close to Dolores Carrillo, the composer’s daughter, and became the two most important Sonido 13 advocates in 1970s Mexico. It was during this time that they became reacquainted with Estrella Newman, who became a financial sponsor as well as an eventual collaborator in their performances. They played concerts using the Arpas del Sonido 13, offered lectures about Carrillo and his ideas, and taught music lessons in which they systematically avoided Western music notation and ear training, using exclusively Carrillo’s pragmatic numerical notation. In 1973, Vargas Leal and Espejo released their only commercial recording, Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973, an LP comprising two ten-minute long original compositions for harps in harmonic tuning (just intonation) that gave the album its title (see Figure 7.2).26 The second piece, Cometa 1973, was inspired by the discovery of Comet Kohoutek in 1973. The comet was expected to offer a spectacular display as it passed through the inner solar system; the expectation translated into incredible media hype, and the comet made its way to everything from TV shows like Peanuts and El Chavo del 8 to music by Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, and Journey, a poem by Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, and even the apocalyptic rhetoric of religious cults. The reactions to the comet should be understood within the New Age spirit popular in the late 1960s and 1970s, which partially informed and guided them. Vargas Leal and Espejo’s Cometa 1973 is a quasi-spectralist piece in which the two harps follow each other in and out of the overtone

25. Besides being used by Espejo and Vargas Leal after Carrillo’s death, these instruments were also used by mainstream contemporary musicians; especially noteworthy is their use by Mario Lavista’s avant-garde improvisation group Quanta in the 1970s. See Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 26.  Cromometrofonía was a term coined by Carrillo in the 1910s to replace the word “music.” According to Carrillo, the term “music,” from the Greek word for “muse” was vague and non-descriptive of what the art was. Cromometrofonía on the other hand was a neologism derived from “chromo,” “metro,” and “phonos” and described the art of measuring or organizing sound and its color (the timbre of sound). See María Cristina Mena, “Julián Carrillo. The Herald of a Musical Monroe Doctrine,” Century Magazine 89 (1915): 755. According to Armando Nava Loya, most of Espejo’s compositions use the term “cromometrofonía” in the title out of his respect for Carrillo’s proposition. Armando Nava Loya, personal interview. Naucalpan, México. July 26, 2009.

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Figure 7.2 Oscar Vargas Leal (left) and David Espejo (right) on the jacket of Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973 (1973).

series producing brilliantly resonant moments juxtaposed to incredible dissonant (even “out-of-tune”) effects.27 On the back of the LP’s jacket, Vargas Leal and Espejo stated that “[we are] employing 400 sounds that follow the natural sequence of intervals, all of them different. … [This is a] musical purification and enrichment that will produce in the listener new sensations and emotions which, coupled with the appearance of that celestial body called Kohoutek, which will visit us later this year, will make humans vibrate visually and aurally like never before.”28 27.  I  thank Juan Sebastián Lach for pointing out the possibility that the harps were tuned in just intonation but each one to a different fundamental frequency, thus allowing for extremely consonant moments as well as extremely dissonant ones. Juan Sebastián Lach, electronic communication. October 5, 2013. 28.  There are two different jackets for this LP; one shows the title as mentioned before, Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973. The second one inverts the order of the

[224]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

The overall sonic effect of the pieces along with the jacket’s text, the reference to cosmos, and the fact that a second version of these pieces circulated that included voice-over instructions for meditation make Vargas Leal and Espejo’s into a very New Agey project.29 Besides putting in evidence the spiritual ideology of their project, the recording also attests to the mythological dynamics at the core of their aesthetic and musical creeds; it renders Carrillo’s Sonido 13 visible only to transform it into a harmonic tuning or just intonation project as further explained later and in response to the Carrillo rhetoric explored in Chapter 5. However, Vargas Leal and Espejo’s case is different from Newman’s in that their discourse about their music as the fulfillment of Carrillo’s “prophecy” that Sonido 13 would “enrich, purify, and simplify music”30 actually makes them and not Carrillo the teleological goal of his own Sonido 13 mythology. The dynamics of mythology in Vargas Leal and Espejo’s case are also evident in the fact that, although they championed the cause of Carrillo and Sonido 13, very rarely did they organize concerts that actually featured their teacher’s music. Although Espejo and Vargas Leal shared a mystifying passion for Julián Carrillo as a musical prophet of sorts, an uncompromising, utopian, and vociferous commitment to Sonido 13, and a belief that it represented the true and only path to the “future of music,” their everyday lifestyles and the way they embodied the spiritual/mystical overtones of their musical crusade were very different. Espejo was an ascetic character; he was a routinist and frugal man who as a matter of principle avoided calling attention to himself. From his conservative clothing style, general appearance—he often wore simple jackets or economical suits and shoes—and his demeanor, one would have a hard time picturing him as the experimental, antiestablishment, unconventional musician he was. It is said that every week, until the end of his life, he would walk several miles from the Doctores neighborhood, where he lived in Mexico City, to San Ángel, in order to tune and maintain the microtonal pianos at Carrillo’s house/museum—even years after Dolores Carrillo’s death.31 Oscar Vargas pieces and is titled Cometa 1973 / Cromometrofonía No. 1. This portion of the text appears at the end of the notes in the back of the second jacket only. 29.  César Juárez Joyner, a former student of Espejo, affirms that they also produced a second version of this recording, which included a voice over the music with instructions on how to meditate. César Juárez Joyner, personal interview, Mexico City, July 8, 2013. 30. Julián Carrillo, Problemas de estética musical enviados a la U.N.E.S.C.O.  y datos históricos relacionados con el problema del Sonido 13 (Mexico City:  Imprenta Universitaria, 1949), 27. 31.  Jimena Giménez Cacho, personal interview, Mexico City, August 20, 2008.

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Leal was more of a free spirit with an eccentric and hedonistic personality. He lived in the woods, in the outskirts of Cuernavaca, about one hour south of Mexico City, where he had a workshop dedicated to the construction of microtonal harps. Pursuing an alternative lifestyle in which psychotropic drugs were central for shamanic purposes, altering one’s consciousness, and augmenting the mind—in tune with counterculture movements from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as spiritual tendencies associated with some branches of New Age—Vargas Leal often would rather stay away from the social life and media appearances required to promote Sonido 13. Students of Espejo and Vargas Leal have fond memories of both of them but tend to remember Vargas Leal as more than a simple teacher. When talking about Vargas Leal to people who met him, their descriptions often project him as a type of guru, an illuminated presence admired not only for his knowledge but also for his unconventional way of life and his resolute refusal to sell out. This attitude eventually led Vargas Leal to distance himself from the group in the years preceding his death in 1993. In the early 1980s, more musicians and enthusiasts joined Vargas Leal and Espejo’s group; among them, Armando Nava Loya (b. 1957), Jorge Echevarría (b. 1957) and Ramón Guerrero (b. 1953). Echevarría and Guerrero took part in a well-publicized polemic that colored how regular people in Mexico perceived the idea of Sonido 13. In January 1982, Espejo, Newman, Echevarría, and Guerrero were invited to Hoy Mismo, the most popular Mexican morning TV show, to talk about a concert in homage to Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13, to be presented at the Manuel M. Ponce concert hall of the Palacio de Bellas Artes ( 7.3). I have a vivid memory of that show, which I watched live in my parents’ living room. As part of their TV appearance the group performed a piece (also called Cromometrofonía) for flute in quarter tones, guitar in quarter tones, and harp in sixteenth tones. As soon as the musicians finished playing, Guillermo Ochoa, the host of the show, told his audience that the network had received dozens of telephone calls alleging that pets across the nation were going crazy with the sounds of his guests’ music: “From Cuernavaca, someone informed us that a fish went crazy and was trying to commit suicide by bumping itself into the fishbowl glass; from Puebla, another person called to say that after hearing the music, two overexcited little birds died in ecstasy; somewhere in Mexico City a dog started ‘dancing,’ and dozens of persons felt such awe that some started crying, some laughing, and others entered a disturbing state of complete laxity.”32 The members of the group quickly 32.  Severo Mirón, “Triaca: Estrella Newman, Memo Ochoa, don Julián Carrillo y el escándalo de los animales muertos y excitados,” El Sol de México, February 5, 1982.

[226]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

mobilized to question the callers’ reliability and to explain that Sonido 13 represented no physical harm to those who listen to it. Armando Nava Loya, who joined the group in 1983, argues that it was all part of an ongoing conspiracy against Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 orchestrated by the Mexican intelligentsia;33 regardless, the publicity generated by the event is essential in understanding the mystical, supernatural, and even esoteric aura with which Sonido 13 has been associated thereafter. Nava confirms that the most recurrent question he has to answer when people approach him about Sonido 13 is whether it makes animals go crazy.34 Some of the venues chosen to continue promoting their musical cause also helped solidify this impression. In 1986, Nava landed a gig at the Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. The series of concerts that started that year with him, Vargas Leal, and Espejo performing harmonic tuning harps continued until 1991 with different lineups. First, Nava played with Espejo ( 7.4); later it was Nava and Vargas Leal; the last three years Nava collaborated with two of his own students, Fernando García Hernández and Rosa Calderón, and incorporated an electronic synthesizer into the ensemble. In all cases, scenes of stars, planets, and galaxies projected on the planetarium’s large dome-shaped projection screen always accompanied a musical performance centered around the Arpa Microinterválica—a 909-sound “micro-intervallic” harp in harmonic tuning built by Vargas Leal on commission from Nava’s father, who, infected by his son’s enthusiasm, became a sponsor and supporter of the group’s activities ( 7.5). In line with the location, and following in the tradition of Cometa 1973, the pieces presented in these performances featured titles such as Espacio sideral (Sidereal Space), Cósmica (Cosmic), both composed by Espejo and Nava; Sol (Sun), composed by Vargas; or Bajo las estrellas (Under the Stars), composed by Nava. Often dubbed as Conciertos

33.  Nava Loya argues that this conspiracy had its origin in the open differences between Julián Carrillo and Carlos Chávez. He claims that Chávez hated Carrillo with a vengeance and that his hatred has persisted to the present via the negative attitudes Chávez’s students and the students of his students continue to have toward Sonido 13. Nava Loya bases his interpretation on Carrillo’s own writings, in which Carrillo states that Chávez’s animosity started after Carrillo refused to let him use the National Symphony Orchestra to rehearse one of his pieces in 1920 (see Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, ed. Dolores Carrillo [San Luis Potosí: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992], 172). Nava Loya, personal interview, 2009; Armando Nava Loya, personal interview, Mexico City, December 11, 2008. Nava Loya has also written about it in Armando Nava Loya, ¿Qué ha pasado con el “Sonido 13” en 100 años? (Mexico City: Editorial Herbasa, 1995). He has also posted his opinions about this in http://www.sonido13.com/anecdotas.html#Ancre2 and http:// www.sonido13.com/larepresioncontinua.html (accessed on October 5, 2013). 34.  Nava Loya, personal interview, 2008.

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Cósmicos (Cosmic Concerts), the intention of these events, according to Nava, was to “acclimate the images with music because this artistic expression is in line with the planetarium.”35 Furthermore, in a note written for the series of concerts he and García Hernández presented in 1989, Nava states that a synthesizer combining sound effects and chromatic scales in equal temperament (ET) “will be used along with the micro-intervallic harp and, together with the planetarium, they will achieve a cosmos/ music union that will transport our sensations through the unknown in the development of a unique fantasy.”36 Similarly, newspaper articles described these concerts as “music to travel, to drive through outer space, to guide us into a different but beautiful and surrounding atmosphere. … We heard music … from outer space. Yes, a music that truly transported us to those magic, mysterious, and unknown places. … [F]‌rom an electronic harp [sic] and an outer space, cosmic experience, Sonido 13 is wonderfully coming together live, in a transcendental, perfect union with our senses.”37 It could be argued that the combination of location and rhetoric would be enough to push journalists to use the same esoteric tone in their chronicles. However, this type of reception was also reported from audiences when the group played at elementary schools, radio stations, or public squares.38 For example, on February 1989, Nava was invited to play his Arpa Microinterválica at an elementary school in Mexico City. Among several responses describing the music as “a bit scary,” some of the kids also stated that “I liked the [13th] sound because it sounds like the wind. … I felt tranquil and liked their demonstration of that sound”;39 and “I did not know Sonido 13 but I liked it a lot. It felt very nice; sometimes it was loud, sometimes it was soft; once in a while it sounded like a horror movie. It was happy and sad; I felt as if it was from another world.”40 These children’s responses are similar not only to the kind of rhetoric surrounding the planetarium concerts but also to responses to earlier presentations of Espejo and Vargas Leal. In March and April of 1983, they had 35.  Nava Loya, quoted in Rosa Ma. Chavarría Díaz, “El Planetario Luis Enrique Erro presenta ‘Sonido 13’, de Armando Nava,” El Nacional (July 11, 1988). 36.  Armando Nava Loya, “Reencuentro,” unpublished program notes for the 1989 season of Sonido 13 at the Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium in Mexico City. March 1989. 37.  Araceli Cano Tosqui, “Viaje al espacio con el arpa electronica. ¡Toda una aventura con el Sonido 13!” El Universal (July 13, 1990). 38.  These opinions are very similar to Dolores Carrillo’s description of the uncanny sounds of her father’s String Quartet No. 8. See Chapter 6, footnote 43. 39. José Rodrigo, elementary school student, unpublished comment. Armando Nava Loya, personal collection. February 23, 1989. 40.  Tania Lizette, elementary school student, unpublished comment. Armando Nava Loya, personal collection. Ca. February 23, 1989.

[228]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

offered a series of concerts at Cuernavaca’s Jardín Borda. Reflecting on their feelings when experiencing the music, members of the audience wrote: “Sonido 13 implies superior sensations beyond this world that may be incomprehensible to our minds”;41 or “When one listens to Sonido 13 the spirit is transported to sidereal space.”42 It is possible that the audience’s reaction may have been influenced by the musicians’ explanations of their music; other comments put in evidence the musicians’ tendency to speak for too long about their practice and about the historical significance of Carrillo’s work, a fact that may have put off some members of the audience. That may have been the case; however, the audiences’ comments inform us that they were willing either to buy the musicians’ mystical and esoteric discourse or to develop a New Age one of their own in relation to the odd sounds they experienced. Back when I was a high school student, one of our teachers asked our class to visit the Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium and write a report. My visit coincided with one of the shows in which Sonido 13 was played live to accompany the projection. It has been many years and I do not remember exactly what I wrote in that homework report but I do recall clearly that it was a fascinating experience. I do not remember focusing on the music in particular, though; it was the whole experience, the combination of images and sounds and the planetarium space, that impressed me the most. I was so enthralled that I did not pay attention to who the musicians were and thus did not make the connection between them and the TV polemic of a few years earlier. It would be many years later, when I was doing fieldwork for this book, that it hit me: the musicians at the planetarium, the musicians at Estrella Newman’s happening, and the guys I  was interviewing were all members of the group that had caused the TV scare back when I was a kid. For many years I thought the music played at the planetarium concert had been improvised. Even after getting a copy of Espejo and Vargas Leal’s 1973 recording, I still had the impression that their music was largely a spur-of-the-moment creation. I was surprised to learn, during a visit to Nava’s home in 2009, that the overall process of composition within the group and the specific way of working to synchronize images and live music at the planetarium performances was planned in advance and written down in their version of Carrillo’s numerical music notation.43 In the case of the planetarium, they would start by listing possible visual events

41.  Unpublished anonymous comment. Armando Nava Loya, personal collection. March 28, 1983. 42. Graciela, unpublished comment. Armando Nava Loya, personal collection. March 31, 1983. 43.  In their version of the numerical notation they got rid of bar lines.

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(for example, raining stars, comets, eclipses, clusters, black holes) and the time they lasted on screen, then attaching possible musical actions for each of them. Finally, they would write these “leitmotifs” down and arrange the scores in order to select the music depending on the projected sequence of images. On occasion, for particularly longer shots they would actually write complete compositions; according to Nava, for the first season he and Espejo composed a forty-minute-long piece in advance based on the projectionist’s plan of visual events.44 The concerts at the planetarium were not recorded for commercial release; however, bootleg tapes began to circulate at the Museo del Chopo and other underground music markets and exchange venues where fans could obtain rare LPs and cassettes. Thus, word of mouth ensured a continually growing audience not only for the group’s performances at the planetarium but also for other concerts, radio appearances, and additional events and presentations. The 1980s were probably the busiest and most visible years for Espejo, Vargas Leal, and Nava, a period in which they acquired an almost cult-like status among young, alternative music fans eager to hear innovative and unconventional artistic projects. Today, when I ask friends from my generation if they know anything about Sonido 13, many remember the performances Nava presented at that time; older folks may also remember the TV scandal from 1982. However, one of the more salient features of the group was an uncompromisingly contesting and antiestablishment attitude based on a self-perceived sense of superiority. This attitude, along with an often patronizing tone when explaining their musical crusade, gained them the animosity of many contemporary mainstream musicians who may otherwise have been more open to their cause. In 1985, Espejo and Nava were invited to participate at the 7th Foro de Música Nueva (New Music Forum), the most important contemporary music festival in Mexico, sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts). Nava recalls that on the occasion, they played right before the performance of a piece for prepared piano by Mario Lavista, one of the most influential composers and music entrepreneurs on the contemporary Mexican music scene. Instead of taking the invitation to participate in this forum as an opportunity to strengthen connections that would benefit their cause, Espejo and Nava took the opportunity to antagonize mainstream contemporary musicians, accusing them of trying to conceal their musical incompetence by modifying their pianos in order to get new sounds when—in their mind—all possible sounds had already been “discovered” by Carrillo.45 This type of

44.  Nava Loya, personal interview, 2009. 45.  Nava Loya, personal interview, 2009.

[230]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

intolerant rhetoric, often used to disqualify contemporary composers and their musical practices, was the result of the symbolic capital and prestige they felt their intermundane collaboration with Carrillo bestowed on them. Invoking Carrillo as an enlightened prophet who showed the world the path toward the “music of the future” was for them a source of artistic authenticity and even moral superiority. It made them members of a “chosen people,” the teleological goal of music history. Thus, their complete and uncritical belief in this teleology, coupled with the endogamy and misinformation that often characterizes these types of cult-like networks,46 alienated the group from other types of experimentalism in 1980s Mexico. Eventually, the same kind of doctrinarian attitudes within the group led to increasing tensions between the Sonido 13 faction led by Nava and that of the neo-mexicanistas (followers of Nueva Mexicanidad).

NUEVA MEXICANIDAD, PURIFICATION, AND SONIDO 13

Through her work at Taller de las Nuevas Artes Julián Carrillo and Fundación Ollin Yoleme, Estrella Newman has been a continual advocate for a type of Nueva Mexicanidad in which Carrillo figures prominently as cultural and intermundane presence. She started combining indigenous and Sonido 13 instruments back in the 1970s in performance/happenings inspired by Mexica and Maya rituals under the aegis of Nueva Mexicanidad. She explains the type of musical shows/rituals performed by her group: We start the performances with a Mexica ceremony, and we play [music]. [The beginning] is the blowing of the tune of the seashells [atecocollis] toward the four ritual directions [cardinal directions] … the seashells are natural

46.  The group never recognized Carrillo’s musical achievements in dialogue with other microtonal projects from the first part of the twentieth century. They also never acknowledged the wide varieties of tonal and scalar systems that existed throughout the world beyond Western equal temperament. Particularly frustrating is their apparent ignorance of the work in just intonation (tuning based on the intervals of the overtone series) by composers like Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, or even Carrillo’s Mexican contemporary, Augusto Novaro; this is especially odd since their claim to fame within the Sonido 13 complex is that they were able to make Carrillo’s prophecy about the “purification” of the musical system a reality by tuning their instruments to “harmonic scales” (intervals based on the overtone series). Instead, their determined adoption of Carrillo’s own rhetoric about being the “first” composer in the Western tradition to ever think about these possible new partitions of the whole tone made them look stubborn and ignorant, and, in the end, obscured their possible artistic and creative contributions.

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overtones [sic], and thus sound very far … that was our way of harmonizing with Father Cosmos. … We play extraordinary symphonies. … [I]‌t is like a great, never-heard symphony.47

Newman’s venues were usually her own house (where happenings such as the one described earlier in this chapter took place regularly, performances in which Espejo would often participate) and Nueva Mexicanidad festivals (where she participated regularly, reciting her own Netzahualcóyotl-inspired poetry and accompanying herself on the Arpa Carrillo that Vargas Leal built for her). Before her collaboration with Marisa de Lille in 2009, one of the most memorable Sonido 13 projects Newman was involved with was the production of Quinto sol: música infinita (1978), an LP whose title refers to the Mexica myth of creation48 ( 7.6). In this album, Tino Contreras, a legendary Mexican jazz drummer, collaborates with soprano Margarita González in a fantastically unique project that combines a Dave Brubeck-inspired style of psychedelic jazz reminiscent of 1970s Mexican B movies49 or US TV shows like Mission Impossible, free jazz, and the microtonal sounds of the Arpas Carrillo.50 A fan described “Orbita 13” (Orbit 13), one of the pieces in the album, as “an intoxicating blend … a track [that] required specially modified instruments to be built in order to create the wonderfully strange percussive effects which feature in this lopsided waltz time number. Shards of prepared piano collide with a deep jazz groove while sonorous baritone sax overtones dissolve into kinetic percussive joy.”51 This was Contreras’s only immersion in Sonido 13. Produced by Newman in a limited edition (only ca. 300 copies) via her Taller de las Nuevas Artes, Quinto sol: música infinita has become a collector’s item among fans of Mexican jazz and rare experimental music. Its seemingly odd combination

47.  Newman, personal interview. 48.  See footnote 46. 49.  Those starring characters like El Santo or Alex Dynamo. El Santo is probably the most legendary Mexican wrestler; in the 1960s and 1970s he starred in many Mexican B movies in which he played a type of super hero/secret agent who had to fight everything from mad scientists trying to take over the world to extraterrestrials and zombies. Some of these movies include Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro (1962), and Las momias de Guanajuato (1972). Alex Dynamos was a kind of Latin American James Bond who starred in movies like Peligro! … Mujeres en acción (1967) and S.O.S. Operación bikini (1969). 50.  See Tino Contreras, Quinto sol: música infinita. Taller Escuela de las Nuevas Artes QL 001. 1978. “Orbita,” one of the works included in this recording, was re-released in the compilation El jazz mexicano de Tino Contreras. Jazzman JMANLP 043. 2011. 51.  A Sound Awareness, http://fingersports.blogspot.com/2011/11/el-jazz-mexicanode-tino-contreras.html (accessed on October 13, 2013).

[232]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

of musical styles speaks of how spaces at the intersection of popular culture, art music, and indigenous imaginaries allow regular people to imagine peculiar cosmopolitan futurist audiotopias.52 Contreras work in Quinto sol: música infinita could be seen as a type of ethnofusion venture; it foreshadows the work of more permanent Mexican ethnofusion bands, projects, and artists from the 1980s. Some of these groups were formed within Oscar Vargas Leal, David Espejo, and Estrella Newman’s Sonido 13 circle. Jorge Echevarría and Ramón Guerrero started studying with Espejo, Vargas Leal, and Dolores Carrillo in 1981, toward the end of their music studies at the National Conservatory. They had obtained their early musical training at the Escuela Libre de Música (Free School of Music) in Mexico City, a school founded by José F.  Vásquez, a student of Carrillo in the 1900s. There, they received a very basic introduction to Carrillo and his microtonal system by Vásquez’s daughters, who were in charge of the Escuela Libre in the 1970s. Echevarría explains that “the daughters of Maestro Vásquez would tell us about Sonido 13. However, it was a little ambiguous because they would teach us about the subdivision of the whole tone but it was very open because there was never an explicit example; nothing we could hear.”53 Being young musicians imbued with the countercultural spirit of Woodstock and its Mexican response, Avándaro, it was only their chance encounter with Oscar Vargas Leal many years later and the discovery of his holistic approach to music as an integral part of an alternative lifestyle that definitely triggered their interest in Sonido 13. As students of Dolores Carrillo and Espejo, Echevarría and Guerrero learned the theoretical and historical aspects of Sonido 13 and formed the Terceto Nueva Alianza (New Alliance Trio) with Echevarría on flute in quarter tones, Guerrero on guitar in quarter and eighth tones, and Espejo on harp in sixteenth tones.54 This was the group whose playing started the 1982 TV polemic described earlier in this chapter. From the almost shamanic figure of Vargas Leal, Echavarría and Guerrero inherited a curiosity for the overtone series and harmonic scales, and an interest in instrument construction. In the end, it was Vargas Leal’s

52.  I  borrow the term “audiotopia” from Josh Kun to refer to sonic spaces “of effective utopian longing where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together, not only in the space of a particular piece of music itself, but in the production of social space and mapping of geographical space that music makes possible as well.” Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 23. 53.  Echevarría, telephone interview. 54.  Guerrero, telephone interview.

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mystical presence that truly influenced the development of Echevarría and Guerrero’s artistic vision thereafter. Guerrero insists that their involvement with neo-indigenist musical practices started around the same time they met Vargas, influenced by the work of groups like Tribu, one of the pioneers of ethnofusion in 1970s Mexico.55 Their interest in ethnofusion coincided with Newman’s own involvement with Nueva Mexicanidad; this fortuitous encounter provided Echevarría and Guerrero with a discursive and practical space for the intersection of concerns with indigenous spirituality and harmonic scales. Echevarría elaborates: When we started working with Sonido 13, based on Maestro Carrillo’s ideology, based on the law of the overtone series, I  realized that pre-Hispanic instruments are based on that kind of tuning. They do not follow Ramos de Pareja’s tuning [system] but rather they go with the law of Nature. … We started a group that fused pre-Hispanic instruments and Sonido 13 instruments.56

The group founded in 1981 by Echevarría and Ramón Guerrero, amusingly known as “los barbones” [the bearded ones] within the Sonido 13 circle (Figure 7.3), was called Itza (from Itzazenzontlecuicatl, a neologism in Nahuatl that stands for “knowledge and wisdom of the bird of four hundred voices”; the band was later re-named Itza Kayum).57 The group combined Maya and Mexica pre-Columbian instruments such as the huéhuetl (three-headed drum), kayum (clay drum), chicahuaztli (cane-shaped rattle), ocarina (clay whistle), and chul (bamboo, wood, and clay flute); electric and electronic instruments like the electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard, and synthesizer; and quarter-tone flutes and guitars. They developed a show based on imagined indigenous rituals and presented it at government agencies like ISSSTE (Social Security Institute)

55.  Guerrero, telephone interview. Tribu, founded in 1973, is one of the earliest examples of the type of ethnofusion that combined pre-Columbian indigenous instruments and electric instruments. 56.  Echevarría, telephone interview. 57.  Echevarría’s argument that pre-Columbian music was based on the overtone series is incorrect. Recent organology scholarship shows that although pre-Columbian wind instruments were tuned to non-ET scales (and some surviving instruments even produce partials within the overtone series), the fact that there are no standardized instrumental body shapes or mouthpieces means “there can be no fully standardized scales; to date, there is no evidence of consistent pitches or intervals, nor of great interest in the harmonic series, nor of maximizing pitch range.” Susan Rawcliffe, “Eight West Mexican Flutes in the Fowler Museum,” The World of Music49, no. 2 (2007):  53. See also Susan Rawcliffe, “Complex Acoustics in Pre-Columbian Flute Systems,” in Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, ed. Carol E. Robertson (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 35–64.

[234]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

Figure 7.3  Ramón Guerrero, Dolores Carrillo, and Jorge Echevarría in Julián Carrillo’s piano room in Mexico City. Used by courtesy of José Ramón Guerrero Asperó.

and Sociocultur (Mexico City’s cultural agency), universities, music schools, and archaeological sites throughout the country and even abroad. Itza’s were pedagogical dance and music events in which Echevarría and Guerrero provided information both about the importance of solar cycles for pre-Columbian cultures and the particularities of Carrillo’s Sonido 13 music.58 Both Newman’s projects and Itza were born at a time of renewed indigenous political and cultural activism in Mexico and abroad that intersected with New Age ideologies—Newman collaborated with La Cuna de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle in California and Itza participated at Chicago’s Fiesta del Sol.59 Danzantes and pre-Columbian-inspired music had been an integral aspect of these movements for a long time.60 The significance of Newman and Itza’s projects grows from these particular 58.  The Mexica myth of the Five Suns states that there have been four suns, worlds, or universes before the one we live in. In order to keep the fifth sun from dying, the Mexicas had to perform offerings of blood and hearts. 59.  David Kelley, “Near Blythe, Historian Sees Solar Plants as Threat to Ancient Carvings,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2010; and Echevarría, telephone interview. 60.  The most salient and publicized example of this is the work of Xokonoschtletl Gómora (b. 1951), a dancer, musician, and activist for the preservation of pre-Columbian Mexican culture. He is better known for his long-standing struggle to pressure the Austrian government to return Moctezuma’s headdress to Mexico, currently kept at Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde.

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historical circumstances. However, among the neo-Mexican effervescence, Itza and Estrella Newman’s incorporation of Sonido 13 instruments to the re-imagined pre-Columbian rituals was unique. The niches developed by Newman to promote their views on Sonido 13, especially the Taller de las Nuevas Artes, provided David Espejo a way to keep promoting, teaching, and staying active as a Sonido 13 musician after Oscar Vargas Leal left the group, after Armando Nava slowed down his own activities toward the end of the 1990s, and after Itza became a more independent project in the late 1980s. In his study about Nueva Mexicanidad, Francisco de la Peña briefly acknowledges that the work of Julián Carrillo, Diego Rivera, and Gerardo Murillo “Dr.  Atl,” has nourished “the imaginary of the neo-mexicanista movement,”61 although he does not offer details as to how and why this has happened. It is understandable that Rivera’s indigenista murals and Dr. Atl’s paintings of Mexican landscapes—including many canvases dedicated to the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes, which are considered holy land by the neo-mexicanista movement—could find their way into Nueva Mexicanidad iconography; but it is more difficult to identify why Carrillo, with his ambivalence toward Mexican indigenous culture, could have appealed to the ideologues of the movement. As mentioned earlier, Carrillo was a child of positivism and liberalism, and as such, he not only believed that Mexican indigenous peoples needed to integrate into modern mainstream Mexican society in order to contribute to the country’s progress but also understood non-Western musical practices as “primitive genre[s]‌ … but not art in the ideological and philosophical sense of the word.”62 Whenever Carrillo mentioned his own indigenous background, he did it to show how hard work, study, and discipline allowed social mobility even to an indigenous person like him. He thought of himself as a prime example of what embracing Western rationality and culture could offer indigenous people. However, although he rarely wrote about indigenous cultures in his numerous books and articles, his ambiguous stance regarding pre-Columbian culture is evident in an article he wrote about Preludio a Colón, where he states: I dedicated [Preludio a Colón] to the great sailor who discovered the Americas, and who, by doing this, incorporated the Indians from these blessed lands to

61.  Francisco de la Peña, Los hijos del sexto sol (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 2002), 246. 62.  Julián Carrillo in a trivia interview published ca. 1923. Newspaper clip kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive.

[236]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

European civilization; and [I say] this without lamenting that the conquerors destroyed our wonderful cultures, which had individuals of such great mentality as Netzahualpilli’s, the son of Netzahualcoyotl, who is said to have had a temple to the divinity built by the Texcoco Lake shore and painted its interior in black. When asked about that, he replied with a phrase that I consider one of the greatest of humanity, since it encapsulates an extraordinarily profound philosophical idea: “I have ordered the temple to be painted in black,” he said, “because whenever I think of the divinity—the creating and immaterial god—I see everything black.”63

This is one of Carrillo’s few explicit apologies of pre-Columbian indigenous cultures in his writings. Although Carrillo admited the substance of their philosophical and spiritual beliefs, it is also clear that he still encouraged their incorporation into Western European civilization ( 7.7). With such an ambiguous position it would seem unlikely for Carrillo and his artistic endeavor to become icons and symbols of a movement that prophesies a renaissance of indigenous culture that would replace European civilization in Mexico. One could argue that the centrality of the number 13 in Nueva Mexicanidad numerology—as in the thirteen heavens of Mexica mythology—could be seen as a type of metaphorical connection by apologists of the movement. However, as foreseen in Echevarría and Newman’s comments, it was the imaginary engagement of the overtone series at the intersection of Carrillo’s discourse about microtonality and a series of imagined values attached to his indigenous background that informs this intermundane collaboration. In an interview published at the height of the success of his planetarium concerts, Armando Nava declared that as Sonido 13 musicians, their work was not to interpret Carrillo’s music but “to make reality what he was unable to do; we made possible what he said was going to happen. It is a continuation of his work.”64 Nava’s statement refers to Espejo and Vargas Leal’s work with harmonic scales, which was the path discursively followed by all of their pupils, including Echavarría, Guerrero, and Nava. As explained earlier, this project was validated on Carrillo’s three fundamental goals of Sonido 13:  the simplification, enrichment, and purification of music. For Carrillo and his students, the simplification of music was achieved by developing the Sonido 13 numerical notation system, which eliminated

63. Julián Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical (Mexico City: Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, 1967), 198. 64.  Armando Nava quoted in Rosa Ma. Chavarría, “ ‘Sonido 13’, punto de partida de una nueva generación musical,” El Nacional, April 15, 1989.

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staves, additional lines, keys, alteration signs (sharps, flats, etc.); according to Carrillo, the system “made it prodigiously easier to write music as well as learning it [and allowed] the art of sounds to be cultivated not just by a specific group of people, as it happens today, but by anyone who knows how to count up to twelve.”65 Sonido 13’s enrichment of music was possible due to the vast possibilities of pitches and chords derived from the intervallic subdivision of the whole tone. Carrillo explained this by stating that his system “achieved the sixteenths of a tone, which expanded the sounds of music eight hundred per cent. In the years following this, the achievements of the Sonido 13 revolution have increased in such a way that it is not possible that more sounds could be achieved in the future.”66 Regarding the so-called “purification” of music, Carrillo explored it in relation to understanding the overtone series as a type of “natural” musical scale. Soon after devising the Sonido 13 as an ET subdivision of the whole tones within the octave, Carrillo attempted to provide a scientific and acoustic base to his system. However, as described in Chapter 5, he quickly discovered the contradictions in trying to validate an ET microtonal system with a discourse about it being closer to Nature or as the natural consequence of incorporating harmonics from the overtone series. Although Carrillo wrote many texts criticizing ET, he was never able to solve the contradiction raised by the fact that Sonido 13 was a system within equal temperament and not within the overtone series as he would have wished. Carrillo died thinking that this “purification of music”—the abolition of equal temperament and its replacement by a harmonic tuning—was Sonido 13’s unresolved task. As such, Espejo, Vargas Leal, and their pupils took it upon themselves to “fulfill Carrillo’s prophecies.”67 They stuck to Carrillo’s idea that the Western music system needed to be “rectified” in order to follow the overtone series, which, Nava argues “is produced by Nature.”68 Curiously, within the Sonido 13 group, the discourse about Nature intersected with Nueva Mexicanidad’s desire to vindicate pre-Columbian cultures and spirituality also as somehow closer to Nature than European civilization may be. The latter is clear in Newman’s description of the seashells used in her Mexica performance as being able to “harmonize with Father Cosmos” because they produce natural harmonics;69 it is also

65.  Julián Carrillo, Rectificación básica al sistema musical clásico: análisis físico-músico “Pre-Sonido 13” (San Luis Potosí: Comité de los 13, Pro-Julián Carrillo, 1930), 43. 66.  Julián Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (Mexico City:  Ediciones Sonido 13, 1957), 21. 67.  Nava Loya, personal interview, 2009. 68.  Nava Loya, personal interview, 2009. 69.  See footnote number 57.

[238]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

evident in Echevarría’s claim that pre-Columbian instruments follow “the law of Nature” instead of ET. Newman goes further by also appealing to Carrillo’s ethnic background as validation for their intermundane invocation within her neo-mexicanista project when she states that “the Maestro [Carrillo] was indigenous, and I am sure he knew our vigesimal mathematical system. It is the mathematics of corn, the nepohualtzintzin. An abacus that is like Carrillo’s music, infinite. … [W]‌ith it you can count up to the stars.”70 Odd at first, the type of mythological invocation of Julián Carrillo at the rhetorical nexus of Nature, cosmos, ethnicity, experimentation, celebration of indigeneity, healing powers, and spirituality makes perfect sense when analyzed within the New Age spirit in which the activities of the Sonido 13 group and Nueva Mexicanidad developed. One of the characteristics of the New Age is precisely its diversity, which makes it difficult to define. However, as Paul Heelas argues, “beneath much of [New Age’s] heterogeneity, there is remarkable consistency … the same (or very similar) lingua franca to do with the human and planetary condition and how it can be transformed.”71 It is precisely this lingua franca, a language about making contact with Nature and one’s inner spirituality through a “shift from our contaminated mode of being … to that realm which constitutes our authentic nature,”72 which links together experiences and practices as diverse as the ones described in this chapter. It is this obsession with “purification” (consistently borrowed from Carrillo’s own rhetoric), with fixing the spiritual and cultural wrongs of human history and personal story, that makes Espejo, Vargas Leal, and Nava’s harmonic tuning program; Echevarría, Guerrero, and Newman’s Nueva Mexicanidad; and de Lille’s healing practice meaningful as part of a larger philosophical complex. However, this is not to say that these musical projects should be understood as New Age music. Although they may share some traits with what music labels, stores, and consumers understand as New Age music, such as an emphasis on “music’s ability to harmonize, mind body, and spirit,”73 ultimately, the utilitarian character of most New Age music, positioned more as a commercial product with a specified purpose (to meditate, to relax, to shop, etc.) than as art,74 makes them into very 70.  Newman, personal interview. 71. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement:  The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 2. 72. Heelas, The New Age Movement, 2. 73.  Leslie Berman, “New Age Music?” in Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Basil (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 254. 74.  Ryan Hibbett, “The New Age Taboo,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22, no. 3 (2010): 297–298.

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different cultural projects. This aura of authenticity is further emphasized in Sonido 13 musicians’ characterization of their music as alternative and experimental—thus, non-commercial—with the prestige economies such claim unleashes. The mythological invocation of Carrillo and Sonido 13 performed by his pupils as part of these creative projects speaks of the ways in which powerful uses of music in everyday life continuously give it new meaning and signification. In the epigrammatic quotation from Alfred Tennyson that opens this chapter, the “faithful mirror” refers to a river the poet is sitting by and on whose waters he claims to see the reflection of his desires. But the winding waters of a river can never be fully faithful; the images one may see in them are nothing but a refraction of reality. It is only our desire making sense of that refraction that allows us to see in it the objects of our affection. Evoking Tennyson’s words as a poetic metaphor to better understand the kind of intermundane economy generated between Carrillo and his followers, one could argue that the music produced under the auspices of the Sonido 13 group in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s behaves like that river; instead of actually reflecting Carrillo’s image, it refracts it. Thus, Sonido 13 becomes a speculum musicae, a mirror of sounds that allows for the transformation of Carrillo’s reflection into a refraction resignified according to the many experimental cultural projects that brought together and eventually tore apart the members of the Sonido 13 group after the composer’s death.

NATUR ALIZED SPIRITUALIT Y, TR ANSCENDENTALISM, AND CARRILLO’S SONIDO 13

An exploration of post-Carrillo Sonido 13 practices allows one to “hear” a number of cultural overtones and links that may go otherwise unnoticed. I take note of these overtones in order to re-orient a transhistorical exploration of Julián Carrillo’s spirituality and the ambiguous place of religious music in his catalogue. In this section I propose to break the semiotic chain of mythology to make sense of the past through our experiences related to Sonido 13 in the present. As explained in previous chapters, Julián Carrillo was a true child of nineteenth-century positivism; throughout his life, he tried to explain the development of his microtonal system using a rhetoric born out of a profound belief in historical teleology and an obsession with science as the path to understanding the mysteries of the natural world. However, Carrillo’s attempts to validate his microtonal crusade as a futuristic endeavor grounded on both tradition and innovation are

[240]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

often somehow marred by contradictions in both musical discourse and practice. This is especially evident at particular moments in his writings when he refers to his microtonal discoveries in quasi-theosophical or mystical terms: “When the interplanetary connection is achieved, it will be possible to find new timbres; but no new sounds”;75 or “I added the quarters of a tone, which are emotionally superior to the semitones. This will produce in Christianity a spiritual elevation never before attained.”76 Furthermore, one may argue that the type of mystical rhetoric one hears in Nueva Mexicanidad was also somehow associated to Sonido 13 even before the composer’s death. For example, in July 1959, after the presentation of his Carrillo pianos at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts, Carrillo received a peculiar letter in which an admirer named Lucio de Miguel congratulated him on the success of the demonstration and stated that God, our Lord, has chosen you to be the instrument to disseminate the Holy Spirit prophesized by Quetzalcóatl when he said:  “For my race the Spirit will speak.” Yesterday, I corroborated the fulfillment of that prophecy for the future in the present time. … [T]‌he harmony of Sonido 13 is the peak and sum of all harmonies through which the promised Holy Spirit expresses itself.77

These moments in Carrillo’s rhetoric and in his representation may seem awkward when compared to the overall scientistic language that dominates his writings and the somehow marginal place of religious music in his catalogue. In an intermundane twist I propose to make sense of them by reading and listening to Carrillo’s relation to spirituality and religion transhistorically and rhizophonically, taking the New Age spirit that informs his resignification from the 1970s onward as a filter to understand him in the past. Thus, looking at Carrillo through the New-Age-like notion of “naturalized spirituality” allows us to make sense of his aspirations to scientific authenticity and rationality while also revealing a deep relationship between the cultural policies of the post-revolutionary Mexican government and the ambiguous place of religious music among his works. Robert C. Solomon coined the notion of “naturalized spirituality” as a love for Nature (the world, universe, or cosmos) and for understanding it as it is; it is a movement toward a larger appreciation of our roles in the world and a kind of reverence and awe for Nature

75. Carrillo, El infinito en las escalas y los acordes, 21. 76.  Julián Carrillo, Introduction to Misa en cuartos de tono (manuscript kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive, Mexico City). 77.  Letter from Lucio de Miguel M. to Julián Carrillo, July 14, 1959. Julián Carrillo Archive, Mexico City.

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and its laws.78 Thus, naturalized spirituality is a larger sense of life in which individuals see beyond themselves in the relations they establish first with the people around them and then with Nature. This type of spirituality is relational and ultimately embraces a belief in cosmic trust that is social and global; it is cosmopolitan.79 It is precisely this kind of New Age cosmopolitan spirituality, with its root in the notion of cosmos as the world humans inhabit, which lies at the core of both the historical and contemporary reception of Carrillo’s microtonal music. After Carrillo’s first microtonal music concert in Mexico City on February 15, 1925, the Mexican composer and critic Antonio Gomezanda described his impressions as follows: I had never felt as close to Nature as I  did with maestro Carrillo’s Prelude [Preludio a Colón]. Here, I realized what the caressing wind had told me on previous occasions:  the perfume that, without knowing its source, caressingly surrounded me. The day Maestro Carrillo presents an idea like the admirable climax of his Prelude with an orchestra I will let my soul get lost in the music, believing it is in communion with the great symphony of Nature.80

Later that year, Carrillo and the musicians who had collaborated in that concert embarked on a national tour to introduce Mexican audiences in cities and villages throughout the country to Sonido 13. After a concert in Tampico, a critic for the local newspaper La Opinión wrote: It is unquestionable that this is a spiritual conquest of enormous transcendence; it belongs to an astral realm, to the Fourth Dimension, to the future realm of artistic sensibility in its most useful appreciations. A sentiment of elevation and non-gravity is evident in the new music. It imprints impulses of perfection and aspirations of infinity in the mood [of the listener]. And such sensations correspond to the psychic state in the astral realm, according to the Maestro’s appreciations. [Carrillo’s great conquest] belongs to the realm of spirituality and opens new fields for human consciousness to enter into the dominion of the Fourth Dimension.81 78. Robert C.  Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic:  The Thoughtful Love of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41. 79. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, 6. 80.  Antonio Gomezanda, “La primera fiesta del Grupo 13,” El Sonido 13 2, no. 1 (1925): 9. 81.  F. de la Colina, La Opinión (Tampico), quoted in El Sonido 13 2, no. 19–20 (1925): 7. Speculations about the Fourth Dimension are common in theosophical rhetoric of the early twentieth century. See Alexander Horne, Theosophy and the Fourth Dimension (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1928).

[242]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

In January 1926, Carrillo arrived in New  York City ready to begin the international crusade to promote his microtonal credo. After the premiere of his Sonata casi fantasía at Town Hall on March 13, pianist and critic Mary Lindsay-Oliver published the following lines: One seemed to have entered a realm of heavenly zephyrs such as those heard only in dreams or seen in the subtle iridescent colors of the sunset reflected on water! To me the accomplishment seemed most truly a reflection of modern psychology and aspiration!82

Similar opinions and remarks appeared in newspapers or magazines reviewing concerts of Carrillo’s microtonal music in Mexico and the United States. Audiences of dilettantes, music critics, musicians, and music lovers were in tune when describing Sonido 13 as music conducive to a unique connection with mysterious aspects of Nature or psychic life, or plainly as music from a different realm of understanding. In their articulation of nature, human consciousness, or cosmic mystery, these characterizations speak both of the naturalized spirituality described by Solomon and the spirituality related to the supernatural that nineteenth-century Romantic artists favored. They also resonate with the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy sought by followers of theosophy, including composers active during the first decades of the twentieth century.83 Spirituality is not located in music but rather in our relation with music; it “takes place in the space between the subject and the object; it comes into being in relations, relations stripped off from ordinary structures.”84 Thus, regardless of the intense feelings it awakens in its audiences, the naturalized, romantic, and theosophical spirituality of Sonido 13 is not inherent to it. Instead, it is relationally situated in the affairs it allows its consumers to establish with the sounds but also with the world around 82.  Mary Lindsay-Oliver, “The Music of the Future” in El Sonido 13 no. 2 (1926): 28. 83. For explorations on how theosophical ideas informed the work of early twentieth-century composers like Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, Charles Ives, Dane Rudhyar, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky, see Barbara Barthelmes, Raum und Klang:  das musikalische und theoretische Schaffen Ivan Wyschnegradskys (Hofheim:  Wolke, 1995); Lincoln Ballard, “Scriabin and Ives: An Unanswered Question?” Journal of the Scriabin Society of America 9, no. 1 (2005): 37–61; John Covach, “Schoenberg and the Occult: Some Reflections on the ‘Musical Idea,’ ” Theory and Practice:  Journal of the Music Theory Society of New  York State 17 (1992): 103–118; Deniz Ertan, Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 27–34; and Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65–68. 84.  Marcel Corbussen, Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 20–21.

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them, as evident in Gomezanda, de la Colina, and Lindsay-Oliver’s opinions. In other words, the perceived spirituality in the music is created in the listeners’ minds as they relate the new and strange sounds they hear to their own beliefs and ideas about the mysteries of the universe, the awe-inspiring character of the natural world, and even existential concerns about transcendental consciousness and psychic existence. These descriptions talk about how audiences signified Sonido 13 as a spiritual enterprise in the act of consumption, a process likely defined by the ways in which their own beliefs and cultural backgrounds resonate with the rhetoric used by Carrillo when presenting his music. The relational character of the construction of musical meaning implies that to understand better the spiritual reverberations of Carrillo’s microtonal music one should put these narratives of reception in dialogue with the composer’s processes of production and representation.

UNDERSTANDING SPIRITUALIT Y AND RELIGION IN JULIÁN CARRILLO’S OUTPUT

In exploring the apparently unlikely relation between Modernism and religion in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Robert Weldon Whalen addresses the transfiguration that the notion of God undergoes in relation to Nature in the works of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.85 Focusing on the ambiguous place of religious music in Carrillo’s catalogue, it is possible to discern his engagement with a futurist, Modernist, aesthetic project also informed by a changing notion of spirituality. Early in the composer’s life, his spirituality was expressed in Catholicism; later, he departed from it in response to both personal and political circumstances; finally, toward the end of his life, Carrillo attempted to reestablish a connection between the naturalized spirituality that informs his music after 1925 and Catholicism. Before 1925, Carrillo composed several religious compositions, three masses (1895, 1913, and 1918), the Requiem, Op. 1 (1900), as well as a short microtonal Ave María (1924). With the exception of the latter, all of Carrillo’s early religious works are large-scale compositions difficult to perform, as they require large orchestral and vocal ensembles. However, between 1924 and the year he composed his last two major religious works, Misa en cuartos de tono a S.S. Juan XXIII (1962) and Segunda misa “a capella” en cuartos de tono (1965), Carrillo’s only religious 85.  Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Grand Rapids, MI: Eermans, 2007), 240–241 and 301–303.

[244]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

composition was his Pequeño requiem atonal (1956). There are two reasons for his apparent lack of interest in religious or spiritually oriented music: first, an anti-religious climate dominated intellectual and political life in Mexico after the revolution; and second, the naturalized spirituality of Sonido 13 slowly replaced and transformed the composer’s earlier Catholic spirituality. Carrillo had committed a number of political errors and miscalculations during the armed phase of the Mexican revolution that had been very costly personally and professionally. His political naivety was evident in his acceptance of the National Conservatory directorship during the short regime of Victoriano Huerta (1913–1914), which resulted in Carrillo’s exile to Cuba and New York. When he came back to Mexico in 1918 to lead the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) he had learned to be more careful of and attentive to his political surroundings. During the chaos that ended the administration of President Venustiano Carranza and led to the eventual presidency of Álvaro Obregón in 1920, he was not only able to navigate cleverly a mined political territory and maintain his post at the NSO but he also managed to become an ally of José Vasconcelos, the new minister of education, in Vasconcelos’s educational-philosophical crusade.86 Acutely aware of the anti-clerical sentiment that began to dominate the Mexican political scene with Obregón’s administration, Carrillo quickly forgot his proposal to create a school of sacred music—an idea he had publicly supported before 1920 but one that he would never mention again in his life—and refrained from programming music with any religious overtones with the NSO. Although nothing in Carrillo’s writings shows that he was aware of the fading place of Catholicism in the 1920s national political environment, composer Alfredo Carrasco’s autobiography offers an anecdote that accounts for Carrillo’s position on the matter. As head of the NSO, Carrillo was to conduct a number of works selected by a special committee formed in 1921; one of them was Carrasco’s Motete eucarístico (Eucharistic Motet). In March 1922, Carrillo requested a meeting with Carrasco, which Carrasco later described: I arrived at the meeting and, as I  thought, it was to inform me that there was certain repugnancy from those “up there” to have my work in any of 86.  Carrillo’s NSO programming during that period clearly shows his awareness of Vasconcelos’s reverence of Beethoven as the musical embodiment of his philosophical ideas. See Leonora Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others: Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics of Modern Mexican Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 100–114.

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the programs of the [NSO’s] concert season because its character was eminently religious and it could be interpreted as propaganda for the Church. … [S]‌ectarianism triumphed and the Motete eucarístico was taken out [of the NSO’s season program]. 87

This anecdote shows that Carrillo was not only aware of the political problems Catholicism faced at the time in Mexico but was also willing to navigate them. The fact that religious music remained largely absent from Carrillo’s output during the next forty years coupled with the scientistic rhetoric of his microtonal crusade may have led people to believe that Carrillo was an agnostic.88 When José Velasco Urda questioned the composer about this in Julián Carrillo: su vida y su obra (1943), Carrillo gave him an answer that offers a rare glimpse into the particularities of his spiritual beliefs: Me, indifferent to the mystery of creation? Never; although I  do declare to everyone who wants to hear me that I have never believed to have enough intelligence to understand what the Divinity is. … My admiration [for the Divinity] is the result of profound meditation throughout my life; I explain: From whom did we receive the mystery of the air we breathe? From whom the light? From whom the water? From whom the sun? From whom the earth? From whom the fruits? From whom the trees? From whom the flowers and their scent? From whom the mountains? From whom the seas and from whom the forests? And from whom astros that baffle us with the mystery of their beauty? Who does not marvel when contemplating the colors of the sky at dusk? Who, while contemplating the multiplicity of worlds on the celestial heights, does not think of the Divinity, the only one capable of realizing such marvels? And about ourselves as humans, who does not feel beauty even in negative elements? Who does not marvel with the wonder of complete darkness? Who does not feel their soul swell when contemplating the dawn of the day? And who does not marvel with what we ourselves are both physically and morally? Who is not astonished when thinking about each and every one of our organs and our faculties?89

Carrillo’s emphasis on the beauty, magnificence, and mystery of Nature as a central aspect of his mysticism links his beliefs to naturalized 87.  Alfredo Carrasco, Mis recuerdos (Mexico City: UNAM, 1996), 390. 88.  The fact that none of the existing academic studies about Julián Carrillo and his music pay any attention to the role of spirituality in his music indicates that scholars may have also believed this to be true. 89.  José Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo:  su vida y su obra (Mexico City:  Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1943), 7–8.

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spirituality. It is significant that although Velasco Urda commended Carrillo by saying that such concepts “could only be expressed with such fervor by one of the great priests of the Catholic Church,”90 the composer chose to stay away from Catholic rhetoric and imagery. It is also telling that although he would use it later in his life, at least throughout the interview with Velasco Urda he chose not to use the word “god,” preferring instead the terms divinidad creadora (creative divinity) or misterio creador (creative mystery). A  few more pieces of circumstantial evidence about Carrillo’s understanding of spirituality beyond organized religious systems appear in his memoir, Testimonio de una vida (1992).91 In the book’s preface, Dolores Carrillo states that “he was a profound admirer of God in his creation; in the genius of men and the marvel of Nature. And according to his beliefs he was respectful of my own religiosity [Catholicism].”92 The memoire is an edited and expanded version of Urda Velasco’s book with additions from other writings by Carrillo as well as a few new portions dictated by the composer to his daughter. Here, Carrillo himself clarifies his beliefs in terms of an ideology closely related to naturalized spirituality, when he says: I should mention that as an adult, especially after I turned eighty years old, I have come to truly hear the voice of God in everything that surrounds me; I hear His voice in the songs of the birds and the terrifying voice of thunder; I hear it in the waves of the stormy sea and at night, during the deep darkness and silence that wrap me before falling asleep, when my spirit prostrates before that Voice, which is the wonderful work of creation. … In the last ten or twenty years I feel the immensity of God so profoundly that it almost seems irreverent to find people who, in their naïveté, ask to be brought close to Him.93

Dolores Carrillo’s remarks support the claim that Carrillo’s notion of spirituality may not have been a conventional one, aligned to a specific religious institution. In his own statement Carrillo, abandons the term “creative divinity” he had used twenty years earlier, but he continues to characterize his spirituality as something that transcends the particularity of 90.  Velasco Urda, Julián Carrillo, 7–8. 91.  Although the book was not published until 1992, Carrillo began entertaining the idea of writing his memoirs about the end of May 1965, just five months before he passed away. The final result is a combination of updated material from Velasco Urda’s book plus independent articles previously published by Carrillo, and a prologue and epilogue written years later by Dolores Carrillo. 92.  Dolores Carrillo, “Prólogo,” in Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida (San Luis Potosí, Mexico: Comité Organizador “San Luis 400,” 1992), 18. 93.  Julián Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 27–28.

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Christian dogma, based instead on a passion for the mystery of Nature. The sense of reverence that Carrillo felt toward Nature was a fundamental aspect of his microtonal crusade; Sonido 13 was an attempt to reflect, exult, and express “natural laws” of acoustics through aesthetic means. Such an aesthetic attitude is essential to naturalized spirituality “whether or not they embody any bolder metaphysical or cosmic notion.”94 Carrillo conceived Sonido 13 as a rational system that would enable artist and listener to approach closer to a “proper” experience of Nature. He saw himself not as someone who receives a revelation but rather as the restorer of the links between music as a system and music as a natural acoustic phenomenon; someone who would enable musicians a closer contemplation of the divinity through a musical system that “reflects” the natural perfection of that divinity. He is not the instrument for revelation but the corrector of human error that clears the path for an access to the divinity that enables revelation, to “attain a spiritual elevation that was never before produced.”95

SPIRITUALIT Y, STILLNESS, AND RESTOR ATION: FROM L A VIRGEN MORENA TO MISA EN CUARTOS DE TONO A S.S. JUAN X XIII

In 1942, Carrillo contributed two pieces of incidental music to Gabriel Soria’s La virgen morena, a film about the myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe and her appearances to a Mexica man named Juan Diego asking for a shrine in her name at the Tepeyac hill, on the northern outskirts of Mexico City.96 One of the pieces was a tonal arrangement for voices and orchestra of the Marian anthem ¡Oh María, madre mía! to be sung at the climactic scene when Spaniards and Mexicas surrender to the image of the Virgin at the end of the movie.97 The other composition was an original piece of microtonal music composed for the scenes when the Virgin appears. In the film, this music announces the imminent apparition of the Virgin, which Juan Diego hears right before she appears. One could almost say that Carrillo’s microtonal sounds are the Virgin of Guadalupe’s leitmotif, most likely chosen due to the mysteriously fantastic character that Sonido 13 94. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, 67. 95.  Carrillo, Introduction to Misa en cuartos de tono. 96.  Carrillo contributed only these two pieces to the movie; Jorge Pérez composed the rest of the film score. 97.  The Mexicas were the indigenous ethnic group that founded the Aztec Empire and formed its ruling elite.

[248]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

had acquired in the minds of listeners in Mexico and abroad. In an article about the evocation of the fantastic through music in film, Paul Bowles refers to Carrillo’s score, stating that “the only effective sounds in the film are those Sr. Carrillo uses for the actual appearance of the Virgin: an ensemble of sliding siren-like notes played ostensibly on zither … sounds that help stress the unearthly nature of the divine apparition.”98 This link between Sonido 13, the uncanny or sublime, and Mexican spiritual hybridity (as represented by the Virgin of Guadalupe) is worth keeping in mind as it takes a central symbolic role in the contemporary re-symbolization of Carrillo’s music by neo-mexicanista esoteric-mystical projects. The use of Carrillo’s music in the film is based on the idea of Sonido 13 as the sound of divine, celestial affairs that humans may witness but not fully comprehend, a sense that audiences and critics had come to share. The music achieves this character in part through its static harmonic quality as much as by the out-of-this-world, odd sound of its microtonal “sliding siren-like notes.” Carrillo had developed and polished this language throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, especially through his experiments with scales and harmonies in his series of atonal string quartets, as described in Chapter 6. In the music for the Virgin of Guadalupe, Carrillo uses a static harmonic language extracted from the whole-tone collection; and the stillness of the music is the result of Carrillo’s avoidance of tonal directionality. This feature could be easily homologized with the timeless, celestial nature of the character it seeks to identify. This static musical quality is also evident in his Misa en cuartos de tono a S.S. Juan XXIII. Here, the musical language reveals a composer trying to reconcile his naturalized spirituality with Catholic practices at a particularly significant time in the history of Catholicism, the second Vatican Council. It is intriguing that an eighty-six-year-old composer who had largely neglected to compose music with religious overtones for almost four decades decided to embark on the composition of a major religious work. In a couple of chapters from his posthumously published Errores universales en música y física musical (1967), Carrillo states that he decided to compose his mass as an homage to Pope John XXIII after learning of the pope’s desire to “enrich, purify, and simplify [Catholicism and] restore the ritual to the purity of its origins.”99 A small newspaper clipping found with the manuscript of the mass at the Carrillo Archive in Mexico City further sheds light and complicates matters as to the composer’s motivation to 98.  Paul Bowles, “On Film Music,” New York Herald, June 20, 1943. Republished in Paul Bowles on Music, ed. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 117. 99. Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 358.

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write the mass.100 The article tells the story of a church in Formia, Italy, which was closed for four days for arguably “having violated the instruction of the ecclesiastical authorities, who forbade the programming of any light music during celebrations of religious character.”101 It is difficult to determine when Carrillo read this news report, but the fact that he decided to clip it to the manuscript of his mass tells us that the composer found the issues at stake in the report somehow relevant to his own composition. Furthermore, the small clipping might also give us more information about the composer’s intentions when mentioning Palestrina in the introductory text to the mass manuscript. At a moment when the discussion over tradition and renovation within the Catholic Church was about to lead to the reforms of the second Vatican Council, the composition of a serious musical work in Latin would place Carrillo among those who defended tradition over modernist renovation.102 Indeed, Carrillo’s reference to Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass, the composition that came to embody the Council of Trent’s decree to purge music from “secular and lascivious” elements in an attempt to devote it “to the worship of God and the encouragement of faith” almost 400 years earlier is not unjustified. Carrillo saw his own mass as playing a Palestrinian role in a new time of reformation; he wanted it to offer “a new route to worship God [and] to elevate the spirit of the faithful toward the creator of all existing things.”103 To be more precise, the composer argued that in many religious ceremonies the music is frequently far from the spirit of the words, and that he expects Christians from around the world to back his “belief that pure religious emotion breathes in the sounds of the Sonido 13 revolution.”104 Carrillo’s apology for microtonal religious music rests on his conviction that Sonido 13 reflects the spiritual meaning of the words of the liturgy better than music in 12tET. The composer’s intentions are informed by his interpretation of the Catholic Church’s practical attempts to establish a more direct link between congregation and liturgical service as an effort 100.  Probably published on June 30, 1962. 101.  “Prohibieron el culto en Formia,” June 30, 1962?; clip from unknown newspaper kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 102.  Modernism within Catholicism refers to a progressive theological movement characterized by its desire to break with the past and its push for a reinterpretation of dogma. The movement started at the end of the nineteenth century and was officially opposed by the Catholic hierarchy through the first half of the twentieth century. However, its philosophical impact was very strong, influencing the discussions about modernist renovation of the church during the second Vatican Council. See Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology:  Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (New York: T & T Clark, 2010). 103.  Carrillo, “Preface” to Misa en cuartos de tono. 104. Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 360.

[250]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

to re-establish the privilege of the liturgical text and making its emotional content accessible to the worshipers through serious, intelligent music—not the light music that had started the problem at the church in Formia. Ironically, Carrillo’s stance places him instead on the side of the traditionalists who rejected the changes proposed by the modernist wing of the Catholic Church. In the introductory text to the Misa, Carrillo describes this piece as a “musically new mass” and explains his reasoning:  I did not employ in it, in its melodic part, any of the two scales commonly used, major or minor; harmonically I did not use classic major, minor or diminished chords; and consequently, I did not use perfect or plagal cadences. The musical basis of this Misa is one of the thirteen thousand and three hundred scales conquered by my Sonido 13 revolution. To this scale I added the quarters of a tone, whose emotional strength is far superior to that of the semitones.105

It may sound contradictory to talk about new sounds and musical revolution while supporting the traditionalist stance within the Catholic Church polemic. However, Carrillo did not understand the idea of revolution as a revolt or turnaround in the modern sense of the word. For him the notion of revolution was closer to its Copernican coinage; it was about the re-establishment of the preordained, eternal recurrence of lawful natural cycles, as the relation between Nature and sound imply in his apology of microtonality.106 In that sense, Carrillo’s return to religious music after his shift toward a naturalized spirituality through his Sonido 13 is informed by what he believed to be a Catholic revolution that resonated with his own musical revolution. The fact that Carrillo himself re-titled his work Misa de restauración (Mass of Restoration) further clarifies his idea of revolution as restoration as well as his understanding of what the modernization process of the Catholic Church in the early 1960s was about.107 As seen in Chapter 6, a salient and seemingly contradictory aspect in Carrillo’s mature microtonal practices is precisely his use of microtonal scales and the whole-tone collection at the same time; on the one hand he proposes to fill in the chromatic gamut with microtones, while on the other he appears interested in emptying it out with the use of 105.  Carrillo, Introduction to Misa en cuartos de tono. 106. For an explanation of the original meaning of the term “revolution,” see Hanna Arendt, On Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), 35. 107.  Carrillo did not live to see the effects of Vatican II and the introduction of vernacular languages into the Catholic ritual as a result of this process of modernization.

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the whole-tone collection.108 Looking at Carrillo’s music from the perspective of spirituality provides an explanation of this issue that goes past the composer’s interest in an infinite number of scales beyond the chromatic gamut, as exposed in El infinito en las escalas y los acordes (1957). The notion of spirituality, as a new interpretative reagent, links together his brief and sporadic mentions of divinity and cosmos with his sudden interest in religious music at the end of his life, and the stylistic predominance of the whole-tone collection, which could be taken as a symbol and expression of naturalized spirituality in the Misa’s musical style.

CARRILLO AND ROMANTICISM: POSTMICROTONAL ASSESSMENT

As explained in Chapters 4 and 5, Carrillo’s musical ideology at the outset of his microtonal crusade was based on a type of logical empiricism clearly in tune with mainstream Modernist Germanic ideas about progress in music history and the gradual musical “conquest” of Nature. However, as his project advanced, the emphasis of his rhetoric quickly shifted from the “conquest” of Nature to the “purification” of the ET system since he believed it actually compromised Nature as exemplified in the overtone series. Arguing that “any composer who deliberately incorporates into his aesthetic discourse an interest in nature and organicism is, in essence, a Romantic,”109 Ricardo Miranda attempts to explain Carrillo’s rhetoric and musical practice as part of a larger “Romantic spirit.” Against Carl Dahlhaus’s admonition about the inconvenience of using a term like Romanticism in a historiographic sense, Miranda traces a parallelism between Carrillo’s obsession with the “errors in the Western music system” and Wagner’s warning about the impossibility of art to achieve its potential without freeing itself from the errors and perversions of modern life to claim Carrillo’s project as a Romantic one. To validate his position, Miranda borrows from Isaiah Berlin the idea that the Romantics did not believe in a natural order and that they were more interested in the creation of values than in the understanding of those values. Miranda 108.  When one is immersed in the details of specific cultural practices and in figuring out the poietic rhetoric of an artist, one sometimes misses things that are otherwise obvious. I would like to thank Beth Levy for pointing out this apparent contradiction to me and posing it as a relevant question. 109. Ricardo Miranda, “Romanticismo y contradicción en la obra de Julián Carrillo,” Heterofonía 35, no. 129 (2003): 73.

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interprets Carrillo’s early microtonal ideas to be a perfect example of this.110 However, Carrillo’s musical ideology discards one of the fundamental values of Romanticism, the belief in the supernatural as that which transcends scientific explanation and is inaccessible to ordinary experience. As Richard Taruskin has shown, the work of some of the first Western art music composers interested in microtonalism—Charles Ives and Ivan Wyschnegradsky—is indeed informed by a notion of supernatural transcendentalism similar to that expressed in the reception of Carrillo and his music described in the first part of this chapter.111 However, Carrillo’s microtonal interests, although derived from ideas related to Schoenberg, Schenker, and Busoni, is an example of how his affair with fin-de-siècle Romantic German ideas was in fact an exercise of productive consumption that resulted in a unique non-European product. The development of Sonido 13 was not guided by a Romantic desire for pure creation and a belief in the absence of a natural order; instead, the Mexican composer was precisely interested in understanding the order of Nature and developing a musical system that would give musicians and audiences an access to aesthetic experiences that reflected that marvelous order. Furthermore, Carrillo’s infatuation with Nature lacks Wagner’s disdain of modern life; on the contrary, his logical empiricism branches out of the specific positivist education that permeated Mexican political, intellectual, and social life at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century. His was a project that celebrated modern life and its most visible fetishes: science and progress. The notion of naturalized spirituality rejects the Romantics and intuitionists’ reduction of spirit to vacuous monism, dwelling instead in engaging the world around us and marveling at the laws that regulate it. This is precisely what characterizes Carrillo’s microtonal searches, a type of naturalized spirituality that aspires to understand and get closer to the “laws” governing the natural world. As explored in Chapter 5, the spirit of his project is to “enrich, simplify, and purify” music. When defining the intermundane, Stanyek and Piekut emphasize that in this new arrangement of interpenetrations, “the living do not one-sidedly handle the dead, but participate in an inter-handling, a mutually affective co-laboring.”112 The mythologies validating the Sonido 13 experimental practices of Espejo, Vargas Leal, Nava, Newman, Echevarría,

110.  Miranda, “Romanticismo y contradicción en la obra de Julián Carrillo,” 75. 111.  Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 4: Music in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 243–244, 285–295. 112.  Stanyek and Piekut, “Deadness,” 14.

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[2 53]

Guerrero, and de Lille, and the interpretation of Carrillo through the spirit of their work, respond to a network of intermundane economies. In this case, the intermundane functions as a hermeneutic tool that mediates between semiological and postcolonial understandings of mythology and allows for an exploration of the affective transhistorical responses these mythologies allow. This chapter shows how the dead may provide a discursive validation for the living but also how, in the intermundane spirit of co-laboring, the actions of the living may be the basis for the validation of the dead and the re-configuration of those projects that mortality may have temporarily put on hold.

[254]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

CH AP TER   8

Estrangement, Performance, and Performativity: Musicking Sonido 13

I

n the summer of 1958, an extremely large shipment from Germany arrived at the Mexican pavilion of the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles (Expo Brussels 58). The shipment came from the Carl Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur and included fifteen microtonal pianos built at Julián Carrillo’s request and to his specifications; he had also requested them shipped directly to Brussels in time for the Expo 58. The Mexican pavilion was too small to host all of the instruments and thus, the Mexican ambassador in Brussels had to request special permission to have them exhibited at the Expo’s Palais 3, a venue for temporary exhibits. The administrators of the Expo made the hall available for Carrillo’s instruments from July 25 to August 17.1 Advertised as “Les Pianos Carrillo. Pianos ‘metamorphosés.’ Unique au monde. Rendant divers tons chacun. Des sons jamais entendu!” [“Carrillo Pianos. “Metamorphoser” pianos. Unique in the world. Making many different sounds each. Sounds never before heard!”],2 the exhibit opened on July 283 ( 8.1). A few weeks later, Carrillo, who remained in Mexico City during the exhibit, received a letter from Oscar Urrutia, the Mexican commissary to Expo Brussels 58, notifying him that the organizers of the event had presented Carrillo

1. Letter from Baron Moens de Fernig, General Commissary of the Belgian Government at the Expo 58, to Dr. Francisco del Río y Cañedo, Mexican Ambassador in Brussels, June 23, 1958. Letter kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 2.  Les Pianos Carrillo: Expo 58. Booklet printed for the exhibit of the Carrillo Pianos at the Expo Brussels 58 kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. 3.  “La revolución musical el Sonido 13,” Exposición de los Pianos Carrillo: Palacio de Bellas Artes. Ciudad de México, 1959 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Hacienda, 1959), 13.

with a medal for his participation in it.4 From October 27 to November 7, the pianos were exhibited at the Hall Gaveau in Paris, and later that year, Carrillo traveled to Belgium to conduct a concert of his microtonal music on November 9.  The event included the premiere of his Concertino for piano in thirds of a tone and orchestra (1958).5 The presentation of these pianos was the fulfillment of one of Carrillo’s oldest and most cherished dreams. For more than thirty years, since the inception of Sonido 13 and the building and designing of his first microtonal instruments in the mid-1920s, Carrillo had envisaged the construction of a series of microtonal keyboards.6 It took the composer almost twenty-five years to have this idea come to fruition. In 1949, Carrillo patented the designs of his fifteen metamorphoser pianos—one in each subdivision of the whole tone from thirds of a tone all the way down to sixteenths of a tone7—and convinced local piano maker Federico Buschmann to undertake the construction of a piano in thirds of a tone based on these models. On September 29, 1949, Carrillo presented this piano at a concert at Mexico City’s Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar; to demonstrate the instrument’s possibilities, the composer’s daughter, Dolores Carrillo, performed a small prelude. However, almost ten more years passed before the construction of the remaining fourteen pianos, when the Carl Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur accepted Carrillo’s commission and built the instruments in time for the Expo Brussels 58.8 Microtonal keyboards were designed and built as early as the late sixteenth century and through the nineteenth century to deal with a variety of tuning systems, from meantone and enharmonic music to just

4.  Letter from Oscar Urrutia, General Commissary of the Mexican Government at the Expo 58, to Julián Carrillo, August 22, 1958. Letter kept at the Julián Carrillo Archive. Carrillo would later claim that the Belgian government had presented him and his pianos with a Grande Médaille d’Or for “the great cultural value they represented for humanity.” See Julián Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical (Mexico City:  Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, 1967), 435. In fact, the medal was made of bronze and was given to him in recognition of his participation at the expo. 5.  The program of the event announces this composition as Concerto for piano and orchestra in thirds of a tone. In later writings, Carrillo calls it Concertino for piano in thirds of a tone and orchestra. See Carrillo, Errores universales en música y física musical, 352. 6.  One of the earliest mentions of Carrillo’s desire to build a microtonal piano appears in “Los pianos con cuartos de tono construidos en Alemania y Estados Unidos,” El Sonido 13 2, no. 1 (1925): 7–8. 7.  As mentioned earlier, the fifteenth piano was a smaller instrument tuned by whole tones. 8. Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur still makes the sixteenth-tone Carrillo Piano. See http://www.sauter-pianos.de/english/pianos/microtone.html (accessed on May 8, 2014).

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intonation and various microtonal equal temperaments (ET). In 1917, Willi Möllendorff designed his bichromatische harmonium (bi-chromatic harmonium), which enabled the production of quarter tones.9 Around that time, Ivan Wyschnegradsky developed a pragmatic idea for playing music in quarter tones by using a two-keyboard piano with each keyboard tuned a quarter tone apart.10 By the end of the 1920s, following on this concept, the German manufacturer August Förster had built pianos in quarter tones and sixth tones for Wyschnegradsky and Alois Hába, respectively.11 All of these instruments altered the conventional keyboard configuration of the traditional piano by adding extra keys (or entire extra keyboards) for the production of microtones. Thus, they looked relatively different from the piano most musicians and audiences have been familiar with since the mid-nineteenth century.12 One of the particularities of the Carrillo Pianos is that, besides the wide range of microtonal subdivisions they provide, for all practical purposes they look exactly the same as the ordinary vertical piano one may find in the living room of a middle-class family. However, they sound completely different from a traditional piano. When a musician trained in the Western music tradition plays a Carrillo Piano, a cognitive dissonance arises since sonic expectation and sonic experience do not match. This experience may be particularly harsh for musicians with perfect or even relative pitch who link particular keys or key combinations to specific pitches and sonorities. A  trained musician approaches a particular arrangement of keys on the standard keyboard of a Carrillo Piano (for instance, the keys that produce the C major chord or the C major scale on a regular piano) with the expectation that playing them will produce familiar sounds—an expectation that playing those keys will not fulfill. There is a gap between the expectation created by the materiality of the musical instrument and its actual sound. Thus, the Carrillo Piano keyboard is an interface that creates sensorial and aesthetic expectations that are ultimately estranged by the actual sounds of the instrument. The types of

9.  Willi Möllendorff, Musik mit Vierteltönen (Leipzig: Verlag von F. E. C. Leuckart, 1917), 14–15. 10.  Hans Rudolph Zeller, “Komposition und Instrumentarium,” Mikrotöne III, ed. Horst-Peter Hesse (Innsbruck: Edition Helbing, 1990), 88–91. 11.  Alois Hába, Mein Weg zur Viertel- und Sechsteltonmusik (Dusseldorf: Gesellschaft zu Förderung der systematischen Musikwissenschaft, 1971), 51. 12.  Keyboardists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries were accustomed to keyboards with extra keys for performance of music in meantone temperament, just intonation, or a variety of ET systems. See Patrizio Barbieri, Enharmonic: Instruments and Music 1470–1900 (Sermoneta:  Il Levante Libreria Editrice, 2008), 3–105 and 279–505.

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estrangement exemplified by the gap between expectation and experience in the case of the Carrillo Pianos always take place within specific cultural networks and histories that inform how individuals may resignify and feel them as either expanded or restrictive aesthetic experiences. In the fall of 2010, the Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum in Mexico City organized 13 Sonoro, an exhibit of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 materials ( 8.2). Among the many items showcased was the Carrillo Piano in third tones made by Buschmann in the 1940s, which visitors were encouraged to play (Figure 8.1). The day I  visited the exhibit, a couple of teenagers were exploring the instrument; after a few minutes of playing and looking inside it one of them cried: “¡Este piano está bien desafinado!” (This piano is so out of tune!). This moment illustrates that there is no such thing as an ideal, pure aesthetic experience; there is no unmediated access to aesthetic experiences. Regardless of how estranged or foreign the objects we come into contact with may appear, we never experience them in a cultural vacuum; they are always understood within specific cultural frameworks. In this case, the sounds of the Carrillo Piano were immediately signified within the framework of twelve-tone equal tuning (12tET) that informs the mainstream Western musical experience. Even if those youngsters, warned by the exhibit’s advertisement of Sonido 13 as “the

Figure  8.1  Third-Tone Carrillo Piano at the 13 Sonoro Exhibit, Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum. Mexico City, September 30, 2010.

[258]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

point of departure for a new generation of musicians who will come to transform everything,” were somehow prepared for the unexpected, the new intervallic relations of the standard-looking Carrillo Piano could only make sense to them within their own cultural experience as being out of tune. The estrangement that informs how one experiences the Carrillo Pianos is the point of departure for exploring two interrelated processes in music making: the performance of aesthetic experiences and the relationship between musicking, cultural discipline, and sensorial experiences. This chapter takes the materiality of musical instruments and the expectations they generate in performers—and, to a lesser degree, also listeners, as explained toward the end of the chapter—as an entrance into surveying the aesthetic possibilities that arise from the cognitive dissonance between these expectations and the actual sensorial experiences the instruments enable. I do this via an examination of technique, technologies, instruments, and the performing body (especially as it challenges its historical disciplining into specific musical paradigms). Central to this discussion are the experiences of contemporary musicians who have tackled, with varying degrees of success and coming from different musical traditions, the performance of Sonido 13 music in the last fifteen years. By doing this I argue that the relationship between sensorial and aesthetic experiences is not informative but rather performative. Technology and our relation to technology (as musicians or listeners) occupy a central role in the processes described here. The technology of a musical instrument provides an interface that mediates between musical epistemologies; it triggers specific ways to interact with music and sound. However, as Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco suggest, “the way to understand musical instruments is not from their essences—what their theoretical possibilities are—but from the way people who actually make the music put them into practice.”13 Although music technology may provide structures not only to conceptualize but also to corporeally relate to music it does not necessarily determine how music would be envisioned and experienced. Instead, I would argue that one could think about the relationship between technology, music innovation, and music experience as also performative. Musicians and engineers may design instruments that would translate their ideas and may come up with interfaces that mediate between familiarity and innovation in order to emphasize these very ideas, but other musicians and even listeners may creatively reinvent 13.  Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days:  The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10.

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[2 59 ]

them. Quanta, a group of collective improvisation and experimental music founded in 1970 by composer Mario Lavista, made use of Carrillo’s microtonal harps as part of their public happenings and performances. The musicians played the instruments in ways that completely challenged the conception of their creators, to the point that it is impossible to recognize them by their sound in the few available recordings of those performances.14 This type of estrangement in the use of the Sonido 13 instruments transcends the unfamiliarity of their design. It shows us that the development of instruments—and the novel use of traditional instruments, including the human voice—within the Sonido 13 performance complex should be understood as a constant dialogue between innovation, estrangement, familiarity, and everyday usage beyond envisioned creative scenarios.

COGNITIVE ESTR ANGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGIES OF ESTR ANGEMENT IN SONIDO 13

Estrangement is conventionally understood as alienation, disaffection, split, or schism.15 As a literary theory concept it was first used by the Russian formalists, especially Viktor Shklovsky. It was he who developed the term ostranenie (estrangement) in order to account for the process by which Russian prose writers remove their material from the sphere of automatized perception. For Shklovsky, the goal of art was to lead to knowledge through active perception rather than recognition. However, he argued that reiteration of perception makes objects recognizable; one gets used to these objects and perceives them automatically rather than actively. Shklovsky suggests that for objects to retain their aesthetic power they need to be estranged and complicated in order to “make perception long and laborious.”16 Similarly, Bertolt Brecht proposed a process of estrangement that would give a representation the power to “allow us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.”17 For Brecht, this was necessary precisely to make sure his audience remained

14.  See Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 15.  Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/estrangement (accessed on May 10, 2014). 16.  Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL:  Dalkey Archive Press, 1990 [1929]), 6. 17. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater:  The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 192.

[260]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

engaged and kept a critical distance in the process of aesthetic perception, which for him was the only way to produce knowledge.18 Darko Suvin borrows Shklovsky’s and Brecht’s notions of estrangement to analyze the genre of science fiction in relation to the type of cognition that this process may allow. Suvin argues that the factual reporting of fiction in this literary genre acts as a type of alienation that confronts a “set normative system … with a point of view or look implying a new set of norms.”19 For him, this is a type of cognitive estrangement that effectively establishes the difference between science fiction and myth, for it is science fiction’s critical attitude toward the timelessness and essentialism that characterize mythology (the basis of myth’s set normative system), which cognitive estrangement encourages, that sets it apart. Thus, cognitive estrangement speaks of the creative and productive character of this alienation that may be conducive to the understanding of normativity as oppressive and in fact, not normal, essential, or timeless. I take the concept of estrangement as a theoretical tool to explore the aesthetic relation between Sonido 13 and the mainstream music system from the common practice period. Several aspects of the Sonido 13 experience may be interpreted as instances of estrangement. The Carrillo Pianos and their metamorphoser character can be heard as technologies of estrangement that offer moments of cognitive dissonance between expectation and the sensorial experience the instruments provide. By doing this the Carrillo Pianos expand the familiar piano, its notation, its mechanisms, and its sound to make it into a new and unexpected sonic aesthetic experience in the manner that Suvin discusses as cognitive estrangement. It is no accident that Carrillo called these instruments pianos metamorfoseadores (metamorphoser pianos); any piece of traditional tonal music played on them would automatically undergo a process of intervallic transformation that would transmute it into a new musical entity. One could argue that the pianos instigated a number of other metamorphoses as they create at least three types of cognitive dissonances. First, the sonic expectation of a musician when approaching the instrument would be challenged. As interfaces, the keyboards of all Carrillo Pianos look like standard pianos (with the exception of the whole-tone piano, which is smaller than a regular piano) but their tuning makes them all sound different from each other. The keyboard generates a particular sonic expectation as well as a physical sensation matching the imagined sound—the 18.  Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 6. 19. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 6.

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feel in the hand of the “normalness” of the keyboard, as Annette Richards puts it—but the actual sonic result is very different from that expectation. The cognitive dissonance is produced by the gap between the musician’s familiarity with the standard piano keyboard and what playing it should sound like and the sonic result of his or her playing a Carrillo Piano with its very different tuning. Thus the Carrillo Pianos provide a de-familiarization of the traditional piano interface that produces a cognitive surplus in which the sonic experience produced by the keyboard will always be more than the normative sonic expectations. A second moment of estrangement occurs in relation to the notation Carrillo uses when writing for these instruments. Carrillo resorts to standard notation, which shows performers the keys to be played on the piano but does not provide them with a visual guide to the actual sonorities being produced.20 As noted by French pianist Martine Joste, a specialist in the sixteenth-tone Carrillo Piano, this notation is “correct for the hand but wrong for the ear.”21 The pianist may play a score that appears to be in C major but the sonority produced does not respond at all to the pitches notated on the score, and thus the actual notation system provides another space for alienation. This type of estrangement empties of sonic meaning the familiar symbols of the Western music tradition and transforms a familiar code into a blueprint for kinetic action (it almost works like a tablature). A  third instance of estrangement relates to the musician’s physical actions while performing on the instrument. In playing a Carrillo Piano, pianists realize that the very motions and skills they have been trained to use to play their instrument do not match the results of their actions; the produced sounds do not coincide with what their motions are supposed to produce or what they have been trained to believe their body motions mean musically ( Video 8.1). Here, kinetic action and sonic experience are completely at odds; the de-familiarization takes place within the body of the performer and may create a state of confusion as he or she plays the instrument since the result contradicts the information

20.  The manuscript of Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Poeme, Op.  44, No. 1, for Carrillo Piano in sixth tones and Etude, Op. 44, No. 2, for Carrillo Piano in twelfth tones, is kept at the Carrillo Archive. The score shows two notations, a practical one that identifies keys to be played using standard notation, and on top of that a second one that provides the actual sonorities produced. Carrillo’s microtonal piano scores never provide actual sounds. Martine Joste affirms that following Wyschnegradsky’s example, some composers writing for the sixteenth-tone piano also provide transcriptions of the sixteenth-tone signs but suggests that although useful in helping the performers to verify the pitches, “they are particularly difficult to decode.” Martine Joste, electronic communication, August 24, 2014. 21.  Joste, electronic communication.

[262]  In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13

that hundreds of hours of training have taught the performer to expect. Martine Joste notes that this cognitive dissonance translates into specific technical challenges, especially getting used “to finding your place [on the keyboard, since] the center—or geographical midpoint of the instrument is displaced,” and suggests that the keyboard “may eventually be marked with small label stickers corresponding to the pitches of the C major scale, by half tones or a label every 8 keys.”22 Furthermore, she insists that when studying sixteenth-tone piano music performers should avoid playing the score on a standard piano since “the pianistic gesture must always be connected to listening, and if you get used to hearing other pitches, the phrasing—the musical intention—will not be correct.”23 In this case, cognitive estrangement engages processes of discipline and training that resonate with the experience of other musicians for whom Sonido 13 may also challenge conventions—namely, the techniques and ways of listening and conceptualizing music for which their bodies were prepared. This process ultimately illustrates the shortcomings of a conservatory training centered on the common practice repertory, thus providing an avenue to develop alternate paths to expanded aesthetic experience and new sonic knowledge.24 If the Carrillo Pianos and their metamorphoser character may be interpreted as a type of technology of estrangement, this could also apply to the composer’s leyes de metamorfosis musical [laws of musical metamorphosis], which predate and in a way foreshadow the pianos. Carrillo explains his leyes de metamorfosis as a way of proportionally and systematically altering the size of the intervals within a given composition so as to make it impossible to recognize (a more detailed explanation of this process is offered in Chapter 5). He suggests that “no composer will ever recognize his/her own work once it has been subjected to my leyes de metamorfosis.”25 According to Carrillo, the application of such process would positively expand the life span of a musical work—by providing many different and unrecognizable versions of the same composition. He argues that “these leyes de metamorfosis musicales not only rejuvenate but give new life to that which 22.  Joste, electronic communication. 23.  Joste, electronic communication. 24.  A  broader conclusion would be that any discipline creates expectations that can be transcended through estrangement and that all such experiences take place against a backdrop of expectation. However, my critique of disciplining in the standard Western conservatory system as a tool for the creation of expectations is not arbitrary since Sonido 13 as estrangement takes place precisely in relation to that music tradition. 25. Julián Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales (Mexico:  Julián Carrillo, 1949), 12.

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[2 6 3]

was dead, and immediately provide the authors with a multiplicity of post-lives. … Either we apply the leyes de metamorfosis to musical works so that they can live again or we let them die! That is the conundrum!”26 Carrillo’s vehement exposition of this compositional technique is clearly set in terms of cognitive estrangement. Thus, the leyes de metamorfosis are conceptualized to render a given musical work unrecognizable, allowing it to live a new aesthetic life as a transfigured work of art; the leyes expand the aesthetic experience of a work that may have grown old, familiar, and recognizable in the sense proposed by Shklovsky. Carrillo’s technologies, whether in the form of a compositional technique or an instrumental music novelty, offer ways to transfigure musical works and musical experiences in order to extend their aesthetic impact on perception, somatic engagement, performance, and reception.27

THE SYMBOLIC IN SENSORIAL AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES

Is it possible that the type of sensorial experiences triggered by moments of cognitive estrangement could be understood as universal experiences and even windows into a transcendental reality? After all, it may be claimed that the experience of a completely alienated sonic moment may be similar for all listeners who experience it as alien and fail to recognize it as a code that attempts a type of semiotic communication. One may argue that such a moment is a pure, unmediated sensorial experience free from symbolic references and therefore a window into what Jacques Lacan calls the Real.28 But how do we experience music that does not fall into the 26. Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, 62–63. 27. In Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, Carrillo applies his process of metamorphosis to fragments of several canonic piano works, including Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat (1849) as well as several preludes from J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier (1722). Most recently, Mexican-Canadian guitarist Angélos Quetzalcóatl has performed live his own metamorphosized versions of Luis de Narváez’s Diferencias sobre “Guárdame las vacas” (1538) and Halim El-Dabh’s Tryptich to Segovia (1953); they were realized following Carrillo’s rules. 28.  According to Jacques Lacan, the psyche comprises three levels that control our lives and desires; the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. He defines the Real as the primordial, pre-Oedipal realm; the state of Nature of fullness and completeness from which we have been separated due to our entering into the world of symbols (culture). The Real resists representation; it is an external dimension of experience beyond the order of the Symbolic in which we operate in everyday life. As such, the Real is different from the reality one experiences within the realm of the Symbolic in that it lies beyond language and is thus impossible to integrate into the Symbolic. The Imaginary refers to the moment of formation of the ego; it is a narcissistic order of self-recognition that enables the entrance into the Symbolic. In fact, for Lacan, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are continuously intertwined and exist in tension with

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categories familiar to us? Can such an experience in fact bypass the realm of the Symbolic to directly engage the realm of the Real? Lacan would immediately discourage such notion arguing that it is impossible to access the Real. The reaction to the estrangement of Sonido 13 witnessed at the Mexico City exhibit in 2010 provides a relevant commentary on these queries. When those youngsters engaged the Carrillo Piano in third tones through its familiar interface it produced a moment of alienation, but they were able to make sense of it by unconsciously choosing to listen to it via their inherited musical background (¡Está bien desafinado!). Chapter 7 provides evidence of a different type of reaction to the strangeness of Sonido 13, one that explains this music in accordance to pre-circulated ideas about spirituality, science fiction, and indigeneity. All of these responses show that, regardless of the degree of alienation, the sensorial experience is in some ways always mediated by the Symbolic. As individuals, once we enter the realm of language and the Symbolic, any type of sensorial experience is filtered through culture. The pure sensorial experience as a transcendental encounter is nothing but an illusion of the Real since the space of transcendence is a place within the Symbolic realm. The sensorial is not universal and therefore does not provide an access to the Real; it is always mediated by culture because our bodies—the site where the sensorial experience takes place—and how we experience them are part of the realm of culture; our bodily experiences are always cultural. We can never experience anything outside of the ideological networks that allow us to identify our bodies, ourselves, and our sensations. As such, our only experience of the Real is a negative one. The Real is a space one realizes was there when confronted with the cognitive surplus of estrangement. However, surplus does not provide access to it; it can only hint at its presence. These experiences raise questions about the relationship between expectation, the world of senses, and the aesthetic experience. Following Slavoj Žižek, who argues that enjoyment takes place as a type of surplus (between the Real and the Symbolic),29 one could argue that the aesthetic enjoyment of this sense of disconnection also takes place as a type of excess, the leftover of sensorial experience that transcends expectation. The essentialist fantasy would want to have this surplus as a traumatic gap in the symbolic order that provides a glimpse of the Real and would the Real. See Jacques Lacan, “The Topic of the Imaginary,” and “The Symbolic Order,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 73–88 and 220–233. 29.  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 50.

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claim an informative relation between sensorial experience and aesthetic experience—as if the sensorial preceded and informed the aesthetic, as if it were pre-symbolic. Arguing against essentialism, I propose that this surplus speaks of gaps between expectation and what we experience as reality within the symbolic order. As such, the relationship between sensorial and aesthetic experiences is instead performative. The aesthetic experience is not informed by the presumed access to the Real that the sensorial experience may provide but rather it is performed relationally; the sensorial and the aesthetic perform each other within the habitus that offers the epistemological space for their encounter and also guides and evaluates how we identify them and make sense of them individually and socially. This relation informs the degrees of estrangement and the level of success in musicking Sonido 13 among contemporary Mexican musicians whose performance is defined within a variety of habitus and genealogies of disciplining. Musicking, the act of actively or passively taking part in a musical performance making it individually and socially meaningful and significant, as Christopher Small defines the term, takes place in a wide variety of public or personal, collective or individual instances and spaces.30 In this case, I focus on the experiences of musicians both as performers, listeners, and social and cultural actors, mediators, and recipients. I pay attention to the intersection of their individual musical and sensorial experiences while musicking Sonido 13 in relation to the social and cultural expectations prescribed by the performance traditions they belong to and the habitus that nurtures them socially and allows them to insert themselves as part of larger cultural and social networks. In doing this, I explore the types of estrangement that inform different musical performances of Sonido 13 as well as the kinds of performative relations between sensorial and aesthetic realms that such disorientation enables.

MUSICKING SONIDO 13: A PERSPECTIVE FROM COMMON PR ACTICE-BASED MUSICAL TR AINING

In 1999, José Luis Navarro (b. 1974)  received a grant from the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA, National Fund for Culture and Arts)31 to carry out a project about Carrillo’s 30. Christopher Small, Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9–10. 31.  The Mexican equivalent to the American National Endowment for the Arts.

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microtonal music for solo guitar. As a classically trained guitarist, Navarro encountered a number of important, practical, technical, and epistemological challenges when taking on this repertory. The first problem was finding the instruments that would enable him to play the quarter and third tones required in the various compositions Carrillo wrote for solo guitar. 32 Due to budget constraints, which prevented Navarro from commissioning a luthier to build microtonal guitars for the project, he was forced to come up with an economical, practical, and creative solution. His answer was to transform his standard classical concert guitar by adding extra removable frets between semitones to produce quarter tones. This solution was not completely trouble-free; it precluded Navarro from tackling Carrillo’s Etude for seven string guitar in third tones since the division of the whole tone in three equal parts conflicted with the half-tone frets built into the instrument. However, the solution allowed him to perform Carrillo’s quarter-tone and standard guitar music on the same instrument without any complications. A second problem was how to approach the numerical music notation used by Carrillo for most of these works. Although the composer always maintained that his numerical notation was much simpler than traditional Western music notation, for someone who has been trained within the latter, coming to terms with Carrillo’s system presents important challenges. Navarro explains: I read in one of Carrillo’s books that someone said it is easier to read [music] in the Carrillo system; that is just not true. It is a truly complex system. In quarters of a tone, you use [the number] zero for C, [the number] four for C a quarter tone higher, then [the number] eight … so it is only until [the number] sixteen that you get to a whole tone. Logically, having more sounds [and signs for them] makes it more complex. The cycles of numbers and all of that is something truly complicated. So, my first step was to transcribe the music into something that resembled the traditional pentagram, just using more conventional accidentals for the quarter tones. 33

32.  Carrillo’s works for solo guitar include Sonata (1929) for quarter-tone guitar, Suite (1931) for quarter-tone guitar, Estudios (1931) for quarter-tone guitar, Dos preludios (1955) for standard guitar, Estudio (1962) for seven string third-tone guitar, and Tres preludios (1964) for standard guitar. For information about these works, see José Luis Navarro, “Nuevos aportes a la música para guitarra de Julián Carrillo,” Heterofonía 45, no.145 (2011). 33.  José Luis Navarro, personal interview, Mexico City, December 5, 2008.

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Navarro’s experience shows that Carrillo’s claim about his numerical notation being a step toward the simplification of music should be understood contingently. It may be true that for someone with no background in music it would be simpler to learn numbers than the meaning of neumes, accidentals, clefs, and other symbols on a staff; but for someone who has been trained for years in encoding and decoding symbols on the five-line staff notation and translating them into specific physical gestures in relation to a musical instrument, Carrillo’s numerical notation presents a serious obstacle. Cellist Jimena Giménez Cacho (b. 1954) also points out that because every different tuning requires a different numerical cycle in Carrillo’s notation, the numerical system is extremely difficult. 34 It is no coincidence that most musicians trained in the standard conservatory system who embark on projects involving Carrillo’s compositions only available in numerical notation—Navarro and Giménez Cacho as well as violist Omar Hernández-Hidalgo (1971–2010)—choose to transcribe them or use versions written in modified standard Western notation. Figure  8.2 shows the first page of Carrillo’s Capricho (1928) for solo viola, in the composer’s numerical notation. Another serious test for Navarro was the technical challenge of visually and physically reducing the distances on his instrument by half. He argues that the new frets for the quarter tone reduce the performer’s margin of error on the instrument by compressing the spaces the hand and fingers have to work through, while at the same time expanding the possibilities of playing pitches separated by several frets since the distance between frets is shortened and the fingers and hand can reach more pitches. Classical guitarists usually work through the fingerboard by positions. Each position is determined by the placement of the four fingers from the left hand in contiguous spaces between adjacent frets, enabling the guitarist to play four chromatic pitches on each string by hand position. 35 Since the distances are shortened by half in 34.  A  third tone system is written in cycles of eighteen numbers from 0 to 17; one in fifth tones in cycles of thirty numbers from 0 to 29; one in sixteenth tones in cycles of ninety-six numbers from 0 to 95; this means that often, depending on tuning, the same numbers may refer to different pitches. There are complementary or inclusive systems; these are systems in which the pitches in the smaller intervallic divisions include the pitches in the larger intervallic divisions. For example, the sixteenth-tone system includes the pitches in the quarter- and, eighth-tone systems. 35. First position allows for five chromatic pitches, counting the open string. Separating the fingers to allow the hand to be able to reach extra frets and thus play extra chromatic pitches is referred to as a stretch of the hand position—a stretch of the technical norm, so to speak.

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Figure  8.2  An example of numerical notation. First page of Julián Carrillo’s Capricho (1928) for solo viola in quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones. A work transcribed into standard notation and recorded by Omar Hernández-Hidalgo in 2007.

a quarter-tone guitar, the concept of hand position is questioned as the ability to play pitches within each hand position is expanded. So, while the margin of error is reduced, the number of pitches within reach of the hand’s fingers is doubled. This translates into a performance

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problem that Navarro explains as “the cognitive process of representing codes on an instrument that is apparently smaller. So I just said ‘ok, I am a beginner’ and decided to use the techniques of a beginner when approaching the instrument.” 36 These techniques were aiming at relocating the hands and mind of the performer within the framework of the new fretboard. Navarro had to go through a physical re-education of his guitar technique that would enable him to move within the apparently reduced scale of the instrument but also through a re-training of how to conceptualize his movements over the fretboard to take full advantage of the potential that these restrictions also provided him as a performer. In sum, he had to reinvent his technique to match the physical and aesthetic potential of this music. The final problem for Navarro was an aesthetic and interpretative one: how to make sense of a musical discourse that was at complete odds with the music he was trained to perform and was used to listening to, as well as the aesthetic expectations generated by the type of musical gestures that are supposed to work better on a guitar. He describes the problem as trying to come up with a coherent interpretation [of this music]. It is very complicated to give coherence to these sonic textures combined with traditional forms. If you do not interpret this music correctly it could sound monotonous, boring, senseless. Sometimes you would even find minimalist formulas, and the idea is to create atmospheres. Understanding that, that the music is not about virtuoso displays, or form, but rather about creating atmospheres, exploring sonorities through the instrument’s tessitura, is not easy. [When I played it for other musicians] they always found it very strange. There was not a single case of someone who would say “I understand that composition.” Most of them thought that Carrillo’s way of composing—the texture, the form—was very strange. … General audiences would also tell me “what a strange and special piece.”37

Navarro’s description places an emphasis on the aesthetic strangeness of Carrillo’s music, which defies conventions not only about guitar music (it does not exploit the idiomatic technical capabilities of the guitar; it is 36.  Navarro, personal interview. 37.  Navarro, personal interview. Navarro refers to some of Carrillo’s early microtonal works that indeed combine traditional forms and microtonal idioms, especially his Sonata for quarter-tone guitar (1929), which includes a minuet, and his Suite for quarter-tone guitar (1931), which includes a gavotte and a jarabe (a traditional Mexican dance form).

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almost as if being written for that instrument was circumstantial) but also about what music itself should be. He had to be especially attentive so that the repetitive character of the pieces (which resembles some of the sequential sections in the string quartets analyzed in Chapter 6) would not be heard as monotonous and boring. Carrillo’s guitar pieces avoid the virtuosic displays many people associate with the instrument, which might make his music sound too easy. Thus, in dealing with these works, Navarro also had to somehow come to terms with a different expectation from him as a master of his instrument. The experience was draining and eventually led him to a moment in which he had to stop playing this music in order to re-enter the music world he had left behind when working on the Carrillo project. For me it was something very hard, very tiring [playing Carrillo’s microtonal guitar music]. Mentally and cognitively it was a very tiring experience. I do not know what provoked this fatigue. It was very stressing. I was also very young and was playing at these very prestigious places, which generated an extra pressure … but I know it was not that, because I have played difficult works at these type of venues and they never generated in me that type of mental fatigue. It lasted a long time … maybe months … you have to be [technically] very precise [to play this music], maybe it was that. Also, the psychological process of interpreting this music … the composer encodes it, I decode it and then I present it to an audience; achieving that with the complex codes of this music was very complicated. 38

Cellist Jimena Giménez Cacho went through a very similar process, both liberating, illuminating, and exhausting, when she decided to learn Carrillo’s Seis casi sonatas (1959–1964) for solo cello in quarter tones in 2005. When she took on the Carrillo project, she had already released four CDs—with a repertory ranging from baroque to contemporary music—and was one of the most prominent cello players of her generation in the Mexican classical music scene. This adventure was a transformative experience that forever changed her musical outlook and career. The project took three and a half years of intense work that included developing a technique to play the microtones, conceptualizing how to interpret them (she worked closely with David Espejo in these two aspects of the project), presenting the Mexican premiere of the six Casi sonatas (each one is about twenty minutes long), recording them, and finally, also doing the Mexican premiere of Carrillo’s Concertino (1945) for cello in quarter, 38.  Navarro, personal interview.

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eighth, and sixteenth tones and orchestra.39 Giménez Cacho explains that she first had to discover the world of quarter tones and educate my ears for them. It was a very slow and lonely process. … [David Espejo] told me that I could not just play them by ear, I had to be very rigorous. … [H]‌e marked quarter tones on the fingerboard with white ink and I had to get used to them very carefully until the quarter tones were very precise. … Then your hand position changes. … [O]f a sudden you find yourself doing very strange things in order to play those pitches. … You have to de-articulate your [left] hand. … [Y]ou spend all of your career [as a musician] placing your hand to play half tones, but this music is in quarter tones; so, something strange starts happening in your mind and your ear. I was passionate about it but I swear to you that at one point I thought I was going to go crazy. I mean, the cello fingerboard became a skateboard where everything was valid, any sound; everything was welcomed once tonality disintegrated.40

Giménez Cacho went through an extreme technical process that profoundly challenged her approach to playing her instrument but also her understanding of musical discourse. Her experience resulted in a type of technical estrangement that, by focusing on aspects of the instrument that the common practice-based conservatory training ignores, challenges the normative conception of what her instrument is allowed to do. This experience was so powerful that after recording the Casi sonatas, she went through a moment of deep re-evaluation of herself as a musician and artist and of questioning her relation to the music tradition she had been trained in. The process was emotionally draining since it pushed her away from the musical world she had been a part of throughout her life; however, it also provided a fresh type of artistic freedom that eventually led her into new creative spaces. She explains it as follows: [Carrillo’s] is a maddening world. On the one hand it is marvelous, but on the other, we live in this society where people are used to tonic and dominant, they are used to melodies, they are used to [time signatures]. Most of the sonatas have no bars; so, you do not have the [temporal] certainty that

39.  Giménez Cacho’s recording of the Seis casi sonatas is commercially available in Julián Carrillo: seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello, Quindecim, QP 182 (2007). 40.  Jimena Giménez Cacho, personal interview, Mexico City, August 20, 2008.

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counting provides. You cannot hold on to anything [to keep you stable and grounded], and the deeper you get into that it becomes a passion that sets you apart from the rest of the world … for, who are you going to play with after that? It is very difficult, it is something that requires a lot of time and openness of mind. … So, I fell into a depression, I had to stop playing the cello for a year and a half. I was like “what do I do now? Who do I play with?” I  felt like I  was disintegrated inside. Carrillo opened a world for me that gave me the freedom to do anything. Now I am unable to take a Beethoven score and play one of his sonatas; I just can’t. I lost interest in doing that. See, Carrillo expands your sounds, he places you in a more current dimension; it is like traditional music is suddenly too rigid. I do not deny its value though. Anyway, I started composing; I lost the fear of not following a [traditional] form, of not following a precise tempo, of being out of tune, and the fear of what people would say.41

This moment of reflection led Giménez Cacho to collaborate in a series of experimental and improvisational projects—some of them with Espejo, her microtonal mentor, but also with other alternative Mexican musicians, including progressive rock, ethnofusion, and soundscape pioneer Jorge Reyes (1952–2009). Giménez Cacho and Espejo collaborated on the soundtrack of Juan Pablo Villaseñor’s film Espérame en otro mundo (Wait for Me in Another World, 2007), a movie that tells the story of two characters who, unable to enjoy their present lives decide to re-live their past moments of happiness through hypnotic regression. Here, Sonido 13 sequences are used as leitmotifs that signal the uncanny moments in which the characters psychically move to “other worlds,” providing emotional spaces for transcendental and transhistoric encounters. Giménez Cacho also produced a recording of Espejo’s music for microtonal harps that remains unreleased after copyright complications due to Espejo’s death ( 8.3).With Jorge Reyes, Giménez Cacho collaborated in a concert named “Agua y Aceite” (Water and Oil) after the apparently unlikely combination of her classical sounds and his electronic ethnofusion. For this event, the musicians produced a pre-recorded track created by the computer manipulation of sounds from Giménez Cacho’s solo cello repertory (J. S. Bach and Carrillo) and Reyes’s samples of pre-Columbian ocarina, teponaztli, sonaja, and sea shells, as well as Espejo’s microtonal harps. Inspired by Carrillo’s own techniques of metamorphosis, one of the sections of the track was the prelude from his Casi sonata No. 5 41.  Giménez Cacho, personal interview.

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but played backward;42 another section offered a virtual “orchestra of microtonal harps” based on the electronic manipulation and juxtaposition of samples from Espejo’s playing.43 During their concert, Giménez Cacho and Reyes used this pre-recorded track as the sonic background for live improvisation.44 Processes of estrangement mark the microtonal experiences of Navarro and Giménez Cacho. The most salient is the estrangement from their instruments and their instrumental techniques and also from the music notation, and an eventual questioning of the very conceptualization of music. In both cases, estrangement translates into a challenging of the disciplined body in relation to the common practice-based conservatory tradition they had both been trained in. Furthermore, the physical and epistemological transformation of their instruments and their bodily relation to them could also be understood in terms of estrangement as a kind of de-familiarization that expands the musical and aesthetic possibilities of their instruments but also alienates the musicians from their musical traditions. For these performers, musicking Sonido 13 worked as an act of cognitive estrangement as defined by Darko Suvin; it was a productive moment that challenged the normative system they knew up to that moment and proposed a new one. In doing so, musicking Sonido 13 articulated new sensorial relations to their instruments and the sounds they could produce as well as an array of new aesthetic possibilities. Nevertheless, estrangement is always relational and contingent; one cannot speak of a universal experience. It can only take place within specific cultural coordinates and in relation to precise conventions and regimes of discipline for both musicians and audiences. While the cases of musicians like Navarro and Giménez Cacho, whose training had been very traditional, reveal moments of a sense of alienation in the locus of performance, other musicking experiences may emphasize different loci of estrangement, from listening to consumption and reception.

42.  Carrillo proposed the backward motion as one of the possibilities of musical metamorphosis. See Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, 43. An example of that is the cancrizans of his String Quartet No. 2, his first atonal string quartet, known as Cuarteto atonal a Debussy—which exists in a complete backward version entitled Cuarteto metamorfoseado—as well as the cancrizans in the scherzo of his String Quartet No. 4. 43.  Giménez Cacho, personal interview. 44.  Juan José Olivares, “Tocar con Jorge Reyes, ruptura que me abre otras puertas:  Jimena Giménez,” La Jornada, August 1, 2008. http://www.jornada.unam. mx/2008/08/01/index.php?section=espectaculos&article=a13n1esp (accessed May 25, 2014).

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MUSICKING SONIDO 13: ALTERNATIVE GATEWAYS

The encounter of Marisa de Lille and Estrella Newman in 2009 was the meeting of two non-traditional musicians. Each of them had long careers as alternative musicians/performers and although their paths had not crossed, they were both leading members of different ethnofusion movements. As mentioned in Chapter  7, de Lille evolved from a commercial rock and pop musician and musical theater and soap opera actress to an ethnofusion artist with training in Carnatic ragas and Tibetan chanting, while Newman was a prominent proponent of both Nueva Mexicanidad and the last active member of a Sonido 13 group that resignified Carrillo’s ideas in the 1970s and 1980s. Almost immediately after their meeting the two musicians were playing together and improvising, a collaboration that led to their recording, Música de las estrellas (2009). When listening to their recording one is struck by the sheer physicality of their performance style. The almost ghostlike sonic character of Música de las estrellas may leave one wondering how exactly these musicians produce those sounds; however, if the musicians’ modus operandi appears ambiguous its inherent corporality is evident. De Lille’s and Newman’s performance is an improvisation that takes the physicality of their bodily gestures as the genesis of sound. While Espejo, Oscar Vargas Leal, and Armando Nava preferred to carefully strike single strings of their microtonal harps in an attempt to produce clear pitch articulations, Newman’s approach is to energetically sweep her fingers through the strings, producing glissando-like effects that take full advantage of the instrument’s unique resonance qualities ( Video 8.2). One could describe Espejo, Vargas Leal, and Nava’s physical approach toward the instrument as much more restrained than Newman’s, which is the result of a more bodily engaged playing (Figure 8.3 shows Estrella Newman playing a sixteenth-tone harp). At one point, Newman’s performance style generated a minor controversy among Sonido 13 practitioners as to what would be the most effective way of playing the harps. Espejo, Vargas Leal, and Nava believed that careful articulation of microtonal intervals would provide listeners with a clear idea of the scales and tuning systems being used while these details would go unnoticed in Newman’s style.45 However, in performance, Newman was not concerned with showing the technical specificities of Sonido 13 as a tuning system; instead, she was interested in its emotional and affective capabilities, which she

45.  Armando Nava Loya, personal interview, Mexico City, December 11, 2008.

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Figure 8.3  Estrella Newman playing a Sonido 13 Harp.

believed were more directly conveyed through a more corporeally engaged performance style.46 When asked about how she produces the complex microtonal sonic motions that characterize the vocal parts of Música de las Estrellas, de Lille reveals that instead of thinking about musical parameters (pitch, register, timbre, etc.) she focuses on the places in her body where the sound is generated,47 thus developing a perfectly controlled vocal style in which her body does the “thinking.” Her followers, who are used to her performance style and in fact expect it, are able to feel in their own bodies the visceral vocality of de Lille’s “Ballenas cósmicas” as the piece unfolds. The rare power of this uncompromisingly experimental take on Sonido 13 lies precisely in how it enables the expecting listening bodies to vibrate in sympathy with the performing bodies. The habitus that nurtured de Lille and Newman was one of artistic and cultural openness, experimentation, improvisation, ritualistic performance, and search for novel sounds. One could argue that the extended techniques that characterize late twentieth-century Western art music 46.  Later in his life, Espejo also made use of this performance style. This can be heard in the soundtrack of Juan Pablo Villaseñor’s film Espérame en otro mundo. 47.  Marisa de Lille, electronic interview, September 14, 2013.

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experimentalism were nothing new or strange for de Lille and Newman; instead, they were the very foundation of their musical vocabulary. They illustrate different gateways into the Sonido 13 experience where estrangement could not be placed in the experience of the performer. Here, such moments should be looked for in the bodies that vibrate in sympathy with these performances and experience their oddity in relation to their own cultural expectations of what a musical event should be. These are alternatives musicking experiences that move beyond the locus of performance practice into the type of active perception proposed by Shklovsky. It is in this concatenation of musickings and performances that the sensorial and the aesthetic perform each other. Throughout the last three or four decades, many musicians trained in experimental and avant-garde music as well as extended techniques have attempted the microtonal music of Julián Carrillo or have brought new life to his musical instruments. The French avant-garde composer JeanÉtienne Marie (1917–1989), a champion of Carrillo’s music since they met in the 1950s, led performances of his music in France and Mexico in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the Cuarteto México, a string quartet for whom Mexican avant-garde composer Manuel Enríquez (1926–1994) played second violin, regularly performed Carrillo’s Dos bosquejos (String Quartet No. 3) as well as his first string quartet in quarter tones (String Quartet No. 8). In 1981, the Tage Neuer Musik (Days of New Music) in Bonn were dedicated to microtonal music and offered performances of Carrillo’s Tepepan (1924), and Preludio a Colón (1924) as well as works composed for the Carrillo Pianos by Ivan Wyschnegradsky. On June 5, 1988, the Nürmebrg Theaterhalle presented a concert entitled Der Abend der Anderen Klaviere (The Evening of Other Pianos) that included Carrillo’s Balbuceos (1959) for piano in sixteenth tones and chamber orchestra, Concertino (1958) for piano in third tones and orchestra, and Preludio a Colón. In fact, the Carrillo Pianos themselves have had an important afterlife beyond Julián Carrillo’s death. Carrillo entrusted Jean-Étienne Marie with copies of the Carrillo Pianos in third and sixteenth tones. Marie, who loaned the instruments to the Consertvatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, continued using them in concerts throughout Europe until his death in 1989. After that, his heirs sold the third-tone and sixteenth-tone instruments to the Haute école des arts de Berne and the Musée de la Musique in Paris, respectively. In 1997, at the request of French composer Alain Bancquart (b. 1934), the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique commissioned a sixteenth-tone Carrillo Piano from the Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur. The presentation of this instrument at the Internationalen Pianoforum “… antasten …” in Heilbronn caused

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a stir, which led to a new wave of composers and performers interested in it. These activities have generated a growing repertory for Carrillo Pianos that includes works by Bancquart, Pascale Criton (b. 1954), Ernst Helmuth Flammer (b. 1949), Martin Imholz (b. 1961), Marc Kilchenmann (b. 1970), Jean-Étienne Marie, Bruce Mather (b. 1939), Fernand Vandenbogaerde (b. 1946), Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Franck Christoph Yeznikian (b. 1969), among others. Some of the pianists who regularly perform on Carrillo Pianos include Dominik Blum, Martine Joste, Bruce Mather, and Dominique Roy.48 The Dutch guitarist Wim Hoogewerf (b. 1956) has played and recorded Carrillo’s music with guitar, including chamber works like Preludio a Colón and I Think of You (1928) as well as solo pieces like the Suite for quarter-tone guitar. Johnny Reinhardt (b. 1956), director of the American Festival of Microtonal Music has consistently programmed Carrillo’s music and has included Preludio a Colón and I Think of You in two CDs released by the festival in 2004 and 2009, respectively.49 In 2007, Mexican violist Omar Hernández-Hidalgo recorded Carrillo’s Capricho for solo viola in quarter, eighth, and sixteenth tones.50 In 2010, Angélos Quetzalcóatl (b. 1978)  recorded Carrillo’s complete works for solo guitar.51 Most recently, the avant-garde bassist Dywane Thomas, Jr. (“MonoNeon”) (b. 1990) has released an Internet video of his improvisation over Giménez Cacho’s recording of the third movement of Carrillo’s Casi sonata No. 2 (1959)—he uses a fretless electric bass to play quarter tones—and a track called “Julián Carrillo in a Memphis Juke Joint” (a mix of microtonal music and Southern soul/blues);52 and the Dueto Carrillera (formed by quarter-tone guitar player César Juárez-Joyner, a former student of David Espejo, and quarter-tone marimba player Iván Cipactli Hernández) have invoked Carrillo and Sonido 13 as the inspiration for 48. See Musiques en tiers et en seizièmes de ton/Music in Thirds and Sixteenths of Tones, Société Nouvelle D’Enregistrement, SNE-667 (2009); and The Carrillo 1/16 Tone Piano, Edition Zeitklang, ez-14016 (2003). 49.  The recordings are both by the American Festival of Microtonal Music; Chamber, Pitch, P200203 (2004); and Ideas, Pitch, P200212 (2009). 50.  Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, La viola espiral:  música mexicana para viola—viola y piano del siglo XX, Quindecim, QP 183 (2007); and Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, Twentieth-Century Mexican Music for Viola/Música mexicana para viola del siglo XX, IUMusic-LAMC, CD2010-01 OB (2010). 51. Angélos Quetzalcóatl, The Guitar Music of Beethoven, Carrillo and Corral, CONACULTA, without number (2010). 52.  The video can be accessed at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18r5nm_ mononeon-julian-carrillo-s-quasi-sonata-no-2-for-cello-24-edo_music (accessed on May 29, 2014). The track can be downloaded from http://dywanethomasjr.bandcamp.com/track/julian-carrillo-in-a-memphis-juke-joint (accessed on May 29, 2014). Other microtonal music by MonoNeon is at http://www.reverbnation.com/ mononeon (accessed on May 29, 2014).

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their chamber music project.53 These are all musicians who have developed their musical careers at the margins of the Western common practice repertory, often reaching out beyond its boundaries to attain the technical proficiency necessary to perform the experimental avant-garde music they favor. One could even speculate that for this experimental crowd, what most musicians call the “extended techniques” of avant-garde music are anything but strange. For them, these practices are not an extension but rather the norm in their everyday musical experience. Although Preludio a Colón is undoubtedly one of Carrillo’s most popular works, having been performed and recorded with relative frequency in Mexico, Europe, and the United States, it had not been played in Mexico City for a couple of decades when, on July 4, 2013, the Mexican new music ensemble Liminar programmed it as part of a concert at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. The occasion presented old and new fans of Carrillo’s music with a unique opportunity to hear live a piece that many had only had a chance to listen to in old recordings. Carmina Escobar (b. 1981), singer, media artist, and founding member of Liminar, became interested in performing Preludio a Colón while pursuing a master’s degree in vocal performance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). There, she focused on contemporary repertory, especially the world of expanded tonality from both Western and non-Western traditions. It was her exposure to non-Western tuning systems in Indian and Indonesian music as well as just intonation works by Ben Johnston (b. 1926)  and Harry Partch (1901–1974) that pushed her to search for something similar among Mexican composers. Due to its historical importance, Carrillo’s Preludio a Colón, a score of which she found at the CalArts library, seemed to be the obvious choice. However, it was not until several years later, when Liminar decided to program a concert of historical Modernist Mexican music, that she finally had the opportunity to sing Carrillo’s music. By the time Liminar played Preludio a Colón, she had already moved beyond the bel canto training she had been disciplined in during her undergraduate years in Mexico, and her body and mind were open to the technical and aesthetic challenges of Carrillo’s ET microtonality. Escobar explains that because our sonic universe is tonality it is hard for our bodies and our vocal chords [to sing microtones]. At the beginning, when I was studying [the piece], I had to put a lot of pressure on my vocal chords but eventually the body simply adapts to it and you start listening. … [T]‌he body eventually remembers, and

53.  Some of Dueto Carrillera’s work can be found at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Olt112XL_cY (accessed on May 29, 2014).

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once one has embodied it the vocal chords relax and they achieve the right intonations. … But I was already interested in [singing] contemporary music; for me it was easier to sing very demanding repertory, like Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, than singing an operatic aria; so, [singing Carrillo] was not that dramatic. … It is a different aesthetic process, and once you understand it your body just does it. After that, the distances [in 12-tone ET] feel huge.54

Escobar’s explanation emphasizes the performative relationship between the sensorial, physical experience of singing Sonido 13 and the aesthetic experience of making sense of the music. In her case, these experiences develop and flow as a process in relation to each other and the performing body. Her statement also makes clear that for a musician who already moves within a sonic world that transcends Western art music’s common practice it is not too hard to embody the technical, emotional, and aesthetic power of this music. In the case of performers experienced in contemporary music techniques one cannot recognize the same type of estrangement process that takes place among performers whose approach to music remains within the constraints of the common practice repertory and its influence over commercial pop music. Nevertheless, cognitive estrangement still takes place in these musicking experiences; it just happens in a different locus of experiencing and making music, that of reception. MonoNeon’s experiments with quarter tones gained him praise but also comments such as “Please make it stop,” “2 options  –Genius [or]  –Done waaay too many drugs,” or simply “wtf?”55 Furthermore, processes of estrangement in reception may also occur in performance; they are not mutually exclusive. José Luis Navarro said that when he played Carrillo’s guitar music, musicians and audiences unanimously reacted in the same way: they labeled the music “strange.” One could also describe as indexes of estrangement the historical reactions to Sonido 13 in relation to Carrillo’s concerts as well as those of his students discussed in Chapter 7 as well as contemporary Mexican composers’ responses to Carrillo mentioned in Chapter 1. In some cases, these reactions triggered meaningful processes of creative reception that challenged normative ways of emotionally and intellectually relating to music and sound; in other cases they were simply lost in a general disinterest in the new sounds. These reactions show that instances of cognitive estrangement as described by Suvin are always contingent on

54.  Carmina Escobar, personal interview, Mexico City, July 14, 2013. 55.  Comments for MonoNeon’s “Freeak Her in Quarter Tones,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qoabtk6FrLc (accessed on May 29, 2014).

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the listeners’ specific habitus and networks of aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual participation. Thus, within a habitus that encourages a New Age re-interpretation of pre-Columbian indigenous culture, the strangeness of Sonido 13 could easily be transformed into the mystical soundtrack of Nueva Mexicanidad—as discussed in Chapter  7. On the other hand, within a network that privileges a teleological understanding of music based on the historicism that characterizes avant-garde Western music traditions, Sonido 13 could easily be dismissed as “desvaríos fantasiosos” (fanciful ravings),56 just an inconsequential absurdity. It is important to keep in mind the desires and aspirations that inform different habitus when analyzing the types of estrangement that characterize the reception of more recent Sonido 13 re-articulations—such as Giménez Cacho’s and Liminar’s concerts, as well as de Lille’s Música de las estrellas. It could be argued that the different audiences that gathered at these concerts—and their different expectations of Sonido 13—provide an interesting moment of estrangement in these musical experiences. Escobar reflects on the type of audience they had at the Liminar concert: A lot of people went [to the concert] because it was that piece [Preludio a Colón], because the [microtonal] harp was there, because it was a historical occasion. I think most of the audience went to hear that piece, there was a certain anticipation to hear it because it had not been played in years. The reactions were very positive. I was surprised by the variety of people who attended [but] I was particularly surprised that there were a lot of youngsters and they were also very moved [by the piece].57

Jimena Giménez Cacho also noticed the presence of unusual crowds at her concerts of Carrillo’s Casi sonatas. “Uncommon people came to those concerts, different from your usual [classical music] audiences. Some quasi-punk kids, who would not come to a normal concert, came.”58 These alternative audiences may not have the same expectation from Sonido 13 that a public familiar with the aesthetic discourses of Western art Modernist music would. They may have heard about Carrillo and Sonido 13 through cultural channels and networks that override the elitist world of classical music, engaging instead the mystic and mysterious representations of Carrillo that circulate via Mexican popular music. The 56.  Hugo Fernández de Castro, “¡Música, maestro! Arte, música, silencio y ruido,” Conservatorianos, No. 5 (2000). http://www.conservatorianos.com.mx/5hfdecastro. htm (accessed June 2, 2014). 57.  Escobar, personal interview. 58.  Giménez Cacho, personal interview.

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representations that emphasize the oddity yet uniqueness of Carrillo’s music produce a special desire among younger audiences for whom Sonido 13 exists only in YouTube uploads, Facebook rantings, and apocryphal stories about driving pets wild. For them, the concerts of Liminar or Jiménez Cacho were rare musiking opportunities that enabled them to establish a direct connection with these previously unheard sounds. However, estrangement does not always lead to productive moments that transcend normativity; it is possible that unfamiliarity could simply be received as eccentricity. Someone disciplined within the mainstream aesthetic values of late nineteenth- and even early twentieth-century Modernist music could easily belittle the harmonic stillness and minimalist recurring melodic sequences in many of Carrillo’s works, hearing it as music that literally does nothing and goes nowhere. One could interpret the hindsight reception of Carrillo’s music similarly. Listening to Sonido 13 while expecting a variety of aesthetic values associated with mainstream twentieth-century Modernist music (emancipation of dissonance, disjointed melodic texture, directionality, rhythmic irregularity, etc.) will undoubtedly lead to an experience of disjuncture, and this can only be productive if listeners are willing to suspend some of the values that inform their aesthetic experience; if not, the experience could well be unproductive, failing to challenge normativity. Partly, this is the significance of this phenomenon; it forces listeners to question the seemingly natural character of normativity, asking which values to retain and which to suspend. The centrality of estrangement in Sonido 13—as a strategy for expanding the aesthetic experience in both production and consumption—ultimately reveals it as a distinct Modernist project.

DESIRE, PERFORMATIVIT Y, AND SENSORIAL AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES

In the fall of 1925, Julián Carrillo and his Grupo 13 toured the Mexican countryside. After a concert in Tampico, Tamaulipas, a local journalist wrote, “a sentiment of elevation and non-gravity is evident in the new music. It imprints impulses of perfection and aspirations of infinity in the mood [of the listener]. And such sensations correspond to the psychic state in the astral realm.”59 With the popularization of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy and their own aspirations for broader experiences, the 59. F.  de la Colina, La Opinión (Tampico), quoted in El Sonido 13 2, no.  19–20 (1925): 7.

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audiences of Carrillo’s first national tour heard Sonido 13 as a sort of sonic glimpse into a dimension beyond their mundane everyday lives; many of them describe Sonido 13 as a supra-cultural aesthetic occurrence. One could read these mystic descriptions in Lacanian terms as desires for the Real, a longing to return to a presumably freer pre-symbolic order. For these audiences, the newness and unfamiliarity of Sonido 13 was so different from their past musical experiences that it allowed for new fields of meaning to emerge. The desire for the Real is a very strong and powerful longing for transcendence that informs the reception of many artistic experiences from a wide variety of aesthetic standpoints. The unfamiliarity provided by estrangement would seem like a logical moment for the type of transcendental experience for which people long to take place. However, even the notion of unfamiliarity that they experience is influenced by their culture. Audiences who experience Sonido 13 are able to do so only in relation to the symbolic system such sounds challenge; in other words, their sense of alienation is relational and not a pure sensorial experience as they would want to believe. Its perceived strangeness and unfamiliarity is precisely the result of the cultural background of those who listen to it. It may be argued that this is true of anything unfamiliar; however, not every experience with the unfamiliar results in productive estrangement. More than just the disconnect between expectation and experience, there must be a challenge to expectations and the defiance of norms. Sometimes the strangeness of the music fails to engage aesthetic discourses and challenge expectations already instilled in the listener—for example, the perception of Sonido 13 compositions as doing nothing or going nowhere, or even the ideas that Carrillo’s music is an imitation of Austro-German models or that it failed to transcend those models. In this sense, aesthetic failure can be conceptualized as such only relationally. The cognitive surplus of estrangement, the positive difference between experience and expectation, may lead to productive moments but may also be ignored, ending up reinforcing existing normative systems. This type of desire for the Real may also be discussed in relation to the apparently primal corporeal experience of a musician who approaches Sonido 13 for the first time. The longing to transcend the Symbolic may lead us to try to find the source of delayed aesthetic experiences in the physicality of the technical challenges presented by microtonal music. In such a model, the sensorial experience would seem to precede and trigger the aesthetic experience, as if the sensorial existed beyond the realm of the Symbolic and pre-dated it. But even in these cases one should question the apparent transparency of the corporeal experience; the perceived

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corporal estrangement is also the result of relating physical sensations to expectations that have been disturbed. The Carrillo Pianos are understood as estranged technology in relation to the familiarity of the piano keyboard as interface; the technical estrangement observed in Navarro’s and Giménez Cacho’s Sonido 13 experiences is the result of a previously embodied technique; the estrangement in the reception of MonoNeon or Navarro’s microtonal performances is also the result of a mismatch between expectation and experience. All of these cases show that there is no direct access to a pure, unmediated sensorial experience. Regardless of how alien a musical experience may be, it is always corporeally felt and intellectually processed according to sensations and discourses previously embodied or learned. Christopher Small argues that musicking is an affirmation and celebration of relationships that “does not end with those of a single performance but can expand to the relationships between one performance and another, and, for those who are prepared to explore farther afield, to the relationships between performances in different styles, genres, and even whole musical traditions and cultures. It is an ever-widening spiral of relationships, and each twist of the spiral can widen our understanding of our own relationships, of the reality we construct and is constructed for us by the society in which we ourselves live.”60 Focusing on the relational construction of reality that Small emphasizes one could argue that the power of musicking lies in its performativity. One could also take this relational performativity of musicking to the locus of aesthetic signification and propose that the relationship between sensorial and aesthetic experiences is not informative—the sensorial informing the aesthetic and thus the latter being the result of the former—as an essentialist model would argue, but rather performative. The aesthetic and the sensorial are constructed relationally as we make sense of our desires, emotions, and feelings vis-à-vis the social and ideological frameworks that inform the spaces where these performative encounters take place. However, as the Sonido 13 experience shows, this should not be understood deterministically since the performative dynamics between the sensorial and the aesthetic may also challenge and shape the networks and frameworks that initially inform this encounter. Throughout the musical, philosophical, ethnographic, and historiographic discussions that inform this book’s exploration of Sonido 13 I have systematically invoked the notions of performance and performativity as interpretative tools. I have proposed a transhistorical understanding of 60. Small, Musicking, 209–210.

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Sonido 13 as a performance complex that incorporates a wide variety of ideas through which people have made it meaningful and how these ideas and their resignification in the recent past color our gazes into the distant past as we search for the historical Julián Carrillo. I have argued that establishing new intermundane relations between different reiterations of Sonido 13 enables us to see our historical object of study anew. I have suggested the notion of performative composition as an interpretative concept to analyze Carrillo’s musical bricolages before and after Sonido 13 in order to transcend authenticity/imitation dichotomies and expose the limits of the idea of universality. Finally, I have taken the musicking of Sonido 13 in order to explore the sensorial and aesthetic experiences of estrangement and to theoretically expose their performative character. I would not claim that this book exposes the “true essence” of Carrillo and Sonido 13; I would not argue I have found the “real” Julián Carrillo. However, I am certain that keeping an eye on performativity, what happens when music happens,61 while analyzing his scores, listening to his music, reading archival sources, conducting oral histories, and doing ethnography, offers a unique opportunity to inquire into the aesthetic, emotional, and historical reasons that make Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 a continuously relevant cultural complex.

61. Alejandro L.  Madrid, “Why Music and Performance Studies? Why Now? An Introduction to the Special Issue,” Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música no. 13 (2009). http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a1/why-music-an d-performance-studies-why-now-an-introduction-to-the-special-issue (accessed June 2, 2014).

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INTERVIEWS Böhm, Claudius. Electronic communication. 6 and 8 January 2014. de Lille, Marisa. Electronic interview. 14 September 2013. Echevarría, Jorge. Telephone interview. 1 December 2010. Escobar, Carmina. Personal interview. Mexico City, Mexico. 14 July 2013. Giménez Cacho, Jimena. Personal interview. Mexico City, Mexico. 20 August 2008. García, Milton. Telephone interview. 24 January 2009. Guerrero Asperó, José Ramón. Telephone interview. 16 October 2013. Joste, Martine. Electronic communication. 12 June 2014. Juárez Joyner, César. Personal interview. Mexico City, Mexico. 8 July 2013. Lach, Juan Sebastián. Electronic communication. 5 October 2013. Miramontes Zapata, José. Personal interview. San Luis Potosí, Mexico. 1 October 2010. Nava Loya, Armando. Personal interview. Mexico City, Mexico. 11 December 2008. Nava Loya, Armando. Personal interview. Naucalpan, Mexico. 26 July 2009. Navarro, José Luis. Personal interview. Mexico City, Mexico. 5 December 2008. Newman, Estrella. Personal interview. Puebla, Mexico. 18 July 2009. Thomas, Jr., Dywane. Electronic communication. 20 May 2014. Undiano, Carlos. Personal interview. San Luis Potosí, Mexico. 1 October 2010. Van Driessche, Roos. Electronic communication. 17 January 2014. RECORDINGS 13th Sound Ensemble of Havana. Preludio a Colón. Columbia Phonograph Company, 50216-D. 1930. American Festival of Microtonal Music. Chamber. Pitch, P200203. 2004. American Festival of Microtonal Music. Ideas. Pitch, P200212. 2009. Angélos Quetzalcóatl. The Guitar Music of Beethoven, Carrillo and Corral. CONACULTA, without number. 2010. Carrillo, Julián. Matilde ó México en 1810. Ópera en 4 actos. Quindecim, QP 223. 2011. Carrillo, Julián. Música de: Julián Carrillo. SONY Music, CDEC2 486131. 1997. Contreras, Tino. El jazz mexicano de Tino Contreras. Jazzman, JMANLP 043. 2011. Contreras, Tino. Quinto sol. Música infinita. Taller Escuela de las Nuevas Artes, QL 001. 1978. Giménez Cacho, Jimena. Julián Carrillo. Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello. Quindecim, QP 182. 2007. Grupo Itza. Tepoztecatl. 13, without number. 1983. Hernández-Hidalgo, Omar. La viola espiral. Música mexicana para viola—viola y piano del siglo XX. Quindecim, QP 183. 2007. Hernández-Hidalgo, Omar. Twentieth-Century Mexican Music for Viola/Música mexicana para viola del siglo XX. IUMusic-LAMC, CD2010-01 OB. 2010. Higuera, Maricarmen. Maricarmen Higuera, piano. Carrillo, Revueltas, Quintanar, Hernández Moncada, Muench. INBA-SACM, 10019. 1987. La guitarra en el mundo XXXIV. Radio UNAM, without number. 2005. Musiques en tiers et en seizièmes de ton/Music in Thirds and Sixteenths of Tones. Société Nouvelle D’Enregistrement, SNE-667. 2009. Newman, Estrella and Marisa de Lille. Música de las estrellas. http://www.marisadelille.org/#!música/vstc4=estrellas, 2009. Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil “Julián Carrillo.” En concierto en el Centro Nacional de las Artes. Secretaría de Educación del Estado de San Luis Potosí, OSJJC 001. 2006.

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The Carrillo 1/16 Tone Piano. Edition Zeitklang, ez-14016. 2003. Undiano, Carlos. San Luis Potosí … su música para piano. Instituto de Cultura de San Luis Potosí, without number. 2002. Vargas Leal, Oscar and David Espejo Avilés. Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973. Discos Pax, 1. 1973. VIDEOS “Juan Arturo Brennan Interviews Jimena Giménez Cacho.” Ventana 22. Canal 22. Mexico City. Mexico. 26 February 2008. Soria, Gabriel. La virgen morena. Alejandro Afif Abularach. 1942. Villaseñor, Juan Pablo. Espérame en otro mundo. Arte 7 and IMCINE. 2007.

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INDE X

13 Sonoro, 258 absolute music, 38, 40–41, 44, 46 acoustic value, 127, 129 Adame, Rafael, 12, 12 fn 17 affective turn, 26 Ahualulco del Sonido 13, 182 Angélos Quetzalcóatl, 5 fn 5, 264 fn27, 278 Arpas del Sonido 13, 219, 223 Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 120, 126, 127. Austin, J. L., 17 authenticity, 221 fn 22, 222, 240, 241, 285 Avraamov, Arseny, 125 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 35, 44, 158, 264 fn 27, 273 Baglioni, Silvestro, 125 Balbuceos, 14, 178, 178 fn 16, 179, 183, 277 Bancquart, Alain, 277–278 Baqueiro Foster, Gerónimo, 12 fn 17, 36, 144, 147, 161, 161 fn 78, 163 Becker, Hans, 8, 9 fn 12 Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 39, 44, 47, 68, 137, 171, 172, 174, 195, 245 fn 86, 273 Beethoven Orchestra, 10, 76, 107 Beethoven String Quartet, 10, 107 Brahms, Johannes, 16, 19, 32, 38–39, 44, 47, 50, 55 bricolage, 16, 50, 67 Brussels World’s Fair, 14. See also Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles Buschman, Federico, 14, 256, 258 Busoni, Ferruccio, 109, 120, 125, 126–128, 132, 150, 253. See also Ästhetik der Tonkunst Butler, Judith, 17

Carl Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur, 255, 256, 256 fn 8, 277 Carrasco, Alfredo, 245 Carrillo, Dolores, 7 fn 6, 14, 63 fn 44, 74 fn 3, 74 fn 4, 170, 199, 200, 200 fn 43, 220, 223, 225, 233, 247, 247 fn 91, 256 Carrillo, Julián and Carlos Chávez, 34–36, 103, 142, 149–150, 166, 181–182, 227 fn 33 and Grupo de los 9, 12, 143, 145–156, 201 and religious music, 240, 244–251 and spirituality, 30, 67, 215–216, 240, 238–252 biography of, 7–15 criticism against, 2, 16, 19, 32, 35–37, 103–105, 142, 145–156, 166–167, 211, 281 Carter, Elliott, 186 fn 32 Caso, Antonio, 104, 104 fn 3, 105, 111 Castañeda, Daniel, 161 Chávez, Carlos, 34–37, 103–106, 142, 145, 149–150, 166, 181–182, 189, 211 fn 48, 227 fn 33 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas, 49–50 Comet Kohoutek, 223, 224 Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Gand, 9, 171 continuum (music), 193, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 203, 206–210, 210 fn 46 Contreras, Tino, 30, 232–233 Corpus Christi, 80–81, 80 fn 23, 89–95 Cowell, Henry, 243 fn 83 Criton, Pascale, 278 Cromometrofonía, 223 fn 26

Cromometrofonía No. 1/Cometa 1973, 223, 224–225, 224 fn 28 cultural complex, 4–5, 19–21 de Lille, Marisa, 30, 216220, 232, 275 de Nora, Tia, 25 death drive, 92–93 Debussy, Claude, 30, 133, 168, 176 Delgadillo, Luis A., 145, 145 fns 23 and 25, 146, 146 fn 29 developing variation, 48 Díaz, Porfirio, 8, 10, 74, 76–77, 76 fn 13, 94, 96 Dueto Carrillera, 278 ET. See Equal Temperament Echevarría, Jorge, 30, 219 fn 16, 226, 233–235, 237, 239, 253 El Ateneo de la Juventud, 104, 104 fn 3 El infinito en las escalas y los acordes, 128, 154 Enríquez, Manuel, 277 Equal Temperament (ET), 13, 158, 159, 160, 228, 231 fn 46, 238 Escobar, Carmina, 31, 279–281 Espejo, David, 30, 200 fn 43, 213, 220, 223, 223 fns 25 and 26, 225–233, 236, 237, 239, 253, 271–276, 276 fn 46, 278 Estrangement 232, 257–260, 262–266, 263 fn 24, 272, 274, 280–285 and aesthetic experience, 263–264, 282 and sensorial experience, 261, 265 cognitive estrangement, 261, 263, 264 ethnofusion, 218, 233–234, 234 fn 55, 273, 275 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, 255 Flammer, Ernst Helmuth, 278 Fojas, Camilla, 19 Fokker, Adriaan, 198–199 Forte, Allen, 128, 154 Gagarin, Yuri, 200 fn 43 Gewandhausorchester, 8–9, 9 fn 10, 39, 43–45, 141, 141 fn 10 repertory between 1899 and 1902, 43

[300] Index

Giménez Cacho, Jimena, 31, 268, 271–274, 278, 281, 284 Grupo 13 de La Habana, 13 Grupo de los 9, 12, 143, 145–152, 155–156, 155 fn 57, 161 fn 78, 201 Guerrero, Ramón, 30, 222 fn 24, 226, 233–235, 237, 239 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 26 Hába, Alois, 125–126, 150, 198, 257 Hanslick, Eduard, 40–42. See also Von Musikalisch-Schönen harmonic tuning, 223, 225, 227, 238 see also just intonation Hernández de Acevedo, Juan, 141 Herrera y Ogazón, Alba, 107, 110, 145, 149 Hoogewerf, Wim, 278 Horizontes, 14, 193, 205 Hoy Mismo, 21, 226 Huerta, Victoriano, 11, 245 Imholz, Martin, 278 imitation (of European models), 16, 18–20, 27, 29, 33, 35, 50, 66, 104, 150, 283 285 intermundane, 5, 20, 30, 214, 215, 221, 222, 231, 237, 239, 240, 241, 253, 254, 285 definition, 215 International Music Congress (Rome), 10, 46, 171 Itza, 234–236 Ives, Charles, 205, 243 fn 83, 253 Jadassohn, Salomon, 8, 9 fn 12, 39, 39 fns 15 and 17, 40, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50, 65, 66, 171 Johnston, Ben, 231 fn 46, 279 Joste, Martine, 31, 262, 262 fn 20, 263, 278 just intonation, 157, 160, 219, 223, 224 fn 27, 225, 231 fn 46, 257 fn 12, 279 Kilchenmann, Marc, 278 Koening’s harp, 147, 155, 155 fns 55 and 57 Königliches Konservatorium der Musik Leipzig, 8, 39, 48

La virgen morena, 248–249 Lacan, Jacques, 264–265 impossibility of sexual relation, 93 Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, 264–266, 264 fn 28, 283 Larios, Elvira, 12, 12 fn 17, 153 Lavista, Mario, 2, 223 fn 25, 230, 260 Leipzig, 8, 9, 33, 35, 39, 42–46, 43 fn 26, 48–50, 54–55, 63, 66, 141, 141 fn 10, 171–172 Leningrad Quarter-Tone Circle, 125 Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, 153, 185, 263, 264 fn 27, 274 fn 42 Liebestod, 92 Liminar, 279, 281, 282 Liszt, Franz, 38–39, 42, 44, 47, 68, 107, 128, 171–172, 171 fn 7, 174, 264 fn 27 Lourié, Arthur, 125, 127 Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium, 21, 227, 229 Mager, Jörg, 125 Mahler, Gustav, 38, 244 Marie, Jean Étienne, 132 fn 42, 194, 277, 278 Mather, Bruce, 278 Matilde o México en 1810, 10, 27–28, 70–102 plot, 78–87 as symbolic discourse, 92–96 as proleptic representation, 95–96 Meneses, Carlos J., 75, 145 fn 25 Merkel, Johannes, 8, 9 fn 12 metric modulation, 186, 186 fns 32 and 33 Miramontes Zapata, José, 89, 100–102 Misa de restauración, 251. See also Misa en cuartos de tono a S.S. Juan XXIII Misa en cuartos de tono a S.S. Juan XXIII, 244, 249. See also Misa de restauración Modernism, 3, 28, 37, 105, 133, 200 fn 43, 211 fn 48, 244, 250 fn 102 Modernismo, 79 fn 22 Modernista, 19 fn 30, 79–80, 104 Möllendorff, Willi, 125, 257 Morales, Melesio, 8, 33–34, 35, 45, 103 musical persona, 17, 50 musicking, 259, 266, 274, 277, 280, 284–285

and aesthetic experience, 277, 284, 285 and sensorial experience, 274, 277, 285 and performativity, 277, 284, 285 mythology, 6, 7, 28, 73, 86, 140–141, 214–215, 220, 225, 237, 240, 254, 261 National Congress of Music (1926), 146 fn 26, 161, 163 National Conservatory (Mexico), 8, 8 fn 7, 10, 11, 12, 74, 141, 142, 144 fn 22, 145, 145 fn 25, 181, 233, 245 National Symphony Orchestra (Mexico), 11, 34, 78, 181, 227 fn 33, 245 natural law, 30, 165 naturalized spirituality, 30, 241–244, 248–249, 251–252, 253 Nava Loya, Armando, 30, 136 fn 1, 138, 223 fn 26, 226, 227–231, 227 fn 33, 236, 237, 238 Navarro, José Luis, 31, 266–271, 270 fn 37, 274, 280 New Age, 22, 214, 214 fn 3, 215, 223, 226, 229, 235, 239, 241–242, 281 New York City, 11, 12, 13, 175, 178, 193, 243 Newman, Estrella, 30, 213, 216–217, 219, 219 fn 16, 220–221, 220 fn 20, 223, 225–226, 229, 231–239, 253, 275–277 Nikisch, Arthur, 39, 43, 171 fn 7 Novaro, Augusto, 160, 160 fn 74, 161, 210 fn 46, 231 fn 46 Nueva Mexicanidad, 162 fn 81, 213– 214, 216, 218–222, 231–239, 241, 275, 281 organicism, 10, 34, 68, 69, 107, 252 Ornstein, Leo, 110 Ortega y Fonseca, Francisco, 8, 142 Ossián, 10, 75 overtone series, 108–109, 127, 147, 150, 154–158, 160, 160 fn 74, 164, 180, 180 fn 19, 202, 211, 231 fn 46, 233–234, 234 fn 57, 237–238, 252. See also harmonic tuning and just intonation

Index  [30 1]

Padilla, Soledad, 12 Partch, Harry, 159 fn 71, 160, 231 fn 46, 279 performance complex, 4–5, 4 fn 4, 6, 21 fn 31, 25–26, 137–138, 260, 285. See also cultural complex performative composition, 16–18, 29, 50, 69, 105, 285 performativity, 17, 18, 90, 284–285 and identity, 17 in aesthetic and sensorial experiences, 259, 266, 274, 277, 280, 284, 285 musicking and, 277, 284, 285 of law, 162–165 Pianos Carrillo, 198, 255. See also Pianos Metamorfoseadores Pianos Metamorfoseadores, 14, 261. See also Pianos Carrillo Pollock, Della, 18 post-nationality, 28, 73, 99, 102 Pratt, Mary Louise, 16–17 Preludio a Colón, 12–13, 28, 110, 128, 133, 144, 161 fn 78, 167, 167 fn 3, 168, 168 fn 4, 180, 188–189, 201, 205, 236, 242, 277–279, 281 analysis of, 112–124 productive consumption, 19, 253 Quanta, 223 fn 25, 260 Reinhardt, Johnny, 278 Reyes, Angel, 13, 13 fn 18, See also Grupo 13 de La Habana Reyes, Jorge, 273–274 Rimsky-Korsakov, Georgy, 125 Romanticism, 2, 67–69, 169, 211, 211 fn 47, 252–254 Romero, Jesús C. 110 Roslavets, Nicolai, 125 fn 27, 129 fn 40 Rudhyar, Dane, 243 fn 83 Sauter, Carl — see Carl Sauter Pianofortemanufaktur Schenker, Heinrich, 106, 108 fn 11, 109–111, 119, 121, 123–125, 127, 164, 253 Schoenberg, Arnold, 13, 30, 39, 48 fn 37, 106, 108, 108 fn 11, 109–110, 126–127, 150, 163 fn 89, 164, 164

[302] Index

fn 91, 168, 175, 176 fn 9, 178 fn 14, 189, 189 fn 34, 200 fn 43, 210, 211, 243 fn 83, 244, 253, 280 Harmonielehre, 108–109, 127 Style and Idea, 48 fn 37, 164 fn 91, 178 fn 14, 189 fn 34 Wind Quintet Op. 26, 13, 176 fn 9, 213 fn 34 Scriabin, Alexander, 30, 125 fn 27, 151, 129 fn 40, 168, 210, 243 fn 83 Segunda misa “a capella” en cuartos de tono, 14, 167, 244 Sonata casi fantasía, 13, 75, 176 fn 9, 177, 189 fn 34, 243 Sonido 13 description, 12, 107–110, 151–154 as revolution, 12, 110–111, 110 fn 15, 128, 137–138, 140–141, 145, 156, 158, 161 fn 78, 181–182, 185–186, 211, 238, 250–251, 251 fn 106 spirituality, 10, 67, 214–216, 214 fn 3, 238–249, 251–253, 265. See also naturalized spirituality Stein, Richard Heinrich, 125, 125–126 fn 30 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 194 Stokowski, Leopold, 13, 14, 175, 179, 181–182, 193 Strauss, Richard, 16, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 137 Stravinsky, Igor, 168, 177, 194, 211, 211 fn 48 Sturm und Drang, 68 Symphony No. 1 in D major analysis of, 48–67 Taller de las Nuevas Artes, 231, 232, 236. See also Taller Escuela de las Nuevas Artes Julián Carrillo Taller Escuela de las Nuevas Artes Julián Carrillo, 220. See also Taller de las Nuevas Artes Taylor, Diana, 16–17, 215 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilich, 46, 61 fn 43, 68 Tennyson, Alfred, 213, 240 thematic transformation, 46 fn 33, 47, 171, 171 fn 7, 174 Thomas, Jr., Dywane “MonoNeon,” 278, 280, 284

Tonal Variety and Ideological Unity — see Varietà tonica e unità ideologica transcendentalism, 253 transhistorical, 3–5, 25, 73, 137, 240, 241, 254, 285 method, 3–5, 25–26, 240 narrative, 25 Tratado sintético de harmonía, 11, 65, 128, 129 Trucco, Eduardo, 74, 74 fn 4, 75, 79 fn 20 ultrachromatic, 127, 132, 132 fn 42, 202, 209, 217 fn 9 Vandenbogaerde, Fernand, 278 Vargas Leal, Oscar, 30, 136 fn 1, 200 fn 43, 219 fn 16, 222–230, 222 fns 23 and 24, 223 fn 25, 232–234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 253, 275 Varietà tonica e unità ideologica, 10, 46, 47 fn 34, 107, 171

Vasconcelos, José, 34, 104, 104 fn 3, 128, 245, 245 fn 86 verismo, 77, 80 Wagner, Richard, 16, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 54, 68, 133, 137, 252, 253, whole-tone collection, 164, 169, 177, 178 fn 14, 183, 184, 189 fn 34, 198, 201, 202, 204, 209, 249, 251, 252, See also whole-tone scale whole-tone scales, 65, 128–129, 177, 178 fn 14, 183, 193, 195, 202, 207, 209, See also whole-tone collection Wyschnegradsky, Ivan, 125, 127–128, 129, 132, 132 fn 42, 198, 243 fn 83, 253, 257, 262 fn 20, 277, 278 Xenakis, Iannis, 30, 168, 210 Yeznikian, Franck Christoph, 278 Zimmer, Albert, 9, 9–10 fn 13, 171

Index  [3 0 3]