"Composer and Community"
An Inter-Disciplinary Colloquium
Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas and
the Myth of the Aztec Renaissance
Leonora Saavedra
Associate Professor of Music
University of California-Riverside
Abstract:
Despite its central role in the historiography of twentieth-century Mexican art music, the so-called "Aztec Renaissance" of the 1920s and 30s contains more myth than truth. Works by Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, and other composers of this period that show any demonstrable link to an intended representation of indigenous peoples and their music--whether of the Aztecs or Mayans or of contemporary communities--were few in number. Moreover, such a representation of "Indians"--in the sense of re-presenting and of speaking for--proved to be a very difficult task. In the first place, it ran counter to a conception of the self that contemporary Mexican audiences had already constructed, one centered in particular on their mestizo identity. Secondly, the contradictions and ambivalences embodied in the "Indianista" music of Chávez and Revueltas, and the difficulty they encountered in encoding "the Indian" suggests that indigenous culture, including music, was in fact quite foreign to them as well.
Focusing on Chávez's Sinfonia India (1935), and Revueltas's Cuauhnáhuac (1931), this paper demonstrates, in particular, how both composers, by using such means as pentatonic scales (as a sign of “the primitive”) constructed signifiers of "the Indian" that were based on Eurocentric assumptions, which, paradoxically, were then subverted in the same compositions by the composers themselves.
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