The Sounds of the Nation: Visions of Modernity and Tradition in Mexico’s First National Congress of Music
2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2006-047
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoFor decades, political, social, and (lately) cultural historians have successfully challenged the orthodox history of the Mexican Revolution: a teleology of progress achieved through the beneficence of the postrevolutionary state. The official history of nationalist aesthetics and national identity — with its essentialist claims to mexicanidad or lo mexicano, its iconization of (male) cultural caudillos, and its close association of cultural nationalism with the state — has received less attention. The critical assessment of aesthetics now underway has focused on the relationship between indigenismo and the plastic arts, rather than music.1 The orthodox history of music iconizes a few great men (for example, Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez) and links cultural nationalism to government sponsorship; such prevailing views bear reexamination. The cultural production and consumption of music is an arena for the dynamic interplay of power in particular historical contexts.2 This article seeks to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that reexamines musical production in such a light.I will focus on the First National Congress of Music, celebrated in Mexico City’s Palacio de Minería in September 1926. I understand the congress as a site for uncovering distinct visions of the relationship among national identity and music, modernity, and modernism, at a moment when the postrevolutionary atmosphere of Mexico City fostered an intense interest in national culture. The diverse positions put forth at the congress, to and by its organizing and evaluation committees, represented distinct understandings of modernism as a broad, multifaceted aesthetic movement that originated in turn-of-the-century Europe and served as a powerful tool in the construction of nationalist aesthetics in the Americas.3 An examination of the congress shows contention, rather than consensus, concerning the nature of a national music and thus reveals the constructed nature of national identity. An analysis of debates over the nature of a Mexican “national music” also elucidates dissension within and about the cultural nationalist crusade launched in 1921 by José Vasconcelos as minister of education. At the same time, it highlights the role of the private sector in fostering cultural nationalism: the congress was not sponsored by the government but by the newspaper El Universal.The First National Congress of Music was an unprecedented event. It brought together musicians from a wide variety of fields — composers, music educators, performers, impresarios, musicologists, musical theorists — and aesthetic tendencies to discuss the state of musical affairs in postrevolutionary society. More than 90 people registered for the congress, and approximately 36 papers were presented, discussed, and evaluated during the eight days of the meeting. The first forum of this kind ever organized, the congresss allowed musicians from different generations to voice their opinions about the future of music in their country. The issues discussed ranged from the National Conservatory curriculum to the role of folk music in the development of a “true” national music; from the lack of regular concert seasons to more radical modernist proposals, such as the need to reform the foundations of the Western music system.The congress took place just six years after the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution. The year 1920 marked the shaky beginnings of national reconstruction organized around President Álvaro Obregón’s tentative alliance with selected worker and agrarian organizations, as well as the cultural and educational crusade led by Vasconcelos from the Ministry of Education. It was a period of persistent ideological, social, and political confrontation over state and nation building. The socialist and anticlerical projects of several state governors, and the opposition such campaigns engendered, represented a challenge to central authority. A major military rebellion against the central government and radical regional experiments wracked Mexico in 1923 – 24. In 1927, Catholics protesting the postrevolutionary state’s attack on religious rights launched a fierce rebellion (the Cristiada) that engulfed western Mexico until 1929.Inevitably touched by these political and social upheavals, Mexican musicians experienced their own professional uncertainties and challenges. Those who belonged to the intellectual elite had witnessed the crisis and collapse of many prerevolutionary musical institutions that had nurtured them and had fostered the development of an active musical life in Mexico City. In 1919, the need to revitalize institutions and redefine their roles prompted composer Manuel M. Ponce (1882 – 48) to call for a congress that would discuss “the causes of our music’s backwardness and the best ways to fight that decadence.”4 Ponce was one of the early advocates of musical nationalism. In 1913, as part of the activities of El Ateneo de la Juventud, he had given a lecture on “La música y la canción mexicana” (Music and Mexican Song), in which he urged composers to take vernacular songs as the foundation of a national music style. Ponce’s project attempted to “dignify” and “elevate [these songs] to the category of works of art” by harmonizing and arranging them according to contemporary European musical practices.5 The composer’s 1919 call recycled his ideas from 1913 and labeled current musical practices in Mexico “backward,” since they were unconcerned with the development of a decidedly national music style.Ponce’s call did not receive immediate response, but six years later Carlos Chávez (1899 – 78) rekindled the idea when he published an ironic article entitled “Un congreso sin rigor” (A Congress without Rigor). He called for a meeting that would acknowledge the problems of Latin American music, which he labeled “Indo-Spanish.”6 A former student of Ponce, Chávez had gained notoriety in Mexico City through his association with foreign avant-garde and modernist composers (including Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger), whose music he presented in Mexico in a series of concerts called Conciertos de Música Nueva (1924 – 25). Such endeavors gave Chávez an aura of enfant terrible. By referring to Latin American music as Indo-Spanish, Chávez echoed an increasing interest in indigenismo among Mexican intellectuals and private entrepreneurs. In fact, such an interest had already made its way, in the form of dramatic plots or imaginary soundscapes, into a few of Chávez’s scores — mainly El fuego nuevo (1921), Tres piezas para guitarra (1923 – 54), and Los cuatro soles (1925).7A year later, Carlos del Castillo (1892 – 1957), then dean of the National Conservatory, called for a meeting of “serious” Mexican composers that would “put an end to the despicable music pompously called Mexican.”8 Del Castillo’s criticism targeted both Julián Carrillo’s Grupo 13 and the composers of popular music who arranged vernacular folk songs (del Castillo called them “arregla-dores,” or arrangers).9 Like Ponce, Carrillo was one of the most important figures in the Mexican music scene. He received his musical training in fin-de-siècle Leipzig, and as one of the first Mexican composers trained in Germany he struggled to introduce the German organicist musical paradigm to Mexico.10 After 1924, when Carrillo and his Grupo 13 presented a concert of modernist music based entirely on a microtonal scale based on 1/16ths of a tone, he and his followers proposed that such alternative temperaments, or tunings, were a “natural” system that, according to the evolutionary, teleological flow of history, was destined to replace the dominant Western music system.11 Carrillo’s futuristic microtonal project infuriated conservative, moderate, and even avant-garde musicians. A heterogeneous group of conservative and moderate musicians led by Manuel Barajas (1895 – 1956), Daniel Castañeda (1899 – 1957), Alba Herrera y Ogazón (1885 – 1931), Estanislao Mejía (1882 – 1967), and Jesús C. Romero (1893 – 1958), among others, formed the Grupo de los 9 and used the pages of El Universal to challenge the viability of Carrillo’s microtonal music. The more radical Chávez dismissed Carrillo’s project as a mere imitation of European and Hindu musical practices.12Del Castillo was also enraged by the arregladores, a group of musicians that included Alfonso Esparza Oteo, Ignacio González Esperón “Tata Nacho,” and Mario Talavera. They followed Vasconcelos’s criollista guidelines — in turn inspired by Ponce’s nationalist calls from 1913 and 1919 — in transcribing and arranging Mexican vernacular songs in an unsophisticated, romantic, and sentimental style.13 By attacking Carrillo and the arregladores, del Castillo sought to distance himself from two of the most visible and polemical musical discourses in Mexico at the time. However, as Ricardo Miranda notes, del Castillo’s diatribe created a climate that weakened his candidacy as organizer of the congress, while forcing the music community to acknowledge the need to discuss the current state of Mexican music.14In June 1926, a small organizing committee made up of conservatory professor Manuel Barajas and two young musicians, Daniel Castañeda and Fran-cisco Domínguez (1897 – 1975), invited “all Mexican musicians, composers, and musicologists to attend the second organizing meeting for the National Music Congress.” The first draft of the convocation letter was signed by them, as well as by Estanislao Mejía, Jesús C. Romero, and Ignacio Montiel y López (1889 – 1947). When the bulletin and call for papers were published in July 1926, the committee also included Alba Herrera y Ogazón and the young musician Juan León Mariscal (1899 – 1972). Once a collaborator and supporter of Carrillo, Herrera y Ogazón had joined Barajas, Castañeda, Mejía, and Romero in orga-nizing the Grupo de los 9 that had criticized Carrillo. They formed the core of the newly founded Grupo Nosotros, a heterogeneous mix of established musicians and younger students from the National Conservatory. Some members could trace their musical activity back to the Ateneo de la Juventud, a movement of young intellectuals and artists that, coterminous with the eruption of the 1910 revolution, rebelled against then-dominant positivism in favor of a more spontaneous, intuitive, and spiritualist expression of creativity.15 In their oppositional stance, they had drawn from the Bergson’s and Schopenhauer’s brand of musical modernism, associated with the irrational. On the other hand, they eventually became vociferous opponents of the path of European modernism pursued by Julián Carrillo in Mexico. As discussed below, the reasons behind the Grupo de los 9’s attack on Carrillo were as varied as the group’s heterogeneous membership.The ideological heterogeneity of the organizing committee informed its call for papers. One concern was “the inability of the people to appreciate works of art and their beauty because they lack musical culture.”16 This idea had been fundamental to the Ateneo, whose members had helped to found the Universidad Popular in 1912 as a civilizing forum for bringing “culture” to the “masses.”17 The civilizing drive also inspired ex-Ateneista José Vasconcelos to launch a national educational crusade that included a massive publication and distribution of European literary classics. The civilizing project permeated the group around Alba Herrera y Ogazón, who had made a mission out of inculcating nineteenth-century European aesthetics in Mexican musical performers and the listening public. On the other hand, the call for papers stressed the need to “organize a systematic study of Mexican folklore” and to dignify Mexico’s national art-music tradition, which according to them was “nothing but a reflection of Europe.”18 This position reflected the interests of the younger members of the organizing committee, Francisco Domínguez and Daniel Castañeda. Domínguez had studied vernacular and indigenous music in Michoacán for a project sponsored by the Ministry of Public Education. Castañeda was both an engineer and a musician who joined the Grupo de los 9 in its 1924 crusade against Carrillo not because he found the maestro’s ideas unfeasible, but rather because he thought that Carrillo’s approach was unsystematic and lacked scientific rigor. In fact, his interest in microtonality would be clear not only in the works he submitted to the congress but also later in his life, when he collaborated with Augusto Novaro, a Mexican theorist who developed a microtonal system different from Carrillo’s.It would be simplistic to reduce the aesthetic and philosophical tendencies in the committee to an Europeanist-versus-folklorist dichotomy. In fact, there were very important differences among the members of each faction. Such differences informed their contradictory positions on the role of European music in the formation of a Mexican art music (for example, that of Romero versus that of Herrera y Ogazón) and radically different understandings of the notion of folk music, its role in the development of a national music, and its relationship to the idea of modernity (for example, Romero versus Castañeda versus Domínguez). Yet, they stood united with del Castillo against the arregladores’ songs, which enjoyed a broad audience and had been promoted as essentially Mexican by Vasconcelos. This trend has its origin in Manuel M. Ponce and his 1913 Ateneo lecture, which recommended that popular tunes be refined through the canons of the European art-music tradition. His aesthetic values derived from a strain of late nineteenth-century literary modernismo associated with poets such as José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and others who sought the renovation of the Spanish language through cross-fertilization with foreign models and local elements.19 Ponce’s adoption of organicist compositional techniques from the German tradition (such as developing variation and thematic transformation in his 1912 Piano concerto) and his interest in Mexican folk music expressed a modernist desire to expand the inherited European music language and triggered a process of renovation similar to that proposed by José Enrique Rodó’s Americanismo: a specifically American way to search for a place in the modern world.20 In the modernistas’ view, modernity, modernism, the nation, and the local became inseparable notions. As minister of education, Vasconcelos applied Ponce’s ideal to his educational program in order to foment a sense of national identity based upon the perceived Hispanic heritage. This project encouraged an indiscriminate arrangement of popular Mexican songs following very simple harmonic procedures, the composition of original songs, and their performance in schools and at public events. Such practices generated a body of musical arrangements that neither “dignified” folk music, according to Ponce’s prescriptions, nor presented a worthy basis for a distinct Mexican art music.21 One of the most important elements in the 1926 call for papers was its questioning of the equation of the vernacular song with Mexican folk music, such as Ponce’s own “Estrellita” and “Por ti mi corazón,” which he arranged for solo guitar, along with “Cuiden su vida,” “Pajarera,” and “La Valentina” in a cycle of Canciones mexicanas (ca. 1925) dedicated to Andrés Segovia.While the congress was cosponsored by the National University (at this time still part of the Ministry of Public Education), it was organized largely through private support. Historians are just beginning to recognize the fundamental role played by the nongovernmental media in the development and dissemination of intellectual discussions of national identity, modernity, and modernism. The first radio program broadcast by La Casa del Radio, a station affiliated with the newspaper El Universal, captured the eclecticism of Mexican cultural life in the early 1920s. On that occasion, the estridentista poet Manuel Maples Arce shared the airwaves with Manuel M. Ponce,22 the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the Orquesta Típica of Juan N. Torreblanca: the iconoclastic avant-garde, the old, sentimental modernista aesthetic, the European music tradition, and the popular criollo song were all vital elements in the negotiation of national identity.23 As noted above, El Universal was also the public forum for the debate between Carrillo and the Grupo de los 9, a discussion that prompted Carrillo to offer the first recital of his microtonal music (which he considered a uniquely modern, futurist, and decidedly Mexican music) at Casa del Radio. Further, the media was quick to show an interest in the indigenous as an iconic symbol. El Universal had organized the India Bonita beauty pageant in 1921 in conjunction with the Centennial of Independence. El Buen Tono, the cigar company that owned CYB (later XEB), the other radio station of the day, used indigenous imagery in its advertisements. The media was thus a competing actor in the race to represent the nation, its heritage, its modernity, and its trajectory.On May 15, 1926, in response to del Castillo’s idea of a congress that would “put an end to the despicable music pompously called Mexican,” the young Carlos Chávez republished “Un congreso sin rigor” in the magazine Arte, one of many ephemeral cultural journals that sprang up in these years of controversy and effervescence. He added an introduction that openly criticized del Castillo: “If [the congress I proposed] had taken place, it would have produced a catalog of good and bad ideas that would have reached everyone who, like those seditious musicians and music critics, does not know that national Mexican music exists as long as a Mexican nationality exists. What else can we wish for, a congress that dictates a sentence? A sentence that determines and imposes the ‘aesthetic’ of a Mexican music so that it comes out of the congress as Minerva from the head of Zeus?”24 In a few words, Chávez recognized the congress as a performative site and feared it could result in the imposition of a univocal “aesthetic” of Mexican music. However, he failed to recognize that the performativity of the congress would not necessarily express itself in “dictated sentences” but rather in distinct discourses that would enter into hegemonic negotiation.The First National Congress was a site from which key experts who desired to set national standards sought to articulate a variety of different and even contradictory projects. On the one hand, a faction of the organizing committee (Herrera y Ogazón, Barajas, and Mejía) intended to use the congress to keep pushing the classical Europeanist projects they had defended for over ten years. On the other hand, the younger members (Domínguez and Castañeda) attempted an ideological separation from the old regime. They were willing to perform this separation by emphasizing and reevaluating folklore and by attempting to develop a unique Mexican modernism that would bring “personality to the nationalist music project.”25 Still other members of the organizing committee, such as Jesús C. Romero, had individual notions of nationality and national music that did not clearly align with any others.The call for papers evoked a strong response from the music community, with 36 papers submitted and 93 participants attending. Although the most well-known and prestigious composers, Carrillo and Ponce, were abroad and unable to attend, the list of registered participants included established musicians such as Carlos del Castillo, Luis G. Saloma (1866 – 1956), Rafael J. Tello (1872 – 1946), and José Rocabruna (1879 – 1957), as well as rising young stars Antonio Gomezanda (1894 – 1961) and José F. Vázquez (1896 – 1961). The enfant terrible Carlos Chávez seems to have registered for the congress, but he moved to New York before it convened and did not attend.26 The positive response alerts us to the consensus around the desire to define the issues in the making of a Mexican music. However, the organizing committee faced a problem when some of the papers did not fit the categories defined in the original call: acoustics, the study of instruments, theory and composition (itself divided into technical or artistic issues), pedagogy, folklore, and free subjects.27 The variety of papers made clear the need for the negotiation. The congress has to be read as a creative practice producing the discursive space in which ideas about music and nation could be constituted.The First National Congress of Music took place on September 5 through September 12, 1926. Before the meeting, the organizing committee established evaluating committees for each category in the call for papers, naming and swearing in three members for each. While participants delivered their papers to the conference as a whole for open discussion, each paper was also submitted to its corresponding evaluation committee, which reviewed and either approved or rejected its suggestions. Each committee submitted its evaluations to the general board, which could ratify or overturn the evaluation committee decisions. Finally (and ideally), the general board recommended the implementation of the approved proposals in the different music schools of the country.Documents in the archives of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México show that the evaluation committees approved approximately 79 percent of the papers presented. All papers presented by organizing-committee members were approved, although, as discussed below, some of the most radical propositions followed alternative (including undemocratic) channels of approval. The majority of members’ papers dealt with problems in music education that did not tackle issues as complex as questioning the validity of the dominant musical system. Many stressed the lack of music education among the population or the absence of mechanisms that would expose them to “high art,” rather than asking whether elite expectations resonated with the musical interests of the masses. The approved papers confirmed the persistence of the prerevolutionary civilizing project. However, it is also clear that they revalidated a crumbling status quo.Alba Herrera y Ogazón’s paper on the need for a well-rounded education for musicians repeated an essay she had presented in 1913 at the Universidad Popular. There, she had blamed Mexican audiences’ views of music as a mere social ornament and insignificant pleasure on shortcomings in musical education. Basing her argument on an idealist understanding of music borrowed from Schopenhauer, she had argued that European art music was an indispensable part of every civilized person’s life. Music, she had asserted, revealed the origin, fate, abilities, and possibilities of the individual. For her, the capacity to hear and understand the beauty of European art music would stimulate heroic acts.28 Now, in 1926, she insisted on the great urgency of establishing a “great civilizing program [for which] the supreme mission of our official art schools is to make the nation more refined, intelligent, and cultivated.”29 For her and those who thought like her, art music came from the European tradition, and Mexican musical training should aspire to arrive at the level of European music institutions. For Herrera y Ogazón’s camp, culture was not something people created on a daily basis but a goal and status to be achieved. This position undermined the value of local cultural production outside the criteria of European high art.The Herrera y Ogazón faction imagined the congress as a site for relegitimizing their prerevolutionary agenda. The majority of papers reflected this position. They were systematically approved by the evaluation committees and their propositions recommended by the general board. Even those contradicting one another on minor points were approved, as long as they did not deviate significantly from the larger ideological project. For example, neither Ignacio Montiel y López nor Flavio Carlos challenged classical European understandings of rhythm in their different, and even mutually exclusive, methods for teaching rhythm. Thus, despite their contradictions, their papers were both approved and their ideas recommended for implementation at the conservatory. Such was not the case with the more challenging papers, which had to overcome many obstacles before being rejected or reluctantly accepted. It is these papers that show the degree to which the dominant civilizing project was under fire.The fate of Jesús C. Romero’s paper shows how diversity of opinion among organizing-committee members gave rise to heated debates. He submitted a paper entitled “La cátedra de la historia crítica de la música en México como base de la justificación de nuestro arte nacional” (A Course on the Critical Music History in Mexico as Grounds to Justify Our National Art), which boldly challenged widely held assumptions about music and nation. Romero asked for a prior survey of Mexican composers before any one could speak of national music, and he suggested that a course on the history of Mexican music be integrated into the conservatory curriculum. In a move questioning the sole focus of musical study on the European classical and romantic traditions, he asked: “Would it be possible that students could learn to love and be a part of their tradition when the program [of study] invalidates and hides their heroes rather than commending them, a program that on the contrary praises foreigners as the best and teaches students to venerate them as one of a kind?”30Before deciding on Romero’s paper, the evaluation committee had approved a paper by Ernesto Enríquez requesting the teaching of the history of Mexican music at the conservatory. However, Enríquez proposed that Mexican material be incorporated into the Western music-history surveys already taught. Romero, on the other hand, asked for the creation of a separate class on the history of music in Mexico. The evaluation committee determined: “[Mexican] music history does not even cover eighty years; therefore it is sufficient to include a broad section on it in the general history class that has already been approved by the congress.”31Romero protested that the committee’s decision was based on a series of errors that invalidated their judgment. Most importantly, he noted that his paper had been given to Ernesto Enríquez, who in order to support his own previously accepted proposition rejected Romero’s suggestions and prepared the written judgment of the evaluation committee. Nevertheless, the general board overruled the evaluation committee’s decision. In this case, the evaluation committee’s judgment raises important questions about the nation and national music. What criteria determined that Mexican music history was not more than eighty years old? The evaluation committee’s position points to an understanding of Mexican music as an assimilation of classical and romantic European techniques and genres as taught at the National Conservatory and traceable to the activities of the Sociedad Filarmónica de México from the mid – nineteenth century. By such a definition, “lo mexicano” is only identified with postindependence institutions and practices. For Romero, the notion of a Mexican nation was intimately connected to the particular historical cultural experiences of the people inhabiting the national territory. The music they made was Mexican, apart from any relationship to a particular aesthetic. Romero himself was interested in music from colonial Mexico and wanted to see this incorporated into a course of Mexican musical history.The question of national identity was also central to the papers of Francisco Domínguez and Pedro Michaca. Both responded directly to the role of vernacular music in Vasconcelos’s cultural crusade and called for a reevaluation of the idea of folklore. However, each presented distinct understandings of the ethnic component of Mexican folk music. Michaca returned to Ponce’s early call for a national music based upon the popular vernacular. In a typically essentialist move, he proposed that music scholars not limit themselves to collecting and harmonizing these songs, but to analyzing them in order to “find and isolate those elements that characterize [vernacular] popular music in order to assimilate them and achieve the ideal of creating motifs and melodies through which we can feel the living soul of the race.”32 Domínguez, in his paper “Nuevas orientaciones sobre el folklore mexicano” (New Orientations in Mexican Folklore), went farther than Michaca. He criticized the arrangers of vernacular music and traced the problem back to Ponce himself. He accused the maestro of being the precursor of all the arrangers. According to Domínguez, none of them knew anything about “true” Mexican folklore, as none had conducted fieldwork and therefore had never experienced “pure” indigenous music. As noted, the Ministry of Public Education had sponsored Domínguez’s Michoacán fieldwork trip in 1923.Domínguez proposed the organization of a fieldwork team that would transcribe and publish indigenous music. The implications of his proposal were radical: “The publication of this compilation [of folk music] is of capital importance not only for the dissemination of our true folklore, but also [to observe] the results of such dissemination. First, we need to become familiar with this type of music; then we must assimilate it little by little until it is our own. The personal, individual work will only come later.”33 In other words, not only did Domínguez argue for a revision of the meaning of heritage to focus on indigenous, rather than criollo, popular music; he summoned Mexican musicians to adopt indigenous music as their own in order to be able to create individual works (we assume of “true” Mexican character). He taci
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