Notes for: July 21, 2009
Although his career as a composer spanned less than a decade, Silvestre Revueltas in the 1930s earned recognition as one of Mexico’s leading nationalist composers.
He was born in Durango, Mexico, and studied at the National Conservatory in Mexico City, Saint Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, and the Chicago College of Music. He then began his career as a violinist, playing in theater orchestras in Texas and conducting them in Texas and Alabama. In 1929, Carlos Chavez, the great Mexican composer-conductor, appointed him assistant conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, a post he held until 1935.
At the time, Chavez was the leader of the nationalist movement in Mexico, working to promote contemporary Mexican music. In 1931 he persuaded Revueltas to write some music for the orchestra in the nationalist idiom. Over the next six years Revueltas turned out six sophisticated orchestral pieces, including his best-known work Sensemaya. This led to other works – chamber music, ballet and film scores, and songs.
In 1937, Revueltas went to Spain to work for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, serving in the Fine Arts Department of the Loyalist government. After Francisco Franco’s victory, Revueltas returned to Mexico to teach and to resume composing. However, weakened by alcoholism, he died of pneumonia at the age of 41.
Like many of his contemporaries, Revueltas was strongly influenced by Latin-American popular music, and in his own music he strove to incorporate indigenous Mexican culture. He often used the elements of mestizo folk songs and dances (a uniquely Mexican blend of European and native traditions). The result is a musical style of great variety, one infused with Revueltas’s distinctive wit.
These folk elements mark the fourth and last of his string quartets, which we hear this evening. In four brief movements, the quartet is a brash and rowdy picture of a rural Mexican fair. Although it does not directly quote Mexican folksong, its melodic strains and rhythms reflect the colors of the people and the landscape, a solitary folk singer, the vitality of the popular mariachi street music, and the bustle of the market place.