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Madrid - ImitationIdeologyPerformativity PDF
Madrid - ImitationIdeologyPerformativity PDF
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215781.003.0002
Based on a combination of archival evidence, music analysis, and critical theory, Chapter
2 presents a detailed analysis of Carrillo’s Symphony No. 1. By interpreting the composer
as an epistemological contact zone, the chapter argues that instead of imitating European
models, Carrillo’s symphony is a bricolage that tells the story of the composer’s
mediation of multiple cultural worlds. The chapter closes with a critique of the scholarly
discourse that considers Carrillo’s music as Romantic.
Critics 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 (p.33) 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:
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 (p.35) 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
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 (p.36) 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:
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 (p.37) 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:
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 (p.38) 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.
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.
(p.40) 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:
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):
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 (p.42) 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.
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 (p.45)
Tannhäuser, Die
Meistersinger von
Nürnberg, Also sprach
Zarathustra, and Till
Eulenspiegel.30
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
(p.47) 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
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 (p.48) 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.
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
(p.50) 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.
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 (p.51) 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.
Carrillo’s interest in
thematic derivation is clear
in the thematic material of
his symphony. However, an Example 2.9 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth
analysis of the symphony movement. First theme.
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 Example 2.10 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth
that he was simply movement. Second theme.
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.
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 (p.56)
(p.57) (p.58) 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.
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).
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 (p.69) 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.
Notes:
(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.
(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.
(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 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.
(10) Leonora Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others: Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics
of Modern Mexican Art Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 16.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(28) To avoid working with decimals I rounded numbers to the closer figure. Thus, 9.52
became 10 and 2.38 became 2, etc.
(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.
(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).
(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.
(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.
(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, Uzrasai ir Straipsniai
(Vilnius: Valstybine Grozines Literaturos Leidkla, 1960), 108–114. The letter was also
quoted in Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 96.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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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