Silvestre Revueltas at the
Dawn of His "American Period": St. Edward's College, Austin, Texas (1917-1918)

By Lorenzo Candelaria

Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) is widely recognized as one of the most important composers of the Mexican nationalist movement, perhaps second only to his coeval Carlos Chšvez (1899-1978). Otto Mayer-Serra's "Silvestre Revueltas and Musical Nationalism in Mexico," appearing just six months after the composer's death on October 5, 1940, is the earliest article in a major English-language music journal (The Musical Quarterly) to call attention to his importance on the contemporary scene of Mexican art music. "Revueltas," in Mayer-Serra's assessment, "had not only produced some of the most significant musical works of his country, but had begun to open up new vistas for the development of a contemporary Mexican musical idiom." Drawing inspiration from primitive indigenous cultures, folklife in contemporary Mexico, and a modernist aesthetic that favored complex plays on meter and rhythm, the works Revueltas produced in a tremendous burst of activity during the last decade of his life—Janitzio (1933), Sensemaya (1938), and La noche de los mayas (1939), to name a few—came to form the basis of his nationalist image. That image was further enhanced by collaborations in later life with Chšvez and the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (1929-35), and involvement with the leftist Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios in the mid-1930s.