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How the relationships between avant-garde music and ideas of modernity in post-revolutionary Mexico shaped discourses of nationality
Sounds of the Modern Nation
Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
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Alejandro L. Madrid
Winner of the International Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize, 2005
Sounds of the Modern Nation explores the development of modernist and avant-garde art music styles and aesthetics in Mexico in relation to the social and cultural changes that affected the country after the 1910-1920 revolution. Alejandro Madrid argues that these modernist works provide insight into the construction of individual and collective identities based on new ideas about modernity and nationality. Instead of depicting a dichotomy between modernity and nationalism, Madrid reflects on the multiple intersections between these two ideas and the dialogic ways through which these notions acquired meaning.
Madrid challenges the view that Latin American modernist music and other art were mere imitations of European trends, advancing instead the argument that Latin American artists resignified European ideas according to their specific historical and cultural circumstances. His work shows how microtonal and futurist music, modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as indigenist and indianist ideas, entered a process of negotiation that ultimately shaped the ideological framework of twentieth-century Mexico.
Excerpt
Reviews
"[I]t is not necessary to be a musician to appreciate and comprehend many of Madrid's arguments. At every turn in this brilliant, challenging and beautifully structured book, Madrid pushes for complexity over simplification, and for the importance of individual artistic identity over that of aesthetic movements, or the hegemonic power of either history or the state. Sounds of the Modern Nation...makes fascinating reading for those with an interest in Mexican cultural history. And for musicologists of all stripes, it is indispensable for understanding how Mexican music achieved modernity."
—The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education
"One of the strengths of Madrid's study is his interdisciplinary approach, which draws on elements of anthropology, musicology, and semiology....Summing Up: Recommended."
— Choice
"In this compact and insightful book, Alejandro Madrid examines an elite group of early
twentieth-century Mexican composers at a critical time in the nation’s cultural history, the 1920s.... Sounds of the Modern Nation reveals much not only about the politics of culture but also about the often contentious process of writing national history."
—Hispanic American Historical Review
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: History, Ideas, Musical Writing, and the Writing of Music
1. Modernism, Teleology, and Identity: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Julian Carillo's Sonodo 13
2. The Avant-Garde as a Site of Identification: Style and Ideology in Carlos Chavez's Early Music
3. Manuel M. Ponce, from Nineteenth-Century Modernismo to Twentieth-Century Modernism
4. The Sounds of the Nation, Modernity, and Tradition: The First National Congress of Music as Synecdoche of Discourses
5. Porfirian Music in Revolutionary Times: Atzimba and the Imagination of "the Indigenous"
6. Ideas, Canon, Revolution, and Places in History: Carlos Chavez and His Relationships with Julian Carrillo and Manual M. Ponce
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Alejandro L. Madrid is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World and co-editor (with Ignacio Corona) of Postnational Musical Identities. Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario. |
Subject Categories
Music and Dance
Latin American/Caribbean Studies
Cultural Studies
In the series
Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music, edited by Peter Manuel.
Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music, edited by Peter Manuel, aims to present interdisciplinary studies in the traditional and contemporary musics of Latin America and the Caribbean.