Silvestre Revueltas

Book excerpt: "To this day, both at home and beyond Mexico's borders, Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) has been systematically portrayed as a nationalist composer. Unknown or ignored, his private and public writings destroy this myth straight out. The then-fashionable musicking of a presumed Mexicanness was far from Revueltas' mind. Strongly inspired by the Soviet Revolution, his dream was to find ways to sound the voice of the social people, not only those wandering the Mexican streets but also the gypsy miners in Spain, the black slaves in the U.S. South, and those in Cuba in colonial times. The various soundings of such social actors account for the diversity of aesthetics in his works, explored in this book through a correlation of the musical texts with the composer's writings as well as his political activism: he was not only active at home as a leading member of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, but also significantly as a member of the Mexican delegation visiting Republican Spain in the midst of the war against Franco's fascist troupes. With few exceptions, though, most of his works seek to transcend standards of political art expression, such as program music or scores variously linked to word or image. Significantly, Revueltas' early instrumental works appear to abstract a musical ontology from the time and space of his diverse and multiple social actors through a daringly free use of montage and collage. Avant-garde rebellion and satire are also present in his best-known late works. Revueltas's is a unique and provocative decolonial art that pokes fun at the cosmopolitanistic fantasies of his Eurocentric peers at home as well as exoticizing expectations abroad. Unveiling the sense behind Revueltas's irony and the form political passion takes on in his music is the intention behind Kolb-Neuhaus's hermeneutic approach, which intertwines Revueltian art with his writings and political actions"--