Mexican Modernity and Revolution in Estridentismo and Sonido 13

This essay will compare two avant-gardes formed in 1920s Mexico as part of the processes derived from the Revolution that the country was just emerging from. Estridentismo (which can be roughly translated as “stridentism”) in visual arts and literature and Sonido 13 (“the 13th sound”) in music, were both immersed in the intellectual dynamics and currents of post-Revolutionary life, whose politics and culture portrayed the nation as a renewed historical actor now entering the world stage as an equal among moderns. Said decade was a fertile period for both political and aesthetic experiments, with various avant-gardes struggling for discursive hegemony in arts and politics; by the 1930s, the most visible and representative current, primarily thanks to state support, was a muralist and musical nationalism that taught what the meaning of being Mexican was (tied invariably to the myths of mestizaje outlined by thinkers such as José Vasconcelos or Manuel Gamio), as well as the progressive history of Mexico’s emancipation from tyranny, both foreign and national. The objective is to offer an understanding of the connections and distinctiveness of avant-gardes later marginalized by the state’s history-making, through a comparison between currents that have rarely been the subject of such an approach. The most notable exception is an article by Enea Zaramella, who directly linked Estridentismo and Sonido 13, through the notion of the “noises of modern soundscapes” resulting from both heavy machinery and the “lighter” sounds of radio and advertising.[1] My approach differs from Zaramella’s in setting the ground for the comparison upon the idea of Revolution and its connection to modernity itself, as broadly projected by these two movements in discursive terms advertising (Zaramella, “Estridentismo and Sonido Trece”, 25). The comparison between a mostly musical artistic movement and a mostly visual one is grounded upon the notion that avant-gardes are transdisciplinary formations meant to radically transform the context from which they emerge, which is to say that the implications of their aesthetic positions cut across artistic (and political) fields. This means that, by setting Sonido 13 and Estridentismo together, it is possible to expand the usual conceptions of revolutionary change associated with 1920s Mexican avant-garde art, commonly centered around the development of muralism in visual art and nationalist aesthetics in other artistic fields.

This entails considering modernity not as a fixed concept with a clear definition, but as a constellation of notions that shift in accordance to context. Generally speaking, the most stable terms of the concept that is put to work in this essay are the Eurocentric ideals of what Néstor García Canclini has deemed the four basic movements of modernity, and which discursively burden the intellectual milieu of the time: a project of emancipation, expansion, renovation, and  democratization.[2] The avant-gardes of this period, including Estridentismo and Sonido 13, embraced the rationalization of social life towards autonomy (emancipation); aligned with the betterment of knowledge about and possession of nature (expansion); sought out self-reflection and freedom from preceding illusions (renovation); and they promoted the wide dissemination of education and the arts as a path towards further rationalism (democratization) (García Canclini, Culturas híbridas, 31–32). For the intelligentsia and the cultural agents of the 1920s, the Revolution provided the grounds upon which to realize all of these projects, tying it to the constitution of images of a now modern Mexico. As will be discussed below, Estridentismo and Sonido 13 grasped this connection differently than other avant-gardes of the period, primarily muralism and musical nationalism, which would become, by the 1930s, the movements best integrated into the post-Revolutionary state and its own historical discourse. The accompanying concept, that of revolution, should also be viewed as a fraught term; not only is there no historiographical consensus regarding when to place its end as historical process, the 1920s and 1930s offer a rich tapestry of struggles, both political and cultural, about defining its meaning and significance. This is why, like historian Thomas Benjamin, I use the term with a capitalized “R”: both Estridentismo and Sonido 13 were part of the political and cultural confrontations that attempted to discursively unify the historical event as having a singular direction.[3] The essay will therefore also provide, widely speaking, the perspectives of these movements when it comes to the meaning of the Revolution, approaching them as thinkers in a cultural field with political implications. Therefore, instead of focusing on singular works of art, it will overview the movements’ intellectual agendas across “organs” like their magazines and the concepts they developed from them. Revolution for both these movements is a historical transformation related to modernity: in Estridentismo an opening towards the present as the nation’s becoming, and in Sonido 13 as the latest (and last) step in enlightened universal history. For both, Revolution is a “total” transformation in progress, the opening of a new reality to be shaped through grand aesthetic programs.

The Movements

Estridentismo was initiated by poet and lawyer Manuel Maples Arce in 1921, through a manifesto that was thoroughly absorbed into the dynamics of daily life in the bustling center of Mexico City, appearing as a poster plastered across various walls near culturally relevant places, mainly the University district.[4] Actual no. 1, as the header of the page indicated, was the loudspeaker of a new movement that was intended to break with the past in order to introduce Mexico not to the future but to the present, a time of vertiginous technological innovation, of simultaneously chaotic and ordered urban sprawls, of agitation and heterogeneity represented by machines and cosmopolitan cities. While the muralists extended their presence from the center of the country to its regions through the patronage of the federal government, the Estridentistas, as suggested by Lynda Klich, developed in two phases (1922–1925, 1925–1927) corresponding to their base of operations, first in Mexico City and then in Xalapa, in the coastal state of Veracruz.[5] Invited by the socialist government of Heriberto Jara Corona, the Estridentistas embraced local state funding and worked as the aesthetic arm of the government’s policies, crafting propaganda, educational materials, and even coming to plan mass construction projects like a radio station and a stadium. The movement was dealt a decisive blow with the 1927 coup against Jara, after which Estridentismo would slowly but surely become a footnote in the histories of Mexican art until the late twentieth century.

Julián Carrillo was a composer who by 1921 had already had a distinguished career; belonging to an older generation than most of the avant-gardists that constituted the new hegemony, Carrillo represented an older, modernista way of thought, which, contrary to its nomenclature was quite conservative in its tastes. Modernismo, which was a Latin American, late-Romantic and transatlantic aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, conceived of modernity as a humanistic endeavor (rather than a purely technical, rationalist one) with a cosmopolitan scope, and it permeated the Mexican school of thought with which Carrillo was most closely associated by the beginning of the twentieth century.[6] This meant Carrillo thought still in terms of “universal history” and believed in a correlation between changes in aesthetic practices and social change, the Romantic ideal of total unification and harmony (Castro-Gómez, Crítica, 132).

With the publication of his theory of Sonido 13 in 1923, he forcefully entered the struggles for the definition of a Mexican musical vanguard. Intended as a “rectification” of the Western tonal system, which consists of 12 tones, his theory—condensed under the simple name of Sonido 13—was an all-encompassing transformation of music of all sorts by means of microtonality, by embracing a universe of sounds found in the subdivision of tones. While microtonality is a feature of many musical practices across the world, including the Western one, Carrillo’s reformulation of the system as such was an innovative proposal of such a scope that he would eventually, though partially for self-serving reasons and for prestige, start calling it the Revolution of Sonido 13. Famously opposed to composer Carlos Chávez, who would become the key figure of musical nationalism and had an affinity for Estridentismo in the mid-1920s, Carrillo mostly fell out of national recognition after leaving the country for New York in 1926.[7] Carrillo’s approach to the music of the nation was different to the kind that would be later represented by Chávez, which followed a parallel course to muralism’s claims upon Mexico’s past as the basis for its arrival at modernity. For Carrillo, the Revolution was an opportunity to finally insert the country into the progressive course of universal history, alongside China, Greece and Rome, without the need to appeal to the past.[8] He would dedicate the rest of his life to Sonido 13, and would, for the most part, be excluded from the canon of Mexican music that was formalized by the hegemony of cultural nationalism that found its emblems in Chávez and his colleagues and students like Silvestre Revueltas or José Pablo Moncayo.

As thinkers of both the Revolution and modernity, Estridentismo and Sonido 13 provide distinct understandings of the relationship between them. Both conceived of modernity as a great historical forward movement, but unlike the muralists or their musical counterparts, they crafted an aesthetics in which indigeneity and mestizaje were not the primary elements of Mexico’s becoming modern. Also, unlike other groups like the Contemporáneos, with which Estridentismo clashed over issues of nationalism around 1924, both Estridentismo and Sonido 13 made constant, direct references to the Revolution as a new cultural horizon.[9] For Estridentismo, whose members were all young and came of age during the Revolution, the mass technologies of the present, as found in Mexico, were the core of new historical possibilities. For Sonido 13, promoted mostly by the lone figure of Julián Carrillo, an old believer in positivism and closer to modernismo in aesthetic thought, it was the discovery of new musical principles what had transcendental implications for the country’s place in history with capital H. Both viewed the masses with suspicion; although for Estridentismo they were fundamental to the construction of a new world and needed vanguardist guidance, for Carrillo they were more simply the receivers of a new paradigm in tune with the changes of History. Both viewed their movements as correctives to the past: Estridentistas, in a forceful vanguardist tone, offered their movement as a hygienic cleansing of the sicknesses of tradition, while Sonido 13 was posited as a civilizing force of progress and further control of nature. Thus, the Revolution, for both, is ultimately the amendment of an erred historical trajectory.

Modernity Sought Through Revolution

Estridentismo

To the young Estridentistas, the Revolution was not only the object of poems and artworks, but also the ideological source of concepts central to the avant-gardes of the time—concepts such as “the masses” and the “old regime.”[10] Their visual practices, unlike those associated with what was then called the “Mexican Renaissance,” primarily those of muralists, were rooted in the dynamism of much more recent mass media, as Actual no. 1 exemplifies. Their first magazine, called Irradiador (1923), through an unsigned open letter directed to “México-Stándar” (“Standard Mexico”), entitled “To the Nose of the Avenue-Guard Who Learns By Speed Excess,” criticizes common reading practices, calling the public to turn the act of reading into an adventure, or in other words, to turn the passivity of readership into an active contextual transformation (fig. 1, fig. 2). They argued that reading should not be a pedagogical exercise in which blank slates are filled, but an imaginative, Romantic engagement geared towards action in the world.[11] The figure criticized as “standard” in the letter stands in opposition to the unique individual. This tension was often the core of Estridentista works, in which the masses are, ambiguously, agents and supporters of transcendental change associated to individuals, not collectives (Rashkin, La aventura, 203). Across Estridentista art and literature, the masses held an ambivalent position as subjects and objects, sometimes surpassed by urban dynamics, sometimes presented as builders of the city, sometimes positioned as the center of social change, and sometimes even absent from the panorama of modernity.[12] The heterogeneity of positions occupied by the representation of the masses in post-Revolutionary art, and its relation to its counterpart, the individual, form a complex discursive node in which “masses” are signified as the builders of the nation who must receive instruction oriented towards historical self-consciousness (thus becoming revolutionary, modern). Estridentista art adds another, complex layer that implies that the victory of the Revolution does not guarantee consciousness by itself, and is thus not yet necessarily modern. The masses must be engaged, not through a public display underlined by state education, as in murals, but through the contemporaneity that results from true mass media, from periodicals to advertisement and radio.

For the Estridentistas, the new mobilization of the masses and the individual as reflected by urbanized daily life and media was the key to the abolition of the old regime, at first a rhetorical call (as in the 1921 manifesto), and then, when the institutions of the post-Revolutionary regimes started to welcome the avant-gardes into their ranks (by 1922), a full aesthetic and political program. Once past the early years of enthusiastic calls to destroy the vestiges of liberal Porfirian aesthetics, as in the 1923 manifesto’s list of enemy literary figures, the Estridentistas and their peers were dedicated to the constructive potential of the Revolutionary state. The anti-national sentiment shown by Maples Arce in the 1921 demand to “cosmopolitanize” Mexico would merge with a nationalist streak as more people joined the movement; but, as Elissa Rashkin has argued, its de-centralization after 1925 created a renewed relationship between local, national, and international contexts (Rashkin, La aventura, 257).[13] Just as the Revolution itself had not been a uniformly national process, Estridentismo’s move to Veracruz and other states reflected the heterogeneous politics that their aesthetics were associated with, as in their conception of radio as a wireless mode of becoming cosmopolitan, a scattered form of transcending all geographical limitations that was both individual and mass-based.[14] The old regime of symbolist poetry and rural national landscapes was dead, its classicist homogeneity replaced by the diversity of the technological, social, and political forces of the Revolution: becoming modern implied a vast, democratic rationalization ultimately meant for emancipation. In associating all these changes to “actuality” (as Maples Arce did in Actual no. 1), it is possible to affirm that the Estridentistas conceived of the Revolution as the process that birthed the present. The resulting Estridentista position, as the most actual in terms of culture, enabled them to conceive of themselves as guides to the transformation of the country as variously stated in their magazine Horizonte (1926–1927) and elsewhere (fig. 3).[15]

Following Canclini, it is possible to view the covers of Irradiador and Horizonte as symptomatic of the basic movements of modernity the estridentistas sought through Revolutionary means. Irradiador, with its bold typography and bright colors, produced industrial and urban visual referents that, like Actual no. 1, evoked public advertising and announced itself, through its subheader, as a “projector of a new aesthetic” (fig. 1) Horizonte followed up with images of industrial development, natural landscapes, industrial workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples. The common thread of rationalization (technological, social, political) brings these depictions together into a discursive set of modernity. First, it views the possession of nature as progressive platform (the project of expansion). Then, the old regime’s signals are abolished by the prominence of urbanity and new historical subjects (the project of renovation). Furthermore, the magazines themselves are meant as vessels of the type of education and culture needed to further rationalize society (the project of democratization). All of these elements put together, like the representations of industry, city life, peasants and workers, are meant to work towards the furthering of autonomy (the project of emancipation).

Sonido 13

Julian Carrillo’s integration with the Revolutionary state followed Vasconcelos’ appeals to humanism; after all, they had both belonged to the association Ateneo de la Juventud (“Mexican Youth Athenaeum”), founded in 1909, which philosophically staged an attack on the intellectual hegemony of positivism through the emphasis and recovery of humanistic conceptions of society (Híjar Guevara, “Sonidos,” 72–74). The break with positivism, however, was not radical, and certain elements persisted in the thought of figures like Vasconcelos or Carrillo himself, particularly in methodological terms, as with the rest of the Ateneo.[16] For Carrillo, history followed a progressive course towards further emancipation and closeness to the truths of nature, something to which his own theory of Sonido 13 was, according to him, a grand contribution. The composer framed the theory as a “rectification” of the Western system of tonality, justified in the language of scientific discoveries and the application of scientific method to music.[17] This rationalist renovation of music was intended to simplify notation to make it easier to learn and understand, thus extending musical learning throughout humanity.[18] Carrillo’s rhetoric about progress was decidedly vanguardist, considering Sonido 13 not only inevitable but also all-encompassing, leaving all musical past in the dustbin of history (Hijar Guevara, “Sonidos,” 134–135).

However, his conception of humanity was not tied to the novelties of recurrent avant-garde subjects of history such as “the people” or “the proletariat”; in fact, Carrillo explicitly despised popular traditions and often emphasized the “civilizatory” role of Spain in the history of Mexican culture.[19] The composer’s self-promotional magazine, El Sonido 13 (1924–1927), subtitled “Musical-Revolutionary Publication,” was crafted in a style far from the avant-garde formats used by Estridentismo. It is, rather, reminiscent of the modernist periodicals of the late nineteenth century, with an illustrated header featuring an armed (Spanish) conqueror menacingly standing before the Mexico City cathedral, over which hovers an illuminating sun bearing the legend “Sonido 13: 1895,” the year in which supposedly Carrillo discovered the basis of his theory (fig. 4). To the right, the Paris Notre Dame cathedral appears in a much smaller scale, above it another, smaller sun bearing the date of 1922, the year in which Carrillo said to have made Sonido 13 public.[20] The header’s order could be read as a historical progression of the kind Carrillo, modernistas and the Ateneo de la Juventud members like Vasconcelos were prone to, seeing Paris—the Porfiriato’s main cultural referent—as the necessary European past of a new and better American culture.

As Mariana Híjar has proposed, Carrillo’s revolutionary impulses were foregrounded by a conservatism signified by Hispanophilia and Catholicism; while not a reactionary modernist, the composer could be fruitfully described as a conservative one, for whom the Revolution was the fulfilment of an inevitable civilizational historical arc grounded upon the colonial idea of “universal history” (Hijar Guevara, “Sonidos,” 143). The “old regime” was not necessarily Porfirian, it was the entirety of musical history, and the development of Sonido 13 represented the culmination of a process in which Mexico entered the world-stage as protagonist. In contrast to the claims of muralists and estridentistas alike, Carrillo did not find a motor of history in indigeneity or the proletariat, but rather, in the ultimate civilizatory integration represented by the American continent in modernista thought: European history was but the last step in the new direction of “universal history” to be set by America, with Mexico at its helm. Through his scientistic imagination, Carrillo even developed the notion of musical “metamorphosis,” a way to correct the music of the (Western) past by means of the Sonido 13 system.[21] Works by past composers could be given a longer life, and the errors of history would finally be rectified by the truth reached only thanks to revolutionary, modern thought that was willing to unconditionally combat the mistakes of tradition. Carrillo was not really interested in revolution as the emancipative action of the masses, but rather, like many a modernista of the late nineteenth century, in the idea of revolution as a cosmopolitan paradigm shift resulting from a practice of art for art’s sake by specialists and professionals. In this sense, Carrillo’s “metamorphosis” follows an organicist principle that, described by the composer as a law of nature discovered by himself, implies constant flux as well as continuity. His own modification of Sonido 13 into the Revolution of Sonido 13 suggests that, beyond making a statement of personal aggrandizement, the composer could have understood revolutionary change as a dynamic in which the totality of an organism adapts to new conditions, yet remains, in spirit at least, the same. Framed by Carrillo’s conservatism, the need to appeal to indigenous or folk traditions, or to new subjects of history, is of little value to a concept of revolution in which the sufficient renewal of art (meaning the Westernized canon) can lead to the renewal of society as a whole.

With Canclini, it is possible to see in the scant images of El Sonido 13 a discursive set about modernity that is nonetheless distinct from estridentismo’s. Conservative in nature, its referents posit rationalization as a reordering (a mixture of change and continuity) of culture. With its menacing conquistador, depictions of the triumphant sun, and cathedrals standing over an indeterminate horizon, the magazine attempted self-reflection in a different register to the images of industry or indigenous peoples, as an assault on the “preceding illusions” of the (musical) “old regime.” This project of renovation, oriented by a further entrenchment of civilizatory categories and European heritage, is aligned with a project of democratization that posits Sonido 13 as an entirely new—simultaneously “universal” and Mexican—system of knowledge that is easy to apprehend in order to further the education of the people, and therefore, their “spirit.” The cover of El sonido 13 no. 3 illustrates this point through a photograph of a musical band composed by prison inmates; for Carrillo, the organization of popular musical bands was fundamental for the access of all to this new knowledge (fig. 5). Moreover, the magazine is littered with articles about the scientific qualities of Carrillo’s theory and his discovery, promoting his “corrections” of otherwise “universal mistakes” in the Western tonal system, going all the way back to the Greeks and their observation of nature. Grasping this discovery and furthering this knowledge consist of a project of expansion over the natural world, characterized by an idealism that does not necessarily map onto the materialist views of other avant-gardists of the time regarding industrial development, for example. It is in this sense that this particular project of emancipation is geared toward the rationalization of cultural life towards autonomy, in which the distinction between culture and society is collapsed.

Conclusion

The ties between Revolution and modernity for these movements are expressed in historical change, signaled by transformations in daily life. In this sense, the Estridentistas and Julián Carrillo were enthusiasts of technological change on different registers. The former embraced the diffuse character of present-day machines (from radio to buses) and sought to further their presence as a right for the people to become modern individually.[22] The latter’s Sonido 13, as an idealist locus point for the transformation of society, was itself the platform for musically-based technological change, detonated first and foremost by new instruments capable of reproducing the “true” sounds of nature (Zaramella, “Estridentismo and Sonido Trece,” 15). Old instruments could be adapted, or “metamorphosized,” and the new industries could be run by worker-musicians, thus bettering the conditions of society in accordance with Revolutionary thought.[23]

Modernity, as a wide-ranging rationalization process in line with Westernized, colonially-founded epistemologies, represented for late nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin Americans an opportunity to advance a cosmopolitan-oriented version they could call their own and which could rival US/European conceptions.[24] The modernista view of a humanistic, cosmopolitan, Latin American modernity is part of the shared heritage of Estridentismo and Sonido 13, underpinning, for instance, the tensions regarding the effects of technology in various Estridentista works, as well as Carrillo’s teleology. In Estridentismo, this meant modernity was both an expressive and rational forward momentum whose relationship to the past was one of revolutionary change, coming to offer Estridentista works as a corrective to the immobilizing sicknesses of tradition. In Sonido 13, it was even more decisive, an unstoppable, civilizing force of progress that would scientifically rid tradition of its errors, making claims that were universal in scope, relating to the conquest of the truths of nature regardless of context (Madrid, In Search, 139, 162).[25] Both could be seen under Canclini’s four basic movements of modernity as completing each project in distinct manners, one progressive, one conservative.

Estridentismo and Sonido 13 differ from the positions that became hegemonic in Mexican culture after the 1920s. Best represented by muralism (often characterized in historiography as the all-encompassing “Mexican School of Painting”) and its parallel movements in other arts, this sort of cultural nationalism placed Mexico at the crossroads of modernity through indigenist politics and aesthetics, finding in folk traditions the “essence” of the Mexican people. Activated and assimilated by Revolution, these traditions were the platform from which the country’s unique position in modernity would emerge. The state, primarily through artists working as state functionaries, created a narrative of Mexican art that came to exclude other perspectives about the Revolution and modernity to the point of, on one side, Estridentismo being recovered as a subject of study until the 1970s by Luis Mario Schneider, and on the other, on Sonido 13 works rarely—if ever—being played in concerts or even recorded.[26]

For Estridentismo and Sonido 13, the country’s traditions were either an ambivalent variable already modified by the modernity brought about by revolutionary processes or an obstacle in the true path of change signified by the Revolution itself. Modernity was no longer an aspiration, but a fact of life, either represented by the proliferation of technologies across society (whether parts of it were aware of it or not) or by the development of a theory finally conducive to the discovery of the truths of the natural (sound-)world. While Estridentismo held within it a variety of positions regarding modernity, it is possible to affirm that for the most part they were progressive, the tensions between individual and collective resolving in favor of the emancipatory revolutionary action of masses and individuals. In contrast, for Carrillo, the Revolution, while sounding a collective note, is rather the process through which individuals such as himself come to represent the masses in the movements of universal history. Although one is progressively and the other conservatively oriented, this transformation of society reaffirms the modernista idea of finding a place for Mexico in modernity as well as finding a modernity that is uniquely Mexican.