Silvestre Revueltas’s Colorines vis-à-vis US Musical Modernisms: A Dialogue of the Deaf?

Abstract

This article contrasts cultural hybridity in Colorines (1932), a musical collage by composer Silvestre Revueltas, with the exoticist or modernistic expectations implied or explicitly formulated in four articles about the Mexican composer by contemporary US composers Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, and Virgil Thomson. Deeply ironic, Revueltas’s collage contests such expectations by musically embodying an ontological position of no-place regarding both essentialist discourses and precepts of modernity current in Mexico and the United States at the time.