Forging a Cosmopolitan Ideal: Mario Lavista’s Early Music

During the second half of the twentieth century a group of Mexican composers was consciously avoiding nationalist models that had been carried over from the time of the Revolution (1910–1920s), instead favoring an “international avant-garde.” For Mario Lavista (b. 1943), this turn was accompanied by a cosmopolitan ideal—a site in which he could navigate among the expectations placed on him by a consolidated artistic and intellectual elite. In focusing on his works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, my intention is to show how this cosmopolitan ideal informed Lavista’s compositional decisions and how it played a role in the establishment of his public persona.