University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

In Search of Julin Carrillo and Sonido 13

Alejandro Madrid

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780190215781
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215781.001.0001

Imitation, Ideology, Performativity, and Carrillos

Symphony No. 1
Alejandro L. Madrid

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215781.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

Based on a combination of archival evidence, music analysis, and critical theory, Chapter
2 presents a detailed analysis of Carrillos Symphony No. 1. By interpreting the composer
as an epistemological contact zone, the chapter argues that instead of imitating European
models, Carrillos symphony is a bricolage that tells the story of the composers
mediation of multiple cultural worlds. The chapter closes with a critique of the scholarly
discourse that considers Carrillos music as Romantic.

Keywords: imitation, authenticity, bricolage, performative composition, transculturation

Critics as well as contemporary musicians and musicologists have often referred to Julin
Carrillos pre-microtonal music as duplicative of late nineteenth-century Austro-German
symphonic formalist music. These opinions are expressed from various perspectives,
sometimes as harsh criticism against a perceived lack of originality, sometimes as
paternalistic praise for Carrillos compositional talent. In his 1979 survey of Latin
American music, Gerard Bhague states that Julin Carrillos Symphony No. 1 was just
an example of a work modeled on Brahms.1 Bhagues opinion was probably based on
one of the few studies of Carrillos music available to him in English in the 1970s, Gerald
Benjamins essay Julin Carrillo and Sonido Trece (1967) in which the author states
that the symphonys movements are typical of Brahms, the romantic classicist.2 The
Mexican musicologist Yolanda Moreno Rivas somehow echoes this reading when she
states that the same symphony seems to suggests a mestizo Mendelssohn or sweetened
Wagner.3 A casual listening of Carrillos early music would support this assessment; not
only does Carrillo make use of the classical forms and compositional devices of the
Austro-German music tradition, but indeed, the contour, shape, and gestural
characteristics of his melodies often remind the listener of Wagner. However, by
providing (p.33) an analysis of tonal and formal structural relations in his Symphony No.
1, this chapter shows that these similarities are superficial faades that mask important
ideological differences. Two sections precede, anticipate, and provide a framework for
the musical analysis of the symphony. The first one offers a genealogy of the
representations of Carrillo as an imitator of Austro-German models that shows the
political character of these discourses within the process of post-revolutionary canon
construction. The second one explores the ideologies Carrillo encountered in Leipzig
during his years of study to illuminate the aesthetic struggles that may have influenced
the development of musical style in his Symphony No. 1 (1902).

A Genealogy of Representations
We can trace the origin of the representation of Carrillo as a composer solely interested in
copying imported models to Melesio Moraless review of the Mexican premiere of his
first symphony. Morales, who had been Carrillos composition teacher at the
Conservatorio Nacional prior to his training in Leipzig, published this review in El
Tiempo on June 27, 1905:

Julin Carrillo, a hard-working man and a musician full of dreams, is following a

laudable ideal that deserves better luck; he cultivates serious music con amore
and what a mistake! He keeps in his briefcase several compositions based on the
narcotic, thematic symphonic development of musical discourse, divided in the
three or four typical movements, in the classical style. Regarding the authors
predilection for German instrumental music, having studied in Leipzig, it is clear
that the music is filled with such style; which fortunately is not Wagners, since
this composer did not write any chamber music. The compositions I heard at the
Arbeu Theater reveal and denounce a composer interested in imitating the great
masters of the classical school. Of course, Carrillos music is not totally
original nor is it the result of plagiarism, it is merely a deliberate imitation of
style. The will of the author accomplished most of it, the rest was the result of his
inspiration, which is, naturally, melodic and Creole, with a national flavor. When
composing in the German style, the Mexican maestro involuntarily discovers that
the pronunciation and the accent of the language itself are as unfamiliar to him as
 they are to his fellow Mexicans; it is music they can neither taste nor enjoy.4

(p.34)Morales belonged to a long tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican composers,

trained in Italy and France, who preferred salon music (waltzes, mazurkas, gavottes,
marches) and the bel canto style of Italian opera over the organicism of formalist German
symphonic compositions. Moraless distaste of German music was a bias that necessarily
influenced his criticism of Carrillos symphony. Although Moraless review
acknowledged a certain degree of originality in Carrillos music, it was the idea that he
had imitated the German style that gave birth to the mistaken discourse that has since
developed for a variety of political and artistic reasons.

The difficult personal relationship between Carrillo and Carlos Chvez (18991978) in
the 1920s and 1930s, the period of national and institutional reconstruction that followed
the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (19101920), is also fundamental
in reproducing the discourse about the former composer as an imitator of foreign styles.
In fact, the first public confrontation between Carrillo and Chvez took place around
1920, when Carrillo was conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. According to
Carrillos recollection, the problem started when Jos Vasconcelos, then minister of
education, requested his permission for Chvez to rehearse one of Chvezs new
compositions with the orchestra. Carrillo wrote the following:

Chvez had more than twenty rehearsals and was still unable to conduct the
orchestra. His lack of ability was evident; a boy with mediocre knowledge could
have done it in two rehearsals. I was disturbed by the waste of time and told him:
look young man, I believe it would be practical if you first take some conducting
lessons, then you can go on with your work.5

The relationship between Carrillo and Chvez was problematic from the outset, but it
reached its most tense moments in the early 1930s, when Chvez, excused and sheltered
by the post-revolutionary enthusiasm for nationalistic compositions, viciously attacked
Carrillo and other pre-revolutionary composers, questioning their musical representation
of national identity. In 1930, embracing the nationalist spirit expressed in the guidelines
of the Partido Nacional Revolucionarios (Mexicos ruling party and the forerunner of the
later Partido Revolucionario Institucional), Carlos Chvez published an article in the
weekly Domingos Culturales6 that both established publicly the ideological basis of the
new (p.35) nationalist Mexican music and rejected the aesthetic credo of the older
generation of composers:

Today, after living the new phases of the 1910 Mexican revolution that have been
decisive in establishing our own criteria and culture, musical nationalism in
Mexico could be determinedly channeled. [Mexican nationalism] should be
considered the fruit of a balanced mestizaje in which the personal expression of
the artist is not absorbed by Europeanism or by Mexican regionalism. We should
recognize our own, temporally eclipsed tradition. We should get soaked in it,
having personal contact with the indigenous and mestizo expressions of our soil,
 without forgetting European musicwhich is universal human culturebut not
through the perception of German and French conservatories as it has been done
up to this day, but through its multiple manifestations, since antiquity. We deny the
professionalist [sic] music composed in Mexico before us because it is not the
fruit of a true Mexican tradition.7

Chvezs rejection of pre-revolutionary music was even more specific in an article he

published in 1932. The target of Chvezs attack could not be more specific considering
that Carrillo was the only Mexican composer trained in Leipzig:

It is not true that we are trying to destroy the academicians. What destroys them is
the indifference of our times towards them. In Mexico, we no longer buy that;
outside of Mexico, who in Germany would be interested in the music of a
Mexican who imitates the German masters? Our eminent academicians have spent
the best years of their lives studying in Leipzig, learning to write suites and
symphonies in the German style; here and in Germany we prefer Bach, we prefer
the genuinely German; that is all.8

In these two articles, Chvez reproduced the core of Melesio Moraless 1905 criticism of
Carrillos post-Leipzig compositions, repeating the idea that his music was nothing but an
imitation of foreign models with (p.36) the addition of a few new elements that allowed
him to support a political agenda based on an essentialist understanding of Mexican
identity. Artists, intellectuals, private entrepreneurs, and government officials alike
adopted this essentialist perspective to support the idea that Mexicos indigenous heritage
was the true, authentic source of Mexican identity. This new argument attempted to sever
the obvious links and continuities between the past and the revolutionary regime, and
create a new discourse of nationality. Carrillos music (which refused to adopt the
folklorist tone that made the music of composers like Manuel M. Ponce, Carlos Chvez,
and Silvestre Revueltas so popular) and the composer himself (whose music education in
Europe had been financed by the pre-revolutionary regime) did not have a place in the
new ideology and were systematically excluded from concerts and academic discussions.

In 1941, Otto Mayer-Serra published Panorama de la msica mexicana. At the time, this
book was the most important history of Mexican music written after the Mexican
revolution. The text, following a teleological understanding of history, claims that the
nationalist movement reflected the maturity reached by Mexican music through its
affiliation with the nationalist ideology of the revolution. The book became an apology
for the hegemonic discourse current in Mexico at the time, and as such, it reproduced the
older criticism against Carrillo by largely excluding him from the history of Mexican art
music. Mayer-Serras book has only this mention of Carrillo:

Foreign influences on Mexican music culminated with [Ricardo Castro]. The

composers that followed him on that path, such as Julin Carrillo, Rafael J. Tello,
and others, did not do anything but introduce new European elementsthe style
of Wagner and Strauss, or French Impressionismwithout achieving a genuine
 and representative art.9

It is important to notice three things: first, Mayer-Serra had lived in Mexico for only three
years at the time he wrote his book; second, the majority of his informants were
composers who in one way or another were associated with post-revolutionary musical
culture (Silvestre Revueltas, Gernimo Baqueiro Foster, Luis Sandi, Blas Galindo,
among others); and third, the book was written under the auspices of Alfonso Reyes and
El Colegio Nacionalthe former Casa de Espaa, an institution created by Republican
Spaniards in exile, whose revolutionary ideology resonated (p.37) with the leftist
discourse of the Mexican government. Considering all these circumstances, Mayer-
Serras endorsement of the dominant ideology in his adopted country and his exclusion of
a composer frequently associated with the pre-revolutionary regime should not come as a
surprise. Mayer-Serras interpretation excludes Carrillo from the history of Mexican
music on the same basis established by Chvez ten years earlier and Morales thirty-five
years before that: for not being Mexican enough, at least not according to the folklorist-
essentialist canons that dominated Mexican political life in the 1930s and 1940s.

If it is uncanny that these representations of Carrillos output and activities survived for
almost a century, it is more astonishing that current scholarship has failed to reevaluate
his production in light of contemporary social and cultural criticism. In her doctoral
dissertation, Leonora Saavedra explains her decision to exclude Carrillo from her
discussion of identity and Mexican music in the 1920s:

Carrillo chose not to participate in the processes around nationalism and

modernism. At the end of the day, Carrillo is also different from the Mexican
composers whom I discuss [Manuel M. Ponce, Carlos Chvez, and Silvestre
Revueltas] in that he is not a multi-centered subject: he belongs in the history of
German music. Or rather I should say: he belongs in the history of Mexican music
precisely because he is a Mexican composer who belongs in the history of another
countrys music.10

Saavedra still denies Carrillo a place in the nationalist and Modernist fervor that pervaded
the Mexican arts in the 1920s and 1930s on the basis of his music being German and
not Mexican. Saavedras assessment is particularly intriguing as it leaves a door open
for understanding Carrillos cosmopolitan aspirationsas expressed in the way he
engaged the Austro-German music tradition and how he used it to carve a unique niche
for himself in early twentieth-century Mexican musical lifeas a fundamental aspect of
Mexican culture. In other words, when Saavedra states that a Mexican composer could
not have a place in the history of Mexican music because he belongs in the history of
another countrys music, she tacitly recognizes the narrowness of a nationalist rhetoric
that defines mexicanidad as an authentic essence devoid of foreign influences. Ultimately,
this genealogy shows that what may have prevented Carrillos (p.38) music from having a
lasting presence in the Mexican music scene (both in academia and the concert hall) was
a combination of specific political miscalculations and the fact that the composers
aesthetics (first his German formalism and later his Modernist Sonido 13) remained
consistently at odds with those privileged by the countrys mainstream.

Encountering and Making Sense of Austro-German Musical

Ideologies
During the second half of the nineteenth century, two philosophical and aesthetic
positions polarized the Austro-German musical discourse. On the one side, Richard
Wagner, Franz Liszt, and their followersconsidered by some to be the progressive wing
of this debatechampioned music based on extra-musical meaning and associations,
such as the opera and symphonic poem. This group of composers and musicians
understood musical form as contingent to narrative and representational elements beyond
the pure sonic experience of the music. On the other side, Johannes Brahms and the
formalistslabeled as the classicist wing of the controversypreferred music not
subordinated to words (as in song), to drama (as in opera), to some representational
meaning (as in program music), and even to the vague requirements of emotional
expression.11 Although Richard Wagner coined the term absolute music in 1846,12 it
was in the writings of Romantic German philosophers like E.T.A. Hofmann, J. G. Herder,
Ludwig Tieck, and W. H. Wackenroder that it was first described and developed as a type
of purely instrumental music of alleged eternal relevance.13 For them, absolute music
was the ideal state of musical art; their creed emphasized that formal structures were the
basis for a purely musical experience in which form stood for the only content of
music. In the mid-nineteenth century, heated controversies, personal accusations, and
conflicting political positioning made almost impossible to reconcile the two groups.
However, by the end of the century this debate was cooling off throughout the German-
speaking world; the symphonic works of composers like Gustav Mahler (18601911),
Max Reger (p.39) (18731916), and Richard Strauss (18641949) show how composers
transcended and came to terms with many of these apparently irreconcilable positions. As
Arnold Schoenberg would put it, What in 1883 seemed an impassable gulf was in 1897
no longer a problem.14 Nevertheless, the debate still informed the more conservative
musical life in Leipzig when Carrillo arrived there as a student in 1899.

Leipzigs musical life had been largely defined under the influence of the formalist
Brahmsian tradition, a tendency that continued even toward the end of the nineteenth
century. At the Knigliches Konservatorium der Musik, the two more influential
composition professors were Carl Reinecke (18241910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1831
1902), well-known champions of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, and
largely indifferent to the music of Wagner.15 Besides his post at the Konservatorium,
Reinecke was also the director of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig from 1860 until
1895, when Arthur Nikisch (18551922), a Hungarian-born conductor equally interested
in Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, and Wagner, replaced him. The programs of the
Gewandhausorchester show that change was coming slowly but steadily to the Leipzig
music scene of the late 1890s.16 At the Konservatorium, Carrillo studied with Jadassohn.
Although today, Jadassohn is a rather obscure reference in German music history texts,
he was one of the most respected and popular pedagogues in fin-de sicle Leipzig.17
Beate Hiltner affirms that his classes and those [offered] by his colleague, Ernest
Friederich Richter, had the largest number of [enrolled] students in the conservatory.18
According to Julin Carrillo, one of the basic textbooks in Jadassohns harmony class was
his own Harmonie Lehrbuch (1883).19 This book sheds light on Carrillos training while
he studied in Leipzig.

(p.40) Harmonie Lehrbuch is not just a harmony manual in the technical sense but also a
powerful defense of formalist and absolute music, as observed in the last two chapters:
On the Musical Hearing and Subject-Matter and Form. In the latter, Jadassohn
remarks:

We have grown accustomed to accepting the terms subject-matter and form

solely in this sense, and thus they serve both the teacher and the musical reporter
as makeshift in the critical analysis of a piece of music. Still, on examining the
matter with closer attention, the question first forces itself upon us: Can the
form and the subject-matter really be distinguished in this manner, and can we
conceive them, let us say, as something external and internal? The answer will of
course be negative. Both naturally belong together; for how and where can form
and subject-matter be separatedwhat makes the subject-matter, what is the form
is the subject-matter not itself the form or, reversely, is the form not itself the
subject-matter?20

Jadassohns argument reminds the reader of the ideas that German philosophers had
emphasized in developing the notion of absolute music. His apology of form as content is
a clear articulation of the ideas that Eduard Hanslick, the most prominent German
formalist critic, had formulated in Von Musikalisch-Schnen (1854):

If now we ask what should be expressed by means of this tone-material, the

answer is musical ideas. But a musical idea brought into complete manifestation in
appearance is already self-subsistent beauty; it is in no way primarily a medium or
material for the representation of feelings or conceptions. The content of music is
tonally moving forms.21

As a student of Jadassohn, in the very conservative environment of the Konservatorium,

Carrillo was likely educated within a culture of absolute music. His later writings in favor
of a supposed superiority of instrumental music over opera are clearly informed by the
formalist ideas of his teacher. The following passage from Sinfona y pera (1909)
reflects this influence:

Assumingand this is no small assumptionthat symphony composers and

opera composers are equally good musicians, OPERA MUSIC WILL ALWAYS
BE INFERIOR TO THE SYMPHONY because it has to follow the
(p.41)

requirements of a plot, while the symphony is ENTIRELY FREE. Fantasy is good

 enough for opera but will never be sufficient for a symphony.22

Such an argument affiliates Carrillo with Jadassohn, Hanslick, and the German apologists
of absolute music. However, Carrillos purpose is not to criticize Wagner or Richard
Straussas German formalists didbut rather the Italian and French styles of Rossini
and Meyerbeer. Later in the article, Carrillo amends his position by stating that opera
composers have always failed when trying to compose symphonies, while THERE IS
NO symphonist who has tried to write an opera and has not succeeded.23 Carrillo offers
the examples of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Hector Berlioz as unsuccessful symphony
composers. On the other hand, another statement in the essay problematizes his position
as a pure formalist:

I affirm that [the symphony] is the highest manifestation of pure music, because
several types of musics are exemplified in it, from the elegiac to the triumphal,
without excluding eroticism and drama.24

Carrillos article may appear contradictory. If the symphony was the greatest example of
absolute music precisely because it was not subordinated to the vague requirements of
emotional expression, how can it also exemplify the wide range of human emotional
expression Carrillo attributes to it? When one interprets Carrillos discussion within the
mentality that permeated the musical mainstream in Germany during the second half of
the nineteenth century, one has to dismiss his claims as inconsistent: while proselytizing
for absolute music, Carrillos text apparently ends up embracing values of
representational music. However, Carrillos attitude is understandable when one reads
him as a newcomer to German musical life who resignified the polemics he encountered
there through the lens of his early training in Mexico, a scene that privileged completely
different musical values (the melodic inventiveness of Italian opera and the immediate
charm of salon music over the structural complexity of symphonic music from the
Austro-Germanic tradition). True, a statement like that would be a contradiction for a
German composer actively involved in the politics (p.42) between these two realms, but
it would not necessarily be an inconsistency for a composer like Carrillo, who had a
Brahmsian training of the kind the Leipzig Konservatorium offered but was also an
admirer of the expansive operatic melodies in the music of Wagner, Liszt, and their
followers, including Richard Strauss. By not being invested in radical long-standing
politics between these camps, Carrillo did not feel he had to stick to the dogmas of one or
the other; instead, he was able to fully embrace both ideals. Like other composers from
the periphery (Russians, Lithuanians, Czechs, etc.) were doing at the time, by engaging
both of these traditions, Carrillo reinterpreted and reconfigured German symbolic codes
according to the musical ideologies that prevailed in his native country.25 Thus, Carrillos
is not a process of picking and choosing that would trivialize German culture; rather, it
re-articulates the cultural meaning of German music ideologies beyond the boundaries of
the German experience. Meaning is constructed through experience, and Carrillos
reconciling attitude was as much a result of his Mexican upbringing as it was a reflection
of the cultural context he experienced during his years in Leipzig. Traces of Carrillos
ideological re-articulation are evident when one outlines a map of his musical
experiences in Leipzig and analyzes it in relation to the music and aesthetic criteria he
chose to privilege on his return to Mexico as well as in the style of the music he
composed at the time.

Music in Carrillos Leipzig

There is no doubt that Carrillo was well indoctrinated by Jadassohn while at the
Konservatorium; his interest in the symphony and the aesthetic concerns surrounding the
genre is proof of that. However, his belief in music as a representation of specific feelings
and emotions (elegy, triumph, eroticism, drama)unthinkable for a pure music
absolutist follower of Hanslickare also evident in his musical thinking. The academic
environment in Germany was not the only intellectual and aesthetic inspiration for the
Mexican composer while in Germany; as a frequent attender of its concerts and possibly
as a substitute student musician with (p.43) the Gewandhausorchester, he was also
influenced by Arthur Nikisch, one of the most progressive musicians in fin-de-sicle
Leipzig.26 A closer look at the programs of the orchestra between 1899 and 1902 give us
a sense of some of the music Carrillo may have experienced most directly, an occasional
violinist with the orchestra, while in Germany.

Figure 2.1 shows a statistical chart of the repertoire performed by the

Gewandhausorchester in the 18991900, 19001901, and 19021902 seasons;27 these
were the years Carrillo spent in Leipzig. A total of sixty-six concerts were offered during
this period; as the citys musical life was (p.44) considered a bastion of formalist music, it
is no surprise that the composers most often programmed were Beethoven, Brahms, and
Schubert. The orchestra played the complete cycle of Brahmss symphonies every year;
Brahmss second piano concerto, violin concerto, violin and cello concerto, and the
Haydn Variations were performed repeatedly.

Among the composers

considered progressive,
Wagner was programmed
in 18% of the concerts,
Liszt in 12%, Richard
Strauss in 9%, and Berlioz
in 6%.28 The orchestra
played Wagners overture
to Tannhuser and prelude
to Die Meistersinger von
Nrnberg; Strausss Tod
und Verklrung, Also
sprach Zarathustra, and
Till Eulenspiegel; and
Liszts Les Prludes.
Composers usually
associated with formalist
aesthetics and absolute
music outnumber
progressive ones in the
programs of the
Gewandhausorchester.
Nevertheless, the statistics
do not necessarily mean
that conservative
composers exerted a larger
influence on Carrillo, they
simply tell us what music
he may have heard and
experienced while in Figure 2.1 Composers included during the 1899
Leipzig. 1902 seasons of the Gewandhausorchester.

To make a fair evaluation

of how this repertoire
might have impressed Carrillo, I have prepared a chart that accounts for the composers he
chose to use and quote musical examples from in his own Tratado sinttico de harmona
[sic] from 1915 (Figure 2.2). There are forty-two musical examples in Carrillos harmony
book; works by Wagner and Beethoven represent 38% (19% each), and Bach, Richard
Strauss, and Jadassohn together 30% (10% each). Several other composers make up the
remaining 32%. It is revealing that Carrillo did not include a single example by Brahms,
while the music of Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss make up 38% of the total
examples. As mentioned earlier, Gerald Benjamin and Gerard Bhague have described
Carrillo as a Brahmsian, formalist composer, due to his interest in classical formats like
the symphony and string quartet; but this is not borne out by the evidence.

Apparently, an
overwhelming majority of
the music experienced by
Carrillo in Leipzig belongs
to the Austro-German
formalist camp, as we
observed in the programs
of the
Gewandhausorchester and
as we may surmise from
Jadassohns lack of interest
in Wagners music.29
Nevertheless, the music of
Wagner and his followers
had a great impact on
Carrillo. Among the
examples found in his book
are fragments from (p.45)

Tannhuser, Die
Meistersinger von
Nrnberg, Also sprach
Zarathustra, and Till
Eulenspiegel.30

A comparison of the music

experienced by Carrillo at
the Konservatorium and the
Gewandhausorchester and
the music from which he
drew examples in his
Tratado sinttico de
harmona illustrates his
embrace of distinctly
different repertories. The Figure 2.2 Musical examples in Julin Carrillos
contents of the Tratado Tratado sinttico de harmona.
suggest a composer whose
personal interest remained
closer to the melodic creativity in the music of Wagner and Liszt; theirs was a style that
resonated with Carrillos musical training in Mexico, one that emphasized melodic
development over formal considerations (the result of his inspiration, which is, naturally,
melodic and Creole, with a national flavor as Melesio Morales put it)31 and set the stage
for a process of cultural appropriation. However, as a student and (p.46) musician in
Leipzig, Carrillo had to position himself within the dominant ideology of the citys
musical mainstream, one championing formalism and absolute music. Synthesizing both
traditions was a way for Carrillo to gain access to the mainstream while remaining
faithful to his intellectual and emotional interests. The seemingly contradictory
statements about the symphony found in Carrillos Sinfona y pera can be explained
as the ruminations of a decentered artist, aware of the problems of German musical
ideology and choosing to contest some of its conventions as he made it meaningful to his
own musical interests.

Carl Dahlhaus stated that composers of symphonies at the end of the nineteenth century
faced a musical predicament: whether to continue with the formal characteristics of the
genre (a multi-movement structure and the use of sonata allegro form) or to incorporate
the formal conceptions of the symphonic poem (freer forms and harmonic relations that
did not respond to pre-set or conventional structures). It could not be otherwise, since the
procedures of thematic transformation followed by progressive composers and
conventional formal structures preferred by traditionalists were all concerned with the
issue of cohesive unity across large musical forms, be it the symphony or the symphonic
poem. It would be normal for younger composers to be interested in both genres,
especially if, like Carrillo, they did not feel culturally pressured to be faithful to one
aesthetic tradition over the other. Thus, it is not surprising that Dahlhaus turns to
musicians peripheral to the German tradition to exemplify this shift: Tchaikovsky,
Borodin, and Dvok.32 I would argue that although the solutions developed by non-
German composers are not unique in the larger context of change that German music was
experiencing at the end of the nineteenth century, they are indeed distinct responses that
take new cultural milieus as filters to reinterpret the controversy between the two
antagonistic aesthetic positions that were current in German musical life.33

Carrillos intellectual concern with the symphony and his interest in the type of organic-
melodic developments in Wagners music led him to combine these seemingly
irreconcilable trends both in his music and in his rhetoric. Proof of this fascination is
found in his essay Variet tonica e unit ideologica (Ideological unity and tonal
variety), a talk that Carrillo presented at the International Music Congress of Rome in
(p.47) 1911. According to Carrillo, the great classical masters had developed the sonata,

symphony, and the concerto as monumental forms that should be integrated by tonal
unity; however, he claims that unfortunately, these forms have remained unchanged and
that in order to continue being artistically relevant they need to evolve via more tonal
variety and ideological unity.34 He goes on to describe the sonata, symphony, and
concerto as multi-movement works whose internal movements present no relation of
character, themes, or rhythm, and therefore lack ideological unity. Carrillo argues that
as such, these compositions tend to resemble three or four unrelated small pieces
(depending on the number of movements) rather than one single large unity. Furthermore,
Carrillo observes that tonality was used to unify the different movements but that

bringing tonal unity without ideological [unity] necessarily resulted in an excess

of tonal stabilitygenerally that of the main degrees of the four movementsand
therefore today, by requiring more unity in the ideology, it is necessary to demand
tonal variety. [T]he balance remains perfectly stable in this formula: Variety
in unity through ideology, and unity in variety through tonality.35

Carrillos explanation is rather vague and does not fully clarify how his intention varied
from the motivic and thematic transformation and derivation procedures that characterize
the music of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, or Brahms. Gerald Benjamin explains unidad
ideolgica (ideological unity) as the use of thematic derivation and motivic variation to
attain a certain cyclic effect; and describes variedad tonal (tonal variety) as the use of
many passing modulations. According to Benjamin, the goal of Carrillos idea is to
invoke sensations more easily from the listener.36 An analysis of Carrillos String Quartet
No. 1 in E flat major (see Chapter 6), which the composer considered the perfect example
of these ideas, may lead one to speculate that for him unidad ideolgica may have
meant that themes and motives throughout all of the movements in a particular
composition should be traced back to the same motivic and thematic cell. In sum, the
notion of unidad ideological y variedad tonal is simply a (p.48) radicalization of the
ideas of developing variation and thematic transformation already in vogue among
Germanic composers in the nineteenth century and applied systematically to traditional
multi-movement genres and forms beyond the boundaries of individual movements.37

A passing comment in Carrillos writings regarding this paper sheds light on our attempt
to understand when these concerns were born.

When in 1899, Jadassohn, who taught the class of musical forms at the
conservatory, told us about the sonata, the concerto, and the symphony, I
immediately understood that something was missing, although I could not exactly
grasp what needed modification, and I could only understand it after long and hard
hours of study. I asked myself in silence many times, without being able to
enlighten my brain! The riddle of the Sphinx from Greek mythology was less
obscure and intricate than the solution to those questions, where I thought I could
find the seed of new and necessary doctrines in the world of Art.38

This quotation shows that by 1913, when the first edition of Plticas musicales was
published, Carrillo had been meditating over the issue of classical forms for several
years. The fact that he embarked on the composition of a string quartet, a string sextet, a
piano quintet, and a second symphony between his student years with Jadassohn and the
writing of his bookforms that were not particularly popular within the Mexican music
scene of the timeis evidence that he maintained a sustained interest on this issue
throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. The following analysis of thematic
derivation in Carrillos Symphony No. 1 shows that Carrillo was already concerned with
these issues when he composed this early work.

Style in Carrillos Symphony No. 1: Issues of Thematic Derivation

and Transformation
On March 21, 1902, the Knigliches Konservatorium der Musik in Leipzig presented its
last concert of the season. It was an event devoted to orchestral works by composition
students that included music by the American (p.49) George E. Simpson, the Germans
Hans Mohn, Carl Osterloh, Rudolf Dost, and the Mexican Julin Carrillo. On that
occasion Carrillo premiered three movements from his Symphony No. 1. Regardless of
Carrillos optimistic recollection of the event, as expressed in his memoirs, the German
reception of the event was not exactly warm. A couple of weeks after the concert, on
April 3, Musikalisches Wochenblatt published a short review of the event signed by an F.
Wilfferdot. It stated:

Of course, most of the works were of only moderate interest and should be viewed
as tentative pieces of no higher value. The last piece to be presented was the
Symphony in D major composed by Mr. Julin Carrillo from San Luis Potos
 (Mexico). Although I noticed some unsymphonic characteristics, this work was
more refreshing than the preceding compositions. Its three movements do not lack
life and color, and they show a variety of attractive ideas that are correctly
presented, giving an overall impression of good proportion.39

Wilfferdot praised the refreshing quality of Carrillos work only to put in evidence the
poor quality of the other music performed that evening. Despite acknowledging attractive
ideas and good compositional craft in the Mexican composers symphony, he was quick
to point out that he felt it showed some unsymphonic features. I take this review not to
try to figure out exactly what Wilfferdot may have meant but rather to call attention to the
ideas and stylistic elements in Carrillos symphony that may conform to but also deviate
from conventional symphonic writing in fin-de-sicle Leipzig.

If the German critic was rather cold toward Carrillos symphony, the reaction from some
of his classmates seemed to have been quite different. Mikalojus Konstantinas iurlionis
(18751911), a Lithuanian composer and artist who attended the Knigliches
Konservatorium between 1901 and 1902, wrote a letter to Eugeniu Moravskiu after the
premiere in which he stated that the symphony was a

wonderful work in all aspects. A lot of fire, fantasy and poetry. From the
beginning until the end, in a delightful disorder; first an ample melody, then
something that resembles a cry only to return to brilliant and sonorous pearls
then the trumpets, and everything acquires a melancholic tone; after a few minutes
the sun returns and the idyll resurfaces and like that until the end.40

(p.50) It would be difficult to know exactly why iurlionis enjoyed Carrillos music so
much; it could have been just a matter of personal taste. However, I would like to take
iurlioniss own cultural marginality as an excuse to suggest that it was easier for
someone who had been trained outside central European traditions to appreciate and
recognize the musical negotiation between conventional and peripheral styles that
Carrillos music exemplified.

iurlioniss laudatory statement gives me a pretext to advance my critique of the

reception of Carrillo as a mere imitator of Austro-German Romantic music. Against the
conventional opinions about Carrillos early tonal music, I argue that his Symphony No.
1 is not an imitation of Brahms or Mendelssohn but rather an example of how he heard,
interpreted, and processed sonic Leipzig and the ideological disputes that animated its
music scene. Carrillos symphony is what the Leipzig music scene sounded like to him
through the filters of a different musical culture, through the ears of his education in fin-
de-sicle Mexico. As such, the symphony is an example of bricolage and performative
composition; it transforms the aesthetic ideas Carrillo received in Leipzig through those
that prevailed in the cultural milieu of his native Mexico, making them meaningful in
relation to his previous musical experience while performing his own musical persona.

Composed at the end of his studies under Jadassohn at the Knigliches Konservatorium,
Carrillos Symphony No. 1 has four movements (Largo-Allegro, Andante sostenuto,
Scherzo, and Final) with thematic material related by common rhythmic and melodic
motives and gestures. Gerald Benjamin noticed that the thematic material of all the B
themes throughout the symphony derive from the material in the introduction of the first
movement.41 However, I argue here that in fact all of the thematic material in the
composition is related motivically and gesturally, making it a thorough organicistic
display that reflects the strict contrapuntal techniques of thematic derivation emphasized
in Jadassohns lessons.

The first movement, in an altered sonata allegro form as explained later, is in D major.
The melodic material in the introduction of this movement presents a rising leap of a
minor third or perfect fourth followed by the descending unfolding of a triad (example
2.1). This generative gesture or cell or its constituent motivic material (segment I: the
ascending minor third leap, and segment II: the descending unfolding harmony, and the
variants of the rhythmic cell that characterize segment I) lay the structral basis of all the
melodic material in the symphony. The first (p.51) theme of the first movement (example
2.2) is an expanded version of the material in example 2.1. The theme is made of two
phrases: the first one presents a measure-long extension of segment II before the arrival
on the tonic; in the second phrase an added fragment embellishes the melodic descent to
G and displaces it an octave higher before repeating the gesture in a more chromatically
embellished fashion. The second theme of the first movement (example 2.3) also features
the basic contour of the generative gesture, but segment I is expanded into an octave and
segment II is cleverly camouflaged by octave displacement and pitch switching (E6-A6-C
sharp6-G sharp6-F sharp6-D6 instead of E6-C sharp6-A5-G sharp5-F sharp5-D5; see
mm. 45 in example 2.3). In this way, Carrillo offers melodic variety and novelty while
maintaining motivic unity.

The second movement, in

B flat major, is a slow and
nostagic andante sostenuto.
The first theme (example Example 2.1 Julin Carrillo, Symphony No. 1
2.4) is based on the (1902), first movement. Generative cell from the
generative cell (segments I introduction.
and II), but in this case, in
the first phrase of the theme
(mm. 15) the minor third
leap is expanded by
beginning on the upper
pitch and (p.52) repeating
it, while segment II is
ornamented through a
Example 2.2 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first
descending scale into the
movement. First theme.
tonic. The second part of
the theme (mm. 59)
presents the basic contour
of the generative gesture, in
this case an octave leap that
moves back to the tonic via
a descending scale that Example 2.3 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first
foreshadows the second movement. Second theme.
theme of the movement.
The second theme
(example 2.5), is also based on the contour of the generative cell, a leap of perfect fourth
and a descending scale (this time, to the tonic) although Carrillo displaces the descending
scale with an octave leap in the third measure of the theme. In this movement the motivic
material in the bridges between themes is also based on segment I of the generative
gesture (example 2.6).

The third movement is a

scherzo in G minor with a
tempo marking of allegro
non troppo. The first theme
of the scherzo (example
Example 2.4 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second
2.7) disguises its origin in
movement. First theme.
the generative cell by
presenting its beginning
octave ascent not as a leap
but rather as an arpeggiated
harmonic unfolding
followed (p.53) by a slow Example 2.5 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second
descent over the next five movement. Second theme.
measures. The use of the
rhythmic motive from the
beginning leap of the
generative gesture
throughout the scherzos Example 2.6 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, second
first theme brings another movement. Motivic material used in the bridges.
link to the thematic
material in the rest of the
movements.

The second theme of the

scherzo is in D major
(example 2.8) and relies on
segment II from the second
measure of the generative
cell but skips the Example 2.7 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third
characteristic leap from the movement. First theme.
beginning of the motive.
The transformation of the
generative gesture into this
Wagnerian theme
foreshadows the melodic
contour of the second
Example 2.8 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, third
theme from the fourth
movement. Second theme.
movement.

The fourth movement, in

sonata allegro form, is back in D major. The first theme (example 2.9), which starts with
an octave leap and embellishes the following descent with a repeated sequence over each
of the pitches of the unfolding chord, is also clearly based on the generative gesture. The
first few notes of the theme are used throughout the movement as sequential material to
connect the first and second themes. The second theme (example 2.10) begins with a
perfect fourth leap and immediately descends by a minor sixth to the third degree of the
scale where it sits for two measures before descending to the first degree via a chromatic
extension to the sixth degree of the scale. This extension transforms the generative cell
into a melody reminiscent of the opening theme from the (p.54) overture to Richard
Wagners Tannhuser. Such motivic recollection is not accidental but rather an index of
the conflicting musical ideologies Carrillo was trying to reconcile in this work.

Carrillos interest in
thematic derivation is clear
in the thematic material of
his symphony. However, an Example 2.9 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth
analysis of the symphony movement. First theme.
vis--vis a critical appraisal
of his writings about
thematic derivation and the
opera versus symphony
debate in fin-de-sicle
Leipzig during his time
prevent us from concluding Example 2.10 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, fourth
that he was simply movement. Second theme.
imitating German models.
A closer look at the formal
structure in the symphony offers further evidence of the process of cultural synthesis that
gave birth to this work.

Style in Carrillos Symphony No. 1: Issues of Form in the First

Movement
Formal idiosyncrasies in Carrillos Symphony No. 1 are particularly evident in his use of
sonata-allegro form. For instance, Christina Taylor-Gibson has called attention to the
false recapitulation in the fourth movementthe second theme returning in A major as
opposed to the expected D majorand the subsequent unexpected harmonic modulations
throughout the end of the movement.42 Here, I focus on the exceptional challenges to
conventional sonata-allegro form in the symphonys first movement. A quick glance at
the version of the first movement of Carrillos Symphony No. 1 published by Editions
Jobert reveals some inconsistencies to the standard sonata-allegro format. Until the end of
the second theme (in A major), the first part of the exposition presents no problems; it is
at this moment that the complications start. The second part of the second theme moves
away from A major, first tonicizing the second degree (B minor), then moving to F sharp
minor through a brief D major passage in measure 105. The F sharp minor section
quickly modulates to A major in measure 117, which as a dominant area prepares the
movement back to the original tonic (D major) in measure 125.

At this point one would

expect a repeat of the
exposition or at the very
least, a preparing motion
toward the development;
however, the D major
section, which is the goal
of the tonal excursion, does
not represent a return to the
exposition but rather the
preparation for the
recapitulation. This is not
to say that the first
movement lacks a
development, although it
(p.55) raises questions as to
where the development
starts and what its role may
be in the overall tonal
drama expected in a sonata-
allegro form. A possible
way to hear the work in
relation to the sonata-
allegro form model may be
to acknowledge the
harmonic motion at the end
of the second theme and
Figure 2.3a and b Comparative chart. Form in the
place the development in
manuscript and printed version of Carrillos
one of three different Symphony No. 1, first movement.(a) Formal chart
places: measures 91, 113, according to the orchestral manuscript (with 41
or 125 (see the lower measures missing from the development).
portion of Figure 2.3).

Every one of these three interpretative choices has different musical implications in how
we listen to the work as a whole. If we choose the first possibility, then the modulatory
sequence that arises at the end of the second theme would make a nicealthough rather
conservativetonal exploration that would satisfy the harmonic purpose of a
development section. However, in this interpretation the second theme would be part of
both the exposition (in a thematic sense) and the development (in a harmonic sense). If
we prefer the second option, we would respect the position of the second theme as an
autonomous entity, independent from the development. The problem with this choice is
that we would have an extremely short harmonic exploration (comprising only two keys:
F sharp minor and A major). This would be clearly unbalanced with the lengthy transition
into the recapitulation in D major. If on the other hand we feel inclined toward the third
possibility, then we would have a development section that would not fulfill the harmonic
implications of a proper development, since it would be a mere connection between the
end of the second theme and the recapitulation. In other words, the first movement of the
symphony would lack a development. This would even question its being a sonata-
allegro form and would point toward a sonatina form, indeed an odd way to begin a
symphony that, as has been argued, supposedly follows in the steps of Brahms. Are there
any justifications for Carrillos license? A look at the symphonys orchestral manuscript
shows that the work was originally conceived with a more evident and complete
development section and only later did the composer decide to remove it from the final
version of the composition. An analysis of these sources and an interpretation of them in
relation to the musical ideologies Carrillo encountered in Leipzig shed light on the
possible reasons he may have had to remove this passage from the final version of the
symphony.

After comparing the manuscript to the published edition of the symphony I found two
lengthy passages that were crossed out in the manuscript with the Spanish inscriptions
no se toca (not to be played) and esta pgina no se toca (this page is not to be played)
in the composers own handwriting. These passages do not appear in the published
version of the work. The first fragment comprises eight measures between what in (p.56)
(p.57) (p.58) the published version are measures 65 and 66; they are measures 66 to 74

in the manuscript. Formally, this fragment is part of the transition from the first to the
second theme in the exposition. The second fragment is incomplete in the manuscript.
The first two pages out of a total of four are preserved but the last two are missing. These
pages are the first and second ending of the exposition (4 measures, 3 for the first ending
and 1 for the second ending) and the beginning of the development (20 measures, without
taking into account the number of measures from the two missing pages). According to
the piano reduction of the symphony (discussed later), this section included eighty-nine
measures of music, which made it almost as long as the preceding exposition, and longer
than the development that was to follow it. Example 2.11 shows the first twenty-one
measures of the first ending. The first version of the exposition as outlined in the piano
reduction (before the edits in the orchestral manuscript) further emphasizes the odd
choices outlined in Figure 2.3.

To discuss the structure of

the work I should clarify a
specific aspect in the
organization of Carrillos
score. Both the manuscript
and the published version
are divided in different
sections that the composer
labeled with letters from A
to R. These are rehearsal
letters that, as often the
case with these markings,
sometimes coincide with
structural formal points.
For example, rehearsal
letter D corresponds to the
presentation of the second
theme, M corresponds to
the beginning of the
recapitulation; yet no letter
labels the beginning of the
exposition. The first
deduction we can draw
from the recovered
fragments is that the
process of editing the work
was done in at least two
phases. In the first phase,
Carrillo eliminated only the
first and second endings
and the first seven Example 2.11 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first
measures of the movement. Beginning of the first ending (from the
development (example piano reduction).
2.11), which included a
cadence to E major, the
beginning key of that section. On top of measure 129 of the manuscript one can read a
H (to H) in a pencil different from the rest of the score. Since K is only eight measures
into the development, we may safely assume that Carrillos first idea was just to eliminate
the repeat of the exposition by going from E major, the dominant of the first ending that
prepares a return to D major through A major, right into the development. The process
connected an E major chord that was meant to resolve to A major, to the cadential
resolution eight measures into the development, which was itself a resolution to E major.
Carrillo later decided that change was not enough and wrote at the end of measure 129, in
larger letters, A la vuelta K (to K at the turn of the page), a decision that eliminated
sections H, I, and J, and thus got rid of three pages of music that included most of the
development section. The composer might have had two reasons for deleting this section.
First, he might have thought that the repetition of an exposition that already (p.59)
presented an interesting harmonic exploration would overemphasize that tonal excursion,
overshadowing any harmonic exploration he might have followed in the development
especially when the extension between the end of the second theme and the repetition of
the exposition was longer than the development and highly complex harmonically, as
shown in example 2.11. Hence, his first cut: the first and second endings and the
beginning of the development. Later, Carrillo may have decided that the (p.60)
development was, as a matter of fact, harmonically redundant after the harmonic
sequence at the end of the second theme and may have chosen to eliminate the
development altogether.

One of the more distinctive stylistic features in the first movement of Carrillos
symphony is the harmonic behavior of the transitional material between the first and
second themes of the exposition. Since there are two different versions of the transition
in the printed version and in the manuscripta comparative study is necessary. I
prepared a contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition based on the printed version
that shows that Carrillos development of the melodic material pushed him in a harmonic
direction different from that conventionally established by sonata-allegro form. Instead of
progressing from the end of the first theme toward the dominant area (A major), Carrillo
moves toward the area of the minor subdominant (G minor) (example 2.12).

The area is never clearly

established since Carrillo is
well aware that he is
moving in the wrong
direction and continuously
struggles to find his way
back to what the Example 2.12 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1.
conventional sonata-allegro
Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition
model prescribes. When we
from theme A to theme B from the printed version.
compare the printed version
and the manuscript we find
that the material Carrillo cut from the final version of the symphony shows this struggle
clearly. In my own contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition from the manuscript
(example 2.13) we observe that the movement toward the minor subdominant is clear
between measures 65 and 67 and is further emphasized from measures 71 to 78 (example
2.13). In both cases we witness Carrillos struggle to force his music back to the
conventional model (mm. 6869 and 72) without abruptly breaking the smooth (p.61)
flow of his melodic material, and every time we see him falling for the temptation to
move toward the minor subdominant. Particularly interesting is the harmony in measure
68, where we find a chord of the following pitches, G sharp-B-D flat-F (a harmony that
also appears in measure 156 of the first ending in the piano reduction, see Figure 2.4).
This is a German sixth spelled as a double diminished fifth, with a G sharp instead of an
A flata Freudian slip that shows the composer unconsciously reminding himself of the
prescribed goal of his tonal excursion: A major. In other words, these chords are indexes
of the struggle between the tonal trip the composers imagination requests and the tonal
obligation that the form imposes on him. Eventually, Carrillo chose tradition over fantasy
and decided to erase the traces that betrayed his original impulse.43

Carrillo made a piano

reduction of the symphony
in July 1901. As noted
earlier, the composer
prepared the piano version
before he extracted this Example 2.13 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1.
(p.62) (p.63) portion of Contrapuntal-harmonic reduction of the transition
music from the orchestral from theme A to theme B from the manuscript.
manuscript and before its
premiere in Leipzig. This
piano score offers a
glimpse into what the
earliest version of the
symphony may have
sounded like (see Figure
2.4).44 This version shows
that eighty-nine measures
of a first ending before the
Figure 2.4 Form in the piano reduction of Carrillos
repetition of the exposition
Symphony No. 1, first movement.
(mm. 135224 of the first
ending) as well as forty-
two measures between the
beginning of the development and the transition to the recapitulation (mm. 135177)
were removed from the final orchestral version. The two passages begin very similarly,
with a melodic sequence based on segments I and II from the generative gesture on the
dominant of A major. The first ending presents a highly chromatic sequence that features
a series of auxiliary diminished chords and the German sixth on A flat (spelled as G
sharp, as explained earlier) that eventually leads to A major (m. 224). The sequence of
diminished chords and their prolongation over several measures gives the passage a very
static quality. The development section moves from the dominant of A major to F sharp
major through a series of auxiliary dominant chords (see example 2.14). The section in F
sharp major prepares a return to D major, the transition to the recapitulation kept in both
the manuscript and final printed version of the symphony. The harmonic sequence in this
section, although interesting in its motion by major second (from E major to F sharp
major), seems rather artificial. It does not follow the unaffected flow that accompanies the
development of thematic material in the exposition. The use of the motivic material from
the generative cell also seems forced; it does not flow smoothly from the material in the
preceding section nor does it present the tonal struggles between themes that would be
found in conventional sonata-allegro form. The harmonic relations and the use of
thematic material in these sections supports the interpretation that the music taken out
was redundant and even inconsequential considering the harmonic and melodic
sequences in the section preceding the development.

The main question in

analyzing these sections
should not be why Carrillo
decided to cut this passage,
but rather why he decided
to retain the (p.64)
evidence of his harmonic
temptation in the final
version. When Carrillo
hesitates between where he
wants his music to move
(the minor subdominant)
and where the music ought
to move if it is to strictly
follow the conventional
model (the dominant), he
creates a symmetrical
harmonic relationship
(example 2.15). The fact
that Carrillo sticks to this
move to the minor
subdominant in the final Example 2.14 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first
version of the symphony movement. Beginning of the development (from the
even though as a stylistic piano reduction).
feature it contradicts the
sonata-allegro form model
suggests that he is fond of the conceptual overtones created by (p.65) this harmonic
motion. In fact, Carrillos early interest in the tonal possibilities of symmetrical scales can
also be observed in his Tratado sinttico de harmona (1915), where he dedicates an
entire chapter to the harmonization of whole-tone scales.45
This analysis of the stylistic
practices of Carrillo, as
reflected in the form and
harmonic sequences of the
first movement of his
Symphony No. 1, reveals a
synthetic musical thought,
a style that brings together
two very distinct German Example 2.15 Carrillo. Symphony No. 1. Symmetric
music ideologies: a harmonic relation in the transition from theme A to
harmonic and a thematic theme B.
understanding of sonata-
allegro form that usually
contradict each other but that are blended by Carrillo into a style that tacitly displays and
offers a possible solution to these contradictions. The result is a formal structure that
lacks the dramatic crux of a sonata-allegro form, the development as thematic exploration
expanded to its limits. Instead, the last version of Carrillos symphony offers a rather long
as well as harmonically and thematically static bridge that connects the exposition and
the recapitulation; especially motionless is the re-transition section, which features two
secondary diminished chords in the middle of the passage, lasting for fifteen measures,
almost half of the entire section (example 2.16, which corresponds to mm. 125152 in the
chart of the Jobert edition from Figure 2.3). I propose to understand Carrillos cuts and
the static quality in the development of the first movement of his Symphony No. 1 as a
manifestation of his personal negotiation with the ideological webs that surrounded him
in Germany. As such, these fragments could be interpreted as Carrillos attempts to
negotiate his particular position within the contradictory discourses that he was exposed
to. Let us look into these musical ideologies.

Carrillo composed his

Symphony No. 1 after
studying for three years
under Salomon Jadassohn
at the Knigliches
Konservatorium.46 Thus,
(p.66) the work illustrates

Carrillos adoption of the

artistic values he learned
from Jadassohn as well as
the other musical influences
he had in Leipzig during
Example 2.16 Carrillo, Symphony No. 1, first
those years and shows how
movement. Idealized voice leading of the re-
he articulated these with an
transition to the recapitulation.
emphasis on the melodic
expression of fin-de-sicle Mexican music. By analyzing the symphony vis--vis a
critical reading of the seeming contradictions found in Carrillos article Sinfona y
pera one realizes that these contradictions are not only reflected but are the very source
of the style developed in this composition. This makes the process of composition an act
that not only situates the composer within these contradictions as he made sense of them,
but also suggests a possible resolution of the conflict according to the composers unique
ideological and cultural milieu. Upon his return to Mexico in 1904, Carrillo understood
that he needed to build a unique niche for himself that would allow him a place of
distinction within Mexico Citys musical scene. Embracing German musical ideologies
offered such a position, a particularly effective one considering the sympathies for
anything European that characterized pre-Revolutionary Mexican cultural life. However,
rather than merely an imitation of German models, the style in Carrillos Symphony No.
1 shows the most salient Germanic features as elements of the musics foreground level,
with the composer even crossing German ideological boundariessuch as the presence
of a very Wagnerian-sounding theme within the most formalist of musical structures
(the second (p.67) theme of the symphonys sonata-allegro in the fourth movement). As
the analysis makes evident, there are several important stylistic deviations from standard
German symphonic practice at the structural level in Carrillos music that further
challenge his representation as simply an imitator of German models.

Carrillo and Romanticism: Pre-Microtonal Assessment

Most of the criticism about Carrillos early tonal works has advanced the idea of the
composer as an imitator of nineteenth-century Austro-German masters; the preceding
analysis puts this assessment into question. Ricardo Mirandas recent scholarship,
produced under a revisionist look at Carrillos uvre, argues for a more nuanced position
that the Mexican composer was in fact a Romantic because the organicist
craftsmanship and deliberate use of secondary parameters in [the Symphony No. 1, the
String Sextet, and the Suite Los naranjos] are two characteristics that identify Carrillo
with the Romantic style.47 Mirandas project is to trace the continuities in Carrillos
musical style from his tonal to his microtonal works and to interpret them as indexes of a
Romantic spirit that the composer somehow betrayed by attempting the systematization
of his Sonido 13.48 Further discussion about ideology in Carrillos writings (in Chapter 5)
and about issues of spirituality (in Chapter 7) clearly show the Mexican composer as a
non-Romantic artist. Still, in discussing Carrillos tonal works, when one may be tempted
to label him a Romantic because of his use of technical procedures followed by Romantic
composers and his engagement with Austro-German musical ideologies born out of the
Romantic milieu, the issue must be examined. Indeed, as the previous sections argue, the
composition of Symphony No. 1 is the result of a bricolage-like process in which Carrillo
incorporates some of the ideologies that characterized late nineteenth-century German
music; under those circumstances it would seem almost natural to claim him as a
Romantic composer. However, this assumes that Romanticism is purely a matter of style
when it would be better understood as a culturally and geographically contingent
aesthetic/political project; it would also assume that Romanticism is a homogenous and
uncontested artistic category or convention; and it would ultimately (p.68) neglect a
serious assessment of Carrillos particular engagement with those Romantic musical
ideologies.

With roots in the German Sturm und Drang, Romanticism as an artistic and literary
movement had its origin at the intersection of that unique German culture and the advent
of the industrial revolution in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half
of the nineteenth century. As such, its emphasis on emotion, intuition, and untamed
nature was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and an escape from
reality through imagination. These are the characteristics that music as stylistically and
technically dissimilar as the works of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, or Liszt came to
embody in European Romanticism and the Romantic Spirit. Regardless of European
cultures claims to universality, one could argue that Romanticism as such can only exist
within specific historical, geographic, and cultural coordinates since they give meaning to
the movement as an intellectual endeavor and also shape its historical trajectory
throughout the Europeanand most specifically, Austro-Germannineteenth century.
This is not to say that artists from other latitudes could not engage these ideas,
appropriate them, and resignify them in powerful and meaningful ways. However, I
would argue that although composers like Dvok, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Sibelius, or
Grieg had an impact on the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century European music, they
remain always in the margins of the mainstream discussion about Romanticism because
they were not a part of the unique geographical and cultural intersections that gave birth
to Romanticism as an intellectual trend. And even though musicologists have claimed for
decades that Western European culture is universal, this does not make it so. Instead of
searching for labels perceived as universal to classify composers of such varied
backgrounds and experiences as the ones mentioned, I argue that European culture should
be understood as non-universal and the product of very specific local circumstances.
When artists and, in this case, musicians engaged with these localized European cultures
they did it through their own cultural lenses and experiences, in accordance with the local
audiences they were writing for, and in doing so they transformed European culture to
make it their own. As such, composers like Grieg, Tchaikovsky, or Carrillo took the
ideas, techniques, styles, and aesthetic creeds of composers conventionally labeled as
Romantic and changed them into new cultural idioms. The convention of reducing
musical Romanticism to a few stylistic features (be it organicism, use of chromatic
harmonies, use of large orchestral ensembles, etc.) and indiscriminately labeling
composers as dissimilar as Wagner, Borodin, Verdi, or Alberto Williams as Romantics,
without taking into account the intellectual and (p.69) artistic milieu that produced and
made Romanticism culturally significant, belittles the very idea of Romanticism. In a
similar light, the claims about the universality of Western European culture in general,
and Romanticism in particular, in fact end up trivializing both.

Accordingly, by simply reducing Julin Carrillos articulation of nineteenth-century

Austro-German music ideologies to an alleged acculturation into Romanticism, one
would miss the nuanced ways, both in rhetoric and musical style, in which he deviates
from the conventions of those ideologies and makes them into cultural forms relevant to
his own musical development in Germany as well as in Mexico. Far from the intuitive
and Romantic composer Miranda describes, Carrillo was a child of the positivist
philosophy that permeated Mexican political, social, and cultural life at the end of the
nineteenth century. He believed in order, structure, and science as conducive to progress;
as such, he was closer to the spirit of Classicism than to Romanticism. His passionate
involvement with classical idioms such as sonata-allegro form and compositional
principles such as organicism are precisely the result of a rational search for clarity,
balance, unity, and structure that could identify him with anything but Romanticism. The
edits one witnesses in the three different versions of the first movement of his first
symphony can be thought of as indexes of the composers struggle to maintain the proper
balance of sonata-allegro form in his symphony. It is this passion with order and
rationality which informs Carrillos musical path and his lifelong obsession with
systematization. Far from contradictions, the composers musical styles and
methodological anxieties are avenues through which we can interpret his musical works
as instances of performative composition.

Notes:
(1) Gerard Bhague, Latin American Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1979), 225.

(2) Gerald Benjamin, Julin Carrillo and Sonido Trece, Yearbook of the Inter
American Institute for Musical Research, Vol. 3 (1967), 39.

(3) Yolanda Moreno Rivas, La composicin en Mxico en el siglo XX (Mexico City:

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 36.

(4) Melesio Morales, Julin Carrillo, El Tiempo, July 27, 1905. Reprinted in Aurea
Maya, ed., Melesio Morales (18381908): labor periodstica (Mexico City: CENIDIM,
1994), 147151.

(5) Julin Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, ed. Dolores Carrillo (San Luis Potos: Comit
Organizador San Luis 400, 1992), 172.

(6) The partys official guidelines emphasized that foreign music whose morbid
character depresses the spirit of our people must be eliminated absolutely. We do not find
sufficient reason to prefer foreign genres when we possess a unique richness in national
arts, songs that have no equal and that are the direct expression of popular soul. Partido
Nacional Revolucionario, Domingos Culturales, July 8, 1930, 6. Quoted in Ilene V.
OMalley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the
Mexican State, 19201920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 119.

(7) Carlos Chvez, La msica propia de Mxico, Msica. Revista Mexicana 1, no. 7
(1930). Reprinted in Carlos Chvez, Escritos periodsticos (19161939), ed. Gloria
Carmona (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional, 1997), 168.

(8) Carlos Chvez, Composicin musical, El Universal, January 23, 1932. Reprinted in
Chvez, Escritos periodsticos, 195.

(9) Otto Mayer-Serra, Panorama de la msica mexicana: desde la Independencia hasta

la actualidad (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1941), 93.

(10) Leonora Saavedra, Of Selves and Others: Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics
of Modern Mexican Art Music (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 16.

(11) Roger Scruton, Absolute Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, Vol. I, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36.

(12) Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 18.

(13) Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2010), 6.

(14) Arnold Schoenberg, Brahms the Progressive, in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and
Idea, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 53.

(15) Beate Hiltner states that Jadassohns enthusiasm for Richard Wagners music was
rather passive and [Wagners music] did not have much effect on him. See Beate Hiltner,
Salomon Jadassohn: Komponist, Musiktheoretiker, Pianist, Pedagogue. Ein
Dokumentation ber einen vergassen Leipziger Musiker des 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig:
Leipziger Universittsverlag, 1995), 150.

(16) The programs are reproduced in Johannes Former, Andreas Gpfert, Fritz
Hennenburg, Brigitte Eichter, and Ingeborg Singer, Die Gewandhaus-Konzert zu Leipzig
(Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag, 1981), 413418.

(17) Beate Hiltner states that during his lifetime, Jadassohn had an entry in the
dictionary Literary Leipzig. His entry was as long as that of his colleague Reinecke. See
Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn, 151.

(18) Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn, 151.

(19) Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 86.

(20) Salomon Jadassohn, A Manual of Harmony, trans. Th. Baker (New York: G.
Schirmer, 1896), 242.

(21) Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1986 [1854]), 2829.
(22) Julin Carrillo, Plticas musicales (Mexico City: Wagner y Levn, 1913), 112. This
book includes a reprint from the original article, which was published in El Heraldo, June
30, 1909. Capital letters are used in the original.

(23) Carrillo, Plticas musicales, 113.

(24) Carrillo, Plticas musicales, 111.

(25) As mentioned earlier, a number of German-speaking composers were also invested

in bridging these musical camps. However, the political pressures they might have felt by
embarking on such a project had to be necessarily different from those confronted by a
non-local composer. My argument emphasizes that composers from the periphery could
feel free from those politics, embrace both camps, and produce a musical style that
synthesized their ideas with the musical ideologies prevailing in their countries.

(26) Jos Velasco Urda quotes Carrillo as saying that he was a member of the
Gewandhausorchester during the years he lived in Leipzig; see Jos Velasco Urda, Julin
Carrillo: su vida y su obra (Mexico City: Grupo 13 Metropolitano, 1943), 179. This is
reproduced by Gerald Benjamin, who adds that Carrillo served as the orchestras
concertmaster; see Gerald R. Benjamin, Julin Carrillo and Sonido Trece, Yearbook,
Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Vol. III (1967), 38. This information is
erroneous; Claudius Bhm, the archivist of the Gewandhaus confirms that Carrillo was
never a formal member of the orchestra; Claudius Bhm, electronic communication,
January 8, 2014. The Leipzig Konservatorium had the practice of sending talented
students to rehearse with the Gewandhaus and sometimes as substitute musicians. This
may have been Carrillos case; but that did not make him a member of the orchestra as he
implied or as his biographers assumed.

(27) See Former, Gpfert, Hennenburg, Eichter, and Singer, Die Gewandhaus-Konzert zu
Leipzig, 413418.

(28) To avoid working with decimals I rounded numbers to the closer figure. Thus, 9.52
became 10 and 2.38 became 2, etc.

(29) See footnote 15.

(30) Note that Wagners music had been known in Mexico since 1891, when the Italian
opera company of Napoleon Sieni premiered Lohengrin, Tannhuser, and Die Walkre in
the country. See Karl Bellinghausen, ed., Melesio Morales: mi libro verde de apuntes e
impresiones (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes 1999), 45. That
was not the case with Richard Strausss music, which was not performed in Mexico until
the twentieth century.

(31) Morales, Julin Carrillo.

(32) Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989), 268269.

(33) With antagonistic aesthetic positions I wish to refer not only to formalist and
programmatic preferences among composers but also preferences of genre (the
symphonic tradition versus composers of symphonic poems) and technique (the tradition
of thematic return versus thematic transformation).

(34) Julin Carrillo, Variet tonica e unit ideologica, paper presented at the Congresso
Internazionale di Musica in Rome, April 411, 1911. A copy of this paper, in Italian and
French, is kept at the Julin Carrillo Archive. This is the only transcript that I have been
able to locate. My description here paraphrases from that version of the text. A later
article published by Carrillo in 1925 recycles some of the ideas and even fragments from
his early essay. See Julin Carrillo, Las formas musicales, El Sonido 13 2, no.12
(1925): 38.

(35) Carrillo, Variet tonica e unit ideologica.

(36) Benjamin, Julin Carrillo and Sonido Trece, 39.

(37) Evidence of this is also found in Carrillos marginalia to Arnold Schoenbergs article
Brahms the Progressive. In commenting on a paragraph in which Schoenberg explains
the Wagnerian leitmotif as the grandiose intention of unification of the thematic material
of an entire opera, and even of an entire tetralogy (Schoenberg, Brahms the
Progressive, in Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 61) Carrillo writes Igual que mi tesis de
unidad ideologica para la sinfona (Just as in my thesis about ideological unity for the
symphony). Carrillos copy of Schoenbergs book is kept at the Julin Carrillo Archive.

(38) Carrillo, Plticas musicales, 64.

(39) F. Wilfferdot, Leipzig, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 33, no. 15 (1902): 235.

(40) Letter from Mikalojus Konstantinas iurlionis to Eugeniu Moravskiu (March 21,
1902). The letter was originally written in Polish but has been published in Lithuanian in
Mikalojus Konstantinas iurlionis, Apie Muzika ir Daile. Laiskai, Uzrasai ir Straipsniai
(Vilnius: Valstybine Grozines Literaturos Leidkla, 1960), 108114. The letter was also
quoted in Carrillo, Testimonio de una vida, 96.

(41) Benjamin, Julin Carrillo and Sonido Trece, 39.

(42) Christina Taylor-Gibson, The Music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julin Carrillo, and
Carlos Chvez in New York, 19251932 (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland-
College Park, 2008), 31.

(43) Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky controversially affirmed in his Guide to the Practical Study
of Harmony that the German sixth chord, which is traditionally interpreted as a harmony
built on the sixth degree, could also be thought of as a chord built on the lowered second
 degree. The suggestion of C minor in measure 71 may also imply that the misspelled
German sixth could be thought of, in a Tchaikovskian way, as a chord built on D flat
rather than on A flat (see Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Guide to the Practical Study of
Harmony, trans. from the German of P. Juon by Emil Krall and Jame Liebling [Canoga
Park: Summit, 1971], 106). This appears as another suggestive connection between
Carrillo and the late nineteenth-century peripheral symphonic traditions mentioned by
Carl Dahlhaus.

(44) The piano reduction surfaced among a series of unrelated papers during my work at
the Julin Carrillo Archive in 2009. It was not mentioned in any of the earlier catalogues
of Carrillos works prepared by himself or his daughter (Dolores Carrillo), nor is it noted
in the most recent and comprehensive catalogue of the archive prepared by Omar
Hernndez-Hidalgo, Catlogo integral del archivo Julin Carrillo (San Luis Potos:
Instituto de Cultura de San Luis Potos, 2000). Although it is unclear when Carrillo
decided to edit the symphony, it is evident that he made this piano reduction before
determining to get rid of the discussed passage from the final orchestral score. This piano
reduction is the most complete source for trying to figure out what the earliest version of
the symphony may have sounded like.

(45) See Julin Carrillo, Tratado sinttico de harmona (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915),
6771.

(46) Carrillos Symphony No. 1 was premiered only a month and a half after Jadassohns
death.

(47) Ricardo Miranda, Romanticismo y contradiccin en la obra de Julin Carrillo,

Heterofona 35, no. 129 (2003): 72.

(48) Miranda, Romanticismo y contradiccin en la obra de Julin Carrillo, 75.

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