Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and the Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (review)

Sounds of the Modern Nation is Madrid’s second published version of his doctoral dissertation “Writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Music in Mexico: Performativity, Transculturation, and Identity after the Revolution, 1920– 1930” (2003), the fi rst being the Spanish version Los sonidos de la nación moderna, Música, cultura e ideas en el México postrevolucionario, 1920–1930, which was awarded the Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize in 2005. In this work Madrid deconstructs the post-revolutionary Mexican nationalistic discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. He maintains that this discourse undermines the multivocality of Mexican society to favor an essentialized conception of lo mexicano, which served the post-revolutionary state’s nation-building project. Madrid proposes that as Indigenismo became a central component of post-revolutionary Mexican identity, mestizo and European artistic expressions were increasingly perceived as little more than unremarkable imitations of European art, and therefore unworthy of recognition as “truly Mexican.” However, Madrid suggests that the artistic production of this period may also be understood as manifestations of transculturation, in which composers adopted modernist and avant-garde sensibilities but adapted them to the Mexican context. Although this argument has been forwarded with regards to other arts (for example García Canclini 1989, 65–93), Madrid application of this concept to music represents a signifi cant contribution to music and cultural studies. By examining works that lay at the margins of national and international canons Madrid does not seek to “reinstate these composers to their ‘rightful’ places in the canon of Mexican music [because] this type of exercise would only revive an essentialist notion of what Mexican music ought or ought not to be” (168). Instead, through non-canonical works he explores the values, discourse, and processes at work in the formation of the post-revolutionary Mexican identity. Madrid’s methodology draws from a variety of disciplines. At times the author engages in Schenkerian analysis, at times he refl ects on composers’ Reviews