“Two for a Half and Four for a Quarter Seeing that the Weather is Bad”: the Town Crier in Silvestre Revueltas’ Musical Semiosis

Abstract

The generation of postrevolutionary artists that included Silvestre Revueltas confronted a conflict in the making and communication of their art. On the one hand continuing with their modernist impulse that leaned towards a sort of emancipation of artistic material and on the other hand finding a way to capture in their art an ideological message according to the different social expectations of the time. This second purpose tended to undermine and even invalidate the first; particularly in the realm of music which is symbolic and polysemous by nature and very useless for articulating ideological content. Revueltas renounces the second goal right away by incorporating a verbal paratext to his music that he publishes in the program for his concerts which in turn serves the purpose, although sometimes subtly, to supply the necessary code for the ideological interpretation of the musical composition and what is needed to be understood as part of the performative act. This paratext frees Revueltas from the necessity of resorting to his colleagues’ “figurative” strategies to validate his art both politically and socially and they consist of a protagonic reutilization of conventional materials which are almost always largely literal quotes taken from popular music. In Esquinas, Revueltas starts from source material that he sees as politically significant: the town crier. By means of a sophisticated exercise of semiotic transposition, he draws a musical expression from the crier’s expression that will become a very particular musical discourse which is modern but political all the same.