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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Julián Carrillo (1875-1965) might be regarded as a Mexican Schoenberg: from more conventional late Romantic beginnings, he gradually abandoned traditional tonality entirely in favor of a radical new approach. In contrast to Schoenberg's serialism, Carrillo became known for microtonal music and for developing his own notation for intervals as small as 1/16th-tones. Carrillo has been highly regarded in avant-garde music circles -- but unlike Schoenberg, whose pieces from his Late Romantic period are still performed, Carrillo's early works have fallen into obscurity.
The youngest of 19 children in a poor family, Carrillo was first noticed when he sang in the children's choir at his church; his church's music director helped him travel to San Luis Potosí, the state capital, for more advanced studies in music. There, he made quick progress and earned scholarships to study first at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, then in Europe at the Leipzig Conservatory beginning in 1899. While in Leipzig, he became concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and composed several large-scale works including a string sextet and his first symphony. He returned to Mexico in 1904. Over the next fifteen years, while active as a violinist and conductor in Mexico and the United States, he conducted scientific research in acoustics and began to develop his microtonal music theory, which he called “Sonido 13” or “The Thirteenth Sound” because it expanded on the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Carrillo first introduced Sonido 13 in a paper he wrote in New York in 1916 or 1917 and published in 1922, and his microtonal music received its first performances in Mexico City in 1925. From then on he was known almost entirely for Sonido 13, especially after he met Leopold Stokowski, who went on to commission many of his microtonal pieces for orchestra. Surprisingly, he was nominated for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, for acoustics experiments at New York University in which he showed that the conventionally accepted node law needed to be modified.
Carrillo's String Sextet is one of his early works in the late Romantic idiom. Completed in 1900 while he was a student in Leipzig, it was his second major work, after a mass he composed before leaving Mexico. Although entirely tonal, the Sextet already reflects Carrillo's mature aesthetic. Following Liszt, Carrillo advocated maintaining an “organic” coherence among multiple movements of a piece by using transformations of a single motive across movements. Accordingly, the main themes of all the movements are variations of the opening theme, and echoes of all three previous movements can be heard in the lengthy finale. The piece had a successful premiere in Leipzig, but when Carrillo returned to Mexico, its combination of Lisztian structure and Brahmsian textures baffled Mexican critics, who called it an unconvincing imitation of German music. Along with Carrillo's other early works, it was quickly overshadowed by an entire generation of Mexican nationalist composers and only revived in the last years of Carrillo's life more than 60 years later.
Movements:
I. Allegro con brio
II. Largo non troppo (9:53)
III. Scherzo (18:37)
IV. Allegro brillante (23:58)
Julián Carrillo (1875-1965) might be regarded as a Mexican Schoenberg: from more conventional late Romantic beginnings, he gradually abandoned traditional tonality entirely in favor of a radical new approach. In contrast to Schoenberg's serialism, Carrillo became known for microtonal music and for developing his own notation for intervals as small as 1/16th-tones. Carrillo has been highly regarded in avant-garde music circles -- but unlike Schoenberg, whose pieces from his Late Romantic period are still performed, Carrillo's early works have fallen into obscurity.
The youngest of 19 children in a poor family, Carrillo was first noticed when he sang in the children's choir at his church; his church's music director helped him travel to San Luis Potosí, the state capital, for more advanced studies in music. There, he made quick progress and earned scholarships to study first at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, then in Europe at the Leipzig Conservatory beginning in 1899. While in Leipzig, he became concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and composed several large-scale works including a string sextet and his first symphony. He returned to Mexico in 1904. Over the next fifteen years, while active as a violinist and conductor in Mexico and the United States, he conducted scientific research in acoustics and began to develop his microtonal music theory, which he called “Sonido 13” or “The Thirteenth Sound” because it expanded on the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Carrillo first introduced Sonido 13 in a paper he wrote in New York in 1916 or 1917 and published in 1922, and his microtonal music received its first performances in Mexico City in 1925. From then on he was known almost entirely for Sonido 13, especially after he met Leopold Stokowski, who went on to commission many of his microtonal pieces for orchestra. Surprisingly, he was nominated for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, for acoustics experiments at New York University in which he showed that the conventionally accepted node law needed to be modified.
Carrillo's String Sextet is one of his early works in the late Romantic idiom. Completed in 1900 while he was a student in Leipzig, it was his second major work, after a mass he composed before leaving Mexico. Although entirely tonal, the Sextet already reflects Carrillo's mature aesthetic. Following Liszt, Carrillo advocated maintaining an “organic” coherence among multiple movements of a piece by using transformations of a single motive across movements. Accordingly, the main themes of all the movements are variations of the opening theme, and echoes of all three previous movements can be heard in the lengthy finale. The piece had a successful premiere in Leipzig, but when Carrillo returned to Mexico, its combination of Lisztian structure and Brahmsian textures baffled Mexican critics, who called it an unconvincing imitation of German music. Along with Carrillo's other early works, it was quickly overshadowed by an entire generation of Mexican nationalist composers and only revived in the last years of Carrillo's life more than 60 years later.
Movements:
I. Allegro con brio
II. Largo non troppo (9:53)
III. Scherzo (18:37)
IV. Allegro brillante (23:58)