Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) has been portrayed as a nationalist artist both at home and beyond Mexico’s borders. However, the musicking of a presumed Mexicanness was far from Revueltas’ mind. In Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion, author Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus shows how Revueltas, strongly inspired by the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, sought ways to sound the voice of the commoners wandering the Mexican streets, as well as that of gypsy miners in Spain, Black women in the U.S. South, and slaves in Cuba in colonial times. The soundings of such social actors and their environments account for the great variety of musical approaches in Revueltas’ scores, from Dadaistic collages satirizing domesticating nationalisms to symphonic poems akin to socialist realism. The intent behind this hermeneutic approach is to reveal and inform the political passion expressed in Revueltas’s music, interlinked with his writings and political actions.

Buried in history for half a century, Revueltas has recently risen to be recognized as one of the most prominent Latin American composers of the twentieth century. The peculiar story of his life and works reveals not only what led to the stunning originality of his music that was unprecedented in Western art music. It also opens the window to all those interested in the unique art that emerged in Mexico as a result of the Revolution that shook the country for decades at the offset of the twentieth century.