The Mexican Revolution one of the most important events of the 20th for arts

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910-1920 and was one of the most important events of the 20^th Century

 

Things  in Mexico hadn’t been working very well for  a long time already, and different groups with their own opinions were fighting for their interests, such as farmers, bourgeois citizens, and even artists. But things started to get worse  when the general and politician Porfirio Diaz, who served seven terms as President of México, declared himself the winner of an eighth term in office in 1910. Francisco Madero was the one who lost  this last election and issued a call to start a rebellion against the Porfirio Diaz regime. All the country  united to take him out of the power and in six months Diaz was overthrown and México entered in a decade of fierce civil strife. .

Artists and intellectuals in Mexico were at the center of a great debate about their country’s destiny and with the revolution they decided to fight together to break rules and modify old customs  fighting for a better art education. Some of these  artists were famous painters as like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Dr. Atl, María Izquierdo, Roberto Montenegro, Carlos Mérida, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and many others.

The violinist and composer Manuel Ponce Cuéllar became famous for connecting his classical compositions with popular Mexican folklore songs. Villa-Lobos, a Brazilian composer, is responsible for The Modern Art Week (the arts revolution  in Brazil in February 1922 ), met with Ponce in Paris – 1920s, and he wrote “I asked Ponce at that time, the composers of his country were as yet taking an interest in native music, as I had been doing since 1912, and he answered that he himself had been working in that direction. It gave me great joy to learn that in that distant part of my continent there was another artist who was arming himself with the resources of the folklore of his people in the struggle for the future musical independence of his country”. At the end Mexicans were able to change their art and inspire others to fight for their artistic freedom.

 

Johanny Veiga Barbosa

 

 

 

 

 

Saavedra, Leonora. “Manuel M. Ponce’s ‘Chapultepec’ and the Conflicted Representations of a Contested Space.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 3/4, 2009, pp. 279–328. www.jstor.org/stable/27751864.

“Manuel Maria Ponce (1882–1948)“, by John Patykula, Guitarra Magazine [2006 or earlier] (archive from 16 September 2016, accessed 17 October 2016).

L.S.H. Revista De Musicología 3, no. 1/2 (1980): 310. http://0-www.jstor.org.lib.utep.edu/stable/20794731.

 

Arroyo, Luis Leobardo. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 12, no. 1 (1984): 158-60. http://0-www.jstor.org.lib.utep.edu/stable/23262708.

Vassberg, David E. “Villa-Lobos as Pedagogue: Music in the Service of the State.” Journal of Research in Music Education 23, no. 3 (1975): 163-70. http://0-www.jstor.org.lib.utep.edu/stable/3344641.