Julio Estrada: The Latin American Avant Garde

Latin American culture is based primarily in two structures: the prehispanic and the Hispanic. These two concepts blend and formed our cultural and artistic background. During the 1930’s with Silvestre Revueltas, Mexican Music begin to enter to the modernism, a new language was being written in the hands of Revueltas but still, it was full of the national romanticism of the early twentieth century. After Revueltas the search for the Latin American voice started to reach new fields and began to turn its face to the American and European Avant Garde.

Julio Estrada is a Mexican composer and theorist and its one of the Mexican represents of the Avant Garde of the 60-70s.  Event thought the shadow of death and terror that was leave by the two WW was still floating in the air, in the 1960s the search for new languages in Art and Music was more focused in the experimentation and in the search for new textures and new languages, not exactly based in the horror of the past wars. The Avant Garde of those years looked to extend the music and art experience and change completely the traditional structure of the artistic performances.

Estrada studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, Oliver Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti. All of these composers were initiators of the avant garde movement of the 1960s. This influence was carried with Estrada to Mexico where he began his research for new musical systems.

Estrada compositional style is a blend of some the musical movements that start in the 1960s such as allateorism, controlled uncertainty and his own musical theories that are based of interval classes for scales of any subdivision and the amplitude of the harmony based on rhythm and sound. One of his majors and more representative works is an Opera based on the Mexican book Pedro Paramo. In this piece, Estrada makes an analysis of the text and search for tonal musical elements in its narrative. The book was created by Juan Rulfo and tells the history of a ghost town in the north of Mexico where the ancient tradition of the Mexican country and local ideas of death blends into a surrealism narration that described many of the Mexican culture idiosyncrasies. The result of these investigations creates a world of expression where music and literature blends perfectly. The experiment aspect of the avant gardism in Julio Estrada are taken to the interdisciplinary world with this piece but at the same time we can find the two aspects that makes the distinction with the European and American avant garde: the Hispanic and the prehispanic heritage.

The search for a truly Latin American voice in the music is still happening, Estrada is taken this concept and he is forming a new generation of composers that are taking this search for a cultural autonomy and a truly national aesthetic part of their own quest. He is an active member of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and he is part of the institute for aesthetic research and the National School of Music.