Cuauhnáhuac
It was at this time that Revueltas began composing in earnest, and the manuscript of one of his earliest large-scale compositions, the string-orchestra version of Cuauhnáhuac, is dedicated to Aurora.
"Cuauhnáhuac", a Nahuatl word meaning "near the forest" (from quauitl, "tree" and nauac or nahuac, "near"), was the name given by the Tlalhuicas, a people related ethnically to the Aztecs, to the capital of their province of Tlahuican.
The Aztec emperor Moctezuma II is said to have had a country palace there, and when he was deposed by the conquistadores, their commander, Hernán Cortés, built a stone palacio on its main square after he had selected Cuernavaca to be an administrative seat for his massive, semiautonomous estate, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca.
[8] Like many of Revueltas's single-movement works, it is cast in a tripartite form, in which the atonal opening character returns in the chromatic concluding part.
Although it bears the markings of inspiration of Romanticism, its essentially dissonant character, produced by the superposition of different harmonic levels and a strong percussive background, show the emergence of a personal style of composition.
[14] By 1928, it had become clear that Mexican critics, performers, and the public favoured a musical nationalism based on popular rather than imagined pre-Columbian styles.
[16] It has been described as "a carefully constructed composition showing an inexhaustible melodic imagination and a masterful use of counterpoint",[17] and praised for "the extraordinary vitality of all the voices, the striking contrasts of instrumental coloring, and the superposition of different harmonic planes".
[18] An especially admired trait is its instinctual quality, which enables Revueltas to invest the music "with fresh compositional intent, a primary character or dislocated cubism which, as collage, arises spontaneously in his work".
When the score was first published, Henry Cowell found that, though it "bristles with unique and exciting sounds and the whole work has the attractiveness of original genius", he predicted its "scattered" form would prevent it from entering the standard repertory, even if it might often be played as "an amusing novelty".
He found the mixture of Central American Indian culture with a European modernistic style "rather awkward", and the ending "so incongruous as to turn the whole thing into a joke, amusing enough, but leaving, if not a rather bad taste in the ear, at least an unpleasant sound in the mouth".
