Janitzio (Revueltas)

[4] According to one source, Revueltas originally composed the work for the film Janitzio, directed by Carlos Navarro and starring Emilio Fernández.

Revueltas revised the score three years later, completing the new version on 30 December 1936 at the Sanitorio Ramírez Moreno in Mexico City, where he was hospitalized for fatigue and rehabilitation from alcoholism.

[8] The composer wrote a short programme note on the work (in at least two versions): Janitzio is a fishermen's [small] island in Lake Pátzcuaro.

However, considering his leftist political views, these remarks might better be understood "as a reflection of his disdain for bourgeois consumerism, or as an attack on artistic production within a capitalist system".

The original 1933 version had only two horns, one trombone, and no violas; the side drum was to be played with the snares off, and the word "gong" appears instead of "tam-tam".

[11] Janitzio follows the three-part structure that Revueltas favoured in all his orchestral works, with a lyrical, slow middle section.

The first is made up of three motivic cells, found in the first four bars and characterised principally by their rhythms, from which the entire work is generated: an ascending perfect fourth from E to A, a scale segment G♯–A–B–(C♯); and a descending major third from C♯–A.

Besides its sheer aesthetic and aural beauty, “Janitzio” can very well stand as the expression of the most contrasting states that define the Mexican psyche: the romantic and sweet daydreaming, interrupted by the harsh and bitter reality; the joy that is, above all, abandon and a desire to forget, and the sad awakening.

[20]Janitzio was the epitome of the style of musical nationalism preferred by Mexican audiences, which was based on mestizo, popular elements, rather than on the pre-Columbian.

Revueltas had by this time developed a style in which various, often disparate elements of the Mexican cultural soundscape were made to collide in audible violence: the popular, the modern, the urban, the peasant, the Indian, the military, the street life, the market, and the dance.