Julián Carrillo
The choir's conductor, Flavio F. Carlos, encouraged him to study music in the state capital, San Luis Potosí.
This, along with a letter of recommendation from the government of San Luis Potosí, allowed him to go to study in the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City.
His professors included Pedro Manzano (violin), Melesio Morales (composition), and Francisco Ortega y Fonseca (physics, acoustics, and mathematics).
Having not completed primary studies, he was ignorant of the acoustic basis of music—so he was fascinated when Ortega discussed laws governing generation of fundamental intervals in music.
Carrillo was admitted to the Leipzig Royal Conservatory, where he studied with Hans Becker (violin), Johann Merkel (piano), and Salomon Jadassohn (composition, harmony and counterpoint).
There, he studied with Albert Zimmer (who had been Eugène Ysaÿe's student) and was admitted to the Ghent Royal Conservatory of Music.
[3] In 1903, he composed a Quartet in E minor, which he intended to give, "ideological unity, [and] tonal variety," to classical forms.
Later that year he returned to Mexico where President Díaz gave him an Amati violin "as a present from the Mexican Nation" for his excellent performance in foreign countries.
In Mexico City, Carrillo began intense work as violinist, orchestra conductor, composer and teacher.
Other notable students were Antonio Gómezanda (pianist and composer), Rafael Ordoñez, Rafael Adame, Vicente Teódulo Mendoza (researcher of the Mexican folklore), Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (composer and music historian and critic), Daniel Ayala, José López Alavés (composer of the famous Mexican song Canción Mixteca), Rosendo Sánchez, Leticia Euroza, Angel Badillo, Felipe Cortés Texeira, Agustin Oropeza, and Gabriel Gómez.
At the first, he presented a report, "Reforming the great forms of composition to give symphony, concert, sonata and quartet ideological unity and tonal diversity".
There he amended the curriculum, putting more emphasis on rigorous musical technical preparation as well as literature and Spanish language.
With his orchestra, Carrillo introduced Mexico to the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Richard Strauss, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Ravel.
This debate is known as the Thirteenth Sound Polemic and was supported principally by the Mexico City's daily El Universal.
The program included several compositions of Carillo and his students in quarter-, eighth- and sixteenth-tones, performed with adapted instruments and specially trained voices.
At that time, Carrillo wrote Leyes de Metamórfosis Musicales (Musical Metamorphosis Laws), a method to transform the tonal proportions of a work.
In New York City on February 7, 1930, Ángel Reyes, principal of the Thirteenth Sound Group of Havana, recorded the Preludio a Colón (Prelude to Christopher Columbus) for the Columbia label.
In 1940, Carrillo patented fifteen metamorphoser pianos for producing whole tones, third-tones, quarter-tones, fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, eighth-, ninth-, tenth-, eleventh-, twelfth-, thirteenth- fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-tones.
In 1947 he conducted experiments at New York University examining the node law that prevailed at the time and showed that it had to be modified.
In 1951 Carrillo produced a concert in the Esperanza Iris Theatre of Mexico City to demonstrate the musical metamorphosis laws.
That year, in Pittsburgh, Leopold Stokowski performed for the first time Horizontes: Poema sinfónico (Horizons: Symphonic Poem for violin, cello and harp in quarter- eighth- and sixteenth-tones).
Julián Carrillo, Ivan Wyschnegradsky and Alois Hába met in Paris where they were all participating in the International Congress of Music that year.
From 1960 to 1965 Carrillo recorded about thirty musical works with the Lamoureaux Concerts' Association Symphony Orchestra with renowned French musicians like Jean-Pierre Rampal, Bernard Flavigny, Robert Gendre, and Reine Flachot.
In 1960 Carrillo composed his Canon atonal a 64 voces (Atonal Canon for 64 Voices); the Misa de la Restauración dedicada a Juan XXIII (Mass of the Restoration dedicated to Pope John XXIII for male voices acapella in quarter-tones); Balbuceos (Babbles for metamorphoser piano in sixteenth-tones and orchestra).
The Times of London published an article from their Mexico City correspondent: The grand old man of Mexican music, Julián Carrillo, has spent his life peering into an unsuspected microtonic world of sound.
He has shattered and then remade our chromatic scale, and we might be tempted to call him the atom-splitter of music, except that the name gives no idea of the rich emotional world he has opened.
This was a more startling revolution than when Terpander, in Greece 26 centuries ago, added two notes to the Chinese five-tone scale.
Mexico's government awarded him the Civic Merit Medal because of the anniversary of the Canto a la Bandera (Song to the National Flag).
He also won the Sibelius Award of Finland, with the support of the most important musical institutes of France, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, but his death prevented his receiving it personally.
