Silvestre Revueltas

Biography

Silvestre Revueltas was born in Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, in 1899. A child prodigy, Revueltas began studying violin at eight years old and entered the Juárez Institute in Durango when he was twelve. In 1916, he left his home in Mexico to study composition and violin at St Edward College in Austin, Texas. Revueltas continued his studies at the Chicago Musical College with Borowski and Sametini. After a brief hiatus in Mexico, he returned to Chicago in 1922 to complete a four-year violin course under Kochanski and Ševčik.

Revueltas began his professional career in the US playing violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio, Texas, and conducting an orchestra in Mobile, Alabama. In 1929, Carlos Chávez invited Revueltas to be the assistant conductor at the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, where he remained until 1935. During this time, Revueltas was very active as a composer and teacher; he wrote six pieces for the orchestra and taught composition and violin at the conservatory. In 1936, Revueltas shifted his focus to film music. The next year he traveled to Europe and became involved in the Socialist struggle against the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. While the last ten years of his life were extremely productive, Revueltas’s long battle with alcoholism caught up to him in 1939 and he was admitted to a mental health clinic. The following year he passed away in Mexico City.

Revueltas’s compositions are known for their colorful orchestration and distinctive use of rhythm. He frequently incorporated hemiolas and septuple or quintuple meters and many of his works suggest folk derivations without actually quoting Mexican folk songs. These distinctive stylistic features can be heard in Sensemayá, one of his most famous pieces.