About this Piece

Sensemayá was the work that brought Silvestre Revueltas to international attention. Through a recording of the work made by Leopold Stokowski in New York in December 1947, widespread audiences began to get an idea of Revueltas’ music.

Revueltas died in 1940 from complications of chronic alcoholism. At the time, his music was virtually unknown outside of Mexico, some performances during a 1937 trip to Spain notwithstanding. The last decade of his life was devoted to music, with Revueltas active as a composer, teacher, and conductor in Mexico City. Between 1928 and his death, Revueltas composed roughly 60 works, including orchestral, chamber, vocal, and theater pieces, as well as a handful of film scores, such as Redes (The Wave, 1936) and La noche de los mayas (The Night of the Mayans, 1939).

Revueltas had a varied and useful musical education, with a fair amount of practical experience. After three years in Mexico City (1913–16), Revueltas traveled to the United States, where he studied violin and composition in Austin and Chicago. In the late 1920s, he played violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio and conducted an orchestra in Mobile, AL. He returned to Mexico in 1929, when Carlos Chávez, one of the country’s foremost composers and musicians, invited him to become assistant conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, a post he held until 1935.

These experiences combined to make Revueltas a sensitive and insightful writer for orchestra and a composer with an intrinsic ability to express Latin American culture musically. Sensemayá first materialized in a (still unpublished) version for chamber ensemble in 1937. Revueltas based the work on a poem that describes the ritual killing of a snake in Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén’s collection West Indies Ltd., published in 1934. The atmosphere of the poem, which pits life against death, the snake against its ritual executioners, is captured by Revueltas in his brief, vibrant musical work, but emerges even more viscerally in the version for full orchestra premiered by the composer with a pickup orchestra at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on December 15, 1938. The obsessive rhythms (the work is in 7/8 and 7/16 time), the slithering, pictorial wind writing, and the threatening brass all combine to create a raw evocation of the ceremony, comparable to what Stravinsky did for pagan Russia in The Rite of Spring.

—John Mangum