About...
“Moreover, it is not only the phrases that invoke the shapes of the ancient soul before our eyes. […] Today I could not resist the call of these visions that I saw floating between two waters in the transparency of my thoughts.”
Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Essays and Articles
In Otto Mayer-Serra’s study we learn that Mexican composer Manuel María Ponce was one of the founders of modern musical nationalism in his country and that “[…] he might not have attracted so much attention had his work not brought together the disparate trends of the Romantic era, whose culmination was also the starting point for a qualitatively different art form.”
Jorge Velazco and Ricardo Miranda report that after a brief trip to the United States, he travelled to Italy. In Bologna he was introduced to Marco Enrico Bossi, who suggested that he enroll at the Rossini Conservatory in the city to study piano with Luigi Torchi and composition with Cesare Dall’Ollio, Giacomo Puccini’s teacher. He also continued his training in Berlin with Edwin Kisocher and, once admitted to the Stern Conservatory, continued with Martin Krause, a disciple of Franz Liszt, whom he always considered his most important teacher in terms of his development as a pianist. He later returned to Mexico, where he became the leading figure on the music scene between 1918 and 1924. Appointed conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, he also conducted the Revista Musical de Mexico and collaborated in Mexico Moderno, edited by the poet Enrique González Martínez. However, it was during his previous exile in Cuba that he began to contribute regularly to newspapers and magazines and his music became better known. He also contributed to the newspapers El Heraldo Ilustrado, El Universal and El Mundo Ilustrado, and to the magazines Cultura, Orientación Musical and Occidente.
Although composition was the predominant activity in Ponce’s life, his work as a critic and musicologist is equally important, since, through the inspiration and precision of his writing, words served as a means of expressing his concerns, discoveries and preoccupations. Around 1920, he stated:
“For the future, I have no other plan than to continue writing music, trying to do so within modern guidelines. But this does not mean that I want to throw myself into imitating the latest French composers… I want to continue, as Luis G. Urbina often told me, carving out my own destiny. That is all.” In 1925, he returned to Europe in search of new horizons and settled in Paris. He enrolled at the École Normale de Musique in the French capital and received lessons from Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas, who, in the Bulletin de notes de l’élève Monsieur Manuel Ponce after completing his studies on 11th July 1932, wrote these significant words: “The compositions of Manuel M. Ponce bear the stamp of a most distinguished talent and, for a long time now, cannot be graded into any school category. I would hesitate giving him a grade, even if it were the highest, to express my satisfaction at having taught such an outstanding and personal student.”
Whilst in Paris he edited the Gaceta Musical and participated in the rich artistic and intellectual life of the French capital during that decade, frequenting the circles and company of Joaquín Turina, Joaquín Nin, Manuel de Falla, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Joaquín Rodrigo, José Rolón, Arnold Schönberg and Darius Milhaud, who left their mark on his work during those years. They point out that his change in aesthetic ideas is immediately apparent in the first work he composed in Paris, entitled Preludios encadenados, perhaps reaching its most advanced expression in the Cuatro piezas para piano, in which he makes forays into bitonality. He will always be associated with a particularly refined style of writing, as demonstrated in his symphonic poem Ferial and in his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, his last major work.
