La Noche de los Mayas

“There is inside me a very peculiar understanding of nature: Everything is rhythm,” Revueltas wrote. “The poet’s language is everyday language. Everyone understands it or feels it. Music alone has to perfect its own language. All of that together is what music is to me. My rhythms are booming, dynamic, tactile, visual. I think in images that are melodic strains, that move dynamically.” Thinking in dynamic images is a productive quality in a film composer, so it is fitting that films became the mainstay of perennial outsider Silvestre Revueltas’ career. After his first score, for the film Redes (1936), Revueltas scored or contributed music to eight more films before he died in October 1940. One of the last of these was La Noche de los Mayas, adapted by the director Chano Urueta from a story by Antonio Mediz Bolio, who was born in the state of Yucatán and became an important advocate for Mayan culture. Shot on location in the Yucatán jungles, the film concerns a tribe of Mayans still living in traditional ways and their meeting with the modern world in the form of an Indiana Jones-type explorer. Tragedy ensues, of course, romantic as well as cultural. Although it received some appreciative reviews in Mexico, the film has been generally neglected, if not scorned. Its music, however, has long attracted notice. In 1960 the composer and conductor José Yves Limantour arranged music from the 36 cues of Revueltas’ score into a four-movement suite. (Paul Hindemith made a two-movement suite of his own, and the composer and conductor Enrique Diemecke later wrote a percussion cadenza -- based on motifs from various Revueltas scores -- to fill the indicated moment in the final movement of Limantour’s suite.) This suite has the shape of a symphony. The first movement opens as a powerful ritual, a brooding evocation of rooted history with a gently awakening middle section. The second movement is a dancing scherzo, genial rusticity interrupted by urban sass. (“Jarana” indicates both uproarious partying and a type of Mexican dance.) Following is an almost Mahlerian nocturne, with a central interlude for flute and light percussion based on a traditional Yucatán evening song. Following a foreboding introduction, the finale (Night of Enchantment) is a fluid theme and variations, a sacrificial frenzy that exhausts itself in an orgy of percussion.