Julián Carrillo (1875-1965)

Carrillo was born into the lowest class of Mexican society as a mestizo and died a rich and honored man in Mexico City.

Ahualulco, Carrillo's birthplace, is a small village near San Luis Potosí. He was the youngest child in a family of nineteen children. His father died when Julián was only three years old. At the age of ten, he moved with his mother to San Luis Potosí, the capital of the state of the same name. In San Luis Potosí, Carrillo began his rise to success. He bought butter at one end of the city to resell it at the other end for a few pesos more. Later, he did the same with houses. While still a boy, he bought a house for his mother. He played drums in a dance band and taught himself to play the violin.

In 1892, during the four-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the discovery of America, the governor of the state of San Luis Potosí recognized the extraordinary musical talent of the young Julián and sent him to the National Conservatory in Mexico City, where he completed his studies as a professional musician in 1899. He was top of his class and received a scholarship from Mexican President Porfirio Díaz to study in Europe. This marked the beginning of Carrillo's international music career. He played under Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig and won first prize at the violin competition in Ghent in 1902.

After returning to Mexico, Carrillo took a position at the Ministry of Education and developed a music education system based entirely on singing, as the voice is the only instrument that does not need to be purchased. However, Carrillo's brilliant career came to an end at the age of 48.

In 1923, he published the text "The Thirteenth Tone" ("El sonido 13"), part of the second volume of his autobiographical book with the rather innocuous title "Platicas musicales" ("Musical Conversations"). This text is a futuristic manifesto in the style of Ferruccio Busoni's "Entwurf zu einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst”, albeit in a much more radical form. Carrillo announces a revolution in European music and calls for an end to the chromatic semitone system. The thirteenth tone, invented and created by Carrillo, heralds a new era in which much smaller intervals apply and where all old music from the Greeks to Richard Strauss is destroyed.

The explanations he gives in this first text about the thirteenth tone are vague: he did not yet have a theory of microtonal music, nor microtonal instruments or microtonal compositions. All this would come later. In a harsh and sometimes racist debate in the Mexican newspaper El Universal, Carrillo was accused of being a fraud who claimed to be the inventor of microtones without having composed a single piece of music.

After this fierce criticism, Carrillo was forced to create a new microtonal notation, new instruments, and new compositions within a year, and then find musicians who could play this new music on the new instruments. Carrillo being a very practical person he in 1924 built a harp zither tuned in sixteenth tones, a type of bass guitar in eighth tones, a flute, a trumpet, a trombone, and a horn in quarter tones. He invented a numerical notation for the sixteenth-tone system, ranging from 0 to 95 different pitches within an octave, and founded a group of thirteen musicians, aptly named "El Sonido 13.”

In February 1925, he gave the first Sonido 13 concert in Mexico City. After this concert, he rented a special Pullman car and traveled throughout Mexico with his musicians to introduce the Mexican population to the new system and compositions. In 1926, Carrillo went to New York and presented his compositions to the League of Composers. There he met the famous conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was very impressed by Carrillo's system and his microtonal ideas. He commissioned Carrillo to write concerts in which the microtonal instruments form a kind of Concertino, while the orchestra plays in the traditional semitone system.

This combination of a chromatic orchestra with various microtonal solo instruments was probably the origin of the theory of "Leyes de metamorfosis musicales" (Laws of Musical Metamorphosis), which Carrillo developed when he returned to Mexico in 1929. An important intermediate step was the theory of Présonido 13, the Prae-Sonido 13 theory. In it, Carrillo emphatically revises all previous music theories: he condemns all so-called "natural" theories that explain the tuning system with the physical phenomenon of overtones. For Carrillo, the tuning system was a purely mathematical problem and had nothing to do with nature or physical reality. The chromatic system was calculated using the formula "twelfth root of two", which was adapted for the musical system in 1605 by the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin.

Carrillo was also irritated because he never heard a pure octave when musicians played the trumpet or any other overblowing instruments. And with the knot experiment, he was able to prove that no instrument can tune a pure octave, since the knot shortens the length of the air column or string; not even nature can produce an octave – another reason for Carrillo to base his entire tuning system on mathematical formulas.

This disregard for all "nature" and all physical conditions in the intervals enabled him to radically explore the laws of musical metamorphosis. He published this theory in Mexico City in 1937. It is a very extreme theory, as Carrillo once again combines a compositional system with an attempt at global super-authorship of all musical compositions.

In 1923, he had proclaimed himself the destroyer of European music. With his laws of metamorphosis, he now wants to become its savior. What does he mean by these laws? Simply the uniform compression and expansion of melodic and harmonic structures as a compositional technique, but also—and this is the key point—of complete pieces of music! He offers examples such as a version of a Bach aria condensed into quarter tones or a Bach prelude expanded into a whole-tone system.

In his opinion, sounds are based on mathematical calculations – which is why they can be enlarged and reduced in size just like photos. He is fascinated by the fact that, unlike photography, where reducing the format does not change our perception, even Beethoven would not recognize his Waldstein Sonata if it were run through one of Carrillo's microtonal mixers. And he is very proud to announce that, thanks to him and his laws of metamorphosis, Joseph Haydn had not only composed around 100 symphonies, but 1,500, as these can be expanded into the whole tone system or compressed into the third, quarter, fifth, and even sixteenth tone systems.

It is indeed a rather disturbing redemption of existing music that this eccentric futurist of the music world proposed in 1937!

After 1945, French composer and musicologist Jean-Etienne Marie (1917-1989) became extremely important to Carrillo. He initially put him in touch with the Sauter piano factory in Germany, where Carrillo was able to build his microtonal pianos. These pianos were then exhibited in the Belgian Queen's pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair and later for a month at the Salle Gavaud in Paris. The French publisher Jobert published many of his works, and Deluxe Edition recorded 12 records featuring Carrillo's works. The elderly Carrillo flew to Paris several times for this purpose. He never lost his extravagance: when he was not allowed to present the Sonido-13 revolution at the UNESCO assembly in Paris, he stood on a balcony throwing leaflets explaining his revolution at the assembly.

Dr. Roman Brotbeck