Description: The author considers how the relationships between avant-garde music and ideas of modernity in post-revolutionary Mexico shaped discourses of nationality.
Review Quotes:
"[I]t is not necessary to be a musician to appreciate and comprehend many of Madrid's arguments. At every turn in this brilliant, challenging and beautifully structured book, Madrid pushes for complexity over simplification, and for the importance of individual artistic identity over that of aesthetic movements, or the hegemonic power of either history or the state. Sounds of the Modern Nation...makes fascinating reading for those with an interest in Mexican cultural history. And for musicologists of all stripes, it is indispensable for understanding how Mexican music achieved modernity."
--The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education