Mário’s League and Ariel

Abstract

More than literary works, magazines were the most effective vehicle for disseminating modernist ideas. Beyond that, they served simultaneously as laboratories for linguistic experimentation and platforms for cultural intervention, offering a sense of modernism both in and as a movement. This paper aims to present a full-bodied profile of Ariel: Revista de Cultura Musical, a publication largely overlooked by the extensive modernist critical tradition, and to assess its role in affirming a musical ideology that was at once modern and national. The focus is on Mário de Andrade’s editorial leadership of the magazine, from issues 9 through 13. If his early modernist poetics—shaped by the notion of sonic simultaneity in musical composition—advanced the ideas of “polyphony” and “simultaneism” to break with mimesis and the linearity of verbal discourse, in Ariel he appears to incorporate this polyphonic principle into the magazine’s very editorial structure and composition.