Latin American classical music is so fucking good, and so little of it is known. It's generally considered that there are four geniuses of Latin American classical: Heitor Villa-Lobos of Brazil, Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico, Carlos Chavez of Mexico, and the Argentine: Alberto Ginastera. I, and probably others of my generation, would add Osvaldo Golijov, also of Argentina, and while his recent output has slowed to molasses in the wake of a plagiarism scandal that was really neither plagiarism nor a scandal, the greatness of his work from 20 years ago speaks for itself to nearly anyone who's heard it.
Today, we're going to talk about that previous Argentine, Alberto Ginastera: contemporary of Shostakovich, Britten, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, and Bernstein, a compositional giant of the mid-20th century, and while probably the least known of that generation's giants, fully a giant among them.
In some ways, Ginastera was the truest heir among them to Stravinsky, beginning as a composer brined in the folk roots of his native land, whom during the political turmoil of the Peron and Videla years looked elsewhere for his inspiration. For the last decade of his life, he moved to Switzerland, evolving over the course of a lifetime to fully embrace the life and style of a modernist cosmopolitan. The truth is, Ginastera, like many white Argentinians, was perhaps as European as he was Latin American, hailing from a Catalan father and an Italian mother, and as the decades progressed he drew ever closer to his European roots.
But his musical output began practically wrapped in the Argentinian flag. The red-hot work of a coruscatingly brilliant young native son. His two early ballets, Panambi and Estancia, could be stand-ins for Petrushka and the Rite of Spring, both are ferociously exciting, and so completely Latin-American sounding that many passages could be played in Latin American dance pageants and people would simply think that the musicians were feeling experimental that week. One can perceive a much similar feeling in his early piano music: in the Danzas Argentinas, in the Malambo, in the Preludios Americanos, this is music by a Latin American Bartok. Ginastera would later call this period of his work around World War II 'Objective Nationalism.'
But after the war, Ginastera found himself in serious trouble with the Peron government for signing a petition in favor of greater civil liberties, and was soon forced to resign all his official Argentinian positions.
This coincided, or perhaps caused, a period he called 'Subjective Nationalism.' I don't know what the objective difference is between these two forms of nationalism, but this is ultimately a very different sort of music. The balletic rhythmic spring of the early work is still there, but used far more sparingly, and in its place often something much more peaceful and sparse, with a ravishing array of instrumental color. Certain works like the first String Quartet are heavily pickled with an overwhelming flavor of Bartok, but I think the works of this period are equally influenced by Debussy. And much like Shostakovich's famous DSCH, Ginastera began using a musical calling card in certain pieces, E-A-D-G-B-E, the exact tones of open guitar strings.
And yet there is still something thoroughly of the Latin American land about this music. Ginastera was said to be inspired by the 'Gauchesco' tradition, literary works about the Gauchos in the rural Argentinian pampus, and while I've never been there (and one day I will,... I have a lot of family in Argentina), I've read that in works of this period like the Pampeana no. 3 or Ollantay or the Variaciones Concertates, Ginastera portrays the Argentinian landscape perfectly, or at least I've read in youtube comments....
Like Stravinsky or Picasso, Ginastera's early work accumulated its naive energy by its proximity to folk sources, perhaps in a process that was too close to appropriation. But in all three cases, the work gradually becoming grew more abstract until one began to realize that for such creators, the abstraction, the style with which the expression is conveyed, is more the point of the music than the expression itself. Ginastera was not a composer burning with messages for his audiences in the manner of Villa-Lobos, who struggled to keep apace with all his musical ideas. Ginastera was a musical magpie, constantly revising, constantly accumulating new musical influences from around the world. And if a composer in the 1950s was assimilating world influences, there was only one wind from which international influence blew.
So from the late 50's onward, Ginastera referred to his work as Neo-expressionist. Ginastera was yet another composer no one expected to begin writing serial music, and yet there came twelve-tone score after score, along with atonality. But Ginastera was too good a composer to completely subsume his voice in dogma, and scores like Popol Vuh or the Violin Concerto juxtapose Schoenbergian atonality with the same tango-progressive tonality that Ginastera wrote with a generation earlier.
Was Ginastera as great as the greatest in his generation like Shostakovich or Messiaen? Well.... probably not quite, but he was incredibly close. Even the atonal scores of his later years are incredibly powerful, and the scores of his earlier years are just wonderful: gorgeous and exciting in equal measure. Ginastera is a master composer whose work, whether easy to listen to or hard, is always worth the time put in.
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