Alberto Ginastera’s signature sound, marked by a highly percussive 6/8, dissonant harmonies, rapid tempi, and rich timbres, is identifiable from his earliest works, such as Danzas Argentinas, op. 2, and Malambo, op. 7, for piano, composed respectively in 1937 and 1940. Malambo is a men’s dance from the Pampas, observed by Carlos Vega, the father of Argentine ethnomusicology, in the 1920s but known by folklorists since the end of the nineteenth century. In Ginastera’s hands, it became a vigorous polytonal toccata pitting simple melodies against harmonic shocks. Ginastera also used a malambo motif to create a leitmotif in his ballet Estancia whose finale he once again entitled “Malambo.” This time, he used less dissonant harmony and orchestrated brilliantly for strong winds and percussion. In 1952, he applied serial techniques in the presto misterioso of his Piano Sonata to produce an atonal theme of comparable but less percussive rhythmic qualities. He would continue to use twelve-tone technique later in his String Quartet No. 2, which premiered in 1958. In his 1967 opera Bomarzo, he once again developed a vigorous 6/8 dance motif, but entitled it saltarello rather than malambo, to better befit the Italian Renaissance setting in which the hunchbacked protagonist navigates a prolonged nightmare, tormented by impotence and a fear of death. This type of obsessional rhythm also appears in the finale of the Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1973, the rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer would revisit the piece using synthesizers and drums, successfully introducing it to the pop culture industry that Ginastera had criticized since the heyday of the Beatles. In a certain way, this rhythmic motif echoes the tensions in Argentine and Latin American cultural identity during a good part of the twentieth century. Ginastera’s music is at the crossroads of two main ideologies that underscored the arts: nationalism and modernism. Following Heitor Villa-Lobos in Brazil and Carlos Chávez in Mexico, Ginastera synthesized these polarities often viewed as contradictory, and with a skillful technique that not even his staunchest opponents have challenged.

Within Argentina’s musical history, Ginastera’s career can be situated between those of two polar opposites: Juan Carlos Paz (1897-1972) and Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992). The former was an avant-garde composer and local pioneer of twelve-tone serialism. Despite a tense relationship with Paz, Ginastera would begin to use serialism in the 1950s. The latter, who is known for revisiting and reviving the tango, was Ginastera’s student starting in 1941. The two shared an interest in popular music, but Ginastera maintained a resolutely classical style, preferring to draw on folkloric references from rural Argentina than popular urban music from Buenos Aires.

Ginastera’s institutional career in classical music began when he was a student at the conservatory founded by the father of Argentine musical nationalism, Alberto Williams (1862-1949), who was himself trained by Cesar Franck. And his career culminated in the 1960s when he was the director of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), where, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, young Latin American composers could meet Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, and other international figures of contemporary music.

In conversations with his biographer Pola Suárez Urtubey published in 1967, Ginastera shared insights concerning his career that would serve musicologists for long to come. First, Arthur Rubinstein’s interpretation of Béla Bartók’s Allegro barbaro was a revelation for him. Also decisive was the notion of “imaginary folklore” that the critic Serge Moreux had applied to Bartók. Second, he divided his musical output into three style periods: “objective nationalism” in his early career, “subjective nationalism” beginning with his Pampeana No. 1, op. 16, for violin and piano in 1947, and “neo-expressionism” from his Quartet No. 2 of 1958 forward.

Influenced by the dominant aesthetic of the interwar period, Ginastera was drawn to the earthy energy and additive climactic moments introduced by Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Illustrating Stravinsky’s influence, a series of primitive images appears in Ginastera’s works, from the “Warriors’ Dance” of Panambí, op. 1, to the “Song for the Warriors’ Departure” from the Cantata para América Mágica, and beyond. Ginastera gradually moved away from primitivism to shape a complex expressive universe enriched by other facets of contemporary music. Drawing on Argentine national soundscapes, Ginastera subjectively developed the spontaneous expression of the people into a tool to represent contemporary subjectivity itself. Paradoxically, he found its expression in a neurotic angst and death drive, as permeate Bomarzo. The disruptive energy was never truly tempered, even by his almost systematic reference to Christianity, spanning his career from Psalm 150 in 1938 and The Lamentations of Jeremiah, op. 14, in 1946, to Iubilum, op. 51, in 1980.

The shift from objective nationalism to subjective nationalism seems to cover, even mask, what is really a range of conventions to convey the symbolic sounds of the collective. Ginastera had a particular flair for knowing the international evolutions of nationalist images, which was no doubt one of the reasons for his success. The patriotic themes and rugged language of his first successes match with the mix of nationalism and modernism found also in Rodeo (1942) and other favorite themes his mentor Copland wrote around the same time. Estancia became canonic in Argentina, perhaps due to the safe distance it maintains in terms of the ethnographic paradigm when depicting the daily cycle of labor on the pampean ranches that had made the country’s traditional elite rich. Commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein for George Balanchine’s company (which would never perform the piece), composed in 1941, premiered in 1943 in its orchestral version in Buenos Aires, and premiered again in 1952 as a scenic work, this piece would over time acquire quasi-official status, revived as it was in 2010 for Argentina’s bicentenary celebrations.

Yet again in his Pampeanas series, Ginastera cultivated a national sound compatible with a Pan-American credo, as illustrated in 1944 with Doce Preludios Americanos for piano. This piece resonated as a manifesto, while, in the midst of World War II, Ginastera called upon an institutional network controlled by the United States. The titles of the twelve brief pieces combined allusions to folklore (“Danza Criolla,” “Vidala”), characteristic technical processes (“Sobre los acentos,” “En el primer modo menor pentatónico”), and emblematic composers from the continent (Roberto García Morillo, Juan José Castro, Copland, and Villa-Lobos). Sixteen years later, in 1960, a call for continental unity was again suggested in Cantata para América Mágica, a piece for soprano, two pianos, and a large percussion orchestra, with a text inspired by indigenous stories written by Ginastera’s first wife, Mercedes de Toro. The microtones and atonal vocal line, as well as the rich timbres and irrational rhythms from fifty-three percussion instruments (including many of indigenous origin), powerfully depict the “magical” element in the history of the Americas that Ginastera would oppose to the Christian culture of the conquistadores. Twenty years later, in 1980, he would explore the ideological opposition between these two expressive elements — a pentatonic “Quechua” theme and a theme inspired by Gregorian chant — to structure Iubilum, celebrating the 400^th anniversary of the founding of Buenos Aires by the Spanish in 1580.

At the beginning of the 1960s, when leftist intellectuals were rediscovering the appeal of nationalism in the Cold War, Ginastera turned toward more “universal” themes, namely those from operas set in the Spanish Middle Ages or Italian Renaissance. “I see Bomarzo as a man of our times,” Ginastera said in 1967. A scandal had broken out around his second opera when, with support from the archbishop of Buenos Aires, General Juan Carlos Onganía banned its production, objecting to the outrageous “sex, violence, and hallucination” he imagined were contained therein. Ginastera tried to explain that it was actually a moral fable about the downward spiral of contemporary individualism, but the opera would not be performed in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón until 1972, after the fall of the dictator. This unfortunate episode, which the American ambassador of the time called “the Bomarzo affair,” did have some unexpected benefits for Ginastera. He would be remembered as an opponent to military dictatorships, although in reality he would not refuse any of the honors they bestowed, notably after the coup d’état in 1976.

In the years preceding his death in 1983, Ginastera lived in Geneva, Switzerland, with his second wife, Aurora Nátola. A peaceful unifying nature prevailed in his work of this period. He merged different techniques, including clusters woven into Letters from Kafka to Milena Jesenska and Gregorian chants in his Passion, which he deliberately wanted in Latin to counter the populist drifts of the Vatican II. With poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, and Federico García Lorca set to music, some particularly moving passages of the String Quartet No. 3, op. 40, with soprano (1973) prove that Ginastera knew how to loosen the stranglehold of his percussive rhythms and give in to the lyricism that, in an admittedly minor way, runs through his works. His pieces for cello, in particular, are imbued with a sensuality that was earlier perceptible in his Pampeana No. 2 composed in 1950 and explicit in the first movement of Concerto No. 2 composed in 1980, which is adorned with this quotation in French: “Aurore, je viens à toi avec ce chant né de la brume” (Oh Dawn, I come to you with this song born of the mist).

Over the years, Ginastera, despite not having a particularly revolutionary temperament, progressively incorporated into his musical language a palette of resources specific to avant-garde contemporary music. He used atonality, dodecaphony, serial processes, microtones, unconventional graphics, and aleatory techniques. These appeared alongside a core of formal and expressive resources from the classical repertoire and his post-Stravinskian training and, in his later works, indigenous sources that he was keen on reviving. Nevertheless, of the great novelties of his time, electronics and the musical theater of Mauricio Kagel remained foreign to his expressive universe. While electronic music was welcome at the CLAEM, notably with the composer Francisco Kröpfl, Ginastera denounced “anti-operas” and “Dadaist anarchy,” perhaps indirectly targeting his compatriot Kagel. He clearly privileged order and structure. His ideal for opera was a synthesis of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and Wozzeck by Alban Berg, whose dramaturgical structures inspired Ginastera’s stage works. In this respect, he might be said to have defended a traditionalist approach to opera. However, unsuspected touches of modernity appear in his operas, as was the case with [work: 31645][Beatrix Cenci] staged in Geneva in 2000 by Francisco Negrín and Gisele Ben-Dor. In short, although avant-gardists have reproached Ginastera for his eclecticism, none can deny his extraordinary expressive power and his skillful technique in treating resources spanning from the entire history of Western classical music.

Translated from French by Jessica L. Hackett.