Astor Piazzolla (b. 1921–d. 1992) is one of Argentina’s most prominent composers. A prodigious musician, he was as active in popular music circles as he was committed to mastering the classical canon. From the five years of training in the art music tradition with a then young Alberto Ginastera (1940–1945) and studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (1954–1955), he acquired a solid foundation. As a virtuoso of the bandoneón, he was among the most formidable performers in the history of tango and played his own art music works for that instrument and orchestra. He started his career in 1939 and remained professionally active until 1989. A majority of his compositions can be assigned to the semantic field of popular music, from which he emerged as the iconoclastic innovator of traditional tango, forging his own normative language that was to jolt traditionalists and impact the genre at home and abroad. Transcending national borders, Piazzolla was viewed as a controversial exponent of tango’s avant-garde. He developed his innovations between 1955 and 1972, although in later years he continued searching for new ideas on the basis of his unique language, which already had been solidly established. In a process masterfully addressed by Carlos Kuri in “Agonía del género y potencia del nombre” (cited under Comprehensive Studies), Piazzolla transformed tango by transgressing the boundaries of genre and opening it up to the alterity of other musics. As a symbol of progressive culture in Argentina during the 1960s, his vanguardist language met with the vigorous rejection of culturally conservative sectors of the population. What Piazzolla forged was firmly anchored in rhizomatic tango, a genre whose stylistic variants he had assimilated with the fluency of a master. Certain characteristics define three stages in the course of his prolific career. In the domain of popular music, Piazzolla started in 1939 as a performer in the orchestra of Aníbal Troilo (b. 1914–d. 1975), a central figure in tango’s history. From Troilo, Piazzolla learned the secrets of a craft from which he emerged as an independent figure who, by 1953, had reached distinction. During the following stage, he formed iconic chamber groups for which he wrote music that would monopolize the discourse of tango for decades, starting with the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955 and the point of articulation between tradition and New Tango. In pieces for the Octeto converge Piazzolla’s knowledge of traditional tango, principles of classical composition, and a significant jazz influence that would surface in greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity and in his approach to structure. His stay in the United States in 1958 altered rhythmic and melodic compositional layers. The sum of these sediments and experiences, initially in Argentina and later in Europe, intersected in the formulation of a style that characterized his music from the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s until 1977. Between 1978 and 1989, Piazzolla toured the world with his quintet and his output slackened. Once his original language was established, trademarks from tango were consistently appropriated at structural levels of his neoclassical aesthetics. This article has been translated into English by Malena Kuss.
In 1520, the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan sighted the southern coast of Chile; in 1538, the Spaniard Diego de Almagro reached the northern desert after crossing the Andean mountains; and in 1540, Pedro de Valdivia (b. 1497–d. 1553), the first governor of Chile, settled in the Mapocho River Valley, where the capital city of Santiago stands today. Exploration and Conquest prefigured some of Chile’s geographic trademarks: seas and southern islands, northern deserts, central valleys and rivers, and the majestic Andes towering over the long strip’s spine. Three centuries of colonial history configured a stratified agrarian society whose inhabitants settled mostly in the central region. Among the most dynamic sectors of the population were the criollos and mestizos, bred from a mixture of Spaniards, Native Americans, and African descendants now lumped under Chilean citizenry. During struggles for Independence (1810–1818), the population barely reached a half a million souls. The Republican period encouraged immigration from Europe: the British, working mostly on commerce, settled around the port city of Valparaíso from the 1820s onward; the Germans, who settled on the southern stretch between Valdivia and Puerto Montt, arrived between 1840 and 1879; and the French, forging commerce and urban culture, arrived in the late nineteenth century. These migrations never surpassed 100,000 persons but had a considerable impact on local developments. Institutions founded during this period include the Universidad de Chile (1842), the Conservatorio Nacional de Música (1850), and the Teatro Municipal (1857), where Italian opera reigned supreme after reaching Chilean cities in earlier decades. Political and military history, however, was turbulent: between 1836 and 1839, Chile entered into a war with the Peru-Bolivian Confederation; this conflict surfaced again between 1879 and 1884 in the so-called War of the Pacific, which ended with Chile’s annexation of territory in the North. The period between 1885 and 1952 was marked by significant migrations from rural to urban areas, especially to cities such as Concepción, Valparaíso, and the capital city of Santiago. Around 1950, with the population estimated at five million, urban dwellers finally surpassed rural inhabitancy. By then the teaching of music had become institutionalized at the Universidad de Chile and was operating at a national level in the areas of training, outreach, and research. In literary circles, and poetry in particular, Gabriela Mistral (Lucía Godoy Alcayaga, b. 1889–d. 1957) was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature, and, during Allende’s Unidad Popular régime, the renowned Pablo Neruda (Neftalí Reyes, b. 1904–d. 1973) received the same recognition. The right-wing military dictatorship (1973–1990) dismantled Chile’s cultural, artistic, and educational infrastructure through the free-market-oriented 1980 Constitution that restricted government support for education and cultural institutions. With the return to democracy in 1990, social inequality carried over into the post-dictatorship period of social reconstruction by the legacy of market-oriented monetarism; its ferment for social unrest led to popular insurrections in the twenty-first century, which resulted in a revision of the Constitution that is still in progress as Chile’s population reaches a total of nearly twenty million inhabitants. This article was translated by Malena Kuss.
