Alberto Ginastera and his musical identity with traditional music.
Traditional, popular or vernacular music offers the composer a great variety of musical elements that contain an ancestral cultural wealth. The regular rhythms of Latin America, and specifically of Argentina, have offered Alberto Ginastera great sound material, which allows the composer to achieve an irrepressible sound identity in another composer. This is perhaps the essential element in the mix between classical and traditional music. Alberto Ginastera has been a Latin American musical reference in rhythms such as the chacarera and the malambo, typical of the Argentine cultural tradition, mixing them with microtonal, twelve-tone, and random avant-garde compositional styles, among others. As expected, revolutionary ideas have defenders and detractors. Still, it is essential to relate those sound revolutions give music a before and after. All this range of enormous cultural and rhythmic mixtures can be seen in Ginastera’s works, including works for orchestra, for piano, string quartets, and her concerts for solo instruments, ballets, choral music, etc. Ginastera had a great career around the world, mainly in the United States after the cold war. His music was performed in large concert halls. He always qualified as being a revolutionary composer with fresh creativity through his dynamic and energetic orchestrations. Nationalist, folkloric, or vernacular music is an element of identifying a composer, as with Ginastera, Bartok, Falla, or Stravinsky. Therefore, the appropriation of a style based on this ideology must be analyzed and studied to know and highlight the elements that make sounds have a renewal and a reorganization. Finally, in my opinion, traditional music is the one with which we have the first contact since we were children. Therefore we can express it naturally since we learned it by oral tradition, in most cases.
When facing repertoires based on this music, we must go to the primary source of its sound. For example, we must know how traditional Argentine music sounds before approaching Ginastera’s music, to be able to give it the characteristic style through accents, rhythmic cuts, phrases, etc., which although they are indicated in the score, we can only be closer to a correct stylistic interpretation if we imitate the basic sound of the musical tradition. Latin American music is impregnated with these traditional musical elements. The strict, permanent and syncopated rhythm is the way to a correct acoustic representation of a beautiful ancestral tradition.
