ASTOR PIAZZOLLA
A tango phenomenon
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of renowned tango composer Astor Piazzolla’s birth this month, Argentine violinists Rafael Gintoli and Gabriela Olcese pay tribute to him and offer basic guidance to violinists on how to interpret tango music
Astor Piazzolla with his orchestra on Argentina’s Channel 13 in 1963
GENERAL ARCHIVE OF THE NATION, ARGENTINA
Today, the names Carlos Gardel (1890–1935) and Astor Piazzolla (1921–92) are synonymous with the tango genre for audiences around the world. While Gardel took the incipient Argentine tango to the stages of Paris and New York from the 1920s until his tragic death in 1935, Piazzolla managed to modernise it, thus allowing tango to be definitively accepted in academic music circles and to be included in the contemporary classical repertoire.
Although Piazzolla initially set out from the ríoplatense and profoundly popular roots of Argentine tango, his style evolved towards a new urban music – música ciudadana, as he termed it. His personal ‘manifesto’ (set out in a ‘Decalogue’, published in 1955) was as resisted locally as it was recognised in the European musical world. In Buenos Aires, composers and tangueros (tango playing musicians) objected to his new music, stating that it did not represent the traditional tango. Piazzolla’s tango was instead fused with jazz and Uruguayan candombe, and played a part in the music of his numerous film soundtracks.
Paradoxically, 1960s Buenos Aires witnessed the birth of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, which, under the direction of Alberto Ginastera, helped to showcase contemporary music by the great international composers of the period. Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti and Copland, among others, were invited to the city to present courses and concerts to the local public and it was against this experimental backdrop that Piazzolla revealed his revolutionary urban music.