From Rio to Buenos Aires

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

Art song is traditionally the late bloomer in a musical culture, appearing after instrumental and operatic works have established themselves. In the late eighteenth century, Germany and Austria first led the way, followed by Russia and France, then Scandinavia, and finally Great Britain. Country by country, culture by culture, composers started to raise the sentimental and comic parlor songs of their times to the status of art music, giving denser and more complex settings to increasingly sophisticated poetry. In North America, the early years of the twentieth century finally saw composers such as Griffes, MacDowell, and Amy Beach lay the foundations for the American art song, initially based on European models, and eventually finding its own colloquial style.

In South America, the rise of the art song coincided with the rise of the nationalist movement at the beginning of this century. In Argentina and Brazil, composers turned decisively and passionately to folk and popular sources to write classical music in all genres, each artist reflecting the new nationalist ideal in his own sensibility and training. So much of South American song is not music of the cities, but of the forest, the countryside, the farms, the rivers, the small towns – brought into the world of art music with varying degrees of sophistication. The natural, simple tunefulness of Guastavino, the arty folk-songs of Braga, the jazzy charm of López Buchardo, the far-ranging freedom of Villa-Lobos describe a wide range of what are now known as “crossover” approaches; only Nazareth and Paizzolla, of tonight’s writers, seem firmly based in urban life. But above all, this is music that dances. The Argentine historian Ricardo Riojas sees dance as the fusion of the city and the countryside, the urban and the “gauchesco”: “dances are the perfect union of poetry, music, and gesture, synthesized through rhythm.”

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