Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)

Alberto Ginastera was one of the most influential Latin American composers worldwide. Ginastera's musical education began at the age of 7 with the study of piano. At the age of 12, he entered the Alberto Williams Conservatory, where he learned music theory, solfège, harmony, and composition. At the age of 19, after graduating from the conservatory with a gold medal in composition, he continued to study harmony, composition, and counterpoint at the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires. Known as a young national composer while still in school, Ginastera was awarded a Guggenheim scholarship to study in the United States at the age of 29 (after a three-year postponement because of World War II). After this experience, Ginastera gradually expanded his international activities. In the 1970s, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland, after his second marriage. Around 1981, he fell ill and was in and out of the hospital for health reasons. He passed away on June 25, 1983, several months before the transition from a military regime to democracy in his homeland, Argentina.

A major characteristic of his style is the combination of Argentine/South American folk music elements with contemporary compositional styles. His early works directly or indirectly employ a wide variety of folk music (música folklorica), along with the sentiments of the Pampas (Argentina's vast plains) and representations of the gauchos (nomadic horsemen on the great Argentine plains). The use of the sesquialtera (a type of hemiola with simultaneous two- and three-beat rhythms) and the chords formed by the notes of the open strings of the guitar (E-A-D-G-B-E) is prominent. As his international musical activities unfolded, Ginastera gradually began to distance himself from folkloric elements; as he later said, "The time for folklore has passed." However, after moving to Switzerland, he began to feel nostalgia for his homeland, whose severe military regime deprived the people of their freedom. His later works feature Argentine musical elements in highly abstract forms.

What is important about Ginastera is not only his achievements as a composer but his personality. Ginastera, who was always in search of new imagination and creativity, used to talk at home about the importance of experiencing "great things." By the 1950s, he was already known as one of the leading composers in the Americas. In 1961, he devoted himself to the Latin American Music Center (CLAEM) at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Ginastera had long felt the necessity to introduce talented young Latin American composers to the latest compositional techniques offering them diverse cultural and creative perspectives. In 1963 he resigned from all his posts except that of the Center's director to train young composers. He invited established composers like Copland, Xenakis, and Messiaen as guests, so that the young students could gain exposure to "great things." "Ginastera was a man of few words and would not talk so much," the late journalist Abel López Iturbe recalled fondly about Ginastera's everyday attitude. According to Iturbe, Ginastera always said:

“Music is not something unique to a country. We should not build our own walls.”

　　　　　　　　          　Mitsuko Kawabata

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