Astor Piazzolla
Authors: García Brunelli Omar 
Published: January 2024

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.