| This study explores the rich relationship between Argentine musical nationalism and the symbolic heritage associated with the gaucho (the cowboy of the Argentine plains). It draws upon recent scholarly approaches that conceive of a musical work as an interwoven strand within the fabric of a complex cultural system. The study thus situates the construction of Argentine art music within the search for identity that motivated and shaped the development of national expressive forms. During the late nineteenth century, Argentine leaders upheld the gaucho as a central cultural symbol to counter the cultural fragmentation produced by intensive European immigration. Such authorities symbolically selected the rural horseman as a paradigmatic native emblem because he personified the rich heartland of the nation and possessed the noble attributes of courage, independence, individualism, and machismo that could be extolled as Argentine virtues.;During the years ca. 1890-1955, when nationalism arose in Argentina as a potent means of cultural expression, art music composers closely identified with the gauchesco tradition. Alberto Williams (1852-1962) and Julian Aguirre (1868-1924), the so-called founders of cultivated Argentine music, invented a symbolic system of folkloric "codes" to convey their national identity. A second generation of musicians, headed by Constantino Gaito (1878-1945), Carlos Lopez Buchardo (1881-1948), Felipe Boero (1884-1958), and Floro Ugarte (1884-1975), intensified the nationalist approach of their predecessors, combining previous codified formulas with post-romanticism, impressionism, and verismo. The third generation, consisting of Gilardo Gilardi (1889-1963), Luis Gianneo (1897-1968), and Juan Jose Castro (1895-1968), reacted negatively to the populist ethos of authoritarian and Peronist regimes by espousing an increasingly abstract and cosmopolitan musical language, in which nationalist elements appeared in a highly sublimated form. Finally, Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983), the dominant member of the fourth generation, dynamically synthesized native folkloric idioms with contemporary compositional techniques, brilliantly concluding the musical era based on the gaucho. |
