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  • Alberto Ginastera: A Research and Information Guide
  • Carol A. Hess
Deborah Schwartz-Kates . Alberto Ginastera: A Research and Information Guide. Routledge Music Bibliographies. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 230pp. Hardback: $150.00. ISBN: 978-0-415-97318-2.

By chance, I had the pleasure of picking up this book for the first time on the 21st of January 2011, Plácido Domingo's 70th birthday. It was Domingo who sang the title role in Alberto Ginastera's Don Rodrigo with New York City Opera in February of 1966, a blockbuster of an opera noted, among other things, for its arresting spatial arrangements. At one point, for example, 18 French horns are stationed around the hall and at another, an ensemble of 25 bells rings throughout the audience. Critics hailed Don Rodrigo as "a twelve-tone Otello," praising Ginastera for having rejected nationalism to embrace "current serial and aleatoric practices."1 Those who remember the triumphant New York performance (a young Richard Taruskin was in the audience) thus experienced a landmark in Latin American art music. For not only was Don Rodrigo Ginastera's first foray into opera, but it emphatically defied any lingering suspicions that Latin American art music consists of nothing but "picture-postcard works" or represents the "rum-and-coca-cola school," epithets with which it has often been dismissed in the United States.2

As Deborah Schwartz-Kates makes clear in her admirable research guide, Don Rodrigo was but one such peak moment in the United States for the Argentine composer. In 1958, his serialist String Quartet no. 2 was applauded by critics based in Washington, D.C., and New York. Ginastera's second opera, Bomarzo, which combines serialism, aleatory, parody, and a host of other techniques, was hailed as a modern masterpiece before it was [End Page 276] banned by one of the military regimes that has disfigured the history of 20th-century Argentina. On the other hand, the unabashedly folkloric orchestral suite Estancia (from an earlier period) figures on concerts of Latin American music worldwide and sometimes on more mainstream programs. As for Ginastera's career at home, it was launched with Panambí, a ballet suite performed at the Teatro Colón in his native city, Buenos Aires, when the composer was only 21.

Besides spotlighting his career as a composer, Schwartz-Kates calls to our notice Ginastera's other talents, not always sufficiently appreciated in the United States. As she shows in what is surely the most complete listing of his writings (95-108), he published a significant number of articles. Schwartz-Kates elaborates on Ginastera's status as an educator. Having graduated in 1938 from the Conservatorio Nacional de Música (Buenos Aires) with a professor's diploma, Ginastera held teaching posts in that city and in La Plata (Buenos Aires province). During a visit to the United States, he attended meetings of the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) and in 1958, back in Argentina, established the department of music at the Catholic University of Buenos Aires, which he served as dean. From 1963, he directed in the same city the CLAEM (Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales), affiliated with the Instituto Torcuato di Tella (founded in 1958) and Latin America's most prestigious laboratory for avant-garde music during the heady post-Perón years. A savvy administrator, Ginastera brought luminaries such as Luigi Nono, Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Dallapiccola, Aaron Copland, Gilbert Chase, and Robert M. Stevenson to the CLAEM to teach composition or lecture. Ginastera, who cared deeply about performance, also served on international juries, such as the 5th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1977 and the John F. Kennedy Center-Rockefeller Foundation International Competition for Excellence in the Performance of American Music two years later (20).

The longest portion of the book, some 83 pages, is the annotated bibliography. One of the challenges in Ginastera scholarship is the fact that all personal documents concerning his years in Argentina are presumed lost except for those he took to Switzerland, where he moved in 1971, and those housed at the di Tella. (This lack of hard information may account for less-than-definitive accounts of his...

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