The Learned Style in Argentine Music: Topic Simultaneity and Rhetorics of Identity in the Work of Carlos Guastavino

Abstract

This article examines the interplay of European and Argentine vernacular topics in two works by Carlos Guastavino: ‘Un domingo de mañana’ (A Sunday Morning), a three-part fugue from his Diez preludios for piano (1952) that combines the learned style with the topic of the children’s song, and the fourth movement—‘Fuga y final’—of his Sonata for piano in C sharp minor (1946), whose subject uses the topic of a South American folk dance and song called cueca. The learned style is not only present through the fugal procedure, but also by the use of a specific subtopic, briefly presented here, that connects these works to the Baroque organ tradition and its nineteenth-century reception in piano music.

Against the essentialist view that privileges the identification of the so-called “folk idioms” in the study of Latin American art music, the article aims to emphasise the fact that European topics are as important as vernacular ones in the construction of the musical rhetoric of Argentine identity.