Alberto Ginastera's Change Brought In Music Analysis

1945 brought the end of the second world war in which ended the lives of nearly 60 million people. This war had led to changes in the economy, politics, geography and country relations and had also changed people’s sentiments and thoughts. This partly also one reason due to which many 21st century composers changed their approach towards composing music. One example of a composer who changed his attitude to composing music was Alberto Ginastera, an Argentine composer who changed his style of music from 1948. In this essay, I will be talking about the change in paradigm that Alberto Ginastera brought in music.
Ginastera’s change in music was described by musical analysts as a change from objective nationalism to subjective nationalism. By his own account, Ginastera himself divided his compositional years into three periods, which are Objective nationalism(1934-1948), Subjective nationalism(1948-1958) and neo-expressionism (1958-till his death in 1983).
The first period, “Objective nationalism” was a period in which Ginastera directly used Argentine folk music and added them into his compositions. Argentine folk music is a multi-cultural fabric containing strands from Native Indian, African, European and "Criollo" (or Latin American) peoples. Ginastera was particularly attracted to the …show more content…
After his visit to the United States, he became more creative and started composing more melodic passages in his works. In piano sonata no.1, Ginastera uses scales were not used very frequently in his other pieces. Ginastera starts out the first movement of piano sonata no.1 in an aeolian mode with A as its tonal centre. He also uses the 12-tone scale in the second movement which was made prominent by Arnold Schoenberg. This is quite different from his previous pieces such as Danzas Argentinas in which he uses keys such as C Major and Db Major. This change in key is quite obvious in the pieces that Ginastera