Ástor Piazzolla

Ástor Piazzolla
Ástor Piazzolla with his bandoneón in 1971.
Background information
Birth name	Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla
Born	(1921-03-11)March 11, 1921 Mar del Plata, Argentina
Died	July 4, 1992(1992-07-04) (aged 71) Buenos Aires, Argentina
Genres	Nuevo tango
Occupations	Composer, Bandoneón player

Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneónist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles.

Biography

Childhood

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente "Nonino" Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. His grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleón Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century.

In 1925 Ástor Piazzolla moved with his family to Greenwich Village in New York City, which in those days was a violent neighbourhood inhabited by a volatile mixture of gangsters and hard-working immigrants. His parents worked long hours and Piazzolla soon learnt how to take care of himself on the streets despite having a limp. At home he would listen to his father's records of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro, and was also exposed to jazz and classical music, including Bach, from an early age. He began to play the bandoneón after his father spotted one in a New York pawn shop in1929.

After their return to New York City from a brief visit to Mar del Plata in 1930, the family went to live in Little Italy in lower Manhattan, and in 1932 Piazzolla composed his first tango La catinga. The following year Piazzolla took music lessons with the Hungarian classical pianist Bela Wilda, a student of Rachmaninov, who taught him to play Bach on his bandoneón. In 1934 he met Carlos Gardel, one of the most important figures in the history of tango, who invited the young bandoneón player to join him on his current tour. Much to Piazzolla's dismay, his father decided that he was not old enough to go along, although the following year he did play a cameo role as a young paper boy in Gardel's movie El día que me quieras [1]. This early disappointment of not being allowed to join the tour proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it was on this tour that Gardel and his entire orchestra perished in a plane crash in 1935. In later years, Piazzolla made light of this near miss, joking that had his father not been so careful, he would now be playing the harp, rather than the bandoneón.

Early Musical Career

In 1936, he returned with his family to Mar del Plata, where he began to play in a variety of tango orchestras and around this time he discovered the music of Elvino Vardaro’s sextet on the radio. Vardaro’s novel interpretation of tango made a great impression on Piazzolla and years later he would become Piazzolla’s violinist in his Orquesta de Cuerdas and his First Quintet.

Inspired by Vardaro’s style of tango, and still only 17 years old, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires in 1938 where, the following year, he realized a dream when he joined the orchestra of the bandoneónist Anibal Troilo, which would become one of the greatest tango orchestras of that time. Piazzolla was employed as a temporary replacement for Toto Rodríguez who was ill, but when Rodríguez returned to work Troilo decided to retain Piazzolla as a fourth bandoneónist. Apart from playing the bandoneón, Piazzolla also became Troilo’s arranger and would occasionally play the piano for him. By 1941 he was earning a good wage, enough to pay for music lessons with Alberto Ginastera, an eminent Argentine composer of classical music. It was the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, who had advised him to study with Ginastera and delving into scores of Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel, and others, Piazzolla rose early each morning to hear the Teatro Colón orchestra rehearse while continuing a gruelling performing schedule in the tango clubs at night. During his 5 years of study with Ginastera he would master orchestration which he later considered to be one of his strong points. In 1943 he started piano lessons with the Argentine classical pianist Raúl Spivak, which would continue for the next five years, and wrote his first classical works Preludio No. 1 for Violin and Piano and Suite for Strings and Harps. That same year he married his first wife, Dedé Wolff, an artist, with whom he would have two children, Diana and Daniel.

As time went by Troilo began to fear that the advanced musical ideas of the young bandoneónist might undermine the style of his orchestra and make it less appealing to dancers of tango. Tensions mounted between the two bandoneónists until, in 1944, Piazzolla announced his intention to leave Troilo and join the orchestra of the tango singer and bandoneónist Francisco Fiorentino. Piazzolla would lead Fiorentino's orchestra until 1946 and make many recordings with him, including his first two instrumental tangos, La chiflada and Color de rosa.

In 1946 Piazzolla formed his, Orquesta Típica, which although having a similar formation to other tango orchestras of the day, gave him his first opportunity to experiment with his own approach to the orchestration and musical content of tango. That same year he composed, El Desbande, which he considered to be his first formal tango, and then began to compose musical scores for films, starting with Con los mismos colores in 1949 and Bólidos de acero in 1950, both films directed by Carlos Torres Ríos.

Having disbanded his first orchestra in 1950 he almost abandoned tango altogether as he continued to study Bartok and Stravinsky, and orchestra direction with Herman Scherchen. He spent a lot of time listening to jazz and searching for a musical style of his own beyond the realms of tango. He decided to drop the bandoneon and to dedicate himself to writing and to studying music. Between 1950 and 1954 he composed a series of works that began to develop his unique style: Para lucirse, Tanguango, Prepárense, Contrabajeando, Triunfal and Lo que vendrá.

Studies in Paris

At Ginastera's urging, Piazzolla entered his classical composition Buenos Aires Symphony, in three movements, for the Fabian Sevitzky Award on 16 August 1953. The performance took place at the Law School in Buenos Aires with the symphony orchestra of Radio del Estadio under the direction of Sevitzky himself. At the end of the concert a fight broke out among some members of the audience who were offended by the inclusion of two bandoneons in a traditional symphony orchestra. In spite of this Piazzolla's composition won a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau conservatory.

In 1954 he and his wife left their two children (Diana aged 11 and Daniel aged 10) behind with Piazzolla's parents and travelled to Paris. At this stage in his life Piazzolla was tired of tango and at first, he tried to hide his tanguero past and his bandoneon compositions from Boulanger, thinking that his destiny lay in classical music. By way of introduction to his work, Piazzolla played her a number of his classically-inspired compositions but it was not until he finally played her his tango Triunfal that she immediately congratulated him and encouraged him to pursue his career in tango, recognising that this was where his true musical talent lay. This was to prove an historic encounter and a cross-roads in Piazzolla's career.

During his time with Boulanger he studied classical composition including counterpoint which was to play a key role in his later tango compositions. Before leaving Paris he heard, and was deeply impressed by, the octet of the American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan which was to give him the idea of forming his own octet on his return to Buenos Aires. At this time he composed and recorded a series of tangos with the String Orchestra of the Paris Opera and began to play the bandoneon while standing up, putting his right foot on a chair and the bellows of the instrument across his right thigh. Until that time bandoneonists played sitting down.

In the Vanguard of Nuevo Tango

Back in Argentina, Piazzolla formed his Orquesta de Cuerdas (String Orchestra), which performed with the singer Jorge Sobral, and his Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955. With two bandoneons (Piazzolla and Leopoldo Federico), two violins (Enrique Mario Francini and Hugo Baralis), double bass (Juan Vasallo), cello (José Bragato), piano (Atilio Stampone), and an electric guitar (Horacio Malvicino), his Octeto effectively broke the mould of the traditional orquesta típica and created a new sound akin to chamber music, without a singer and with jazz-like improvisations. This was to be a turning point in his career and a watershed in the history of tango. Piazzolla's new approach to the tango, nuevo tango, made him a controversial figure in his native land both musically and politically. However, his music gained acceptance in Europe and North America, and his reworking of the tango was embraced by some liberal segments of Argentine society, who were pushing for political changes in parallel to his musical revolution.

In 1958 he disbanded both the Octeto and the String Orchestra and returned to New York City with his family where he struggled to make a living as a musician and arranger. Briefly forming his own group, the Jazz Tango Quintet with whom he made just two recordings, his attempts to blend jazz and tango where not successful. He received the news of the death of his father in October 1959 whilst performing with Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves in Puerto Rico and on his return to New York City a few days later, he asked to be left alone in his apartment and in less than an hour wrote his famous tango, Adiós Nonino, in homage to his father.

Back in Buenos Aires in 1960 he put together the first, and perhaps most famous, of his quintets, the first Quinteto, initially comprising bandoneon (Piazzolla), piano (Jaime Gosis), violin (Simón Bajour), electric guitar (Horacio Malvicino ) and double bass (Kicho Díaz). Of the many ensembles that Piazzolla set up during his career it was the quintet formation which best expressed his approach to tango.

In 1963 he set up his Nuevo Octeto and the same year premiered his Tres Tangos Sinfonicos, under the direction of Paul Klecky, for which he was awarded the Hirsch Prize.

In 1965 he released El Tango, an album for which he collaborated with the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. The recording featured his Quinteto together with an orchestra, the singer Edmundo Rivero and Luis Medina Castro reciting texts.

In 1966 he left Dedé Wolff and the following year signed a five year contract with the poet Horacio Ferrer with whom he composed the operetta Maria de Buenos Aires, with lyrics by Ferrer. The work was premiered in May 1968 with the singer Amelita Baltar and introduced a new style of tango, the tango song. Soon after this he began a relationship with Amelita Baltar. The following year he wrote Balada para un loco with lyrics by Ferrer which was premiered at the First Iberoamerican Music Festival with Amelita Baltar and Piazzolla himself conducting the orchestra. Piazzolla was awarded second prize and the composition would prove to be his first popular success.

In 1970 Piazzolla returned to Paris where with Ferrer he wrote the oratorio El pueblo joven premiered in Saarbrucken, Germany in 1971. Back in Buenos Aires he founded his Conjunto 9 (aka Nonet), a chamber music formation, which was a realisation of a dream for Piazzolla and for which he composed some of his most sophisticated music. He now put aside his first Quinteto and made several recordings with his new ensemble in Italy. Within a year the Conjunto 9 had run into financial problems and was dissolved and in 1972 he participated in his first concert at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, sharing the bill with other Tango orchestras.

After a period of great productivity as a composer, he suffered a heart attack in 1973 and that same year he moved to Italy where he began a series of recordings which would span a period of five years. The music publisher Aldo Pagani, a partner in Curti-Pagani Music, had offered Piazzolla a 15 year contract in Rome to record anything he could write. His famous album Libertango was recorded in Milan^[1] in May 1974 and later that year he separated from Amelita Baltar and in September recorded the album Summit-Reunion Cumbre with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and an Italian orchestra, including jazz musicians such as bassist Pino Presti and drummer Tullio De Piscopo,^[2] in Milan. The album includes the composition Aire de Buenos Aires by Mulligan.

In 1975 he set up his Electronic Octet an octet made up of bandoneon, electric piano and/or acoustic piano, organ, guitar, electric bass, drums, synthesizer and violin, which was later replaced by a flute or saxophone. Later that year Aníbal Troilo died and Piazzolla composed the Suite Troileana in his memory, a work in four parts, which he recorded with the Conjunto Electronico. At this time Piazzolla started a collaboration with the singer Jose A. Trelles with whom he made a number of recordings.

In December 1976 he played at a concert at the Teatro Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, where he presented his work, “500 motivaciones”, written especially for the Conjunto Electronico, and in 1977 he played another memorable concert at the Olympia in Paris, with a new formation of the Conjunto Electronico.

In 1978 he formed his second Quintet, with which he would tour the world for 11 years, and would make him world renowned. He also returned to writing chamber music and symphonic works.

During the period of Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Piazzolla lived in Italy, but returned many times to Argentina, recorded there, and on at least one occasion had lunch with the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. However, his relationship with the dictator might have been less than friendly, as recounted in Ástor Piazzolla, A manera de memorias (a comprehensive collection of interviews, constituting a memoir):^[3]

One year before the Los Largartos issue you went to Videla's house and had lunch with him, why did you accept that invitation? What an invitation! They sent a couple of guys in black suits and a letter with my name on it that said that Videla expected me a particular day in a particular place. I have a book around in some place, with pictures of all the guests: Eladia Blázquez, Daniel Tinayre, Olga Ferri, the composer Juan Carlos Tauriello, there were painters, actors […]

—Ástor Piazzolla, A manera de memorias

Travelling the World

In 1982 he recorded the album Oblivion with an orquestra in Italy for the film Enrico IV, directed by Marco Bellochio, and in May 1982, in the middle of the Falklands War, he played in a concert at the Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires with the second Quinteto and the singer Roberto Goyeneche. That same year he wrote Le Grand Tango for cello and piano, dedicated to Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich which would be premiered by him in 1990 in New Orleans.

On 11 June 1983 he put on one of the best concerts of his life when he played a program of his music at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. For the occasion he regrouped the Conjunto 9 and played solo with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, directed by Pedro Ignacio Calderón. The programme included his 3 movement Concerto for bandoneon and orquestra and his 3 movement Concierto de Nacar.

In June 1984 Piazzolla appeared at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and on 29 September that same year he appeared with his Quinteto and the Italian singer Milva at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris.

In 1985 he was named Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires and premiered his Concerto for bandoneon and guitar at the Fifth International Belgian Guitar Festival on 15 Mar 1985, with the Philharmonic conducted by Leo Brouwer. He made his London debut with his second Quinteto at the Almeida Theatre in London at the end of June.

With the film score for El exilio de Gardel he won the French critics Cesar Award in Paris for best film music in 1986.

He appeared at Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland, with vibraphonist Gary Burton in July 1986 and on 6 September 1987 gave a concert in New York’s Central Park, in the city where he spent his childhood.

In September 1987 he recorded his Concierto para bandoneon y orquesta and Tres tangos para bandoneon y orquesta with Lalo Schifrin conducting the St. Luke’s Orchestra, in the Richardson Auditorium at Princetown University.

In 1988 he wrote music for the film Sur and married the singer and television personality Laura Escalada on 11 April. In May that year he recorded his album La Camorra in New York, a suite of three pieces, the last time he would record with the second Quinteto. During a tour of Japan with Milva he played at a concert in Tokyo in June 1988 and that same year underwent a quadruple by-pass operation.

Early in 1989 he formed his Sexteto, his last ensemble, with two bandoneons, piano, electric guitar, bass and cello. With them he appeared at the Teatro Opera in Buenos Aires in the presence of the newly-elected Argentine President Carlos Menem on Fri 9 June 1989. This would be Piazzolla's last concert in Argentina.

There followed a concert at the Royal Carre Theatre in Amsterdam with his Sexteto and Osvaldo Pugliese’s Orquestra on 26 June 1989, a live recording at the BBC Bristol Studios in June 1989 and a concert at the Wembley Conference Centre on 30 June 1989. Towards the end of the year he dissolved his sexteto and continued playing solo with classical string quartets and symphonic orchestras. He joined Anahi Carfi's Mantova String Quartet and toured Italy and Finland with them and in November 1989 he hade his last album Five Tango Sensations, with the Kronos Quartet in the US. His 1982 composition, Le grand tango, for cello and piano was premiered in New Orleons by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the pianist Igor Uriash before the end of the year.

On 3 July 1990 he gave his last concert in Athens, Greece, with Athens Orquestra of Colours, conducted by Manos Hatzidakis.

He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in Paris on 4 August 1990, which left him in a coma, and died in Buenos Aires, just under two years later on 4 July 1992, without regaining consciousness.

Among his followers, his own protégé Marcelo Nisinman is the best known innovator of the tango music of the new millennium, while Pablo Ziegler, pianist with Piazzolla's second quintet, has assumed the role of principal custodian of nuevo tango, extending the jazz influence in the style. The Brazilian guitarist Sergio Assad has also experimented with folk-derived, complex virtuoso compositions that show Piazzolla's structural influence while steering clear of tango sounds; and Osvaldo Golijov has acknowledged Piazzolla as perhaps the greatest influence on his globally oriented, eclectic compositions for classical and klezmer performers.

Musical style

Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer around 1970.

Piazzolla's nuevo tango was distinct from the traditional tango in its incorporation of elements of jazz, its use of extended harmonies and dissonance, its use of counterpoint, and its ventures into extended compositional forms. As Argentine psychoanalyst Carlos Kuri has pointed out, Piazzolla's fusion of tango with this wide range of other recognizable Western musical elements was so successful that it produced a new individual style transcending these influences.^[4] It is precisely this success, and individuality, that makes it hard to pin down where particular influences reside in his compositions, but some aspects are clear. The use of the passacaglia technique of a circulating bass line and harmonic sequence, invented and much used in 17th and 18th century baroque music but also central to the idea of jazz "changes", predominates in most of Piazzolla's mature compositions. Another clear reference to the baroque is the often complex and virtuosic counterpoint that sometimes follows strict fugal behavior but more often simply allows each performer in the group to assert his voice. A further technique that emphasises this sense of democracy and freedom among the musicians is improvisation that is borrowed from jazz in concept, but in practice involves a different vocabulary of scales and rhythms that stay within the parameters of the established tango sound-world. Pablo Ziegler has been particularly responsible for developing this aspect of the style both within Piazzolla's groups and since the composer's death.

With the composition of Adiós Nonino in 1959, Piazzolla established a standard structural pattern for his compositions, involving a formal pattern of fast-slow-fast-slow-coda, with the fast sections emphasizing gritty tango rhythms and harsh, angular melodic figures, and the slower sections usually making use of the string instrument in the group and/or Piazzolla's own bandoneón as lyrical soloists. The piano tends to be used throughout as a percussive rhythmic backbone, while the electric guitar either joins in this role or spins filigree improvisations; the double bass parts are usually of little interest, but provide an indispensable rugged thickness to the sound of the ensemble. The quintet of bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass was Piazzolla's preferred setup on two extended occasions during his career, and most critics consider it to be the most successful instrumentation for his works.^[5] This is due partly to its great efficiency in terms of sound – it covers or imitates most sections of a symphony orchestra, including the percussion which is improvised by all players on the bodies of their instruments – and the strong expressive identity it permits each individual musician. With a style that is both rugged and intricate, such a setup augments the compositions' inherent characteristics.

Despite the prevalence of the quintet formation and the ABABC compositional structure, Piazzolla consistently experimented with other musical forms and instrumental combinations. In 1965 an album was released containing collaborations between Piazzolla and Jorge Luis Borges where Borges's poetry was narrated over very avant-garde music by Piazzolla including the use of dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) rows, free non-melodic improvisation on all instruments, and modal harmonies and scales.^[6] In 1968 Piazzolla wrote and produced an "operita", María de Buenos Aires, that employed a larger ensemble including flute, percussion, multiple strings and three vocalists, and juxtaposed movements in Piazzolla's own style with several pastiche numbers ranging from waltz and hurdy-gurdy to a piano/narrator bar-room scena straight out of Casablanca.

By the 1970s Piazzolla was living in Rome, managed by the Italian agent Aldo Pagani, and exploring a leaner, more fluid musical style drawing on more jazz influence, and with simpler, more continuous forms. Pieces that exemplify this new direction include Libertango and most of the Suite Troileana, written in memory of the late Aníbal Troilo. In the 1980s Piazzolla was wealthy enough, for the first time, to become relatively autonomous artistically, and wrote some of his most ambitious multi-movement works. These included Tango Suite for the virtuoso guitar duo Sergio and Odair Assad; Histoire du Tango, where a flutist and guitarist tell the history of tango in four chunks of music styled at thirty-year intervals; and La Camorra, a suite in three ten minute movements, inspired by the Neapolitan crime family and exploring symphonic concepts of large-scale form, thematic development, contrasts of texture and massive accumulations of ensemble sound. After making three albums in New York with the second quintet and producer Kip Hanrahan, two of which he described on separate occasions as "the greatest thing I've done", he disbanded the quintet, formed a sextet with an extra bandoneón, cello, bass, electric guitar, and piano, and wrote music for this ensemble that was even more adventurous harmonically and structurally than any of his previous works (Preludio y Fuga; Sex-tet). Had he not suffered an incapacitating stroke on the way to Notre Dame mass in 1990, it is likely that he would have continued to use his popularity as a performer of his own works to experiment in relative safety with even more audacious musical techniques, while possibly responding to the surging popularity of non-Western musics by finding ways to incorporate new styles into his own. In his musical professionalism and open-minded attitude to existing styles he held the mindset of an 18th century composing performer such as Handel or Mozart, who were anxious to assimilate all national "flavors" of their day into their own compositions, and who always wrote with both first-hand performing experience and a sense of direct social relationship with their audiences. This may have resulted in a backlash amongst conservative tango aficionados in Argentina, but in the rest of the West it was the key to his extremely sympathetic reception among classical and jazz musicians, both seeing some of the best aspects of their musical practices reflected in his work.^[7]

Musical career

Astor Piazzolla and Gerry Mulligan at the "Summit" recording, Milan, Italy 1974.
Photograph by Pino Presti

Piazzolla, after leaving Troilo's orchestra in the 1940s, led numerous ensembles beginning with the 1946 Orchestra, the 1955 Octeto Buenos Aires, the 1960 "First Quintet", the 1971 Conjunto 9 ("Noneto"), the 1978 "Second Quintet" and the 1989 New Tango Sextet. As well as providing original compositions and arrangements, he was the director and bandoneón player in all of them. He also recorded the album Summit with jazz baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. His numerous compositions include orchestral work such as the "Concierto para bandoneón, orquesta, cuerdas y percusión", "Doble concierto para bandoneón y guitarra", "Tres tangos sinfónicos" and "Concierto de Nácar para 9 tanguistas y orquesta", pieces for the solo classical guitar—the Cinco Piezas (1980), as well as song-form compositions that still today are well known by the general public in his country, like "Balada para un loco" (Ballad for a madman) and Adiós Nonino (dedicated to his father) which he recorded many times with different musicians and ensembles. Biographers estimate that Piazzolla wrote around 3,000 pieces and recorded around 500.

In the summer of 1985 he appeared with his Quinteto Tango Nuevo at the Almeida Theatre in London for a week-long engagement. On September 6, 1987, his quintet gave a concert in New York's Central Park, which was recorded and, in 1994, released in compact disk format as The Central Park Concert. [2]

Piazzolla’s Ensembles

• Orquesta Típica (in English: Piazzolla's Traditional Orchestra), aka the 1946 Orchestra, 1946-50.
• Orquesta de Cuerdas (in English: String Orchestra), 1955-1958.
• Octeto Buenos Aires (in English: Buenos Aires Octet) 1955-58.
• Jazz Tango Quintet, 1959.
• Quinteto (in English: Quintet), aka the first Quintet, 1960-70.
• Nuevo Octeto (in English: New Octet), 1963.
• Conjunto 9 (in English: Ensemble 9), aka Noneto, 1971-72 & 1983.
• Conjunto Electronico (in English: Electronic Ensemble), aka Electronic Octet, 1975.
• Quinteto Tango Nuevo (in English: New Tango Quintet), aka the second Quintet, 1978-1988.
• Sexteto Nuevo Tango (in English: New Tango Sextet), 1989.

Film Music