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The
musicologist is forced again and again to admit that al attempts at reconstructing
'authentic' performances can only remain conjecture. When all is said and
done, even the most beautiful documents are but paper, and the atmosphere
in which George Frideric Handel performed his organ concertos or Johann
Sebastian Bach his cantatas, can at best be recreated through the listener's
power of imagination and in the mind's eye.
What
could, however, stimulate our imagination would be some sort of associative
backward transfer of acoustical documents. When, for example, we hear Duke
Ellington play Duke Ellington, we not only hear music which is truly authentic:
we also experience, in the case of jazz, how the melodic and harmonic framework
is repeatedly filled out just as it might been - mutatis mutandis - in
earlier centuries.
Piazzolla,
however, embarked on other paths. For him what mattered was to pay tribute
to the great tradition of the tango and its friendlier sister, the milonga,
not by reviving traditional modes of expression, but rather by breathing
new life into his unmistakable component of the Argentinian life-style.
In this respect he was doing more or less what Bela Bartók had done
when he went back to folk music for musical principles which in their turn
caused serious problems for musical conservatives before finally gaining
acceptance as pointers towards new developments in music.
Of
course, Piazzolla differs from Bartók in his fundamentally more
relaxed attitude toward commercialism. His tango -canciones, for example,
'new tangos' sung mainly to texts by Horacio Ferrer, had no difficulty
in becoming best-sellers - which again speaks for the baroque nature of
the composer, who was just as happy to be engaged for film work as he was
to write oratorios and works for full orchestra while simultaneously earning
storms of applause from vast crowds of admirers with his pyrotechnics on
the bandoneon.
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