Piermarco Viñas, Matteo Corio - Guastavino, López Buchardo: Radio Buenos Aires (20TH Century Argentinian Songs) (2021)

In the history of languages, it may happen that a particular dialect, which used to be one among many others, at a given moment becomes the standard form of a “language”; consequently, it acquires an importance greater than that of its neighbours, which are and remain confined to the status of dialects. This happened, for example, in the history of the Italian language, which ultimately is the Tuscan dialect, and which has imposed itself as a language.

A similar fate happened in the history of Western Classical music. Due to the increasing importance of the Austrian-German tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, elements coming from the local traditions of folk music were absorbed within the language of “cultivated” music. Thus, the presence of popular elements taken from Austrian or German folk music in the works by Schubert or Brahms is not felt as something “exotic”. The relationship between other nations’ folk music and the “cultivated” repertoire is however more complex: tunes, rhythms and sounds from the Eastern European traditions, or from Spain, frequently entered the “classical” repertoire but maintaining a distinctly exotic flavour, which was frequently remarked by critics and musicologists writing from the cultural centres of “classical” music.