Chilean Guitar Music: Violeta Parra’s “Anticuecas”

Abstract

The relevance of the article is to increase knowledge about the most important figures of the world of guitar art on the example of studying the legacy of the famous guitarist, composer and artist Violeta Parra in the context of the formation of the Chilean academic guitar art of the twentieth century.

Main objectives of the study is to identify ethnic sources and determine the nature of their radical linguistic transformation in the composer’s creative legacy of Violeta Parra on the example of the guitar cycle “Anticuecas”.

The methodology is based on the methods of historical, cultural, comparative, phenomenological, as well as structural and functional analysis (for considering the historical and cultural context of the composer’s creative activity, studying the genre and stylistic elements of Chilean musical traditions and comparing them with European models).

Results and conclusions. The legacy of the famous Chilean performer, composer and artist Violeta Parra is considered, her significant influence on the development of national musical culture is indicated. The guitar cycle “Anticuecas” was studied, the polymetric core of the Chilean cueca was determined as the general genre model of the entire opus. The features of the structural organization of the dance are indicated, its source and leading rhythmic formula is founded as the bolero rhythm in comparison with other Latin American genres — the Paraguayan polka, Venezuelan waltz, horopo or meregne. The stylistic features of the composer’s work, the national genre roots of thematic phenomena, the gravitation towards modern musical vocabulary, formed thanks to the resources of the guitar performing technique, are characterized. An analytical study of the author’s audio recordings and musical scores transcribed by famous Chilean performers, musicologists and composers revealed a high level of contrasts of modern sound lexemes, which differ significantly from traditional cueca. The radical renewal of the linguistic resources of Chilean dance is due to a number of author’s creative and technological procedures: deconstruction of short melodic cueca’s patterns; nesting them inside modern dissonant sound complexes formed according to choosing a positional guitar configuration; variety transposition playing with models with shifted positions along the frets and strings of the neck. The versatility and typicality of the use of numerous versions of the chosen performance technique testifies to the generalization of individual samples of specific guitar thinking in the process of creating music. It is concluded that in the cycle “Anticuecas” by Violeta Parra it was the technique of playing the classical guitar that turned out to be the conductor of the author’s modernist consciousness. The study of the opus is carried out in the context of pictorial analogies between the composer’s musical works, her paintings, tapestries and other artifacts of decorative and applied art