The Conquistadores, the Indians, and the Argentine Generals:

Iubilum op. 51, a Commission to Alberto Ginastera (1980)1

Twenty years after the arrival to the Río de la Plata of a Spanish expedition, led by
Juan Díaz de Solís, whose members were immediately massacred and, according to some
narratives, devoured by the Indians, the city of Buenos Aires was founded a first time in 1536
by Pedro de Mendoza. This first European settlement in the area “where Juan Díaz fasted and
the Indians dined”, as Jorge Luis Borges (1996, 81) says in Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires
[Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires], collapsed in only a few years because of hunger,
disease, inner quarrels, fratricide cannibalism, and the military pressure of a local tribe, the
querandíes. A long time had to pass until the second founding of Buenos Aires by Juan de
Garay, who in the name of the Spanish crown massacred the querandíes, attributed parcels of
land to his troops, and gave to these as slaves people from a nearby tribe, the guaraníes. On
11 June 1580, the new town was christened Ciudad de La Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de
Santa María del Buen Ayre; the Cathedral, the Franciscan and Benedictine convents, and the
Jesuit school where among its first buildings. Garay was killed by the Indians four years later,
but the city became in time the capital of the Río de la Plata viceroyalty and then, after the
1810 Mayo Revolution, that of the Argentine Republic (Saer, 1991; Bernand, 1997; Guérin,
2000).
In 1980, the Fourth Centenary of the Second Founding of Buenos Aires was
celebrated with great pomp and ceremony by the Argentine dictatorship of general Jorge
Rafael Videla and the military Junta. Exactly one year before, on 11 June 1979, the regime
had commemorated the centenary of another founding historical event, the Conquista del
Desierto [Conquest of the Desert], the official name for an expedition to Northern Patagonia
and other territories at the end of the nineteenth century, which expanded and consolidated the
modern State at the price of another genocide of Indians (Quijada, 1998; Andermann, 2009;
Delrio e.al, 2010; Trímboli, 2013). Through these ceremonies anchored in well-known
episodes of Argentine history, the military regime inscribed its political action in the long-
range narrative of a “myth of the Catholic nation” (Zanatta, 1999) rooted in the Hispanic
Colonial period, and exalted the role of the military forces in the triumph of “civilization”
over “barbarism” (Svampa, 2006). This last concept could be associated with past and present
figures of the “anti-Nation”, from Indians from pre-Hispanic times up to their present-day
descendants, which the regime still seek to “modernize” by destroying their traditions and
commodifying their handicrafts (Sheinin, 2012), but also with contemporary leftist
revolutionaries.
In 1980, the main attraction of the Cuarto Centenario was the Queen of Spain Sofía,
wife of King Juan Carlos de Borbón, crowned five years before according to general Franco’s
political testament. The regime clearly tried to improve both its popular support and its
international reputation, severely shaken by its terrible record on human rights. Among other
things, the ceremonies included the inauguration of a monument to Don Quijote, who
according to the mayor of Buenos Aires, brigadier (RE) Osvaldo Cacciatore, was to “give us
strength to fight the dragons of anarchy and subversion”2. While “anarchy” had been a
keyword to deride the –doubtless incompetent and criminal- government of Isabel Martínez

1
The author is grateful to Angela Ida de Benedictis and Carlos Chanfón, at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, for their
assistance while consulting the Ginastera Collection; to Georgina Ginastera for her kind authorization to
reproduce and quote documents from this collection in this article; and to Adriana Cerletti, Igor Contreras,
Camila Juárez, Luis Velasco Pufleau, for their comments and help.
2
“Fue inaugurado ayer el monumento al Quijote”, La Nación Internacional, 16 June 1980. All translations are
the author’s.

1
de Perón, ousted by the coup d’État of 24 March 1976, “subversion” was the dictatorship’s
name for the guerilla and the leftist movements it pitiless destroyed in the following years.
Enrolling the Quijote for State terrorism and its sinister legacy of tens of thousands of
desaparecidos, hundreds of kidnapped babies, countless people arrested, tortured and exiled,
not to mention the suppression of democratic institutions and the disastrous social and
economical policies, was not the only way in which art was involved in the Cuarto
Centenario. On the evening of 12 April 1980, the audience of the prestigious Teatro Colón –
whose name was itself a mark of traditionalist Hispanism- attended the first performance of a
musical composition commissioned for the occasion: Alberto Ginastera’s “symphonic
celebration” Iubilum, op. 51, a work that can be heard as his own “mythical founding of
Buenos Aires” (Buch, 2003, 191).

Commissioning a Fanfare

The idea of commissioning a piece to Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) seems to have

been Enzo Valenti Ferro’s, a music critic who assisted as artistic director the Teatro Colón’s
general administrator, Guillermo Gallacher. This last was an Air Force officer who in the
early 1940s had been the composer’s pupil at the Liceo Militar (military high school), as he
will timely recall him. Ginastera was already in those years of the Second World War a key
figure of Argentine art music. Aaron Copland was a true supporter, and Lincoln Kirstein
commissioned a ballet that made him one of the foremost nationalist composers of Latin-
America: Estancia (1941), an idealized vision of rural Argentina modeled on Copland’s
cowboy ballets (Schwarz-Kates, 2002; Fauser, 2013). A liberal Catholic, an anti-Peronist and
an anti-Communist, in the late 1960s Ginastera became the advocate of a moderate, Pan-
American avant-garde, sponsored by the US State Department and the Argentine military
government - even if this last’s puritanism led to the censorship of his opera Bomarzo in
1967, soon after its premiere in Washington DC, and if the military will eventually retire their
support to the Di Tella Institute, the host of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios
Musicales (CLAEM) he run since 1962 (King, 1985; Buch, 2003; Novoa, 2011; Hess, 2013).
Established in Geneva in 1971, Ginastera seldom traveled to Argentina, yet after the 1976
military take-over reacted with enthusiasm to Gallacher’s and Valenti Ferro’s proposals.
By late 1978, a trip to Buenos Aires by his second wife, the violoncellist Aurora
Nátola, allowed the commission to progress. Ginastera answered to Valenti Ferro on 9
January 1979: “Aurora came back delighted with you and all your proposals. The Fanfarra
for the Centenary sounds fascinating to me, and I’d be happy to compose it. I am a porteño
[native from Buenos Aires] and son of porteños, and even if I live in Europe I feel always
nostalgic about the Reina del Plata [the Queen of the Río de la Plata, i.e. Buenos Aires]. Of
course, that doesn’t mean I will write a work in tango rhythm…”3. This letter shows that from
the start Valenti Ferro had in mind a specific genre, well suited for an official
commemoration with military overtones, namely a fanfare; and also, that Ginastera still felt
the need to say, be it in a humorous guise, that he would not allude to the musical symbol of
modern Buenos Aires, namely tango. Adding to his personal reluctance to incorporate tango
into his nationalist idiom (Buch, 2007; Di Cione, 2012), the choice of both men was clear:
referring directly to the founding event of 1580, rather than to the city of Buenos Aires as
such.

3
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 9 January1979, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Ginastera Collection, MF 286.1.
Also Aurora Nátola’s cello recital, given at the Basílica de San Francisco on 25 April, is associated with the
Cuarto Centenario in La Prensa, 16 April 1980.

2
 The commission of a fanfare is but one of the several ways in which the most famous
Argentine living composer is associated with the Teatro Colón during the 1979 and 1980
seasons. Following Ginastera’s earlier contacts with Gallacher, Valenti Ferro imagines this
new work performed together with Turbae ad passionem gregorianem op. 43, a Passion in
Latin composed in 1974 and still unheard in Buenos Aires, and also with the Second Cello
Concerto, featuring Aurora Nátola on its world premiere. The Colón would pay for the
composer’s and the cellist’s trips to Buenos Aires, and organize a cycle of four concerts,
several of which will appear publicly associated with the Cuarto Centenario
commemorations4. On 5 April 1979, the whole tour is negotiated in detail by Valenti Ferro
and Roberto Barry, Ginastera’s friend and long-time editor, who the same day reports to
Geneva that the City of Buenos Aires offers for the commemorative piece 8.000 U$S (nearly
24.000 U$S today)5.
All these preparations for the 1980 season were progressing in the eve of the
Ginasteras first trip to Buenos Aires since 1972. In May 1979, Aurora plays Ginastera’s first
Cello Concerto with the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra at the Teatro Colón, in a tour
sponsored by the national government and the Mozarteum Argentino, a private institution
presided by a long-time friend of the composer, Jeannette Arata de Erize. These days, the
composer is fêted by top-rank authorities, including president Videla, with a private audience
at the Casa Rosada (the government palace), and mayor Cacciatore, at the Buenos Aires City
Hall. Following this last meeting, the press announces that the mayor has commissioned him
a piece for the Cuarto Centenario, thus giving the whole venture a political significance far
above the administrative and artistic level of the Teatro Colón6.
Back in Geneva, Ginastera writes to Valenti Ferro to set the details of the
performances to come. His letter dated 15 August 1979 shows his sensibility to the context,
by pronouncing himself against the inclusion of his “work to celebrate the Fourth Centenary
of Buenos Aires” in an all-Ginastera concert: “To go back to the programs: during my
holidays I often thought that the first one had to be changed. If I got you right, this will be a
gala, guests-only concert, and the audience will be one of ambassadors and officials who do
not understand much about contemporary music, and even less if it comes with Gregorian
chant and a Catholic spirit. Turbae will confuse all this people and my work will not be
received as it deserves”7. Ginastera proposes instead to give it together with Dvorak’s Cello
Concerto performed by his wife Aurora and, as a second part, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony;
Turbae, he goes on, should go separately, in a concert not intended for celebratory purposes.
This view will prevail, for the first performance of Iubilum on 12 April 1980, will be followed
by Dvorak’s Concerto and by Tchaikovsky’s Fourth (instead of the Beethoven); Turbae will
be performed alone a week later.
A few days later, a discussion on the conductor sheds more light on the official
dimension of the event. Valenti Ferro pleads for the Argentine Pedro Ignacio Calderón
against the Swiss Peter Maag: “No doubt that Calderón is our most important symphonic
conductor. Everyone agrees on that. This basic condition added to the fact that he is an
Argentinian, it would be an expression of good policy, and not inconvenient on purely artistic
grounds, to entrust him with a symphonic concert intended as the official inauguration of a
series of manifestations to commemorate Buenos Aires’ Fourth Centenary”8. Even if for
health reasons Calderón will eventually be replaced by the Italian-born Bruno d’Astoli, the

4
Enzo Valenti Ferro to Alberto Ginastera, 5 March 1979, PSS, MF 286.1.
5
Roberto Barry to Alberto Ginastera, 5 April 1979, MF 281.1
6
“Segunda Fundación: Obra de Ginastera”, Crónica, ed. vesp., 15 May 1979; “Ginastera visitó al intendente”,
La Nación, 28 May 1979.
7
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 15 August 1979, PSS, MF 286.1
8
Enzo Valenti Ferro to Alberto Ginastera, 29 August 1979, PSS, MF 286.1.

3
concern about the nationality of the conductor shows the organizer’s conception of “good
policy” in such an official occasion.
In a letter dated 26 February 1980, Ginastera elaborates on “good policy” matters by
asking Valenti Ferro to sponsor a commercial recording of Turbae: “Why we, Argentine
composers, are not as lucky as Communist composers? Why all records made in Argentina,
and promoted abroad, are tango and protest folklore?” He further argues that a good recording
of his work “might be a wonderful propaganda [admirable propaganda] to show audiences
worldwide that in Argentina there are other things than those that the news agencies never get
tired of mentioning”9. This last alludes to the denunciation by the international press of the
regime’s human rights abuses, one especially intense in Geneva, the host of the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights. Already in October 1978, Ginastera had written to his
daughter that Aurora had returned “enchanted with Buenos Aires. She found it very modern,
and full of things other cities have. With all the bad propaganda we get, it’s nice to hear that
about the ‘Reina del Plata’”10. Little doubt is left, then, that the political context and the
concern for “propaganda” played a role in Ginastera’s decision to compose a piece that would
fit at best the official commemoration of the founding of Buenos Aires in 1580.
Indeed, despite his intense international agenda, the whole enterprise seems to have
progressively won his attention. Ginastera was supposed to send the score by the 1st of
January, but two months later he is still working late to complete it11. In his late February
letter, he announces to Valenti Ferro that the piece is ready:

I’m already finishing to copy the work you commissioned from me, a work
more substantial than what we both had envisioned.
Its title is IUBILUM Opus 51, Celebración sinfónica entre (sic) partes:
Fanfarra (sic), Corales y Final [Symphonic Celebration in Three parts: Fanfare,
Chorale, and Finale]. The Fanfarra is set for the whole orchestra, but the brass are
predominant; Corales is a kind of elegy, homage or reminder for those who lived,
worked and made our city great, and the Finale is a short piece on a single theme, with
the sense of an alleluia.
As I always do with my works, I first document myself about the words I use
for the titles, and I was surprised to learn that fanfarra is not in the Diccionario de la
Academia [the standard Spanish dictionary], while it’s current in Italian, French, and
English. In Buenos Aires I’ll try to discover why this common word does not belong
into the Spanish language. Instead there is charanga, but it means cavalry music. In
French one of the meanings, which corresponds to ours, is that of a piece of
symphonic or dramatic music for brass instruments. Maybe you could solve this
problem for me12.

Ginastera’s concern about the Spanish word fanfarra is puzzling, because while this
spelling does not seem to exist, fanfarria is said to appear in Spanish dictionaries since the
early seventeenth century, and to be registered by the Real Academia already in 173213. As
for charanga, recent editions of the same dictionary do not associate it with cavalry music – a
genre that for sure would have been more apt, given the military setting, to commemorate the
Conquista del Desierto than the founding of Buenos Aires. Whatever the sources for his
comment, Ginastera clearly believed that by composing a fanfare he introduced into the

9
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 26 February 1980, PSS, MF 286.1
10
Alberto Ginastera to Georgina Ginastera, 29 January 1978, in Scalisi, 2012, 2126.
11
Alberto Ginastera to Georgina Ginastera, 28 February 1980, in Scalisi, 2012, 2539.
12
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 26 February 1980, PSS, MF 286.1.
13
See http://dirae.es/palabras/fanfarria (accessed 14 July 2014).

4
Hispanic realm a tradition belonging into the history of other European countries. And
Valenti Ferro had in mind a very special model, if one has to believe a review on the first
performance of Iubilum mentioning the aborted project to have that day in the hall of the
Teatro Colón “a brass fanfare performing marches inspired from the Wagnerian festivals in
Bayreuth, which are almost unknown in this country”14.
Now, was the resulting piece actually of that kind? In April 1979, the Teatro Colón
had commissioned a fanfare; yet, Ginastera, after his meeting with mayor Cacciatore in May,
announced already “a fanfare or a small allegorical overture”15. Indeed, the music seems to
have evolved from a purely ceremonial piece into a full program work, whose content the
composer resumed in his late February letter to Valenti Ferro, and then developed first in an
unpublished draft in Spanish16, finally in the English prologue of the score published in 1980
by Boosey & Hawkes, where he also comments on the creative process: “My original thought
was to write a Fanfare, but as the work developed on my mind I felt that a tripartite form with
the duration of an overture was more appropriate. Thus IUBILUM was composed, a work in
three movements entitled Fanfare, Chorale, and Finale” (Ginastera, 1980, n.pag.).
Endorsing Valenti Ferro’s idea of a fanfare as his own and stressing an unexpected
change of genre amounted to say that the work was a truly creative endeavor, rather than a
simple answer to an official commission – a thing always suspect of opportunism or
superficiality. But more surprising is that all the written versions of the program depict three
different, peaceful, and quite unrelated moods, which can best be rendered perhaps by nouns
such as: solemnity, introspection, joy. Yet, the music unfolds in time as a unique and coherent
narrative, namely a story about the violent founding of Buenos Aires in 1580. In short, the
music with the program does not have the same meaning than the music without it. To a
certain extent, each way of listening to the piece contradicts the other; Iubilum is a musical
myth that its own program ignores and even negates, for political and historical reasons that -
as the study of its reception makes clear later in this essay- go straight to the heart of the 1980
commemoration of the Cuarto Centenario by the Argentine dictatorship.

Sketches for Catholic Joy

The sketches for Iubilum op. 51, at the Ginastera Collection of the Paul Sacher
Stiftung in Basel, consist in 18 manuscript pages, with no dates, nor other contextual
indications. Twelve of them, including nine numbered 1 to 9 and three others ordered with the
letters a, b, c, anticipate quite precisely the materials of the first movement of the score, even
if in a different ordering; another four, with no explicit order, are preparatory materials for the
second movement, with a focus on harmonic and serial structure; the two others deal with the
Finale in a rather cursory way, congruently with Ginastera’s shipping the first and second
movement at the end of February “so that Calderón can begin to study them”, while the third
was to be send later17. Yet these two last pages allow among other things for a precise
sourcing of the plainchant melodies used by the composer to forge the “single theme, with the
sense of an alleluia” on which the works culminates.
The whole set of sketches gives interesting hints about the title. The very first for the
Fanfare is already entitled Iubilum, Latin for Joy, and contains other verbal indications, such
as Celebración sinfónica en tres partes. Even if the word Iubilum does have a liturgical
dimension, for instance as the incipit of Psalm n°100 Jubilate Deo [O be Joyful in the Lord!],

14
RGL [Raúl García Luna], “El metal de Ginastera”, Somos, 18 April 1980, pp. 46-47.
15
“Segunda Fundación…”, Crónica, 25 May 1979.
16
“Werkeinführung”, Iubilum op. 51, PSS, Alberto Ginastera Collection, MF 260.1.
17
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 26 February 1980.

5
as a noun it does not seem to be a quote. Now, a fanfare can surely be a joyful music, yet its
principal function, from the sixteenth century up to at least Copland’s Fanfare for the
Common man (1942), to say nothing of film and media music, was not to express joy, but
rather to express power (Brownrigg & Meech, 2002). Joy, on the other hand, has been a
topical emotion in Western music from plainchant alleluias, through Handel’s Hallelujah, up
to Beethoven’s secular Ode to Joy, and beyond. But with a title in Latin, and as the
commemoration of a 1580 event, it sounds indeed as an alleluia in the Christian, pre-
Conciliar tradition. All that suggests that the composer wrote the sketches for the Fanfare
with the Finale already in mind, and that the title of the work derives from its ending, as
summing up the feeling aroused by the commemorated event, namely joy – Catholic joy.
For that reason, it is worth discussing first the two sketches for the Finale, a fast
movement consisting in a rather simple sequence of orchestrations of a plainchant-like
melody culminating in a D major, largo, coda. In the first one (reproduced below, line 6),
Ginastera writes “ritornello ostinato cum Alleluiatici”, this last Latin word meaning “a kind of
antiphon specific to the Hispanic liturgy, where the Alleluia can appear at any moment of the
piece” (Wikipedia). This idea was not retained, for in the score the successive versions of the
theme are separated by very short interludes, while an alleluia is only evoked at the end. As
for the ritornello theme, the sources are clearly indicated in the sketch, together with other
unused melodic materials (lines 1-4):

6
 The plainchant melodies, some of them set to a Latin text, are identified as “132
Suñol”, “140 Suñol”, “id 120”, “Suñol 118”. This refers to pages of a book by Gregorio Suñol
y Baulenas (1879-1946), a Benedictine monk from the Monserrat convent: the Método
completo de canto gregoriano según la escuela de Solesmes, first published in French in
1905, and translated and reedited many times until at least 195718. The source for the first
melody, letting aside the metrical writing, some missing notes, and the flattening of B in bar
4, is this Alleluia reproduced by Suñol (1943, n.pag):

This melody was not used in the Finale, and neither was that on Cantate Domino, line
2 in the sketch. But the Laudate Dominum de caelis in line 3, which appears in Suñol (1943,

18
While it has not been possible to identify the edition of Suñol’s book used by Ginastera, the distance between
the pages numbers in his sketch fits regularly with those of the first French edition (1927) and the eighth Spanish
edition (1943).

7
122) written in neumes in a pedagogical section on “composite rhythms”, was the basis for its
main theme:

This corresponds to an incipit for Psalm 148 included in a chant for the Seventh
Sunday in several medieval manuscripts, for instance an Antiphonarium Benedictinum from
circa 140019. Yet, Suñol does not mention his own sources, so that for Ginastera this melody
probably did not have a specific liturgical meaning, beyond the general idea of the text:
Praise ye the Lord from the heavens. Now, as the sketch makes clear (lines 4 to 6), his own
theme is not exactly this chant alone, but a montage made of it, with the Dorian mode altered
by the sharpening of F and without the final note, and of a short D major fragment on the
words gloria tua (Suñol, 1943, 120). Set in instrumental fashion to uneven durations, it
becomes an “authentic” theme by Ginastera, whose elaboration throughout the movement
makes good use of his dissonant, yet tonal, harmonic style; of his insistent motoric rhythms;
and of his rich orchestral palette.
The same sketch (line 7) indicates two series of orchestral colors: a first one in black,
barred perhaps as the work progressed, and a second one in red, probably added later, which
together form the additive sequence of the definitive score. By introducing the bells
(campane) in the Largo coda, Ginastera clearly reinforced the religious meaning of the end,
precisely at the point where the score features, for once complete in its original Dorian mode,
Suñol’s excerpt on Laudate Dominum de Caelis. In his Spanish draft for the prologue,
Ginastera writes that at this point the ostinato phrase appears at the orchestra “under its true
form of a Gregorian sequence (‘Laudate Dominum de caelis. Alleluia’), with which the works
comes to an end”20. Now, in Suñol the word Alleluia does not follow the words de caelis; in
Ginastera’s second sketch for the last movement (lines 7 to 9), it is set to an elaboration of the
gloria tua motif, as if it was an inaudible comment on the ending. Thus, what Ginastera calls
the “true form” of the theme is also a montage, as was already his main theme proper itself;
whatever “true form” is here at stake, it is not that of History.
At bar 199 of the score, against a descending set of seven notes in the glockenspiel, a
new ascending, pentatonic theme emerges in the bells and the celesta. Together they form a
twelve-tone row; the second sketch shows them written down one after the other (line 7):

19
See http://cantusdatabase.org (accessed 8 July 2014).
20
Iubilum op. 51, Werkeinführung, in PSS, Alberto Ginastera Collection, MF 260.1.

8
 The bells being rather noisy instruments, this pentatonic theme, repeated three times,
strongly marks the blowing last cadence by the full orchestra. Yet, it sounds more as a colour
added to the final D major chord than as a melodic motif with a meaning of its own. This
ambiguity reveals important questions about the work as a whole, and in particular about its
beginning, to which we can turn now. For, in this piece about the founding of Buenos Aires
that ends with a Catholic celebration in the Finale, it has to do with the representation of the
Indians - the first, Pagan victims in the history of the city.

A History of Violence

Ginastera’s program in Spanish ends with the following sentence about the Finale:

This final sequence, together with the pentatonic kechua (sic) theme with which
“Iubilum” begins, symbolize (sic) the eternity and the universality of my city, Buenos
Aires.21

It is unclear whether for Ginastera the symbol of “the eternity and the universality” of
Buenos Aires lies in the final cadence only, when the pentatonic theme and the plainchant
theme are heard together synchronically, or in the diachronic relationship between the
beginning and the end of the work. In the first case, if the pentatonic scale of the Finale is
meant as a trace of the initial “pentatonic kechua theme”, the fact that it is here played in D

21
Iubilum op. 51, Werkeinführung, PSS, Ginastera Collection, MF 260.1.

9
major by the bells, the Christian instrument par excellence that had just taken over the
Laudate melody, suggests that the Indians are entitled to eternity and universality in Christian
clothes, i.e. as a result of evangelization. In the second case, if the expression “pentatonic
kechua theme” refers only to the first theme of the Fanfare rather than to pentatonic themes in
general –for the last melody at the bells is definitely not like the one with which the work
begins-, Ginastera’s statement is complicated by the fact the theme in question is not
pentatonic at all. This is a mistake he must have later realized, for in the English prologue to
the score the sentence reads only: “The final sequence, together with the theme, Kechua, with
which IUBILUM starts, symbolizes (sic) the character of the city of my birth, Buenos Aires”.
Yet it can also be argued that in Iubilum Ginastera pictured the Indians in two different
ways, namely pentatonicism at the bells in the end, and the “kechua theme” at the horns in the
beginning. The plausibility of the first code lies in the fact that pentatonic scales were the
topical representation of indigenous cultures in Latin-American art music since at least the
early twentieth century, one abundantly used, among many composers, by Pascual de Rogatis,
Enrique Casella, Carlos Chávez, Teodoro Valcárcel and, for that matter, Ginastera himself,
since his early Impresiones de la puna (1934) (Kuss, 1974; Stevenson, 1993; Béhague, 2006;
Velasco Pufleau, 2009). Of course, this topic was to some extent grounded in actual
archaeological and historical documentation on Inca music and its quechua language, as
presented by scholars such as Charles Mead (1924), Raoul and Marguerite d’Harcourt (1925),
Carlos Vega (1937), and Robert Stevenson (1959), whose work is in fact often more nuanced
than the popular view. And the iconic status, for Latin-American indigenous cultures as a
whole, of the Inca empire conquered by Pizarro, adding to the existence of this important
literature about Inca music which in turn contrasted with the lack of traces of any querandí
music, might explain why Ginastera spoke of “kechua” in a work about Buenos Aires, distant
several thousand kilometers from the Inca territories.
Now, to turn to what he calls the “kechua theme”, let’s say first that the Fanfare is
articulated in three moments, starting with a slow, bi-thematic solenne section, which after a
first cadence in D major gives way to an allegro (bar 29) that accelerates to become a vivo
(bar 73). Even if it is not pentatonic, the initial atmosphere of the work is also topical for a
local kind of primitivism that, initially derived from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, had irrigated
Latin-American art music for decades, often taking advantage of modernist expressive
resources such as huge percussion sets and non-tonal scales, as in other Ginastera pieces like
Cantata para América mágica (1960) (Heister, [1984] 2006). Indeed, the first theme of
Iubilum is not unlike that of his 1947 symphonic poem Ollantay, an Inca tale based on a book
by nationalist and indigenist Argentine writer Ricardo Rojas – and that might well have been
still another reason to call it “kechua”. With these precedents in mind, the beginning of
Iubilum is recognizable as a representation of Indian cultures even without the composer’s
openly labeling it “kechua”. Indeed, Iubilum stands as a musical narrative thanks to its sole
topical vocabulary (Monelle, 2006).
The sketches show that Ginastera started working on the score by fully elaborating the
first theme, based in the F-C interval, always played by the four horns, ornamented with
increasingly dissonant grace notes, and completed by a closing motif at the timpani. In the
first two (out of three) variations sketched below, its pitch collection is F / Gb / G / A / Bb / B
/ C / D - eight notes, not five, to which the timpani add a ninth, namely E. Here is sketch
number 1:

10
 Contrary to the Suñol book for the chant melodies, Ginastera’s sketches do not
mention a source for the “kechua theme”. Strangely enough, aside for the Gb/F#, the pitch
collection of this theme is the same than that of the first Alleluia quoted in the first sketch for
the Finale (line 2). Since the conception of the Finale surely preceded the writing of the
Fanfare, it is not absurd to imagine an association between the two, in which case the artistic
representation of the Indians would be technically derived from actual Catholic liturgy. In that
case, the music would represent the victimized Other with the language of the victimizer Self,
including a foreign Gb/F# meant to accentuate the difference between the initial primitive
culture and the final Christian rejoicing.
This, though, remains a speculation22. To stay with source issues, it is worth noting
that Ginastera was a friend of American musicologist Robert Stevenson (1985), who in The
Music of Peru quotes Spanish Conquista descriptions of metal trumpets and percussions in
Inca ritual practices:

Silver, bronze, and copper trumpets sounded at all the principal shrines when
the Spaniards arrived. Catequil, an idol who dared “contest” Atahuallpa’s (sic)
right to supplant Huascar and for such temerity was later broken to pieces,
enjoyed in palmier days the praise of trompetas de plata baxa y metal.
Tantazoro, another favourite idol, commanded 14 trompetas de plata y cobre
22
The catalogue of the Ginastera Collection at the PSS distinguishes between a unique Entwurf of 16 pages for
the first and second movements, and two pages of Skizzen for the third. Even if this clear-cut distinction is open
to question, given among other things the intermediary status of the materials for the second movement, it does
suggest that the sketches for the third movement might have been written before those of the first. See Kuss &
Handschein, 1990, p. 23.

11
 which sounded bravely against the din of muy hermosos atambores (very
beautiful drums) for the celebration of his rites. … In general, metal trumpets
seem to have been preferred for shrines, conch for martial events gourd for the
imperial post, and skull for ‘folk’ festivals (Stevenson, 1959, 26).

“14 trompetas de plata y cobre which sounded bravely against the din of muy
hermosos atambores”: this may, or may not, correspond to actual Inca practices, but it does
fit with the opening of Iubilum. Except for the fact that here the “kechua theme” is not played
by the trumpets and the drums but by the horns and the timpani, whose sonority is surely
brave and beautiful, but milder and deeper, and perhaps closer to the imaginary sound of the
“conchs” for Inca “martial events”, than the Western military connotations of the trumpets
and drums of a modern symphonic orchestra.
This brings us to a crucial aspect of the first movement, namely its bi-thematic
structure. The introductory, solenne section, is a sequence of two separated, alternated phrases
(ABA’B’A’’). The sketches show that Ginastera worked first on the three versions of the
“kechua theme” at the horns, and only later on the two versions of the second theme at the
trumpets, whose emplacements are identified in sketch page 1 by the red letters x and y in bars
7 and 16. This second theme is elaborated in sketches a, b, and c, starting with lines 7-10 of a,
with the four trumpets playing muted ppp lontano, on a hexatonic collection D/E/F/G/A/B (b
and c show it varied and transposed a triton higher, i.e. on the complementary hexachord):

The dramatic contrast between the two themes is maximal: the horns and timpani play
long notes at a slow, non-measured tempo, and forte; the trumpets play fast, on triplets,
quintuplets and dotted rhythms, and they are heard from far away. If musical themes can
stand for characters, as often in program music since the nineteenth century, the meaning

12
seems pretty clear: two armies, the Indians and the Spaniards, are spatially perceived from the
geographical place where Buenos Aires will lie. The Indians were there first, but now the
Spaniards have arrived, and the section ends on a D major chord featuring for the first time a
military drum (cassa rullante). The setting is ready for the battle, which is the story of the rest
of the first movement, starting with the allegro deciso.
All this strongly suggests that Iubilum is a battle piece, or a battaglia, an ancient
music genre whose main convention is the picturing of two armies by way of contrasting
tunes, followed by that of their fight. This is sometimes completed by an evocation of the
defeated or the dead, and always by a celebration of victory. Coming after Jannequin’s La
guerre and Byrd’s The Battle, Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg is the paradigm of such a
narrative, with Rule Britannia in E flat major standing for the British army and Malborough
in C major for the French, and God save the King as the main theme of the final “victory”
symphony (Röder, 1989). The same applies, in a less straightforward way, to Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture and even to Stravinsky’s Ritual of the Rival Tribes from the Rite of Spring
(Buch, 2013a). The three-movements Ginastera’s op. 51 fits perfectly well into that genre
convention.
Yet, before discussing how Ginastera deals with war in the second part of the first
movement, let’s say that the fact that the piece is a battaglia goes not without saying. For one
thing, the first movement is called Fanfare, a genre that might have military connotations but
does not refer to war as such. Indeed, the bi-thematism of the battle contrasts with the mono-
thematism of the fanfare, related to its ceremonial function and still characteristic of its
modern, programmatic elaborations, such as Copland’s. In fact, some time after the first
performance of Iubilum op. 51, Ginastera will publish as a separated piece a Fanfare for Four
Trumpets in C opus 51a based in the trumpets’ material only, with no allusions to the horns’
“kechua theme”. And his descriptions of the fanfare of op. 51 never mention a battle:
“Fanfare is the first movement, in which the brass instruments prevail with both solemnity
and joyfulness, in accordance with the spirit of the occasion,” says the prologue of the score.
For him, war is clearly not “the spirit of the occasion”.
The contradiction between the title of Iubilum’s first movement and its musical
content is all but secondary, for it goes right at the heart of the commemoration, namely what
it means to celebrate a city’s founding that resulted from brutal, even genocidal, colonial war.
In other words, at stake here is the ethical problem of the foundational violence of the capital
of the Argentine nation-state.

The Memory of the Defeated

The musical war that follows the first solenne section at bar 29, allegro deciso, makes
use of other conventional traits of the battaglia, including a percussion rich in military
sonorities. The overall trajectory is a gradual intensification of dynamics, tempo, harmonic
rhythm, texture, and orchestral color, eventually leading to a long tutta forza climax in D
major (bars 81-88). While the woodwind, the strings and the percussion suggest emotional
tensions and particular events, thus contributing to tell a story in the classical sense of a series
of human actions, the brass remain associated with the two opposing dramatic characters,
namely horns versus trumpets as symbols of Indians versus Spaniards. Yet, also following
here the Beethoven model, the thematic material is not exactly that of the first section, for
while the trumpets make use of the same motifs as before, the horns elaborate on a new quart-
span, fast triplet motif. This similar velocity, requested to suggest the overall acceleration of
the events, also allows for an eventual blurring of the distinction between the two camps in
bars 46-48, where the whole brass section plays a twelve-note chord over a triplet motif. This

13
perhaps suggests that in the midst of a battle it is hard to distinguish the enemies, like in
Stendhal’s famous description of Fabrice at Waterloo.
The final phase of the war is the third, vivo section (mm. 74-87). Here sketches differ
from the score on an essential point. In the third measure of the second system of sketch page
5 (line 6), the horns start playing padiglioni in alto a theme that strongly resembles the first
“kechua theme”, be it not for the lack of grace notes, and also because in the last measure it
seems to lead to D, thus finally becoming pentatonic: F-G-A-C-D (line 10, last note):

Now, Ginastera indicates in the sketch that D should not be played by the four horns,
which indeed are busy sustaining the chord F-G-A-C, but by the trumpets. And this D, on
which the horns’ theme melodically climaxes, reveals itself to be the first pitch of another
five-note theme played by the trumpets, D-Eb-Gb-Ab-A, where A is the fifth of the final tutti
D major chord. This is apparent in the second system of sketch number 9 (line 9):

14
 If a theme can ever reveal progressively its “true form”, as Ginastera said of the
Laudate theme, it might be said that the “kechua theme”, once deemed “pentatonic” by him
even if it was not, reaches its “true” pentatonic form precisely at the point where it ceases to
be itself, for it endorses the instrument, i.e. the identity, of its enemy. And what the trumpets
play now is also a five-note theme, but one that, contrary to the anhemitonic indigenist cliché,
is now of a hemitonic kind, and whose ambitus D-A is the harmonic foundation of most royal
and military fanfares - the very chord of traditional Western power, D major.
Yet this is not how things go in Ginastera’s definitive version. In the edited score, the
horns do not give way to D, but to Db, or rather C#. Indeed, by writing the sequence C#-D#-
F#-G#-A at the trumpets over the sustained F-G-A-C chord at the horns, Ginastera makes
both readable and audible the final dissonant clash between the two dramatic characters. As
the first trumpet reaches the upper fifth of D major, the climactic cadence seals the victory of
the Spaniards over the Indians. This triumph is still underscored by dotted, martial rhythms,
and by the timpani that, contrary to the irregular, atonal motif of the opening section, blow
now on equal quintuplets the perfect triad of the tonic. For once, the fourth horn plays then a
D, but in a lower register, a lone body lost in the midst of the final explosion.
What is left after the battle? As the “metal solo!” indication in the sketch suggests, the
final chord is played by the brass, plus the woodwind and percussions, but without the strings.
Before the end of the first movement, imperceptibly, these have started ppp dolce a twelve-
tone chord, which actually belongs already into the second movement, Chorale. The score
says here Adagio elegiaco, making clear its role in Iubilum’s narrative. This elegy, played
pianissimo through and through, is a succession of quasi-homophonic phrases by the strings,
the brass, and the woodwind. While the percussion is silent, each section succeeds the other
as separate blocks or choirs – hence the plural Spanish title, Corales. The harmonic language,
based on twelve-tone technique is particularly complex, and gives the piece an ethereal, yet
intriguing, quality (Fobes, 2006). At the end, the symmetrical expansion by thirds of a central

15
F5/G5 interval at the strings forms a dominant for the final cadence on C major, where the
three “choirs” reunite across the whole audible spectrum, before vanishing into silence.
The title of the movement, Chorale, alludes to a religious genre. Yet, contrary to the
third movement, the melodic material has no relationship with plainchant, or to other
Christian rituals, like funeral marches. No “Indian” elements are present, either. While
elsewhere in Iubilum the two cultures are clearly identified, the elegy alludes to vocal music
as representing a kind of universal mourning – even if its stylistic background remains the
Bachian choral tradition, maybe the West’s favorite musical incarnation of the idea of
universal spirituality.
In this epic story about the founding of Buenos Aires, coming after a battle scene and
before an Alleluia, the Adagio elegiaco brings forth the question: if the second movement is a
kind of musical memorial, what dead are to be remembered? The first that come to mind are
of course the fallen during the battle that has just been represented in the music. And while
these people must have been mostly Indians, given the result, it is known that in any war even
the winner has losses. Actually, in the sixteenth century the Río de la Plata was a dangerous
place for everyone, including the conquistador Juan de Garay himself. Thus, an ecumenical
memorial, colored with the humanism inherent to the notion of a plurality of instrumental
choirs, fits well with the rest of the work’s narrative, and introduces in it a moral concern for
the equality before death of all human beings, regardless of race and faith (Buch, 2012;
Rocher, 2013).
Yet, here again, Ginastera’s writings are at odds with what the music seems to be
saying. The English prologue makes no mention of any mourning or memorial dimension,
and the word “elegiac” appears in the score only as qualifying the Adagio: “Chorale is a slow
movement, the theme of which is successively revealed by the muted strings, the brass and
the woodwinds as separate instrumental choirs that are eventually united.” If that sheds some
light on the orchestration, it also omits all allusion to people, dead or alive. Things were
different in the earlier version in Spanish, which added: “It is a meditation, or an elegiac
remembering, for all these men and women who forged our city with their work and love”.
Yet, the text makes clear that these people did not fall in the war, but lived and died in Buenos
Aires at an unspecified time after 1580. Thus, while replacing it either by a discourse on the
city as a whole or by a purely formal description, the composer seems to turn his back to his
own narrative on the founding event, to favor a depiction of Buenos Aires as the place of the
harmonic and lasting encounter of Indians and Spaniards, of Paganism and Christianity.
Coupled with a description of the first movement that makes no mention of war, this
confirms that in his verbal statements Ginastera systematically avoided addressing the
foundational violence that marked the history of the capital of the Argentine nation-state – a
violent historical event that at the same time the music he wrote under the title Iubilum
represents, mourns, and celebrates. Now, this is not to say that Ginastera’s program occults
the work’s “true” meaning, but rather, that the music and the program are different parts of a
complex aesthetic object that can afford different meanings, according to how they are
presented and performed in a given occasion, and also to the audience’s aesthetical and
political expectations and experiences. Now, in both cases Joy is the main signifier, for both
the music and the text picture it as emanating from an imaginary, collective voice, namely that
who “sings” the alleluia. A “symphonic celebration” it is, as the subtitle goes, and a Catholic
celebration at that. In a word: Iubilum.

“An Evident Call to National Communion”

16
 The world premiere of Iubilum took place on Saturday, 12 April 1980, as the opening
piece of the inaugural concert of the annual season of the Teatro Colón, “in support of the
celebration of the fourth centenary of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires”23. Even if
Ginastera has always spelled the title in its classic Latin form, in the program given to the
audience it is written Jubilum, following a medieval tradition that brings it closer to the
Spanish Júbilo. In this handout, the piece is presented by musicologist Pola Suárez Urtubey,
whose source, besides a short history of the fanfare from Josquin to Bizet, is clearly
Ginastera’s program in Spanish. This last is quoted by name several times, for instance on the
“pentatonic kechua theme” and the “Gregorian sequence” as symbols of “the eternity and
universality” of Buenos Aires; on the other hand, no mention is made of the elegiac character
of the second movement. Thus, not unusually in such circumstances, the audience was invited
to make sense of the work on the basis of what the composer wrote about it; the musicological
contextualization, following again Ginastera, associated Iubilum’s genre with the fanfare,
rather than with the battle piece.
The recording of the concert by the Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón conducted by
Bruno d’Astoli gives a good idea of how this eleven minutes work was performed that
evening24. Its technical quality, though, does not allow telling how it actually sounded in the
concert hall, especially from the spatial perspective. Overall, one gets the impression that if
the reading of the score was in general correct and persuasive, important features went
unheard or distorted. In the first movement, the grace notes of the “kechua theme” were
perhaps too slow to fully render its primitivist character, and the rhythm of its quasi-
pentatonic return padiglioni in alto is fuzzy, with a loss of intelligibility of the final clash in
the brass. The adagio was the most hazardous moment, due to problems of tempo,
articulation, and dynamics. The Finale, on the other hand, was well rendered, and the joyful
climax sounded convincing, if one judges by the recorded applause. Anyhow, the first
performance of a contemporary work seldom allows the audience to perceive technical
shortcomings, given the lack of references for comparison. No wonder that Iubilum’s first
performance was a warm, if uneventful, success, followed by Dvorak’s Cello Concerto and
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
We can speculate that, in this case as in many other performances of new works, the
main impact of Iubilum on the audience lied first of all in the emotional curve of its three-
parts structure, relying in both the first and the last movement –as often in Ginastera- on
powerful, quasi-orgasmic closing processes. Neither the performance nor the verbal
presentation of the work allowed for an easy perception of its actual musical semantics, aside
from the religious topic of the Finale and the vague notion that it had something to do with
the founding of Buenos Aires. On the other hand, the written text was not necessarily, either,
the key for its interpretation by the general audience. Overall, it is impossible to tell today
how the nearly 3.500 people who attended the concert actually perceived the work; and in
particular what relationship, if any, did they establish with the history of Buenos Aires or the
situation of the country. For one thing, no mention is made in the press or the correspondence
of the presence of “ambassadors and officials”, envisioned by the composer while working on
the score.
The music critics, though, did write on Iubilum (Schwarz-Kates, 2010: 88). The
reviews for Ginastera’s new piece were good, even enthusiastic, as were Aurora Nátola’s for
the Dvorak; d’Astoli’s and the orchestra’s were in general not so good. The concert was of
course taken as a concert, rather than as a commemoration, and the comments followed the
conventions of music criticism. That being said, the seven known texts published on Iubilum
took all into consideration its theme and content, together with the fact that it was
23
Program for the concert of 12 April 1980. Teatro Colón Archives, Buenos Aires.
24
Sound recording of the first performance of Iubilum, 12 April 1980. Teatro Colón Archives.

17
commissioned by the Teatro Colón. In Criterio, a magazine close to the Catholic church,
Emilio Giménez was enthusiastic about this last point: “It’s a good and stimulating thing that
the authorities decide to associate the arts, music in this case, to the most relevant events”, he
said, adding that the result “is far beyond, or far above, one of these pieces essentially
circumstantial, pretty or ‘effective’, which more often than not result from commissions of
this kind. On the contrary, Iubilum is a work whose destiny is to live on, to last”25.
This last will be an unfulfilled prophecy, since Iubilum -except for a 1980 LP by the
Louisville Orchestra and Akira Endo- has seldom been heard anywhere in the world since its
premiere in Buenos Aires. Now, the contradiction of applauding the authorities for
commissioning artworks whose very function dooms them to be often aesthetical failures is
blatant. The blame, though, should not be put personally on the critic, but rather on the
institutional frame. The tension is strong between the autonomy principle that governs the
liberal ideology of art music on one side, and the “enlightened” principle of a State that
integrates the arts into the building of the nation on the other. Yet these two things can and are
in fact articulated in different ways, in democratic states as in terrorist dictatorships – even if
in the history of the Argentine regime the commission to Ginastera stands as an exception,
rather than as an example.
The critics hailed both Iubilum’s artistic achievement and its historical significance.
They did so mostly by elaborating on Ginastera’s own ideas as quoted by Suárez Urtubey,
while of course adding something of their own. The same Giménez, writing for the
conservative daily La Nación, described the three movements up to the Laudate apotheosis,
before commenting: “The diversity of elements -there is a quechua theme at the beginning-
acquires symbolic value –the melting pot [crisol de razas] leads to unity-”26. This
corresponded to the composer’s vision of the Indian and the Christian themes forging together
the symbol of “the eternity and universality” of Buenos Aires, while associating it with this
crisol de razas that had been since the nineteenth century the keyword of a narrative on the
Argentine nation as the melting pot of “European races”, or immigrants (Segato, 2002). Its
mention by La Nación in 1980 amounted, very much in the line of the government’s policies
on these matters, to both acknowledging the historical existence of an Indian “element” and
pleading for its merging into a unified national identity.
A similar idea appears in Somos, a political magazine especially close to the regime,
where one can read that “Iubilum is the harmonic convergence of the three sources that
represent the national character: to the basic scale of the five quechua sounds, which recall
Ginastera’s love of the earth in Impresiones de la Puna, are added pianissimo typical military
sounds, and a Debussy-like festive echo, with a strong influence of religious choirs. A
difficult, perfect, and –as Ginastera wanted it- moving synthesis”27. For Raúl García Luna, by
showing the “harmonic convergence” of the territory, the army, and religion in the “national
character”, Ginastera’s music appears as totally coherent with the ideology of the military
dictatorship.
Still a variant of this appears in the review by Napoleón Cabrera for Clarín, the
country’s most read newspaper: “Telluric roots, sonic and religious tradition, and an evident
call to national communion are reunited in Jubilum, an exciting proclamation for an Argentina
more dreamed than lived. Not only poets, but also artists and composers celebrate and
proclaim, some times in a more lasting way”28. An artwork meant to incarnate and produce a
kind of “national communion”: the Wagnerian tradition, latent in the aborted project of

25
[Emilio Giménez], “Orquesta estable del Colón”, Criterio, 24 April 1980.
26
[Emilio Giménez], “Bella obra de Alberto Ginastera y gran labor de Aurora Nátola”, La Nación, 14 April
1980.
27
RGL [Raúl García Luna], “El metal de Ginastera”, Somos, 18 April 1980, pp. 46-47.
28
Napoleón Cabrera, “Ginastera y su música para el país”, Clarín, 15 April 1980.

18
playing fanfares in the hall of the Teatro Colón, seems here fully realized, at least in the mind
of the critic. And the conservative spirit of his dream is also a technical issue, for Cabrera is
happy that in this score “everything is clearly written, with notes (it seems obvious but now it
is not anymore), without appealing to these sound resources so frequent in this last decades”,
like “aleatory sections, etc.” Never mind if Ginastera himself had often used aleatory
techniques; for the critic of Clarín, his new piece is both a celebration and a proclamation of
the national values of tradition and conservatism.
Thus, Iubilum is generally taken as a musical symbol of the Argentine nation, without
any reference to the founding of Buenos Aires in 1580. In La Razón, the anonymous reviewer
did comment favorably, if mysteriously, on “a modern language that does not disdain to dig
into the archaic suggestions provided by the spirit of the commemoration”29, while in The
Buenos Aires Herald –the only newspaper which at the time objected to the regime’s policy
on human rights- Fred Marey spoke of “music of enormous vitality which makes its point –its
three different, although related points- convincingly”, yet without saying what these points
were30. Only in La Prensa “L.M.H.” explained that Ginastera “made without historical
meaning, that is, avoided to evocate folk music ant stuff like that” [folklore y otras yerbas],
yet managed in some moments of the Fanfare, “with second intervals, especially in the brass
and the woodwind, to give the strange feeling of the moment of the event, of the encounter,
that we commemorate”31. This mention of dissonant harmonies as a hint on the spirit of the
1580 “encounter”, obscured by its strange exclusion from the historical realm, is the only
trace of a decoding of the musical battle narrative by the critics.
To sum up, responding to the project conceived by Valenti Ferro and realized by
Ginastera, the critical reception of Iubilum was well tuned to the regime’s ideology. And it
must be stressed that the critics reacted more to what the composer said than to what his
music says. This is obvious in García Luna’s mentioning Impresiones de la Puna, a work that
uses pentatonic melodies as Iubilum supposedly does according to the program, but contrary
to its actual score. And this is also apparent in the fact that, following what Ginastera did not
say, nobody speaks of violence, to say nothing of genocide. In that respect at least, the
reaction of the music critics is fully coherent with the general attitude of the press backing the
dictatorship both by commenting its policies and by not commenting its crimes, and rejoicing
with the military when they announced that, now that the “dirty war” had been won by the
heroic Argentine Armed Forces, the time had come to “win the peace” (Palermo and Novaro,
2003; Carassai, 2013).

Conclusion: A State Ode to Joy?

In 1980, the genocidal aspect of the Conquest of America, of which the founding of
Buenos Aires was but a minor, peripheral chapter, was far from being a public concern; on the
contrary, the Hispanist narrative taught to every Argentine child from elementary school on
was hegemonic, even common sense. Had not been Columbus a true hero? Was not the
founding of Buenos Aires, regardless of its violent side, something to be celebrated? How
could any Argentinian negate the positive value of this historical event without at the same
time negating that of the very existence of the country? From that point of view, as a narrative
Iubilum was not the exception, but rather the norm. Only later, towards the end of the
dictatorship, and precisely as a consequence of the general acknowledgment of its genocidal
dimension, would the Indians begin to be considered as victims, rather than as Others:

29
“Triunfal recepción en el Colón al ‘Jubilum’ op.51 de Alberto Ginastera y a la actuación de Aurora Nátola”,
La Razón, 15 April 1980.
30
Fred Marey, “Music in Buenos Aires”, The Buenos Aires Herald, 18 April 1980.
31
L.M.H., “ ‘Jubilum’ de Ginastera, dirigido por d’Astoli”, La Prensa, 16 April 1980.

19
“Perhaps the Indians were the desaparecidos of 1879?”, wrote in 1982 the exile novelist and
literary critic David Viñas (1982, 12)32.
Now, Ginastera, for one, could not be suspected of personally approving the
destruction of indigenous cultures. From the ballet Panambí opus 1 (1937) up to his
unfinished Popol Vuh opus 44, en passant by Ollantay opus 17 (1947), by his famous Cantata
para América mágica opus 27 (1960) and by his Puneña n°2 for cello (1976), his catalogue is
full of indigenist works (Suárez Urtubey, 1967; Sottile, 2007; Schwarz-Kates, 2010). And to
these might apply what Gérard Béhague (2006: 36) said of early musical indigenism: “No one
can deny that from an ethnological viewpoint this appropriation was very shallow, yet from a
historical/intellectual perspective Indianism served a very useful political purpose. Later Latin
American generations have recognized that early modernist movements were beneficial to the
region in that they called the attention of urban artists and intellectuals to the contrasting
cultural elements of national heritage in their respective countries”.
At the same time, Ginastera was a Catholic, and the founder in 1958 of the music
department of the Universidad Católica Argentina, whose rector, archbishop Octavio Derisi,
will become in time the confessor of general Videla (Rodríguez & Ruvituso, 2012).
Plainchant- and Palestrina-inspired works are also prominent in his catalogue, like Salmo CL
(1938), Hieremiae Prophetae Lamentationes (1946) and Turbae (1974), to which one can add
strong Catholic elements in his operas, especially Don Rodrigo (1964). Yet, up to Iubilum
op. 51, the Indian and the Catholic themes had remained like separated tracks of his creative
endeavor. Only the commission by the Teatro Colón made up their encounter for a musical
narrative on the clash between the two cultures; only the intervention of the Argentine State
led him, despite the mourning that his narrative includes, to celebrate the triumph of Hispanic
Christianity over indigenous cultures. And this “symphonic celebration”, intended as a public
representation of the history of the country, took in the Finale the shape of an imaginary
collective, unified voice, a voice symbolically close to that of the community itself, as in a
Christian kind of national anthem (Buch, 2013b).
This did not amount to actively endorse the massacre of the Indians, to whom his
verbal program grants an access to “eternity”, while denying the violence that allowed it in
the first place. Perhaps, if he ever gave it a thought, he considered violence as a necessary
evil, as many Argentinians actually did during the “dirty war”. In any case, the emphasis he
put on religion was not common sense at the time, for Argentina had remained throughout its
history, beyond an influence of the Church regularly reinforced under military rule, a secular
Republic. Thus, it can be argued that, beyond the visceral anti-Peronism that led him close to
the global orientation of the regime, and beyond the obvious narcissistic reasons that moved
him to accept official honors, in 1980 Ginastera created in Iubilum the ode to joy of the
dictatorial State.

Esteban Buch
CRAL/EHESS

Reference List

Sources

32
The word desaparecidos is emphasized in the original.

20
Ginastera, A., Iubilum op. 51, Particell (Entwurf) von Satz 1 und 2 (16 pp.), Paul Sacher Stiftung - Sammlung
Alberto Ginastera (PSS-SAG), MF120.
Ginastera, A., Iubilum op. 51, Skizzen zu Satz 3 (2 p.), PSS-SAG, MF120.
Ginastera, A. Iubilum op. 51, Partitur (Reinschrift), PSS-SAG, MF120.
Ginastera, A., 1980. Iubilum. Symphonic Celebration op. 51. New York: Boosey & Hawkes.

Ginastera, A., Werkeinführung [Spanish and English versions], Iubilum op. 51, PSS-SAG, MF 260.1.

Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 9 January1979, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1.

Enzo Valenti Ferro to Alberto Ginastera, 5 March 1979, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1.
Roberto Barry to Alberto Ginastera, 5 April 1979, PSS-SAG, MF 281.1
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 15 August 1979, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1
Enzo Valenti Ferro to Alberto Ginastera, 29 August 1979, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1.
Alberto Ginastera to Georgina Ginastera, 29 January 1978, in Scalisi, 2012, 2126.
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 26 February 1980, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1
Alberto Ginastera to Enzo Valenti Ferro, 26 February 1980, PSS-SAG, MF 286.1.
Alberto Ginastera to Georgina Ginastera, 28 February 1980, in Scalisi, 2012, 2539.

Program for the concert of 12 April 1980. Teatro Colón Archives (TCA), Buenos Aires.
Sound recording of the first performance of Iubilum, concert of 12 April 1980. TCA.

Segunda Fundación: Obra de Ginastera, Crónica, 25 May 1979 (ed.vesp.).

Ginastera visitó al intendente, La Nación, 28 May 1979.
[Emilio Giménez], Bella obra de Alberto Ginastera y gran labor de Aurora Nátola, La Nación, 14 April 1980.
Napoleón Cabrera, Ginastera y su música para el país, Clarín, 15 April 1980.
RGL [Raúl García Luna], El metal de Ginastera, Somos, 18 April 1980, pp. 46-47.
[An.], Triunfal recepción en el Colón al ‘Jubilum’ op.51 de Alberto Ginastera y a la actuación de Aurora Nátola,
La Razón, 15 April 1980.
L.M.H., “ ‘Jubilum’ de Ginastera, dirigido por d’Astoli”, La Prensa, 16 April 1980.
Walter Thiers, Alberto Ginastera : Carisma de un creador, Télam, 17 April 1980 [?].
Fred Marey, “Music in Buenos Aires”, The Buenos Aires Herald, 18 April 1980.
[Emilio Giménez], Orquesta estable del Colón, Criterio, 24 April 1980.
Fue inaugurado ayer el monumento al Quijote, La Nación Internacional, 16 June 1980.

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