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His paternal grandfather, a sailor, and fisherman named Pantaleo (later Pantaleón) Piazzolla had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19 th century.
#Astor piazzolla biography full
But Piazzolla always stuck to his guns and remained tango’s foremost emissary to the world at large up until his death in 1992.Īstor Piazzolla, in full Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla, was born on March 11, 1921, Mar del Plata, Argentina, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Assunta Manetti. The complexity and ambition of Piazzolla’s oeuvre brought him enormous international acclaim, particularly in Europe and Latin America, but it also earned him the lasting enmity of many tango purists, who attacked him mercilessly for his supposed abandonment of tradition (and even helped drive him out of the country for several years). In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as “the world’s foremost composer of tango music”. Some of his devices could be downright experimental he wasn’t afraid of dissonance or abrupt shifts in tempo and meter, and he often composed segmented pieces with hugely contrasting moods that interrupted the normal flow and demanded the audience’s concentration. In Piazzolla’s hands, tango was no longer strictly a piece of dance music his compositions borrowed from jazz and classical forms, creating a whole new harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary made for the concert hall more than the ballroom (which was dubbed “nuevo tango”). But even more than Ellington, Piazzolla was also a virtuosic performer with a near-unparalleled mastery of his chosen instrument, the bandoneon, a large button accordion noted for its unwieldy size and difficult fingering system. Piazzolla’s place in Argentina’s greatest cultural export is roughly equivalent to that of Duke Ellington in jazz the genius composer who took an earthy, sensual, even disreputable folk music and elevated it into a sophisticated form of high art. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music.
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He was a major Latin American composer of the 20 th century. An Argentine musician, a virtuoso on the bandoneón (a square-built button accordion), who left traditional Latin American tango bands in 1955 to create a new tango that blended elements of jazz and classical music, Astor Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Assunta Manetti.