Influences of Béla Bartók’s Piano Compositions on Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Music

Abstract

This study seeks to reveal the musical relationship between Bartók’s and Ginastera’s piano compositions, showing stylistic conceptualizations of twentieth-century Western art music which held many interesting musical aspects, specifically in the classical piano repertoire. This musicological research employs stylistic analysis and theoretical analysis to shed some light on Bartók’s and Ginastera’s piano music vocabulary. Following this methodology, it is revealed that Ginastera’s compositional language was very much influenced by the highly unique characteristics of Bartók’s. Such characteristics include the axial system, Bulgarian peasant rhythmic dance, bi-modality, intervallic cell (Z-cell, 0167), hexachordal sets of octatonic collections, the symmetrical old Hungarian pentatonic scale, polychord, quartal chords, hammering-percussive piano style, secundal chords based on ostinato, and many others. In light of this, one may propose that Ginastera’s compositional strategies in piano music were heavily influenced by Bartók’s rhythmic and harmonic idioms, which contributed to the creation of an innovative musical craft.