The Topos of the Guitar in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Argentina

Abstract

Regarded as the “national instrument,” the guitar pervades Argentine culture both as musical artifact and cultural emblem. Its image, whether literary, visual, or musical, has been consistently used by Argentine artists and intellectuals to evoke images of argentinidad, or Argentineness. The play of metonymies in which the guitar stands for Argentina, the Pampa, or a woman (who in turn signifies the motherland) is a recurrent feature in Argentine literature. No example can be more pertinent than Jorge Luis Borges's celebrated poem La guitarra, in which the instrument is represented as the shelter wherein the Pampa is hidden, and its music the key that enables the author to grasp its immensity. ... The image of the guitar is also one of the most significant topoi of the rhetoric of Argentine musical nationalism, ranging from the relatively direct, iconic evocations of strummed and plucked accompaniments employed by early nationalist composers, such as Alberto Williams and Julián Aguirre, to the more abstract “symbolic chord” formed by the sounds of the open strings of the guitar (E–A–d–g–b–e′) that became one of Alberto Ginastera's trademarks.2