Gerardo Gandini’s Play with Allusions

Robert Schumann’s music represents a key source of non-original materials for an extended series of works that the Argentine composer Gerardo Gandini developed from the 1980s until the end of his creative career. Rsch: Escenas for piano and orchestra (1983–84), the first work in the series, reinterprets Schumann’s concept of cycle, emphasizing its fragmentary and self-reflexive nature. The work comprises fourteen brief numbers, twelve of which are derived from Schumann’s pieces. Concealed by their shared title (“Florestán,” in reference to one of Schumann’s alter egos), nos. 5 and 13 are based instead on paraphrased fragments drawn from Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Gandini’s rereading of these pieces, which he regarded as athematic, is characterized by a gestural conception of musical materials. By associating Schumann’s cycles with Schoenberg’s opus 11 in this way, Gandini extends his idea of the aesthetic availability of traditional materials into the twentieth century. Additional procedural allusions to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître enable Gandini to reaffirm his commitment to the modernist tradition while simultaneously maintaining an ironic distance from it. Drawing on concepts from Gérard Genette’s literary theory, the article argues that each element of this intertextual framework fulfills a specific function aimed at shaping an allusive tradition that extends, as “music about music,” to Gandini’s work itself. By incorporating his own work into a genealogy encompassing both nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, Gandini at the same time attained a distinctive position within Argentine music of his time.