[Monday Notes No. 178] Vuelvo al sur is a song composed by the Argentinian musician Astor Piazzolla as the soundtrack for the film Sur, directed by Fernando Ezequiel Solanas. The 1988 film is about the return home of a former prisoner, but it also contains a severe critique of the Argentinian dictatorship, which had fallen a few years earlier.
Astor Piazzolla’s music is very original, mixing traditional Argentine tango with the sounds of jazz. In this sense, it is similar to bossa nova, which also arose from the meeting of jazz and traditional Brazilian music, samba in particular.
The diverse folk music traditions of South America thus met with jazz, giving rise to musical genres that are harmonically sophisticated but have immediate and singable melodies. A third example of the blending of jazz and popular music is Latin jazz, also called Salsa, which mixes jazz and Caribbean rhythms, particularly bolero and cha cha.
Returning to the music of Astor Piazzolla, the Mar del Plata-born composer was a virtuoso on the bandoneon, an instrument similar to the accordion but even more complex and difficult to play. In fact, in the accordion the right hand moves on a keyboard formed by a succession of black and white keys, similar to that of a piano, while the bandoneon has a series of buttons on either side.
In the bandoneon it is therefore more difficult to identify notes, as the buttons are all the same, while the piano keyboard allows one to distinguish at first glance between natural and altered sounds, sharps and flats. Both instruments also require considerable skill in operating the bellow, which passes air between the reeds producing the sound.
Accordion and bandoneon are fascinating instruments because they are played with the hands, but they reproduce through the bellows the nuances of a wind instrument as well as the human voice. They are therefore very lyrical instruments, perfect for playing poignant melodies.
Astor Piazzolla composed much more articulate and complex pieces than Vuelvo al Sur, mostly instrumental music. This piece is a song instead, embellished with lyrics by Fernando Solanas himself, the film’s director and screenwriter. The song is about a return home, like many travel songs typical of Central and South America.
For example, on this website we have already analyzed Vidala Triste by Gato Barbieri and Chan Chan by Compay Segundo. Both of these songs deal with the theme of travel and return.
For this analysis of Vuelvo al Sur I chose the original version of the song, performed by Roberto Goyeneche, the main actor in the film Sur. His performance places special emphasis on the words, being almost recited.
The verse of the song has a simple form of only eight measures. The chords follow one another in a classic circle of fourths, somewhat like what happens in songs such as Autumn Leaves by Jacques Prevert or Mi sono innamorato di te by Luigi Tenco.
After four verses, the song lingers for a long time on a single chord, G Minor. This stop creates great tension and prepares for the next reprise of the verse.
Vuelvo al Sur is thus a simple song, that is made more interesting by a very refined and ingenious introduction. The initial motif of the song is first repeated on a pair of neighboring chords, C#m and Cm. It is then repeated on the two chords Ebm and Dm, before returning to C#m, moving a descending minor third to Bbm, and finally arriving at the key of the song, G minor.
Thus, the introduction of the song is very ambiguous and suspenseful, and until the end it does not let you guess the true tonality of the song. As is often the case in a piece of music, these technical details are not enough to explain the magic of the whole. Melody, harmony, arrangement and words all blend to create something unique and unrepeatable. In this way, we also travel south to the Argentina of many years ago.
Until next Monday!