Compositional Style
Guastavino's musical style marked a stark contrast with the works of his 20th-century Argentine contemporaries such as Alberto Ginastera and reveals the influence of European composers such as Albéniz, Granados, Rachmaninoff, Chabrier, Falla, Debussy, and Ravel, but also is clearly inherited from the luminaries of 19th-century Argentine nationalist composers, such as Alberto Williams, Ernesto Drangosch, Francisco Hargreaves, Eduardo García Mansilla and Julián Aguirre. Aguirre’s delicate and intimate piano writing is an especially evident influence on Guastavino. Guastavino's stylistic isolation from the modernist and avant-garde movements going on around him, and the self-consciously nationalist content of his songs made him a model for Argentine popular and folk musicians in the 1960s.
Guastavino published more than a hundred and fifty songs for voice and piano, numerous piano solo pieces, choral works, school songs, and chamber music. The poets whose works he set to music included Rafael Alberti, Leon Benaros, Hamlet Lima Quintana, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. A small number of his songs are settings of his own texts. His works for orchestra included Divertissement; fue una vez, commissioned by Colonel de Basil for his original Ballet Russe and premiered at the Teatro Colón, in Buenos Aires, in 1942; and Suite Argentina which was performed in London, Paris, Barcelona, and Havana by the Ballet Español of Isabel Lopez. He also wrote three Sonatas for guitar.
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