Juan Carlos Paz (5 August 1897 – 26 August 1972) was an Argentine composer and

music theorist Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the " rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (k ...

. Paz was born in

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

, either in 1897 or in 1901, where he studied piano with Roberto Nery and composition with Constantino Gaito and Eduardo Fornarini. He also studied organ with Jules Beyer, and then travelled to Paris to work with

Vincent d'Indy Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy (; 27 March 18512 December 1931) was a French composer and teacher. His influence as a teacher, in particular, was considerable. He was a co-founder of the Schola Cantorum de Paris and also taught at the P ...

at the Schola Cantorum. On 22 October 1929, a shared enthusiasm for new musical developments caused him, together with

Juan José Castro Juan José Castro (March 7, 1895September 3, 1968) was an Argentine composer and conductor. Born in Avellaneda, Castro studied piano and violin under Manuel Posadas and composition under Eduardo Fornarini, in Buenos Aires. In the 1920s he was ...

and José María Castro, Gilardo Gilardi, and Jacobo Ficher, to form the Grupo renovación, with the aim of promoting the cause of modern music in Argentina. In 1936, Paz left the group to found his own concert series, the Conciertos de la Nueva Música. Paz was firmly opposed to the folkloristic approach to music that was widespread in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s. Opinions differ about his earliest compositional styles. According to one authority, in the 1920s and early 1930s, his music was post-Romantic, with influences from

César Franck César-Auguste Jean-Guillaume Hubert Franck (; 10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in modern-day Belgium. He was born in Liège (which at the time of his birth was pa ...

and Richard Strauss; another writer describes this same period (1920–27) as characterized by neoclassical polyphony. The former author regards Igor Stravinsky's neoclassicism and

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

as Paz's focus in the 1930s, whereas the latter describes his second period (1927–1934) as "marked by atonal melodic idiom and polytonal harmony". Both authors agree that in the 1930s he was investing the diverse styles and techniques prevalent worldwide at that time, and particularly Arnold Schoenberg's

twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...

, which Paz introduced to Argentina. He was particularly attracted by

Anton Webern Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...

's music, and from 1934 adopted twelve-tone writing, which he continued to use until 1950. Though he continued to maintain that Schoenberg's methods deserved to be better-known and understood, publishing in 1954 a book ''Arnold Schoenberg, o el fin de la era tonal'', he abandoned the technique in his own compositions, evolving a new experimental, highly structured idiom. In the mid-1960s, however, he gave up composing altogether. Paz's pupils included Susana Barón Superville who, like him, was a member of the Agrupación Nueva Música.

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Juan Carlos Paz
Biografías y Vidas

Latinoamérica Música * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Paz, Juan Carlos 1897 births 1972 deaths Musicians from Buenos Aires Argentine classical composers Schola Cantorum de Paris alumni Twelve-tone and serial composers Male classical composers 20th-century classical composers 20th-century male musicians

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