Variation in Paulino Pereiro’s piano music: 'Variacións Beiras' (1990) and 'Branca, no desxeo das tebras' (2000)

Abstract

The Spanish composer Paulino Pereiro (born in A Coruña in 1957) is one of the leading figures in the concert music scene in Galicia since the 1980s, when he emerged as one of the founders of the Galician Association of Composers in 1987, which he chaired for a period of time. Pereiro boasts a catalogue of nearly 300 compositions. Among them, alongside about twenty orchestral works, his extensive chamber music production stands out, including 13 string quartets (1989-2019), as well as his piano repertoire, consisting of over 40 compositions. This piano music represents a clear example of the prevailing heterogeneity in his personal musical language, which draws from international folk traditions, jazz, the vast repertoire of past centuries, and atonality. This paper aims to explore Pereiro's extensive piano production through two highly representative solo works, both in terms of their length and the range of compositional techniques they display through their use of variation technique. An analytical methodological approach is applied, focusing on discursive articulation and harmony, utilizing Forte's Pitch-Class Set Theory.