Tango
The tango is a musical genre and a dance, characteristic of the Río de la Plata region and its area of influence, but mainly of the cities of Buenos Aires (in Argentina) and Montevideo (In uruguay). The writer Ernesto Sabato highlighted the condition of "hybrid" of tango. The poet Eduardo Giorlandini highlights its Afro-Rioplatense roots, with the gaucho, Spanish, Italian culture and the enormous ethnic diversity of the great wave of immigration that came mainly from Europe. The researcher Beatriz Crisorio says that "tango is debtor of multi-ethnic contributions, thanks to our colonial past (indigenous, African and Creole) and the successive immigration contribution". Since then it has remained one of the musical genres whose presence has become familiar throughout the world, as well as one of the best known.
Different investigations indicate six main musical styles that left their mark on tango: the Andalusian tango, the Cuban habanera, the candombe, the milonga, the mazurka and the European polka.
Tango revolutionized popular dance by introducing a sensual dance with an embraced couple that proposes a deep emotional relationship of each person with their own body and of the bodies of the dancers with each other. Referring to this relationship, Enrique Santos Discépolo, one of its greatest poets, defined tango as "a sad thought that is danced".
Musically it usually has a binary form (theme and chorus) or ternary (two parts to which a trio is added). Its interpretation can be carried out through a wide variety of instrumental formations, with a classical preponderance of the orchestra and the sextet of two bandoneons, two violins, piano and double bass. Without being exclusive, the bandoneon occupies a central place.
Many of the lyrics of their songs are written in a local River Plate slang called lunfardo and usually express the emotions and sadness felt by men and women from the town, especially "in the things of love".
In 1996 Argentina declared tango an integral part of its cultural heritage. On September 30, 2009, at the request of the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, UNESCO declared it Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (PCI).
Etymology
Its etymology has been and continues to be the subject of multiple theories and strong controversies. One of the fundamental works in this regard is the article by José Gobello Tango, controversial word (1976), which precisely highlights the controversial climate that the origin of the word gives rise to. The core of the passionate debate is essentially civilizing, since it focuses on determining the role played by indigenous, Latin American, African and European cultures in shaping expression. Reflecting on this civilizing bid, Gobello said in 1999:
Even today the specialists discuss whether the Spanish or African ingredients prevailed in the elaboration of the tango. The discussion is rather idle, because the Hispanic ingredients in question also had their share of black blood.José Gobello
The researcher Héctor Benedetti, in his essay "On the etymology of the word tango" (2001), he makes a detailed review of the various theories that have been formulated and the fate of each one. Theories about the origin of the word "tango" They date back to the 1914 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, in which it said that it came from the Latin tangere, a statement eliminated in later editions.
In 1957, historian Ricardo Rodríguez Molas investigated the languages of the slaves brought to Argentina, mainly belonging to ethnic groups from the Congo, the Gulf of Guinea and southern Sudan, and discovered the existence of the word &# 34;tango" to refer to "gathering places", used both in Africa and in colonial America. Rodríguez Molas then maintained that the word "tango" has African origin. Other words closely related to tango, such as "milonga" and "canyengue", are also of African origin.
Rodríguez Molas cites a denunciation from 1789, made by Manuel Warnes (then an official of the Buenos Aires council), in which the word "tango" to refer to the dance meetings of the slaves:
Do not allow such dances and together those of the tango, because in them it is nothing but the theft and the iniquity to live blacks freely and shake the yoke of slavery.
In Montevideo, at that time, the word "tango" was used with a similar meaning. The Uruguayan musicologist Lauro Ayestarán quoted in his founding work The music of Uruguay the resolution of the Cabildo de Montevideo of September 26, 1807 issued with the agreement of Governor Francisco Javier de Elio:
About tambosBlack dances. As for the dances of blacks, they are for all harmful reasons, they prohide absolutely, inside and outside the City, and that the one who contravenes the punishment of one month to the public works is imposed.Resolution of the Cabildo de Montevideo
in common agreement with Governor Francisco Javier Elío of September 26, 1807
Notably, the aforementioned provision of Viceroy De Elío was registered in the index of Chapter Acts using the term "tango". It is that in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata the terms "tango" and "tambo" were used as synonyms, to refer to the places where blacks danced.
Precisely from the widespread use as synonyms of the words "tambo" and "tango", the researcher Oscar Escalada, from the University of La Plata, maintains that the origin of the term is Quechua, from the word tanpu, Hispanicized by the Spanish conquerors as "tambo" and later used as a synonym for "tango".
It was those "tambos" or "tangos", already constituted in associations by ethnic origin of the Afro-Rioplatense community since slavery began to be abolished in 1813, from where the academies, milongas, pirigundines and canguelas arose, in which they would gradually form Tango in the second half of the XIX century.
With a different course, it has also been highlighted that the word "tango" It has existed in Andalusia since the middle of the XIX century, to designate a musical genre called flamenco tango or Andalusian tango, whose origin has been detected around 1823 in Cuba, in the black neighborhood of Havana. Flamenco tango, in turn, registers Afro-Cuban influences -particularly the habanera- and African ones. Both the habanera and the flamenco tango are among the genres that most influenced the appearance of tango as a musical genre.
Finally, taking into account the widespread use in the Río de la Plata since colonial times of the expressions "tambo-tango" and at the same time the expression "Andalusian tango", a double entry theory has been supported, which proposes that the word "tango" it was used in the Río de la Plata during the 18th and 19th centuries to designate the sites of the black dance, and then re-entered in the second half of the century XIX, from Cuba-Andalusia, this time to designate dance and the musical genre.
Radio Alphabet
The word "tango" was selected to represent the letter "T" in the globally used radio alphabet.
History
Geographic area
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Tango originated and is characteristic of some cities with river ports in Argentina and Uruguay, whose axis is the Río de la Plata, where the capitals of both countries are located, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but which extends to other cities with river ports in the region, including Rosario, an Argentine city in the Province of Santa Fe.
The joint presentation of Argentina and Uruguay before Unesco for the recognition of tango as intangible heritage of humanity reads:
Tango was born among the lower classes of both cities [Buenos Aires and Montevideo] as an expression originated from the fusion of elements of Afro-Bronze and Afro-Uruguayan cultures, authentic Creoles and European immigrants. As an artistic and cultural result of this hybridization process, tango is considered today as one of the main identitarian signs of the Rio de la Plata.Tango nomination form as an immaterial cultural heritage of humanity
There are various studies that aim to determine the precise geographical point in which tango appeared. Some sources maintain that it arose first in Buenos Aires, others in its suburban surroundings, in Montevideo and even Rosario. Cities surrounding Buenos Aires such as Avellaneda and Sarandí, which made up the suburb known as Barracas al Sud , also record ancient tango antecedents.
The port cities where tango was developed were not only the points where millions of immigrants entered Argentina and Uruguay between 1850 and 1930, but were also the export centers of the agro-livestock-export economic model that both countries organized in the second half of the XIX century.
Although its origins still dispute the coffee tables of tangueros, the prestige and recognition that it acquired internationally is not disputed.
Like all authentic artistic expression, tango unravels the inextricable human condition. Perhaps because of this truth, he lives in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, on the streets of Montevideo, in the academies of Japan, on the streets of Paris, and in the New York cultural centers.
Tango: music of social fusion
It is known that the slang for tango, lunfardo, is full of Italian and African expressions; that the tango rhythm and its nostalgic atmosphere have a close relationship with the Cuban habanera; and that "tango, milonga and candombe" are part of the same musical family with African roots and also with customs from the gauchos who migrated to the city. However, tango is not confused or derived from any dance or musical genre in particular. Ernesto Sabato said that above all things, tango is a hybrid, an original and new expression that derives from a gigantic and exceptional human mobilization. In the same sense, the musician Juan Carlos Cáceres has made the following description of the origin of tango:
In the origin of the tango there were three decisive black contributions: the origin of the Rio de la Plata, which is the candombe; the one from Cuba, which is the European counterpart converted into a Havana, and the milonga, native of Brazil, brought by the soldiers of the army of Urquiza, and that with time it would arrive on the banks of Buenos Aires. The three elements will be consolidated in tango. Then it will receive other contributions from immigration, until it becomes the first musical fruit of syncretism. Buenos Aires was the last port in the world: artists and sailors came to it with all the music gathered in the ports of the way. And the long stay of the ships in each port gave time for contact and exchange with the inhabitants.
The period in which tango appears is the second half of the 19th century, in the sociocultural framework of the great migratory waves of the most varied internal and external origins that the region received then, mainly men, a situation that will profoundly influence the the way of relating between men and women.
It was an eminently popular music, rejected and prohibited by the upper classes and the Catholic Church, which is why it developed in the poor neighborhoods of the suburbs (the suburbs), the ports, the brothels, the bodegones and the prisons, where immigrants and the local population, mostly descendants of indigenous people and African slaves, converged.
There the most diverse musical forms were freely fused (Uruguayan candombe, Buenos Aires candombe, payada, milonga, habanera, Andalusian tango, mazurka, polka, waltz, zarzuela, sainete, etc.), coming from the most diverse origins (Africans, gauchos, colonial Hispanics, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Andalusians, Cubans, etc.), to form the tango. It is estimated that the transition lasted around forty years to establish itself as a new musical genre, with its own identity, in the last decade of the 19th century.
The stages of tango
Historians of tango have defined major stylistic stages in the evolution of the genre, on which there is a generic consensus, although with considerable chronological variations.
In its origins, scholars distinguish a primitive, anonymous and popular stage, centered on the Afro-Rioplatense communities and on the "shores" (orillera) of the city, from a period of definition of the genre called Guardia Vieja, in which tango acquired its own identity, began to be recorded by professional musicians and reached a wide geographical and social diffusion. The Old Guard stage itself is usually subdivided into a gestation substage, located in the last two decades of the XIX century and a stage of stylistic definition, located in the first two decades of the XX century.
The Old Guard is followed by the New Guard or Decarean stage, in which tango reaches maturity, refinement and international diffusion. As a result of this evolution, tango reaches its so-called Golden Age, with its axis in the 1940s and part of the following.
After the golden age of tango, the definitions of stages or musical eras become more imprecise, speaking of "tango crisis", "avant-garde tango" and "new tango". In general lines, two great periods can be identified after the golden age: a first stage that can be called "piazzollian" and a second contemporary stage, which can be called "fusion tango".
For purely informational purposes and with only approximate dates and denominations, the Museo del Tango, managed by the National Tango Academy of the Argentine Republic, distinguishes the following stages and sub-stages of tango:
- Origins of the tango (before 1895)
- The Old Guard (1895-1925)
- I. Eclosion (1895-1909)
- II. The formalization (1910-1925)
- The New Guard (1925-1950)
- I. The Transformation (1925-1940)
- II. The Forty: exaltation (1940-1955)
- The vanguard: Modernization (1955-1970)
- Contemporary period (1970-2000)
- I. Universalization (1970-1985)
- II. Perduration (1985-2000)
- Current period (2000 thereafter)
The ancient Afro tango from the River Plate
The initial roots of the tango are found in the "tangos" and "candombes" of the slaves of African origin, when Buenos Aires and Montevideo were under the colonial rule of Spain. Since colonial times, it was called "tangos" » to the musical meetings of the communities of African origin of the Río de la Plata, formed as a result of the slave trade from what is now Angola, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea. Buenos Aires and Montevideo had been enabled by the Spanish Empire as ports for the "slave trade" and for that reason they had important Afro-Rioplatense communities, with their local peculiarities.
In 1813 the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata decreed the freedom of wombs (the children of slaves were free men) and from the war of independence against Spain, in the second decade of the 19th century, the abolition of slavery. By mid-century, this process was virtually complete. In Uruguay, slavery was definitively abolished in 1846 and in Argentina in 1853, but in Buenos Aires it was only abolished in 1860.
Until the middle of the XIX century, both in Argentina and Uruguay, the gaucho and the china predominated in the rural areas of the River Plate, while the communities of "black", "brown" and "mulatto" populations, of European, indigenous and African descent, were an important minority in the urban environment. From then on, the popular sectors of Buenos Aires and Montevideo saw millions of migrants converge in their cities, mostly men, of the most diverse ethnic groups and languages, mostly Italian and Spanish but also French, German, Polish, British, Russian, Armenian and Arabs as well as Jews from various countries, who came from the other side of the ocean. That urban revolution in which ethnic groups, cultures and languages converged, and in which "the blacks" were "the owners of the house", would lead to the emergence of tango. Daniel Vidart conceives of tango as an "estuary" into which different ethnic and cultural rivers flow.
At that time and in the face of this population "flood", the Afro-Rioplatense communities created more "academies", "milongas" or "canguelas" in the popular neighborhoods, which would serve as a meeting, dance and entertainment point for those millions of workers who converged in those port cities. There the "compadritos" converged, social descendants of the gauchos migrated to the city, the "Chinas" forcibly transferred after the "wars against the Indian" or in search of better living conditions than in their towns and overseas immigrants, like the Italians who would impose the name of "piringundines" to those places.
The oldest of the academies, the Academia de Pardos y Morenos de Buenos Aires, dates from approximately the beginning of the 1830s. Little by little the academies and milongas multiplied, related to the sale of drinks, the famous « quarters of the Chinese barracks" and the brothels, organized from 1870.
It was in those areas of intimacy between men and women that tango originated, from a very peculiar way of dancing: a couple closely linked in a sensual embrace, with their bodies and faces in contact, each dancer moving autonomously, but with the man "marking" and advancing on the woman, and the woman "responding" to the male marking.
The choreographic embrace was the first step towards the creation of tango. Taken from the waltz - which in the first half of the XIX century became fashionable while scandalizing the English upper classes Due to the indecency of the embracing couples- and the mazurka, the tango embrace brought the bodies and faces of the dancers into even closer contact. Thus embraced, the popular social types that created the tango, referred to by names such as "las negras", "las pardas", "las chinas", the "compadritos", the Creole "tano", would add to the dance the other choreographic elements that would characterize the canyengue tango, essentially the cut and the broken. The result was a sensual dance that would revolutionize the way of dancing throughout the world.
Gobello points out that the dance with these characteristics took shape after the defeat of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina in 1852, when candombe marches through the streets of the city were prohibited., the Afro-Argentine communities began to symbolize the cuts or arrests that they carried out in the marches and the corporal breaks that characterize the candombe, but this time linked as a couple. In Buenos Aires, in 1862, the arrest of four men and two women from a conventillo for being "dancing and throwing cuts" is documented.
In the following decades, this dance would search for a music and a rhythm that would sustain it, until reaching an original genre perfectly adapted to the new dance around the end of the century, both taking the name of "tango". For this reason, scholars They usually say that tango began as a dance and that "later it made way for singing".
In the academies or milongas, the women of the town, the “negras”, “mulatas”, “pardas” and “chinas”, played an important role in the origin of tango, especially as hostesses, choreographers and dancers. The historians Héctor and Luis Bates have highlighted that the woman who created tango as a dance did not obey the traditional passive role, but rather "were women with a league knife that they knew how to use well". "compadritos", a popular urban type defined as "the dismounted gaucho" and the musicians, who mostly belonged to black communities.
In Buenos Aires, around 1854, the Academia de la Parda Cármen Gómez appeared. The names are also remembered -many times in the lyrics of the tangos-, of dancers such as Morena Agustina, Clotilde Lemos, the brown Refucilo, Flora, Adelina, the Negra Rosa, María la Vasca, the mulatto María Celeste, the Ñata Aurora, the Ñata Rosaura, La Voladora, among many others. Among the men who created the tango, dancers like the blacks Cotongo and Benguela and the pianist Alejandro Vilela, known as the Pardo Alejandro are remembered. In Montevideo, the names of Parda Deolinda, the dancer Pintín Castellanos, Morena Sixta and Negro Hilario, singer, guitarist and payador.
Among those dancers and musicians from the academies the very first tango composers would begin to stand out. The violinist and dancer from Santiago, Casimiro Alcorta, known as el Negro Casimiro (1840-1913), freedman of the musician Amancio Alcorta, one of the first classical music composers in the country, would appear there at the beginning of the 1870s. Casimiro formed the first well-known tango ensemble, with the clarinetist Mulato Sinforoso, to which a guitarist would be added to correctly mark the bars and rhythm of the tango. They performed from the early 1870s to the early 1890s. It is believed that This duo was the author and performer of many of the first tangos that today appear as anonymous, since at that time the works were not usually signed. In the following decade, Casimiro will compose «Concha sucia», an initiation tango par excellence of the genre. He also formed a famous dance couple with his partner, la Paulina . José Gobello has considered him the father of tango.
In Buenos Aires the main neighborhoods where tango was born were San Telmo, Balvanera, Monserrat, La Boca -legend attributes the corner of Suárez and Necochea to be the birthplace of tango-, Barracas, San Cristóbal and Palermo. In Montevideo, tango settled in the defunct Yerbal street, in the southern neighborhood of the Old City and the Goes neighborhood.
Outside the circuit of the Afro-Rioplatense academies, in 1857, the Spanish musician Santiago Ramos expressed the decisive Andalusian contribution -which in turn recognizes Afro-Cuban and African roots-, by composing one of the first songs with a tango air that is known, «Toma mate, che», a proto-tango with lyrics from the River Plate and Andalusian-style musical arrangements. The theme was part of the work El gaucho de Buenos Aires, premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria. From those very first moments also comes the proto-tango "Bartolo had a flute" or simply "Bartolo", derived from a classic Andalusian melody from the XV century and the Montevidean candombe tangueado «El chicoba».
In 1874, the first Andalusian tango composed in Argentina, which achieved massive popular diffusion, has been documented. It is about «El queco» (slang for «brothel»), by the Andalusian pianist Eloísa de Silva, consecrated as the first composer of tangos and who would compose more than a hundred songs until her death in 1943, including several tangos. The song, in an open Andalusian style, refers in its lyrics to the "Chinas" (Argentine women of indigenous or African origin) who worked as prostitutes in brothels.
In 1876 a candombe called «tango» became very popular with the title «El merenguengué», which became a success in the carnivals of Buenos Aires that were celebrated in February of that year, organized by the black population. In 1877 the restaurant Lo de Hansen was inaugurated in Palermo, the first of a series of restaurants, cabarets and beer halls where tango was danced and which was also attended by young people from the upper classes.
By the late 1870s, tango (dance and music) had begun to take shape. Initially it had been very similar to the Cuban habanera and Andalusian tangos, without yet acquiring a defined personality. Singing was a neglected aspect and the singers also interpreted national styles, zambas and chacareras. When it was sung, it was sung as milongueado tango, with a rural-suburban accent and with a predominance of picaresque verses, which scandalized the high society of the River Plate.
The 1880s show a strong evolution of tango, which some authors consider as a sign of initiation of the so-called Old Guard, the gestation stage of tango, although others prefer to wait for a further evolution of the genre and the appearance of the first sheet music In this decade, the tango and the milonga are confused with each other, and both have begun to impose their predominance over the habanera. These are years in which tangos begin to multiply: «Señora casera» (anonymous, 1880), «Andate a la Recoleta" (anonymous, 1880), "El porteñito" (Gabriel Diez, 1880), "Tango no. 1" (José Machado, 1883), "Give me the can" (Juan Pérez, 1883), "What dust with so much wind" (Pedro M. Quijano, 1890).
In 1884 Casimiro Alcorta composed the oldest famous tango, «Concha sucia», with openly pornographic and brothel lyrics. Three decades later, Francisco Canaro would change the lyrics and the title to «Dirty Face», making it the definitive tango for the inaugural. Casimiro also composed "La yapa", a tango that was later recorded, and "Entrada prohibida", later signed by the Teisseire brothers. Around the same time, the payador Gabino Ezeiza introduced the milongueado counterpoint, linking the milonga with candombe.
At this time, the most common tango group was guitar, violin and flute. In the following years, the flute gradually disappeared, while the piano and later the bandoneon would be integrated, giving shape to the so-called «typical tango orchestra». In those years, the small organ, a portable player that played a very important role in the initial diffusion of tango, also stood out.
Tango was strongly resisted by the upper classes and the Catholic Church. As an argument for this rejection, they associated tango with the brothel, calling it "brothel music". Writers linked to the upper class, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, and Julio Mafud, will spread a derogatory vision of tango, sinful, violent and typical of the criminal underworld. The poet Leopoldo Lugones would synthesize that look by calling the tango a "lupanar reptile".
But scholars have questioned this vision, because it is simplifying and prejudiced. It is true that many of the initial tangos have lewd and pornographic titles (see Annex: Old lewd titles in tango), which were performed in nocturnal settings from the popular margins of the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in the midst of an immigration flood, and that casual sexual relations and brothels were a component of the River Plate nightlife. But reducing nightlife to sexual relations and tango to a brothel is a simplification based on prejudice and ignorance of popular life. The nightclubs were also places of fun, recreation, sociability and popular culture, especially dance and music. But in addition, the original tango did not limit its performance to nightclubs, and during the day the neighborhoods were toured. by organ grinders, generally Italian immigrants, who massively spread the new genre, while reading fortunes. Daniel Vidart has severely questioned those writers linked to the upper classes entrenched in their libraries and harassed by interpret a world to which they did not belong:
An infamous stigma fell upon the tango from its origin: if it was the dance of the humble should bear with the seven capital sins that the patriciate of the center endorsed yesterday and will always endorse the poor of the suburbs, eternal emissary goats of their own and other faults... We still endure the repeated mischievousness of the urban artists, plutocrats and bureaucrats who confuse the humble with the dirty, the popular with the low, the proletarian with the indecent. This craving mitomania of the tango that has enlisted the criollos writers for three decades is marked by an undeniable classic sign. It's time to return the tango to the one who invented it, danced it, sang it, whistled it, felt it really. I speak simply of the people, of the own Rio de Janeiro people.Daniel Vidart (The tango and its world, 1967)
The Old Guard
Wikimedia Commons hosts a multimedia category Original recordings of tangos by the Guardia Vieja.
Tango itself begins with the Guardia Vieja. All scholars recognize this stage and call it the same way, although there are differences about the moment that marks the beginning and end of that stage. The Academia Nacional del Tango locates the period between 1895 and 1925 and divides it into two sub-stages, a first moment of emergence of tango and a second moment of formalization, in which it is installed socially.
I. Hatching
After several decades of musical, lyrical and cultural combinations, already in the last two decades of the XIX century, the tango had left behind the initial forms of the old tango (milonga campera evolved with touches of habanera, candombe, Andalusian tango and zarzuela), and increasingly adopted a defined original form, with its own identity, entering the stage known as the Old Guard. To reflect this originality, it began to be defined by the musicians themselves as "Creole tango".
Coincidentally, in the last decade of the XIX century, tango scores began to appear. first tango with a registered author, "El entrerriano", by Afro-Porteño Rosendo Mendizábal, considered by many scholars as the first tango proper. A year earlier, in 1897, the new genre had been designated for the first time as "tango", in the zarzuela Justicia Criolla by Ezequiel Soria. In 1899 the violinist Ernesto Ponzio composed "Don Juan" and in 1903 Ángel Villoldo composed "El choclo". The writer José Portogalo relates a dialogue between the payador Gabino Ezeiza and Ponzio at that initial moment of tango:
The notes came out like sparks.
- My God, as this pibe handles it! - he swept the breeze (Ezeiza) by jumping into the chair.
The "Pibe Ernesto" didn't make her praise and she continued to diabolize her instrument.
-Che, what's his name again?
- It's a tango, Don Gabino - the boy once the piece was finished - I wrote it on "Mamita"... Do you like it? It's called "Don Juan".José Portogalo
By then the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo were pilgrimages in which hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers from the most diverse nations and speakers of the most diverse languages swarmed, mostly men, who established relationships with the local populations originating from the Spanish colonization, with multiple origins and indigenous and African miscegenation, in which women played a crucial role. Montevideo, which had its immigration peak before Buenos Aires, went from 100,000 inhabitants in 1865 to 300,000 inhabitants in 1908. Buenos Aires, for its part, will cease to be "the great village" of 1870, with a population that did not reach to 200,000 people, to rank among the largest cities in the world in 1914, with more than 1,500,000 inhabitants.
In that unique moment of multiethnic and multicultural interaction, almost unparalleled in the world, the Río de la Plata tango appeared, between the mid-1890s and the late 1910s. Tango became independent from the milonga and acquired a defined own personality. Tangos like «El entrerriano» and «Don Juan», which established the three-part structure that characterized the tangos of that time, composers like Ángel Villoldo, author of «El choclo» and «La morocha», with a defined style in his songs that for the first time have lyrics, "typical" orchestras such as those of Vicente Greco and Juan Maglio (Pacho), and the entry of the German bandoneon, at the end of the stage, clearly define the birth of the tango itself.
Tango was reaching wider audiences, entering theater shows, cafes, tents, circuses, dance halls and cabarets. Following this evolution, the original canyengue tango was transformed to "clean it up", softening or directly eliminating the cuts and breaks, and it began to be danced in the street and in the patios of the tenements, until in the 1920s, without the stain of forbidden dance, he began to master the so-called salon tango, also known as track tango or smooth tango.
Similarly, from 1901 Argentine musicians began to be recorded, through the recent inventions of the phonograph (cylinders) and the gramophone (records). Among the oldest tango recordings are «El pimpollo» (1904), «El negro alegre» (1907), «El choclo» (1907), «El porteñito» (1906), «El esquinazo» and «Cuidado con los 50» --the author's first with lyrics-- by Ángel Villoldo; "Patagones" (1905) by Gabino Ezeiza; "El taita" (1905) by Higinio Cazón; "The life of the carter" (1905); "The tango of death" (1906); "La morocha" (1906) by Villoldo and Enrique Saborido and performed by Flora Gobbi; "A counterfeit Creole" (1907) by Los Gobbi; "You went too far" and "Che, take the mold out of me", by José Luis Roncallo; "The Queen of Sheba", by Rosendo; "You understand what I tell you", by Ernesto Borra; "Do not wrinkle, there is no one to iron", by Miguel Calvello; "Memories of the Pampa" and "Cabo cuarto", by Alfredo C. Bevilacqua; "Tango de los negros" (1907) by Arturo de Nava; "Don Juan" (1910) by Vicente Greco's typical orchestra, the first recording with bandoneon.
In the first decade of the 1900s, the first tango singers began to stand out, especially the latter, such as the legendary zarzuela singer Lola Membrives, Andrée Vivianne and Linda Thelma, among others, as well as the first recordings, among which stand out the records of Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi and his wife Flora Gobbi, known as "the kings of the gramophone" for the large number of cylinders and discs they recorded. The first hits of that sung tango were «Hotel Victoria», «El porteñito» and above all the great success of «La morocha» from 1905, «tango azarzuelado» with music by Enrique Saborido and lyrics by Ángel Villoldo, premiered by the very muse that had inspired him, the Uruguayan dancer Lola Candales and originally recorded by Flora Gobbi.
I'm the morocha,
the most graceful,
the most renowned
of this population.
I'm the one with the countryman.
very early
very early
offers a mole. (...)I'm the Argentinean morocha,
the one who does not feel sorrows
and joyful spends life
with her singing.
I am the gentle companion
of the noble porteño gaucho,
the one that keeps the love
for your owner.The Moorish (Angel Villoldo)
Despite this first outbreak of sung tango, there was still a decade left for the tango-song to mature, which will have Pascual Contursi as lyricist and Carlos Gardel, as singer, as its greatest exponents. «What Villoldo, Gobbi, Mathon, the cupletistas sang, were not tangos as we now understand, but a hybrid of cuplé and milonga», says Gobelo.
The bandoneon
Oscar Zucchi, main scholar of the bandoneon in tango, maintains that the bandoneon was integrated into tango shortly before 1910. Although there are several records of the presence of the bandoneon in the Río de la Plata much earlier, it was only in the first decade of the XX century that the bandoneon became the central instrument of tango. Like the piano, there was resistance on the part of the musicians to accept the presence of an instrument that required study and rhythmic and musical adaptation.
This is a German instrument, whose invention is attributed to Heinrich Band in 1846. Made in Germany, it was founded in 1911 by the Alfred Arnold Bandonion firm, manufacturer of the famous "AA" ("double A"), which won the preference of musicians from the River Plate.
The entry of the bandoneon and in a second measure of the piano to the tango, radically modified the musical integration of the tango ensembles and orchestras, which until then were composed on the basis of the flute, violin and guitar. With this integration, the sound of tango had a bouncy and lively style, marked by the flute. From that moment on, the flute began to disappear from tango and the guitar was relatively neglected. But also the entry of the bandoneon substantially influenced a notable change in the tango sound, which would lead to the Guardia Nueva, a new stage in the history of tango:
The inclusion of bandoneon in popular music sets coincided with a change of rhythm and articulation that imposed a slow and tied execution. The drag of the notes and the continuous ligation, took away the vivacity of leaping to tango, making it moroso and slow. The jumping tango and compadrito is an effect that is obtained by playing "staccato-picado" and the bandoneonists were far from achieving such a form of execution by their limited domain of the instrument.Oscar Zucchi
Among the precursors who paved the way for the bandoneon, the violinist Carlos Posadas, the "Pardo" Sebastian Ramos Mejia, and Antonio Chiappe.
The bandoneon will mark the so-called Generation of 1910, which was characterized by making a leap in the instrumentation of tango, rather than in the diversification of styles. In 1910, the "orquesta típica criolla" appeared -and hence the name-, named after Vicente Greco, incorporating the bandoneon along with the guitar, flute and violin.
Juan Maglio (Pacho) was the first to record a bandoneon solo in 1912 performing the tango "La sonámbula". Other important bandoneon recordings in that early period of the instrument corresponded to Genaro Espósito, Vicente Loduca, Eduardo Arolas, Augusto Pedro Berto and Vicente Greco.
II. Registration
In the first half of the 1910s, tango began to have a wide international diffusion. A new era begins for the genre, with the contribution of better-prepared musicians, the incorporation of evocative lyrics of the suburban landscape, childhood and broken love, and the worldwide spread of dance.
There had been a first advance to Europe, in 1907, by Los Gobbi and Ángel Villoldo, followed in 1911, by Enrique Saborido and Carlos Vicente Geroni Flores. But the worldwide explosion of tango, as a global dance, was triggered by the premiere in February 1912 in London of the musical comedy The sunshine girl, which included a tango number danced by George Grossmith Jr. and Phyllis Dare. The work also triggered a wave of "tango teas" organized by the high society that quickly made Argentine dance fashionable, with a force rarely seen in the history of popular music. The historian of tango Carlos Groppa relates that at that time the version spread that the surprising boom of tango in England was intentionally promoted by the British government, which at that time had huge investments in Argentina, oriented to the export of meat:
The following year, on February 3, 1913, The sunshine girl was released in the United States:
That was the beginning of the most durable dance fashion in the United States in the 20th century, comparable only to the waltz in the previous century, but with a difference: tango would pass to the next century.
A few months later Gladys Beattie Crozier published The tango and how to dance it, the first book in history dedicated to a popular dance. Due to the requirements triggered by the fashion for tango in Europe, that same year of 1913, there was a second Argentine incursion led by the pianist Celestino Ferrer, with the bandoneonist Vicente Loduca and the violinist Eduardo Monelos, accompanied this time by a couple of dancers, Casimiro Aín (el Vasquito) and his partner Martina, who moved the old continent, with a sensual dance that completely revolutionized the ways of dancing and even relating to the body and between genders. The group of Argentine tangueros in Europe took the name of the Murga Argentina, and above his adventures and misadventures, Enrique García Velloso wrote Tango in Paris.
At the same time El Cachafaz (Ovidio José Bianquet), who would become the most famous tango dancer in history, set up his dance academy in Buenos Aires, while the Italian Rodolfo Valentino arrived in Hollywood, who year later he would become a world celebrity by adopting the identity of an Argentine tango dancer.
Tango was rejected by the middle and upper classes who danced, among other things, ballroom dances and with them the Viennese waltz. In the decade between 1910 and 1920, tango began to become fashionable in the great halls of the main European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Vienna. However, feelings for this new dance were heterogeneous..
Shortly before the start of World War I in 1914, German Emperor Wilhelm II forbade Prussian officers from dancing the tango if they were dressed in uniform. The Vatican's semi-official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano , openly supported the decision in the following terms:
The Kaiser has done what he has been able to prevent the Gentile men from identifying themselves with the low sensuality of Blacks and Mestizos (...) And some go around saying that tango is like any other dance when he is not danced licentiously! Tango dance is, the less, one of which can in no way conserve even with some probability decency. Because, if in all the other dances the morality of the dancers is in near danger, in the tango the decency is in full shipwreck, and for this reason Emperor William has forbidden him to the officers when these view uniform.
The Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria also issued an order that officers in uniform had to be seated whenever this new rhythm was played. In Rome, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy had banned it at Palace balls of the Quirinal. In the Austrian capital, documents have been found that show that the Argentine tango was deliberately excluded from the program of the 23rd Ball of the City of Vienna (year between 1920-30). Only since 2017 has the Argentine tango entered the traditional dances of Vienna through the prestigious Ball of the Polytechnic of Vienna that now includes a milonga in its program.
The prohibitions of tango in Europe indicated the growing diffusion of the dance in the countries that at that time were "the center" of the world. Already in 1913 there was talk of the tangomania unleashed in Europe. scandal that has ever taken place in the history of modern customs". An Italian journalist of the time, reflecting on the reasons for the success of tango, wrote at the time:
The old polcas and the antiquated mazurcas and the lancers accompanied could no longer satisfy the modern soul packed with sensitivity. The old German waltz could barely stand with its twists in four times, destined more to the athletic people than to the modern women of tight skirts. A dance, they say, that does nothing but continually repeat a single step and that does not represent another variety than to rotate in the reverse sense, is exercise too monotonous, too serious, too little plastic, and for nothing destined to translate through gestures the squisites and inadvertent varieties of rhythm. The old dances do not photograph the music or the psychic state of those who dance. The modern soul needs something thinner, more sensitive, more cerebral, that is not a single decided and even step like a soldier's platoon marching. It needs first of all sensitivity, a new aesthetic, more dynamic than plastic, of a somewhat worldly choreography, which is more art than sport.(...) A more complex and daring dance was needed, more nervous and sensitive, deeper and tormented, more refined and dynamic, made of impulses and arrests, unforeseen attitudes and meaningful, more artistic and literary postures, a dance that was the plastic and dynamic translation of a written music prevalently in minor and portrayed on a sad, harmoniously anguished and saturated tones of pavements.
The researcher Enrique Cámara de Landa has documented the massive success of tango in Italy -and the rest of Europe- since the middle of the second decade of the century XX, and the development in the peninsula of a tango with original characteristics, which took the name of tango liscio (smooth tango), from a fusion of the tango, with the waltz, the polka and the mazurka, which is still practiced today. In the United States, around the same time, the father of the blues W. C. Handy composed his famous song "St. Louis Blues", like a tango that is interrupted abruptly to become a blues.
The First World War, declared in 1914, would stop the international diffusion of tango in Europe and we will have to wait until its end, for the expansion of the genre to restart.
Meanwhile, the bandoneon was followed by the piano. In the same way that the bandoneon had replaced the flute, becoming the heart of the genre, the piano replaced the guitars in the typical orchestra. In front of ever larger audiences, the guitar lacked sufficient volume and rhythmic power for dancing. In the same way that Maglio and Greco had included the bandoneon in the tango orchestra, it is Roberto Firpo and his famous orchestra, the benchmark for the inclusion of the piano, from 1912. Another of the first pianists was Agustín Bardi, author of great number of successful tangos, "Gallo ciego", and already in the 1930s, "Never had a boyfriend" (with Cadicamo).
Simultaneously, the brilliant and ill-fated Eduardo Arolas (1892-1924), called "el tigre del bandoneón", shows the potential for tango of an instrument not yet fully discovered, and that would find its fullness recently in the following decade, with Pedro Maffía. Arolas, who died when he was barely 32 years old, is one of the most outstanding bridges between the Old Guard and the New Guard, inaugurated almost simultaneously with his death.
In 1916, the Uruguayan immigrant Francisco Canaro gave shape in Buenos Aires to a typical orchestra with a sextet structure (two bandoneons, two violins, piano and double bass) and top-level instrumentalists: José Martínez (piano), Osvaldo Fresedo and Pedro Polito (bandoneons), Rafael Rinaldi (violin) and Leopoldo Thompson (double bass). This integration will establish the typical instrumentation of tango for decades and will be the one who forms the first great orchestras. Canaro, who was also a prolific composer, will be the first great tango star and the first to be hired for upper-class parties. In the following decades he would achieve enormous international success, he would become a star on the radio, the record, the musical theater and the Creole farce, with more than 3,500 recordings and he would accumulate such a fortune that his name became synonymous with a millionaire in everyday speech: "he has more money than Canaro". Among his innumerable songs and hits we can mention "Madreselva" (“Old wall of the suburb, your shadow was my companion”), "Sentimiento gaucho" (“In an old warehouse on Paseo Colón, where those who have lost their faith go”) and “Se dice de mi”, which years later would be identified with Tita Merello.
The Old Guard finds immortality in an instrumental work composed by a 19-year-old boy from Montevideo: "La cumparsita", by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez. In 1916 Roberto Firpo arranged it and premiered it in Montevideo. The title refers to the carnival comparsas, a popular festival to which tango was linked from the beginning. Years later Enrique Pedro Maroni and Pascual Contursi wrote the best-known lyrics (“si supieras / que aún dentro de mi alma...») and Carlos Gardel recorded it, making it a worldwide success.
Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), who had started singing in the political committees where the payada reigned and who had been singing Creole songs in a duet with José Razzano for some years, sang a tango for the first time in 1917, & #34;My sad night" (“Percanta que me amuraste en lo mejor de mi vida”), by Samuel Castriota and Pascual Contursi, theme and interpretation that is considered the creator of the tango-song. Gardel revolutionizes and popularizes tango, because he brings a high-quality voice to a genre that already produced excellent composers and instrumentalists, but he had not yet found great singers or a way of singing adequate to the style's cadence. The duo would remain until 1925, when Gardel began his solo career. With Gardel and "Mi noche triste" the era of tango song begins.
Delfino would complete the transformation of the tango song in 1920 with "Milonguita (Esthercita)", in which he reduced the three-part tango that the Guardia Vieja had been producing, to give a binary form to the tango song, with two parts (verse and chorus), a structure that would become a model.
After the First World War ended in 1918 and international travel was reestablished, in a world in which records and silent films inaugurated the era of the global diffusion of music and dance, tango became "one of the most popular ballroom dances in Europe" throughout the 1920s, not only in Paris and Spain, where Argentine tango musicians went, but even in Eastern European countries, such as Poland -where Yddish tango would emerge, or Soviet Russia.
Towards the 1920s, other areas, growing culturally, would increase their contribution by providing their geography to shelter tango musicians, such as Avenida Boedo, where artists such as Cátulo Castillo, Pedro Maffia or a little later Homero Manzi (considered these three members of the Boedo Group, who met at Café El Japonés) would frequent cafes like the Canadian (now Homero Manzi, establishment where said author is believed to have written tango Sur), Café El Japonés and Café Margot. Visits by Juan de Dios Filiberto and presentations by Carlos Gardel in the area that is now the Boedo neighborhood were also registered.
In 1920 Casimiro Aín (El Lecherito) and his partner Jazmine won the World Dance Championship, held at the Marigny Theater in Paris, and on February 1, 1924, the same dancer danced the tango "Ave María& #3. 4; de Canaro, before Pope Pius XI, in a presentation made at the request of the Argentine embassy.
In 1921 Gardel and Razzano recorded a song with very lunfardo lyrics by an unknown poet, "Margot", by Celedonio Flores (1896-1947):
You're getting drunk from afar, you've got a slick,
that you were born in the misery of an arrabal convent...
Because there's something that sells you, I don't know if it's the look,
the way you sit, look, stand
Or that body accustomed to the perchal stacks."Margot" by Celedonio Flores and Gardel-Ricardo
From that moment on, Flores would compose several of the best-known songs in the historical tango songbook: "Mano a mano", "El bulín de la calle Ayacucho" and the famous "Corrientes y Esmeralda" ("They fell handsome next to your ochavas, when a pack of cross-country shoes put them on, and the brave patotas gave you luster back in the year... nine hundred and two...").
Among the great singers who shaped the tango song, Gardel would be added in 1922 by Ignacio Corsini, the Singing Knight, who broke out with the success of "Patotero sentimental" ("In my life there were many mines, but never a woman"), by Manuel Jovés and Manuel Romero. and shortly after Agustín Magaldi. Gardel, Corsini and Magaldi have been called "the golden trilogy" of tango, which the New Guard is already anticipating.
In this stage the tango is formalized. The bandoneon, the piano, the typical tango orchestra, the quality of the sung tango, an unparalleled dance, record diffusion and international acceptance, were laying the foundations to hit a leap in quality that would take him to a new stage, the New Guard.
Tango, compadritos and homosexuality
Osvaldo Bazán, in his History of Homosexuality in Argentina, includes a chapter entitled "Los compadritos", in which he analyzes the links between homosexuality and tango in the first years, through the figure of the "compadrito". Bazán rescues the "musical cafés without women" in which the compadritos danced the tango among themselves, to the contempt of "the thieves", who considered them "effeminate".
The poet José Sebastián Tallón (1904-1954) mentions the "sexual and suspicious evidence", "amariconada" and "relaxed" from the way of dressing and combing the compadritos, which he transferred to the way of dancing the tango, giving it its own style:
And they brought and acquainted with an exaggerated narcissism of women, evidently sexual and suspicious; they took the tango and took it to the obscene sexual media. The contone cryollo of walking, which originated in the high heels, they did it half tiling, if not bitter. And in the same way, the choreography of tango was given a style of erotic exaggerations.José Sebastián Tallón
Bazán distances himself from the social prejudice of associating certain ways of dressing, combing or walking with homosexuality, but highlights the cultural rupture that expressed the decision of the compadritos to adopt an image that the society of the time associated with homosexuality. homosexuality and with stereotyped roles for men and women.
Juan José Sebrelli, for his part, highlights the public lesbianism of Pepita Avellaneda, the first tango female singer, who dressed as a man and disputed with Gardel the love affairs of Madame Jeanne.
The New Guard
La Guardia Nueva is the name given to the musical period in which tango reaches the pinnacle of its worldwide diffusion and in which the styles of the artists begin to differentiate. Due to the importance of the orchestral arrangements introduced by Julio de Caro, many scholars refer to this stage as the Decarean period. The New Guard coincides with the massification promoted by the invention of radio and talkies, it was characterized by the popular force of the tango-song and arrived in its second stage to the so-called Golden Age of Tango, in a long decade of the 1940s..
I. The transformation
In 1924 Julio de Caro, at the age of 25, formed a famous sextet that would completely revolutionize the sound of tango. The ensemble was also made up of his brothers, the pianist Francisco de Caro and the violinist Emilio de Caro and the bandoneonist Pedro Maffia, plus Leopoldo Thompson on double bass and Luis Petrucelli on the second bandoneon. Shortly after, Pedro Laurenz would replace Petrucelli, forming with Maffia what is considered the best bandoneon duo in history.
De Caro brought a completely new concept of tango interpretation, supported by harmony, which would have an enormous influence from that moment on, which was called decarismo. Basically, De Caro took advantage of the deep musical knowledge that he had learned first from his father and from a strict conservatory study, later, to design a melancholic and sentimental orchestral sound, full of nuances. Technically, De Caro also contributed an imperceptible innovation for the amateurs, but of great importance for performing musicians, when abandoning musical writing in a two-by-four or two-quarter (2/4) time signature and starting to write in a four-by-eight (4/8) time signature, which is also it corresponded perfectly with the basic step of the dance. Osvaldo Pugliese synthetically explained the root of the Decarean school in this way:
The transcendent sextet is the decarean sexteto, the classic, which reached its definitive structuring acting for the public in the mute cinemas, on the basis of arrangements for bandoneons two superimposed voices or solos, for violins, also in two voices or solos, and leaning on a piano, like that of Francisco de Caro, which was creating the bass, adapted inexorOsvaldo Pugliese
Pedro Maffia's role would exceed that of integrating De Caro's historical sextet. Maffia was the musician who fully discovered the possibilities of the bandoneon in tango. Julio Nudler says that:
It is not known why secret Don Pedro Maffia found at the bottom of the bandoneon sounds that no one had discovered before. Oscar Zucchi... explains that until his advent in the second decade of the twentieth century the bandoneonists had a tendency to remedy with the instrument the flute - graduated from the primitive quartets- and the outpatient organito. After suffering in his childhood the chains of a brutal father, who forced him to pass the cap after each tango, Maffia was the one who gave this popular genre the bandoneon that needed to leave behind the Vieja Guard and become grave, refocused, quite dreaming and often sad.July Nudler
Although De Caro did not value the importance of singing sufficiently, the tango of the Guardia Nueva would be supported by a conjunction of the Decarian instrumental school and the Gardelian school in singing. In Argentina, the National Tango Day It is celebrated every December 11, precisely because Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro were born on that day.
From the innovations in the composition of songs in the final stage of the Guardia Vieja, the singing of tango manifested itself in three varieties: tango-milonga, tango-romanza and tango-song. The musical and poetic complexity achieved by the genre was what gave way to the styles. Horacio Ferrer says that "only with the New Guard can one speak with full ownership of styles and interpretative modalities".
Then other orchestras appeared with other styles. Osvaldo Fresedo, "El pibe de la Paternal", had been developing a special style since before the appearance of the Julio de Caro sextet, achieving enormous success from the second half of the 1920s. With new timbres, such as the integration of the harp, the vibraphone and even the drums, and giving great importance to the singer, he developed an elegant style that was preferred by the upper classes.
From the Fresedo orchestra comes the pianist Carlos Di Sarli who has successfully imposed his own style and his own orchestras since the late 1920s and who will reach his peak of popularity, with the singer Roberto Rufino, already in the 1940s.
In 1925 Carlos Gardel became a soloist and for the next ten years he would be a world star, until his death in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935, when he was at the pinnacle of his glory. Gardel will shine as a singer-songwriter together with the lyricist Alfredo Le Pera, with tangos like "El día que me quieras", "Por una cabeza" and & # 34; His eyes closed & # 34;. But in addition, Gardel will make intensive use of the diffusion possibilities that radio, records and especially talkies have opened up, acting in several Paramount films, seen all over the world, mainly his feature films Luces de Buenos Aires (1931) -with the popular singer Sofía "La Negra" Bozán-, Wait for me (1933), Melodía de arrabal (1933), Cuesta abajo (1934), Tango en Broadway (1934), Tango Bar (1935) and The day you love me (1935). Gardel would combine sound and image like no other tango artist and would become a popular idol throughout Latin America. The Ecuadorian poet and filmmaker Ulises Estrella, in an article entitled "The cinema that Gardel sang" He speaks of the famous "pinta de Carlos Gardel":
The ears, glued to the photographer, accompanied corridors and tangos. The eyes longed for gestures, looks, paints. Above all Gardel's painting: the photogenic face with the eyebrows loaded with blackness, his permanent smile, the handkerchief, the tie to the polka dots, the shirt at bay, the hat cornered on the forehead.Ulysses Star
Shortly before, the enormous popular success of Rosita Quiroga took place, a singer who shone between 1923 and 1931. In the 1930s, new orchestra conductors with their own styles such as Juan D'Arienzo, known as the King of the Compás for his strong rhythmic style, and Juan de Dios Filiberto, with his Orquesta Porteña full of new sonorities through the introduction of the clarinet, the flute and the harmonium and author of the music of crucial themes of the historical songbook, such as &# 34;Caminito", "Malevaje" and the instrumental "Quejas de bandoneón". Tango floods the neighborhoods, the visit of Juan de Dios Filiberto to Café El Japonés on Avenida Boedo is remembered.
Internationally, the tango "Jalousie (Celos)" by the Danish Jacob Gade, who since then will become one of the best-known tangos in history. In Germany the popular Paul Godwin orchestra records several tangos, among them "Das Lied der Liebe hat eine süße Melodie" (That Love Song Has Such a Sweet Melody, 1929), by Willi Meisel and Kurt Schwabach, and "Kitch tango" (1933), by Hollaender and Robitscheck, sung by Curt Bois. Piotr Leshchenko appears in Russia, known as the king of Russian tango, who became world famous with "Serdtse" (Corazón), by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, the most famous tango sung in a non-Spanish language.
Yiddish tango brings international hit songs such as "Oygn" (Ojos) by Molly Picon and Abraham Ellstein, while it is booming in Argentina at the hands of Jevel Katz, known as the Jewish Gardel, and Max Zalkind, with versions of popular hits such as the "Cumparsita" and original tangos integrated into a broader movement of Argentine popular music in Yiddish.
Two of the greatest poets of tango also emerged, leading figures of the Golden Age that would come in the 1940s, such as Homero Manzi ("Malena", "Sur", "Milonga sentimental", "Barrio de tango") and above all Enrique Santos Discépolo, creator of immortal songs full of pessimism and emotional suffering that would come to symbolize tango itself: "Cambalache", Uno, "Tonight I get drunk", "Chorra", "Malevaje", "Yira, yira" "Alma de bandoneón", "Cafetín de Buenos Aires".
Important for the diffusion of tango in the decade were the radio, which began to broadcast live recitals, and the Argentine film industry, which reached a presence throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The Argentina Sono Film studio released the first film in 1932, precisely ¡Tango!, with the participation of the main musicians, singers and dancers of the national tango. A week later, the Lumiton studio premiered the film Los tres berretines, referring to the three Argentine passions: tango, soccer and radio. Some of the most important Argentine tango films of the decade were:
- The soul of the bandoneon (1935) by Mario Soffici with Libertad Lamarque in which the tango "Cambalache" by Enrique Santos Discépolo is premiered;
- Noches de Buenos Aires Manuel Romero (1935) with Tita Merello;
- Melodies porteñas (1937) by Luis José Moglia Barth with a script by Enrique Santos Discépolo that designed Juan D'Arienzo;
- Madreselva (1938) by Luis César Amadori, Libertad Lamarque and Hugo del Carril, who used as the basis the famous tango that Amadori himself had written with Canaro;
- Life is a tango Manuel Romero (1939) with Hugo del Carril and Sabina Olmos;
- The Life of Carlos Gardel Alberto de Zavalía (1939) with Hugo del Carril;
- Walk of glory (1939) by Luis César Amadori with Libertad Lamarque, inspired by the song "Caminito".
II. The Golden Age
The long decade of the forties is considered the golden age of tango, the culminating moment of the New Guard, due to the sum of its massiveness and quality. The singer Alberto Castillo would have a show that he called Quarantine , referring to this golden age, whose decline will coincide with the rise of folklore and rock.
The Golden Age of tango coincides with the formation of Peronism in Argentina and its rise to power from 1943 until its overthrow in 1955. Peronism defined itself as a "national and popular movement& #34;, closely linked to the "working class" and the unions, and several of the greatest tango figures were openly Peronists: Homero Manzi, Discépolo, Hugo del Carril (author of the Peronist March), Francisco Canaro, Nelly Omar, Héctor Mauré, Mariano Mores, Chola Luna.
The '40s were the time of the great orchestras, of the massive popular tango dances with live orchestras and of the massive diffusion through the radio, the record and the cinema. Tango was the music and dance of that entire generation. Tango was heard in dozens of cafes and cabarets and it was danced in sweet shops, clubs, unions, salons and carnivals. Among the cafes in Buenos Aires were El Nacional, Marzotto, Ebro Bar, Café Germinal, Tango Bar, Benigno, Argentino, Buen Orden and the Richmond and El Olmo confectioneries where there was no dancing. Among the sweet shops were Sans Souci, Le Toucan, Taboo, Cairo, Picadilly. The cabarets were very important redoubts of tango, such as the Chantecler, the Marabú, the Tibidabo, and the Tabarís. The main ballrooms were the Palermo Palace in the Parque Japonés, the Monumental de Flores, the Salón Lavalle in the Luna Park, the Centro Region Leonesa and the Unione e Benevolenza. The big football clubs organized the weekend balls and the massive carnival balls. In each of these places the tango orchestras performed live and the center of all that tango activity was Corrientes Avenue.
Musicians who came from the Old Guard, as well as the musicians who defined the New Guard, found in the forties the moment of "exaltation", as the National Tango Academy of Argentina says.
Among all the musicians, Aníbal Troilo (Pichuco), with his bandoneon and his orchestra, was the greatest exponent of the golden decade. It has been widely discussed what made Troilo the central figure of the age of splendor and massiveness of tango, in the midst of thousands of other musicians. Piazzolla, who knew him deeply, defined him as "a monster of intuition", a musician with a sensitivity capable of synthesizing "the most refined, and at the same time richest, essence of tango&# 34;.
And with Troilo, its singers stand out: Francisco Fiorentino (1937-1944), Alberto Marino (1943-1947), Floreal Ruiz (1944-1948), Edmundo Rivero (1947-1950), and Raúl Berón (1949-1955). After 1955, Ángel Cárdenas, Roberto Rufino, Roberto Goyeneche, Elba Berón, Tito Reyes and Nelly Vázquez would sing in the Troilo orchestra.
Decisive musicians would also emerge from the orchestra or from working with Troilo in the following decades, such as Ástor Piazzola, the guitarist Roberto Grela, the pianist Osvaldo Berlingieri, and the bandoneonists Ernesto Baffa and later Raúl Garello. Troilo's hits number in the dozens, such as the instrumentals "Responso" and "Bohemian Memories" and the songs "Sur", "Barrio de tango" and "Che bandoneón", composed with Homero Manzi; "Last Kurdish" and "The Last Lantern", with Cátulo Castillo; or "Garúa" and "For the boys to dance", with Enrique Cadícamo.
But the golden age had many other orchestras. From those led by established musicians from previous decades, such as Fresedo, Canaro, Firpo, Di Sarli, De Caro, to new orchestras with innovative styles.
Among the latter, Juan D'Arienzo and his popular return-to-measure style in two by four (2/4) stood out, generating a faster and livelier tango, perfect for dancing, with versions of &# 34;La cumparsita" and "La puñalada", which sold millions of records around the world. For D'Arienzo, singers like Héctor Mauré sang
The Osvaldo Pugliese orchestra, with hits like "La yumba", shone with its precursor effects of avant-garde tango and singers like Roberto Chanel, Alberto Morán, Jorge Vidal, Jorge Maciel and Miguel Montero.
The Ángel D'Agostino orchestra built its success developing a style characterized by the simplicity and crystalline voice of Ángel Vargas, with great hits such as "Tres esquinas" (“I am from the Tres Esquinas neighborhood, an old bastion of a suburb, where pretty girls in aprons flourish like wisteria”).
The orchestra led by Lucio Demare, the author of the music for "Malena" With lyrics by Homero Manzi, he stood out for the intimate phrasing of his piano, and the voices of Juan Carlos Miranda, Raúl Berón and Horacio Quintana.
Another of the great orchestras of the forties was that of Osmar Maderna, known as the Chopin of tango, which softened the rhythmic forms of tango, seeking a romantic and ethereal sound, which shone especially with members such as the violinist Enrique Mario Francini, the bandoneonists Eduardo Rovira, Armando Pontier and Domingo Federico and Raúl Iriarte as singer, leaving anthological hits such as the waltz "Little Girl", the instrumental "Lluvia de estrellas" and the tango version of "El vuelo del moscardón" by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Like D'Arienzo, the Alfredo de Angelis orchestra emphasized dancing and the choice of good singers, characterized by using vocal duets, among which the one formed by Carlos Dante and Lalo Martel.
The pianist Horacio Salgán formed an orchestra that gave him a "black touch" to tango, with Brazilian and jazz resonances, with a sound that took a long time to be received, advancing an avant-garde that would only start in the 1960s.
Miguel Caló's orchestra with the singing of Raúl Berón, Alberto Podestá and Raúl Iriarte, was, like that of Pichuco, a school for great tangueros as well as a group of great technical quality and great popularity.
Finally, among the great orchestras of the forties is that of Francini-Pontier, violinist that one and bandoneonist this one, who achieved a "magical communion" to create a very milonguero style, resorting to Argentino Galván's arrangements and the voices of Berón, Rufino, Alberto Podestá and a young Julio Sosa recently arrived in Argentina. Among his successes is & # 34; He never had a boyfriend & # 34; sung by Rufino and "El ciruja", by Sosa.
Among the composers of the 40s and 50s, Mariano Mores also shone with tangos such as "Cuartito azul", "Uno", "Adiós Pampa mía", "Military Taquito", "Tanguera", "Gricel", "On this gray afternoon", "Cafetín de Buenos Aires&# 34;, "Adiós", "El firulete", "Cristal" and "Frente al mar", among many others.
Among the lyricists of the golden age, Enrique Santos Discépolo, Homero Manzi, Enrique Cadícamo and Cátulo Castillo achieved special prominence. Discepolín, with their lyrics charged with pessimism and emotional suffering, Manzi and Castillo with the elegiac tone and metaphors that became flesh in popular culture, and Cadícamo with the modernist resonances of the influence of the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.
Red ink (Cátulo Castillo, 1941)
Cotton,
red ink in yesterday's gray;
your brick emotion, happy
on my alley,
with a blur
painted the corner
and the button
that in the width of the night
put the edge of the round
Like a brooch...
And that carmine mailbox
and that fondin,
where the tan was crying
His blond love far away
that wet with bon vin...
The Tides (Enrique Cadícamo, 1942)
Tonight, my friend,
The alcohol has drunk us...
I don't care if they laugh.
and call us the tides!
Each has his sorrows
And we have them...
Tonight we drink
'Cause we're not coming back anymore.
to see us more...One (Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1943)
One, look full of hopes
the road that dreams
They promised their cravings...
You know the fight is cruel
and it's a lot, but it fights and it's bleeding.
by the faith that impecinates him...
One is crawling in thorns
and in his desire to give his love,
suffers and shatters to understand
that one has left heartless...
Price of punishment that one delivers
for a kiss that doesn't come
Or a love that deceived him...
Empty of love and of crying
so much betrayal!
South (Homero Manzi, 1948)
St. John and Old Boedo and all the sky,
Pompey and, beyond, flooding,
your girlfriend in memory,
And your name floating on goodbye...
The corner of the blacksmith, mud and pampa,
your house, your sidewalk and the ditch
and a perfume of yuyos and alfalfa
that fills my heart again.
In the cinema related to tango, films such as La historia del tango stood out, with a consecration performance by the singer Virginia Luque.
In the international arena, tango played a notable expressive role during the Holocaust, "both as a means of expression for Jewish prisoners and as a macabre recreation of their oppressors". On the one hand, the Nazis approved the inclusion of tangos in the repertoires of the Lagernkapellen, orchestras formed by prisoners in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Terezin, Mauthausen, Dachau and Buchenwald. The Nazis also chose tangos to be performed during the executions of prisoners, which is why these songs took the name "Tango de la muerte", the tango being "Plegaria" by Eduardo Bianco, which would become the anthem chosen by the Nazis for the annihilations. The survivor León Weliczer Wells recounted in his book The Janowska Road (1966) the use of tango in the concentration camps. concentration, like dance macabre:
After the gate begins to sound the music. That's right, we have an orchestra of sixteen members, all prisoners. This orchestra, which possesses some recognized personalities of the musical world, plays whenever we go or come from work or when the Germans take a group to shoot it. We know that many of us, but all of us, were once dedicated to the Tango of Death, as we call it on such occasions.
But Jewish communities detained in Nazi camps also chose tango to express their emotions during the Holocaust. Among the most prominent are "Friling" (Spring) by Shmerke Kaczerginsky and Abraham Brudno, which evokes the grief over the death of the former's wife in the Vilna ghetto, as well as "Kinder iorn" (Childhood Years) and "Maj tsu di eiguelej" (Close Your Eyes) by David Beigelman.
The lyrics rewritten in the ghettos and concentration camps are also important, about tangos that were already popular, such as "Shpil zhe mir a tango ois in idish" (Sing me a tango in Yiddish, too), rewritten by Ruven Tsarfat from the classic Yiddish tango "Shpil zhe mir a lidele in Yiddish", which became a resistance anthem in the Kovno ghetto. of the rewritten tangos was the one composed by twelve-year-old Rikle Glezer, titled "Es iz gueven a zumertog" (It was a summer day), to the music of the famous "Papirosen" (Cigarettes) by Herman Yablokoff, where he conveys the horror of the Vilnius ghetto and the Ponary Massacre. Finally, "Der tango fun Oshvientshim" (The Auschwitz Tango), rewritten to a popular tune by another twelve-year-old girl murdered at Auschwitz:
A black man takes his mandolin.
and is accompanied by an Englishman and a Frenchman.
A threesome emerges from grief.
Also a Polish begins to sing a song
that will relieve the hearts of those who long for their freedom.
This is Auschwitz's tango,
steel spears threaten us,
But freedom calls us."The tango of Auschwitz"
III. heyday
In 1950 tango was left behind in sales, for the first time, by a popular song from folklore, "El rancho 'e la Cambicha", sung by Antonio Tormo, the &# 34;singer of the little black heads". The folklore boom began, driven for two decades by a new wave of migration to Buenos Aires, this time from the interior provinces and border countries. In 1955, a white singer from the United States named Elvis Presley, began to sing black music known as "rock and roll". New social sectors and new generations began to modify the social and artistic panorama that led tango to its peak. By the second half of the 1950s, "the splendor of tango was beginning to fade. The venues had reduced their budgets and the groups to reduce their components".
Coincidentally, also in 1955, Peronism was overthrown by a coup. Many Peronist tangueros, such as Hugo del Carril, Nelly Omar, Héctor Mauré, Anita Palmero, Chola Luna, among others, were persecuted for their ideas and practically never returned to work.
The avant-garde tango
In the 1950s and 1960s, tango was displaced from the central place it had in popular and youthful music and dance in previous decades. Partly because after the dictatorship that called itself the Revolución Libertadora, the State abandoned all cultural policies to protect popular artistic expressions and partly because new musical currents emerged. For tango it was "the fateful decade", in the expression of the singer Enrique Dumas:
I was born in tango in moments of low tide, when the fateful decade of the '60s approached. It was always necessary to create something new to be taken into account by a public who had massively renegade tango, and had changed it for other rhythms that branded him the engraving companies that defended non-national interests.Hector Dumas
On the one hand, folk music with the folklore boom in the 1950s and the renewal of folklore in the 1960s and 1970s, established itself as one of the main popular genres with national roots.
On the other hand, in these two decades tango has also suffered from the generational and countercultural confrontation carried out by youth movements around the world, with expressions such as the summer of love in 1967 and the hippie movement in the US, the French May of 1968, which had in rock and roll and in the sexual revolution, two of their common reference codes. In Argentina, this manifested itself as a confrontation of generational content between tango and rock: tango was the music of "the old men"; rock and roll was the music of the young.
With the rise of the international recording market and the appearance of sound amplifiers, popular and youthful dance moved towards boites, discos, bailantas and massive recitals, in which genres other than tango predominated, such as the bolero, the romantic ballad, the cumbia, the quartet, international and national rock.
Under these conditions, tango evolved towards musical forms that gave priority to heard tango, over tango danced by the masses. Since the 1950s, renovating tango currents had appeared, such as Mariano Mores and Horacio Salgán, who experimented with new sounds and themes. But the undisputed innovator was Ástor Piazzolla from Mar del Plata, the heart of what was called «avant-garde tango».
Ástor Piazzolla alternated between evenings of classical music at the Teatro Colón and his passion for Ígor Stravinski and Béla Bartók, with nights of tango, and his work as bandoneonist and musical arranger for the Aníbal Troilo orchestra (1914-1975). Creatively fusing the most diverse influences, Piazzolla introduced into tango dissonant harmonies and intense and nervous rhythmic bases that produced a radical transformation of the genre. In 1955 he composed «Adiós Nonino», a song that broke all the structures of the tango song that came from the Guardia Vieja and the Guardia Nueva, creating a new urban sound associated with the postwar world, marked by the horror of the atomic bomb. and the reign of television. In the following years, Piazzolla would renew his sound more and more, both in the form of interpretation and in composition, with songs such as "What will come", "La muerte del ángel", "Buenos Aires Hora 0", "Fuga y mystery", "Decarísimo" and "Milonga del ángel".
Piazzolla's music produced a passionate controversy between traditionalists and renovators, about whether or not "it" was tango. The culminating point of this controversy was the Buenos Aires Song Festival held at Luna Park in 1969, in which Ástor Piazzolla and the Uruguayan Horacio Ferrer presented the tango «Balada para un loco», interpreted by Amelita Baltar in the section corresponding to tango. The song caused a huge scandal that led the organizers to change the rules to prevent "Balada para un loco" from winning the festival. Despite this, the new tango-song gained popular support, especially among young people, and became a sales success like the tango had not had for years.
The Piazzola-Ferrer duo produced other works of wide popular diffusion such as the tango waltz «Chiquilín de Bachín» (1968) or the «operita-tango» María de Buenos Aires (1967), the first great conceptual work in the history of tango.
At this time, Piazzolla would strongly influence the birth of what was called "national rock", a peculiar variety of rock born in Buenos Aires and sung in Spanish.
This period also saw the brilliant encounters of the guitarist Roberto Grela with the bandoneonists, first, Aníbal Troilo, and Leopoldo Federico, later, the singers Julio Sosa and Roberto Goyeneche, the Salgán-De Lío duo and the Quintet reached their peak Real, and the Cedrón Quartet was founded, led by Tata Cedrón, who broke out in 1964 with an innovative album entitled Madrugada.
Tango began to overcome the shock of having ceased to be the popular youth genre par excellence for several decades and began to modernize to become a genre capable of going beyond the dynamics of the record business and taking advantage of the potential of a sound of enormous originality and emotional expressiveness.
Contemporary Period
I. Universalization
Starting in the 1970s, under the overwhelming influence of Piazzolla's sound, tango established itself as a universal genre, beyond the ups and downs of the record market. Also "national" Argentinian was influenced by Piazzolla. Piazzolla himself revolutionized tango instrumentation with his electronic octet and developed a monumental work that won the world and transformed him into one of the great composers of the century XX, with creations such as Música contemporáneo de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, Libertango , Suite Troileana, the Summit Meeting with Gerry Mulligan, Le Grand Tango, Concert for Bandoneon and Guitar: Tribute a Liège, Concierto for Bandoneón, Three Tangos for Bandoneón and Orchestra, El exilio de Gardel, Five Tango Sensations , notable collaborations with Georges Moustaki, Milva, Jairo, among others, and musical bands for nearly 40 films.
In those two decades of renewal, other authors and performers of great importance also emerged, such as Eladia Blázquez ("With my heart in the south", "Si Buenos Aires no fuera así,", & #34;Sueño de barrilete", etc.), Chico Novarro ("Cordón", "El balance", "Cantata a Buenos Aires"), Cacho Castaña ("Café La Humedad"), the Tango Sextet, the Mayor Sextet, the choral octet Buenos Aires 8, with an exceptional album in 1970, Buenos Aires Hora 0, the new sounds introduced by Osvaldo Berlingieri (1928) from the piano and his association with Ernesto Baffa (Baffa-Berlingeri), the youthful and romantic voice of Susana Rinaldi, the compositional maturity of Leopoldo Federico, the revolutionary album Concepto (1972) by Atilio Stampone, Rodolfo Mederos ―who was considered "the visible head of a new Buenos Aires music in the 1970s"―, etc.
Mention should also be made here of the last Goyeneche from the "sand throat" -according to the singer-songwriter Cacho Castaña- who developed the art of "saying" the tango, when paradoxically he reached the highest peak of popular devotion.
The decline of tango as a massive and danceable musical genre caused great interest on the part of many Argentine intellectuals. From the writing of various historiographical interpretations of tango, a large part of the intellectual field exercised a social and political criticism of the country. The strong tendency of Peronization of the intellectual field could be seen materialized in the new interest that the historiography of tango aroused
After two decades of decline and rearrangements, the 1980s would mark the reintegration of tango into the international music framework, although no longer as part of pop music driven by the great global record business, but as a genre with a strong musical identity. At the end of 1981, the Trottoirs tango club in Buenos Aires opened in Paris, where the Sexteto Mayor played a decisive role, as well as Julio Cortázar, Edgardo Cantón -one of the owners of the club- and Tata Cedrón, who released an album with the same name.
II. The renaissance of tango
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In 1983, two events converged decisively to start the renaissance of tango: the reconquest of democracy in Argentina and the premiere of the show Tango Argentino in Paris.
The dancer Pedro Benavente, El Indio, says about it:
Little by little people went connecting with the popular, meeting their own identity. Do not forget that in times of dictatorship tango was forbidden. There were words that could not be pronounced, salons that could not be concurred with. A number of people were already subject to suspicion. Democracy was giving us back those habits, those customs so ours.Pedro Benavente
That same year the show Argentine Tango, created and directed by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, premiered in Paris, with the participation of dancers Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves, Cecilia Narova, Carlos and María Rivarola, Mayoral and Elsa María, Nélida Rodríguez and Nelson Ávila (Nélida and Nelson), Virulazo and Elvira, and Mónica and Luciano Frías. The singers were Roberto Goyeneche, Elba Berón, María Graña, Raúl Lavié and Jovita Luna, while the musicians were the Sexteto Mayor, Horacio Salgán and Ubaldo De Lío. The work was presented in 1985 on Broadway (New York) and for more than ten years in all parts of the world, obtaining a resounding success that marked the worldwide renaissance of tango and the rediscovery of the expressive capacity of the dance. He made the film Tangos, the exile of Gardel, by Pino Solanas, which associates the last military dictatorship in Argentina, which ended in 1983, with a musical band led by Ástor Piazzolla and José Luis Castiñeira de Dios, a renovator of tango song and a choreography that integrates the original eroticism of tango with modern dance.
Starting in the 1990s, hand in hand with the globalization process, the appearance of the Internet and the mp3, a worldwide movement of cultural integration began that led to the fusion of musical languages, such as jazz, rock, electronic music, Latin and folkloric rhythms, styles belonging to the most varied ethnic groups and local expressions, which also involved tango.
In 1991, singer Nacha Guevara released the show and album Heavy Tango, featuring members of the Argentine heavy metal band Alakrán. In dance, the choreographer Ana María Stekelman created the company Tangokinesis in 1993, with the intention of fusing modern dance, folklore and tango. Among the composers, the bandoneonist Daniel Binelli stands out, with works such as Preludio y candombe, or To those who left, dedicated to those who disappeared during the last military dictatorship.
In the second half of the 1990s, several musicians from national rock, such as Daniel Melingo, Rodolfo Gorosito (Trío Gorosito-Cataldi-De la Vega) and Leo Sujatovich turned to tango, playing a very important role in the tango boom that will take place in the following decade. In Uruguay, Federico García Vigil, as director of the Montevideo Philharmonic, achieved enormous popular success with the Tango Galas cycle, which has since become part of the orchestra's permanent program.
In 1997 the famous French cellist Yo-Yo Ma recorded the album Soul of the Tango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla, which has been considered by experts as one of the best albums in history of the tango and that it was a sales success in the United States, displacing even Paul McCartney himself for several years. In 1998 the Russian ice dance couple won the gold medal at the Nagano Olympic Games, dancing the tango &# 34;Tanguero" by Mariano Mores, with choreography designed by the Argentine dancer and choreographer Guillermina Quiroga and Roberto Reis.
Another space for the development of new tango expressions were the recaladas in Buenos Aires, informal meetings of musicians with the public, after the formal performances. The most famous of the recaladas was that of the bandoneon player Rubén Juárez, started in 1983 at the Café Homero. In the landfalls, musicians, generations and diverse expressions began to interact that began to be outlined at the beginning of the century XXI in the so-called Young Guard.
Since the year 2000, tango dance reappeared with great diffusion in Argentina, Uruguay and throughout the world, among young people and not young people, no longer as a fashionable dance, but as a culture of the body, of expression and of the sensual relationship between two people. In Buenos Aires alone, more than 200 "milongas" and "academies" to dance tango popularly. "In tango the body is put on", says the psychoanalyst Sonia Abadi:
In these days of physical loneliness in which friendship, sex and affection cultivate internet solutions, tango dance offers the opportunity of a living encounter, body to body, while a space to experience experiences of different emotional, sensual and artistic quality. I am talking about the tango danced, the “milonga” as popular experience and not the shows for the public.Sonia Abadi
Similarly, the Uruguayan musicologist Adriana Santos Melgarejo published an investigation in 2010 where she defined a framework that she called the alternative scene of tango (circumscribed to the city of Montevideo), in this study she focused her observation focus on a close group of three hundred people called "Avalancha tango". The researcher concludes:
"While the evolution of tango dance is observed only in some sectors of society, this should not make it suppose that it has suffered a process of loss. It can be said that there are changes in the possibility of invention of new steps, the replacement of cultors and the existence of social dances. It is remarkable that all this has allowed the traditional space of tango to be transformed into a wide place in which several people live. As a result, the new cultors rebuild and relocate tango within society and thus become responsible for its validity. "Adriana Santos Melgarejo
At the beginning of the 2010s, tango generated 500 million dollars a year worldwide, of which only 10% correspond to Argentina. On the Internet there were 50 million sites about tango. It is estimated that there are millions of people who dance tango outside of Argentina and Uruguay. Festivals are held in countries as different as Iceland, Japan, Turkey and the United States, not to mention Finland where it is considered its own genre. All the big cities in the world have tango magazines.
In the book The Revival of the Forbidden Dances, its author Reneé Critcher Lyons concludes by saying:
Indeed, modern tango is "old, new, profoundly vital and undeniably global" (Goertzen, 74). The tango, often described as the dance of life and death, has embraced and conquered both, reincarnating and reviving in a way similar to its own cyclical nature, but keeping above all the dance of two hearts merged in one, creator of life, of our next step. From there, there will never be a last tango...
III. Current outlook and future trends
Given the worldwide renaissance of tango, some scholars speak of a "New Golden Age". In 2003 Buenos Aires began to organize the World Tango Dance Championship and in 2009 UNESCO declared that the tango was Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (PCI). Some music critics use the expression "Guardia Joven", "Tango Joven" or "New Tango" to refer to the new currents of young artists that have multiplied since the mid-1990s, and highlight the phenomenon of "reconciliation" of youth with tango, after the "generational rupture" from the 1960s and 1970s.
We can place something arbitrarily in the year 1995 the beginning of the emergence of a New Tango that answers to a period of drought in which the classic exponents of the genre did not do much more than interpret old repeated tangos until tiredness, without a massive bet to the renewal of the genre.Angela Flavio
In any case, both in Argentina and Uruguay, as well as in various parts of the world, a broad and heterogeneous cultural movement made up of young musicians who seek to rescue and reinterpret tango with new codes is notable.
Some of the new currents have a clearly defined profile such as electronic tango, queer tango, tango for boys, indie tango, etc.
Electronic tango began to define itself as current in the year 2000 with the formation of the group Gotan Project, later accompanied by other formations such as Tanghetto, Bajofondo Tango Club, Narcotango, and Otros Aires.
Queer tango, originated in Germany and spread throughout the world, proposes a tango that reconstructs the free connection of bodies and in which the roles in dance are not fixed or determined by gender.
The new artists dedicated to tango are referred to by music critics as "Guardia Joven", "Tango Indie or Independiente", "Tango Off", etc. In some cases they have come to be linked to form movements and events such as the Independent Tango Festival in Buenos Aires, Mendoza, La Plata and Rosario, with the proposal of not interpreting covers of traditional tangos. In Buenos Aires, many of these artists are also linked by the culture of the recaladas tango in places like El Bar de Roberto, Bar El Faro and Sanata Bar.
Among the new tango performers who stand out in Argentina, we can mention: Astillero, Julián Peralta, 34 stab wounds, The Chicano, Fernández Fierro Typical Orchestra, quatrotango, Lydia Borda, Milonguero Sextet, China Cruel and Graciela Pesce, among others. Among the new lyricists stands out Marcelo Mercadante, Jorge Alorsa, Dema, Juan Penas, Lucio Arce, Peche Estevez with Buenos Aires Negro, Acho Estol, Pacha González, Alejandro Guyot, Tape Rubin, Juan Serén and Juan Vattuone, who contribute both poetic and humorous works.
On the Uruguayan side and although in smaller numbers you can also find musicians like the Ricacosa Quartet, Tabare Leyton, Monica Navarro, the Troilo Cannibal Project, Malena Muyala, Gabriel Peluffo, Maya Castro, Nelson Pino and Quintet the mufa.
Dance
Evolution
There is a general agreement among scholars in pointing out that tango was born first as a dance style and then as a musical genre. Since the middle of the XIX century, it is the tango dance that has promoted a progressive musical transformation that corresponds to the dance, reaching the creation of tango, as a musical genre, in the last decade of the XIX century.
Tango as a dance began to emerge in the middle of the century in what was called the orillas or arrabal of cities such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo, that is, the marginal areas inhabited by the popular sectors. In those suburbs it was within the Afro-Rioplatense communities, in the final process of liberation from slavery, where popular dance and entertainment venues were installed, called "academias", "milongas", "piringundines" or "funks" in which tango would be invented. The protagonists were the Afro-Rioplatense communities themselves with their social types called "blacks", "blacks", "brown" and "pardas", and the mixed-race rural populations in the process of migrating to the cities called "chinas" and "compadritos", this last outstanding protagonist of the origin of tango as a dance. Additionally, the academies and milongas also received the growing presence of the wave of immigrants from the most diverse countries in Europe and the Middle East, mostly Italians.
José Gobello explains that after the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852, in Buenos Aires, the Afro-Porteño communities could not continue marching with their candombes through the streets and were forced to do so in closed places. It is under these conditions that the dance is transformed, merging the characteristic cuts and breaks of candombe, with the linked couple of the waltz and the mazurka. The waltz had become fashionable in Europe with the novelty of the couple dancing embraced, in the first decades of the XIX century, unleashing strong questions in conservative sectors for its alleged indecency and immorality, especially in England. The mazurka, also with a linked couple, was the dance in fashion in 1850. The fusion of styles gave rise to waltzes and mazurkas danced with corte and quebrada, laying the choreographic foundations of tango: closely linked couple, walk, cut and quebrada.
These characteristics were already defined in the 1860s. In Buenos Aires there are records of the arrest of four men and two women for dancing with a court in 1862.
In the following three decades this type of dance was used in the Río de la Plata to dance different styles: mazurcas, polkas, chotis, habaneras, Andalusian tangos and milongas, in search of a style that would adapt to their cadence. At that time it was called "tango" to everything that "los negros" danced to. In this process, a new musical genre was generated, perfectly adapted to that peculiar and sensual dance style. Finally, this new genre appeared in the last years of the century XIX and was baptized with the same name as the dance: "tango".
This initial way of dancing tango is known as "canyengue tango", orillero tango or arrabalero tango. The canyengue tango acquired the profile of a defined style, strongly marked by the cut and the broken, with a very close embrace and the bodies in contact. It is a provocative and very sensual style.
But as the tango came out of the academies, milongas and piringundines of the suburban night, to begin to be danced in salons and public or family areas, a new style of dancing appeared, which sought to moderate its most provocative aspects, separating the bodies but without losing the embrace and attenuating, or even eliminating, the cuts and breaks, at least his most sensual figures. This style, developed mainly from the second decade of the XX century, received the name of salon tango or smooth tango.. The salon tango or smooth tango was based above all on the tango walk. It was basically the style that was popularly danced between the 1920s and 1950s.
In the halls it was forbidden to dance with court, if we did someone approached and told us: "Pase por boletería" and there they recommended us or threw us out. They called us fellows.Oil (Carlos Estévez)
Almost simultaneously with the salon tango practiced as a popular entertainment, a tango danced by professionals oriented to the show appeared, which received the name of stage tango. Stage tango uses more daring and free choreographies, often taken from other dances or physical disciplines, such as jumps and figures with loose dancers, which neither ballroom tango nor canyengue tango accept.
Tango almost ceased to be danced from the sixties in Buenos Aires. Some milongas survived. However, in the eighties it received a new impetus thanks to the success of the show Argentine Tango by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, first in Paris and then on Broadway, generating a worldwide tangomania. Tango academies flourished everywhere and people from all over the world began to make pilgrimages in search of places to dance it, especially Buenos Aires, promoted by tourists as the Capital of Tango.
Since 2003, the World Tango Dance Championship has been held annually in Buenos Aires, with competitions in two categories, «stage tango» and «salon tango», or «on the dance floor».
Among the professional tango dancers noted in history are Pedrín de San Telmo, El Cachafaz (Benito Bianquet), Casmiro "El Vazco" Aín -who danced before the Catholic Pope in 1924-, Negro Navarro, Parda Haydé, Parda Ester, Petróleo (Carlos Estévez), Jorge "El Vasco" Orradre, Cacho Lavandina, Antonio Todaro, Virulazo (Jorge Orcaizaguirre), Los Dinzel, Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves.
Tango choreography
The tango dance is built on four basic components: the close embrace, the walk, the cut and la quebrada, understood these last two classic terms as the axis of improvisation and the choreographic figures that adorn the dance and that are known under the generic name of "firulete". But above all else, tango must be danced as a body language through which personal emotions are transmitted to the couple.
It is said that tango is danced "listening to the body of the other". In tango, the couple must perform figures, pauses and improvised movements, called «cuts, quebradas and firuletes», different for each one of them, without letting go. It is the embrace that makes it difficult to combine the improvisations of both in a single choreography.
One of the styles of the tango, the Argentine tango, performs the miracle of inserting the figure in the link... This is the secret of its success; this is the main innovation that offers the world.
Argentine writer Alicia Dujovne Ortiz has described it this way: "A two-headed monster, a four-legged beast, languid or lively, that lives for the duration of a song and is killed by the last measure."
The choreography, designed around the couple's embrace, is extremely sensual and complex. The complexity of the steps does not affect the expression or what you want to convey during the dance. It is about expressing a feeling full of sensuality and not sexuality, where the main thing is not only the steps or the figures that the dancers make with their feet. A perfect technique or perfect timing is useless when the dancers' facial expressions do not convey feelings. Everything in the tango dance is united, the looks, the arms, the hands, each movement of the body accompanying the cadence of the tango and accompanying what they are experiencing: a three-minute romance, between two people who may have just met know each other and are probably not in a real-life relationship.
Tango transcends and reaches the hearts of those who contemplate the dancers, thanks to the feelings they put into the dance and the quality of their choreography. Each musical stanza, each passage, each tango has different moments; a complete tango cannot be danced following an identical behavior pattern for the entire melody. There are sad, happy, sensual or euphoric cadences, silent or grandiose endings, in-crescendo music or in-diminuendo music, it only expresses feelings and these are what the dancers transport to their feet and their entire bodies.
Steps
- Progress backwards
- Baldosa.
- Barrida.
- Boleo
- Inverted chain.
- Fall.
- Cadence (Vaivén).
- Calesita.
- Address changes.
- Side change.
- Front shift.
- Syncopate walk.
- Walking
- Punish.
- Countermolinete
- Basic setbacks with eights.
- Cunita and taken.
- Hanging
- Double molinete.
- Double countermoline.
- Double eight.
- Red.
- Check it out.
- Gangs (from the outside, from the inside, eight back or forward)
- Continuous hooks on the same foot
- Mutual win
- Syncopated goose and hike.
- Boys with answer.
- I turn with sweep and boleo.
- Turn with brim or hook.
- I turn with pull and stop.
- I turn with drawer, needle and eight cut.
- I turn around and boleo.
- Left turn with sweep and boleo.
- Turn left and right.
- I turn in eights.
- Simple turn.
- Turn and exit to the left.
- Pencil
- "The box."
- "The little girl."
- The bite.
- American media
- Half chain with boleo.
- Half moon
- Molinete
- Molinete broke.
- Death
- Inverted bite.
- Continuous linear bite.
- Eight back.
- Eight adorned.
- Eight cut.
- Orillero (Milonguero)
- Pass
- Syncopate basic step.
- Basic steps with draw and boleo.
- Picado/s
- Planning
- Bridge and pie.
- With a twist.
- Moved in.
- Crusade, twist and eight cut.
- Out of the cross with variants.
- Pulled and bridge in a twist.
- Shot with boleos.
- Shot from the back
- American exit.
- Exit back.
- Combined output.
- Departure with ornaments.
- Departure with sweep.
- Departure with transfer.
- Sentenced
- Scissors
- Touch and thread.
- Worked
- I moved across with twists.
- Vaivén.
- Volcada.
Gender roles
In the traditional male-female couple, gender roles are sexually defined. This means that in the tango couple it is the man who creates and directs the dance and the woman who follows it, although with an autonomous choreography. This traditional assignment of roles by gender in tango is, however, conditioned by the also traditional custom of dancing tango between men.
Tango choreography also admits that occasionally, it is the woman who "marks" the passage to the male Carmencita Rodríguez, partner of the legendary Cachafaz, remembered that when she felt that a bullfight was appropriate, she would indicate it to her partner, if he did not start it before.
At the end of the year 2000 a movement emerged in Germany, self-proclaimed queer tango, which proposes dancing the tango without the roles being fixed to the gender of those who dance it. Therefore, in this style, same-gender dance partners are frequent and the roles of conductor and led are exchanged. From Germany the movement spread to different parts of the world. Queer Tango festivals are held in Argentina, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States, etc.
Themes
The suburb
Arrabal bitter...
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Tango is an art with suburban roots, “arrabalero”, derived from its popular nature. It is worth noting the different origin of suburb and arrabal, now considered synonymous. Arrabal is a word of Arabic origin, which meant 'outside the walls' in the case of the walled city of Montevideo. It arises and develops in the working-class neighborhoods that surround the cities of the River Plate: the "arrabal". For tango, the suburb is the inspiring muse, the place of belonging that should not be abandoned, betrayed or forgotten. Above all things, the tanguero is a man (and a woman) "from the neighborhood". In the language of tango, the suburb and the center make up two opposite poles: the suburb, often inextricably linked to friends and "la vieja", expresses the true and the authentic, while the center usually expresses the fleeting, « the lights” that dazzle, failure.
The feeling of belonging to the suburb has led tango to build neighborhood cultures, to give them personality. Especially in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, tango is inextricably linked to the identity of the neighborhoods. The city of tango is a city lived from the suburbs.
Some tangos that take the suburb as their theme are Mi Buenos Aires querido (Le Pera), Cafetín de Buenos Aires (Discépolo), Barrio de tango (Castillo), A media luz (Carlos César Lenzi), I am the brunette (Villoldo), Ballad for a madman (Ferrer), South (Homero Manzi).
Disappointment
Cry, cry heart,
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Love disappointment as the central theme of tango is commonplace, although only partially true. Probably what draws attention in the way in which tango addresses heartbreak, is the contrast of the "tough" man and oriented towards machismo, emotionally restricted, who opens up in the lyrics of tango, showing his interiority and depth. of his suffering. In tango men cry and talk about their emotions, in a world where men should not cry or expose their feelings.
Some tangos related to heartbreak are: Mano a mano (Celedonio Flores), Uno (Discépolo), Nostalgia (Cadícamo), Tonight I'm getting drunk (Discépolo), Bitterness (Alfredo Le Pera).
Sexual desire and sadness
The years are going on,
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Sexual desire, sublimated in sensuality, and sadness or melancholy, derived from a permanent state of dissatisfaction, are the central components of tango. Originally, these feelings emerged from the harsh situation of millions of mostly male immigrant workers, lonely in a strange land, flocking en masse to brothels, where paid sex accentuated "the nostalgia for communion and love, the longing for the woman" and the evidence of loneliness. Tango thus emerged from a massive and popular "erotic resentment", which led to a harsh introspective reflection, also massive and popular, about love, sex, frustration and finally the meaning of life and death for man. common.
Over the course of the 20th century and with the importance that sexuality and introspection acquired, as well as an existential vision and less optimistic about life, tango developed its basic components as an artistic expression notably related to the problems of contemporary man. Ernesto Sabato reflects that the meeting in the tango of markedly existential components with the metaphysical temper, is what makes this dance or these songs a unique artistic expression throughout the world.
The gender issue
He found her in the bun and other arms,
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There is a general consensus in recognizing tango as macho, at least in its traditional form. There are several tangos that celebrate gender violence and even femicide, humorously addressing it or justifying it ("Amablemente&# 34;, "La biaba", "La toalla mojada", "Cuando me entrés a fail", "Confession", " Smacks"). It has also been pointed out that this characteristic is not exclusive to tango and is present as symbolic violence in all artistic genres and in the media. Phrases like "Tango is a thing for men& #3. 4; or "tango is macho", has been coined to justify the gender imbalance that characterizes a large part of tango production.
Regarding women, one of the traditional themes of tango is that of "Milonguita", to refer to young women who participated in the nightlife and exercised their sexual freedom, using negative evaluations such as "the one who took the wrong step" and expressions like "mines" ("in my life I had many women but never a woman"), "loss" and the association with the "mud" ("Fangal", "Tonight I get drunk", "Flor de fango", "The seamstress who took that bad step"). However, it has also been pointed out that many of the components of tango are contrary to machismo, such as the intertwined dance and the externalization of masculine emotions.
In an interview with the tango group Boquitas Pintadas, its members -all women- say:
- Q: Is tango a macho world?
- BP: Tango was born in a machista society and, little by little, society is reversing that reality and that, of course, has an impact on music. We know that there were no orchestras that contain women before, except the counts and exotic “missive orchestras”
-Q. Do you think there was any change in the last time?
-BP: Yes, of course. Luckily – and also with a stop of melancholy – we feel that these characters are missing that are the “tangueros de ley” that have a lot of fun and make us understand the yeite of tango. If machismo had not existed, tango would not be what it is. So many letters wouldn't make sense, so many codes at the dance wouldn't enrich the style. It is a beautiful period where that sensuality of man's conquest is mixed in the dance and interpretation of musicians with new styles and freedoms of our time. It's very beautiful to see women dancing together without something strange in milongas. We feel no impediment to living tango as women.
- Q: How do you live it daily?
- BP: Super well, sometimes we meet people who still have that “imaginary” woman who couldn’t be professional, and they are surprised to hear us and the typical phrase we already hear several times is: ‘They’re women and how well they play! What strength! I close my eyes and look like men!’. (Laughter) We take it with humor, luckily!
The passage of time
The reflection on time is a very special characteristic of tango lyrics, perhaps as much or more than the love disappointment itself. Virtually all tangos contain a torn look at the destructive effect of time on relationships, things and life itself. Above all things, the tango poet manifests his impotence before that "fierce revenge of time" and expresses "the pain of no longer being".
Some tangos related to the passage of time are Volver (Le Pera), Caminito (Coria Peñaloza), El corazón al sur (Eladia Blázquez), Red ink (Cátulo Castillo).
Other topics
- Love: The day you love me and Student loves (Le Pera), The tide and You forget everything (girlfriend head) Cadícamo.
- Death: His eyes closed (Le Pera), Bye, guys. (César Veldani) Bye, Nonino. (Astor Piazzolla).
- The social problem: Cambalache (Speaking) That's it. (Speaking) Where's a mango, old Gomez? (Ivo Pelay), Chiquilín de Bachín (Ferrer) Broke (Battistella).
- The tango: Malena (Manzi), Che, bandoneon (Manzi), The firulete (Rodolfo Taboada), The Song of Buenos Aires (Romero) So tango dances (Marvil) Pa’ to dance the boys (Cadicamo), Follow the dance (Carlos Warren) Che, papusa, I heard (Cadicamo), The last curda (Castillo).
Tango poetry
There is also tango or lunfarda poetry and prose, created without being intended to be part of a song. Among them we can mention Julián Centeya, Celedonio Flores, Evaristo Carriego, Atilio Jorge Castelpoggi, Carlos de la Púa, Martina Íñiguez, Orlando Mario Punzi, Juan Carlos Lamadrid, Luis Luchi, Héctor Gagliardi, among many. Jorge Luis Borges himself has texts that can be considered tango, such as the poem Jacinto Chiclana and the short story Hombre de la esquina rosada. Juan Gelman should also be included as a tango poet, who has said that for him "tango is a way of conversing".
Melody
In its first forms, tango was played in 2/4 time, but shortly before the consolidation of the Old Guard, the first works appeared in 4/4, prevailing in the New Guard and from then on. Historically it presents a binary form (theme and chorus).
Jorge Luis Borges highlighted that tango music is so connected to the world of the River Plate that when a composer, from any other part of the world, tries to compose a tango «discovers, not without surprise, that he has hatched something that our ears cannot They recognize that our memory does not host and that our body rejects. This strongly local characteristic of tango, imbricated with the rhythm and musicality of the River Plate language, has been repeatedly pointed out.
One of the first characteristics of tango music was the exclusion of brass and percussion instruments, removing stridency in order to build an intimate and warm sound, capable of transmitting the sensuality that defined it from the beginning.
Instrumentation
Classically, tango is performed by a typical orchestra or sextet and recognizes the bandoneon as one of the essential instruments.
It has been said that «bandoneon and tango are the same thing». Of German origin, it was adopted by tangueros at the beginning of the 20th century to replace the initial presence of the flute and complete the unmistakable sound of tango. Cátulo Castillo attributes "...to the bandoneon the definitive lamenting sound that tango has, its inclination to moan, to grumble".
The bandoneon gave tango its definitive complex form, integrating the melody into a simultaneously rhythmic and harmonic base.
This melodic-rhythmic-harmonic complexity was later strengthened with the incorporation of the piano, replacing the guitar, and the development of a particularly tango performance technique, based on rhythmic percussion. In this way the instrumental basis of tango is defined as a quartet of bandoneon, piano, violin and double bass (there may be a guitar).
On its instruments the typical tango orchestra is formed, originally invented by Julio de Caro in the twenties and consolidated mainly in the form of a sextet with the following integration: piano, two bandoneons, two violins and double bass. The tango orchestra, properly speaking, follows the same scheme, enlarging the bandoneon group, and adding violas and cellos to the string group.
Letter
History
Tango was born as instrumental music exclusively to be danced. Over time he incorporated singing, almost always soloist, eventually in a duet, without chorus or harmonies, but keeping quite clearly the separation between instrumental tangos and sung tangos.
In the first decades of the 20th century there was no radio and the cinema was silent, so the theater was very popular. Pascual Contursi, Celedonio Flores, Enrique Santos Discépolo, Homero Manzi to name a few, were theater people and wrote verses for plays, some in Lunfardo. It is logical to say that the tango song was enlightened by the theater and tango is often compared to a dramatic play: the tango singer is precisely recounting a drama. This is also thanks to Carlos Gardel himself, who chose to interpret and put melody to the verses that best portrayed the feelings of the man from the city, his characters, his language, his places and idiosyncrasies and, especially, the spirit of the people.
The writer Jorge Luis Borges used to say that he didn't like listening to Gardel because he made the porteños cry with his tangos. Carlos Gardel was a very charismatic and cheerful man but with a tendency to depression. Reserved and humble, he would rather lose than disagree. Dependent on his affections, but with an irrepressible need to take tango to the whole world. We can find many traits of his personality in the tango song. José Razzano said that he sometimes found him melancholic and pensive, as if he were holding an intense grief.
Tango poetry has the unusual characteristic of being considerably complex, with the use of metaphors and philosophical reflections and at the same time very popular, especially in the most humble strata of the population. Images such as «the mystery of goodbye that the train sows» used by Homero Manzi in Barrio de tango (1942), or «the snows of time silvered my temple» by Carlos Gardel in Volver (1935), or "your miraculous mix of wise men and suicides" created by Enrique Santos Discépolo in Cafetín de Buenos Aires (1948), or "red ink on the gray of yesterday" that Cátulo Castillo put in Red ink (1941), they bring together a high poetic complexity and at the same time a high popularity, which has persisted over the years.
Language
I remembered those hours of garufa.
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The lyrics are composed based on a local slang called lunfardo and usually express sadness, especially "in the things of love."
Although tango can be sung with a greater or lesser presence of lunfardo in its lyrics, it is the pose and sound of lunfardo from the River Plate that characterizes it. Lunfardo is not only a slang made up of hundreds of its own words, but it is also, and perhaps more essentially, a linguistic pose, a somewhat exaggerated way of speaking (which includes eating the S's), for which they are usually recognized. throughout the world the Argentines and Uruguayans, inhabitants of the coasts of the Río de la Plata. Tango is "reo" because lunfardo "is reo", that is, it is a musical style built on popular speech; lunfardo is the speech of the suburb, the voice of the suburb.
Lunfardo expresses the migratory fusion that originated the River Plate societies, expressed by tango, like nowhere else. Lunfardo is originated in the 19th century mainly by Italian immigrants who were the majority, both in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but it also contains other influences, including words, African, Aymara, Mapuche, Jewish, Gypsy-Spanish, Galician, Quechua, Arabic, Guarani, Polish, Portuguese and English, which are mixed in daily use without awareness of their origin.
Lunfardo was in its origins and continues to be today an occult-metaphorical language built from a notable dynamic between prison society, young people and the world of work. Somehow, according to José Gobello, lunfardo is "a lexical prank, something like a mischievous wink that speech makes to the language".
At times the lunfardo was persecuted in the Río de la Plata and questioned by some academics from the Royal Spanish Academy. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was the practice of intermediate officials of censoring tangos that contained lyrics in lunfardo. For this reason, many -among them "Mano a mano" and "The dizzy" they were rewritten. During the Onganía dictatorship (1966-1970) lunfardo virtually disappeared from tango and popular music. In 1969 Alejandro Dolina included the term "bulín" in his theme & # 34; Fantasmas de Belgrano & # 34; and Horacio Ferrer began his famous "Balada para un loco" with an essentially lunfarda exclamation: "I know I'm crazy, crazy, crazy...". Since then, and despite some attempts during the dictatorship established in 1976 to "clean up" popular culture, lunfardo registered a notable resurgence.
At the beginning of the XXI century, lunfardo enjoyed great vitality, having been adopted and reformulated by new generations. Some linguists such as the Italian Matteo Bartoli affirmed that the term "lunfardo" comes from the Italian dialect term lumbardo (that is, lombard, inhabitant of Lombardy, a region of northern Italy). Over time, lunfardo assimilated cocoliche (which was heard less and less in Buenos Aires in the second half of the 20th century, probably due to the disappearance of immigrants from southern Italy who spoke it). Many of the words of cocoliche today are part of lunfardo.
Some examples of Lunfardo, borrowed especially from Italian and Lombard, appear below:
- «Fiaca»fiacca: ‘flackness’ in Italian): laziness;
- “Mufa” (‘moho’ in some dialect): annoyance and also bad luck;
- “Gamba” (“pierna” in Italian): someone who helps or has good intentions, also ‘cent pesos’ because they “help”;
- "Gambetear": skiing (mainly in football);
- «Minga»: ‘nada’ in Lombard dialect;
- “Yeta” (from Italian iettaturaBad luck;
- “Yira” or “yiro” (from ‘turning, turning’ in Italian): street prostitute;
- «Atenti» (‘atentos’ in Italian): attention;
- “Salute” (“salud” in Italian);
- “Cuore” (“heart” in Italian), if someone says “I love you as a cuore” means ‘I love you with my heart’.
In addition, terms such as eagerness, boludo, bardo, bondi, cana, chabón, che, chorro, escabiar, junar, mina, morfi, pibe, rajar, rea, yuta, manyar, ballastar, pilcha constitute River Plate speech, in both banks of the Plata, both in Uruguay and in Buenos Aires (see map of the Río de la Plata) and in other parts of Argentina.
Table
In the following table we find the origin of some defined terms used in tango:
| Expression | Meaning | Origin | Verse | Tango | Author |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tamangos mango morfar | shoes money eat | African Italian French | When you scratch them tamangos, looking for that one. mango to make you morfar | Yira, yira | Enrique S. Discépolo |
| milonga | 1. Dance and music close to tango 2. Place to dance tango | African | With the milonga I'll go equal to Because I'm also milonga... | The milonga and I | Leopoldo Díaz Vélez and Tito Ribero |
| candombe | Afro-Rrioplatense musical styles (on the one hand the Argentine, and on the other the Uruguayan -both different today, although equal in their respective African origins of the Bantu area-) with intense use of the percussion close to the tango | African | !Candombe! !Candombe Black! Buenos Aires nostalgia through the streets of San Telmo He's moving the street! | Azabache | Enrique Francini, Héctor Stamponi and Homer Expósito |
| quilombo | brothel, clutter, clutter, chin, annoying noise | African | What fate will you have, Old Juan Tango iluso? Son of no one and all in a quilombo Dark. | Old Juan Tango | Juan Navarro |
| fuel Mine | work "easy" or young seductive woman | Italian Lombard | It's the same thing. the bore night and day like an ox who lives from the mines the one who kills, the one who heals or it's out of the law. | Cambalache | Enrique Santos Discépolo |
| Pantheon | Crazy. | Italian | I know I'm Pyantao, piantao... | Balada for a madman | Ástor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer |
| ♪ gil | thief foolish fool | prison Italian | Chorra: you, your old man and your dad. What makes me sick It's been so gil. | Chorra | Enrique Santos Discépolo |
| junar | Watch | Calo | Like with a sprout and ♪... | The surgeon. | Alfredo Marino and Ernesto de la Cruz |
| Clown Chamuyar Firulete | ‘chambón’ or ‘torpe’ errante, loser speaking down, seducing excess, drawing | Calo Galician-French | You leave no more some Clown chamuye To the cue and shake your Frulete | The firulete | Mariano Mores and Rodolfo Taboada |
| pibe | child | uncertain | «Mamita, mamita», he approached screaming, The strange mother left the pool and pibe He said laughing and crying: "The club sent me the summons today." | The Pibe's Dream | Reinaldo Yiso and Juan Puey |
| Stack. | clothes | mapundungun and quichua | Get him to life, get him out, changing of nest, Stack. And gavion, | Why do you tell me? | Alberto Alonso and Rodolfo Sciammarella |
| Daddyrusa | beautiful woman | Polish | In your corner, one day, Milonguita, That one. Daddyrusa criolla that Linnig lied | "Corrientes y Esmeralda" | Celedonio Flores |
| pucho | cigarette | Mapudungun Quechua | Tango dear that already pa’ always happened, Like pucho consumed the delights of my life that today ashes are only. | "On a pig" | Sebastián Piana and José González Castillo |
Composers
Cinematography
Since the very origin of cinema, tango has been constantly represented in the cinema, from the famous films by Gardel, to Tango by Carlos Saura, passing through universal classics such as El último tango in Paris (1972), Soldaat van Oranje (1977) by Paul Verhoeven, El exilio de Gardel (Tangos) (1985) by Pino Solanas, or Perfume de mujer (Scent of a women, 1992) with Al Pacino.
Some films referring to tango are the following:
- Tango Council (1932), directed by Luis José Moglia Barth; with María Esther Gamas and Carlos Viván.
- Tango! (27 April 1933), directed by Luis José Moglia Barth. It was the start of Argentine commercial sound cinema and the birth of Argentina Sono Film.
- The Exile of Gardel (Tangos) (1984), directed by Pino Solanas.
- South (film) (1988), directed by Pino Solanas.
- The pest (film) of Luis Puenzo (1991)
- After the storm Tristan Bauer (1991)
- Naked tango of Leonard Schrader (1991)
- Funes, a great love of Raúl de la Torre (1993)
- The lesson of tango (1997) by Sally Potter, semi-autobiographical history, in which a film director relates to a tango dancer, and a plot related to the director role of each one, in dance, cinema and life. Sally Potter proposes a vision of tango as a struggle and symbolizes it in the painting "The struggle between Jacob and the angel" of the French painter Eugène Delacroix, which becomes omnipresent in the film.
- Tango (1998) directed by Carlos Saura; nominated to the Oscar for the best foreign film and prize for photography at the Festival de Cannes, among other awards.
- Tango Magic (1999) of Lawrence Jordan
- Assassination Tango (2002) of Robert Duvall
- Russkie v Gorode Angelov (first episode of the TV series, 2003)
- 12 Tangos - Goodbye Buenos Aires (2005) of Arne Birkenstock.
- If you are witch: A tango story (2005) of Caroline Neal
- Valentina's Tango (2007) by Rogelio Lobato
- Fantasma de Buenos Aires (2009) by Guillermo Grillo
- The last applause (2009) directed by German Kral, documentary film, a german-argentina co-production, which narrates the story of a group of tango singers from Buenos Aires who used to play in one of the most famous tango bars in the city, the “Bar El Chino”.
- Pichuco (pelicula) (2014) by Martin Turnes. A musical tour of the work of Aníbal Troilo alias "Pichuco", one of the fundamental characters of the history of Tango and Argentina music.
- One shot at night 2 (2019) by Alejandro Diez (director)
National styles
Tango in Argentina and Uruguay
In Buenos Aires, certain neighborhoods have a special tango imprint, such as El Abasto, San Telmo or La Boca and in Montevideo, Barrio Sur, Ciudad Vieja de Montevideo, La Mondiola, La Unión and other neighborhoods. Tango academies are also important, where tango is learned and danced. Other cities in Argentina and Uruguay have important centers or tango activities. In Santa Fe the Tango Week is organized, an event organized and produced by the Tangofex4 group, sponsored by the municipality of Santa Fe and the Luz y Fuerza Union, in which musicians, dancers, singers, plastic artists, designers and photographers, more than 100 artists from all over the country, with many free and free shows. The city of San Carlos de Bariloche organizes annually since 2002, in the first fortnight of March, the World Tango Summit.
Brazilian tango
Brazilian tango was formed simultaneously with River Plate tango and from similar influences, such as candomblé and lundu of African origin, Cuban habanera, Andalusian tango, and European polka and mazurka.
Brazilian tango evolved into maxixe (a style known as Brazilian tango) and choro, with performers such as Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga. Nazareth began by playing "tangos" and later transcribed his scores to "chorinho", pressured by record companies, "who wanted to transmute Brazilian tango into chorinho and samba". Chiquinha Gonzaga, on the other hand, continued composing tangos, tangos-choros, waltzes, mazurkas, gavottes, polkas and habaneras, in the Brazilian style.
Brazilian tangos has continued to have important composers such as Lina Pesce, David Nasser, José Fernandes, Nelson Gonçalves and others, especially in the regions located in the south of Brazil, especially in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
Tango in Colombia
Tango became very popular in Colombia at the beginning of the XX century, when numerous Argentine artists arrived in the country. Specifically, the city of Medellín, one of the capitals of tango, outside of Argentina and Uruguay. In the city, there are a large number of bars of this genre, and also in the rest of Colombia. In the 1930s it began to become more popular, and to expand throughout the rest of the national territory. A historical fact, precisely, was the death of Carlos Gardel in Medellín in 1935 in an aeronautical accident. Currently, in Colombia, there is the 'Colombia Tango Festival' an international event on the genre held in Manizales, the Annual Tango Festival in Medellín and the "Festival Universitario de Tango", which in 2014 reached its tenth version in the month of May integrating the university tango groups of the capital. Likewise, there are several academies and places to learn to dance. In Medellín there is the Gardeliana House Museum, where the singer's objects are exhibited. In Manizales there is the emblematic Calle del Tango, which receives its name because there are 4 places where the rhythms of Río de La Plata are danced and listened to: Los Faroles, Reminiscences Tango Show, Tiempo de Tango and Grill La Feria.
Tango in Chile
Since the first decades of the XX century, tango was danced both in the Chilean capital, Santiago, and ―especially― in the port of Valparaíso, where the love for the arrabalero dance still develops. Some academies, radio programs and festivals where tangueros meet still subsist.
Cátulo Castillo, who lived in Chile until he was 16 years old, bandoneon player Gabriel Clausi (El Chula) who settled with his orchestra in Viña del Mar between 1944 and 1953, stands out among the Chilean tangueros or those closely linked to Chilean culture. and he composed the tango «En una rincón del café». In Clausi's orchestra, the tango singers Jorge Abril and Chito Faró stood out. The latter, author of the famous waltz "Si vas para Chile", also composed several tangos, including the widespread "Matecito de plata".
But in Chilean tango, Porfirio Díaz stands out above all -also author of the Chilote folkloric classic "Viejo lobo chilote"- who reigned in the world of tango in Chile with his own orchestra since the end of the decade from 1930. Other prominent performers were Armando Bonasco, Cármen Carol, the duo Sonia & Miriam and Pepe Aguirre.
Among the recommended works is the album Tango/Chile, by the Chula Clausi orchestra, which brings together recordings made in Chile for RCA between 1944 and 1948.
Finnish tango
Finnish tango began to take on its own characteristics in the 1930s. It is distinguished from other variants by its almost exclusive performance in minor keys and in themes, which reflect established conventions in Finnish folklore. One of the highlights is the Tangomarkkinat, or tango festival, held annually since 1985 in Seinäjoki, considered by Finnish tangueros as the second city of tango after Buenos Aires. Olavi Virta (1915-1972) and Unto Mononen (1930-1968). According to the slogan of the article, Finland sings the tango like no one is, from 1910 the tango arrived in Finland through France and Germany; According to oral tradition, it was a couple of Danish dancers who, in 1913, showed for the first time how tango was danced. The Uruguayan musicologist Adriana Santos Melgarejo makes said article of journalistic dissemination where she frames the tango in Finland alluding to the work of other researchers.
Tango from other countries
- The tango liscio, own of Italy.
- The Ukrainian tango.
Tango events
Festival and World Tango Dance Championship
The Tango Dance World Championship is held annually, during the month of August, in Buenos Aires. Couples from all over the world compete in two categories: track tango and stage tango. The Championship takes place within the framework of a two-week Tango Festival in which the main artists of the genre perform.
The champions of the 2013 edition were the couples made up of Jesica Arfenoni and Maximiliano Cristiani (dance tango) and Guido Palacios and Florencia Zárate Castilla (stage tango), both from Argentina.
European Tango Dance Festival and Championship
Since 2010, the European Tango Dance Championship has been held annually in the last week of June, also within the framework of a tango festival, following the format of the festival and world championship held in Buenos Aires. The champions qualify directly for the world championship final.
Lunfardo and Tango Book Fair
Since 2004, the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo has organized the Lunfardo and Tanguero Book Fair in Buenos Aires. It is held annually throughout the month of December. At the fair, tango and lunfardo books, records and publications are exhibited and sold, conferences and presentations are held, artists and musicians are presented and films related to the fair's themes are shown.
Barriales Tango Festivals
Since 2010, different initiatives of independent festivals with a strong territorial identification have been carried out in the city of Buenos Aires, organized by the artists and the community of neighbors and cultural actors. Some of them are: Boedo Tango Festival (March and April), Republic of La Boca Tango Festival (November), Flores Tango Festival (September) and the Urchasdonia Tango Festival (November).
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