PaperCongresso01.pdf

Rhythm, Meter, and Dance of the Argentine Tango

Kristin Wendland, Emory University

Presentation given to the Dance and Culture Area of the

Popular Culture Association

5 th Congress of the Americas

October 19, 2001

INTRODUCTION

TANGO ….Just the word conjures up exciting images and inspires many

associations and interpretations, such as passion, sensuality, drama, gender wars, even

violent ones, a national identity, a by-gone era, a universal art form. While I am

fascinated with the many dimensions of the music and the dance of the Argentine tango, I

will limit my discussion to a more tangible perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the elusive relationship between music

and dance. I take the approach as a musician who also has a passion for dance. This is a

preliminary study, aimed at sharing information about the two forms and demonstrating

relationships between the rhythm and meter of the music with specific figures and steps

of the dance. While this may seem like a surface relationship, one must always establish

labels for elements to be compared on deeper levels. My hope is to lay the groundwork

for an analytical study that may reveal a deeper connection between the dance and music

of the Argentine tango, not only in terms of musical analysis but also metaphors for

meaning.

BACKGROUND (omitted from the presentation due to lack of time)

Since this may be a new topic to many of you, I would first like to give a brief

background of the dance and the music, and hopefully portray a glimpse into the culture

of Argentina. (It has been said that Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish, think they

are British, and wish they were French.)

Dance

The economic boom in Argentina at beginning of the last century attracted nearly

as many immigrants seeking prosperity to this large, fertile country as to the U.S. While

the centro of the capital, Buenos Aires, housed the rising middle and upper classes in the

opulent city described as “the Paris of South America,” the outer neighborhoods housed

the workers of the slaughterhouses and the newly-arrived immigrants. There in the

arrabales , or the outermost slums of Buenos Aires, the compraditos , those unemployed

young men—hoodlums really—and their prostitutes gave birth to the tango in their shady

dance halls, cafes, and brothels.

While the etymology of the word tango has various interpretations, the word was

used to describe African dances and places where Africans danced in the Rio de la Plata

region of Argentina and Uruguay around the end of the 19 th century. Since it was already

used in connection with dance, the word tango was easily associated with the new dance

taking shape in the arrabales of Buenos Aires.

Most historians agree the predecessor of the tango was the Argentine milonga , an

urbanized folk dance that incorporated elements of the cuban habanera The director of

the Lunfardo Institute in Buenos Aires, José Gobello, has an interesting theory about how

tango started ( lunfardo refers to colloquial Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, which was

often used in many tango lyrics). He maintains the new dance began with the influence

of the African candombe , a bantu-African rhythm and dance, on the milonga.

Compraditos , who were in the habit of visiting African-Argentine dance halls in Buenos

Aires, witnessed this wildly rhythmic and often improvised dance, and they created a

parody of the movements within the context of the milonga . A key difference was that,

while the Africans danced the candombe separately, the compraditos danced together. It

seems the most novel movements were the quebradas (dramatically improvised, jerky,

quasi-athletic movements) and the cortes (a sudden pause in the movement, more as a

prelude to another series of quebradas ) (Collier, 44-46)

This new Africanized dance born in the lower-class slums was called the milonga-

tango , or tango-milonga. It moved toward the centro from its origins in the outer barrios,

probably carried by high-class prostitutes and middle and upper-class porteños , citizens

of Buenos Aires, who took to “slumming.” (Collier, 50) While the dance had a bad

reputation from the outset, it soon provided an authentic, or criollo form, for the

Argentine people. Even the new immigrants embraced it. The new tango was

unacceptable to the high society of Buenos Aires, however,. who frowned on such other

lascivious dances as the mazurka and the habenera, Only when the dance became the rage

in Paris and beyond in the early teens, albeit in a toned-down form, did the Argentine

upper-class follow suit. By 1930s, while tango had become out of fashion in Paris, it was

firmly established as the popular dance in every class socio-economic class in the capital

of Argentina.

Music

The music was born alongside the dance, as musicians tried to fit melody and

rhythm to the dance movements. While the early origins of the music are mostly open to

speculation, it seems certain the first tango musicians were untrained. They improvised

their tunes first on flutes, violins, harps and then with the guitar, clarinet, and

bandoneón—the German button accordion that became a permanent fixture in tango

orchestras. Just as the dance has its African roots, so does the music. Some of the earliest

tango musicians were African-Argentine, including one of the earliest composers of real

tangos, Rosendo Mendizábal.

The earliest tangos written and published in the 1890s were mostly titled “tango

criollo para piano,” and they more closely resemble milongas than later tangos. By 1910

the tango solidified as a distinct style and established a firm foothold in Buenos Aires and

had begun to spread to other urban areas such as Montivideo in Uruguay. Through

recordings and these published “tangos for piano,” the music became as popular as the

dance in the cafes and dance halls.

The earliest tango ensembles were trios, usually bandoneón, flute, and guitar. As

the groups played in cafes, the music was refined somewhat just for listening. The first

real “stars’ emerged around 1910, most notably the bandleaders Francisco Canaro (1884-

1964) an Uruguayan violinist, Roberto Firpo (1884-1969), pianist, and Vicente Greco

(1888-1924), bandoneonist. By 1911, when Columbia contracted Greco to record some

tangos, he had expanded the basic trio to a sextet of two bandoneóns, two violins, piano,

and flute, and named the group orquesta típica criolla , or creole traditional band. While

the adjective criolla fell out of use, tango bands continued to be called orquestas típicas .

In the teens, the standard sextet was solidified into two bandoneóns, two violins,

piano, and double-bass—a configuration begun by Canaro that lasted for the next 20

years. The rise of the tango-cancion , the tango song, by 1920 further marked an

evolutionary stage of the tango as a popular song. While words had been fitted to earlier

tangos, usually of a light-hearted nature, it was not until the letras of Pascual Contursi

(1888-1932) that the tango lyrics evolved to the depth of their soul. Usually the lyrics

bemoan the struggles of a poor immigrant, betrayal of a woman, lost love, and general

fatalism. Many use lunfardo , the colloquial Spanish of Buenos Aires.

By the 1920s, the tango had gained acceptance on every level of Argentine

society after its “gentrification” in Europe, and the country was at its most prosperous.

Tango music was in high demand for both dancing and listening. People often went to

the cinema just to hear their favorite musicians play tangos at the silent films. In this

decade, tango musicians split into two schools, the “traditionalists” (such as Canaro and

Firpo) who stressed rhythm to produce a tango suitable for dancing, and the

“evolutionist” (such as de Caro, and Fresedo) who wanted to emphasize melody and

harmony. The two schools also differed in number of musicians in their ensembles: the

traditionalists often doubled the number of bandoneóns and violins and added other

instruments, whereas the evolutionary bands maintained the classic sextet of two

bandoneóns, two violins, piano, and bass.

The 1930s solidified the Golden Age of tango in Argentina. Some of the great

tango musicians who emerged at the height of the Golden Age, include the great

bandoneonist Aníbal Triolo (1914-1975), Carlos Di Sarli (1900–1960), Miguel Caló

(1907-1972), Rodolfo Biagi (1906-1969), Pedro Laurenz (1902-1972) and Osvaldo

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