The origins of Tango are obscure. There are many theories, each with its passionate advocates, but ultimately it is impossible to discover the facts because the records don’t exist. Tango sprang from the poor and the disadvantaged, in tenement blocks and on street corners, amongst people whose lives usually leave little trace in the history books. Nevertheless, we owe a great debt to the many dancers and musicians who gave shape to the Tango, though we shall never know their names. The earliest evidence of ‘tangos’ being sung on stage in Buenos Aires comes from the mid Nineteenth Century (though if we could hear them today, we probably wouldn’t recognise them as what we would call Tango). Tango bands at that time would often be made up of flute, violin and guitar, or tangos might be played on a solo piano in the brothels and cabarets. FOLLOW US ON HOME PRIVATE LESSONS WORKSHOPS CLASSES MILONGA VIDEO ABOUT CONTACT HOME PRIVATE LESSONS PRIVATE LESSONS SHOWS GIFT CERTIFICATES WORKSHOPS FOLLOWER’S TECHNIQUE LEADER’S TECHNIQUE CLASSES SAN MATEO MOUNTAIN VIEW NEW TO TANGO? VIDEOS FAQ MILONGA VIDEO PERFORMANCES LESSONS ABOUT GUSTAVO & JESICA OUR MISSION AWARDS SHOW TESTIMONIALS BENEFITS OF TANGO DANCER RESOURCES CONTACT Tango Music
Transcript
The origins of Tango are obscure. There are many theories, each with its passionate advocates, but ultimately it is impossible todiscover the facts because the records don’t exist. Tango sprang from the poor and the disadvantaged, in tenement blocks and onstreet corners, amongst people whose lives usually leave little trace in the history books. Nevertheless, we owe a great debt tothe many dancers and musicians who gave shape to the Tango, though we shall never know their names.
The earliest evidence of ‘tangos’ being sung on stage in Buenos Aires comes from the mid Nineteenth Century (though if we couldhear them today, we probably wouldn’t recognise them as what we would call Tango). Tango bands at that time would often bemade up of flute, violin and guitar, or tangos might be played on a solo piano in the brothels and cabarets.
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1890′s – 1910′s La Guardia Vieja I (The Old Guard)
The oldest tango which is still in the repertoire of Tango orchestras was written by Rosendo Mendizabal, a pianist working in aclub, he was named “El Entrerriano“, after one of their regular clients who came from the province called Entre Rios. The tangowas written in the 1890s.
Soon after this the first sound recordings of Tango started to appear, performed by everything from a singer accompanyinghimself on the guitar to a municipal brass band, as well as pianola rolls which can still be played. These early recordings have avery Spanish feel, and lack some of the key influences that formed the Tango we know today.
The first great tango was written around 1905 by Angel Villoldo, one of those singers with a guitar. It was El Choclo, one of thetwo tunes that almost everyone will instantly recognise as Tango. Villoldo wrote many influential tangos, and his tunes are stillplayed regularly today. He is the first great Tango artist that we can name and know a few facts about. Interestingly, he wrote ElChoclo as a comedy song which he performed himself - choclo means literally corn-cob, but he was using it in a less literal andmore bawdy sense. Villoldo’s words quickly fell out of use, and were replaced in the 1940s by a lyric proclaiming grandly that withthis tango the Tango was born.
Around the turn of the Century massive European immigration brought huge numbers of Italians to Buenos Aires, a great many ofthem from Naples. (In Lunfardo, the dialect of Buenos Aires, the word for Italian is tano, shortened from neapolitano,Neapolitan.) They brought with them a more lyrical style of violin playing, and the melodic influence of Neapolitan song, a keyfactor in the melodic beauty characteristic of Tango.
Soon afterwards, probably around 1910, the bandoneón, the emblematic instrument of the Tango, arrived in Buenos Aires,perhaps brought by German immigrants or sailors. The bandoneón was invented, probably in Germany, possibly in France, andproduced in Germany, as a cheap substitute for a church organ in poorer communities. A large accordion-like instrument, thebandoneón is possibly the hardest instrument in the world to learn to play, having two button keyboards, each with no obviousrelationship in the placing of notes, and each having the notes placed differently depending on whether the keyboards are going inor out. But no other instrument sounds like the bandoneón, and, once past the hurdle of learning where the notes actually are onthe keyboard, bandoneonistas can create the most extraordinary, hauntingly beautiful sounds.
1912-‐‑1920′s La Guardia Vieja II (The Old Guard)
By 1912 Tango had its first real recording star, Juan Maglio, “Pacho”, a bandoneonista, recording with flute, violin and guitar. Hissuccess in Buenos Aires was huge, and the position of the bandoneón as Tango’s key instrument was confirmed.
A driving force in the development of Tango music had always been the dance, and around this time it was the dance thatintroduced the music to the world. Young men of good Argentine families (and Argentina was one of the richest countries in theworld) would be sent to Europe to study, or to do the Grand Tour. Some of these young men, not surprisingly, had spent manyhappy hours in the brothels, clubs and places of ill repute in Buenos Aires, where they had learned to dance the Tango. Politesociety in Paris saw the dance for the first time and fell in love, and very soon the whole of Europe was whipped by afurious Tangomania. 1913 was the year of the Tango. The impact back in Buenos Aires was profound. To the elite, Tango had beensomething that they chose not to associate themselves with, in public at least. Now Tango could move from the tradesman’sentrance to the front door, and into the salons of the wealthy.
The lyrics of Tango had generally been humorous, like those Villoldo had written for El Choclo, andoften portrayed Buenos Aires street life. In 1915 Pascual Contursi wrote a lyric called Mi Noche Triste for an existing tune, and in1917 it was recorded by Carlos Gardel. Gardel was already a famous folk singer, working in the duo Gardel-Razzano, and folkmusic was the most popular musical form in Buenos Aires at the turn of the Century. Whether Contursi had intended his lyricseriously or ironically is open to debate, but Gardel sang the story of the abandoned lover with passion and pain, as though hemeant every word. The triumph was immense. Tragic love became the backbone of the Tango repertoire, and the Tango becameuniversal. Gardel himself went on to become a huge icon throughout the whole Spanish speaking world. His rags to riches story –the illegitimate son of an impoverished French immigrant who became a superstar – his warm personality, his compositionaltalent, his tragic death in a plane crash at the age of 44, and, of course, his glorious voice, made him one of the world’s greatpopular heroes, and an enduring symbol of Buenos Aires.
In 1916 Roberto Firpo, pianist, leader of the most successful Tango band of this period, and creator of the standard Tango sextet– two bandoneones, two violins, piano and double bass – heard a march by a young Uruguayan called Gerardo Mattos Rodriguez,and decided to arrange it as a tango. The result was the most famous tango of all time, La Cumparsita. Later Pascual Contursiadded lyrics, a story of lost love, which were recorded by Gardel, but the tune itself has been recorded by almost every Tangoorchestra in every style, and is, the world over, the symbol of Tango.
1920′s to 1930′s La Guardia Nueva (The New Guard)
The early Tango musicians had for the most part been self-taught. In the 1920s classically trained musicians began playing theTango, the most successful and influential of them being violinist Julio De Caro. His brilliant orchestra, including in the late 1920sand early 1930s the gloriously gifted bandoneonista Pedro Laurenz, introduced a new complexity and elegance to the music,slowing the pace a little, and making it less popular with the dancers of the time.
Then in 1935 came Juan D’Arienzo and Rodolfo Biagi. D’Arienzo was a violinist, but not a very good one, who by 1935 hadgiven up playing himself in favour of directing his orchestra, something for which he had far more talent, having both excellenttaste and tremendous style as a showman.
With pianist Rodolfo Biagi, he created a quicker style, with a characteristic ‘electric’ rhythm which dancers found completelyirresistible. Although the more academic Tango lovers were shocked by what they saw as a lack of subtlety and musical innovationin the D’Arienzo-Biagi style (De Caro apparently said in 1935 that their success wouldn’t last the summer, something forwhich D’Arienzo never forgave him), dancers loved it, and flocked back to the dancefloors. The new ‘electric’ rhythm was hugelyinfluential, with everyone, even De Caro, speeding up the tempo in the late 1930s.
1935 is seen as the beginning of the Golden Age of Tango, and the next decade was one of astounding creativity on every front.The dance matured into one of the most beautiful couple dances the world has ever seen, a subtle, heady blend of sex and chess.Composers, arrangers, lyricists and singers all hit new heights. There were more great orchestras than one could count, such asthose led by Anibal Troilo, Carlos Di Sarli, Miguel Caló, Lucio Demare, Alfredo De Angelis or Osvaldo Pugliese. It wasthe period in the Tango’s history when all the branches of this extraordinary art were most closely integrated, and each spurredthe other on to ever more stunning achievements.
1930′s – 1950′s The Golden Age of Tango
In the late 1940s the music and the dancing began to separate again, as musicians began to be interested in playing for a concertaudience, or for records and radio programmes designed to be listened to rather than danced to. Singers, too, who werebecoming stars in films and on records, wanted to be freed of the rhythmic constraints imposed by the requirement to pleasedancers. For a while the two schools existed side by side.
But is 1955 the coup that ousted Perón brought a very different political climate, which was to hit the Tango hard. Thenationalistic Peronist government had encouraged Argentine music, for example by putting quotas on the amount of foreign musicallowed to be played on the radio. The new regime, instantly suspicious of anything that was determinedly Argentine, because itimplied nationalism and therefore Perón, discouraged Tango, and encouraged the importation of music from abroad, bringing Rockand Roll and the new world youth culture to the young of Buenos Aires. Also, bans on meetings of more than three people, forfear of political agitation, made public dances dificult, and the dancing went underground. Tango moved in a few years from amass movement involving a huge proportion of the population of Buenos Aires, to a persecuted fringe activity, with many greatartists being blacklisted or imprisoned for their Peronist connections.
In 1950 a brilliant young bandoneonista called Astor Piazzolla left Buenos Aires to go to Paris to study classical composition withNadia Boulanger. Although born in Argentina, he had been taken to the United States as a small child. He came to Buenos Aires asa teenager and began playing in the orchestra of Anibal Troilo, doing there some wonderful arrangements, before forming hisown orchestra in 1946. Surrounded by such musical riches, he realised that it would be hard to have the success that he wantedby staying within the Tango tradition. Taking elements of Tango, elements of the Jazz that he had heard as a child in the States,and classical ideas, Piazzolla created what he called Tango Nuevo, New Tango. Determined that his music should be listened torather than danced to, Piazzolla made the jazzy rhythms very different from what the dancers were expecting.
When Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo (1955) was first heard in Buenos Aires it caused outrage, with many people saying that it so farfrom the tradition as not to be Tango at all. But the cross fertilisation with North American and European forms created somethingaccessible and appealing to people not brought up with the Tango tradition, and Piazzolla’s huge success in the rest of the worldsoftened opinion at home. Musicians and stage dancers both found the freer rhythms appealing, and with the near disappearanceof the social dancers, new Tango music mostly followed Piazzolla’s lead.
1980′s to present
The fall of the military junta in Argentina in 1983 and the phenomenal success throughout the world of the hit show TangoArgentino, premiered the same year, thrust Tango back into the spotlight, catching both musicians and dancers unawares.Hastily thrown together Tango shows sprang up in Buenos Aires, and began to follow Tango Argentino around the world. Youngpeople, keen once again to reassert their Argentine-ness, wanted to learn to dance the Tango, and began trying to piece thedance back together as best they could. Dances that had been operating underground came back into the open, and people whohadn’t danced for twenty five or thirty years gradually began to dance again.
The new interest in the dance created a demand for the Tango music of the Golden Age, which began to be re-released, first oncassette, then on cd. A twenty-four hour Tango radio station, FM Tango, was opened, followed by a cable station, Solo Tango. Anew generation of dancers and musicians, brought up with Tango Nuevo, or without Tango at all, are starting to rediscover thetradition. Most recent recordings are still heavily influenced by Piazzolla, but some younger musicians are realising that a largepart of their audience in the future will be people who have come to Tango through the dance, and are looking to the Golden Agefor inspiration.
This is still an early stage in the renaissance of the Tango. The future will certainly hold a new synthesis, new directions and newriches.
By Christine Denniston
ORQUESTA TIPICA (TANGO ORCHESTRA)
A tango orchestra (called an Orquesta Típica) generally had about 10 musicians: a piano, a bass, 3 or 4 bandoneons, 4 violins,sometimes a viola or a guitar, and often a singer. The orchestras are named after the orchestra leader. The orchestra leader was incharge of deciding what everything would sound like, and all the orchestras sound distinctive and recognizable.
Below are some of the most important tango orchestras:
FRANCISCO CANARO (November 26, 1888 – December 14, 1964) was an Uruguayan violinist, orchestra leader and composer.
His parents, Italians emigrated to Uruguay, and later (when Francisco Canaro was less than 10 years old), they emigratedto Buenos Aires, Argentina in the late nineteenth century. Canaro was born in San José de Mayo, Uruguay, in 1888. As a youngman and found work in a factory, where an empty oil can would, in his skilled hands, become his first violin. Performing inseedy bars initially, he ultimately forged a career that spanned many decades, and his orchestra was one of the most recorded.
His introduction to the tango came by orquesta típica leader Vicente Greco in 1908, and in 1912, he composed Pinta brava (FierceLook). Canaro composed the music for the 1915 Argentine classic, Nobleza Gaucha, and later was romantically attached toArgentine actress and tango vocalist Ada Falcón, but the relationship, which began in the early 1920s, grew apart a decade later.
Much of his recorded music is in the classic salon style of the 1940′s, but he is also considered a member of the old guard, andsome of his later recordings contributed to the transition to concert tango. His orchestra became a fixture on Argentineradio during the 1940s and early ’50s, though for many contemporary dancers and listeners, his early golden age recordingsremained the best in their genre.
ANIBAL TROILO (July 11, 1914 – May 18, 1975 in Buenos Aires) he was a bandoneon player, composer, arrangerand bandleader in Argentina.
His orquesta típica was among the most popular with social dancers during the golden age of tango (1940-1955), but he changedto a concert sound by the late 1950s. Troilo’s orchestra is best known for its instrumentals and also recorded with many vocalists,such as Francisco Fiorentino, Alberto Marino, Floreal Ruiz, Roberto Goyeneche, Raul Beron, and Edmundo Rivero. The rhythmicinstrumentals and the recordings with vocalist Francisco Fiorentino from 1940-41 are the favorite recordings for social dancing incontemporary tango salons (milongas). The renowned bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla played in and arranged for his orquesta típicaduring the period 1939-1944.
JUAN D’ARIENZO (December 14, 1900-January 14, 1976) was an Argentine tango musician, also known as “El Rey del Compas”(King of the Beat).
D’Arienzo was born on 14 December 1900 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Balvanera. D’Arienzo departed from otherorchestras of the golden age by returning to the strong driving staccato dance rhythm that characterized the music of the oldguard, but with more modern arrangements and instrumentation. He worked with some wonderful singers and recorded manygreat tangos, milongas and fast valses.
The defining moment of d’Arienzo’s career came in 1935 when he added Rodolfo Biagi as the pianist for his Orchestra. TogetherD’Arienzo and Biagi created his signature driving staccato sound. By 1936 Juan d’Arienzo was at the height of his popularity. Hewas just 35 years old, one less than Julio de Caro, but stylistically at the other end of the musical spectrum of tango. De Caro hadbegun moving Tango music more towards the avante-guard with more robust, complex arrangements. D’Arienzo was seen as astep backwards by many tango musicians and fans of the music, but the dancer’s loved him. He also became very popular on theradio. D’Arienzo saw it differently and thought that tango had become a slave to the singers. D’Arienzo did work with many greatsingers such as Hector Maure, Alberto Echague and Jorge Valdez and sometimes did put them out front. He also made himselfsomewhat of a star and loved to be very enthusiastic during performances.
CARLOS DI DARLI (January 7, 1903 – January 12, 1960) was an Argentine tango musician, orchestra leader, composer andpianist.
He was born in the town of Bahía Blanca and later wrote one of the most famous tangos of all time of the same name. Hecomposed his first tango in 1919, “Meditación” which was never recorded. In 1923, he moved to Buenos Aires and started hiscareer playing in Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra. By 1927, Di Sarli started his first sextet. He paid homage to Fresedo by composingthe song, “Milonguero Viejo” and dedicating it to Fresedo.
He is known for his smooth, clean-sound and yet powerful arrangements. His songs are often played in Tango classes and atMilongas because of their easy, danceable rhythm while being complex enough for advanced dancers to enjoy. He respected boththe melody and the rhythm of Tango. His music has also been described as lyrical and playful. The peak of his career was in the1940s, but he was always well respected and popular until his death in 1960 as demonstrated by his nickname, “El Señor delTango” (The Lord of Tango). He worked with some of the greatest voices of Tango: Roberto Rufino, Alberto Podestá, Jorge Durán,Oscar Serpa and Carlos Acuña.
OSVALDO PUGLIESE (Buenos Aires, December 2, 1905 – July 25, 1995) was an orchestra leader, composer and pianist.
He was known for his dramatic and passionate arrangements while still keeping the strong walking beat of salon tango. His musicwalked a fine line between the dance hall and concert hall. The greatest musicians of the time wanted to work with Pugliese. Hecomposed his first tango “Recuerdo” in 1924 when he was only 19 years old. The title was originally “Recuerdo para mis amigos”(Memory for my friends) and was an homage to his friends that he used to hang out with in the cafe. This song is often describedas a milestone of tango composition for its melodic structure and its complex density. “Recuerdo” shows Pugliese’s knowledge ofEuropean classical music and his commitment to the streets of Buenos Aires, as De Caro had previously. It is no wonder that DeCaro was the first orchestra to record the song.
“La Yumba” was another of Pugliese’s major hits. It was recorded in 1946 and showed his respect for the early black musicians oftango. As mentioned before, Pugliese took tango to a new level but did not discard its roots in the streets of BA. He stated oncethat he was inspired to write “La Yumba” by a young black pianist. Some of his music, mostly since the 50s, is used for theatrical
dance performances. In Buenos Aires, Pugliese is often played later in the evening when the dancers want to dance more slowly,impressionistically and intimately. Pugliese is a great choice for slower tango dance music, but the arrangements can be a bitmore rhythmically challenging than those played by other orchestras.
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