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Abstracts
“Afro-Argentine Contributions to the Tango in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”
The Afro-Argentine roots and influences of tango was hardly news to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers. Yet in the first decades of the twentieth century, as tango became the national dance of an Argentina imagined as white and European, most narrators of tango’s history increasingly minimized, forgot, or disavowed its Black roots in favor of European ones. Dissenting scholars and practitioners have pointed to the importance of Afro-Argentine musical and dance traditions in the tango. Yet even these accounts of tango’s Black roots often reiterate elements of Argentina’s dominant racial narratives. The entrenched myth of Afro-Argentines’ “disappearance” over the nineteenth century makes it difficult to tell a continuous story of Afro-Argentine influences in the tango from the nineteenth century onward. The paucity of sheet music or recordings from the 1800s that pinpoint Afro-Argentine contributions exacerbates these difficulties.
In this context, historical work in archives, in the Afro-Argentine press, or with oral histories can help paint a more fine-grained, evidence-based history of Black contributions to the tango. This presentation uses the multigenerational story of one family of Afro-Argentine musicians, the Grigeras, to illustrate the affordances of grounding tango’s past in the documented social history of the Afrodescendant community of Buenos Aires, and to suggest new directions for future research.
“Tango Dancing: Freedom or Conformity?”
This paper explores probing questions of gender and politics in the cultural space of the milonga (tango dance). Is the space of the milonga truly a place of freedom, as many dancers seem to assert? Is the milonga not also a moment where one practices conformist mandates in terms of invitations, role-playing, and gendered assignments? This conformism appears to align with the political void that seems to link practitioners! Ultimately, does this not define the small world of tango dance: a profound disconnection from political concerns, which the reconstruction around the roles tend to minimize?
“Tango And The Idea Of Latin America In Japan, 1910s–1940s”
This presentation examines tango performances in Japan and the idea of Latin America in the country in relation to Argentine tango and migration between the 1910s and the 1940s. Tango was introduced in Japan in the 1910s by travelling tango dancers from the United States. Asaba reveals the ways in which the idea of tango became superimposed on an imagined “Latin America” through performances in Japan, leading many to migrate to the distant continent at this time.
“Getting to Know the Singing Styles of the First Tango Cancionistas: Gender Performance, Star System, and Sorrows of Love”
Tango cancionistas were the female representatives of the so-called tango canción (sung tango), and they emerged in Buenos Aires during the 1920s. Although this new path for tango acknowledges the foundation by Carlos Gardel when he recorded “Mi noche triste” in 1917, women provided radio broadcasts and recording labels featuring the female experience of tango through a variety of voices that widely outnumbered the male ones. Once they achieved their own repertoire, cancionistas developed their singing styles, enriching the idiosyncratic tango phrasing and rubato with elements from national theatre performance. In the 1930s, the Argentine sound cinema industry took them to the big screen as protagonists of stories based on tango. Dezillio argues that this combination of mass media gave cancionistas the possibility to explore and establish their singing styles through characters that blended their own biographical features with fictional ones, increasing audience appeal.
Examining a variety of documents concerning tango as a key element of the local show business—such as recordings, lyrics, music sheets, movie scenes, photographs, and magazine articles—she approaches the singing careers of Ada Falcón (1905–2002) and Tita Merello (1904–2002) for different purposes. First, she compares their singing styles to outline their most outstanding characteristics. Second, she examines their particular hallmarks in the context of the roles assigned as actresses by the local star system. Finally, she considers their singing styles as a complex entanglement of tango identity narratives, gender “performativity” (according to Judith Butler), and moral policing at the time.
“The Creation of the Nuevo Tango: The Ghosts of Ginastera, Mulligan, and Salgán in Astor Piazzolla’s Musical Brainstorming”
Piazzolla was a prominent participant of classical tango until 1951 and from 1960 onwards the creator of nuevo tango. During the lapse of almost ten years between the stages, Piazzolla traveled the margins of tango. He developed a series of ideas that took him from tango classicism to innovation. It was a prolonged period of brainstorming made of successive steps, practically without interlocutors against whom to confront. As he took steps along a winding path, Piazzolla devised new musical projects influenced by Ginastera, Salgán, and Mulligan (or jazz) in different ways.
First, with a solid base as an art music composer and guided by Ginastera, he worked as an outsider of tango while observing Horacio Salgán. Then in Paris, while listening to Gerry Mulligan, he returned to working as an active performer and composer as he decided to modernize tango. In the next step, he created the Octeto Buenos Aires and distorted the tango genre almost to a breaking point. Finally, in New York, he created a fusion of jazz and tango.
This paper will show the consequences of Piazzolla’s process, and how his ideas appear and disappear like ghosts. Some ideas appeared in more abstract ways, like the jazz concept of the arrangement. Others came as small details in only two themes by Salgán, but of enormous consequences. Finally, this paper will demonstrate how Piazzolla organized the jazz-tango discourse and the consequence of this entire process was the nuevo tango, in force for 30 years.
“Exploring Argentine Tango and American Jazz: Past and Present Borders"
Tango has always had a close relationship with jazz due to the genres’ parallel evolutionary histories. From their origins at the turn of the twentieth century, both genres developed from popular music and dance forms that descended from the African diaspora, specifically the candombe of Argentina and Uruguay and ragtime of the United States. In this presentation, Julián Graciano will demonstrate points of union between tango and jazz through his research and analysis of two compositions—”Autumn Leaves” from the American songbook and “Mariposita” from the “Real Book of Tango.” He will show how to transform each work into the complementary genre, making the tango standard into a jazz piece and the jazz standard into a tango.
“Tango and Healing: A Clinical Research Perspective About Therapies for Neurodegenerative Diseases"
Throughout history, dance has played a role in promoting health and preventing disease. Dance, including tango, is a pleasurable physical activity and provides access to unique learning strategies that can access neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change because of experiences—to improve these conditions. Dance’s therapeutic potential has been studied over the last decade with observed benefits in physical, cognitive, and emotional domains—particularly in neurodegenerative conditions. Dance may be ideal for combining physical and cognitive training because dance is a rewarding activity involving the combined experience of moving to music and socially interacting. Including sensory elements, e.g., touch, sound, and sight, may contribute to this enjoyment and enhance the potential to acquire new, flexible ways of moving in an environment. These positive factors increase the likelihood that dance participants will be adherent, which is critical for effective therapy. Partnered dance, which involves a leader and a follower, stands out as a potential therapy because it is a cognitively demanding, mentally stimulating movement conversation. In tango, for example, the leader serves as the planner of movement, while the follower receives nonverbal cues to execute specific steps. The embrace, a fixed arm position linking the two dancers, enables a sophisticated, yet accessible tactile communication system that conveys motor intentions and goals between dancers. This presentation concerns a modified form of tango called “Adapted Tango,” first created in 2006 and which has since been refined for rehabilitative goals in people with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, older adults with low vision, and oldest old adults.
“Ghostly Moans of Guitars in Exile: Nostalgia and Nationalism in Orquesta Típica Tango Compositions”
A haunting E-minor bassline rises and falls in the left hand of pianist Osvaldo Manzi in Aníbal Troilo’s 1956 recording of Emilio Balcarce’s tango “La bordona.” While the guitar neither appears on this recording nor Osvaldo Pugliese’s recording of the same tango two years later, the bassline and title “La bordona,” meaning the lowest sixth string of the guitar, clearly evoke the image of a guitarist playing a melancholic solo piece. This paper expands on Melanie Plesch’s work on the topos of the guitar in Argentine art music by applying it to tango. In addition to the topoi referencing the national myth of the gaucho and the nostalgia for the now-lost Argentina of the gaucho, the topic of the guitar in tango is also self-referential. The standard history of the tango argues that the guitar disappeared from orquestas típicas in the 1910s. Thus, the work of Balcarce and others is not only referential to Argentine cultural nationalism, but functions to discursively combine both gauchesca nationalism and the early tango (drawing on Svetlana Boym’s [2001] concept of restorative and reflective nostalgia that references national symbols, i.e., the gaucho, and uses the cultural memory of the guitar’s exile to situate these tangos into the national imagination). Through the connection of two different cultural symbols, the defamiliarization of the guitar and sense of distance allow for these tangos to construct a seemingly coherent narrative from the past (the gaucho), the present (the tango), and the future.
"From International Fad to Local Tradition: The Myth of Tango Essentialism"
To contemporary ears and eyes, tango music and dance are unique; both practitioners and audience members understand it as essentially different from other forms of music and dance. This uniqueness is most often explained as a product of tango’s deep local roots. According to this common sense, tango is the music and dance of Buenos Aires (or of Buenos Aires and Montevideo); it is a product of the specific emotional and cultural world of that city, so it’s no surprise that it sounds, looks, and feels different from music and dance from other parts of the world. Yet, tango didn’t always sound or look so different. This paper will chart tango’s trajectory from global pop music to local tradition, offering a historical account that centers the role of the recording industry. Though the myth of tango essentialism was largely a product of commercial strategies, it exerted a powerful impact on the music, erasing the memory of tango’s transnational roots and, in effect, producing the uniqueness it claimed to describe.
“The Immortal Voice: Repetition, Reissues, and the Non-life of Recorded Sound"
This paper examines how the notion of the musical past is organized and manufactured via the practice of repetitive listening and the commercial reissue of historical sound recordings across markets and media formats. It focuses on the recorded work of Carlos Gardel (1890–1935), an iconic Argentine singer and early film star who died in an airline accident in 1935 but remains a key point of reference in Latin American popular culture to this day. Luker is interested in the innovative ways Gardel deployed the technologies of recorded sound to cultivate his celebrity persona across emergent formats of mass media during his lifetime (film, print, radio) but also in how the popular reception of Gardel’s violent and unexpected death reframed the sound and reception of what came to be marketed and heard as his “immortal voice.” The continuous commercial reissuing of Gardel’s sound recordings following his death played a crucial and creative role in this process, from narrowing the scope of his commonly heard repertoire (which canonized him specifically as a tango singer) to the sometimes-elaborate reworking of a recording’s actual sound via remastering and other sonic interventions at the moment of reissue. In examining the phenomenon of reissuing these historical recordings, Luker traces the intertwined impulses towards commercial value (in terms of back catalog) and noncommercial value (in terms of cultural heritage) that have come to characterize our understanding and experience of what is valuable not only about the posthumous celebrity voice but about the recorded musical past in general.
"The Future of Cultural Tango Códigos: Will Traditional Milongas Survive the Twenty-First Century?"
This paper explores the future of the traditional Argentine milonga (tango dance) and the hallowed culture of its códigos, the unwritten rules that govern behavior on and off the floor from the moment one walks into the dance hall. These codes were developed many decades ago to encourage dancers to respect their partners and the dancers who surround them on the dance floor. They help to ensure cohesive movement of the ronda (line of dance in a counterclockwise circle), which is especially important considering the intimate, almost sacred nature of dancing tango.
In our modern lives, societies, customs, and relationships have significantly evolved since the early days of tango, creating a challenge for tango dancers. There are many milonga organizers and dancers in the United States, Europe, and around the world who reject the codes as outdated and unnecessary, even in Buenos Aires. They prefer, for example, to personally ask a partner to dance rather than using the traditional mirada and cabaceo (look and head-nod). However, a great many milongueros/as appreciate the very clear rules of the códigos. They believe the codes increase the viability and closeness of their tango communities while creating a distinctiveness that may be lacking in other social dance communities.
Seeking to gain a better understanding of the changes ahead for traditional milongas, this paper includes interviews and discussions with key Argentine tango professionals and aficionados across an international spectrum, including milonga organizers, DJ’s, social dancers, performers, teachers, writers, and musicians. The final question may well be, “Whose responsibility is it to maintain and nurture the traditional culture of Argentine tango milongas outside of Buenos Aires?”
“Re-Imagining Tango: A Dance Anthropologist’s Perspective on Lead-Follow Gender Roles in Tango’s Future"
Tango as dance promises little more than potential—for connection, bliss, trance, transcendence, whatever we wish to call these moments that shift our experience of self and bring us into communion. If these moments bring vibrant life, they ultimately evaporate. But their memories take root in the body, and they have nourished and continue to haunt me. Reconciling this residue to the shifting terrain of multiple pandemics, aging bodies, and culture’s ebb and flow into and against the deep grooves of time, is a destabilizing, revelatory act. This presentation plumbs Merritt’s two-decade-plus love affair with tango, as a dancer, anthropologist, mother, and woman trying to work some things out in and through this intimate partner dance, following its lead and seeking a little reciprocity. Interweaving crowdsourced responses to a generative prompt, and offering an embodied exploration of tango’s dual roles, she examines tango’s evolution, and raises questions about its future. She will share portraits of, and a phenomenological glimpse into, its impact on the human experience.
"Carlos Gardel in the Spanish-Language Ecosystem of 1930s New York"
The travels of Carlos Gardel, unparalleled icon of the tango canción, through transatlantic cultural circuits in the 1930s gave rise to synergies between the recording, broadcast, and film industries that prefigure today’s multi-national media empires, built on the cross-promotion of cultural commodities. Gardel’s concerts in Paris and broadcasting engagements with NBC in New York brought him into proximity with the satellite studios that emerged during Hollywood’s transition to sound. Through the multi-language production strategy adopted by the studios to hold onto foreign markets before dubbing became feasible, Gardel starred in seven features for Paramount, shot in Joinville outside Paris and in Queens, New York. The production history and content of Gardel’s films reflect the tango’s international mobility and marketability, a paradoxical product of its (partial) immigrant roots and its indelible links with the Río de la Plata region. Gardel’s New York sojourn (1933–1935) exemplifies how the spatial clustering of cultural activities shapes media production, and in turn, how media (radio, film, journalism) conjugate the global with the local. Gardel’s career capitalized on modern mass media’s capacity to bridge space and time, as in a radio broadcast where he sang in a New York studio to the accompaniment of guitarists in Buenos Aires. Yet publicity in New York’s Spanish-language entertainment media stressed his embeddedness in the local cultural scene, including personal appearances at local Spanish-language movie theaters. Gardel’s time in New York exemplifies how modern media in general, and tango media in particular, enact a tension between locatedness and global circulation.
“The Poetics of Golden Age Tango, Then and Today"
While early tango lyrics were often accessories to the music—which in turn was mainly intended to produce the dance—by the Golden Age from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, lyrics shaped through memorable verses the collective imagination. Combining modernism and vernacular speech, tango lyrics became a sentimental, philosophical, and aesthetic lens for several generations of listeners in Argentina and beyond. This presentation discusses three central themes that emerged in the Golden Age tango poetry: the urban space, the sociological and poetic issue of the relationship between love and self, and the modern experience itself. Based on these three themes, the presentation elaborates a historical hypothesis to explain the uniqueness of this Río de la Plata tradition, within the longer and geographically wider history of tango, a global genre in which rhythm, orchestration, and dance tend to supersede poetry as main aesthetic features.
"Culturally Decoding Tango’s Performance Practices: Marcato, Síncopa, and Yeites"
This workshop delves into the vibrant world of tango music. It will trace tango’s origins from the 1920s to the present as it reflects on tango’s socio-political roots and its role as a dynamic vehicle for cultural expression. Participants will engage in an in-depth exploration of the essential musical elements that define the genre. The rhythmic aspect will be examined through techniques such as marcato in 2 and 4, síncopa (syncopation), bordoneo (syncopated bass-line pattern, referring to the three low strings of the guitar called la bordona), and various articulations, including accents, slurs, and staccatos. Yeites. or percussive effects, like lija (sandpaper), escoba (broom), and tambor (snare drum), will be demonstrated, highlighting the unique and intricate rhythmic fabric of tango. In terms of melody, the workshop will address fraseo (phrasing), adornos (ornaments), and the significance of chromaticism, illustrating how these components contribute to tango’s expressive nature. The harmonic evolution of tango will be traced from its roots to contemporary interpretations, including the innovations of Astor Piazzolla, with practical examples performed by a trio featuring piano, violin, and bandoneón. Participants will have opportunities to engage actively or passively, fostering a deeper appreciation for tango not only as a musical genre but also as a rich cultural phenomenon.
“Examining Rhythmic Interactions Between Music and Dance in Tango: A Choreomusical Analytic Approach"
In Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Tango, Simpson-Litke provided an in-depth choreomusical transcription and analysis of Gerardo Matos Rodríguez’s “La cumparsita,” exploring the rhythmic interactions that emerge between music and dance as performed by dancers Cecilia Narova and Juan Carlos Copes in an iconic scene from Carlos Saura’s film Tango. This paper applies this choreomusical analytic approach to another well-known representative of the tango genre—Ángel Villoldo’s “El choclo”—showing how musicians and dancers engage with this famous piece in a variety of interesting ways. As with her analysis of “La cumparsita,” Simpson-Litke highlights both moments where dancers align their movement patterns with existing musical patterns to draw out specific instruments from within the musical texture, and moments where dancers create entirely new rhythmic patterns not supplied directly by the music. However, instead of focusing the attention solely on one particularly riveting performance of the piece, she puts several dance-music performances of “El choclo” into dialogue with one another. In this way, she engages with Morgan James Luker’s “causal” and “matrix” listening approaches to the piece, as described in Chapter 3 of The Cambridge Companion to Tango. In particular, Simpson-Litke examines how different tango musicians retain some characteristic elements of the notated version of the piece while also changing aspects of rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics, and form to create unique interpretations. She then examines how different dancers bring additional layers of interpretation to the collaborative art form, both through choreographed and improvised dance practices.
"Aural depth as a variation technique in tango music creation"
This paper investigates a compelling yet underexplored aspect of tango music creation and performance regarding the hierarchical relationship between the melody and the accompaniment. This particularly striking feature, found in many arrangements and compositions, is the ambiguity that arises when background and foreground musical layers are interchanged. Such technique, traceable to Julio De Caro’s style and used by various musicians in many arrangements and compositions, manifests when a secondary melodic line takes the forefront while the original theme assumes the role of a countermelody or background layer. This clever manipulation alters the listener’s perception, creating the illusion of a new section by simply layering a new melody over existing material. The paper presents musical examples from diverse ensembles and styles through time to illustrate how this technique expands the expressive possibilities of tango music.
"The Double Bass in Tango: The Role and the Tools"
With a tradition spanning more than a century, the double bass in tango is one of the instruments with the greatest responsibility in shaping the rhythmic foundation of any ensemble, whether it’s a trio or a large orquesta típica. In this presentation, Varchausky will analyze in depth the logic behind the tango double bassist’s playing and the impact of their personality on the group’s sound. He will explore all the functions and responsibilities that the role entails, taking a detailed look at the various technical and stylistic tools available to fulfill it. Given that there are many ways to play the same thing while still maintaining the role of rhythmic leadership, for the tango double bassist, each measure is a new opportunity to imprint their own personality and character into the music. One single score, countless possibilities. Bow strokes, marcatos, síncopas, types of pizzicato, arrastres, percussive effects, and much more, all in service of one main objective: fulfilling the role.
"Rebranding Authenticity: Argentine Tango Taking the World by Storm"
The worldwide popularity of the Argentine tango in recent decades has been largely driven by Argentines’ reterritorialization efforts—a form of symbolic capital through which they exercise discursive and performative ownership of the tango genre. To support this argument, this presentation shows how Buenos Aires (Argentina’s capital) has, for over two decades, reinforced its identity as the tango’s philosophical, emotional, and technical core. Aided by a flourishing tango industry, fed by both local and global markets, Argentine tango artists have become highly valued agents as artists and entrepreneurs, both at home and abroad. Drawn to New York City by a vibrant tango field, newer waves of Argentine tango artists have migrated there either permanently or seasonally in order to maximize their “tango capital”—a combination of technical skills, social contacts, and public recognition. In its conclusion, this presentation argues that these artists’ embodiment of the genre’s authenticity is the key to their ability to artistically succeed both in NYC and the global tango field.