NEH DISCUSSION FORUM #1 (MAY 2024)

PLEASE RESPOND TO THE TWO QUESTIONS BELOW BY 5/14/24.

  1. Are there any specific questions or areas that you are interested in pursuing within this discussion forum or these collaborators?
  2. Has there been a time when you wanted to pursue a tango topic or research question further, but your area of expertise has limited you?  Examples?

25 Responses

  2. 1-Not now, Im reading the book at this moment, maybe in future I will have some question.
    2-Today we have a lot of material of tango(transcriptión, method, etc) but years ago was very confused and hard to find the info about different tango topics.A lot of information about tango was “hidden”, for example the full score from Orquesta Típica.

  3. Hello, all!

    1. One avenue that might be interesting to explore is tango in the age of new media (role in tango tourism, “virality” of certain forms of tango performance, etc.)

    2. I’m a film studies person with interest/expertise in sound in cinema. One thing that always comes up in relation to film music is the fact that most media studies scholars don’t have expertise in music theory and related disciplines. Of course, this is very labor-intensive to acquire, but definitely a disciplinary gap I’ve perceived.

  4. Hi everyone, my questions 1 and 2 are interrelated:

    I’d like to know more about the Afro-Argentine origins of tango (surprise!) and, specifically, to better understand the connections between candombe and early tango (1880s-90s). There is no sheet music, nor recordings, for the tangos/candombes of the late 19th c that are mentioned in the Afro-Argentine press, and I wonder to what extent someone who has the necessary musical/ ethnomusicology background could help a historian like me to reconstruct possible sounds from the extant information (including lyrics and descriptions of the music and dance) in that press.

      1. Thank you Julián! yes, I know that clip, it is fantastic, and I have found Cirio’s work extremely helpful. I should have explained in my original post that I’ve been working on this for a while and have read much of the available literature, but I’ve been finding new ways of using the information in the Afro-Argentine press, which I think adds to our understanding of the tango in new ways by helping to reconstruct the everyday lives of the musicians who created it. In any case, there is still so much to do!

      1. Hi Omar, thank you–yes, I found your article extremely useful, and incorporated it into the article for the Cambridge Companion. I am finding that the Afro-Argentine press has still a lot to teach us about the Afro-Argentine contributions to tango (but I am a social historian, not a musicologist…)

  5. Hello everyone! Here are my answers to the first two questions:

    1-Not for now, but certainly in the future.
    2-For a while, it was very difficult for me to access Guardia Vieja materials. Fortunately, I now have access to them.

  6. Hello everyone! I’m a music theorist who specializes in choreomusical analysis of salsa, so tango dance-music analysis is a relatively new project for me. I am looking forward to learning a lot from the other chapters in the book and to upcoming conversations with all of you. I’ll be spending some time on analysis this summer, so perhaps I could ask — are there any recorded dance performances that you find feature particularly engaging rhythmic interactions between musicians and dancers? I’d love to have some suggestions!

  7. Hi everyone — I’m a tango dancer and anthropologist and my current interests including gender roles, leading and following, addiction/ catharsis/ labor, the taxi dancer industry, and adapted tango. Also I’m part of a newly launched nonprofit, The Tango Therapy Project, and we’re soon training with Madeleine Hackney in order to pilot adapted tango programming for people with Parkinson’s (and other communities in the future). I’d love to hear from anyone who has done research on the taxi industry. This is not necessarily an expertise limitation, but I do I wonder if my new nonprofit endeavor, to harness the therapeutic potential of tango, is at odds or in a relationship of tension with my research interests in labor and the economy of catharsis via the taxi dance phenomenon. Otherwise, I’m generally excited to meet everyone and hear more about your work.

  8. Hello all.
    1) My interest area is that of music studies, from 1900 to now. Within an ample scope, considering performance, scores, styles, organology. And the relationship between lyrics and music, when it is possible.
    2) Some times it is difficult to obtain some piano score (those from commercial publishers), sometimes you need a full score or even a recording that it is hard to locate.

  9. Hello everyone, I hope you´re doing well.

    1. Concerning the first question, as my topic of interest refers to the activity and different style of tango cancionistas, I’d like to know how much is know about them outside Argentina, that is to say the state of the art about the subject matter. The field has been a bit developed during the last years here, but is still an area of knowledge vacancy.
    2. Limitations have mostly come from the difficulties in finding documents about cancionistas. The studies available are usually focused on hermeneutical analysis, but information is still hard to find, even biographies are scarse.

  10. Hello everyone! Sorry for the late post.

    1. I hope that consistent conversations about tango scholarship and research will help make connections and give both me and the field a more holistic understanding of tango.

    2. Although this isn’t my area of expertise, I want to echo the concerns about accessing research materials. This issue has been particularly pressing for me in the post-COVID years, as I have been unable to travel to Argentina and Uruguay to work in archives.

    Regarding my expertise, I often encounter challenges in understanding the provenance of the sources I find, especially how they are intertwined with political and commercial interests. For example, one of my main sources for my research has been radio magazines like Sintonía and Radiolandia. What is included and excluded in these magazines clearly indicates a larger power structure influencing their publication. This is particularly evident during periods of dictatorship, such as the sudden appearance of generals in military garb (the Peron era is a whole other story). The influence on the writing of tango history as these magazines are often uncritically used as sources, leading to what I believe to be some misleading accounts of history. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any publicly available scholarship on this subject. However, I do know that one of Julio Korn’s descendants wrote a dissertation about Radiolandia.

  11. Bonjour,
    1/ I am also interested in semantic questions, in particular in the language of language (“langue de bois” in french) in the cultural professions in France. The way in which the notion of consent is used normatively in dance is a current issue.

    2/ My work evolves towards a political analysis of the dance of power (contemporary dance). We can also ask ourselves the question of the conservative dimensions of the practice of tango…

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