9 Responses

1. I actually feel that tango is in itself a way of understanding life. Then we try to formulate certain theoretical frameworks to understand its music, its poetry or its dance through experiences, in many cases from the very nature of upbringing and others from the adoption of the genre as their own without even knowing the land where it was created.
   As a guitarist, I would like to propose this crossover with Eric Johns, to understand what his attraction and interest is in the tango guitar or rather in the “guitar heroes” of tango. Same passion from two angles of view, South America and North America.

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2. I am struck by the evolving and “migratory” nature of the tango across media and national borders, from dance and musical performance (instrumental and later lyrical) sound recording and film, and its popularity in Argentina and Uruguay to France, the United States, Japan, and beyond. In this sense, it engages not just musicology, dance, and performance studies, but also media studies and questions of human geography (migration and exile) along with the cultural dimensions of international relations (international cultural relations, soft power) and studies of tourism, including sex/romance tourism.

   If it’s fair to say that the dominant affect or emotion associated with tango is longing, this connects to a myriad of questions: geographic displacement, sexual desire, nostalgia for an idealized past. Its eroticism opens up a multitude of questions regarding both heterosexual desire and queer sexuality, while the nostalgia that often characterizes it raises questions about how musical and dance performance, as well as recorded sound and film, mediate a personal or collective relationship to the past.

   In my past writing on tango, I was interested in how tango’s circulation via new media technologies shifted cultural hegemonies within and beyond national borders with Carlos Gardel’s tango films as a case study. While made by Paramount outside Paris and New York, their popularity arguably paved the way for Argentina’s sound film industry. Other scholars such as Donald S. Castro had written about how radio and phonograph records facilitated tango’s transformation from a “marginal” urban phenomenon to a cultural form that enjoyed national, cross-class popularity. I explored how Gardel’s Paramount films, initially part of Hollywood’s attempt to hold onto its foreign markets once spoken dialogue replaced silent-era intertitles that could be translated and adapted for local contexts with relative ease, ultimately allowed Argentina’s industry to challenge Hollywood’s hegemony by capitalizing on the popularity of tango both within and beyond Argentina.

   I am currently interested in the urban landscape surrounding Gardel’s films shot in Astoria, Queens, including the radio broadcasts that provided the initial impetus for his presence in the city and the way the local Spanish-language press (including the newspaper La Prensa and the Spanish-language entertainment magazine Cine Mundial) constructed an ecosystem of Spanish-language cultural production and consumption in the 1930s. I am actually thinking of changing my presentation topic to focus specifically on that, if that’s OK!

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3. Hola todxs,

   I’ve always felt that my work barely scratches the surface of that vast, multinational (a passion with multiple geographies, paraphrasing Julián), and multidimensional set of traditions, both historical and current, we call “tango.”

   My approach has addressed two main aspects: on the one hand, the poetic themes in the lyrics (I wrote about the “golden age” tango lyrics); and on the other, how artists, producers, and public culture in general, in Buenos Aires and elsewhere, *classify* tango (culturally, morally, nationally, etc.), in a vein perhaps similar to Rielle’s.

   In both cases, my focus is on the words, on the rhetorical and pragmatic strategies that turned the tango tradition into a “sentimental pedagogy,” and into a “cultural industry” at once local, national, and transnational. (I studied for example how composers at SADAIC defined tango in varied terms to take care of their copyright at home and abroad and circumvent nationalist censorship in the 1940s and 1950s). In other words, I read lyrics and archival documents as a historian, reconstructing through them specific cultural contexts and transnational networks, following two broader, interdisciplinary questions: how do Latin American cultural traditions interact with modern globalization, and how music not just simply “illustrates” Latin American history, but makes it.

   In doing all this, I’ve been able to cultivate a rich dialogue with ethnomusicologists and other music scholars (not just around tango, but around the cultural history of Latin American music in general), despite my lack of technical expertise. Conversely, a challenge I’ve faced has been the relative lack of musical awareness among historians, who see musical and aesthetic practices in general as “reflections” of social life rather than actual engines (poetic, economic, etc.) of it.

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4. I’m a historian (social, cultural, intellectual) of Afro-Latin America, and came to a deeper scholarly interest in tango through the study of Afro-Argentine history (I’m from Argentina, so a basic interest in tango was pre-existing). In my last project on the Afro-Argentine icon of the tango nightlife, Raúl Grigera (who descended from a family of tango and candombe musicians), I found that although musicologists have learned a great deal about the African origins of the tango in Argentina, there is still a lot of information to be gleaned from the Afro-Argentine press. The work of musicologists has helped me enormously, and I think that perhaps the skills of social historians, applied to documents like the Afro-Argentine press, can also help musicologists look into new areas–the social spaces and homes of Afro-Argentine individuals, families, associations, etc. who played a role in the rise of the early tango. I don’t know that I’ll pursue this further as a project (I am on to something non-tango-related for my next book), but it would be a great project for a team to pursue. In short, I echo many of Pablo’s points and concerns above; the world of tango was not a mere “reflection” of the broader social processes that shaped racial formation in Argentina (the issue I focus on in my scholarship), but was an engine of it, a place where ideas about race and culture and national identity were actively being made.

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5. Hello everyone.

   As a musicologist I´ve always been interested in the dialectic relationship between the musical creation and its cultural context. So, the the way both mutually impact each other is something I tend to consider and think about. As I work from a feminist and critical gender perspectives, the approaches usually combine theoretical and analytical tools from different disciplines from the humanistic fields besides musicology, such as Feminist and Gender Studies, Literature, Cultural Studies or History. Concerning tango, as I´ve been digging into tango cancionistas of the Golden Age, cultural representations are a key to study the development of their careers; the manipulation of their image and he dissemination and recreation of their private lives became a part of their media figure (they starred in movies, many times with their actual names, they were on the cover of magazines and were exclusive artists of radio stations or record companies). Thus, according to their different performance styles, they became different feminine archetypes. Inversely we could think that their personal ways of performing gender shape their own character and each singing style. So, as much as the diverse humanistic fields can help us to embrace such a huge object as tango in its multifaceted condition, the study of tango cancionistas through a gender perspective that pays attention to the (gender and artistic) performance can shed light on women posibilities, limits and conditions at the time; their conquests, dreams, desires and emotions, even transgretions and subversions. At this point, my ideas connect with those of Pablo and Paulina, since “the world of tango” has been a place where also gender identity was negociated, regulated, expanded or limited.

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6. I have always worked with tango starting from the music, through musicology, attempting to understand its structural functioning, the idiomatic particularities of composers and performers, and their stylistic traits. Of course, a very important aid comes from reading various historical studies, whether biographies or histories of the genre, which are not actually very abundant. Where I have obtained richer information is from ethnography, interviews with musicians that I have conducted myself or interviews published by other researchers, many of whom are not academics (collectors, enthusiasts, or interested parties).

   Although I do not dance tango myself, I have taken dance classes to understand how it works and physically perceive the relationship with the music. This practice and the insightful comments from the instructor, Eduardo Arquimbau, allowed me to greatly broaden my perspective regarding the music. Alongside Arquimbau, we also reviewed films of Gardel and other tango films to see how it was danced in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a great revelation for me to discover that Valentino executed some perfect tango steps beyond his theatricality; also, to understand that Gardel was not a great dancer but made good use of his basic steps in a simple style.

   I haven’t delved much deeper into cinema, like Rielle, but I have read some very interesting works on tango and cinema that have helped me understand the musical scene of tango, always so broad and complex.

   Very recently, I have studied tango lyrics a bit more with a literature specialist. I have been dazzled by lesser-known lyrics of Homero Manzi and Homero Expósito, and I have learned to appreciate the enormous skill of García Jiménez. But also, the popular emotionality of the simpler lyrics. In all cases, trying to ascertain which came first, the music or the lyrics, is a challenge that often illuminates the overall understanding of a work.

   I have worked a bit with what tango owes to Afro-American culture. The Afro musical features that I believe I have found illuminated part of my rhythmic understanding of the genre.

   I am immersed in the culture where tango still survives as part of many people’s lives, but this is fading. Those born after 1980 have not naturally incorporated it as their own. It is studied as a complex knowledge.

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7. Historically, music theorists have worked in a rather insular fashion — the lone researcher analyzing the structure of individual pieces of music without significant reference to the broader social or historical contexts within which that music was created. However, as new generations of music theorists have worked to expand the field to include music outside the Western art music canon, discussions of these issues have come to be understood as essential, rather than superfluous, to responsible music-theoretical inquiry. While my academic training is as a fairly traditional music theorist (who wrote a dissertation on pitch organization in the music of Olivier Messiaen), my entry point into my post-PhD research has been as a social Latin dance participant. My explorations of the rhythmic interactions and improvisational practices of dancers and musicians in salsa have caused me to reflect often on the social power dynamics between partners in the dancing couple and between musicians in the band, as well as between the dance floor and the musical stage. As I move more into tango, I see my research going in a couple of different directions: 1) I would like to continue the kind of in-depth analysis of specific tango performances that I began in my chapter, comparing a number of different dance interpretations (both choreographed and improvised) of the same pieces of music (continuing with “La cumparsita,” and probably also exploring performances of “El choclo”). In this work, I believe I will be taking a similar matrix-based approach to listening/viewing of video performances that Morgan James Luker discusses for historical sound recordings. 2) As I gain more experience as a tango dance participant, I find myself comparing the physical mechanics, musical interactions, social dynamics, and opportunities for improvisational freedom in tango to those found in the other social dance forms I have practiced. In this project, I find myself drawing a lot on the work of David Kaminsky, whose book Social Partner Dance: Body, Sound, and Space provides significant discussion of tango and its relation to a number of other dance forms. I am also looking forward to learning from the other scholars in this project, and particularly from the dance scholars (Christophe Apprill, Kathy Davis, Kendra Stepputat, Carolyn Merritt), whose chapters I have not yet read but am getting to soon!

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8. Hello, sociologist, working specifically on dance, I have carried out several research on ballroom sociabilities, and on what dancing tango in milonga represents (gender issues, addiction, passion, tourism, coach, etc.). Understanding tango dance is not easy, from the point of view of social sciences in France. The sociology of dance is young there, unlike Anglo-Saxon countries, and it is little considered. Also, once I had distanced myself from my own passion for dance, I had to admit that it was an illegitimate object of research, part of subaltern studies! I therefore focused part of my work on the status of a dance like tango with regard to other forms of culture: how tango dance is the object of contempt and condescension, both in France and in Argentina, from so-called cultured people. And this is what gradually led me to work on contemporary dance, which I also call “the dance of power”, or Dance (with capital letters), because it alone represents the reference of references in the worlds dance.

   However, one question has evolved a lot since the beginning of the 2000s: that of gender, roles and sexual assignments. My latest book being a study of the sociabilities of Slow dance, it seems interesting to me to combine the decline of slow with the rise of digital dating platforms (Tinder and others) and the lasting success of tango dance in the world. One question is present in these three universes: consent.

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9. Thanks all who already weighed in on the discussion! I’m looking forward to processing these thoughtful and insightful comments, as they raise a couple of new ideas to discuss. Here are two of mine for starters:

   1. The concept of tango as an “engine” rather than a “reflection” of society and culture (both inside and outside of Argentina) strikes me as a perspective that could apply to the various disciplines represented in our group. Maybe this could be a common entry point for a larger conference project?

   2. Many of you mentioned how your work relies on, or could relate to, work of scholars in other disciplines (Julián with Eric on tango guitar and guitarists; Rielle, Romina, Pablo, and Paulina with cultural production, gender, and social spaces; Omar with dancers and literary scholars; Rebecca with dance scholars). This opens the possibility of a bigger project that unites the traditional dimensions of tango as music, dance, and poetry, and their inherent performance-related view that Omar and Rebecca discussed (and I daresay that Kacey and I took in our book “Tracing Tangueros”) into a bigger social/cultural force. Or, do we continue to keep the music, dance, and poetry dimensions more separate and distinct?

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