Collaborating with the Cambridge Companion to Tango and participating in the Tango in the Humanities conference and festival made me reflect on the meanings of the history of tango in the present, for myself as a historian and teacher, inspired by the talented colleagues who participated in this project, who are—simultaneously or alternatively—musicians, scholars, and cultural activists and mediators. Whether they are also the readers of this short blog post, or these lines reach a broader public, I would like to underline the dimension of tango as a series of artifacts for intergenerational and intercultural transmission.

Tango is both a tradition one can study as a historian and a living reality many colleagues keep cultivating and expanding. They expand it back, enriching an archive full of possibilities for the present, and they expand it further, both opening that history to new publics and inventing new forms. The fascinated engagement of the young musicians of the Emory University Symphony Orchestra when performing with the extraordinary trio of Sonia Possetti, Damián Bolotín, and Nicolás Enrich was a wonderful example of both transmissions—among generations and cultures. At the conference, the conversations among musicians, musicologists, dancers, pedagogues, and historians from Argentina, the US, Japan, and France produced those transmissions as well, although most participants were middle-aged tangueros, and therefore the transmission was, above all, among specific expertises around tango.

In my case, presenting the conference was an opportunity to revisit a series of questions around the meanings of tango poetry in different contexts and for different generations. To what degree the scenes depicted in immortal tangos like “Cafetín de Buenos Aires” by Enrique Santos Discépolo or “Niebla del Riachuelo” by Enrique Cadícamo—the coffee table with living and dead friends, the harbor of abandoned ships—are metaphors, and to what degree are they literal or naturalistic depictions? Was the Buenos Aires of the golden-age tangos lyrics a real city or an imagined one? Why and how were those verses meaningful to listeners growing up in that city twenty years later—i.e., a transformed city? Why and how is this poetry meaningful to us, a quarter century into the 21^st, almost a hundred years later they were penned? If tango’s poetic appeal lays on its rendering of the simultaneously fragile and intense nature of life, experienced as embodied sound and poetry, then those verses can be literal and figurative in different ways for different generations and in different spaces—either exploring sounds in the archive, strolling the docks, performing on stage, or delving into one’s own memory. Tangos are powerful devices to connect with that intense fragility / fragile intensity, especially for cultural historians like me, interested in the globalization of modern urban life, and who make a living out of conveying the importance of this history to younger generations.

The conference and festival were thus a productive interdisciplinary conversation, and an experience of both musical learning and intellectual reflection, that made me see more clearly the importance of cultivating tango as a way to communicating with my students a vital understanding of the past (that of my own country and that of the modern experience that tango incarnates like no other genre).