Tango Lessons: Movement, Sound, Image, and Text in Contemporary Practice - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355663 ISBN 13: 9780822355663

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

From its earliest manifestations on the street corners of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires to its ascendancy as a global cultural form, tango has continually exceeded the confines of the dance floor or the music hall. In Tango Lessons, scholars from Latin America and the United States explore tango's enduring vitality. The interdisciplinary group of contributors—including specialists in dance, music, anthropology, linguistics, literature, film, and fine art—take up a broad range of topics. Among these are the productive tensions between tradition and experimentation in tango nuevo, representations of tango in film and contemporary art, and the role of tango in the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges. Taken together, the essays show that tango provides a kaleidoscopic perspective on Argentina's social, cultural, and intellectual history from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Contributors. Esteban Buch, Oscar Conde, Antonio Gómez, Morgan James Luker, Carolyn Merritt, Marilyn G. Miller, Fernando Rosenberg, Alejandro Susti

About this title

About the Author

Marilyn G. Miller is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. She is the author of Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America.

Excerpt. Š Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TANGO LESSONS

MOVEMENT, SOUND, IMAGE, AND TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE

By MARILYN G. MILLER

Duke University Press

Copyright Š 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5566-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
INTRODUCTION • MARILYN G. MILLER, 1, 
CHAPTER ONE • OSCAR CONDE Lunfardo in Tango: A Way of Speaking That Defines a Way of Being, 33, 
CHAPTER TWO • ALEJANDRO SUSTI Borges, Tango, and Milonga, 60, 
CHAPTER THREE • MARILYN G. MILLER Picturing Tango, 82, 
CHAPTER FOUR • ANTONIO GÓMEZ Tango, Politics, and the Musical of Exile, 118, 
CHAPTER FIVE • FERNANDO ROSENBERG The Return of the Tango in Documentary Film, 140, 
CHAPTER SIX • CAROLYN MERRITT "Manejame como un auto": Drive Me Like a Car, or What's So New about Tango Nuevo?, 164, 
CHAPTER SEVEN • MORGAN JAMES LUKER Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of Música Popular, 198, 
CHAPTER EIGHT • ESTEBAN BUCH Gotan Project's Tango Project, 220, 
Glossary, 243, 
Works Cited, 247, 
Contributors and Translators, 267, 
Index, 269, 

CHAPTER 1

Lunfardo in Tango A Way of Speaking That Defines a Way of Being

OSCAR CONDE

Translated by Kurt Hofer

Tango has demonstrated a singular originality and vitality during its many decades of existence. It presents us with a wide range of perspectives in both its musical and choreographic aspects, and we should not fail to take into account its very rich history as a poetics and a literary history as well. Even before the emergence of that period of tango history known as tango canción, initiated in 1917 with the appearance of "Mi noche triste" (Gobello, Letras de tango, 24), tango lyrics had already begun to make use of lunfardo, the distinct vocabulary of the popular classes of the Río de la Plata region, to achieve an enhanced level of expressivity. Thanks to the particularly strong bond between lunfardo and tango lyrics, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, the popularity of the form increased, and tango music and dance were ultimately complemented by a new element: poetry. This was by no means the only use of lunfardo in a literary context: it has also been used in comic sketches, in the grotesque and other forms of popular theater, in costumbrista journalism that focused on local and regional customs, in comic strips, in rock lyrics, and even in the works of some of Argentina's most canonical authors, such as Leopoldo Marechal, Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, and Manuel Puig. Nonetheless, the connection between tango and lunfardo remains readily apparent today due to the role of the former in disseminating the latter, the latter being initially circumscribed to the lower classes.

The aim of this chapter is first to show how lunfardo has occupied a privileged space in tango, even if a few of its principal lyricists (such as Homero Manzi and Alfredo Le Pera) made infrequent use of its unique vocabulary in their compositions. I then take up the relationship of tango and lunfardo, a relationship that we could credit, without risk of overstatement, with the continuing presence of tango language in the everyday experience of people living in the Río de la Plata region.

Tango is in all of its aspects a product of hybridization, constituted through a diverse constellation of musical, instrumental, and choreographic syncretisms throughout its long history. The resulting phenomenon has proved appealing over a long period to a variety of academics in fields such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Even if such a model results in the oversimplification of certain elements of this history, it is only through the adoption of an integrationist approach to tango that any of the aforementioned fields do not become the single axis of our analysis but rather are reconfigured with the aim of providing a broad, multidimensional vision of the form. Tango is without doubt a product of complexity. A series of distinct elements, all of them necessary to the process, had to come together and work in conjunction with one another to enable its emergence and development as a cultural matrix. It is for this very reason not only appropriate but also advisable that we study tango as a phenomenon of transcultural symbiosis.

While the preservation and study of tango strengthens the regeneration of the dance's singularities and constitutes a kind of return to origins and to questions of regional identity in Argentina and Uruguay, tango has at the same time become part of an indubitably transnational culture in which it has been identified as unique within "planetary folklore" (an expression coined by Morin). This status is evident in its extensive popularization in academies and dance halls throughout Europe and the Americas as well as in movies, plays, and other diverse contexts and venues.

In its early stages, however, tango was rarely seen for what it truly was: a genuine creation of the popular classes, a product of hybridization and of the waves of immigrants who arrived in the port of Buenos Aires between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Contrary to what has been said time and time again, tango was not solely the creation of a marginalized segment of the population. Its history is a singular parable that stretches from the inner reaches of the lower classes to academic studies and intellectual circles, from humble cafés and popular dances of the masses to the opulent halls of the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires's renowned opera house. Once the dance had been legitimated abroad in Paris in 1913, the Argentine upper classes adopted tango both as music and choreography, but as Eduardo Romano has pointed out, "they never swallowed the vulgarity and crassness of its lyrics" (Romano 126; nunca deglutieron el vulgarismo y la cursilería de sus letras). Nonetheless, tango lyrics in the Río de la Plata region have accompanied the common man or woman for many decades: they have provided comfort in the face of disgrace, company in moments of solitude, and an opportunity to ponder the caprices of one's destiny. No one can doubt that a corpus numbering more than thirty thousand tango lyrics provides a series of images that together constitute an extensive history of sentiment—and of private life in general—of Buenos Aires and other Argentine and Uruguayan cities during most of the twentieth century.

If anything defines the tango as a genre, both with respect to its musical roots and in terms of its poetic origins, it is hybridity. In the first case, as is now common knowledge, the earliest forms of tango developed from the confluence of various black rhythms: the habanera, the Andalusian tango, and the milonga. Blas Matamoro summarized the contribution of each of these genres in the following way: "Just as the habanera was lyrical and candombe danceable, we can say that the milonga was a lyrical genre that became a dance by incorporating some of the elements of the candombe's choreography overlaid onto the rhythmic scheme of the habanera. This formula attempts to resolve the question of defining the tango porteńo [identified with the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo], starting with its necessarily hybrid character" (Matamoro, "Orígenes musicales" 89). So it was in the territory of dance that tango came into its own. The discursive construction of the identity of inhabitants of the Río de la Plata region, which had begun within the practice of listening to forms of music born of hybridization, at that point still more cheerful than nostalgic, continued to insinuate itself within the bodies of dancers and ultimately became consolidated in the voice of the region's poets.

The immediate antecedent of the tango lyric was the lyric of the cuplé espańol, a short and light-hearted song form that female singers from Spain known as tonadilleras spread through the theaters of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although other literary influences also left their mark, such as those of the payadores (a kind of rural folk poet and musician) and the canción criolla on the one hand, as well as brothel songs (canciones prostibularias) and pimp poetry (poesía rufianesca) on the other.

Many of the tango lyrics of Ángel Villodo and Alfredo Gobbi, like the popular cuplés of the time, began with the introduction of a character: "Yo soy ... [I am ...]." Perhaps the most memorable example is Villodo's "La Morocha" (The dark-haired woman) (1905), which might be considered less a tango then a creolized cuplé:

Yo soy la morocha,
La más agraciada,
la más renombrada
de esta población. (Gobello, Letras de tango, 7)

[I am the dark-haired woman,
the most graceful,
the most renowned,
of the whole community.]

This first generation of musicians took the tango to Paris, where they enjoyed an incredible level of success. But in those years (between 1907 and 1913), the tango lyric remained unchanged and, far from constituting a collective representation of porteńo life, reflected a limited construction of rather amoral archetypes, such as that of the compadrito who is not only presented as an accomplished dancer but also as a successful cafishio or pimp.

It was a guitarist by the name of Pascual Contursi (1888–1932), who sang and played at the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Montevideo, who unexpectedly inaugurated what we recognize today as tango song (tango canción), when he began to add lyrics to diverse forms of instrumental tango. This turn of events is very clearly evident in Francisco Canaro's "Matasano," which he debuted in 1914. The first stanza mimics the tone of Villoldo's cuplés, but the spirit of the second and third stanzas is considerably different:

Yo he nacido en Buenos Aires
y mi techo ha sido el cielo.
Fue mi único consuelo
la madre que me dio el ser.
Desde entonces mi destino
me arrastra en el padecer.
Y por eso es que en la cara
llevo eterna la alegría,
pero dentro de mi pecho
llevo escondido un dolor. (Gobello, Letras de tango, 21)

[I was born in Buenos Aires
and my roof has been the sky.
My only consolation
was the mother who gave me birth.
Since then my destiny
has dragged me through tribulation.
That is the reason that in my face
I show eternal happiness,
but in my chest
I bear concealed pain.]

Pain enters tango in these lyrics that Contursi wrote for Canaro's composition, and there it will remain, forever branding tango with the quality of affliction. As Gobello has written, the text of this particular tango "is very representative because in these lyrics the tango of the compadrito and the sentimental tango are fused" (Gobello, Letras de tango 3; es muy representativa porque en ella se funden el tango compadrito y el tango sentimental), to which he later adds that it was in fact Contursi who "converted into an intimate confession of the porteńo what had previously been the bragging style of the compadritos" (Gobello, Letras de tango 4; convirtió en una íntima confesión del porteńo lo que solo era alarde de compadritos).

In other words, suffering began to appear with Contursi. The poet has distanced himself from the happy nature of the cuplé, pains and laments have appeared, and with them a whole series of material and formal characteristics that denote the decisive influence of the melancholy-laden themes of the canción criolla and the lines of the poet Evaristo Carriego (1883–1912). Contursi, the first lyricist of tango canción, thus fathered two innovations that definitively changed the literary structure of sung tango: the insertion of the second person, that is to say, of the apostrophe ("Percanta, que me amuraste / muchacha, que me abandonaste" [You, my love, who deceived me / you, the girl that abandoned me]), and the incorporation of a plot line—that is, the transition from pure description to the actual telling of a story. These novel elements appeared in the now-classic "Mi noche triste" (My sad night), a song frequently associated with the introduction of lyrics into what had been primarily instrumental dance music. These lyrics—like several others Contursi composed for tango pieces then in vogue—were added to the instrumental tango "Lita" by Samuel Castriota, probably in the year 1915, although the song wasn't recorded by Carlos Gardel until two years later. The song begins:

Percanta que me amuraste
en lo mejor de mi vida,
dejándome el alma herida
y espina en el corazón,
sabiendo que te quería,
que vos eras mi alegría
y mi sueńo abrasador.
Para mí ya no hay consuelo
y por eso me encurdelo
pa' olvidarme de tu amor. (Gobello, Letras de tango, 24)

[Woman, you who abandoned me
in the prime of my life
leaving me with a wounded soul
and thorns in my heart
knowing that I loved you
that you were my happiness
and the dream that embraced me.
There's no consolation for me
and for this reason I get drunk
to forget about your love.]

This is the radiography of a loser. From this point forward, a primary foundation existed upon which the whole superstructure of the literary system of tango would be built. Contursi's importance derives from his having recreated a sensibility rooted in characters who are willing to paint themselves as failures, to be sentimentalists, characters who represent the other face of Villoldo's arrogant and triumphant compadritos. When the legendary singer Carlos Gardel first became familiar with "Mi noche triste" in 1917, he immediately wanted to record it, and the success he achieved with this tango would forever change the trajectory of his career. This would ultimately be of decisive importance to the history of tango; Contursi, consciously or not, gave shape to the genre of tango canción, and Gardel would literally invent the way in which that genre would be interpreted. From that moment on, tango would never be the same.

Beginning in 1915, a series of traits began to take form that would come to characterize the school known as the Guardia Nueva or New Guard. The great composers and poets who were beginning to appear started to create a tango that was meant to be listened to more than to be danced to, as had been the case up until that point. This did not spell the end of the dance itself, but rather a growing perception of tango as a triangular form. Now, the public would be faced with three possibilities: tango as music to listen to, tango as music to dance to, or tango as a lyric narration to follow. Obviously, these options could also be combined. So it is that, beginning in the 1920s, tango stopped being the music of the gritty outskirts alone and became the impetus of an entire industry with a mass audience, an industry that soon became materialized in records, sheet music, radio shows, plays, concerts, and dances.

Osvaldo Pelletieri has lucidly explained exactly how the literary system of the tango lyric took shape:

Since that era marked as the first generation—Pascual Contursi, Celedonio Flores, José González Castillo—tango poets invariably worked with materials that the highbrow literary system had discarded and replaced with others.

The creation of these marginal artists consisted in proposing and solidifying a change of functions produced within the canonical text of "high" poetry. The case of modernism is paradigmatic: it is known that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, this movement as well as Carriego's sentimental poetry "spoke" very little to the highly educated sectors reading poetry at the time.

Nonetheless, Contursi and Flores included their work in tango within Carriego's intertextual model and converted the poet's texts in true generators of new texts, constituting the tango category, fixing its norms to such a degree that Carriego continued to serve as a model until well into the decade of the 1950s. (10)

Pelletieri then goes on to conclude that "Carriego's poetry already contained a near totality of the elements necessary to construct a literary system. All that was lacking was the definitive creation of a common literary language, the achievement of the union of poetry and music and the subsequent securing of an audience for this new invention" (11).

This creation of a common literary language happened with "Milonguita" (1920, with lyrics by Samuel Linnig and music by Enrique Delfino), which, within the history of tango, should hold a place at least as important as that of "Mi noche triste" for having contributed a definitive structure. Beginning with this work, the linearity of Contursi's and Flores's earliest lyrics is henceforth modified, and what emerges is a pattern of three movements composed of two longer stanzas of a narrative-evocative character, a shorter refrain meant to exhort or prompt reflection between the two stanzas, and a refrain often repeated at the end of the song.

Lunfardo, a popular vocabulary born of the encounter between immigrants and criollos (native-born Latin Americans) in the conventillos (tenements) and suburbs of the city, appeared in the majority of the lyrics from the early period of the tango canción. Indeed, it is almost a commonplace to say that lunfardo constitutes, with its contribution of a rich lexical imagination full of shadings, a true stamp of identity. A stamp that, on the one hand, distinguishes Argentines from other Latin Americans with whom they share a common language and, on the other, strengthens the sense of belonging to a culture in which the "popular" (language, culture, and popular arts) has never been a mere condiment but rather an essential ingredient.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822355663
• ISBN 13: 9780822355663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Miller Marilyn G.