Tango is the most analyzed popular music in the world — a music so philosophically rich that it generated its own body of aesthetic theory. It is also one of the clearest examples of how immigrant cultures create entirely new musical forms.
ORIGINS: THE PORT CITY CRUCIBLE
Tango emerged in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late nineteenth century from the convergence of three immigrant communities: European (predominantly Italian and Spanish), African-Argentine (descendants of enslaved Africans), and internal migrants from the Argentine interior. The specific musical ingredients are debated by historians, but include the Cuban habanera (with its characteristic dotted-dotted-long-short rhythmic figure), the African-Argentine candombe, the Argentine milonga (a rural dance), Italian opera vocal traditions, and German polka.
The port neighborhoods of Buenos Aires — Palermo, Barracas, La Boca — were the incubators of early tango. By the 1900s the music had moved into the city's cafés and dance halls; by the 1910s it had conquered Paris (where Argentine tango was embraced before it was accepted by the Buenos Aires middle class, who initially considered it too vulgar); by the 1930s it had become Argentina's national music.
THE GOLDEN AGE: 1935–1955
The Golden Age of tango is the period associated with the great dance orchestras: Osvaldo Pugliese, Aníbal Troilo, Carlos Di Sarli, Juan D'Arienzo. Troilo's orchestra was the school in which the young Astor Piazzolla played bandoneón and arranged. These orchestras played in the milongas (dance halls) of Buenos Aires to packed houses; the bandleader was both a musical director and a social figure of considerable importance.
The tango orchestra of the Golden Age typically consisted of two or three bandoneóns (the German concertina that defines the tango sound), violins (in varying numbers), piano, double bass, and voice. The bandonéon's angular, reedy tone — entirely unlike any instrument in the European orchestra — became the sonic signature of tango. Carlos Gardel (1890–1935) was the greatest tango singer; his death in an air crash at age 44 made him a mythological figure in Argentine culture.
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA AND NUEVO TANGO
Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992) is the figure who brought tango into the concert hall and created the most controversial and ultimately most influential development in the music's history. Trained with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Piazzolla combined the tango rhythmic vocabulary with jazz harmonies, counterpoint, and twentieth-century formal structures. His nuevo tango was initially rejected by the Buenos Aires tango establishment as a betrayal of the dance form; it is now recognized as among the most significant popular music of the twentieth century.
Piazzolla's "Adiós Nonino" (1959), composed as an elegy for his father, is the most frequently performed of his pieces. It demonstrates the harmonic sophistication (modulations through distantly related keys, chromatic voice-leading), rhythmic complexity (layered against the underlying tango ostinato), and emotional directness of his mature style.
TANGO AS PHILOSOPHY
More than almost any other popular music, tango has attracted philosophical analysis. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote extensively about tango as an expression of Buenos Aires identity and the porteño (Buenos Aires resident) worldview. The anthropologist Marta Savigliano, in "Tango and the Political Economy of Passion" (Westview Press, 1995), analyzes tango as a vehicle of colonial and post-colonial desire — how the exotic eroticism of the dance was constructed for European consumption, and what that says about the global circulation of "passionate" musical traditions.
The concept of lunfardo — the slang of Buenos Aires, developed primarily by Italian and Spanish immigrants in the early twentieth century — is inseparable from tango lyrics. Many tango texts are incomprehensible without knowledge of lunfardo, which was itself a form of coded communication among the urban poor.
TANGO'S GLOBAL DIFFUSION
Tango's global spread — to Japan (which has one of the world's most active tango communities), Finland, Turkey, South Korea — raises questions about why this specific music from a specific place became globally transmissible. The combination of a clear rhythmic identity, a sophisticated emotional vocabulary, and the physical intimacy of the dance creates a package that translates across cultural contexts in ways that, say, gamelan or pansori does not. This transferability is itself worth analyzing.
THE BANDONEÓN AS CULTURAL ARTIFACT
The bandoneón was developed in Germany in the 1840s by Heinrich Band as an instrument for traveling religious services in regions too remote to support a pipe organ. Manufactured by the firms of Alfred Arnold and others in Carlsfeld, Saxony, the bandoneón had a button keyboard (rather than the piano-style keyboard of the accordion) that allowed extraordinary virtuosity in the hands of master players. German and Italian immigrants and sailors brought the instrument to the Río de la Plata in the late nineteenth century, where it was adopted into early tango ensembles. The instrument's distinctive timbre — at once melancholic, harsh, and capable of intense lyrical expression — became inseparable from the tango sound, and the original German production halted with World War II. The contemporary bandoneón market depends almost entirely on antique instruments, restoration, and a small number of artisanal builders attempting to revive production.
LUNFARDO AND THE LITERARY DIMENSION
Tango lyrics constitute one of the most literary popular song traditions in the world. Lyricists including Enrique Santos Discépolo, Homero Manzi, Cátulo Castillo, and Horacio Ferrer produced texts that are studied in Argentine universities as literature in their own right. The themes — lost love, urban alienation, nostalgia for the immigrant past, political disillusionment, the philosophy of fate — are treated with a verbal density and metaphoric inventiveness rivaling any other vernacular poetic tradition. The lyrics' use of lunfardo and their syntactic complexity make tango songs largely opaque to non-Argentine Spanish speakers without specific study, even as the music's emotional content communicates universally.
CANDOMBE AND URUGUAYAN TRADITIONS
The contribution of Montevideo to the tango tradition is often underappreciated. Uruguay claims Carlos Gardel was born there; many early tango musicians were Uruguayan. Uruguay also developed candombe — an Afro-Uruguayan drumming tradition deriving from the Bantu cultural inheritance of enslaved Africans in the Río de la Plata region. Candombe uses three different-sized barrel drums (chico, repique, piano) in interlocking rhythmic patterns played by ensembles called comparsas during the annual Llamadas (Calls) parade through Montevideo's Barrio Sur and Palermo neighborhoods. UNESCO inscribed candombe on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009. The interaction between candombe and tango in the nineteenth century — both products of the same multicultural port-city environment — produced features audible in early tango that are often attributed solely to European sources.
TANGO AND DANCE PEDAGOGY
The technical study of tango dance has produced a substantial body of pedagogical and theoretical literature. The dance is improvised within established conventions: the leader navigates the dance floor and proposes movements through subtle weight transfers; the follower interprets these signals and responds with movements that fit the music's phrasing. The relationship between dance partners is one of continuous negotiation, not predetermined choreography. The contemporary global tango community — milongas (tango dance events) operate weekly in cities including Tokyo, Helsinki, Istanbul, Seoul, and Berlin — has developed pedagogical traditions that codify what was originally a more fluid social practice.
EXERCISE: THE BANDONÉON
Find two recordings: a Golden Age tango orchestra (Juan D'Arienzo or Carlos Di Sarli) and a Piazzolla quintet piece. Identify the bandonéon in each recording. How does its role change between the two contexts — from dance accompaniment to concert foreground? What specifically does Piazzolla do with the bandonéon that the Golden Age orchestras did not?