[Tango-L] Tango music

[TangoDC.com]

Hello everyone,

PATRICK CROTTY wrote:
> <schnip> Composers and musicians make music. Social partnered dancers _pick and choose_ some musical genre to dance. The dancers _then_ create a dance genre they think and feel reflects and is in harmony with the music. <schnap> [emphasis mine]
I more or less agree with the Later thrust of this post, but This Part 
Here is quite a mis-statement of actual history, and music/dance 
creation. You think Any music, or any art (for that matter), has ever 
been made in a market-proof vacuum? You think these things are isolated 
in history or in place? You think music creators are one camp, dancers 
another, and the populace a third?

There's always an interplay between extant traditions, past traditions, 
and innovations; and all that is usually directed by popular demand 
(dance halls and producers, not to mention radio stations). You've got 
it rather backward. Nowadays, for instance, people look at the music of 
John Cage as some kind of ivory-tower thing, created ex nihilo; and yet 
his prepared-piano pieces were commissioned For A Dance Troupe, and one 
with a paying audience.

Actual tango history:

early 1930s-- The tango had moved into 4/4, was for crooners, and the 
dance floors were filled with chairs. Things had gotten rather 
bourgeois. The Decarian school was developing its innovations, many of 
which fueled the developments in crooner tango and in concert tango. It 
was lucrative for more than a few.

1937-- D'Arienzo reverts tangos to 2/4 (the old milonga tempo). The 
people respond to his change, _unless they prompted it in the first 
place_. Either way, the chairs leave. In consequence, he keeps it 
coming. Workaday orchestras are forced to adapt if they want gigs, 
because dancers want dance music. Some extreme tango snobs still despise 
D'Arienzo for this, I've heard. (Some people never catch up, which 
you're right about, Patrick.)

Both of these trajectories in tango history were important, and both 
were equally fueled by (a) money and (b) popular demand. There's a whole 
Other tradition of tango music for crooners out there, which is still 
alive and loved. Dancers often ignore this rather huge current in the 
river. It, however, seems to have fared much better than dance music did 
in the wake of 60s rock.

But as far as I know, if we consider the dark prehistorical days of 
tango-- the dance (not that we'd recognize it today) seems to have 
preceded the music. At least, that's a minor part of the argument put 
forward by R.F. Thompson...

Also, with regard to the recent sneers at, and support for, concert 
tango music: That's another current as well, which is part of tango 
culture as a whole. I personally blow my nose on much (not all) of it 
_qua music_, because I think it sucks. I find excessive violin vibrato 
(the norm these days among soloists) intolerable. But if people want to 
dance to it, what do I care? And if live bands, influenced by that 
tradition, play at some milonga you attend, what do you care?

DJs playing stuff like that is, of course, an entirely different 
matter... they ought to do what they're hired for, in my opinion.

In any case, dance music (and dancing) is only one part of the whole. 
Gardel and El Arranque (just for example) are other parts. I mean, just 
because people don't usually dance to Miles Davis and Sinatra (or maybe 
they do, I don't know) doesn't mean that their work isn't a vital part 
of jazz.

Jake Spatz
DC