[Tango-L] World Class tango dancers....

[Konstantin Zahariev]

Hi,

It seems to me that the statements below need some significant qualifiers.


On 7/17/07, Amaury de Siqueira <amaurycdsf at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>[...] Little does she know about the history of the dance.  That the
> Argentines on the turn of the last century condemned Tango (and disowning
> it)and the French welcomed with open arms.


That is not true on its face. A more accurate statement would be that
the _wealthy_ or high society Argentines (i.e. the ones that could
shape the discussion, the ones with the voice to be heard the loudest
and recorded) condemned tango (before the French accepted it). This is
not an insignificant detail. The working class Argentines created
tango and obviously embraced and liked tango from its beginning. I
don't think they were less Argentines than the upper class were.


> That theTango is not an
> Argentine product, but the product of fusion between afro-Caribbean and
> European rhythms.


Rhythm is only one of several parts of a musical form though. Even so,
pre-1920 tangos borrowed the Cuban habanera rhythm pattern of
dotted-eight, sixteenth, eight, eight. However this pattern was
imported from the slaves in Haiti, and they were brought to Haiti from
West Africa. I do not know what European rhythms are referred to here
when we talk about tango (and not vals, for example), but in any case
the evidence shows that any syncopated rhythm pattern (one example is
the habanera pattern above) that was imported in "civilized" Europe
ultimately came from West African and other black people's drum lines.

In fact the theory is that the habanera pattern came as a 3-2 rhythm
pattern (alternating or mixing 3-long and 2-long rhythm blocks is
something common in African drum lines) which was something
incomprehensible, with its implied 5/8 time signature, to western
Europe. So the sailors and others distorted the 3-long block and
shortened it to fit into a 2-long block, thus "straightening" the time
signature into a 2/4 or 4/8 and the pattern into the habanera pattern
mentioned above. The other consequence was that whenever songs had
accents or notes on all three eights of the original 3-long block,
this became a triplet (to fit into 2 eights). Habaneras are filled
with these triplets, as were very early tangos. See even Bizet's
Carmen - the famous habanera (which was really Sebastien Yradier's El
Arreglito habanera that Bizet borrowed thinking it was a folk tune.)

I don't think all this rhythm genealogy business makes tango less
Argentine or somehow a derivative from Europe. The habanera rhythm
pattern is not tango.

Rhythm aside, it was Argentines who took, at first, whatever portable
instruments they had, later the bandoneon and piano and violins of
different sizes, and created the musical form, and it was Argentines,
mostly immigrants from Italy and Spain, and others, who created the
dance form in conventillos.

With best regards,

Konstantin
Victoria, Canada