[Tango-L] Origins

[Tom Stermitz]

Thanks for this.

I also noticed that Sergio ran together the categories of historical  
milongas from the previous century with our modern concept of milonga  
which dates from the 1930s.  As you say, there are very few primary  
sources that allow us to figure out the exact truth when we go back  
before the 1920s.


"Brothel" may or may not be the same thing as "Dance Hall" or  
"nightclub". One would assume that men met women at locations that  
varied from respectable to dis-reputable, and from high-class to low- 
class. One would assume that women were protected, controlled or  
allowed freedom, paid or not paid depending on numerous factors. In a  
culture of extreme poverty and wealth, the difference between a  
prostitute, mistress, and girlfriend may also be ambiguous.

Certainly, wealthy "jailaifs" would go "slumming" in downtown  
nightclubs, which to me presumes (but doesn't prove) that there was  
tango in brothels at least in the occasional sense.



On Jul 18, 2007, at 11:29 AM, Konstantin Zahariev wrote:

> Hi,
>
> While many have claims have been made, and we do not really have
> copious amounts of primary documents for incontrovertible proof of one
> hypothesis over another, I think that we can still (A) identify and
> separate obvious biases that got woven into the narrative, as well as
> claims that are made to reinforce or conform to the preferred
> narrative (B) separate less systematic analyses and famous people's
> opinions from more systematic analyses and (C) distill more probable
> from less probable realizations.



> Then there are some confusions in terminology or context.
>
> The milongas before 1930 came in several flavours - most famously the
> milonga campera, a slow, 3-3-2 pattern, sung by payadores accompanied
> by guitar, but also some 2/4 livelier tunes, yet none of them had
> anything to do with the post-1930 milonga as we know it.
>
> However the post-1930 milonga and the pre-1920 tangos share the
> habanera rhythm pattern of dotted eight-sixteenth-eight-eight, which
> is why Sergio could say that some outside Argentina confuse early
> tangos (in pre-1920 arrangement) with post-1930 milongas. This cannot
> be an argument about the primacy of milonga, though - at least not
> about the milonga as we know it now.