[Tango-L] What Do You Think? Milonga

[Tom Stermitz]

Keith, note how Andrew says:

"The milonga we dance nowadays"

The milonga from the 19th century was a different music from the  
milonga that developed in the 1930s. The roots of tango may have been  
the older milonga, but today's (1930s and later) milonga came out of  
the tango of the 1920s, not the milonga of the 1890s, which which was  
two generations earlier.

In other words the evolutionary tree split in the 1930s. Milonga and  
Tango did not go back to the 1890s as two separate musical forms.

If you listen to the music of the 1920s, it is (in general) somewhat  
march-like. Some songs feel tango-ish and others feel milonga-ish, and  
a lot of them aren't very differentiated as milonga or tango.

In the 1930s, tangos slowed down, added new musical elements, and  
developed along the de Darean (slower) and d'Arienzean (rhythmic) paths.

In the 1930s, milongas sped up and had candombe and african-ish  
rhythms and lyrics added. The lyrics were full of this nostalgia for  
the good old days when black people lived in San Telmo, and danced  
under the torches.

Are there examples of milonga candombera from the 1910s and 1920s? I'm  
going to assume we could find 1920s examples of canbombe in Uruguaya,  
but I'm not sure if these were part of the tango experience or whether  
they stayed with the african communities and carnivals of Uruguay.

Our enjoyment of milonga is sort of "double nostalgia".

I guess, all this discussion is "meta milonga.


On Aug 1, 2009, at 12:47 PM, Keith Elshaw wrote:

>> Milonga pre-dated tango.
>>
>> The milonga we dance nowadays [2 beats to the bar, fastish ,as in  
>> Milonga
>> sentimental] only goes back to the 30's. The pre-dating one was a  
>> slow
>> dirge played by the payadores towards the end on the 19th Century and
>> hardly ever danced to. Piazzolla revived it in the 50's as "Milonga
>> Campera": "Oblivion", "Milonga del angel" &c....True. the milonga  
>> campera
>> eventually became more lively & turned into tango - that could be  
>> danced.
>
> All the above is, I'm afraid, reproduction of myth and mis- 
> information.
>

Tom Stermitz
http://www.tango.org
Denver, CO 80207