[Tango-L] Report No. 5 on the Tango Festival & Mundial Buenos Aires August 2011

[Shahrukh Merchant]

"Trini y Sean \(PATangoS\)" <patangos at yahoo.com> asks:

> When the musicians have been playing for dancers, how have they've
> been arranging their music?  In tandas or have they've been mixing it
> up?

If you're referring to musicians at the festival, as you seem to be, I 
will re-emphasize that musicians at the festivals have generally NOT 
been playing for dancers at all (other than at the opening milonga), nor 
have been expected to do so. So no, the concept of tandas was largely 
irrelevant for 90% of the live music being played at the festival.

The Grand Opening milonga did feature Los Reyes del Tango. I wasn't 
there, so I don't know what they played there, but Los Reyes usually 
does not play in tandas, so I'd guess they didn't at the festival. 
Sexteto Milonguero will be playing at the Closing Milonga on Sunday 
afternoon, and they sometimes do play vaguely in tandas at regular 
milongas, but since there will be a larger listening crowd than a 
dancing crowd, I'm not sure what they will do there.

There are two Tango worlds in Buenos Aires--that of the music and that 
of the dance (and they seem to overlap nowadays only slightly). Most 
tourist (including those who come to dance Tango) completely miss the 
first, other than what they might hear at a Tango show or at a milonga 
that features live music, but this barely scratches the surface. A lot 
of it does seem to be underground, with no formal mechanism for 
disseminating information. One of the great things about this festival 
is that it brought the two worlds together, or at least under one roof, 
so that those mostly on one side could get visibility into the other.

If you're referring to Tango orchestras in general in Buenos Aires, 
mostly they do not play in tandas at all, except to some extent for the 
few orchestras that have one or more social Tango dancers among the 
musicians (e.g., Sexteto Milonguero and Orquesta Mariano Bujacich, among 
others). Generally then, an announcement of the previous or following 
tanda takes the place of a cortina.

Shahrukh