Articles

What Is Tango?
The Bandoneon: It's Blurred Unreal Past

What is Tango?

Think of romance, passion, sensuality - and more.

"To dance tango well you need to fall in love for the 3 minutes of the dance."

Argentine Tango is often close embrace, involves a definite lead and follow, constantly caresses the floor and is danced to music similar to classical music - combined with the unmistakeable and unique sound of a squeezebox called a " eon".

The unique component of tango is the sweet melancholy of its melody combined with the liveliness of its beats, partly reflecting its history.

The biggest myth about tango is that it is difficult to learn. The steps aren't complicated! Its essence is popular - from the streets. It is learned by practice.

The basic steps are like lego pieces - the man decides what order to put them in. So you could have 10 couples in the same room, dancing to the same music at the same time, and doing totally different combinations of steps. If you like the music, you're halfway there. You can start with music that has a regular rhythm pattern and gradually move to more complex and variable music, allowing your untapped intuitive and creative aspects to emerge.

There are 3 main tango rhythms: tango (slow/medium/fast, with possible variations within one piece), tango vals (waltz) and milonga (which is faster and bouncier).

The melancholy of the music relates to the first European immigrants who came to Buenos Aires and expressed their longing for home. At the same time, local residents from the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the early 1900s expressed their 'virility' - showed off - through the performance of tango. That is why there is a strong component of virility -the man leads - complemented by the femininity in the sweet melancholy that flows lightly and beautifully following behind those definite beats.

Tango dancing originated in the brothels (men dancing with men) on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in Argentina, gained respectability in Paris and became the national dance when it returned to Argentina.

Tango is now an international passport to the world, whilst Buenos Aires is the international mecca for tango lovers.

There is a unique connection between tango dancers - where each person focuses on his or her partner (rather than performing for an audience) as the music weaves its magic spell. It is a journey into the inner landscape. A venture into the unknown.

Every dance is unique. Even if you dance with the same partner to the same piece, it will never be the same. Tango is the dance where you truly live "in the moment" and enjoy the fleeting moments of tango bliss.

And having fallen in love for the 3 minutes of the dance ... you get to do it all over again with the next person!

But be warned: Tango is addictive!!

— Written by Sandy Grant, with contributions from Gabriela Ramazzotti in Buenos Aires

The Bandoneon: It's Blurred Unreal Past

Bandoneon and tango: the first word evokes the second. One is a mirror of the other, as if born of the same ancestors, under the same star. The union of both sounds so natural, that to figure their origin in far away and dissimilar territories - Germany and Argentina- seems a fairy tale.

In the last thirty years of the 18th century, when the bandoneon had not yet joined the tango, the latter was informed by a rhythmic pattern (2/4), being a cheerful and picaresque expression of the lower classes settled in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The musical groups were trios of flute, guitar and violin, (sometimes harp, rarely clarinet). The beats were marked by the guitar, played by black men called "bordoneros", acquainted with the "candombe" and the "habanera" (dances from Central America) and who stamped on the strings their own rhythmic style typical of the percussion of black music.

Primitive tango was played in street dances, small clubs and brothels. It was considered a marginal dance, an "incorrect" way of entertainment of lower social class --freed black men and their children, "gauchos" settled in the suburbs and several others.

As from 1900, with the massive arrival of European immigrants, the Argentine social interweaving was deeply transformed. The newly-arrived population, mostly men who had dreamed to "get wealthy" go back to Europe, only came to find hard working conditions and see the possibility of returning home fade away. They adopted some habits of the native lower classes and, thus, primitive tango became their main source of entertainment.

How did the bandoneon come across tango?

The "fuelle" arrived in Argentina about 1870. It is said to have been brought by sailors: either by a German of unknown name, or Bartolo, the Brazilian, or an Englishman, Thomas Moore. They played polkas y mazurkas, never tangos. They did not read music, except for "the German", Arturo Berstein, who only had a classical repertoire and knew the original technique for the instrument. The first native players of bandoneon were JosŠ Santa Cruz, Pedro Ávila, and "the blind" Ruperto.

The "fuelle" was not incorporated to tango until 1900. The first generation of tango bandoneon players was that of "El Pardo" Sebasti™n Ramos Mejía, followed by his disciples: Mazuchelli, Zambrano, Reppeto, Solari, "The Black" Romero y Antonio Chiappe.

Compared to the current one, the execution was by then very precarious; yet those primitive musicians invented a totally original technique that was later adopted by Arturo Berstein when he began to play tango.

Once the bandoneon was totally identified with tango, the first great interpreters, many of them composers too, appeared: Domingo Santa Cruz, Vicente Greco, Vicente Loduca, Juan Maglio "Pacho", "El Tano Genaro": Genaro Expósito, Augusto P. Berto, Eduardo Arolas, and others.

The bandoneon was found exotic by the local audience and thus, appealing. The trios or quartets including it attracted a greater number of people. Although at the beginning it had fewer notes, the inherent complexity of its execution delayed the rhythm of the primitive 2/4 tango and prompted the other instruments to follow it. In this way, the bandoneon changed the cadence of that original tango and transformed it into a deeper, plaintive melody.

Once it was consecrated as the soul of tango, the execution of the bandoneon has reproduced the dreams and the creative effort of an aristocracy of composers integrated, among others, by Pedro Maffia, Pedro Laurens, Ciriaco Ortiz, Osvaldo Fresedo, Aníbal Troilo, Astor Piazzolla, Leopoldo Federico, Néstor Marconi and Aníbal Binelli.

As in the case of any consecrated object, we have granted the bandoneon a birth certificate, probably, moved by a selfish curiosity -desire to know what of ourselves was in that origin-- rather than a scientific interest in the instrument genealogy.

According to the first version, the "fuelle" was invented by Heinrich Band (also attributed to Herman Uligh) in Krefeld, Germany, about 1840; and then it was made by a cooperative called Union; and from the conjunction of the name of its inventor and that of its factory derived the definitive name.

It was meant to be an improvement of the concertina, and more easily portable than the accordion to accompany peasants in their religious processions and street funerals. The oldest German scores written for bandonion, are dedicated to sacred music, arias, fragments of operas and saloon dances.

This historay, partly mixed with legend, was later revised. In October 1985, a radio from Colony - by then the Federal Republican Germany-- spread a documented research by Manuel Rom™n. It was the result of his investigations in both Germanys and was published in a book entitled "The Bandoneon since Tango" by Arturo Penón and Javier García Méndez - Ed. COALT, Montreal , Canada, 1986.

The following summarizes its contents and conclusions.

Henrich Band was a salesman devoted to sell musical instruments and scores. He was registered in Krefeld under that name and had neither employees nor factory of bandoneons. In the local registers and files there is no evidence of any cooperative manufacturing bandoneons.

In 1850, Band announced in a newspaper from Krefeld a new, still nameless instrument that improved the accordion. Not until 1856 did the word bandoneon appear printed for the first time. A local salesman referred to it in the city yearbook as "Accordion's Concertino's", also called bandonions. The word was created to differentiate the new instrument from its relatives: the concertina and the accordion. A part of the word evokes the surname of its presenter in the city and the other part, the word accordion, then becoming Band/onion.

Likewise in 1849, a Saxon, C. Zimmerman, at the Industrial Exhibition in Paris presented a new instrument created by him based on the concertina of Carl Friedich Uhlig. He had changed its shape, the order of the keys and increased the number of voices. In Krefeld they started to call it bandonion.

Heirinch Band died in 1860. C. Zimmerman emigrated to the United States where he sold his factory to Louis Arnold who, in 1864, founded the famous dynasty of manufacturers of bandoneons called "Arnold". Finally, in 1911, one of his sons, Alfred, started the factory Alfred Arnold, producer of the famous "Double A".

The history of the bandoneon conceived as an evolution of the concertina and the accordion, destined to sacred and classical music and to accompany peasant dances has connotations that are very distant from its successful destiny in Buenos Aires so that the records of its origins sound less credible than the history of its evolution in tango. Thus, emerging from German formality, it has evolved into tango versatility, melancholy and sensuality.

Borges says: "...Tango creates a blurred unreal past that somehow is true ". The logic ruling our present time urges us to invent fables that project us beyond our tedious task inventories. This line by Borges casts light on the confusing illusory past revealed by the precise annals about the bandoneon, only to find us again in some dusty narrow streets where the light melody , recreates that blurred unreal past that somehow is true.

— Written by Gabriela Ramazzotti in Buenos Aires