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Tango Lessons: Movement, Sound, Image, and Text in Contemporary Practice

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3161742

1527-1900

Deborah Jakubs,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Tango is truly “many things to many people”: a dance, a song, a window on history; poetry, a brand, a symbol of the Argentine nation, a vivid manifestation of nostalgia; an experiment, a global cultural commodity, a mystery. The editor of this diverse collection notes in the introduction that “there are few popular cultural forms so thoroughly interdisciplinary as the tango” (p. 2), and the essays in this rich and multifaceted volume demonstrate the truth of that statement. Marilyn Miller sets the stage by first tracing tango's history through some well-worn facts about its origins as well as many other more enlightening contextual elements. This is a book to read carefully and to savor for each essay's distinctive take on the contemporary tango.Tango Lessons consists of eight largely complementary chapters of broad range: a discussion of the “privileged space” (p. 33) of lunfardo in tango (by Oscar Conde); an examination of the relationship of tango and milonga to the work of Jorge Luis Borges (by Alejandro Susti); tango in visual culture (by Miller); the internationalization of tango, via Paris, in music and film (by Antonio Gómez); the renewal and rejuvenation of tango through documentary film (by Fernando Rosenberg); narratives of gender and sexuality, and the tension between preservation and evolution in tango nuevo (by Carolyn Merritt); the cultural politics of música popular, and the “tango of rupture” (p. 201) (by Morgan James Luker); and the integration of electronic tango into the genre's historical trajectory, as illustrated by the Gotan Project (by Esteban Buch).Each essay in Tango Lessons offers questions and commentaries that cast light on tango's nature, significance, and future: the idea, for example, that lunfardo, the language of tango, long considered to be street argot associated with immigrants and lowlife characters, is less a “criminal lexicon” than a “true stamp of identity” (p. 40), or the fact that Jorge Luis Borges predicted the endurance of the tango lyric, estimating that lyrics associated with popular danced tangos “would outlast the poetry of many of those figures sanctioned by the literary establishment” (p. 51). One essay raises the topic of female autonomy in tango; another, the significance of tango in Argentina's severe economic crisis of 2001. Miller comments that artists will need “to warily negotiate tango's growing global success and ever more prevalent stereotyping” (p. 96). She notes, in regard to the work of artist Hermenegildo Sábat, tango's “continuing power” and that tango serves as “a tool or lens with which to read and reread local, national, and international histories” (p. 113). Rosenberg describes how younger musicians respect and honor the classical composers and arrangements while rejuvenating tango through the music of contemporary orchestras, thus providing both continuity and experimentation (p. 154).This collection contains many new insights, based on historical context and solid analysis. The essays, taken together, convey the complexity of tango, which owes its origins to improvisation and has continued to adapt and to be renewed. Tango has been interwoven from the start with immigration, politics, exile, culture, and the arts. As a global cultural commodity, it has been widely exported and assimilated while remaining true to itself. Tango is an enduring force with near-universal appeal. It provokes nostalgia at the same time that it demands recognition in its newer forms. Can there be a true or pure tango? It lives on and on through its hybridization.It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to such a varied collection of essays. As in most edited volumes, some contributions are stronger than others, and one or two are laced with jargon that could make them less accessible to a general reader. But this is a solid and diverse collection, and the detailed and highly informative footnotes further embellish the essays. Even those readers who are well versed in tango history will learn a great deal from Tango Lessons.