Tango is a musical genre and a River Plate dance characteristic of the city of Buenos Aires, of strict urban nature and renown worldwide. Musically speaking, it has binary form and rhythm of four quarters (even though it is called “two by four”). It is classically interpreted by a typical orchestra or sextet and it recognizes the “bandoneón” as its essential instrument.

The choreography, designed after a couples’ hug, is highly sensual and complex. The lyrics are composed with the local dialect called “lunfardo” and usually express sadness, especially in when referring to the love that men and women feel, without leaving out other themes, such as humor and politics.

Enrique Santos Discépolo, one of tango’s most renown poets, defined it as “a sad thought that is danced.”

Although tango acknowledges far-off African, Latin American, and European antecedents, its cultural origins have fused in such a way that it is almost impossible to recognize them. In essence, tango is a fusion of artistic expression, of strict urban nature and suburban root, that responds to the concrete historical process of massive immigration, mostly European, that completely reconstructed the River Plate societies, especially that of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, as of the last decades of the XIX century.

It is known that its sensuality derives from its origins in brothels, where European immigrants that arrived alone to look for work maintained sexual relations with the natives, mainly Afro-Argentine and Indo-Americans, called “chinas.” It is also known that the slang used in the lyrics, called “lunfardo,” is full of Italian and African expressions, that its rhythm and nostalgic atmosphere is closely related to the Cuban habanera, and that “tango, milonga, malambo, and candombe” are all part of a same musical family of African roots and also come from the customs of gauchos that migrated to the city.

However, tango should not be confused with nor does it derive from a particular musical style. Ernesto Sábato said that above all things tango is a hybrid, an original and new expression that comes from an exceptional and enormous human mobilization.

Tango appeared in the port cities of the River Plate and its hinterlands in the second half of the XIX century, in the socio-cultural framework of the great migration waves of the most varied domestic and external origins that the region received back then. Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and to a lesser extent Rosario, fight over which city is tango’s true place of birth.

back