by Christine Denniston

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century a provincial style of music from a remote corner of the former Spanish Empire known as "Tango" came under two transforming influences.  The first was the arrival in Buenos Aries of huge numbers of Italian immigrants, many of them from Naples, who brought with them the romanticism and melodic sweetness of Neapolitan song.  The second was the introduction of the bandoneón, made in Germany as a cheap, portable church organ, which found its destiny as the key instrument in Tango. Together they gave Tango depth and richness, and the potential to touch the world.

Throughout its history, key revolutionary figures have changed the course of Tango.  Perhaps the most important figure in the fundamental reinvention of Tango at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was pianist Roberto Firpo.  His compositions are landmarks in the romanticisation of Tango.

A colossus casting his shadow across the whole story of Tango is Julio De Caro.  De Caro’s father was a classical musician, and ran a music school in Buenos Aires, where his sons Julio and Francisco were trained in violin and piano respectively.  When first Francisco then Julio told him that they had decided to become Tango musicians, he threw his sons out of the family home, and refused to see them for twenty years.

The passion that drove the De Caro brothers to abandon their roots also drove them to revolutionise the Tango.  Working together in the orchestra that Julio headed, they created tight, formal arrangements, conscious of the chamber music tradition.  In the period between 1926 and 1932, the peak of their creative career, they lifted Tango to a new level of elegance and sophistication.  Their legacy has had an enormous influence on every experimental Tango musician, including Piazzolla.

The next revolution, in 1935, brought Tango firmly back to its roots on the dance floor. Populist genius and brilliant showman Juan D’Arienzo, together with his pianist Rodolfo Biagi, created an explosion of rhythmic energy that can only be compared to the birth of Rock and Roll.

The King of the Beat, as D’Arienzo was known, put the earth back into the Tango, where the De Caro brothers had lifted it towards the stars.  The period between 1935 and 1955, when the most gifted musicians explored the tensions between the extremes of heaven and earth, is referred to in Buenos Aires as the Golden Age of Tango.

Throughout the Golden Age, many musicians found a unique voice.  While some chose the path of tradition, others pushed dance music to new levels of complexity and richness, and explored new paths.  The days of self taught musicians busking their way through a song were long gone.  Ever since De Caro, Tango orchestras had worked with increasingly subtle arrangements.  Many experimented with concert works - Osmar Maderna, for example, wrote a number of concertos, as well as arranging classical pieces for Tango orchestra, and also had works performed by Paul Whiteman’s famous Jazz band in the United States.

This was the world Piazzolla found when he arrived in Buenos Aires in his late teens, and got his first job as one of four bandoneón players in the orchestra of arguably the greatest bandoneón player in the history of Tango, Anibal Troilo.

In the period between the coup in 1955 that ousted Perón and the fall of the military junta in 1983 Tango went through a period of decline.  Some artists were blacklisted, the dance was discouraged and discriminated against, and while Tango was never completely banned, it was firmly pushed out of its pivotal role in Argentine culture.

As Tango reached its lowest point, the next revolutionary emerged.  Piazzolla’s genius was in translating the complex idioms of Tango into a language that could be more widely understood - the language of contemporary modern Jazz.  In doing so he made his New Tango accessible to people all over the world.

Piazzolla’s influence on the musicians that followed him has been huge.  His New Tango is captivating to musicians from many different backgrounds and many different cultures, as recent recordings by classical musicians and Jazz musicians, as well as Tango musicians, show.

As Tango has slowly re-emerged from the dark ages of the dictatorship and more young musicians are discovering their roots, in Piazzolla’s New Tango, in the classical elegance of Julio De Caro, and in the richness and variety of the Golden Age, it can only be a matter of time before the next revolutionary emerges and takes Tango, once again, in a new direction.  Yet it is hard to imagine that anyone could have as great an influence as Piazzolla, who reached across the boundaries of Tango to touch the hearts of people all over the world.

Christine Denniston is chair of the United Kingdom Academy of Tango, only UK branch of the National Tango Academy in Buenos Aires, the world’s most important centre for the study and teaching of Tango history.

© Christine Denniston 2002, all rights reserved.

Please do not make any changes to this article without the author’s permission.

Reproduced with permission from www.totaltango.com.