Richard Jernigan -> RE: Argentine tango guitar teacher in Boston/Cambridge (Apr. 10 2018 17:32:27)
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ORIGINAL: BarkellWH It is probably dangerous (and certainly inexact!) to apply animal taxonomy to describe different genres of music...<snip> Nevertheless, in my opinion, Argentine Tango and flamenco are not as closely related as leopards and cheetahs. <snip>Perhaps a better comparison would be to leopards and antelopes. Cheers, Bill Until the subject came up here I had thought it was mere coincidence that both flamenco tangos and Argentine tango have the same name. The two seemed musically quite distinct to me. Paco Peña assures us there is no connection, and his opinion is certainly due respect. But Googling a bit I came across the fact that historians say they have a common ancestor, the Cuban habanera. The feasibility of sequencing entire genomes has revolutionized biological taxonomy, but for music we are still limited to the tools of historical research. The Wikipedia article on Tango begins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_tango "The dance derives from the Cuban habanera, the Argentine milonga and candombe, and is said to contain elements from the African community in Buenos Aires, influenced both by ancient African rhythms and the music from Europe." "Even though the present forms developed in Argentina and Uruguay from the mid 19th century, [6] there are earlier written records of Tango dances in Cuba and Spain,[7][8] while there is a flamenco Tangos dance that may share a common ancestor in a minuet-style European dance.[5] All sources stress the influence of the African communities and their rhythms, while the instruments and techniques brought in by European immigrants played a major role in its final definition, relating it to the Salon music styles to which Tango would contribute back at a later stage, when it became fashionable in early 20th century Paris." The article "Tangos" on Faustino Nuñez's excellent site Flamencopolis contains the following: http://www.flamencopolis.com/archives/324 "El patrón de tango o habanera, se dice que procede de las contradanzas que llegaron a América durante el siglo XVIII. Se ha dicho que fueron los franceses huídos de Haití los que llevaron a Cuba el patrón de tango, nosotros pensamos más bien que fueron los esclavos de Santiago de Cuba quienes comenzaron a desarrollar el patrón, llevándolo a La Habana, tomando forma comenzado el siglo XIX, y desde allí se extendió como la pólvora por todo Occidente. Primero llega a la capital americana de la metrópoli española, Cádiz, como tango americano, y comenzándose a insertar como uno de los números centrales en las zarzuelas." Nuñez continues with a detailed account of the adaptation of the tango americano to the flamenco tangos. You only have to go back to the late 19th-early 20th century to find a common ancestor of Argentine and flamenco tango/tangos/tanguillos, namely the Cuban habanera of the late 19th century. Nuñez points out that in Spain the piece was called "habanera" if the subject was romantic, "tango" if comic. Traces of common ancestry remain in flamenco tangos: Binary compas instead of 12-beat. When cantiñas entered flamenco it morphed to a 12-beat compas, while retaining its diatonic tonality. Diatonic major key of tanguillos instead of the andaluz scale. These days however, it seems more common to end tientos (a slow tangos) with an up-tempo tango por medio, rather than the older style of ending with tanguillos in A-major, as Montoya does in the solo guitar example above, following the practice of contemporary singers like Pastora Pavon "La Niña de los Peines". Culture evolves far more rapidly than genomes do, so it is certainly a matter of opinion how closely related the two genres may still be, due to sharing a recent common ancestor. RNJ
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