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MUSIC ----- Traditional or Modern ?
The quality of the music is our speciality. Tangos, Vals, and Milongas from the great Orquestas of the Golden Age of Tango, (the late 1930's & 1940's mainly) when the music was played specifically with dancers in mind. The same music that is played in the great Milongas of Buenos Aires today. Tango West has acquired over the years a great body of dance music from the era of the Golden Age.
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that most Tango music is for listening and not dancing at all. A classic example of this is the music of Piazzola. Certainly Piazzola had no interest in dancers; his music turned people away from dancing, rather like developments in modern Jazz in North America at around the same time. Of course there are many reasons why the majority
of Argentines stopped dancing Tango in the 1950's, but it's true to say that very little Tango music from this time was dance music,
although there is a huge body of recorded Tango music from the 1950's
The
confusion arises when we see stage performers dancing to a wide
variety of music, old, modern and electronic (even non Tango music). The
stage dancers are free to choose any music they like, because their
routines are invariably choreographed and performed with one couple, or perhaps a few couples together, on the spot, on a stage; the routine can be endlessly repeated.
Social dancing is quite different. The music is constantly changing, and we are usually with different partners. Most importantly there are other couples dancing around us, and we have to dance with them in mind and not try to dominate the space around us with set routines of figures that don't progress or take a lot of room to execute. We have to be very flexible and improvise, and the music of the Golden Age reflects this need. It tends to have a more rhythmic drive than much of the later Tango music and encourages a strong driving walk (powerful yet soft, and with turns and changes of direction) that we see in the dancing of the Milongueros.
When we at Tango West started putting on social Tango events in Bristol (the first was in 1998 at the Polish Club with Tango Siempre) we
played a very wide range of music, traditional, modern (this was before
electronic tango) and non tango. This is very much the way many
Tango groups in the country organize the music at social events today. Over the years, we've progressed away from this approach, as
we've learned more about the music and the dance, and what works at social events. Not surprisingly this so called 'traditional' approach
is
similar to the way the great Milongas are organized in Buenos Aires. This is not a result of trying to slavishly copy Buenos Aires for
the sake of it, it's merely the realization that the structure of the social event, with the traditional music and the 'Milonga Codes' has
evolved for a reason; this is to do with eliminating chaos on the dance floor that often characterizes the more 'anything goes' approach.
We intent to show a variety of clips on this page that highlight some of the great dance orchestras and their music.
Juan D'Arienzo Playing that most famous of all Tangos, La Cumparsita.
It was D'Arienzo's orchestra in the mid 1930s that made
in particular the rhythmic changes to Tango that got
everyone dancing again. It's not an exaggeration to
say that D'Arienzo saved Tango as a dance.
Angel D'Agostino This wonderful orchestra (one of Andrew's favorites)
was at it's peak here, with the great singer
Angel Vargas. Here they play 'Tres Esquinas'
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