Part II is organized as ten in-depth case studies of “representative” tangueros. In Part I, the authors explain and illustrate the musical elements that “make it a tango,” and present a comprehensive history of tango style.
TT consists of an introduction and two long parts. Their detailed study of tango music synthesizes a wide variety of sources: performance and compositional manuals, scholarly and non-scholarly writings on tango music and history, original and transcribed arrangements, live performances, sound and video recordings, workshops and private lessons with tangueros in Buenos Aires, and countless formal and informal interviews. They have paid their dues in Buenos Aires, studying, playing, and interacting with prominent tangueros (tango musicians). Both authors are accomplished pianists who perform in, and lead, tango ensembles. Link and Wendland base their effort on more than a decade of experience studying and performing Argentine tango. There I call attention to issues relating to how the authors defined their corpus, constructed their historical narrative, and chose representative tangueros. (2) Moreover, the authors seek to engage an even wider audience, “ranging from a tango aficionado wishing to learn about the music of a specific tanguero to a professional musician seeking a detailed performance or theoretical analysis” (18). (1) Pace Borges, in Tracing Tangueros Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland go beyond the brief definition, to provide a “detailed study of Argentine tango instrumental music” that promises to reveal the genre’s secret and assist musicians who perform and arrange, composers who write, and music scholars who analyze Argentine, or more precisely, River Plate tangos. “Musical dictionaries provide a brief, adequate, and generally approved definition,” Borges wrote, but “the French or Spanish composer who, trusting the definition, correctly crafts a ‘tango,’ discovers, very much to his surprise, that he has crafted something that our ears do not recognize, that our memory does not welcome, and that our body rejects” ( 2009, 267–68). The tango, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges argued, contains a secret. Copyright © 2019 Society for Music Theory
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