Tango’s multicultural origins foreshadowed its current international status. It was spawned and fostered at the turn of the twentieth century from a confluence of Afro-Argentine, rural Argentine, and European cultures and traditions in the Río de la Plata region of present-day Argentina and Uruguay; traveled to France and beyond in the 19-teens; and then reached its height of fame in Argentina during its Golden Age (1930s–1955). Since the hit show Tango Argentino opened in Paris in 1983, the tango art form has experienced a significant revival and is presently seeing an international resurgence.

Yet, stereotypical images and sounds of tango persist in a time capsule, typically containing a white heterosexual couple dressed in formal yet risqué attire (probably accented with red) who are engaged in a flashy dance to a standard tango tune such as “El choclo.” Try testing yourself with free association (this is how we open the first day of a tango class or presentation). What do you imagine when you hear the word “tango”? Do you see dancers like we just described here? Do you recall how tango is portrayed in a passionate Hollywood movie scene? Or, do you hear the tango icon Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992) mightily playing the bandoneón?

While such images of the art form are frequently perpetuated by tango shows in Argentina and abroad, they sadly project a simplified version of what tango really is – a multidimensional art form comprised of music, dance, and poetry. They overlook tango’s rich and dynamic history and presence in today’s modern global society. Such clichéd depictions also neglect to account for tango’s impact on culture and society throughout the world, from milongas (tango dances) in Europe to concert stages in Japan, or how tango can be viewed as a case study for understanding broader humanistic concepts in the realms of politics, race, and gender.

Since the 2000s, scholars have begun to shatter such static viewpoints of the art form, and tango research has significantly increased in breadth, quantity, and quality within the last ten years. They are now publishing books and articles in English about tango from all perspectives – historical, ethnographic, sociological, political, and anthropological – and deepening our understanding of the music, dance, and poetry of the art form. Some of these scholars are represented in the present volume. Paulina L. Alberto retells the story of the origins of tango to include its Afro-Argentine influences in Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Girgera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (2022). Julián Graciano’s Método Guitarra Tango/Tango Guitar Method (2016) provides “how-to” instructions on tango musical techniques and performance practices and, more broadly, a window into the cultural sounds of Argentina. Matthew B. Karush’s Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (2017) examines Latin identity in transnational Argentine musicians of the twentieth century, including Piazzolla. He also looks at race in tango in his article “Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango, and Race before Perón” (2012) and his book chapter “Black in Buenos Aires: The Transnational Career of Oscar Alemán” in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (2016, also a Cambridge book co-edited by Alberto). Our Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music (2016) offers a musical analysis of tango’s instrumental compositional and arranging techniques and performance practices. Morgan James Luker’s The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (2016) explores how Argentina uses tango as a national resource for economic, social, and cultural projects. Kathy Davis’ Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World (2015) studies the dance and how individuals negotiate issues relating to gender, sexuality, and global relations of power. In Tango Nuevo (2012), Carolyn Merritt looks at how the younger generation has transformed tango dancing in Argentina since the early 2000s. Madeleine Hackney conducts and publishes medical research on the therapeutic application of tango dance for patients with neurological diseases, most recently in “Adapted Tango Improves Mobility, Motor-Cognitive Function, and Gait but Not Cognition in Older Adults in Independent Living” (2015). Rielle Navitski writes about an iconic tango figure in “The Tango on Broadway: Carlos Gardel’s International Stardom and the Transition to Sound in Argentina” (2011). Numerous scholars beyond those represented here have contributed to the tango field, like Michael O’Brien’s study of tango’s institutionalization in Buenos Aires in “Activism, Authority, and Aesthetics: Finding the Popular in Academies of Música Popular” (2015); Lloica Czackis’s exploration of Yiddish influences on tango in “Tangele: The History of Yiddish Tango” (2009); and John Turci-Escobar’s examination of Piazzolla’s relationship with the famed Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges in “Rescatando al tango para nueva música: Reconsidering the 1965 Collaboration between Borges and Piazzolla” (2011).

Scholars writing in Spanish are also expanding the gamut and examining a multitude of areas of tango. Omar García Brunelli, also a contributor to this Cambridge book, has an outstanding edited volume on the music of Piazzolla (2008) as well as a book providing a comprehensive discussion of Piazzolla’s recordings (2010). María Mercedes Liska has published on tango queer studies (Argentine Queer Tango, 2017) as well as edited volumes relating to contemporary tango (Tango: ventanas del presente I and II, 2012 and 2016). Sofia Cecconi writes of tango tourism (2018), youth’s role in tango’s rise in the 1990s (2017), as well as the musical identity of tango and its relationship to Buenos Aires (2009). Some scholars even examine sampling in electronic tango (Greco and López Cano, 2014). Diego Fischerman and Abel Gilbert also have a book dedicated to the life and music of Piazzolla (2009). Jorge Dimov and Esther Echenbaum compiled a study of the bandoneonist Leopoldo Federico (2009), while Pablo Kohan published a substantial book outlining tango orchestral practices from 1920 to 1935 (2010). Additionally, Paulina Fain has spearheaded a series to approach performance practices for individual instruments titled Método de tango (2010), following two previous performance practice and arranging manuals by Julián Peralta (2008) and Horacio Salgán (2001).

As many academic music programs seek to expand and diversify course offerings, tango is also spreading into curricula in colleges and universities. Aside from the firmly established undergraduate and graduate Latin American music programs at major research institutions, such as the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin and the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, new courses either dedicated solely to tango or incorporating tango in a broader survey of Latin American music have taken shape in North American universities. As the study of Latin American music in general gains strength in the United States, many smaller music programs are expanding their offerings in this field as they update their curriculum. In Buenos Aires, established programs for tango music studies include La Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda and El Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” Established European programs include the Argentinian Tango studies curriculum in the World Music Department at Codarts in Rotterdam, and the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional du Grand Avignon (CRR du Grand Avignon) offers classes in bandoneón. Ethnomusicologists study dance-music relationships through fieldwork in milongas at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz in Austria.

Educational tango programs and activities outside the academe also further advance tango knowledge. The Orquesta Escuela de Tango Emilio Balcarce in Buenos Aires facilitates the transmission of the great maestros’ cultural legacy from the tango orchestras of the 1940s and 1950s in a two-year program instructed by actual musicians from that era who remain active, as well as important tango musicians of successive generations. “Tango para músicos” (“Tango for Musicians”) offers a week-long intensive workshop to study and share knowledge on the fundamentals of tango and Argentine music, with an annual summer edition in the United States through Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Intensive tango dance workshops and festivals abound around the world, often featuring guest Argentine teachers, in such US cities as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Tucson, and European cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, and Rome.

As demonstrated by this brief overview of recent scholarship and educational course offerings, the field of tango studies is growing tremendously; however, the publications are primarily limited to monographs or area-specific articles and edited volumes. With this collaborative and interdisciplinary volume, we hope to remedy the status quo and present an innovative tango collection that will impact the performing arts and the humanities in powerful ways. The Cambridge Companion to Tango offers a more “user-friendly” approach to understanding the art form as a whole. We draw together the current scholarship in an innovative volume that incorporates all the facets of tango studies, and it is geared toward undergraduate and early graduate-level students and tango enthusiasts. As the book unites twenty-two scholars and scholar-artists from a variety of disciplines under the umbrella of tango, the reader may find common points and intersections across such fields as musicology, Latin American studies, and political science. We hope the reader will ultimately broaden their knowledge of this complex art form and its relationship to culture and society.

While envisioning how to lay out this book, we asked ourselves broad research questions such as: How do diverse humanistic fields of inquiry further shape our understanding of the tango art form? Inversely, how does the tango help us further understand culture and society? How do interdisciplinary perspectives on tango influence current scholarship? How do international perspectives on and research approaches to tango differ, and why are they important? To address these questions, we solicited proposals from an array of tango scholars and scholar-artists. We sought those active in research through distinctive pathways to represent various national and international viewpoints. We asked for proposals under such broad topic titles as “Tango Antecedents,” “Tango History,” “Tango Poetry,” “Tango and Jazz,” “Tango and Film,” and “Tango and Politics,” and then began to map out how these chapters would flow within sections organized by the art form’s three dimensions of music, dance, and poetry, and a section of interdisciplinary studies. As the reader will notice, our final product actually presents only a handful of authors, namely the scholar-artist practitioners, focused on a singular tango dimension. Most authors organically cross at least one disciplinary boundary in their chapter, thus demonstrating the essential nature of the art form itself and the enlarging field of tango studies. We hope the reader will find answers to the questions we asked ourselves as we embarked on this book project, and that this collection will raise additional questions for them to carry tango research into new directions and promote future collaborations across disciplines.

The scope of our addition to The Cambridge Companion to Music series presents a comprehensive view of tango studies on the global stage in twenty chapters. The chapters collectively cover tango’s history, culture, and performance practices from multiple perspectives; highlight how it flourished in its native Argentina and abroad; and trace its international impact over the last century. The authors signify tango’s global reach, including Argentine nationals living both in Argentina and abroad, North Americans, Europeans, and a Japanese and a Turkish national, as they represent diverse approaches to the study and practice of the art form in our globalized world.

Omar García Brunelli’s Chapter 1 provides a solid historical overview of tango music, dance, and poetry. It first broadly lays out tango’s African, European, Argentine, and Uruguayan origins in the Río de la Plata region of South America, then focuses on the musical changes that took place through time. In doing so, García Brunelli highlights important contributors from the guardia vieja (Old Guard), guardia nueva (New Guard), and Golden Age; discusses Piazzolla’s nuevo tango (New Tango); and brings his overview up to today by describing active contemporary tango musicians.

We organize the other nineteen chapters into four groups: Tango Music, Tango Song, Tango Dance, and Interdisciplinary Tango Studies. Within these groups, the reader will encounter diverse approaches and methodologies to studying tango. Six chapters focus on various aspects of tango music. In Chapter 2, Ortaç Aydınoğlu explores the bandoneón as a symbol of tango, focusing on the great interpreters in Argentina and abroad. In Chapter 3, Morgan James Luker examines tango through the early recorded sound industry, using archival recordings of tango artist Ángel Villoldo (1861–1919). Ignacio Varchausky’s Chapter 4 examines tango music through its standard instrumental performance practices. He draws on the orchestral styles of two Golden Age orchestras, those of Juan D’Arienzo and Aníbal Troilo, and illustrates with important archival recordings and scores from the tango repertory. In Chapter 5, scholar and guitarist Eric Johns focuses on contemporary tango guitar performance practice, highlighting two important schools of playing established by Aníbal Arias (1922–2010) and Roberto Grela (1913–1992). Our Chapter 6 moves into the post–Golden Age beginning in 1955 and compares the life and works of two great pillars: Horacio Salgán and Astor Piazzolla. As a composer/practitioner, Julián Graciano offers insights into tango as a transnational musical form by analyzing the performance element of spontaneity and improvisation in both tango and jazz in Chapter 7. As a bonus to the numerous musical examples of his own tango-jazz hybrid compositions and other living tango composers, he provides a video tutorial on how to realize a tango lead sheet.

Two chapters by Argentine scholars delve into the tango canción, or tango song. In Chapter 8, Romina Dezillio considers female tango singers’ artistic and social contributions to the professionalization of women within the national and international tango scene. Her study of the consolidation process of the tango cancionista (female tango singer) during the 1930s in Argentina reveals gender-based relationships between the tango canción and Argentine society as she highlights the personal styles and careers of three star cancionistas: Rosita Quiroga (1896–1984), Azucena Maizani (1902–1970), and Libertad Lamarque (1908–2000). Pablo Palomino analyzes broader cultural themes and aesthetic currents in lyrics from tango’s Golden Age. His Chapter 9 considers the historical context in which tango lyrics became a sentimental, philosophical, and aesthetic lens for several generations of listeners in Argentina and beyond through a unique mix of modernism and vernacular speech. He then examines the poetry around three central themes that emerged in the Golden Age: the urban space, the sociological and poetic issue of the relationship between love and self, and the modern experience itself.

Four chapters focus on aspects of tango dance in its social, rather than show, context. Sociologist and dance practitioner Christophe Apprill begins his Chapter 10 by providing a solid historical overview of tango dance. He then explores gender relations and roles in tango by examining tango stereotypes in relation to tango dance, while opening new perspectives on contemporary dimensions of globalized tango scenes. Sociologist and tango dancer Kathy Davis provides an ethnographic exploration of passion in tango dancers in Chapter 11, and she illustrates how such passion is embodied, attached to strongly felt emotions, and implicated in biographical transformations. She argues that tango dancing offers a perfect site for understanding the importance of passion in ordinary people’s everyday lives, gender relations in late modernity, and the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational encounters in a globalizing world. In Chapter 12, Kendra Stepputat examines the choreomusical aspect of tango through an ethnographic lens in European countries. She focuses on one of the currently very popular tango social dance events in Europe called encuentros milongueros, paying particular attention to how these events, originally set up to mimic tango dance environments in Buenos Aires, have developed into translocal/contemporary tango music-dance practice that is particular to Europe. Anthropologist and social tango dancer Carolyn Merritt had begun to take dance lessons in leading, then the COVID-19 restrictions shut down in-person classes and milongas. In Chapter 13, Merritt reflects on her experiences and insights about how tango is politically generative, confronts the struggles many women face with tango, and pursues a more profound examination into tango’s evolution and future.

The last seven chapters of this volume highlight how tango studies have advanced through interdisciplinary and multidimensional pathways to its analysis and practice. Historian Paulina L. Alberto leads this final group in Chapter 14, using original research about a multigeneration family of Black musicians to illustrate different stages of musical experimentation that fed into tango. In doing so, she sheds new light on the relationship between the Afro-Argentine musical and dance tradition of candombes and early tango, and she challenges the entrenched racial narrative of Afro-Argentine “disappearance” over the course of the nineteenth century. In Chapter 15, music theorist and social dancer Rebecca Simpson-Litke brings tango music and dance together through the current interdisciplinary lens of choreomusical analysis. As she explores the connection between movement and music through her transcriptions and analyses of Juan Carlos Copes’s choreography of the famous “La cumparsita,” she shows how music and dance reinforce or complement each other through rhythm. Historian Matthew Karush delves into tango’s role in Argentina’s political and social history in Chapter 16. He specifically analyzes how the art form functioned within Peronism and anti-Peronism of the mid-to-late half of the twentieth century. Film scholar Rielle Navitski applies her discipline’s lens to tango and Argentine culture in Chapter 17. She provides an overview of tango’s intersections with film; analyzes how tango’s affective qualities and transnational wanderings have shaped a long and productive pas de deux with the cinema; shows the influence of each in a historical context; and raises broader questions of cultural exchange and hegemony. Ethnomusicologist Yuiko Asaba provides a solid global view of tango in Chapter 18. She examines tango’s transnational dynamics with historical and ethnographic approaches and embraces themes of affect and transculturality between Japan and Argentina. Bárbara Varassi Pega’s Chapter 19 represents how tango studies have become institutionalized in her case study of the Tango Department at Codarts University in the Netherlands. She focuses on the work of its founder Gustavo Beytelmann (b. 1945), and the educational exchange with scholars and practitioners in Argentina. To conclude the volume and demonstrate how widely tango reaches across disciplines, health professionals Madeleine E. Hackney and J. Lucas McKay offer a case study for how medical research projects incorporate tango therapeutically in Chapter 20. Hackney and McKay utilize tango for promoting health and preventing or changing declining conditions, and they illustrate how their current research applies “Adapted Tango” to improve motor and cognitive functions in individuals with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

An Epilogue rounds off the book. First, we offer some final reflections to help the reader evaluate what they have learned, as we summarize various themes that run through the twenty chapters. Then, we present a list of resources to guide the reader into further tango studies. Finally, to aid the reader in keeping track of all the historical information scattered throughout these chapters, and contextually understanding the art form, we provide a historical tango chronology framed in a backdrop of political, social, and cultural events in the Appendix.

Although this tango volume draws together authors from a diverse array of disciplines and geographical locations, it cannot be completely comprehensive. We hope readers will not be offended if they note inevitable omissions in their own field of interest. Our intent with this volume is to offer the reader a compendium of diverse, multidisciplinary, and multinational perspectives united broadly around tango. It reflects how, in addition to writing about music, dance, and poetry, tango scholars are now writing about tango from numerous viewpoints, including race, gender, and even medical research.

In 2009, UNESCO declared the tango as Argentina and Uruguay’s “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” highlighting how the multidimensional art form of music, dance, and poetry has captivated the world for over a century. Tango research, too, has captivated scholars and artist-scholars. In our conclusion to Tracing Tangueros, we expressed hope that “our work here lays a strong foundation for further studies of tango music,” and that “scholars and musicians will … carry and invigorate tango into the future.”¹ Indeed, the authors presented in this book are already fulfilling our aspirations. As this volume brings them together, we trust their contributions to the field will carry tango studies even further forward. We hope this book will stimulate even more new research as readers throughout multiple disciplines ask their own significant questions.