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 two musical genres typically associated with the United States and Argentina, namely jazz and tango respectively. Graciano shows show how the two genres have impacted each other in sound, style, and technique, illustrated with numerous musical examples of his own tango-jazz hybrid compositions and other tango and jazz composers. As a bonus, Graciano provides a video tutorial on how to realize a tango lead sheet.

As we laid out the final chapter order of this book, we reflected on the research questions we initially posed when soliciting proposals from an array of tango scholars and scholar-artists. 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?

Morgan James Luker examines tango through the early recorded sound industry, using archival recordings of tango artist Ángel Villoldo (1861–1919). Luker shows the reader how to move from the narrative-driven mode of “causal listening” to the object-driven mode of “matrix listening,” and so view individual recorded sound objects as things with agency. He illuminates our understanding of Villoldo as a case study.

Ethnomusicologist Yuiko Asaba provides a solid global view of tango. She examines tango’s transnational dynamics with historical and ethnographic approaches, and embraces themes of affect and transculturality between Japan and Argentina.

Sociologist and tango dancer Kathy Davis provides an ethnographic exploration of passion in tango dancers, 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.

Omar García Brunelli provides a solid historical overview of tango music, dance, and poetry. He 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 tango’s 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.

Film scholar Rielle Navitski applies her discipline’s lens to tango and Argentine culture. 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.

Bárbara Varassi Pega’s chapter 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.

Pablo Palomino analyzes broader cultural themes and aesthetic currents in lyrics from the tango’s Golden Age. He 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.

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. He specifically analyzes how the art form functioned within Peronism and anti-Peronism of the mid-to-late half of the twentieth century as he seeks to understand how the tango is reflected in the political climate in Argentina through time and amid political upheaval.