The Signature of Tango

Music plays a critical role in tango. Mediocre, unfamiliar, eccentric, and non-tango music has never produced a beautiful tango. Well-performed tangos are all danced to excellent classic tango music, which is an inspiration indispensable for bringing the dancers’ skills into full play. Good classic tango music excites the dancers, stirs up their emotions, kindles their creativity, generates synergism, and leads to what the Argentinians call duende, an elated state in which the dancers perform exceptionally well. Without good music, there is little scope for even a master’s abilities.

There are tens of thousands of tango songs available on the market. Only a fraction of which are high quality danceable songs, and the remainder are either of mediocre quality or made only for listening. CD makers are aware of this. They mix the good and bad songs together to avoid selling only a few songs. As a result, a CD with twenty tracks may only contain one or two good, danceable songs, with the rest being subpar. Argentines who grew up in tango culture know what a good tango song is. They buy a CD for that one or two good songs and discard the rest. American tourists, on the other hand, buy a CD and play everything on it. Without adequate knowledge of tango music, they collect tango songs as indiscriminately as they collect tango steps, and they display a preference for exotic and alternative music.

Experts all agree that familiarity with music is essential to an exuberant tango experience. The Argentinians only play well-known classic tango music in their milongas. They don’t even play unfamiliar tango songs, let alone alternative music. Playing such music does a disservice to tango. It is weird. It lacks the richness and depth of the classic tango music. It changes tango to a hybrid dance that caters to the taste of the amateurs and repels the seasoned dancers who in Argentina are treated with great respect, free or discount admission, best seats and their favorite classic tango music, because they are the mainstay of the milongas.

Classic tango music is the signature of tango. It is created and developed with tango and for tango. People recognize it and associate it with the dance when they hear it. There is a sentimental attachment between the two. In fact, tango dance and classic tango music are two aspects of one thing called Argentine tango, inseparable as body and soul. The fact that tango can be danced to other music doesn’t mean it can remain intact when so danced. One may dance tango to the music of Beijing opera, but that is no longer tango. Alternative music from different cultural background does not have the same rhythmic structure and sentimental richness of the classic tango music, which is passionate, multi-layered, manifold, changeful, sentimental and moody, allowing the dancers to interpret and improvise (see The Characteristics of Classic Tango). Any music sharing the same rhythmic structure and sentimental richness will be recognized as tango and not alternative music. By definition, alternative music is music that lacks the structural and sentimental depth of tango, therefore is not the best music for tango dancing. It only appeals to novices deficient in good taste or weird dudes seeking novelty, and people who choose to pander to their taste in order to make money.

Those who love tango more than money, on the other hand, can do one thing for tango. A three-hour milonga only contains 15 tondas or 60 songs. If we meticulously select 600 best classic tango songs and play them repeatedly in our milongas like the Argentinians do in the milongas of Buenos Aires, we will change our tango culture and raise the level of our dance in more ways than we can imagine. After all, tango is intimately related to its music. The better the music, the better the dance, the better the milonga, and the better we all will be. (See My Two Cents on Music Selections.)