Tango Music and Its Danceability

One

Tango music is 4/4 time. There are four quarter notes in each measure and each quarter note receives a beat, counted as 1, 2, 3, 4. The first and third beats are the strong beats on which we step. The second and forth beats are the weak beats on which we do ancillary actions such as cross, weight change, hip rotation, pivot and embellishment, etc.

Each quarter note can be evenly divided into two eighth notes. We count the resulted 8 eighth notes in a bar as 1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and. Similarly, each quarter note can be evenly divided into four sixteenth notes. We count the resulted 16 sixteenth notes in a bar as 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a.

The ability to divide the notes and predict where the subdivisions fall is important because it enables the dancer to take advantage of the increased footwork possibilities. Feeling rhythm is internal. The rhythm must be in your mind before it can happen on your feet. Rhythm is the most essential element in music, which can exist without melody, as in the drumbeats of primitive music. Dancing is body's response to rhythm. We naturally step on the accents of the music. Without rhythm there is no dance.

But feeling rhythm becomes not so easy when syncopation is involved. Syncopation is the way musicians spice up the music by shifting, splitting, adding or omitting beats, such as shifting the accent to the even-numbered beat (1, 2, 3, 4), extending a beat (1 - - -), starting a note on an unaccented beat and continuing it through the next accented beat (1, 2 -, 4), splitting a note into subdivisions (1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and), accenting the subdivision (1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and), adding an accent (1, 2, 3, 4), omitting one or more notes and replacing them with a rest, etc. Syncopation modifies the rhythm and makes it more interesting, yet difficult to follow.

Nevertheless, dancers welcome the challenge. As long as the beats are consistent with the time signature, i.e., as long as the entire song can be counted with 1, 2, 3, 4 from beginning to end, the music is danceable. In fact, songs that we like to dance most are neither arrhythmic nor mono-rhythmic, but complex yet still have regular, recognizable and predictable beats, which is the characteristic of classic tango. (See The Characteristics of Classic Tango.)


Two

That is changed when musicians started to experiment new ideas like improvisation, counterpoint, cross-rhythms, poly-rhythms, compound rhythms, asymmetrical rhythms, complex harmonies, odd numbered meter in which the notes are not evenly grouped (such as 5/4 time and 7/8 time), mixing duple time, triple time with quadruple time, playing different instruments at different rhythms, or ensemble of instrumental part and vocal part with different rhythms, etc. These methods, though creative, make the rhythm too intricate to dance to, which becomes a characteristic of modern music.

Musicians still produce classic music today; therefore, not all musics made in the contemporary time are modern music. Only musics containing unconventional elements are modern music. There are gray areas, of course, but modern musics are all incorporated with at least some nontraditional elements, which make the rhythm of the song, or sections of the song, irregular, unrecognizable, unpredictable, and thus undanceable.

Some people argue that all music is danceable, which is not true. Perhaps all music that can be played with the two legs is danceable, but fingers can move much faster than legs, and an orchestra of dozens or even hundreds of fingers could make the music extremely complex, especially when it is intended for listening only.

For music to be danceable, it must have recognizable, predictable, and followable beats. Dance is our body's response to rhythm. We feel comfortable with rhythm because it facilitates our movements. Our rhythm echoes regular occurrences, biologic clock, heartbeats and muscle memory of rhythmic motion such as walk, etc. Millions of years of human evolution made rhythm aesthetic and musical to our senses, and our body naturally responds to rhythmic sounds. Although it is possible that with practice some professional dancers can dance to irregular and unpredictable beats that they memorized, ordinary dancers without special training can't do that. DJs must be aware that the music they play at the milongas is for ordinary dancers to dance social tango, not for a few highly trained professionals to show off their skills. A DJ needs to keep the majority of dancers in mind and not yield to the pressure of a few individuals. (Being a DJ myself I am fully aware of such pressure.)


Three

It needs to be pointed out that the change in modern music is not coincidental. We live in a society where rampant liberalism and individualism drive many people to pursue individuality at any cost and profit-driven commercialim constantly pushes for innovation, repackaging, impression, exoticism, eye-catching boldness, etc. in order to increase sales. Innovation improves life, but it also causes unintended consequences. Every time I bought a smart phone, a smarter one was repackaged the next week. In economic terms that is called "creating demands" so consumers would keep throwing away their perfectly functional old phones for new ones, causing tremendous waste, as this documentary discloses. People grown up in this culture exhibit a lack of depth and lasting quality. They confuse novelty with beauty, focus too much on the flashy form rather than the substance, and constantly seek for changes. The following quote from a reader's comment reflects such a mentality.

"Most of us did not start doing the tango in order to get the ocho just right. Most of us saw elegant, dramatic and erotic moves in a performance that took our breath away. Then we take tango lessons and dance among older people who look down their noses at beginners for not doing the details as well as they can, who are quite conservative in their tastes, who are uptight about the eroticism, who are offended when attractive young people look better at the erotic movements than they do, and who are too weak, inflexible, heavy, and cowardly to do the more dramatic moves... The idea of dividing tango into social dance and 'show' dance trivializes efforts to be more creative and to actually do the dance that we were attracted to in the first place. Performance is not just for tourists. It includes ballet, modern dance, jazz and other rich, culturally important forms. It can be brilliant and revolutionary, changing the way we think. It can give tango dance its Isadora Duncans, Sergei Diaghilevs, Merce Cunnihams and Astor Piazzollas. Tango and dance have always included a conversation between performance and social dance. Both should be respected at spaces in which creativity can take place. That's how art and culture evolve in living ways."

I am not getting into why the milonga is not the place for performance (see Social Tango and Performance Tango) and will concentrate on creativity here. No doubt, creativity has changed our way of living. But, despite its many contributions, we should not forget its drawbacks. Human creativity is a double-edged sword. It provides us with automobiles, computers, GPS and beautiful, danceable music like classic tango; it also provides us with weapons of mass destruction, narcotics, high-tech crimes and undanceable noises. Human creativity can improve life if we use it wisely. It can also destroy life if we foolishly think we can do whatever we want just to be novel, and ignore the force beyond human control that produced and conditioned us, whether you call that force the Cosmos, Nature, Law, Tao, or God. In fact, human creativity has already caused many problems to our very existence, such as the irreversible damage to our home planet, pollution, climate change, environmental catastrophes, the exhaustion of natural resources, the collapse of the ecosystem, chemical, biological and nuclear threats, the astonishing number of death caused by all kinds of hman inventions including guns, drugs, automobiles, man-made virus and modern warfare, and the polarization and dysfunction of our governments thanks to our very creative politicians, etc.

The obsession to creativity is also the cause of the relentless efforts of many DJs to make their music selections unconventional. They collect songs that are abnormal, rare, exotic and hard to follow. They make their brand by paying little attention to the danceability of their collections. They embrace modernism and look down at the classics despite that the classics are the time-tested quintessence embodying what is deemed beautiful and danceable by generations of dancers. They ignore the fact that sixty years after the end of the Golden Age tango dancers today still love classic tango music while the "revolutionary" music created during the same period has long been forgotten. They are blind to the fact that in every generation there are people who created lasting classics and people who created fleeting rubbish. They don't understand that creativity must serve the best human interests, needs and aesthetics to have a lasting value, which in case of dance is danceability, not outlandishness. Although they love music and may have collected a big number of songs, they don't understand what constitutes danceability and what does not. Worst of all, they tend to play unfamiliar, abnormal, erratic and undanceable songs in the milongas since the danceable ones are traditional.

Dancers don't reject innervation and creativity. In fact that is what we do on the dance floor. We welcome challenges that can make our dance more interesting. But we also desire music that is danceable. We want our DJs to put danceability above other concerns in their selection of music and carefully listen to each and every song from beginning to end to make sure it is entirely danceable before playing it at the milonga, and we want them to play for us the average social dancers, not only for few elites or weird dudes. (See My Two Cents on Music Selection.)