The Cambridge Companion to Tango

Tango is a single word with multiple manifestations. It is dance, instrumental music, song, cultural phenomenon, complex art form, national symbol. The literature on tango is abundant, international, and growing. The Cambridge Companion to Tango is a welcome addition, bringing together 20 contributions from a diverse set of writers with local and global focus. Each chapter includes helpful suggestions for further reading on the topic. The book is complemented by an open-access website, https://www.tangocompanion.com (hosted by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship), which offers illustrative audio, musical, and film links, diagrams and charts, photos, and scores, as well as background on the two editors and their fellow contributors.After a context-setting introduction by the editors, the first chapter sets the stage for the rest by providing a brief history and trajectory of tango from its origins in the nineteenth century. The following chapters are organized broadly into four categories: tango music, tango song, tango dance, and interdisciplinary tango studies. Part 1, “Tango Music,” consists of six chapters that cover, in turn, the origins, mechanics, and performance practices of the bandonion; the “matrix listening” approach to early tango recordings, focusing on Ángel Villoldo; the stylistic traits of two significant (and quite different) tango orchestras of the Golden Age (1940s and 1950s), those of Juan D'Arienzo and Aníbal Troilo; the historical and stylistic practices of two influential tango guitar figures, Roberto Grela and Aníbal Arias; analysis of the compositional styles and performance practices of two enormously significant figures, Horacio Salgán and Astor Piazzolla; and, finally, the connections—historical and performance-related—between tango and jazz, and insights into tango-jazz hybrids.Part 2, “Tango Song,” offers just two chapters, the first profiling three distinctive female cancionistas, Rosita Quiroga, Azucena Maizani, and Libertad Lamarque, and the second dedicated to tango poetics and cultural themes. Although both chapters are excellent, the importance of the evolution of tango lyrics as a window into Argentine history and society—rich ground for study—calls for broader and deeper coverage, perhaps another chapter or two in this section.Part 3 highlights tango dance through four chapters that cover, respectively, tango's move from its humble origins to its European triumph and the embrace of the milonga as a dance venue; research on tango dancing based on interviews with dancers globally; the cultural phenomenon of European tango dance culture through the lens of the encuentro milonguero, or dance gathering; and a highly personal reflection on the significance and future of tango dance through the author's experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.Part 4 begins with one of the strongest contributions, an original and well-documented study of the nineteenth-century Afro-Argentine origins of tango. Following are a choreomusical study of the well-known tango “La cumparsita,” a highly perceptive essay on tango and politics, a study of tango in film, tango performance in Japan, the institutionalization of tango as a field of study at Codarts University in the Netherlands through the teaching of composer and pianist Gustavo Beytelmann, and “Adapted Tango” as a therapeutic approach to individuals with dementia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and similar diseases. This final chapter fits less well in this book and would be more accessible to medical professionals in a journal focused on treatments and therapies.The book concludes with an epilogue that highlights suggestions for further exploration in tango studies, using the previous chapters as jumping-off points, and with a detailed tango chronology that lists key tango events in history alongside political, social, and cultural events from 1480 to 2022.It is not easy to do justice in a short review to a rich collection covering such wide ground. The Cambridge Companion to Tango will appeal most to performers, composers, choreographers, and musicologists, given the distinct focus in many of the chapters on technical details likely beyond the grasp and possibly the interest of the casual reader, or the reader seeking historical context. This is a fresh approach, and no doubt a reflection of the interests and expertise of the editors, a musicologist-scholar and a pianist-scholar who have previously collaborated on studies of tango instrumental music. Alas, the book has frequent intrusive translations into English of words within the text, repetitive from chapter to chapter (e.g., porteño, gaucho, compadrito, Nuevo Tango, Guardia Vieja), as well as every song title. This may be a Cambridge policy or an editorial decision; a glossary would have eliminated these distracting disruptions to reading

Art · Diversity and Impact of Dance · History · Physical education and sports games research · Sports and Physical Education Studies