Author: alecoyung

An unauthorized translation of a passage that originally appeared in a magazine: La Patria Argentina, no. 636, Buenos Aires: 1800, p. 1.

The regulations, fines, and taxes that the Municipality uses to discourage public dances have resulted in a new, creative system of putting on these entertainments for the common people.

Generally, the establishment that is used as a front for these clandestine dances is a café.

On some dirty windows, painted white, are big black letters, illuminated from within, that announce to the public “café such-and-such.”

On the first floor, towards the street, there is a real café, with waitresses who are more or less ugly (a great attraction). The door at the back of the room is closed, and one doesn’t hear anything more than the voices of the customers and the natural noise of the serving.

After a while, a customer gets up and goes through the door, disappearing for a while, or the door opens, and someone comes out looking tired, and goes up to the counter to order a drink, usually a French wine mixed in equal parts with soda water—a strange drink, invented by Italians on the bocce courts. Each time the door opens, you can hear from the interior a strange brushing sound from the floor, as if many people were walking, dragging their feet.

This is because behind this door, there is a large ballroom where dances are held—quite unusual dances, in fact.

At the back of the ballroom there is one of those piano organs, covered with a mattress which is tied tightly to the instrument.

The mattress has the advantage of dampening the sound, which doesn’t make it to the street—or even out of the room—and the muffled striking of the instrument’s hammers mark the time of the piece being danced to, making a strange noise, something like a damp percussion instrument.

To this strange music, they dance in the ballroom.

And they dance with only two, three, or four women who are hired by the owner as dancers.

These poor women dance all night, every night, without resting, passing from the arms of a Criollo dancer who pushes them through a milonga, to those of an Englishman who shakes them dryly through a leaping waltz, to those of an Italian who twists them around in a peringundín.

The room fills up with dancers, and since women are scarce, the rest dance men-with-men, in order to take advantage of the sonata that someone has paid a peso for, which is its price.

When the piece ends, you hear a local voice yelling “lata!” This means that the next sonata is for him; he goes up to the organer [sic], asks for his favorite piece, and gives him a lata [tin/coin] for the piece that he is asking for next—if he pays, he is always understood.

And the dance continues, with a warm atmosphere because the room is closed. Smoke from the cigars fogs the air, and the brushing of feet on the floor is the dominant sound.
Everyone is quiet, no one speaks, because here, they dance to dance.

“Lata!” or “Girl, dance this one with me,” are the only words that are heard.

The female dancers cannot say no, because they would lose their jobs.

In these ballrooms are are no chairs, to discourage the public from ogling: whoever enters has to dance or leave.

Anonymous, 1880.

The magazine passage is taken from the book:

Benedetti, Héctor. 2017. Nueva historia del tango: De los orígenes al siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. p. 34-35.

The photo is not from Nueva historia del tango. It is from the Queer Tango Image Archive, at queertangobook.org (Pareja de hombres bailando en conventillo).

An unauthorized translation from this book:

Benedetti, Héctor. 2017. Nueva historia del tango: De los orígenes al siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. p. 31-33.

Blogger’s note: See Chart 1 from Nueva historia del tango for a list of dances danced in Buenos Aires during this time. These included Polka, Schottische, Contra Dance, Mazurka, Habanera, Milonga, Malagueña, and Peringundín. Tango was not one of them. It is unclear what “Milonga” meant during this time period.

[Begin excerpt]

Ugly women and dirty windows: The popular dances of the mid-1880s

In the 1810s and 1820s, Porteño society saw the emergence, in different parts of the city (which was not yet very large) of some “dancing schools,” teaching establishments known as “academies.” The “quote-unquote” here is important, because barely twenty or thirty years later, “academy” would become a synonym for a private dance salon—with access by the public allowed and even regulated by the municipality—where no lessons were taught. These places were far from having good reputations: there were many reports of police action there in those days—although surely some were exaggerated—which indicated that these were places frequented by troublemakers, drunks, corruptors, and scandalous people of all sorts. Worse, it was often the case that one single person could be all of these things and on top of all this, a conjurer. These types of accusations were more than sufficient to raise calls for arrests and closures (which hardly ever actually happened).

It is interesting to note that during these years the academies were mostly populated by Blacks and Italians, although by about 1860 the first group had been largely excluded from the business.

The businesses are variously registered as “academy” and “peringundín” (or perengundín or piringundín) [which also refers to a style of dance]; but also, and with a similar meaning, in what seems to be a mere abuse of synonyms, “café” or “bordello.” Because of this, the first hurried conclusion of early historians, which has been reproduced in subsequent writings for a century, was that tango originated in brothels. In reality, the available references about music, although scarce, always indicate that other genres of music were popular at this time. Some of these genres developed into particular styles and regional substyles. The most notable of these various mentions show that there were clear musical antecedents, in terms of both rhythm and choreography, for what would later develop into tango.

In contrast to the dance school, the academy began a rapid process of acceptance by certain social strata, while at the same time suffering a loss in reputation in other circles. The atmosphere of the academies was often dark, and without a doubt the press of the time detected a certain air of clandestine activity which, in practice, did not actually exist. It is probable that musicians as well as other attendees, years later, when they were consulted, tended to exaggerate what happened behind closed doors in the academies. And it is probable that the first historians of tango picked up on these tales and concluded that, since tango was born in the academy, then the academy must be a synonym for a brothel, and that therefore tango was born in the brothels. As we have seen, academies and brothels were very different places, each with their specific regulations. Certain types of municipal infractions were to be expected in the academies: drunken brawls, expired permits, and stiffed musicians who retaliated with violence. By contrast, in the brothels, an important type of infraction resulted from the music itself: there, dancing was explicitly prohibited. Of course in any case, dancing was inevitable, but the lack of integration of the underground dancing happening in brothels with the more public dancing taking place in the academies leads one to conclude that there were few possibilities for a “brothel dance” to develop into tango, especially since we still do not see any mentions of tango at this time.

[End excerpt]

Note: The image of the mazurka is not from Nueva historia del tango.

Note: The “ugly women and dirty windows” are mentioned in a magazine article quoted in this book immediately after this passage, which is translated in a separate blog post, “A funny fracas.”

An unauthorized translation of a passage from the magazine Sherlock Holmes (published in Argentina in Spanish), quoted in Nueva historia del tango.

Sherlock Holmes, no. 86, April 29th, 1913.

Benedetti, Héctor. 2017. Nueva historia del tango: De los orígenes al siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. p. 49.

Do you want some facts about the origin of the bandonión [sic]? Here you go: first of all, it is of German origin. That is where it came from in the beginning. It’s true, like you say, that it is somewhat analogous to the accordion.

Possibly, it might be a derivation. A variety. A variety of the form. Within the mechanism. Within the technique.

The folding box, after all . . . but the sound: this I assure you, is as different as the day is from the night.

If you have an ear to hear with. If you can feel. If you have soul. If you have ever been in love. If you have a sweetheart, you have to recognize that I’m right. […] That’s why, I tell you. It is really just the right sound for the tango . . . and for other things . . . […]

Like I was telling you. It was more than thirty years ago that the bandonión arrived for the first time in the Republic [Argentina]. It looked kind of funny, and this might have caused people to forget about it. Nobody wanted to learn how to play it. There were very few people who had the guts to go into a salon carrying it in a case. […] Before, they used to be embarrassed by how it looked. By its vulgarity.

Now, it’s starting to come into fashion.

There are a lot of people who are playing it. Those who make art with it. Now in some cafés you can hear the sound of the instrument, and more than one passerby will stop to listen. They come from far away. From the outskirts. Towards the center of the city.

In the Avenida de Mayo, it has already become part of the orchestras.

Could you tell me, Loduca, Who are the people from this area who know the bandoneon and its music well?

There are very few. In the first place, there is Santa Cruz, who has been playing continually for 15 years now, in a café on Santa Fe Street. He might be the one who knows it best. Augusto Berto also knows it. He has for a long time.

Reporting by Luis Sixto Clara.

Blogger’s note: Vicente Loduca was the first bandoneonist to bring tango to Paris in 1913 (he traveled there shortly after this interview). After returning to Argentina, he was very prolific as a composer and bandleader, especially during the 1920s. He is famous for the tangos “El Argentino,” “Sacudime la persiana,” “Juanita,” “Alma Atravesada,” and “Quique.”

The photo of Loduca is not from Nueva historia del tango.

Benedetti, Héctor. 2017. Nueva historia del tango: De los orígenes al siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. p. 47-48

This is an unauthorized translation of two pages from the book.

The bandoneon, “the folding box”

No one can deny that the musical instrument that represents tango is the bandoneon. Our ear immediately associates its sound with tango music, and, by extension, with the city and urban life. Although in Argentina the instrument had been well-known since the second half of the 19th century, it began to be popularized as the characteristic instrument of the genre more recently, with the development of the orquesta típica. The instrument lent to the new orquestas a timbre that, from that point on, would become indispensable. It was a curious destiny for a wind instrument whose original purpose, apparently, was to accompany Lutheran services in the Rhineland.

The bandoneon was born out of the need to perfect an earlier instrument: the concertina. There were two types of concertina, which were similar and which had parallel histories: one German and one English. The designs of these were based in turn on the simpler instruments that had preceded them. The German concertina was created by the luthier Carl Friedrich Uhlig, whose goal was to make a substitute for the harmonium [a small organ], that would be portable. The new instrument was first introduced in 1834, and it reappeared in a more developed form 20 years later. As for the English type, it owed its existence to the maker Charles Wheatstone. It was patented in 1829, and 15 years later was reintroduced with an improved design.

Both the German and English concertinas were instruments that had a ‘free reed’ or ‘tongue’ and worked using a bellows, with buttons or keys on both sides that moved in the same direction as the movement of the bellows. This was the notable feature that distinguished them from the accordion, whose keys, when they were pressed down, moved in a direction perpendicular to the bellows. The buttons of the concertinas were arranged on wooden cases whose forms went through various modifications (octagonal, hexagonal, square), and the number of tones produced varied widely between the different models of each type. In the German type, when the bellows were stretched or compressed, the keys would produce different sounds (in other words, they were bisonoric keys); while in the English type, there was one unique sound for each button, regardless of whether the bellows were being opened or closed.

The concertina that evolved into the bandoneon was the German type. The music teacher Heinrich Band began a series of redesigns to it in about 1840. He chose the square case, or box, as the standard, and arranged the buttons in a different way, giving this new instrument the name of “bandonion.” The number of tones varied between 56 (28 buttons) and 130 (65 buttons), depending on the model. Later, the model adopted by tango musicians would have 71 buttons and 142 tones, which became the “standard” bandoneon for the genre.

Photo: Juan Maglio “Pacho” and his bandoneon. Publicity photo from the 1910’s.