BACK TO BUENOS AIRES - THE GOLDEN AGE OF TANGO (continued)

Starting with this period the tango began to resonate with a more refined sound and the music became sophisticated. Composers, dancers and singers started to debate the purpose of the music, some professing the overwhelming importance of the composer and the orchestra, some aiming to give the tango back to the dancers, and some aiming to showcase the singers and push the musicians into a complimentary background.

The Osvaldo Pugliese orchestra (el nectar de tango – the tango nectar) (see www.todotango.com) proposed a complex, rich, sometimes intentionally discordant sound. Pugliese’s music was not necessarily written for dancing and was mostly listened to or used for choreographies or tango shows. Gallo ciego (see www.todotango.com), one of the Pugliese representative tangos, is a perfect example of the distinct sound of this orchestra.

TANGO NUEVO

Modern tango is dominated by the composer Ástor Piazzolla (see www.todotango.com), who in the used to be laughed at in the 1950s by the tango traditionalists for his attempts to make tango more modern. His music, often not danceable, established itself as the true sound of Buenos Aires life bringing together together jazz, tango and classical music.

Other modern masters of tango sounds followed: Litto Nebbia, Siglo XX and later Gotan Project (Philippe Cohen Solal, Edoardo Makaroff and Christophe H. Muller) and Carlos Libedinsky. The modern tango mixes electronic music with tango and is often described as ‘tango fusion’.