A tango phenomenon

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of renowned tango composer Astor Piazzolla’s birth this month, Argentine violinists Rafael Gintoli and Gabriela Olcese pay tribute to him and offer basic guidance to violinists on how to interpret tango music

Today, the names Carlos Gardel (1890–1935) and Astor Piazzolla (1921–92) are synonymous with the tango genre for audiences around the world. While Gardel took the incipient Argentine tango to the stages of Paris and New York from the 1920s until his tragic death in 1935, Piazzolla managed to modernise it, thus allowing tango to be definitively accepted in academic music circles and to be included in the contemporary classical repertoire.

Although Piazzolla initially set out from the ríoplatense and profoundly popular roots of Argentine tango, his style evolved towards a new urban music – música ciudadana, as he termed it. His personal ‘manifesto’ (set out in a ‘Decalogue’, published in 1955) was as resisted locally as it was recognised in the European musical world. In Buenos Aires, composers and tangueros (tango playing musicians) objected to his new music, stating that it did not represent the traditional tango. Piazzolla’s tango was instead fused with jazz and Uruguayan candombe, and played a part in the music of his numerous film soundtracks.

Paradoxically, 1960s Buenos Aires witnessed the birth of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, which, under the direction of Alberto Ginastera, helped to showcase contemporary music by the great international composers of the period. Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti and Copland, among others, were invited to the city to present courses and concerts to the local public and it was against this experimental backdrop that Piazzolla revealed his revolutionary urban music.

EFFECTS AND PHRASING 

Piazzolla’s music reflects the continuous noises and murmurs of the streets of Buenos Aires through the development and amplification of sound effects characteristic of tanguística (tango aesthetics) and tanguera (the tango sound world). One of these effects is the chicharra of the cicada insect (example 1), which is executed by scraping the hairs of the bow on the D string on the wrong side of (in other words, behind) the bridge, generally with rhythmical figures of four or six semiquavers (s), usually stressing the first one or prolonging the last one.

Another effect is the látigo (‘whip’) – a quick ascending or descending glissando, played either on one string or on two as a double-stop, generally in 6ths. Example 2 is taken from an orchestral part where divisi violins start on the same note but end their glissandos on different notes.

For the tambor (‘drum’) effect (example 3): in the left hand, the player rests the nail of the middle or ring finger between the third and fourth strings, touching the fourth string with that nail while executing quick pizzicatos with two or three fingers of the right hand to imitate the effect of a snare drum.

 IN THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF TANGO, WE SELDOM EXPECT EXECUTION TO BE PRECISE OR FAITHFUL TO THE COMPOSER’S NOTATION

The arrastre (‘drag’) is a messa di voce-style anticipation of the beginning of a phrase or bar with a little glissando up to the main note. It may also be executed as a double-stop (examples 4a and 4b, page 41).

In the musical language of tango, we seldom expect execution to be precise or faithful to the composer’s notation. This can be witnessed when comparing example 5a with our proposed interpretation in example 5b, which shows divergences from the rhythm and even some of the pitches of the original. One simple approach might be a sequence of equal notes, of which a few at the beginning are lengthened thus necessitating a subsequent accelerando to compress the remaining notes into the time allowed. This can be seen when comparing examples 6a and 6b.

Although the styles of execution – the effects of touch, phrasing and ornamentation – discussed above are broadly the standard when performing tango, every musician develops their specific interpretation spontaneously in the moment, thus creating interest and excitement. These effects, among others, did exist before Piazzolla, but he was the one who introduced the concept of mugre (‘grime’) – a ‘dirty’ execution achieved through these effects in combination with his personal phrasing. This came to typify his sound universe.

PIAZZOLLA’S VIOLINISTS 

The four leading interpreters of Piazzolla’s violin music were, chronologically, Elvino Vardaro (1905–71), Simón Bajour (1928–2005), Antonio Agri (1932–98) and Fernando Suárez Paz (1941–2020). Piazzolla offered each artist the space and freedom to develop his own personality within the music, and in recordings we can appreciate the differences in their ornamentation, bowing technique, melodic phrasing, sound effects and rhythm.

Each one of these violinists was a faithful representative of the prevailing aesthetics of his time: Vardaro offered classical execution and a pure melodic line; Bajour brought technical growth whereby the violinist was the main protagonist; Agri played with a magical inspiration and vibrato; while Suárez Paz was an important partner during the last stage of the fusion of Piazzolla’s music with jazz, the music of the 1970s and elements of contemporary music. Among the many works that demonstrate how these performers contributed to Piazzolla’s compositional development are Vardarito, Escualo, Fuga y misterio and the great solo from Adiós nonino.

Via Piazzolla, his contemporaries and his immediate predecessors, the evolution of tango music for the violin saw an increase in technical difficulty and musical sophistication as well as in the duration of the violin ‘solo’, pushing players to achieve higher levels of skill and refinement and to perform longer and more complex melodic lines. An example of this complexity is evidenced in the tango Vardarito (example 7), composed by Piazzolla in 1972 as a tribute to Vardaro and a memento of his interpretative style. The score offers numerous technical challenges, such as sustained high pitches, flying picchettato bowings and constant variation in both rhythm and harmony; in short, it constitutes a synthetic panorama of the techniques of the school of virtuoso classical playing.

In Decarísimo, a tango composed in the 1960s in which Piazzolla pays homage to the great violinist of the early tango period Julio De Caro (1899–1980), the interpreter should express not only a very melodic singing line but also the agogic of well-defined tango cells (example 8a) – as well as adding a technically advanced cadenza (example 8b).

Piazzolla developed the tango violin ‘solo’

TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

MODERN DEVELOPMENTS 

Today, tango composers have followed Piazzolla’s path in pursuit of the violin as protagonist. The composer and bandoneon player Néstor Marconi (b.1942) begins his transcription (for violin, double bass and bandoneon) of Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera’s tango song El día que me quieras with a cadenza that showcases virtuosic violin playing with passages of great technical difficulty, very much in the style of Paganini, as well as a beautiful melodic line typical of ‘Gardelian’ genius (example 9).

La cumparsita by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, composed around 1915. The transcription for Undoubtedly the most iconic tango is solo violin by Vicente Zito (example 10), using all the potential technical virtuosity of the instrument, is very well known, and there is a recording of it by Ruggiero Ricci, who was an admirer of Zito. They met backstage at a theatre in Cordoba (Argentina), where Ricci heard Zito play several of his transcriptions. Ricci offered to play this music himself, and La cumparsita became an encore that he performed on stages around the world. In 1995, Zito’s son Adalberto graciously made all the manuscripts available to Rafael Gintoli in the hope of bringing greater attention to his father’s work. Excepting Ricci’s La cumparsita arrangement, all Zito’s transcriptions remain unedited and in manuscript form (example 11 shows part of his transcription of Ángel Villoldo’s El choclo).

EXAMPLE 10 Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, La cumparsita, transcr. Vicente Zito for violin solo, first page of manuscript

MANUSCRIPTS COURTESY ADALBERTO ZITO

EXAMPLE 11 Villoldo, El choclo, transcr. Vicente Zito for violin solo, first page of manuscript

INTERPRETATION OF TANGO MUSIC 

It is beneficial for those interpreting tango music to keep in mind the conversational inflections and rhythms of the porteños (inhabitants of Buenos Aires) – their accents, how they end their sentences, and their general character (they are known for a sense of nostalgia that mixes hope and frustration). Most important in terms of capturing these moods is bowing technique. It is the bow that sculpts each musical phrase, sometimes achieving very blurred sounds, sometimes highly articulated ones. Generally, two contrasting techniques are used in tango: a fluid handling of the melodic lines by using the whole bow to create a variety of colours; and very accentuated, short strokes predominantly played at the frog.

Left-hand technique must be of a refined nature, being capable of a sophisticated use of vibrato that can emphasise accents and rhythm as well as develop the melodic line. Sometimes the violinist is called upon to play entirely without vibrato followed by a fast and incisive one. In moments of lyricism and melancholy, it is important to use a moderate type of vibrato, placing the fingers softly on the fingerboard to produce a dolce and cushioned melodic line.

Rafael Gintoli

When performing with piano (or bandoneon) and double bass (in the manner of a Baroque basso continuo), the violinist needs to feel a strong down-beat so that they can more easily take advantage of the rhythmic freedoms offered by the tango tradition, bar by bar.

Today, tango interpretations can be highly complicated, but the genre can still be expanded and developed as those from other musical traditions bring their aesthetic ideas to the table. This is one of the reasons we have recently created our online Violin for Tango course through iClassical Academy (bit.ly/3qU1Kf7), recorded in Buenos Aires with a team of tango specialists playing on authentic instruments. We are witnessing an expansion of tango composition and performance in countries and regions such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, China and Russia and are keen to support this growth.