Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina

Abstract

Long celebrated as a national genre in Argentina, tango has not been massively popular there since the late 1950s. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in the genre began to develop among many Argentines, and tango has since risen to again occupy a prominent position within the wider domain of the country's cultural life. The reemergence of tango was punctuated by the devastating Argentine economic crisis of December 2001, which generated severe economic hardship and raised fundamental questions about self and society in Argentina. In this context, the collective work of a growing milieu of contemporary Argentine tango artists, audiences, and critics has amounted to what has been called a renovacion (renovation or renewal) of tango. As a musical practice, renovation consists of drawing upon genre conventions, stylistic details, and musical repertoires from previous periods of tango history and incorporating that material into current practices. It is a complex domain of music making in which the past is sonically brought to bear on the present, which, in turn, is heard as a commentary on the past. The paper is arranged in a series of three case studies, each of which is focused on a particular strategy of renovation corresponding to the work of several contemporary tango artists and groups. By contextualizing these cases, I show how similar musical strategies and aesthetic concerns underlie what might sound like radically divergent musical styles and artistic projects. The ultimate goal is to develop a sense of how, in this particular context, musical style and history are used as a means of negotiating political-economic ruptures and demonstrate how these musical practices are connected to larger transformations in the cultural and political topography of contemporary Latin America.