Review-essay of Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland, Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music (Oxford, 2016)

Abstract

[1] The tango, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges argued, contains a secret. “Musical dictionaries provide a brief, adequate, and generally approved definition,” Borges wrote, but “the French or Spanish composer who, trusting the definition, correctly crafts a ‘tango,’ discovers, very much to his surprise, that he has crafted something that our ears do not recognize, that our memory does not welcome, and that our body rejects” (2009, 267–68).(1) Pace Borges, in Tracing Tangueros Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland go beyond the brief definition, to provide a “detailed study of Argentine tango instrumental music” that promises to reveal the genre’s secret and assist musicians who perform and arrange, composers who write, and music scholars who analyze Argentine, or more precisely, River Plate tangos.(2) Moreover, the authors seek to engage an even wider audience, “ranging from a tango aficionado wishing to learn about the music of a specific tanguero to a professional musician seeking a detailed performance or theoretical analysis” (18). There I call attention to issues relating to how the authors defined their corpus, constructed their historical narrative, and chose representative tangueros.