The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency

By Morgan James Luker

In Argentina, tango isn’t just the national music—it’s a national brand. But ask any contemporary Argentine if they ever really listen to it and chances are the answer is no: tango hasn’t been popular for more than fifty years. In this book, Morgan James Luker explores that odd paradox by tracing the many ways Argentina draws upon tango as a resource for a wide array of economic, social, and cultural—that is to say, non-musical—projects. In doing so, he illuminates new facets of all musical culture in an age of expediency when the value and meaning of the arts is less about the arts themselves and more about how they can be used.
           
Luker traces the diverse and often contradictory ways tango is used in Argentina in activities ranging from state cultural policy-making to its export abroad as a cultural emblem, from the expanding nonprofit arts sector to tango-themed urban renewal projects. He shows how projects such as these are not peripheral to an otherwise “real” tango—they are the absolutely central means by which the values of this musical culture are cultivated. By richly detailing the interdependence of aesthetic value and the regimes of cultural management, this book sheds light on core conceptual challenges facing critical music scholarship today.  
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226385686

Book preview

The Tango Machine

Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

A series edited by Philip V. Bohlman, Ronald Radano, and Timothy Rommen

Editorial Board

Margaret J. Kartomi

Bruno Nettl

Anthony Seeger

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

Martin H. Stokes

Bonnie C. Wade

The Tango Machine

Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency

Morgan James Luker

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

MORGAN JAMES LUKER is associate professor of music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38540-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38554-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38568-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226385686.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luker, Morgan James, author.

Title: The tango machine : musical culture in the age of expediency / Morgan James Luker.

Other titles: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology

Identifiers: LCCN 2015049862 | ISBN 9780226385402 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226385549 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226385686 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Tangos—Argentina—History and criticism. | Popular music—Argentina.

Classification: LCC ML3465 .L85 2016 | DDC 784.18/8850982—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049862

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents, with gratitude, and to my kids, with love.

Me, a prophet? No!

I’m a worker like any other,

nothing more and nothing less. [. . .]

I’m nothing special,

a screw in the tango machine.

Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Values of Music in Expedient Argentina

1  Expedient Soundings: The Genre Culture of Contemporary Tango Music

2  Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of música popular

3  Tango among the Nonprofit Arts

4  Tango as Part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

5  This Is Going to Be Good for All of Us: Tango and the Cultural Industries

Conclusion: He Sings Better Every Day: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks to the musicians, policy makers, managers, music industry figures, and others in Buenos Aires who graciously and patiently shared their work and their lives with me. I would especially like to thank all those who sat for formal interviews. Not all of their voices are directly incorporated into the text that follows, though their perspectives have certainly shaped it. They include Gustavo Álvarez Núñez, Alejandro Antico, Patricio Bonfiglio, Mariano Caló, Patricia Corradini, Adrian D’Amore, Roberto Di Lorenzo, Acho Estol, José Luis Filacchione, Ramiro Gallo, Edgardo González, Hernán Greco, Santiago Greco, Ezequiel Grimson, Alejandro Guyot, Dr. Gustavo López, Néstor Marconi, Gustavo Margulies, Enrique Marmonti, Dolores Solá, Juan Lorenzo, Augusto Macri, Augustina Peretti, Gabriel Plaza, Victor Ponieman, Sonia Possetti, Stella Puente, Hernán Reinaudo, Osiris Rodríguez, Gabriel Rotbaum, Ricardo Salton, Héctor Schargorodsky, Carolina Simón, Javier Tenenbaum, Laura Tesoriero, Néstor Tomassini, and Nicolás Wainszelbaum. I would further like to thank Diego Benbassat, Romina Brel, Fernando D’Addario, Daniela Derito, Oscar Fischer, Richard Gottehrer, Alexandra Hegarty, Damián Karaman, Edu Louzada, Jorge Marchini, Eduardo Muszkat, Caroline Neal, Andrea Rosenfeld, Horacio Spinetto, Débora Staiff, Patrick Sullivan, Carlos Toro, Andrea, Fede, and all the musicians of the Orquesta Típica Piel de Mono and the Orquesta Típica Mario Baracus.

Special thanks to Julián Peralta of Astillero, Ignacio Varchausky of TangoVia Buenos Aires, and Alejandro Guyot, Edgardo González, Juan Lorenzo, and the other members of 34 Puñaladas for their extended interest, engagement, and friendship. I learned a tremendous amount from them and their families, only the smallest fraction of which can be represented here. Working closely with Ramiro Gallo, Exequiel Mantega, Hernán Possetti, Diego Schissi, Adam Tully, Eva Wolff, and especially Paulina Fain reframed my understanding of tango music, and I want to thank each of them for their support of this and other projects. I received assistance from a variety of academic interlocutors in Buenos Aires, including Alejandra Cragnolini, Hector Goyena, and Alejandro Grimson. Thanks to you all. I would especially like to acknowledge María Mercedes Liska, who was consistently supportive of my work in Buenos Aires and showed me what it meant to conduct truly committed scholarship there. Thanks also to Janine Krüger, Michael O’Brien, and Ana María Romaniuk for their intellectual collaboration. There are not words enough to express my gratitude and affection for all the Wicklers. Fanny graciously and generously hosted me during many of my research trips, and I will never forget our afternoons of playing Piazzolla duets together. Alberto and Adriana welcomed me into every aspect of their lives and world and changed mine in the process. Un fuerte abrazo also to Jorge, Doda, Julieta, Tomás, Martín, Federico, Andrea, Lara, Ana, Ariel, Mariela, Santiago, and Sol. Dario Zajdenberg became a great and lasting friend. Thanks also to Sergio, Vibtor, and Yael. I miss you all every day.

This project first took shape while I was at Columbia University, where I had the privilege of studying with an exceptional group of scholars. Ana María Ochoa Gautier was a rigorous but compassionate mentor, teaching me not only how to make sense of the world but how to live in it. I hope that this book at least approaches her expectations. I will forever be grateful for the intellectual and institutional support Aaron A. Fox provided, which made this project possible. My heartfelt thanks goes to all the other scholars I had the privilege of working with while in New York, including and Steven Feld, Lila Ellen Gray, Claudio Lomnitz, Toby Miller, Sherry Ortner, Timothy Taylor, and Christopher Washburne, among many others. A special thanks goes to George Yúdice, whose teaching and scholarship inspired this project, and to Anthony Seeger, who encouraged my interest in cultural policy. Thanks also to Ronald M. Radano and R. Anderson Sutton, my mentors at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who first set me down this path and helped see me through it. I walked that path with an extraordinary cohort of colleagues and friends—Farzaneh Hemmasi and Niko Higgins especially—and cherish the memory of the time we were able to spend together.

The ideas and writing presented here developed in part through participation in a variety of conferences, colloquia, and workshops. I am grateful to all who made those opportunities possible and provided feedback in those contexts, especially Margot Minardi for the American Studies Colloquia Series at Reed College; Ronald M. Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan for the Music—Race—Empire International Conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Marilyn Miller for the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University; and Lillian Wohl for the EthNoise! Music, Language, and Culture workshop at the University of Chicago. Thanks to Louise Meintjes, Ronald M. Radano, Matt Sakakeeny, and Ken Wissoker for helping me understand how to frame the project as a book, and to the series editors for taking it on. Elizabeth Branch Dyson has been an astute and supportive editor, and this book is infinitely better for her guidance and advice. Thanks to her and her staff at the University of Chicago Press for making the editorial process such a pleasure. Barbara Norton’s careful copyediting made the final version much more readable. Two anonymous reviewers provided uncommonly productive feedback on an earlier draft and have my heartfelt thanks for it, as does Timothy Rommen, who provided focused advice in his capacity as series editor. Ana María Ochoa Gautier and David Novak read and critiqued (and reread and recritiqued) most parts of the manuscript at different stages in the process, improving them greatly. Amanda Minks carefully read the penultimate version in its entirety, providing thoughtful comments that helped me see the forest instead of the trees. I am of course responsible for the final form of the book and whatever errors it might contain.

I have been fortunate to be able to work alongside a wonderful group of colleagues, students, and administrators at Reed College and would like to thank them all. Mark Burford and Paul Silverstein have been especially engaged with the details of this project, and I am grateful for their support. Two student research assistants—Gabriel Richardson and Maya Scherr-Wilson—helped with transcribing interviews, and working with students in my Latin American area studies and ethnographic research methods courses helped me refine my ideas and think about how best to present them on paper. Research funding from Reed allowed me to make two follow-up trips to Buenos Aires and provided me the space and time to complete the initial manuscript during a semester leave from teaching. Funding for my primary fieldwork was provided by Columbia University and a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. Reed has also provided the opportunity for me to produce several artistic residencies with contemporary tango artists, including weeklong visits to campus from 34 Puñaladas and Astillero, and I am grateful to all the people and programs that have made this possible, especially Brittney Corrigan-McElroy. These residencies have been fascinating moments of intercultural artistic exchange and a unique opportunity for me to open my world to the artists and musicians who have shared so much of their worlds with me.

The love and support of my immediate and extended family has been unwavering throughout this project and indeed throughout my life. I especially want to thank my mother, father, and brother for helping me see this project through to its conclusion. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my friend and wife Ruth Wikler-Luker, who has given me intellectual feedback, moral support, and loving companionship throughout the course of this project and the many places it has brought us. Our son, Julian, and daughter, Nadine, arrived along the way, and I dedicate the book to them. I love you all.

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Tango Lessons: Movement, Sound, Image, and Text in Contemporary Practice, © 2014 Duke University Press. Portions of the introduction and chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, © 2016 Duke University Press. I thank Duke University Press for permission to include this work in The Tango Machine. The musical figures used in chapter 2 are derived from Julián Peralta’s La orquesta típica: Mecánica y aplicación de los fundamentos técnicos del tango (Buenos Aires: Editorial De Puerto, 2006), and I gratefully acknowledge his permission to employ them here. Thanks to Alejandro Guyot, Débora Staiff, and Ruth Wikler-Luker for their feedback on translations, and to Nigel Nicholson and the dean of the faculty’s office at Reed College for their generous subvention of the book’s production costs.

INTRODUCTION

On the Values of Music in Expedient Argentina

This book examines the new and different ways contemporary tango music has been drawn upon and used as a resource for cultural, social, and economic development in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In doing so, it addresses broader concerns with how the value and meaning of musical culture has been profoundly reframed in what I call, following Yúdice (2003), the age of expediency—where music and the arts are called upon and often compelled to address social, political, and economic problems that were previously located, by theorists and practitioners alike, outside the cultural domain. Long hailed as Argentina’s so-called national genre of popular music and dance, tango has not been widely popular in Argentina since the late 1950s, and many if not most Argentines today consider tango to be little more than a kitschy remnant of an increasingly distant past. Nevertheless, tango continues to have salience as a potent symbol of Argentine culture within both the national imaginary and global representations, not so much a national genre as what one of my interlocutors called a national brand. It is precisely this dual trend of detachment and connection that has made tango an exceptionally productive resource for bolstering so many different projects in contemporary Buenos Aires, the values of which clearly extend beyond the aesthetic domain. Over the course of what follows, I show how these projects have reshaped the field of cultural production regarding tango in Buenos Aires, turning previous ambivalences if not outright antagonisms between cultural producers, private enterprise, the state, and so-called third-sector or civil-society organizations into synergistic opportunities for development of all sorts. And while these newly configured relationships are usually not the straightforward win-win that many advocates claim, they certainly confound conventional notions of left/right politics—cultural and otherwise—and in that sense present a serious challenge to the critical scholarship of music.

We will return to the theoretical details of this argument shortly, but first I want to bring you on a short ethnographic excursion. It is early afternoon on June 24 and I am riding the B train of the Buenos Aires Subte system out toward the end of the line. I am going to Chacarita cemetery for the annual celebration commemorating the life and music of Carlos Gardel, the emblematic Argentine tango singer and icon of Latin American popular culture who died in a plane crash on this day in 1935 (Collier 1986). When he died, at the age of forty-four, Gardel was at the height of his fame, having achieved more or less resounding successes as a live performer, composer, recording artist, and film star. His stature in these and other areas of the then burgeoning cultural industries would surely have been even more impressive had fate somehow prevented him from boarding the doomed flight, though the renown he achieved in his lifetime was such that he remains a household name throughout the Spanish-speaking world to this day. Among tango aficionados, Gardel is without peer. In Argentina his name has become a slang term that is synonymous with excellence: Have you been to the so-and-so restaurant? That place is Gardel. That place is the best. Musically, many of the songs he wrote or co-wrote occupy the core of the tango canon, however one might define it, and his recorded renditions of them remain authoritative. A popular phrase circulated widely among tango fans claims that the passage of time has only made Gardel’s recorded voice that much more compelling and influential: cada día canta mejor—he sings better every day. And while this notion of the long-dead tango singer’s recorded voice forever improving like some cellared fine wine is usually evoked in a manner that is at least somewhat tongue in cheek, it nevertheless speaks to the depth of popular devotion that Gardel elicits among some listeners, a devotion that can at times verge upon religiosity.

The full range of these sentiments was on display when I arrived at the cemetery. A group of about 150 people had gathered around Gardel’s grave, a large mausoleum that sits at the corner of two pedestrian streets that traverse a densely packed section of the cemetery, where the final resting places of the city’s relatively rich and famous are squeezed next to one another like row houses, passing the years in various states of decrepit opulence.¹ The mausoleum, which holds Gardel’s mortal remains and also those of his mother, Berta Gardés (1865–1943), is covered with more than two hundred commemorative plaques. These range from elaborately sculptural cast-bronze pieces placed there by professional organizations or businesses Gardel was associated with during his lifetime (such as the Paramount film studio) to what are clearly homemade memorials that testify to the singer’s excellence and thank him for the favors received. The centerpiece of the mausoleum is a slightly larger-than-life statue of Gardel affectionately known as the bronze that smiles. It depicts the singer in all of his casual but sophisticated glory: standing upright, dressed in a tuxedo, relaxed, with one leg slightly in front of the other, his right arm bent at the elbow with his hand raised in front of his chest. The statue looks directly outward, as if toward the audience, with his famously broad and inviting smile on full, radiant display. I imagine that this is how Gardel must have looked in that magical moment right after the end of a song, with the echo of his voice still hanging in the air while the theater, café, or concert hall exploded into raucous applause, a moment that must have given him tremendous pleasure.

Visitors to the grave will often leave lit cigarettes burning between the fingers of the statue’s bronze hand, the blue smoke ascending to heaven as an offering to the spirit of the legendary bohemian. On this day, however, you couldn’t fit another cigarette between those metal fingers no matter how much you loved Gardel. A large and growing pile of flowers was also accumulating around the statue’s feet, mostly single carnations that you can buy for a few pesos from a group of old ladies stationed outside the main gates of the cemetery. Someone, to my amazement, had a key to the heavy padlock that usually secured the door of the mausoleum, and there was a queue of people patiently waiting their turn to enter the cramped chamber, take the few steps down into the main interior space, and place their hands directly on the singer’s dusty coffin, which rests on a stone shelf a few feet above the ground. Surrounding this was a swirl of social and sonic activity. Several people, including a number of Gardel look-alikes whom I recognized as buskers from the city’s famous Sunday antiques market, had brought their guitars, and groups gathered around them spontaneously to sing together through the staples of Gardel’s repertoire. Others were engaged in causal but animated conversations, with the oldest attendees gladly recounting childhood memories of or about Gardel—having seen him perform, or, more likely, given how much time had passed since his death, remembering the first time they saw his films. Younger fans, many in their twenties or early thirties, shared stories about how they first encountered Gardel and his music: one grew up listening to Gardel with his grandfather; another discovered him almost by accident, happening upon his voice while twisting the tuner on his radio; another admitted that she didn’t really know or care much about Gardel, but came to the event because a friend of hers, who was taking beginner tango singing lessons at their local community center, had invited her along.

Alongside these songs and conversations, person after person spoke directly at Gardel, publicly delivering private monologues that usually concluded with adding a flower to the pile or blowing a kiss upward toward the likeness of the signer’s face. These seemingly one-sided discussions were also taking place with a number of television cameras, participants delivering their thoughts and opinions on Gardel and his greatness to mediated audiences that felt oddly present in their absence, like the singer himself. There were three different television film crews and a handful of radio and print journalists documenting the event for a variety of local, national, and international media outlets. The material they gathered would later be assembled into a series of human-interest pieces, filling a few columns in the next day’s arts and culture section or occupying the closing minutes of the evening news broadcast. Those I saw and read usually framed the event as a touching oddity, conveying a respectful and informative but also somewhat bewildered sense of amazement that the collective memories of some long-dead tango singer could mobilize such an animated gathering.

For other observers, the event was much more than a local curiosity. For example, the graveside tribute to Gardel was featured in a then recently published Atlas of intangible cultural heritage that was prepared by the city government of Buenos Aires’s Commission for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Patrimony (Comisión para la Preservación del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural 2006). Directed at the time by the well-known Argentine social anthropologist Mónica Lacarrieu (Lacarrieu and Alvarez 2008; Lacarrieu and Bayardo 1997), the intangible cultural heritage division of the larger Commission for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Patrimony was charged with mapping the parties, celebrations, commemorations, and rituals of the city’s different neighborhoods, ethnic groups, religious communities, and so on. The Atlas included the most public and accessible highlights of this research, serving as a formal governmental document and a general celebration of the city’s cultural diversity. It included everything from the Chinese New Year festivities put on in Buenos Aires’s diminutive Chinatown to official ceremonies and reenactments commemorating the reconquest of the city following the short-lived British invasion of 1806 to the city’s substantial but embattled Jewish population’s Purim celebrations, among many others.

Considered from this perspective, it is not surprising that the Gardel commemoration would be included in such a volume. The Atlas identifies and describes a number of similar graveside celebrations that are held for a variety of important public figures in Argentina, including the former president Juan Perón (1895–1974), which takes place every October 8, Perón’s birthday. More curious was the fact that the Gardel commemoration was the only tango-related event documented in the Atlas. This seemed like quite a conspicuous absence to me, given that by the time the Atlas was published in 2006, the city government of Buenos Aires and the national government of Argentina were already deeply invested in the institutionalization of tango as intangible cultural heritage. For instance, federal law 24.684 of 1996 officially recognized tango as one of the typical cultural expressions of the country and thereby declared it an integral part of Argentina’s cultural patrimony (Poder Ejecutivo 1996, 1). The city government of Buenos Aires passed its own law of tango (law 130) in 1999, which recognized the genre and all its manifestations as an equally integral part of the city’s cultural patrimony.² By the time the Atlas was published, the national government of Argentina had even tried—and failed—to have tango declared a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The international organization would change its mind several years later in response to joint efforts on the part of the national governments of Argentina and Uruguay, the neighboring countries where tango initially developed, declaring tango a part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2009.

Given these and other efforts to recognize and promote tango as an intangible cultural heritage of the city of Buenos Aires, the nation of Argentina, and, eventually, humanity in general, the absence of any mention of tango or tango-related activity beyond the June 24 commemoration of Gardel’s death in the city government’s official Atlas of intangible cultural heritage felt incongruous. I later had the chance to ask Lacarrieu why tango was seemingly underrepresented in the Atlas, assuming that she, as the head of the intangible cultural heritage program of the Commission for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Patrimony for the city government of Buenos Aires, would certainly be aware of if not actively involved with the many efforts to enshrine tango as intangible cultural heritage in Buenos Aires and beyond.

So what about tango as intangible heritage? I asked her.

Ah, tango, she replied. It sometimes seems like we are the only office in the whole city government that doesn’t deal with tango. You see, we deal with real intangible heritage, not stuff for some tourist show (Lacarrieu 2006).

I began to understand Lacarrieu’s provocative answer while visiting the other statue of Carlos Gardel that stands in Buenos Aires today, the one that tourists are much more likely to see. Like the bronze that smiles in Chacarita cemetery, this statue also represents the iconic singer firmly on his feet, confidently looking outward, again in a tuxedo, and again with a wide though, to me, less lifelike rendition of the singer’s trademark smile. The biggest sculptural difference between the two statues is that this Gardel holds his arms crossed in front of him, hiding the hands that, on the other statue, are forever extended outward, as if waiting for the offerings of rolled tobacco that so many have left between its metal fingers. This other statue stands on the corner of Anchorena and (tellingly) Carlos Gardel streets in the Abasto neighborhood of Buenos Aires, just five stops closer into the city center on the same B Subte line that I took out to the cemetery (get out at the Carlos Gardel Station). But rather than facing the quiet mausoleums of his fellow cemetery residents, this Gardel overlooks a massive-scale urban renewal and development project that has drawn upon the music, image, and physical traces of Gardel and the larger genre of tango that he embodies and represents as its idée fixe. This work combines private enterprise, public investment, and popular memory of Gardel’s historical presence in the neighborhood (he once owned a home there) to reshape this geographically central but economically and socially marginalized area of the city (see Carman 2006).

At the center of these transformations, both physically and symbolically, is the massive Mercado de Abasto building, which served as the city’s central market for fruits and vegetables between 1893 and 1984. In 1999, after fifteen years of abandonment, the renovated Mercado building reopened as the Abasto de Buenos Aires shopping mall, the largest in the city, with some 186 stores, 12 movie theaters, a food court, an indoor amusement park, a commercial children’s museum, and other features. The shopping, as it is called, using the English term, anchors the textbookishly postmodern transformation of the neighborhood as a whole, where the historic infrastructure of the city is filled in with businesses, services, and amenities worthy of the air-conditioned consumerism many Argentines imagine enjoying in the shopping malls of such primer mundo cities as Miami (Sarlo 2001b).

What makes these recent transformations of the Abasto neighborhood unique, however, is not consumption per se, but the consumption of culture, especially, in this case, tango. For instance, kitty-corner from the shopping is the Abasto Hotel, the first five star tango themed hotel in Buenos Aires (abastohotel.com), a modern tower of stone and glass that stands some twenty stories above the surrounding neighborhood. Included in the cost of any room is a daily group tango dance lesson taught by bilingual instructors with extensive international experience (ibid.). The hotel can also provide guests with private tango dance lessons catered to their specific needs and previous experience with the largely improvised and notoriously difficult salon or social style of tango dance. The hotel’s two tango suites, their most luxurious rooms, both of which are named after famous Carlos Gardel songs, have small dance floors built into the main living space. Patrons can take lessons or practice their technique to the musical accompaniment of a collection