3840  Tango - milongueo & outskirts

Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 15:35:32 -0300
From: Alberto Gesualdi <clambat2001@YAHOO.COM.AR>
Subject: Tango - milongueo & outskirts

Dear friends from the tango list

As a different comment from this composer Abel Fleury , called "the poet of the guitar" , we may say his compositions were more related to folk songs . However the milongas as played on the suburban areas outside Buenos Aires ,were present altogether with the milongas appeared as "urban" milongas , to give them some kind of name. There is an interview to Sebastian Piana, composer of the lyrics of Milonga sentimental (1932) considered the first milonga of this "urban" type .

Now I am writing this mail in a cyber booth that is over the river Maldonado . 100 years ago, at this same place, the river was open , and this area of Palermo was a meeting of wagons drived by horses ,known as "los portones/the gates" . The gathering produced the singing and playing of guitars , by the wagon drivers, the peasants, and people that came from the "centre" of the city . From this mixture of styles , some was given and some was lost .

There is a long discussion about tango as a folk music. For one group of researchers , it lacks certain aspects of the folk music ( being transmitted orally, many generations ). For other group , any music played within the boundaries of the country is folk music . This will include not only tango, but the cordobese cuarteta and the cumbia villera , a music composed and performed by people from the shanty towns inside and outside Buenos Aires, with scripts very crude , related to drugs, crime, killing cops and so on . But as authentic music , i.e. music that describes what is happening now in Buenos Aires or part of it , it is authentic .

Abel Fleury played guitar with a "pampeano style" . Some of his recordings seem to be nostalgic , like this "Milongueo del ayer ", also another recording "Te vas milonga / Milonga you are leaving " recorded by Pablo Mainetti. Another recording is "Estilo Pampeano / Pampeano style " .

But also Fleury is a guitar teacher, the kind of teacher as Sagreras teacher, whose method to study guitar is one of the most popular for students applying for the Conservatory locally.

One thing that is difficult to transmit in a tango arrangement for guitar is the "mud/ronia" , the special way to play and to make it sound as a tango, a milonga (urban ) or a valsecito criollo.

I am using the books of tango arrangements from Anibal Arias ,the gifted guitar player , that is still pushing his students at the Universidad Popular de Avellaneda .

If you play the arrangements of the book of Arias as they are written , they sound like classic guitar playing . . But I think they were conceived as a practice for the combination of fingers properly . If you listen Anibal Arias playing , he sounds "slow" ,even in the milongas , that usually are more quick .

Last year 2004 I watch Anibal Arias with bandoneonist "sailor" Montes playing duets at the Tasso, sharing the stage with another duet,. Juanjo Dominguez and Julio Pane. The last part of the show have the four of them playing , and when Pane and Dominguez started improvising quickly playings, Anibal Arias shout " mas despacio, carajo !! / more slowly , damn it !!" .This maybe could be a division into the Milongueo del ayer compositions , and the more quicker milongas arrangements like "Orillera " or "Nocturna"


warm regards
alberto gesualdi
the guitar "manco" player

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