Archive for May 13th, 2008
Assai amoroso
Taken from Cherie’s blog, the above is an interesting multimedia presentation from Clarín about tango, with blips from musicians and dancers who tell us what tango means to them.
I am a bit piqued that there wasn’t a single piece of footage on how tango is being danced inside a real milonga… Oh well.
(Also, I didn’t know that someone named Valeria Lynch became the most important artist in the country in 1986. Note to self: Must search for Valeria in the tango music stores, and possibly catch her live while I am in Buenos Aires.)
Anyway, the inspiring thoughts and sentiments of the interviewed dancers and musicians made me think why tango is so alluring to me. Why the music is so moving, even though I don’t know the words… Why I persistently listen to scratched up recordings of ancient songs sung by men and women who are long since dead and gone… Why it still sounds so modern and relevant and fresh to someone living in another century, another city, another culture, another time.
And it reminded me of an alleged exchange that occurred between two artists almost a hundred years ago:
“The music salon at Chanel’s hotêl particulier was smothered in the odor of tuberose. Diaghilev led Igor to the massive polished Steinway and directed him to play a composition. On those first youthful and derivative pieces Markevitch played, Dighilev commented: ‘I have told you to prepare Tomorrow for me, and you are thinking only of Yesterday.’
Shy as he was at sixteen, Igor was nevertheless capable of a ready return: ‘I’m not interested in yesterday or today but what is forever.’”
-From “The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties”, by William Wiser
The tango is alive, because it is eternal.
