Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music
Page 67
Pupy y los que son son, and other orchestras inside and outside of Cuba. Accord-
ing to Formell, the term songo comes from the combination of son as a genre and
go, from go-go. The last word was also a play on words mirroring the name of the
orchestra Los Van Van, Formell’s orchestra, since the word go is the English equivalent
of the Spanish word van.
Songo is distinctive for its integration of different elements and styles and has
become one of the most representative forms of dance music. It combines rumba ,
jazz, rock, beat, pop, bossa nova , and even rap, reggaetón, and funk, somehow finding a way to integrate all of these styles and rhythms into the son tradition.
Cuban Orchestra leader Juan Formell performs at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the
Congresgebouw in The Hague, Netherlands, 1986. (Redferns/Getty Images)
Songo | 391
This fusion of musical genre has been expressed in many different ways through-
out the evolution of songo. Its progression can be followed through the song rep-
ertoire of Los Van Van orchestra. The rumba and son remain the foundation of this
eclectic and international fusion of popular styles. Of all the variations, the most
developed is merensongo.
Formell’s creativity is evident in the everchanging nature of songo. Songo is dis-
tinguished by the peculiar off-beat stress matching the pattern of the congas . This
is mixed with the solo breaks performed on the Cuban timbals and the drum form-
ing a strong foundation. Songo is also characterized by the melodic-rhythmic for-
mulas, cadences and phrase closures; the unique combination of violins and flutes,
as well as the design, mobility and rhythmic richness of the bass, the performance
of which goes beyond the traditional harmonic support. Another feature of songo
is the convergence of the strong tradition on montunos , and the occasional use of
the stresses associated with changüí and reggae; the mixture of tumbao with slow conga and especially a particular and paradigmatic arrangement of the chorus.
Although songo is the result of the inspiration of Juan Formell, as realized in
the orchestra Los Van Van together with drummer Blas Egües in 1969, it owes its
evolution largely to Cuban percussionist José Luis Quintana Changuito who took
songo through many transformations, using a variety of instrumentation, which
resulted in the overall timbre of the orchestra. Cesar Pupy Pedroso, the director of
the orchestra Pupy y los que son son, pioneered the use of the piano tumbaos and
this also contributed to the formation of songo.
The repertoire of this genre shows a variety of themes primarily focused on love,
women, Cuba and its regions, dance, the orchestra itself, food, friendship, Afro-
Cuban religion, and popular philosophy, together with topics of a general nature.
The lyrics of Formell and Pupy, the two main composers, fall within the custom of
historical narratives and are notable for telling a story and commenting on social is-
sues at the same time. Frequently, their songs feature characters from daily life who
embody the moral quality associated with Cuban identity. Humor is also a common
quality in four decades of songo lyrics.
Morphologically, songo makes use of the principle of rondal found in other
Cuban musical genres, especially in son montuno. Son montuno features an alter-
nating solo-chorus throughout a piece. This structure coexists with the different
varieties of the classical architecture of son: introduction, body of the piece and
montuno.
Representative pieces of this genre include “Por encima del nivel,” “La titi-
manía,” “Hoy se cumplen seis semanas,” and “Esto te pone la cabeza mala” (in the
boundaries of timba ).
Further Reading
Gerard, Charley. Music from Cuba: Mongo Santamaria, Chocolate Armenteros, and
Cuban Musicians in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.
392 | Surdo
Moore, Robin. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. Music of the
African Diaspora, 9. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Perna, Vincenzo. Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Prince, Rob. “Afro-Cuban.” Folk Roots 67 (1989): 17.
Neris González and Liliana Casanella
Surdo
The surdo is a deep, double-headed bass drum in various sizes (from about 16 to
24 inches in diameter and about 20 inches in length) used in many Brazilian styles
of samba . It is typically played with a soft mallet in the right hand while the left
hand controls the open or dampened vibrations of the nylon or goat skin head. In
the baterias (percussion sections) of the escolas de samba, three sizes of surdo ( primeira, segunda, and corte ) are used. The primeira and segunda surdos serve the function of marking the basic pulse of the samba (alternating beats one and two
of each measure) and hence are sometimes called surdos de maracação. The corte
(cutting) surdo, also called terceira, plays syncopated rhythmic variations that cut
across the regular pulses of the marking surdos. Bide (Alcebíades Maia Barcelos),
a legendary percussionist and composer who helped found Rio de Janeiro’s first
escola de samba, Deixa Falar (1928), is often credited with introducing the surdo
into the escola de samba tradition. Brazilian percussionists use a single surdo when
playing sambas in smaller groups and in informal gatherings. In the Bahian tradi-
tion of the blocos afro , four sizes of surdo are used to create interlocking patterns.
Further Reading
Bolão, Oscar. Batuque é um privilégio: A percussão da música do Rio de Janeiro/
Batuque is a privilege: Percussion in Rio de Janeiro’s music. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Lu-
miar Editora, 2003.
Crook, Larry. Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern
Nation. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Larry Crook
T
Tamborím
The tamborím is a small (five to six inches in diameter), single-headed drum of wood
or metal used in various folk and popular musical traditions in Brazil, especially
those associated with samba . Technically a frame drum, the instrument is used exten-
sively in the baterias (percussion sections) of the escolas de samba ( samba schools) of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. In the escola de samba, the tamborím is played with a flexible plastic stick (usually comprising a bundle of three to six thin plastic rods)
in the right hand while the left hand holds and controls the rotating movement of the
Gardel, Carlos
Singer, composer, and guitarist, Carlos Gardel (1887?–1935) began his
professional career singing duets with Uruguayan José Razzano in 1913. They
performed together until 1925 with a repertoire of Argentinean folklore music,
including zamba , chacarera , and queca tonada. Gardel signed with Columbia Records in 1913, but his career was made in 1917 with his recording of “Mi
Noche Triste.” It sold 100,000 copies, making Gardel the icon of the tango to
the present day. As he became a star in New York and Paris, the upper classes
of Argentina began to embrace Gardel and his melancholy, seductive inter-
pretation of tango song. Gardel recorded over 1,000 songs and made 11 major
fi lms. He died in a plane crash in 1935.
; The rise of Gardel’s career coincides with the birth of the recording, fi lm,
and radio industries. Gardel’s fame and the popularity of tango spread quickly
because of these new media, but in turn, his popularity was instrumental in
creating an audience for these new industries.
Further Reading
Castro, Donald. S. “Massifi cation of the Tango: The Electronic Media, the Pop-
ular Theatre and the Cabaret from Contursi to Perón, 1917–1955.” Studies
in Latin American Popular Culture 18 (1999): 93–114.
Rebecca Stuhr
393
394 | Tango
drum. This technique allows single and bounced strokes to be executed rapidly on the
drum and its rim. In the escola de samba context, multiple tamborím players execute
tightly coordinated and syncopated unison patterns ( desenhos ) that serve as creative
markers of individual schools. In softer contexts of musical performance, Brazilian
percussionists often use a single wooden stick or even the fingers to perform syn-
copated clave-like figures (repeating rhythms). Bide (Alcebíades Maia Barcelos), a
legendary percussionist and composer who helped found Rio de Janeiro’s first escola
de samba, Deixa Falar (1928), is frequently credited as one of the first musicians to
introduce the tamborím into the bateria of the escola de samba.
Further Reading
Bolão, Oscar. Batuque é um privilégio: A percussão da música do Rio de Janeiro
(Batuque Is a Privilege: Percussion in Rio de Janeiro’s Music). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Lu-
miar Editora, 2003.
Larry Crook
Tango
Tango is a dance, song, and musical form that emerged in the poor suburbs of the
Uruguayan capital of Montevideo and the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires start-
ing in the late 19th century. By 1913, it had gained popularity in Paris and London
as a salon dance, and as a result eventually gained acceptance by middle- and upper-
class Argentine society. It was the most prominent urban popular music and dance
of the Argentine capital from the 1920s through the 1940s, and is often identified
as the musical national symbol of Argentina.
Origins
The term tango came into Spanish from the West African Bantu languages spoken
by African populations brought to the River Plate region. By the late 19th century, it
was used here to describe three interrelated concepts, all derived from cultural prac-
tices relating to this population of African descendants: tango referred to a drum,
a particular form of dance, and a place or event where Afro-Argentines and Afro-
Uruguayans would gather to dance. The word also took on a more general meaning
in the Spanish-speaking world, as a form of music played or sung by blacks. It was
this latter meaning that led to the development of the tango andaluz, a flamenco
genre that is otherwise musically unrelated to the tango of the River Plate region.
The tango emerged first as a unique dance and only later as a specific genre of
music. One of the first chroniclers of the genre, known as “ El Viejo Tanguero ” (“The
old tangoer”), claims that the term was used to identify a new dance that borrowed
choreography from the candombe as early as 1877.
Tango | 395
La Guardia Vieja (The Old Guard)
The tango as a distinct musical style began to consolidate in the last two decades
of the 19th century. Demonstrating the influences of European popular song and
a prevalent rhythmic pattern derived from the Cuban habanera, tangos in this period were typically written in three contrasting sections with the last marked as a
trio. In performance, these tangos would feature one or more instruments play-
ing a simple melody in unison with a simple chordal accompaniment in habanera
rhythm. This oral tradition form of playing, where distribution of melodic and ac-
companimental roles is resolved spontaneously and without reference to a prewrit-
ten arrangement, was known as a la parrilla and remains in use among traditional
tango musicians to this day. The most typical instrumental ensemble consisted of
a trio of flute, guitar, and violin, but the music and the social sphere it occupied
were loosely structured enough to permit variants. It was not until the turn of the
century that the instrument that would come to play the most prominent role as
sonic and visual icon of the tango, the German-made bandoneón, began to appear in tango ensembles. This instrument, a free-reed concertina, entered tango
ensembles as a replacement or supplement to the flute, playing simple unadorned
melodies, but its role and the associated technique would develop significantly
in the coming decades. Many of these early tango musicians were not formally
trained in music, and generally pieces were learned and transmitted orally. Ret-
roactively, this generation of musicians would become known as la guardia vieja
(the old guard), distinguishing them from the next generation and their stylistic in
novations starting around 1920.
From 1897 onward, local publishing houses began printing scores of tangos
for piano, suggesting both a growing interest by formally trained musicians and at
least some part of the middle and upper classes. Rosendo Mendizábal’s “El entrer-
riano” (“the man from Entre Ríos province”) was the first published tango, which
was printed under the pseudonym A. Rosendo. Mendizábal was a pianist, and an
Argentine of African descent. In fact, a significant number of guardia vieja musi-
cians were Afro-Argentine, including the violinist known as El Negro Casimiro and
the first exponent of a local style of bandoneón playing, Sebastián Ramos Mejía.
Other prominent composers of the period included Angel Villoldo (“El choclo”),
bandoneonist Eduardo Arolas, and Vicente Greco. Tango music during this pe-
riod reached an increasingly wider public. No longer was it heard only in the aca-
demias (public dance halls in the poor outer suburbs of Buenos Aires that were
closely associated with prostitution) but in other spaces as well. Composers of the
sainetes, popular theater productions aimed at a principally bourgeois audience,
began to include tangos in their productions, and organ-grinders playing on the
street began to play popular tangos as well.
From 1910 to 1920, the most important musical innovations in the tango came in
the form of new instrumentation: the piano began to replace the guitar as the most
396 | Tango
common harmonic and rhythmic instrument, and the bandoneón gained promi-
nence. Bandoneonist Vicente Greco coined the term orquesta típica criolla , later
shortened to orquesta típica, to describe the ensemble he formed in 1911. Greco’s
group included a flute, an instrument that would soon fall out of favor, but his basic
configuration of sections of bandoneones and bowed strings, with a piano and con-
trabass providing rhythmic and harmonic support, would become the standard in-
strumentation for the coming decades.
International Diffusion
The year 1913 marked the explosion of the tango craze in Paris where, introduced
by wealthy Argentine elites, a more buttoned-down and restrained version of the
dance caught on in ballrooms, society teas, and among dance teachers. London,
dancers in those locales had generated local versions of tango dance and music by
the mid-1910s. While often this tango bore little musical or choreographic resem-
blance to what was being played and danced in Argentina at the time, the growing
global enthusiasm for the dance among a cosmopolitan elite certainly influenced
tango’s growing acceptance back in Argentina. Furthermore, the growing interna-
tional market led to interest by both local and foreign record companies and film
producers. By 1920 tango was being mass-produced and sold on a global scale,
both on record and in film.
Tango Song and Lyrics
While the earliest tangos may have had lyrics, few of them survive, and accounts
of the period suggest that they may have been improvised and frequently were
lighthearted and bawdy in character. This practice was to change radically with
the introduction of tango canción, or tango song, and the worldwide success of
its best-known exponent, Carlos Gardel. Gardel had already attained a modest
degree of success performing as a singer in a folk duo when he began to incor-
porate tangos into his repertoire. His 1917 recording of Pascual Contursi’s lyric
“ Mi noche triste ” marked the emergence of a new style of singing and a new
genre of tango music. Tango lyrics took on a melancholy, cynical worldview,
often describing failed love affairs through a philosophical style of complaint
known as la mufa. Local slang, or lunfardo, originally associated with the crimi-
nal class, began to be incorporated into these lyrics. Through the contributions
of poets such as Enrique Santos Discépolo and Homero Manzi, the tango lyrics
of the golden age of tango remain some of the most important contributions to
Argentine literature of the 20th century and are a frequent topic of serious liter-
ary analysis.
Tango | 397
The Golden Age
With the growing national and international interest in tango music, song, and
dance, the period between roughly 1920 and 1940 witnessed a proliferation in all