The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency 9780226385686

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The Tango Machine

CHICAGO STUDIES IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

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

E DI T OR I A L B OA R D

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 and London

M O R G A N J A M E S L U K E R 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. OS VA L D O PU GL I E SE (19 0 5 –19 95 )

Contents Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: On the Values of Music in Expedient Argentina 1 1

Expedient Soundings: The Genre Culture of Contemporary Tango Music 33

2

Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of música popular 64

3

Tango among the Nonprofit Arts 90

4

Tango as Part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity 120

5

“This Is Going to Be Good for All of Us”: Tango and the Cultural Industries 148 Conclusion: He Sings Better Every Day: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency 174 Notes 187

Bibliography 197

Index 211

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, xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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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 refi ne 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

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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.

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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 1

INTRODUCTION

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, 2

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

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 3

INTRODUCTION

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 4

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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 5

INTRODUCTION

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 fi xe. 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 6

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is filled in with businesses, services, and amenities worthy of the airconditioned 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 fi rst 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 of classic tango recordings that are included with the room. The hotel, in turn, is located across from the Esquina Carlos Gardel, a high- end cena show nightclub named in homage to the legendary singer that presents glossily produced tango floor shows to dining audiences seven nights a week. These shows feature a small orchestra of live tango musicians and several pairs of professional tango dancers who perform in the elaborately choreographed and highly athletic escenario or “stage” style of tango dancing. At the time of this writing, a night at the Esquina Carlos Gardel begins at US$96 per person (without dinner) and can go as high as $280—significant sums even for many foreign tourists, who are the Esquina’s target audience and primary clientele. The Esquina, which opened in 2001, occupies a new- construction building designed in a faux-Parisian beaux-arts style, evoking the architectural sensibility that defined Buenos Aires during Gardel’s lifetime, when the city was described as the Paris of South America (Scobie 1974, 114– 59). It stands at the head of the blocklong Carlos Gardel Street, which is closed to vehicular traffic and lined with tango-themed souvenir shops and open-air cafés. The previously asphalted pedestrian street was recently recobbled in yet another gesture toward both the infrastructural historicity of the neighborhood and the visual iconography of tango. The statue of Gardel stands at the head of this street, right in front of the Esquina. Walking that street made it easier for me to understand Lacarrieu’s 7

INTRODUCTION

response to my question about tango as intangible cultural heritage and her dismissal of it as “stuff for some tourist show.” Whatever else it might mean or be, tango here was clearly operating as a brand to sell or a service to consume, with Gardel’s smiling image looming over it all like some trademarked mascot, the Ronald McDonald of tango. Still, Gardel’s connection to the neighborhood is not arbitrary. As mentioned above, Gardel once owned a house a few blocks from the Esquina, at 735 Jean Juares Street, in the northeastern shadow of the Mercado building, where he lived with his mother during the final years of his life. The city government of Buenos Aires has since obtained the house, converting it into a small museum dedicated to Gardel that opened to the public in 2003. This government-sponsored commemoration of Gardel and his place in the neighborhood’s past compliments a variety of long-standing gestures of remembrance on the part of neighborhood residents. Many business owners in the historically light-industrial area have had the outside walls of their small warehouses and workshops painted with massive pop-art images of Gardel by the artist Marino Santa María (Miller 2013), snippets of notation from his compositions and songs, or the intricately designed and brightly colorful fileteado decorative painting style that is traditionally associated with tango and the city of Buenos Aires (and which has also been declared intangible cultural heritage by the city government). These paintings make for a colorful urban passageway and a unique homage to the man many still claim as the neighborhood’s favorite son, but it is not directly for tourists. Before the city government installed more effective street lighting in 2005, these were not the streets one would want to walk down after dark, and most visitors to the Esquina Carlos Gardel itself are still ferried directly to and from their hotels in the ubiquitous white tourist vans seen putt-putting around the city. Transportation is included in the price of admission. And tango is not the only cultural game in the neighborhood. Today most Argentine music fans associate Abasto not with Gardel but with Luca Prodan (1953–1987), the iconic Italian expatriate singer of the legendary Argentine rock nacional band Sumo, who died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of thirty-four. Sumo’s song “Mañana en el Abasto” (Morning in Abasto), from the group’s third and final album After Chabón (1987), is an emotive description of the gritty neighborhood before its urban renewal and is widely considered one of the greatest rock nacional songs of all time. The neighborhood is also home to a number of independent theater spaces, a tradition that has been spectacularly institutionalized in the Konex Cultural City, a massive 8

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factory space that has been reconverted into a multistage performance venue featuring world- class experimental theater and performance, in the mold of U.S. venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Add to that a peppering of Peruvian restaurants and discos aimed largely at the substantial immigrant populations that still live in the neighborhood’s historically run- down housing stock, and you have a cultural milieu that, despite its continued grit, would make creative- city urban planning gurus such as Charles Landry (2008) and Richard Florida (2014) smile.

Carlos Gardel’s Expedient Afterlife So who was Carlos Gardel? Or, better, what is Carlos Gardel? He was, of course, a singer and musician, one of the world’s “great voices” regardless of style, language, genre, or nationality (Del Barco 2010). He is also a keystone figure in the musical and social history of tango, not just a highpoint of musical excellence in the genre but someone who defined its core features and tropes, musical and otherwise. For many aficionados Gardel is tango, a cultural icon that still inspires seemingly limitless enthusiasm among dedicated fans. As such, he also serves as a point of reference for collective identifications in Argentina, though this may be no more profound than briefly passing by the crackle of his voice while searching out another radio station, and should certainly not be taken as directly correlating with any singular notion of Argentine identity (Grimson 2006). Nevertheless, the inexhaustible admiration that many still hold for Gardel has fi rmly enshrined him in the pantheon of cultural idols in Argentina and effectively canonized him as a popular saint (see Meisemer 2008). Of course, the vast majority of Gardel’s fans and admirers, both now and during his lifetime, were never in his presence—physical, spiritual, or otherwise. They know him, instead, through listening to his recordings and viewing his films, through the consumption of his schizophonic voice and image as it has been produced and circulated by the local, national, and international cultural industries for the past one hundred years and more (Feld 1994). Thus, in addition to everything else he is, Gardel is also and always a product to purchase (or pirate) and consume, speaking to the instrumentally economic life of tango that has been a core feature of the genre since its formative moment in the late nineteenth century. The monetary value of these recordings is just one aspect of their social life as cultural commodities (see 9

INTRODUCTION

Coombe 1998). When a knowing fan quips “cada día canta mejor,” he or she means that Gardel’s audio recordings warrant and reward a potentially endless series of repeated listenings over time, a practice that explodes any easy account of the use value versus exchange value of commercial audio recordings. Nevertheless, it is only upon these mediated audiovisual materials that any claims to Gardel’s universal artistic significance and value can be coherently made. This curiously conflates  the price-tagged products of the commercial cultural industries with the “priceless” transcendence of the aesthetic sublime—or, in this case, the economic potential of Gardel as media content and his institutionalization as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. And while he is in many ways an exceptional if not a singular figure, the multiple and multiplying mobilizations and uses of Gardel in contemporary Buenos Aires are firmly representative of the broader phenomena examined in this book. That is: how the value and meaning of musical culture and the arts has come to be defined by their usability within larger social, political, and economic projects. This has arguably gone from being an exceptional curiosity to almost a pillar of so-called common sense regarding the role of culture and the arts in social life in Argentina and beyond,3 underscoring the claim that we are operating in an “age of expediency” where, again following Yúdice, “it is not possible not to make recourse to culture as a resource” (Yúdice 2003, 38). This is not to claim that the many uses of musical culture are historically unprecedented. Tango, for instance, has always been productively used in ways that are congruent with those described here, contributing at different times to the project of national consolidation in Argentina (Bergero 2008), the projection of the nation within global politics and economies (Goertzen and Azzi 1999), the local rearticulation of musical modernism (Azzi and Collier 2000), and current efforts to promote Argentina as a destination for cultural tourism (Dávila 2012). In fact, I would argue that the many uses of contemporary tango music are Buenos Aires are not an anomaly of circumstance, but the historical norm, in Argentina and elsewhere. What I call the “age of expediency” is therefore best thought of as a particular configuration of long-standing interests and tendencies rather than a wholly new historical experience regarding the value and meaning of culture and the arts. It is that configuration, rather than the use of culture as such, that I take to be truly new about expediency as an analytical frame.4 The political implications of this are ambiguous at best. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize from the outset that practical and critical engagement with the expediency of musical 10

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

culture does not represent a capitulation to the profit motives of the cultural industries or the neoliberal machinations of cultural and other policy makers. Nor does it imply a reactionary defense of capital-letter Culture or the Arts against those same forces. The age of expediency is defined not by the eclipse or displacement of one mode of cultural values and meanings by another, but by a general reframing of musical values, meanings, and uses, such that different styles and relationships can become productively synergistic for all sorts of development projects (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). For example, our encounter with Gardel began with a striking instance of popular participation in a shared public culture: the graveside commemoration of the singer’s untimely death and heterogeneous afterlife. Those who go to Chacarita cemetery to participate in this event are differently motivated by their personal dedication (bordering on devotion) to Gardel and his music, which many outside observers fi nd rather curious. Nevertheless, the city government of Buenos Aires has officially recognized this and many other previously informal performative events as an intangible cultural heritage of the city, which both increases their visibility and compounds their value within the public sphere. This recognition, as we shall see below, was motivated less by any particular investment in Gardel as a public figure or in tango as a local form than by a broad if uneven political agenda aimed at addressing issues of social inclusion and cultural rights via culture and cultural-policy making, from which the very notion of tangible and intangible cultural heritage initially emerged.5 In other words, the event in Chacarita cemetery was valuable to policy makers not because of what it commemorates—Gardel—but because it, alongside the many other “parties, celebrations, commemorations, and rituals” documented in the city government’s Atlas, served as an indicator of Buenos Aires’s social, cultural, ethnic, political, and economic diversity. Official recognition of such diversity as embodied in intangible and other modes of cultural heritage is taken as a cornerstone of progressive social policy and good governance in the early twenty-first century. At the same time, this heritage-making project complements and compounds the many other values that Gardel is used to generate in Buenos Aires today, not least of which is the economic value seen in the culture-and- consumption- driven redevelopment of the Abasto neighborhood. For policy makers, that value is measured not only in attendance at the Esquina Carlos Gardel cena show, room occupancy in the Abasto Hotel, or sales figures from the Abasto de Buenos Aires shopping mall, but in rising property values, 11

INTRODUCTION

an expanded tax base, and the broader economic revitalization of the neighborhood as a whole. For many, the postmodern gloss of post-redevelopment Abasto feels like the furthest possible thing from the supposedly genuine popular culture of the Chacarita commemoration, almost begging for dismissals from scholarly experts like Mónica Lacarrieu or Arlene Dávila, who describes the neighborhood as a “Disneyworld of Tango” (2012, 137). Nevertheless, the recent changes in Abasto are equally anchored in the image and idea of Gardel and the lived experience and history of his presence in the neighborhood—that is, in what cannot be described as anything other than “real” cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. At the same time, and unlike the social-inclusion agenda that motivated the Atlas project, the redevelopment of Abasto was more or less deliberately designed to be inaccessible to all but the most affluent consumers, many of whom are foreign tourists. Thus, having euros or U.S. dollars in one’s bank account was effectively a prerequisite for full participation in the complete array of the neighborhood’s cultural offerings, sidestepping the issue of cultural citizenship, rights, and belonging that is at the heart of much heritage-making discourse, especially regarding music (Avelar and Dunn 2011; Weintraub 2009). Here we can begin to see how the conflicts and contradictions that necessarily underlie any and all instances of cultural production can build off one another, accumulating and compounding a multiplicity of values: social, cultural, and economic, among others. In this case, the public institutionalization of Gardel and his legacy (such as converting his historic home into a city-run museum) reinforces private cultural enterprises that are premised in part on wide acknowledgment of Gardel’s transcendent artistry and his historic presence in the Abasto neighborhood. That private development, in turn, is considered a public good, or at least good for the public, in that it draws upon, celebrates, and expands the tangible and intangible values of a shared cultural heritage and improves the quality of life in a once marginalized area of the city. And this synergistic pattern is repeated at the macro level. For instance, a 2007 study by the city government of Buenos Aires’s Cultural Industries Observatory estimated that tango-related activity in Buenos Aires generated some US$450 million of revenue every year and predicted that the sector would only grow in the future (Marchini 2007). Just two years later UNESCO declared tango part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” perhaps the ultimate institutional validation regarding the universal value of situated cultural locality and meaning. 12

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

But who is really benefiting from this synergistic mushrooming of values? As we have already seen, the changes in Abasto are as much about economic exclusivity and cultural exclusion as they are about institutionalizing a shared musical heritage or lifting all of the neighborhood’s economic boats.6 The larger cultural economy of tango in Buenos Aires is similarly uneven, with stark disparities in the distribution of benefits despite the eye-popping numbers supposedly produced by the sector as a whole. The tango guitarist and composer Edgardo González, whose group 34 Puñaladas is the focus of the following chapter, joked with me about this in a casual conversation: “Our group has been very successful, receiving lots of awards and recognitions from the newspapers and elsewhere. When I read that report about tango generating so much money, I had to laugh and ask myself: if tango makes so much money, and I make tango, why don’t I make money? Awards and recognitions are great, but you can’t eat them. If there is so much money in tango, can’t I have just a little bit, please?” (2007). González said this with a laugh, but the situation he described—his situation—isn’t very funny. The fact is that many of the musicians, dancers, and other artists who have dedicated their lives to mastering, maintaining, and innovating tango in Argentina—the supposedly priceless cultural heritage of all humanity—often live extremely precarious lives. Such precariousness is the rule rather than the exception regarding cultural labor in the age of expediency, which more closely resembles the lower rungs of the service economy than any professional policy maker’s rosy-spectacled vision of venerated “tradition bearers.”7 Here we arrive at something of an impasse. On the one hand, calling out these and other structural inequalities amounts to little more than a basic observation about the lived experience of contemporary tango musicians and other cultural workers. On the other hand, attempting to parse who can or cannot claim Gardel, tango, or any other cultural figure or practice as their supposedly real, genuine, or authentic heritage against those whose claims are somehow construed as fake, artificial, or inauthentic leads to a critical and political dead end. Either way, the project of critical music scholarship is left in the now well-settled dust of Abasto’s cultural and economic revitalization via tango and innumerable other projects that have drawn upon and used musical culture in similar ways, in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, in Latin America, and elsewhere. If, as I argue here, the configuration of interests I call the age of expediency has reframed the values and meaning of musical culture and the broader field of cultural production, then 13

INTRODUCTION

we need to reframe our questions accordingly. We can begin by taking our cue from those who are already engaged in these practices: instead of asking, “What is it?” we must ask, “What is done with it? How is it used?” These, I believe, are the key questions regarding musical culture in the age of expediency.

Managerial Regimes and the Uses of Musical Culture Central to addressing these questions is a critical rethinking of the many managerial regimes that have come to define contemporary musical life in Argentina and elsewhere. By “managerial regime” I mean any entity that lays claim to the expediency of musical culture, including the cultural industries and other media corporations, nonprofit and nongovernmental arts organizations, and especially the cultural policies of local and national governments. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, managerial regimes now occupy protagonist roles in the cultural, economic, and political life of music, with management as such operating as a key mode of cultural practice through which these and other domains are engaged. In Buenos Aires, the managerial regimes have interpellated tango as everything from part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage to a purely touristic music “for export,” from a true música popular to a so- called world music as different as any other, from a unique resource for economic development and urban renewal to something that many feel would be better left to the dustbin of history. Faced with this multiplicity, the challenge is not to decide which of these claims represent the real tango, but to understand how and why the managerial regimes can coherently mobilize tango toward such seemingly contradictory ends. Those mobilizations, I argue, account for much of the value, meaning, and power of musical practice today. I propose “managerial regimes” as an analytic category that can productively engage across the multiplying domains of musical practice, production, and value that are gathered and compounded in the age of expediency. For instance, the term can help us locate the very notion of “musical culture” within the many institutional structures and projects that necessarily frame musical practice of any sort. This is helpful because, while the field of ethnomusicology has developed a notoriously expansive view of music as a category of human experience (e.g., Becker 1989), its normative understanding of where relevant instances of musical culture can or should be located has been rather 14

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

circumscribed in practice. Historically, work in the field has tended to focus on particular musicians, musical communities, musical- culture areas, or broader genre cultures over other types of institutional formations such as state cultural policy, the cultural industries, and the work of the nonprofit arts sector, among others. Because of this, such institutions have received relatively scant ethnographic attention from music scholars and are therefore often misunderstood or, worse, almost entirely ignored, despite their absolute centrality to contemporary musical practice and cultural life more broadly. This is true regarding managerial regimes in general, though especially so regarding state engagements with musical culture and the many forms of cultural-policy making that shape musical life today. There are, of course, significant exceptions. Ethnomusicologists have made important contributions to our understanding of how the moment of technological mediation is fraught with conflicts over musical sound, meaning, identification, and the power to shape and represent them, with the recording studio operating as a key site of ethnographic engagement (Meintjes 2003; Samuels 2004; Porcello 2004). There is also increasing interest in the broader use of digital media technologies and the diverse impacts they have had on musical practices around the world (Marshall 2009; Novak 2013; Baker 2015). Others have focused on the structures of the music and other cultural industries, with particular interest in the culture and practice of music piracy, both digital (Dawdy and Bonni 2012) and physical (Larkin 2008; Stobart 2010; Skinner 2012), though directly ethnographic work within the music industries remains rare. Joshua Tucker’s recent work on huayno music in urban Peru is an important departure in this regard, ethnographically tracing the developing contours of the local music industry and showing how media figures such as radio DJs do not simply circulate music but play a fundamental role in shaping musical sound, interpretation, meaning, and value (Tucker 2013). Outside of work on the commercial cultural industries, there is increasing interest on what I call the heritage-making project, especially the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage program, which is the focus of my fourth chapter here (see Howard 2012). Ethnomusicologists are often directly involved in heritage-making projects, either as evaluators (Seeger 2009) or as advocates, making these projects a naturalized—if fraught—site for participant observation. Work on heritage making dovetails with a growing literature on the formal politics of music, including issues of cultural rights (Weintraub and Yung 2009), citizenship (Avelar and Dunn 2011), and the broader politics of musi15

INTRODUCTION

cal place and belonging in changing urban contexts (Sharp 2014; Gray 2013; Feld 2012). Less ethnographic work is directly concerned with the functioning of governments and matters of cultural-policy making in ethnomusicology, though some music scholars have done significant work in this area (an early example is Born 1995), and the literature on it has grown significantly in recent years, much of it focused on Latin American contexts (Baker 2014; Guilbault 2007; Moore 2006). My notion of managerial regimes both contributes to and attempts to draw new connections among these different scholarly concerns. The term, as I use it, is meant to encompass the moment of mediation as much as the institutionalizations of the heritage-making project, the development and elaboration of state cultural policies as much as the workings of the commercial cultural industries, and the profit motives of capitalist cultural production as much as the alternative discourses of value mobilized by the nonprofit arts sector. One of my main goals in using the term “managerial regime” is to simply bring these issues and institutions more directly into the foreground of scholarly debate, something that we not only can but must engage if we hope to account for the tremendous power of music in social life and history, both now and in the past. Aside from its descriptive use, the term also suggests certain analytical tacks for scholarly engagement with these institutional formations and is therefore meant to serve as a broader critical tool. With its emphasis on management as a mode of action rather than institutionalization and organizational structure per se, the term recognizes from the outset that these regimes, while capable of wielding tremendous power, are themselves internally diverse and contested. “The state,” as one of my interlocutors put it, “is formed by human beings” (e.g., Sharma and Gupta 2006). The same can be said of the cultural industries and other media corporations, where, for instance, the personal tastes and sometimes subconscious prejudices of executive-level managers can shape the style and diversity of “content” that is produced and circulated by even the largest institutions in the freest of markets (Negus 1999). Nevertheless, these institutions are often represented as monolithic hegemons whose agency exceeds that of their human managers. This is due in part, I believe, to the practical difficulties of gaining ethnographic access to these institutions (Ortner 2010), the personal tastes and politics of individual scholars and particular scholarly communities (Frith 1992), and the lingering attitude of refusal that still permeates much critical music scholarship regarding the workings of the commercial cultural industries, governmental policy making, and the broader “ide16

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

ological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1971), which are often imagined as being outside of or even antithetical to idealized formulations of music in social life (e.g., Turino 2008). I argue that state cultural policy, the cultural industries, and other managerial regimes should not be considered static entities within broader narratives of domination and resistance. They should instead be seen as dynamic sites of strategic engagement within which various actors—in this case politicians, city functionaries, artists and musicians, business owners, nongovernmental organizations, and general consumers/citizens, and so on—can play out their “serious games” (Ortner 2006, 129–30). This practice- oriented perspective underlines the point that the many uses of musical culture I describe here are not determined by market logics alone. Practice theory is premised on a dialectical approach to social reproduction whereby individual practices or shifts in material conditions can produce unexpected consequences that are productive and sometimes transformational (Bourdieu 1977). At the same time, social agents “are always involved in, and can never act outside of, the multiplicity of social relations in which they are enmeshed,” such that it is “virtually impossible to imagine that the agent is free, or is an unfettered individual” (Ortner 2006, 130). Therefore, realizing radical alternatives regarding the value, meaning, and use of musical culture in the age of expediency is not simply a matter of everyone getting together and changing their minds. Considered from this perspective, the idea of managerial regimes also forces us to acknowledge that cultural management is also and always a mode of cultural practice, and therefore very much open to the analytical tools of critical music scholarship. Any practical claims on the expediency of musical culture are implicitly based on an idea that has long been a centerpiece of critical musical scholarship: that musical culture is fundamentally social. One of the core contributions of contemporary ethnomusicological thought is the idea that music does not “signify something outside of itself, a reality, the truth,” but rather functions as “an interactive social context, a conduit for other forms of interaction” (Erlmann 1999, 6). Recognizing this not only provides a productive opening for scholarly intervention in these issues, but also helps explain why music in particular has come to occupy such a privileged position within these wider transformations, not potentially but necessarily implicated in the many managerial regimes that have come to define musical life in the age of expediency. The ultimate goal of this project, then, is not to simply demonstrate the scope and range of contested cultural politics regarding tango in Buenos Aires, the mate17

INTRODUCTION

rial consequences of which remain very real, but to outline the mechanisms through which musical values and meanings are made subject to expedient claims. Central to this is recognizing that the fundamental sociality of music cuts both ways. Managerial regimes not only cultivate and use the many new values of musical culture in the age of expediency, but actively shape music and musical life as such, with transformations in institutional politics directly affecting the conceptualization and practice of musical forms. At the same time, whatever power managerial regimes wield in shaping social, political, and economic life via expedient claims on musical culture is ultimately derived from the collective values and shared meanings that are invested in musical culture as social practice. Thus the seemingly intangible matters of musical form, style, and history are inextricably and reciprocally linked not only to the cultural politics of meaning and representation, but to the material realities and instrumental politics of cultural production, the cultural industries, cultural-policy making, and beyond.

Aural and Ethnographic Orientations But what is this thing called “tango?” As you might have guessed by now, there is no simple definition to point to, and even if there were, I would be reluctant to mobilize it here (however, see Fain 2010 and Gallo 2011; see also Schwartz-Kates 2012).8 That said, it is important to establish some common ground for what follows, especially regarding the relationship between tango music and tango dance. Musically, tango is one of the twentieth century’s most elaborated and influential forms of global popular music, with a large and varied repertoire, a rich vocabulary of styles, and more than a century’s worth of subgenres and influences, much of which will be detailed in the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people who are involved with tango today participate in tango as a form of dance. This is true, too, of the much larger group that happens to encounter tango in the course of daily life, usually via the mass media. Musical sound is often but not always integral to these mediated representations of tango. The early film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino’s (1895–1926) famous performance of an elaborately stylized (and largely fantastical) tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a silent film from 1921, comes to mind in this regard. While clearly a product of its technological time, the separation of sound and movement in Valentino’s performance symbolizes 18

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

a greater disconnect between tango music and tango dance, a disconnect that has become a defining feature of the genre as it is usually practiced today. This was not always the case. In the 1940s and 1950s, during what is now called the “golden age” of tango in Argentina, tango was a massive-scale form of participatory popular culture centered on social dancing to live music (see chapter 2), somewhat akin to the big band or swing era in jazz. Following the end of the golden age, those who continued to dance tango (and nearly everyone who has been attracted to tango dance since that time, in Argentina and elsewhere) almost always danced to a large but limited selection of historical audio recordings made during the golden age. This is the common practice to this day at tango social- dance events known as milongas. Tango musicians continued to produce and perform after the end of the golden age, but their music was usually not danced to. It was instead aimed at a dedicated niche audience of focused critical listeners. Thus the broad-stroked history of tango since the mid-twentieth century essentially follows a trajectory opposite that of American jazz. Whereas the participatory popular culture of big-band swing dancing was later displaced, at least in terms of critical favor, by bebop and other forms of modern jazz for listening during and after World War II, social dancing to historical audio recordings became and remains the primary mode of engagement with tango, with live musical performance and especially listening- oriented musical experimentation becoming much less common.9 There are many significant exceptions to this trend, and it is important to recognize that there have been dance- oriented and listeningoriented tendencies within tango going back to the genre’s formative moment in the late nineteenth century. It is also important to recognize that tango encompasses much more than just music and dance, including historically significant developments in verbal art and poetry, literature, visual art, film, fashion and design, and much more (see Miller 2014). Still, it is difficult to overstate the current disconnect between tango music and tango dance, at least as I encountered it during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires. Some musicians and groups at the time were deliberately trying to reinsert live musical performance into dancing contexts, having a tango band trade sets with the more typical DJ performance of historical audio recordings at a milonga, for example. On one such occasion I watched as dancers arrived at a well-known milonga, and as soon as they noticed that a stage was set up for a band to play live music they immediately turned around and left—before the band began playing or even took the stage. I later had the chance 19

INTRODUCTION

to ask a different group of dedicated tango dancers about this refusal to engage with live musical performance, and they explained that they found live music distracting. With experience, I was told, tango dancers internalize the musical details of the historical audio recordings typically played at milongas to such a degree that even the slightest departure from them can throw off their concentration and thereby interfere with the pleasure of the dance. Thus the disconnect between tango music and tango dance reflects less some inherent aversion to live tango music than a particular mode of embodied listening that tango dancers value and cultivate, a mode in which matters of musical liveness are simply not privileged.10 What this means for us here is that almost all of the musical contexts explored in the chapters that follow are just that: musical.11 Most of the artists described here do not play dance music, and those that do are almost never actually danced to in performance contexts. This is not to say that tango music is somehow peripheral to the “real” world of tango dance, much less that the two domains are actively opposed to one another. For the most part, audiences for tango music and audiences for tango dance simply do not overlap very much and seem to be largely uninterested in one another. At the same time, we should not allow the many real differences between tango music and tango dance to obscure their fundamental sameness as cultural resources in the age of expediency. The primary ethnographic research for this project was conducted between 2004 and 2007, including a stretch of thirteen continuous months between 2006 and 2007 and shorter follow-up trips to Argentina in 2012 and 2014. The rise and generally enthusiastic embrace of social media on the part of the musicians and managers I write about here during this same time period allowed me to maintain relationships and keep up with what was going on in Buenos Aires in ways that would have been impossible when I first began this project. Nevertheless, and as is the case with all ethnographic research, what I present here is limited to the time in which it took place. Many significant musical changes have occurred since I conducted my primary fieldwork, not the least of which is the rise of a younger generation of tango musicians, bandleaders, and composers that looks to many of the artists described here as points of reference, examples to be emulated or avoided depending on their artistic goals and orientations. Thus, while this book is about contemporary tango music, it is not up to date. Nor is it comprehensive. There were and are a wide array of artistically and historically significant musicians and musical tendencies that I do not 20

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describe here. I was fortunate enough to be able to work with some of these artists during my research, but I have been unable to incorporate what I learned from them directly into this text. Others I know only through their performances, recordings, Web sites, or other media discourse. And there certainly were and are many others of which I am entirely unaware. As the unnamed protagonist in Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer” reports back to his supervising professor, “The secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself” (Borges [1969] 1999, 335). In that spirit, I present this book not as a revelation of the “secret” of contemporary tango but as a narration of the paths I walked while having my particular questions in mind. Those paths were variously cleared or closed to me based on my ethnographic aptitudes, scholarly and artistic interests, economic resources, and personal identifications and subjectivity, not to mention the patience and goodwill of the many interlocutors with whom I had the privilege of being able to work on this project. My identifications, in particular, were largely chosen for and imposed upon me, fundamentally framing who I am and what I am able to do both as a researcher in the field and as a writer here on the page. All of what you read here, then, was and is shaped by the uneven distribution of power and its articulation via the lived experience of race, class, gender, generation, and formal political subjectivity and (cultural) citizenship. It is also structured by the long history of political conflict and economic inequality that have defined the encounter between the United States and Latin America going back to the Monroe Doctrine if not earlier, as well as the more immediate history of crisis and change that has characterized the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Argentina and elsewhere.

Negotiating Musical Values in a Context of Crisis Much of what I observed in Buenos Aires and describe here is entirely congruent with the transformations in economic, social, and political life wrought by the expansion of neoliberal economic and social policies over the last decades of the twentieth century. Neoliberalism is the theory that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 2). In Argentina, the implementation of 21

INTRODUCTION

neoliberal policies entailed “wholesale privatizations, deregulations of all kinds including those tending to the fully fledged ‘flexibilization’ of labor markets, and an indiscriminate ‘opening’ to the world economy” (Teubal 2004, 174). The development of neoliberal economic and social policies was often the condition of loan guarantees from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and was enthusiastically implemented by a succession of Argentine presidential administrations over the last decades of the twentieth century, particularly that of Carlos Menem (b. 1930, served as president 1989–99) (Blustein 2005). These policies ran directly counter to long-standing trends in Argentine economic and social policy, which had been characterized by robust governmental involvement going back to the first half of the twentieth century and earlier (Rocchi 2005). Argentina had been an early adopter of import substitution industrialization, a development strategy embraced by many Latin American countries in the wake of the global depression of the 1930s and the economic disruptions of World War II (Chasteen 2011). Import substitution industrialization aimed to foster the domestic production of finished consumer products, substituting those products for previously imported equivalents within the local marketplace and thereby decreasing the “dependency” of these postcolonial states and their largely export- of-raw-materialsdriven economies on the whims of international purchasers. The development of import substitution industrialization policies had a profound impact on the economy, society, and culture of Argentina. They prompted, among other things, a huge wave of internal migration from the largely rural provinces to the rapidly expanding industrial peripheries of Buenos Aires and other large cities, effectively manufacturing a massive urban industrial working and consumer class where none had previously existed (Rock 1987). It was this group that formed the core of support that would bring Juan Perón (1895–1974) to political power during and immediately after World War II, first as the minister of labor and later as president (first served 1946– 55). Perón consolidated power by institutionalizing the demands of this emerging working class via the development of robust social-service and welfare programs and by expanding and/or consolidating the state management of Argentine industry, through either the corporatist organization of state-aligned labor unions or the direct nationalization of various industries and utilities (James 1988). The latter included natural gas production, the telephone and other communications networks, the railway system, and the domestic pe22

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

troleum industry, among others, all of which were nationalized during Perón’s first years in office. Building on a longer (though highly uneven) history of economic development and opportunity in Argentina going back to the European immigration boom of the late nineteenth century, these social and economic policies cemented what the Argentine literary critic Beatriz Sarlo has identified as the core triad of Argentine exceptionalism with respect to its Latin American neighbors: literacy through universal education, universal claims to the privileges of citizenship, and access to upward mobility through work and job security (Sarlo 2001a). These are precisely the traits of Argentine experience that the design and implementation of neoliberal economic and social policies more or less systematically dismantled over the last decades of the twentieth century, beginning with the nearly wholesale privatization of the industries and utilities that had been nationalized under Perón. Sarlo’s triad of educational and economic exceptionalism maps onto a trope of Argentine cultural exceptionalism, which has characterized the production, circulation, reception, and use of Argentine arts and culture both domestically and abroad over the course of the twentieth century. This trope has shaped the reception of Argentine arts and identifications to the point of caricature, mobilizing a stereotype of the ultraconfident and hypercosmopolitan “Argentine artist and intellectual” that is usually invoked in a sort of hypocritical register of critique by disdainful outsiders. Such sweeping generalizations gloss over much more than they illuminate. Nevertheless, the cumulative history of Argentine cultural production has certainly shaped collective identifications in ways that are significant for my argument here. The city of Buenos Aires, especially, has been a nexus of transatlantic artistic modernism going back to the late nineteenth century, with a continuous history of internationally significant figures working in all artistic disciplines since that time. The city has also been an important node in the global cultural industries, with historically significant film, publishing, and music industries that have each been regionally dominant at different points. Buenos Aires has been and remains the epicenter of Argentine artistic production, home to almost all significant arts organizations and institutions, many of which are overseen by the municipal or national governments. These and other uses of culture serve as the historical backdrop against which the newer mobilizations of culture operate and are understood in Argentina, helping us articulate how and why culture and the arts have become valued and used in the ways that they are in 23

INTRODUCTION

this context. Acknowledging this background is especially important regarding the work of the managerial regimes, in that collective identifications shaped by the trope of cultural exceptionalism continue to influence governmental and other policy making toward the arts and culture in significant ways despite the larger transformations of the neoliberal turn. Taken as a whole, however, it is simply undeniable that the rise of neoliberalism has greatly exacerbated issues of economic inequality and social exclusion in Argentina, with the state not just “getting out of the way” of corporate and individual entrepreneurial activity within supposedly free markets but, according to some critics, actively enabling the upward distribution of wealth via tax policy and other managerial strategies (Harvey 2005, 16). It is worth noting that some aspects of the neoliberal project were generally perceived as being largely beneficial by many Argentines. For example, prior to privatization in 1990, it was common for Argentine consumers to have to wait four years or more to have a new line installed by the national telephone company. The problem was entrenched to such a degree that properties with preexisting telephone service could command significantly higher prices within the realestate market than those that did not. Telecom Argentina, one of the private companies that took over the previously public telephone network (itself a consortium of domestic and international business interests) largely turned this situation around, dramatically reducing wait times for installation and repairs (Cook 1999). Still, neoliberal success stories like that of Telecom Argentina need to be taken with several grains of salt, given that the company’s road to “efficiency” and profitability began with a radical downsizing at the moment of privatization. This pattern was repeated throughout neoliberal Argentina, where privatizations of this sort quickly became de rigueur. Even I, an emissary from the United States—the undisputed hegemon of global neoliberalism—was sometimes shocked by the sheer extent of these privatizations. The Buenos Aires subway system had been privatized. The freeways had been privatized. Even street signs had been privatized, with brightly colored strips of advertisements jumping out at the eye immediately beneath the names of the intersecting streets. Those advertisements announced how firmly ensconced neoliberalism had become in Argentina, just as clearly as they announced what corner you were on. They also stood as a superficial sign of the much deeper transformation in Argentine economic, social, and cultural life following the neoliberal turn, in which large swaths of the population had effectively been rendered disposable, long-term patterns of inclusion 24

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

and exclusion were greatly exacerbated, and the very meaning of what it was to be a citizen had been significantly transformed. The development and implementation of these policies fundamentally reframed the relationship between the state and its citizenry, questioning longstanding assumptions about what the state should be and do as such (Grimson and Kessler 2005). The contradictions of this system were brought violently to the surface in the Argentine economic crisis of late 2001, which punctuated and has since come to define the country’s larger encounter with neoliberalism. The economic crisis caused tremendous hardship in Argentina, the severity of which is difficult to overstate: immediately following the crisis the nation’s GDP dropped 15 percent, the open unemployment rate rose to 25 percent, and the number of households living in poverty reached nearly 50 percent (Felix 2002, 4), making it statistically worse than the Great Depression as experienced in the United States (Knight and Drinot 2014). Along with the tremendous economic hardship and human suffering it caused, the 2001 Argentine economic crisis also sparked intense debate about the larger costs and benefits of neoliberal economic ideology and policy making, of which Argentina was both an early adherent and an early victim. In terms of direct responsibility for the crisis, Argentines often faulted international economic institutions that promoted neoliberal policies and the local politicians who implemented them, and they tend to believe that such policies were implicitly biased toward private and largely international economic interests over the justiciable rights and welfare of Argentine citizens. The IMF and other international stakeholders cited local mismanagement and “insufficient political support and resolve” in Argentina as the primary causes of the crisis (Daseking et al. 2004, 4). Regardless of who or what was ultimately to blame, the 2001 crisis made it painfully clear that neoliberalism, as a mode of economic management, could not—or would not—deliver upon its promises of shared prosperity in Argentina, echoing the larger pattern of disaster capitalism that has defined the practice of neoliberalism at the global level (Klein 2007). Taking a longer view, the radically uneven economic history of Argentina since independence can be read as a story of perpetual tumult, in which the 2001 economic crisis is just another episode, though it is frankly cynical to naturalize this or any other instance of economic catastrophe. But whether we see it as the unprecedented exception or the horrifying norm, the 2001 economic crisis left a bitter residue that coats almost everything I discuss in the chapters that follow, includ25

INTRODUCTION

ing the musical details of contemporary tango. This is not to suggest that there is a directly causal relationship between musical practices and economic processes, though the economic crisis undoubtedly influenced the work of artists who lived through it in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. It is to say that the 2001 economic crisis and the broader neoliberal transformation of which it was a part effectively reframed fundamental understandings about what musical culture is and what it does—what it can be used to do—not only in the artistic realm, but in the broader domains of society, politics, and the economy. This can be seen even more directly in the tremendous urgency the 2001 economic crisis added to the cultural- development projects, both social and economic, that a select group of cultural-policy makers in Buenos Aires and elsewhere were already beginning to imagine, articulate, and implement in the years leading up to the crisis. At that time, and as part of the broader neoliberal project outlined above, culture generally and music specifically came to be seen as an increasingly critical area for governmental intervention and investment for at least two distinct types of policy makers. On the one hand, social justice– oriented policy makers believed that diversity- driven cultural policies could meaningfully address the existing crisis of social and economic exclusion in Argentina. They developed a wide array of cultural policies and programs that were designed to alleviate such exclusions and the problems they were believed to produce, encouraging cultural participation amongst historically excluded communities and expanding the cultural representation of those communities in the public sphere. On the other hand, the 2001 economic crisis gave a tremendous boost to those policy makers who had already recognized the value of culture as a resource for economic development in the city of Buenos Aires, or, more specifically, those who recognized the growth potential of the local cultural industries as a sector of the city’s economy. The productive capacity of that sector was such that it could not be sidestepped, downplayed, or ignored by local policy makers, especially following the 2001 economic crisis and regardless of their personal understanding or appreciation of the arts. Thus the idea that culture, for everything else that it was or could be, was first and foremost an economically productive industry began to spread and take root throughout the city government (see chapter 5). We will meet some of the key players in these efforts and hear their stories in the chapters that follow. For now it is important only to recognize how, in the age of expediency, the aesthetic, economic, and so26

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

cial dimensions of cultural practice and value are taken to be entirely congruous and, indeed, synergistic. This echoes but goes beyond the “consent” of Gramscian cultural hegemony, where a “governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates” via cultural, political, and economic forms and the workings of civil society (Eagleton 2007, 112; Gramsci 1971). Nor is it simply another instance of popular art retaining alternative social values despite being produced within the fully commercialized cultural industries or elaborately managed governmental contexts (Frith 1978; Denning 2015). It reflects, instead, a genuine reframing of the field of cultural production following the neoliberal turn. That reframing is characterized by a mushrooming of cultural and artistic values of all sorts, not a reduction of noneconomic values to the terms of economic development and exchange. Thus an increase in the diversity of media content and representations would also be indicative of a robust market for local cultural production, just as an increase in the number and productivity of local cultural firms would ostensibly also mean that broader, larger, and more diverse audiences are hearing a wider and more diverse array of artistic voices. Given these conceptual and practical synergies, by the time the 2001 economic crisis hit, and certainly in the years immediately following it, a broad managerial consensus emerged among a critical mass of municipal policy makers that understood culture as the city’s “most valuable resource.”

The Uses of Culture, Past and Present This managerial consensus was a product of and response to a number of interconnected cultural, political, economic, and historical circumstances on the part of a wide variety of acting subjects, not only politicians, cultural-policy makers, and governmental employees, but also musicians, artists, and operatives within the cultural industries, media, and other managerial regimes. It is therefore best thought of as a zone of overlapping, conflictive, and in some cases directly contradictory interests rather than an enforced imposition of one cultural ideology and institutional vision over others. This is not to suggest that the wider field of cultural production was or is level for these and other actors, but to underscore the point that the many values and uses of musical culture described here were not and are not the inevitable outcome of these circumstances: this is not simply what “happens” to culture and the arts under neoliberalism.12 At the same time, it is important 27

INTRODUCTION

to recognize that there are many forms, practices, and uses of musical culture that fit only unevenly within this managerial consensus. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, for example, describes what she calls “disencounters” between the allure of music and the expediency of culture in two Colombian case studies, showing that “musicians often privilege other values of music—aesthetic desires, stylistic options, and so on—as primary epistemic and affective reasons for determining their choices and what they find valuable in music” (2013, 12). The same is certainly true of contemporary tango musicians working in Buenos Aires, whose many uses of tango cannot be entirely accounted for within managerial discourses of productivity, as we shall see throughout the chapters that follow. Equally relevant for my case is Ochoa Gautier’s discussion of champeta, “an urban, electronic, self-produced dance music” from Colombia that is characterized by “the difficulty that institutions of the state, different types of formal music production projects, and even the champeta musicians themselves have had in harnessing the force of this music to the performative effect of an Afro- descendant identity beyond the specific confines of the black neighborhoods of Cartagena” (Ochoa Gautier 2013, 20–21). This difficulty resonates with the case of cumbia, a massively popular and somewhat polemical genre of contemporary dance music that was without doubt the most popular form of music in urban Argentina at the time of my fieldwork. A subgenre known as cumbia villera (slum cumbia) had been especially polemic, causing moral panics among mainstream Argentine audiences akin to the initial reactions many U.S. audiences had to gangsta rap in the late 1980s (Quinn 2004; Vila and Semán 2007). For these and other reasons, the city government of Buenos Aires considered cumbia essentially unsupportable, despite the very real economic potential that it clearly represented at the time (see Luker 2010). This seeming contradiction highlights a managerial disencounter between the many values of musical culture as an expedient resource and long-standing ideologies within the city government, other managerial regimes, and Argentine culture more broadly that continued to privilege historically entrenched cultural hierarchies and subject positions to the exclusion of others. Recognizing the disencounters represented by champeta, cumbia, and any number of other popular genres can help us map the highly uneven terrain of cultural production in contemporary Latin America and elsewhere. We should not, however, mistake them for modes of resistance in any straightforward sense. These musical practices do not

28

ON THE VALUES OF MUSIC IN E XPEDIENT ARGENTINA

represent some kind of ground-up resistance to the top- down structures of neoliberal capitalism, however that dynamic might be understood, and highlighting them does not represent a wishful return to that analytic paradigm. To put it starkly: the story of musical culture in the age of expediency, like the story of neoliberalism itself, is, for better or (often) worse, not the story of haves and have-nots, but the story of haves and have-mores, with the have-nots rendered silent and almost entirely excluded from the sphere of official cultural politics. Thus, and to put it in more hopeful terms, the critical task is not to look for vestiges of domination and resistance within the reconfigured field of cultural production, but to understand the musical and other dynamics through which those who are included and those who are excluded are located within the larger transformational tumult that is neoliberalism. The notion of expediency is analytically useful precisely because it helps highlight the workings of those dynamics, moving us immediately and definitively beyond matters of identifying, defending, or decrying a particular type of value and meaning among or against others—economic versus aesthetic, social versus cultural, and so on. It instead focuses us squarely on artistic production and management as a mode of practice within what are clearly all- encompassing structures of power. This applies as much to managerial governance and cultural-policy making as it does to matters of artistic production and the culture of genre, helping us connect worlds of activity, practice, value, and meaning that are otherwise too easily separated or conceptually opposed to one another, if not entirely subsumed by larger critical commitments. Despite the transformational tumult I have emphasized here, the cumulative details of my case study speak to connection and continuity among the managerial regimes as much as rupture and change, underscoring my emphasis on “the age of expediency” as a new configuration of long-standing tendencies following the neoliberal turn rather than a categorical departure from previous historical experience. This also echoes the dual trend of detachment and connection that I use to make sense of musical culture as an artistic and productive practice in the age of expediency. In this case, the dual trend of detachment and connection enables tango to be coherently incorporated into an everwidening network of complexly overlapping and often contradictory plans and projects with little (if any) resistance on the part of individuals and institutions that have famously intervened in past developments they deemed musically undesirable for whatever reason. These

29

INTRODUCTION

stubborn commitments still reverberate in the active mystification that continues to permeate many discussions of tango and its history. Some organizations and individuals directly counter this legacy, connecting their work to carefully revised narratives of tango’s musical and social history. Others cultivate a detached position with respect to these discourses, seeking to circulate not as “tango” but as “world music” or even “classical music” precisely because it frees them from the presumptive expectations that many audiences—especially dedicated tango audiences—still bring with them when they seek out “tango.” All of these artists and organizations draw upon and use specifically musical sounds and processes, speaking to the enduring power of music as an expressive social practice. Their work also harnesses the power of music as a productive force, invariably using music to further a wide variety of institutionalizing efforts. These efforts encompass the traditional managerial regimes (such as the recorded music industry and state cultural-policy making) as well as more alternative institutions such as newly formed nonprofit arts organizations and truly underground arts and social movements. The intensity and variety of these institutionalizing efforts have effectively reframed tango as a musical practice, blurring the line between music and managerial regime such that it is difficult to locate where one domain of activity ends and the other begins, if there even is an essential difference between them. Here we can begin to see how, in the age of expediency, the many values and meanings of tango have become commensurate with the genre’s usability. Far from a static national genre or uncontested symbol of Argentina, tango has been and remains a historically informed yet essentially open- ended zone of engagement in which a diverse group of intention-filled actors can stake their expedient claims, musical and otherwise. I ultimately argue that this is true not only of tango but of musical culture in general, both now and in the past. In other words, what I describe here regarding the many uses of contemporary tango music in Buenos Aires is not an anomaly of circumstance but, in fact, the historical norm, in Argentina and elsewhere. Thus, although this book is steeped in the ethnographic details of my particular case study, I present it as an invitation to rethink these issues in other times and places, beginning with the many so- called national genres of popular music in Latin America. The key questions, again, are not “What is samba?” but “What is done with samba?” Not “What is son?” but “What is done with son?” Not “What is merengue?” but “What is done with merengue?” Not “What is mariachi?” but “What is done with mariachi?” How is musical culture used? 30

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Conclusion: Turning on the Tango Machine Locating the above claims in a nuanced ethnographic account that emphasizes the complex lived experience of musical culture in the age of expediency as encountered in contemporary tango music in Buenos Aires, this book addresses some of the core conceptual challenges facing critical music scholarship and proposes new avenues for scholarly intervention in these issues. Chapter 1 examines the details of musical practice and meaning among contemporary tango artists in Buenos Aires, whose collective activity is defined less by a dominant musical style than by a self- conscious return to tango as a medium for reexamining and rearticulating the genre’s historical tropes and meanings against contemporary experiences and concerns. These musical practices are then located in expanding spheres of managerial engagement and intervention, from loosely organized arts and social movements that envision themselves as genuine cultural and political alternatives to the claims of more official managerial regimes (chapter 2) to nonprofit arts organizations located on the shifting border of the public and private spheres (chapter 3) to direct governmental engagements with tango as a resource for cultural, social, and economic development via the institutionalization of tango as a part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” (chapter 4) and government intervention within the local cultural industries, especially the “independent” music industry (chapter 5). The latter two efforts were differently framed by the idea and discourse of “cultural diversity,” which was then ascendant within cultural-policy-making circles at the local, national, and international levels. For all the contextual detail and historic specificity of this particular case study, I argue that what is described here regarding tango in Buenos Aires is emblematic of musical culture in the age of expediency in general, where the value and meaning of music and the arts are largely defined by their usability within broader social, political, and economic projects. This has important implications for the critical scholarship of music. On the one hand, it means that musical culture can no longer be thought of as an autonomous or transcendent field of cultural production, if it ever was. It is, always and everywhere, a complex and contradictory zone of engagement for the making of claims on musical expediency, including questions of aesthetic meaning and value. On the other hand, institutional claims on the expediency of musical culture cannot be adequately accounted for if they are thought 31

INTRODUCTION

of as occasional or even anomalous contexts for music and music making. The work of the managerial regimes is instead a central means by which the values of musical culture are cultivated, articulated, and animated. At the same time, the relationship between these two domains has also been reconfigured in the age of expediency, such that the cultural aspects of musical life cannot be thought of as oppositional or antagonistic to the expedient realm in any analytically straightforward way. Instead, the two domains are effectively interdependent, with musical practices and meanings of all sorts necessarily framed by the structures and concerns of the managerial regimes, just as any expedient claims on musical culture are operable and effective only because music has tremendous aesthetic value and meaning in social life and history. The same is true regarding musical culture writ large in the age of expediency, such that the seemingly most minute details of musical form and artistic practice are necessarily and inextricably implicated in a much broader network of managerial intervention, if they are not, indeed, simply another type of expedient claim.

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ONE

Expedient Soundings: The Genre Culture of Contemporary Tango Music It is late at night, well past midnight. We are in the basement performance space of a downtown bar. During the day the streets outside are a cacophony of noise and bustle. Now they are quiet, with little more than the scratch of the wind as it pushes piles of urban dust from one side of the street to the other. The room itself is completely dark, save for the dim spotlight on the singer. The four guitarists arranged behind him are barely visible, illuminated as if by candlelight. It is the perfect setting for hearing a tango story, a story told in song. This one is called “Amablemente” (Nicely). It describes a man who returns to his small, squalid home to find his lover wrapped in another man’s arms. Still, the lyrics continue, without getting worked up, and with great skill, the man dismisses the Don Juan: “You can split, buddy; the man is never guilty in these cases.” Now alone with the girl, as the lilting 3– 3–2 rhythm of the milonga accompaniment pattern picks up slightly, the man asks for his slippers and settles in to relax, as if he had seen nothing at all. The brooding guitars are violently cut off by a sudden, foreshadowing silence. The previously soaring vocal line retreats to a hushed spoken voice: “Catalina,” says the man, “brew me up some tea.” The woman, frightened, follows his orders, while the 33

CHAPTER ONE

man enjoys the flavor of a nice smoke, chattering on about nothing. The guitars quietly return to marking time, with a plodding emphasis on the downbeat. After relaxing with his tea, the man rises up and approaches the woman, drawing her closely to him, covering her forehead with kisses. Then, with great tranquility—amablemente—he stabs her thirty-four times, killing her. The vocalist releases the final line the way we might imagine the murdered woman’s body falling to the floor. The contemporary tango ensemble 34 Puñaladas is made up of of three guitars and guitarrón that accompany a single male vocalist— “an orchestra of tense strings and singer,” as they describe themselves (34punaladas.com.ar). This instrumentation is a classic setting for tango song, going back to the time of Carlos Gardel (1890–1935) and even earlier, though it has been heard only rarely in recent decades. The song itself is generations older than the musicians playing it, but it is now one of their signature pieces. The name of the group, which translates as “34 Stabs,” is taken from the song’s startlingly violent final image. Like the rest of the so- called prison tango repertoire that 34 Puñaladas specializes in, “Amablemente” depicts the lives of the urban poor at the margins of early twentieth-century Argentine society. This was the formative moment of modern urbanity in Argentina, the mundane violence and refined desperation of which have long been exalted in Argentine literature, most famously in the evocative journalism and bleak fiction of Roberto Arlt (1900–1942). Like Arlt’s unflinching journalistic etchings, tango songs from this period examine the tropes of urban life—violence, delinquency, drunkenness, infidelity, poverty, and so on—in such a way that they can be heard as quasi-historical reportages, verbal art, and poetic literature simultaneously. However, by concentrating on this repertoire at a time when the social realities of poverty, violence, and insecurity have returned to Buenos Aires at levels similar to those portrayed in these songs, 34 Puñaladas challenges the comfortable consumption of tango enabled by the passage of time and the gloss of canonization. Their music does not breathe new life into tango as much as conjure it from the dead. Alejandro Guyot, the group’s vocalist, explained this to me in evocative terms: “When I put on my suit, a black suit, to go out and sing [. . .] it is like going back to give life to the anonymous, low-life characters of Buenos Aires. That is what the reinterpretation of these tangos amounts to, a liberation of those ghosts. It is like returning to free the ashes of those forgotten characters, so that they can once again travel across the city of Buenos Aires with the wind”

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(2007). This image of tango as a ghost that occupies the city flirts with hyperbole. There has been a continuous, albeit highly circumscribed, genre culture of tango among dedicated audiences in Buenos Aires going back more than a hundred years. Thus any claim regarding the “death” of tango should be taken with more than a grain of salt (e.g., Zanada 1988 [2006]). Yet, as we saw in the introduction, there is simply no denying the profound disconnect between the niche status of contemporary tango and the long history of mobilizing tango as a national genre in Argentina. For contemporary tango musicians, this dual trend of detachment and connection is not a loss to be mourned, nor is it a contradiction in need of explanation. It is the foundational trope of their historical experience regarding tango and a key part of what has made tango such a productive resource for making artistic work today. This dual trend of detachment and connection is reflected in a vigorous debate regarding the value and meaning of tango in Argentina that took place during the neoliberal transformation of the 1990s and the disaster of the 2001 economic crisis. A new generation of historically informed tango ensembles first emerged at that time, including 34 Puñaladas. These groups drew upon genre conventions, stylistic details, and musical repertoires from previous periods of tango history and creatively incorporated that material into their current artistic work. Rather than producing straightforwardly new or original music, these artists utilized the sound, style, and visual imagery of their historical predecessors as aesthetic templates that would frame or key their musical performances (Bateson 1972 [2000]; Goffman 1974 [1986]; Bauman 1984). Because knowledge of these templates was unevenly shared, the value and meaning of this work came not from the alternately celebratory or anxious positions these artists took with respect to canonized tango history, but from the creative misunderstandings of that history that their music articulated. In this context, music history itself became a charged field of symbolic action in which a variety of contemporary concerns could be productively engaged, not least of which is the contested relevance of that history. Discussing the music of 34 Puñaladas within the broad contours of this context, this chapter introduces us to the genre culture of contemporary tango music in Buenos Aires. In it, I argue that contemporary tango operates as a mode of “expedient sounding,” a means of making productive claims not only on music and the arts, but also on culture, power, history, and politics more broadly. These productive claims are made, in this case, through formal matters of instrumentation, style,

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CHAPTER ONE

performance practice, repertoire, and language, among others. Examining how these artists draw upon and use these musical features will help us understand how and why tango has once again become a valuable resource for meaningful artistic production, something that was by no means inevitable given the larger scope of musical and social history in Argentina. It will also help us understand how and why musical practice itself participates in the larger turn toward usability that characterizes musical culture in the age of expediency and the work of the managerial regimes, a crucial component of the critique that unfolds over the course of the subsequent chapters. On the surface of it, the relationship between musical and managerial use is straightforward. These musicians deliberately use tango to generate a wide variety of values and meanings: musical, social, historical, economic, and so on. Those values and meanings in turn serve as a cornerstone of what makes other expedient claims on tango compelling and, indeed, even possible. Tango is not simply out there waiting to be drawn upon and used, despite the managerial regimes’ metaphorical interpellation of culture as a “natural” or “renewable” resource, which is commonplace in the discourses of cultural-policy making and the commercial cultural industries. It is in fact not a thing at all, but an intangible zone of cultural practice that is creatively conjured anew with every sounding note. This is what Alejandro Guyot means by his image of musical performance as a “liberation of [tango’s] ghosts [. . .] so that they can once again travel across the city of Buenos Aires with the wind.” In framing it this way, I do not mean to perpetuate romanticized notions regarding the moment of musical origination or to propose that the role of “musician” is above or comes before the many other roles that together constitute the field of cultural production regarding contemporary tango in Buenos Aires. I simply mean to recognize that the tango genre would not exist without the genre culture of tango; much less would it serve as the affective foundation of the many expedient projects that mobilize and use tango in Buenos Aires today. The idea of genre culture comes from recent work in popular-music studies, ethnomusicology, and elsewhere. Fabian Holt hears genre culture as a complex amalgamation of social and discursive networks, musical conventions, and the work of the mass and micro media. His perspective is useful because it “stresses the social and historical dimensions that are ignored when categories are defined only in relation to the music itself” (2007, 19). My argument expands the idea of genre culture in two specific ways. First, it places additional emphasis on the 36

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historical relationality of genre. Musical production is not only a mode of artistic creativity within a historically informed social network, but what the Argentine sociologist Elizabeth Jelin (2003, 5) calls a “labor of memory,” something that takes place “when human beings are actively involved in the processes of symbolic transformation and elaboration of meanings of the past.” In other words, the history contained in genre—as repertoire, as canon, as performance practice, and so on— is not “a presence without agency” that is simply received from the past. It is the product of creative work that both generates and transforms that history through a tense process of “acting out” and “working through” (Jelin 2003, 6–7). Secondly, my argument asks us to reconsider the role of place in genre culture, especially regarding the cultivation of musical value and meaning. Tango is no different from other genres in that its every mobilization is located within a network of “communicative relations between the many different agents that create and sustain the genre’s identity,” a network whose many nodes, be they individual fans, musicians, groups, communities, or scenes, are always located in space and time (Holt 2007, 20–21). The primary site here is the city of Buenos Aires, the place where tango initially developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and where the musicians I examine are physically situated.1 Buenos Aires is also relentlessly celebrated in tango itself, exalted in innumerable tango songs from across the history of the genre. Thus the city of Buenos Aires is not just a physical site, a node in a global network of artistic affinity, the location of a particular musical scene, or even a charged cultural geography. It is a key frame for the production and reception of tango in artistic practice, the stage upon which the drama of the genre is enacted, and a physical means by which the past and the present of tango are juxtaposed and mediated.2 Taken together, these twin emphases on place and historicity carry some explanatory power regarding how and why tango has once again become a productive zone of artistic engagement in Buenos Aires today, at least for 34 Puñaladas and their peers. It also helps us understand how artistic concerns with tango can intervene in broader matters of history and politics in Argentina. Long celebrated as the so- called national genre of Argentina, the performance conventions and musical codes associated with tango have been taken as a sonic boundary between those who are included and those who are excluded from the imaginary space of the musical nation. Genres like tango are therefore not just frames for historically and physically situated modes of shared 37

CHAPTER ONE

artistic practice, but powerful discourses of place and history that exalt certain figures, instances, or subjectivities while silencing others. The hows and whys of this are highly contested, but this lived correlation between musical style and social inclusion nevertheless speaks to the value of musical culture as a resource for aesthetic forms, social sensibilities, modes of cultural politics, and other expedient claims. Following a brief introduction to the group and its members, I begin with a discussion of the artistic concerns that motivated 34 Puñaladas’ initial interest in tango. Their engagements with the genre have been highly self- conscious and clearly charged with the weight of the contested histories outlined above. I then focus on the musical details of 34 Puñaladas’ artistic project, with particular attention to matters of instrumentation, style, and performance practice. These and other features of their music speak directly to the group’s concern with the historicity of tango, which is widely shared among their peers. They also speak to how musical style can be mobilized as a resource for the creative rearticulation of social identifications. I then examine how these concerns are further compounded by the group’s focus on tango canción (tango song), a historically distinct subgenre within the otherwise largely instrumental tradition of tango music. Their emphasis on tango canción raises additional questions regarding the status of language in tango. Central to this is the use of lunfardo, a slang vocabulary of Spanish unique to Buenos Aires that was commonly used in historical tango lyrics, especially the so- called prison tango repertoire in which 34 Puñaladas have specialized (Conde 2014). All of this is framed by the dual trend of detachment and connection that is at the heart of 34 Puñaladas’ musical project and the genre culture of contemporary tango music as a whole. As we shall see, the group is deeply engaged with but ultimately critical of the hegemonic construction of the tango tradition as they have encountered it. That tradition has historically located the value and meaning of tango in its exceptionalism and essential difference vis-à-vis other forms and styles, places and times. Against this, 34 Puñaladas refigure the relationship between the sounds, styles, and sensibilities of tango and other decidedly non-tango forms, genres, and practices. In doing so, they have made tango into something that can, in its musical sameness, meaningfully account for an expanding range of historical, social, and political difference. This conflation of artistic practice and cultural politics is part and parcel of the larger mushrooming of values and meanings that characterizes the use of musical culture in the age of expediency.

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34 Puñaladas and the Genre Culture of Tango Treinta y cuatro Puñaladas was formed in March 1998 and has since gone through several personnel changes. At the time of my primary fieldwork, the group featured Alejandro Guyot as vocalist, Augusto Macri, Edgardo González, and Juan Lorenzo on nylon-stringed acoustic guitars, and Hernan Reinaudo on the Argentine guitarrón,3 a slightly larger-bodied six-string guitar that was incorporated into tango from Argentine folkloric music (it is not related to the Chilean and Mexican instruments of the same name).4 As of 2015, the group has released five full-length recordings, Tangos carcelarios (2002), Slang (2005), Argot (2006), Bombay BsAs (2009), and Astiya (2014). In 2011 they released a DVD titled De la bolsa al ruedo, which documented a live performance. With the exception of their first recording, which was released on the Argentine jazz- oriented record label BAU Records, all of their recordings have been released by Acqua Records, an independent record label in Buenos Aires that specializes in contemporary Argentine music in a variety of genres, including tango, folklore, and rock, among others.5 The group’s recorded work has been greeted with significant critical acclaim from the outset. Tangos carcelarios was recognized as one of the best contemporary tango recordings of the year by two of the most prominent daily newspapers in Argentina, Clarín and La Nación. Their two subsequent albums, Slang and Argot, were both nominated for the Premio Gardel de la Música, the Argentine equivalent of a Grammy Award.6 Gabriel Plaza, an influential Argentine music journalist, wrote that the album Bombay BsAs, the group’s first to consist entirely of original compositions, was “not just another recording for the group,” but “the beginning of another era” for tango in general (Plaza 2009). The ensemble performs regularly in Buenos Aires and has toured internationally, including appearances in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Australia, the United States, and Canada. But despite the extent of their performance schedule and the enthusiasm they have generated among critics, at the time of my fieldwork the group’s members were unable to support themselves through work with 34 Puñaladas alone and had to supplement their incomes by other means. Much of this was still musical. The guitarist Edgardo González composed and recorded music for films, taught private tango guitar and composition lessons, and occasionally worked as a record producer. Hernan Reinaudo kept a rigorous schedule as one of the most

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active freelance tango guitarists in Buenos Aires. Outside of music, the guitarist Juan Lorenzo had a significant parallel career as a visual artist, and vocalist Alejandro Guyot worked as a German-language instructor in an Argentine high school. All expressed hopes that they would someday earn their living through work with the ensemble. Treinta y cuatro Puñaladas emerged at a key moment in the recent history of tango music in Buenos Aires, part of a cohort of now historically important ensembles that first came together in the mid- and late 1990s. Along with 34 Puñaladas, these groups included El Arranque (formed in 1996), an instrumental septet with vocalist that has since become the most well-known and widely acclaimed ensemble of their generation; Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro (formed in 1998), a twelve-member tango “big band” that operates in the mold of the classic tango dance ensembles of the 1940s and ’50s as seen through a punk rock lens; and La Chicana (formed in 1995), a so- called new-form tango ensemble that irreverently fuses tango forms and themes with a variety of Latin American and world popular musics (see Luker 2007). These groups served as the model, inspiration, or incubator for many subsequent ensembles, and there is now a vibrant and diverse genre culture of contemporary tango music in Buenos Aires. This genre culture is not only about music and music making. There is a fluctuating milieu of dedicated tango performance venues. Major newspapers provide relatively consistent coverage of tango, especially recording and performance reviews. Several independent tango media outlets have emerged, including specialized radio programs, print magazines, and Web sites. A number of local independent record labels produce and distribute new recordings on an ongoing basis. Institutional supports for contemporary tango have begun to develop in both the public and private sectors. And there is fledgling academic interest in contemporary tango music (e.g., Liska 2012). Taken together, the collective work of this growing genre culture has arguably repositioned tango in relation to the broader contours of Argentine history, culture, and society, amounting to what some critics have described as a new golden age of tango in Argentina (Bolasell 2011). This notion of a new golden age is of course defined in relation to a previous golden age, which most historians and critics date to the decades straddling World War II, when tango reached its zenith of musical and social popularity in Argentina. Tango later declined to such a degree that it effectively disappeared from popular culture, making little or no impression on the vast majority of contemporary tango musicians as they came of age in the 1980s and ’90s. Thus the grow40

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ing genre culture of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires cannot be accounted for by any continued salience of tango as a national genre. It instead highlights the tremendous impact that contemporary musical work, and the artistic concerns motivating it, has had on these musicians and their peers, audiences, the local media, and the larger cultural milieu of the city. Examining how and why the members of 34 Puñaladas were drawn to tango in the first place can help us understand those concerns and appreciate that impact. It is important to remember that few if any of the musicians active in the current generation had any preexisting, “organic” connection to the genre. Their interest in tango did not develop from listening to tango with their families when they were young, picking up an instrument from an older relative who performed tango, engaging tango in their primary education, or other forms of modern genre acculturation. Some aspects of tango of course have been and remain common cultural currency in Argentina, such as the core repertoire associated with Gardel. But tango certainly did not exist as something that was of interest to young audiences before the intervention of the first contemporary tango groups in the mid- and late 1990s. Because of this, these musicians’ initial engagement with tango was highly selfconscious and deliberate, driven by artistic concerns that developed outside the canonical social and musical histories of tango up to that point. Thus their music did not develop in reaction to the immediate stylistic history of tango, something that built upon or departed from what came before it in a teleological lineage of musical history. It instead reflected their creative responses to what was, in many cases, a more or less accidental discovery of the genre beyond its most generalized clichés. The details of this are different for every individual and group. In the case of 34 Puñaladas, their initial interest in tango was sparked by their previous involvement with rock music, which they saw tango both departing from and curiously reinforcing. This moment was narrated to me in a group interview: Juan Lorenzo (guitar): We got to know one another because we were all playing rock, or punk or folklore. And at the time the group formed, in 1998, we felt like we could find things in tango that we didn’t find in rock. [. . .] Something that spoke to identity in a way these other types of music didn’t. Edgardo González (guitar): Rock in Argentina had been going on for more than forty years at that time, and for that reason it was very cut off from its antiestablishment spirit, its spirit of rebellion. [. . .] So just at the time that rock started to 41

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fall away from that, to establish itself within the system, musicians of our generation saw tango as something that could continue to have that spirit. Agusto Macri (guitar): Especially the tango songs from the 1920s and ’30s. [.  .  .] The stories that were told in the poetry were attractive to us; what the words referred to was attractive. [.  .  .] It was like a forgotten part of history. On the other hand it was a repertoire that was not very familiar to most people, in comparison to other parts of the repertoire that were very well-worn. (34 Puñaladas 2006)

This exchange illustrates the multifaceted set of experiences and concerns that these musicians brought to their initial engagement and subsequent work with tango. Key among these was an artistic attraction to tango as music. Tango was not a part of their musical education and development, but as accomplished musicians they found tango formally compelling and technically challenging. There were also political motivations for their interest in the genre, especially the “tango songs of the 1920s and ’30s,” the prison tango repertoire that they were initially drawn to. This was not because of the actual politics of these songs, which, as we saw in the discussion of “Amablemente” above, are brutally misogynistic and otherwise reactionary in many cases. It was instead because this repertoire spoke to a generalized spirit of rebellion that had initially attracted a whole generation of Argentine musicians and audiences to rock but which the members of 34 Puñaladas found lacking in that genre’s contemporary production.7 Members of 34 Puñaladas were also drawn to tango for personal reasons. There was something about tango that was compelling to them as artists and individuals, something that “spoke to them.” It would perhaps be foolish to deny that at least some of this had to do with their identifications as Argentines. At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that any attraction of this sort would have been equally true of their previous (and in some cases ongoing) participation in other forms of music, including rock. In other words, it was not their identifications as Argentines that drew them to tango as much as their cultivated musicality that drew them to music as a form of personal and collective expression, regardless of particular generic conventions or concerns. Saying that musicians like music may sound like a tautology, but recognizing how that basic dynamic operates beyond the confines of any single genre can also help us acknowledge the group’s professional motivations for turning to tango, especially the prison tango repertoire. By focusing on a style and repertoire that had been neglected by other artists, 34 Puñaladas could claim a niche for 42

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themselves within the growing genre culture of contemporary tango music. In short, these musicians were drawn to tango not because it operated as a sonic icon of national identification, but because it was an engaging zone for creative work on aesthetic, political, personal, and professional levels. These and other motivating factors were framed by overarching anxieties about place, history, and belonging that characterized Argentine society during the 1990s, as the neoliberal economic and social policies that would culminate in the economic crisis of December 2001 were first designed and implemented. It is this context of radical transformation, rather than any essentialized notion of what tango “is” or is “about,” that made the genre a powerful and productive domain of musical practice for 34 Puñaladas and their peers. This is not to say that the musical details of tango were a marginal part of this narrative of change; quite the contrary. It is to say that the rich musicality and complex historicity of tango in Argentina—in which every musical feature of the genre gestures toward the past but is not overdetermined by it—made the genre an exceptionally productive zone of engagement for the creative articulation of contemporary experience, an experience that was defined by the dual trend of detachment and connection across place and time. Significantly, these productive potentialities were compounded, not reduced, by tango’s relationality to other genres, especially rock. For these musicians, tango was powerfully attractive because it was both an alternative to rock (“we felt like we could fi nd things in tango that we didn’t find in rock”) and simultaneously framed and defi ned by rock (“something that could continue to have that spirit”). This productive relationality operates not only between genres, but at multiple levels within the genre culture of tango itself: between the past and the present, between presence and absence, and between the connection of narrated music history and the detachment of lived musical experience, all of it framed by the city of Buenos Aires.

The Musical Play of Style and History It is not a coincidence that this work takes place as and through music. Musical meaning does not lie within a musical object, but in the social practices through which music is engaged and made meaningful by musical subjects (Blacking 1995; Feld 1984a). Music is somewhat unique in that it can communicate through affect, “feelingfully and 43

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intuitively,” allowing the same musical object to communicate multiple messages on multiple levels to multiple interpretive subjects simultaneously (Meintjes 1990, 38). Musical meanings are therefore flexible and diverse—but they are not arbitrary. As a valued aesthetic and social form, the meaning of music is largely cultivated and channeled through matters of style. Style does not operate as a value-neutral parameter, but as “a performed and multilayered sign that expresses, constructs, and reproduces the sensibilities of the artists” and their audiences (Meintjes 2003, 8-9). This may be observed at the micro level of stylistic detail (Keil 1994; Feld 1988) or in the broad organization of a circumscribed range of practices deemed acceptable or unacceptable by a given social group, often articulated and enforced through arrangements of core repertoire into musical canons (Bohlman 1992; McClary 2000). Such processes are clearly present in the work of many contemporary tango artists active in Buenos Aires today, in that the aesthetic value of their work is based on the self- conscious reincorporation of stylistic details and a canon of repertoire from earlier historical moments. These dynamics play out on nearly all levels of 34 Puñaladas’ artistic project, from the forces and function of the ensemble’s instrumentation to the group’s general stylistic orientation to the details of their vocal and instrumental performance practice. The group’s instrumentation alone places them in immediate and direct dialogue with a very specific historical lineage of tango: guitar- ensemble tango canción. Precursors of this type of ensemble, in which a group of acoustic guitars (a  quartet in this case, but often a trio, duo, or sometimes even a solo guitar) backs up a single, usually male, singer, dates back to the formative historical moment of the genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The guitar is discussed as being “the first” tango instrument (e.g., Collier 1995), though it is slightly more marginal within the overall genre culture of tango today, particularly when compared to the core instruments of violin, piano, double bass, and especially bandoneón, which has become both a sonic and visual icon of tango. The guitar also speaks to a deeper history of relationality in nineteenth- century Argentina, serving as the common instrumental currency between the emerging genre of tango and the multitude of distinct folkloric genres that were played in and around the city of Buenos Aires at the time, many of which would go on to become fully codified genres of popular music in their own right. The guitar ensemble plus singer instrumentation can be heard in Carlos Gardel’s 1917 recording of “Mi noche triste” (My Sad Night),8 44

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which represented the up to that point predominantly folkloric singer’s first recorded foray into tango canción and is widely cited as a formative moment in the history of the genre (Collier 1986, 59– 62). This instrumentation appears as a conventionalized ensemble in the subsequent recordings of Gardel, Ignacio Corsini (1891–1967), and Agustín Magaldi (1898–1938), the trinity of 1920s and ’30s tango vocalists.9 It is important to note that these artists, their contemporaries, and the many tango singers that followed them performed and recorded with a wide variety of ensembles over the course of their careers, from smaller groups of mixed instrumentation (quartets, quintets, and sextets) to the larger orquestas típicas to Hollywood- esque string orchestras for film music. Nevertheless, the guitar ensemble occupies a privileged place in the history and imagination of tango canción. Its codification was driven by a number of factors, not least of which was the instrument’s musical flexibility and generic heterogeneity, discussed above. Other matters were more practical. For instance, guitar ensembles could produce sufficient but not overpowering instrumental volume for the theatrical and nightclub performances that were typical of tango canción in the 1920s and ’30s, before the widespread use of electronic amplification. As a transnational cultural object, the guitar easily conducted the cross- cultural fantasies and desires that fueled the spectacular circulation of tango around the globe in the years leading up to World War I. In these circulating contexts, the instrument served as a visual and musical mediator of elaborate fantasies about “Latin” difference on the part of European and other international audiences. These fantasies of difference were enabled by the very sameness of the guitar and, indeed, the music itself. Tango was similar enough to European music and dance forms that it could be easily misunderstood and enjoyed in European society but different enough that it could also feed Europeans’ seemingly insatiable appetite for so- called exotic or sensual arts at this time (Matsuda 1996). These instrumental forces also provided a rich and varied palette of musical resources with which a singer and their accompanying ensemble could work. Compounding the versatility of the guitar as a melodic and harmonic instrument, each guitar in a tango canción ensemble has a specific function and plays a particular role in relation to the other instruments. In quartet settings, the first or lead guitar traditionally focuses on playing precomposed and often relatively elaborate melodic lines that support, complement, and provide melodic bridges between lines and verses of the vocal melody, which is the primary focus of the overall performance. The second guitar harmonizes the 45

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lead guitar’s countermelodies, while the third guitar usually doubles the melodic material of the lead guitar an octave lower, supplying additional volume and resonance. The fourth guitar, or guitarrón, which is tuned lower than the other instruments, provides rhythmic and harmonic support using a set of stock rhythmic accompaniment patterns that are typical of tango as well as driving melodic figures in the bass register, if not bass lines per se. (Guitar trios eliminate the octave doubling of a quartet’s third guitar, while quintets add another rhythm guitar supporting the quartet’s fourth guitar or guitarrón.) As the relative intricacy of these functional relationships suggests, the work of standard tango canción guitar ensembles typically featured little to no improvisation. Each instrumentalist worked from precomposed parts that were typically set to memory in the course of rehearsal (though some contemporary groups now also use notated sheet music).10 This does not mean that an external composer was responsible for every pitch heard in a given performance, as would usually be the case, for example, with a string quartet in the Western art music tradition. Instead, one or more members the tango ensemble would arrange instrumental parts based on an external composition, with the arranger taking little more than the primary vocal melody (usually including lyrics), basic harmonic progressions, and the conventions of the genre as guides. These initial compositions were sometimes the original work of members of the group, but it was also common for a group to make new arrangements of one of the many preexisting compositions that were then coming to form a canon of shared tango repertoire. This method of arranging remains common today. It is a core component of tango performance practice and a distinctive feature of the genre. Because of this, there is a hugely diverse pool of arranged interpretations derived from the same compositions, both past and present. Nevertheless, the particular accompaniment patterns and countermelodies featured in canonical recordings are now familiar to the point of standardization, effectively becoming a part of the composition itself. Over the course of a collective history of listening, certain accompaniment figures from classic arrangements (especially the instrumental countermelodies) have become so enmeshed with a given song that adherence to or departure from them is itself artistically significant. Thus 34 Puñaladas and other contemporary tango artists working in this lineage can mobilize not only the canon of shared repertoire but the history of its arranged interpretation as a resource for their musical work. This creative play of detachment from and connection to traditional repertoires and modes of interpretation is only one way that 34 Pu46

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ñaladas innovates within the lineage of tango canción and the broader genre culture of tango. The simple fact that they work as a band—a named ensemble that operates and is identified as a musical totality whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts—represents a significant departure. Historically, it was common for star singers to be presented as singular talents supported by an ensemble whose members were aesthetically anonymous, despite the fact that many historic tango singers had lasting musical relationships with their accompanying guitarists and that many guitarists became prominent artists in their own right. Thus 34 Puñaladas’ decision to work as a named band again reflects the relationality between contemporary tango and the conventions of other musical genres, especially rock. Other innovations speak more directly to the internal conventions of tango canción. For instance, the group has deliberately revised the traditional instrumental roles and functions discussed above, departing from the more or less static division of musical labor between the first, second, and third guitar and guitarrón heard in classic tango canción. Instead, 34  Puñaladas exchange the different roles and functions among the four guitarists, such that any single instrumentalist will end up fulfilling a number of roles over the course of a complete performance and even within a single arrangement. This renovation of traditional practice broadens the scope of musical possibilities for any given instrument within the ensemble—allowing, for instance, the bass-andharmonic-accompaniment- oriented guitarrón to present passages of primary melodic material—thereby expanding the musical resources available to the group in their arrangements and original compositions. Those original compositions, which have been the group’s primary artistic focus since their symbolic refounding in 2006, are perhaps their most radical innovation, as we shall see below. So what does their music sound like? On the one hand, 34 Puñaladas is immediately and deeply engaged with the history and conventions of tango canción as it has been practiced and performed in Buenos Aires over the past hundred-and-some years. On the other hand, the group has developed a distinct style and approach to this artistic lineage that would be difficult to mistake for any of their historical predecessors, and not simply for the higher fidelity of their recordings. Overall their sound is intricate, atmospheric, and dark, but also occasionally playful, driving, and nearly mischievous. They cultivate rhythmic feels that can range from a heavy, lethargic sense of ominous dread in their slower pieces to a frantic, joyful lilt in more up-tempo performances, all while treating the pulse with a nuanced flexibility 47

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that can add depth to specific musical moments while contributing greatly to the overall drama of a given piece. Their melodic sensibility covers a similarly broad range, from the openly, almost sentimentally lyrical to opaque passages of near-modern contrapuntal abstraction. They freely utilize the crunchy bite of unresolved dissonance and draw upon many of the jabbing extended-technique sound effects or yeites that are typical of instrumental tango performance going back to the golden age and earlier. All of this is framed by the musical conventions of tango canción, which include, among others, a peppering of instrumental pieces among the group’s primarily vocal repertoire; reportorial representation of the three standard subforms of tango (the duplemeter, medium-tempo tango; the quicker, duple-meter milonga; and the triple-meter vals); two- or three-part verse/chorus song forms; and compositional durations of approximately two and a half to three and a half minutes. At the center of this is the voice of the tango singer. Alejandro Guyot seems to embody these songs more than interpret them. He wields his gravelly voice with calm, poised intensity, utilizing a wide range of expressive strategies—dynamics, ornamentation, vibrato—and moving fluidly between a solemnly spoken and forcefully sung voice. Like the group’s instrumental performance practice, Guyot’s vocal style is deeply informed by the work of his historical predecessors. In an interview, he pointed to Ignacio Corsini, Edmundo Rivero (1911–1986), and, especially, Roberto Goyeneche (1926–1994) as his core tango influences. While each of these figures would be firmly included in any general narrative of historical excellence in tango vocal performance, this lineage—from the folklore-inflected foundational recordings of Corsini to the grumbling, slang-infused bass of Rivero to the vanguard hijinks of Goyeneche—nevertheless represents a particular history of listening. This is compounded by the fact that Guyot’s vocal sensibility is equally informed by performers who would clearly lie outside even the most revisionary narrative of tango history, including the Australian rock singer Nick Cave (b. 1957), the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits (b. 1949), and the Argentine rock singer and musician Indio Solari (b. 1949), among many others. Conventional accounts of both tango and rock would place these figures on either side of an irreconcilable musical alterity, but for Guyot they walk in the same shoes or, to return to the image from his quoted interview at the beginning of this chapter, wear the same suit. Thus, while the black suit Guyot dons for performances with 34 Puñaladas is a means of “returning to free the ashes of those forgotten characters” of the tango underworld, it is also 48

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and equally, as he explained, “related to the suit that Nick Cave wears, or Tom Waits. [. . .] The black suit I wear when I sing with 34 Puñaladas has a lot of that in it. For me, it is the common denominator between us” (2007). It is crucial to recognize that the historical and intergeneric relationality reflected in this statement and heard in Guyot’s vocal sensibility—and indeed in every aspect of 34 Puñaladas’ instrumentation, style, and performance practice—is not an exceptional and therefore singular artistic gesture, in spite of the group’s truly original innovations. It is the performed embodiment of the dual trend of detachment and connection that is shared by these musicians and their diverse cohort. That dual trend is what has, once again, made tango a compelling domain of artistic practice in Buenos Aires today, something that is genuinely valuable and meaningful, at least for these musicians and their peers. They use tango to mediate and articulate this dual trend, as a means of placing the lived experience of the present against the received if often incoherent legacy of the past, musical and otherwise. From this perspective, 34 Puñaladas’ music represents a mode of expressive archaeology more than a received lineage of musical history, a way of creatively knowing a past that cannot be recovered and a present that does not conform to promise or expectation. Thus 34 Puñaladas’ artistic project, despite its rigor, is not about getting to the musical “truth” of tango via matters of style and history so much as it is about expanding the genre’s scope and range, such that the full breadth of these musicians’ experience—Tom Waits records and all—can coherently be labeled “tango.” Their music conjures an artistic world in which the  feelingful connection between Ignacio Corsini and Nick Cave is not only possible but, indeed, intuitive. Matters of instrumentation, style, and performance practice are only part of this: how things are said rather than what is said. In the next section I shift focus to the latter—what is said—including matters of repertoire, language, and the tango song itself.

Repertoire and Language in Tango Canción Despite the rich and varied history of guitar- ensemble tango canción, tango as a whole is largely an instrumental form. Singers can be heard in a wide variety of contexts outside of guitar- driven tango canción ensembles, and there are a number of star singers active in Buenos Aires today, including Adriana Varela (b. 1952), Lidia Borda (b. 1966), 49

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and Ariel Ardit (b. 1974), among others. Still, in most contexts singers were (and are) presented only occasionally, if at all. For example, the dance- oriented orquestas típicas of the golden age would feature singers on a handful of numbers in what were otherwise primarily instrumental programs designed for social tango dancing. Singers were relegated even further to the background during the later vanguard period, when the smaller, more technically virtuosic ensembles only rarely included vocalists.11 That being said, it would be a significant overstatement to claim that singers, songs, and lyrics are a marginal part of tango as a whole. For how richly expressive tango’s musical style and performance practice is, the overall sensibility of the genre has been decisively shaped by the core images and tropes of the tango song repertoire. These include, among others, betrayal, nostalgia, vengeance, motherly love, disillusionment, the city of Buenos Aires, and the adoration of tango itself (Collier 1986). These tropes mark the borders of a stylized world occupied by a collection of stock characters and standardized situations: exalted but long-suffering mothers; the ungrateful (though sometimes repentant) sons who betray them by abandoning themselves to the pleasures of the night; the daughters they lose to the corrupting influence of the cabaret; male lovers jilted by these same women, who, having abandoned their social stations in the name of pleasure and ambition, more often than not end up falling spectacularly from grace; and neighborhood tough guys or compadritos who occupy the violent shadows of this world, among many others. The dramas of these characters’ lives take place in known (albeit elaborately stylized) physical and cultural landscapes, be they the generalized spaces of the modernizing city—the urban slums or conventillos, the marginal outskirts or arrabales, or the cosmopolitan cabaret—or specific urban locations: named neighborhoods, known landmarks, particular street corners, and the like. All of this is framed by an atmosphere of pessimism, melancholy, and nostalgia, which pervades tango song as a whole. The tango song repertoire returns to these tropes and images with an almost relentless enthusiasm, such that any given example is received less as an instance of a type than as a renewed mobilization of a whole sentimental complex. Therefore, a given tango song becomes aesthetically powerful both because of its particular artistic features and because of how it speaks anew to a stylized sense of cultural intimacy among dedicated tango audiences, often delineated by generation (see also Stokes 2010). Thus one can commonly hear lyrical excerpts or references to tango songs utilized in everyday speech and applied to a 50

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variety of situations in Buenos Aires. For instance, while reflecting on my imminent return to the United States following the conclusion of my primary fieldwork and the rupture that would necessarily follow in the social relationships I had built up to that point, one of my older interlocutors (a man in his late sixties) got a kick out of me, the novice outsider, remarking “yira, yira.” The phrase is a reference to the tango composer and lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo’s (1901–1951) famously bleak 1930 composition of the same name, which lists an elaborate litany of unfortunate events that one can expect to befall them without receiving even the slightest empathy or assistance from their fellow man. “The world doesn’t care about anything,” the chorus warns, “yira yira” (it just turns and turns). For dedicated tango aficionados like my interlocutor here, the tropes of the genre are not just stock contexts or characters, but affective frames for making sense of everyday life and experience. It is worth noting that my comment here did not elicit tears but a hearty laugh. Thus, despite Discépolo’s oft- cited description of tango as “a sad thought that is danced,” tango is not actually sad, about sadness, or designed to elicit a feeling of sadness.12 It is melodramatic, an elaborately stylized frame for the deeply pleasurable sharing and communication of cultural intimacy that no one would mistake for emotional reality. Tango is a way “to narrate the ‘minor’ epics of daily life” in the heroic mode (Bergero 2008, 374). In that sense, tango was in lockstep with the broader contours of Argentine popular culture going back to the late nineteenth century: “Melodrama was omnipresent in the mass culture of this period. Both its aesthetic of emotional excess and is Manichean vision of a society divided between rich and poor were visible in every medium and in almost every genre” (Karush 2012, 85). Appreciating the hegemony of the melodramatic mode is a key part of understanding the historical trajectory of tango and how its popular appeal waxed and waned over time. Indeed, the over-the-top sentimentality and florid musical setting of many canonical tango songs is a key component of why tango fell out of favor with post–golden age audiences in Argentina. It is of course impossible to attribute massive shifts in popular taste to any single artistic feature. Nevertheless, I think it is important to recognize that the attraction alternative genres such as folklore and rock presented to post–golden age audiences in Argentina was, if anything, only compounded by an increasing revulsion toward the emotional excesses of tango as a melodramatic form. Thus while the cultural geography of tango canción—its emblematic street corners, its 51

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named barrios, its nostalgic evocation of city’s minor landmarks—still corresponded to Buenos Aires as a physical site, its emotional geography did not. The vast majority of emerging music listeners did not— and did not want to—live in tango’s rigidly stylized world of arrabales, conventillos, or the cabaret. In other words, the interpellative “Hey, you there!” of tango canción no longer hailed the individual listening subject, much less the nation as such (Althusser 1971). And when that listening subject did turn around to acknowledge the genre’s interpellative call, it was almost always with an ironic self- consciousness that reframed this once deeply feelingful if never entirely self-serious repertoire as grasa—cheesy, a guilty pleasure, something that was so bad it was good (Party 2009). However, more often than not post–golden age listeners in Argentina wanted less than nothing to do with tango and its melodramas. Treinta y cuatro Puñaladas and their contemporary audiences have found the prison tango repertoire less alienating. An earlier (pre– golden age) and relatively neglected tendency in tango song, the prison tango repertoire depicts a social universe of conflict and marginality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Buenos Aires. The ensemble has specialized in reinterpreting this historical repertoire, and the band’s original work takes inspiration from it. These tango songs present the listener with a stylized code for surviving the everyday exceptionalism of life in a world where law and custom apply unevenly, if at all. For instance, one should never turn one’s back on their neighborhood, as does the protagonist of the 1933 song “Ventarrón” (music by Pedro Maffia, lyrics by José Horacio Staffolani), featured on 34 Puñaladas’ recording Slang. A onetime king of the neighborhood toughs, Ventarrón leaves his southern Buenos Aires neighborhood of Pompeya in order to “follow the star that destiny placed before him.” He later returns, a disgraced failure, hoping to reclaim his place of honor in the neighborhood’s social ecosystem, only to find that others had long taken it from him, definitively and forever, leaving him to regretfully ponder “that distant past, and the onetime glories of Ventarrón.”13 Another lesson from the prison tango repertoire is that you should not count on others, even your most intimate partners and confidants, to honor and remember you with dignity after death. In the 1932 song “Olvidao” (Forgotten; music by Guillermo Barbieri, lyrics by Enrique Cadícamo), which is featured on the EP recording that accompanies the 34 Puñaladas’ concert film De la bolsa al ruedo, a newlywed is stabbed to death in a fight at his own wedding reception. With his dying words, he implores his soon-to-be widow to visit his grave, to 52

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bring him flowers to him there, because “the earth is a cold place to be forgotten.” At first she complies, but with the passing of time her sadness leaves her, and she never again goes to visit him in the cemetery. The song ends with a description of how, on stormy nights, one can clearly hear the dead man’s voice still calling out: “Lucinda, I am so very lonely, come to my side!” And there are many songs that address honorable ways of committing murder. Take, for example, the 1927 song “A la luz del candil” (By the Light of the Oil Lamp; music by Carlos Vicente Geroni Flores, lyrics by Julio Navarrine), featured on the 34 Puñaladas album Argot. The song takes the form of an extended fi rst-person confession to a police officer following the double murder of the protagonist’s wife and the lover with whom she betrayed him, one of his best friends. The man begins with an extremely polite request for the officer’s attention, followed by an apology for his unkempt appearance and an affi rmation of his scruples: “Perhaps you think I am a fugitive. I am a staunchly honest gaucho. I am not a drunk, nor am I a rustler.” He is, however, a murderer, and he has brought the proof of his guilt with him in his bag: the braids of the woman’s hair accompanied by the man’s bloody heart, a vividly gruesome detail that is not entirely exceptional in the prison tango repertoire. The song concludes with a request for justice that is both submissive and defiant, recognizing civilian powers while pointing to an ultimate authority far beyond them. “Arrest me, sergeant, and put me in chains. If I am a criminal, may God forgive me.” Again, it is crucial to recognize these stories as melodramas, sensationalist and exaggerated presentations of life that might gesture toward a lived experience but that no one would understand—and certainly not advocate—as a transparent representation of historical realities or a model for acceptable modes of behavior. This is especially true regarding these songs’ depiction of misogynistic violence against women, which has today reached horrifyingly epidemic proportions in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America (Fregoso and Bejarando 2010). The very language used in telling these stories—lunfardo—further reinforces their exceptionalism. A now largely historical slang vocabulary of Spanish unique to Buenos Aires that draws heavily from the many languages of immigrant Argentina, lunfardo initially developed among the populations depicted in the prison tango repertoire: criminals, inmates, lowlifes, prostitutes, slum dwellers, and the like. As explained to me in an interview with Alejandro Guyot, lunfardo first emerged as a code for talking openly about criminal behavior, though 53

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it developed into a generalized alternative vocabulary for everyday things: Lunfardo is composed of words that the immigrants brought with them from Europe, from Russia, Poland, Germany, France—a lot comes from Spanish, and a lot comes from Italian. These words took on new meanings in Buenos Aires. For example, there are many tangos that use the word papusa to talk about women, the papusa women. Papusa comes from the word papirusa which, I believe, in Russian means “cigarette.” It was a word that the prostitutes who had been brought from Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine used when approaching men, by asking them for a light. It was prohibited to approach people openly in the streets at that time, so they approached the men by asking for a cigarette. And since they didn’t know Spanish they asked for a papirusa, and so they came to be called papusa. (Guyot 2007)14

Tango song generally and the prison tango repertoire in particular is noteworthy for its sometimes extensive use of lunfardo, to the point where those unfamiliar with the argot—including native-Spanishspeaking Argentines—literally can’t understand the details of what a song is about. The Argentine journalist and writer Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934–2010) describes this in his novel The Tango Singer (2006), which revolves around the unpredictable appearances of a fictional tango vocalist named Julio Martel. Martel specializes in the most obscure corners of the prison tango repertoire: It was difficult to understand the lyrics of his tangos, which reproduced an ancient and now meaningless language. The tenor had a refined way of pronouncing them, but the words wouldn’t let themselves be caught: You donked the little strumple / up against a bamp in the creamery. They were all like that, or almost all. Sometimes, among the six or seven tangos he sang a night, one or two would come up that the oldest of his listeners could identify, though not without effort, like Mucked Up with Yeast or I Got Gut Rot from Your Manger, of which there are no records or sheet music. (Martínez 2006, 30–31)

In the novel, the unintelligibility of Martel’s repertoire ends up driving away “conventional” audiences who were “fed up with songs they couldn’t decipher” from his performances while attracting a group of “more imaginative listeners” who were “amazed by a voice that, rather than repeating images or stories, slid from one emotion to another, with the clarity of a sonata. Like the music, the voice had no need of meaning. It expressed itself alone” (ibid.).

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The romantic suggestion that the lunfardo-laden tango repertoire is appealing because it has no “need” for meaning, because its linguistic opacity somehow dissolves its semantic content into the transcendence of musical sound, could not, in my experience, be further from the truth. This passage does, however, speak nicely to the aesthetic pleasures taken in the project of deciphering and interpretation that dedicated listeners bring to this repertoire and is, indeed, demanded by it. I spent many evenings in Buenos Aires listening to these songs with tango musicians and other friends, at first guided through them line by line if not word by word. From this experience I learned that the use of lunfardo terminology in tango lyrics, despite how truly abstruse it can be, did not so much obscure the overall meaning of a song as much as frame it within a particular dramatic setting and expressive atmosphere. Consider the song “Amablemente,” from which 34 Puñaladas took their name. I don’t think any Spanish speaker would miss the violent gist of the song, despite the fact that it is peppered with lunfardo and other slang terminology, marked in bold in the text below:

La encontró en el bulín y en otros brazos

He found her in the house, in another’s arms

Sin embargo, canchero y sin cabrearse, Still, skillfully and without getting le dijo al gavilán: “Puede rajarse; el hombre no es culpable en estos casos.”

worked up, He told the Don Juan: “You can split; The man is not guilty in these cases.”

Y al encontarse solo con la mina,

And upon finding himself alone with the girl

pidió las zapatillas y ya listo,

He asked for his slippers and relaxed,

le dijo cual si nada hubiera visto:

He said to her, as if nothing had been seen:

“Cebame un par de mates, Catalina.”

“Prepare some mate [tea] for me, Catalina”

La mina, jaboneada, le hizo caso

The girl, frightened, did what he said

y el varón, saboreándose un buen faso, And the guy, enjoying a nice smoke la siguió chamuyando de pavadas.

Continued chattering about nothings.

Y luego, besuqueándole la frente,

And then, covering her forehead

con gran tranquilidad, amablemente, le fajó treinta y cuatro puñaladas.

with kisses With great tranquility, nicely, He stabbed her thirty four times.

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The use of lunfardo terms here does not obscure the text’s meaning, but adds depth and richness to it. For example, the lunfardo term bulín, used in the opening line of the song, I translate as “the house”; but in this case it refers more specifically to the humble, dingy, and cheap housing stock found in the arrabales, the precarious living quarters of the poor and immigrant classes on the outskirts of turn-of-the- century Buenos Aires (Scobie 1974).15 Thus a single lunfardo term not only conveys its immediate semantic meaning but also sets the stage for the melodrama that follows, providing the listener with a historical setting, the place where the events occur, the social and economic contexts of the story, and so on. Lunfardo is therefore not just an alternative, obscure, and vaguely criminal vocabulary, but, in the words of Alejandro Guyot (2007), “a particular manner of putting words onto reality.” It is an exceptionally expressive resource for poetic discourse that is made all the more powerful owing to its hyperspecificity regarding place and time. Considered from this perspective, lunfardo is less a filthy argot of a gritty underworld than it is a form of intangible cultural heritage, a traditional feature of verbal art and poetic literature that has come to occupy a privileged—and now robustly institutionalized—status in the official cultural politics of the city of Buenos Aires.16 Echoes of this institutionalization can even be heard in the song “Amablemente” itself. Though “Amablemente” has become emblematic of the prison tango repertoire, most of which dates to the first several decades of the twentieth century, the song itself dates back only to 1963. The tango singer, guitarist, and impresario Edmundo Rivero composed the music to a preexisting text by the journalist, sports radio announcer, and lunfardo poet Iván Díez (the pen name of Augusto Arturo Martini, 1897–1960). Rivero first came to prominence as a featured singer in the golden-age orquestas típicas of Julio de Caro, Horacio Salgán, and Aníbal Troilo, among others, though he was also the key figure in a post–golden age resurgence of guitar ensemble tango canción featuring lunfardo lyrics. His work in that regard was documented in a number of historically significant recordings, which together represented a striking departure from the largely orchestral settings for tango love songs that were popular at the time. In that sense, Rivero’s work with lunfardo-laced tango canción is congruent within the broader musical ruptures of the so- called vanguard period of the 1960s and ’70s despite his distinctively historical inspiration and orientation, foreshadowing the dual trend of detachment and connection that has come to define tango for contemporary artists. 56

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Detachment, Connection, and the Values of Contemporary Tango This dual trend of detachment and connection is what makes tango canción a productive resource for contemporary artists like 34 Puñaladas. It also stands as a challenge, and not because these artists are unable to decipher the meaning of lunfardo words or deliver these melodramatic stories with a straight face. The challenge lies in how they can mobilize the instrumentation, style, performance practice, repertoire, and language of tango canción as it has been practiced and institutionalized in Buenos Aires for more than a century as a resource for making music that addresses contemporary issues and concerns in valuable and meaningful ways. This challenge is especially acute regarding 34 Puñaladas’ efforts at original composition. On the one hand, the core tropes and aesthetic features of tango that in some contexts can feel powerfully compelling—betrayal, nostalgia, vengeance, motherly love, disillusionment, the city of Buenos Aires, and the tango itself—can easily fall into irony or caricature in contemporary musical contexts. On the other hand, if 34 Puñaladas’ original work did not speak to contemporary experiences, their whole aesthetic project would amount to little more than an interesting musical and historical exercise. Finding a successful artistic balance requires true mastery, which is why the group has spent years arranging and performing the historical prison tango repertoire. It also shapes contemporary practice, such that nearly every aspect of their original compositions—despite how distinctive they are—can be accounted for within the tropes and conventions of guitar- ensemble tango canción as it has been practiced since the time of Gardel. Take the composition “Lezama” (music by Edgardo González, lyrics by Alejandro Guyot), from the 2009 recording Bombay BsAs, the group’s first to feature entirely original work. The song tells the story of a desperate man’s regret-saturated meanderings through the city, hinting at a final, suicidal leap into the Riachuelo River, which separates Buenos Aires from its southern suburb of Avellaneda. The text is less a narrative than a series of short images and interlocking metaphors, which is typical of Guyot’s lyrical style and broader poetic writing (see Guyot 2009): De puentes no hablás más,

You no longer speak of bridges,

Y de morir quizás.

Though you may speak of dying.

Hoy nunca más reís,

You never laugh anymore,

Hoy nunca más llorás.

You never cry anymore. 57

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Volviste a aquel lugar

You returned to that place

que tanto mal te da.

That gives you so much pain.

Ni un tango te quedó

Not a tango remains

ni sombras que pisar.

Nor shadows to step on.

Ni aquel sueño encallado,

Your dream ran aground,

Tu andar a ningún lado,

You keep walking to nowhere,

Siquiera algún destino te quedó . . .

As if some destination remained.

Embarraste bien tus pies,

You muddied up your feet,

Saliste a caminar

Going out for a walk

Sin rumbo a la deriva,

Without a course to drift from,

Y no volviste más.

And you never returned.

Volviste a aquel lugar

You returned to that place

que tanto mal te da.

That gives you so much pain.

Ni un tango te quedó

Not a tango remains

ni sombras que pisar.

Nor shadows to step on.

Y un paso adelante,

And one step ahead,

El triste Riachuelo,

The sad Riachuelo [River],

A aquel que toda culpa le achacas.

Which you blame for everything.

While this text is a stark departure from the most stereotypical emotional excesses of tango canción, it nevertheless speaks to the core themes and images of the prison tango repertoire. The theme of loneliness and desperation is a common sentiment in tango generally, as is the gnawing regret that seems to drive the protagonist of this song into the streets and toward his fate. Beyond these general themes, the song also features several lyrical gestures that are typical of tango canción, including the names of specific geographic locations and self- conscious references to the genre of tango itself. The Riachuelo River, for instance, is a key landmark in the emotional topography of the city as documented in tango, evoked and exalted in innumerable tango songs. At the same time, the lyrics of this piece depart from their historical predecessors in significant ways. Perhaps the most striking, especially given the group’s general dedication to the prison tango repertoire, is Guyot’s choice not to use lunfardo terminology in this piece. For all its richness as a poetic resource, Guyot explained to me in an interview that he considers lunfardo artistically out of bounds for his original lyric writing: “We can’t compose using lunfardo from the ’20s and ’30s; it wouldn’t make any sense because it would amount to nothing 58

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more than a parody. It would be like a contemporary filmmaker trying to make a silent film. You just can’t” (2007). The bleak imagery of the lyrics is greatly compounded by the musical arrangement, which forms a tense atmosphere of unresolved dissonance within a piercing march of staccato eighth notes followed by passages of grinding accents, the first suggesting an agitated version of the 3–3–2 milonga accompaniment pattern and the latter directly echoing the heavy emphasis on beats 1 and 3, typical of tango as a whole. The music repeats as the lyrics continue on to the second verse, building to a high point of intensity that immediately and disturbingly drops off into an abyss of silence, which is followed by a disjunctive fugal interlude whose cumulative density seems to mirror the protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind. The guitars come together for a brief tutti passage of swirling dissonance that leads into a recap of the second verse, again culminating in an intense burst of lyrical imagery and musical barbs that does not so much end as is violently cut off, like the life that may have just been lost. For all its musical abstraction, the piece as a whole is intensely atmospheric, almost even cinematic; that is probably 34 Puñaladas’ most distinctive contribution to the broader tradition of tango canción, to which they otherwise adhere quite strictly. This musically rich dynamic between rupture and continuity is the most characteristic feature of 34 Puñaladas’ music, speaking to the dual trend of detachment and connection that defi nes the larger genre culture of contemporary tango music today. These songs are not haunted by the musical past as much as they are a means of conjuring it, literally bringing it forth into the present through the materiality of musical sound and performance. The goal is not to return to or revive that past, however it might be imagined, but to locate present experience within a broader narrative of continuity and change. This is the “labor of memory” that is at the heart of much contemporary tango music making in Buenos Aires today. The city of Buenos Aires operates as a crucial frame for this labor, subject to these same forces while also serving as the stage upon which these artistic efforts can be practiced and articulated. As this music remakes the past of musical history, so too does it remake the city as a physical site and affective experience, remapping the boundaries of who is included and who is excluded by telling their stories in song. However congruent or incongruent 34 Puñaladas’ original work may be with the canonized history of tango canción, the stories they tell are ultimately not so different from those told by Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Indio Solari, and other non-tango artists whose music depicts the lives of those who have been left out, if 59

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not actively excluded from, whatever benefits modernization may have had in Buenos Aires and beyond, from the turn- of-the- century conventillos to the 2001 economic crisis. In that sense, this musical labor of memory is entirely congruent with the broader reconfiguration of labor under neoliberal conditions, which is often thought of as a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization within shifting relationships between the state, society, industry, and, I would argue, the arts and other expressive practices (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Deleuze and Guattari 2009).

Conclusion: Musical Practice as Expedient Claim Given the many political, economic, social, and cultural ruptures of late twentieth- and early twenty-first- century Argentina, it is perhaps not surprising that tango and the renewed engagements with it have once again become valuable and meaningful for some contemporary Argentine artists and their audiences. The notion that the artists of a society under duress would revisit a local form that supposedly speaks to the essence of some national spirit or sensibility fits nicely with a dramatic (and analytical) archetype of departure and return that has been told over and over again, from Odysseus to the Arrabal. There is, of course, some truth to this narrative. I first visited Buenos Aires in the summer of 2004, a time when the worst effects of the 2001 economic crisis were already beginning to recede while others—crime, insecurity, hunger, homelessness—were becoming further entrenched as a part of daily life in the city. Many of the contemporary tango musicians I spoke to at that time were already using the crisis as a frame for understanding their collective musical efforts, which, as we saw above, were not so much prompted by the 2001 economic crisis as punctuated by it. For instance, Sonia Possetti, a prominent contemporary tango composer and pianist, echoed what I had heard from many of her peers when she told me in a 2004 interview that “with the crisis we thought the curtain was coming down on Argentina for good; that was it, the end of the show. After that, many people asked who am I? Who are we?” (2004). These were not abstract questions, but immediate and real dilemmas that have framed much of everyday life in Argentina following the crisis, including the musical work of individual artists and the larger field of cultural production. Music might not seem particularly important against the widespread human suffering that has been witnessed and endured by Argentines 60

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following the 2001 economic crisis and, indeed, long before it. But debates going on within tango nevertheless engage these crises and the broader contours of Argentine history in ways that cannot be reduced to a symbolic function. Contemporary tango does not just reflect the impact these crises had on Argentine society, culture, and history, but is an integral and productive part of those contexts. Still, how is one to answer Possetti’s rhetorical questions? We are Argentines, and Argentina is tango, therefore we are tango—and this despite the tremendous diversity of cultural production in Argentina, past and present, within tango itself and far, far beyond. Is this a satisfying explanation for how and why a diverse milieu of contemporary tango musicians in Buenos Aires has returned to the genre after a gap of almost forty years? While Possetti’s words of course need to be considered seriously and at face value, I take her questions less as a sign of her straight forward subscription to the notion of tango as a so- called national genre and more as an indicator of tango’s increasing expediency as a resource for contemporary artistic production. In other words, the answer to the questions “who am I? who are we?” is not “tango.” Tango is instead a means by which those questions, and many others, can be meaningfully explored and articulated. It is a nuanced and productive frame for contemporary creative engagement and artistic practice within a stylistic lineage of musical history that is powerful and compelling precisely because it speaks to the dual trend of detachment and connection that elicited Posetti’s questions in the first place. This is the key to understanding how and why the work of 34 Puñaladas and the wider musical milieu of which they are a part is both aesthetically powerful and historically significant. The group uses tango to rigorously elaborate their experience of recent musical and social history in Argentina—and the dual trend of detachment and connection that defines it—as and through music. This dual trend plays out in nearly all aspects of the their musical work: from the instrumentation of the ensemble to their general stylistic sensibility and performance practice; from their choice of historical repertoire to the details of lyrical style and language use; and from their approach to crafting musical arrangements to their strategies for original composition. These and other aspects of their music engage with, speak to, and ultimately critique the historically hegemonic narratives of tango history that have positioned the genre as the ideologically singular form in and of the city of Buenos Aires, an artistic gesture of no small significance in this place and time. That critique is only enhanced by the group’s formative and on61

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going commitment to what would, from almost any other perspective, be considered non-tango or even anti-tango musical forms and influences, such as rock. By rejecting the essentialist singularity of the national-genre trope in favor of an almost intuitive sense of intergeneric relationality, 34 Puñaladas have effectively transformed what tango is and what it is about in Buenos Aires today. They have taken what in recent decades has been widely considered an embarrassing relic of an increasingly distant musical past and turned it into something that is, once again, very much worth listening to. The aesthetic and critical significance of this is greatly compounded when considered alongside that of their many musical peers operating along similar conceptual (though often radically different musical) lines within the genre culture of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires, some of whom we will encounter in the chapters that follow. This expedient sounding, the musical process of “acting out” and “working through,” is also key to understanding how and why tango has become so tremendously valuable as a resource for so many different projects and claims, many of which could not be further from the details of musical practice explored here. Nevertheless, these and other mobilizations of tango are compelling, powerful, and indeed even possible because of how the genre of tango operates as a creative gloss of place and time that is conjured anew with every engagement precisely because it has no singular meaning or authentic core. Without making this connection, we would be condemned to repeat the seemingly endless debate regarding who or what is or is not a “real” tango artist producing “real” tango music, which has been and in some circles remains a core trope of popular tango reception and criticism in Argentina and beyond. This does not mean that such debates are somehow insignificant. As we saw above, contemporary tango music as performed by 34 Puñaladas and their peers is both intimately connected to and fundamentally detached from tango as it has been canonized in Argentina over the past century. Therefore, if their music and the experiences from which it is formed are to be accepted as valid—which of course they are—some of the core tropes of tango and the nation will require significant revision. This is not a matter of musical realness or authenticity, but a matter of inclusion and exclusion—and the stakes are high. At the same time, leaving the discussion there effectively deafens us to the immediately observed reality of contemporary tango operating comfortably and coherently as a tremendous range of different “things” in Buenos Aires today. This includes not only the largely local musical youth culture created by 34 Puñaladas and their peers, but also 62

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the machinations of the managerial regimes—regimes that in many instances not even be aware of these musical efforts and their circulating meanings. My point with this chapter, then, is not just to examine and articulate how and why the current generation of contemporary tango artists and musicians active in Buenos Aires may or may not have refigured the scope, range, and meaning of tango as a genre culture, but to set the stage for understanding how and why the expedient claims on tango examined in subsequent chapters can be made. Music does not enjoy a privileged status in relation to these other claims, but those claims are operational in part because of the unique properties of musical practice examined here: as tango is invented and reinvented with every sounding pitch, so too is it made and remade via other expedient claims. It is to these that we now turn.

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Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of música popular Early in my fieldwork I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Enrique Marmonti, a prominent tango film, television, record, and event producer. Marmonti scheduled me between a series of casual business meetings he was hosting at a table in the second-floor restaurant and café of the Abasto Hotel, the “five star tango themed hotel” that stands as a physical monument to tango’s many values as a resource for economic development and urban renewal in Buenos Aires today. In the years leading up to my main period of fieldwork, the Abasto neighborhood had rapidly transformed itself from a marginalized zone of abandonment to a culture- and consumptiondriven urban destination, much of it tango related. This was the context that literally surrounded us during our afternoon meeting, and I was curious to know what Marmonti made of it. I especially wanted to know if he, a local cultural producer who was deeply invested in tango, perceived any sense of conflict between the tremendous growth in tango-themed international cultural tourism to Buenos Aires following the 2001 economic crisis—epitomized by the very building in which we were meeting— and whatever meanings and values tango might have as a form of cultural practice and heritage at the local level. Was there, I asked, “a conflict between the presence of so many foreigners and all the discourse about tango and Ar64

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gentine identity?” He replied, somewhat gruffly: “That’s all a lie. Tango is not popular—it is not popular. Don’t believe that. It is a lie that it is popular. Your problem is that you think about tango, but if you take your recorder and go out walking for two days without thinking about tango you are not going to hear tango anywhere. The only tangos you will hear are tourist tangos, so there is no identity conflict, there is just tango as a national brand” (Marmonti 2006). Marmonti’s curt reply to my apparently naive question caught me off guard at the time, though over the course of my fieldwork I came to understand that he had in fact pinpointed a key condition regarding tango in Buenos Aires today: the dual trend of detachment and connection that accounts for much of the value tango has come to have as a resource not only for musical practice but also for cultural, social, and economic development. While his claim that “the only tangos you will hear are tourist tangos” was a rhetorical overstatement, the vast majority of Argentines today are not personally invested or even interested in tango even though the form continues to circulate and be received as an icon of Argentina at the international level, a situation that has bolstered tango’s expediency. This dual trend of detachment and connection is precisely why tango has become so artistically productive for those musicians who have chosen to engage with it today. It is also why it has become a privileged object of the many managerial regimes that draw upon tango as a resource, as a means to multiple—and multiplying—ends.1 Similar trends can be observed at the global level, with governments and other managerial regimes increasingly framing local cultures as a natural or renewable resource in need of management like any other. The two quintessential examples of this are, on the one hand, the traditional cultural knowledge of indigenous and other supposedly place-based ethnic or “folkloric” groups (Escobar 2008; Chamosa 2010), and, on the other, Culture with a capital C, that is, symphony orchestras, art museums, and other high-art institutions that are promoted as engines of urban renewal and economic development above and beyond whatever aesthetic value their content might have. What does not fit this managerial model so well—and what Marmonti was also gesturing toward—are the so- called popular arts, especially popular music, which are neither traditional culture nor high art in the way those domains have tended to be conceived by governmental cultural agencies, nongovernmental arts organizations, and other managerial regimes. This incongruity is even more acute in the context of Latin America, where the idea of the popular as it is used in discussions of música popular is particularly nuanced. In Latin America, 65

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the term música popular describes specific forms of musical style and mediation (as does the English term “popular music”) as well as lingering hierarchies of musical value that are closely correlated with macro patterns of social exclusion and inclusion (Capellano 2004). That is, in Latin America the idea of música popular is associated not only with the relations between tradition and mass mediation, but also with the social definitions of inclusion and exclusion centered on “the popular” or “the people” as a social and political category (Martín-Barbero 1993). These patterns map directly onto musical concerns, such that socially popular genres of music have been largely excluded from most support programs for the arts in Argentina, that is, from the sphere of official cultural politics. Tango occupies a curious position within this larger discussion. On the one hand, it is clearly popular music as that term is usually understood in English: it is considered by some to be of inferior quality to other musics, it is neither folk nor art music, and it has been and remains fully entrenched within the mass media and cultural industries (see Middleton 1990). On the other hand, it is no longer música popular as that term is deployed in Spanish. Thus, in saying that tango is “not popular,” Marmonti meant both that tango today operates as a niche genre with a circumscribed, largely specialist audience and at the same time that tango was no longer a socially popular form that is understood as coming from and expressing “the people” as a social, cultural, and economic category. One of the key facts regarding the genre culture of tango in contemporary Buenos Aires is that tango no longer functions as a música popular of this sort, as it had in previous historical moments. Tango’s break from the popular experience led to a steep decline of the genre in Argentina, despite its continued salience as a potent symbol of Argentine culture—not so much a national genre but, as Marmonti said, a “national brand,” something that could be used to bolster a wide variety of development projects with little or no “popular” resistance. At the same time, the dual trend of detachment and connection has also enabled tango’s sonic and historical legacy as a música popular to itself operate as an expedient resource for alternative musical practices and cultural politics of the popular in contemporary Argentina. This chapter examines these alternative practices and politics via an analytic and ethnographic discussion of Astillero, a contemporary tango ensemble whose work is based on remaking tango a música popular, on rearticulating the genre’s relationship to a specifically Latin American notion of the popular. For the members of Astillero, tango must operate 66

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as música popular in order to be socially meaningful and aesthetically effective, even though tango has not functioned in this particular way for some fifty years in Argentina, and even though much contemporary tango music is indeed produced for tourist audiences. After introducing the group and the musical milieu from which they emerged, I will discuss the formal details of Astillero’s music and the social universe in which it circulates and is made meaningful. Each of these domains is framed by the contested musical and social histories of tango as a popular genre in Argentina, as well as the larger challenges posed by the 2001 economic crisis and its aftermath. I will show how Astillero’s project of remaking tango a música popular must be understood as both a musical style and a social movement, an aesthetic ideology and an embodied social practice. This example—like “the popular” as such— can help us question the managerial impulse to productivity that is increasingly determining cultural life in Buenos Aires and beyond, while also helping us to better understand the changing role of music and the arts in the age of expediency. This discussion expands on the largely musical concerns of the previous chapter, showing how the stylistic conventions of tango are mobilized not only for articulating aesthetic value and meaning, but also for cultivating power within explicitly social and political domains. It also serves as a bridge to subsequent chapters, showing how claims to institutional authority and power on the part of the managerial regimes are grounded in the details of cultural practice, discussed here in terms of musical style and social sensibility (see Stokes 2010). Astillero’s contemporary tango music is powerful and compelling in large part because it circulates and can be heard as a coherent reading of musical and social history in Argentina, as a partisan reading of political life as and through música popular. At the same time, whatever social force and power Astillero’s alternative musical and institution-building efforts may have is derived almost exclusively from how the group mobilizes the popular as a type of sonic affect and mode of political identification. This, in turn, will help us unpack the conundrum of the popular within the larger domain of the managerial regimes. It is crucial to recognize from the outset that the popular arts, especially popular music, are a key concern of the many managerial regimes, rather obviously in the case of the commercial cultural industries but also within governmental agencies and other nongovernmental or nonprofit organizations (which will be the focus of the following chapters). My effort here is therefore not an attempt to identify a domain of cultural practice that is somehow outside of or resistant 67

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to the broader turn toward the use of musical culture in the age of expediency. It instead highlights the disconnect between governmental and nonprofit modes of promoting the arts and culture as a means of shaping political subjectivity and for-profit models that define music and the arts as nothing more, and nothing less, than consumable entertainment. Socially popular genres of music fall between these two poles. On the one hand, they are often considered unsupportable by governmental and nonprofit organizations, which consider them aesthetically suspect. On the other hand, they are deeply implicated in massive-scale music piracy, which significantly undermines the profit motives of the transnational cultural industries (Ochoa Gautier and Yúdice 2002). Those industries are, by definition, not invested in the social meanings of music and the arts in local contexts.

Música popular in Tango History and Memory Formed in May 2005, Astillero is a sextet of two bandoneones, violin, cello, bass, and piano, as well as a singer. The group’s pianist, Julián Peralta, is one of the key figures in the larger genre culture of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires. At the time of my fieldwork, the other members of the group included Patricio “Tripa” Bonfiglio on first bandoneón; Mariano Caló on second bandoneón; Osiris Rodríguez on violin; Leonhard Bartussek on cello; Félix Archangeli on bass; and Peyo on vocals. The group remains active as of this writing, though it has undergone significant personnel changes since the time of my primary fieldwork, with only Peralta and Caló continuing as members. Astillero was one of the first contemporary tango groups in Buenos Aires dedicated exclusively to the composition and performance of original tango music. While this focus on original composition may seem unexceptional, the group operates in a historical juncture that has made the very act of composing original tangos—and perhaps the performance of tango in itself—a highly charged domain of musical activity. On the one hand, there is the repetition of memory on the part of Argentine tango audiences nostalgic for times and musics past, making them notoriously unreceptive to new, original work. On the other hand, the vast majority of Argentines—especially those who came of age during and following the last military dictatorship (1976– 83)—have generally ignored tango if not rejected it outright, despite its influence on some early forms of Argentine rock music (Vila 1989). In spite of this dual refusal, there has been a growing appetite for 68

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tango among some communities in Buenos Aires, and several contemporary tango artists and artistic movements have achieved a measure of success in recent years. As discussed in detail in chapter 1, these movements have generally consisted of historical projects in which contemporary artists creatively draw upon the genre conventions, stylistic details, and musical repertoires from previous periods of tango history rather than create wholly original works. The orquesta típica tradition of the 1940s and ’50s has been especially significant in this regard. Large-scale tango ensembles of some ten to twelve members, orquestas típicas had been almost entirely absent from Buenos Aires for nearly forty years, though they were once the mainstay of tango music during what is now known as the genre’s golden age. Beginning with the founding of the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro in 1998, the most well-known group of this type, the past decades have witnessed a veritable explosion of new orquestas típicas in Buenos Aires, with dozens of these ensembles active today. The members of Astillero have their musical roots in the new orquesta movement. Peralta and Bonfiglio were both founding members of the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro, for instance, and Peralta has played an instrumental role in forming and training many of the subsequent groups. Astillero’s musical project also grew out of and is deeply informed by the motivating concerns of the new orquesta movement, concerns that are worth looking at in some detail. The golden-age orquestas típicas were large ensembles that generally consisted of four violins, four bandoneones, piano, and bass. There was significant variation in the instrumental forces utilized by individual groups, but the overall sound of the orquestas típicas was defined by this section-based instrumentation (Sierra 1997). Many ensembles also featured vocalists, though the majority of music they performed was instrumental. Individual members of these ensembles would compose original music for them, and the orquestas also drew upon a canon of common repertoire that by that time represented a more generalized tango tradition. Because the orquestas played many of the same basic compositions, an ensemble was sonically defined less by what pieces of music they played than by how they played them, by their style. One orquesta’s particular rendition of a song could sound quite different from that of another. These differences can be heard in how the melody is treated (to what degree it is embellished or elaborated upon); how the different sections of the ensembles interact with and support one another (if the violin and bandoneón sections play simultaneously or in sequence, for instance); the density of the harmonies; how and 69

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to what degree dynamics are employed; the density or clarity of contrapuntal sections; and, perhaps above all, the overall rhythmic sensibility of the performance, that is, how strictly the metric pulse was adhered to or deviated from.2 Contemporary musicians active in the new orquesta movement were drawn to the work of the golden-age orquestas not only because it is musically rich and complex, but because the original orquestas típicas operated and were enjoyed as música popular. At the height of the golden age, tango was a massively popular music in the broadest sense of the term. There were innumerable orquestas, both professional and amateur, that performed regularly, from the most refined and lavish dance halls of the city center to the most humble social clubs in the suburban outskirts and beyond into the provinces. A domestic cultural industry produced and promoted tango media, from radio broadcasts to 78 r.p.m. and then LP recordings, from tango-themed magazines and books to tango film and, later, television production. Social tango dancing was a widespread phenomenon, and the top bandleaders were stars for whom corners, streets, and subway stations would eventually be named (Castro 1999). The golden age was followed by what is known as the “vanguard” period, which roughly covers the years from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, though in many ways the vanguard movement is still very much alive and well today. The vanguard period was defined in part by a self- conscious attempt to transform tango into what could be described as an alternative art music. These efforts are most famously associated with the composer, bandoneonist, and bandleader Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), whose nuevo tango (new tango) style deliberately fused tango gestures with forms and techniques drawn from Western art music and jazz. These included utilizing specific compositional techniques such as fugal counterpoint; developing a more extensive (though not necessarily improvisatory) role for virtuosic instrumental soloists; drawing upon larger-scale compositional structures such as suites and other extended forms; utilizing smaller instrumental forces such as quartets or quintets (versus the ten to twelve members of a golden-age orquesta típica); and cultivating performance contexts— such as genre-specific nightclubs and formal concert settings—that encouraged focused listening over social dancing (Azzi and Collier 2000). Along with these and other musical innovations, the vanguard period was also defined by the precipitous decline of tango as a popular form in Argentina, which happened for a number of specific musical, historical, and political reasons. In particular, the members of Astillero 70

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trace the decline of tango as a música popular to the violent ouster of the populist president Juan Perón in September of 1955. Upon taking power, the new provisional government declared a state of siege that, among other things, banned large public gatherings of any kind, including the innumerable formal and informal tango dances that were then taking place throughout the city (James 1988). While the new regime was probably not anti-tango in any meaningful way—despite the fact that many prominent golden-age tango musicians were ardent Peronists (Azzi 2002)—its antagonism toward oppositional organizing outweighed whatever value tango dances and other ostensibly harmless social activities may have had, and they were swept away as collateral damage, if only temporarily. The state of siege effectively drained the financial, social, and cultural lifeblood of the golden-age orquestas típicas, if not the genre as a whole, marking what the members of Astillero considered the beginning of the end of tango’s golden age as a música popular in Argentina.3 In the wake of these and other political ruptures and aesthetic upheavals, post–golden age tango came to be perceived, in the words of Julián Peralta, as “more and more conservative, more reactionary,” eventually taking on entrenched negative associations with the vast majority of Argentines who came of age during and following this transitional period, despite the real (though generally singular) successes of certain tango-related cultural productions and representations (Peralta 2006).4 Over time, however, tango came to have a renewed significance for many Argentines, especially those who are active in the new orquesta movement and in the broader musical renovation of tango taking place in Buenos Aires today. It is crucial to recognize that these artists have not taken up tango because it somehow inherently speaks to them or their concerns in ways that other musical forms or genres do not. On the contrary, it is the temporal distance between these artists and the more reactionary elements of post–golden age tango—along with the unique semantic flexibility of music as an expressive practice—that has allowed those renovating tango to approach the genre in ways that are influenced but not overdetermined by the broader sweep of music history. As Peralta explained: “Forty years have passed, and in those forty years we appeared, a generation for which tango has lost some of its bad connotations. [. . .] For us tango was nothing more than music, it returned to being nothing more than music, because when we listened to it tango was beyond all that other stuff. It was just records, which we approached with other connotations, [. . .] able to say, ‘hey, there is some good music here’” (Peralta 2006). Because of this per71

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sonal, historical, and artistic distance from tango, these artists could take up the musical sound and social history of golden-age tango as a lens through which they could examine their own experiences and concerns, both drawing upon and playing with the older aesthetic sensibilities of the genre in ways that spoke to the deep complexity of the contemporary moment. The result marked both a departure and a return, speaking to the dual trend of detachment and connection that has come to define contemporary tango in Buenos Aires today. The new orquestas seemed to take up the tradition of large- ensemble tango nearly intact from where it was at the end of the golden age, when the original groups began to disband owing to combined political, economic, and aesthetic pressures. Like their predecessors, the new orquestas are large, consisting of violin and bandoneón sections accompanied by piano, bass, and perhaps a few other instruments (viola, cello, etc). Most of their repertoire is drawn from that of the golden-age orquestas, which contemporary musicians have learned either through the study of recordings or by seeking out performers who were active in the mid-twentieth century and who are still alive and willing to teach (Liska 2004). Like their predecessors, these new ensembles write and perform original arrangements of pieces drawn from the classic tango repertoire, and they also compose some entirely original material. The musical affinity between the new orquestas and their golden-age counterparts is such that despite being separated by more than forty years of musical and social history, few sonic markers (aside from sound quality itself) would make their recorded work immediately distinguishable to the unfamiliar ear. And although it is rather unintuitive, it is this sonic similarity that marks the musical and social intervention of the new orquestas. For example, a common desire on the part of many of the contemporary orquesta musicians I spoke with in Buenos Aires was a general turn away from the work of Piazzolla and the larger tango vanguard. This has less to do with a direct dislike of Piazzolla’s music, which is widely admired by most musicians involved with the new orquestas, than it does with the belief that his effort to reinvent tango as an art music betrayed tango’s legacy and function as a música popular. In rejecting Piazzolla and the tango vanguard, musicians involved with the new orquestas have taken up the golden-age bandleader, composer, arranger and pianist Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995) as their principal point of reference and historical model. Pugliese is considered the quintessential practitioner of tango in the popular tradition these musicians identify with and wish to engage. Pugliese’s work, while musically pro72

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gressive, never gave up the genre’s poised intensity for the sake of compositional complexity. He specialized in an aggressive sensibility that highlighted the refined violence of tango without sacrificing its basic rhythmic drive. And while he flirted with the limits of danceability in some of his compositions, he remained invested in tango’s popular function as participatory dance music. Beyond this, Pugliese was also deeply committed to the radical political causes to which many politically minded young musicians are highly receptive. As a dedicated communist, Pugliese ran his orquesta as a collective, designing systems for equitable income distribution and coming to collective decisions regarding repertoire. He articulated a particular aesthetic philosophy that saw composing and performing tango less as a personalized or individualistic artistic pursuit than a response to the collective needs of audiences and the larger genre as a whole (Liska 2005). In other words, Pugliese saw tango as música popular. While the new orquestas make partisan claims about the broad trajectory of tango history through discursive claims about musical tastes and preferences, they make similar claims through the use of particular musical devices, the most obvious of which, in this case, is the orquesta típica format itself. Such claims are also made at the micro level of stylistic detail. For instance, many of the new groups sonically align themselves with Pugliese’s aesthetic (and political) sensibility by consciously incorporating specific stylistic characteristics associated with him into their work. In particular, an emphasis on el yumbeado, a rhythmic device introduced in Pugliese’s emblematic composition “La Yumba” of 1943, has become a hallmark of the contemporary orquesta sound. El yumbeado is a rhythmic pattern that places an extremely heavy accent on the first and third beats of a quadruple-meter bar and a very light emphasis on the second and fourth beats, often marked only by the piano player’s gently touching a single note in the instrument’s lower register. The title of Pugliese’s composition is an onomatopoeic representation of this rhythm—yum-ba, yum-ba, yum-ba . . . (see fig. 1). While it clearly originated with Pugliese, el yumbeado was taken up by a wide range of golden-age orquestas and came to be a defining aspect of that period’s musical style as a whole, testifying to Pugliese’s prominence in the history of the genre. Though el yumbeado can be heard in some compositions from the later vanguard period,5 with changes in instrumentation and a general shift in musical priorities, it was less commonly heard in tango music after the 1950s (Pelinski 2000). Therefore, when taken up by the new orquestas, el yumbeado serves as an aural reference to the lineage represented by Pugliese and 73

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1

El yumbeado, a rhythmic pattern that places an extremely heavy accent on the first and third beats of a quadruple- meter bar followed by a very light emphasis on the second and fourth beats.

his golden-age colleagues, a partisan reading of social history as and through musical sound and performance. At the same time, the visual presentation and performance practice utilized by many of the new orquestas is highly incongruent with that of their golden-age models, including Pugliese. The music of the earlier orquestas típicas represented the epitome of tango elegance and sophistication at the time, and their visual presentation corresponded to those same ideals. Nothing less than tuxedos were worn on stage and bands performed with a controlled ease that was the product of impeccably refined technique. Many of the new orquestas, on the other hand, have cultivated a visual sensibility that articulates the opposite priorities of their golden-age counterparts, and in no uncertain terms. Peralta’s original band, the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro, is most famous in this regard: for tuxedos they substitute a mix of leather jackets, torn jeans, hooded sweatshirts, sunglasses and T-shirts. For clipped, combed, and gelled hair they substitute dreadlocks, unkempt long hair, and beards. Through such strikingly incongruent visual performances, the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro and other groups like them have essentially reinvented golden-age tango as contemporary youth music, complicating what might seem like their conservative musical strategy.

Astillero and the Tango of Rupture Despite the tremendous enthusiasm that groups like the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro have received from their peers, by the mid-2000s Julián Peralta came to feel that the new orquesta movement had begun to exhaust itself artistically. The new orquestas típicas are still quintessential incubators for aspiring young tango musicians in Buenos Aires today, but the larger renovation of the golden-age orquesta tradition had lost some of the “internal revolution” that Peralta felt was necessary for the remaking of tango as a música popular.

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In an early moment, just playing tango was revolutionary. In 1994, to put together a tango group was revolutionary. In 1998, to put together an orquesta típica, that was revolutionary. In 2000, to put together a tango group, an orquesta típica, with all original arrangements, that was revolutionary. In 2002, to have an orquesta típica with its own tangos, or with new tangos (even though not all of them were new) and without wearing a black shirt, and filling a theater, it was a revolutionary deed! But what is revolutionary one day is not revolutionary the next day. [. . .] So a moment came when continuing to have an orquesta típica, to sing a Gardel tango, the moment has arrived when that is no longer revolutionary. (Peralta 2006)

Following this logic, Peralta and the other members of Astillero believed that the next “revolutionary” step would be to create a new ensemble dedicated entirely to the composition and performance of original tango music. This music would reflect the sound and experience of everyday life in contemporary Buenos Aires in a way that the music of the golden-age orquestas clearly could not. At the same time, it would also attempt to operate as música popular in the particular way Peralta and other members of the ensemble envisioned it, something tango had not done since the decline of the golden-age orquestas. Claiming this position required that the group both break from and recommit to tango as a musical genre, a stance that they have theorized as the “tango of rupture.” As Tripa Bonfiglio, the group’s first bandoneonist, explained to me in an interview: “We talk about the tango of rupture precisely because it is not classic tango—it is a new tango, with new elements, but it comes from tango itself. It breaks with the classic scheme without falling into fusion, because it does not incorporate elements taken from other genres. It’s not that we break with tango by using jazz harmonies, but by developing the extreme gestures that are in tango but have never been interpreted in this way. So it breaks with the classic scheme but from within the genre” (Bonfiglio 2007). While Astillero’s musical style is a sharp departure from that of previous tango groups, their tango of rupture in fact represents a break with tango’s larger musical history more than a break in musical sound per se. Considered from this perspective, Astillero’s tango of rupture can be heard as a fundamental critique of the previous vanguard movement and what they perceived as the broader decline of tango as a música popular following the golden age. For instance, whereas the tango of rupture is based on transforming tango from within the genre itself, the tango vanguard deliberately looked beyond tango for new techniques and inspiration. Thus Astillero’s tango of rupture is a musical style that is

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essentially about music history. At the same time, as and we have already seen, the members of Astillero were drawn to “classic tango”—by which they mean golden-age tango of the pre-vanguard period—not only because of its rich musicality, but because tango then operated as música popular. The group incorporates and exaggerates features of golden-age tango in their original compositions in order to create a contemporary music that can sonically claim the historic legacy of tango as a popular form. Thus, despite Astillero’s modernist discourse of rupture with the tango tradition, their project in fact marks a return to concerns with cultural history and local musical meanings. It is worth examining how this process operates at the level of musical gesture. The utilization of a set of standard accompaniment patterns is, in many ways, what defines tango as a genre. The most basic and fundamental of these patterns is the marcato, in which the accompanying instruments articulate all four downbeats in a 4/4 measure. There are two general ways of playing marcatos, one giving an equal emphasis to all four beats of the bar and the other placing accents on the first and third beats. These differences may seem minimal, but they have strikingly different effects in practice.6 Another fundamental accompaniment pattern is the síncopa, the basic rhythmic form of which, in a 4/4 bar, is eighth note– eighth note– eighth rest– eighth note– quarter note– quarter rest (see fig. 2). Like the marcato, the síncopa can also be varied depending on how it is accented. These variations can be expanded even further by applying different sorts of accented or unaccented arrastres—rhythmic anticipations of as much as a half of a beat—to the basic pattern. These variations provide tango with much of its rhythmic liveliness. In fact, while the Spanish term “síncopa” could be translated as “syncopation,” without arrastres and various other forms of accentuation the basic síncopa accompaniment pattern does not actually produce any musical syncopation.7 Peralta and other members of Astillero claimed that the pattern’s seemingly inappropriate name was a holdover from its origin in the fusion of what were (and are) two truly syncopated accompani-

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The basic síncopa accompaniment pattern.

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3

The bordoneo pattern from the milonga campera, as notated for guitar.

ment patterns found in the bordoneo texture of the milonga campera, a genre of folkloric music from Buenos Aires province (see fig. 3). While the bordoneo itself is occasionally heard in tango (as one of several more standardized accompaniment patterns), perhaps the clearest folkloric influence in tango is the 3– 3–2 eighth-note rhythmic division that is derived from the bass accompaniment figure of the milonga campera (seen in the downward-pointing stems in fig. 3). However, formal links between specific aspects of folkloric practice and fundamental features of tango such as the síncopa and the 3– 3–2—as clearly as they might be heard—tend to be underappreciated or even rejected outright by many of the genre’s aficionados, who imagine tango as a deeply if not exclusively cosmopolitan genre, in congruence with broader trends in Argentine modernism. Still, the members of Astillero consider such connections between tango and Argentine folk music to be a core component of what makes tango compelling to their generation as Argentines. For if nothing else, folkloric music is another form of música popular, the acceptance or rejection of which parallels tropes of inclusion and exclusion that are at the heart of Argentine cultural politics, musical and otherwise. Therefore musical features such as the marcato, the síncopa, and the 3–3–2 are not just generic stylistic features of tango, but the sonic foundation upon which coherent readings of musical and social history can be constructed. While the deliberate use of accompaniment patterns from goldenage tango can be used to emphasize the popular roots of tango, other features of Astillero’s music connect their work to different types of values. A particular use of musical motives, for instance, links Astillero’s music to popular ideologies of musical sophistication and compositional rigor. In tango, as in other forms of music, a motive functions as the smallest unit recognizable as a distinct musical idea, with specific melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic characteristics. Usually no more than one or two measures in length, motives are used as the fundamental unit of melodic development in tango, the building blocks of larger musical ideas. Complete melodic phrases, for example, are often made up of a sequence of imitative and/or contrastive motives; units of 77

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two or more phrases, in turn, can be arranged into larger parts; parts can be grouped to create a complete piece, and so on. Motivic constructions of this sort can be heard throughout the repertoire of golden-age tango. Therefore, however formulaic such motivically oriented music might be, adhering to these types of melodic constructions also operates as a way for contemporary composers to maintain their allegiance to the genre’s traditional compositional processes. At the same time, some golden-age tango composers used motivic development in a more extensive fashion, creating compositions that are today exalted as something akin to a popular art music. Osvaldo Pugliese’s piece “La Yumba” is again emblematic in this regard. Based on the elaborate development of a single motive that is varied and expounded upon throughout the course of the piece, “La Yumba” was described to me as “the Beethoven’s Fifth of tango” on many occasions, the comparison based on that famous piece’s similarly extensive use of motivic development. The compositional rigor of “La Yumba,” alongside its undisputable position at the core of the popular tango tradition, has served as a key inspiration for Astillero’s project of creating original tangos that can be both musically rich and socially popular. As Julián Peralta (2006) observed: “One does not need to make bad music in order for it to have reach. Pugliese demonstrated that [with “La Yumba.”]. [.  .  .] It shows that one can make a song [.  .  .] with an almost Schubert-like structure, but in a certain moment it can become popular music. Because [.  .  .] it transcends conscious enjoyment and just hits you in the gut.” While these and other compositional techniques are valorously compared to those found in Western art music, my interlocutors repeatedly emphasized to me that they developed within tango itself. Therefore, although many contemporary tango composers are familiar with Western art music and its techniques, the motivic orientation of golden-age tango predisposes them to compositional practices that might appear borrowed from Western art music but that in fact emerged from the common practice of tango as a popular form. Utilizing such techniques, then, does not add value to tango by raising it to the so- called higher level of an external art music, but instead marks the inherent sophistication and artistic merit of tango as a música popular. Given this emphasis on composition, it is perhaps not surprising that tango, in general, is not a highly improvisatory music. The goldenage orquestas típicas, for instance, played from (or commonly memorized) written parts in which most aspects of a given composition or arrangement were notated, including instrumental solos. However, there 78

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is a significant amount of interpretive space between what is notated on the page and what an ensemble or individual performer is at liberty and indeed expected to play. This is especially true regarding overall rhythmic interpretation, which, in tango, is based on exaggerating the perceived pull that the notes that fall on the strong beats of the bar (1  and 3) exert on those that fall on the weak beats (2 and 4). When executed effectively, this interpretative style creates a rhythmic tension that makes it sound as if the strong beats are being rushed, when in fact they remain metrically steady while the rest of the musical material is slightly delayed, thereby creating a rhythmic swing that is essentially the opposite of that heard in straight-ahead jazz. The members of Astillero believed that the rhythmic tension created by this performance practice was central to tango’s appeal as popular dance music, and therefore learning how to interpret pieces according to these principles was considered a key component of performing tango “correctly.” Tripa Bonfiglio took these associations even further in my beginning bandoneón lessons with him, explaining to me that tango’s particular rhythmic feel could be understood as a musical embodiment of the tension, toughness, and looming violence that is at the heart of popular identity and experience in Argentina—in tango and beyond—both past and present. For example, in teaching me what he considered an acceptable rhythmic interpretation for the opening phrase of Jesús Ventura’s composition “A la gran muñeca” (1920; famously recorded by Carlos Di Sarli in 1951), Bonfiglio constantly reminded me that tango was a popular form, that it was what he called bien Italiano. In describing it this way, Bonfiglio emphasized tango’s historical connection to working- class immigrant populations in Buenos Aires over its more recent history of transnational circulation as alternative art music. He illustrated the musical implications of this by setting the piece’s rhythmically simple melodic line to a common but very vulgar set of Argentine curse words, creating heavy accents on the strong beats and their corresponding rhythmic drag on the rest of the measure: “con- cha de tu ma- dre.”8 For Bonfiglio, setting the line to this obscenity made for a good interpretation because it highlighted the kind of rhythmic tension any version of the piece would need in order to be heard as tango. It also renaturalized tango’s connection to a trope of violent or at least transgressive masculinity that, for better or (often) worse, shapes cultural practices of all sorts in Argentina (Archetti 1999). By incorporating these and other features of golden-age tango into their contemporary compositions, Astillero aligns its music with his79

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torical practices that its members believe to be essential components of what once made tango a música popular. These features are, in a way, what tango as a popular form “is,” and using them is what makes music tango. That said, the group has by no means embraced all the musical features of golden-age tango, and those that they do draw upon are often exaggerated in an extreme way.9 Taken as a whole, then, Astillero’s music breaks with some of the most reified stereotypes of tango without rejecting—or indeed radically altering—the musical fundamentals of the genre as it was practiced during the golden age, again suggesting a new concern for cultural synthesis on the part of these artists despite their modernist discourse of rupture. This, coupled with their rejection of the vanguard’s impulse toward fusion, is ultimately what the tango of rupture is about: reaffirming the genre’s roots in popular practice while reinvigorating it as a newly relevant form, something capable of speaking to a wider range of contemporary experiences in a way that golden-age tango no longer could. As Mariano Caló, the group’s second bandoneonist, observed: “Tango was originally born from nostalgia, from the ‘lost world’ [of the immigrants], but now that nostalgia is not there. I don’t miss any lost world because I was born here, my parents were born here. But there are other things that happen, this is a messed-up country, a lot of things happen. So it’s not that we just have a style: if you sit down to compose a tango today this is what comes out: something violent, with strong rhythms, influenced by a lot of things that have happened. There just aren’t many more ways of making tango today, making tango as música popular” (Caló 2007).

Música popular as Social Practice These formal features and compositional techniques are part of what makes Astillero’s tango of rupture popular music, but they are not everything that makes it música popular. In Buenos Aires, as in the rest of Latin America, a música popular is defined less by matters of musical style and mediation than by specific types of popular social institutions and networks. In the case of golden-age tango, these included the large milieu of professional and amateur musicians who performed in the orquestas típicas, the social network of tango dancers and other audience members, and the institutional structures of neighborhood social clubs and other performance spaces. In other words, golden-age tango was música popular not because it had a mass audience and was distributed through the mass media, but because it served as the center 80

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of gravity around which a specific type of participatory popular culture could coalesce, creating a true golden age of live performance and participation that had a near-magical effect on social reality. But because tango has not mobilized popular participation and sociability of this type since the end of the golden age, Astillero has had to build the participatory networks and institutional structures required to remake tango a música popular largely from the ground up. These include the escuela de tango Orlando Goñi, an underground tango school where members of Astillero and other musicians teach lessons and direct student ensembles, and a weekly milonga. These and other projects are designed to be financially, socially, and aesthetically accessible to the group’s immediate peer group, and are undertaken in adherence to an ideology of autogestión, a collective approach to cultural production that developed as a component of the broader social movements that emerged in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis (Sitrin 2006). Translated roughly as “self-management,” autogestión is an organizational philosophy that operates between the private and the public, a form of collective participation such that institutions belong to everyone and to no one. Autogestión “is based not in the what, but in the how”: “It is the relationships among people that create a particular project, not simply the project itself. It is a word reflecting an autonomous and collective practice. When people in the movements in Argentina speak of autogestión they usually are implying directly democratic decision-making processes and the creation of new subjectivities along the way” (Sitrin 2006, vii). In a country without a broad tradition of artistic philanthropy and a paternalistic state apparatus that has long managed artistic production through an extensive but often exclusive set of cultural policies and programs, such alternative institutions and the cultural strategies through which they are managed are among the few viable resources available to these musicians at this time. Then housed in what was once a small furniture factory on Avenida Independencia in the San Telmo neighborhood, just south of the Plaza de Mayo, the escuela de tango Orlando Goñi is named for the pianist and sometime bandleader (1914–1945) who made his name as a member of the golden-age orquestas of Aníbal Troilo. Naming institutions in honor of significant figures from a given field is common in Argentina, though here the name functions as a tribute to Goñi’s hard- core bohemianism (which left him dead of alcoholism at the age of thirty- one) as much as a memorial to his musicianship. The school operates entirely underground, that is, outside of any official regulation or accreditation. 81

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It does not grant any degrees and has no real curriculum or sequence of courses, though students of all skill levels—many with extensive backgrounds in Western art music—take classes there. At the time of my fieldwork, these included lessons on tango instruments (violin and other string instruments, bandoneón, piano, bass, or guitar); student performance ensembles (including several orquestas típicas of various skill levels and a guitar ensemble); and private or group classes in tango music theory, arranging, and composition. I took weekly private bandoneón lessons first with Tripa Bonfiglio and then with Mariano Caló as part of my ethnographic fieldwork. I also played with two different student orquestas. The first was the Orquesta Típica Piel de Mono (Monkey Skin Tango Orchestra), a mid-level group directed by Peralta. After a few weeks of struggle—at the time I did not even know where all the notes were located on the instrument’s two infamously scrambled button keyboards—I was demoted to the beginner-level Orquesta Típica Mario Baracus (Mr. T. Tango Orchestra), directed by Caló. The names of these orquestas—the first chosen by group consensus before I joined it and the second given by Caló when the group formed—illustrate some of the irreverence with which these projects and the institution as a whole were approached, even though the music and musical training that took place at the school were taken very seriously. Students who found their way there were generally dedicated to the broader vision of remaking tango a música popular, part of which entailed a nearly philosophical commitment to the pleasure of music making and the camaraderie that accompanied it. In the time I spent with the Orquesta Típica Mario Baracus, we worked two different pieces up to performance level, such as it was. The first was an original arrangement that Peralta had made of “Trenzas” (Braids), a classic of the golden-age vocal repertoire that he had previously performed and recorded with the Orquesta Típica Fer nandez Fierro.10 The second was an orquesta típica arrangement of Peralta’s original piece “Chiru,” which he had originally written for the smaller instrumental forces of Astillero. Rehearsals consisted of working through lines for rhythmic interpretation and feel, making decisions on how we would articulate and accent the generically notated marcatos and síncopas, balancing the bandoneón and string sections against one another, establishing dynamics, and so on—and just trying to make it through the pieces. The decision to approach this particular repertoire (a cornerstone of the golden-age canon and an original piece written in accordance with the tango of rupture) in this particular way was not an arbitrary one. Like the school as a whole, learning 82

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to play this type of repertoire in this kind of ensemble was seen as a small but integral part of the much larger project of remaking tango a música popular. The primary goal of the school, which had about fifty active students at the time I attended it, was to make tango musicians, to create a critical mass of performers who would want and be able to participate in tango as a newly popular form. As Caló explained: The school is necessary so that there can be more groups like Astillero, [.  .  .] so that the friends of the people who are in each group like Astillero begin to listen to tango. After they listen to Astillero, and after they listen to other groups, they will want to create another group. And there will be more and more groups, like it was during the golden age of tango. That is it: tango as música popular. Having tango as música popular means that there are forty orchestras, playing tangos from one another’s groups. That is what happened before, and that is the logic of what we are looking for now. (Caló 2007)

The training project of the school is paired with a weekly milonga, which is produced, organized, and staffed by members of Astillero and some of their students. Congruent with the famously late nights that are enjoyed by most Argentines and de rigueur for tango dance aficionados, Astillero’s milonga opened with an hour-long dance lesson that began around ten or eleven in the evening.11 The lesson, in which more experienced dancers were taught new steps while beginners were refreshed on the basics, was followed by several hours of formalized tango dancing to historical audio recordings of golden-age tango orquestas, as is typical at contemporary milongas in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. Sometime between two and four in the morning a short set of live music would be performed by Astillero, one of the student ensembles from the school, or another invited group. These musical performances served at least two purposes. On the one hand, they helped build an audience for Astillero, the other groups, and live tango music in general. This is important, because there is no necessary affinity between an interest in tango as dance and an interest in tango as music—much less ostensibly new types of music—among tango audiences in Buenos Aires today. However, because tango’s popular roots are firmly grounded in the genre’s historical function as a music made for social dancing, systematically reconnecting live performance with the dance- oriented sociability of the milongas—if not creating dance music outright—was considered a crucial component of Astillero’s project. On the other hand, the milonga also provides a readily available and relatively supportive venue for the school’s student ensembles 83

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or other emerging groups to present themselves before an audience. However pleasurable it might be to arrange or compose tangos in private, or to practice an instrument or even rehearse with an ensemble of friends, the members of Astillero believed that making tango música popular was ultimately about creating a back-and-forth dialogue with the audience in performance. The dancing continued following these live performances, eventually shifting to a variety of popular folkloric genres—such as chacarera, chamamé, and zamba—each of which is danced to a relatively elaborate set of steps (though none as involved as tango itself). Even later, the music would shift to cumbia, a massively popular genre of contemporary urban dance music.12 The more informal style of cumbia dancing went on well into the daylight hours. In the course of this particular milonga, Astillero mapped a specific narrative of the popular, sonically tracing connections not only between the contemporary tango of rupture and the genre’s popular past, but between tango and the popular folk music of the Argentine provinces as well as the hugely popular music of the peripheral urban “masses.” These connections were at once musical, social, historical, and emotive. They were not only narrated, but enacted and embodied in the sequence of dance forms performed over the course of the evening, forms whose style and meanings were shaped in the participatory and collective sociability of the milonga but that emerged from the everyday experience of individual attendees. That emotive sociability was not simply there, part of the “passionate days and nights” that so many tourist brochures promise one will find in Buenos Aires. Nor was it somehow an inherent part of tango as a genre of music or style of dance. It was instead a carefully constructed enactment of everything that these musicians imagined and believed tango was as a música popular. Taken together, the school and the milonga created the space needed for the participatory sociability of tango as a música poplar to be experienced by these musicians and their peers. As Caló observed: “The only way we have access to the public is by generating spaces; there is no other way to do it. This is not a genre that you can sell on the radio. The first thing you need to do is create a space where you feel like you belong. Where you can bring your friends and where they like it. I go to the milonga and I feel it, I go to the school and I feel like I am a part of it. [. . .] It is really a necessity for everyone that this kind of movement exists, because we need the tango, and we also need a space in which we belong. It is a thing that feeds itself, a movement” (2007).

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As suggested in this quote, Astillero’s inspiration for building alternative networks and institutions came not only from the group’s vision of tango’s popular past, but from the many social movements that emerged in Argentina following the 2001 economic crisis, including unemployed workers’ movements; neighborhood assemblies; local, regional, and national barter networks; and community soup kitchens, among others. Affinities between the broader social movements and Astillero’s musical and political project can be seen not only in the fact that both have had to build alternative institutional structures essentially from the ground up, but also in the political ideologies and organizational practices through which those institutions are managed. For instance, Astillero’s tango school and milonga both operated in strict accordance with the idea of autogestión. Caló described what this meant in practice: For example, when we first put together the milonga, I put in around a thousand pesos, all of us put in about that much, and we bought the piano, we bought lights, we bought a few speakers, glasses, and the first round of drinks to sell. That was returned to us in about two months, from the entrance fee, from the bar, and we were left without any debts. So, who does this all belong to? We all pitched in and helped, but we have already been repaid, so it is no longer ours. It isn’t anyone’s, it just is. It exists. The same goes with the movement. It is. It is everyone’s. So this is the crazy part of the aesthetic, of being collective like that. We all do things because it is good, not because it is a favor to anyone. You do it for yourself, because you like that it exists. This is the movement. (Caló 2007)

As inspirational as Argentina’s post- crisis social movements have been for local participants and outside observers alike (Lewis and Klein 2004; Klein 2007), it is important to emphasize that they emerged from a context of desperate need. They were (and are) mobilized to address the state’s abject failure to provide even the most basic necessities and services in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis, essentially denying many Argentines the full benefits of citizenship. These failures—or refusals, really—long pre- date the crisis (Auyero 2001) and are in many ways what define the popular experience in Argentina in the last quarter century. Such uneven “modes of citizenship” (Lomnitz 2001, 58) have direct implications for music and the arts. In this particular case, Astillero’s project of remaking tango into a música popular has been entirely excluded from official efforts to promote or develop tango as an emblem-

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atic component of Argentine culture, especially those of the city government of Buenos Aires. This is all the more striking given the sheer extent of those efforts: the city government is by far the largest producer of cultural events in Buenos Aires, having produced more than fifteen hundred mostly free performances throughout their network of city- owned venues in 2006, the year I conducted my primary fieldwork (Ministerio de Cultura 2007). The city has also mobilized an elaborate set of cultural policies designed to promote tango and the city’s historical connection to it as a cultural and/or economic resource, including two large-scale tango dance and music festivals that take place annually. Astillero and their peers have been largely excluded from these projects. As Julián Peralta observed: “The city government has cultural policies [for tango]. They say, quote unquote, ‘we promote,’ ‘we develop’ [. . .] but everything that is new they throw out like garbage, and in the end it is development without development. So you eventually begin to generate your own way of developing things, so that they work the way you want, because you have already been dismissed by the state. You already know that they are not going to help you” (2006). Given the strikingly uneven distribution of state services, including the benefits of cultural-policy making, it is tempting to read Astillero’s work as a mode of resistance against reified notions of cultural citizenship and belonging in post- crisis Argentina. Nevertheless, their institutionalizing efforts are entirely congruent with the broader turn toward the usability of musical culture in the age of expediency, with “development” serving as the common denominator of these otherwise seemingly disparate mobilizations of tango.

Conclusion: The Cultural Politics of música popular Here we can begin to see the real impasse that the popular as such represents in contemporary Buenos Aires. On the one hand, the popular social movements that emerged after the 2001 economic crisis and those inspired by them have had to create alternative spaces and institutions because they have been excluded from the realm of official politics, cultural and otherwise. On the other hand, they have been excluded precisely because their popularity places them outside of what is considered acceptable or supportable by the government and other official institutions, with the popular here conjuring a complex amalgamation of long-standing racial, ethnic, gender, and especially class differences and prejudices, each of which has a specific geneal86

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ogy  within Argentina and other Latin American contexts (Grimson and Jelin 2006; Wade 1997). At the same time, the popular points less to overt discrimination based on racial, ethnic, gendered, or class differences than to the social logic of systematic inequalities that are largely defined by patterns of cultural production and consumption. As the anthropologist Néstor García Canclini (1995, 145) notes: “The popular is the excluded: those who have no patrimony or who do not succeed in being acknowledged and conserved; artisans who do not become artists, who do not become individuals or participate in the market for ‘legitimate’ symbolic goods; spectators of the mass media who remain outside the universities and museums, ‘incapable’ of reading and looking at high culture because they do not know the history of knowledge and styles.” Such exclusions have only been exacerbated by the spectacular series of failures on the part of international political-economic ideologies that have successively intended to “develop,” “modernize,” “integrate,” or “globalize” Latin American economies, political policies, and cultures, of which the 2001 Argentine economic crisis is but one example. Far from achieving their stated goals, these policies have succeeded only in compounding exclusions of all sorts—from economic opportunity, social integration, political participation, or cultural legitimacy—to the point that the region as a whole has been mired in what has been identified as a more or less permanent state of crisis (Yúdice, Flores, and Franco 1992; Richard 2004; Grimson 2004). Within such a context, “the popular” has come to operate as a key component of Latin American politics (Laclau 2005), social movements (Eckstein 2001; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998), culture (Míguez and Semán, 2006), the arts, and música popular. Such divisions are reinforced, not reduced, by state cultural policies and other managerial regimes that aim to channel the multitude of local cultural practices and aesthetic meanings into a manageable, productive resource—in this case, circumscribing what is or is not acceptable as tango. Astillero’s project of remaking tango into a música popular highlights how these divisions are reinscribed on and through musical sound and style within the context of social practice. Música popular is worth talking about in part because it fits so uncomfortably within these processes, because it is at once and irreducibly aesthetic and social, artistic and political, such that the most minutely artistic and aesthetic concerns are immediately implicated in a much broader cultural politics. Recognizing this, however, does not represent a further invitation to 87

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depart from the serious consideration of specifically musical materials in favor of a more contextual or interpretive analysis. Both the political claims and material consequences of debates regarding tango as a música popular in contemporary Buenos Aires are embedded precisely within the sonic details of musical style itself—specific accompaniment figures, particular melodic gestures, modes of rhythmic interpretation, and so on—such that musical style, at least in this particular case, can and does serve as an aural icon of an alternative social universe. This is not an instance of sound structure somehow representing social structure (Lomax 1971; Feld 1984b) or even sound structure representing social sensibilities (Turino 2008). Astillero’s tango of rupture is nothing more than a partisan reading of tango’s historic legacy as a música popular qua music, through which the alternative social sensibilities and institutional structures envisioned by Astillero and their peers can be imagined and called forth in social practice. At the same time, it should be stressed that the aesthetic project of Astillero and the broader musical and social movement they have attempted to cultivate does not, in the last analysis, represent a radical alternative to the hegemonic forms against which they define themselves, particularly those of the city government. It could instead be argued that Astillero represents something of a “loyal opposition” that differently though ultimately accepts tango as the privileged genre of the city’s aural public sphere. From this perspective, Astillero and their peers have not recreated tango as a música popular so much as they have convincingly engaged and animated the idea of the popular as it is imagined to have existed in the historical experience and legacy of tango by this particular demographic of musicians and their audiences (many of whom, it should be said, come from genuinely disenfranchised backgrounds among the so- called popular classes in Argentina).13 These debates, in turn, are framed by the new place of local musics within the transnational arena, which has reconfigured how these types of social and aesthetic divisions are experienced and lived in local contexts. For instance, while Astillero’s efforts to remake tango a música popular have been largely excluded from the aural public sphere of tango in Buenos Aires, it is very much in demand in places like Europe and East Asia, where the group regularly tours. In May of 2010, for example, Astillero was in London, rehearsing for a new production of Romeo and Juliet by the Mercury Theatre Company, which reenvisioned the star-crossed lovers as a pair of tango dancers. The production’s publicity brochure stated, in part: “Through the power and passion of the 88

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evocative tango the decline of the lovers is seen not as fate, but an act of orchestration. The musicians intertwine with the actors creating their world, their love, and ultimately their fate” (Mercury Theatre 2010, 4). Astillero’s participation in the play was made possible by financial support from the British Council, the international cultural relations organization of the British government, as well as other official funding sources. This production should be considered as a specific instance of engagement within a much larger and broadly shifting terrain of musical circulation, cultural-policy making, and global commerce, which together frames this and every other engagement with tango in the age of expediency. These transformations open new spaces for changing styles of music and alternative modes of cultural production, including those of Astillero and many others. They also call forth new forms and structures of cultural institutionalization and the modes of managerial practice that are a key trope of musical culture in the age of expediency. Such institutionalizations, it bears repeating, are not utopian alternatives but modes of gathering and articulating power, musical and otherwise. Recognizing this is a crucial component of our critical account of these institutional formations, which can otherwise be easily and even enthusiastically positioned as true alternatives to the broader machinations of the many other managerial regimes that both mobilize and shape musical practice and social life in the age of expediency. Even more important is the recognition that alongside the very real difference of Astillero’s musical style, social sensibility, and cultural politics of the popular is the sameness of institutionalization as a mode of cultural practice and the managerial impulse that underlies it, reflected here in the formation of Astillero’s school, their weekly milonga, and other seemingly extramusical organizational strategies. In other words, and for everything else it is, Astillero is also a managerial regime.

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Tango among the Nonprofit Arts TangoVia Buenos Aires is a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is, in part, to “position tango, the collective, popular creation that best represents the multiplicity of [Argentine] roots and identity, as Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world” (tangovia .org/mision). Self- consciously modeled on like-minded international institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, the organization is located squarely within broader debates regarding artistic canonization, cultural ownership, and the authority to represent an ostensibly collective cultural form. At the same time, recent transformations of the state have allowed TangoVia to take advantage of the city government of Buenos Aires’ newfound interest in fostering public-private partnerships in the support of culture. The very existence of a nonprofit arts organization like TangoVia in Buenos Aires highlights a fundamental shift in cultural-policy making, from historical models that have envisioned the state as a direct producer of the arts and culture to ones where the state operates as a partner in the development of cultural enterprises, a typical feature of musical culture in the age of expediency. This chapter traces the culture and politics of this shift. I argue that the viability of such partnerships has required a substantial revision of historically entrenched aesthetic ideologies regarding tango in Argentina, again reflecting the dual trend of detachment and connection that shapes the value and meaning of tango today. This has involved, 90

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on the one hand, a renewed commitment to tango as a genre. That commitment is expressed in TangoVia’s systematic refinement and codification of a widely acknowledged but loosely defined canon of tango music within shifting discourses of aesthetic value and cultural heritage. On the other hand, it has required a careful revision of the core tropes that have historically characterized tango in Argentina, tropes that are celebrated to the point of caricature in many instances. This celebratory self-referentiality has in fact been the hegemonic mode of tango circulation in Buenos Aires for the past several decades outside the niche musical youth movements examined in chapters 1 and 2. Like those movements, TangoVia carefully departs from these tropes. Both its detachment from and connection to tango pivots on the essentially novel proposition that tango is art and thereby worthy of the very specific types of institutional support called forth by publicprivate partnerships. On the surface, TangoVia’s institutional project seems in many ways the opposite of Astillero’s efforts to remake tango as a música popular. While clearly framed within shifting contexts of musical meaning and circulation at the global level, Astillero’s project was ultimately localist in nature. Astillero was focused on creating a musical style that the group’s immediate peers could identify with and enjoy, a social milieu of participatory popular culture that they could directly engage with and contribute to, and the institutional forms and spaces that would both enable and reinforce these efforts. TangoVia, by contrast, is decidedly cosmopolitan, its institutional mission defined by the notion that tango is “Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world.” Astillero’s tango of rupture was premised, in part, on rejecting what it considered to be the high-art pretensions of the tango vanguard movement in favor of a “popular” musical aesthetics that “transcends conscious enjoyment and just hits you in the gut” (Peralta 2006). TangoVia’s project is premised on the idea that music from all periods of tango history is worthy of consideration as art. Astillero and TangoVia also have strikingly different relationships to the broader milieu of managerial regimes in Buenos Aires, especially the cultural-policy making of the city government. At the time of my fieldwork, Astillero’s institution-building efforts had not received any support whatsoever from the City, a lack that Julián Peralta was acutely aware of. As he explained to me in an interview: “We have been putting together orquestas for many years. Any [new] orquesta típica that you can name, in one way or another, has a relationship with one of the guys in Astillero. But [the city government] has never given us a space. 91

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Not a space, not even a light bulb. They never lent us a bass or tuned our pianos. So even with the high level of cultural production for tango in Buenos Aires, half of tango comes from a place where the state does not put a single thing” (2006). In contrast to Astillero’s exclusion from official channels of governmental support, which itself is a key trope of the popular experience in Argentina as they mobilized it, TangoVia has worked closely with the city government in a variety of capacities. Despite these and other differences between Astillero’s efforts to remake tango a música popular and TangoVia’s project of positioning tango as Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world, both emerged in response to the profound transformations of Argentine culture, politics, and society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The broad (though highly uneven) retreat of the state following the neoliberal turn prompted the formation of new, different, or alternative institutional structures, in the arts and elsewhere. The case of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is most famous in this regard. Originally designed to address the many real needs that the state and the market were either unable or unwilling to meet, the mushrooming of NGOs in Argentina over the past decades reflects the economic, social, and political transformations enacted by the limited successes of social movements and the expansion of neoliberalism. One consequence of these transformations has been the privileging of what Toby Miller calls “cultural citizenship” over more traditional modes of political and economic citizenship: “now that many forms of publicly expressed identity have emerged from a combination of expanded human and civil rights and expanded niche marketing, globalizing and privatizing norms merge with forms of consumer targeting to produce new kinds of civic life” (2001, 3; see also Miller 2007). These new kinds of civic life have reoriented the conditions of political subjectivity such that consumerism displaces citizenship, media representation stands in for political representation, and social entrepreneurialism takes the place of state services. It is in this context of institutional change that culture has emerged as a unique kind of resource for economic and social development in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. The economic value of culture is now acknowledged and deliberately cultivated not only by the market but by the state and civil society as well. At the same time, the many noneconomic values of culture have also been reconfigured. On the one hand, the types of cultural resistance traditionally embraced by Latin American social movements, usually based on a wholesale rejection of official culture and the mainstream media in favor of oppositional 92

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alternatives created within movements, have morphed into complex strategies of engagement based on network building through cultural spectacle and media representation (see Neate and Platt 2010). On the other hand, the state’s long-standing commitment to using culture to shape subjectivities and cultivate national identifications has receded in favor not only of a more economically instrumental consideration of culture, but of essentially new criteria of transnational cultural prestige, one that emphasizes the universal value of local culture over the local value of universal culture. TangoVia, as a nonprofit arts institution, operates at precisely this intersection. In what follows I examine how these trends are embedded throughout TangoVia’s projects, institutional structures, and aesthetic ideologies. I focus on understanding how TangoVia’s successful transition from the either/or stance of previous institutional models to the both/and position of public-private partnerships reflects and contributes to the broader reorientation of the market, the state, and civil society following the neoliberal turn. After a general introduction to the organization and its founder, I will focus first on the different ways the institution has connected to tango, how it has positioned the genre as something worth preserving and perpetuating. This revalorization of tango was put into practice in a variety of ways, from the ongoing assembly of a potentially exhaustive digital archive of musical recordings and other historical materials to the codification and canonization of that material through educational projects that disseminate the institution’s particular vision for understanding the genre’s history and broader aesthetic significance. The ultimate instance of this is the Orquesta Escuela de Tango (Tango School Orchestra), a two-year training program where aspiring musicians under the age of thirty are taught to perform in the seven “most significant tango orchestra styles of the 1940s and 1950s” (tangovia.org/plan). While the Orquesta Escuela is one of TangoVia’s cornerstone projects and has become a significant presence within the city’s broader tango milieu, it is almost entirely dependent on funding from the city government for its viability and is partly managed by the city’s Ministry of Culture. The counterpart to this deep connection to tango is TangoVia’s equally forceful detachment from what has become some of the core tropes of the genre as it is practiced in Buenos Aires today. Against a lo nuestro (our thing) essentialism that posits tango as the exclusive province of a uniquely Argentine sentimental and expressive complex—accessible to outsiders only through devotion to widespread mythologies that see the genre as artistically isolated and aesthetically self93

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referential—TangoVia proposes an alternative vision of tango that sees it as an artistic practice like any other. In so doing, it positions tango as a rightful heir to cosmopolitan aesthetic ideologies that highlight artistic innovation within a given musical tradition as the hallmark of a local music’s universal value (see Stokes 2007). These efforts can be observed with respect to the production and dissemination of artistic products—from original recordings aimed at connoisseur audiences, to the many international tango festivals TangoVia has produced, to its support for contemporary artists of a certain aesthetic stripe. The artistic principles that guide these musical projects have, in turn, come to be equally valued by the city government of Buenos Aires, forming cornerstones of its broader project of shaping Buenos Aires as a world cultural city (Sassen 2001).

TangoVia as an Institution The prominent tango bassist and producer Ignacio Varchausky founded TangoVia and serves as the organization’s president and artistic director. TangoVia was officially incorporated at the end of 2002, though Varchausky’s high profile within the contemporary tango community in Buenos Aires dates back to 1996, when he founded the Orquesta El Arranque. El Arranque is one of the earliest, most critically acclaimed, and most commercially successful tango ensembles of the current generation, with seven celebrated recordings to its name as of 2015 (including a live album that was nominated for a Latin Grammy award in 2004) and many tours to Europe, the United States, Asia, and other parts of Latin America. The group was awarded a prestigious “diploma of merit” from the Konex Foundation in 2005 and again in 2015, describing them as “a fundamental point of reference among the tango groups of their generation.”1 In 2007 the Argentine Society of Authors and Music Composers (SADAIC) recognized El Arranque as the “tango revelation of the last decade.”2 The group has also served as a launching pad for musicians who have gone on to become some of the most prominent tango figures of their generation, including the violinist and composer Ramiro Gallo and the singer Ariel Ardit. An accomplished performer, bandleader, and music educator, Varchausky has also worked extensively as a cultural producer. His first significant production work took place the year after he formed El Arranque, when he organized a homage to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the tango singer Ignacio Corsini (1891–1967) 94

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at Buenos Aires’ famous Café Tortoni. Corsini was the first tango artist Varchausky became personally fascinated with after his father played him a cassette of the historic tango singer, which Varchausky’s father thought his then rock and roll–minded early-adolescent son would take as nothing more than a joke. Years later, as the anniversary of Corsini’s death approached, and in the absence of plans for any other commemorative event, Varchausky decided to organize something himself. In the end he was able to enlist the help of several well-known tango musicians and collectors, including the singers Nelly Omar and Enzo Valentino, who is considered the contemporary torchbearer of Corsini’s vocal style, and the collector Bruno Cespi, who has assembled a significant private collection of tango photographs. He secured the collaboration of Página 12, Buenos Aires’s left-leaning daily newspaper, which printed programs featuring a short biography of Corsini written by Varchausky, photos from Cespi’s collection, and other special contributions. The crowd that attended the event was large enough that many people had to be turned away, and it attracted significant attention from the local media. “And it was all organized by this twenty-somethingyear- old kid,” as Varchausky described it to me. “It was a great experience. [.  .  .] I was especially happy because all the Corsini fans felt so happy, because no one usually pays any attention to Corsini. So it felt like a huge success to have Corsini in the newspapers, to have a full house, a tribute, everything was fantastic. That night I remember thinking how great it was that you can do a thing like that, something that is so nice and so important, with only a little work and love. It wasn’t like mission impossible, you know? And from there a lot of people noticed me. ‘Oh, that kid. Who is that kid?’” (2007). The success of this event established Varchausky as a significant new presence on the city’s cultural scene, launching what has since become a varied career as a cultural producer. Some of these activities have come to be conducted under the auspices of TangoVia, though most of that organization’s projects are undertaken independently. At the time of my primary fieldwork, Varchausky had yet to be paid for his work with TangoVia. TangoVia was then housed in the Casa del Tango, an inconspicuously modern two-story building located in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Just a few blocks off of Avenida Corrientes, the city’s principal commercial artery, the Casa del Tango is halfway down a largely residential block, mostly quiet except for the racket of city busses that regularly pass down the pockmarked street. Built on land 95

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owned by the city government and leased to the Casa del Tango foundation for a nominal fee, the building hosted a variety of relatively low-profile events, from occasional tango dance classes and concerts to writing workshops and yoga classes. TangoVia made the most active use of the space: the Orquesta Escuela de Tango held its twiceweekly rehearsals there, Varchausky and his staff had their offices on the building’s second floor, and TangoVia was assembling a small audio digitization studio in the building and occasionally hosted special events there. TangoVia employed a staff of four: an administrative director who oversaw the organization’s day-to- day operations, a production coordinator who assisted with the realization of special projects, a general coordinator for the Orquesta Escuela and its director, and a general collaborator. The organization was overseen by a directive commission of eight, which at the time included, in addition to Varchausky, Andrés Casak, a music journalist; Andrés Linetzky, a prominent tango piano player; Gustavo Margulies, a musician and producer who oversaw the music-publishing operation for EPSA Music, one of the largest independent record labels in Buenos Aires; Caroline Neal, an Americanborn filmmaker; Santiago Rosso, a cultural producer and psychologist; Roberto Sarfati, a record producer who oversaw the reissue of many historical tango recordings for the Lantower record label; and Diego Schissi, a prominent contemporary tango pianist and composer who is also an expert in musical transcription, a key component of TangoVia’s recuperation of musical scores based on historical audio recordings.3 TangoVia also cultivated a diverse network of supporters and collaborators at the local, national, and international levels representing a wide array of interests and expertise. They included, among others, government functionaries; members of the business and diplomatic communities; musicians, dancers, and other tango artists; entertainmentindustry operatives; journalists and other media figures; and academic investigators like me. Creating collaborative synergies across networks of supporters has been central to TangoVia’s workings as an institution. The very idea of forming an organization like TangoVia emerged through the process of constructing these networks. In May 2001 El Arranque traveled to Lincoln Center in New York City for a joint performance alongside the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, an event that Varchausky coordinated and produced from Buenos Aires. Deeply impressed with Jazz at Lincoln Center and personally coached on the fundamentals of institution building by Marsalis, Varchausky 96

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returned to Buenos Aires motivated to try to replicate with tango and Argentine culture what he saw as Marsalis’s achievements concerning jazz and U.S. culture. The influence of Jazz at Lincoln Center can be seen in many aspects of TangoVia, from its structure as a nonprofit arts organization—a historically rare institutional form in Argentina—to the scope and range of its projects, artistic orientation, and institutional priorities. It can even be seen in its core aesthetic ideology: “The idea of putting together something of our own came from [Jazz at Lincoln Center]. Including the name TangoVia, which has to do with our vision of tango in the world, as something that should be considered significant throughout the world.4 We already see tango as a culture that does not have only to do with us [as Argentines]” (Varchausky 2007). As is the case with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its chosen genre, TangoVia’s work is based on a vision of “tango in the world,” on its belief in the universal value of what it sees as a local practice. Such universalizing discourses provide the core justification for embarking  on institution-building projects of this kind. Calling forth the particular structure of the nonprofit arts organization as their key mediator, these projects establish a positive feedback loop between local artistic practice, international prestige, and aesthetic and economic enterprise. In doing so, they rearrange previously hegemonic aesthetic hierarchies without diminishing the social power of hierarchy as such, substituting Western art music’s canon of great works for a canon of great genres (jazz, tango, samba, flamenco, fado, mariachi, etc.), all of which are taken as self- evidently equal to and different from one another. The value of these universally local genres, moreover, is determined not by their relationship to one another—by how a particular example of tango may or may not measure up to a jazz performance or a concert of Western art music, however we might measure those differences—but by each genre’s internal relationship to its own history and tradition. The project of universal validation therefore begins with a return to the genre itself, with a reevaluation of tango’s musical history.

TangoVia’s Institutional Revision of Music History One of TangoVia’s main projects is assembling a digital archive of tango recordings, scores, and other material culture, with the goal of preserving these materials for future generations and making them available to interested members of the public. The collection has thus far focused on two principal areas: the original scores and parts used 97

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by the orquestas típicas (tango big bands) of the 1940s and 1950s and a general collection of tango audio recordings, both commercial and non- commercial. TangoVia’s archiving and preservation efforts presume that these materials—and, by extension, the genre of tango as a whole—are worth saving. As surprising as it may seem, this is an idea that has not been widely supported in Argentina until relatively recently, despite the many current mobilizations of tango as an expedient resource explored throughout this book. Tango has generally fallen between the cracks of academic and public efforts to document and institutionalize musical culture in Argentina over the course of the twentieth century. Early academic and freelance folklorists, for instance, were not interested in tango because they saw it as urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, and too closely tied to the immigrant-influenced culture of Buenos Aires, though they were, in some instances, open to documenting popular music and acknowledged interest in tango among rural populations (Chamosa 2010). Before and during World War II, many urban intellectuals and artists on the left were suspicious of tango because of its blatant commercialism, likening it to a “dangerous distraction” that in their minds would need to be reformed if it was ever to serve a valuable social role (Karush 2012, 151– 53). High-art institutions were almost exclusively focused on fostering the creation of universal culture via formal experimentation within the norms and networks of the international art world, to the absolute exclusion of tango and other local commercial genres (Herrera 2013; Giunta 2007). At the same time, the commercial cultural industries were interested in tango and other popular genres only insofar as they remained profitable. When appetite for tango declined steeply among Argentine audiences in the late 1950s, the music and other cultural industries reacted accordingly, making little effort to preserve their master recordings, film negatives, or other cultural materials related to tango, which for them was, by that point, literally worthless. Faced with this history of multiple refusals, tango was and in many instances continues to be considered a cultural expression of little or no lasting value, aesthetic or otherwise. Thus, obtaining support for any rigorous archival or preservation efforts—and indeed any serious institutionalization of tango at all—has been more or less out of the question for the vast majority of the genre’s history, with a few notable exceptions. The Academia Nacional del Tango (National Tango Academy), for example, was created by a decree from the national government in 1990. Long overseen by the legendary tango lyricist and poet Horacio Ferrer (1933–2014), the Academia organizes academic 98

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discussions on tango; offers courses on tango music, dance, and history; and maintains a small tango museum that is open to the public, among other activities. It does not, however, engage in any serious archival or preservation efforts. And unlike the cosmopolitan orientation TangoVia has cultivated regarding tango in the world, the Academia is firmly anchored in a celebratory vision of tango as “the authentic and profound expression of the Argentine people,” an artistic world unto itself.5 The Academia’s mythologizing devotion to tango resonates with other cultural practices in Argentina, from the pasión of football fans to the worship of popular saints (Míguez and Semán 2006), and has been the most visible mode of tango appreciation in Buenos Aires since the end of the genre’s golden age in the late 1950s. Those outside or on the margins of the Academia’s influence—even those who are deeply invested in tango—cite the Academia’s relentless devotion to its celebratory version of tango history as an indicator of the genre’s ultimate irrelevance to broader currents in Argentine music and culture today. At the same time, the very presence of the Academia has enabled other institutions, both public and private, to think of tango as someone else’s business, the concern of the Academia alone. Taken together, this has meant that the historical material culture of tango has been broadly neglected until recently. These alternating tropes of disdain and devotion remain salient in current debates over tango in Buenos Aires, marking extreme positions within the dual trend of detachment and connection. But as the city government and certain sectors of the city’s musical community (including musicians and various music-industry figures) became differently invested in tango as a resource in recent years, a general reevaluation of these positions began to take place. For example, Roberto Di  Lorenzo, then the sub-secretary for cultural management (gestión cultural) in the city government’s Ministry of Culture and former head of the city’s General Directorate for Music, explained to me in a 2007 interview that he thought the city government should expand its involvement with tango. Part of his argument was based his recognition that “there are people in the cultural sector and in some sectors of society that really do value tango,” despite the general disdain with which the genre has historically been treated in official quarters (Di Lorenzo 2007). Beyond that, his argument was based on a broader understanding of tango as a resource for development of all sorts, which he believed the city government had a key role in supporting. For Di Lorenzo, a committed proponent of then- emerging models 99

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of economic development via culture and the arts, the government’s role in these areas should be defined by the contours of the market. The state should take up projects that are deemed unprofitable—such as the archiving and preservation of the genre’s historic material culture— while recusing itself from efforts that would be of interest to the private sector, such as producing tango festivals as draws for cultural tourists. He explained it to me this way, citing TangoVia’s archival project as an example: We, and especially the city of Buenos Aires, we say, “[Tango] is our brand, this is what we are.” So it is good that the state is dedicated to tango. Take [TangoVia’s preservation project] for example, its digital archive of music. That is a project that the state should be doing, because there is not going to be a business that is going to be interested in that. If it does not generate revenues, it doesn’t exist. So that is a place where the state ought to be involved. With music festivals or an international tango dance competition, it would be better if that were run by a private enterprise, because that is a business. So what I want to say is that there are some things regarding tango that I would help and others that we shouldn’t help, because that is in the domain of the market. (Di Lorenzo 2007)

With statements like this, Di Lorenzo and other like-minded city functionaries were clearly moving beyond the celebratory-versus- disdainful terms of the debate regarding the value of tango in Buenos Aires. Instead, he emphasized tango’s potential as a resource that, while rooted in the lived experience of some sectors of society, can and should be used to bolster a wide variety of cultural and economic development projects. This line of thinking represents the dawn of the age of expediency within the city government. The fact remains, however, that neither the city government nor any other public institution has seriously engaged in the kind of preservation efforts Di Lorenzo called for in my conversation with him. It is also worth noting that Di Lorenzo’s line of reasoning, at least in the case of musical preservation, did not call for an accompanying privatization of public efforts, because, as we have already seen, there was essentially no public tango preservation activity to be privatized. (And while the city’s involvement with tango was greatly expanding at this time, it focused on the large-scale music festivals and dance championships that Di Lorenzo believed should be left to the private sector.) Nevertheless, this shift from historical modes of emphasizing the indifference or antagonism between tango and the state to more

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contemporary modes of understanding tango as a resource signaled a key transformation in the relationship between the state, the market, and civil society regarding tango. It rearranged the field of moral obligations, taking a cultural domain that the state will not support and transforming it into something that the state should support but does not. This created an ethical imperative for the intervention of alternative institutions such as TangoVia, which, because of their status as nonprofit arts organizations located between the state and the market, were specifically designed to address this shifting institutional terrain. Thus TangoVia’s most fundamental intervention lies in its existence as a nonprofit arts organization, an institutional structure that both transcends and transforms the terms of the debate regarding the value of tango. The nonprofit structure allows that which falls outside the purview of the market and the state “to exist,” to paraphrase Di Lorenzo. Thus it is not a coincidence that archival and preservation projects lie at the heart of TangoVia’s mission, for they, too, enact a significant transformation. If tango is valuable, its historic material culture is valuable. If its historic material culture is valuable, it ought to be protected and preserved. In other words, the act of preservation renders the many values of this material self- evident, such that the aesthetic and historic significance of tango can no longer be questioned in the way it once was, even in light of inaction on the part of the state or profit-seeking enterprises. TangoVia’s goal for its audio archive project is to systematically collect and digitize literally every tango recording ever made, both commercial and, when possible, noncommercial. It is an ambitious but apparently achievable goal, given the relatively limited volume of historical tango recordings in comparison to other genres of popular music. As Varchausky explained to me, however, aiming for comprehensiveness is nearly as significant as actually achieving it: Achieving our goals with [the digital archive] project is very possible, very, very possible. It is not searching in the dark. It is not sending a man to the moon. It is five years of work, a little bit of money, smart people, and the desire to work, nothing more. I imagine that the whole project—really everything—how much would it cost? Less than a million dollars. And you are talking about changing the history of the genre forever, putting an end to one hundred years of forgetting. It is a probable future, a possible future. At the same time, if it is not meant to happen it is not going to happen, but at the very least one should not give up the intention to do it. (Varchausky 2007)

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As the very existence of TangoVia’s digital archive project signals significant transformations in understanding tango as a valuable cultural expression, so too does its intention to make that archive an absolutely comprehensive document of the genre’s recorded history. Most immediately, it signals a decisive shift away from the hagiographic orientation of many previous narratives of tango history, recorded and otherwise. These earlier efforts have tended to focus on the minutiae of a handful of historical styles, performers, or songs, to the neglect of other artists and the genre as a whole. This type of focused devotion, while seemingly limitless in the depth of its sincerity and enthusiasm, has over time resulted in what many observers consider to be a striking limitation on the range of tango figures, recorded performances, and musical repertoires that are commonly encountered in Buenos Aires today. Parallel to this celebratory narrowing of the genre’s history is a general hostility to new musical developments, be they original compositions, nontraditional interpretations or performance practices, or even expanded biographical narratives, especially regarding canonical figures.6 To those who adhere to these positions, the stubborn commitment of this “devoted memory” is what tango “is.” But to those differently invested in tango and those who are entirely indifferent—the vast majority—it is also why tango is often considered at best a self-referential caricature of itself and at worst an embarrassment to be explained away. TangoVia’s emphasis on comprehensiveness represents a fundamental shift in perspective. Not that Varchausky or others involved with TangoVia believe that every recording of every figure from across tango history is of equal historical or aesthetic value. Each and every recording instead makes a unique contribution to the depth and complexity of the genre as a whole. The exclusion of any example, however obscure or seemingly unexceptional, would limit the range of the genre’s knowable history and thereby render a particular kind of aesthetic violence to the value of the genre as such. To be sure, TangoVia’s archival and preservation efforts are motivated by a deeply celebratory reverence for tango. But whereas the celebratory orientation of devoted memory has pruned tango down to a selective lineage of exceptional figures, TangoVia uses those same motivations to create a much broader picture of tango’s musical history. This version of tango history is designed to be not only more inclusive but also more compelling, especially to those artists and audiences who do not already subscribe to the premises of more devoted narratives. This aesthetic transformation of tango history is paralleled by a similar transformation in the archived objects themselves. In the ab102

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sence of systematic archiving efforts on the part of public or private institutions, the vast majority of historical tango material survives only because private individuals have held onto it. Much of this has been informal: the surviving members of a recently deceased musician’s family might find a box full of old orquesta típica parts when cleaning out their relative’s closet. Because the value of such material has not been widely recognized, even by a musician’s own family, much of it can end up being thrown out with the trash. Other efforts have been more systematic: as is the case with many genres of popular music, tango has developed a small but obsessively dedicated tradition of collecting, such that a handful of collectors, both within and outside of Argentina, now hold significant private archives. Some of these materials were mass-produced but are now essentially unique—rare recordings, magazines, publicity photographs, and other commercially produced materials. Others—such as private recordings of local performances, radio broadcasts, or television appearances—are one- of-a-kind items. Both Varchausky and TangoVia have actively sought out material from these and other sources, contacting aging musicians and their families about examining any materials they might possess and slowly developing relationships of trust with collectors in order to gain access to their personal archives. Even then, only a small percentage of these original materials comes into the permanent possession of TangoVia. The musicians’ families who do recognize the value of these materials often want to hold onto them for sentimental reasons, if nothing more.7 Collectors, for their part, are often loath to lend out materials because their cultural capital within the collecting world is based on the rarity and uniqueness of the items in their personal archives, not to mention the lifetime of effort that has gone into amassing them.8 Because of the complicated realities of gathering these materials, TangoVia’s archive and preservation projects have been based not on amassing physical copies of historical recordings or musical scores, but on producing a huge collection of digitized copies of those materials. In the case of musical manuscripts, for instance, TangoVia scans the original parts it has gained access to, creating high- quality digital images that are used to preserve the physical characteristics of the originals. It then makes cleaned-up versions of these manuscript scores using musical notation software such as Finale or Sibelius, filling in interpretative details as necessary by comparing the digitized scores to recorded performances when available. At the time of my fieldwork, its collection already contained more than seven hundred original arrangements for orquesta típica and more than six hundred for solo bandoneón. In the 103

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case of musical recordings, TangoVia makes digital copies that meet the preservation standards of international organizations such as the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). This work was first carried out in partnership with the digital music studios at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, where Varchausky’s brother earned a degree in electroacoustic music composition, though TangoVia has since assembled its own high- quality audio preservation and digitization lab so that this work can be conducted in-house. After the work of digitization is completed, TangoVia returns the original materials back to their owners, leaving the organization with nothing but its digital copies of what remains privately held material.9 What TangoVia is archiving and preserving, then, is not the physical traces of tango’s musical history as much as the institution’s own social capital. Its digital copies of manuscript scores and audio recordings represent not only the historical legacy of tango as a genre, but also the organization’s carefully constructed network of relationships. It is these relationships that are valuable in this context, as much as if not more than the original physical materials themselves, for without cultivating the relationships through which TangoVia has been granted access to these materials, the materials would, for all intents and purposes, not exist. TangoVia therefore does not manage so much an archive of historical materials as access to those materials, and it is with that access that the institution cultivates its power. This is an explicit component of the archive project: Varchausky believes that the digital archive is what will ultimately establish TangoVia as what he calls the “world reference” for the genre, the authoritative institutional voice that will not be able to be ignored by those interested or invested in tango. This is not about positioning TangoVia’s particular aesthetic sensibility as the rightful inheritor of tango’s broader musical history—which remains a collectively shared but complexly privatized and productive resource for any number of cultural and economic projects—but about positioning TangoVia as the guardian of the historical narrative as such. It will be the ultimate institutional authority regarding tango’s musical history because it manages what will be the ultimate document of that history: the comprehensive digital archive.

From History to Tradition The very existence of the digital archive accomplishes significant ideological work, transposing the devoted memory of previous narratives 104

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into a much broader document of musical history. But the archive itself is designed to stand as an ideologically neutral representation of tango. It is a document of recorded musical history whose neutrality is underscored by the quasi-scientific overtones associated with the goal of attaining comprehensiveness: where collectors have been selective, devoted, and emotionally engaged, TangoVia has been systematic, distanced, and supposedly objective.10 This is not to say that TangoVia as an institution is somehow objective, neutral, or otherwise uncommitted to any particular aesthetic ideology of tango. Unlike the various types of strictly public or entirely private institutions that we might imagine housing a recorded-sound archive of this sort, as a nonprofit arts organization TangoVia is not obligated to maximize the public good of its collection or to follow the profit-seeking impulses of the market to their logical conclusion. TangoVia is beholden only to its mission statement and institutional vision: “to position tango, the collective, popular creation that best represents the multiplicity of [Argentine] roots and identity, as Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world.” This is in fact a deeply partisan stance, premised on an aesthetic ideology that, through the digital archive project, has already enacted a wholesale transformation of tango’s recorded legacy in both physical and symbolic terms. While the quasi- objective music history that is documented in and produced by the digital archive project departs significantly from previous forms of devotional memory, the archive itself, like the history it contains, is essentially a neutral document of the genre’s recorded form, the referential foundation upon which TangoVia can further elaborate its particular aesthetic vision and institutional ideology. This is primarily done through a variety of education and dissemination projects that both build upon and transform the ground established by the digital archive project, taking the general musical history of the archive and turning it into a sonic and discursive narrative of the tango tradition. It is this notion of tradition, above and beyond the fact of the archive itself, that promotes the general understanding and experience of tango as an “important cultural contribution” to everyday musical life in Buenos Aires and beyond. The notion of tradition serves at least two specific functions, both of which are foreshadowed in TangoVia’s vision statement. On the one hand, it establishes tango as something that was, is, and will continue to be worth engaging and understanding because it represents a specifically local tradition of unquestionable aesthetic, cultural, and musical value—“the collective, popular creation that best represents the 105

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multiplicity of Argentine roots and identity.” And while such claims may not seem particularly radical, they do go against the deeply ingrained aesthetic and artistic prejudices most Argentine listeners still hold against tango, prejudices that in most cases have stood unquestioned for more than a generation. On the other hand, the notion of tradition also places tango within more cosmopolitan narratives of musical excellence—“Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world.” From this perspective, tradition, like history, stands as one of the defining features of what makes tango (and other universally local genres) an artistically justified musical alternative to Western art music on the one hand, and institutionalized forms of regional folklore on the other. The task of TangoVia’s education and dissemination programs, then, is not just to claim and articulate a particular narrative of musical style and artistic excellence against the generic history of the archive, but to establish the tradition as the ultimate framework both for a supposedly proper understanding of musical history and for the evaluation of current and future practice. TangoVia’s most visible endeavor in this regard is the Orquesta Escuela de Tango, which has become a mainstay of the Buenos Aires tango milieu since its foundation in the year 2000. The Orquesta Escuela is essentially a repertory ensemble, focused on producing nuanced re- creations of the sound and style of the orquestas típicas that were the standard bearers of tango during the genre’s so- called golden age of the 1940s and ’50s (see chapter 2). The Orquesta Escuela’s repertoire is selected from that of the most prominent golden-age orquestas, and their performances are almost always based on the original arrangements used by the historical orquestas, many of which have been recuperated by TangoVia and are now stored in its archive of musical arrangements and scores. The Orquesta Escuela is coached in its interpretation of these original arrangements by a permanent director and a rotating group of visiting maestros, generally older and often very prominent tango figures who, if not active during the golden age itself, became involved in tango when it was a much more widespread phenomenon than it is today. Emilio Balcarce (1918–2011), the Orquesta Escuela’s first director, for whom the ensemble is now named,11 was a prominent figure in some of the most celebrated orquestas of the golden age, contributing his talents as a violinist, arranger, and composer to the ensembles of Aníbal Troilo (1914–1975), Alfredo Gobbi (1912–1965), Leopoldo Federico (1927–2014), and Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995), among others. His piece “La Bordona,” written for Troilo’s orquesta in 1958, is 106

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near the top of any hierarchy of golden-age tango composition, and his many other compositions and arrangements remain central to devoted narratives of tango history. Balcarce retired from his directorship of the Orquesta Escuela in 2007 (at age eighty-nine), having served in that capacity since the project’s inception; he died in 2011, just a month before his ninety-third birthday. Balcarce was replaced by the bandoneonist, composer, and arranger Nestór Marconi (b. 1942), who is considered one of the most prominent tango instrumentalists of the immediate post–golden age generation. Marconi was a fi xture on the tango nightclub circuit of the 1970s and ’80s, where he accompanied such prominent vocalists as Roberto Goyeneche (1926–1994) and Rubén Juárez (1947–2010) and also led his own ensembles. The bandoneonist, composer, and arranger Víctor Lavallén (b. 1935), who worked in Osvaldo Pugliese’s orchestra for many years, took over the directorship of the Orquesta Escuela in 2011. The Orquesta Escuela’s directors oversee the group’s rehearsals and regular monthly performances, as well as other special events and tours, and are paid as permanent staff members of the Orquesta Escuela. The visiting maestros generally work with the Orquesta Escuela for shorter periods, usually no more than a few weeks, coaching the ensemble through golden-age repertoire that the guest artists wrote, arranged, or are otherwise uniquely familiar with. The Orquesta Escuela then features that music at its regular concert performances, where the visiting maestro conducts the material he worked on with the ensemble and performs as a guest soloist. These guest maestros have included the pianist, bandoneonist, composer, and legendary arranger Julián Plaza (1928–2003); the bandoneonist, composer, and contemporary bandleader Raúl Garello (b. 1936); and the pianist, arranger, bandleader, and early Piazzolla collaborator Atilio Stampone (b. 1926), among many others. Establishing these direct relationships between the current generation of aspiring young tango musicians and still-active veteran practitioners is a key component of the Orquesta Escuela’s overall pedagogical program. As tango declined after 1955, the once-wide array of daily opportunities to directly participate in tango music became much more limited in number and frequency. Because no alternative mode of institutionalized tango pedagogy and training had emerged until recently, younger generations of musicians who were interested in learning about tango during the intervening years were left to their own devices, picking up what they could from listening to recordings or the occasional lesson with a surviving practitioner. 107

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The Orquesta Escuela cannot re- create the participatory pedagogical milieu enjoyed by the preceding generations, but it has tried to recapture some of that milieu’s spirit. As Néstor Marconi, the Orquesta Escuela’s director in 2007, explained to me: Those of my generation and those of the previous generation, we have had the luck to have lived tango, to experiment with it and play under different directors. We have had the opportunity, if not to work with everyone, to at least share the stage with everyone, to share places with them. We just learned like that, every day, with live music. The project with the Orquesta Escuela is different because the world is different. Here we have to study each style as if it were a separate curriculum, trying to transmit all that I have learned about those styles from my experience so that it can be absorbed by each musician [in the Orquesta Escuela]. It does not have to do with one musician later being able to play in one style and another being able to play in another style, no. We want this [experience] to be the foundation for learning and growth, so that new and different kinds of things can come from each person later on. (Marconi 2007)

Whatever new and different things Marconi might like to hear from Orquesta Escuela alumni in the future, the program is primarily focused on training students in the mechanics and stylistic details of large- ensemble tango as it was practiced during the golden age. During the first year of the program, the ensemble focuses its studies exclusively on what TangoVia identifies as “the most significant styles of the 1940s and ’50s” (tangovia.org/plan). Over the course of the year, the Orquesta Escuela works up a standard selection of material drawn from the repertoire of seven historical bandleaders, using original compositions or arrangements from the period and moving through the material roughly a month at a time. The seven styles that the Orquesta Escuela concentrates on are associated with the golden-age ensembles of: the pianist Carlos Di Sarli (1903–1960), the bandoneonist Aníbal Troilo (1914–1975), the pianist Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995), the violinist Juan D’Arienzo (1900–1976), the violinist Alfredo Gobbi (1912–1965), the pianist Horacio Salgán (b. 1916), and the bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992). Students also study a limited selection of compositions and arrangements by the Orquesta Escuela’s current and former directors. While some tango aficionados might debate the inclusion or exclusion of a few figures from this list, these bandleaders are, in my experience, almost universally recognized as the most significant figures of golden-age tango. The Orquesta Escuela’s pedagogical curriculum 108

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therefore does not depart significantly from most devoted narratives of tango history, though its codification of this lineage does raise the stakes regarding the institutionalization of a specific tango canon. The real intervention TangoVia has made in the selection of this repertoire is not in who or what it chooses to serve as the musical foundation of the Orquesta Escuela’s program, but why they were chosen. Each of these bandleaders was selected for his stylistic uniqueness, artistic excellence, and musical originality—how he built upon the musical materials that he inherited from his artistic predecessors and made his own contributions to that material as it moved through and beyond him. They were selected, in other words, for the perceived musical value of their work and nothing else. Limiting curricular decisions to aesthetic criteria departs strikingly from more devoted modes of canonization. Along with musical considerations, devoted canonization is also based on matters of artistic personality, popular participation, and general social significance (as we saw in the previous chapter regarding Osvaldo Pugliese and the new orquesta movement). As formalized in the Orquesta Escuela’s pedagogical program, TangoVia’s canon of “the most significant styles of the 1940s and ’50s” is, in contrast, a strictly musical lineage of artistic excellence. Thus, for example, the modernist innovators Salgán and Piazzolla are included in the Orquesta Escuela’s program alongside such popular idols as Di Sarli, D’Arienzo, and Pugliese. Not that Salgán and Piazzolla are considered less musically significant in other quarters: their stature within the overall trajectory of Argentine music is now widely acknowledged and highly celebrated, though at one point their music was not considered “real” tango by many devoted listeners. In contrast, a figure like Pugliese is firmly lodged in the devoted imagination for reasons that go well beyond the technical details of his innovative musical style. Informal monuments have been erected to him on street corners, petitions were circulated to rename a subway stop in his honor, and his grave in Chacarita cemetery is consistently adorned with a red carnation, representing the devoted memory of an individual fan as well as Pugliese’s commitment to radical political causes during his lifetime. The divisions between musical and social understandings of tango history are not entirely separable in practice, and I do not doubt that many members of the Orquesta Escuela, its directors, and Varchausky himself would support these and other devoted expressions regarding Pugliese. At the institutional level, however, TangoVia’s reorientation of tango history—and what is valuable about that history—around 109

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strictly musical considerations represents a substantial departure. From this point of view, understanding tango has essentially nothing to do with anecdotal knowledge about the seven privileged bandleaders’ lives outside of their musical works, however interesting or amusing that knowledge might be. It has everything to do with developing a specifically musical understanding and, in the case of the Orquesta Escuela, an embodied practical knowledge of how and why the seven primary styles are musically exceptional and artistically unique. That is what constitutes the foundation of the tango tradition, the musical framework within which the current and future generations of tango musicians should operate and against which their work can be meaningfully judged. The ultimate goal of the Orquesta Escuela, then, is not to sonically re- create an idealized musical past, but to redefine the artistic significance of that past such that it can serve as a meaningful framework for present and future work. It is about transforming the broad musical history of tango (as documented in the digital archive) into a much more specific narrative of the tango tradition, defined and experienced as a concrete lineage of musical style and excellence. In demarcating its understanding of the tango tradition within an institutionalized pedagogical project, the Orquesta Escuela reevaluates the musical past of the genre and reasserts that past as a meaningful guide for the present. The Escuela also redefines the relationship between the present and the past, disseminating sounds and styles that have been marginalized from the broader urban soundscape for decades. This is done through a regular series of usually free performances in Buenos Aires, surrounding Argentine cities, and, occasionally, abroad. In addition to these performances, which, in my experience, were always very well attended, the Orquesta Escuela has produced three well-received audio recordings (in 2004, 2006, and 2012) that have garnered a significant amount of airplay in the local media, especially on the city-owned and - operated all-tango radio station. For those listeners who have always been invested in tango, the reinsertion of this music into the aural public sphere represents a personal vindication, especially after many years of general disdain for tango in the wider media. (Many audience members at the Orquesta Escuela performances I attended were of an age that tango would have been the popular music of their youth, though younger people were consistently in attendance as well.) At the same time, the Orquesta Escuela’s strictly musical understanding of what is valuable about these historical tango styles has opened a new space for listening among au110

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dience members who would otherwise be predisposed against tango owing to years of prejudice against the more devoted interpretations of tango history. Either way, it is crucial to recognize that it is this multifaceted pedagogical project as a whole—and not just the circulation and dissemination of recordings—that does the work of reorienting the general music history of the digital archive into an open but nonetheless channeled narrative of artistic excellence, a tango tradition. By redefining the tango tradition in this way, the Orquesta Escuela both convincingly demonstrates the depth and complexity of tango as a musical form and also highlights the city’s broader relationship to the genre, opening spaces in which this music can become newly and differently productive, meaningful, and engaging to broader audiences. This is partially why the city government of Buenos Aires has provided both financial and administrative support for the Orquesta Escuela. While the Orquesta Escuela was originally organized by Varchausky and continues to be overseen by TangoVia, the project is technically a program of the city government’s General Directorate of Music, part of the larger Ministry of Culture. The General Directorate of Music oversees the annual application process for admission to the Orquesta Escuela, which is free for those students who are accepted to it, and provides some funding for the salaries of the Orquesta’s directors, their long-term section leaders, and general operating expenses. I was told that the funding provided by the city government is not adequate to cover the program’s real costs. Varchausky has yet to pay himself anything for his extensive involvement with the program, and funding for the directors and coaches, I was told, has not increased at all in the years since the program’s inception in 2000. TangoVia covers the Orquesta Escuela’s additional expenses, though the program as a whole depends on the support it receives from the city government for both its immediate and long-term viability. Despite the real limits on the support it receives from the city government, the Orquesta Escuela has, over time, become established as state policy, that is, a long-standing program that the city government would not be able to eliminate without facing some type of political consequences, regardless of whatever opinion a given administration or administrator might have regarding the value of the program in general.12 Beyond the day-to- day political intricacies of navigating state support, however, I believe the Orquesta Escuela has been able to acquire and maintain a privileged position across several city administrations because its particular formulation of the tango tradition has, over time, begun to gain some traction within the city’s wider circles 111

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of musical, cultural, and political influence. As organized and articulated by the Orquesta Esceula, tango is no longer seen as the embarrassing burden of a devoted past that has stubbornly refused to go away, but as a prideful point of cultural reference around which not only new generations of tango musicians but the city itself can reorient at least part of their cultural history and identity. At the same time, the Orquesta Escuela’s projection of the tango tradition as a lineage of artistic excellence with universal ambitions is largely congruent with the city’s broader efforts to cultivate musical culture as an expedient resource.

Artistic Innovation as Economic Development Here the notion of tradition emerges as a valuable resource for innovation and development, both artistic and economic. Along with its preservation and educational programs, TangoVia has been committed to supporting and promoting contemporary music making. The artistic goals of these activities often dovetail with broader modes of economic development, increasing the value of both. This work falls under the institutional category of “special productions,” projects designed to support and disseminate the music of both established and emerging artists that TangoVia has identified as worthy of its support. These special productions are presented as artistic endeavors, focused on positioning contemporary activity within a broader tradition of musical excellence. At the same time, the economic implications of these special productions are not insignificant, and the artistic innovations cultivated by TangoVia also serve as the basis for a variety of economic development projects, from local and international tango festivals to the production of audio recordings, films, and other media. In other words, innovation here serves not as the goal of artistic and economic development but as its engine, a conceptual mediator between aesthetic and economic priorities that allows these and the many other values tango has come to represent in Buenos Aires today to be captured, compounded, and exploited. While TangoVia’s institutional priorities and resources are largely concentrated on the preservation and education projects described above, its support of contemporary tango musicians is an important part of its mission. The applied potential of tango history and tradition that TangoVia has cultivated through the digital archive and Orquesta Escuela projects emerges only when that history and tradition is placed in a clear and coherent relationship to contemporary practice. That re112

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lationship demonstrates that the digital archive is not just a repository of historical musical anachronisms, a monument to the industriousness of a group of particularly dedicated fans, or a museum of dead music, but instead a complex document of what was and is a living tradition. Thus, the archive is an invaluable resource for the investigation and understanding of historical musical practices, the significance of which is dependent in part on the insights historical projects might lend to contemporary music making. The notion of the living tradition, in turn, is taken not as just one more partisan narrative of an obscure and ultimately irrelevant musical practice, but as a musically significant and emotionally coherent map for guiding the direction and marking the limits of contemporary practice, establishing the criteria against which contemporary tango music can be judged and made meaningful. TangoVia’s work in this area is centered on the patronage of new tango composers and performers whom the institution identifies according to internal criteria and private judgments of musical excellence. TangoVia does not invite solicitations for support, nor does it administer any grant programs. The artists supported through these special projects generally adhere to TangoVia’s vision of what musical excellence is, making music that can be justified in relation to the tango tradition but that also expands upon that tradition in creative and original ways. This is not to say that TangoVia’s promotion of a given artist or group is entirely blind to any nonmusical considerations, as many of the figures it has chosen to work with have circulated within TangoVia’s immediate sphere of influence for some time. That sphere of influence represents only one of several significant artistic tendencies within the larger tango milieu in Buenos Aires, as seen in the first two chapters. At the same time, TangoVia has made conscientious efforts to not pass blanket judgments on contemporary musical trends. I was told that its various canonization projects, especially the Orquesta Escuela, purposely exclude contemporary music in order to avoid exacerbating professional rivalries among tango artists who are active today. In other instances, TangoVia has organized broadly inclusive projects designed to represent contemporary tango in Buenos Aires in all its diversity. The most striking example of this was the Tango en Vivo (Live Tango) series of concerts, which were broadcast over the city-run all-tango radio station and later gathered into a five- CD collection of highlights (Various Artists 2003). Billed as “a musical map of tango in the city of Buenos Aires,” the recordings feature more than seventy tango musicians, singers, composers, and ensembles that were 113

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active in Buenos Aires at the time, from the most established to the just emerging. The Tango en Vivo concerts, broadcasts, and subsequent recording collection are a good example of the type of support TangoVia provides to the musicians it chooses to work with in its special productions. TangoVia’s support usually takes the form of programming musicians for live performances, though it has also collaborated with other institutions to directly commission select tango composers (Linetzky, Corrales, and Schissi 2011). These performances—which TangoVia describes as “unique creative situations” (tangovia.org/producciones)— represent a significant opportunity for contemporary tango musicians. First and foremost, they offer a high-profile opportunity for these musicians to present their work in public, which is surprisingly rare in Buenos Aires today owing to the rather limited infrastructure for presenting contemporary tango music. They also promote media visibility (via newspaper reviews, radio broadcasts, the production of recorded documents, etc.) and provide a usually onetime but nevertheless meaningful financial boost. And while these collaborations are directly beneficial to the featured musicians, they are also designed to be good for the genre of tango more broadly. Taken together, they are a spectacular reminder that tango is, indeed, a living tradition, a contemporary practice of individualistic artistic innovation within a continuous historical narrative of music making. It is precisely this balance of musical innovation within an ideologically continuous (though in fact elaborately constructed) musical tradition that enables TangoVia to convincingly represent tango as an artistic practice worthy of the term to those who are not already dedicated supporters. As presented by TangoVia, tango must be understood as a rigorous practice of aesthetic innovation within what are now clearly defined limits of traditional practice and historical precedence—as an art. From this perspective, tango no longer operates as the isolated, selfreferential musical universe of devoted memory; rather, it is but a single planet within a larger artistic solar system, in Argentina and elsewhere. Tango makes a unique contribution to that system, but it is not the system’s defining feature. Tango is not only an art, then, but an art among the arts: a strictly musical tradition of artistic excellence that is defined not through a relationship of sonic iconicity to the nation state, that is, as a national genre, but through its circulation within cosmopolitan networks of artistic prestige. Those networks realign the complex relationship between local musical practices within global contexts of circulation and exchange. 114

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At the same time, TangoVia’s emphasis on artistic innovation dovetails with broader economic agendas regarding culture and the arts, the intersection of which has become a key concern of the city government of Buenos Aires in recent years. Many of TangoVia’s special productions, while clearly forwarding the organization’s artistic goals, simultaneously operate as significant revenue streams. This blending of aesthetic and economic interests is indicative of broader transformations in how tango specifically and the arts more generally are mobilized and used as a resource for the managerial regimes of government and industry in the age of expediency. These transformations are illustrated most directly in TangoVia’s existence as a nonprofit arts organization, an institutional structure that reorients the strictly aesthetic domain of the arts around what is by definition a more corporate model of governance (DiMaggio 1987). The dual aesthetic and economic impulses at the heart of TangoVia’s institutional structure can also be seen in many of its special projects, which include the artistic production of domestic and international tango festivals as well as the production of a variety of media products, including a series of original recordings aimed at connoisseur audiences and feature-length documentary films. TangoVia has been involved with the artistic production of several large-scale tango festivals, both in Buenos Aires and internationally, including three in Paris (in 2003, 2006, and 2008), a singular event in Rome (2009), and a coordinated event in Genoa, Italy, and Lille, France, as part of its European Capitals of Culture year (2004), among others. These international festivals are significant financial opportunities for the Argentine artists featured on their programs, especially given the radical disparity between the Argentine peso and international currencies like the euro following the 2001 Argentine economic crisis. At the same time, these international festivals also serve TangoVia’s artistic goals, demonstrating tango’s continuing artistic viability while also repositioning the city of Buenos Aires as the cradle of the genre, both past and present. This repositioning is a powerful form of public relations and promotion for TangoVia, the genre of tango, and the city of Buenos Aires, with tangible and intangible returns for both the organization and the city. TangoVia has also been involved in the production of tango content for various forms of media, from a regular series of audio recordings for connoisseur audiences to the production of feature-length documentary films. These projects also represent tango as a living genre and expand tango’s presence and economic potential within the cultural marketplace. Recordings released in its series The Art of the Bandoneón 115

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and The Art of the Orquesta Típica are high- quality original documents featuring of some of the most prominent tango performers active in Buenos Aires today, including, in the case of the bandoneón series, Julio Pane (2006), Néstor Marconi (2008), Walter Ríos (2008), and Leopoldo Federico (2008). These recordings put these artists in a “unique creative setting,” performing solo improvisations and arrangements for bandoneón (tangovia.org/arte-bandoneon). When taken together, these recordings exhaustively illustrate the musical potential of this iconic tango instrument and highlight the unique artistry of each musician. They are truly unlike any other available tango recordings, and are self- consciously produced with an eye toward their value as historical documents. But however valuable they may be as aesthetic or historical documents, these recordings are also consumable commodities that are designed and marketed with a domestic and international audience of musical connoisseurs in mind. Departing significantly from the dominant visual tropes of most tango recordings available in Buenos Aires today (from nostalgic “golden hits” collections to vaguely sexualized compilation albums), TangoVia’s The Art of . . . recordings use a crisp, modern design scheme. Album covers are centered on close-up images of the artists in performance, bordered by a standardized arrangement for the title of the recording, its number in the series, the artist’s name, and the TangoVia logo. Beyond that logo, the albums do not obviously announce themselves as tango recordings at all, and the stock images associated with tango—the iconic Buenos Aires obelisk, the detail of a woman’s fishnet stocking, an isolated streetlight illuminating a cobblestoned back alley, and the like—are notably absent. The primary visual impression the recordings convey is one of musical rigor and sophistication (not least through the Art of . . . designation), and they could easily sit next to similarly connoisseur recordings of jazz or classical music in any cosmopolitan listener’s CD collection. The documentary film Si sos brujo: Una historia de tango (If You Know Magic: A Tango Story [Neal 2007]) traces the formation and fi rst successes of the Orquesta Escuela, from Varchausky’s original overtures to the initially reluctant Emilio Balcarce, the group’s first director, to the group’s triumphant performance in Buenos Aires’ famous Teatro Colón, which is owned and operated by the city government. Directed by the American filmmaker Caroline Neal and produced by TangoVia, the film played for several months in mainstream theaters in Buenos Aires and was screened at several international film festivals. It is probably the most public representation of TangoVia’s efforts to reshape the no116

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tions of history, tradition, and innovation in tango (though TangoVia itself remains in the background of the film), evocatively positioning the Orquesta Escuela as the pivot point between an older generation of veteran performers, many of whom are featured in the film, and the newer generation of young innovators, many of whom got their start as part of the Orquesta Escuela’s first cohort (see also Rosenberg 2014). The film, like the connoisseur recordings discussed above, was carefully produced to be compelling and appealing to audiences that were not already invested in tango. Judging from the many positive reviews that the film received in the local and international media, the fact that the film centered on the past and current conditions of tango seemed somewhat beside the point. For instance, the jury of the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival described it as a “magnificent and moving film about how to save an antique art and maintain it alive” (quoted in Neal 2007). The Argentine newspaper La Nación called the film “one of those works that has the very particular virtue: that of enthusiasm . . . making it so that it is very difficult to resist so much passion [for the topic]” (Minghetti 2006). Another Argentine newspaper, Clarín, applauded how the filmmaker captured “the crucial moment in which one generation, rescued from obscurity, passes a cultural treasure to another” (Frías 2006). Irresistible “enthusiasm” for the “cultural treasure” that is this “antique art” form: these terms represent a significant departure from the discursive tropes of devoted memory regarding what is valuable about tango (that it represents “the authentic and profound expression of the Argentine people,” etc.). Rather than openly celebrating tango, the film creates an educational and entertaining narrative about how and why tango is worth engaging and preserving on artistic grounds, like any other universally local art form in need of institutional safeguarding after years of social apathy and neglect. In other words, tango needs TangoVia.

Conclusion: The Cosmopolitan Consensus on Tango Taken as a whole, TangoVia has enacted significant transformations within what is, on the ground, a much larger and often contradictory domain of musical practice and economic production. Most significant is its fundamental reorientation of tango’s devoted memory into specific renderings of musical history (with the digital archive project), artistic tradition (with the Orquesta Escuela), and the intertwined engine of aesthetic innovation and economic development (through a variety 117

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of special productions). As a nonprofit arts organization, TangoVia is not participating in these activities for their economic rewards alone. Varchausky told me that he did not believe tango really represented the vast potential for economic growth that many people in the city government and elsewhere in the cultural industries were beginning to claim at the time of my fieldwork (Marchini 2007). Nevertheless, TangoVia has made a decisive intervention regarding the value and meaning of tango in Buenos Aires today, such that whatever economic potential the genre might represent, both now and in the future, has been significantly expanded. All of these efforts have required both detachment from and connection to devoted narratives of tango, be they celebratory institutionalizations such as the Academia Nacional, the selective memory of hagiographic fandom, or informal modes of artistic canonization. Throughout its many projects, TangoVia aims to reorient those same musical and historical elements around newly cosmopolitan narratives of musical excellence, defined by a universalizing impulse to position tango not as a so- called national genre, but as an art among the arts. But these transformations were enabled not only by TangoVia’s life as a nonprofit arts organization. The emergence of a viable nonprofit arts organization like TangoVia reflects a broader shift in the relationship between the state and civil society following the neoliberal turn, in which previous demarcations between public and private have been superseded by transnational networks of cosmopolitan practice that cultivate and consolidate their power precisely through their careful management of openness and inaccessibility (Escobar 2008). But beyond the “NGO-ization” of both the state and social movements in postcrisis Argentina—the consequences of which can be observed in nearly all aspects of social and political life—the nonprofit arts organization is uniquely positioned to identify and cultivate the complex new values that culture and the arts have taken on in the age of expediency. As an early instance of an emergently hegemonic institutional structure, TangoVia can be read as something of a laboratory for future transformations. These include the outsourcing of cultural management and preservation, which in Buenos Aires does not entail the privatization of public activities but a shifting of the ethical burden for such activities from the government to a growing nonprofit sector. This shift in moral obligation is, in turn, accompanied by a parallel transformation in support for cultural activities on the part of the state, with cultural producers generally, and alternative institutions like TangoVia especially, having increasingly to turn to the private sec118

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tor for financial support. This, too, is an essentially new phenomenon in Buenos Aires, where the government has historically been not only the biggest financial supporter of culture and the arts, but the single biggest producer of cultural events, and could be read as a practical constriction on the cultural rights of the city’s citizenry just at the moment that discourses of cultural rights are emerging as a serious topic of consideration among critics (Avelar and Dunn 2011). This should not, however, be seen as a wholesale retreat of the state from the cultural domain, as we saw regarding the continuing involvement and support of the city government in the Orquesta Escuela and TangoVia’s many other artistic and educational projects. These and other transformations speak to the compounding values of musical culture in the age of expediency, where a musical practice like tango is valued as much for its economic potential as for whatever artistic value it may have. It is perhaps somewhat ironic that TangoVia’s many activities, when seen within their broader context, are as much about cultivating tango—once imagined as the quintessential national genre of Argentina—as about turning it into nothing more nor less than a national brand. The following chapter expands on these themes, examining how similar transformations have been enacted and used by local governments and their transnational institutional partners, taking the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s 2009 declaration that recognized tango as part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” as a case. The UNESCO declaration can be read as the ultimate institutional validation of TangoVia’s claim regarding the universal value of tango as a local form. At the same time, it also represents the further entrenchment of cosmopolitan institutional ideologies that reduce the true heterogeneity of local cultural practice and production to the irreducible sameness of difference. Glossed as “diversity,” such interchangeable cultural differences, musical and otherwise, have themselves been taken up as a key resource for development of all sorts in the age of expediency.

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Tango as Part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity I had been back from Argentina for more than two years when the news first reached me. It was September of 2009, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had just announced its formal recognition of tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. My quick search for more information soon bombarded me with a cascade of headlines from around the world: “Tango, Argentina and Uruguay’s sultry dance, gets UNESCO status” (Tweedy 2009); “Tango strides into world heritage list” (“Tango Strides” 2009); “Argentina, Uruguay tango to UNESCO tune” (CBC News 2009). Newspaper editors were clearly excited about UNESCO’s announcement, which, given the playful tone of these articles, they must have taken as somewhat incongruous. On the one hand, there was the gleeful evocation of the rose-in-the-mouth cheesiness that still seems to serve as the first (and often last) point of reference for many members of the public upon hearing the word “tango.” On the other hand, there was the austere sobriety of UNESCO as an institution and the abstract reverence that the discourse of “intangible cultural heritage” seems to motivate when it circulates beyond the rarified sphere of professional policy makers and governmental or nongovernmental cultural institutions. Tango and Argentina have been essentially synony120

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mous in the minds of cosmopolitan audiences going back to the Parisian tango craze of the early twentieth century, if not earlier. These associations are a product of the creative misunderstandings that fuel the global imagination, more than of any lived historical experience. The rose-in-the-mouth image of tango, for instance, is really a product of the early Hollywood film industry, an emotive mash-up of “Latin sensuousness” and naked exoticism that was brought to life on the screen by tangoing silent-film heartthrobs like Rudolph Valentino (1895– 1926). Valentino’s performances, including the famous tango sequence in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), made hearts swoon the world over but were otherwise more or less incoherent. They certainly did not represent any actually existing cultural style or practice in Argentina or elsewhere (Leider 2003). Still, given tango’s long history as an object of cross- cultural fantasy and desire and a generic symbol of Argentina, the UNESCO declaration was probably not as incongruous as it would have been to have the organization declare tango the intangible cultural heritage of, say, Finland, for which an equally legitimate (if highly unlikely) argument could be made (Kukkonen 2003). Nor was tango somehow inherently unworthy of the distinction, despite the fact that recognition and even awareness of tango’s real richness as a mode of expressive culture encompassing music, dance, and verbal art is not particularly widespread beyond dedicated communities of fans and aficionados, even within Argentina, as we saw in the previous chapter. Incongruous or not, the UNESCO declaration was clearly doing much more than enshrining tango as an additional element of our shared cultural heritage. Like all claims on musical culture in the age of expediency, the declaration was getting things done, locating and mobilizing tango as a means to multiple productive ends. The UNESCO declaration in fact represented the confluence of the many productive engagements with tango that we have encountered in previous chapters. The declaration was attuned to the cultural politics and social history of tango in Argentina, drawing upon and intervening in those domains in ways that echo the politico-aesthetic project, discussed in chapter 2, of remaking tango into a música popular, though to significantly different ends. The very notion of tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, a localized cultural practice that is of universal value and significance, is clearly congruent with TangoVia’s cosmopolitan vision of “tango in the world,” as explored in chapter 3. And the mere existence of tango as an intangible cultural practice that is recognizable as such is of course directly due to the ongoing work of 121

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contemporary tango artists and musicians operating within the genre culture of tango as examined in chapter 1. In contrast with these mobilizations of tango, which were rife with both artistic conflicts and professional rivalries, the UNESCO declaration did not (and was designed not to) champion any particular engagement with tango over any other. Its aim, instead, was to gather and locate tango as a generic object of institutional intervention, the supposedly proper management of which would lead to the widest possible variety of productive outcomes. In that sense, the UNESCO declaration clearly reflected the managerial impulse to productivity that had taken root within the local and national governments that assembled and forwarded the tango proposal over the preceding years, particularly the city government of Buenos Aires, and in many ways represented the culmination of those efforts. Understanding these tendencies—understanding how and why municipal, state, and national governments and their international partner organizations have become more and differently invested in culture and the arts despite the broad transformation and general restriction of the state following the neoliberal turn—is a crucial component of understanding musical culture in the age of expediency. Expanding on previous discussions of individual artists, artistic movements, and nonprofit arts organizations, in this chapter I set my sights directly on the workings of cultural-policy making, one of the core managerial regimes that shapes contemporary musical life in Buenos Aires and beyond, taking the 2009 UNESCO tango declaration as a case. Less an exceptional moment of global visibility than an emblematic instance of cultural-policy making in the age of expediency, the UNESCO declaration had several important consequences within Argentina and Uruguay, the two countries in which tango initially developed and which jointly applied to UNESCO for its recognition as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. On the one hand, it reinscribed tango within highly prestigious international networks of musical production and consumption while simultaneously reframing local musical and cultural histories within revisionist narratives of multicultural transnationalism. On the other hand, it gave a significant boost to already robust efforts on the part of local and national governments to promote tango as an engine for economic development via international cultural tourism and the export of music and other cultural goods abroad. At the same time, the UNESCO declaration speaks in equal mea-

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sure to the many other values of music and culture in the age of expediency. Governmental and nongovernmental heritage-making efforts regarding tango are symptomatic of a much broader turn from more traditional conceptions of musical culture that have dominated cultural-policy making in Buenos Aires and elsewhere for many years. Previously, Culture with a capital C—culture as the fine or high arts— was considered a necessary object of governmental intervention and support because it could articulate a supposedly unified national culture and serve the betterment of what Toby Miller has called an “ethically incomplete” citizenry (Miller 1993, xi). Questions of subjectivity and belonging also motivated governments to manage the circulation of cultural content through policies such as media quotas, which required that a certain percentage of broadcast time be dedicated to local music and musicians. Both of these efforts were defensive in the sense that they were designed to either cultivate or protect cultural subjectivity within the space of the nation. The discourse and practice of heritage making, in contrast, is primarily productive, framing local cultural forms as natural or renewable resources in need of management like any other, providing both legalistic and ethical frameworks for state intervention in newly audible and differently valuable areas of cultural practice, musical and otherwise. The heritage-making project thus represents a significant intervention, the consequences of which extend well beyond the parsing of bureaucratic jargon. I begin with a brief discussion of cultural-policy making as a mode of cultural practice, exploring how the trends embodied in the UNESCO declaration both adhere to and depart from long-standing efforts in these respects in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. This echoes the dual trend of detachment and connection that I have used to make sense of the musical and social history of tango in Argentina. I then turn to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage program as a mode of institutional intervention, highlighting some of the challenges the heritagemaking project poses for the critical scholarship of music and the arts. Next, I examine the local context in which the UNESCO declaration and other cultural policies regarding tango were developed in Buenos Aires, focusing on the musical and historical circumstances that have enabled these projects. Contrary to what one might assume, and as we saw in the previous chapter, those who have been interested in preserving tango in Buenos Aires outside of this particular effort have historically been confronted with the reality of long-standing personal and institutional prejudices against tango in Argentina, such that the genre

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continues to be considered an expression of little or no value in many instances, both official and unofficial, and despite the claims represented in the UNESCO declaration. I then turn to a more detailed discussion of the UNESCO declaration itself, giving particular attention to how the declaration enacted important transformations in both the aesthetic meaning and economic value of the genre it was designed to preserve and protect. Among other things, the proposal carefully reframes the historical origins of tango in terms of the diversity discourses that are currently in vogue at all levels of cultural-policy making. The UNESCO declaration’s emphasis on tango as a symbol of cultural (and especially racial) diversity, while historically accurate, represents a fundamental reframing of long-standing hegemonic narratives of both musical and social history in Argentina. At the same time, these aesthetic and historical interventions bolster a wide variety of economically expedient gestures, which are incorporated throughout the declaration and in fact frame the mission of the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage programs as a whole. The UNESCO program is explicitly designed not only to bolster efforts to preserve intangible cultural practices, but also to harness more efficiently and creatively the new economic potential those practices might have as engines for what UNESCO calls “sustainable development” (UNESCO 2003, 1). These features of the program speak to the emergent and multiple values that local cultural differences have begun to take on within new circuits of transnational cultural prestige and economic exchange, a theme that is explored further in chapter 5.

Cultural Policy as Cultural Practice Following Miller and Yúdice (2002, 1), cultural policy refers to “the institutional supports that channel both aesthetic creativity and collective ways of life.” Framed broadly, cultural policy is a means of shaping political subjectivity, of managing “those cultural knowledges and practices that determine the formation and governance of subjects” (ibid., 2). A wide range of institutions participate in such processes, and it is important to keep in mind that the shaping and management of subjectivity via cultural policy does not begin and end with state bureaucracies and official governmental programs, but extends to the broader managerial regimes. It is also important to remember that these efforts reach far beyond the realm of aesthetic appreciation and cultural consumption, that is, beyond the realm of Bourdieuian dis124

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tinction and the social hierarchies it creates via mastery of artistic canons and the embodied performance of “good taste” (Bourdieu 1984). A primary point of articulation for cultural-policy making in this mode is state efforts to implement universal public education programs and official, often single, language policies. In Argentina, such efforts date back to the presidency of Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888; served as president 1868–74), a major figure in nineteenth- century Latin American political and literary history. In his renowned 1845 book Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism ([1845] 1998), Sarmiento proposed general modernization—and education in particular—as the only viable path toward “civilization,” given what he considered Argentina’s postindependence state of “barbarism,” as represented in such strongman dictators as Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877). As president, Sarmiento was able to implement many of his ideas regarding modern education policy, laying the groundwork for the contemporary Argentine education system. That system, despite many serious problems and challenges, remains enviable in many ways, with 93 percent of Argentines receiving some type of formal education (with a nearly 98 percent literacy rate) and public education through university remaining free and open to all (Auguste, Echart, and Franchetti 2008). As Sarmiento’s civilization-versus-barbarism trope suggests, cultural policy is also about accounting for internal heterogeneity among populations and the management of difference. Since the nineteenth century, this has primarily been envisioned as a matter of manufacturing national consolidation, especially, again, via education and language policies, but also through broader notions of personal and community cultivation via cultural heritage and the fine arts. Here cultural policy is clearly operating as an ideological state apparatus in the Althusserian sense, mobilizing culture and education as a privileged terrain of disciplinary power and hegemony (Althusser 1971). In the case of Argentine education policy, this was less about making civilized citizens of a modern democracy out of “barbarous” clients of a caudillo than it was about manufacturing Spanish-speakers out of the polyglot communities of immigrant Argentina (itself a crucial aspect of tango; see the discussion of lunfardo in chapter 1). It was also about imposing a profoundly ideological common cultural knowledge of what it was to be Argentine. On the one hand, this meant the public institutionalization of local knowledge, history, and customs as cultural heritage of the nation via school curricula, natural history museums, anthropological research institutions, folk-life festivals, and the like (Chamosa 2010). On the other hand, it meant deliberately cultivating the supposedly 125

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universal citizen-subjects by educating them about and teaching them to appreciate supposedly universal aesthetic forms and experiences, especially, in this case, the so- called fine or high arts. Individuals and groups could and should be measured and indeed measure themselves vis-à-vis these institutionalized modes of knowledge, culture, and sentiment, enacting the “ethical incompleteness” that Toby Miller (1993, xi–xiv) has argued is key to forming cultural subjects who are selfmanaged via their always incomplete pursuit of self-mastery in the name of social harmony. Here good taste begins to operate both as a sign of and a path toward good citizenship and, by extension, good governance. This is also where state interest and investment in capital-letter Culture and the Arts comes to the foreground, with cultural policies that are directly aimed at cultivating and promoting the Arnoldian “best which has been thought and said” as a means of manufacturing better citizens and managing civil life (Arnold [1869] 2009, 7). The so- called fine or high arts, Western art music in this case, have been and remain the privileged domain of the ideological imagination that motivates such policies, where fluent knowledge of particular forms, styles, repertoires, and canons has long been (and often still is) taken as a key component of what it means to be a well- educated and therefore supposedly good citizen-subject. Thus we see the expansion of both direct (through subsidies) and indirect (though tax policy) public support for high-art institutions and organizations of all kinds, including, in many countries, national orchestras, art museums, and arts education programs. These and other institutions often operate alongside a diverse array of support programs for individual artists and other cultural producers, from awards and honors to grants and subsidies to direct employment in any number of artistic and institutional capacities. While cultural policies of this sort are motivated by somewhat abstract political philosophies regarding cultural subjectivity and national belonging, in practice they often operate as an entirely different means of management and control. This can range from formal and personal favoritism within cultural bureaucracies to interagency competition for limited governmental resources to the clientist mobilization of culture and the arts for instrumentally political ends, among many others (see Baker 2014 on the case of music education programs in Venezuela). In an interview, one then-high-level administrator in the city government of Buenos Aires’s General Directorate for Music expressed this last point in strikingly direct terms: “The people who vote in the city [of Buenos Aires] are interested in culture. This is a city 126

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where culture brings votes, to put it bluntly. [. . .] This is not necessarily the case at the national level, because in the provinces you get fewer votes with culture than you do with making a railroad or other things. In Buenos Aires you can get votes by cleaning the streets, but you can also get votes by putting on concerts.” Far from directly dictating artistic form and content or otherwise controlling cultural life, culturalpolicy making in this mode shapes the field of cultural production while simultaneously operating as an actor within that same field. It creates a space in which artists, institutions, governmental agencies, and the groups who populate and work in them can further their intention-filled projects and play out their “serious games” (Ortner 2006, 129–30), some of which are imagined as transcending social life via aesthetic form while others are explicitly framed as cultural means to directly political ends. Thus while such policies and programs are clearly top- down, they by no means represent single articulations of institutional or artistic power. Cultural policies and the artists, organizations, and institutions within their purview are internally diverse as a sector, with widely varying understandings of what culture is and what public policies can or should do with it. Nevertheless, these activities depend upon a shared consensus regarding the social and political good of public investment in the arts and culture. That consensus is still largely built around matters of subjectivity and belonging via culture and the arts within the frame of the nation as outlined above, despite the fundamental transformation of those very categories following the neoliberal turn. Cultural-policy making in the age of expediency therefore does not represent a definitive break from long-standing efforts so much as a complex dynamic of adherence and departure, echoing the dual trend of detachment and connection that shapes the value and meaning of contemporary musical practice regarding tango. This is not about the abandonment of the fine or high arts in favor of commercial cultural products (or the absence of cultural policy in favor of the so- called free market) or the emergence of governmental interest in the media and other cultural industries over matters of subjectivity and belonging. Nor is it about the discovery of a new “usability” of culture and the arts in forwarding governmental interests and goals, which, as we have already seen, has been a core objective and justification of cultural-policy making going back to the nineteenth century and even earlier. Instead, culturalpolicy making in the age of expediency has essentially rearranged the broader field and discourse of cultural production itself, both within and beyond the government. In this context, the many tensions be127

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tween different cultural-policy-making priorities, in which one domain (the so- called high arts or local forms of institutionalized folklore) needs to be prioritized over or protected from another (especially the media and international cultural industries), become productive synergies for development of all sorts. This can certainly be observed in the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage program.

UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Program and the Values of Musical Culture UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2003, defines intangible cultural heritage as the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO 2003, 2)

The Convention suggests that intangible cultural heritage is manifest in: “(a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; (b) performing arts; (c) social practices, rituals and festive events; (d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; (e) traditional craftsmanship” (ibid.). The idea of intangible cultural heritage emerged from and expands upon UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Dating back to the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, this program aims to identify, protect, and preserve physical sites that are considered to be “of outstanding value to humanity” (whc.unesco.org/en/about). Such sites can be either natural—the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the Galápagos Islands off Ecuador; the Iguazu Falls, which straddle the border between Argentina and Brazil; and others—or what UNESCO calls “cultural,” that is, substantial built artifacts, environments, and other physical objects. Such cultural sites famously include the physical remains of ancient civilizations, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the pyramid fields from Giza to Dahshur in Egypt, and the pre-Hispanic city of Chichen Itza in Mexico, among 128

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many others, but also extend to historic buildings and districts in modern cities such as the historic district of Old Québec; various types of what UNESCO calls “cultural landscapes,” such as the Blaenavon industrial landscape in Wales; and even wholly modern urban planning and architecture such as the entire city of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, designed and built from nothing in 1956. As of this writing, UNESCO has identified a total of 981 World Heritage sites, including 193 natural sites, 759 cultural sites, and 29 “mixed” sites, which are typically inhabited natural sites.1 The discourse of world heritage envisions such sites as belonging to “all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located” (whc.unesco.org/en/about). This vision, and the humanistic universalism that underlies it, are idealizations in that UNESCO has no binding political or territorial claim on World Heritage sites. The World Heritage program instead operates as a means of encouraging states parties to the 1972 Convention to actively seek out and identify potential World Heritage sites within their territories and to develop programs to protect and preserve those sites according to international standards of professionalism and best practices as determined by UNESCO, regardless of whether or not they are ultimately recognized as World Heritage sites. The UNESCO World Heritage program uses two primary incentives to motivate this behavior. First is the prestige and visibility that recognition as a World Heritage site bestows upon the site itself and the government that oversees it, prestige and visibility that are tremendously important to most states parties to the 1972 Convention and their peers. The second incentive is financial, in that once a site is recognized as a World Heritage site, governments are entitled to apply for funding and other assistance from UNESCO in support of their protection and preservation programs related to it. The UNESCO-managed World Heritage Fund distributes roughly US$4 million to states parties for the support of World Heritage sites and programs each year, significant sums given the so- called developing status of most states parties and the scant to nonexistent resources available for heritage-making projects in many local contexts. When these different interests and incentives combine in such  a way that the desired outcomes of the World Heritage program are forwarded, the results, according to advocates, are good for everyone. UNESCO succeeds in identifying, protecting, and preserving more and different natural and cultural sites of supposedly universal value and significance while reinforcing their particular vision of good governance within global civil society. National governments that suc129

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cessfully identify and manage World Heritage sites (and, notably, even potential sites) are able to significantly reposition themselves within those same circuits of transnational political participation and global economic exchange. Local communities are newly acknowledged and validated by the state, with significant implications for long-standing matters of political subjectivity and national belonging, especially in the case of cultural heritage sites, and at the same time are provided with a newly discovered resource for economic development through eco- and/or cultural tourism and their attendant support services (hotels, restaurants, transportation, etc). In practice, the lived experience of World Heritage sites and site making is often much more messy, disruptive, and contested than UNESCO and its local institutional partners often imagine it to be. The intangible cultural heritage program both expands upon and reinforces the goals of the World Heritage program in a number of important ways. First of all, it greatly increases the scope of what types of things can and should be identified, protected, and preserved as the shared heritage of humanity, moving from the situated materiality of natural and cultural sites to the much more amorphous—and numerous—realm of intangible cultural practices as delineated above. This is a change in type but not in kind, for the expansion of what heritage is necessarily represents an equal expansion of governmental and nongovernmental interest and authority into these same domains. It thereby frames the whole universe of intangible cultural practices as an untapped resource that not only can be institutionalized as heritage but in fact needs proper managerial oversight if it is to be utilized to its full potential. At the same time, the very immateriality of intangible cultural practices makes them differently valuable compared to the tangible physicality of World Heritage sites. This is especially true regarding musical practices generally and popular musical forms like tango in particular, which, while imagined as being rooted in local contexts, can and do circulate freely, reaching geographically dispersed consumers and citizens as fully mediated yet unquestionably authentic “ethno- commodities” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 22). The stated goal of the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention is to “safeguard” exemplary elements of intangible cultural heritage as defined above. This is done through “measures aimed at ensuring the viability of the intangible cultural heritage, including the identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission, particularly through formal and nonformal education, as well as the revitalization of the various aspects 130

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of such heritage” (UNESCO 2003, 2–3). Via the authority of the 2003 Convention, UNESCO encourages member states to develop and implement a range of cultural policies and programs for identifying and safeguarding internal forms of intangible cultural heritage and provides some financial assistance for doing so in accordance with international best practices. This is largely the same process and incentives used in the World Heritage program, though the practical and political implications are substantially different. Unlike an exceptional natural feature or the physical ruins of an ancient civilization, intangible cultural heritage is necessarily connected to living groups of contemporary practitioners, groups that in many instances represent internal minorities of a given state. For this reason, institutionalizing intangible cultural practices as part of the heritage of a nation or of all humanity in general also means differently accounting for and acknowledging the internal heterogeneity of the state itself. Promoting the official recognition of internal cultural diversity among states parties is a key goal of the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage program, but it has also made some states more reluctant to participate. As of this writing, 155 states have signed on to the 2003 Convention, compared to the 190 that have signed the 1972 World Heritage Convention. In other cases, including that of Argentina, the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage program complemented existing programs in this area that were often quite robust. Taking the city government of Buenos Aries alone, the scope and range of such programs is almost dizzying. For instance, at the time of my primary fieldwork the city government’s Ministry of Culture included a sub-secretariat dedicated to issues of cultural patrimony, including tangible and intangible cultural heritage but also including museums and the city’s historical institute. Operating independently of the Sub-Secretariat for Cultural Patrimony was the Commission for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Patrimony. The Commission, which was formed by a separate city ordinance in 1995, oversees seven separate programs related to the cultural heritage of the city of Buenos Aires, including one dedicated exclusively to the identification, preservation, and promotion of intangible cultural heritage. Both the Commission and the Sub- Secretariat sponsored research, produced published materials, organized public exhibitions, and sponsored educational programs, among other activities, and they were by no means the only governmental organizations and programs involved in these issues at the time. Tango was complexly implicated and, at times, excluded from these activities, though efforts to institutionalize the genre as intangible cultural heritage (of 131

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the city, the nation, and, eventually, of all humanity in general) date back to federal law 24.684 of 1996.2 In this context, the 2009 UNESCO tango declaration is better thought of as a high-water mark for complex and sometimes contested institutional efforts at the local level than as a top- down intervention on the part of international cultural bureaucrats. Despite the scope and range of governmental involvement with tangible and intangible cultural heritage programs in Argentina, the prestige and visibility that UNESCO recognition bestows extends far beyond anything a local or national government could provide and therefore remains highly desirable. What that recognition actually consists of is rather mundane: formal inscription on one of two lists, either the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity or the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The Representative List “aims at contributing to ensuring visibility and awareness of the significance of the intangible cultural heritage and to encouraging dialogue, thus reflecting cultural diversity worldwide and testifying to human creativity”; the Urgent Safeguarding list “aims at taking appropriate safeguarding measures for those intangible cultural heritage expressions or manifestations whose viability—that is whose continuous recreation and transmission—is threatened.”3 A twenty-four-member Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage evaluates proposals, and those selected for inscription on either of the two lists are announced annually. Crucially, and in accordance with the legalistic authority of the United Nations as a whole, only national governments from states parties to the 2003 Convention (which the United States is not) can present proposals for the consideration of the Committee, though it is expected that they do so with the formal consent and active participation of “the community or group concerned”4 —the actual practitioners of whatever form of intangible cultural heritage is being presented for consideration. As of this writing, 31 elements of intangible cultural heritage from nearly 20 different countries have been inscribed on the Urgent Safeguarding list, while the Representative list includes 257 elements, including tango, from more than 70 different countries.5 Taking a step back, it is clear that the very notion of intangible cultural heritage as defined in the 2003 UNESCO Convention represents a significant departure from previous institutional understandings of music specifically and the performing arts more generally. The idea that intangible cultural heritage is (or should be considered) something of universal value directly undermines the widespread privileging of 132

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Western art music as the exclusive vehicle for contributing to supposedly universal musical formations. This alone is a tremendous intervention, given that the vast majority of elements included in the Representative List come from the nations of the global south, where the public institutionalization of Western art music has often been taken as an indicator of modernization efforts if not modernity as such, however contested it might be, going back to the colonial period (Baker 2008; Ochoa 2006). The explicitly transnational institutionalization of what is imagined as a globally shared repertoire of intangible cultural practices also unsettles long-standing efforts to institutionalize local folklore as the common currency of identifications and belonging within the space of the nation. The practical and philosophical implications of the heritage-making project should therefore not be underestimated. At the same time, institutionalization and everything it entails remain very much at the center of these efforts, despite the otherwise profound transformation in how the cultural content that is managed by these institutions is conceptualized, located, recognized, and valued. It is the emergence of this managerial mode that defines the heritage-making project as much as if not more than the very real cultural diversification these efforts undoubtedly represent within specific national contexts and the transnational public sphere. In that sense, the heritage-making project is clearly congruent with the broader turn toward the use of culture in the age of expediency, where the value and meaning of music and the arts are largely defined by their usability within broader cultural, social, and economic development projects. A key part of this—indeed, the very reason heritage making has become a compelling paradigm for the public management of culture in recent years—is the fact that heritage making encompasses both the aesthetic and the economic value of intangible cultural practices in equal measure. Accounting for the politics of this shift can be confounding. Among critics who have directly tackled the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage programs and the larger heritage-making project, some, such as Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (2004), have anxiously called out the discourse and practice of heritage making as little more than a new and largely cynical wrinkle in the tragic narrative of denial, silencing, and exclusion that is at the heart of modernity itself. Others, such as Seeger (2009), take a somewhat more celebratory position regarding what they see as the deeply progressive if also complexly problematic impulse to recognize, protect, and promote emblematic features of the world’s cultural diversity that partly motivates the UNESCO program. Still oth133

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ers, such as Kurin (2004), fall somewhere in between these positions, exhibiting a pragmatic optimism about the work of UNESCO and the broader heritage-making project while predicting that such efforts may very well leave us with only that many more underfunded and therefore ineffective cultural programs and institutions. The issue of who truly benefits from intangible cultural heritage programs—the practitioners of intangible cultural practices or the professional cultural bureaucrats and institutions designed to identify, protect, and preserve them—has haunted these efforts since their inception. But regardless of where we might locate ourselves within these debates, it is important to note that these and other perspectives occupy different points along a continuum between aesthetic and economic prioritizations within the overall heritage-making project rather than entirely different ideological universes. This is a crucial shift, creating a space where previously ambivalent relationships—localized practices of cultural heritage and meaning versus globalized networks of recognition and exchange, the priceless transcendence of the aesthetic sublime versus the price-tagged products of the commercial cultural industries—become productive synergies for development of all sorts.

Tango as Intangible Cultural Heritage The primary “thing” produced by the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage program and the broader heritage-making project is heritage itself. Like all naming practices, declaring something the intangible cultural heritage of humanity is a transformative act. It hails the given heritage element within a discursive universe of governmental and nongovernmental intervention, rendering it visible and audible to forces for which it was previously unseen or unheard (if not actively erased or silenced) while simultaneously objectifying it in a way that both valorizes and marginalizes actual practitioners of the given element. This is not simply a matter of placing an honorific label on an existing natural or cultural object or intangible cultural practice, but of fundamentally reinventing those objects and practices—what they are and what they do in social life and history. As we saw in the previous section, this is not a purely top- down process, but one that at least attempts to identify and incorporate as many invested actors as possible, from UNESCO technocrats to local politicians and cultural-policy makers to “concerned communities or groups” and the transnational public of humanity in general. Expanding the scope and range of those 134

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who are implicated and invested in emerging forms and discourses of intangible cultural heritage is emblematic of cultural-policy making in the age of expediency, where cultivating more and different stakeholders is often considered a vital component of a given project or policy’s overall potential for success, however that might be defined. Even there, however, the heritage-making project is about making new and different things rather than neutrally identifying intangible cultural practices that are simply “out there” in the world, waiting to be recognized. The transformative power of the heritage-making project is particularly clear in the case of tango, which, as we have seen, is by no means a broadly shared and celebrated cultural form among Argentines today. Nevertheless, tango and Argentina have been effectively synonymous in the cosmopolitan cultural imagination for more than a century now, and the genre serves as a powerful symbol of the nation within the transnational cultural sphere. This history of cross- cultural fantasy and desire explains, in part, the playful tone of the news coverage that accompanied UNESCO’s 2009 tango declaration in the international press, and even the fact that the declaration was considered to be as broadly newsworthy as it was. Still, many of the contemporary tango musicians I spoke with following the declaration’s announcement— those who one might expect would be most directly implicated and invested in their chosen genre’s new status as intangible cultural heritage of humanity—seemed largely ambivalent about the declaration. Some took it as yet another use (or abuse) of tango by governmental managers and their institutional allies, who did not know or care about contemporary tango music as an actually existing practice or the lives of those who produced it. Others felt flattered by the declaration but were skeptical about what if any benefits they, their peers, and the larger community of contemporary tango practitioners might see as a result of the declaration. Still others had not even heard about the declaration, carrying on with their lives and artistic work as if nothing had happened. Such opinions are as numerous and divergent as the practitioners of tango themselves, many of whom would undoubtedly be fully supportive of the UNESCO declaration and other heritage-making efforts regarding tango. The point is, however, that the declaration did not acknowledge the lives and work of these musicians as a preexisting community of artistic practice so much as bolster tango as an object of intervention and management on the part of governmental agencies and other managerial regimes. That effort was facilitated, not hin135

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dered, by the widespread ambivalence of contemporary tango artists regarding the heritage-making project and the general disidentification with tango in the larger Argentine public, which effectively enabled UNESCO and its governmental partners to make more or less whatever they would like of it. What we have here, then, is not the culmination of heritage-making efforts on the part of enthusiastic individuals and cultural institutions at the local, national, and international level, but yet another articulation of the dual trend of detachment and connection that has defined artistic life and the broader field of cultural production regarding tango in Buenos Aires in recent decades. As we have seen throughout the previous chapters, this dual trend of detachment and connection serves not only as the context in which any and all engagements with contemporary tango in Buenos Aires necessarily take place, but as a platform for the productive mobilization of tango as a cultural practice, be it in terms of artistic form and style (chapter 1), social politics (chapter 2), institutional power (chapter 3) or, in this case, cultural and economic productivity. However abstract or esoteric the notion of intangible cultural heritage might appear, it is explicitly designed to mobilize the tremendous potential that local cultural practices have come to represent as an engine for what UNESCO calls “sustainable development.” But beyond their direct economic potential within the global marketplace for culture, newly recognized forms of intangible cultural heritage such as tango are especially prized because cultural-policy makers consider the economic (and many other) values they generate to be the “right” kind of development. According to advocates, there is no downside to sustainable development via the economic exploitation of intangible cultural heritage: practitioners and their communities are able to generate new and different revenue streams without subjecting themselves to the alienation of classic commodification schemes; audiences increase their awareness and respect for the world’s cultural diversity through the act of cultural consumption; and local governments simultaneously demonstrate their commitment to good governance, increase their prestige within international cultural-policy-making circles, and bolster state revenues though taxing the legitimate sale of cultural goods and services. This last point serves as a particularly important justification for the heritage-making project, given the general retreat of the state following the neoliberal turn and the actually existing context of much cultural production in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. On the one hand, it is a simple fact that a huge percentage of economic activity in Argentina takes place en negro, that is, outside the scope of state regula136

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tion and taxation. This is even more striking regarding the products of the cultural industries generally and the music industry in particular, since music piracy supposedly accounts for as much as 50 percent of the market for physical music sales in Argentina and 99 percent of the online market for digital audio files (IIPA 2011). Much of this is managed by criminal organizations that manufacture, distribute, and sell pirated physical-media content on an industrial scale (see Stobart 2010 on similar circumstances in Bolivia). Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that these jaw- dropping statistics speak more to the limitations of economic oversight and other practical articulations of state power than to any entrenched culture of piracy or criminality in Argentina or elsewhere (see Dawdy and Bonni 2012). On the other hand, much artistic innovation takes place alongside activities that have long been deemed unsupportable by state agencies, cultural and otherwise. These range from the relatively banal “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” celebrated by the private popular-music industries to the many institutionally entrenched prejudices against particular modes of cultural production and subjectivity. In Argentina, the latter is usually framed in terms of broader debates regarding the place of the popular in governmental cultural activities and programs (see chapter 2) and is concretely reflected, for instance, in programming decisions for the many free and public musical events and festivals produced by the city government of Buenos Aires. Nicolás Wainszelbaum, then an employee in the city government’s Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries (discussed in more detail in chapter 5), self- consciously reflected on this predicament in an interview, citing the city government’s refusal to program cumbia—a somewhat polemical genre that was without question the massively and socially popular form of music in Argentina at the time of my fieldwork—as an example: “Cumbia is a genre that is not programmed by the city [government]. It is extremely popular; it is the most popular of all the genres—like Michael Jackson or Madonna in the United States, that is cumbia here—but it is not programmed. They don’t program it. They don’t promote it. Why? Because of the people who would come. Because of prejudice. Maybe because the city government still has a conception of culture in which the popular does not have a place” (2006; see also Baker 2015). The heritage-making project was designed, in part, to address and potentially revise these types of entrenched institutional prejudices, cultural and otherwise. In practice, however, the heritage-making project, at least in the case of tango, does not intervene in these debates so much as sidestep them, institutionalizing a cultural element that was 137

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already highly visible (if not widely celebrated) while cementing previously uneven governmental commitments to mobilizing culture as an economically productive resource. Thus, while privileged elements of intangible cultural heritage are valorized on a scale that was previously unimaginable, much cultural activity remains unsupportable if not actively fought by the state, in spite of its very real cultural value among local communities and regardless of whatever economic potential it might represent in the broader marketplace for culture. Alongside the fact of massive-scale music piracy, these lingering commitments to restricted notions of subjectivity and belonging, a motivating concern of traditional cultural-policy making, casts tremendous doubt on the largely celebratory discourses that promote cultural development generally and musical production specifically as a viable economic alternative in postindustrial and/or underdeveloped cities worldwide. Despite these restrictions, the heritage-making project is very much able to generate significant transformations in local contexts. Take the case of tourism. The city of Buenos Aires witnessed a huge boom in foreign tourism following the steep devaluation of the Argentine peso in late 2001 and early 2002, part of the larger 2001 Argentine economic crisis. The value of Argentine currency had been pegged to the U.S. dollar since the early 1990s, which provided a means of taming the hyperinflation Argentines suffered in the late 1980s. The Argentine government abandoned the policy of currency parity in January 2002, leading to a precipitous decline in the value of the peso, which sank to as low as four Argentine pesos to one U.S. dollar in the weeks following the crisis. This was good for the overall economy in the sense that it made Argentine exports much more affordable within the global marketplace, leading to economic growth rates of as high as 9 percent a year immediately following the crisis; but it also effectively erased the life savings and spending power of Argentine citizens within a matter of weeks (see Blustein 2005). It also made the goods and services of the previously expensive city (on par with New York City) jaw- droppingly affordable for those who happened to have U.S. dollars, euros, pounds, reais, or other foreign currencies in their bank accounts, and international tourists began flocking to Buenos Aires to take advantage of the highly imbalanced exchange rates. By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires for my primary fieldwork in 2006, the city government was elaborating policies to more deliberately channel consumption- driven predatory tourism into modes of touristic engagement that officials considered more productive and beneficial for the city and its citizens. Tango was an important resource 138

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for these efforts. Unlike the predatory tourists, who usually made brief trips to Buenos Aires to buy cheap leather jackets by day and binge drink by night, tango tourists would make multiple, sometimes annual, trips to the city and tended to stay longer, for several weeks or even several months at a time. During their stays, tango tourists would have more direct interactions and make more personal connections with local residents who were also active in the tango dance or music scene, building ongoing relationships and often genuine friendships over time. These types of interactions between visitors and locals, while clearly shot through with unequal power relationships, were considered qualitatively different from the naked fee-for-service interactions that characterize the more predatory tourism industry. In contrast to this, tango tourism was imagined (and lived) as a mode of intercultural communication as much as a domain of economic exchange, the benefits of which, according to advocates, would be mutual, multiple, and widely shared. As Arlene Dávila (2012) has shown, however, the actual experience of those on both sides of the tango tourism equation does not always measure up to the idealistic formulations of cultural-policy makers, especially regarding the long-term prospects for economic stability and mobility on the part of those who labor in the tango tourism industry. But while the nonmaterial cultural benefits of tango tourism are impossible to measure and, frankly, largely debatable, the tremendous economic potential of the tango sector as a whole is hard to ignore. As mentioned in the introduction, a 2007 study estimated that tango-related activity in Buenos Aires was generating the equivalent of US$450 million annually, and doing so without significant governmental intervention in the sector up to that point (Marchini 2007). UNESCO declared tango part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity two years later. Thus the exploding values of tango as both an economic resource and a form of intangible cultural heritage are not contradictory but in fact complementary, with the private accumulation of capital (supposedly) producing broadly shared cultural benefits while the aesthetic value of artistic practice is experienced and articulated via irreducibly economic modes of exchange. The UNESCO declaration and the larger heritage-making project are therefore not about recognizing tango for what it really is (whatever that might be), but about shaping tango as a zone of practice and channeling future engagements with it toward what cultural-policy makers believe are the most broadly productive ends. While it bolstered these and other efforts to harness the productive 139

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power of tango in Buenos Aires, the 2009 declaration also represented a productive intervention within UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage program itself. For instance, of the approximately two hundred elements that preceded tango in being recognized as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, tango was one of only four that could arguably be described as (or even meaningfully related to) a form of popular music. Like tango, these other forms all hailed from Latin America. They included: “the language, dance, and music of the Garifuna” (Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua); “the Samba de Roda of the Recôncavo of Bahia” (Brazil); and “the Candombe and its socio- cultural space: a community practice” (Uruguay), which was recognized alongside tango in 2009. Noteworthy here is the fact that the popular-music components of each of these elements are carefully contextualized within wider complexes of language and expressive culture (Garifuna), specific physical locations and performative contexts (Samba de Roda), or a particular sociocultural milieu (Candombe). None of these contextual features are broadly shared or able to circulate beyond these specific places and communities, even though each of these forms has a long history of commercial cultural production and transnational circulation as fully mediated popular musics. The tango declaration, in contrast, framed its object much more broadly, recognizing tango as a generic category of popular cultural practice, as a genre of popular music and dance, with few if any contextual caveats or constraints that framed and thereby defined the other elements. In doing so, UNESCO opened the door for other global genres of popular music to be recognized as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and several have since joined tango in sharing this distinction, including flamenco (Spain), recognized in 2010, and fado (Portugal) and mariachi (Mexico), both recognized in 2011. Also noteworthy was the fact that tango was one of only eleven elements that, up to that point, had been jointly proposed by two or more countries. As we saw above, UNESCO does not independently seek out elements of intangible cultural heritage for recognition, but instead evaluates formal applications that are submitted by states parties to the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, that is, the national governments of the territories in which these intangible cultural elements are practiced. It is expected that they do so with the formal consent and active participation of “concerned communities or groups,” the actual producers of whatever form of intangible cultural heritage is being presented for consideration, though national governments themselves are the ultimate arbiter of what can 140

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or cannot be submitted and therefore of what may or may not be acknowledged as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The transnational aspect of the tango declaration was particularly interesting, because despite its historic saliency as a so- called national genre of Argentina, tango was, at least initially, the singular music of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the two urban areas that straddle the Río de la Plata as it empties into the South Atlantic, the river itself marking the political boundary between Argentina and Uruguay. As such, tango is at once more local and more transnational than standard conceptualizations of national culture would allow, including both the ideological history of Argentine tango and the traditional criteria guiding UNESCO’s institutional procedures for recognizing forms of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Diversity Discourses and the Productive Power of Heritage Making A core feature of the UNESCO declaration was how it framed the initial codification and development of tango within the diverse social milieu of late nineteenth- century Buenos Aires and Montevideo. It presents the racial, ethnic, and economic diversity that characterized the rapid modernization of these cities as a defining feature of the genre. Tango is a genre that originally involved dance, music, poetry and singing. Tango expresses a way of conceiving the world and life and it nourishes the cultural imagery of the inhabitants of the capital cities of the Rio de la Plata. [. . .] Tango was born among the lower urban classes in both cities as an expression originated in the fusion of elements from Argentine and Uruguayan’s African culture, authentic criollos and European immigrants.6 As the artistic and cultural result of hybridization’s processes, Tango is considered nowadays one of the fundamental signs of the Rio de la Plata’s identity. (UNESCO 2009, 2)

The declaration’s interpellation of tango as a product and symbol of a historical experience centered on diversity represented a significant intervention in long-standing narratives of musical and social history in Argentina. Most immediately, it validated and reinforced a growing body of recent scholarly, critical, and artistic work that has aimed to more directly acknowledge and recenter the significant historical contributions made by internal minority groups, especially Afro-Argentine residents of the city of Buenos Aires, to Argentine culture and history, in and beyond tango. These contributions have tended to be under141

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emphasized if not entirely denied in many previous accounts of tango and its historical development. Nevertheless, and as demonstrated in a substantial body of scholarly literature across a variety of disciplines in both Spanish and English, the presence and participation of Afro-Argentines in the formative moments of tango and the broader experience of modernizing Argentina is undeniable. Chasteen (2004), Andrews (1980), and others have conducted careful historical work on the role of Afro-Argentines played in the development of tango dance, which they ultimately see as the product of intercultural interaction across divisions of race and class in nineteenth- century Buenos Aires.7 The specifically musical aspect of this intercultural but highly unequal narrative is more opaque, though tango is ultimately just one of many musical complexes to emerge from the circumatlantic experience that is itself “clearly a product of triangular and multilevel cultural commerce resulting from the trade in enslaved Africans” (Miller 2004, 81). Given this and other scholarly work on the early history of tango, it is curious that the issue of Afro-Argentine participation and influence in the formative moments of the genre continues to endure and even, in some instances, remain controversial. This could (and in some cases should) be chalked up to racial prejudice plain and simple, though making a convincing claim in this regard would require a nuanced discussion of racial ideology in Argentina specifically and Latin America more broadly, the details of which are beyond the scope of my discussion here (see Wade 2010; Matory 2005).8 Even more important than this historical revisionism is, I believe, the fact that the heritage-making project demands modes of listening, forms of appreciation, and narrative strategies that depart significantly from those that have characterized tango fandom since the late 1950s, following the end of tango’s historic golden age. Most immediately, it signals a decisive shift away from the hagiographic orientation of many previous accounts of the genre and its history, the “devoted memory” of which was discussed in detail in chapter 3. In contrast to this intensely self-referential localism, the heritage-making project begins with what we could call a “universal” vision regarding situated cultural practices, including tango and the 250-plus additional forms that together constitute the intangible cultural heritage of humanity as curated by UNESCO. The heritage value of these universally local genres, moreover,  is determined not by their relationship to one another, but by each genre’s internal relationship to its own history and tradition (echoing the work of TangoVia discussed in chapter 3). This, in turn, privileges 142

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broadly sociological readings of music history that highlight general conditions—such as cultural diversity—over the specific contributions of particular musical figures or styles, which are taken more as exemplary instances of a type rather than simple articulations of artistic excellence. It also calls forth particular institutional forms and structures required for the “identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission, [and] revitalization” of intangible cultural heritage as a category of practice, displacing if not denigrating unofficial engagements with tango as encountered in, say, fan magazines, commercial radio broadcasts, and the informal expertise of record collectors, among many others. When managed properly, the product of these discourses—the intangible cultural heritage of humanity—can operate as the center of gravity for an ever- expanding universe of local cultural practice, transnational appreciation and prestige, and the twin engines of social and economic development. And we should not lose track of these projects’ social goals. The emphasis on cultural diversity in the UNESCO declaration reflected and reinforced what were by then long-standing efforts on the part of certain Argentine cultural institutions and policy makers to mobilize culture as a means of addressing the historic legacies and lived experience of social inclusion and exclusion in Argentina, in tango and far beyond. As explained to me in a 2007 interview with Gustavo López, the former secretary of culture for the city government of Buenos Aires and intellectual architect of much of the city’s cultural-policy making following the 2001 economic crisis: “We work with the concept of culture as a process of social transformation, something that is in a constant state of evolution, going wherever it goes. [.  .  .] The concept we have found for developing this idea is ‘cultural diversity,’ something that does not exacerbate nationalism but instead makes us respect differences. [. . .] Today the phenomenon of transculturation is so strong one does not speak of nationalism, one speaks of diversity, of respect for difference, respect for the minority” (2007). It is interesting to note that when taken to its logical conclusion, López’s conceptualization of cultural diversity would ultimately reject the heritage-making project as such, arguing instead, as he did in my interview with him, that “there should be no national culture” and that the state should work to foster “whatever it is that is there.” Given this, it is not just ironic that the city government of Buenos Aires and the national government of Argentina have instead put tremendous effort into identifying and declaring a wide array of local cultural prac143

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tices as heritage of the city, the nation, and all of humanity in general. The prioritization of heritage making represents a specific policy move on the part of certain contingents within these governments to shape and restrict the implications of what counts as “diversity.” But even here we need to carefully resist the urge to see López’s invocation of diversity as somehow departing from the larger conflation of economic and cultural interests and values that the heritage-making project is a product of and clearly promotes. The term “cultural diversity,” as used by López and other cultural-policy makers in Argentina, has little or no relationship to how it has been used in struggles over identity politics and institutional inclusion or exclusion in the United States, despite López’s emphasis on “respect for difference, respect for the minority” (see Ciminy and Moreno 2009; Yúdice 1992). In fact, the idea of cultural diversity as used here originally emerged from debates over the scope and range of free-trade agreements, as will be explored in detail in the next chapter. The point here is that diversity is not a virtue in and of itself but a means to multiple productive ends, not least of which is attaining the recognition of UNESCO and other cultural institutions in which the term “diversity” has clearly become a buzzword. There are passages in the tango declaration that take this to an extreme: “As any long-lasting cultural phenomenon in complex societies, [tango] has enriched itself with a wide variety of contributions. Therefore the need to stress the sense of identity that it proposes, respecting the cultural diversity at its very core. Cultural diversity, in fact, belongs to its origin and is critical for its essence and roots” (UNESCO 2009, 3). While we should probably not make too much of an issue over this type of institutional grant–speak, I think it does reflect an infatuation with the discourse of diversity that can at times eclipse concerns with the history and lived experience of inclusion and exclusion that the heritage-making project and the broader discourse of cultural diversity are at least nominally designed and intended to address. For example, of the ten “concerned community organizations or representatives” cited in the tango declaration, none are directly concerned with representing the cultural life, musical or otherwise, of contemporary Afro-Argentine or Afro-Uruguayan communities (see Andrews 2010), despite the key role those communities played in the initial formation of the genre, at least according to the UNESCO declaration. To be fair, simply asking such organizations to sign on to the document when it was in preparation would not necessarily have addressed these issues

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either. Nevertheless, I think the total absence of such groups from the final document is indicative of how the UNESCO declaration, for all its emphasis on cultural diversity and ethnic, racial, and economic difference, ultimately obscures efforts to acknowledge and address social inequalities in Argentina today. At the same time, a critique of UNESCO’s use of Argentine history, however well deserved, essentially misses the point, because for all its emphasis on the past, the UNESCO declaration and the heritagemaking project are ultimately about shaping the future. That future is one in which cultural diversity, as (believed to be) embodied in institutionalized forms of intangible cultural heritage, can serve as the catalyst for multiple and multiplying forms of development—cultural, social, economic, and the like. For example, in compliance with UNESCO’s criteria for inscription on the representative list of intangible heritage, the proposal identifies a variety of established safeguarding measures for the preservation or promotion of tango, almost all of which operated under the auspices of either the municipal or national governments of the concerned parties. The proposal also outlines the basic objectives and proposed actions of eleven additional safeguarding measures that would be implemented with the support of the UNESCO declaration. These include a tango documentation and record center (essentially a public archive of tango’s historical material culture, the first of its kind); a tango dance institute; a training center for the repair, maintenance, and future manufacture of specialty tango instruments; the development and dissemination of tango-themed walking tours; and the creation of tango-themed hostels. The combined budget requested for these safeguarding measures exceeds US$2.25 million. This is a tremendous sum in comparison to previous institutional resources allocated to tango-related projects and policies at the local level. But it is arguably a trifling amount when weighed on a global scale, especially if the projects they would fund in fact accomplish what they claim: to provide the institutional infrastructure required to protect, maintain, and promote an intangible cultural practice of universal value and significance. But regardless of such claims, and regardless of the ultimate quantity of funds actually allocated to these projects, these numbers speak to the very tangible consequences of declaring tango part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, especially given that most of the requested support is intended to be used to establish new institutions that are themselves designed to bring in further revenues in the future, both directly and indirectly.

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Conclusion: What Intangible Cultural Heritage Gets Done Taking a step back, then, I think we can productively frame these and other interventions enacted by the 2009 UNESCO declaration within two primary categories, the cultural and the economic. From the cultural perspective, the declaration’s insistence on tango’s emblematic status as a marker of ethnic, racial, and economic diversity in Argentina constitutes a major intervention, despite its political shortcomings. This is significant given the continued salience of tango as a potent symbol of the nation both within Argentina and abroad, where the limits and boundaries of the genre have symbolically marked who is included and who is excluded from the national imaginary. From the economic perspective, it could be argued that many if not most aspects of the declaration—including its broad aesthetic reevaluation and historical reframing of the genre—represent nothing more than the further entrenchment of the managerial impulse toward economic productivity that has become one of the hallmarks of local, national, and international cultural-policy making following the neoliberal turn. This is not necessarily a criticism, especially given the spectacular series of failures on the part of international political-economic ideologies that have successively intended to develop, modernize, integrate, or globalize Latin American economies, political policies, and cultures over the past decades. It is instead a simple recognition of the emergent and multiple values that local cultural differences have begun to take on within new circuits of transnational cultural prestige and economic exchange. Regarding tango specifically, such processes are of course nothing new. The initial consolidation of tango as a genre was itself a product of historical experiences defined more by transnational circulation (of people, musicians, audiences, media, images, ideas, etc.) than any purely localist sentiment or experience. Or, rather, it is clear that the local milieu in which the genre initially took shape was a product of these broader forms of transnational circulation, such that the UNESCO declaration—itself perhaps the ultimate international validation of situated cultural locality and meaning—can in fact be interpreted as little more than a further wrinkle in a narrative of artistic development and exchange that is now more than a century old. Even the managerial impulse to productivity, while perhaps foregrounded to an unprecedented degree here, is not new to tango, which has been mobilized and used in similarly productive ways since its initial formation as a genre. What is new is how the discourse of cultural diversity 146

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as institutionalized in the UNESCO declaration and elsewhere has reformulated the scope and range of what tango is. Self-referential narratives of devoted memory position tango as the exceptional product of a singular historical experience that is stubbornly local and largely closed to outsiders. In contrast, the UNESCO declaration’s cosmopolitan version of tango positions it as the emblematic expression of a historical encounter that is defined by diversity, something that is fundamentally global and intuitively open to all of humanity today. I would argue that ultimately UNESCO’s reformulation of tango is more about opening and expanding international consumer markets for tango than valuing tango as an existing cultural practice. Nevertheless, the declaration has significant implications for the musical efforts of contemporary tango artists, whose experiences and concerns go largely unacknowledged in these debates. The development and institutionalization of diversity as a culturalpolicy-making discourse marks a radical departure from the immediate goals of traditional cultural-policy making while maintaining if not expanding the core justifications for governmental involvement and intervention in the artistic domain and cultural life more broadly. Part of this stems from how local governments, including the city government of Buenos Aires, have institutionalized official multiculturalism as it developed over the course of the past several decades. Much of this was precipitated by the demands of new social movements, but it also reflects the genuine desire of some policy makers within postdictatorship Latin American governments to address long-standing patterns of social and other exclusions, with culture and the arts serving as a means of incorporating those subjects and subjectivities that have historically been excluded from economic opportunity, cultural representation, and the broader privileges of citizenship, however it might be defined. The UNESCO declaration was highly congruent with these efforts. At the same time, the discourse of cultural diversity speaks as much if not more to the managerial impulse to productivity that has come to define cultural policy making in recent years. From this perspective, diversity- driven cultural-policy making has emerged as a priority in Buenos Aires and beyond not because it enables states to reframe historical wrongs, but because the objects of those policies— including intangible cultural heritage—can so clearly and coherently address the twin demands for cultural meaning and economic development that characterizes cultural production in the age of expediency.

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“This Is Going to Be Good for All of Us”: Tango and the Cultural Industries It was approaching six o’clock in the evening on Saturday, November 16, 2006, and the contemporary tango ensemble El Arranque was making the final adjustments to their stage setup for a late afternoon performance: tweaking microphone placements, adjusting the height and angle of their music stands, shaking out their arms and hands, and peering out at the seated audience through the glare of the stage lights.1 A septet of two violins, two bandoneones, piano, bass, and electric guitar, along with a singer, El Arranque was founded by the bassist Ignacio Varchausky, whom we met as the cultural producer behind the nonprofit arts organization TangoVia Buenos Aires in chapter 3, and the bandoneonist Camilo Ferrero; both continue to perform with the group. Grounded in masterful instrumental technique, framed by elaborate practical knowledge of the stylistic history of tango, and shaped by a keen awareness of how contemporary innovations might adhere to or depart from the core tendencies of that lineage, El Arranque is one of the most prominent and successful contemporary tango groups active in Buenos Aires today. Varchausky opened the performance with a short announcement from the stage, reaching around his bass for a vocal microphone attached to a stand beside him: “Good afternoon, and thanks so much for being here. We are El Arranque, and before we start I want to say that we 148

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are really very happy to be here, to be a part of this wonderful event. I want to thank the organizers for inviting us, and wish them congratulations for putting it all together. Nothing like this has ever happened in Buenos Aires before, and we are proud to be a part of it, because this is going to be good for all of us.” “This” was a main-stage performance at the first Buenos Aires International Music Fair (BAFIM), a massive-scale music festival and industry trade show that was organized and produced by the city government of Buenos Aires (Luker 2010). Taking place November 16–19, 2006, BAFIM was a key event within broader governmental policies aimed at fostering and promoting the local music industry. As described by Stella Puente, at that time the city government’s sub-secretary of cultural industries: “With the state in its role as facilitator and promoter, BAFIM is a fair that proposes multiple spaces of participation, training, and interchange; a rich, diverse, and free artistic program; and a space of business opportunities for the industry: international visits, live concerts, conferences, discussions, musical encounters, disc sales, business meetings, showcases, and more” (Puente 2006, 7). Given this wide scope of activity, the “all of us” in Varchausky’s “this is going to be good for all of us” referred not just to tango and tango musicians, but to anyone and everyone who was invested in music as an economically productive force. Foremost among these was the city government of Buenos Aires, which had become increasingly involved with the cultural industries generally and the local music industry in particular following the 2001 economic crisis. The then- emerging discourse of cultural diversity was instrumental in these efforts, used to forge new connections between the commercial cultural industries as private, forprofit businesses and the public management of arts and culture via traditional modes of cultural-policy making. As with the heritage-making project examined in the previous chapter, diversity discourses were used to reframe the field of cultural production regarding music as a cultural industry in Buenos Aires. BAFIM was a spectacular instance of this: a means of gathering a heterogeneous collection of cultural actors within an elaborately managed event in which ambivalences and antagonisms could be transformed into synergistic opportunities for immediate and future development, both cultural and economic.2 Like the cunning recognition that Povinelli (2002) located at the core of liberal multiculturalism, BAFIM took an unruly “difference”—different styles and genres of music, different scales and practices of production, different business models, different cultural values, different artistic goals, and so on—and turned it into 149

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a manageable “diversity.” This is a crucial shift, for while a language of “difference” would engender apathy or antagonism among these musical actors, “diversity” incorporated their heterogeneity into what the city government envisioned as a single robust market of musical production. Varchausky’s off-the- cuff comment from the stage captured the ideological essence of these efforts (which is not to say that he personally subscribed to them). Whether or not we agree that “this is going to be good for all of us,” El Arranque’s appearance at BAFIM challenges us to account for the transformations that diversity- driven governmental engagements with music and the music industry have engendered in Buenos Aires. From this point of view, El Arranque was presented at BAFIM not simply because they were an exemplary instance of local musical excellence within the tradition of an institutionally privileged form—tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The band was also presented because it represented yet another part of the city’s much larger milieu of musical production and creativity. That milieu included tango but also rock, jazz, folklore, electronic dance music, and so forth, all of which were prominently featured at BAFIM, rendering these genres self- evidently both equal to and different from one another. Thus diversity driven cultural-policy making efforts designed to enhance the productive power of music simultaneously bolster and gloss the many other values and meanings of situated musical practices like tango. They also greatly expand the scope of what music is and is about. From this perspective the city’s musical milieu includes not only a diverse range of styles and genres but also independent and multinational record labels, recording and mastering studios, music schools, graphic design and printing companies, compact disc reproducers and manufacturers, publishers, instrument makers, distribution companies, record stores, media outlets, production companies, and other businesses related to the commercial production of music, all of which were represented at BAFIM. This closing chapter examines this shifting terrain of musical practice, cultural-policy making, and the working of the commercial cultural industries in the age of expediency, taking the institutional history of how the cultural industries were located as an object of governmental intervention in Buenos Aires as a case. I trace the sometimes conflicting development of governmental efforts in this area and demonstrate how the discourse of cultural diversity was used to further a wide array of managerial projects within the city government. I argue that diversity- driven cultural-policy making regarding the cultural in150

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dustries is not simply the bureaucratic background against which the many musical practices examined in the previous chapters take place, but an irreducible component of what makes those practices valuable and meaningful. At the same time, contemporary tango, like any fully mediated form of popular music, is drawn upon, used, and deeply valued for reasons that have little or nothing to do with matters of musical style and meaning. Those reasons, as I demonstrate below, should not be taken for granted or otherwise ignored in any critical account of musical culture in the age of expediency. Mediated by cultural-policy making, the commercial cultural industries shape the practice and meaning of musical form while also mobilizing music as a resource for development of all sorts, echoing the dual trend of detachment and connection that we have explored throughout the previous chapters. I have argued that musical practice itself could be understood as a type of managerial regime, mobilizing and using musical style, form, and history as a resource for a variety of productive ends, only some of which are directly musical. Here I emphasize the cultural dimension of cultural-policy making, the commercial cultural industries, and other managerial regimes, arguing that they are best understood as dynamic sites of strategic engagement rather than static institutional entities within broader struggles over material resources and cultural power. This is not to elide the managerial impulse toward economic productivity, which is the foundational trope of the commercial cultural industries and increasingly characterizes the work of cultural-policy making in Argentina and elsewhere, as we saw in the previous chapter. It is to recognize that these practices emerged as the creative response of individual policy makers and their allies to the material and political realities of post-crisis Argentina and the broader neoliberal turn. Therefore policies designed to exploit the multiple values of musical culture in Buenos Aires, while clearly topdown, should not only be taken as a hegemonic imposition from above or outside, as many critical analyses of neoliberalism would have it (see Klein 2007).

Locating the Cultural Industries as an Object of Governmental Intervention “Encouraging the development of the cultural industries” has become such a priority for the city government of Buenos Aires that it is now enshrined in the city’s constitution alongside other cultural goals. 151

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These include “ensuring free artistic expression,” “facilitating access to cultural goods,” and the “preservation, recuperation, and diffusion of cultural patrimony” (Constitución de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Chapter 6, Article 32). Incorporating the cultural industries as a fundamental part of the city government’s goals regarding culture was particularly significant given the long-standing trope of cultural exceptionalism in Argentina and the privileged position culture has come to occupy in Buenos Aires since the collapse of Argentina’s last military dictatorship in 1983. Though the role of culture in daily life was radically transformed after the neoliberal turn, culture and the arts are still imagined as an important means through which the state and its citizens can address fundamental issues regarding the creation and maintenance of a democratic society: social inclusion and exclusion, individual and collective identity, memory and forgetting, and many others (Wortman 2007). The centrality of culture to the governing project of the city of Buenos Aires has only increased in the intervening years. A more recent example is Law 2.176 of 2006, which identifies, declares, and supposedly protects “cultural rights” as a “universal, irreplaceable, and interdependent” part of human rights more broadly (La Legislatura de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires 2006). It is not obvious that the protection and promotion of the cultural industries should be included within these conceptual and legalistic frameworks regarding culture and the arts. Thus the challenge for policy makers who wished to prioritize the cultural industries in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis lay not in recognizing the economic value generated by the cultural industries, which by 2004 accounted for more than 8.4 percent of the city’s GDP and 5 percent of those employed (128,000 jobs) (Observatorio de Industrias Culturales de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2005, 30). The challenge was to articulate the extraeconomic contributions made by those industries and their products, their cultural value. In other words, policy makers needed to reframe the cultural industries within existing conceptualizations of culture as an inherently valuable component of society beyond whatever benefits they might generate as an economically productive sector, not expand the definition of culture so that it would encompass the work of those industries. At the same time, those within the city government who wished to develop public policies to support and enhance the cultural industries as an economically productive sector also faced opposition owing to long-standing critical and institutional skepticism regarding the place of the cultural industries in public life. Given this context, the conceptual basis for governmental interven152

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tion in the local cultural industries tended to oscillate between two primary nodes of consensus. Both of these were reflected in official policies as well as the personal convictions of individual policy makers. The first was chiefly concerned with defining the cultural industries and the goods and services they produce as important and valuable components of Argentine culture more broadly. As such, they deserved governmental protection in the face of both real and perceived threats from international cultural producers and organizations, especially the U.S. cultural industries and the free-trade policies promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The second focused primarily on defining the cultural industries as a productive sector whose contribution to the city’s economy was such that they deserved state assistance and support regardless of claims (or denials) regarding their social or cultural significance. The emerging discourse of cultural diversity operated as a pivot point between these two positions, strategically used to forward a variety of different policy-making agendas.

Locating the Cultural Value of the Cultural Industries The city government of Buenos Aires’s actions regarding the cultural industries resonated with those of an increasing number of governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations operating at variously local, regional, national, and international levels. Accounting for the cultural value of the cultural industries had become a pressing issue for these governments and organizations following the neoliberal turn of the 1990s. And while the neoliberal transformation of economic and social policy has had a profound impact on many aspects of daily life the world over, the situation faced by the city of Buenos Aires was unique given the tumultuous context of the 2001 economic crisis and its aftermath. Many of the city’s policies regarding the cultural industries were formed in response to the challenges posed by the 2001 economic crisis. They were designed to take advantage of new and different kinds of development strategies that were believed to be effective in the wake of such an event. The intellectual architect of many of the city’s early policies regarding the cultural industries was Gustavo López. A lawyer by training, López served as the director of the Argentine Federal Committee for Radio Diffusion (roughly equivalent of the United States’ Federal Communication Commission) under the administration of President Fernando de la Rúa, who was ousted from power on 153

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December 21, 2001, in the face of massive popular protest during the economic crisis. Shortly thereafter López joined the administration of Aníbal Ibarra, chief of government for the city of Buenos Aires from 2000 to 2006, serving initially as sub-secretary for management of the cultural industries but rising to the position of secretary of culture for the city following Ibarra’s reelection in 2003. As secretary of culture, López occupied a cabinet-level position, reporting directly to the chief of government, and oversaw a large, multitiered, and highly influential branch of the city government. When López first joined the city government, the local cultural industries, like the rest of the economy, were facing extreme difficulties. As he explained to me in an interview, “At that moment, the cultural industries were passing through a great crisis. [. . .] There was a lot of debt. So from the city government we started to work with the idea of creating a special regimen to help the cultural industries” (López 2007). The first product of that regimen was federal Law 24.750 (“preservation of cultural goods and patrimonies”), ratified in June of 2003 and effective as of July of 2003. The law declared the preservation of “anthropological, historical, artistic and cultural” patrimonies; “scientific, technological, and research” businesses; and “activities and industries of relevant importance for national defense,” as well as the radio spectrum and communication media, to be of strategic interest to the nation. Foreign opportunists, be they art collectors or media conglomerates, had essentially pillaged each of these areas in the chaotic months following the crisis (Becerra, Hernández, and Postolski 2003). The government intended to slow down if not stop the predatory purchasing of patrimonial goods, intellectual properties, and commercial infrastructures the new law identified for protection. The law discussed the cultural industries in terms of “communications media,” defined as newspapers, magazines, periodicals, and general publishing businesses; radio broadcasting services and their complementary services; producers of audiovisual and digital content; internet access providers; and advertising companies. It limited foreign ownership and participation in Argentine communications media to 30  percent of a company’s value, which was intended to keep local firms local despite their dire economic situation following the crisis. The law prioritized the nation’s strategic interest in local ownership of communications media over whatever cultural value the goods and services produced by those media might have, but it also opened the door to further governmental intervention in these sectors as businesses. This was a crucial departure from previous practices, in that govern154

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mental support for the cultural industries, such as it was, had traditionally taken the form of state subsidies for the production of specific cultural content such as films. The new law, by contrast, was concerned with supporting the producers of cultural content regardless of the aesthetic or social value of the content they produced. It did so through a legalistic intervention that far surpassed supplying direct financial support through subsidies or governmental grants to individual artists or cultural institutions. As Law 25.750 was being discussed and drafted in early 2002, the city government began coordinating another aspect of its new regimen for the cultural industries. The city arranged a series of meetings to examine, discuss, formulate, and implement public and private policies aimed at addressing the needs of the local cultural industries. The issue was taken up with some urgency, not only because the city believed that the immediate challenges of the economic crisis and its aftermath demanded a coordinated response from the public and private sector, but because the WTO was already scheduled to determine whether cultural goods and services should be declared subject to international free-trade agreements as part of its 2005 round of negotiations. López and other invested parties in Buenos Aires believed that subjecting the products of the cultural industries to the rules of free trade would have at least two potentially dire consequences for the local cultural industries and the state policies that managed them. First, it would eliminate existing state intervention in markets for cultural goods and services, such as national- content or language quotas in television and radio—mainstays of many national cultural policies. Such interventions would violate the free-trade principle of “national treatment,” under which domestic and imported goods must be treated equally under the law. Secondly, and following this, trade liberalization would make direct support for national cultural industries through state subsidies illegal, eliminating policies on the cultural industries already in place and preemptively ruling out many future governmental interventions in the sector. Faced with this pressure, the city initiated meetings in order to begin coordinating public and private sector opposition to the liberalization of trade in cultural goods and services. From these meetings emerged a formal advocacy group called the Forum for the Defense of the Cultural Industries. Its stated objective was “to generate a space of multi-sector consensus for the design of public and private policies for the defense, promotion, and fortification of the production of cultural goods” (Salerno 2003, 85). The foundational document of the Forum 155

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(reproduced in Salerno 2003) is dated June 4, 2002. It outlines the principles guiding the group’s work and identifies several goals regarding public-policy making for the cultural industries, including a call to limit the influence of foreign capital in the local media that was later implemented in Law 24.750. Forged in the heat of the economic crisis, the document acknowledged the economic significance of the culture industries and their role in Argentina’s recovery and further development following the crisis. On balance, however, the document downplayed the economic potential of the cultural industries in favor of a more celebratory emphasis on the contribution the cultural industries make to culture and society as a whole. This difference between the economic and the cultural value of the cultural industries was articulated with a distinctly nationalist rhetoric. Written to be read aloud, the Forum’s declaration stated, in part: “Cultural goods, their production and preservation, are the fundamental basis of the identity of a nation. We are our books, our theater, and our music. We are the result of what we have read and what we have seen. Of what we read and hear today. Our cinema, our radio, our television, our museums. And it is our responsibility to protect them. As it is our obligation to produce new books, new recordings, and new films” (Salerno 2003, 89). The passionate nationalism of this highly partisan statement was striking, especially in comparison to the formal legalese of many other governmental interventions in these issues. The tone of the document reflects the fervent nationalism that accompanied the stress and rupture of the 2001 economic crisis, which many saw as a direct attack on Argentina’s economic and political sovereignty. It also underscores the point that cultural-policy making always operates within larger political projects. Motivated by specific political commitments, cultural-policy making does not simply support culture but mobilizes and uses it in order to achieve particular political goals, echoing the broader turn toward the use of culture in the age of expediency. More surprising was the rhetorical position taken by the city government only one year later, in late May of 2003, as it hosted what would be the first of several annual international meetings on cultural diversity (Salerno 2005a). Framed even more explicitly in opposition to the WTO’s upcoming negotiations on the liberalization of trade in audiovisual goods, the meeting abandoned the earlier fierce rhetoric of cultural nationalism in favor of a much more diffuse notion of “cultural diversity.” From this point of view, liberalization of trade in cultural goods and services not only represented “an enormous risk for patrimony” but also threatened “the cultural diversity of the people” 156

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(López 2005a, 5). Over the course of a single year, then, the defensive and deeply nationalistic debate regarding the cultural industries and public policy in Buenos Aires was almost entirely reframed within the discourse of cultural diversity, which, notably, did not appear anywhere in the foundational declaration of the original Forum. What happened? In the year between the 2002 meetings from which the Forum emerged and the 2003 international meeting on cultural diversity in Buenos Aires, López and other members of the Forum reached out to international groups that were also organizing in opposition to the upcoming WTO meetings on liberalization of trade in cultural goods and services. The most robust of these at the time was the Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (CCD), which formed in Quebec in 1998 in opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) then being negotiated by member states of the Organization for Economic Co- Operation and Development (OECD).3 The highest priority for the Canadian CCD and other such organizations was to promote cultural diversity as a legalistic justification for continued state involvement with the domestic cultural industries. Its argument was heavily indebted to earlier theories of cultural “grey- out” (i.e., Lomax 1972, 3), in which the diversity of the world’s so- called folk cultures were anxiously imagined as being under constant threat from the everencroaching forces of modernity, especially the modern mass media and the capitalist consumer culture that accompanied it. The Canadian CCD’s argument regarding cultural diversity was essentially the same, except in that the perceived threat was not to some type of folkloric diversity but to diversity of content and point of origin within the commercial cultural industries as a sector. From this point of view, liberalization of trade in cultural goods and services would unfairly tilt what was already an uneven economic playing field to the advantage of the hegemonic power centers of the global cultural industries, especially the United States, thereby endangering the world’s cultural diversity in terms of media content and content providers. This particular notion of cultural diversity was the strategic successor to the idea of the “cultural exception,” a similarly defensive position championed by France during the 1993 “Uruguay Round” of negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a provisional agreement that was replaced by the WTO in 1994. The culturalexception doctrine argued that cultural goods should be exempted from the full scope of free trade agreements because some aspects of those agreements (especially the “national treatment” rule discussed 157

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above) undermined the cultural specificity of those goods in favor of a mechanically economic understanding of them.4 The cultural exception rejected the idea of treating cultural goods as if they were commodities like any other, such as steel, rice, or timber. The argument was based on the idea that cultural goods made unique contributions to national identities: “Culture is not like any other merchandise because it goes beyond the commercial: cultural goods and services convey ideas, values and ways of life which reflect the [. . .] identities of a country” (UNESCO n.d.). This argument cut against the grain of prevailing thought within industry power centers like the United States at the time. There it was argued that the goods and services produced by the cultural industries—movies, books, musical recordings—should be defined as entertainment, not culture, meaning that they could and should be included within the scope of free-trade agreements. Partisan advocates like López and others later came to see the cultural exception as an entirely negative gesture, a refusal and nothing more. The cultural exception protected local cultural industries based on the special contribution their goods were believed to make to national identities but did not meaningfully address the changing nature of those identities within increasingly pluralistic societies. I discussed the matter with López. López: When the United States wanted to liberalize cultural goods and services [through the GATT and WTO], they did it with a conception of culture in which culture was considered part of the entertainment industry. For us, culture is an industry in and of itself, which does not have to do with entertainment or leisure but with the construction of identity. [.  .  .] Cultural goods and services were exempted from free trade agreements by the idea of the cultural exception; it left them to the side. It was a negative, it was a “no” against all this. And now it has been superseded by another “no,” because we have to rescue diversity. We have to preserve diversity and respect diversity. If we don’t protect this diversity, it disappears. That is how this new concept appeared, diversity as respect for the minority, respect for the other. Luker: And this is different from the cultural exception in the sense that in practice the exception was used to protect “arts” more than “cultures”? López: The exception was more a “no” than any other thing, a rejection of the other. In contrast, the concept of diversity incorporates respect for the differences that operate within each country. Why? Because the French, who were the ones who brought forward the concept of the exception in the first place, did not apply a policy of respect toward their [internal] minorities. Respect for difference was never really questioned by them. With the introduction of the idea 158

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of cultural diversity, we are also obligated to respect minority expressions within our own countries. (López 2007)

This understanding of diversity echoes how that term was mobilized in the heritage-making project examined in the previous chapter, which, as we saw, did not always lead to policies that respected minority expressions. In terms of how it was used in negotiations over free trade, however, the argument in favor of cultural diversity started where the case for the cultural exception left off: with the idea that the products of the cultural industries are unlike other products and should therefore not be considered in purely economic terms. Advocates of the diversity paradigm claimed that the uniquely extraeconomic quality of cultural goods and services was located not simply in the cultural content of these goods but in “the important social role they play” (Curzi, Stoddart, and Pilon 2001, 4). In contrast to the cultural exception’s homogenous and therefore exclusionary vision of national culture, advocates of the new paradigm championed a pluralistic and supposedly more positive notion of cultural diversity. Governmental-policy making regarding the cultural industries would need to account for this diversity if they wanted the cultural goods and services produced by those industries to achieve their full potential for social good: “Only a broad range of cultural expression that truly mirrors the diversity of each society and of the rest of the world can enable culture to fully play its role in society” (ibid., 5). This argument applied not only to the production side of the cultural industries, but also to the consumption of cultural goods. As “members of a community must have access to a wide range of cultural works and productions,” so must “the availability of cultural products [.  .  .] reflect a diversity of the places of origin of these creations, linguistic diversity and a balance between local and foreign productions” (ibid., 4). This was where the issue of governmental cultural-policy making reentered the picture, because, as the argument went, “the free market alone cannot ensure cultural diversity” (ibid.). Again, it is important to emphasize that these are the ideologically laden arguments of politically committed individuals, governments, and nongovernmental advocacy organizations. They were developed in order to oppose the liberalization of trade in cultural goods and services on the part of local cultural industries, not in direct support of culture and the arts as such. Thus, taking a step back, we can see how arguments for both cultural exception (based on the defense of national identity) and cultural diversity (based on the defense of a diver159

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sity of cultural expressions as a social good) ultimately functioned in the same way, despite their many other differences. At the same time, it is important to note that the cultural- diversity argument at least theoretically demanded that the state abandon any pretense of an “official” culture in favor of plurality and inclusion. It is questionable whether this happens in practice, as we saw in the previous chapter. But López, in his position as secretary of culture for the city government of Buenos Aires, took these implications seriously. In opposition to the cultural concepts of, for example, socialist realism, which promoted the development of only that which had to do with state ideology, or Nazism or fascism, which were the exacerbations of nationalisms, the concept that we have found in order to better develop all of this is cultural diversity. [Diversity] does not exacerbate nationalism, but instead makes us respect differences. It is a very distinct conceptualization compared to what emerged from globalization or transculturation after World War I, which ended with the zenith of Nazism and fascism in order to exalt national values against foreign imposition. Now, the phenomenon of transculturation is so strong that one does not speak of nationalism, one speaks of diversity, which is respect for difference, respect for the minority. It is simply this. (López 2007)

Engaging with these international discourses, the city government of Buenos Aires shifted its rhetoric from its initial position, based on a nationalistic defense of the cultural industries, to a broader commitment to cultural diversity on the global level. Quickly embracing the new term, the city placed itself firmly at the center of international debate on the issue by organizing and hosting the 2003 international meeting on cultural diversity. That meeting was attended by officials and organizations from Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, France, and Canada, including representatives of the Canadian CCD, reflecting both the global nature of the issue and an emerging regional consensus on culture and trade among full and associate members states of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) regional trade agreement. The city government of Buenos Aires hosted a second such meeting in September of 2004, which was attended by representatives from Chile, France, Peru, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. The goal of the second meeting was to intervene in the issue in a way that would have real and lasting impact on the international level. That was done through the Declaration of Buenos Aires, a document that emerged from the 2004 meeting and was signed by more than one hundred of its participants. The Declaration stated flat- out that “cul160

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ture is not a commodity” and that only the state, in conjunction with other cultural actors, was “able to permit that a true diversity of cultural content and artistic expressions come to be realized and known by the largest number of citizens” (Salerno 2005b, 243). The Declaration of Buenos Aires was a key precursor to the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, perhaps the ultimate triumph of the diversity paradigm over those in favor of the liberalization of trade in cultural goods (UNESCO 2005). With more than twenty reasons that diversity should be protected outlined in its preamble, the UNESCO convention reaffirmed “the sovereign right of states to draw up cultural policies” and recognized “the specific nature of cultural goods and services as vehicles of identity, values, and meaning.” It stated that “cultural activities, goods and services have both an economic and a cultural nature, because they convey identities, values and meanings, and must therefore not be treated as solely having commercial value” (3). It was and is the authoritative statement confirming the extraeconomic value of the cultural industries and their products at the international level.

Identifying the Cultural Industries as a Productive Sector As López and others recognized throughout their efforts to identify and defend the cultural value of the cultural industries, those industries— and culture more broadly—do generate significant economic value. Thus, alongside the project of locating the cultural industries within international diversity discourses that emphasized those industries’ cultural values, workers in other areas of the city government focused their policy-making efforts on enhancing the economic potential of the local cultural industries. These projects understood and addressed the cultural industries as an economically productive sector fi rst and foremost. They saw cultural-policy making for the cultural industries as a means of increasing both public and private revenue and promoting economic development above and beyond whatever cultural or social values the cultural industries and their products might have. From this point of view, enabling the local cultural industries to increase their productive potential should be the primary focus of governmentalpolicy making for the sector. Advocates claimed that, along with the general benefit of development and growth within an important sector of the city’s economy, these efforts would also directly profit the city 161

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government via increased tax revenues from the legitimate sale of cultural goods, both domestically and abroad. At the time of my primary fieldwork, production- oriented culturalpolicy making was concentrated within the city’s Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries. Formed in 2003, the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries was organized into several broad programs. These included General Directorates of Cultural Industries and Design (including programs that concentrated specifically on the publishing, music, and design industries), Promotion and Exportation of Cultural Goods, and the city’s Cultural Industries Observatory, among others. The formation of the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries reflected the new priority the city government had given the cultural industries as an engine of economic development following the 2001 economic crisis, and it spoke to the contribution the government expected the sector to make to the city’s economy in the coming years. However, in a city that had long been dedicated to the management of culture and the arts outside of economic considerations, some believed that the city’s recognition and support of the cultural industries as a productive sector was incongruent with other cultural priorities and values. Even with the added impetus of the economic crisis and the ideological support of key city functionaries, including Gustavo López and others, clearly defining the cultural industries as a productive sector was a real challenge for the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries. The strongest expression of this productive turn can be seen in then chief of government Jorge Telerman’s decision upon taking office in March 2006 to move the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries from the purview of the secretary of culture to the newly renamed Ministry of Production. This took the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries and its associated programs out of what was a generally cultural context into an institutional environment that was clearly oriented toward economic production. Under the secretary of culture, for example, the cultural industries programs operated alongside the Sub- Secretariat for Cultural Patrimony (including museums and the History Institute) and the Sub-Secretariat for Cultural Development (including artistic education and music). In the Ministry of Production it operated next to the Sub-Secretariat of Work, Employment, and Professional Formation, the Sub-Secretariat of Production (including technology and consumer protection), and the Sub-Secretariat of Tourism. For many of the city’s employees, especially those who remained in the renamed Ministry of Culture, this move was indicative of what they perceived as the new center-left government’s misunderstand162

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ing of the cultural value of the cultural industries. As one Ministry of Culture employee told me angrily: “Those people [in the Ministry of Production] have no idea what they are dealing with. They don’t understand the symbolic content of cultural goods. They think about [cultural goods] as if they were shoes, as if they were commodities like any other.” On the other hand, and before the move, Stella Puente, who served as the sub-secretary of cultural industries from 2003 to 2007, publicly stated that policy work on the cultural industries needed to be liberated from what she called “the ghetto of culture.” In her mind, many cultural-policy makers were blind to the economic potential of the cultural industries—and the city’s role in fostering them— because of their distaste for thinking about culture from an economic perspective and their personal commitments to Culture with a capital C (Observatorio de Industrias Culturales de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2006). As she told me in a later interview: “The advantage [of being in the Ministry of Production] is to be seated within an area where you have people who understand the productive sector—who know what it means to fortify a business through management, who know what credit is. There are a ton of questions that have to do with the financial aspect of things—with production, with business development, with the development of productive strategy—and you just don’t have interlocutors [for that] in [the Ministry of] Culture, in how the Culture area has traditionally been handled” (Puente 2007). The challenge facing Puente and her colleagues was, again, not a matter of making the cultural industries an economically productive sector (they were already generating significant revenues without governmental intervention), but in making institutional space for the cultural industries within policy-making structures that were unaccustomed to thinking about culture in this way. In Buenos Aires, public policies for the cultural industries fell squarely between these different state discourses and their underlying cultural and economic ideologies, neither of which was the provenance of an entirely left- or right-wing politics. If such policies and programs were to be established as what my interlocutors called “state policy”— as anything more than the pet project of individual policy makers that would almost certainly be discontinued in any future change of government—their advocates would need to communicate effectively across this discursive, institutional, and ideological divide, a key challenge to almost any policy-making project (Ochoa 2003). Puente and her colleagues used the discourse of cultural diversity to placate the concerns of cultural advocates within the city government who were 163

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reluctant to support the cultural industries. Outside of the cultural sector, however, discourses of development and management based on “real” numbers—data, statistics, measurements, and so on—still occupied a hegemonic position in governmental decision making. The city government’s Cultural Industries Observatory (OIC) was formed to address this other audience. The OIC was an interdisciplinary research group “dedicated to obtaining, processing, and elaborating quantitative and qualitative information on the cultural activity in general and the cultural industries in particular.”5 Housed within and overseen by the larger Sub- Secretariat of Cultural Industries, the OIC’s mission was “to gather and process information and analyses on the situation of the cultural industries, putting [that information] into public service in order to contribute to the improvement of public policies (executive and legislative) and to the productive development of the private sector (authors, businesses, technicians, academics, and cultural workers in general).”6 The staff of the OIC conducted a wide range of research related to the cultural industries as a productive sector. They gathered and consolidated statistics on specific sectors of the cultural industries and produced reports analyzing the evolution of the cultural industries in the region. They facilitated forums and debates about the cultural industries and the issues surrounding them. They monitored legislation related to the cultural industries and created guides examining issues related to specific areas of the cultural industries (films, books, and audio recordings). The OIC made documents related to proposed policies for the cultural industries sector available to those industries, mapping the frameworks of the cultural industries and related sectors. They also kept an updated bibliography of research on the cultural industries and published a variety of original documents, including a journal of the OIC, an annual report on the sector, and other investigations. The results of these efforts were primarily directed toward the small and medium-sized businesses (pequeña y mediana empresas, or PyMES) working in the cultural sector. Both employment and production in the cultural sector were concentrated in PyMES, though such enterprises tended to have limited access to reliable information on industry trends because of their size and scale (Observatorio de Industrias Culturales de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2007, 7). Equally important to the overall mission of the OIC, however, was the audience of policy makers and government bureaucrats who have tended to overlook or dismiss the local cultural industries because of their lack of information regarding the scope of their contribution to the city’s overall economy. 164

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As explained to me by sub-secretary Puente, who presided over the creation of the OIC: If I am speaking of [the cultural industries as] a productive sector, I want to know the dimensions of the sector, to have data in order to effectively give it weight as a productive sector. Because of this, the first thing I did [as sub-secretary of cultural industries] was create the Cultural Industries Observatory. With the Observatory, we started to systematically put together a collection of data that was not organized by any other statistical organization: their aggregate in the GDP, what their economic value is, what impact the cultural industries have in terms of employment. [. . .] After this, my objective was to install, as much in the public agenda as in the management agenda, the cultural industries as a productive sector for which it is necessary to have policies as a productive sector. (Puente 2007)

A shift in the discourses framing the OIC’s annual reports on the cultural industries in Buenos Aires for the years 2004 and 2005 illustrated some of the real differences between the cultural and the productive perspectives on the cultural industries. The 2004 report was produced and published when Gustavo López was serving as the city’s secretary of culture, overseeing the OIC and the Sub- Secretariat of Cultural Industries as a whole. López’s introduction to the report, while on the whole dedicated to the growth and economic potential of the cultural industries, ultimately frames those industries in terms of their cultural value: “Industries with a cultural basis have grown strongly in the last years and are on the road to constituting one of the most important economic sectors of our city. But they are not only new business opportunities: cultural businesses are effective channels for making, communicating, and living culture. Their productions communicate our identity to the world, and therefore the state should define strategies and actions for promoting their expansion” (López 2005b, 6). One year later, following the fall of the previous administration and its replacement by that of Jorge Telerman—who had served as vice chief of government during the second term of the previous government and secretary of culture during the first (2000–2003)—the OIC, along with the rest of the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries, was moved out of the purview of the secretary of culture and into the Ministry of Production, as described above. This change meant that the general introduction to the OIC’s 2005 annual report was written by the then-minister of production, Enrique Rodríguez, not the new minister of culture. Rodríguez framed the issue of the cultural industries and their importance to the city in very different terms: “[The cultural 165

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industries] are a very dynamic sector for the city, to the point that its rate of growth is one of the highest of the last three years [since the 2001 economic crisis] in comparison with other economic activities and with the average of both the local and national economy. [. . .] We understand [the cultural industries] as a sector to which we have to attend in a special manner because of their double character: that of their contribution to the growth of the economy and employment in our city, but especially for the possibilities that they grant for balanced social development” (2007, 4). López discussed the cultural industries in terms of the city’s cultural goals, while Rodríguez emphasized the role of the cultural industries as a productive sector based on measured performance vis-à-vis other sectors of the city’s economy. Still, it would be a mistake to imply that their two perspectives did not share similar priorities or were somehow diametrically opposed to one another. The defensive position staked out by those committed to the cultural value of the cultural industries, while not primarily defined by financial concerns, was nevertheless invested in the health and performance of the cultural industries as businesses. At the same time, those who advocated for the productive perspective were clearly interested in more than bolstering the bottom line of the local cultural industries. Elsewhere in his introduction to the 2005 annual report, for example, Rodríguez (2007, 4) stated that the city was “convinced of the importance of [the cultural industries] in the social development of the community through the spreading of creativity and the values that they give towards identity.” In recognizing these similarities I am not saying that the many political differences between the two perspectives and the individual policy makers who espoused them were either not real or somehow irrelevant. Developing policies from the productive perspective had immediate and, in the context of larger histories of cultural-policy making in Buenos Aires, significant implications for practice. Perhaps the most important of these was defining who the intended subject of these policies should be and how the state could intervene on their behalf. The cultural perspective, with its emphasis on diversity on a grand scale, operated primarily at the international level. Advocates used this perspective to champion the diversity of local cultural industries as an ideal within in the context of free-trade negotiations rather than directly addressing local needs. The subjects of these efforts were not the local cultural industries but the trade agreements themselves, with the government intervening in order to shape the language that would set international law and regulations. For Stella Puente and other 166

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advocates of the productive perspective, however, defining the cultural industries as a productive sector was driven by “the clear objective that the subject of our policies was not the artists, but the producers and the businesspeople, the PyMES, the small businesses, those who need policies from the state” (Puente 2007). Either way, the subjects of culturalpolicy making for the cultural industries—free-trade agreements or PyMES working in the cultural sector—were very different from the individual artists, arts organizations, or public arts institutions that had long been the subjects of more traditional cultural-policy-making efforts in Buenos Aires.

The Local Music Industry as an Object of Governmental Intervention Following the productive mandate of supporting the cultural industries as businesses, the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries identified the sectors it felt would most benefit from state intervention. It was particularly concerned with incorporating areas that had received little or no government assistance in the past and eventually decided to concentrate on the publishing sector, the local music industry—specifically independent record labels—and the general design industries (including fashion, industrial design, digital design, etc.). The Sub-Secretariat provided additional support to the audiovisual and film industries, but since those sectors were already the subject of state support via the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), they were less of a priority for the city government. The institutional structure of the Sub- Secretariat reflected these areas of interest. The Sub-Secretariat as a whole was organized as a collection of semi-independent general directorates that focused on each one of these sectors. A different director or coordinator oversaw each general directorate, managing a staff of eight to twelve, contracting additional workers as needed depending on the demands of a given project. The General Directorate for the Music Industry, which was called the Discográfícas de Buenos Aires program, was charged with developing “strategic work between the city government and local record labels.” This was organized around six goals: (1) to establish space for dialogue with the local record labels that permits the government to devise and elaborate policies according to the needs of the sector, (2) to promote permanent dialogue with similar institutions in other countries in order to generate interchanges that favor the circulation of local 167

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products, (3) to accompany and propel the businesses in their projection abroad, (4) to facilitate the generation of new musical products, (5) to support the release of new recordings, and (6) to attend to the training needs and facilitate the functioning of new areas of the music business.7 These goals were put into practice through a variety of programs. In order to facilitate dialogue within the local music industry, in 2006 the Discográfícas program assisted in the formation of the Argentine Union of Independent Record Labels (UDI). The UDI was a trade organization (not a labor union) through which members could discuss, address, and take action regarding the challenges that faced their companies and the larger music industry. In order to generate interchange and promote local music abroad, the city organized missions to international music fairs, including WOMEX in Seville, MIDEM in Cannes, Popkomm in Berlin, and several music fairs around Latin America, among others. These missions were not only underwritten by the city government but also produced and executed by the city government. The city sent employees from the Discográfícas program to the fairs as representatives of the local music industry, most of whom could never have afforded to attend these trade fairs on their own. The city paid for and hosted promotional stands at the fairs and compiled CD samplers that promoted local independent record labels (Discográficas de Buenos Aires 2006). To assist in the generation of more and new musical material, the program managed a set of subsidies that independent labels could use for promoting recordings, expanding their productive capacities, and offsetting the production costs of specific recording projects. To support the release of new recordings, the city organized a series of monthly concerts that featured local artists from independent record labels to perform material from new releases. The series was titled Discos Vivos (Live Records) and took place in different artist-appropriate venues throughout the city, usually private clubs, bars, or cafés. Like most of the city government’s extensive cultural programming, these concerts were free and open to the public. The professional development and training needs of the local recording industry were addressed through a series of city-produced seminars that brought professionals working in the sector together with independent experts to discuss a specific issue facing the local music industry. These seminars, which took place in one of the many city- owned cultural centers and were also free and open to the public, tended to be quite technical. Topics ranged from “commercialization 168

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and marketing in the mobile phone sector” (July 4, 2007) to “new horizons for phonogram producers” (July 25, 2007). The latter covered future possibilities in the sales and support of physical recordings, usually CDs, which still dominated music production and consumption in Argentina. The city also produced a series of reference guides designed to help independent record labels navigate the technical aspects of the contemporary music business, including the management and protection of intellectual property rights, the legal and technical foundations of exporting cultural goods, and more general statistical reports on the performance of the sector. Despite their intensely productive orientation, the economic development of the local music industry—especially independent record labels—was not the only goal of the Discográficas program and the larger Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries. According to Stella Puente, the Sub-Secretariat deliberately worked at the point “where productive development and cultural development are mutually implicated in one another” (Puente 2007). In other words, the Sub- Secretariat focused its policy-making efforts on the cultural PyMES not only because of the significant economic contribution they were expected to make to the city, both now and in the future, but because “the diversity of economic actors has direct implications for the production and circulation of diverse cultural contents” (ibid.). This was where the priorities of the productive perspective on the cultural industries intersected with those of the cultural perspective, with “diversity” operating as the pivot point between them. The adoption of diversity discourses marked a paradigm shift in local cultural-policy making. As with the heritage-making project examined in the previous chapter, here the mobilization of diversity discourses marked a significant transformation regarding the value and meaning of musical culture. These policies were designed and implemented with little consideration of musical “content” beyond the point of production and, in the case of the Discográficas program, the size and type of cultural firm: small and medium-sized independent record labels based in Buenos Aires. The city government’s interlocutors in the private sector did not always accept the terms of this debate. For instance, the city’s particular notion of independence was largely imposed on the music sector from the top down and did not reflect any existing affinity between the different record labels that the government placed in this category.8 The seeming arbitrariness of the term grated on some of the independent record label owners with whom I spoke. As Javier Tenenbaum, the director of the independent label 169

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Los Años Luz, observed: “The word ‘independent’ does not define very much. The only thing it really means is that a label is not part of a bigger corporation. It does not define a specific cultural politics or designate a certain road to follow. None of that. Independent, beyond what they call indie rock or whatever, simply means that the label is not a ‘major,’ it is not a multinational; that it does not belong to a corporation or a media group. That’s it. It is a definition in and of itself. It does not mean that independents support culture or whatever. Not at all. Not here, not anywhere” (2007). Rather than denying the cultural value of the work done by independent labels, Tenenbaum’s statement should be read as an irreverent rebuttal to the city government’s particular vision of cultural diversity. That vision, in its pursuit of cultural diversity in terms of more and different musical content, appeared indifferent to the many other values and meanings that music has for its producers and consumers. At the same time, we should not mistake his statement as a straightforward point of resistance to the broader trends outlined in this chapter. The fact that many independent record labels, including Los Años Luz, chose to participate in these programs speaks to the interpellative power of the city’s diversity- driven cultural-policy-making efforts regarding the cultural industries. The city government more or less invented “independent record label” as a category of organizational subjectivity in Buenos Aires, but cultural producers like Tenenbaum recognized themselves in it, often enthusiastically, and despite whatever hesitations and concerns they might otherwise have had. At the same time, Tenenbaum’s observation regarding the generic nature of the term “independent” highlights the crucial point that diversity- driven government support for independent record labels was not and (at least theoretically) could not be directed toward a certain type of musical culture, such as historically privileged genres like tango and the independent record labels that championed them. This is all the more striking given the hyperprivileged position that tango has come to occupy in other domains of cultural-policy making in Buenos Aires, particularly the efforts to enshrine tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Despite these seeming contradictions, governmental engagement with the cultural industries and heritagemaking efforts regarding tango are both explicitly motivated by concerns with cultural diversity, underscoring the tremendous power that diversity discourses have taken on as a frame for cultural-policy making in Buenos Aires and elsewhere in recent years.

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Conclusion: Is This Going to Be Good for All of Us? In the previous chapter, I argued that the discourse of intangible cultural heritage privileged tango as a managerial category at the expense of existing artistic practitioners. Tango musicians were exalted as generic “tradition bearers” but generally received little material benefit from the institutionalization of tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity and other heritage-making programs. Here, in contrast, the city government’s cultural-policy-making efforts were aimed directly at a specific population of cultural producers: the owners and employees of independent record labels. This had an arguably positive secondary impact on contemporary tango artists in Buenos Aires in that many of them recorded and released their work through these local independent labels. Nevertheless, these policies still reduce tango musicians to a category other than “artist.” Here tango musicians are not tradition bearers but content providers, cultural workers who perform the precarious labor of feeding the cultural industries’ insatiable appetite for cultural diversity. Acknowledging the exploitative nature of this cultural labor is the first step toward developing a critical account of how diversity- driven cultural-policy making for the cultural industries and other managerial regimes has reshaped musical culture in the age of expediency. But while we should start with a call for the redistribution of resources from those who control the means of cultural production to those whose labor is exploited in the capitalist economy of music and the arts, our critique cannot end there. Take the example of EPSA Music, one of the most prominent independent record labels operating in Buenos Aires and home to many of the most important contemporary tango artists active today, including El Arranque. The owner and manager of the label, Laura Tesorieo, is a key figure in the Argentine music industry and a generally enthusiastic booster of government efforts to support the cultural industries. For its part, the city government promoted EPSA Music as a role model for the business professionalism, artistic quality, and product diversity that they sought to foster among local independent labels as a sector. However, Tesorieo explained to me in an interview that EPSA Music was unable to consistently produce any meaningful or sustainable profit. The label was able to operate only because it was supported by another company owned by Tesorieo’s family, EPSA Electrical Products, the oldest and largest producer of compact discs and other media carriers in

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Argentina (2007). Tesorieo kept EPSA Music going—and by many measures truly thriving—out of a personal desire to support and promote Argentine arts and artistic communities, including tango musicians as well as those playing folklore, rock, jazz, and other local genres. EPSA Music is in many ways atypical. Nevertheless, EPSA Music’s difficulty in achieving financial sustainability underscores the tremendous challenges that all cultural producers face in the age of expediency. The experience of endemic precariousness that typifies the cultural labor of tango artists and musicians extends well beyond them, encompassing many of those who work with tango and other genres within the local cultural industries and the broader managerial regimes. And this remains true despite the city government’s nowrobust efforts to bolster the independent music industry. This reflects the many challenges so- called creative cities like Buenos Aires continue to face in mobilizing arts and culture as a meaningful resource for sustainable economic, social, and cultural development beyond the impressive—but highly uneven—economic contribution made by the cultural industries as an aggregate sector. So is this really going to be good for all of us? Whether it is or not, the policy-making response to these challenges speaks to what I believe is a fundamental transformation in the field of cultural production regarding music in Buenos Aires and the genre culture of tango in particular. The effective reduction of local musical and social histories of artistic practice and meaning in tango (and many other genres) to  an essentially interchangeable notion of commodified cultural diversity—to cultural “content” that is always and everywhere both different from but equal to any and all others—raises fundamental questions about much of what has been said over the course of the previous chapters. What do noneconomic engagements with tango really amount to in this context? In what ways are the other values of musical culture really valuable? What, indeed, is the critical justification for talking about tango (or any other supposedly privileged genre) at all given these broader transformations? At the same time, the city government’s promotion of diversity within the local cultural industries is not incongruent with the lived experience of artistic practice and education that we encountered among contemporary tango musicians in chapter 1. This is not to say that these musicians would somehow recognize themselves within diversity- driven cultural policies and programs; rather, the world of musical diversity conjured by these policies meaningfully echoes their individual and collective histories of diverse listening practices. Those histories are a defining feature of how and 172

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why tango has become compelling and valuable to a new generation of Argentine artists, audiences, and managerial regimes. This affinity is significant given tango’s historic salience as a socalled national genre, where the stylistic limits of tango are taken to echo larger questions of musical and social inclusion and exclusion, an urgent issue in Argentina today. If, as a national genre, the aesthetic boundaries of tango are taken to symbolically dovetail with a historically hegemonic account of what it is to be Argentine, the stakes in debates regarding who or what is or is not to be excluded from these ongoing musical and social histories are very high indeed. Against these debates regarding the status and content of tango in Argentina, the discourse of cultural diversity makes nothing less than a radical intervention. By greatly expanding the scope and range of what is heard and valued as Argentine music, it effectively transforms the shared image and idea of Argentina. And this despite the fact that the discourse of cultural diversity has, in practice, led to privileging economic productivity over the many other values and meanings of musical culture in the age of expediency.

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He Sings Better Every Day: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency It was a Friday afternoon in late February of 2007 and I was sitting on a dilapidated bench in the Parque Tres de Febrero, the massive public park that covers nearly a thousand acres of land between the Río de la Plata and the posh neighborhoods of northeastern Buenos Aires. The South American summer was coming to a close, but the sun was still shining hot on the shrubby grass that seemed to endure more than grow between the ruddy dust of the park’s crushed-brick walking paths. Before me was a growing crowd of teenagers and young adults gathering for a youth recreation event organized by the city government of Buenos Aires. Free and open to the public, the event featured live music performances, sports and organized physical activities, and other outdoor entertainment for local youth. I wasn’t there to play basketball or listen to the bands, however, but to interview one of the event’s producers, Gustavo Álvarez Núñez. Núñez is an important musician, music journalist, and freelance concert organizer and event producer in Buenos Aires, and he has deep knowledge of the contemporary popular music scene and the history of Argentine rock music. I had met him several months earlier at BAFIM, the hybrid public music festival and music-industry expo that the city government had produced in hopes of consolidating the diverse local music industry. Núñez was contracted to help produce the 174

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fair, curating a series of concerts and assisting with other aspects of event production. I had been trying to organize a follow-up interview with Núñez since November, but most of the summer went by before we could find a time that worked for both of us. As the city heated up during the intervening months, so too did the race for the chief of government of the city of Buenos Aires. The center-left incumbent, Jorge Telerman, had been elevated to the office following the impeachment of the previous chief of government, Aníbal Ibarra, in March of 2006 and was now running in hopes of being properly elected based on his record of accomplishments during his brief tenure.1 (One of his campaign slogans was “Twice as much done in half the time.”) Running against him were the right-wing businessman (and owner of the famous Boca Juniors soccer team) Mauricio Macri and the left-wing sociologist and former federal minister of education, science and technology Daniel Filmus. The first round of voting would take place on the first Sunday in June, with a runoff election between the top two vote getters held later that month if no single candidate took more than 50 percent of the vote. As the summer came to an end, the political campaign got hotter. By the time I finally connected with Nuñez, those on the left side of the political spectrum were increasingly and at times bitterly divided between Telerman and Filmus. Despite his record, Telerman’s campaign was precarious owing to the circumstances under which he had come into office.2 Filmus, for his part, enjoyed the strong support of the widely popular then-president Néstor Kirchner (1950–2010; served 2003–7) and his harder-left political coalition, which was ascendant at the national level but more unevenly supported within the city of Buenos Aires. Despite their many differences, however, the left was united in its anxiety over what a victory for Macri and his right-wing coalition would mean for the city government and its policies. These feelings were especially acute regarding potential changes a Macri administration might make regarding the city government’s role in producing and managing culture and the arts, to the point that artists, arts organizations, and those who worked in the cultural and creative industries had organized a formal campaign in opposition to Macri’s candidacy. These simmering political anxieties framed my conversation with Nuñez as much as the youth festival that surrounded us, and our interview inevitably drifted to the topic of the campaign. In a moment of rhetorical passion, Nuñez dramatically gestured to the public youth festival going on behind us, which was beginning to gain the steam of participatory 175

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enthusiasm. “Do you see all of this?” he asked me. “If Macri wins, all of this is going to disappear. It is all going to end. It is as simple as that” (2007). Macri did in fact go on to win the election, taking 45.6 percent of the vote in the first round, slightly under the 50 percent needed to win outright. Filmus took 23.8 percent, which put him far behind Macri but with just enough support to eliminate the incumbent Telerman, who fell a few points behind Filmus with 20.7 percent. Macri then went on to trounce Filmus in the runoff, winning the chief of government’s office 61 percent to 39 percent. Given the striking imbalance of the opening round, the ultimate outcome of the election was not really surprising to anyone when it finally came. Still, it was a profoundly disappointing result for those who had opposed Macri’s candidacy, which did indeed mark a definitive departure from the previous administration in terms of guiding political ideology, bureaucratic organization, and policy objectives, all of which Macri changed significantly upon taking office. (Macri was elected president of Argentina in November 2015, as this book went to press.) This type of rapid and large-scale political change—common throughout Latin America—represents a serious challenge not only for making policy but for critical scholarly engagements with policy as well, in that it can be almost impossible to think or act past specific governmental configurations (Ochoa 2003). Working within this context is equally challenging, and many of the middle- and lowerlevel policy makers and employees within the city government were focused on trying to establish their various programs as what they called “state policy” rather than mere “government policy.” Government policy represented those programs or projects championed and promoted by a given administration upon its arrival in office, which would more likely than not be cut from any future administration’s agenda with little or no hesitation. State policy, on the other hand, included those projects and programs that were able to establish themselves in such a way that they would not be able to be cut by future administrations without some type of concrete political consequences, usually in the form of lost votes. The incoming Macri administration followed this pattern, and the many real changes made to individual programs and services (including many restructurings and outright eliminations) should not be downplayed. Nor should the large-scale turnover of employment in governmental positions, which took place at all levels. In terms of culture and the arts, however, it turns out that things were not “as simple 176

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as that.” Considered from a macro perspective, the Macri administration’s position and policies on culture and the arts represented less a departure than a further entrenchment of general tendencies that were already developing within previous city administrations. This is especially true regarding the managerial impulse toward productivity that has become a hallmark of government involvement in culture and the arts following the neoliberal turn in Buenos Aires and far beyond. Regarding tango specifically, Macri himself perhaps said it best when he referred to the genre as the “soja porteña” (soybean of Buenos Aires)—a cultural cash crop made almost exclusively for export and consumption abroad with little or no local benefit or value aside from the economic revenue it brings in. Many of Macri’s detractors—including many of the most prominent tango artists and musicians active in Buenos Aries at the time—took this flippant statement as just another indication of the chief of government’s personal ignorance and cynicism regarding culture, the arts, and those who produce it, which it very well may have been. Nevertheless, the metaphor succinctly articulates one of the core conditions regarding contemporary tango in Buenos Aires and musical culture in general in the age of expediency. That is, that the primary value of tango and other art forms is derived not from aesthetic philosophies of excellence and beauty or the social function of participatory popular culture, but from these arts’ utility as a resource for other types of projects, in this case economic development, strictly defined. Macri made his “soja porteña” comment at the ceremonial unveiling of the program for the 2010 Buenos Aires tango festival and international dance competition, a massive-scale music-and- dance event that the city government has organized and produced annually since the late 1990s (as state policy across several city administrations). The tango festival now attracts nearly half a million participants, many of them coming from abroad specifically for this event. The graphic design for the 2010 festival—including the backdrop against which Macri made his controversial remarks—prominently featured the fact that UNESCO had recently declared tango part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. For everything else it did, the UNESCO declaration and the discourses of the larger heritage-making project also complicated—and complemented—the instrumentally economic view of tango articulated by Macri. In a further twist, the 2010 tango festival was also the first to present a significant variety of what could be called underground tango artists and tendencies, suggesting that long-standing hierarchies of ar177

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tistic style and political favor that had divided the contemporary tango music scene up to that point were being revised, if not dismantled (see chapter 2). Of course, this might simply reflect the fact that some of these groups were by that time becoming more well-known among tango listeners, creating an increased demand for them on the part of both local and international audiences. In that case, presenting them as part of the festival might mean nothing more than that the city government was “giving the people what they want,” a raison d’être for government arts programming going back to the circuses of ancient Rome. Nevertheless, many observers took these carefully curated programming decisions as a watershed moment in the history of the festival and the city’s broader engagement with contemporary tango music and musicians. The Argentine ethnomusicologist Mercedes Liska, for instance, described the 2010 festival to me as “the moment the vanguard arrived in official circles” (pers. comm.). This trend was solidified the following year, when Astillero, which had been largely excluded from government supports for arts and culture up to that point (chapter 2), made its first appearance at the tango festival. How can we account for these simultaneous demands for economic development via music, the valorization and institutionalization of tango as the supposedly priceless heritage of all humanity, and the formal interventions of an artistic vanguard that is premised in part on the ideological rejection of both the market and tradition as such? The genre of tango serves as the common denominator between these uncomfortably interconnected efforts, and we could conclude that tango simply is all of these things and leave it at that. These and other engagements with the genre are certainly enabled by the uniquely polysemic and polyvalent nature of music as a formal practice and expressive phenomenon, which frames the particular musical, social, and political histories of tango that we explored over the course of the previous chapters. Still, this perspective ultimately amounts to little more than the description of a condition, providing a sense of how such intersections are possible with little explanatory power regarding why they happen. Missing is a basic notion of musical practice, of who is doing what, of intention-filled action and structured subjectivity that these and other engagements with tango are the product of and undoubtedly represent. Also missing is a situated account of power and its articulation, as if all mobilizations of tango were somehow created equal, despite the expressly political process that put Marci in position not only to make his quip about tango as the soja porteña but to have it be heard. Approaching the matter with these concerns in mind, we can see 178

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that the common denominator here is not the genre of tango, but the mediating power of the managerial regimes. These include the cultural industries and other media corporations, nonprofit and nongovernmental arts organizations, the cultural policies of local and national governments, and, I argue, the artistic practice of working musicians. Mobilized by these and other managerial regimes, musical practice becomes a productive force, a resource not only for creating aesthetic value and meaning but for development of all sorts, the material consequences of which are very real, as we have seen throughout the previous pages. I proposed the term “managerial regimes” as a means of conceptualizing and accounting for these different efforts, which, I have argued, are absolutely central to contemporary musical practice in Argentina and elsewhere. The term “managerial regimes” can also help us break down the long-standing—and, frankly, caricatured—dichotomies that continue to guide much scholarly work on these issues: music versus the music industry, arts versus arts organizations, and cultural practice versus cultural-policy making. This is not to say the work of the managerial regimes has somehow diminished the highly uneven power relationships that continue to characterize musical practice in this and every other case. It instead helps us understand how power is fragmented and diffused in these contexts, enmeshing cultural actors in a web of productive interdependence that may be more flexible than previous configurations but only to the extent that winners and losers are not as readily identifiable as such. I also use the term “managerial regimes” to bring forth the governmental management of music and the work of cultural-policy making in particular as key issues for the critical scholarship of music. For everything else it was, the 2010 Buenos Aires Tango Festival was first and foremost an instance of cultural-policy making made flesh. It was a spectacular public event elaborately designed and managed to further multiple, seemingly contradictory policy goals and agendas while simultaneously meeting the demands of a diverse group of variously organized constituencies. Those constituencies were located along a contested continuum between nearly pure consumers of culture (such as foreign tourists) and vote-wielding citizens demanding what they believed were their cultural rights. As we can see even here, and as it is crucial to recognize, cultural-policy making and the broader work of the managerial regimes—despite how truly pervasive they are—are not the hegemonic articulation of a single power center. It is a mode of engagement through which a diverse group of intention-filled actors can negotiate and lay claim to state (and other) power and vice 179

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versa. In the case of the 2010 Buenos Aires Tango Festival, this was less about controlling what could or could not be done with, through, or as “tango” than it was about framing the genre such that it could be simultaneously and coherently used by as many people for as many reasons toward as many ends as possible. These ranged from the formal experimentation of artistic vanguards to the transnational institutionalization of local musical histories and “tradition,” from the private capital accumulation of cultural entrepreneurs to the public good of social participation and cultural inclusion. This carefully managed mushrooming of activities, values, goals, and outcomes is typical not only of the 2010 Buenos Aires Tango Festival but of the city government’s cultural-policy-making efforts in general, which extend well beyond direct or indirect support for individual forms, artists, or arts institutions. It is also largely congruent with global trends, where culture and the arts have become increasingly and differently valuable as an object of public-policy making and government intervention despite the general restriction of the state following the neoliberal turn. I would argue that cultural-policy making has become the key mediator of cultural practice and artistic life at all levels and in nearly all places, a defining if not determining feature of musical culture in the age of expediency. This is not, again, a paranoid vision of some top- down conspiracy, but a simple recognition that the many aims and goals of an ever-shifting milieu of governmental managers and policy makers (and those who lay claim to their favor and attention) are always already present in every musical sound that reaches our ears today, as are the parallel efforts of nongovernmental organizations, arts institutions, and the cultural industries—the managerial regimes and those who perform the often directly cultural work they require. In other words, there is no public musical life that is entirely outside the scope of the managerial regimes in general, and the workings of cultural policy in particular. At the same time, the controversy that arose in the wake of Macri’s “soja porteña” comment underscores how delicate the balancing act between cultural agents and values can be when projects based on expedient cultural claims are designed and implemented in practice. This is especially true regarding work that emerges entirely within the public sector, as is the case with many of the city government’s efforts regarding tango. Cultural managers and politicians are at least theoretically accountable to the constituencies that elected them, not all of which share the technocratic conceptualization of culture that is often promoted by policy makers and other managerial regimes. Nevertheless, 180

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it is worth noting that Macri did not dismiss the other values of tango so much as overemphasize the genre’s economic value, upsetting those who cared about tango for additional reasons. Even more noteworthy is that many of those who were angered by Macri’s comment began incorporating his instrumentally economic reasoning about tango into their oppositional arguments, both cultural and political. For instance, Susana Rinaldi, a famous tango singer and a far-left member of the Buenos Aires city legislature, wrote an open letter denouncing, among other things, Macri’s later decision to veto a bill that would have preserved the historical home of Juan de Dios Filiberto (1885–1964), a foundational figure in the early history of tango music, from an urbandevelopment project in the southern Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca. “If tango is a commodity from which profits must be generated,” she wrote in a tone of bitter irony, “how do you explain this dreadful razing of land that would mean destroying the house of Juan de Dios Filiberto?” (Rinaldi 2012). Like the values and uses of contemporary tango itself, such conflicts and debates have only increased in recent years, building off and against one another in a messy accumulation. That accumulation has created a discursive and practical milieu in which it is impossible not to draw upon tango as a resource, as a cultural means to a productive end. This is, again, the defining feature of musical culture in the age of expediency, which, as we have already seen, represents less a newly hegemonic consensus regarding the role of culture and the arts in society than a shift in the terms of debate about what music is and what can be done with it. The previous chapters traced several different options in these regards, some of them carefully synergistic (such as the work of TangoVia Buenos Aires and the larger heritage-making project, examined in chapters 3 and 4), others actively oppositional to one another (such as Astillero’s efforts to remake tango a música popular, discussed in chapter 2). My goal here, again, was not to identify which of these efforts is more “correct” than any other, or to determine which is more musically compelling. The goal was to represent these efforts in such a way that we can appreciate the larger dynamic of musical practice and cultural production regarding contemporary tango in Buenos Aires and from there infer some of the key challenges facing critical music scholarship in the age of expediency. Toward that end, I have presented a grounded sense of how musical practice and the broader field of cultural production regarding contemporary tango in Buenos Aires has been reframed in the age of expediency. Far from a static “national genre” or uncontested symbol of 181

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“Argentina,” tango has been and remains a historically informed yet essentially open- ended zone of engagement in which a diverse group of intention-filled actors—including musicians, artists, audiences, dancers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, politicians, and the public in general, both local and international (among many others)—can stake their expedient claims, musical and otherwise. This, indeed, is what musical culture in the age of expediency is. Beyond this basic observation, however, I have also investigated how such claims operate and what makes them effective, why some take root as what appears to operate as common cultural knowledge while others emerge and disappear almost if not completely unnoticed. Much of this is due to what I have called the dual trend of detachment and connection regarding tango in Argentina, a trend based in the fact that, on the one hand, the vast majority of Argentines no longer identify with tango as an icon of national identifications and belonging while, on the other, tango remains a powerful symbol of Argentine culture within the national imaginary and global representations. Thus tango today operates not as a national genre but as a national brand. I have identified the dual trend of detachment and connection as a productive lens through which to examine how musical history is experienced and engaged in the age of expediency, how musical history itself can be mobilized and used as a resource. None of the musicians discussed in the previous chapters subscribed to a teleological understanding of tango, where their work built upon or departed from what came before it in a continuous sequence of linear artistic progress. For 34 Puñaladas, Astillero, the Orquesta Escuela de Tango, El Arranque, and many other contemporary tango artists and musicians, musical history instead constituted a field of competing aesthetic sensibilities and historical trajectories that needed to be actively engaged from the perspective of the present if they were to be made meaningful as a past. The stakes in this project go beyond those of musical revivalism or postmodernist pastiche to matters of social and historical renewal via new forms of artistic synthesis within a context of radical change, with musical form itself operating as the privileged site of historical and artistic intervention. Thus the dual trend of detachment and connection arguably defines the contemporary genre culture of tango in Buenos Aires. It also frames the many other mobilizations and uses of tango examined throughout this book. In other words, the musical reconfiguration of tango as something that is once again valuable and meaningful to a variety of

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artistic constituencies reflects and reinforces the managerial reconfiguration of tango as a newly valuable resource for cultural-policy making, the cultural industries, and the managerial regimes. As we have seen throughout this book, however, this does not mean that one can simply make whatever one wishes out of tango, be it música popular (chapter 2), “Argentina’s most important cultural contribution to the world” (chapter 3), the intangible cultural heritage of humanity (chapter 4), or a drop in the proverbial bucket of cultural diversity within the local cultural industries (chapter 5). Instead, a given claim must be buttressed by means of diverse modes of consensus building or the sheer accumulation of power. Thus we see the rise of institutionalization as such and the power that accompanies it as a core component of musical practice in the age of expediency. This institutionalizing impulse does not diminish the many values and meanings of musical practice in social life and history; if anything, rather, it compounds and increases them, as demonstrated throughout this volume. Nevertheless, accounting for these claims requires that we reconsider the scope and range of critical musical inquiry. A key impediment to this is critical music scholarship’s general resistance to engaging with the instrumental uses of music and culture. This resistance, while driven in most cases by admirable commitment to a progressive cultural politics of music, effectively deafens the scholarly ear to some of the more profound transformations of musical culture in the age of expediency. This does not require some type of critical capitulation to the “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1944], 94), the “ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1971, 85), or their confluence in what I am here calling the managerial regimes. It instead requires a renewed commitment to critical engagement with these regimes. That engagement is fortified, not undermined, by two of the key ideas presented here: (1) that cultural management is itself a mode of cultural practice and therefore fully open to the analytical tools of critical music scholarship and (2) that whatever power managerial regimes wield in shaping social, political, and economic life in the age of expediency is ultimately derived from the collective values and social meanings invested in musical culture as social practice. In other words, contemporary artistic production is also and always a mode of politics—cultural and otherwise. Therefore the details of musical style and meaning must remain at the center of discussions regarding the economic and social values of musical culture and the arts in general in the age of expediency, not because they

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help us get to the real stuff of music behind or before the expedient claims made on music, but because musical culture is also and always expedient. Before we go, I want to return to Chacarita cemetery for one last visit to Carlos Gardel’s grave. It is mid-August now, with the first signs of spring just beginning to show that the clammy dampness of the Buenos Aires winter will soon be breaking. I won’t be here to enjoy it, however, as I will soon be returning to the United States, just in time for the crispness of fall weather in the northern hemisphere and the accompanying bustle of the fall semester. The cemetery is quiet today, nothing like the hubbub of activity that we encountered at the June 25 commemoration of Gardel’s death. It almost feels like a private visitation, as if “the bronze that smiles” was waiting there just for us, ready to receive our offering of a lit cigarette between his two metal fingers and grant us an audience for our requests. I don’t have any real requests for Gardel—only questions. Certainly nothing like the “favors received” by those who left many of the homemade commemorative plaques that cover almost every square inch of the mausoleum. Still, I like to pay my respects, and have always found the cemetery a nice place to reflect on everything I have encountered in my fieldwork. Not that “it all comes back” to Gardel in some romantic fashion, but I do think the life and afterlife of the long- dead singer encompass much of what I have described in this book. Though he died more than eighty years ago, Gardel’s music, image, memory, and material traces live on in Buenos Aires today, where he is conjured as everything from a popular saint to tangible and intangible cultural heritage, from an engine for economic development and urban renewal via cultural tourism to an icon of embarrassment and the stubborn commitments of the past. Regardless of one’s personal experience with or opinions regarding Gardel and his music—from those who still get a chill down their spines when his voice comes crackling over the radio to those who feel nothing less than burdened by the ubiquity of his image and the relentless cheesiness it has been used to mobilize in the decades since his death—the sheer power of his life and afterlife is difficult to deny. He is, or has been made, the ultimate expedient object, an endlessly renewable resource for the productive reproduction of musical culture in Buenos Aires and beyond. There is no shared consensus regarding which—if any—of these and many other productive mobilizations of Gardel is more real, appropriate, prior to, or positive than any other, though I am sure that many 184

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of his quasi-spiritual devotees would have difficulty recognizing themselves in the glossy floor shows of the Esquina Carlos Gardel, if they could ever afford to even enter the high- end tango cena show venue in the first place. The same is probably true for those who marvel at the glass- encased 78 r.p.m. record of Gardel’s “El día que me quieras” on display in the Museo Casa Carlos Gardel and those who spend a few nights in the luxury “tango suite” named for the same song in the Abasto Hotel, just a few blocks down from the museum, before moving on to their next international destination. So there is no consensus, but there is no real contradiction either. Part of this has to do with the dual trend of detachment and connection that we have explored in the previous chapters, and which largely sets the strikingly open- ended terms of debate regarding the productive power of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires. More important, it has to do with how musical culture operates and is lived in the age of expediency, where the micro level of conflict and contradiction cannot avoid being turned into macro contexts of productive synergy for development of all sorts, social, economic, cultural, and, yes, profoundly musical. How might we make it otherwise? What would that sound like? Those are the questions I’m leaving in Chacarita for Gardel, the icon of tango and—equally—the icon of expediency. He sings better every day.

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Notes INTRODUCTION

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Chacarita cemetery should not be confused with the much more well-known and heavily visited Recoleta cemetery in the northern Buenos Aires neighborhood of the same name, which has been and remains the fi nal resting place of the city’s truly rich since its founding in 1822. Among other things, the city’s law of tango officially recognized the previously informal “tango day” celebrations that mark the coincidental birthdays of Gardel and the historic tango bandleader Julio de Caro (1899–1980) on December 11 of each year. Take, for instance, the United States’ National Endowment for the Art’s polyvalent motto under the Obama administration: “art works” (www.nea.gov). In that sense I depart from Yúdice, who claims that expediency does in fact operate as a new historical episteme in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as a new mode of mediation between words and things (2003, 29– 38). And while the turn toward heritage-making discourses and policies is a truly global phenomenon, mediated in large part by international organizations such as UNESCO, such policies are invested with additional urgency in Argentina, where, during the last military dictatorship (1976– 83), as many as thirty thousand Argentine citizens were murdered by the military government during a reign of “state terror” (Jelin 2003). This echoes global patterns, where urban redevelopment and gentrification has largely replaced more liberal urban

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policies that were at least nominally concerned with social reproduction (Smith 2002). 7. See Dávila (2012) on the precarious situation of tango dancers working in the Buenos Aires tourist economy and Sakakeeney (2013) on the situation of brass-band musicians in New Orleans. It is also worth noting that many people I spoke with in Buenos Aires in both the public and private sectors simply did not believe the statistics cited in the city government’s report regarding tango as an economic sector. One prominent tango event producer I spoke with dismissed the report as “science fiction.” According to critics, misreporting or misrepresenting official economic data for political reasons is common in Argentina (see “Don’t Lie to Me, Argentina,” The Economist, February 23, 2012). 8. Following Fain (2010) and Gallo (2011), tango can be identified in strictly musical terms by the use of several standardized rhythmic accompaniment patterns combined with specific styles of melodic interpretation or phrasing. The stylistic features of tango music are discussed in more detail in chapters 1 and 2. 9. The major exception to the disconnect between tango music and tango dance is the many professional tango shows that present programs of choreographed tango dance sequences that are often, but not always, accompanied by live music. This is the type of thing one sees at the Esquina Carlos Gardel or any number of other cena show venues in Buenos Aires. It is also typical of the many touring tango dance companies that make regular appearances in Broadway-style theaters throughout the world. 10. There are, again, many exceptions to this general tendency. For experimental developments in contemporary tango dance, of which there are many, see Merritt 2012. 11. There is a rich and diverse literature on tango dance. See Manning 2007, Savigliano 1995, Taylor 1998, and Viladrich 2013. 12. One reason I have chosen “expediency” over “neoliberalism” as the guiding frame for this project is that the discourse of expediency helps us hear and account for countertrends and even open contradictions within the larger neoliberal project, trends that might otherwise be unheard owing to the sometimes overwhelming volume of neoliberalism as both a lived experience and an interpretative category. This can be as simple as recognizing the fact that many governmental entities, in this case the city government of Buenos Aires, have in fact become more and differently invested in culture and the arts following the neoliberal turn, despite the otherwise radical retreat of the state from other areas of public life. CHAPTER ONE

1.

188

Important developments in the early formation of tango also took place in Montevideo, Uruguay, which is situated across the Río de la Plata from

N OT E S TO PAG E S 37– 50

Buenos Aires; the massive waterway marks the political boundary between Argentina and Uruguay. The transnational development of tango tends to be downplayed in most histories of the genre, though it was a central component of recent efforts to institutionalize tango as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity (see chapter 4). 2. See Cohen (2007) on Liverpool and Gray (2013) on Lisbon for similar musical dynamics in other urban contexts. 3. Reinaudo left the group in mid-2007 and was replaced by Lucas Ferrera. Maximiliano Cortéz joined the group in 2013 following the departure of Macri. 4. The Argentine guitarrón shares the five lowest strings of the standard guitar, substituting the guitar’s high E string for a lower string tuned to B, which allows the instrument to fulfill both bass and a chordalaccompaniment functions (Reinaudo 2012). 5. Local music production is a robust sector of the managerial regimes in Buenos Aires (see Luker 2010), with more than a hundred recordings released by local artists every year. Tango operated as a niche genre within this overall market for local music: there were roughly two dozen releases produced by formal labels, and several more produced directly by artists per year. See chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of the local music industry. 6. Note that the award is named for Carlos Gardel, both in homage to the legendary singer and as a way of using his name to denote general excellence (see the introduction). 7. See Manzano (2014) and Vila (1987) and (1989) on the musical and social history of Spanish-language rock music in Argentina, known as rock nacional. 8. Lyrics by Pascual Contrusi, music by Samuel Castriota, originally titled “Lita” and renamed by Gardel (Azzi 1991). Gardel recorded the song again in 1930, and it is this later version that is most commonly heard today. 9. Gardel, Corsini, and Magaldi were not only pioneering tango singers but also emblematic practitioners of what is called the cantor nacional tradition, figures who sang “national” repertoire that included tango as well as folkloric genres from the region around Buenos Aires province, including estilo, triunfo, and milonga campera. Singers such as Nelly Omar (1911–2013) and Edmundo Rivero (1911–1986) were considered latter- day proponents of the cantor nacional tradition (Adam Tully, pers. comm.). 10. There is a tradition of producing spontaneous arrangements in tango. Known as a la parrilla (from the grill), this style is usually heard in jam-session contexts or by jazz-influenced ensembles that specialize in expanding the improvisatory component of tango (see Krüger 2012). 11. There are several famous exceptions to this, such as the composer, bandleader, and bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla’s (1921–1992) tango operita titled María de Buenos Aires (1968), whose libretto was produced in collaboration with the tango poet and lyricist Horacio Ferrer (1933–2014).

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Piazzolla and Ferrer also produced some of the iconic tango songs of the vanguard period—including “Balada para un loco” (1969) and “Chiquilín de Bachín” (1968), among others—though these exceptions prove the rule that vocalists were usually only included in vanguard tango when they fit within a larger compositional gesture. One major exception to this is the work of Juan “Tata” Cedrón (b. 1939), an important vanguard composer, guitarist, bandleader, and singer who specializes in setting existing poetic literature to original music (Castro 2010). Discépolo’s phrase speaks to the larger relationality between tango music and tango dance despite their separation in practice today (see the introduction). This fall from grace, moreover, does not make Ventarrón a sympathetic figure or even an object of pity, but a gil, a detestable loser, as the tango singer Adriana Varela put it when introducing her performance of this song at the 2012 Buenos Aires tango festival. Published scholarly work largely supports Guyot’s off-the- cuff etymology of the lunfardo term papusa but claims that it derives from Polish, not Russian. Oscar Conde mentions a Polish origin of the lunfardo term papirusa, which he translates as “beautiful woman” (2014, 41). The writer, poet, and essayist José Gobello (1919–2013), in his Nuevo diccionario lunfardo, also says that the lunfardo terms papusa and papirusa are derived from the Polish papjerosy, meaning “cigarette, a word that was frequently used by Polish prostitutes” (2003, 192). Gobello provides several additional translations for bulín, including “lodging,” “quarters,” “bedroom,” and “bed” (2003, 43), each of which would change the sensibility of the text if not its overall meaning. I translated the term in consultation with Alejandro Guyot, who explained that bulín, as used in this example, would mean “a small, humble home” (pers. comm.). A lunfardo dictionary is a requisite part of any tango aficionado’s library, usually Gobello’s Nuevo diccionario lunfardo (2003). Gobello was also one of the founding members of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo (Buenos Aires Lunfardo Academy), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study and documentation of the history and usage of lunfardo in Buenos Aires. Since the year 2000, the city government of Buenos Aires has officially recognized each September 4 as Lunfardo Day, commemorating the general cultural significance of lunfardo in the city and marking the anniversary of the publication of Gobello’s landmark 1953 book Lunfardía.

CHAPTER T WO

1.

190

As mentioned in the introduction, by “managerial regime” I mean any entity that aims to channel cultural practices into resources for development of all sorts, including the cultural industries and other media corpora-

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tions, nonprofit and nongovernmental arts organizations, and, especially, the cultural policies of local and national governments, among others. 2. It is upon this division between strict or flexible treatment of rhythm that the overarching trends in golden-age orquestas came to be divided, with bandleaders like Juan D’Arienzo (1900–1976) favoring a strict adherence to rhythmic regularity, while others, such as Aníbal Troilo (1914–1975), favored a more flexible treatment of rhythm in favor of other musical elements (see Sierra 1997). 3. While Julie Taylor (1998, 22) has described how, for her, “some of the weight of past terror was borne by the tango,” tango was never, to my knowledge, the direct target of organized repression on the part of any government, military or otherwise. 4. These include, among others, Fernando Solanas’s 1985 film Tango, El exilio de Gardel and Claudio Segovia’s stage production Tango argentino. The latter premiered fi rst in Paris in 1983 and then on Broadway in 1984; it is widely credited with rekindling interest in tango at the international level. 5. Piazzolla’s composition “Deus Xango,” from Reunión cumbre ([1974] 2003), his well-known recording with American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, prominently features a variation on el yumbeado. 6. Indeed, el yumbeado is just a particular mode of articulating a standard marcato. 7. Syncopation is defined as “the regular shifting of each beat in a measured pattern by the same amount ahead of or behind its normal position in that pattern” (Oxford Music Online). 8. Literally, “your mother’s cunt.” 9. They have also created several ostensibly new elements, including a deliberately less florid approach to composing and interpreting melodic lines, especially in vocal pieces; the use of some original instrumental and vocal effects; the use of modern studio recording techniques such as overdubbing; and the use of projected visual material during live performances. 10. Music by Armando Pontier, lyrics by Homero Expósito (1945), featured on the Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro recordings Destrucción masiva (2003) and Vivo en Europa (2004). 11. I attended Astillero’s milonga almost weekly throughout my primary research period. 12. Cumbia is a transnational genre of Latin American dance music that has roots in Colombia but distinct local histories in Argentina and other Latin American countries going back to the 1950s (see L’Hoeste, Fernández, and Vila 2013). The polemic subgenre known as cumbia villera was especially popular in Argentina at the time of my fieldwork (Cragnolini 2006; Vila and Semán 2012), though Astillero’s milonga tended to feature other forms of cumbia.

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13. In this sense, Astillero’s project—despite its real alterity—can ultimately be seen as broadly congruent with the broader narrative of purification and transculturation that Ochoa (2006) has located at the heart of the Latin American aural public sphere. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2. 3. 4.

See http://www.fundacionkonex.org/ b2672 - orquesta _el _arranque. See http://www.epsapublishing.com.ar/orquesta _el _arranque#0. See tangovia.org/integrantes. The Spanish word vía translates into English as “route,” “track,” or “street.” 5. See www.anacdeltango.org.ar/creacion.asp. 6. I once attended a satirical presentation in the form of a mock conference on tango history put on by Fractura Expuesta (fracturaexpuesta.com.ar), a highly irreverent tango media outlet aligned with the new generation of performers and musicians. Some of those in attendance were, I believe, unaware that the event was going to be staged in this way and were expecting a sober and serious discussion of tango history. The audience sat respectfully if uncomfortably as the “professors” systematically broke many of the taboos of popular tango history, up to when they began to insinuate that Carlos Gardel, the emblematic singer, was gay, a rumor that is whispered around the edges of tango history as it has been popularly canonized. At that point, a middle-aged woman in the audience stood up and began shouting her disapproval: “No, no, no! That is not true! You can say these other terrible things, but I cannot let you say that!” After attempting to laugh it off, the presenters promptly moved on to another topic and did not bring it up again. 7. As far as I am aware, there is no significant private market for tango memorabilia, such that the types of historical materials TangoVia is interested in gathering, other than those associated with the most prominent historical figures, would have little if any monetary value. 8. Varchausky, who describes himself as an “amateur collector,” has generally built rapport with collectors through the mutual exchange of rare recordings and other objects. Some collectors have been open and willing collaborators with TangoVia; others have wanted little to do with the organization. 9. However, some of these materials, especially musical scores, have been donated to the organization for their permanent collection. 10. At the same time, the digital archive project is clearly about marking musical boundaries, drawing the limits of the genre via inclusion or exclusion from the theoretically comprehensive archive of tango. Never theless, it is important to note that the scope and range of TangoVia’s digital archive project effectively negates the micro-stylistic com-

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mitments that have traditionally defi ned more devoted narratives of tango history. 11. Upon Balcarce’s retirement as director of the Orquesta Escuela in 2007, the group was formally renamed the Orquesta Escuela de Tango Emilio Balcarce in his honor. 12. For instance, Varchausky recounted an incident that happened while he was making a visit to government offices to discuss the Orquesta Escuela. While waiting for his appointment, he was casually told that the rest of the money set aside for the Orquesta Escuela that year had been allocated to other programs and spent without his knowledge or prior notification, essentially meaning that the program would have to shut down, at least temporarily. Deeply angered, Varchausky demanded that the money be reinstated—regardless of where it would have to come from—and forecast the political consequences this decision might have, given the immediate political circumstances. “I told them that they would not want to have the whole of the tango community up in arms against them for doing this” he said, “especially in an election year” (Varchausky 2007). The money was reinstated, and the program continued on as if nothing had happened. In 2013 the city government again eliminated funding for the Orquesta Escuela without explanation. The funding once more was eventually reinstated, but only following a highly organized public campaign demanding that the city continue its support of the project, including a Change .org petition that garnered 8,332 signatures. CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

See whc.unesco.org. As discussed in the introduction, law 24.684 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). See http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg= 00021. Last consulted August 27, 2013. See www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/involvement- of- communities. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg= en& pg= 00559. Last consulted August 27, 2013. This is the wording as it appears in the nomination form. As it appears here, the term “authentic criollos” is used to locate those who are direct descendants of the region’s Spanish colonizers. The use (and abuse) of the terms “creole” or “creolization” has a long a complicated history in Latin America (see Palmié 2006). Much of this took the form of what we would now recognize as clearly racist modes of mockery and derision, with white dancers burlesquing the motions of Afro-Argentine dance forms for pleasure and power

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8.

(Andrews 1980, 166). Similar tropes of fascination and denigration were institutionalized in the stylized movement of organized carnival groups, many of which paraded in blackface, speaking to a broader narrative of racial “love and theft” across the Americas (Chasteen 2004, 63; Lott 1993). Suffice it to say that part of the reason tango came to occupy such a prominent position in the Argentine national imaginary is because it operated as both an active articulation and symbolic representation of a social and political consensus between the ruling creole elite and the urban “popular” classes in the first half of the twentieth century, both of which were phenotypically “white” in what was, by then, a largely European immigrant population (Vila 1991). While not explicitly racist per se, this consensus did amount to a de facto exclusion of nonwhite subjects, both Afro-Argentine and, especially, inhabitants of the interior of the country who displayed mixed indigenous ancestry. It is the latter group that has been historically (and pejoratively) labeled cabecitas negras or simply negros in Argentina, terms that have racial and ethnic connotations but also encompass matters of class difference, geographic displacement, political subjectivity, and cultural citizenship (Grimson 2005). I would ultimately argue that questions of racial and ethnic inclusion and exclusion in tango would be more productively addressed via considerations of how the rise of this group as an empowered political subject during the first Peronist period (1946– 55) challenged some of the core tropes of tango as a national genre rather than considerations of the absence or presence of AfroArgentines at a quasi-mythological point of origin (e.g., Thompson 2006, Cáceres 2010; see also James 1988, 31).

CHAPTER FIVE

1.

2.

194

Though much of their music is danceable, audiences listen rather than dance to El Arranque, as is the case with contemporary tango music in general (see the introduction). BAFIM took place in El Dorrego, a city- owned event and exhibition space that occupies an entire block on the edge of what is called the Palermo Hollywood district in the city’s northern sector. Some twenty-three concerts were presented on three different stages over the course of the fair’s four days, as well as several private showcases that took place offsite. These concerts presented not only prominent tango groups like El Arranque but also important musical figures in pop, rock, jazz, folklore, and other genres that were considered significant parts of the local music industry. The fair also featured some seventy exhibition stands occupied by businesses or organizations representing almost every aspect of music making as a cultural industry in Buenos Aires. According to government figures, more than two thousand representatives of the music industry partici-

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 5 7 – 17 5

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

pated in BAFIM, and some thirty-five thousand members of the general public attended the fair. The OECD is an international organization that “brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world to: support sustainable economic growth, boost employment, raise living standards, maintain fi nancial stability, assist other countries’ economic development, and contribute to growth in world trade” (see oecd.org). The goal of the MAI was to streamline international rules on foreign direct investment by applying principles of nondiscrimination and national treatment to investment rules, by which “foreign investors were to be treated as domestic investors, and all foreign investors were [. . .] to be treated equally, regardless of their country of origin” (ibid.). UNESCO defi nes “cultural goods” as “tangibles or intangibles conveying cultural content that might take either the form of a good or a service (books, recorded CDs, video games, printing or dubbing services, etc.)” (UNESCO n.d.). See http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/areas/produccion/industrias/ observatorio/?menu _id= 6933. Ibid. See discograficas.gov.ar. This departs from the case of American independent filmmakers, as examined by Ortner (2013). According to Ortner, independent fi lmmakers share general aesthetic sensibilities despite their diverse institutional structures and divergent relationships to the major Hollywood film studios.

CO N C L U S I O N

1.

On December 30, 2004, a fire at a dangerously oversold rock concert in a downtown nightclub called the República Cromagnón killed 194 people and injured 714, mostly adolescents and very young adults. The tragedy represented the single greatest peacetime loss of life in a nonnatural disaster in Argentina’s history and incited widespread public outrage against the band performing that night, the club’s owner, and the city government as a whole, especially Ibarra, who had served as chief of government of the city of Buenos Aires since 2000 (Wortman 2005). This outrage only increased when, during later investigations, it became clear that corrupt or incompetent city safety inspectors had turned a blind eye to numerous building and safety code violations in the club—from the illegal installation of toxicly flammable sound-absorbing foam to the chaining closed of emergency exit doors in order to prevent unticketed entry to the club to overselling performances by as many as a thousand tickets beyond legal capacity. Ibarra was accused of tolerating if not fostering a dangerously lax and pettily corrupt city administration, in the absence of which, many

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2.

196

believed, this tragedy would not have happened. Calls for his resignation soon followed. In the face of these accusations, which some observers believed to be calculated attempts to take advantage of the city’s grief by a largely politically motivated opposition, Ibarra put the matter of his resignation up for a referendum vote, which he won. The referendum did not satisfy his opponents, however, and in November of 2005 he was suspended from his post pending the investigation of an impeachment commission formed by the Buenos Aires legislature, which permanently removed him from office in March of 2006, some twenty months before his term would have expired. A journalist, professor, and arts entrepreneur, Telerman had already served in a variety of posts for both the national and city governments, including as the press secretary to a variety of Argentine embassies and as ambassador to Cuba (see jorgetelerman.blogspot.com). Telerman also served as the secretary of culture for the city government during Ibarra’s first term in office and rose to the position of vice chief of government upon Ibarra’s reelection. Telerman took over the chief of government position when Ibarra was suspended and later impeached; he served out the rest of Ibarra’s term. In the wake of the Ibarra debacle, Telerman came off as something of a disloyal opportunist to many of the previous government’s supporters, undermining his effort to be directly elected to the chief of government position when his appointed term was up.

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210

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abasto de Buenos Aires shopping mall, 6–7 Abasto Hotel, 7, 64, 185 Abasto neighborhood: Prodan and, 8–9; revitalization of, 6– 8, 11–12, 64; social inclusion not seen in, 12, 13 Academia Nacional del Tango (National Tango Academy), 98– 99 Academia Porteña del Lunfardo (Buenos Aires Lunfardo Academy), 190n16 Acqua Records, 39 acting out musically, 62 Afro-Argentines, 141– 42, 194n8 age of expediency, 1, 10–11, 17–18, 188n12 “A la luz del candil” (By the Light of the Oil Lamp), 53 a la parrilla, 189n10 “Amablemente” (Nicely), 33– 34, 55– 56 American jazz, tango compared to, 19 Años Luz, Los, 170 Archangeli, Félix, 68 archives, 97–112, 192n10 Argentine Society of Authors and Music Composers (SADAIC), 94 Argentine Union of Independent Record Labels (UDI), 168 Argot (2006), 39, 53 arrangements, 46– 47

Arranque, El, 40, 96–97, 148– 49, 150 arrastres, 76 Art of the Bandoneón, The, 115–16 Art of the Orquesta Típica, The, 116 arts. See culture and the arts; musical culture Astillero: basis of work, 66– 67; Buenos Aires Tango Festival, 178; European popularity, 88– 89; managerial regimes and, 89, 91–92; original composition by, 68– 69; overview of, 68; social practice and, 80– 86; tango of rupture and, 74– 80, 88; TangoVia Buenos Aires compared to, 91–92; vanguard period, 70–71 Astiya (2014), 39 Atlas of intangible cultural heritage, 4– 6 authentic criollos, 193n6 autogestión, 81 BAFIM (Buenos Aires International Music Fair), 149– 50, 194n2 Balcarce, Emilio, 106–7 bandoneón, 44, 116 bands, 47 Barbieri, Guillermo, 52– 53 Bartussek, Leonhard, 68 Bombay BsAs (2009), 39, 57– 59

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Bonfiglio, Patricio “Tripa,” 68, 69, 75, 79, 82 “Bordona, La,” 106–7 bordoneo pattern, 77, 77 Borges, Jorge Luis, 21 Braids (“Trenzas”), 82 Buenos Aires International Music Fair (BAFIM), 149– 50, 194n2 Buenos Aires Lunfardo Academy (Academia Porteña del Lunfardo), 190n16 Buenos Aires Tango Festival, 177– 80 bulín, 56, 190n15 By the Light of the Oil Lamp (“A la luz del candil”), 53 cabecitas negras, 194n8 cada día canta mejor, 2, 10 Cadícamo, Enrique, 52– 53 Caló, Mariano, 68, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85 Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (CCD), 157 Candombe, 140 cantor nacional tradition, 189n9 Carlos Gardel Street, 7– 8 Caro, Julio de, 187n2 Casa del Tango, 95–96 Cave, Nick, 48– 49 CCD (Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity), 157 Cedrón, Juan “Tata,” 190n11 cena show venues, 188n9 Cespi, Bruno, 95 Chacarita cemetary, Gardel commemoration, 2– 4, 11, 187n1 champeta, 28 Chicana, La, 40 “Chiru,” 82 citizenship privileges, 23, 124–28 Clarín, 117 collectivism, 73, 81 collectors, preservation and, 103 commercial cultural industries. See cultural industries Commission for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Patrimony, 4– 6, 131– 32 Committee for Radio Diffusion, 153– 54 communications media, defi ned, 154 connection/detachment. See detachment/ connection constitution of Buenos Aires, 151– 52

212

Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), 128– 30 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), 128, 130– 34. See also intangible cultural heritage; UNESCO tango declaration Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 161 Corsini, Ignacio, 45, 48, 94–95 critical music scholarship, 183 cultural citizenship, 92 cultural diversification, 133 cultural diversity. See diversity cultural exceptionalism, 23 cultural exception doctrine, 157– 60 cultural goods, defi ned, 195n4 cultural grey- out, 157 cultural industries: benefits from, 171–73; cultural value location and, 153– 61, 165– 67; diversity discourses as reframing, 149– 50, 156– 57, 159– 61; identification as productive sector, 161– 67; as object of government intervention, 151– 53, 167–70; overview of, 150– 51; 2001 economic crisis and, 152 Cultural Industries Observatory (OIC), 162, 164– 66 cultural labor, 13. See also 34 Puñaladas cultural landscape, 129 cultural policy, defi ned, 124 cultural policy making: Buenos Aires Tango Festival and, 179– 80; as cultural practice, 124–28; diversity and, 147, 150; economic issues, 162– 63; impacts of, 122–23, 180; leadership changes and, 175–77. See also cultural industries; diversity cultural politics, 64– 65. See also Astillero; cultural policy making cultural site protection, 128– 30 culture, traditional, 65– 66 culture and the arts: background of, 23–24; disencounters and, 28–29; as economically productive, 26–27, 92–93, 112–17, 161– 67, 177–79, 181; entertainment compared to, 158; uses of, 27– 30; value and meaning of, 31. See also cultural policy making; musical culture; TangoVia Buenos Aires

INDEX

Culture with a capital C, 65– 66, 123, 126 cumbia, 28, 137– 38, 191n12 cumbia villera (slum cumbia), 28, 191n12 currency parity policy, 138 dance, 84, 188n9 D’Arienzo, Juan, 108, 109, 191n2 Dávila, Arlene, 12 death, 52– 53 Declaration of Buenos Aires (2004), 160– 61 De la bolsa al ruedo (2011), 39, 52– 53 detachment/connection: disdain and devotion, 98–99, 182– 83; historical tango and, 35; identity confl ict and, 64– 65; orquestas típicas and, 72; overview of, 1, 29– 30; privileged elements versus prejudiced ones, 137– 38; tango of rupture and, 75– 80; TangoVia Buenos Aires, 90–91, 93–94; UNESCO tango declaration and, 135– 36. See also 34 Puñaladas “Deus Xango,” 191n5 Díez, Iván, 56 difference, management of, 125. See also diversity digital media technologies, 15, 103– 4 Di Lorenzo, Roberto, 99–101 Dios Filiberto, Juan de, 181 Di Sarli, Carlos, 108, 109 Discográfícas de Buenos Aires program, 167– 68 Discos Vivos (Live Records), 168 disencounters, 28–29 diversity: cultural versus economic ideologies and, 163– 64; effects of on tango, 146– 47, 179– 80; Gardel graveside commemoration as, 11; heritage making and, 141– 45; international meetings on, 160– 61; PyMES and, 169; as reframing cultural industries, 149– 50; trade liberalization and, 156– 57, 159– 61; UNESCO and, 124, 131 economic crisis of 2001. See 2001 economic crisis economic issues: culture as productive, 26–27, 92–93, 112–17, 161– 67, 177– 79, 181; currency parity policy, 138; marketing, 116; neoliberalism, 25–26; Perón and, 22–23; report as lies, 188n7; revenue from tango, 12, 119, 139;

TangoVia Buenos Aires, 112–17; 34 Puñaladas, 39; UNESCO and, 124, 136; World Heritage Fund, 129. See also 2001 economic crisis education, universal, 23, 125 entertainment versus culture, 158 EPSA Music, 96, 171–72 escuela de tango, 81– 85 Esquina Carlos Gardel, 7, 185 “Ethnographer, The” (Borges), 21 ethnographic research for book, 20–21 ethnomusicology, 14–17 exclusion: Abasto neighborhood, 12, 13; economic crisis of 2001 and, 26; genre culture and, 37–38; musical culture and, 28–29; political policies and, 87– 88; popular music and, 66. See also diversity Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism (Sarmiento), 125 fado, 140 Federal Committee for Radio Diffusion, 153– 54 federal law 24.684, 5, 132, 193n2 federal law 24.750, 154– 55, 156 Federico, Leopoldo, 106–7, 116 Ferrer, Horacio, 98– 99, 189n11 Ferrero, Camilo, 148 fileteado decorative painting style, 8 Filmus, Daniel, 175 fi ne/high arts (Culture with a capital C), 65– 66, 123, 126 flamenco, 140 folklore, 51– 52, 76–77, 77 Forum for the Defense of the Cultural Industries, 155– 57 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The, 18–19, 121 Fractura Expuesta, 192n6 free-trade agreements, 155– 61 García Canclini, Néstor, 87 Gardel, Carlos: commemoration of, 2– 4, 11, 184– 85, 187n1; instrumentation, 44– 45; museum of former house, 8, 185; rumors about, 192n6; statutes of, 3, 6, 7; what is, 9–10 Gardés, Berta, 3 Garifuna, 140 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 157

213

INDEX

General Directorate for Music, 111–12, 126–27 General Directorate for the Music Industry, 167– 68 General Directorates of Cultural Industries and Design, 162 genre culture: 2001 economic crisis and, 43; emergence of, 34– 35; expansion of, 36– 37; history and, 35, 37; idea of, 35– 36; language and singers, 49– 56; musical meaning and, 43– 49; place and, 37; social exclusion and, 37– 38. See also 34 Puñaladas Geroni Flores, Caroles Vicente, 53 Gobbi, Alfredo, 106–7, 109 Gobello, José, 190n14, 190n16 González, Edgardo, 13, 39, 41– 42, 57– 59 government versus state policy, 176 Goyeneche, Roberto, 48, 107 graveside celebrations, 2– 4, 5, 11 grey- out, 157 guitar- ensemble tango canción, 44– 46, 49– 56 guitarróns, 39, 46, 189n4 guitars, 44– 46, 47 Guyot, Alejandro: black suit, 34– 35, 48– 49; fi nancial difficulties, 40; influences on, 48– 49; “Lezama,” 57– 59; on lunfardo, 53– 54, 56, 58– 59, 190n14; role of, 39; tango as conjured anew, 34, 36; vocal style of, 48 heritage-making project: critics of, 133– 34; diversity and, 141– 45; ethnomusicology involved in, 15–16; policy and, 144; significance of, 123; transformative power of, 134– 35. See also intangible cultural heritage; UNESCO tango declaration high arts. See Culture with a capital C history. See music history Holt, Fabian, 36 Horacio Staffolani, José, 52 huayno music, 15 Ibarra, Aníbal, 154, 175, 195n1 identity confl ict, 64– 65 If You Know Magic (Si sos brujo), 116–17 immigrants, 79– 80, 125 import substitution industrialization, 22 improvisation, 46, 78–79

214

INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), 167 inclusion, 24, 38, 66. See also diversity; exclusion independent labels, 167–70 institutionalization, 5, 132– 33, 183 instrumentation, 34, 44– 46, 69 intangible cultural heritage: critics of, 133– 34; diversity and, 141– 45; effects of, 146– 47; Gardel as, 5– 6, 7– 8, 10; Gardel graveside commemoration as, 11; institutionalization of, 132– 33; local efforts regarding, 131– 32; tango as, 134– 41. See also Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003); UNESCO tango declaration Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 132 international festivals, 115, 149– 50, 194n2 international meetings on cultural diversity, 160– 61 jazz, tango compared, 19, 79 Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, 96–97 Jelin, Elizabeth, 37 Juárez, Rubén, 107 Karush, Matthew B., 51 Kirchner, Néstor, 175 Konex Cultural City, 8– 9 Konex Foundation, 94 labor of memory, 37, 59– 60 Lacarrieu, Mónica, 4, 5– 6 language policies, 125 Lavallén, Víctor, 107 Law 2.176, 152 Law 24.684, 5, 132, 193n2 Law 24.750, 154– 55, 156 Law of tango (Law 130), 5, 187n2 “Lezama,” 57– 59 Linetzky, Andrés, 96 Liska, Mercedes, 178 List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, 132 Live Records (Discos Vivos), 168 living tradition notion, 112–13 local music. See cultural industries López, Gustavo, 143– 44, 153– 55, 157, 158– 59, 160, 165

INDEX

Lorenzo, Juan, 39, 40, 41 loyalty, 52 lunfardo (slang), 38, 53– 56, 58– 59, 190n14 Lunfardo Day, 190n16 lunfardo dictionaries, 190n16 lyrics, use of in everyday speech, 50– 51 Macri, Augusto, 39, 42 Macri, Mauricio, 175–77, 180– 81 Maffi, Pedro, 52 Magaldi, Agustín, 45 MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment), 157, 195n3 managerial regimes: Astillero and, 89, 91–92; blurring lines between music and, 30; connection and continuity between, 29; critical engagement with, 183– 84; as critical tool, 16; cultural exceptionalism and, 24; cultural policy making, 122; cultural uses seen by, 27– 30, 32; culture as needing, 65– 66; defi ned, 14, 179, 190n1; diversity and, 147, 179– 80; as dynamic, 17; extent of, 16; mediating power of, 179; music shaped by, 18; popular arts as concern of, 67– 68; protagonist roles of, 14; social inclusion not seen in, 24; UNESCO tango declaration as bolstering, 135– 36. See also TangoVia Buenos Aires “Mañana en el Abasto” (Morning in Abasto), 8 marcato, 76 Marconi, Nestór, 107, 108, 116 Margulies, Gustavo, 96 mariachi, 140 María de Buenos Aires, 189n11 Marmonti, Enrique, 64– 65, 66 Marsalis, Wynton, 96– 97 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 54– 55 Martini, Augusto Arturo, 56 mausoleum, Gardel, 2– 3 media corporations: communications media defi ned, 154; Fractura Expuesta, 192n6; grey- outs and, 157; power of, 16–17; Valentino’s performance, 18–19, 121 media quotas, 123 melodrama, 51– 52, 53 Mercado de Abasto building, 6–7 Miller, Toby, 92, 124 milonga campera, 77, 77

milongas, 19, 83 Ministry of Culture, 111–12, 131, 162– 63 Ministry of Production, 162– 63 “Mi noche triste” (My Sad Night), 44– 45 Monkey Skin Tango Orchestra (Orquesta Típica Piel de Mono), 82 Montevideo, Uruguay, 141, 188n1 Morning in Abasto (“Mañana en el Abasto”), 8 motives, 77–78 Mr. T. Tango Orchestra (Orquesta Típica Mario Baracus), 82– 83 Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), 157, 195n3 murder, 53 Museo Casa Carlos Gardel, 8, 185 musical culture: in age of expediency, 181– 82; background of, 23–24; economic crisis of 2001 and, 25–26; expediency of, 10–11; managerial regimes and, 14–18, 27– 30; as social, 17–18; social exclusion and, 28–29; uses of, 30. See also 34 Puñaladas musical meaning, 43– 49 musical motives, 77–78 música popular: composition techniques and, 76–78, 76–77; defi ned, 66; folklore and, 77; history and, 68–74; incorporation of in Astillero, 76; lack of city support for, 85– 86; orquestas típicas as, 70; participatory sociability of, 82– 85; political policies and, 87– 88, 137– 38; as social practice, 80– 86; UNESCO tango declaration and, 140; where lacking, 98–99. See also Astillero music history: detachment/connection, 35, 49, 182; genre culture and, 43– 49; preservation efforts and, 97–104; vanguard period, 70–71, 75–76. See also Astillero; 34 Puñaladas music piracy, 15, 137 music scholarship, 183 Nación, La, 117 naming as transformative, 134– 35 National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), 167 nationalism, 156– 57 nationalization of industry, 22–23 national treatment principle, 155 natural site protection, 128– 30

215

INDEX

Navarrine, Julio, 53 Neal, Caroline, 96, 116 negros, 194n8 neighborhood loyalty, 52 neoliberalism: age of expediency versus, 188n12; as beneficial, 24; defi ned, 21; implementation of, 21–22; import substitution industrialization, 22; intangible cultural heritage and, 146; nongovernment organizations and, 92; privatization of industry, 24–25; 2001 economic crisis and, 25–26 new tango (nuevo tango), 70 Nicely (“Amablemente”), 33– 34, 55– 56 nongovernment organizations (NGOs). See TangoVia Buenos Aires nonprofits. See TangoVia Buenos Aires nuevo tango (new tango), 70 Núñez, Gustavo Álvarez, 174–76 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María, 28 OIC (Cultural Industries Observatory), 162, 164– 66 “Olvidao” (Forgotten), 52– 53 Omar, Nelly, 95 Organization for Economic Co- Operation and Development (OECD), 157, 195n3 Orlando Goñi, 81– 85 Orquesta El Arranque, 94 Orquesta Escuela de Tango (Tango School Orchestra), 93, 96, 106–12, 113, 116, 193nn11–12 Orquesta Típica Fernandez Fierro, 40, 69, 74 Orquesta Típica Mario Baracus (Mr. T. Tango Orchestra), 82– 83 Orquesta Típica Piel de Mono (Monkey Skin Tango Orchestra), 82 orquesta típica tradition, 69–70, 72–73 Ortner, Sherry, 17 Página 12, 95 painting, 8 Pane, Julio, 116 papusa, 190n14 pequeña y mediana empresas (PyMES), 164– 65, 167 Peralta, Julián: associations with tango, 71; city support lacking for, 91– 92; on government policies, 86; importance of, 68, 69; on revolutionary nature of tango, 74–75; “La Yumba,” 78

216

Perón, Juan, 5, 22–23, 69, 71 Peyo, 68 Piazzolla, Astor, 70, 72–73, 108, 109, 189n11, 191n5 piracy, 15, 137 Plaza, Gabriel, 39 Plaza, Julián, 107 political policies, exclusions and, 87– 88 popular music. See música popular Possetti, Sonia, 60– 61 practice theory, 17 predatory tourism, 138– 39 prejudices, 137– 38, 142. See also racism preservation, 97–104 prison tango, 42, 52– 56 private development, Gardel based on, 12 privatization of industry, 118–19. See also neoliberalism Prodan, Luca, 8 Promotion and Exportation of Cultural Goods, 162 Puente, Stella, 149, 163– 64, 165, 166– 67, 169 Pugliese, Osvaldo, 72–73, 78, 106–7, 108, 109 PyMES (pequeña y mediana empresas), 164– 65, 167 racism, 193n7, 194n8. See also prejudices Recoleta cemetery, 187n1 recording studios, ethnomusicology and, 15 Reinaudo, Hernan, 39– 40 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 132 República Cromañón fi re, 195n1 resistance, 28–29 Reunión cumbre, 191n5 rhythm, treatment of, 191n2 rhythmic tension, 79 Riachuelo River, 58 Rinaldi, Susana, 181 Ríos, Walter, 116 Rivero, Edmundo, 48, 56 rock, tango compared to, 42, 43, 47, 51– 52 Rodríguez, Enrique, 165– 66 Rodríguez, Osiris, 68 Romeo and Juliet, 88– 89 Rosso, Santiago, 96 Rúa, Fernando de la, 153– 54 SADAIC (Argentine Society of Authors and Music Composers), 94

INDEX

Salgán, Horacio, 108, 109 Samba de Roda, 140 Santos Discépolo, Enrique, 51 Sarfati, Roberto, 96 Sarlo, Beatriz, 23 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 125 Schissi, Diego, 96 Segovia, Claudio, 191n4 seminars, 168– 69 síncopa (syncopation), 76, 76, 191n7 Si sos brujo (If You Know Magic), 116–17 Slang (2005), 39, 52 slang (lunfardo), 38, 53– 56, 58– 59 small- and medium-sized businesses (PyMES), 164– 65, 167 social agents, 17 social policy, Gardel graveside commemoration and, 11 “soja porteña” comment, 177, 180– 81 Solari, Indio, 48 special productions, 112–17 Stampone, Atilio, 107 state versus government policy, 176 style, 44, 69–70, 183– 84, 188n8 Sub- Secretariat for Cultural Development, 162 Sub- Secretariat for Cultural Patrimony, 162 Sub- Secretariat of Cultural Industries, 162, 164, 167, 169 Sub- Secretariat of Production, 162 Sub- Secretariat of Tourism, 162 Sub- Secretariat of Work, Employment, and Professional Formation, 162 Sumo (band), 8 syncopation, 76–77, 76, 191n7 synergism, private development based on public institutionalization of Gardel, 12 tango: description of, 18, 44, 183– 84, 188n8; disconnect between music and dance, 18–20, 188n9; golden age of, 19, 68–70, 80– 81; institutionalization of, 5; as melodrama, 51– 52; new golden age of, 40– 41; revenue from, 12, 119, 139; rock compared to, 42, 43, 47, 51– 52; uneven benefits from, 13; vanguard period, 70–71, 75–76 Tango argentino, 191n4 tango canción, 38, 48. See also guitarensemble tango canción tango dance, 84, 188n9

Tango en Vivo (Live Tango) series, 113–14 tango of rupture, 74– 80 Tangos carcelarios (2002), 39 Tango Singer, The (Martínez), 54– 55 tango tourists, 138– 39 TangoVia Buenos Aires: archives, 104–12, 192n10; Astillero compared to, 91–92; economic development by, 112–17, 119; as institution, 94–97; managerial regimes and, 92; neutrality stance, 105– 6; overview of, 93–94; preservation efforts, 97–104, 192nn7–10; privatization of industry and, 118–19 taxes, 136– 37 Telecom Agentina, 24 Telerman, Jorge, 162, 165, 175, 196n2 Tenenbaum, Javier, 169–70 Tesorieo, Laura, 171–72 Teubal, Miguel, 22 34 Puñaladas: “Amablemente,” 33– 34, 55– 56; arrangements, 46– 47; detachment/connection, 46– 47, 49, 57– 60, 61– 62; emergence of, 35, 40; fi nancial difficulties, 39; genre culture and, 39– 43, 61– 62; history and style of, 44– 48; instrumentation, 34, 44– 46; interest in tango by, 41– 43; as named band, 47; prison tango, 42, 52– 56; revenue from tango, 13; rupture versus continuity in, 59; shared repertoire, 46, 57, 62; sound of, 47– 49 Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, 117 tourism, 138– 39 trade agreements, 155– 61 traditional culture, 65– 66, 105– 6 “Trenzas” (Braids), 82 triad of Argentine exceptionalism, 23 Troilo, Aníbal, 106–7, 108, 191n2 Tucker, Joshua, 15 2001 economic crisis: economic value of cultural industries after, 152, 153– 55; genre culture and, 43; nationalism after, 156– 57; overview of, 25–26; social movements after, 84– 87; tango as integral part of context, 60– 61; tourism and, 138– 39 UDI (Argentine Union of Independent Record Labels), 168 UNESCO tango declaration: diversity and, 124, 141– 45; effects of, 12, 122–23,

217

INDEX

UNESCO tango declaration (continued) 139–140, 177; reactions to, 120, 135– 36; TangoVia Buenos Aires and, 119; two countries submitting for, 5, 140– 41 Union of Independent Record Labels (UDI), 168 United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 161; cultural exception doctrine, 158; cultural goods defi ned by, 195n4; sustainable development, 124, 136; World Heritage program, 128–130. See also Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003); UNESCO tango declaration universal education, 23, 125 universalizing discourses, 97. See also TangoVia Buenos Aires upward mobility, 23 Uruguay Round, 157 Valentino, Enzo, 95 Valentino, Rudolph, 18–19, 121

218

vanguard period, 70–71, 75–76 Varchausky, Ignacio: on archives, 103, 104; BAFIM, 148–150; on comprehensiveness, 101; Orquesta Escuela and, 111, 193n12; overview of, 94– 97; value of tango, 118 Varela, Adriana, 190n13 “Ventarrón,” 52 vía, 192n4 vocalists, 50, 189n11. See also 34 Puñaladas Wainszelbaum, Nicolás, 137 Waits, Tom, 48– 49 wealth distribution, 24. See also Abasto neighborhood working through musically, 62 World Heritage Fund, 129 World Heritage program, 128–130. See also intangible cultural heritage yeites, 48 “yira, yira,” 51 Yúdice, George, 10, 124, 187n4 “Yumba, La” (1943), 73–74, 78 yumbeado, el, 73–74, 74, 191nn5– 6