The Bandoneón Review
A journal devoted to the music of Astor Piazzolla and the revolution he set loose in tango — the moment a dance from the docks of Buenos Aires walked into the concert hall and refused to leave.
For most of a century tango belonged to the ballroom and the cabaret. Then a bandoneón player who had grown up between New York and Buenos Aires decided that the music of his city deserved to be listened to as closely as a string quartet — and the argument that followed split a nation. This publication is about that argument and its extraordinary music: nuevo tango, the concert tango of Astor Piazzolla, treated as living repertoire, as history, and as craft.
Why Piazzolla still matters
Piazzolla did not invent tango; he detonated it. Into a form that had settled comfortably into the dance halls of the Golden Age he introduced the counterpoint of Bach, the harmonic restlessness of Stravinsky and Bartók, and the swing and improvisatory heat of the jazz he loved. Traditionalists accused him of murdering the tango. Half a century later his compositions are played by cellists and string quartets, sampled by film composers, and programmed beside Vivaldi. The Encyclopædia Britannica now calls him simply the most important tango composer of the second half of the twentieth century.
What you will find here
- The life — from a second-hand bandoneón in a New York tenement to the concert stages of Paris and Milan.
- Nuevo tango — what actually changed, and why it caused a war.
- The bandoneón — the wheezing German import that became the soul of the Río de la Plata.
- The essential works — Adiós Nonino, Libertango, Oblivion, the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and more.
- The ensembles — the octet and the quintet that were his laboratory and his ideal.
- María de Buenos Aires — the tango operita that put a fable on the stage.
- The legacy — Yo-Yo Ma, Gidon Kremer, the Kronos Quartet, and a UNESCO heritage listing.
- A listening guide for anyone starting from the beginning.
The two tangos
Running through this whole journal is a single argument that has never quite been settled: the quarrel between the two tangos. One is the tango of the ballroom — danced, social, driven by an unmistakable beat, the glory of the Golden Age orchestras that filled the dance halls of Buenos Aires every night of the 1940s. The other is the tango Piazzolla built for the concert hall — heard rather than danced, closer to a string quartet than to a dance band, and written to be followed the way you follow a fugue. Piazzolla's enemies insisted the second kind was no tango at all. His admirers answered that it was the one thing that would keep tango alive once the dance halls emptied. Both, it turns out, were partly right. Today the danced tango is thriving again in the milongas, and the concert tango fills auditoriums from Buenos Aires to Berlin — two living branches of the same old root. This publication takes the side of close listening, but it never forgets the dance the music came from.
A note on how to read this music
Piazzolla asked to be heard, not danced. He described his output as música contemporánea de Buenos Aires — contemporary music of Buenos Aires — and the phrase is a good instruction. Give a piece like Oblivion or the slow movement of the Four Seasons the attention you would give a Schubert song, and the melancholy that porteños call fefa or simply the sadness of the port opens up. This is city music: nocturnal, ironic, grieving and defiant, sometimes all in the same bar. Begin wherever you like — with the journal, with the works, or with the man who made it. Whether you are a musician, a student of the twentieth century, or simply a listener who has been ambushed by Adiós Nonino, you are welcome.