Argentine Tango: A Glossary of Terms

Argentine tango (tango argentino) names both a musical genre and the partnered social dance bound to it, a form that took shape in the outskirts of Buenos Aires and of Montevideo toward the close of the nineteenth century.^[1] Its working vocabulary is inseparable from the porteño world that produced it — porteño denoting what belongs to Buenos Aires, whose bohemian and street culture furnished the genre its earliest poetic voice.^[2] The idiom diversified quickly into competing manners and repertories, and the 1983 stage production Tango Argentino later assembled that history beside the form's many varieties for audiences far from the Río de la Plata.^[6]

Several of the genre's defining terms belong to its sung poetry rather than its choreography. Lunfardo, the argot of Buenos Aires, became the characteristic register of early tango lyric, and the letrista, or lyricist, was its custodian; Celedonio Flores (1896–1947), a Buenos Aires poet who composed tangos such as Margot and Mano a mano, ranks among the most popular practitioners of lunfardo verse.^[2] Behind the letrista stood older oral figures, foremost the payador, the itinerant guitar-bearing improviser whose sung contests and ballads circulated through the city's outer neighborhoods before tango fully coalesced.^[5] The organito, a street barrel-organ, carried tango melodies through those same districts, and the genre found its emblematic interpreter in Carlos Gardel, the singer who came to give the form its public voice.^[5]

The early tango lyric did not arise in isolation. It belonged to a literary milieu that also held the gauchesco tradition of the pampa — José Hernández's Martín Fierro looming over it — and the décima forms of the payadores, alongside the modernist street verse of poets such as Evaristo Carriego.^[5] Critics have placed Flores at the meeting point of these currents, a figure of the porteño muse whose blunt, picturesque diction fused the speech of the city's margins with the literary fashions of the 1910s.^[2]

As a danced practice, tango is organized around the pareja, the couple, and the close coordination of two partners that sets it apart from solo and line forms.^[4] Empirical study has taken that partnership as its object: one controlled investigation of tango dancers tested how the presence of music and of a partner shaped their emotional and hormonal responses while dancing.^[3] Sociological survey work complements the picture, describing tango dancers as a highly educated group that often takes up the dance only in adulthood, drawn by a mixture of pleasure-seeking and social motives and treating it as a primary leisure pursuit with genuine physical demands.^[4] Together these strands frame tango less as a fixed step-vocabulary than as a social institution whose core terms — partner, music, and gathering — continue to define both the genre and the dance that bears its name.^[1]