Re: Candombe and Milonga

[Carlos Lima <amilsolrac @YAHOO.COM>]

"Jose A. Contreras" <ja.contreras @ENTELCHILE.NET> wrote on 25f01:
>
When you see a label on a CD "milonga candombada", or any other, that's the
feeling of the author about his job, that's not a strict definition... only a
feeling, as in many folk music...
<
Before this posting I spent a couple of long sleepless nights worrying about
the possibility of another round of wild herstory of the tango (or his-tory,
take your pick) inundating the Tango-L, the kind of flash flood that the list
has seen countless times in its ... er, history. (Any problem? Yes, spreading
nonsense has had, and will continue to have, very real consequences in the
"classroom", the social floor, and the stage.) Jose's posting may or may not
be 100% accurate as to the specific facts. I strongly believe IT IS, but
these matters have been the subject of so much ostensive assertion and
drunken speculation that I have learnt to take the most plausible and
seemingly well founded claims with a bushel of caution. Obviously Jose's
posting is a succinct reaction to the thread "primer", not a history article.
For instance, the chronological frame (even a bare bones one) is missing ---
not really a problem in this case but, with special relevance to the sorry
story of the history / herstory / his-tory of the tango, chronology forgone
is licence to go nuts taken. In fact, the only postings with real, honest to
truth, history in them that I can remember seeing in the Tango-L archives
were those by Richard Powers several years back. I am sure there were others,
authors, please take no offense; much more conspicuous on the list and the
net then were the ignorant rantings of people who thought that scholarship
has to take a back seat to ideology, widely or not so widely believed myth,
personal or popular pet "theories", national sensibilities, in short, blatant
assertion. Whether somebody gets a particular matter of fact right or wrong,
or slightly one way or the other is not quite the important point. Accounts
can be improved as more evidence is adduced; much more important is that the
context and approach are right --- that what we could call meta-historic, or
epistemological, considerations are reasonably well taken care of. To give a
simple example, following Jose', one must realize that whatever is written on
blurbs of recordings, whatever "style" names are given by musicians
(collectively almost as bad historians as dancers are, but not quite) to
their compositions or performances, etc, bear only a tenuous relationship, if
not a non-relationship, with any past genre developments, not just in the
folklore, but in the musicians' world as well. If this is not clearly
understood from the beginning, if words like Milonga or Candombe' are
understood to mean ONE well defined thing, always the same, over the decades,
whether in the newspaper, a good book, a Uruguayan neighbourhood, or the
milonguero portenno's neighbourhood cafi', then the whole thing is vitiated
by a hidden assumption. This type of mistake (of popular nai:vete') is major
fodder for the myth making process, as it is for what linguists and
philologists call folk etymology. (By the way, the very strongly entrenched
idea that Susana Miller "invented" the label "tango milonguero" as a
marketing ploy, though not entirely implausible, has all the earmarks of folk
etymology. What Susana Miller seams to REALLY have invented was the herstory
of tango milonguero, and the misuse of the labels Tango Danza / Stage / Show,
etc, to designate --- well, denigrate --- the 1940 s classic salon
tradition.)  Recordings of Milongas, Candombe's, the whole lot, including
so-called "early" ones, were there in some abundance from the 1920's on;
things that the people called Milongas and Candombe's were there one whole
century earlier, if not much longer than that! Well, to conclude, what Jose'
posting has and (again, with apologies to many others I may be missing)
several postings by Sergio Suppa had, particularly those on the history of
social mores in Argentina, is, above all, the right approach, the right
context. Before we can sensibly quibble about the evidence for or against a
claim that the verzuvanzai exists, we must have a reasonable consensus on
what we mean by "exist", and what a verzuvanzai is. And, as USA past
president Clinton has so wisely reminded the world of, while we are at it we
might as well make sure that we also agree on what is is.

Cheers,



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