"Nostalgias de las cosas que han pasado"

representations of the past in Buenos Aires tango

Abstract

The paper argues that tango has been one of the ways in which Argentine society relates to its past, inscribing in music and verses the historical process experienced between the decades of 1880 and 1960. It is a musical and social memory, also affective and political, built and updated over more than a century of history. Since the Argentine redemocratization in 1983, tango has been object of cultural and commercial interest, in institutional actions and in the rescue promoted by the phonographic industry. It is, in fact, a movement intrinsic to the very historical trajectory of tango in the fields of dance, music and poetry. The paper considers the cases of the poetry of Homero Manzi, responsible for the renewal of the poetic of tango in the 1930s and 40s, and the music of Astor Piazzolla, whose "tango nuevo" from the 1950s onwards proposed to update the tradition in a contemporary expression. In one and the other, however, the notes of nostalgia and melancholy, tribute and representation of the past mark the character of collective memory inscribed in both verses and music.