Milonga

music and dance style

Tango has three faces. Milonga is Tango's happy, playful face, quicker and more rhythmic than the part of the trinity known as 'Tango'. Vals is Tango in three time, the joyful one.

Milonga has a more complicated history, and the word has many different meanings, which can be confusing.

The first Milonga in Argentina was a folk song form from the countryside around Buenos Aires. Milonga was very popular with the payadores, improvisational singers famed for their inventive lyrics. As a form created to carry words, the 'Milonga Surena' or 'Campera', the folk song Milonga, has a neutral, almost tuneless tune, with the lyrics chanted over a strict structure of rhythm and chords.

Folk music was the most important popular musical form in Buenos Aires before the emergence of the Tango (and certainly one of the important influences in the evolution of Tango). People would often go to places where they could hear the payadores sing, and these places came to be known as milongas. Other forms of folk music were played at the milongas, and many of them were danced. Was the 'Milonga Surena' danced? The folklore community today does not dance it, but rather listens to it in order to be able to enjoy the cleverness of the lyrics. There is some evidence to suggest that it was danced in the Nineteenth Century. In any case, gradually the word milonga came to be extended to a place where dancing happened. Even today in Buenos Aires, when one goes out to dance the Tango, one goes to a milonga.

Then in 1932 a new meaning was added to the word Milonga - the most important meaning in the context of Tango music. The writing team of lyricist Homero Manzi and composer Sebastian Piana had been working together for some time, writing successful Tangos. Manzi decided that he would enjoy the challenge of writing the lyrics for a Milonga, but Piana was not keen. Milonga had a clearly defined musical form, and he felt that as a composer it left him nothing to do. So they decided on a compromise. Manzi would write a lyric in the style of a Milonga, but Piana would break with tradition and set it in a form which was a hybrid between Tango and Milonga. The song which they wrote was 'Milonga Sentimental'.

The song was a huge hit, and Manzi and Piana continued to experiment with their new hybrid form, which was quickly taken up by other composers and lyricists. While some of the new 'Milongas Ciudadanas', city Milongas, retained the musical structure of the 'Milongas Surenas', many abandoned it to become closer to Tangos, though with a stronger rhythm and generally a faster tempo, giving Milonga its place in the Tango trinity. By the late 1930s it was possible to have an instrumental Milonga, something which before Piana's revolutionary 'Milonga Sentimental' would simply not have been thought of.

By the 1940s Tango, Milonga and Vals were inseparable partners, and the three different faces of the same music and dance give Tango its extraordinary depth and richness of expression.

From: www.totaltango.com