Histoire du tango --- flute et guitare

Histoire du Tango for Flute and Guitar by legendary Latin-American composer Astor Piazzolla. The piece is in four movements to reflect the evolutoion of the Tango:
The piece is in four movements to reflect the evolution of the Tango:

Bordel 1900
The tango was born in Buenos-Aires in 1882. It was first played on the guitar and the flute. The piano was added later, followed by the bandoneon. It is music full of charm and vivacity, that gives the impression of the good spirits and volubility of the French, Italian and Spanish women who lived in these brothels, enticing the policemen, thieves, sailors and hoodlums who visited them. The tango is cheerful.

Café 1930
This is a different era of the tango. People no longer danced to it, as in the 1900s and became satisfied by just listening, which allowed for a more musical and romantic evolution. This was a radical transformation. The tango became slower, more melancholic, and incorporated new harmonies. Tango orchestras were made up of two violins, two bandoneons, a piano and a double bass. Sometimes it was sung.

Night-club 1960
A new evolution was witnessed during this period, in which international exchange increased considerably. Brazil and Argentina met in Buenos-Aires - bossa nova and the new tango were "same battle". The public flocked to the nightclubs to listen earnestly to the new tango - a revolution and profound disruption of certain forms of old tango.

Concert d'aujourd'hui
Certain concepts join tango music with contemporary music, such as recollections by Bartok, Stravinsky and several others on a tango base. This is today's tango, the tango of the future.

Poverty drove Piazzolla's ancestors to emigrate from their homeland, and the young Astor was born of Italian parentage in Mar dei Plata in Argentina on 11 March 1921. ln 1925 the family moved to New York to try their fortune in the big city. As Astor Piazzolla has said him- self, "It was at the lime of prohibition and the mafia... I hung around the streets more than I went to school... my musical world gradually grew up round jazz, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway who I managed to hear at the door of the Cotton Club, although I was both too young and too poo - to go in. My father used to play the old nostalgic tangos by Carlos Gardel on the gramophone. For my ninth birthday he gave me a bandoneon (button accordion), and I had lessons with a teacher who introduced me to classical music".

ln 1937 the Piazzolla family returned to Mar dei Plata, but Astor was soon attracted more to the capital, and when only sixteen he moved to Buenos Aires, renting a small room as a lodger. He had been engaged as a bandoneon player in the band directed by Anibal Troïlo, himself a specialist on the instrument, and was thus able to pay the rent with his first tees. At the same lime he did not neglect his studies but look lessons in piano and harmony with a young teacher by the name of Alberto Ginastera, who went on to become a renowned composer.

ln 1946 Astor got his own "tipica" band together, playing nothing but tangos. It was the springboard he needed for his own development.. "I played my own arrangements, and started using triple rhythms in what had been a very four-square rhythmic pattern up to then, and experimenting with bold harmonies" His innovations, however, met with little success and the group disbanded. He renewed his studies even more enthusiastically and founded a new string orchestra - which led him right back to failure and bitter disillusionment. Still he persisted - his hard upbringing in New York had taught him to be stubborn, with an aggressive edge.

The turning point came when Astor traveled to Europe in the 1950s to study conducting with Hermann Scherchen, and met Nadia Boulanger, the famous teacher of composition in Paris. She showed him that his identity was not in intellectual music but in the tango, spiced with a touch of classical style and jazz, and molded by his own intuitive sense.

Once back in Buenos Aires he formed his first octet in 1955 and, by using what he had learned from Ginastera and Boulanger as well as phrasing borrowed from jazz, he made his tangos swing with new life. As was to be expected this caused quite a stir in the ranks of the conservative tango players, but Piazzolla was not to be deflected from his new course. From now on his tango was a distinctively modern form that he exploited with his new quintet which achieved lame with their "tango nuevo". International recognition was at last his, and concerts and recordings flowed unceasingly. From the 1960s until his death in July 1992, his success never stopped growing.