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Brothel tango tunes
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By Ricardo
García Blaya and Bruno
Cespi
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 ery often we read that
some writers, some of them just arrived at the tango field, label a
series of old tango pieces as "brothel" music whose original
sheet music was for piano and with no lyrics, save for some rare exception.
Then, the only reason for the labeling comes from the title, generally with double entendre or with picaresque allusions or referred to parts of the human body or the use of vulgar words or indirectly referred to copulation. Now it's no longer tango and its music and even less its absent lyric, it's only the name of the piece, the procacious title. All this would be of little importance had it not been that those same writers hide, under that labeling, an axiological pretension that intents to demonstrate that the origins of tango are in the brothels.
How could a learned, refined writer from Buenos Aires - the Paris of South America - accept that music born in the poor suburbs, among gauchos and peasants, among bullies and immigrants, a menace to social decorum, banned and sinful, without exorcising it? It was necessary to give a picturesque and audacious explanation that would justify its later acceptance, but that at the same time would clear out that that music from the outskirts became socially good only after its return from Europe. Nonsense.
In order to be brief, I suggest the reading of the excellent book written by Hugo Lamas and Enrique Binda: "El tango en la sociedad porteña, 1880-1920" and to see the chronicle "Reflexiones sobre los orígenes del tango" that is in this same section. There are a large number of procacious titles that match this pseudo classification. The ones I mention below are some of them: Title (Composer) |
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