Tango…The Perfect Vehicle The Dialogues and Sociocultural Circumstances Informing the Emergence and Evolution of Tango Expressions in Paris Since the Late 1970s

This dissertation examines the various dialogues that have shaped the evolution of contemporary tango variants in Paris since the late 1970s. I focus primarily on the work of a number of Argentine composers who went into political exile in the late 1970s and who continue to live abroad. Drawing on the ideas of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (concepts of dialogic relationships and polyvocality), I explore the creative mechanisms that allowed these and other artists to engage with a multiplicity of seemingly irreconcilable idioms within the framing concept of tango in order to accommodate their own musical needs and inquietudes. In addition, based on fieldwork conducted in Basel, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Gerona, Paris, and Rotterdam, I examine the mechanism through which musicians (some experienced tango players with longstanding ties with the genre, others young performers who have only recently fully embraced tango) engage with these new forms in order to revisit, create or reconstruct a sense of personal or communal identity through their performances and compositions. I argue that these novel expressions are recognized as tango not because of their melodies, harmonies or rhythmic patterns, but because of the ways these features are “musicalized” by the performers. I also argue that it is due to both the musical heterogeneity that shaped early tango expressions in Argentina and the primacy of performance practices in shaping the genre’s sound that contemporary artists have been able to approach tango as a vehicle capable of accommodating the new musical identities resulting from their socially diverse and diasporic realities.