So how fast is a Quick and a Slow? It depends on the orchestra leader, who sets the TEMPO by which his orchestra plays each measure. Early tangos were usually quite fast, about a half-second per measure. Tango music evolved from that tempo, partly because conservatory-trained musicians from Europe began playing with their sophisticated toolkit of techniques. Then a measure might take about a second or, if di Sarli was the leader, a second and a half.
So in a second/measure tempo a Slow would be a half second, and a Quick a quarter of a second. A dancer would typically step on the 1 and the 3 quarter notes of a piece of music written with a 4/4 signature. You likely noticed the qualifiers in the previous: "about" and "typically" and so on. That's because orchestra leaders in the 30s began to vary the tempo with which they had their musicians play individual pieces - and the tempo WITHIN a piece. D'Arienzo was one of the first to do this. He also began to vary the force by which his musicians played different parts of a piece: very loud here and very soft there. So soft that sometimes dancers had to infer the tempo and the beats of music - as here starting at about 1:10 minutes into "La Cumparsita." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y7Cnw99GKQ As the 1940s passed and dancers became more numerous and more musically sophisticated orchestra leaders had to come up with more sophisticated techniques to capture and keep dancers and other listeners. One such technique was swapping the bass and melody lines. So the beat would be kept by a violin, and the melody by the bass viol or the left (bass) hand on the piano. OK. That decides it. I will send "The Alfar's Husband" to the magazine first, THEN "Lady Death." Ciao! Larry de Los Angeles http://ShapechangerTales.com ____________________________________________________________ Grow your small business with email marketing. Click Now. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2131/fc/BLSrjnsChw3H6odOtftXTNSIutw331B6MvQpjMtmlWuI7VN2JBO4ZLWPfwc/ _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
