Behind the rhythm: Phrasing (fraseo) in tango beyond rhythmic division

The art of phrasing (fraseo) has played a pivotal role in the history of tango. It was incorporated in 1917 by Carlos Gardel as a vocal resource and later adapted by Aníbal Troilo to instrumental practice, giving rise to the flourishing of interpretative styles in the 1940s and 1950s. From the 1960s...

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Autor principal: Muller, Gaspar
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/oidopensante/article/view/16895
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Sumario:The art of phrasing (fraseo) has played a pivotal role in the history of tango. It was incorporated in 1917 by Carlos Gardel as a vocal resource and later adapted by Aníbal Troilo to instrumental practice, giving rise to the flourishing of interpretative styles in the 1940s and 1950s. From the 1960s onwards, the decline in popularity of tango coincided with the disappearance of Gardelian style of fraseo which, despite the revival of tango since the end of the last century, has not been cultivated again in instrumental performance to date. This article argues that the absence of fraseo in contemporary tango may stem more from a partial or misinterpreted understanding of its essence than from a lack of knowledge of it. The hypothesis presented challenges the idea that fraseo belongs exclusively to the realm of rhythm, understood as division of time, and examines the limitations of its measurement and writing. Instead of as a rhythmic fact, the article proposes to study fraseo as a bifurcation of musical time, which cannot be encoded by our system of notation.