Modern Tango World #4 (Bucharest, Romania)

Alfredo De Angelis playing, 15 minutes sets at 11:00 on Radio El Mundo. (Scan by M. Krugman).
Electric recording was introduced to Buenos Aires
in 1926, and so, pushed to new artistic standards
by Julio De Caro, accepted into the higher society
and propelled by the technology, new tango sextetos
started appearing almost daily. But their life was
quite short. Less than three years later, the crisis of
1929, together with the introduction of sound motion
pictures put an end to their blissful existence
With the swing of a pendulum from a lot in 1926 to
a few in 1929, the increased demand for tango music
could easily become higher than the supply, and
the job of victroleras, which had been technically
feasible since 1926, became a demanded occupation
in 1929. The tango La Victrolera was recorded
only a year later. We can firmly place the emergence
and the proliferation of victroleras in Argentina into
a single year period between 1929 and 1930, not
only in Buenos Aires, but in other cities as well, as
the angry letter, written by Those darnn Victrolas
in a local Santa Fe newspaper attests
However,, Matt Mateo pointed out in an online discussion,
we cannot yet say for sure, whether these victroleras
were indeed playing music for dancers in the
clubs, akin modern musicalizadors or DJs, or served
more like long-legged local attractionsf or the patrons
of cafes, as the heroine a Fellini-like story La Vitrolera.
When the custom playing tandas separated by
cortinas appear?
Firstly we should mention a well-thought answer
to this question that appeared in Tango-L mail list.
However, the brothel origin of tango, and the very
existence of tango academias is more of a legend
than a historical fact, and also, this answer was met
with lots of criticism on the ground that live orquestas
do not play music in tandas. Many modern tango
orquestas do not play any danceable music. Those
few that do, pften use tandas format, in one or another
form. But what about the orquestas of the
Golden Age? And what about the early DJs?
In the Golden Age a contract on the radio was a prestigious
and a lucrative source of income for any orquesta
tipica. The standard radio format was to have
an orquesta tipica play a live quarter-hour set, change
the type of programming for the next quarter-hour,
and then play another quarter-hour set, and so on. Of
course, any orquesta worthy of its name, would not
just randomly chose pieces from its repertoire, but
rather build this fifteen minutes set into a certain story,
with a beginning, culmination and conclusion. At least
for the radio performances, an orquesta tipica would
use a format, both by its length and its design similar,
although not identical to a modern tanda.
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