The tango singer: His evolution along time

he historical development of singing in tango music reveals us definite times and circumstances which allow us a better understanding of the growth of the genre and its lasting popular insertion.

Certainly, the passing of time was giving way to different interpretive forms and styles, different relationships between vocalist and orchestra, and very diverse kinds of singers, but this did not happen either in an excluding manner or in a strict chronological order.

We can distinguish in our city music, four categories of vocal interpreters who stand out for two essential reasons: the quality of the singer´s performance in a musical number and its effect on the audience, besides the matching with the period in which he lived.

In this sense, the four categories, even though when occupying their own historical place, can neither be defined nor differentiated only by the epoch because they coexisted on many occasions. So much so, that a singer was in more than one category.

This analysis aims at portraying the participation of human voice and its contribution to tango, since its beginnings up to the present, by presenting the analysis in five chapters, the first four correspond to the aforementioned categories and the last is a brief reference to the present reality.

The national singer
The refrain singer
The orchestra singer
The consecrated soloist
The singer, today