Tango Music – Tango Topics

These videos teach a skill that emphasizes the 5 Pauses of Tango Music. Each video shows you a working exercise to teach you how to do this with every piece of music.

There are a host of skills being developed here which are in no particular order: a.) Understanding the orchestral lead, which helps to inform your dancing choices. b.) Understanding musical time and how to reinforce it. c.) How to fix your “Can’t find a beat to save your life!” issues that you didn’t know you had. d.) What markers to listen for in each piece of music regardless of genre. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more, lots more. These 3 videos (5), give you the basic building blocks you’ll need to start to listen to the music in a very different way.

A Method for Tango Improvisation

The Tango Topics Method of Tango Improvisation uses extensions, dissociation/applied dissociation, and individual component movements, as well as Beat and the 5 Pause Types as the building blocks for generating a type of improvisation that can be combined with contemporary…

The Structure of a Song (and a Tanda).

A song in Tango (the genre, not to be confused with the entire idea of tango music), consists of 5 to 6 musical paragraphs. Those musical paragraphs are generally 6 to 8 phrases in length. Each one of those phrases…

The Five Pause Types Methodology & Primer

The 5 Pause types are in every piece of tango music you have ever heard from the golden age. They are best described as 'musical rests' or a simply a 'pause'. However unlike normal musical pauses, a Tango Pause is…

Musical Interpretation – Parts 1 & 2

What is ‘Musical Interpretation’ ? Musical Interpretation is a term that means brings together to very different ideas. First, ’Musical’, is that either role hears the music in a very specific way so that they can thereby convey the meaning…

Musical Interpretation – Parts 3 & 4

Today’s Tango Topic refines the process of Musical Interpretation, by showing you how to use Musical Interpretation with two important tools: Alternation & Symmetry. The end goal here is to create a structured process that allows us to make free…

Musical Interpretation with Traveling Ochos! 🙂

Musical Interpretation. Another aspect of Musical Interpretation is what happens when you start to apply very specific pieces of Tango Vocabulary to fit with the music. It is through this specificity of the vocabulary choice, and really the granular control…

Musical Interpretation with Turns

What is a Musical Turn ? First and foremost it is a 'Turn' or rotation that the couple initiates within the line and lane of dance that can exist in one of three places in the music. 1.) The space…

Musical Interpretation with the Argentine Cross 🙂

Section 5b of Musical Interpretation, we continue with specific granular control (from a leading and following perspective), with a piece of well known and well-worn piece of Tango vocabulary occurring in a very discrete place. The discrete place ? The…

Teaching Musical Interpretation

1.) Learning the Pauses. First let’s dispense with the fact that you ‘Yes you must know where the beat is at’! That’s a given. Tango Topics does an adequate job of giving you the tools to hear the beat, not…

The Accent Note

The Accent Note is rife in Tango, Milonga, and Vals. It's everywhere and also in the most unexpected places! They are there for one reason: To draw attention to that particular measure of music that you're listening to, highlighting that…

La Variación (The Variation of Tango Music)

What is "La Variación", it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a variation of the musical theme of the piece of music that you're listening to. Each piece of Tango Music has a major theme, and that theme can be…

The Musical Tools of Tango

Building Your Music Skills