Yesterday and Today Tango Music. A Study of Temporality and musical Phrasing in Aníbal Troilo's Style

Abstract

Musicology defines the style mainly on the basis of the compositional features; the
use of tools for the analysis of the sound signal to study the expressive features in
argentine popular music is recently applied. We propose that the musical phrasing in
tango performers could focus on the recurrent characteristics of temporal elongation
and shortening of rhythmic-melodic patterns embedded in the musical structure.
Thus the stylistic identity would be the result of the interaction between the musical
properties and the microtiming of such patterns. In this work, we combine musical
analysis and temporal microanalysis to examine the individual and joint temporal
variability, comparing in the same arrangement, the phrasing of Aníbal Troilo's orchestra
with other current orchestras.