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| Measures of masculinity: On the lyrics and recordings of "Humillación" |
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Essay and translations by Jake Spatz Humillación by Carlos Bahr "Aspasia" by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) |
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THE TWO RECORDINGS Biagi wrote the music to "Humillación," but he broke with the D'Arienzo squad in 1938. When D'Arienzo recorded the song in the '40s, with the singer Hector Mauré, his pianist was the young Fulvio Salamanca. This talented pianist does a passable imitation of Biagi—so much so, that I initially thought it was him, and interpreted the uncharacteristic solo passage as Biagi lashing out at what (I imagined) he considered a failed arrangement. |
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It's a very odd recording, especially given that Mauré was at one time a boxer, and that D'Arienzo often claimed to have returned the masculine character to tango music. What they made together is quite the opposite of macho.
Mauré sings the lyrics as though he took the speaker's apologetic tone to be in earnest. It was the wrong time to emote: Mauré comes off like a great big crybaby. D'Arienzo's arrangement too makes this manly song mellifluous. Despite some compelling countermelodies in the violins (characteristic of, to me, D'Arienzo's most interesting music: he once said he liked the fourth violin to play low like a cello), the song's hard edge is almost wholly blunted. Biagi's trademark backbeat sincopas are in there somewhere (he did write the music, after all), but they're muted almost out of earshot. |
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| When the pianist Salamanca hits the short solo passage, the playing starts to sound very uncharacteristic of Biagi. The notes are belligerent. The maestro's typically spare, rubato delivery, which borders on a boogie-woogie lilt, is here badly imitated: except for a few notes in the middle, everything is played sharp, anticipating the beat. Biagi's fills and solos have the air of a sorcerer: Salamanca sounds like an apprentice, breaking his wand against the inside of a birdcage. | ||
The solo's harshness does contrast strangely with Mauré, and gives the song some appeal, at least to one listener. As I said, I at first thought it was Biagi himself: I pictured him losing his cool and jackknifing the rhythm of an already botched handling of his material. That's not what actually happened in the studio, but it illuminates the dramatic texture of the song as shaped by D'Arienzo, Mauré, and Salamanca's choices.
Biagi's own recording of "Humillación" presents a huge difference. His version is a great phonic mass—with power chords galore—and achieves the monolithic sound appropriate (in my reading of the lyrics) to a male ego in revolt. Jorge Ortiz, as opposed to Mauré, belts the words out like a man. With the machismo established, we hear Biagi's ticklish, antsy fills played with authority, not in a poor imitation that gets the surface right and the substance wrong. His solo too is relaxed, sparse, and incantatory—recognizably him—and it provides a nice contrast to Ortiz, giving the song animation and depth rather than slashing it apart. |
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THE AESTHETIC SPLIT WRIT LARGE Just listening to the openings of these two recordings is an exercise in general music criticism. D'Arienzo sounds small, cutesy, and smart. His singer is smooth and his orchestra, as usual, sounds like a clockshop. In D'Arienzo there's always a lot of stuff going on, an abundance of bits for a dancer to play with, a variety of lines for the ear to follow. It's like a jigsaw puzzle in the act of being put together. |
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Biagi, to me, is the polar opposite of this. He distinguishes himself from D'Arienzo by cutting out the crap, removing all filler (the better to foreground his fills), and giving his ensemble a unified purpose. As a result, his sound is monumental, not baroque: he answers the D'Arienzo fleet of sportscars and motorscooters with a massive lone battleship. Wherever you hear D'Arienzo multiplying lines of music, you hear Biagi consolidating them: his typical treatment of a melody either fuses it to the rhythm section's marcado, or else magnifies it in a loud, foregrounded tutti passage. (The opening of "Humillación" alternates between both.)
The subject of countermelody writing is also worth a moment, since it plays a large role in setting one arrangement (and thus one recording) apart from another. After a certain year (which I haven't been able to identify yet), D'Arienzo consistently put eerie, creative lines in the fourth violin (i.e., the "second violin" part), and in songs like "Yuyo brujo" or "Y suma y sigue" the effect is electrifying. But with everything else going on, they're never in the foreground for long: D'Arienzo is great dance music because he's so hectic. He created a similarly crowded canvas for every song he encountered. |
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| Biagi's countermelody work is, in comparison, strikingly clean. In "Humillación," it comes to the fore in the bandoneóns; in songs like "Quiero verte una vez mas," he adds a competing violin line during the introduction which ends up highlighting the original melody. In "El 13," the violins' countermelody ends up the primary one, and the song is amazingly renewed. (Compare it with Carabelli's wonderful older version, which has its own strong countermelody additions: we have two very unique songs.) Where D'Arienzo populated the air with lines, Biagi used negative space sculpturally, carving out melodic elements and giving each song its own thematic identity. | ||
I don't understand those who say Biagi was primarily interested in rhythm in his tangos. I hear him continually summoning all available resources to a melodic or at least thematic end. His signature suckerpunch beats are emphatic not because they support the rhythm, but because they thwart it, more committed to melody than meter. D'Arienzo has relatively little accent, because he's always decorating the rhythm, keeping it intact so he can draw vignettes around it. This "King of the Beat," in the end, proved its most unwavering subject. He was loyal above all to his own style, and that style was built from the beat upward. Biagi, far less prey to the tyrannies of rhythm, didn't pave with it, but used it craftsmanlike to produce a range of dramatic moods—from the sentimental ("Soñemos") to the grand ("A la gran muñeca"), from the rustic ("Zaraza") to the vehement ("Humillación"). Biagi recycled his fills too much perhaps; but he found something distinct in the songs, and put it center-stage.
I don't know the official reason why Biagi ultimately struck out on his own, but I can't help thinking it had something to do with the aesthetic differences illustrated by the two versions of "Humillación." Whatever the cause actually was, the net effect is that he produced a very different body of work. Without his wizard pianist, D'Arienzo turned to his own instrument, the violin, for countermelody, and made a second sorcery in the music—one completely unlike the bright, nervy speed that Biagi gave his sound. And after 1938, Biagi changed roles from influential sideman-soloist to consummate bandleader. D'Arienzo and Biagi may have been great together while they lasted, but thanks be to break-ups for the respective fruits of their separation. |
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| —09 Oct. 2006 | ||
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