Milonga: A Glossary of the Genre and Its Dance

Milonga denotes at once a musical genre and a type of social dance.^[1] Reference catalogues likewise record it simply as a dance form,^[2] while in the wider tango tradition the term belongs to the Río de la Plata, the broad estuary that separates Argentina from Uruguay.^[3] Its two anchoring cities sit on opposite banks: the Argentine capital lies on the south-western side of that river,^[4] and the Uruguayan capital faces it from the north-eastern shore.^[5] Histories of popular dance group milonga with tango among the hybrid New World forms that took shape in the late nineteenth century, when African movement met the European habit of couple dancing in the carnivals and dance halls of the Plate.^[6]

The term is best defined against its cognate forms. Surveys of tango's ancestry list the candombe, the Cuban habanera, the mazurka and the European polka beside milonga as the idioms whose imprint persists in the later dance.^[7] Of these the habanera's path is the most fully traced in the cited literature: it crossed from Cuba into Spanish salons and came back so altered that Cuban listeners are reported to have rejected the returning version, while the black mutual-aid cabildos figure among the festive settings in which such transgressive rhythms fermented.^[8] Milonga, on this account, is one node in a network of forms that circulated between port cities and social classes long before any of them earned respectable standing.

Several terms milonga shares with its tango sibling describe instrumentation and idiom rather than steps. The bandoneón occupies the centre of the classic Rioplatense ensemble, usually set among violins, piano and double bass,^[9] and the sung repertoire is carried in lunfardo, the local argot of many lyrics.^[9] Dancers in turn speak of connection, which a study of Argentine practice characterises as a feeling of full synchrony binding each dancer to a partner and to the music together.^[10]

Beyond the dance floor, milonga also names a sung and poetic form. Folklore scholarship pairs the milonga's poetic and musical airs with the song of the payador, the improvising rural singer whose tradition has been repeatedly reinterpreted.^[11] The form likewise drew literary notice: Jorge Luis Borges set verses under the title of a milonga and composed a history of the tango, a mark of the genre's place in Rioplatense letters.^[12]

Period score collections preserve the criollo forms that surround milonga in the notated repertoire. The published scores of the Uruguayan composer José Pierri Sapere gather a milonga together with an estilo and a campera, song types of the rural Plate.^[13] A further set of his milonga scores was digitised in Uruguay, a modest measure of the form's survival in the country's written tradition.^[14] By the twentieth century the genre had acquired a composed, orchestral repertoire with named exemplars: the Argentine pianist and orchestra director Mariano Mores wrote "Taquito militar", a piece later chosen by popular vote as the milonga of the century, carrying the form from the dance hall toward the concert and revue stage.^[15]