Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) captivated Argentine and international audiences with his innovative works in a nuevo tango style and his bandoneón performances. Piazzolla?s success culminated during the 1980s with his second Quinteto, which performed remarkable concerts in venues such as the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and the Central Park Bandshell in New York, in addition to the performances at the Montreal and Montreux Jazz Festivals. His music also grew popular with a plethora of internationally acclaimed classical and jazz artists as well as with Argentine musicians themselves. However, Piazzolla?s music poses a challenge today, because nuevo tango represents a synthesis of the composer?s musical and cultural backgrounds, conjoining the tango legacy of Buenos Aires, the jazz idioms that he absorbed in New York, and the international traditions of classical music. Many musicians, specifically those from the United States, perform and study nuevo tango without having sufficient prerequisite knowledge of these practices, causing the genre to lose its cultural substance. By considering the fusion of tango, jazz, and classical genres and incorporating a cross-cultural analysis, this thesis aims to illuminate the basis of Piazzolla?s performance practices. It seeks to identify the yeites (tango instrumental techniques) that define nuevo tango and to suggest ways that the modern performer can incorporate these stylistic features to produce culturally informed interpretations of Piazzolla?s works. This study focuses on the practices of Piazzolla?s second Quinteto, at the pinnacle of his career, and emphasizes a gestural analysis of the yeites to produce a well-grounded concept of nuevo tango sound. This study concludes that, even though Piazzolla?s compositions represented a fusion of genres, the performance practices (and specifically the gestures) of the second Quinteto are primarily associated with the tango traditions of previous eras. Such gestures embody Piazzolla?s music and thus allow contemporary performers to recreate the evocative and persuasive characteristics of nuevo tango practices today.

Le but de cette thèse est d'identifier les analogies entre les manifestations culturelles des communautés noires dans les villes de Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires et New York à la fin du XIXe et au début du XXe siècle. Du point de vue de cette réflexion, nous prétendons montrer que les stimulations culturelles et idéologiques qui imprégnaient ces villes ont été fondamentales pour la formation d’une matrice provocante et atténuante dans les compositions musicales et poétiques telles quelles les sambas, milongas, tangos et jazz de cette période et passibles, de cette façon, d’être observées dans une perspective trans-hémisphérique en ce qui concerne les Amériques. Fatalement, comme les villes de Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires et New York possèdent en commun le fait d’avoir participé à une expérience modernisatrice, nous déduisons que l’élément de désillusion senti par une fraction sociale a produit un mouvement de critique dans ces manifestations musicales qui faisait échouer les objectifs civilisateurs en créant des atmosphères qui rivalisaient avec la ville officialisée. Il s’agit de la ville contre la ville qui attirera notre attention à partir de l’atmosphère sentie dans les clubs, favelas et conventillos de ces villes et qui, prise dans sa complexité et densité historique, nous fournira des éléments pour penser les similitudes et les différences de ces villes et expériences musicales dans les Amériques. / The aim of this thesis is to identify the analogies between the cultural manifestations of black communities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the point of view of this reflection, we claim to show that the cultural and ideological stimulations that permeated these cities were fundamental for the formation of a provocative and attenuating matrix in musical and poetic compositions such as sambas, milongas, tangos and jazz of this period and in this way can be observed in a trans-hemispheric perspective in the Americas. Fatally, as the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and New York have in common the fact of having participated in a modernizing experiment, we deduce that the element of disillusionment felt by a social fraction produced a movement of criticism in these musical demonstrations that defeated the civilizing aims by creating atmospheres that rivaled the official city. It is the city against the city that will draw our attention from the atmosphere felt in the clubs, favelas and conventillos of these cities and which, taken in its complexity and historical density, will provide us with elements to think similarities and the differences of these cities and musical experiences in the Americas.

Quando nos debruçamos sobre as letras de samba e tango compostas entre 1917 e 1945, notamos a reiterada presença nos sambas do personagem chamado malandro e outros de seu universo. No caso do tango, testemunhamos a do denominado compadrito e outros relacionados a ele nos tangos. Essa presença se relaciona a uma contradição constitutiva, já que esses gêneros musicais, muitas vezes relacionados à representação do nacional, propagavam um modo de vida marginal, fora do apregoado como ideal de cidadão pelos respectivos Estados nacionais. É nosso objetivo nesta tese analisar como, nas composições nas quais aparece esse tipo de personagem, emergem embates, nas diferentes formas da heterogeneidade discursiva, entre vozes que identificamos, de um lado, como filiadas com a perspectiva marginal e, de outro, com posicionamentos relacionados às ações disciplinadoras dos Estados nacionais. Trabalharemos com composições elaboradas no período de 1917-1945, momento privilegiado de discussões de cunho nacionalista, quando o samba e o tango foram, por diferentes motivos e em distintas medidas, sendo associados a questões identitárias. Os referenciais teóricos que norteiam nossa pesquisa se relacionam especialmente aos estudos discursivos e enunciativos; porém, tendo em vista o caráter interdisciplinar de nosso trabalho, também lançaremos mão de conceitos relacionados aos estudos históricos, sociológicos, musicológicos e das ciências da comunicação. / When we dedicate our attention to the samba and tango lyrics produced between the years 1917 and 1945, we notice in them the persistent presence of the character known as malandro (smooth operator), and others belonging to his universe, as well as of the character known as compadrito, and others related to him in the tango songs. Such presences are related to a constitutive contradiction, for those musical genres which were constantly related to a national representation produced a propaganda of a marginal way of life, that is, the one of the outcast opposite to the ideal of citizen such as defended by national States. In this thesis, we take the compositions in which those characters are presented, and aim to analyze the way how clashes are established in the different manners of discursive heterogeneity. We identify voices sided with the marginal perspective, and we also identify other voices, on the other side, whose position stands for the one defended by the disciplining perspective of the national States. In such a frame, we work with lyrics composed in the period from 1917 to 1945, given that is a privileged moment for discussions from a nationalist perspective. Due to several reasons and different measures, that was the period when the samba and the tango were associated to identity matters. The theoretical references heading this research are mainly related to the enunciation and discourse studies; however, once we aim at maintaining the interdisciplinary aspect of our study, we also make use of conceptions related to the historical and sociological studies, as the ones belonging to the fields of musicology and communications

La présente thèse se propose de comprendre la production musicale d’Astor Piazzolla, notamment la façon particulière dont le compositeur réalise le dialogue entre musique populaire urbaine et musique savante. Pour ce faire, nous avons repéré quatre courants musicaux principaux dont il a été possible de tracer les origines dans son œuvre : le tango, base structurelle de sa musique, le jazz, la musique baroque et la musique savante moderne. Après avoir montré leur présence dans la première partie, nous procédons à l’analyse de l’articulation particulière de ces éléments dans la deuxième. Certains traits du tango semblent privilégiés dans ce métissage, en constituant des éléments de base repérables principalement par des gestes mélodiques, des modèles d’accompagnement et des timbres caractéristiques très fréquemment employés, qui assurent aussi bien la cohésion et l’unité musicale que l’identité du genre urbain argentin. Cette fusion musicale utilise à de nombreuses reprises des caractéristiques communes des musiques métissées comme stratégie de réussite de l’alliage musical ; on constate dans certains passages un subtil et soigneux dosage des ingrédients musicaux utilisés. Le discours du compositeur, analysé au dernier chapitre, nous a permis en outre de dégager trois aspects de ce rapport entre populaire et savant : la recherche d’une identité, en produisant une musique qui représente la ville de Buenos Aires et l’Argentine ; un rapport aux avant-gardes modernistes, en cherchant à exprimer l’ère de son temps et à symboliser la nouveauté à travers une musique moderne ; la recherche d’une légitimité, apparue notamment sous l’expression de l’« élévation » du tango. / The aim of the present thesis is to understand the musical production of Piazzolla, especially the particular dialogue between popular and art music in his work. To do so, we located four main musical streams which origins were possible to trace: the tango, structural basis of his music, the jazz, the baroque music and the modern art music. Having shown their presence in the first part, we proceed to the analysis of the particular articulation of these elements in the second one. Certain features of the tango seem favored in this junction, constituting the basic elements mainly through the presence of melodic gestures, accompaniment models and characteristic timbres very frequently used, which assure the cohesion and musical unity as well as the identity of the Argentine urban genre. On numerous occasions, his fusion employs common characteristics of the several music crossed as a strategy for reaching the musical jointure; we also noticed in certain passages a subtle and careful dosage of the musical ingredients used. The speech of the composer analyzed in the last chapter still allowed us to identify three aspects of this relationship between popular and art music: the search for an identity, by producing a music which represents the city of Buenos Aires and Argentina; a relationship with the modernist avant-gardes, in an attempt to express the present time and to symbolize the novelty through a modern music; and the quest for legitimacy, appeared notably under the expression of the "rise" of the tango.

En Argentine et à l’étranger, le tango inspire un engouement croissant depuis un peu plus de dix ans. Mais lorsqu’on fait référence au tango on omet souvent que l’on désigne en fait un ensemble complexe d’expressions artistiques populaires –musique, danse et paroles chantées– qui mettent en scène une identité argentine. Les identités sont en effet le résultat de constructions discursives –informées par les discours sociaux sur les rapports de classe, de race et de sexe- qui se manifestent et font l’objet d’une reformulation constante dans les objets culturels. L’objectif consiste à comprendre comment une identité est véhiculée dans le tango et à identifier les discours sociaux qui l’ont construite selon des modalités singulières en fonction des époques. Pour ce faire, nous travaillerons à partir du corpus des refrains et des strophes constitué par l’ethnologue Robert Lehmann-Nitsche dans son ouvrage Textos Eróticos del Río de la Plata, ainsi que à partir des paroles de tango publiées entre 1900 et 1935, période qui correspond à deux étapes fondamentales : la Guardia Vieja et la Guardia Nueva. L’étude de l’œuvre poétique du groupe Gotan Project et de l’œuvre picturale surréaliste du peintre argentin Juan Carlos Liberti compléteront notre corpus à partir des formes contemporaines.Dans le premier volet de l’étude, il s’agira d’analyser la définition institutionnelle du tango à partir de l’étude du discours des historiens cosignataires de la demande d’inscription du tango dans le répertoire des objets culturels faisant partie du patrimoine immatériel universel auprès de l’Unesco. Dans la deuxième partie, nous questionnerons les luttes symboliques au principe des périodisations à l’œuvre dans l’histoire du tango. Un retour sur les premiers tangos recueillis par Lehmann-Nitsche, dont les thématiques sont associées aux maisons closes, qualifiés de « préhistoriques », et de ce fait marginalisées par la critique, nous permettra de rétablir les origines populaires du tango. / In Argentina and abroad, tango has known an increasing popularity over the last ten years. However, we often overlook the fact that tango is a term referring to a complex structure of popular artistic expressions, i.e. music, dancing and lyrics, forming an Argentinean identity. Indeed, identities are constantly shaped by relationships influenced by social classes, races and gender. Those discursive constructions offer a constant re-interpretation of cultural objects. The aim of our analysis consists in comprehending how an identity is reflected in tango and how to identify the social discourses which have built the tango along different periods and according to particular modalities. To answer to those questions, we will refer to the corpus of choruses and strophes constituted by the ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche in his book Textos Eroticos del Rio de la Plata as well as tango lyrics published between 1900 and 1935. This period corresponds to two stages of the evolution of tango referred to by musicians as the Guardia Vieja and the Guardia Nueva. The study of the poetic work of the Gotan Project group and of the pictorial work of the Argentinean surrealist painter Juan Carlos Liberti will complete our corpus of cultural objects of the contemporary era. In the first part of the study, we analyze the institutional definition of tango based on the study of the discourse of historians who signed the request to UNESCO for the inclusion of tango among cultural objects belonging to the universal immaterial heritage. In this part, we will shed light on the stakes associated to the definition of tango and expose our current critique on the subject. In the second part, we will question the symbolic struggles which are at the root of the different chapters making up tango’s history. A look back on the first tangos gathered by Lehmann-Nitsche—whose themes are brothels, qualified as ‘prehistoric’ and as such, marginalized by critics—will allow us to re-establish the popular origins of tango

In this thesis we compared some variants of binary search trees that approach dynamic optimality: Tango trees, Multisplay trees, and Splay trees. We empirically tested the behavior of these three types of trees, as well as Red-Black trees. We measured the amount of visited nodes per operation and running time on real hardware. We proved that Tango trees and Multisplay trees are in most cases less efficient than Splay trees and Red-Black trees. Cache-related effects played a surprisingly large part in the behavior of Red-Black tree and Splay tree. 1

An experiential thesis, this document begins at dawn, travels through storms and calm air and ends at night in Argentina. It details the circumstances and influences leading to my thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, including an artist’s statement told through a creative reading of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” and the excitement I found in an out-of-print text on scuba diving.

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Research Report required for the completion of Master of Arts – Applied Drama (MAAD) Drama for Life - Wits School of Arts - Wits University March 2015 / This study aims to explore ideas of liberation in relation to the present tendencies of gender representation in Tango. I argue that the traditional pedagogic model, observed in Johannesburg, tends to perpetuate hegemonic discourses mainly through terminology in which gender binaries, codes and subjectivities are normalized. Such representations reduce, or even reject, plurality and diversity by sustaining specific power dynamics, necessarily related to the role of men and women. Tango is characterized by certain aesthetic elements described in this thesis, and here I prioritize the analysis of its role as a social dance, in the category of couples’ dances. I argue that couples’ dances are embedded in historically and socially constructed stereotypes; thus, the dynamics observed in balls are not capable of reflecting present gender complexities and identities. To do so, I first present a critical reflection of the history of couples’ dances and Tango, along with my own lived experience as a movement facilitator. Then, I present descriptions of the first phase of the research, the Performance as Research (PAR) project in which I aimed to deconstruct hegemony by challenging gender fixities. The PAR included creative processes, interviews, performance, media and textual production, and the main outcome was related to the pedagogy of dance, presenting the DE-GENDERED MODEL of teaching-learning. In the second phase of research, or what I call the fieldwork, I engaged with different methods, such as dance meetings based on investigative approaches, body mapping, micro-performance, group discussions and questionnaires to collect data together with a group of 9 participants. I made sense of all the information collected during PAR, and, given by participants during fieldwork, by correlating theories of performance, critical pedagogy, gender and queer studies, with the purpose of including collaborative pathways of embodiment.

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing. In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and ecologic geographies, intersections of community and government, and the colonial-indigenous language continuum of Paraguay (Spanish-Guaraní). Further, these neighbors’ localized trauma is located within historical, colonial trauma. Of particular concern is the role that languages – English, Spanish, and Guaraní – play in constructing power, worldview, and relationships within the village.