"Naranjo en flor". Métrica y fraseo en el tango cantado

Abstract

I’ve worked with the Naranjo en Flor chorus to analyse the tango phrasing of three singers: Jorge Linares, Floreal Ruiz and Roberto Goyeneche. I used specific software to measure in milliseconds the articulation of all the orchestral and vocal sounds, trying to understand the way they relate to each other. Considering that tango composers (like in many other vocal genres) try to synchronize the lyrics’ accents with the musical accents (or metrical structure), the listener expects that these accents would be coincident. But as I was able to notice in the analysis of these three examples, the singer’s phrasing doesn’t follow that logic. He slows it down or speeds it up, and in just a few cases he makes the phrasing sync with the orchestral accompaniment. Each one of these interpretations produces an expectation game with the audience, reinforcing the interpretation’s effect of spontaneity and uniqueness and it creates a sense of renewal in the meaning of the text, by intensification or even by contradiction.