About tango
Help save tango with a contribution
Laura J. Blutstein and Charles D. Duncan
Portland, Maine
18 December 2011
Dear friends of tango,
We write to ask you to join us in a financial gift to ensure that tango music survives over the years to come.
Did you know that only about 20% of all tango recordings are now available to us? Or that the master recording tapes and disks from the Golden Age of the 40s were discarded by the record companies? What remains is in the hands of a few collectors, sometimes only on a single terribly fragile shellac (78 rpm) record. Original hand-written sheet music is in cardboard boxes in the attic of a family member of the maestro who created it, one house fire or broken pipe away from being lost forever. There is no equivalent of the Library of Congress or the Harlem Jazz Museum.
TangoVia Buenos Aires, a non-profit organization, is doing something about this—they are creating the Tango Digital Archive to preserve these priceless materials with modern technology. Led by Ignacio Varchausky (artistic director of Orquesta El Arranque, and founder of the Tango Orchestra School), the Archive is perfectly positioned to achieve the goal. They have earned the trust of the collectors, have worked with the best sound archivists in the world, have acquired the specialized hardware, and have built a dedicated team of technicians to do the complex digitization. We had the privilege of touring the Archive and meeting with the team in November. We are sold!
Twelve file drawers of sheet music--some of it the composers' original version--await digitizing. For lack of staff time, there is not yet a backup copy of these treasures.
What the Archive needs now is our financial help to pay for the human resources to move the project along. PortTango, the community of tango dancers and musicians in Portland, Maine, has joined with the two of us to create a matching fund so that your contribution can have double the impact on saving tango. Together, we will match the first $1600 in gifts of $100-$500 made to the Archive from people in the Greater Portland area and New Hampshire. It costs about $10 to digitize and catalog one tango, so this effort alone can save 320 tangos (16 hours worth) from being lost forever! Please be as generous as you can. Ignacio Varchausky: “It is perhaps only fitting that it is the lovers of this lovers’ music who will decide if this decades-old romance with tango will survive the test of time.”
Chief engineer, Faviola Russo, explains the complexities of selecting the correct stylus shape and EQ curve.
Contributing to an Argentine non-profit group can be challenging because of the country’s strict anti-money-laundering laws. Fortunately, the Archive has a fiscal sponsor that handles these complexities for many non-profits in Argentina. It is called HelpArgentina, and contributions to it are tax-deductible for U.S. taxpayers http://www.helpargentina.org/en/digitalarchive.
Security concerns mean that you’ll need to create an account at the HelpArgentina website if you have not already done so. The process takes only about as long as listening to one tango—surely that’s worth it! Once you’ve made a qualifying donation, just send us a copy of the e-receipt and we’ll match it.
For a three-minute summary of what it’s all about, see the Associated French Press video: “Tangoing into the Digital Age” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQQiR2mx5i8.
And to hear about how the Portland Maine tango community has been involved listen to the MPBN interview at http://www.mpbn.net/News/MPBNNews/tabid/1159/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3762/ItemId/12978/Default.aspx.
Many thanks for your generosity,
–Laura & Charles
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