Música rioplatense

Tango

Tango is a style of music in 2/4 or 4/4 time that originated among European immigrant populations of Argentina and Uruguay (collectively, the “Rioplatenses“). It is traditionally played on a solo guitar, guitar duo, or an ensemble, known as the orquesta típica, which includes at least two violins, flute, piano, double bass, and at least two bandoneóns. Sometimes guitars and a clarinet join the ensemble. Tango may be purely instrumental or may include a vocalist.

In the early 20th century it was the favorite music of thugs and gangsters who visited the brothels, in a city with 100,000 more men than women (in 1914). The complex dances that arose from such rich music reflects how the men would practice the dance in groups, demonstrating male sexuality and causing a blending of emotion and aggressiveness.

All sources stress the influence of the African communities and their rhythms, while the instruments and techniques brought in by European immigrants in the 20th century played a major role in its final definition.

During the golden age from about 1935 to 1952, Carlos Gardel made tango widely popular.

From the 1950ies, Ástor Piazolla dominated the tango, giving rise to tango nuevo.

Milonga and habanera

Milonga is a musical genre that originated in the Río de la Plata areas of Argentina and Uruguay. It was very popular in the 1870s.

It is set in lively 2/4. Milonga has a syncopated beat, consisting of 8 beats with accents on the 1st (sometimes also 2nd), 4th, 5th, and 7th beats:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

The former is explained in this video. Francisco Canaro’s Milonga Criolla sounds like this:

The same rhythm is used in the earlier habaneras of Afro-Cuban origin, for example in Carmen by French composer Georges Bizet’s:

This explains why sometimes a milonga is referred to as an “excited habanera”. Another famous example is La Paloma by Spanish Basque composer Sebastián Iradier:

Bandoneón

The bandeoneón is an essential instrument in most tango ensembles from the traditional orquesta típica of the 1910s onwards.

The Bandonion, so named by the German instrument dealer Heinrich Band (1821–1860), was originally intended as an instrument for religious and popular music of the day, in contrast to its predecessor, German concertina (Konzertina), which had predominantly been used in folk music.

By 1910 bandoneons were being produced expressly for the Argentine and Uruguayan markets, with 25,000 shipping to Argentina in 1930 alone. However, declining popularity and the disruption of German manufacturing in World War II led to an end of bandoneon mass-production.

Historically, bandoneons were produced primarily in Germany and never in Argentina itself, despite their popularity in that country. As a result, vintage bandoneons had by the 2000s become rare and expensive (costing around 4000 USD), limiting the opportunities for prospective bandeonists. In 2014, the National University of Lanús announced its plan to develop an affordable Argentine-made bandoneon, which it hoped to market for one-third to one-half of the cost of vintage instruments.

Décima

A décima is a ten-line stanza of poetry, and the song form generally consists of forty-four lines (an introductory four-line stanza followed by four ten-line stanzas). It is also called “espinela” after its founder, Vicente Espinel (1550–1624), a Spanish writer and musician of the Siglo de Oro.

The decima in all Latin America and in Spain is a style of poetry that is octosyllabic and has 10 lines to the stanza. The rhyming scheme is ABBAACCDDC. It is spoken, sung and written throughout Latin America with variations in different countries. It is often improvised.

An example is Volver a los diecisiete de Violeta Parra:

Volver a los diecisiete
después de vivir un siglo
es como descifrar signos
sin ser sabio competente
volver a ser de repente
tan frágil como un segundo
volver a sentir profundo
como un niño frente a Dios,
eso es lo que siento
yo en este instante fecundo
 
Se va enredando enredando, como en el muro la hiedra
y va brotando, brotando como el musguito en la piedra
como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si
 
Mi paso retrocedido,
cuando el de ustedes avanza
el arco de las alianzas
ha penetrado en mi nido
con todo su colorido
se ha paseado por mis venas
y hasta la dura cadena
con que nos ata el destino
es como un día bendecido
que alumbra mi alma serena
 
Se va enredando, enredando, como en el muro la hiedra
y va brotando, brotando como el musguito en la piedra
como el musguito en la piedra, ay sí, sí, sí
 
Lo que puede el sentimiento
no lo ha podido el saber,
ni el mas claro proceder
ni el mas ancho pensamiento
todo lo cambia el momento
colmado condescendiente,
nos aleja dulcemente
de rencores y violencias
solo el amor con su ciencia
nos vuelve tan inocentes
 
Se va enredando, enredando, como en el muro la hiedra
y va brotando, brotando como el musguito en la piedra
como el musguito en la piedra, ay sí, sí, sí
 
El amor es torbellino
de pureza original
hasta el feroz animal
susurra su dulce trino,
retiene a los peregrinos,
libera a los prisioneros,
el amor con sus esmeros,
al viejo lo vuelve niño
y al malo solo el cariño
lo vuelve puro y sincero
 
Se va enredando, enredando, como en el muro la hiedra
y va brotando, brotando como el musguito en la piedra
como el musguito en la piedra, ay sí, sí, sí
 
De par en par la ventana
se abrió como por encanto
entro el amor con su manto
como una tibia mañana
y al son de su bella diana
hizo brotar el jazmín,
volando qual serafín
al cielo le puso a retes
y mis anos en diecisiete
los convirtió el querubín
 
Se va enredando, enredando, como en el muro la hiedra
y va brotando, brotando como el musguito en la piedra
como el musguito en la piedra, ay sí, sí, sí
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Boredom

You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.

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Unicode 𒆟

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before the Unicode standard was developed, there were many different systems, called character encodings, for assigning these numbers. These earlier character encodings were limited and did not cover characters for all the world’s languages. Even for a single language like English, no single encoding covered all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use. Pictographic languages, such as Japanese, were a challenge to support with these earlier encoding standards.

Early character encodings also conflicted with one another. That is, two encodings could use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer might have to support many different encodings. However, when data is passed between computers and different encodings it increased the risk of data corruption or errors.

Additionally, researchers in the 1980s faced the dilemma that on the one hand, it seemed necessary to add more bits to accommodate additional characters, but on the other hand, for the users of the relatively small character set of the Latin alphabet (who still constituted the majority of computer users), those additional bits were a colossal waste of then-scarce and expensive computing resources (as they would always be zeroed out for such users).

The compromise solution that was eventually found and developed into Unicode was to break the assumption (dating back to telegraph codes) that each character should always directly correspond to a particular sequence of bits. Instead, each character would first be mapped to a universal intermediate representation in the form of abstract numbers called code points.

Here is the complete list of all Unicode code points. The basic Latin characters (ASCII) can be found here.

Each code point would then be represented in a variety of ways and with various default numbers of bits per character (code units) depending on context. To encode code points higher than the length of the code unit, such as above 256 for 8-bit units, the solution was to implement variable-width encodings where an escape sequence would signal that subsequent bits should be parsed as a higher code point.

The Unicode standard was created on an encoding foundation large enough to support the writing systems used by all the world’s languages.  Over the years the Unicode standard encoding has been steadily expanded and now includes languages like Cherokee, Mongolian, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Beyond simply providing a standardized system of character codes, the Unicode Consortium has expanded the scope of its efforts to include standard “locale” data, such as how a date is formatted in Arabic or Swahili, and code libraries that assist programmers to develop.

Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization based in Mountain View, California.

Same Unicode code point but different encodings. Code units in the UTF8 encoding have 28 = 162 bits and in the UTF16 encoding have 216 = 164 bits. In UTF8 three code units of 28 bits each are needed to represent the € sign.
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Cifra argentina

  • s/l y c/l — sin y con lugar
  • franeleo — AR, caricias, es el contacto fisico con intenciones de seducción (de franela = flannel)
  • franelero — adjective corresponding to franeleo
  • chapar — AR, coloquial, smooch, kiss with the tongue
  • fajar — colloquial, make out (“Un policía agarró a Luis y Alicia fajando en el parque.”)
  • fajarse — AmL, beat up (“Los dos hombres se fajaron en la calle porque uno de ellos había insultado a la novia del otro.”)
  • pajar, coger, joder, garchar — fuck
  • follamigo, amigarche — fuck buddy
  • a pelo — without condom
  • morboso — AR, kinky (more in a playful than perverted way)
  • lechero — produces a lot of cum
  • guarro — pig, dirty
  • pija, pene — penis
  • en bolas — very informal, naked
  • petero — persona que habitualmente estimula el pene de su amante con la boca
  • pete — sexo oral (de chupete)
  • foto en cuero — nude pic of torso
  • chongo — date
  • chongear — to date
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