Romina Dezillio considers female tango singers’ artistic and social contributions to the professionalization of women within the national and international tango scene. Her study of the consolidation process of the tango cancionista (female tango singer) during the 1930s in Argentina reveals gender-based relationships between the tango canción and Argentine society as she highlights the personal styles and careers of three star cancionistas: Rosita Quiroga (1896–1984), Azucena Maizani (1902–1970), and Libertad Lamarque (1908–2000).

Paulina L. Alberto uses original research about a multigeneration family of Black musicians to illustrate different stages of musical experimentation that fed into tango. In doing so, she sheds new light on the relationship between the Afro-Argentine musical and dance tradition of candombes and early tango, and she challenges the entrenched racial narrative of Afro-Argentine “disappearance” over the course of the nineteenth century.

Kendra Stepputat examines the choreomusical aspect of tango through an ethnographic lens in European countries. She focuses on one of the currently very popular tango social dance events in Europe called encuentros milongueros, paying particular attention to how these events, originally set up to mimic tango dance environments in Buenos Aires, have developed into translocal/contemporary tango music-dance practice that is particular to Europe. In doing so, she challenges the reader to rethink what it means to call tango a transnational art form, and how this definition is evolving.

As a composer/practitioner, Julián Graciano offers insights into tango as a transnational musical form by analyzing the performance element of spontaneity and improvisation in two musical genres typically associated with the United States and Argentina, namely jazz and tango respectively. Graciano shows show how the two genres have impacted each other in sound, style, and technique, illustrated with numerous musical examples of his own tango-jazz hybrid compositions and other tango and jazz composers. As a bonus, Graciano provides a video tutorial on how to realize a tango lead sheet.

As we laid out the final chapter order of this book, we reflected on the research questions we initially posed when soliciting proposals from an array of tango scholars and scholar-artists. How do diverse humanistic fields of inquiry further shape our understanding of the tango art form? Inversely, how does the tango help us further understand culture and society? How do interdisciplinary perspectives on tango influence current scholarship? How do international perspectives on and research approaches to tango differ, and why are they important?

Morgan James Luker examines tango through the early recorded sound industry, using archival recordings of tango artist Ángel Villoldo (1861–1919). Luker shows the reader how to move from the narrative-driven mode of “causal listening” to the object-driven mode of “matrix listening,” and so view individual recorded sound objects as things with agency. He illuminates our understanding of Villoldo as a case study.

Ethnomusicologist Yuiko Asaba provides a solid global view of tango. She examines tango’s transnational dynamics with historical and ethnographic approaches, and embraces themes of affect and transculturality between Japan and Argentina.

Sociologist and tango dancer Kathy Davis provides an ethnographic exploration of passion in tango dancers, and she illustrates how such passion is embodied, attached to strongly felt emotions, and implicated in biographical transformations. She argues that tango dancing offers a perfect site for understanding the importance of passion in ordinary people’s everyday lives, gender relations in late modernity, and the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational encounters in a globalizing world.

Omar García Brunelli provides a solid historical overview of tango music, dance, and poetry. He first broadly lays out tango’s African, European, Argentine, and Uruguayan origins in the Río de la Plata region of South America, then focuses on the musical changes that took place through time. In doing so, García Brunelli highlights important contributors from tango’s guardia vieja (Old Guard), guardia nueva (New Guard), and Golden Age; discusses Piazzolla’s nuevo tango (New Tango); and brings his overview up to today by describing active contemporary tango musicians.

Film scholar Rielle Navitski applies her discipline’s lens to tango and Argentine culture. She provides an overview of tango’s intersections with film; analyzes how tango’s affective qualities and transnational wanderings have shaped a long and productive pas de deux with the cinema; shows the influence of each in a historical context; and raises broader questions of cultural exchange and hegemony.

Bárbara Varassi Pega’s chapter represents how tango studies have become institutionalized in her case study of the Tango Department at Codarts University in the Netherlands. She focuses on the work of its founder Gustavo Beytelmann (b. 1945) and the educational exchange with scholars and practitioners in Argentina.