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February 2008: Kristin Wendland

On Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, the Emory Tango Ensemble will take the stage alongside the Emory Big Band and guest musicians Pablo Aslan, bass, and Emilio Solla, piano, for a free performance of tango and jazz music. The program includes exciting arrangements of tango/jazz fusion music originally created for Todo Tango, a recent performance with Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. The faculty member largely responsible for this massive collaborative effort is Kristin Wendland, a Senior Lecturer in the Music Department who has spent many years researching the music, dance, and history of the Argentine tango. Along with courses in undergraduate music theory, she also gives a seminar, Tango: Argentina’s Art Form in Body, Mind, and Spirit, which she has taught twice both as a Freshman Seminar and as 300-level course on the Summer Study Abroad Program in Buenos Aires. She is the faculty advisor for the Emory College Club Tangueros Emory and is the director of the Emory Tango Ensemble.

Wendland received a Fulbright Lecture and Research grant in 2005, which enabled her to give a seminar in Schenkerian analysis at the Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires and to pursue her research in the music of Argentine tango. She has read papers, participated in panel sessions, and led demonstration workshops on these topics for various professional conferences. She has organized, co-directed, narrated, and performed Argentine tango programs including last year’s performance by Osvaldo Barrios, an Emory Coca-Cola Artist in Residence, the Emory Tango Ensemble, and special guests Pablo Aslan and Ruben Stefano. Wendland holds a PhD in Composition from the City University of New York.

In the midst of performance preparations, rehearsals, and classes, Dr. Wendland was able to sit down and talk about her initial interest in the tango, her Fulbright research grant, and the upcoming performance.

Q: How did you first become interested in the tango? Did you start with the dance or the music?
A: I first became interested in the tango through my background as a social dancer. I was a swing dancer in New York City before moving to Atlanta. I saw a performance of Argentine tango (as opposed to ballroom tango) at the dance studio where I was taking lessons and it made a huge impression on me. The couple was cloaked in a magical sphere of intimacy that I thought ‘one day I’m going to learn this dance.’ I started taking tango classes about ten years ago. After about two years of learning the dance, I decided that I wanted to go to the source, so I took my first trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2000 through an ICIS (Institute for Comparative and International Studies at Emory) study grant. Gradually, because of the relationship between the music and the dance, I was able to bring the music into my body by studying how the music maps onto the dance and vice versa. I’ve been studying the music for about four years now. I was originally trained as a classical pianist, but tango styles are very different to play. I now study arranging and tango piano with Sonia Possetti in Buenos Aires. It’s a different style, just like jazz. You just don’t walk into playing tango having only studiedMozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.

Q: Talk a little bit about the evolution of the Emory Tango Ensemble.  
A: I am now into my second year as a coach for the Emory Tango Ensemble, which is part of the Emory Chamber Music program. I formed the group when I came back from my Fulbright-sponsored trip to Argentina. My goal is to create arrangements of tango music for the instruments in our ensemble and to really study and promote the music of the tango. This is generally very difficult because there are not many authentic tango musicians living around here, so imagine my amazement when I came back from my Fulbright only to discover that Osvaldo Barrios (professional tango musician) had just moved to Atlanta. Thanks to the Emory Friends of Music group and the Emory Coca-Cola Artist-in-Residence Program I’ve been able to bring Osvaldo into our ensemble as a guest artist. It’s very exciting to have a real Argentine tango musician who has been playing the tango all of his life be an active coach for our ensemble. We also study the music through recordings and what information I can bring back from my travels. The things we cover include string techniques, performance, interpretations, tempos, fluidity of phrasing…basically anything that’s not directly evident in the score. The goal is to keep building and increasing our repertoire in order to spread the love and interest in tango music.

Q: How did you become involved with Tangueros Emory? What does it do?
A: I am the faculty advisor for Tangueros Emory. The group was started in 1999 but it didn’t really catch on. I came in as an advisor and helped to reform the group. It is now a fixed college club under the Emory College Council with a charter, a budget, and an advisor. We host milongas (tango dances) on the first Saturday of every month in the Glenn Memorial Fellowship Hall, and we have weekly classes on Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. in the same location. On March 29, 2008 we’re going to co-host a Swango with the Emory Swing Club. Our dance teacher is Horacio Arcidiacono, who has been teaching since he moved to Atlanta from Buenos Aires. It is so important to have an authentic teacher. He teaches the authentic social tango that they do in Buenos Aires, not the ballroom style, which is a very different kind of dance.

Q: What was your Fulbright grant for? What was the experience like?
A: My Fulbright research grant in 2005 allowed me to go to Buenos Aires and give a course in Schenkerian analysis at the Universidad Católica Argentina. My research quest while I was there was to find tango scores or orchestrations from the “Golden Age” of tango, which would be the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. The goal was to collect the scores in order to create an anthology of authentic tango scores, which I am still working on. It was such a journey as an outsider to try and establish the trust needed to get into the inner circles of the tango world. People just don’t give out scores if they have them. First you have to find the right contact, but even if you do, much of the written material has been lost or has been packed away in boxes. Only recently have people in Argentina started to see the value of their heritage. Some institutions have begun to recover and preserve these old scores, but it’s a process that has only just begun. Fortunately, I came back with enough music to start making arrangements which I was able to use for the tango ensemble. It’s an ongoing project; I’m still cataloging a ton of music that I brought back. Eventually I’d love to make Emory a repository for an archive of tango.

Q: Talk a little bit about the Feb. 28 performance, Pablo Aslan, Emilio Solla, and idea of a tango/jazz concert.
A: I’ve known Pablo Aslan since I started dancing tango because, not only is he a great bass player, but he also used to give musicality workshops around the country for dancers. I brought him to Emory for my first tango event in 2002. He came with his trio and gave a masterclass for my music students, a musicality workshop for dancers, and a concert/milonga. He also came to perform in 2005 with Avantango and more recently with Osvaldo Barrios. Pablo embodies the fusion of tango and jazz because he’s Argentine but has been living in the States and studying jazz at the University of California, Berkeley. Emilio Solla was primarily a jazz pianist but has now gravitated more towards tango. They are both experimenting with tango/jazz music. Last April I saw their performance with the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra at Lincoln Center. Since we have such a great jazz program here, I thought it would be a good way to join forces and present Pablo and Emilio as the new face of tango, which is more experimental than the traditional. Gary Motley, (Director of Jazz Studies at Emory), has been rehearsing two arrangements of tango but with a jazz flair for the Emory Big Band who are also performing in the February concert. The Emory Tango Ensemble will open the program with a work by Astor Piazzola, one traditional tango, and a milonga by Sonia Possetti.

Q: Just for Fun: Besides the tango, what other types of music do you listen to? Is there another dance form you'd like to learn?
A: I listen to all different kinds of music from classical to contemporary music. I really love jazz as well. As far as the dancing goes, I already do a lot of different kinds of dance. Out of all the social dances tango is the crème de la crème, so there’s nowhere to go after you study tango. But I still love to swing dance. I also practice yoga because I find that tango and yoga complement each other.

Photo Captions:
Top: Osvaldo Barrios (left) and Kristin
Middle: Sonia Possetti (left) and Kristin at Possetti's home in Argentina.
Bottom: Kristin (at keyboards) performing in Inman Park with Osvaldo.

Edited by Jessica Moore
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory

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