I just took a beginning Argentine Tango class and really enjoyed the experience. I’ve had some experience with Ballroom Tango (American Style) and even taken a little Argentine Tango before, but this particular class really underlined the difference in the actually dance style. Searching the web, I find plenty of evidence for this.
From the musical perspective, I found that I would be comfortable dancing Ballroom Tango to most of what the instructors played for Argentine Tango. The character of the music seems very much the same. The tempo was definitely slower than I would choose, but it was a beginner’s class after all. The beat was less clear in many of the songs than I would expect in a Ballroom tango played at a school, club or competition, which was surprising. This was a beginner’s class after all.
Now that I think about it, the Spotify EchoNest integration in music4dance could shed some light on the subject of strength of beat. You can do an informal analysis yourself:
- Go to the songs library page.
- Choose Argentine Tango.
- Click on the strength of beat sort (the header icon that looks like a drum) once for ascending and twice for descending order.
- This will get you a list of the (currently) 578 songs that have been classified specifically as Argentine Tango sorted by the strength of beat.
- Or just click here to see the list.
- In a separate window repeat step’s 1-4 substituting Ballroom Tango for step 2 to get the 438 Ballroom Tango songs that have “strength of beat” information.
- Or just click here.
Now you can see the lists of Argentine Tango and Ballroom Tango both sorted by strength of beat. At a quick glance the distribution seems pretty similar, but if anyone is at all interested let me know via a comment to this blog and I will be happy to do a slightly more formal analysis.
The other aspect of Tango music for dancers that this brought up was where to draw the line on calling something generically Tango vs. Ballroom Tango vs. Argentine Tango, etc. I am currently calling anything a Tango that someone has tagged as any kind of Tango, which I think is fair. Often people will just call something just Tango if they are from a particular community and I think that’s fair too.
If you are interested in stretching your reach and finding all Tangoes of whatever classification that fit a specific tempo criteria, you can use advanced search to choose generic Tango as the dance and choose a tempo range you’re interested in. Or if you’re a Ballroom dancer you can go to the Competition Ballroom Dancing page and just click on the tempo range for the category of Ballroom Tango that you’re interested in. I’ve set things up with the current official tempos for DanceSport and NDCA competition classes.
Speaking of official tempos. Although I’ve found quite a number of sites that advertise and even provide rules for Argentine Tango competitions, I have yet to find anything that defines any kind of official tempo ranges for the music played at the competitions. I suspect this is something fundamentally different about those competitions. However, if I’m missing something and there are such official ranges, please let me know and I’ll incorporate them into the site.
And as always, please let me know what I’ve missed. This is a very nuanced subject and I would love to hear other perspectives. Feel free to comment on this post or send feedback directly.
music4dance 
My understanding is that Argentine Tango music for social dancing has a higher requirement for danceability, while competitions are more apt to take their cues from stage shows, which tend to use listening music rather than social dancing music. Tango listening music often has various tempi within one song, and sometimes a lot of tempo ad lib.
Music from before c. 1955 tends to be preferred for social dance because back then the bands were still recording a lot of dance music.
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