Expressive microstructures of timing in the style of Aníbal Troilo’s tango orchestra

Musicologists and musicians tend to think that the organic features of a musical style are annotated in the musical score. However, musicians add innumerous types of variations during performance, accounting for a range of differences within the boundaries of the style itself. Tango musicians are aware of these features when they speak about the melodic phrasing during performance. In some music styles, such as jazz and samba, the systematic recurrence of rhythmic-melodic patterns became an idiosyncratic feature that supports the identification of the style itself (Benadon, 2006; Naveda et al, 2011). An expressive characteristic of melodic phrasing in tango would consist of the production of temporal recurrences in the peculiar elongation and shortening of rhythmic-melodic patterns embedded in the microstructure of the phrase