Besides being a superb poet and noted figure of the musical stage, Horacio is a renowned educator of tango music and lyrics.

Terry: The work you've done with the Academy of the Tango; we'd like to know something of the Academy's history, how it got started and what was its intention.

Horacio: I'll tell you. In 1954, many years ago, I was an adolescent, and I founded La Guardia Nueva in Montevideo. The musicians came, and we worked very well together; and we began to do intellectual work there in the history of, and the thought behind, the tango. It was a very modest group; we were almost all university people, and there were some artists. We worked on magazines that were printed by...it was called "mimeograph." We did them and we were very keen about it, as much in Montevideo as in Buenos Aires and other cities. The work we did!

A lot later, after becoming an Argentine citizen as well, and since there were national academies in Argentina, it occurred to me to found a National Academy of the Tango. So I spoke with the Secretary of Culture, and then the President called me to ask me for one of my books, and I said to him, "What would you think, Mr. President, if we were to...?"

He said to me, "I'm a tanguero, and I love the idea. You put it together, and I'll support you." And so in six months the Academy had been constituted. And now it's been in existence for many years. We have our publications, our academics, our exhibitions, our CD's. We have corresponding academies in several parts of the world, that aren't branches, but rather independent institutions with which we collaborate.

I think we've brought back together the people who know the most about the tango, from many different angles, eh?, because the tango can be approached from a scientific point of view, by demography, sociology, psychology, from an esthetic point of view, an artistic one.

It can be approached from a philosophical point of view, from the musical point of view, from the choreographic point of view. So that there are many ways of analyzing the tango and arriving at knowing the tango. And so we have the titled academics, the honored ones who are also artists, no? Plus the young people and the generation in between, plus a permanent assemblage of knowledge, of exchange, that I hope can be disseminated through fellowships, through the exchange back and forth of people, by doing conferences, courses, etc.

Terry: And what's the state of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires now? For example, are there musicians who are writing tangos now?

Horacio: Tango was always like...anti-official, right? And that's changed a little in recent years, and there's the Orquesta del Tango de Buenos Aires and the Orquesta Nacional de Música Argentina, that play only the tango, and they're both very good. And there are many new orchestras, like Tangata Rea, Siglo XXX, quite young groups. For which we have work to do at the Academy, and that's what we're there for, to conserve the different styles. That's why there's the Orchesta Académica.

And now we've got the entrance of women into the orchestras. Orchestras were always all men. And now there are many women playing in Argentine orchestras and everywhere in the world. And with that, the old tradition of European tango, that was a very hardened sort of tango, a less affectionate one, you might put it, has given way. Because the maestros of the Rio de La Plata (the areas around Buenos Aires and Montevideo) have been to Holland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Canada, and have given dance lessons, music lessons, how to conduct, how to play the bandoneón.

The language of the tango has been profoundly understood, so now it's a subject with real sensitivity. You know, the young guy playing the bandoneón in our María de Buenos Aires presentation, who's Norwegian, learned Spanish in order to be able to speak with the tangueros, with his proper masters.

Terry: That's my story, too. I was studying Spanish just so that I could escape from a life crisis a number of years ago, and I liked the tango lyrics because I thought I could learn Spanish better through the lyrics, and the music as well. But a friend of mine told me one day, "You can't study the tango without dancing it. You can't." And I, who had not danced a step in my life, told her, "No, I can't dance. I just can't." But after two years of insisting on it, she convinced me, and I went very, very nervously to a tango lesson. With Nora Dinzelbacher. I've been studying with her ever since.

Horacio: Well, to dance the tango, you have to listen to it, to listen to the music well, to what the lyrics are saying, to what each tango is saying, no? We could talk a great deal more about this.

Terry: I'm going to go see María de Buenos Aires this Saturday, and I'd like to know how you wrote it. Where'd the idea come from?

Horacio: It came from two places: one is that, in 1965, I had written a book called Romancero Canyengue.

Terry: Yes, it's poetry.

Horacio: It's poetry. And it was the first book, or the first poems that had the good fortune to be in that book, in which I found that I had my own voice. The previous voice could have been OK, but it was like that of other writers, like Homero Manzí, it was like Espósito, it was like Lamadrid. But in that book I found myself...the voice in the tango, and Piazzolla liked it so much that he told me, "From now on you're working with me, because what you're doing in words, I'm doing in music." He invited me to do a piece. He said, "No, no, not a tango. Do a big work. I want to do something like West Side Story," he told me. So I went about writing what he'd asked me to write.

Terry: I imagine your heart was beating.

Horacio: Please. Please. Of course! But that meant I would abandon everything else, and I like that kind of thing. And, well, I wrote it in 1967, starting in August or September. And in December Piazzolla came to Montevideo and I read what I had written to him...it was almost everything. And we went to a little bar in Uruguay, and on my bandoneón...because I played the bandoneón too...he wrote the music. We finished it in Buenos Aires and we put it on for the first time on May 8, 1968. And it was so revolutionary. Raul Lavié was going to sing it for us, because he was in Mexico City doing "Man of La Mancha", but then he couldn't come. So now, for the first time, years later, he's singing with us on this tour now. It's fantastic, no?

So it was the first work we'd done with Astor, whom I'd known since 1948 when I was fifteen years old and I went to see his orchestra. I was a friend of his, and more so when I did La Guardia Nueva, which he loved. He always came to play, to talk, to feel like was with the young people, which he liked.

So that's how María de Buenos Aires got started: Romancero Canyengue and the time I spent with Piazzolla.

(Concluded in Part 4)