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Rosita Quiroga - La musa mistonga (The humble muse)

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Rosita Quiroga was from that first generation of female tango voices, the generation I call  arrabalera  - authentic voices of the arrabal, the poor margins of Buenos Aires, untrained, unsophisticated, but full of feeling and expression. Born and bred in the waterfront barrio of La Boca, as a child she often found, when she swung her legs out of bed in the morning, that the floor was underwater. In August 1922 she made a single recording for the Victor company (a great story that will have to wait for another time) but it was rejected by the regional manager and sat on a shelf for the rest of the year, the disc appearing only in January 1923. That same year she was the first woman to perform on the new medium of the radio, and on March 1st 1926 she was the first artist to make a recording using the new electrical system. The track she chose was La musa mistonga  whose lyrics, by the celebrated lyricist Celedonio Flores, are typically full of lunfardo (the local slang), ...
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Welcome to Tango 100 years

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On 1st March 1926 the technicians of the Victor company in Argentina made the first electrical recording in Argentina, with their rivals Odeon following suit six months later. Prior to this, recordings had been made using the acoustic system in which a horn focussed sound energy directly onto the stylus which cut the groove into the wax. Musicians crowd around the horn in the recording studio using the old acoustic system  The new electrical technology (with a microphone and valve amplifier) offered much better fidelity than the old system. In particular, the high and low frequencies were recorded more faithfully than before. However, neither company made a big announcement because they did not want to damage sales of their existing discs, of which they had large stocks. Was this introduction without much consequence, then? Not at all. It acted as a huge stimulus to the musicians, keen to exploit the advantages of the new system. The development of tango music - already under way...
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Location: Norwich, UK
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