text:
Tango (disambiguation)

Tango is a social dance form including Argentine, Uruguayan, and international ballroom tango.

Tango may also refer to:

Dance

 * Tango (Balanchine), a ballet by George Balanchine based on a Stravinsky composition
 * Tango (Martins), a ballet by Peter Martins based on a Stravinsky composition
 * Maxixe (dance), also known as "Brazilian tango"

Films

 * ¡Tango! (1933 film), a film by Argentine director Luis Moglia Barth
 * Tango (1933 film), a film by Danish director George Schnéevoigt
 * Tango (1936 film), a film by Phil Rosen
 * Tango (1969 film), a 1969 Bulgarian film
 * Tango (1981 film), an animated film by Polish director Zbigniew Rybczyński
 * Tango (1993 film), a film by French director Patrice Leconte
 * Tango (1998 film), a film by Spanish director Carlos Saura

Genres and styles

 * Tango music, a genre of music that originated in Argentina and Uruguay
 * Tango (flamenco), a song-form or instrumental-form of flamenco music

Albums

 * Tango (Julio Iglesias album), 1996
 * Tango (Patty Larkin album), 1991
 * Tango (Negative album), 2004
 * Tango (Sonia & Disappear Fear album), 2007
 * Tango (Tanguito album), recorded in 1970 and released posthumously in 1973

Compositions

 * "Tango" (Stravinsky), a 1940 piece by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky

Songs

 * "Tango" (Jaci Velasquez song), a song on the 2008 album Love Out Loud
 * "Tango" (Tananai song), a song on the 2023 album Rave, eclissi
 * "Tango", a song on the 2006 album Public Warning by Lady Sovereign
 * "Tango", a song on the 2004 album Tango by Negative
 * "Tango", a song on the 1994 album Thirsty Work by Status Quo

Television

 * Tango (telecom), a mobile telephone operator in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein
 * T.TV, a television channel in Luxembourg formerly known as Tango TV
 * TV6 (Lithuania), also known as Tango TV in Lithuania

Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media

 * Tango (comics), a comics anthology published in Australia since 1997
 * Tango (novel), a 1989 novel by Alan Judd
 * Tango (play), a 1964 play by Sławomir Mrożek
 * Tango (ride), a type of amusement ride
 * Tango Magazine, an American magazine for adult women under 40
 * Tango (Italian magazine), an Italian satirical magazine
 * Tango Desktop Project (stylized Tango!), which set standards for computer icons

Military

 * Tango (boat), also known as the Armored Troop Carrier, used in the Vietnam War
 * Command Post TANGO, a U.S. military installation in South Korea
 * Russian battleship Poltava (1894), sunk by the Japanese, raised and renamed Tango
 * Tango-class submarine, the NATO code name for a Russian submarine class

People

 * Tango McCauley (born 1978), American gridiron football player
 * Egisto Tango (1873–1951), Italian conductor
 * Hiromi Tango (born 1976), Japanese installation and performance artist
 * Tom Tango, pseudonym of a Canadian sabermetrician residing in USA
 * Tanguito (1945–1972), a.k.a. Tango, Argentine singer-songwriter
 * Virginia Tango Piatti (1869–1958), Italian writer and pacifist

Places

 * Tango, a neighborhood in Glan, Sarangani, Philippines
 * Tango Monastery, near Thimphu, Bhutan
 * Tango Province, Japan, an old province in today's northern Kyoto Prefecture
 * Tangov (also spelled Tango), Azerbaijan, a village

Software

 * Tango (application), a video-messaging application software
 * Tango (platform), augmented reality computing platform developed and authored by Google
 * Tango (D library), an alternative to the Phobos standard library
 * TANGO, a CORBA+ZMQ based control system
 * Tango Desktop Project
 * Tango PCB and Tango Schematic, early Computer-aided engineering programs

Transport

 * Tango (tram), a tram type produced by Stadler Rail
 * Air Canada Tango, a defunct low-cost airline launched by Air Canada
 * Commuter Cars Tango, an electric vehicle manufactured in Spokane, Washington, U.S.
 * Paraavis Tango, a Russian paraglider design
 * Paraavis Tango Duett, a Russian paraglider design
 * SEAT Tango, a roadster concept car built by the Spanish car maker SEAT
 * SS Tango, a floating casino located off of Southern California from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, run by mobster Anthony Cornero

Other uses

 * Tango (drink), a soft drink manufactured in the United Kingdom
 * Tango (mythology), the third child of the primordial mother goddess Varima-te-takere
 * Tango, a satellite as part of the Prisma (satellite project) owned by the Swedish Space Corporation
 * Tango, also known as Cluster 4, an ESA satellite in the Cluster II mission
 * Tango, the letter T in the NATO phonetic alphabet
 * Adidas Tango, a family of association football balls designed by Adidas

title: Tango (disambiguation)


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Vowel harmony

In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.

Vowel harmony is found in many agglutinative languages. The given domain of vowel harmony taking effect often spans across morpheme boundaries, and suffixes and prefixes will usually follow vowel harmony rules.

Terminology
The term vowel harmony is used in two different senses.

In the first sense, it refers to any type of long distance assimilatory process of vowels, either progressive or regressive. When used in this sense, the term vowel harmony is synonymous with the term metaphony.

In the second sense, vowel harmony refers only to progressive vowel harmony (beginning-to-end). For regressive harmony, the term umlaut is used. In this sense, metaphony is the general term while vowel harmony and umlaut are both sub-types of metaphony. The term umlaut is also used in a different sense to refer to a type of vowel gradation. This article will use "vowel harmony" for both progressive and regressive harmony.

"Long-distance"
Harmony processes are "long-distance" in the sense that the assimilation involves sounds that are separated by intervening segments (usually consonant segments). In other words, harmony refers to the assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other. For example, a vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation in a vowel at the end of a word. The assimilation occurs across the entire word in many languages. This is represented schematically in the following diagram:

 * {| cellspacing="5" style="font-size: 110%;"

! before assimilation ! after assimilation
 * Va C Vb C Vb C
 * Va C Va C Va C
 * ( Va = type-a vowel, Vb = type-b vowel, C = consonant)
 * }
 * Va C Va C Va C
 * ( Va = type-a vowel, Vb = type-b vowel, C = consonant)
 * }

In the diagram above, the Va (type-a vowel) causes the following Vb (type-b vowel) to assimilate and become the same type of vowel (and thus they become, metaphorically, "in harmony").

The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate (or harmonize) are termed targets. When the vowel triggers lie within the root or stem of a word and the affixes contain the targets, this is called stem-controlled vowel harmony (the opposite situation is called dominant). This is fairly common among languages with vowel harmony and may be seen in the Hungarian dative suffix:

 * {| cellspacing="5"

! Root ! Dative ! Gloss
 * város
 * város-nak
 * 'city'
 * öröm
 * öröm-nek
 * 'joy'
 * }
 * 'joy'
 * }

The dative suffix has two different forms -nak/-nek. The -nak form appears after the root with back vowels (o and a are back vowels). The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels (ö and e are front vowels).

Features of vowel harmony
Vowel harmony often involves dimensions such as

 * Nasalization  (i.e. oral or nasal) (in this case, a nasal consonant is usually the trigger)

In many languages, vowels can be said to belong to particular sets or classes, such as back vowels or rounded vowels. Some languages have more than one system of harmony. For instance, Altaic languages are proposed to have a rounding harmony superimposed over a backness harmony.

Even among languages with vowel harmony, not all vowels need to participate in the vowel conversions; these vowels are termed neutral. Neutral vowels may be opaque and block harmonic processes or they may be transparent and not affect them. Intervening consonants are also often transparent.

Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony often allow for lexical disharmony, or words with mixed sets of vowels even when an opaque neutral vowel is not involved. Van der Hulst & van de Weijer (1995) point to two such situations: polysyllabic trigger morphemes may contain non-neutral vowels from opposite harmonic sets and certain target morphemes simply fail to harmonize. Many loanwords exhibit disharmony. For example, Turkish vakit, ('time' [from Arabic waqt]); *vakıt would have been expected.

Korean
There are three classes of vowels in Korean: positive, negative, and neutral. These categories loosely follow the front (positive) and mid (negative) vowels. Middle Korean had strong vowel harmony; however, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Korean. In modern Korean, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia, adjectives, adverbs, conjugation, and interjections. The vowel ㅡ (eu) is considered a partially neutral and a partially negative vowel. There are other traces of vowel harmony in modern Korean: many native Korean words tend to follow vowel harmony, such as 사람 (saram, 'person') and 부엌 (bu-eok, 'kitchen').

Mongolian
Mongolian exhibits both a tongue root harmony and a rounding harmony. In particular, the tongue root harmony involves the vowels: (+RTR) and  (-RTR). The vowel is phonetically similar to the -RTR vowels. However, it is largely transparent to vowel harmony. Rounding harmony only affects the open vowels,. Some sources refer to the primary harmonization dimension as pharyngealization or patalalness (among others), but neither of these is technically correct. Likewise, referring to ±RTR as the sole defining feature of vowel categories in Mongolian is not fully accurate either. In any case, the two vowel categories differ primarily with regards to tongue root position, and ±RTR is a convenient and fairly accurate descriptor for the articulatory parameters involved.

Turkic languages
Turkic languages inherit their systems of vowel harmony from Proto-Turkic, which already had a fully developed system. The one exception is Uzbek, which has lost its vowel harmony due to extensive Persian influence; however, its closest relative, Uyghur, has retained Turkic vowel harmony.

Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani's system of vowel harmony has both front/back and rounded/unrounded vowels.

Tatar
Tatar has no neutral vowels. The vowel é is found only in loanwords. Other vowels also could be found in loanwords, but they are seen as Back vowels. Tatar language also has a rounding harmony, but it is not represented in writing. O and ö could be written only in the first syllable, but vowels they mark could be pronounced in the place where ı and e are written.

Kazakh
Kazakh's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony that is not represented by the orthography.

Kyrgyz
Kyrgyz's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony, which strongly resembles that of Kazakh.

Turkish
Turkish has a 2-dimensional vowel harmony system, where vowels are characterised by two features: [±front] and [±rounded]. There are two sets of vocal harmony systems: a simple one and a complex one. The simple one is concerned with the low vowels e, a and has only the [±front] feature (e front vs a back). The complex one is concerned with the high vowels i, ü, ı, u and has both [±front] and [±rounded] features (i front unrounded vs ü front rounded and ı back unrounded vs u back rounded). The close-mid vowels ö, o are not involved in vowel harmony processes.

Front/back harmony
Turkish has two classes of vowels – front and back. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels. Therefore, most grammatical suffixes come in front and back forms, e.g. Türkiye'de "in Turkey" but Almanya'da "in Germany".

Rounding harmony
In addition, there is a secondary rule that i and ı in suffixes tend to become ü and u respectively after rounded vowels, so certain suffixes have additional forms. This gives constructions such as Türkiye'dir "it is Turkey", kapıdır "it is the door", but gündür "it is the day", karpuzdur "it is the watermelon".

Exceptions
Not all suffixes obey vowel harmony perfectly.

In the suffix -(i)yor, the o is invariant, while the i changes according to the preceding vowel; for example sönüyor – "he/she/it fades". Likewise, in the suffix -(y)ken, the e is invariant: Roma'dayken – "When in Rome"; and so is the i in the suffix -(y)ebil: inanılabilir – "credible". The suffix -ki exhibits partial harmony, never taking a back vowel but allowing only the front-voweled variant -kü: dünkü – "belonging to yesterday"; yarınki – "belonging to tomorrow".

Most Turkish words do not only have vowel harmony for suffixes, but also internally. However, there are many exceptions.

Compound words are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have to harmonize between members of the compound (thus forms like bu "this|day" = "today" are permissible). Vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords, as in otobüs – from French "autobus". There are also a few native modern Turkish words that do not follow the rule (such as anne "mother" or kardeş "sibling" which used to obey vowel harmony in their older forms, ana and karındaş, respectively). However, in such words, suffixes nevertheless harmonize with the final vowel; thus annesi – "his/her mother", and voleybolcu – "volleyballer".

In some loanwords the final vowel is an a, o or u and thus looks like a back vowel, but is phonetically actually a front vowel, and governs vowel harmony accordingly. An example is the word saat, meaning "hour" or "clock", a loanword from Arabic. Its plural is saatler. This is not truly an exception to vowel harmony itself; rather, it is an exception to the rule that a denotes a front vowel.

Disharmony tends to disappear through analogy, especially within loanwords; e.g. Hüsnü (a man's name) < earlier Hüsni, from Arabic husnî; Müslüman "Moslem, Muslim (adj. and n.)" < Ottoman Turkish müslimân, from Persian mosalmân).

Tuvan
Tuvan has one of the most complete systems of vowel harmony among the Turkic languages.

Persian
Persian is a language which includes various types of regressive and progressive vowel harmony in different words and expressions.

In Persian, progressive vowel harmony only applies to prepositions/post-positions when attached to pronouns. In Persian, regressive vowel harmony, some features spread from the triggering non-initial vowel to the target vowel in the previous syllable. The application and non-application of this backness harmony which can also be considered rounding harmony.

Uralic languages
Many, though not all, Uralic languages show vowel harmony between front and back vowels. Vowel harmony is often hypothesized to have existed in Proto-Uralic, though its original scope remains a matter of discussion.

Samoyedic
Vowel harmony is found in Nganasan and is reconstructed also for Proto-Samoyedic.

Vowel types
Hungarian, like its distant relative Finnish, has the same system of front, back, and intermediate (neutral) vowels but is more complex than the one in Finnish, and some vowel harmony processes. The basic rule is that words including at least one back vowel get back vowel suffixes (karba – in(to) the arm), while words excluding back vowels get front vowel suffixes (kézbe – in(to) the hand). Single-vowel words which have only the neutral vowels (i, í or é) are unpredictable, but e takes a front-vowel suffix.

One essential difference in classification between Hungarian and Finnish is that standard Hungarian (along with 3 out of 10 local dialects) does not observe the difference between Finnish 'ä' and 'e'  – the Hungarian front vowel 'e'  is closely pronounced as the Finnish front vowel 'ä'. 7 out of the 10 local dialects have the vowel ë which has never been part of the Hungarian alphabet, and thus is not used in writing.

Behaviour of neutral vowels
Unrounded front vowels (or Intermediate or neutral vowels) can occur together with either back vowels (e.g. répa carrot, kocsi car) or rounded front vowels (e.g. tető, tündér), but rounded front vowels and back vowels can occur together only in words of foreign origins (e.g. sofőr = chauffeur, French word for driver). The basic rule is that words including at least one back vowel take back vowel suffixes (e.g. répában in a carrot, kocsiban in a car), while words excluding back vowels usually take front vowel suffixes (except for words including only the vowels i or í, for which there is no general rule, e.g. lisztet, hídat).

Some other rules and guidelines to consider:
 * Compound words get suffix according to the last word, e.g.: ártér (floodplain) compound of ár + tér front vowel suffix just as the word tér when stands alone (téren, ártéren)
 * In case of words of obvious foreign origins: only the last vowel counts (if it is not i or í): sofőrhöz, nüanszszal, generálás, októberben, parlamentben, szoftverrel
 * If the last vowel of the foreign word is i or í, then the last but one vowel will be taken into consideration, e.g. papírhoz, Rashiddal. If the foreign word includes only the vowels i or í then it gets front vowel suffix, e.g.: Mitch-nek ( = "for Mitch")
 * There are some non-Hungarian geographical names that have no vowels at all (e.g. the Croatian island of Krk), in which case as the word does not include back vowel, it gets front vowel suffix (e.g. Krk-re = to Krk)
 * For acronyms: the last vowel counts (just as in case of foreign words), e.g.: HR (pronounced: há-er) gets front vowel suffix as the last pronounced vowel is front vowel (HR-rel = with HR)
 * Some 1-syllable Hungarian words with i, í or é are strictly using front suffixes (gépre, mélyről, víz > vizet, hírek), while some others can take back suffixes only (héjak, szíjról, nyíl > nyilat, zsírban, írás)
 * Some foreign words that have fit to the Hungarian language and start with back vowel and end with front vowel can take either front or back suffixes (so can be optionally considered foreign word or Hungarian word): farmerban or farmerben

Suffixes with multiple forms
Grammatical suffixes in Hungarian can have one, two, three, or four forms: An example on basic numerals:
 * one form: every word gets the same suffix regardless of the included vowels (e.g. -kor)
 * two forms (most common): words get either back vowel or front vowel suffix (as mentioned above) (e.g. -ban/-ben)
 * three forms: there is one back vowel form and two front vowel forms; one for words whose last vowel is rounded front vowel and one for words whose last vowel is not rounded front vowel (e.g. -hoz/-hez/-höz)
 * four forms: there are two back vowel forms and two front vowel forms (e.g. -ot/-at/-et/-öt or simply -t, if the last sound is a vowel)

Mansi
Vowel harmony occurred in Southern Mansi.

Khanty
In the Khanty language, vowel harmony occurs in the Eastern dialects, and affects both inflectional and derivational suffixes. The Vakh-Vasyugan dialect has a particularly extensive system of vowel harmony:

Trigger vowels occur in the first syllable of a word, and control the backness of the entire word. Target vowels are affected by vowel harmony and are arranged in seven front-back pairs of similar height and roundedness, which are assigned the archiphonemes A, O, U, I, Ɪ, Ʊ.

The vowels, and  appear only in the first syllable of a word, and are thus strictly trigger vowels. All other vowel qualities may act in both roles.

Vowel harmony is lost in the Northern and Southern dialects, as well as in the Surgut dialect of Eastern Khanty.

Mari
Most varieties of the Mari language have vowel harmony.

Erzya
The Erzya language has a limited system of vowel harmony, involving only two vowel phonemes: (front) versus  (back).

Moksha, the closest relative of Erzya, has no phonemic vowel harmony, though has front and back allophones in a distribution similar to the vowel harmony in Erzya.

Finnic languages
Vowel harmony is found in most of the Finnic languages. It has been lost in Livonian and in Standard Estonian, where the front vowels ü ä ö occur only in the first (stressed) syllable. South Estonian Võro (and Seto) language as well as some [North] Estonian dialects, however, retain vowel harmony.

Finnish

In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels – front, back, and neutral, where each front vowel has a back vowel pairing. Grammatical endings such as case and derivational endings – but not enclitics – have only archiphonemic vowels U, O, A, which are realized as either back or front  inside a single word. From vowel harmony it follows that the initial syllable of each single (non-compound) word controls the frontness or backness of the entire word. Non-initially, the neutral vowels are transparent to and unaffected by vowel harmony. In the initial syllable:
 * 1) a back vowel causes all non-initial syllables to be realized with back (or neutral) vowels, e.g. pos+ahta+(t)a → posahtaa
 * 2) a front vowel causes all non-initial syllables to be realized with front (or neutral) vowels, e.g. räj+ahta+(t)a → räjähtää.
 * 3) a neutral vowel acts like a front vowel, but does not control the frontness or backness of the word: if there are back vowels in non-initial syllables, the word acts like it began with back vowels, even if they come from derivational endings, e.g. sih+ahta+(t)a → sihahtaa cf. sih+ise+(t)a → sihistä.

For example:
 * kaura begins with back vowel → kauralla
 * kuori begins with back vowel → kuorella
 * sieni begins without back vowels → sienellä (not *sienella)
 * käyrä begins without back vowels → käyrällä
 * tuote begins with back vowels → tuotteessa
 * kerä begins with a neutral vowel → kerällä
 * kera begins with a neutral vowel, but has a noninitial back vowel → keralla

Some dialects that have a sound change opening diphthong codas also permit archiphonemic vowels in the initial syllable. For example, standard 'ie' is reflected as 'ia' or 'iä', controlled by noninitial syllables, in the Tampere dialect, e.g. tiä ← tie but miakka ← miekka

... as evidenced by tuotteessa (not *tuotteessä). Even if phonologically front vowels precede the suffix -nsa, grammatically it is preceded by a word controlled by a back vowel. As shown in the examples, neutral vowels make the system unsymmetrical, as they are front vowels phonologically, but leave the front/back control to any grammatical front or back vowels. There is little or no change in the actual vowel quality of the neutral vowels.

As a consequence, Finnish speakers often have problems with pronouncing foreign words which do not obey vowel harmony. For example, olympia is often pronounced olumpia. The position of some loans is unstandardized (e.g. chattailla/chättäillä) or ill-standardized (e.g. polymeeri, sometimes pronounced polumeeri, and autoritäärinen, which violate vowel harmony). Where a foreign word violates vowel harmony by not using front vowels because it begins with a neutral vowel, then last syllable generally counts, although this rule is irregularly followed. Experiments indicate that e.g. miljonääri always becomes (front) miljonääriä, but marttyyri becomes equally frequently both marttyyria (back) and marttyyriä (front), even by the same speaker.

With respect to vowel harmony, compound words can be considered separate words. For example, syyskuu ("autumn month" i.e. September) has both u and y, but it consists of two words syys and kuu, and declines syys·kuu·ta (not *syyskuutä). The same goes for enclitics, e.g. taaksepäin "backwards" consists of the word taakse "to back" and -päin "-wards", which gives e.g. taaksepäinkään (not *taaksepäinkaan or *taaksepainkaan). If fusion takes place, the vowel is harmonized by some speakers, e.g. tälläinen pro tällainen ← tämän lainen.

Some Finnish words whose stems contain only neutral vowels exhibit an alternating pattern in terms of vowel harmony when inflected or forming new words through derivation. Examples include meri "sea", meressä "in the sea" (inessive), but merta (partitive), not *mertä; veri "blood", verestä "from the blood" (elative), but verta (partitive), not *vertä; pelätä "to be afraid", but pelko "fear", not *pelkö; kipu "pain", but kipeä "sore", not *kipea.

Helsinki slang has slang words that have roots violating vowel harmony, e.g. Sörkka. This can be interpreted as Swedish influence.

Veps
The Veps language has partially lost vowel harmony.

Yokuts
Vowel harmony is present in all Yokutsan languages and dialects. For instance, Yawelmani has 4 vowels (which additionally may be either long or short). These can be grouped as in the table below.

Vowels in suffixes must harmonize with either or its non- counterparts or with  or non- counterparts. For example, the vowel in the aorist suffix appears as when it follows a  in the root, but when it follows all other vowels it appears as. Similarly, the vowel in the nondirective gerundial suffix appears as when it follows a  in the root; otherwise it appears as.

In addition to the harmony found in suffixes, there is a harmony restriction on word stems where in stems with more than one syllable all vowels are required to be of the same lip rounding and tongue height dimensions. For example, a stem must contain all high rounded vowels or all low rounded vowels, etc. This restriction is further complicated by (i) long high vowels being lowered and (ii) an epenthetic vowel which does not harmonize with stem vowels.

Bengali
In Bengali, the main vowel harmony is seen in the case of ɔ and o. A word can never end with the ɔ sound. If there is an 'অ' in a word followed by the i sound, or an u sound, then it is pronounced as o, otherwise it is pronounced as ɔ. For example, অনুবাদ ( onubad )( translation ) and অনেক (ɔnek) ( many) begin with the same letter being pronounced differently due to the presence of 'u' after 'o' in the first one. Similarly, in the absence of any diacritic marks on any consonant letter, its default vowel is 'ɔ' or 'o' using the same rule. For example করি (kori)( I do) and (কর)(kɔro)( you do) are pronounced using the same rules.

Sumerian
There is some evidence for vowel harmony according to vowel height or ATR in the prefix i3/e- in inscriptions from pre-Sargonic Lagash (the specifics of the pattern have led a handful of scholars to postulate not only an phoneme, but even an  and, most recently, an ) Many cases of partial or complete assimilation of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable are reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable though not absolute tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables. What appears to be vowel contraction in hiatus (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a, */ae/ > a, */ue/ > u, etc.) is also very common.

Other languages
Vowel harmony occurs to some degree in many other languages, such as
 * Several dialects of Arabic (see imala) including:
 * Palestinian Arabic
 * Iraqi Arabic
 * Lebanese Arabic
 * Akan languages (tongue root position)
 * Assamese
 * Australian Aboriginal languages
 * Jingulu
 * Warlpiri
 * Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (vowel harmony of one particular timbre across all vowels of a word)
 * Several Bantu languages such as:
 * Standard Lingala (height)
 * Kgalagadi (height)
 * Malila (height)
 * Phuthi (right-to-left and left-to-right)
 * Shona
 * Southern Sotho (right-to-left and left-to-right)
 * Northern Sotho (right-to-left and left-to-right)
 * Tswana (right-to-left and left-to-right)
 * Bezhta
 * Some Chadic languages, such as Buwal
 * Chukchi
 * Coeur d'Alene (tongue root position and height)
 * Coosan languages
 * Dusun languages
 * Iberian languages
 * Astur-Leonese
 * Galician and Portuguese dialects
 * Catalan/Valencian
 * Eastern Andalusian Spanish
 * Murcian Spanish
 * Igbo (tongue root position)
 * Italo-Romance languages: several Swiss Italian dialects (including total vowel harmony systems).
 * Japanese language - in some of the Kansai dialects. Additionally, some consider that vowel harmony must have existed at one time in Old Japanese, though there is no broad consensus. See the pertinent.
 * Maiduan languages
 * Nez Percé
 * Nilotic languages
 * Qiang (rhotic vowel harmony)
 * Buchan Scots is a Scots dialect with vowel height harmony, compare "hairy",  "really". This effect is blocked by voiced obstruents and certain consonant clusters:  "baby",  "lumpy".
 * Somali
 * Takelma
 * Telugu
 * Several Tibetic languages, including Lhasa Tibetan
 * Tungusic languages, such as Manchu
 * Utian languages
 * Urhobo
 * Yurok (rhotic vowel harmony)

Other types of harmony
Although vowel harmony is the most well-known harmony, not all types of harmony that occur in the world's languages involve only vowels. Other types of harmony involve consonants (and is known as consonant harmony). Rarer types of harmony are those that involve tone or both vowels and consonants (e.g. postvelar harmony).

Vowel–consonant harmony
Some languages have harmony processes that involve an interaction between vowels and consonants. For example, Chilcotin has a phonological process known as vowel flattening (i.e. post-velar harmony) where vowels must harmonize with uvular and pharyngealized consonants.

Chilcotin has two classes of vowels:

 * "flat" vowels
 * non-"flat" vowels

Additionally, Chilcotin has a class of pharyngealized "flat" consonants. Whenever a consonant of this class occurs in a word, all preceding vowels must be flat vowels.

If flat consonants do not occur in a word, then all vowels will be of the non-flat class:

Other languages of this region of North America (the Plateau culture area), such as St'át'imcets, have similar vowel–consonant harmonic processes.

Syllabic synharmony
Syllabic synharmony was a process in the Proto-Slavic language ancestral to all modern Slavic languages. It refers to the tendency of frontness (palatality) to be generalised across an entire syllable. It was therefore a form of consonant–vowel harmony in which the property 'palatal' or 'non-palatal' applied to an entire syllable at once rather than to each sound individually.

The result was that back vowels were fronted after j or a palatal consonant, and consonants were palatalised before j or a front vowel. Diphthongs were harmonized as well, although they were soon monophthongized because of a tendency to end syllables with a vowel (syllables were or became open). This rule remained in place for a long time, and ensured that a syllable containing a front vowel always began with a palatal consonant, and a syllable containing j was always preceded by a palatal consonant and followed by a front vowel.

A similar process occurs in Skolt Sami, where palatalization of consonants and fronting of vowels is a suprasegmental process applying to a whole syllable. Suprasegmental palatalization is marked with the letter ʹ, which is a Modifier letter prime, for example in the word vääʹrr 'mountain, hill'.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Vowel harmony


text:
Astor Piazzolla

Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla (, ; March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player, and arranger. His works revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles. In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as "the world's foremost composer of Tango music".

Childhood
Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, the only child of Vicente "Nonino" Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. His paternal grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleo (later Pantaleón) Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. His mother was the daughter of two Italian immigrants from Lucca in the central region of Tuscany.

In 1925 Astor Piazzolla moved with his family to Greenwich Village in New York City, which in those days was a violent neighbourhood inhabited by a volatile mixture of gangsters and hard-working immigrants. His parents worked long hours, and Piazzolla, despite having a limp, soon learned to take care of himself on the streets. At home he would listen to his father's records of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro, and was exposed to jazz and classical music, including Bach, from an early age. He began to play the bandoneon after his father spotted one in a New York pawn shop in 1929.

After their return to New York City from a brief visit to Mar del Plata in 1930, the family moved to Little Italy in lower Manhattan. In 1932 Piazzolla composed his first tango, "La Catinga". The following year he took music lessons with the Hungarian classical pianist Béla Wilda, a student of Rachmaninoff, who taught him to play Bach on his bandoneon. In 1934 he met Carlos Gardel, one of the most important figures in the history of tango, and played a cameo role as a paper boy in his movie El día que me quieras. Gardel invited the young bandoneon player to join him on his tour. Much to Piazzolla's dismay, his father decided that he was not old enough to go along. The disappointment of being forbidden to join the tour proved to be fortunate, as it was on this tour in 1935 that Gardel and his entire orchestra perished in a plane crash. In later years Piazzolla jokingly made light of this fateful event: had his father let him join the tour, Piazzolla would have played the harp instead of the bandoneon.

Early career
In 1936, he returned with his family to Mar del Plata, where he began to play in a variety of tango orchestras and around this time he discovered the music of Elvino Vardaro’s sextet on the radio. Vardaro's novel interpretation of tango made a great impression on Piazzolla and years later he would become Piazzolla's violinist in his Orquesta de Cuerdas (String Orchestra) and his First Quintet.

Inspired by Vardaro's style of tango, and still only 17 years old, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires in 1938 where, the following year, he realized a dream when he joined the orchestra of the bandoneonist Aníbal Troilo, which would become one of the greatest tango orchestras of that time. Piazzolla was employed as a temporary replacement for Toto Rodríguez who was ill, but when Rodríguez returned to work Troilo decided to retain Piazzolla as a fourth bandoneonist. Apart from playing the bandoneon, Piazzolla also became Troilo's arranger and would occasionally play the piano for him. By 1941 he was earning a good wage, enough to pay for music lessons with Alberto Ginastera, an eminent Argentine composer of classical music. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, had advised him to study with Ginastera; delving into scores by Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel and others, Piazzolla rose early each morning to hear the Teatro Colón orchestra rehearse while continuing a gruelling performing schedule in the tango clubs at night. During his five years of study with Ginastera he mastered orchestration, which he later considered to be one of his strong points. In 1943 he started piano lessons with the Argentine classical pianist Raúl Spivak, which would continue for the next five years, and wrote his first classical works Preludio No. 1 for Violin and Piano and Suite for Strings and Harps. In the same year he married his first wife, Dedé Wolff, an artist, with whom he had two children, Diana and Daniel.

As time passed, Troilo began to fear that the advanced musical ideas of the young bandoneonist might undermine the style of his orchestra and make it less appealing to dancers of tango. Tensions mounted between the two bandoneonists until, in 1944, Piazzolla announced his intention to leave Troilo and join the orchestra of the tango singer and bandoneonist Francisco Fiorentino. Piazzolla would lead Fiorentino's orchestra until 1946 and make many recordings with him, including his first two instrumental tangos, La chiflada and Color de rosa.

In 1946 Piazzolla formed his Orquesta Típica, which, although having a similar formation to other tango orchestras of the day, gave him his first opportunity to experiment with his own approach to the orchestration and musical content of tango. That same year he composed El Desbande, which he considered to be his first formal tango, and then began to compose musical scores for films, starting with Con los mismos colores in 1949 and Bólidos de acero in 1950, both films directed by Carlos Torres Ríos.

Having disbanded his first orchestra in 1950, he almost abandoned tango altogether, continuing to study Bartok and Stravinsky and orchestra direction with Hermann Scherchen. He spent a lot of time listening to jazz and searching for a musical style of his own beyond the realms of tango. He decided to drop the bandoneon and to dedicate himself to writing and to studying music. Between 1950 and 1954 he composed a series of works that began to develop his unique style: Para lucirse, Tanguango, Prepárense, Contrabajeando, Triunfal and Lo que vendrá.

Studies in Paris
At Ginastera's urging, on August 16, 1953, Piazzolla entered his classical composition "Buenos Aires Symphony in Three Movements" for the Fabian Sevitzky Award. The performance took place at the law school in Buenos Aires with the symphony orchestra of Radio del Estado under the direction of Sevitzky himself. At the end of the concert, a fight broke out among members of the audience who were offended by the inclusion of two bandoneons in a traditional symphony orchestra. In spite of this Piazzolla's composition won him a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau conservatory.

In 1954, he and his wife left their two children (Diana aged 11 and Daniel aged 10) with Piazzolla's parents and travelled to Paris. Piazzolla was tired of tango and tried to hide his tango and bandoneon compositions from Boulanger, thinking that his destiny lay in classical music. Introducing his work, Piazzolla played her a number of his classically inspired compositions, but it was not until he played his tango Triunfal that she congratulated him and encouraged him to pursue his career in tango, recognising that this was where his talent lay. This was to prove a historic encounter and a crossroads in Piazzolla's career.

With Boulanger he studied classical composition, including counterpoint, which was to play an important role in his later tango compositions. Before leaving Paris, he heard the octet of the American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which was to give him the idea of forming his own octet on his return to Buenos Aires. He composed and recorded a series of tangos with the String Orchestra of the Paris Opera and began to play the bandoneon while standing up, putting his right foot on a chair and the bellows of the instrument across his right thigh. Until that time bandoneonists played sitting down.

In the vanguard of nuevo tango
Back in Argentina, Piazzolla formed his Orquesta de Cuerdas (String Orchestra), which performed with the singer Jorge Sobral, and his Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955. With two bandoneons (Piazzolla and Leopoldo Federico), two violins (Enrique Mario Francini and Hugo Baralis), double bass (Juan Vasallo), cello (José Bragato), piano (Atilio Stampone), and an electric guitar (Horacio Malvicino), his Octeto effectively broke the mould of the traditional orquesta típica and created a new sound akin to chamber music, without a singer and with jazz-like improvisations. This was to be a turning point in his career and a watershed in the history of tango. Piazzolla's new approach to the tango, nuevo tango, made him a controversial figure in his native land both musically and politically. However, his music gained acceptance in Europe and North America, and his reworking of the tango was embraced by some liberal segments of Argentine society, who were pushing for political changes in parallel to his musical revolution.

In 1958 he disbanded both the Octeto and the String Orchestra and returned to New York City with his family where he struggled to make a living as a musician and arranger. Briefly forming his own group, the Jazz Tango Quintet with whom he made just two recordings, his attempts to blend jazz and tango were not successful. He received the news of the death of his father in October 1959 while performing with Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves in Puerto Rico; on his return to New York City a few days later, he asked to be left alone in his apartment and in less than an hour wrote his famous tango Adiós Nonino, in homage to his father.

Copes and Nieves packed out Club Flamboyan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with "Compañia Argentina Tangolandia". Piazzolla was serving as the musical director. The tour continued in New York, Chicago and then Washington. The last show that the three of them did together was an appearance on CBS, the only colour TV channel in the US, on the Arthur Murray Show in April 1960.

Back in Buenos Aires later that year he put together the first, and perhaps most famous, of his quintets, the first Quinteto, initially comprising bandoneon (Piazzolla), piano (Jaime Gosis), violin (Simón Bajour), electric guitar (Horacio Malvicino) and double bass (Kicho Díaz). Of the many ensembles that Piazzolla set up during his career, it was the quintet formation which best expressed his approach to tango.

In 1963 he set up his Nuevo Octeto, and the same year premiered his Tres Tangos Sinfónicos, under the direction of Paul Klecky, for which he was awarded the Hirsch Prize.

In 1965 he released El Tango, an album for which he collaborated with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The recording featured his Quinteto together with an orchestra, the singer Edmundo Rivero and Luis Medina Castro reciting texts.

In 1966 he left Dedé Wolff and the following year signed a five-year contract with the poet Horacio Ferrer with whom he composed the operetta María de Buenos Aires, with lyrics by Ferrer. The work was premiered in May 1968 with the singer Amelita Baltar in the title role and introduced a new style of tango, Tango Canción (in English: Song Tango). Soon after this he began a relationship with Amelita Baltar. The following year he wrote Balada para un loco with lyrics by Ferrer, which was premiered at the First Iberoamerican Music Festival with Amelita Baltar, and Piazzolla himself conducting the orchestra. Piazzolla was awarded second prize and the composition would prove to be his first popular success.

In 1970 Piazzolla returned to Paris where with Ferrer he wrote the oratorio El pueblo joven, later premiered in Saarbrücken, Germany in 1971. On May 19, 1970, he gave a concert with his Quinteto at the Teatro Regina in Buenos Aires in which he premiered his composition Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas.

Back in Buenos Aires he founded his Conjunto 9 (a.k.a. Nonet), a chamber music formation, which was a realisation of a dream for Piazzolla and for which he composed some of his most sophisticated music. He now put aside his first Quinteto and made several recordings with his new ensemble in Italy. Within a year the Conjunto 9 had run into financial problems and was dissolved and in 1972 he participated in his first concert at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, sharing the bill with other Tango orchestras.

After a period of great productivity as a composer, he suffered a heart attack in 1973. That same year he moved to Italy where he began a series of recordings which would span a period of five years. The music publisher Aldo Pagani, a partner in Curci-Pagani Music, had offered Piazzolla a 15-year contract in Rome to record anything he could write. His famous album Libertango was recorded in Milan in May 1974. Later that year he separated from Amelita Baltar and in September recorded the album Summit (Reunión Cumbre) with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and an Italian orchestra, including jazz musicians such as bassist /arranger Pino Presti and drummer Tullio De Piscopo, in Milan. The album includes the composition Aire de Buenos Aires by Mulligan.

In 1975 he set up his Electronic Octet, an octet made up of bandoneon, electric piano and/or acoustic piano, organ, guitar, electric bass, drums, synthesizer and violin, which was later replaced by a flute or saxophone. Later that year Aníbal Troilo died and Piazzolla composed the Suite Troileana in his memory, a work in four parts, which he recorded with the Conjunto Electronico. At this time Piazzolla started a collaboration with the singer José Ángel Trelles, with whom he made a number of recordings.

In December 1976 he played at a concert at the Teatro Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, where he presented his work, “500 motivaciones”, written especially for the Conjunto Electronico, and in 1977 he played another memorable concert at the Olympia in Paris, with a new formation of the Conjunto Electronico.

In 1978 he formed his second Quintet, with which he would tour the world for 11 years, and which would make him world-renowned. He also returned to writing chamber music and symphonic works.

During the period of Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Piazzolla lived in Italy, but returned many times to Argentina, recorded there, and on at least one occasion had lunch with the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. However, his relationship with the dictator might have been less than friendly, as recounted in Astor Piazzolla, A manera de memorias (a comprehensive collection of interviews, constituting a memoir):

 * One year before the Los Largartos issue you went to Videla's house and had lunch with him. Why did you accept that invitation?

 * What invitation? They sent a couple of guys in black suits and a letter with my name on it that said that Videla expected me a particular day in a particular place. I have a book around someplace, with pictures of all the guests: Eladia Blázquez, Daniel Tinayre, Olga Ferri, the composer Juan Carlos Tauriello, there were painters, actors […] – Astor Piazzolla, A manera de memorias

In 1985 he received the Platinum Konex Award, and in 1995 his family received the Honour Konex Award as the most important deceased musician of the decade in Argentina.

Traveling the world
In 1982 he recorded the album Oblivion with an orchestra in Italy for the film Enrico IV, directed by Marco Bellocchio, and in May 1982, in the middle of the Falklands War, he played in a concert at the Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires with the second Quinteto and the singer Roberto Goyeneche. That same year he wrote Le Grand Tango for cello and piano, dedicated to Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, which would be premiered by him in 1990 in New Orleans.

On 11 June 1983 he put on one of the best concerts of his life when he played a program of his music at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. For the occasion he regrouped the Conjunto 9 and played solo with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, directed by Pedro Ignacio Calderón. The programme included his three-movement Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and his three-movement Concierto de Nacar.

On 4 July 1984, Piazzolla appeared with his Quinteto at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the world's largest jazz festival, and on 29 September that same year they appeared with the Italian singer Milva at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris. His concert on 15 October 1984 at the Teatro Nazionale in Milan was recorded and released as the album Suite Punta del Este. At the end of that same year he performed in West-Berlin, and in theater Vredenburg in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where VPRO-TV-director Theo Uittenbogaard recorded his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, playing, among other pieces, a very moving Adios Nonino, with as a backdrop – to Piazzolla's great pleasure – the extremely zoomed-in "live"' projection of his bandoneon playing.

In 1985 he was named Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires and premiered his Concerto for Bandoneon and Guitar (also known as Tribute to Liège), at the Fifth International Liège Guitar Festival on March 15, with the Liège Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leo Brouwer and Cacho Tirao on guitar. Piazzolla made his London debut with his second Quinteto at the Almeida Theatre in London at the end of June.

With the film score for El exilio de Gardel he won the French critics Cesar Award in Paris for best film music in 1986.

He appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland, with vibraphonist Gary Burton in July 1986 and, on 6 September 1987, gave a concert in New York's Central Park, in the city where he spent his childhood.

In September 1987 he recorded his Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and Tres tangos para bandoneón y orquesta with Lalo Schifrin conducting the St. Luke's Orchestra, in the Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University.

In 1988, he wrote music for the film Sur and married the singer and television personality Laura Escalada on April 11. In May that year he recorded his album La Camorra in New York, a suite of three pieces, the last time he would record with the second Quinteto. During a tour of Japan with Milva he played at a concert at the Nakano Sun Plaza Hall in Tokyo on June 26, 1988, and that same year underwent a quadruple by-pass operation.

Early in 1989 he formed his Sexteto Nuevo Tango, his last ensemble, with two bandoneons, piano, electric guitar, bass and cello. Together they gave a concert at the Club Italiano in Buenos Aires in April, a recording of which was issued under the title of Tres minutos con la realidad. Later he appeared with them at the Teatro Opera in Buenos Aires in the presence of the newly elected Argentine President Carlos Menem on Friday, June 9. This would be Piazzolla's last concert in Argentina.

There followed a concert at the Royal Carre Theatre in Amsterdam with his Sexteto and Osvaldo Pugliese’s Orquesta on June 26, 1989, a live recording at the BBC Bristol Studios in June 1989, between concerts in Berlin and Rome, and a concert at the Wembley Conference Centre on June 30, 1989. On November 4, 1989, he gave a concert in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Moulin à Danses and later that month he recorded his composition Five Tango Sensations, with the Kronos Quartet in the US on an album of the same name. This would be his last studio recording and was his second composition for the Kronos Quartet. His first Four, For Tango had been included in their 1988 album Winter Was Hard. Towards the end of the year he dissolved his sexteto and continued playing solo with classical string quartets and symphonic orchestras. He joined Anahi Carfi's Mantova String Quartet and toured Italy and Finland with them.

His 1982 composition Le grand tango, for cello and piano, was premiered in New Orleans by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the pianist Igor Uriash in 1990 and on July 3 he gave his last concert in Athens, Greece, with the Orchestra of Colours, conducted by founder-director Manos Hatzidakis.

He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on August 4, 1990, which left him in a coma, and died in Buenos Aires, just under two years later on July 4, 1992, without regaining consciousness.

Among his followers, the composer and pianist Fernando Otero    and Piazzolla's protégé, bandoneonist Marcelo Nisinman, are the best known innovators of the tango music of the new millennium, while Pablo Ziegler, pianist with Piazzolla's second quintet, has assumed the role of principal custodian of nuevo tango, extending the jazz influence in the style. The Brazilian guitarist Sergio Assad has also experimented with folk-derived, complex virtuoso compositions that show Piazzolla's structural influence while steering clear of tango sounds; and Osvaldo Golijov has acknowledged Piazzolla as perhaps the greatest influence on his globally oriented, eclectic compositions for classical and klezmer performers.

Musical style
Piazzolla's nuevo tango was distinct from the traditional tango in its incorporation of elements of jazz, its use of extended harmonies and dissonance, its use of counterpoint, and its ventures into extended compositional forms. As Argentine psychoanalyst Carlos Kuri has pointed out, Piazzolla's fusion of tango with this wide range of other recognizable Western musical elements was so successful that it produced a new individual style transcending these influences. It is precisely this success, and individuality, that makes it hard to pin down where particular influences reside in his compositions, but some aspects are clear. The use of the passacaglia technique of a circulating bass line and harmonic sequence, invented and much used in 17th- and 18th-century baroque music but also central to the idea of jazz changes, predominates in most of Piazzolla's mature compositions. Another clear reference to the baroque is the often complex and virtuosic counterpoint that sometimes follows strict fugal behavior but more often simply allows each performer in the group to assert his voice. A further technique that emphasises this sense of democracy and freedom among the musicians is improvisation, that is borrowed from jazz in concept, but in practice involves a different vocabulary of scales and rhythms that stay within the parameters of the established tango sound-world. Pablo Ziegler has been particularly responsible for developing this aspect of the style both within Piazzolla's groups and since the composer's death.

With the composition of Adiós Nonino in 1959, Piazzolla established a standard structural pattern for his compositions, involving a formal pattern of fast-slow-fast-slow-coda, with the fast sections emphasizing gritty tango rhythms and harsh, angular melodic figures and the slower sections usually making use of the string instrument in the group and/or Piazzolla's own bandoneon as lyrical soloists. The piano tends to be used throughout as a percussive rhythmic backbone, while the electric guitar either joins in this role or spins filigree improvisations; the double bass parts are usually of little interest, but provide an indispensable rugged thickness to the sound of the ensemble. The quintet of bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass was Piazzolla's preferred setup on two extended occasions during his career, and most critics consider it to be the most successful instrumentation for his works. This is due partly to its great efficiency in terms of sound – it covers or imitates most sections of a symphony orchestra, including the percussion, which is improvised by all players on the bodies of their instruments – and the strong expressive identity it permits each individual musician. With a style that is both rugged and intricate, such a setup augments the compositions' inherent characteristics.

Despite the prevalence of the quintet formation and the ABABC compositional structure, Piazzolla consistently experimented with other musical forms and instrumental combinations. In 1965 an album was released containing collaborations between Piazzolla and Jorge Luis Borges where Borges's poetry was narrated over very avant-garde music by Piazzolla including the use of dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) rows, free non-melodic improvisation on all instruments, and modal harmonies and scales. In 1968 Piazzolla wrote and produced an "operita", María de Buenos Aires, that employed a larger ensemble including flute, percussion, multiple strings and three vocalists, and juxtaposed movements in Piazzolla's own style with several pastiche numbers ranging from waltz and hurdy-gurdy to a piano/narrator bar-room scena straight out of Casablanca.

By the 1970s Piazzolla was living in Rome, managed by the Italian agent Aldo Pagani, and exploring a leaner, more fluid musical style drawing on more jazz influence, and with simpler, more continuous forms. Pieces that exemplify this new direction include Libertango and most of the Suite Troileana, written in memory of Aníbal Troilo. In the 1980s Piazzolla was wealthy enough, for the first time, to become relatively autonomous artistically, and wrote some of his most ambitious multi-movement works. These included Tango Suite for the virtuoso guitar duo Sergio and Odair Assad; Histoire du Tango, where a flutist and guitarist tell the history of tango in four chunks of music styled at thirty-year intervals; and La Camorra, a suite in three ten-minute movements, inspired by the Neapolitan crime family and exploring symphonic concepts of large-scale form, thematic development, contrasts of texture and massive accumulations of ensemble sound. After making three albums in New York with the second quintet and producer Kip Hanrahan, two of which he described on separate occasions as "the greatest thing I've done", he disbanded the quintet, formed a sextet with an extra bandoneon, cello, bass, electric guitar, and piano, and wrote music for this ensemble that was even more adventurous harmonically and structurally than any of his previous works (Preludio y Fuga; Sex-tet). Had he not suffered an incapacitating stroke on the way to Notre Dame mass in 1990, it is likely that he would have continued to use his popularity as a performer of his own works to experiment in relative safety with even more audacious musical techniques, while possibly responding to the surging popularity of non-Western musics by finding ways to incorporate new styles into his own. In his musical professionalism and open-minded attitude to existing styles he held the mindset of an 18th-century composing performer such as Handel or Mozart, who were anxious to assimilate all national "flavors" of their day into their own compositions, and who always wrote with both first-hand performing experience and a sense of direct social relationship with their audiences. This may have resulted in a backlash amongst conservative tango aficionados in Argentina, but in the rest of the West it was the key to his extremely sympathetic reception among classical and jazz musicians, both seeing some of the best aspects of their musical practices reflected in his work.

Musical career
After leaving Troilo's orchestra in the 1940s, Piazzolla led numerous ensembles beginning with the 1946 Orchestra, the 1955 Octeto Buenos Aires, the 1960 "First Quintet", the 1971 Conjunto 9 ("Noneto"), the 1978 "Second Quintet" and the 1989 New Tango Sextet. As well as providing original compositions and arrangements, he was the director and bandoneon player in all of them. He also recorded the album Summit (Reunión Cumbre) with jazz baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. His numerous compositions include orchestral work such as the Concierto para bandoneón, orquesta, cuerdas y percusión, Doble concierto para bandoneón y guitarra, Tres tangos sinfónicos and Concierto de Nácar para 9 tanguistas y orquesta, pieces for the solo classical guitar – the Cinco Piezas (1980), as well as song-form compositions that still today are well known by the general public in his country, including "Balada para un loco" (Ballad for a madman) and Adiós Nonino (dedicated to his father), which he recorded many times with different musicians and ensembles. Biographers estimate that Piazzolla wrote around 3,000 pieces and recorded around 500.

In 1984, he appeared with his Quinteto Tango Nuevo in West-Berlin, Germany and for television in Utrecht, Netherlands. In the summer of 1985 he performed at the Almeida Theatre in London for a week-long engagement. On September 6, 1987, his quintet gave a concert in New York's Central Park, which was recorded and, in 1994, released in compact disc format as The Central Park Concert.

Legacy

 * Astor Piazzolla International Airport in Mar del Plata is named after him.
 * The Buenos Aires music conservatory "Conservatorio Superior de Música de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires" carries his name.
 * Google celebrated his 100th birthday on 11 March 2021 with a Google Doodle.

Ensembles

 * Orquesta Típica (in English: Piazzolla's Traditional Orchestra), a.k.a. the 1946 Orchestra, 1946–50.
 * Orquesta de Cuerdas (in English: String Orchestra), 1955–58.
 * Octeto Buenos Aires (in English: Buenos Aires Octet) 1955–58.
 * Jazz Tango Quintet, 1959.
 * Quinteto (in English: Quintet), a.k.a. the first Quintet, 1960–70.
 * Nuevo Octeto (in English: New Octet), 1963.
 * Conjunto 9 (in English: Ensemble 9), a.k.a. Noneto, 1971–72 & 1983.
 * Conjunto Electronico (in English: Electronic Ensemble), a.k.a. Electronic Octet, 1975.
 * Quinteto Tango Nuevo (in English: New Tango Quintet), a.k.a. the second Quintet, 1979–91.
 * Sexteto Nuevo Tango (in English: New Tango Sextet), 1989–91.

Film music

 * Con los mismos colores, 1949
 * Bólidos de acero, 1950
 * El Cielo en las manos, 1950
 * Stella Maris (1953 film), 1953
 * Sucedió en Buenos Aires, 1954
 * Los tallos amargos, 1955
 * Marta Ferrari, 1956
 * Continente blanco, 1957 (a.k.a. Le Conquérant solitaire and Operación Antártida)
 * Historia de una carta, 1957
 * Una viuda difícil, 1957
 * Violencia en la ciudad, 1957
 * Operación Antartida, 1958
 * Dos basuras, 1958
 * Sábado a la noche, cine, 1960
 * Las furias, 1960
 * Quinto año nacional, 1961
 * Detrás de la mentira, 1962
 * Los que verán a Dios, 1963
 * La fin del mundo, 1963
 * Paula Cautiva, 1963
 * Extraña ternura, 1964
 * Con gusto a rabia, 1965
 * Las locas del conventillo, 1966
 * Los pirañas, 1967
 * Crimen sin olvido, 1968
 * La fiaca, 1969
 * Breve cielo, 1969
 * Pulsación, 1969
 * Con alma y vida, 1970
 * La ñata contra el vidrio, 1972
 * Todo nudez será castigada, 1973
 * Viaje de bodas, 1975
 * Lumière, 1976
 * Cadaveri eccelenti, 1976
 * Il pleut sur Santiago, 1976
 * ¿Qué es el otoño?, 1977
 * Quand la ville s’éveille, 1977
 * Armaguedón, 1977
 * A Intrusa, 1979
 * El infierno tan temido, 1980
 * Volver (1982 film), 1982
 * Somos?, 1982
 * Neon City (1982 film), 1982
 * Bella Donna, 1983
 * Cuarteles de invierno, 1984
 * Enrico IV, 1984
 * El exilio de Gardel: Tangos, 1985
 * Sur, 1988
 * 12 Monkeys, 1995
 * Happy Together, 1997

Discography

 * Two Argentinians in Paris (with Lalo Schifrin, 1955)
 * Sinfonía de Tango (Orquesta de Cuerdas, 1955)
 * Tango progresivo (Buenos Aires Octeto, 1957)
 * Octeto Buenos Aires (Octeto Buenos Aires, 1957)
 * Astor Piazzolla (Orquesta de Cuerdas, 1957)
 * Tango in Hi-Fi (Orquesta de Cuerdas, 1957)
 * Adiós Nonino (1960)
 * Piazzolla Interpreta A Piazzolla (Quinteto, 1961)
 * Piazzolla ... O No? (Vocals by Nelly Vázquez, Quinteto, 1961)
 * Nuestro Tiempo (Vocals by Hector de Rosas, Quinteto, 1962)
 * Tango Contemporáneo (Nuevo Octeto, 1963)
 * Tango Para Una Ciudad (Vocal by Héctor De Rosas, Quinteto, 1963)
 * Concierto en el Philharmonic Hall de New York (Quinteto, 1965)
 * El Tango (Jorge Luis Borges – Astor Piazzolla; Edmundo Rivero, Orquesta and Quinteto, 1965)
 * La Guardia Vieja (1966)
 * La Historia del Tango. La Guardia Vieja (Orquesta, 1967)
 * La Historia del Tango. Época Romántica (Orquesta, 1967)
 * ION Studios (1968)
 * María de Buenos Aires (Orquesta, 1968)
 * Piazzolla En El Regina (Quinteto, 1970)
 * Original Tangos from Argentina Vol. 1 & 2 (solo bandeneon, 1970)
 * Pulsación (Orquesta, 1970)
 * Piazzolla-Troilo (Dúo de Bandoneónes, 1970)
 * Concerto Para Quinteto (Quinteto, 1971)
 * La Bicicleta Blanca (Amelita Baltar y Orquesta, 1971)
 * En Persona (recitations by Horacio Ferrer, Astor Piazzolla, 1971)
 * Música Popular Contemporánea de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Vol.1 & 2 (Conjunto 9, 1972)
 * Roma (Conjunto 9, 1972)
 * Libertango (Orquesta, 1974)
 * Piazzolla and Amelita Baltar (1974)
 * Summit (Reunión Cumbre) (with Gerry Mulligan, Orquesta, 1974)
 * Suite Troileana-Lumiere (Orquesta, 1975)
 * Buenos Aires (1976)
 * Il Pleut Sur Santiago (Orquesta, 1976)
 * Piazzolla & El Conjunto Electrónico (Conjunto Electrónico, 1976)
 * Piazzolla en el Olimpia de Paris (Conjunto Electrónico, 1977)
 * Chador (1978)
 * Lo Que Vendrá (Orquesta de Cuerdas and Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1979)
 * Piazzolla-Goyeneche En Vivo, Teatro Regina (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1982)
 * Oblivion (Orquesta, 1982)
 * Suite Punta Del Este (Quinteto, 1982)
 * Live in Lugano (Quinteto, 1983)
 * SWF Rundfunkorchester (1983)
 * Concierto de Nácar – Piazzolla en el Teatro Colón (Conjunto 9 y Orquesta Filarmónica del Teatro Colón, 1983)
 * Live in Colonia (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984)
 * Montreal Jazz Festival (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984)
 * The Vienna Concert (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984), CD: 1991.
 * Enrico IV (soundtrack to the film of the same name, 1984)
 * Green Studio (1984)
 * Teatro Nazionale di Milano (1984)
 * El Exilio de Gardel (soundtrack to the film of the same name, Quinteto, 1986)
 * Tango: Zero Hour (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1986)
 * Tristezas de un Doble A (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1986), Vienna, Konzerthaus, CD: 1991.
 * Central Park Concert (Quinteto, 1987)
 * Concierto para Bandoneón – Tres Tangos with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Lalo Schifrin (conductor), Princeton University (1987)
 * El Nuevo Tango. Piazzolla y Gary Burton (Atlantic, 1987)
 * Sur (soundtrack of film Sur, Quinteto, 1988)
 * Live in Tokyo 1988 (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1988)
 * Luna. Live in Amsterdam (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1989)
 * Lausanne Concert (Sexteto Nuevo Tango, 1989)
 * Live at the BBC (Sexteto Nuevo Tango, 1989)
 * La Camorra (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1989)
 * Famille d'Artistes (1989)
 * Hommage a Liege: Concierto para bandoneón y guitarra/Historia del Tango (1988) with Liège Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leo Brouwer. The concerto was performed by Piazzolla with Cacho Tirao, the Historia by Guy Lukowski and Marc Grawels.
 * Bandoneón Sinfónico (1990)
 * The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (Tango Apasionado) (1988)
 * Five Tango Sensations (Astor Piazzolla and the Kronos Quartet, 1991)
 * Original Tangos from Argentina (1992)
 * Lausanne Concert (Sexteto Nuevo Tango, 1993)
 * Central Park Concert 1987 (Quinteto, 1994)
 * El Nuevo Tango de Buenos Aires (Quinteto, 1995)
 * 57 Minutos con la Realidad (Sexteto Nuevo Tango, 1996)
 * Tres Minutos con la Realidad (Sexteto Nuevo Tango, 1997)

title: Astor Piazzolla


text:
Red–green alliance

In politics, a red–green alliance or red–green coalition is an alliance of "red" (often social-democratic or democratic socialist) parties with "green" (often green and/or occasionally agrarian) parties. The alliance is often based on common left political views, especially a shared distrust of corporate or capitalist institutions. While the "red" social-democratic parties tend to focus on the effects of capitalism on the working class, the "green" environmentalist parties tend to focus on the environmental effects of capitalism.

Red–green coalition governments
There have been a number of red–green governments in Europe since the 1990s.
 * In Germany, a red–green coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Alliance '90/The Greens led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder formed the federal government from September 1998 to September 2005.
 * In France, the 'Plural Left' coalition of the Socialist Party (PS), The Greens, French Communist Party and allies governed from 1997 until 2002. The Ayrault government which governed from May 2012 until March 2014 had ministers affiliated with the PS, Radical Party of the Left (PRG) and Europe Ecology – The Greens. The second Valls government (August 2014 to December 2016) and Cazeneuve Government (December 2016 to May 2017) were both formed of ministers from the PS, PRG and Ecologist Party.
 * In Finland, Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen's first and second cabinets contained ministers from the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP), including Lipponen himself, and the Green League. The Green League participated in government from April 1995 until May 2002. The Rinne Cabinet formed in June 2019 is formed by the SDP as largest party, in coalition with the Green League, agrarian Centre Party, Swedish People's Party and Left Alliance.
 * In Norway, the Red-Green Coalition of the Labour Party, Socialist Left Party and Centre Party governed Norway as a majority government from the 2005 general election until 2013. The 'green' element was the Centre Party, an agrarian party with green as its official color.
 * In Iceland, the First and Second Cabinets of Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir were formed from a coalition of the Social Democratic Alliance and Left-Green Movement, governing from February 2009 to May 2013.
 * In Italy, from 1996 to 2001 and 2006–2008, the Prodi I, D'Alema I, D'Alema II, Amato II and Prodi II Cabinets included the social-democratic Democrats of the Left (later to become the Democratic Party) as the largest party, with the Federation of the Greens receiving at least one ministry. However, unlike a straightforward red–green alliance, these centre-left cabinets involved a broad range of political parties that were Catholic-inspired Christian left, social-liberal and even communist backgrounds.
 * In Denmark, the Thorning-Schmidt government, which governed from October 2011 to February 2014, contained the Social Democrats as the largest party in coalition with the Social Liberals and Socialist People's Party, the latter being a green party and member of the European Green Party and Global Greens.
 * In Sweden, the Löfven I Cabinet established on 3 October 2014 was a minority government coalition of the Social Democratic Party and Greens. This coalition was renewed on 21 January 2019 as the Löfven II Cabinet and 9 July 2021 as the Löfven III Cabinet, before being replaced on 30 November 2021 by the Andersson Cabinet, formed by the Social Democrats alone with external support from the Greens, Left Party and agrarian Centre Party.
 * In Portugal, the First António Costa Cabinet established on 26 November 2015 was a minority government led by the Socialist Party with external support from the Left Bloc, Portuguese Communist Party and The Greens, which governed until 26 October 2019.

Red–red–green coalition
A red–red–green coalition or red–green–red coalition is a left-wing alliance of two "red" social democratic, democratic socialist, or socialist parties with one "green" environmentalist party. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon's New Ecologic and Social People's Union is an example of a left–green alliance.

Radical red–green alliances
Political parties or joint electoral lists have been formed over the years, most often between socialists and left-oriented greens. Example include:

 * GreenLeft of the Netherlands: a political party that began in 1989 as a political alliance comprising the Communist Party of the Netherlands, Pacifist Socialist Party and the Christian left parties Evangelical People's Party and Political Party of Radicals. The alliance had been known as Rainbow for the 1989 European elections.
 * Unity List – The Red–Greens of Denmark: a political party, originally a political alliance, formed in 1989 by the Left Socialists (VS), Communist Party of Denmark (DKP) and Socialist Workers Party (SAP).
 * The Nordic Green Left Alliance was a European political alliance formed by the Left Alliance (Finland), the Left-Green Movement (Iceland), the Left Party (Sweden), the Socialist Left Party (Norway) and the Socialist People's Party (Denmark). The MEPs of the NGLA sat in the European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group in the European Parliament, although the MEPs of the Socialist People's Party sat in The Greens–European Free Alliance (G/EFA) group and later joined the European Green Party.
 * Left Ecology Freedom (SEL): a former political party in Italy that was initially formed as a political alliance comprising socialists, greens and social democrats. The political alliance was itself a partial successor to the short-lived The Left – The Rainbow electoral alliance which had existed in Italy from December 2007 until May 2008 comprising the Federation of the Greens (FdV), the Communist Refoundation Party, Party of Italian Communists and the Democratic Left (SD). In 2022 a new alliance, Greens and Left Alliance, composed of the successor of SEL and SD Italian Left and the successor of FdV Green Europe, was formed.
 * The Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), a Greek party formed by the merger of a broad set of left-wing and eco-socialist parties, many of which were themselves formerly red–green alliances, such as the Coalition of Left, of Movements and Ecology (Synaspismos), Renewing Communist Ecological Left (AKOA), and Ecosocialists of Greece. The SYRIZA-led cabinet of Alexis Tsipras contains ones junior minister, Giannis Tsironis, from the Ecologist Greens.
 * Green–Left Coalition of Croatia: formed by the We can! and Green Alternative – Sustainable Development of Croatia and by the left-wing New Left and Workers' Front (the latter left the alliance).
 * Green Left of Hungary: was a merger of Alliance of Green Democrats and the Workers' Party of Hungary 2006.

Red–green alliances with centre-left parties
There are also red/green political alliances and/or electoral agreements between social-democratic or liberal parties cooperate with green parties
 * In Canada, the term red–green alliance has been used to describe the limited co-operation between the Liberal Party of Canada which uses red as its colour, and the Green Party of Canada, which is centre-left but not seen as being as radical as many of its overseas sister parties and take a more moderate stance than New Democratic Party.
 * A red–green alliance of sorts occurred during the campaign leading up to the 2008 London mayoral election. Incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone, candidate for the Labour Party, formed an electoral pact with the Green Party mayoral candidate Siân Berry via the supplementary voting system, in which Labour voters were encouraged to place the Green candidate as their second preference, and vice versa.
 * In Italy, The Olive Tree and The Union coalitions comprised the Federation of the Greens along with social-democratic, social Christian, centrist and other parties in a broad heterogenous centre-left alliance. The successor party to the Olive Tree, the Democratic Party, maintains an internal faction of greens called the Democratic Ecologists.
 * In Australia, the term red–green alliance has been used to describe the co-operation between the centre-left Australian Labor Party and the Australian Greens. The Greens supported Labor to form the minority government in 2010. As the Greens is the third party in the Australian Senate which hold the balance power from crossbench, the Labor minority government needed to rely support from the Greens from 2010 to 2013.
 * In New Zealand, after the 2017 general election, the Labour and the Greens signed a memorandum of understanding. This formed a loose relationship between the two parties with the goal of working together when possible to unseat the incumbent National Government. Later, the two parties also agreed to a set of budget responsibility rules, committing both parties to sustainable surpluses and capping debt, amongst other rules. Following the 2020 election, a Labour majority government was formed, supported by the Greens through a confidence and supply arrangement.
 * In Hungary, Unity comprised the social democratic Hungarian Socialist Party and Democratic Coalition and the green Dialogue for Hungary alongside smaller liberal parties.
 * In France, New Ecological and Social People's Union includes the left-wing La France Insoumise and French Communist Party, the centre-left Socialist Party and the green Ecologist Pole.
 * In the Netherlands, GreenLeft and the Labour Party formed an alliance during the 2021-2022 cabinet formation, vowing to only join a government coalition together. In 2023, the parliamentary groups in the Senate merged following a joint election campaign. In the 2023 snap election, the two parties ran on a joint list, after members of both parties voted in favour.

title: Red–green alliance