There is a lot of musical life in the city… Opera seems to be very popular here, and during the season it is performed by separate Italian, French, and German companies. Music that is specifically Argentinian is discussed and demonstrated to me by new-found friends. The tango is still very big, they tell me, and it exists in three forms or phases: there's a kind of classical tango played by the Guardia Vieja (the Old Guard), a postwar tango that is popular and "sensitive," and an avant-garde tango that is claimed to have intellectual depth and modern melodic characteristics. The tendency to categorization is very familiar to me! There is also the milonga, which I refer to as the Argentine blues, because it always has to do with a woman whose man has abandoned her, or vice versa. Then there are the nostalgic songs of the gauchos on the pampas… little different from those our guys sing in the westerns on the way up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. << less