Photo Credit: LUKE HAGGERTY

Name: Caeli Smith
Age: 16
Instrument: Violin
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Schools: 21st Century Cyber Charter School, Settlement Music School, and Juilliard Pre-College Division
Activities: Studies chamber music at Settlement Music School and plays tangos with pianist Tim Ribchester; a violin student of Joey Corpus in New York; often heard in her other job as a roving reporter on NPR’s From The Top.

I got hooked on the nuevo-tango music of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) five years ago at a concert of violinist Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica in my hometown, Philadelphia. In all my life, I had never been so excited on first hearing a piece of music. As a classical violinist, I found the rhythms and textures of the tango irresistible. I absolutely had to play this music on my violin.

But I needed help.

My classical-violin teacher didn’t want to sidetrack my lessons from Bach, Mozart, and Sarasate, so I needed to find a mentor to help me understand tango. In the spring of 2006, I met pianist Tim Ribchester, a University of Pennsylvania grad student who was writing a dissertation about Piazzolla. Over the next couple of years, Tim taught me the history and background of tango music and coached me in tango style. He also wrote some new arrangements of Piazzolla’s music for violin and piano for us to play.

To play tango music well, you need to let go of many of the assumptions you’ve acquired during your lifetime as a classical player.

But I needed to learn a more authentic tango string technique from an experienced tango violinist.

Last fall, when I learned that Quartet San Francisco was coming to the East Coast, I contacted QSF violinist Jeremy Cohen and asked him to help me. I had been listening to the group’s Látigo album, which includes works by Piazzolla and other tango compositions. Jeremy, who is a frequent contributor to Strings and Teen Strings magazines, and violinist Kayo Miki, also of Quartet San Francisco, met me in Princeton, New Jersey, on a break from their busy concert schedule and gave me a marathon lesson in tango string technique that left my head swimming. I went home realizing that the differences between classical violin playing and good tango playing are even greater than I had ever imagined.

Time to Let Go

Although Piazzolla is considered a classical composer, his music is a true infusion of two distinct traditions, with improvisational elements similar to jazz. It doesn’t make sense to approach it from a purely classical perspective, ignoring the tango’s populist roots. To play tango music well, it helps to have a great classical violin technique. Yet, as I learned, you also need to let go of many of the assumptions you’ve acquired during your lifetime as a classical player.

Tango music started as an accompaniment to the tango dance; it’s not all about showcasing yourself as a violinist and producing a big soloistic sound. When I first approached this music, I played it with a lot of bow and vibrato, in a very “into the string” romantic style. Which sounds fine, but it isn’t really tango. Later, I came to understand that, in this music, the violin can provide both melody and percussive background. You need to let go and fall into the groove, to let it happen instead of making it happen. And “letting go” is perhaps the hardest challenge for a classical violinist like me, who has the mind-set of “getting everything right.”

The paradox is that you need to become metronomically rhythmic, but also free. The accents, which define the rhythmic outline of a piece, need to fall into place, not to be brought out with the kind of intentionality you would use in performing a standard classical concerto. You need to learn how to play “dirty,” digging into the strings, and yet do it with elegance and wit. For these reasons, tango is some of the hardest and most rewarding music I have ever played.

I found that some of the best resources for learning to play tango music are on the Internet. Cohen has tango tutorials on his website, including streaming video, that help explain tango string techniques in a clear, precise way. I also found YouTube videos of the great tango players, such as Fernando Suarez Paz, who was the violinist in Piazzolla’s quintet. Studying films of Paz’s performances, along with the printed scores, I began to understand the possibilities for ornamentation and improvisation.

When classical musicians play a score, they can fool around with interpretation in the sense of dynamics and phrasing. But that’s as far as it goes. Paz had done a lot with the Piazzolla scores, adding double-stops, slides, and other embellishments, which made the piece jump out and sound even better. This helped me understand how much freedom I had to make a piece my own. Watching his videos was like having a lesson with him; it totally changed my approach to the music.

Last month, I had the opportunity to play Piazzolla’s “Bordel 1900,” from his suite Histoire du Tango, with pianist Christopher O’Riley at a taping of the PBS series From the Top: Live from Carnegie Hall. The piece was written for flute and guitar, but has been arranged for different instrument combinations. This was a world premiere of our particular arrangement, written by Tim Ribchester.

I spent a lot of time working on my personal interpretation of the piece, anticipating the fun of performing it with Chris. I was really thrilled when From the Top brought in a special surprise guest to coach Chris and me during our rehearsal: Piazzolla’s pianist Pablo Ziegler, who was a member of the composer’s own quintet, along with Fernando Suarez Paz.

What an exciting opportunity, getting so close to the source of this great music!

Learning a new style is a great challenge, especially when there is no clear-cut path to follow. Even though it has been difficult to find my own way, I’m so glad I did. I think the key to being an artist is to balance an open mind with a strong sense of discipline. Learning to play tango has helped sharpen my sense of ensemble and made me an all-around better violinist.

—CAELI SMITH

A Jeremy Cohen duet tango etude can be found in the June/July issue of Strings magazine.