Understanding the habanera and the tango

From Havana to Buenos Aires

In the nineteenth century, Cuba danced the contradanza, known outside the island as the habanera, "the dance of Havana". It was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African pattern, and the ancestor of the danzón, the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. The oldest known piece to put this rhythm in the left hand of the piano, as this lesson does, is an anonymous song published in 1836, La Pimienta.

Around 1860, after a trip to Cuba, Sebastián Iradier wrote La Paloma, one of the first written examples of this rhythm to become very popular. In 1875, the Habanera in Bizet's Carmen, "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle", was adapted from another of Iradier's songs, El Arreglito, published in 1863, which Bizet believed to be a folk song, and whose verses are in D minor, like this lesson. Finally, in Buenos Aires, the tango was born between 1850 and 1900 from a mix of European forms, Latin American ones, including the habanera, and African rhythms. Like the milonga, it kept the habanera rhythm.

The habanera rhythm

The rhythm fits in four notes: a dotted eighth, a sixteenth, then two eighths. The habanera writes it in two beats (2/4); this lesson is written in four, so the left hand plays it twice per bar. It puts the root on the dotted eighth (D under Dm), the fifth on the sixteenth (A), the root again, then, higher up, two notes together: the third and fifth (F and A), or, under A7, the third and seventh (C-sharp and G).

To feel it, count eight sixteenths over two beats, "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8": the notes fall on 1, 4, 5 and 7. One long, one very short that bounces, then two even ones: that is the sway the tango kept. Above it, the melody mostly moves in two eighths and a quarter: a straight rhythm, against the dotted rhythm of the bass.

What the lesson plays

Sixteen bars in an A A B A form, one chord per bar, in D minor. In the sections, the map writes the degrees whose chord is minor in lower case (i, iv).

• A (bars 1 to 4): Dm, two bars of A7, then Dm. The melody climbs the chord, D, F, A, brushes against B-flat, then passes through the C-sharp of A7: missing from the map's scale, it pulls towards D, and going from A7 back to Dm makes a perfect cadence.
• A (bars 5 to 8): the same phrase, except at the end: instead of staying on D, the melody leaps to A, a fifth higher, and stays in suspense to open the bridge.
• B (bars 9 to 12): the bridge starts on Gm, the iv, then comes back through Dm, A7 and Dm. Its first two bars open with a triplet, three even notes in one beat (G, B-flat, D, then F, A, D), against the dotted rhythm of the bass.
• A (bars 13 to 16): the opening phrase, which comes to rest on D.

How to approach it

My plan takes you through it in 10 days. Here, everything starts from the left hand: once its rhythm is settled, the melody sits on top.

1. The rhythm alone, on a table. Tap on 1, 4, 5 and 7 while counting the sixteenths, until you no longer need to count.
2. The left hand alone. Under A7, everything sits under the hand. Under Dm and Gm, the two upper notes are more than an octave above the bass: the hand makes a small jump, twice per bar. Prepare it with your eyes on the landing note.
3. The melody alone, singing it. Only two black keys: the B-flat of the key signature, and the C-sharp that leads to D.
4. Hands together, slowly. The two hands meet on the beats; in between, the right hand's second eighth comes first, the left hand's sixteenth just after.
5. The passages I point out. In bars 8–9 and 12, the melody leaps a fifth (D–A, then A–D). In bar 10, the busiest, the triplet plays against the dotted rhythm: do not try to line them up; the bass's sixteenth falls just after the third note of the triplet. Work on that first beat on its own, very slowly.