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This chapter expands upon the basic musical elements that define the Argentine tango style discussed in chapter I. It discusses how tangueros themselves define and frame Argentine tango musical elements. Through narration, score excerpts, and notated musical examples, it illustrates tango orchestration/arranging techniques. It demonstrates performances practices of how tangueros execute accompanimental rhythms, melodic styles, and special instrumental techniques through audio files and video clips. Through both arranging and performance techniques, the following topics are discussed: marcato, síncopa, arrastre, yumba, rítmico, cantando, fraseo and yeites.

This chapter examines the music and career of Fefita la Grande, a pioneering female accordionist in merengue típico and among the most beloved figures in Dominican music today. A combination of biography and oral history with lyrical, musical, and movement analyses shows that she is culturally charismatic in much the same way as Tatico Henríquez, the male accordionist featured in the previous chapter: she too emerged in the tumultuous post-dictatorship period and carefully performs a persona that merges the archetypal feminine role of mujer seria in her offstage life with the tíguera in the public eye. This performance of gender is all the more notable for how it has grown and changed with her as she has aged. But paradoxically, the love audiences have for her singing voice and stage antics (framed here as a form of camp or choteo, related to that of Cuban American diva La Lupe) is often paired with disdain for her instrumental technique. The author analyzes accordion solos and bodily movements to show how Fefita performs a trickster/tíguera in her rhythmic play and physical gestures, an important intervention in the típico world that paved the way for the many female accordionists that have followed her.

When chemical instruments are used in the laboratory, a specimen undergoes changes at the microscopic level. Depending on the instrument, the specimen absorbs or emits radiation. Alternatively, radiation is scattered, refracted, or diffracted. We often read that microscopic events produced from chemical instrumentation are real, as opposed to mere artifacts of the experiment. But exactly what does this mean? This philosophical question underlies a continual dilemma for the experimental chemist, whether to declare triumphantly that his/her findings reveal some insight about a chemical substance or to refrain from such a judgment for fear of having produced a mere artificial effect. Of course, a commonplace position is that the artificiality of laboratory techniques can be separated, in principle, from the real effects, because these techniques enable scientists to break the influence of laboratory constructions on experimental “ facts.” But some commentators have resurrected the fairly skeptical view that such declarations of success are grossly overstated because the interference from various instrumental techniques, laboratory equipment, and theoretical ideas precludes the possibility of exposing properties of independently existing substance. If we address this philosophical question by exploring techniques of chemical instrumentation, we find that the categories of a laboratory artifact and real effect are not mutually exclusive. As I argue here, the experimental phenomena of chemical research are both real and artificially produced from laboratory apparatus, manufactured conditions, and sophisticated techniques of researchers. The plan of this chapter is as follows: examine the character of analytical instruments in chemistry (section 1); explain the difference between an artifact and a real effect (section 2); examine the process of virtual witnessing in chemistry (section 3); explore how instruments are designed to mimic known chemical or physical processes (section 4); introduce the philosophical importance of noise-blocking techniques (section 5); and conclude with brief remarks about experimental reduction (section 6). The similarities and differences between absorption spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy are discussed. In this chapter I adopt a functional orientation to our understanding chemical substance, according to which a specimen is known by those capacities that technicians try to exploit during laboratory research.