Listen to This. Alex Ross
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When Almadán was married,
A wild party was arranged,
The daughters of Anao dancing
With the grandsons of Milan.
A father-in-law of Don Beltrán
And a sister-in-law of Orfeo
Started dancing the Guineo,
With the fat one at the end.
And Fame spreads it all around:
To the good life, la vida bona,
Let’s all go now to Chacona.
A surreal parade of wedding guests ensues: a blind man poking girls with a stick, an African heathen singing with a Gypsy, a doctor wearing pans around his neck. Drunks, thieves, cuckolds, brawlers, and men and women of ill repute complete the scene.
King Philip II, the austere master of the Spanish imperium, died in 1598, around the time that the chacona first surfaced in Peru. In the final months of his reign, Philip took note of certain immoral dances that were circulating in Madrid; religious authorities had warned him that the frivolity rampant in the city resembled the decadence of the Roman Empire. The debate continued after Philip’s death. In 1615, the King’s Council banned from public theaters the chacona, the zarabanda, and other dances that were deemed “lascivious, dishonest, or offensive to pious ears.” In truth, officialdom had little to fear from these naughty little numbers. They give off a frisson of rebellion, yet the established order remains intact. The errant nobles in Cervantes’s story resume their proper roles; the characters in “Un sarao de la chacona” surely return to their usual places the following day. Tellingly, Arañés dedicated his collection of songs to his employer, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See. Courtly life had no trouble assimilating the chacona, which soon became a respectable form in what we now call classical music.
The subsequent history of the chacona cuts a cross-section through four centuries of Western culture. As the original fad subsided, composers avidly explored the hidden possibilities of the dance, ringing intricate variations on a simple idea. It passed into Italian, French, German, and English hands, assuming masks of arcane virtuosity, aristocratic elegance, minor-key cogitation, and high-toned yearning. Louis XIV, whose empire eclipsed Philip’s, danced la chaconne at the court of Versailles; in the modern era, the French term for the dance has generally prevailed. Johann Sebastian Bach, in the final movement of his Second Partita for solo violin, wrote a chaconne of almost shocking severity, rendering the form all but unrecognizable. In the Romantic age, the chaconne fell from fashion, but amid the terrors of the twentieth century composers once again picked it up, associating it with the high seriousness of Bach rather than the ebullience of the original. The chaconne has continued to evolve in music of recent decades. In 1978, György Ligeti, an avant-gardist with a long historical memory, wrote a harpsichord piece titled Hungarian Rock (Chaconne), which revived the Spanish bounce and infused it with boogie-woogie.
The circuitous career of the chaconne intersects many times with that of another ostinato figure, the basso lamento. This is a repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode (think of the piano riff in Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack”) and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale (think of the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, or, if you prefer, Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”):
If the chaconne is a mercurial thing, radically changing its meaning as it moves through space and time, these motifs of weeping and longing bring out profound continuities in musical history. They almost seem to possess intrinsic significance, as if they were fragments of a strand of musical DNA.
Theorists warn us that music is a non-referential art, that its affective properties depend on extra-musical associations. Indeed, with a change of variables, a rowdy chaconne can turn into a deathly lament. Nothing in the medium is fixed. “I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything,” Stravinsky once said, warding off sentimental interpretations. Then again, when Stravinsky composed the opening lament of his ballet Orpheus, he reached for the same four-note descending figure that has represented sorrow for at least a thousand years.
FOLK LAMENT
Across the millennia, scholars have attempted to construct a grammar of musical meaning. The ancient Greeks believed that their system of scales could be linked to gradations of emotion. Indian ragas include categories of hasya (joy), karuna (sadness), raudra (anger), and shanta (peace). In Western European music, songs in a major key are thought to be happy, songs in a minor key sad. Although these distinctions turn hazy under close inspection—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in muscular C minor, defies categorization—we are, for the most part, surprisingly adept at picking up the intended message of an unfamiliar musical piece. Psychologists have found that Western listeners can properly sort Indian ragas by type, even if they know nothing of the music. Likewise, the Mafa people of Cameroon, who inhabit remote parts of the Mandara Mountains, easily performed a similar exercise with Western samples.
The music of dejection is especially hard to miss. When a person cries, he or she generally makes a noise that slides downward and then leaps to an even higher pitch to begin the slide again. Not surprisingly, something similar happens in musical laments around the world. Those stepwise falling figures suggest not only the sounds that we emit when we are in distress but also the sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, they imply a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld. In a pioneering essay on the chromatic lament, the composer Robert Müller-Hartmann wrote, “A vision of the grave or of Hades is brought about by its decisive downward trend.” At the same time, laments help to guide us out of the labyrinth of despair. Like Aristotelean tragedy, they allow for a purgation of pity and fear: through the repetitive ritual of mourning, we tame the edges of emotion, give shape to inner chaos.
In 1917, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, a passionate collector of folk music, took his Edison cylinder to the Transylvanian village of Mânerău and recorded the bocet, or lament, of a woman pining for her absent husband: “Change me to a rainbow, Lord, / To see where my husband is.” The melody goes down four sobbing steps:
This pattern shows up all over Eastern European folk music. In a village in the Somogy region of Hungary, a woman was recorded singing a strikingly similar tune as she exclaimed, “Woe is me, what have I done against the great Lord that he has taken my beloved spouse away?” At Russian weddings, where a symbolic “killing the bride” is part of the nuptial rite, the wailing of the bride often presses down a fourth. Comparable laments have been documented in the Mangystau region of Kazakhstan and in the Karelian territories of Finland and Russia, with more distant parallels appearing among the Shipibo-Conibo people, in the upper Amazon, and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.
If you twang those four descending notes forcefully on a guitar, you have the makings of flamenco. The motif is especially prominent in the flamenco genre known as siguiriya, which stems from older genres of Gypsy lament. On a 1922 recording, Manuel Torre sings a classic siguiriya, with the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador repeatedly plucking out the fateful figure:
Siempre por los rincones I always find you
te encuentro llorando … weeping in the corners …
Flamenco is more than lament, of course; it is also music of high passion. As Federico García Lorca wrote of the siguiriya, “It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.”
Of course, not every descending melody has lamentation on