Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

For the second time, I have had to change the name of my irregular blog posts featuring other people's music. I gave up on "Tuesday Feature" when it became clear that I wasn't able to stick to a Tuesday schedule, and adopted "Listen to This" in its place. Now Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise, who I wrote about in my post about the MacArthur Fellowships, has released a second book, based on his writings for the New Yorker. The title of the book? Listen to This, of course. I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in music in general, but I am shocked that Ross had the temerity to steal my title¹. Nevertheless, I defer to his authority, and my features will hereupon be known as "Now Hear This" -- at least, until I change my mind.

Today's issue of "Now Hear This" is in fact inspired by Listen to This, specifically the second chapter, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues." In that chapter, Ross traces the lineage of a couple of musical patterns throughout history, drawing connections between Baroque madrigals, Bob Dylan, and many things in between. I frankly expected the chapter to be somewhat dry, but as usual, Ross finds ways to bring the material to life. I especially enjoyed his account of the chacona, so today you will get to hear two chaconas, each with a decidedly different character.

The chacona is a dance of Hispanic American origin, which enjoyed great popularity in Spain around 1600. It is in triple time, and has an emphasis on beat 2. It was said to be so catchy that the laws should ignore whatever mischief was caused by people dancing the chacona, for they surely could not help themselves. Juan Arañés (d. 1649) captured the spirit of the early chacona in "Un Sarao de la Chacona," and here Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI do a brilliant job of recapturing that spirit:

If the guitar introduction² doesn't have you tapping your toes, well, there's not much I can do to help you. The infectious rhythms are taken up by the band and singers in turn, and the lyrics tell of an extravagant party, at which a vast and varied assortment of guests all show up to enjoy "la vida bona" and dance the chacona.

Then we jump ahead nearly 400 years, from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 20th. For a long time, composers have taken the repeated bass line of the chacona and turned it into a vehicle for melodic variation, abstracting the form from its terpsichorean origins. The most famous example of this practice is almost certainly the chaconne from J.S. Bach's second partita for solo violin, which is about as far removed from "la vida bona" as can be imagined, but that's not what I want to share with you today. Rather, our second chacona of the day is the second movement of John Adams' Violin Concerto, "Chaconne: Body Through Which the Dream Flows." Here, Gidon Kremer is the soloist, and Kent Nagano conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. The movement is over 11 minutes long, so it has been broken up into two videos:

The subtitle for this chaconne (the French spelling) is apt, as the effect is somewhat dreamlike, with amorphous rhythmic figures and searching melodies. And although it may bear no superficial resemblance to Arañés' chacona, the two pieces do share a bit of musical DNA. If we put the bass lines of "Un Sarao de la Chacona" and "Body Through Which the Dream Flows" side-by-side, we see that the latter bass line is in effect a simplification of the former:

Here, certain notes in "Un Sarao de la Chacona" (the top line) have been highlighted to show how they relate to "Body Through Which the Dream Flows" on the bottom. "Un Sarao de la Chacona" is a lot more elaborate and rhythmically active, but they both stress a lot of the same pitches. This is no accident; Adams said that he examined a number of chaconne bass lines, and selected one that he felt was a sort of ur-chaconne, from which the others could be derived. Adams also said that at the time he was working on the concerto, he remained unaware of the connection of his ur-chaconne to a more famous bass line, that of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D:

Even if he had been aware of this connection, Adams' chaconne would hardly be a Pachelbel rip-off. The melodies and harmonies are far too abstracted, and even the bass line itself undergoes transformations which change the individual notes, but leave the overall shape intact. You may not be able to dance the chacona to "Body Through Which the Dream Flows," but it is a beautiful reinterpretation of a classic form.

¹ Actually, I probably stole the title from Ross, even though my blog entries predate his book. The first essay from Listen to This, which is the source of the book's title, has been online for years, and it made a big impression on me when I first encountered it.

² At least, I think it's a guitar. I may well be wrong.