Party like it’s 1624

In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, where it became a wildly popular dance. Over time, composers of “art” music got interested in it too, and they used it as the basis for an entire genre of increasingly abstracted compositions. By the time Bach wrote the chaconne in his Partita for Violin No. 2, he was referring to an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, something like a John Coltrane arrangement of a pop standard. It makes me wonder what a chaconne might have sounded like in its original context. Bach’s (and Coltrane’s) abstractions are wonderful in and of themselves, but you can’t fully appreciate them without understanding what they’re referring back to.

It’s easy to listen to Coltrane’s source material. If you try to do the same with for Bach, however, you have a harder time. When you do a Google search for chaconnes, you mostly find performances of Bach, or similarly abstracted works by other canonical composers. Thanks to Wikipedia, though, I did find a chaconne of the kind that a person might have actually danced to back in 17th century Spain. It’s a tune by Juan Arañés called “A La Vida Bona.” Here’s a performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band.

Now that sounds like dance music! Arañés wrote the tune to be sung by a chorus accompanied by guitar, like so:

I like the Piffaro version better, for its percussion, its danceable vibe, and its cheerful Renaissance woodwinds. Like any good dance tune, it’s rhythmically interesting and harmonically boring, mostly I-IV-V progressions in F-sharp. The only surprising chord movement happens in two spots, here for example, when the tune lands briefly on D-sharp major. It’s like a standard movement to the relative minor, but with the parallel major VI chord instead. This chord progression sounds familiar to me, it’s a Renaissance trope that I’m sure I’ve heard before. However, I have no idea what it’s called. Is it a kind of Picardy third? If someone could enlighten me in the comments, I’d appreciate it.

Anyway, the real excitement in the Piffaro recording is its groove. It’s infectious, but very different from the music we’re dancing to now. The chaconne is in triple meter, but it doesn’t sound like a waltz. I can’t help but hear it the chaconne groove as 4/4 with phrases in groups of three bars. If the chaconne groove really is African in origin, then that duple/triple ambiguity was probably intentional. People in Sub-Saharan Africa love twelve-beat cycles because you can divide them into three-beat or four-beat groupings equally easily, and you’re supposed to hear both groupings simultaneously.

Here’s a chaconne written around the same time as the Arañes one, by Francesca Caccini. It has some nifty triplets and dissonances in it.

Here’s another chaconne by Andrea Falconieri from a little later. You can hear the rhythm getting abstracted away from the basic chaconne groove.

Alex Ross calls the chaconne a “sexily swirling dance.” The examples that I can find of people dancing to it are more courtly than sexy or swirling. They dance one in episode four of The Borgias, which is anachronistic, but it gives you the idea. Here’s a not-very-sexy performance from YouTube:

I continue to struggle to aurally connect the rhythms of this dance to the rhythms of chaconnes by Bach and other Northern European composers. Alex Ross talks about the Lully chaconne from Phaeton as being a paradigmatic example of the chaconne genre. Harmonically and formally, Lully’s piece might descend from the folkloric chaconne, but aside from a mildly accented beat two, its rhythms are indistinguishable from plain old waltz time.

Various musicological sources describe a “Chaconne rhythm” common to the genre:

Here’s the chaconne rhythm on the Groove Pizza – the snare is playing the pattern, while the kick and hi-hat are doing generic accompaniment.

You can clap the chaconne rhythm along with any of the music in this post. You can even clap it over the opening bars of the Bach Chaconne, though you have to do it extremely slowly. However, the relationship between the groove in the Piffaro recording and the “chaconne rhythm” is mysterious to me. Did Piffaro invent their groove, or did they get it from some historical or folkloric source? I can’t find an answer online or in the library.

Northern European composers did not seem overly concerned with representing Iberian dances correctly. Spanish colonists brought another triple-meter dance back to Europe from the Americas called the sarabande. Canonical composers used the words “chaconne” and “sarabande” interchangeably. For example, the Handel Sarabande uses the literal chaconne rhythm all the way through.

Eighteenth century white guys mixed up the sarabande and chaconne with other “racy” Southern dances too, like the Italian passacaglia. Bach himself freely interchanged the words “chaconne” and “passacaglia.”

Based on what I can piece together, I’m sensing a narrative: Iberian colonists hear a West African and/or Native American rhythm and like it. They learn to play it, or an approximation of it, and they bring it home, where it’s received as a “saucy,” “sexy,” “primitive” dance. The rhythm takes on a life of its own independent of its cultural origins. Higher-class people adopt it, and sand off its edges. Then the “serious” composers start adapt the simplified version into the abstractions we know from the classical canon. In the process, the rhythms lose their idiosyncrasies, and get mushed together into a vague sense of “sexiness.”

There’s a parallel to the way that white musicians currently describe any Latin-sounding beat as “salsa” or “mambo” or “bossa”, without realizing that these rhythms are all different from each other. I’m also guessing that it’s a similar story to the evolution of “Kumbaya” from the syncopated groove of the Gullah original to the foursquare version we all learned from Joan Baez. The steady appropriation of “lowbrow” dance musics originating in the African diaspora into “highbrow” art music is evidently many hundreds of years older than I thought.

My preferred tool for musicological investigation is the remix. Here’s a version of the Piffaro recording with some present-day dance beats: techno four-on-the-floor from a 909 and the James Brown “Yeah Woo” break. Enjoy.

Mostly unrelated, but: how cool is Baroque dance notation? I can’t say the dancing itself does much for me, but I love looking at these diagrams.

Hear all of my classical remixes.

See also: a deep dive into the Bach Chaconne.

Update! Helen De Cruz has some more examples of chaconnes played in a dance style.

Or Kapsberger's Canarios (canarios were, as the name suggests, inspired by dances of the population of the Canary islands) https://t.co/bm4CYIpkII

— Helen De Cruz (@Helenreflects) July 8, 2023