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    CHACONA, LAMENTO, WALKING BLUES
    BASS LINES OF MUSIC HISTORY

    At the outset of the seventeenth century, as the Spanish Empire reached its zenith, there was a fad for the chacona, a sexily swirling dance that hypnotized all who heard it. No one knows for certain where it came from, but scattered evidence suggests that it originated somewhere in Spain’s New World colonies. In 1598, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo, a soldier and court official who had spent a decade in Peru, included the chacona in a list of locally popular dances and airs whose names had been “given by the devil.” Because no flesh-and-blood person could resist such sounds, Oquendo wrote, the law should ignore whatever mischief they might cause.
    The devil did fine work: the chacona is perfectly engineered to bewitch the senses. It is in triple time, with a stress on the second beat encouraging a sway of the hips. Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato—a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an insistent fashion. (“Ostinato” is Italian for “obstinate.”) Other instruments add variations, the wilder the better. And singers step forward to tell bawdy tales of la vida bona, the good life. The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward. When an early-music group reconstructs the form—the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall often improvises on the chacona with his ensemble Hesperion XXI—centuries melt away and modern feet tap to an ancient tune.
    The late Renaissance brought forth many ostinato dances of this type—the passamezzo, the bergamasca, the zarabanda, la folia —but the chacona took on a certain notoriety. Writers of the Spanish Golden Age savored its exotic, dubious reputation: Lope de Vega personified the dance as an old lady “riding in to Seville from the Indies.” Cervantes’s novella La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Scullery-Maid), published in 1613, has a scene in which a young nobleman poses as a water carrier and plays a chacona in a common tavern, to the stamping delight of the maids and mule boys. He sings:

    So come in, all you nymph girls,
All you nymph boys, if you please,
The dance of the chacona
Is wider than the seas.

    Chacona lyrics often emphasize the dance’s topsy-turvy nature—its knack for disrupting solemn occasions and breaking down inhibitions. Thieves use it to fool their prey. Kings get down with their subjects. When a sexton at a funeral accidentally says “Vida bona” instead of “Requiem,” all begin to bounce to the familiar beat—including, it is said, the corpse. “Un sarao de la chacona,” or “A Chaconne Soiree,” a song published by the Spanish musician Juan Arañés, presents this busy tableau:

    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