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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,