Authors: Alex Ross
Listen to This (7 page)
Bach died in 1750, and the Baroque era more or less died with him. Forms of rigid repetition lost their appeal as the Baroque gave way to the Classical period and then to the Romantic: increasingly, composers valued constant variation, sudden contrast, unrelenting escalation. Music became linear rather than circular, with large-scale structures proceeding from assertive thematic ideas through episodes of strenuous development to climaxes of overwhelming magnitude. “Time’s cycle had been straightened into an arrow, and the arrow was traveling ever faster,” the scholar Karol Berger writes. Music would no longer react to an exterior order; instead, it would become a kind of aesthetic empire unto itself. In 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in which he differentiated the Romantic ethos from the more restrained spirit of prior centuries: “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of Orcus. Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”
For composers of Mozart’s time and after, the chaconne, the passacaglia, and the lamento aria would have been antique devices learned from manuals of counterpoint and the like. Yet they never disappeared entirely. Beethoven studied Bach in his youth, and at some point he came across the B-Minor Mass, or a description of it; in 1810 he asked his publisher to send him “a Mass by J. S. Bach that has the following Crucifixus with a
basso ostinato
as obstinate as you are”—and he wrote out the “Crucifixus” bass line. Beethoven was undoubtedly thinking of Bach when, in his Thirty-two Variations in C Minor of 1806, he elaborated doggedly on the downward chromatic fourth. Eighteen years later, a “Crucifixus” figure cropped up in the stormy D-minor opening movement of the Ninth Symphony. Thirty-five bars before the end, the strings and bassoons churn out a
basso lamento
that has the rhythm of a dirge: you can almost hear the feet of pallbearers dragging alongside a hero’s casket.
basso ostinato
as obstinate as you are”—and he wrote out the “Crucifixus” bass line. Beethoven was undoubtedly thinking of Bach when, in his Thirty-two Variations in C Minor of 1806, he elaborated doggedly on the downward chromatic fourth. Eighteen years later, a “Crucifixus” figure cropped up in the stormy D-minor opening movement of the Ninth Symphony. Thirty-five bars before the end, the strings and bassoons churn out a
basso lamento
that has the rhythm of a dirge: you can almost hear the feet of pallbearers dragging alongside a hero’s casket.
Yet the ostinato is a nightmare from which Beethoven wishes to wake. The finale of the Ninth rejects the mechanics of fateful repetition: in the frenzied, dissonant music that opens the finale, the chromatic descent momentarily resurfaces, and when it is heard again at the beginning of the vocal section of the movement the bass soloist intones, “O friends, not these tones!” At which point the Ode to Joy begins. Beethoven might have been echoing the central shift of the B-Minor Mass—the leap from the chromatic “Crucifixus” to the blazing “Et resurrexit.”
The lamento bass would not stay buried. It rumbles in much music of the later nineteenth century: in various works of Brahms, in the late piano music of Liszt, in the songs and symphonies of Mahler. It is a dominating presence in Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique
Symphony, which ends with a slow movement marked Adagio lamentoso. Even in the first bars of the first movement, double basses creep down step by chromatic step while a single bassoon presses fitfully upward. (The scenario is much like the contrary motion of the upper and lower voices in Dido’s Lament.) The final Adagio begins with a desperately eloquent theme that contains within it the time-worn contour of folkish lament. In the coda, Tchaikovsky combines the modal and chromatic forms of the lamento pattern, creating a hybrid emblem of grief, somewhat in the manner of Bach’s chaconne. The passage plays out over a softly pulsing bass note that recalls the eternal basses of Bach’s Passions.
Pathétique
Symphony, which ends with a slow movement marked Adagio lamentoso. Even in the first bars of the first movement, double basses creep down step by chromatic step while a single bassoon presses fitfully upward. (The scenario is much like the contrary motion of the upper and lower voices in Dido’s Lament.) The final Adagio begins with a desperately eloquent theme that contains within it the time-worn contour of folkish lament. In the coda, Tchaikovsky combines the modal and chromatic forms of the lamento pattern, creating a hybrid emblem of grief, somewhat in the manner of Bach’s chaconne. The passage plays out over a softly pulsing bass note that recalls the eternal basses of Bach’s Passions.
The affect of the Adagio lamentoso could hardly be clearer. Tchaikovsky seems to have reverted to the mimetic code of Renaissance writers such as Ficino: as the music droops, so droops the heart, until death removes all pain. Indeed, the tone of lament is so fearsomely strong that many listeners have taken it to be a direct transcription of Tchaikovsky’s own feelings. The work had its premiere nine days before the composer’s sudden death, of cholera, in 1893, and almost immediately people began to speculate that it was a conscious farewell. Wild rumors circulated: according
to one tale, Tchaikovsky had committed suicide at the behest of former schoolmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality. That last story is a fascinating case of musically induced hallucination, for the biographer Alexander Poznansky has established that no such plot could have existed and that Tchaikovsky was actually in good spirits before he fell ill. The
Pathétique
is best understood not as a confession but as a riposte to Beethoven’s heroic narrative, the progression from solitary struggle to collective joy. In the vein of Dowland, Tchaikovsky asserts the power of the private sphere—the contrary stance of the happily melancholy self. Indeed, lament has never made so voluptuous a sound.
to one tale, Tchaikovsky had committed suicide at the behest of former schoolmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality. That last story is a fascinating case of musically induced hallucination, for the biographer Alexander Poznansky has established that no such plot could have existed and that Tchaikovsky was actually in good spirits before he fell ill. The
Pathétique
is best understood not as a confession but as a riposte to Beethoven’s heroic narrative, the progression from solitary struggle to collective joy. In the vein of Dowland, Tchaikovsky asserts the power of the private sphere—the contrary stance of the happily melancholy self. Indeed, lament has never made so voluptuous a sound.
In the twentieth century, time’s arrow again bent into a cycle, to follow Karol Berger’s metaphor. While some composers pursued ever more arcane musics of the future, others found a new thrill in archaic repetition. Chaconne and related forms returned to fashion. Schoenberg, hailed and feared as the destroyer of tonality, actually considered himself Bach’s heir, and his method of twelve-tone writing, which extracts the musical material of a piece from a fixed series of twelve notes, is an extension of the variation concept. (So argued Stefan Wolpe, an important Schoenberg disciple, in an essay on Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor.) “Nacht,” the eighth song of Schoenberg’s melodrama
Pierrot lunaire,
is subtitled “Passacaglia,” its main theme built around a downward chromatic segment. The revival of Baroque forms quickened after the horror of the First World War, which impelled young composers to distance themselves from a blood-soaked Romantic aesthetic. The circling motion of the chaconne and the passacaglia also summons up a modern kind of fateful loop—the grinding of a monstrous engine or political force. In Berg’s
Wozzeck,
a passacaglia reflects the regimented madness of military life; in Britten’s
Peter Grimes
, the same form voices the mounting dread of a boy apprentice in the grip of a socially outcast fisherman.
Pierrot lunaire,
is subtitled “Passacaglia,” its main theme built around a downward chromatic segment. The revival of Baroque forms quickened after the horror of the First World War, which impelled young composers to distance themselves from a blood-soaked Romantic aesthetic. The circling motion of the chaconne and the passacaglia also summons up a modern kind of fateful loop—the grinding of a monstrous engine or political force. In Berg’s
Wozzeck,
a passacaglia reflects the regimented madness of military life; in Britten’s
Peter Grimes
, the same form voices the mounting dread of a boy apprentice in the grip of a socially outcast fisherman.
No modern composer manipulated the lament and the chaconne more imaginatively than György Ligeti, whose music is known to millions through Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Indeed, Ligeti inspired the present essay. In 1993, I heard the composer give a series of
dazzlingly erudite talks at the New England Conservatory, in Boston, during which he touched many times on the literature of lament. At one point Ligeti sang the notes “La, sol, fa, mi”—A, G, F, E, the
Lamento della ninfa
bass—and began cataloguing its myriad appearances in Western music, both in the classical repertory and in folk melodies that he learned as a child. He remembered hearing the
bocet
in Transylvania: “I was very much impressed by these Romanian lamentos, which old women sing who are paid when somebody is dead in a village. And maybe this is some musical signal which is very, very deep in my subconscious.” He noted a resemblance between Eastern European Gypsy music and Andalusian flamenco. He also spoke of Gesualdo’s madrigals, Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth,” Bach’s “Crucifixus,” and Schubert’s Quartet in G Major—about which more will be said in a later chapter.
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Indeed, Ligeti inspired the present essay. In 1993, I heard the composer give a series of
dazzlingly erudite talks at the New England Conservatory, in Boston, during which he touched many times on the literature of lament. At one point Ligeti sang the notes “La, sol, fa, mi”—A, G, F, E, the
Lamento della ninfa
bass—and began cataloguing its myriad appearances in Western music, both in the classical repertory and in folk melodies that he learned as a child. He remembered hearing the
bocet
in Transylvania: “I was very much impressed by these Romanian lamentos, which old women sing who are paid when somebody is dead in a village. And maybe this is some musical signal which is very, very deep in my subconscious.” He noted a resemblance between Eastern European Gypsy music and Andalusian flamenco. He also spoke of Gesualdo’s madrigals, Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth,” Bach’s “Crucifixus,” and Schubert’s Quartet in G Major—about which more will be said in a later chapter.
Ligeti first encountered the older repertory while studying at the Kolozsvar Conservatory, in the early 1940s. The Second World War interrupted his schooling: after serving in a forced-labor gang, he returned home to discover that many of his relatives, including his father and his brother, had died in the Nazi concentration camps. His first major postwar work,
Musica ricercata
for piano (1951—53), dabbled in various Renaissance and Baroque tricks; the final movement, a hushed fugue, draws on one of Frescobaldi’s chromatic melodies. After leaving Hungary, in 1956, Ligeti entered his avant-garde period, producing scores in which melody and harmony seem to vanish into an enveloping fog of cluster chords, although those masses of sound are in fact made up of thousands of swirling microscopic figures. In the 1980s, Ligeti resumed an eccentric kind of tonal writing, in an effort to engage more directly with classical tradition; perhaps he also wished to excavate his tortured memories of the European past. The finale of his Horn Trio is titled “Lamento”; at the outset, the violin softly wails in a broken chromatic descent. Although the motif recurs in chaconne style, this is a somewhat unhinged ceremony of mourning, its funereal tones giving way to outright delirium. In the climactic passage, the three instruments execute musical sobs in turn, as if mimicking village cries that Ligeti heard as a child.
Musica ricercata
for piano (1951—53), dabbled in various Renaissance and Baroque tricks; the final movement, a hushed fugue, draws on one of Frescobaldi’s chromatic melodies. After leaving Hungary, in 1956, Ligeti entered his avant-garde period, producing scores in which melody and harmony seem to vanish into an enveloping fog of cluster chords, although those masses of sound are in fact made up of thousands of swirling microscopic figures. In the 1980s, Ligeti resumed an eccentric kind of tonal writing, in an effort to engage more directly with classical tradition; perhaps he also wished to excavate his tortured memories of the European past. The finale of his Horn Trio is titled “Lamento”; at the outset, the violin softly wails in a broken chromatic descent. Although the motif recurs in chaconne style, this is a somewhat unhinged ceremony of mourning, its funereal tones giving way to outright delirium. In the climactic passage, the three instruments execute musical sobs in turn, as if mimicking village cries that Ligeti heard as a child.
In the last phase of his career, Ligeti devised his own lament signature. Richard Steinitz, the composer’s biographer, defines it as a melody of three falling phrases, dropping sometimes by half-steps and sometimes by wider intervals, with the note of departure often inching upward in pitch
and the final phrase stretching out longer than the previous two. That heightening and elongating of the phrases is another memory of folk practice. The Ligeti lamento cascades through all registers of the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie”; it also figures in several recklessly intense passages of the Violin Concerto (whose fourth movement is a Passacaglia) and of the Piano Concerto. And in the Viola Sonata, chaconne and lament once again intersect. The final movement of the sonata is titled “Chaconne chromatique,” and the rhythm of the principal theme—short-long, short-long, short-short-short-short long—recalls the languid motion of Dido’s Lament. Then the motif begins to accelerate, becoming, in Steinitz’s words, “fast, exuberant, passionate.” As in
Hungarian Rock,
Ligeti’s rollicking chaconne for harpsichord, the specter of the old Spanish dance returns, writhing behind a modernist scrim.
and the final phrase stretching out longer than the previous two. That heightening and elongating of the phrases is another memory of folk practice. The Ligeti lamento cascades through all registers of the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie”; it also figures in several recklessly intense passages of the Violin Concerto (whose fourth movement is a Passacaglia) and of the Piano Concerto. And in the Viola Sonata, chaconne and lament once again intersect. The final movement of the sonata is titled “Chaconne chromatique,” and the rhythm of the principal theme—short-long, short-long, short-short-short-short long—recalls the languid motion of Dido’s Lament. Then the motif begins to accelerate, becoming, in Steinitz’s words, “fast, exuberant, passionate.” As in
Hungarian Rock,
Ligeti’s rollicking chaconne for harpsichord, the specter of the old Spanish dance returns, writhing behind a modernist scrim.
In 1903, the African-American bandleader W. C. Handy was killing time at a train depot in Tutwiler, Mississippi—a small town in the impoverished, mostly black Mississippi Delta region—when he came upon a raggedly dressed man singing and strumming what Handy later described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” The nameless musician, his face marked with “the sadness of the ages,” kept repeating the phrase “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” and he bent notes on his guitar by applying a knife to the strings. The refrain referred to the meeting point of two railway lines, but it conjured up some vaguer, supernatural scene. Handy tried to capture the phantom singer of Tutwiler in such numbers as “The Memphis Blues,” “The Yellow Dog Blues,” and “The St. Louis Blues.” The last, in 1914, set off an international craze for the music that came to be known as the blues.
One feature common to many early blues, whether commercial or rural, is the old downward chromatic slide. It runs in an almost subliminal way through the opening sequence of “St. Louis Blues,” and makes an unmistakable appearance in Bessie Smith’s 1925 recording of the song, where the young Louis Armstrong traces rapierlike solos on his trumpet. In Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” it takes on burlesque exuberance, merging with the sassy glissando of the slide trombone.
In the late twenties and thirties, recording technology captured the voices of numerous authentic practitioners of the Delta blues: Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, and others. These singers made a living variously as field hands, laborers, drifters, and bootleggers, playing in their spare time. All over their records you hear a rapid articulation of the descending chromatic figure—think of the “Crucifixus” bass line sped up and stripped down. When Willie Brown plays it on “Future Blues,” the strings snap violently in emphasis:
Can’t tell my future, I can’t tell my past
Lord, it seems like every minute sure gon’be my last.
Lord, it seems like every minute sure gon’be my last.
Skip James, the canniest musician among Delta blues singers, uses the chromatic riff for ironic effect in “I’m So Glad”; it’s an ostensibly uplifting number with a gospel tinge, but the continual chromatic undertow undercuts the singer’s claim to be “tired of weeping, tired of moaning, tired of groaning for you.” Chromatic lines snake through James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” a beautifully baleful ode to love gone wrong: “I’d rather be the devil than be that woman[’s] man …” Robert Johnson, rumored to have sold his soul to the devil for the sake of his art, leaned heavily on the chromatic slide in such numbers as “Cross Road Blues,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “Walkin’ Blues.”
The origins of the riff are obscure. It seems to have deep roots in black music, reaching back through ragtime to the sketchily documented repertories of nineteenth-century African-American song. It might even be related to slithery chromatic lines that have been recorded in chants of the Ewe and Yoruba peoples, in West Africa. Although it holds to the classic devil’s-staircase shape, it has little apparent connection to the ostinato laments of previous eras: it’s a decorative element, not a bass line. And it gives off a different vibe, in keeping with the emotional complexity of blues form. A blues is sensual, knowing, tough; it’s full of resilience, even as it heeds the power of fate. The gesture of lament annuls itself and engenders its opposite. This is the subtext of Duke Ellington’s pathbreaking 1935 piece
Reminiscing in Tempo,
a thirteen-minute jazz fantasia propelled by a short chromatic ostinato. It was written in the wake of the death of the composer’s mother, but it keeps sorrow at bay, ending in a jaunty, urbane mood. The trudging ostinato becomes a walking, dancing bass.
Reminiscing in Tempo,
a thirteen-minute jazz fantasia propelled by a short chromatic ostinato. It was written in the wake of the death of the composer’s mother, but it keeps sorrow at bay, ending in a jaunty, urbane mood. The trudging ostinato becomes a walking, dancing bass.
Blues chromaticism entered the American mainstream through the hot jazz of the Roaring Twenties. It was also a favorite tool in the workshops of Tin Pan Alley: Gershwin loved to introduce half-step motion into the inner voices of songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” A hint of the descending chromatic bass shadows the opening of Richard Rodgers’s “My Funny Valentine.” Of course, Tin Pan Alley writers, many of them from Russian-Jewish backgrounds, had multiple sources for these tricks of the trade; they drew liberally on late-Romantic classical music and also on Yiddish song. One way or another, the sighing chromatic line became so widespread as a sign of worldly-wise sophistication that it turned into a journeyman cliche. Sometimes, though, it came bearing a more urgent message. When Frank Sinatra began making downcast concept albums in the later 1950s—
In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares,
and other studies in Cold War melancholia—he seemed to require morose chromatic lines to set the tone. A lamenting pizzicato bass prowls through Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” whose Scotch-soaked emotional state goes from the vengeful to the suicidal (“Excuse me while I disappear”).
In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares,
and other studies in Cold War melancholia—he seemed to require morose chromatic lines to set the tone. A lamenting pizzicato bass prowls through Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” whose Scotch-soaked emotional state goes from the vengeful to the suicidal (“Excuse me while I disappear”).
Sinatra’s nocturnal ballads of the fifties forecast a weird and wonderful twist of musical history: the return, circa 1965, of the chromatic
basso lamento,
in strict, almost neo-Baroque guise. Why it came back is difficult to explain. For one thing, the American folk-music revival of the fifties gave new life to ancient ballad forms, which depended on strophic repetition. Also, Baroque music was much in vogue in the later fifties, with I Musici’s recording of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
and Glenn Gould’s account of the chaconnelike
Goldberg Variations
selling in mass quantities. And perhaps Brazilian bossa nova played an assisting role; as Peter Williams points out, in his wide-ranging survey
The Chromatic Fourth,
liquid chromatic lines course through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” also known as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”
basso lamento,
in strict, almost neo-Baroque guise. Why it came back is difficult to explain. For one thing, the American folk-music revival of the fifties gave new life to ancient ballad forms, which depended on strophic repetition. Also, Baroque music was much in vogue in the later fifties, with I Musici’s recording of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
and Glenn Gould’s account of the chaconnelike
Goldberg Variations
selling in mass quantities. And perhaps Brazilian bossa nova played an assisting role; as Peter Williams points out, in his wide-ranging survey
The Chromatic Fourth,
liquid chromatic lines course through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” also known as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”
Whatever the reason, by the mid-sixties the lamento bass was again the rage. You hear it in “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” the waltzing chimney-sweep song in Richard and Robert Sherman’s movie musical
Mary Poppins.
You hear it also in “Michelle,” on the Beatles’
Rubber Soul,
and in various later Beatles songs. It sounds seven times in Bob Dylan’s psychedelic manifesto “Ballad of a Thin Man,” setting up the refrain “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” (The song’s dramatis personae, consisting of one-eyed midgets, circus geeks,
and sword swallowers in high heels, vaguely resembles the guest list for the wedding of Almadan, as described in Juan Arañés’s “Un sarao de la chacona.”) The rock scholar Walter Everett has catalogued dozens of chromatic basses in sixties and seventies pop: a peculiar playlist could be assembled from the likes of “How Could I Be Such a Fool?” “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” “My Way,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Time in a Bottle,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” As Everett notes, the last song is fittingly set in a decadent Spanish-mission town, by the side of a desert highway.
Mary Poppins.
You hear it also in “Michelle,” on the Beatles’
Rubber Soul,
and in various later Beatles songs. It sounds seven times in Bob Dylan’s psychedelic manifesto “Ballad of a Thin Man,” setting up the refrain “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” (The song’s dramatis personae, consisting of one-eyed midgets, circus geeks,
and sword swallowers in high heels, vaguely resembles the guest list for the wedding of Almadan, as described in Juan Arañés’s “Un sarao de la chacona.”) The rock scholar Walter Everett has catalogued dozens of chromatic basses in sixties and seventies pop: a peculiar playlist could be assembled from the likes of “How Could I Be Such a Fool?” “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” “My Way,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Time in a Bottle,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” As Everett notes, the last song is fittingly set in a decadent Spanish-mission town, by the side of a desert highway.
It fell to Led Zeppelin, the behemoth hard-rock band of the seventies, to perfect the rock Baroque. Dylan and the Beatles may have won the plaudits of the intellectuals, but Led Zeppelin launched a no less ambitious raid on music history, commandeering rock, folk music, Delta blues, Indian and other non-Western music, and smatterings of classical tradition. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “Stairway to Heaven” both take off from meticulous finger-picking exercises for semi-classical guitar, with descending chromatic lines interwoven; washes of Bachian organ playing give a churchy aura to “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Several of the band’s weightiest creations rest on artfully repeating bass lines: “Kashmir” is built on a riff that climbs step by chromatic step.
Led Zeppelin’s early magnum opus was “Dazed and Confused,” a tormented love song that Jimmy Page, the band’s fleet-fingered, mildly satanic guitarist, first started playing when he was in the Yardbirds. Page borrowed many elements of the piece from a New York singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes, who included a track with the same name on his 1967 album
“The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes.
Holmes’s song is anchored in consecutive chromatic descents; they were the work of an itinerant bass guitarist named Rick Randle, whom Holmes later described as “absolutely stone, raving mad,” and who was last reported living in Utah with a witch.
“The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes.
Holmes’s song is anchored in consecutive chromatic descents; they were the work of an itinerant bass guitarist named Rick Randle, whom Holmes later described as “absolutely stone, raving mad,” and who was last reported living in Utah with a witch.
In the Led Zeppelin version, which appeared on the band’s debut album of 1969, John Paul Jones gave the bass line a forbidding, organlike sound—the Delta blues riff monumentalized. In recordings from the band’s stadium
tours of the early seventies, where the song stretches on for half an hour or more, the bass motto undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar, sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. For long stretches, the bass falls silent while singer and guitarist call out to each other, like wanderers lost in a desolate landscape. Finally, in a climactic passage, the theme is thundered out on guitar and bass in tandem, saturating the musical space.
tours of the early seventies, where the song stretches on for half an hour or more, the bass motto undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar, sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. For long stretches, the bass falls silent while singer and guitarist call out to each other, like wanderers lost in a desolate landscape. Finally, in a climactic passage, the theme is thundered out on guitar and bass in tandem, saturating the musical space.
When the chacona first surfaced, at the end of the sixteenth century, it promised an upending of the social order, a liberation of the body. The same outlaw spirit animates modern rock and pop: the swirl of a repeating bass line allows a crowd of dancing fans to forget, for a little while, the linear routines of daily life. When Frescobaldi and Bach recast the dance as a stern, inward-turned form, bending it toward lament, they hinted at a different sort of freedom, that of the individual defining himself in opposition to the mass. “Dazed and Confused,” in its inner sections, implies a similar quest for self: the raw drive of rock and roll gives way to spacey variations. It’s a big, brash rock anthem at heart, but, just as the dance abides in Bach’s chaconne, the lament lingers in the rock arena. Above all, the song demonstrates how the same deep musical structures keep materializing across the centuries. If a time machine were to bring together some late-sixteenth-century Spanish musicians, a continuo section led by Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1940 band, and if John Paul Jones stepped in with the bass line of “Dazed and Confused,” they might, after a minute or two of confusion, find common ground. The dance of the chacona is wider than the sea.
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