Voices of Music Reviews Recurring Bass Lines

The title of today’s offering in the Sunday Mornings at Ten video series, compiled by Voices of Music and now available through a YouTube Web page, was Ciaconna! The program explored the approaches of six different composers from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in inventing variations on a simple repeated bass line. For most of those compositions, the bass line was the “Folia,” whose Wikipedia page describes it as “one of the oldest remembered European musical themes.”

Screenshot of the full Voices of Music ensemble performing Geminiani’s arrangement of Corelli

One of those composers was Arcangelo Corelli; but, presumably for the sake of variety, he was not represented by the “Folia” theme. Rather, the program began with the Ciaconna movement from the last of the twelve sonate da camera trio sonatas collected in his Opus 2. Corelli was the first composer on the program, followed by Andrea Falconieri, Antonio Bertali, Maurizio Cazzati, Tarquinio Merula, and Francesco Geminiani. That last was the latest of the bunch, represented by his arrangement of Corelli’s approach to the “Folia” variations. This was performed at a “Christmas special” concert involving the largest ensemble of musicians represented by the entire video. I sometimes think that Geminiani’s personal motto was “More is better,” particularly since his arrangement of Corelli’s approach to the “Folia” involved 24 movements!