sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, they imply a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld. In a pioneering essay on the chromatic lament, the composer Robert Müller-Hartmann wrote, “A vision of the grave or of Hades is brought about by its decisive downward trend.” At the same time, laments help to guide us out of the labyrinth of despair. Like Aristotelean tragedy, they allow for a purgation of pity and fear: through the repetitive ritual of mourning, we tame the edges of emotion, give shape to inner chaos.
In 1917, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, a passionate collector of folk music, took his Edison cylinder to the Transylvanian village of Mânerău and recorded the bocet, or lament, of a woman pining for her absent husband: “Change me to a rainbow, Lord, / To see where my husband is.” The melody goes down four sobbing steps:
This pattern shows up all over Eastern European folk music. In a village in the Somogy region of Hungary, a woman was recorded singing a strikingly similar tune as she exclaimed, “Woe is me, what have I done against the great Lord that he has taken my beloved spouse away?” At Russian weddings, where a symbolic “killing the bride” is part of the nuptial rite, the wailing of the bride often presses down a fourth. Comparable laments have been documented in the Mangystau region of Kazakhstan and in the Karelian territories of Finland and Russia, with more distant parallels appearing among the Shipibo-Conibo people, in the upper Amazon, and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.
If you twang those four descending notes forcefully on a guitar, you have the makings of flamenco. The motif is especially prominent in the flamenco genre known as siguiriya, which stems from older genres of Gypsy lament. On a 1922 recording, Manuel Torre sings a classic siguiriya, with the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador repeatedly plucking out the fateful figure:
Siempre por los rincones I always find you
te encuentro llorando … weeping in the corners …
Flamenco is more than lament, of course; it is also music of high passion. As Federico García Lorca wrote of the siguiriya, “It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.”
Of course, not every descending melody has lamentation on its mind. Lajos Vargyas’s treatise Folk Music of the Hungarians contains a song called “Hej, Dunaról fuj a szél,” whose slow-moving, downward-tending phrases display the markers of musical sadness. But it is actually a song of flirtation, with the singer turning a bleak situation to her advantage: “Hey, the wind’s blowing from the Danube / Lie beside me, it won’t reach you.” Likewise, certain laments lack telltale “weeping” features: the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, begins with a decorous, upward-arching phrase in a sunny major mode.
In other words, there are no globally consistent signifiers of emotion. Music is something other than a universal language. Nonetheless, the lament topos occurs often enough in various traditions that it has become a durable point of reference. Peter Kivy, in his book Sound Sentiment, argues that musical expression falls into two categories: “contours,” melodic shapes that imitate some basic aspect of human speech or behavior; and “conventions,” gestures that listeners within a particular culture learn to associate with particular psychological states. The falling figure of lament is more contour than convention, and it is a promising thread to follow through the musical maze.
THE ART OF MELANCHOLY
Emotional archetypes came late to notated or composed music. In the late Middle Ages, a stylized array of chantlike lines worked equally for texts of lust, grief, and devotion. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of Rupertsberg (1098–1179), exhibited one of the first strongly defined personalities in music history, yet the fervid mysticism of her output emanates more from the words than from the music. The opening vocal line of Hilde-gard’s “Laus Trinitati” (“Praise be to the Trinity, who is sound, and life”) has much the same rising and falling shape as “O cruor sanguinis” (O bloodshed that rang out on high”). Still, you can identify a few explicitly emotional effects in medieval music—“not mere signs but actual symptoms of feeling,” in the words of the scholar John Stevens. The lament contour might be among the oldest of these. In the twelfth-century liturgical drama The Play of Daniel, the prophet lets out a stepwise descending cry as he faces death in the lion’s den: “Heu, heu!”
As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, “symptoms of feeling” erupted all over the musical landscape. Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), the most celebrated practitioner of the rhythmically pointed style of Ars Nova, dilated on the pleasures and pains of love, and you can hear a marked difference between the gently rippling figures of “Tant doucement” (“So sweetly I feel myself imprisoned”) and the stark descending line of “Mors sui” (“I die, if I do not see you”). This emphasis on palpable emotion, bordering on the erotic, was probably connected to the growing assertiveness of the independent nobility and of the merchant classes. In the following century, Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, described music as presenting “the intentions and passions of the soul as well as words … so forcibly that it immediately provokes both the singer and the audience to imitate and act out the same things.” The conception of music as a spur to individual action was an implicit challenge to medieval doctrine, and, indeed, Ficino’s revival of Greek ideas led to suspicions of heresy.
When secular strains infiltrated sacred music, a major new phase in composition began. The high musical art of the later Renaissance was polyphony, the knotty interweaving of multiple melodic strands. A cadre of composers from the Low Countries—cultivated first by the dukes of Burgundy and later by such patrons as Louis XI of France and Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence—wrote multi-movement masses of unprecedented complexity, perhaps the first purposefully awe-inducing works in the classical tradition. These composers adopted a new practice, English in origin, of letting a preexisting theme take control of a large-scale piece. At first, the melodies were taken from liturgical chant, but popular tunes later came into play. The master of the game was Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497), who is said to have sung with a deep bass voice and who lived to a grand old age. Around 1460, Ockeghem wrote a chanson titled “Fors seulement,” whose lovelorn text begins with the lines “Save only for the expectation of death / No hope dwells in my weary heart.” Its opening notes match up with the lament contour of various folk traditions:
Ockeghem’s song became widely popular, inspiring dozens of arrangements; a version by Antoine Brumel added a text beginning with the words “Plunged into the lake of despair.” In due course, the tune served as a cantus firmus, or “fixed song,” for settings of the Mass. The Kyrie of Ockeghem’s own Missa Fors seulement begins with a terraced series of descents, the basses delving into almost Wagnerian regions. The illusion of three-dimensional space resulting from that vertical plunge is one novel sensation that Ockeghem’s music affords; another is the cascading, overlapping motion of the voices, an early demonstration of the magic of organized sound. As the Mass goes on, the song of despair is transformed into a sign of Christ’s glory.
After reaching a peak of refinement in the works of Ockeghem’s disciple Josquin Desprez, polyphony faded in importance in the later sixteenth century. Listeners demanded new, often simpler styles. The marketplace for music expanded dramatically, with the printing press fostering an international, nonspecialist public. Dance fads such as the chaconne indicated the growing vitality of the vernacular. The Church, shaken by the challenge of the Reformation and its catchy hymns of praise, saw the need to make its messages more transparent; the Council of Trent decreed that church composers should formulate their ideas more intelligibly, instead of giving “empty pleasure to the ear”
