Ostinato and Variation
Variations
1. Ostinato: aka Ground Bass, aka Passacaglia, aka Chaconne.
Early History
The idea of the ostinato dates all the way back to the beginnings of instrumental music, and in particular dance music. Probably dance music was one of the slowest to go ‘legitimate’ in that it was written down; most of it would have been improvisatory. The earliest collections come from the fifteenth century and are devoted to a highly professional courtly dance for couples, known in Italian as a bassadanza and in French as a basse danse. One of the characteristics of the bassadanza is an ostinato pattern which recurs throughout the dance – in fact, those early manuscripts give the bass line ostinato and nothing else; all the rest of it would have been improvised over the ostinato line.
There are a lot of interesting dance collections later on. Here’s an example from Spanish composer Diego Ortiz, a passamezzo (dance in duple time). In the 16th century composers distinguished between two basic chord progressions in these dances – the passamezzo antico and the passamezzo moderno. Within these chord progressions, there were also a set of five standard ‘tenors’, or ostinato lines that were heard throughout the dance. It’s easy to understand how these regular patterns – chord progression & bass line, meter, overall phrase structure, and tempo – could be used to create almost endless amounts of improvised dance music. This example made it through history because Ortiz published a little handbook called Trattado de glosas sobre clausulas in 1553. (The title means “Treatise on Ornamentation Over a Bass”, and can be thought of as a “How to Improvise Dance Music” book.) The actual improvised lines are frozen in time due to being examples, but performers are certainly welcome to use them to move onwards.
The bass line used in this example is the Passamezzo moderno, which is as follows:
Here’s the Ortiz Passamezzo Moderno, which is Recercada #2 from the Tratado de glosas.
One other item of interest is the “Folia” tenor, one of the most popular tenors in the history of music, used from these early dances (and appearing in the Trattado de glosas), and used by composers as diverse as Corelli, Marin Marais, Geminiani, Salieri, Rachmaninoff, and uncounted hordes of others. Here’s the Folia tenor:
Like the Romanesca below, this bass line eventually attracted and standardized a melody above it. However, in its early days, the Folia tenor was without that oh-so-familiar melody. Here’s an example from ca. 1500, by an anonymous composer, which illustrates the tenor without the familiar melody. But it wasn’t all that long before the familiar melody had set in. Here’s an example from the 17th century, by British writer John Playford, from 1684. This one has all the accoutrements of a set of variations on La Folia, as we have come to know so well.
Another fun one to see, just in the interest of how music evolves over time, is the tenor that Ortiz referred to as the Romanesca:
Taken all by itself, it’s a nice-enough bass line, but upon closer examination we realize that it is about to become that sturdy old tune Greensleeves. Interestingly enough, Greensleeves itself has become a ‘tune’ that is subject to variations (from many composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams) but it is also an ‘ostinato’ which can become the tenor of a passacaglia. So here we have a fusion of the two main branches of variations – i.e., ostinato, and variations on a tune. Here’s one of its very first appearances in Western music, also from the Ortiz Trattado, where it pops up as Ricercada #7.
Passacaglia versus Chaconne
In the early days, the two were distinct: the ciaconna was a Portuguese dance (possibly originating in the New World), characterized by a motion of I-V-VI-I in the bass. The passacaglia was a slower dance, characterized more clearly by a stepwise descending bass I-V6-VI-V. However, even by the early Baroque the distinction was being blurred – Frescobaldi tends to use both terms in his suites, and while there might be some differences between some of the examples, he seems to be fairly imprecise about the distinction. From that point onwards, individual composers might seem to make a disinction, but for the most part it’s best to think of the terms chaconne, passacaglia, and ground bass (and ostinato for that matter) as more or less synonymous. The attached handout shows different bass lines from earlier (up to the mid-Baroque) selections.
One distinction that might be made -- although you won't find it all that often -- is that the chaconne is based on a multi-voiced harmonic ostinato, as distinguished from a single-voiced melodic ostinato, the latter normally without harmonization in its first entry. (Therefore Dido's Lament is a passacaglia, while the Brahms Fourth Symphony is a Chaconne.)
Traditionally the chaconne is in triple meter (that's true of most earlier examples) but the word (together with passacaglia) became metrically-agnostic in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, it also becomes synonymous with a kind of über-serious severity during the 19th and 20th centuries, although it actually has its origins in the dance.
Vivaldi: G Major Violin Concerto "La Stravaganza", second movement. Here's the bass:
Purcell: Dido’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas”
2. Variations on a Theme
These are so common that we require only a brief introduction. Just for a good example, here’s a Mozart – the finale of the G Major piano concerto – in which the theme (a two-part song form) has variations for each of its repetitions as well, and is then concluded with a longish coda that incorporates the variation theme into the mix. (See attached listening chart.)
3. Double, or “Alternating” Variations
A technique in which either two themes, or two versions of a theme, are alternated with each other throughout. Usually one of the themes is varied a great deal more than the other. This is a particular favorite of Haydn’s – he more or less invented it, and uses it more than any other composer. Here’s an example, one of the very first such sets, Symphony No. 53 “L’Imperiale”. The second movement is a quintessential example of one of those ineffably charming Haydn tunes, which I sometimes refer to as an UCLT (Utterly Charming Little Tune). (Also a short chart attached.) One very famous example of alternating variations is the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth.