2026
Saravanda! Dances of New Spain
Tracing the African and Mesoamerican Origins of the Sarabande and the Chaconne
Connecticut Early Music Festival – Saturday, June 6, 2026 – 5 pm
Chester Meeting House
4 Liberty Street
Chester, Connecticut 06412
For tickets, click here.
Though the sarabande and the chaconne were stylized sections of courtly suites by Baroque composers such as Scarlatti and Bach, their origins are likely far removed from any European court, stemming instead from New Spain. In a book about the Spanish colony in 1579, a Dominican friar described the sarabande as a lascivious dance and identified it with the indigenous population. However, at least one surviving song — a villancico for Christmas — links it with enslaved Africans, suggesting that both populations were involved in the creation of the genre. In this program, Ensemble Origo aims to contextualize these origins, showing how a song that mentions the dance was likely performed in Christmas services. The next two sections of the concert trace the printing history of both genres (which were related at one time) from simple guitar strumming patterns that sometimes accompanied voices and dance to the stylized instrumental works adopted by hundreds of European composers in the centuries that followed. A dancer brings the gestures associated with these pieces to life. The program aims to bring what is known of the genres’ lost histories to light, thus rethinking these distinctive musical genres, their history, and their trajectory.
In this exploration of the origins of the related genres of the sarabande and chaconne, we aim in part to reverse the conspicuous erasure of Mesoamericans and Africans from the early history of Western notated music. In the first part of the program, we perform repertoire related to constructions of racial identity, “color prejudice” that abounded in early modern texts as part of the colonization process, and interfaith and cultural contacts during the global early modern period. Importantly, though, several of the villancicos we perform demonstrate the use of complex, African-inspired rhythm and provide the best strains of evidence that we have of African connections to the sarabande and the chaconne. Their performance thus reveals the crucial presence of Africans and Mesoamericans in this music as well as their hitherto overlooked centrality to the history of these genres. Given the distinct history of racial constructs, however, they are also settings of texts containing racial stereotypes and coarse, sometimes offensive language, which of course we do not endorse, but which we also cannot avoid if we are to bring to light the enormous contribution of Africans. We contextualize these works and reiterate our goals in remarks during our performance.
For notes on the program, click here:
For texts and translations, click here: