The above mentions that folía is also about locura or madness. I wonder if in the repeated occurrences of the plague in Europe, people danced amongst those who were dead or dying. And that first citation that mentions that a folía is or was a popular song and dance in the Canary Islands might just hint of the content of that Gaspar Sanz work Canarios.

The most famous follia is Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor, Op.5 No.12 'La Folia'. I have a beautiful version with Monica Huggett on violin. But the fact is that a folia, follia or in whatever other spelling you might choose always has an underlying melody that repeats, enthrals and ultimately stays in your head. I can state here unequivocally that these 17 and 18^th century follias are simply baroque proto-Louie Louies! Some years ago Ballet BC danced to a Corelli variant of his La Folia by Francesco Geminiani.

My idea of the best way of spending a day at a concert hall would be a day’s worth of all the follias that can be found. But that would not end there as I have another obsession and, please note, that in today’s program there is Caprice de Chacone by one Francesco Corbetta (1615-1681).

A Chaconne (different spellings depending on the language) is defined thusly by my Wikipedia:

A chaconne (/ʃəˈkɒn/; French: [ʃakɔn]; Spanish: chacona; Italian: ciaccona, pronounced [tʃakˈkoːna]; earlier English: chacony is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. In this it closely resembles the passacaglia.

The ground bass, if there is one, may typically descend stepwise from the tonic to the dominant pitch of the scale; the harmonies given to the upper parts may emphasize the circle of fifths or a derivative pattern thereof.

I absolutely love chaconnes as does my 14-year old granddaughter who plays the violin. When we hear one we smile. Could the ubiquitous chaconne be another Louie-Louie?

My friend Ray Nurse, a fine baritone, who plays the lute and makes them answered me when I asked him if Paul Desmond’s Take Five was a chaconne. His answer was a short, “Yes.”

And so Raquel Andueza and La Galanía  are presenting us tonight with a program that is all madness and (obsessive) torment. I could not ask for more.

In the last few days I have been thinking on how language affects how we think. Spanish like French have gender specific nouns. So el sexo is masculine. Any Argentine man knows that a car is la máquina so cars are women. In the opening line and title to the first song of the evening, Bailly's Yo soy la locura, madness is a woman who lures men into perdition.

But I must leave the last word to Andueza who wrote me (gently to correct typos and the misspeling of her surname) and mentioned tht the gender of the very long and large theorbo that Jesús Fernández Baena plays is la tiorba. Tht goes hand in hand with la guitarra. I just wonder what happened to el laúd, the Spanish lute.