Hi, my name is Augusta Mckay Lodge and I am a violinist with Voices of Music.
Today I am talking about ornamentation - in other words a certain way of improvisation in baroque
music embellishing a musical line. I will be specifically looking at ornamentation within
the violin sonatas which are opus 5 of the famous baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli. I
will talk a bit about the history of these works, the ornamentation itself, and how to approach it
and I will finish with a video clip of myself and harpsichordist Paolo Zanzu performing a movement.
In the baroque period there was a tradition of ornamentation and improvisation. Pretty
much every single melody line you see in a baroque composition would be embellished. We wouldn't just
play the notes plain like they are on a page. So when we look at Corelli sonatas, specifically in
the slow movements, we see a very plain outline of a melody but it was really expected that the
performer without instruction would embellish and fill out this line with their own ornaments
these Corelli violin sonatas are famous today and they were just as famous during Corelli's time
(which of course is not always the case with baroque composers, many of whose works gained
fame posthumously). Arrangements of the sonatas for many different instruments than violin were
published, so if you play for example recorder, you might want to look into the sheet music.
Because the works were extremely popular, we have historical sources of many different performers'
and composers' ornamentations for these sonatas. So I really encourage you to look through these,
compare and contrast, and get inspiration for your own versions. But we also have a
publication by Roger of what may very well have been Corelli's very own ornaments,
although the authorship is certainly disputed. So for the sake of this video, I will refer to
those ornaments as Corelli's. So - how do we start? In general, ornaments could either fill
in A to B between two notes and keep the same two notes as departure and arrival points, like this.
And you can have many different variations on that of course. So,
many different ways to reach those two notes. You can go up
You could go down.
All sorts of things! And they would even twist and turn around the printed notes
and go so far as to change the actual notes the composer wrote. So at the end of the video,
I will perform a movement in its entirety and if you follow along with the score you'll see how I
do change the printed notes with my ornaments. My friend and colleague Paolo Zanzu is here to
speak a bit about the harpsichord and its role in improvisation as a continual instrument.
So as you probably know, the opus 5 by Corelli was a collection of 12
violin sonatas - probably the most important violin sonatas of the all 18th century.
This work presents itself with the violin part - the soloist part - accompanied by a bass line
upon which you can find numbers. So these numbers are meant for the harpsichord player or the organ
player for putting chords on it, and these chords are the normal chords of the tonal system and you
can find the same chords in every work by Bach, Handel... but unlike German or French style,
the accompaniment style - or the basso continuo - in Italian culture,
in Italian tradition, is enriched by many, many dissonances. So for instance
if I want to play a normal chord - C major chord - I probably would play like that
Another dissonance often used in Italy at that time is called "perfidia" which at that time meant
"obsession". So obsessive repetition. For instance, if I take this
Corelli writes these chords.
But you would probably play that
which makes it actually very jazzy so probably even closer to you nowadays. So
all these dissonances contribute to make this particular style of accompaniment
very very characterized in an Italian fashion. So let's have a look at the music with Corelli's
own ornaments. I am discussing the first movement of the Sonata No. 3 in C major.
So here's what the music looks like plain
and here's what it looks like with possibly Corelli's own ornaments.
So we can see a few simple rules. For example, if you are using what I call
a "fill-in ornament", although it has many fancy names (many terminologies)...
but in other words, you're not changing the departure and the arrival notes, it's generally
better to avoid simple scales up and down because these can be quite monotonous. So instead of
a scale... it's good if you can add a little twist in the middle
like this (which you've already heard me do)
and even better would be to include non-consecutive notes. So something like
That little [plays musical example] is just super elegant and it catches the ear, and it just breaks
up the monotony of a simple scalar ornament. When you study the existing ornaments for these sonatas
you also start to see a few patterns that you can steal and use as your own. And so one of my
absolute favorites is this one which is typically used at cadences where you leap down a seventh and
then up a sixth which gives it just such a nice shape to the ornament. If I can think of one...
Something like that! So you have
just really nice flow. Of course you should always add trills at cadences. Always always always!
and actually we can see a moment in Corelli's sonata where he does not add a trill,
but in my opinion this is because it would have been expected that you play one automatically.
Generally with Corelli and other Italian music, you can go wild. So have fun, add lots
of ornaments, and create this super creative embellished performance. However, historical
documents do provide evidence that sometimes they preferred a " less is more" approach.
So if your ornaments aren't providing that much creative content or you don't feel like they're
really adding any message to the music, better to leave them off and let the music speak for itself.
And we have an example within this movement of Corelli doing just that in a very simple plain
little oasis amongst all of these wild ornaments. So now, how do we incorporate all of this?
Eventually, it's better to improvise and to make up your ornaments on the spot.
But of course, to do this you need to have quite an extensive knowledge of the harmony beneath you,
otherwise you can end up with some unintended strange harmonies (I do speak from experience!)
So when you're starting out or if you need security for a certain performance,
I highly recommend you just take your pencil on your manuscript paper and you write out your
ornaments. This... you should feel comfortable to go ahead and do this. So with that, I will leave
you with the performance of this movement using my own ornaments performed with harpsichord. I hope
you enjoy and I really hope that you feel inspired to try this out yourself. Enjoy!