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Trends in Baroque Ornamentation and Its Implications on Modern Performance Practice

Throughout the history of classical music, there has always been much discourse over

interpretation as trends come and go, performance theories are hypothesized, and new evidence

and historical information are unearthed. A ubiquitous practice in the performance of Baroque

music was the implementation of ornaments, an improvisatory device used to both lightly

decorate certain notes as well as fundamentally change extended phrases of a piece. Timothy

Collins’ article, “‘Reactions against the Virtuoso.’ Instrumental Ornamentation Practice and the

Stile Moderno,” and Neal Zaslaw’s article, “Ornaments for Corelli's Violin Sonatas, op.5,”

discuss this issue through the lens of modern performance practice while using supporting

documents from the Baroque era (more specifically, Collins focuses on vocal and instrumental

music from 1580-1620 and Zaslaw focuses on Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas published in 1700).

While the texts delve into the specifics of the music they focus on, there are a number of

connections and similarities I believe are worth pointing out and can shed light on issues of

modern performance practice, a topic both authors lightly touch upon.

Collins’ article is unique in the way that it does not take a strong argumentative stance on

the question it mainly seeks to answer: How should ornamentation be performed today in the

music of the early 17th Century? Instead, Collins presents attitudes of both composers and

performers of the time and explores how they have changed in a short window of time, stating

that “It is apparent that by the early 1580's the practice of adding ornamental passaggi, which

had hitherto flourished virtually unchecked, must have reached abusive proportions” (Collins

143). He further shows how pushback from composers grew increasingly common from 1580

onwards, and that in 1620 composers had practically given up on urging performers to abstain

from ornamentation (149). In his conclusion, Collins once again avoids taking a stance on this
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issue by explaining both sides of the argument – the obvious disapproval many composers had

for ornamentation especially when executed on their own music, but also role of the performer as

a creator and communicator, and the evident adaptation composers had to widespread

performance practices that they may not have initially agreed with. In fact, Collins suggests that

the genre of the sonata arose from composers’ attempts to write compact, motivically tight pieces

that allowed little room for ornamentation (147).

I believe Collins’ uncertainty towards composer-centric interpretations, despite the

abundance of primary sources, would be further muddled by performance trends discussed by

Zaslaw in the early 18th Century. Zaslaw explains how there is much debate over the authenticity

of Corelli’s original scores, as well as the purpose for his publishing of editions which include

ornaments. He argues that the ornaments included in his original manuscripts would not have

been how he would have played them, stating, “Any ornaments Corelli sent to Amsterdam to be

published would have been minimal, all-purpose examples that could work for many types of

violinists in a variety of venues” (Zaslaw 109). The lack of primary sources that portray a

differing attitude than that of where “each subsequent generation to out-ornament its teachers'

generation” could suggest that Corelli himself was a proponent of the latter attitude, and the

editions of his pupil, Geminiani, showed no reversing such an attitude (100). As Collins

mentions in his article, ornamentation reached a point in 1620 where it became ubiquitous and

essentially immune to the critique of composers, and this trend may have carried over into the

following century (Collins 149).

What occurred then, in between the two time frames focused on by Collins and Zaslaw,

can be potentially inferred by drawing on the trends described in both texts. Between 1580 and

1620, Collins explains that there were typically only two differing editions of a piece that were
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published – with ornaments and without ornaments. While amateur and professional musicians

would refer to the edition without ornaments – amateurs would benefit from the technical

simplicity of these editions and professionals who are adept in ornamentation could freely make

the piece their own – intermediate musicians would use the editions which included written out

ornaments by the composer following strict counterpoint rules (one of the main objections

composers had to impromptu ornamentation was its frequent failure to obey counterpoint rules)

(Collins 141). However, from 1700 onwards, publications of Corelli’s op.5 violin sonatas

included editions published by a wide range of musicians – virtuosi, pedagogues, other

composers, and the “fumblings of beginners” (Zaslaw 96). It seems reasonable to me, then, that

should Collins and Zaslaw draw from each other’s articles, they could agree on a period between

1620 and 1700 where counterpoint rules became less important. The large number of editions

that include fully fleshed-out ornaments in the 18th Century suggests that more and more

musicians, sometimes amateur, were trying their hand at notating ornaments, and that proficiency

in ornamenting from an unornamented edition in accordance with counterpoint rules may have

dropped.

Lastly, I believe that Zaslaw’s argument of performers being portrayed in an exaggerated

manner complicates the primary sources Collins uses in his article. Zaslaw shows how

composers including Corelli were often portrayed in a state of “madness … or religious ecstasy”

due to a sort of confirmation bias: “The vocabulary and the imagery for describing such states

were pre-existent, and may have been used more-or-less automatically by writers to whom they

seemed the proper way of dealing with certain mysterious aspects of human behavior” (Zaslaw

112). It is possible that the music critics’ descriptions of vocalists in Collins’ article underwent a

similar treatment; that is, any kind of ornamentation was assumed to be unfavorable because of
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existing beliefs at the time. In reality, composers may not have had a problem with the way their

pieces were performed, but are nonetheless believed to be so today from the flawed inclinations

in these sources.

In conclusion, while Collins and Zaslaw discuss specific topics that are rather different,

general ideas, such as that of modern performance practice, allow for intersections between the

two texts. Using one text as a lens may serve to bolster an argument in the other text, but very

often one text may complicate the other, ultimately shedding light on a shared issue in a way that

is not expressed in either article.

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Works Cited

Collins, Timothy A. “‘Reactions against the Virtuoso.’ Instrumental Ornamentation Practice and

the Stile Moderno.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 32,

no. 2 (2001): 137–52.

Zaslaw, Neal. “Ornaments for Corelli's Violin Sonatas, op. 5.” Early Music 24, no. 1 (Feb. 1996):

95-116.