ornamentation and bach inventions

[chuckbutler]

Hi,

I'm new around here, so I searched the archives for info on this topic before posting.  I found some good information, but I didn't see an answer to my basic question, which is:

There is a world of difference between the way (for example) Glenn Gould interprets ornamentation in his recording of the 2 and 3 part inventions, versus the way Peter Serkin does in a recording I have.  I'm sure there are dozens of other recordings I've never heard, and I suspect that no two of them take exactly the same approach to ornamentation.  Further, none of the recordings I've heard match the editorial approach to ornamentation that I see in the editions of the works that I practice from.

What I'm curious about is what guides all these various interpretations?  What gives one more validity than another?  What do I need to study to begin to draw my own conclusions about the implications of a particular performers approach to ornamentation?  If I were to simply employ my ears and (admittedly) unrefined musical sensibilites, I would favor Gould's approach, which seems to err on the side of less ornamentation and, when it is employed, it's done so in a simple, straight-forward manner.  But it doesn't do _me_ any good to simply copy Gould's approach, so I need to find some way to understand the underlying thinking, so that I can develop my own feelings and interpretation.

Thanks.

[xvimbi]

What I'm curious about is what guides all these various interpretations?

Taste!

What gives one more validity than another?

Nothing really, as long as it's done with taste.

What do I need to study to begin to draw my own conclusions about the implications of a particular performers approach to ornamentation? If I were to simply employ my ears and (admittedly) unrefined musical sensibilites, I would favor Gould's approach, which seems to err on the side of less ornamentation and, when it is employed, it's done so in a simple, straight-forward manner.  But it doesn't do _me_ any good to simply copy Gould's approach, so I need to find some way to understand the underlying thinking, so that I can develop my own feelings and interpretation.

Musical "wars" have been and are still being faught over ornamentation in Bach. I would suggest, you familiarize yourself with the fundamentals, i.e. what kinds of ornamentation there are in the first place and what the context is in which they are usually applied. There are others on this forum who have a lot more experience with this than I have, and there are books that deal with this matter. If that is more than you want to know, then I would suggest to have your ear guide you, i.e. choose whatever sounds good to you. As you have already discovered, the rules about ornamentations are obviously not that strict, so "taste" remains the ultimate guide.

[BoliverAllmon]

i think less is better also. Remember this though. If you do a certain ornament at one section you need to do it also when the section is brought up in another voice.

boliver

[bernhard]

This is a great question! It is a real shame that some threads of doubtful usefulness (Yundi Li x Lang Lang; overrated pianists; underrated pianists; etc.) get hundreds of replies, and interesting and useful ones like this one will probably die pretty soon.

Although I agree with xvimbi to a certain extent that “taste” is necessary (I would say “good taste” though), I am not convinced at all that it is sufficient, or even the most important factor. For a start, who is going to be the arbiter of taste? I tend to regard music like I regard chess. Certainly it is a beautiful, elegant and  aesthetically pleasing game, but taste, is hardly the criterion by which one would judge a game, although certainly the best games will have this component in it as well.

Here are some more thoughts on this matter:

1.   Baroque ornamentation was left to the performer. The composer often just gave the melodic and harmonic skeleton of the piece and it was up to the performer to freely improvise ornamentation. It was not just a matter of trills, mordents and appoggiaturas, but actually creating a “melodic” line whenever an opportunity arose. So it was very common if the composer’s melody, say, went from C to G, for the performer to play C – d – e – f – G, that is insert a stepwise progression between two distant notes. This was a living tradition, that is, it was not learned in books, but passed from master to pupil, very much like Jazz improvisation. Unfortunately such living tradition is now dead. We truly do not know how performers freely improvised ornaments. There are lots of conjectures, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t know. We are in the same situation as Egyptologists: we may have deciphered the hieroglyphs, but we have no idea how they were actually pronounced, nor will we ever know (short of a time machine, or if some mummy does come alive! ).

2.   I learned a lot about free ornamentation from playing the Baroque repertory for the recorder, since in that instrument you are expected to freely ornament – much more than on the piano. So you may find a lot of useful information in recorder-related material (and also other historical instruments like the viola da gamba). Nevertheless, what I said in (1) still applies here. The recorder pretty much disappeared from the musical scene around 1750 (when it was replaced by the transverse flute). When it was rediscovered in the early 1900’s, the ignorance about it was such, that the performer put a piece of plaster on the thumbhole because they had no idea what its function was. Since then many old instruction manuals for the recorder (some dating as far as the 1500s) have been discovered and a number of lost techniques were rediscovered. To have a taste of the kind of ornamentation I am talking about here, I suggest you listen to this CD (if the freely improvised ornaments do not blow your mind, nothing will):

https://www.musicstrands.com/action/detailAlbum/albumId/412860

As usual in Baroque times, slow movements were heavily ornamented: the first time the movement would be played more or less as written and on the repeat, all hell would break loose and the performer could give free rein to his imagination, but always within rules. The problem of course is that such rules were for the most part unwritten and taken for granted.

A very interesting and illuminating book is:

Freda Dinn – “Early music for recorders: and introduction and guide to its interpretation and history for amateurs. (Schott)

[Amongst other works she does a step by step freely improvised ornamentation on Handel’s Sonata in G minor for recorder and continuo explaining why].

3.   As the Baroque was coming to a close, many composers started resenting the liberties performers were taking in their free ornamentation, and most notably J. S. Bach, G. Handel and F. Couperin started writing their own ornaments on their compositions – a fact much resented by performers (“who do these composers think they are! The nerve of it, telling us how to play the music!”). Both Couperin and Bach (through his son C.P.E.) wrote extensive instruction manuals on how they wanted their pieces ornamented. Of course – for all the valuable information they give us on ornamentation – this goes completely against the art of free ornamentation. The editorial approach to ornamentation – more often than not – tends to take these instructions manuals as dogma.

4.   So when you hear someone embellishing music contrary to respected editions directions, this maybe either because the performer is actually ignorant of them and just decided to follow his own “taste”, or it maybe because the performer has gone deeply into the Baroque mind and has come up with something that may actually approach an authentic ornamentation practice (although we can never be sure of that). Usually a bona fide performer will be able to explain his choice of ornamentation in a cogent manner, while an ignorant performer may babble something about “how good it all sounds”.

5.   An extremely thought provoking reference (it provides no easy answers) on this and other matters is:

Nikolaus Harnoncourt: “Baroque music today – music as speech” (Amadeus Press).

6.   Other fundamental references are:

Robert Donnington – “The interpretation of Early music” (Faber) – This is the standard reference book for performance practices in the Baroque.

(Donnington has several other interesting books – the one above is the basic one).

Frederick Neumann: “ Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque  Music”
 (Princeton)

[The ornamentation Bible].

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[BoliverAllmon]

what do  you think of C.P.E. Bach's essay?

[bernhard]

what do  you think of C.P.E. Bach's essay?

I disregard most of what he has to say about actual keyboard technique and fingering, and I regard highly everything else (performance practices, how Bach played, matters of musicality, music theory, etc.)

[BoliverAllmon]

i have been meaning to read this book. I have heard great things about it.

boliver

[chuckbutler]

This is a great question!

Although I agree with xvimbi to a certain extent that “taste” is necessary (I would say “good taste” though), I am not convinced at all that it is sufficient, or even the most important factor. For a start, who is going to be the arbiter of taste? I tend to regard music like I regard chess. Certainly it is a beautiful, elegant and  aesthetically pleasing game, but taste, is hardly the criterion by which one would judge a game, although certainly the best games will have this component in it as well.

Here are some more thoughts on this matter:

4.   So when you hear someone embellishing music contrary to respected editions directions, this maybe either because the performer is actually ignorant of them and just decided to follow his own “taste”, or it maybe because the performer has gone deeply into the Baroque mind and has come up with something that may actually approach an authentic ornamentation practice (although we can never be sure of that). Usually a bona fide performer will be able to explain his choice of ornamentation in a cogent manner, while an ignorant performer may babble something about “how good it all sounds”.

Bernhard, thank you for your detailed reply.  I will look into some of the materials you suggest, but I'm glad to gain some perspective on what my basic thought process should be in developing my own approach.

When I was young, my piano teachers made me learn Bach inventions.  Unfortunately it was all about reading and fingering, rather than learning to hear each "voice", so I found it difficult to connect with these pieces in a musical way.  For me, at that time, they were more of an excersize.  As I've gotten older I've gained a new appreciation for these pieces, both in terms of what they teach about composition and the technical challenge of playing them well.  It may sound trite to some in this forum, but watching "32 short films about GG" a couple of years ago really forced me to reevaluate my old opinions of Bach.  There is a certain directness and immediacy in the way GG interprets Bach; I don't want to get off on a big argument about GG...I can only say that, while his approach may not work for some, he certainly was able to set off a light bulb in my mind.

By the time I got to Berklee I was more interested in learning about jazz, so I never really studied the classical repertiore at the college level.  I've tried to catch up as much as I can on my own...I'm really happy to have found a forum where I can ask these kinds of questions.

Thanks again!

Chuck Butler

[iumonito]

Bernhard, very well done.  Let's have a debate and keep this thread alive.  I was actually going to post today on a somwhat related topic, so let's see if I can tie one with the other.

In response to the original question, I would add that baroque music notation is closer to jazz notation than to modern (say, post Brahms or post Beethoven) music notation.  Not everything was written out and it would have been laughable to play just the notes.  Imagine playign from a fake book just the notes of a standard jazz tune.

That said, Bach was criticized during his life for writing everything out and leaving no room for the performer to play with taste (that is, to improvise ornaments).  Example, in the concerto Italiano and the Goldberg variations there are sections where Bach pretty much writes out what a violinist would have been expected to improvise over a simpler harmonic structure and melodic line.  Another example is the sarabande to the a minor English suite, where Bach provides tastefull and not too heavy ornaments.  An interesting exercise:  play these sources in a bare, no ornament fashion. I believe the turns, syncopation and chromaticism of the ornaments will become more improvisatory to you once you look at the face with no makeup.

Also, note that the harpsichord, not having the dynamic possibilities of the modern piano, required other means to emphasize particular climaxes of the phrase.  Articulation and agogic do some of this, but ornamentation is the biggie.  You put turns and trills where you want to prolong or augment the sound, you wll have little runs where you want something to sound legato, etc.

Which brings me to my question.  I am revisiting the second partita, which I have not played in public in probably ten years, and I am very curious about what you may have to say about how to play the Allemande, Courante and Sarabande. 

I want to play the Allemande much slower than what I hear in every recording I know, and heavily doble-dot the rhythm. 

Also, I am curious about comments on playing each of these movements with little improvised ornamentation both times, then play the entire movement again with no repeats but heavily ornamented, like a Double.

Sounds crazy?  It makes much more sense musically to me than playing A straight, A ornamented, B Straight (this is the one that sounds weird) B ornamented.