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The Double Reed Archaeologist
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Chamber Music and Concertos for
Oboists and Bassoonists
Charles-David Lehrer, General
Editor
No. 70a. Florid Ornamentation for
the Slow Movements
of the Handel Sonatas in C Minor and G Minor
The ornamentation of slow movements in sonatas and concertos of the Baroque
and Classic Eras is a major problem for many of today’s performers,
particularly since relatively few artists practice or teach it. This central
aspect of music making slowly passed out of style among performers in Europe
during the 19th century. On the other hand, the development of Jazz in the
20th century began by incorporating a similar approach to the filling-out
of melodic lines; and, to be sure, ornamentation in that art has reached an
extraordinarily high level today.
Still, what does the present-day ‘Classical’ performer do when
he or she is called upon to embellish a work by Monteverdi, Purcell, Vivaldi,
Handel, or Mozart? Some students attend universities that have courses in
Performance Practice where details of the art can be explored utilizing Robert
Donnington’s most-excellent volume: The Interpretation of Early Music.
When I was a musicology major at UCLA in the late 1980’s, I was assigned
a term paper on ornamentation for the History of Music Theory Graduate Seminar.
I worried that I would not have enough material to work with, particularly
since I was restricted to the years 1100-1600. As it turned out, my 30-page
paper could only explore the tip of the iceberg, so large was the outpouring
of manuals on improvisation, particularly during the era we call the Renaissance.
During the Baroque and Classic Eras, the trend continued. It would seem
that musicians of means could not get enough of this kind of information.
The culmination was reached in three lengthy treatises published by eminent
performers during the 1750’s and ‘60’s:
Johann Joachim Quantz: Versuch einer Anweisung
die Flöte traversière zu spielen. 1752.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu
spielen. 1753-62.
Leopold Mozart: Versuch einer gründlicheViolinschule. 1756.
I first encountered these volumes in the early 1960’s when I was a
young student at Trenton State College and Boston University. But, alas, only
a few of my oboe teachers had ever heard of such ideas; so for some time
I did not get the encouragement I needed to learn how to put ornamentation
to practical use.
One oboist who really knew a great deal about embellishing a melody was
Florian Mueller at the University of Michigan. As a member of the university’s
Baroque Ensemble, Florian put that information to work every week he played.
He was fortunate to have learned about ornamentation during his years in the
Chicago Symphony: sometime in the 1940’s when he was called upon to
play Handel’s G Minor Oboe Concerto, one of the CSO’s harpsichordists
worked out fabulous ornamentation for him to play in all four movements.
In the 1970’s and early 1980’s when I was a professor at the
University of Massachusetts, I wrote out a fair number of ornamented slow
movements for my own use. My procedure was to learn the chord changes of the
movements I wanted to embellish at the keyboard, and then create a descant
for the oboe following the outlines of the composer’s melody. My approach
was similar to that of the great Jazz artists of the 1950’s, Ella Fitzgerald
and Charlie Bird Parker, to name those giants whose recordings were most important
to me. I amalgamated the jazz idioms of Ella and Bird with the ideas I had
read in the treatises or learned firsthand in the ornamented works of J.S.
Bach. (Bach’s keyboard intabulation of Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe
Concerto, BWV 974 is a good example). Within a few years, I had created my
own style.
The embellishment of the slow movements of Handel Sonatas Nos. 6 & 8
are part of the series of works I treated to florid ornamentation during my
years at UMass. I must report that the reception of my manner of ornamenting
Baroque and Classic works ran the full gamut. There were some who never realized
I had added a thing. The ‘play it straight’ folks’ took
much glee in giving me a fair amount of grief over it. Fortunately, the majority
of people in my audiences liked my approach very much indeed.
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