There’s a danger in playing any Baroque era music. With the advent of historically informed performance practice through the 20th century, today’s players are keenly aware of the traditions associated with this repertoire. This music should not be performed ‘as is’; what appears on the page rarely belies exactly how it sounds.
Nowhere are these expectations of tradition and disparities between sight and sound more prevalent than on the matter of ornamentation. It’s one thing to read and execute the pitches and rhythms as notated on the page, but many pitches tradition expects to hear are not represented with traditional noteheads, stems, and tails. Composers had an elaborate system of symbols which represented an elaboration of the notes given. Check out the ornamentation table below and search out the symbols in the excerpt from Bach below it.
You can get a sense of the efficiency of this method. The second measure of the excerpt would have added some 20+ notes in the right hand part alone. Condensing the symbols saves space. And it points to a hidden meaning underneath the many extra notes; the notes written are the essential musical lines we are meant to follow.
There’s a dichotomy, then. The notation does and does not belie its audiation. Not every note we will hear is notated, yet, the essence of the music, suggested by the ornamentation, is what we see with absolute clarity. Like decorations on a Christmas tree, these musical ornaments are in and of themselves interesting, but are meant to enhance the natural essence of the tree. There’s a reason we don’t just build a plain Christmas shelf to put ornaments on; the inconsistency of the tree’s branches, the direction of its needles, and the way these can be highlighted in decoration, makes tree and ornament an aesthetic essence greater than the sum of the two parts.
Okay, that’s one part of it. I started off saying there’s a danger to ornamentation. The danger is how we interpret these ornamental symbols. In the table above, there seems a very clear and straightforward relationship between notational visual and auditory sound; see symbol A?, just play result B.
And the way this gets spoken of in academic literature, that is exactly how we should approach Baroque ornamentation. There should be a precise and consistent rendering of every single symbol. A lot of music teachers preach such a legalistic rendering of ornaments. The will to be correct, to perform without one’s historic legitimacy questioned propels a simplification of ornamental interpretation.
I don’t think it’s that easy. If you read music, just look at the Bach excerpt I shared. Every ornament in the right hand is written on a dotted half note, but the table I shared interprets quarter notes. Should the ornaments in the Bach excerpts therefore be exactly 1.5 times longer than the realization in the table? The table suggests all ‘plain shakes’ preceded by a ‘break’ ought to start on the principle note, however, the pickups to measures 4, 5, and 6, are a third above the principle note with the shake; can’t we start the shake on the note above so as to make a smooth melodic line without skips?
Which brings us to theology. Early in my Christian journey, once I started to take ownership of my faith as an adult, I knew little about grace, about living by faith. I was instead taken by the legalistic mindset: follow the rules, and believe that my god will disappear if I break them. The rules were in the Bible, you see. I heard the word grace but I didn’t live in grace. Grace isn’t a rule you can make explicit and follow. There’s a danger in Christianity: removing the rules sometimes makes life more difficult. It’s almost like the rules light a clear path; it might lead in circles and get you nowhere, but at least it shows you where to go. Grace asks you to walk by faith, almost in darkness, with errors and missteps abounding. It’s rich, but it isn’t easy.
So as in music, it is easy for the text governing Christian faith to be physically manifest exactly as it appears. You have to ignore some key passages of scripture, but it’s easy to read a vast majority of the Bible as legalistic, rule-based living. It’s none the easier that Jesus–the living embodiment of God–sometimes complicated things based by speaking in parables. For us, two thousand years after his death, there is a lot of context we need to capture what it is that Jesus was telling us. That’s a lifelong task, so to be a Christian, you have to step out with some mystery around you. Incidentally, you do that, and your life starts to look like the life of Jesus.