Ormestad [Ormsen], Caspar

1. Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Ornamental signs in lute tablatures came later: Vincenzo Capirola, in his manuscript anthology of lute music (1515–20, US-Cn VM C.25), used dotted red numerals to identify the upper auxiliary of a mordent and two dots above the number of the fret for the grace he called tremolo d'un tasto solo (tremolo on one fret), by which he meant a mordent, usually alternating between the first fret and the open string. In the 1548 Milanese edition of P.P. Borrono's music (Intavolatura di lauto … libro secondo, published by Castiglione) parentheses were inserted to isolate the two notes of a mordent.

English lute and keyboard sources of the late 16th and early 17th centuries also employed signs for mandatory ornaments. The most familiar are probably the diagonal strokes of varying number added to the stems of some notes by keyboard composers to indicate graces, as in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (1609–19, GB-Cfm; see §3 below); Diana Poulton (B1975) described and explained other kinds of grace, sometimes indicated by crosses or other signs, that appear in English lutebooks of the period. In all these cases the use of the signs appears to be unstandardized and experimental, and their interpretation must be made on a source-by-source, or even sometimes a composition-by-composition basis.

For most of the vocal and instrumental ensemble music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, however, ornaments were not specified in the musical text but were added by performers at will within a more or less unwritten set of customs and proprieties. In this music, then, it is often impossible to draw clear lines between what we would call ornamentation, improvisation and arrangement, and the unwritten practice has to be reconstructed hypothetically. Evidence of its existence and nature is more abundant for some repertories than others, and as with most aspects of musical performance it is more explicit for the 16th century than before. Yet some sort of ornamental practice can reasonably be inferred for practically every repertory before 1600.

A number of early chant manuscripts use Significative letters, some of which may have had the effect of ornaments though their exact meanings are still conjectural. Several symbols of chant notation still used today had an original function that we would consider ornamental: the Liquescent neumes (epiphonus, cephalicus etc.) probably implied some sort of glissando; the quilisma also a glissando, possibly with a volume vibrato added; and the repercussive neumes (bistropha, tristropha, pressus etc.) an actual restriking of the note. All these interpretations are obscured by the uniformity of modern Solesmes style (see Notation, §III, 1).

Contemporary descriptions of 13th-century polyphony, chiefly by Anonymus 4, Franco of Cologne and Hieronymous de Moravia, show that, for all its fanciness as written, the music of the Notre Dame period was further embellished in performance. Anonymus 4 refers to a longa florata (flowered long) and a duplex longa florata (see Anonymous theoretical writings, §2, no.23), and Hieronymus describes several interpretative possibilities such as the florificatio vocis and flos harmonicus (both of which we would probably call trills), the reverberatio (an ornamental appoggiatura from below) and the nota procellaris (possibly a vibrato). All seem to have been added most appropriately to long notes, especially at the beginning or end of a phrase. The Plica, which developed from the liquescent neumes of chant and survived into the Franconian era, seems always to have functioned as a kind of grace note, sung differently from its companions.

Specific observations of this sort are more difficult to establish for secular monophony and for the polyphony of the 14th and 15th centuries. But the scattered remarks of theorists, normally lamenting excessive ornamentation, suggest that the tradition of adding ornaments to existing musical texts was all but universal, and a close examination of multiple versions and intabulations of a single song can reveal something of the character of this tradition.

By 1529 Martin Agricola in his Musica instrumentalis deudsch assumed that his audience of amateur instrumentalists would want to learn to add ornaments to their music, though his own instructions, even in a later edition, are fragmentary and abortive. As the musical literacy of amateurs grew over the course of the 16th century, however, a number of treatises offered instruction, in greater and lesser detail, in the art of instrumental and vocal ornamentation. Among the best-known are those by Ganassi (B1535), Ortiz (B1553), Dalla Casa (B1584), Bassano (B1585), Zacconi (E1592), Diruta (E1593) and Bovicelli (E1594). Their languages and vocabulary vary but, as Brown (B1976) has shown, most divide their subject broadly into graces (ornaments added to a single note) and passaggi or divisions (ornaments added between notes or over a longer passage).

They also generally agree that the two most important graces are the tremolo (in modern parlance, a trill or mordent) and groppo (or gruppo; a cadential upper-note trill, often with a turn at the end), and some add a few variants and additions such as Diruta's clamatione (a portamento up to the first note of a passage from a 3rd or 4th below) and Zacconi and Bovicelli's accento (a dotted figure filling in or expanding a written interval). Their treatments of passaggi are much more individual, but most share a pedagogical method, traceable at least to the early 15th century (see Fallows, B1990), in which each basic interval is decorated in numerous different ways – Ortiz, for example, shows 12 ways to fill in a major 2nd, Ganassi 28 and Bovicelli 35 – which the student would presumably practise over and over to develop a ready fund of ornamental figures to add while playing or singing (ex.1). Several treatises add specimen pieces of music with written-out ornamentation; these give a vivid, if perhaps exaggerated, view of the wealth of ornaments available and the use to which they were put in performance.

It must be emphasized that this kind of ornamentation was fundamentally an improvised practice, completely at the performer's discretion: no conventional 16th-century partbooks or choirbooks indicate ornaments in any way. The clean, uncluttered appearance of the music on the page is thus misleading. Performers of the Renaissance, instrumentalists and singers alike, saw improvised ornamentation as part of their fundamental training and their daily musical duty. The ability to add graces and passaggi at sight was part of the personality that a musician brought to the job; the treatises are full of commonsense advice on how to temper virtuosity with taste. Accompanied solo music, they say, may be ornamented more liberally than ensemble music; superius parts more than lower lines; happy music more than sad; cadences more than phrase beginnings; repetitions of a phrase more than its first presentation. Singers are further cautioned not to let their ornaments obscure the words, to abstain altogether in choral music with more than one on a part, and to avoid elaborate passaggi on the vowels ‘u’ and ‘i’.