florida state university college of music performance practice

Ornamentation
Ornamentation, which is a vital component in musical rhetoric, serves to enhance
the musical expressiveness of a work. 398 The degree that Bach integrated ornamentation
within his music has been highly contested. Many cite Scheibe‟s criticism of Bach‟s
practice of writing out ornamentation and assimilating it organically within his
compositions as proof that Bach specifically wrote out every ornament he desired, thus
requiring the performer not to add additional ornamentation. Others however feel that
conventional practice of the day innately guided performers where to provide ornaments
and other improvisatory devices, citing as an example the genre of jazz in contemporary
society. Arthur Mendel in his forward to the G. Schimer vocal edition of the St. John
Passion writes:
Because of the essentially improvisatory character of trills, appoggiaturas, and
other ornaments, the attempt to write out what metric value each tone is to have
can never be successful. I think this may be partly what Schiebe meant in
criticizing Bach for writing out so much…what makes a performer convincing is
always the illusion of spontaneous -in this sense, improvisatory-expression he is
able to create, and the attempt to pin down the rhythm of living music at all in the
crudely simple arithmetical ratios of notated meter is [hardly]…possible. 399
The subject of ornaments is not as essential and paramount to this dissertation
because the parts of the St. John Passion explored in this dissertation are choruses,
chorales and two arias that involve choral accompaniment. However, ornaments, in
particular the trill, are employed in certain choruses, chorales and two arias and they will
be analyzed to determine how they are interpreted. The most common practice of how to
execute the trill was suggested early in the twentieth century by Dolmetsch who used as
evidence Couperin‟s and Quantz‟s writings on the subject. 400 Dolmetsch writes that this
practice places the trill on the beat and starting from above, a practice that he states
would have universally been used by Bach as well as his contemporaries. 401 Mendel
states that while Bach‟s writings about ornaments are meager, save for his example in
Clavierbüchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the evidence corroborates other sources
398 Golomb, “Expression and Meaning in Bach‟s Performance and Reception,” 144.
399 Mendel, (ed.) Bach: St. John Passion Vocal Score, xxii.
400 Fabian, Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975, 140.
401 Ibid.
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