| Scholars have long known that both vocal and instrumental performers in the Renaissance added improvised ornamentation to all kinds of music, secular and sacred, with the possible exception of the Ordinary of the mass. A number of treatises and instructional manuals written in the sixteenth century describe embellishment as it was practiced in certain important musical centers of Italy, Spain and Germany. These didactic works give us a great deal of information concerning practice and procedures, and, in most cases, even provide tables of ornamental melodic patterns for insertion into appropriate places in compositions. Given such a wealth of resources, one must question why we hear so few embellished performances of Renaissance polyphony today.; The reluctance of singers to embrace embellishment may stem primarily from lack of awareness, but some of the problem may reside with the sixteenth-century sources themselves, which do not always present their concepts in the logical sequence that modern musicians have come to expect from pedagogical materials. Furthermore, performers may become frustrated to find that any one of the sources taken individually may not offer enough material to embellish the wide variety of polyphony one wishes to perform.; The intent of my document is to distill essential principles and procedures presented in eight Renaissance sources chosen for their special relevance to vocal ensemble performance. These common principles serve as the basis for a proposed teaching method enriched by pedagogical concepts borrowed from another improvisational art: modern jazz. I have supplemented my explanation of this methodology with a master table of ornamental patterns taken from all eight sources and placed in logical order based on which interval in the original composition the performer wishes to decorate.; This project focuses on the embellishment of true ensemble polyphony, as opposed to the sixteenth-century practice of adapting polyphony as a vehicle for solo display. "Vocal ensemble" often implies one-on-a-part performance in today's community of Renaissance specialists; however, I hope that this study encourages experimentation with embellishment in the context of choral singing (multiple singers on a part with embellishment assigned to soloist) as well. |
