EMBELLISHMENT. — Embellishments, ornaments, or musical flourishes (which the French call agréments, broderies, the Germans Verzierungen, Manieren, Ornamente, and the English graces) are melodic movements superimposed upon the principal note of the melody, and serve to grace and embellish it, making it more pleasing. Secondly, the whole enormous development of embellishment also arose from the fact that the ancient instruments, on which its technique was chiefly developed, were imperfect, and those melodic movements that adorned the melody also served as a necessary connection between the sounds.
In Gregorian chant, all the liquescent neumes, from the cephalicus to the oriscus, are forms of embellishment; for these, V. the table alongside.
Similar formulas must also have been found in Greco-Roman music, with which Gregorian chant has many points of contact.
It may therefore be supposed that these melodic procedures were found in the most ancient and diverse periods of music and that, indeed, they originated with music itself. The musicians of the troubadour period of the 12th and 13th centuries did not ign-
| NAME | FIGURE | MODERN NOTATION |
|---|---|---|
| Cephalicus | ρ | |
| Epiphonus | ε | |
| Ancus | ρ | |
| Liquescent torculus | ρ | |
| Liquescent porrectus | ρ | |
| Quilisma | ω | |
| Strophics | ωωω | |
| Pressus | ωρ | |
| Oriscus | γ |
(drawing Eur. Cult.)
ABBELLIMENTO – Liquescent neumes, as they appear in the manuscripts and according to modern transcription.
…ravano. In the fourteenth century Francesco Landini, the Blind Man of the Organs, and his contemporary masters achieved great spontaneity and often elegance in the art of ornamenting the melody; in their music it is not difficult to discern various forms of a., such as the turn, the trill, etc. The style of classical polyphony required that the melody not be ornamented excessively, and thus the art of ornamentation was excluded from this kind of music. It reappeared, however, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the so-called diminutions: in choral practice, singers embellished their parts with various ornaments and vocal flourishes of every kind, contributing considerably to the development of the technique and art of singing.
The development of vocal and instrumental style, whose principal exponents in the seventeenth century were respectively Claudio Monteverdi and Girolamo Frescobaldi, gave a great impetus to the development of the technique of a.; with the prefaces to the Nuove Musiche, a collection of madrigals and arias by Caccini, and Il Transilvano, a dialogue on the true manner of playing organs and plucked-keyboard instruments, by Diruta, the theory of this art also came into being. Although the two works concern two different currents—one the art of singing and the other the art of playing instruments—they nevertheless agree in indicating how the principal forms of a. are to be performed: trills (tremolos, little tremolos) and groppi. Other contemporary authors, E. De Cavalieri, M. Praetorius, Mersenne, etc., mention certain forms that subsequently fell into disuse, such as the monachina, the zimbelo, the throat reiteration, the tirata, the cascata, and the accent. The first signs for abbreviating a. appear during this period, and these were soon to multiply considerably. It seems that Frescobaldi did not know them, or at least that he used no abbreviation signs other than on rare occasions. According to their use, two schools can be clearly distinguished: the French and the Italo-German. Composers of the French school filled their compositions with every kind of a., while being very diligent in indicating precisely the sign and the exact point at which the a. was to be applied; whereas
the authors of the Italo-German school were much less diligent in notation, but considerably more restrained in their use.
Almost all of them left explanatory tables of the abbreviation signs most frequently used: C. Simpson (1659), one of thirteen; M. Locke in Melothesia (1673), one of five; H. Purcell (1658–95), one of nine; M. Mace in Music's Monument, one of fifteen. The subject was treated more extensively by F. Couperin in L'Art de toucher le Clavecin (1717), and G. S. Bach himself, in Klavier-Büchlein von Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, angefangen in Cöthen den 22. Januar A. 1720, left us a table—though incomplete—of those he used most often.
Throughout this period of ancient ornamentation, a. are something superimposed upon the melody, not always intimately connected with the depth of the musical thought, and their principal purpose was to ornament the often simple and bare melodic substrate. With the invention of the piano, the instrument with powerful sonority, on which it is also possible to bind sounds strictly to one another, that whole tangle of ornaments became superfluous and an impediment to the very naturalness and spontaneity of the thought, as well as difficult and harmful in performance. Little by little, all those that made no real contribution to expression fell away, and in modern musical language there remained the appoggiatura, the mordent, the trill, the turn, and a few others. During this period of modern ornamentation, the notes of a. are often written as actual notes of determined value: a circumstance that contributed, at least in part, to ensuring that only those a. which are a living expression and an integral part of the musical thought remained in use.