EMBELLISHMENT. - Abbellimenti, ornaments or musical embellishments (which the French call agréments, broderies, the Germans Verzierungen, Manieren, Ornamente, the English graces) are melodic motions superimposed on the principal note of the melody and serve to grace it, embellish it, make it more pleasing. Secondarily, the whole enormous flowering of abbellimenti also arose from the fact that the ancient instruments, in which above all their technique was developed, were imperfect, and those melodic motions 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 abbellimento; for these, see the table alongside.
Similar formulas must also have been found in Greco-Roman music, with which Gregorian chant has many points of contact.
One may therefore suppose that these melodic procedures were found in the most ancient and diverse epochs of music and that, indeed, they were born with music itself. The musicians of the troubadour era of the 12th and 13th centuries did not ignore them
| NAME | FIGURE | MODERN NOTATION |
|---|---|---|
| Cephalicus | ρ | |
| Epiphonus | ε | |
| Ancus | ρ | |
| Liquescent torculus | ρ | |
| Liquescent porrectus | ρ | |
| Quilisma | ω | |
| Strofici | ωωω | |
| Pressus | ωρ | |
| Oriscus | γ |
(dis. Eur. Cult.)
EMBELLISHMENT - Liquescent neumes, as they appear in the manuscripts and according to the modern transcription.
They used them. In the 14th century Francesco Landini, the Blind Organist, and his contemporaries were achieving great spontaneity and often elegance in the art of ornamenting melody, and in their music it is not difficult to discern various forms of ornamentation such as the gruppetto, the trill, etc. The style of classical polyphony required that the melody not be too heavily ornamented; therefore the art of ornamentation is banished from this kind of music. It appears, on the other hand, in the 15th and 16th centuries with the so-called diminutions: the singers, in choral practice, embellished their own parts with various ornaments and roulades of every kind, contributing not a little to the development of the technique and art of singing.
The development of vocal and instrumental style, which in the 17th century had its greatest exponents respectively in Claudio Monteverdi and Girolamo Frescobaldi, gave a great impulse to the development of the technique of ornamentation, and with the prefaces to the Nuove Musiche, a collection of madrigals and arias by Caccini, and the Transilvano, a dialogue on the true manner of playing organs and keyboard instruments, by Diruta, the theory of this art was also born. Although the two works concern two different currents — that is, the one the art of singing and the other the art of playing instruments — they nonetheless agree with each other in indicating the manner of executing the principal forms of ornamentation: trills (tremoli, tremoletti) and groppi. By other contemporary authors — E. De Cavalieri, M. Praetorius, Mersenne, etc. — some are cited which later fell into disuse, such as the monachina, the zimbelo, the ribattuta di gola, the tirata, the cascata, the accento. In this period the first signs of abbreviation of ornaments appear, which very soon would have to multiply greatly. It seems that Frescobaldi did not know them, or at least he used no other signs of abbreviation except on a few rare occasions. As regards the use made of them, two schools are clearly distinguished: the French and the Italo-German. Composers of the French school stuffed their compositions with every kind of ornament, while being very diligent in indicating with exactness the sign and the precise point where the ornament was to be applied; whereas the authors of the Italo-German school were far less diligent in notation, but much more restrained in use.
Almost all left explanatory tables of the most frequently used signs of abbreviation: C. Simpson (1659) of thirteen; M. Locke in the Melothesia (1673) of five; H. Purcell (1658-95) of nine; M. Mace in Music's Monument 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 the Klavier-Büchlein von Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, angefangen in Cöthen den 22. Januar A. 1720 left us a table, albeit incomplete, of those he used most often.
Throughout this period of ancient ornamentation, ornaments are like something superimposed on the melody, not always intimately adhering to the depth of the musical thought, and their principal purpose was to adorn the melodic substrate, often simple and bare. With the invention of the pianoforte, the instrument of powerful sonority, on which it is also possible to bind sounds rigorously to one another, all that tangle of ornaments became superfluous and an encumbrance to the very naturalness and spontaneity of the thought, as well as difficult and harmful in performance. Little by little all those that did not bring a real contribution of expression fell away, and there remained, in the modern musical language, the appoggiatura, the mordent, the trill, the gruppetto and a few others. In this period of modern ornamentation, the ornamental notes are often written as real notes of definite value: a circumstance that has contributed, at least in part, to ensuring that only those ornaments remained in use which are a living expression and an integral part of the musical thought.
Bibliography9 works
Alessandro Santini