Ornamentation in the Keyboard Music of Henry Purcell and his Contemporaries

Abstract Purcell’s keyboard music is generally regarded as one of the less important areas of his output, and so it is, in terms of quantity at any rate; his true genius lay elsewhere, especially in his wonderful setting of English words. Nevertheless, what we do have--eight harpsichord suites, some thirty-odd miscellaneous pieces, and a mere five (or is it sixã) organ voluntaries-is by no means to be despised; some of it, indeed, is very fine, and in the manner of its performance, its ornamentation in particular, is subject to certain conventions which are not only interesting in themselves, but are still, even in these days of historically enlightened stylistic awareness, by no means universally understood.1 Time was, and not so very long ago either (as witness Thurston Dart’s edition of the Matthew Locke keyboard works published by Stainer and Bell in the late 1950s), when it was thought expedient to translate the ornament signs used by post-Restoration English composers into their nearest and rather more familiar eighteenth-century equivalents. Such a procedure is entirely unnecessary, however, in that the system of stenographic sigla used by Purcell and his contemporaries must surely be considered one of the most logical and visually coherent ever devised.