Carol Zhang
November 22, 2014

Final Assignment
“Embellished 16th Century Music”

Saying that embellishment was a big deal for sixteenth-century musicians is hardly a bold move as evidences overflow in treatises, music collections, and written accounts from the time. But making sense out of what musicians of the time actually did in performance and trying to reproduce it today has proven to be more difficult, mainly because improvisers, by nature, do not tend to record what they do. The modern current view seems to be that ornamentation was important, mainly because evidence suggests it was so widespread. But ultimately it was just something that could add colour or texture to the surface of the music but that always left the original clearly visible underneath.

Embellishment is adding notes to a part to make it more interesting for the player and listener. After some research I have come to the conclusion that the easiest embellishments to improvise are the graces. These are trills and other short ornaments. Among them are 3 main types: Inverted mordant, trills, and cadential patterns. Who performs embellishments depends on the nature of the music. In homophonic music like dances where the melody is in the top part and the other instruments mostly just play chordal accompaniment, all the embellishment should be done by the top part and that player can really go to town with elaborate graces and divisions. On the other hand, in polyphonic music like fantasies where all the parts are equally important, all players may embellish their parts but with considerable restraint, perhaps just adding a cadential pattern and a few other graces. In renaissance embellishment, especially divisions, performers have to play a lot of notes in a little bit of time. On wind instruments like the recorder, it’s not too hard to get fingers moving, but tongues are generally a