Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:48 pm
If you can read Dutch, Ton Koopman's book Barokmuziek is excellent.
Below I offer what I learned from the book plus my own insights:
Brief synopsis: there are no hard rules, and things differed a lot from place to place, not unlike today, although in some sense the organ schools that came about in the 19th and 20th century leveled (=equalized) the playing field quite a lot.
In my view, the age-old tension between popularism E.g. Lefebure-Wely, Vrigil Fox, E.Power Biggs, Feike Asma, martin Mons, Mr. Carpenter, and many others) and, for lack of a better word, conservatism (e.g,. Gustav Leonhardt, the early music movement, the 19th C. Ceacilians, etc.) persists. Both have their pros and cons.
Ornamentation: a hard thing to put your finger on. Many composers and books on music performance and theory continually wrote down how ornaments were to be played, on the one hand to lay down the rules for newcomers, but also a bit to keep on correcting what was perceived as a lack of proper tradition.
On tempo: also widely differing opinions. Witness e.g. Koopmans hurried playing versus many others, who also are in the know about baroque music. Koopman's teacher Gustav Loonhardt never played THAT fast.
The old complaint that young organists played too fast still exists today.
French style inagalite: far more widespread in Europe than you may think.
Watch out for many 19th C. editions of baroque music: many times pedal lines have been added where they did not exists before, or where the function of the pedal was rather limited. Pay attention to regional organ specifications.
Finger settings: Sweelinck was known to have his "OWN" fingersetting, unlike others. Some old scores have finger settings written in. Koopman argues against lavishly copying them, but instead to learn from them. Each hand has a different size, and again, regional differences costed. The modern style of scale up: 123-thumb-underneath-12345, etc. was not used until later.
Pedal technique: my friend Stef Tuinstra is convinced that toe-heel was already used in the baroque and seems to have found evidence of it as well; also, some passages cannot be easily played by a dogmatically strict toe-toe approach.
Improvisation: yes, yes, and yes. Many scores basically presume you to improvise your way through them with ornamentation, instead of playing long boring chords held over an entire bar's length: embellish!
Embellishment, coluratura was the buzz word. This is the art of not overdoing it (although some surviving score seems to be basically one long trill): grace, subtlety, etc. are all part of the picture.
Many organists seem shy in front of their socre and play the notes like robots. No way in the barok itself: you make the music come alive with embelisshments.
Rubato: accelerando, ritentando: yes, yes and yes: never approach the music with metronome precision.
So many old scores with "a tempo" markings.
Manualiter music: single keybaord music? Many old harpsichord scores have the left hand part written in such fashion that it can all be played independently with the left hand; thus, ideally, the right hand should be played on a 2nd manual with a different, stronger registration. The same holds true for organ music. Study the structure of the music carefully: especially in variations this structure needs to be keenly observed. It will become very obvious once you observe.
Registrations: in many countries it was customary to add reeds before mixtures. We all know about the French Grand Jeu: without mixtures, but with reeds and Cornet engaged. We already know about the richness of reeds in N-Germany and France. In pre-baroque and even baroque music, use of 4' stop for e.g. variation is OK.
So-called 8' Equal verbot: nonsense. Depended on the organ's wind supply. In Holland, a trio of 8' stops was prescribed: Baarpijp, Quintadena, Vox Humana. In Germany, the organs in the south had often a plethora of 8' stops, the Kreszow organ abounds with 8' stops, which combine beautifully.
My own rule: registration according to the music and organ: what works, what doesn't. I can never be dogmatic about it. Also, I cannot force French baroque organ music onto a North-German baroque organ.
Feel to add and/or correct.
