Haas, Eric: The NEW Grammar of Ornament

A greatly revised and updated version of our popular Grammar of Ornament, 176 pp. spiral bound

Original source material, exercises, background information, and musical examples have all been
greatly expanded in the new edition. Conventional cadential figures which would have been taken
for granted by 18th-century performers may be unfamiliar to modern players, so an explanation and
some examples of ‘obligatory’ trills has been added. The chart of ornamentation symbols has been
enlarged with exercises for practicing commonly used ornaments included. In addition to the trill
exercises, I have included a fingering chart after that in Hotteterre’s Principes de la Flûte Traversiere…
(Paris, 1707). Following the catalogue and descriptions of the stock ornamentation figures (drawn
from Telemann’s Sonate metodiche and the treatises of Quantz and Tromlitz) are new pages of
suggestions for practicing and assimilating the patterns. The section on Quantz’s variation figures
now includes a selection of his ornaments for decorating simple intervals with practice material.
A number of 18th century works for which the composer wrote elaborately ornamented solo parts
(Bach, Barsanti, Mercy, Zuccari, and Müthel) have also been ‘stripped down’ to their bare bones in
order to examine the melodic contour underlying the composer’s embellishment.

I have added a section devoted to French baroque ornamentation with an introduction to the most
commonly encountered agréments and instructions for their performance, along with a selection of
examples by Boismortier, Hotteterre, Blavet, Montéclair, and others with florid Italianate decoration,
doubles (repeats with written-out decoration), and variations. Also included is the portion of the
preface to Georg Muffat’s Florilegium secundum on ornamentation in the style of Lully. Although
brief, Muffat’s treatise is quite detailed and includes very useful written-out realisations of the
ornaments.

Learning by Example identifies some of the most commonly encountered baroque figures –
anacrusis, repeated notes, leaps, large intervals, scales, arpeggios, two-note slurs, etc. – and looks at
some of the many different ways Telemann decorates them in his didactic Sonate Metodiche.

Finally, more than half of the book is devoted to an appendix which includes the ornamented slow
movements of all twelve of Telemann’s Sonate Metodiche, the embellished slow movements from
both sets of William Babell’s XII Solos…With proper Graces adapted to each…by the Author, recorder
transcriptions of two sonatas from Corelli’s Opera quinta which have ornamented versions of all four
movements by several 18th century masters, two Castrucci Sonatas in the recorder transcription by
Le Cene, ornamented Adagios from the flute treatises of both Quantz and Tromlitz, and a parallel
presentation of Dowland’s Lachrymae with elaborate settings by van Eyck, Schop, Schidlt and
Scheidemann.