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During and after the time of Carolan, the native tradition continued to flourish (even as it adapted to adversity), and available sources are fairly close (in time and milieu) to that tradition. Irish traditional music preserves a lively practice of ornamentation, which derives in part from local 18th-century styles. But realisations and most of my comments should be useful as a starting-point for any performer. Fingerings, and some of my comments, are specific to harp, even to modern harp. My focus here is on the mid-18th century, and the particular application is to modern harp.
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But you can well use them as reference works, looking up the particular Ornament at hand and getting a quick answer to a specific question.
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Even a thorough survey of a general topic, such as Ornamentation, is a daunting project. These mighty historical documents are pretty heavy going, if one tries to read them all the way through. So this short summary is necessarily simplified, but it is soundly based on these four mid-18th-century Essays. Links all these primary sources are in my Online Resources post. Quantz has 12 pages on ornamentation for beginners (starting from p77), Leopold Mozart 59 pages of detail (from p193), CPE Bach 68 pages (p51 onwards), and even Meyer’s harp Method has two pages of text and four pages of music examples (including lots of arpeggios, of course). And before anyone even starts to think of exceptions to the simple guidelines I offer, let me emphasise that this is only an Introduction. I hope this article will be useful for any student approaching high Baroque and early Classical music. This is another post related to a series of classes I am teaching at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama on Early Music for Modern Harpists: see also Principles & Practice and Online Resources.
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