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  • Reading between the lines
  • Robert Quinney
Rebecca Herissone , 'To fill, forbear, or adorne': the organ accompaniment of Restoration sacred music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), £37.50

Despite the popularity of Restoration sacred music—in church, concert and recorded performances, and in scholarly editions—and despite the near-universal adoption of historically informed attitudes to the performance of 'early' repertory, one potentially valuable group of sources has been overlooked, according to Rebecca Herissone. The 'organ books' compiled for use by organists in the accompaniment of choral music seem largely to have been ignored, at least insofar as they offer information on performance practice. This may have happened because the organ books are apparently inconsistently notated, and to editors inconsistency suggests incoherence or incompleteness. Organists themselves probably share the blame, for assuming a kind of continuo lingua franca for music written between 1600 and 1750. Continuo Esperanto —derived from the bass line by figures (and/or the full score from which we are almost always playing), chordal, independent of the vocal lines—has very little in common with the accompaniment style inferred by Herissone from a thorough and carefully reasoned study of organ books associated with the major London sacred institutions toward the end of the 17th century.

Herissone discerns prescription, rather than the description detected by earlier commentators, in the notation of the organ books. Although organists were most likely expected to add more, at least where the notation includes only top and bottom parts with the occasional glimpse of imitation, they did not play less than the sum of the notes in front of them.

In full sections, this is unsurprising: we can imagine an experienced player filling in the middle parts of a mostly homophonic passage between the outer parts, according to harmonic convention. The shock comes with verse sections: Herissone poses quite a challenge to our accepted distinction between 'full' and 'verse' styles, which runs along the lines of prima prattica versus seconda prattica. In full sections, received wisdom dictates, any number of voices singing in homophony or polyphony can be doubled by any number of instruments without compromising the music's expression of the text; but in verses the very point of the solo voice is its individual communication of the words. To suggest that the organ, of all instruments, should double the solo voice part seems rather improper—not how we retiring organ loft types see ourselves, and certainly not what the singers signed up for.

Herissone, however, argues convincingly that doubling of vocal parts in solo and ensemble verses is implicit in the organ books' notation. Those details which are inconsistent with full scores, and which have therefore been taken by editors to show that the organ books are merely descriptive short scores, or sketchy, or unreliable, are evidence of the copyist's will. Why mutate a solo vocal line into a harmonic cadential cliché if the line was not supposed to be played but merely notated as information (pp.55–6)? Why interpolate independent imitation between actual vocal lines unless all the parts were designed for the fingers? Thus Herissone makes a virtue out of inconsistency, and supports her argument by demonstrating the practical layout of the organ books, with parts occasionally displaced by an octave to make them more manageable by two hands, and rhythms simplified into organ-friendly long notes.

Herissone argues so strongly for the copyists' prescriptive intentions that she occasionally seems to be suggesting that no organist could have coped without explicit notation. Although she appeals to the organist's common sense in dealing with notated tessitura clashes between low-lying bass verses and the actual bass line [End Page 115] (p.63), elsewhere she runs the risk of privileging the notation to the detriment of the performer. Given the expertise of organists of the period as improvisers (as evidenced by, for example, the solo organ music of Purcell and Blow, much of which has the unmistakeable character of written-down improvisation), and given that copyists took this expertise for granted in full sections, it seems reasonable to assume that even prescriptive-looking notation might be a more subtle combination of signs to the player than Herissone's argument tends to...

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