Ornamentation

Ruedi to go

In these quick explainers, our conductor Ruedi Lutz gets straight to the heart of a variety of musical concepts. Clear, concise, entertaining. Simply “Ruedi to go”!

Ornamentation

In this video, Rudolf Lutz introduces us to the broad field of ornamentation. Put simply, ornamentation is the art of adorning a melody line with embellishments such as trills, turns, and melismas. As such, it can be seen as a form of improvisation, and in the baroque period, performers were expected to display their skill by adding ornamental flourishes to repeated and da-capo sections. Unlike Handel and other contemporaries, however, Bach had a penchant for writing out his ornamentation in full, offering less scope to performers for personal interpretation. This means musicians have to focus more on phrasing, dynamics, accents and stress to add their own personal touch to Bach’s music.