Descrizione
Ornaments are one of the many things that fascinate me about music from outside the Western tradition. Indeed, outside of early music circles, the use of ornaments in classical music is largely limited to grace notes, trills and perhaps the occasional mordent. If you write anything more ‘advanced’ than that in a new piece there is a good chance it will get overlooked, or played wrong – indeed even mordents often get a ‘do you mean..’ response from players.
Compare that to say the Indian tradition where there is literally the concept that you never play a note ‘as is’, the pitch is always on the move, pretty much every note has some kind of embellishment. And any Indian musician will know (and have a name for) each of the myriad types of ornament, and be aware of the subtlest of differences, the speed of vibrato, how that speed accelerates, the type of staccato the embellishment ends with etc etc.
I don’t have any desire to imitate Indian music, but I do long to find ways to expand the expressive capabilites of my music by accessing some of these ways of playing. I find them a far richer and more interesting area to explore than, say, quarter tones, or developing some new tuning system. So many of them are tantalisingly beautiful, not that difficult once you get the hang of things, and offer so much to add to our ‘straight’ way of playing in the Classical world.
One resource I have found quite useful in this regard is called Indian Melodies for Violin by Candida Connolly, published by Schott
