Learn to Play Recorder

Lesson 43: Baroque Adagio Movement and Ornamentation

  • Play a Baroque adagio with a singing line and sustained affect.
  • Add at least one period-appropriate improvised ornament per phrase — appoggiatura, trill, or turn — without disrupting the underlying pulse.

A Baroque adagio is a sketch. The performer fills it in.

The Baroque slow movement, as written, is a skeleton: the composer expected the performer to add appoggiature, trills, turns, and full diminution (breaking a long note into a flourish of smaller notes). The unornamented page is not the music; the music is what you make of it. Play one adagio twice — once as written, once with your own ornamentation.

The unadorned line

Play it through with a singing tone and no added ornaments.

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Diminution — filling in

The same line with each long note broken into smaller motion: turns, passing figures, stepwise flourishes.

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Principles

  • Ornament inside the harmony, not against it. Stepwise motion is safe; chromatic dissonance is risky.
  • Save the most elaborate ornamentation for cadences and long notes.
  • Less is more. A movement covered in sixteenths is busy, not expressive.
  • Listen to period recordings for what tastes good.

Now play these

Handel: Sonata in G minor, HWV 360 (Andante)
The most ornament-friendly slow movement in the library.
Handel: Sonata in C major, HWV 365 (Larghetto)
A graceful larghetto inviting moderate ornamentation.
Vivaldi: Concerto RV 443 (Largo)
The famous largo — experiment.

When you can play a Baroque adagio twice in succession with two different ornamentations, both convincing, move on to Lesson 44.