7 - Continuo realisation

Summary

The brief discussion of continuo playing in this chapter focusses mainly on instrumentation, style and recitative accompaniment. Other matters are dealt with in detail elsewhere, especially in the studies of F. T. Arnold and Peter Williams. Arnold's study, first published in 1931, contains remarkably detailed coverage of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources and remains an important survey of the subject, although the author does not fully represent the variety of continuo practice that existed in the Baroque. Peter Williams' more practically oriented work is an extremely useful manual for the performer. In addition to Arnold and Williams, a number of specialist studies exist along with translations of some of the most important early treatises and the practical figured-bass exercises of composers such as Bach and Handel.

A study of figured-bass notation itself lies outside the scope of this chapter, but a brief summary is given here, by way of introduction. There are several layers of complexity attaching to the system of symbols that comprises a figured-bass part. The fundamentals are easy to grasp: a figure placed above or below a bass note denotes the interval above the note that should be played. A figure 6 above or below a bass note therefore implies the performance of a note an interval of a sixth above the bass. Except in the very earliest figured basses, only the figures 1–9 are generally used, so performers must choose in which octave they play an interval.