GENERAL DISCUSSION on the Variation Challenge "Marizápalos"

Olli Awesome! There are a lot of those ornament tables, I really like the one by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach! 

 We are probably not going to dive too deep into the rabbit hole of ornamentation, but since there are several signs given in the facsimile by Santiago de Murcia, we will need to touch on that subject for sure!

Barney Hi Barney! Thank you for your remarks on ornaments! Since this is such a vast topic I decided to have a more general approach on ornaments, which is to trill from the upper auxiliary note. It's a shame that there is no further indication in de Murcia's work since the original manuscripts decides to give us already redundant information (the auxiliary note is almost all the time deductible from the key of the piece with the exception of the b-flat in the F major chord).
The amazing analysis by Stanley Yates takes a lot more secondary information into account, the most important being the works of Gureau and Ribayez (p.118)

You will also come across a small line with two dots in this manner , which in Italy is marked with a T and two dots, which is called the Trino or Aleado. which is executed with the left hand, placing the correct finger at the fret that the sign indicates [i.e. the main note], and playing the string with another finger of the same hand, continuously, one or two frets higher, depending on what the key asks for?

The manner of trilling is to pluck the string to be trilled with the right hand, and to shake the appropriate finger of the left hand immediately ral puntol (on the string and fret at which it is formed); the manner of shaking the finger is, place it and lift it twice without interrupting the tempo, nor do you have to pluck more than once with the right hand for each trill.

Gaspar Sanz seems to be indicating something similar, but then again, if you look on the table on p.121, there is the aleado and two different trinos stated, so Yates rightly concludes (p.122):

From the written  evidence of treatises, then, it is possible to determine that main-note trills are certainly an option in Spanish guitar music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Examination of Murcia's music, however, reveals that a varied approach to the execution of the trill is possible, especially when the stylistic diversity of his collections is considered.

Thanks to Olli for linking Brandon's phenomenal tutorial, this is a great watch!!! :) Brandon goes into phenomenal detail for the different kinds of trills and also talking about the inconsistencies of notation. But the general rule he applies for Italian/Spanish baroque music is to trill from the main note, while I was showing the German/French way of trilling. I hope you excuse my regional bias, in the next workshop I will advise to trill from the main note upwards since we are dealing with a Spanish composer! 🧙‍♂️ I will edit my score and upload it accordingly!

Olli when it comes to ornamentations, we need to keep several things in mind! First of all, several sources from that time contradict each other in terms of wording, definition and musical execution. We need to get a feel for the overall tradition of that time which indicated in Spanish baroque music to trill from the main note upwards, but of course the function of the ornament is to embellish the melody and to emphasize not only the note but also the direction of it! So I definitely can see that deriviating from the hard law is no problem 🧙‍♂️

Olli btw, sorry for replying so late to your question, I had super busy days due to an orchestral live stream, but I saw that you already recorded a phenomenal submission in the Updates thread, thank you for that! 🤘