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    Many kind regards
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    Frederik Magle
    Administrator

    Krummhorn
    Co-Administrator

Playing organ continuo

fanvault

New member
I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience of continuo playing. I have only done so very occasionally but found it far more enjoyable than I expected.

It’s one of those things you grind through as a student, with your mind elsewhere, trying to work out those wretched figures and wondering whether to play three notes in the right hand and one in the left, or two notes to each hand…

When you are actually presented with the opportunity to do this as a performance, it is fairly amazing how it concentrates the mind! You start to try and find out exactly how to do it, and it becomes fascinating. Even though you are scarcely heard and almost certainly not listened to (what’s new?), you have the chance to influence the texture of the music and to help the other players. I love it when you explore how things change when you put a greater or lesser number of notes into chords, and how you can work a diminuendo by gradually reducing the number of fingers you put down, until you are playing single notes. (You also realize what all those tasto solo marks are about.) It’s such fun inventing patterns – broken chords, little snatches of melody, rhythmic elements, octave doublings in the bass - and responding to what everyone else is doing. If you are not directing yourself, perhaps you might occasionally glance in the direction of the person who is!

I still don’t understand how easy it was to direct from the keyboard when the sound you are making is so small. You can’t “bash the notes out” at all, and did Bach and everyone else use their arms to direct, or was it a flash of bushy eyebrows, or what was it?

All best wishes,

Roger.
 
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