I’ve been looking at the facsimiles of John Jones’s Lessons for the Harpsichord (London, 1761 and 1765). There are a few instances of an unusual symbol. It looks like the guidons I am familiar with from French publications, a zigzag kind of like a modern trill sign (underlined in yellow in the attachments) but is obviously not used in the same way as the guidons. At first I thought it might be a space-saving device to prevent stems on low notes from running into the system below, but on closer inspection I find instances of two and three leger lines in the bass, printed as normal. The signs always seem to refer to an octave below the regular note printed above. Does anyone know what’s up with these?
I am no expert in facsimiles. With that being said, I would rely on intuition. My intuition says to double the given notation an octave lower. I am interested in what others on this forum have to say. I look forward to learning.
Oscar, I agree with you that it probably means play the note an octave lower. But that begs the question of why, in a few situations, Jones (or his engraver) used a sign rather than just printing the note in the usual way. Hopefully someone will know.
Is it often found in the context of violistical arpeggios, like in the example you give? Then it might be a suggestion to break the chord, and/or that playing the lower octave is optional. And/or it might indicate that playing the lower octave is optional in the entire following musical phrase (depending on the compass of the instrument you are playing). If it resembles a guidon/custos, as you say, then the last explanation might be the better one.
Thank you, David, for bringing this composer to our attention. I confess that I had not heard of him. I havent seen the pieces you refer to; but I found at IMSLP his Eight Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord, printed in 1754.
It is notable that organ is not specified as an alternative, though he is described as “ORGANIST of the TEMPLE” on the title page. (Apparently this refers to the *Middle Temple, not to be confused with the Inner Temple which had John Stanley as its organist. However, they played at the same Temple Church!) It is clear from the 1754 pieces that Jones is very fond of low bass. There are several examples of quite thick and low four-note chords in the left hand.
I would suggest that the signs, which often come at the culmination of a section or whole piece, are invitations to the player to play the bass in octaves, a piacere. There are other places where he actually writes octaves in the left hand.
No, it is not necessarily in arpeggios. I’d have to go back and count, but I think the majority of the ones I found are not.
I also thought about issues of compass. The two examples I give use a C (that is, two octaves below middle c) and I saw two others on D (again, two octaves down from ‘middle d’). If I recall rightly, those notes would be available even on a spinet (as opposed to a large harpsichord).
By coincidence, I ordered her CD of the 8 Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord earlier today! (Not to be confused with the 20 lessons that Jones later published in two volumes under the plain title Lessons for the Harpsichord.) I did not check the earlier 8 Setts to see if this guidon-like sign is used; all my examples come from the later books.
I should add that Fernando De Luca has recorded all three of Jones’ volumes and has them up on his website. That’s where I found out about them.
I did a little online research. Apparently Jones was a considerable talent (you don’t get appointed organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral otherwise) but worked in the shadow of Handel.
See my reply to Johan about the two different publications. They are both on IMSLP. It may be one of those things where you have to look under “Collections” versus “Works” (I forget the exact headings IMSLP uses).
Playing optional octaves is certainly a possibility.
Without the slightest shred of musicological evidence, it looks like a ‘ditto’ mark to me, and optional or not. Without a table of signs or usage in other composer’s works, I suppose we will never know. Most interesting.
If my reading is correct, and these are optional octaves, they would stop where there are already octaves with the RH. The written out notes then indicate where the LH octaves are not optional.
It’s definitely not compass. In Vol 2 of the Lessons, there are some on
notes within the bass staff, including one on tenor c. I vote for
“optional octaves.”
Further evidence that this is real harpsichord music. It is refreshing to note that the composer is not trying to bolster sales by suggesting that his pieces are generic enough to be intended for all keyboards (and harp)!
Well, the keyboard ecology of Britain at the time was pretty much
h’chords and spinets, both of which were mass produced, so there
wouldn’t be much point in marketing to anything else. I don’t know about
harps, though.
Boyce, Stanley and others marketed their voluntaries, although clearly intended for organ without pedals, as for the organ or harpsichord. It was the Italians a century earlier who sometimes gave harp as an alternative, and there is the case of Handel’s op.4 no.6, which was originally written for the harp.
