his page and the subsections listed below seek to provide a brief introduction to some of the skills required of a consort organist engaging with primary source materials. More will be added in due course.

Three main types of format are encountered among the organ parts to consorts to the organ. Each required certain skills on the part of the organist to realise them effectively. Modern editorial realisations render many of these skills redundant, yet reliance on the work of the editor brings with it a number of problems, and in particular stifles the extempore spontaneity that was a quintessential feature of English consort organ playing in the seventeenth century.

In addition, it was often the case that the organist directed the ensemble, especially where he (and it was invariably a he at this period) was a professional operating among mainly amateur players in a domestic context, and this required a further, and often non-musical, range of skills. More information on this aspect of the organist’s role is found in Chapter 4 of the thesis.

Finally, evidence from contemporary sources, combined with an examination of some of the extant instruments in relation to their original contexts and surviving repertoire, suggests a number of techniques that were employed by seventeenth-century organists that have been overlooked in recent studies.

The following sections provide a brief summary of some of my findings in these areas.

Written-out organ parts: to ‘fill, forbear or adorne’?

‘A nicer waiting on the parts’: The use of organ scores

‘Ingenuity, Observation and Study’: Realising through-basses