ome keyboard sources consist of a partbook specifically for the organ, with music that can be played more or less as it stands in consort. Such sources are frequently associated with playing contexts where amateurs were involved, some of whom may have played the keyboard part themselves.

Because many of the consort composers were not primarily keyboard players themselves, and because much of the organ music found in these sources was originally conceived for mainly professional contexts and was therefore first presented in score or through-bass format, it is often the case that such written-out sources are by third parties and often post-date the composition of the work by some time. Whatever their relationship to the original work, however, such  parts can provide a valuable source of information about contemporary keyboard practices.

Fully written-out organ parts are particularly useful in those works where the organ provided additional, independent strands to a polyphonic string texture, or where the organ was given solo preludes and interludes. Both of these features are found as early as the 1620s in the influential Coprario Fantasia Suites, and these functions of the organ are a distinctive, indispensible (and, it may be added, particularly English) aspect of the organ’s role in string consorts.

Two particular issues stand out as curious to the modern player in many organ parts: writing that is very sparse in texture, consisting of just treble and bass with little or no infilling (this is a common feature of Jenkins’s works), and parts that contain awkward or sometimes even impossible-to-play textures (a particular feature of many of Lawes’s sources). Should one, as Roger North put it, ‘fill, forbear, or adorne’ when faced with such music?

In the case of sparse textures, the main question is: can or should the texture be filled out by the player? The short answer to this question is ‘yes’. There are many contemporary instances from other genres where repertoire was disseminated through simple treble-and-bass textures where the expectation was that the music was to be enhanced by the addition (and often extemporisation) of polyphonic inner parts, chordal textures, or indeed both. These included the masque and theatre repertoire, music for the violin band and the ensembles of the Private Musick at court, and indeed the accompaniments for much liturgical choral music. The process built on traditions such as the expansion of Elizabethan lute music into arrangements for broken consort, and can be likened to the manner in which a modern jazz band improvises chordal and polyphonic textures from a simple lead sheet today.

Contemporary keyboard players would have been well used to expanding such bicinium textures on the hoof, and would have employed this skill in consort music too. We may note that a number of such sources include an occasional third voice in the texture at moments where unexpected ficta or a prominent inner entry occurs in the string parts; this is to guide the organist in his expansion of the texture and assist his role of being, as Mace put it, the ‘touchstone to try the certainty of all things’.

In the case of unidiomatic or awkward keyboard parts, the key question is ‘should this music be played exactly as written, or should it be altered to make it work better for the keyboard?’. The answer here is not so clear-cut, but it is important to understand that such parts are often written this way for good reasons, and the context of the work and its development needs to be considered before the organist starts ‘improving’ the composer’s writing. Many such instances are found in the work of William Lawes in particular. Although Lawes was not recorded as being a keyboard player, he was quite capable of writing a perfectly good, idiomatic keyboard part when he chose to: his early fantasias suites provide good evidence for this. The key to the idiosyncracies of the organ part to works such as the five and six part fantasias in Gb-Ob. Mus. Sch. MS D.229 (such as the disjunct leaps, the long passages of consecutive thirds, the muddy textures low in the left hand, the awkward and sometimes physically unplayable passages) lies in the process by which Lawes used the organ part in the composition or arrangement of his consort works.

This process is examined in detail in John Cunningham’s studies of Lawes’s consort sources.* To summarise his findings, it appears that Lawes often first sketched the essence of his piece for the keyboard, then arranged the sketch for strings, leaving the keyboard sketch intact to serve as the organ part. One may compare it to a builder leaving the internal scaffolding for a building in place after its completion. Lawes’s rearrangements of his own works also employed a similar process. For example, the string parts from the four-part consort suites in the Shirley partbooks were condensed into a (difficult to play) organ part to which two new parts for bass viols were added to form the seven sonatas for two bass viols and organ (GB-Ob. Mus.Sch. MS B.2). (Parenthetically, the fact that the ‘essence’ of the original work is preserved by the organ part, not the viols, is another demonstration of the importance that contemporary musicians placed on the organ in consort)

Did Lawes expect contemporary organists to adapt these organ parts to make them more functional? I suspect that probably he did to some degree, but I would suggest that one always errs on the side of caution and restraint (‘forbear’!) without a thorough familiarity with the English (and I stress ‘English’ rather than Italian or other continental school) keyboard continuo style of the relevant decade.

A final point to consider is the fact that organ parts to so many consort works can be sourced in  different formats, from different decades, from different playing contexts and in different hands. This can make playing from a single editorial version in a modern printed publication an unsatisfactory experience, particularly as many of these editions combine elements from widely-differing sources and frankly often show scant appreciation of the subtleties of English seventeenth-century secular organ techniques. A particularly heinous crime is the editorial imposition, in lieu of anything else, of later Italian-style continuo practices in consort works. If we are truly to understand the evolution of English keyboard continuo style during this period, then primary source material must be presented intact, with each edition aiming to represent a discrete moment in the work’s playing history rather than a horrendous ‘mash-up’ of them all. One looks forward to the day when digital editions on DVD or by download will enable the presentation of a wide range of primary source material with which the player may engage in facsimile, or in transcription with selectable levels of editorial intervention, supported by more detailed explanatory material to enable informed choices to be made.

* See particularly Cunningham, J., The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010)