For this first post I thought I’d better begin where the whole process started, with this small detail in the continuo part of Jeremiah Clarke’s ode ‘Come, come along for a dance and a song’, composed in 1696 to commemorate the death of Henry Purcell the previous year. Apart from anything else, I thought it would at least explain the blog address.
The snippet shown is from the end of a solo treble movement that begins about a third of the way into the work, in which the singer interrupts the revelry of the shepherds and nymphs onstage to deliver the crushing news of ‘Strephon’s’ (=Purcell’s) death. The slash through the continuo figure ‘6′ – instructing the continuo player to supply a G sharp, thereby creating the interval of an augmented sixth with the B flat in the bass – is clearly visible in the manuscript, though it had been ignored in the previous edition and does not feature in the fine recording by the Parley of Instruments.
In preparing my own edition, I therefore had to decide whether the augmented sixth was a plausible sonority for this repertoire, a question which led me first to Mark Ellis’s recently-published book (see about) and ultimately to my own hunt for augmented sixths in the music of Clarke’s contemporaries and compatriots. As you will see in the coming weeks and months, the result was an extensive list – some seventy or so at the last count. And yes, this detail made it into the final text of the edition.