ABSTRACT
Knowledge and understanding of keyboard accompaniment styles in the Baroque can best be described as patchy. While there are some rich sources of theoretical and notated information on continuo realization for German and Italian music in the High Baroque, stylistic details are much harder to determine for many seventeenth-century repertories. It is hardly surprising that textbooks such as F.T. Arnold's The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass and Robert Donington's sections on continuo in A Performer's Guide to Baroque Music and The Interpretation of Early Music concentrate principally on eighteenth-century sources. The most valuable sources of Restoration sacred music in this context are organ books. Spink gives the best generalized description of the organ books' predominant features: the music in front of the organist was a more or less complete short score of what was being sung, arranged on two six-line staves with regular bars. Le Huray and Wood concentrate principally on the 'predominantly three-part texture' given in the organ books.
