ABSTRACT
When systematic research into performance practice began in the 1950s and 1960s, many scholars neglected the styles suitable for seventeenth-century composers such as Henry Purcell. Frederick neumann’s Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (1978) aimed to elucidate the ornaments appropriate for J.S. Bach’s music, viewing the previous century’s embellishment practices largely as a prelude to those of Bach.1 Robert Donington’s Performer’s Guide to Baroque Music (1973) implied that there was a single style valid throughout the period 1600-1750, using such terms as ‘the Baroque attitude’ and ‘Baroque Style’.2 Yet it is anachronistic to impose an all-purpose ‘Baroque Style’ on Purcell’s music, not least because his output was created before the major changes in instruments and performing techniques that occurred around 1700. all the same, until the 1990s many performers tackled Purcell’s music in ways more appropriate for Handel, for instance by adding oboes and a double bass to the orchestra in Dido and Aeneas.3
