ABSTRACT
Developments in music commerce during the eighteenth century provided means to bring the organ voluntary to those organists who lacked the skill or confidence to improvise their own. Signs of a transition from the late Restoration voluntary towards its archetypal Georgian counterpart can be detected in the voluntaries of composers working around the turn of the new century. The indiscriminate admittance to the organ voluntary of secular styles of music, though widespread and by no means universally disapproved, came to represent in the minds of Marsh and other commentators an inevitable and unwanted contamination at a time of concern for integrity in the sacred expression of divine worship. Assessment of the relative merits of organists often took into consideration their competence as extempore players. An organist's capability might be determined by the nature of his improvised voluntaries, with those demonstrating superior levels of complexity or ingenuity–characteristics often equated with the desirable quality of learnedness–deemed to indicate the best players.
