54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement.


Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play.

The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do.

Let me show you two examples:

First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:
 
and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornament the music and extend the sound of an instrument that did not yet have a sustain pedal. The trill would be placed on the point of maximum tension prior to the resolution, that is, on the dominant chord in bar 2, specifically on the highest voice.

This was always rendered as:

Note that we’re in A major, and recall from the previous screenshot that the notated note was the B. Baroque trills always start on the next diatonic note and come down to the written note, alternating almost the whole indicated length, before, as I have also shown here, dropping down one diatonic note below the written pitch and coming back up at the end—C#-B-C#-B-C#-B….-A-B, in this case.

Classical trills, as I said earlier, essentially do the opposite.

This time, we’re in G, but again we have the same cadence:


And the trill goes in the same place of maximum tension before the resolution:

But in the Classical style, the trill would actually be realized as this:

In contrast to the Baroque style, in the Classical style, you trill up from the written note, but the ornament finishes the same way by moving down one diatonic note from the written note and back to it to finish the ornament.  

There'll be plenty more future discussion about many other types of ornaments. Stay tuned!

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