Poglietti's Ricercare: open-score keyboard music and the implications for ensemble performance

The performance implications of some early sources of keyboard music in open score (that is, four separate staves, one for each voice) have often been the cause of controversy. A nagging question has remained: does the use of open-score format indicate the possibility of an ensemble alternative? This article examines a manuscript fragment (recently discovered by the author in the Czech Republic) in the hand of the Czech performer-composer Pavel Vejvanovský (c.1633-1693) that sheds light on the reception and use of keyboard works in open score and the implications for ensemble performance in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Many performers and scholars have believed that the use of open score was to help facilitate the indepedance of voices in a fugal texture, but this latter interpretation was recently challenged by some scholars arguing instead that open score was a visual aid and had little or no effect on performance. Using seventeenth-century source materials, this article demonstrates that composers not only sought the distinction of voices in elaborate contrapuntal textures, but the manuscript fragment at the centre of it shows that such works were even performed on separate instruments (probably strings). The implications of this discovery go well beyond the music of Poglietti to include the collections of composers such as François Roberday, Frescobaldi and even J. S. Bach.