History of mordent notation

[NeeraWM]

Another thing stemming from my previous post on strings indicators, is trying to pinpoint the moment in time mordent became what it is now.
To recap: today's notation assumes that the mordent (M-like symbol without vertical line) is a quick alternation between the main note and the one diatonically above it, like so:

Abbellimenti-Mordente-Kummer 1.png (291.98 KiB) Viewed 14647 times

The inverted mordent (M-like symbol with vertical line) is a quick alternation between the main note and the minor second below (or diatonically below, my sources do not agree), like so:

Dotz Conf - 111.png (257.33 KiB) Viewed 14647 times

Around 1830, the inverted mordent was called "mordent" in Germany, and the mordent was called "Pralltrill" (short trill) and usually played like this:

Dotz Conf - 108.png (312.82 KiB) Viewed 14647 times

At the time, an old way of notating our inverted mordent, described as no-longer in use, was an X above the note:

Dotz Conf - 110.png (57.29 KiB) Viewed 14647 times

Already in 1839, Kummer shows how the mordent has become like our own, yet he doesn't mention the inverted mordent. In 1832, instead, Dotzauer showed the two options of the short trill and the inverted mordent. Only Romberg (1840), mentions the X as inverted mordent as an old-fashioned notation.
Has there been more research on this topic? How have different countries notated this through history?
When did our notation affirmed itself as standard?

Thank you for your input!

[John Ruggero]

Mordent terminology came up several years ago on the Dorico forum, and I was quite surprised by the national differences.

Here in the US, the "mordent" is the squiggle with the line through it, as in the famous chart of ornaments by JS Bach from the mid-18th century. As the name implies, it "bites' a note by alternating it with the lower auxiliary tone (often the half step) very rapidly:

Bach ornament table.png (673.87 KiB) Viewed 14633 times

A "trill" per se was a long or short squiggle without a line through it and means to alternate the main tone with the upper auxiliary according to the situation. If the trill appeared over a long note and was a longish squiggle, it usually meant to play the trill throughout the value of the note. If the squiggle appears over a short note, the shortest trill, the three-note one, called a pralltriller, schneller, or in older texts the "inverted mordent", was used. (Note that the pralltriller does not appear in Bach's table above. This has lead to much speculation. In my opinion it is because the pralltriller was the most common of all and therefore self-evident to his son, for whom the chart was prepared.) If squiggle appeared over a medium note, there is doubt as to whether an extended trill or pralltriller was intended and every situation has to be judged on its own.

In any case, that is the terminology that JS Bach used during the first half of the 18th century and the one his son CPE Bach used in the later 18th century, and the one I grew up with. Other composers and writers both earlier and later had different terminology.

[NeeraWM]

Thank you John!
I didn't know that in the US the "old" terminology is still getting used.
Very interesting!

[John Ruggero]

And it is the same in the major standard music reference books and books on Baroque and Classic performance practice in English such:

The Harvard Dictionary of Music
The Oxford Companion to Music (1965 and 2003 editions)
Neumann. Ornamentation Baroque and post-Baroque Music
Badura-Skoda. Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard
Rosenblum. Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music
etc.

I have never seen in such publications "mordents" in JS Bach's sense called "inverted mordents". Nor have I ever seen it in the prefaces of urtext or scholarly editions from the US, Austria or Germany.

[NeeraWM]

Very... very interesting!

The issue I was trying to raise, though, is when the terminology flipped because in modern notation of modern music the mordent is "note above" and inverted mordent is "note below".
From the second half of XIX century at least, this seems to be case.
In my training, mordent is with the note above, while inverted mordent is with the note below.

Also, what may have been the reason for flipping the meaning of the two symbols? Was this ever documented clearly like "beforehand we did like this, now we do the opposite"?

[John Ruggero]

Here's a hypothesis:

Bach's mordent became less and less used during the Classic period and its symbol became obsolete around the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. But the symbolized pralltriller or schneller squiggle (called an "inverted mordent" in English) was retained. For example, you can find pralltriller squiggles galore in Chopin's music, but no symbolized (Bach) mordents. Since the pralltriller had won out over the mordent, it appropriated its name: "mordent" in common parlance. Then when Baroque music and its ornamentation was rediscovered during the later 19th century, a new name was needed for Bach's mordent and "inverted mordent" came back into use. I think there may even be a name for such reversals in language evolution.

However, Baroque specialists never went through this evolution and continued to call Bach's mordent a "mordent" and the short trill a "pralltriller", "schneller" or "inverted mordent."

Believe me, hearing an "inverted mordent" called a "mordent" and vice versa is just as strange for me as it is for you, although in the opposite direction, and I was amazed when Bravura "got it wrong."

[NeeraWM]

As long as "wrong" will remain subjective, we will still be able to have fun discussing these things :-D
Thanks for your input, John!

[John Ruggero]

You are very welcome, Neera. I guess when it comes to language, there is no "wrong", only "appropriate'.