Le «false» che dilettano

The manuscript Regole per accompagnar sopra la parte d’autore incerto (early eighteenth century), preserved in the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome, presents rare examples of realized continuo parts with, on average, six to nine parts, and in which we find a high number of ‘False’ (mordents and acciaccaturas). My questions are: how are today’s continuo players to deal with such sources? What was the perception of such extemporaneous ornaments in the sources of the period? Is it possible to retrace a path for the modalities in which acciaccaturas and mordents were used, based on the few sources available today, and that often present contradictory information?
In addition to taking into consideration some controversial points in the text of these Regole, this contribution proposes to compare contemporary documents, including Benedetto Marcello’s Lettera Famigliare and a few manuscript fragments of realized continuo parts. Finally, I analyze harpsichord compositions that contain such ‘False’, and that appear in the manuscript D. 2358 (Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio), datable around the last decade of the seventeenth century, a period in which Corelli was in full artistic activity.