The surviving tablature books of the Renaissance and of the early Baroque are true treasure troves of secular music making from these eras. By “tablature”, we mean the type of notation of early instrumental music in which the degrees were not indicated by notes but – at least in part – by letters, numbers or certain symbols. The extensive collections contain sacred and secular music in a varied sequence.

In this edition, we have attempted to group together nine little dance pieces from various collections into a kind of suite. The sources – tablature books from the stylistically very turbulent period around 1600 – stem without exception from the German-speaking lands. However, the titles of certain pieces point in part to a foreign origin.

One might automatically think of the harpsichord or the positive organ as the appropriate instruments for these pieces. However, the specification “keyboard instrument” is intentional, since it is perfectly possible to perform certain pieces of this suite on the organ, distributed among the two manuals and pedal. After all, the use of the organ as a secular musical instrument goes back to antiquity, whereas its use as a church instrument is first recorded only in the 9th century. Around 1600, the courtly and the middle-class society also accompanied its secular festivities with the organ, and used it for dancing and music making. For example, the organ located today in the palace church of Frederiksborg (by Esaias Compenius, 1609) was originally intended for worldly music making.

Pieces of this kind should encourage the performer to try his hand at coloration and diminution – a practice which caused the period from about 1570 to 1620 to be called the “era of the colorists”. As an example of this practice, common among organists and lutenists, I have provided a “colored” form of the “Intrada” of the present suite in the Appendix, whereby the section to be repeated should again be varied differently.