How can a musician get to know some of this music?

The main problem really is making a choice, because there is such a vast amount of material, and the catalogues aren't terribly helpful. It really is a question of starting with the card-index in one of the libraries, and making a note of pieces which fit your particular combination of voices and/or instruments, or which look as if they could be adapted (play violin parts on flutes or oboes, transpose violin and flute parts up a minor third to fit alto recorders, play "basso", "continuo", "cello", "fagotto" parts on whatever bass-instrument you have, etc.).

When you have, maybe, two or three times as many items as you think you need, ask to see them, and see if you can get an idea of which look most interesting, and most suitable for the standard of your group. Lots of people say they can't hear music in their head from seeing it written down: but try to think what's specially interesting about your favourite pieces, and what those features look like on paper. It's not difficult to see whether the parts of a piece have all the same rhythm, or whether there are complicated rests and imitative passages, how varied the musical figures in a piece are and so on. Even unusual harmonies - which you might think you need a score to discover - are usually the result of using more sharps and flats than usual, and can be spotted from a single part.

Some problems you are likely to meet include:

• hand-written words in a style which you're not familiar with, or a language you don't know;
• musical notation with features which have fallen out of use;
• incomplete pieces, missing parts etc.;
• sharps and flats which musicians were assumed to add during performance and which were not written in;
• mistakes in printing or copying;
• lack of a score (that's not a problem, really - it's just a different way of thinking and working, which involves using your ears instead of your eyes).

The questions of style, ornament and thorough-bass are just as relevant in this music as in any other, of course. There are normally no written-out continuo parts: you can either get someone in your group to learn how to improvise the inner parts on keyboard, lute or guitar (there are lots of books on how to do it, and I'm currently working on a new one); or just play the bass-part as it stands, on cello or bassoon, as Corelli did ...

You can find some examples already transcribed on the Musica Thulia web-site; there are others in Jan Ling's book, listed at the end of this article.