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Title: The orchestra & orchestral music
Author: W. J. Henderson
Release date: August 4, 2023 [eBook #71345]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORCHESTRA & ORCHESTRAL MUSIC ***
Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Equal signs “=” before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold=
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Illustrations and music scores have been moved so they do not break up
paragraphs.
Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
The Music-Lover’s Library
[Illustration: BEETHOVEN.]
The Orchestra
And
Orchestral Music
By W. J. Henderson
_Author of “What Is Good Music?” Etc._
With Portraits
Charles Scribner’s Sons
New York :: :: :: 1902
_Copyright, 1899, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons_
Trow Directory
Printing and Bookbinding Company
New York
To the
=_Philharmonic Society of New York_=
which has maintained through fifty-seven years its
existence as an orchestra devoted to the
performance of artistic music
Preface
_This is not a text-book. It is not a treatise on instrumentation. It
is not written for musicians, nor primarily for students of music,
though the latter may find in it information of some value to them.
This is simply an attempt to give to music lovers such facts about the
modern orchestra as will help them in assuming an intelligent attitude
toward the contemporaneous instrumental body and its performances.
The author has endeavored to put before the reader a description of
each instrument with an illustration which will enable him to identify
its tone when next heard in the delivery of the passage quoted. Some
account of the distinctive nature and functions of the strings, the
wood, the brass, and the percussion instruments has been given. With
this account go hand in hand some remarks on the development of methods
of scoring. The reader will not find such historical matter in any
other book with which the present writer is acquainted. Neither will
he find anywhere else a history of the development of the conductor,
which is given in this volume. The author has endeavored to make
his work complete by describing the duties of the conductor and the
requisites of good orchestral playing, and by recounting briefly the
story of the growth of the orchestra and the development of its music.
All other books on the orchestra which the author has seen are for
the professional musician. In making one for the amateur of music the
writer hopes to supply a need._
Contents
Part I
_How the Orchestra is Constituted_
Page
I. Instruments Played with the Bow 3
II. Wind-Instruments of Wood 19
III. Wind-instruments of Brass 30
IV. Other Instruments 37
V. The Orchestral Score 43
Part II
_How the Orchestra is Used_
VI. General Principles 61
VII. The Strings 66
VIII. The Wood-Wind 81
IX. The Brass and the “Battery” 97
X. Qualities of Good Orchestration 113
XI. Qualities of Orchestral Performance 124
Part III
_How the Orchestra is Directed_
XII. Development of the Conductor 147
XIII. Functions of the Conductor 164
Part IV
_How the Orchestra Grew_
XIV. From Peri to Handel 181
XV. From Haydn to Wagner 198
Part V
_How Orchestral Music Grew_
XVI. From Bach to Haydn 217
XVII. From Beethoven to Richard Strauss 226
Index 235
Portraits
Beethoven _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Arthur Nikisch 48
Haydn 86
Wagner 114
Charles Lamoureux 128
Theodore Thomas 142
Hans Richter 162
Berlioz 208
PART I
How the Orchestra is Constituted
I
Instruments Played with the Bow
The modern orchestra is a musical instrument upon which a performer,
known as a conductor, plays compositions written especially for it. It
is true that an orchestra is a collection of instruments, but these are
intended to be so distributed and operated that the result shall be
homogeneous, the effect that of one grand organ of sound. Within itself
the orchestra embraces a wide variety of tone-qualities and many grades
of power and brilliancy, and these are due to the presence of several
different families of instruments, each having general qualities, with
special traits in the individuals. It is by causing these different
families to work together or separately that the composer achieves the
expression of his thought, and it is by governing wisely the operations
of the individual members and the families that the conductor conveys
the composer’s design to the hearer.
The orchestra of to-day is the result of a series of interesting
developments, of which some considerable account will be given in this
volume. But it is necessary before that development can be traced that
the reader shall take a bird’s-eye view of the orchestra as it now
is. Subsequently we shall examine its constitution in detail, but at
present we shall simply glance at its general features. Orchestras are
not the same for all compositions. Composers select their instruments
in these days according to the purpose of the work in hand. But the
orchestra employed by Beethoven and his immediate successors in their
symphonies is the typical orchestra for independent performance.
Curtailed or extended as it may be for special effects, its general
plan remains undisturbed.
The modern orchestra, then, is composed of the following instruments:
Flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, drums,
and other instruments of percussion, violins, violas, violoncellos,
and double-basses. These instruments naturally divide themselves into
families. Flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons are instruments
of wood, and are caused to sound by the blowing of the breath of
the players. They therefore form a single group or family, known as
the “wood-wind,” or, more briefly, the wood. Horns, trumpets, and
trombones are instruments of brass, and they form a family known as
the brass. The percussion instruments (drums, triangles, cymbals, etc.)
are sometimes called “the battery.” Violins, violas, violoncellos
(usually called ’cellos), and double-basses are all stringed
instruments played with a bow, and they form a group known as “the
strings.”
At present the reader will not be invited to study the characteristics
and possibilities of these groups and their combinations, but will be
asked to acquaint himself with the individual instruments composing
them. The foundation of an orchestra is its body of strings. Two
principal reasons may here be given for this: The strings are
capable, when playing alone, of a greater variety of expression than
either the wood or the brass, and they never grow tired. Blowers of
wind-instruments require frequent periods of rest, but the strings are
equal to the demands of an operatic act an hour and a half in length.
Because the strings are the foundation of the orchestra we must study
them first. The string group is often described as the “quartet.” This
was correct in early times when composers wrote the same part for the
’cellos and double-basses, but it is not correct now, because the
strings almost invariably play in five real parts. The violins are
divided into two bodies, known as first and second violins. First
violins are the sopranos of the strings, second violins the altos,
violas the tenors, ’cellos the barytones, and double-basses the basses.
This is not strictly true, because the compass of the viola and of the
’cello enables those instruments to sing above the violins at times.
But the normal distribution of the parts of the strings is that which
has been given, and this distribution is disturbed only when special
effects are required, as we shall see hereafter.
THE VIOLIN
Let us begin our survey of the individual instruments with a look
at the violin, the prima donna of the orchestra. The violin is both
a dramatic and a colorature soprano. It can sob with the woes of an
_Isolde_ as eloquently as Lilli Lehmann, or it can twitter with the
trills and roulades of a _Lucia_ as brightly as a Melba. Its resources
in the way of technical agility are great, and its powers of emotional
expression are still greater. It is not necessary to expatiate upon the
abilities of the violin, because it is so familiar an instrument; but
it is well to note that the effect of a solo violin is very different
from that of a number of violins playing together in an orchestra.
A body of violins is capable of producing a vigorous, masculine,
sonorous volume of tone whose character is as different from that of a
solo instrument as its amount is.
The violin has four strings, the lowest being tuned to the G below the
treble clef. The other three are tuned to D, A, and E, the E being
that in the uppermost space of the treble clef. The E is called the
first string, and the G the fourth. The compass of the instrument as
employed in the orchestra is from the low G, three and a half octaves
upward, to the C in the sixth space above the staff. This compass is
sometimes increased by the employment of what are called harmonics.
These are strangely sweet flute-like sounds, which the Germans call the
flageolet tones of the violin. They are nothing more or less than what
the scientists describe as overtones, or, better, upper partials. It
is a fact of acoustics that every musical tone is composed of several
tones, the ear hearing plainly only that which is the fundamental sound
of the series. In the case of a vibrating string the lesser tones can
be utilized. Professor Zahm, in his “Sound and Music,” says: “A string
emitting a musical note rarely, if ever, vibrates as a whole, without,
at the same time, vibrating in segments, which are aliquot parts of
the whole.” Violinists have discovered that by touching the vibrating
string at certain points very lightly with the fingers of the left
hand, they can stop the vibrations of the fundamental tone, leaving the
upper partial to be heard. These harmonics are very high in pitch and
sweet in quality, and cannot be used in loud or vigorous music, but
in certain kinds of passages they enable the violin to soar away into
realms of ethereal beauty of tone.
The normal tone of a body of violins playing together is clear,
penetrating, and rich. As Berlioz has noted in his book on
orchestration, a mass of violins playing in the middle and upper
registers produces the most brilliant color of the modern orchestra.
The opening measures of Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony, the finale of
Weber’s “Oberon” overture, the closing measures of the garden scene in
Gounod’s “Faust,” or the whole of the prelude to Wagner’s “Lohengrin,”
may be instanced as illustrations of pure violin color and power.
The prelude to “Lohengrin” also makes use of harmonics. They are heard
in the peculiar, mystic, high tones at the close of the number. It
should be noted here that harmonics, or upper partials, need not be
used simply to increase the compass of the violin. On the contrary,
they can be produced from any of the four strings. Those of the G
string, for instance, have a singularly mellow, flute-like quality.
Thus, harmonics can be employed in tone-coloring, in which the
resources of the modern orchestra are almost inexhaustible.
A great many special effects can be produced from violins. The manner
of drawing the bow across the strings has much to do with them. For
instance, bowing close to the bridge of the instrument produces a
rough, metallic sound, while bowing over the finger-board evokes a
soft, veiled tone. There is even a difference in the sound of a tone
produced by the pushing of the bow upward and that given out when it is
drawn downward. The use of the toe or the heel of the bow also makes a
difference. The toe is best employed for a delicate touch, while the
heel is used for short, vigorous notes. All possible gradations between
a smooth, fluent cantilena and the sharpest staccato are possible to
the violin, and can be employed in the orchestra with excellent effect.
Rapid alternating strokes of the bow upward and downward produce the
tremolo effect, which is very common in orchestral music. Berlioz
notes, with his customary accuracy in regard to instrumental effects,
that the tremolo of violins expresses great agitation when played by
many violins not far above the middle B flat, while a forte on the
middle of the first string is stormy and violent. Wagner’s “Flying
Dutchman” overture affords admirable examples of both these effects.
The saltato is sometimes employed. This is a performance of rapid
successions of notes by causing the bow to jump on the strings by its
own elasticity instead of drawing it smoothly. The direction _col
legno_, sometimes seen in orchestra scores, means that the violinists
are to use the backs of their bows instead of the hair. This produces
a harsh, grotesque kind of staccato, and it is a method employed only
in music with something of grim humor in it. Some of the best instances
of its employment are to be found in Wagner’s “Siegfried,” where it
is used in the music accompanying _Mime’s_ betrayal of his gleeful
expectations of _Siegfried’s_ death.
Pizzicato is a term used to express the plucking of the strings with
the fingers. This is a very familiar musical effect. In earlier times
it was employed very little, and confined chiefly to the basses. It
is very common in modern music, and sometimes whole movements are
directed to be played in this manner. The familiar pizzicato movement
of Delibes’s “Sylvia” ballet is an excellent example.
Sordines are little contrivances of wood or brass with teeth which can
be pressed down over the strings so as to deaden their vibrations.
You will often, if you are observant, see the players take them out
of their waistcoat-pockets and place them over the strings of their
instruments just in front of the bridges. These sordine, or mutes,
give the tone of the instrument a veiled sound, which adds to the
mournfulness of pathetic music, and to the mystery of anything weird or
strange. In the “Queen Mab” scherzo of Berlioz’s “Romeo et Juliette”
symphony, for instance, the use of the sordines adds to the suggestion
of the supernatural world, while in “Asa’s Death” in Grieg’s “Peer
Gynt” suite they deepen the impression of crushing sorrow. For the
benefit of those who read orchestral scores it must be added that the
direction to use the mutes is _con sordini_, and the words _senza
sordini_ signify that their use is to be discontinued. The use of the
bow after a pizzicato passage is directed by the words _col arco_, or
simply _arco_ (the bow).
Violins in the orchestra are divided into two bodies, first and
second. A friend once asked me: “What is the difference between a
first and a second violin?” The question amused me and I repeated it
to my friend, Philip Hale, the brilliant music critic of the Boston
_Journal_. He promptly answered: “There is no difference except in the
price.” That is quite true. Violins are all alike, but a first violin
player is sometimes paid more than a second. The reason for dividing
the instruments into two bodies is that the middle voices of the
harmony may be properly filled out. If there were no second violins,
the violas, which we shall presently consider, would have to play
continually in their upper register in order to fill what may be called
the contralto part of the harmony. Then the ’cellos would have to be
pushed up into the tenor register, and there would be a big gap between
them and the low-toned double-basses. On the other hand, if the violas
were kept down, there would be a gap between them and the violins.
But by dividing the violins into two bodies, the second violins are
available for the notes of the harmony lying between those sounded by
the first violins and those given out by the violas. First and second
violins can frequently play the same notes, when the harmonic support
is confided to the wind-instruments, and thus a double amount of power
is attained. Indeed, it is not uncommon to write a melody for all the
violins, violas, and ’cellos to sing together, with wind accompaniment.
First and second violins, on the other hand, are often subdivided into
four or more parts. So are all the other stringed instruments. This is
an effect which we shall consider more in detail when we come to the
extended examination of the separate choirs.
THE VIOLA
This adorable instrument always reminds me of Shakespeare’s
_Viola_--“She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm
i’ the bud, prey on her damask cheek.” The viola speaks often enough,
but no one recognizes her voice. She is unknown to the average
concert-goer. Kept in the background by the position of the players,
who sit behind the violins, and by the unskilful employment of the
earlier composers, this beautiful and expressive member of the viol
family is almost a stranger to lovers of music. The viola is nothing
more or less than a larger violin with a deeper compass. The violin is
tuned, as we have already seen, thus:
[Music]
The viola has also four strings, which are tuned thus:
[Music]
In order to avoid the inconvenience of writing the part of the viola
in two clefs, the old custom of writing it on what is known as the
alto clef is continued. The peculiarities of clefs will be explained
in a separate chapter. The viola is both a tenor and a contralto,
though it is usually employed in modern scores to discharge the duties
of a tenor. The early composers knew so little about its expressive
power that they frequently used it simply to reinforce the basses. The
most recent writers have gone to the other extreme. They have been so
delighted with the individuality of the viola’s tone that they have
shown a tendency to overwork it. The lowest register of the viola has
a peculiarly sepulchral tone, which gives it a dark and threatening
character, admirably adapted to the demands of tragic music. In its
middle register the viola sings with a peculiar pathos which cannot
be imitated by any other instrument playing in the same region of
pitch, and even in the higher parts of its scale the viola maintains
its individuality by a penetrating sweetness and gentleness of tone.
Nevertheless, it blends well with other stringed instruments. If a
composer desires to write a long scale, exceeding the downward range
of violins, he can pass from violins to violas, and so to ’cellos,
without any abrupt change of tonal quality. Again, violas can be used
to reinforce other stringed instruments, as in the beginning of the
_andante con moto_ of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where they play the
melody in unison with the ’cellos. Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and Wagner
have made excellent use of the characteristic qualities of the viola.
The first named gives a good example of his style of treatment in the
viola accompaniment to _Raoul’s_ romance, “Plus blanche que la blanche
hermine,” in Act I. of “Les Huguenots.” Berlioz employs a solo viola
in his “Harold in Italy” symphony to represent Byron’s melancholy
wanderer. Wagner takes advantage of the peculiar tone-color of the
instrument in many places in his scores. A familiar example is that
which begins the bacchanalian passage in the “Tannhäuser” overture:
[Music]
All that has been said about the methods of bowing, tremolo, pizzicato,
harmonics, sordines, etc., applies to the viola as well as to the
violin.
THE VIOLONCELLO
This instrument is so well known that it will not be necessary to say
much about it. Its tone and its various effects are familiar to all
concert-goers. The ’cello is tuned precisely as the viola is, but an
octave lower:
[Music]
The compass usually employed in the orchestra is three and one-half
octaves from the low C to the G just above the treble staff. This
compass may be increased further by the employment of harmonics.
Students of scores will find that three different clefs are used for
’cello music, as explained in the account of clefs.
All that has been said about playing the violin applies also to the
’cello, though, of course, in orchestral music the ’cello is not
expected to display so much agility as the violin. It is heard to
the best advantage in broad and fluent melody. As Berlioz justly
says: “Nothing is more voluptuously melancholy or more suited to the
utterance of tender, languishing themes than a mass of violoncellos
playing in unison on their first strings.” He might have added that
nothing is more expressive of dignity without passion than the lower
tones of the ’cello when uttered by several instruments at once. Owing
to its great compass the ’cello can be used as the bass of the string
quartet, as a solo instrument, or as the singer of the melody with an
accompaniment by the other strings.
THE DOUBLE-BASS
The irreverent frequently call the double-bass the “bull fiddle.” It
is the foundation of the string choir and the fundamental bass of the
whole orchestra. It is tuned thus:
[Music]
It must be borne in mind, however, that the notes sound an octave lower
than written. The instrument is called the double-bass because it was
used in early times to double the bass part played by the ’cello. It
is only since the beginning of the nineteenth century that it has
generally been given an independent bass part. Beethoven extended its
powers immensely and revealed capacities which earlier composers did
not suspect the instrument of possessing. Indeed, some of Beethoven’s
contemporaries looked askance at his innovations. Weber wrote an
article on the great man’s Fourth Symphony. In it he depicted himself
as hearing in a dream the comments of the instruments of the orchestra.
The contra-bass (double-bass) says:
“I have just come from the rehearsal of a symphony by one of our
newest composers; and though, as you know, I have a tolerably strong
constitution, I could only just hold out, and five minutes more would
have shattered my frame and burst the sinews of my life. I have been
made to caper about like a wild goat, and to turn myself into a mere
fiddle to execute the no-ideas of Mr. Composer.”
The time had not yet come for the famous recitative passage of the
basses in the Ninth Symphony. The same methods of bowing, etc., as are
applied to the violin are applied to the double-bass, but without any
attempt at great agility. Sordines, or mutes, are not used, because
an effective mute for a double-bass would weigh about two pounds and
would be very inconvenient to carry in the pocket. Harmonics can be
produced from the double-bass, but they are strident and loud and have
no musical utility.
II
Wind-Instruments of Wood
THE FLUTE
Next in importance to the strings is the wood-wind, which is divided
into three families--flutes, oboes, and clarinets. To the first family
belong the piccolo and the flute; to the second the oboe, English
horn, and bassoon, and to the third the clarinet and bass clarinet.
In the modern orchestra, flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons are
usually employed in pairs, while there is, if needed, one piccolo, one
English horn, and one bass clarinet. The flute is the most agile of the
wind-instruments, and is employed very freely in the orchestra. Its
compass is three octaves upward from the C below the treble clef, but
the two uppermost notes are seldom used. The tone is soft and sweet in
the medium register, clear and penetrating in the upper, and singularly
characteristic in the lower. Rapid passages are readily executed on
the flute, but the instrument’s powers of expression are limited,
owing partly to its tone-quality and partly to the impossibility of
giving a wide crescendo or diminuendo to any passage played upon it.
Nevertheless, it can be employed expressively when used with judgment.
Berlioz calls attention to Gluck’s use of it in his “Orfeo” in
the scene in the Elysian fields, where it voices the humility and
resignation of the bereaved husband. In the upper register rapid
sequences for the flute have an air of gayety. Well-known passages
which illustrate this are that near the close of the “Leonora” overture
No. 3, and that near the close of the finale of the “Eroica” symphony.
The piccolo, or octave-flute, is simply a small, shrill-voiced flute,
sounding an octave higher than the ordinary instrument. The sounds in
its second octave are well adapted to pieces of a joyous character,
while its upper register is useful for violent effects, such as a storm
or a scene in the infernal regions. In grotesque and supernatural
scenes it is also often employed with good results.
THE OBOE
The oboe is a reed instrument with a peculiar pastoral tone, which,
when once recognized, can never again be mistaken for that of another
instrument. It is not possible to describe this tone, beyond saying
that the average hearer thinks of it as the tone of a shepherd’s
pipe. The instrument is so well suited to pastoral music that the
principal melody is almost always given to it in passages having such
a character. Rapid passages, except in rare instances, are not suited
to the utterance of the oboe, though when it joins with the whole
mass of instruments in a tutti, anything that is not impossible may
be written for it. But it is essentially a lyric instrument of tender
expression, and it is seldom called upon for either gayety or tragedy.
Berlioz says: “Candor, artless grace, soft joy, or the grief of a
fragile being, suits the oboe’s accents. It expresses them admirably in
its cantabile.” An excellent example of the oboe’s quality as a tender
lyric singer is the opening of the slow movement of Schubert’s symphony
in C:
[Music]
[Music]
Its pastoral character is illustrated by hundreds of familiar passages.
Perhaps none is more familiar than this from the first scene of
Gounod’s “Faust.”
[Music]
To the oboe belongs the duty of sounding the A to which the whole
orchestra tunes. This privilege dates from the time of Handel, when it
was the principal wind-instrument employed in the band.
THE ENGLISH HORN
The English horn is not, as its name seems to imply, an instrument of
brass, but of wood. It is, in fact, an alto oboe. Its compass is from
the E below the treble clef to the F on the fifth line. This carries
it five tones below the oboe. Its tone is similar to that of the oboe,
but is heavier and has a dryer quality. Its character is less feminine,
more sombre, and more pathetic. Yet it is not incapable of joyous
expression, if the expression is not strained by the context. In all
the range of music there are no such examples of the eloquence of the
English horn as in the works of Wagner, who made it speak with a human
voice. The finest instances of its powers are to be found in his later
dramas, and perhaps the most familiar are in “Tristan und Isolde.” The
English horn is the instrument which imitates the shepherd’s pipe in
the melancholy wail of Act III., played while _Tristan_ is waiting for
news of the ship.
[Music]
When the ship is sighted by the herdsman, his pipe (still the English
horn) bursts into this pæan of joy:
[Music]
THE BASSOON
The bassoon is the bass of the oboe, and it occupies among the
wood-wind instruments a position similar to that of the ’cello among
the strings. Its upper tones resemble somewhat those of the English
horn, while its lower tones are deep and hoarse. Its extreme compass
is from the B flat below the bass clef to the F at the top of the
treble, but the last four notes are uncertain and of unnatural quality.
Music for the bassoon, like that for the ’cello, is written on three
clefs--bass, tenor, and treble. Bassoons are employed in pairs in
the orchestra. They are used either to fill out the harmonies, to
strengthen the bass, or as solo instruments.
The bassoon is capable of a great variety of effects. Its upper
register has a pastoral quality, combined with a certain
plaintiveness, which makes it suitable to the utterance of gentle grief
or melancholy. Composers have frequently availed themselves of the
humorous effects to be obtained by making the bassoon play music which
ill comports with the quality of its tone. The effect is really funny,
though the fun arises, not from the inherent humor of the instrument,
but from the incongruity of the singer and the song. The most familiar
example of this kind of fun is in the clown’s march in Mendelssohn’s
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” music:
[Music]
There is also a contra-bass bassoon, which sounds an octave lower than
the ordinary bassoon. The reader will find that in orchestra scores the
bassoons are usually designated by their Italian title, fagotti. This
name is applied to the instrument because it resembles two sticks bound
together, as in a bundle of fagots.
THE CLARINET
The clarinet is a wind-instrument of wood with a very mellow and
beautiful tone. It differs from the oboe chiefly in the construction
of its mouth-piece, which contains the sound-producing mechanism. The
instruments of the oboe family have mouth-pieces with two vibrating
reeds; those of the clarinet family have only one reed. This accounts
chiefly for the difference in the character of the tone. The compass
of the clarinet is from the E below the treble clef three octaves and
a half upward. The notes of the uppermost octave are shrill and are
seldom used. They are employed occasionally when a screaming effect is
desired. Clarinets are used in pairs in the orchestra, sometimes to
fill out harmonies, and frequently for solo effects. There is hardly
anything which cannot be done with a clarinet, for the instrument
is capable of great agility and brilliancy, and at the same time is
the most expressive of all the wind-instruments. It can be played
pianissimo or fortissimo through most of its compass, and the most
beautiful crescendo and diminuendo effects can be obtained. There is no
more familiar example of the high expressiveness of the clarinet than
that found in the overture to “Tannhäuser,” where the clarinet intones
the pleading passage afterward sung in the first scene by _Venus_:
[Music]
The reader will find that in scores the clarinet part is usually
written in some other key than that of the composition. This is because
three kinds of clarinet are employed, clarinets in A, B flat, and C.
A clarinet in B flat means one whose pitch is a whole tone below the
standard, so that when one plays the scale of C natural on it he gets
the sounds of the scale of B flat, just as he would from a piano tuned
a whole tone too low. A clarinet in A is a tone and a half below pitch
in the scale of C. One in C produces the scale of C when played in
C. The reason for using different kinds of clarinets is that it is
difficult to play the instrument in remote keys. By using an A clarinet
for keys having sharps and a B flat clarinet for keys having flats,
much of the difficulty is obviated. A clarinet in A is producing the
sounds of the key of three sharps when it is playing in C. To get the
sounds of the key of six sharps, it is necessary only to write for the
A clarinet in three sharps. Similarly, to get the sounds of the key of
five flats one needs only to write in three flats for a clarinet in
B flat. The kind of clarinet to be used is designated in the score.
Instruments treated in this manner are called transposing instruments.
(See Chapter V.)
THE BASS CLARINET
The bass clarinet is a clarinet whose compass extends an octave below
that of the B flat clarinet. It is a long instrument with a curved
bell at the lower end, so that it looks like an old-fashioned Dutch
pipe. Bass clarinets in B flat and A are employed, and the music is
usually written on the treble clef, thus transposing an octave below.
Wagner uses the bass clef, which is more convenient for the student of
his scores than for the performer. The tone of the lower register of
the bass clarinet is sonorous and rich, and affords a fine bass for
wood-wind passages.
As a solo instrument the bass clarinet is admirable in its dignity.
The instrument is used singly, not in pairs. As a fine example of the
effect of the bass clarinet, the music of _Elizabeth’s_ final exit in
Act III. of “Tannhäuser” may be commended.
[Music]
III
Wind-Instruments of Brass
THE HORN
The brass choir is composed of horns, trumpets, and trombones, with the
addition in most modern scores of a contra-bass tuba. Wagner has used
also bass trumpets and tenor tubas to enrich the color of this part of
his orchestra. The horn, or French horn, as it is often called, is the
old hunting horn adapted to orchestral purposes. It is an extremely
valuable instrument, because it has a most noble and expressive tone,
which makes it very interesting as a solo voice, and equally because it
blends admirably with either strings or wood, as well as with brass. In
the older compositions the reader will find that two horns were used,
but it is customary with modern composers to employ four, thus making
a full four-part harmony possible. Wagner generally doubles his horn
parts, requiring eight instruments.
It was impossible in earlier times to play in all keys on any one horn,
and so horns in various keys had to be used. The reader will find that
many scores call for horns in D, in E flat, in B flat, etc. Players
now use almost exclusively the horn in F, with valves, upon which it
is possible to play in all keys. It is customary with many composers,
however, to write horn parts in various keys, and the players have to
transpose them. As no opera is more familiar than “Faust,” the reader
may readily identify the horn as a solo instrument in the first act
when _Mephistopheles_ shows _Faust_ the vision of _Marguerite_.
[Music]
In Wagner’s “Siegfried” the horn plays all the passages which the young
hero is supposed to intone on his hunting horn. The quartet of horns
employed in the modern orchestra is frequently heard alone, and the
effect of this full harmony of mellow brass is incomparably fine. Such
effects are heard in the hunting fanfare which precedes the entrance
of the _Landgrave_ and his party in Act I. of “Tannhäuser,” and in the
echoing through the woods of the departing hunt in the beginning of Act
II. of “Tristan und Isolde.” It must not be supposed, however, that
horn quartets are used only for hunting effects. One has only to recall
the beautiful passage in Saint-Säen’s “Phäeton.”
[Music]
Stopped tones are frequently given to the horns. These are produced
by inserting the hand in the bell of the instrument, where it has an
effect not unlike that of a sordine on a violin-string. The quality
of stopped tones is nasal and stertorous. They are used with much
significance in dramatic music.
THE TRUMPET
This fine instrument, the soprano of the brass choir, is too often
replaced by the cornet. Indeed, in the United States I have heard
trumpets only in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Walter Damrosch’s
orchestra. The trumpet has a full, round, brilliant tone, for which
that of the blatant and brassy cornet is not a good substitute. But it
is much easier to get good cornet-players than good trumpeters, so the
cornet is quite common. The pealing, militant character of the trumpet
is always associated in the mind with that of the army bugle, which it
closely resembles. The trumpets are usually employed in chords written
for the brass, or in the big mass effects of the orchestra. They are
seldom called upon to intone a melody except in passages in which the
brass plays alone, or when a very brilliant and forcible orchestration
is used. The instrument is so familiar that no illustration is
necessary. Trumpets in various keys were formerly always employed, but
it is now customary to use chiefly the F trumpet, with valves. Cornets
employed in the orchestra are in A and B flat. There is a high cornet
in E flat, but it is used only in military bands. Stopped tones are
easily produced from the cornet or trumpet, and are often used for
comic effects. They sound much like the voice of a person singing in
a falsetto voice through his nose. Trumpets and cornets are generally
used in pairs in the orchestra.
THE TROMBONE
The trombone is one of the noblest of all orchestral instruments. When
it sounds ignoble, it is either because its part is not well written
or because it is badly played. In respect of register there are three
principal kinds of trombones--alto, tenor, and bass. The alto has a
compass extending from A at the bottom of the bass clef to the E flat
in the top space of the treble clef. The tenor ranges from E below the
bass clef to the B flat in the middle of the treble clef, and this is
the instrument most frequently employed. The bass trombone’s register
runs from B below the bass to the F in the first space of the treble
clef. The alto trombone is in E flat, the tenor in B flat, and the
bass in F. There is also a contra-bass trombone in B flat, sounding an
octave lower than the tenor trombone. It is very fatiguing to play,
and is usually replaced by the tuba, whose tone is of a considerably
different character. Although all these trombones stand in keys other
than C, they are not treated as transposing, but are written in the key
of the composition.
The tone of the trombone is grave and majestic, but it may be made
to rage hoarsely. In all solemn or broadly dignified music trombones
play a conspicuous part. It is customary to write in three parts for
these instruments, but when necessary they may be made to play in
unison, as in the proclamation of the pilgrims’ chorus in the overture
to “Tannhäuser,” or the curse motive in various parts of the Nibelung
series. A fine example of the employment of trombones in several
parts is to be found in the first act of “Die Walküre” on the first
appearance of the “Walhalla” motive.
[Music]
THE TUBA
The tuba is a deep-toned brass instrument of double-bass quality. It
is, in fact, the double-bass of the brass choir. Its quality of tone is
noble and blends well with that of trombones. The instrument usually
employed in the modern orchestra is the bass tuba in B flat. Wagner
employs tenor tubas in the funeral march of the “Götterdämmerung” in
order to get a generally consistent sombre color in the brass. He uses
in other places both bass and contra-bass tubas, but his writing for
these instruments cannot be regarded as invariably felicitous.
The tuba is really a member of the large family of Saxhorns, of which
there are six principal types, all in E flat or B flat. These are the
sopranino, or piccolo Saxhorn in E flat (A below treble to B flat
above), soprano Saxhorn in B flat (German flügelhorn--E below treble
to B flat above), alto in E flat (bass A to E flat in fourth space of
treble), tenor in B flat (E below bass to B flat treble), bass in B
flat, called in Germany bass tuba, and in England euphonium (B flat
below bass to F above it), bass in E flat (same compass less one upper
note), and contra-bass in B flat (E flat an octave below the bass to F
on the third line). These instruments belong primarily to the military
band, but an orchestral composer may employ any of them that suit his
purpose.
In some older scores the music-lover will find instead of the tuba the
ophicleide, which is the bass of the keyed bugle family. Its coarse and
blatant tone is happily replaced by that of the tuba.
IV
Other Instruments
THE TYMPANI
The tympani, or kettle-drums, belong to the department of instruments
of percussion. They are the only drums which can be tuned to sound
certain notes. The other instruments of percussion need not be
described until the department is discussed as a whole. The older
composers employed only two kettle-drums. The modern writers often
use three and sometimes four. There are low and high kettle-drums.
The low drum can be tuned to any note from F below the bass clef to
C in the second space, and the high drum from B flat on the second
line to F on the fourth. The early composers used kettle-drums almost
invariably with the trumpets, and found no better employment for them
than the accentuation of rhythm and changes of harmony. Beethoven, who
was one of the keenest of all composers in his appreciation of the
individuality of instruments, saw that the kettle-drums could be used
for special effects.
The early composers always tuned them to the tonic key and its
dominant. Beethoven, in the scherzo of the Ninth Symphony, tuned them
in octaves and produced a striking effect. Again in the slow movement
of the same symphony he made the two drums play simultaneously on two
notes of a chord. This also was novel. In the andante of his First
Symphony he had already made the tympani play the bass to a melody of
violins and flutes, and in the Fourth Symphony the tympani take their
turn with the other instruments in playing the theme of two notes
often repeated. The solo effects of the tympani in the scherzo of the
Fifth Symphony and in the opening of the violin concerto are well
known. Beethoven thus paved the way for subsequent composers to make
a wide and varied use not only of the tympani but of other percussive
instruments.
Other instruments of percussion employed in the orchestra are the
military snare-drum, bass-drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine,
castanets, the carillon (a set of steel bars which produce sounds like
those of small bells), the xylophone, large bells (or heavy steel tubes
to imitate them), and the gong.
THE HARP
The reader will look in vain for the harp in the older symphonic
scores. It was in its early employment wholly an instrument of the
theatre. Although it found its way into the orchestra early, it was not
employed as a genuine orchestral instrument. Up to the beginning of the
present century, as Gevaert has clearly pointed out, composers used it
for the sake of its historical character. Thus Handel introduced it in
the first version of his “Esther” (1720), Gluck in his “Orfeo” (1762),
and Beethoven in his “Prometheus” ballet (1799). In Gluck’s “Orfeo,”
for example, the harp is heard only when _Orpheus_ is supposed to play
on the instrument carried by him. In this same manner Wagner employs
the harp in “Tannhäuser.” It was employed in a similar manner in the
early part of the present century by composers for the theatre, chiefly
in France. Biblical and classical subjects, in which the harps of the
daughters of Israel or the lyres of Greece and Rome might be heard,
naturally suggested the use of the harp, and thus it was employed
by Méhul in his “Joseph” (1809), Spontini in “La Vestale” (1807),
and Rossini in “Moïse” (1827). Again, scenes in Scotland or Ireland
required the local color of the gleeman’s harp, and for this purpose it
was employed by Méhul in his “Uthal” (1803), Lesueur in “Les Bardes”
(1807), and Catel in “Wallace” (1817).
The perfection of the pedal mechanism by Sebastian Erard in 1810 led
to a much wider use of the harp. Meyerbeer and Wagner began to use it
extensively in their operas, and Berlioz introduced it into symphonic
music of the romantic school.
The harp is provided with seven pedals, operated by the player’s feet.
By means of these pedals the tension of the strings can be instantly
altered, thus changing the pitch of the scale, or, in other words,
putting the harp into another key. It is this mechanism which enables
the harpist of to-day to play in all keys, while in earlier times only
a few were practicable.
The reader of orchestra scores will find that harp parts are written on
two staves, like piano music, and placed in the score just above the
parts of the string quintet. The harp is a non-transposing instrument
and its music is written as it sounds. Sometimes, however, in remote
keys composers remove some of a harp-player’s difficulties by changing
the key signature. For instance, certain kinds of passages, if written
in the key of B natural, are very difficult for the harp, whereas if
written in C flat (which sounds precisely the same) they become easy.
This is because the Erard system of tuning makes C flat the fundamental
key of the harp.
The instrument is much used in our day in orchestral music, as well
as in the opera. Its treatment is usually either in broad chords, as
in the air “Roi du ciel” in Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” or in running
arpeggios, as in “Anges purs et radieux” in “Faust.” Glissando
effects--smooth-running passages produced by sliding the hands rapidly
over the strings without stopping to pluck them--are often used in
modern music, as in the orchestral arrangements of Liszt’s Hungarian
rhapsodies. Harmonics can be produced on the harp. They sound like the
faint tinkle of a muffled glass bell, and are very pretty when properly
applied. A familiar example is to be found in the waltz of the sylphs
in the ballet music of Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.”
Wagner has used the harp very freely in his music dramas. Sometimes
he employs it historically, sometimes for the sake of its luxuriant
tone in the accompaniment of lyric song, and again with a remarkable
insight into its power of combination with other instruments in
descriptive music. In this latter manner it is superbly used in the
magic fire-music of “Die Walküre:”
[Music]
V
The Orchestral Score
The printed form of an orchestral composition, or one for voices and
orchestra, is called a score. (German, Partitur.) In it are comprised
the parts to be played by all the instruments. It is read across
the page precisely as a piece of piano music is, with the important
difference that while in a piano piece there are only two staves--one
for the treble and one for the bass--in an orchestral score there are
from sixteen to twenty-four, according to the number of the parts. The
name of the instrument is printed at the beginning of its part and
also the key in which it stands, if it is a transposing instrument.
The customary order of the instruments from top to bottom of the page
is as follows: Flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets,
trombones, tuba, tympani, and other instruments of percussion, harps,
violins, violas, ’cellos, and double-basses. This order is sometimes
changed for the sake of convenience. If there are voices, as in an
opera or oratorio, they will be found in the older scores between the
viola and ’cello parts. The more modern custom is to put them above the
first violins, so that the parts of the string choir are not separated.
In a concerto the solo instrument is similarly placed. The names of the
instruments of the score are usually given in Italian, but sometimes
in German. The following list gives the names of the instruments in
English, Italian, German, and French, with the plurals where needed:
Italian. German. French.
Flute Flautŏ(i) Flöte(n) Flute.
Oboe Oboe(i) Hoboe(n) Hautbois.
English Horn Cornŏ Inglese Englische Horn Cor Anglais.
Clarinet Clarinettŏ(i) Clarinette(n) Clarinette.
Bassoon Fagottŏ(i) Fagott(e) Basson.
Horn Cornŏ(i) Horn(er) Cor.
Trumpet Tromba(e) Trompete(n) Trompette.
Cornet Cornettó(i) Cornet(te) Cornette à pistons.
Trombone Trombonó(i) Posaune(n) Trombone.
Tuba Tuba Tuba Tuba.
Bass Drum Gran Cassa Grosse Trommel Grosse Caisse.
Cymbals Piatti Becken Cymbales.
Kettle-drums Timpani Pauken Timbales.
Harp Arpa Harfe Harpe.
Violin Violino Geige Violone.
Viola Viola Bratsche Alto.
Violoncello Violoncello Violoncell Violoncelle.
Bass Basso Bass Contrebasse.
[Music]
[Music]
In German scores the Italian names are often used. Sometimes each
instrument has a separate staff, but more frequently a pair of
instruments, as two flutes, or two oboes, is written on one staff. In
such cases the tails of the notes for the upper instrument are turned
up and of those for the lower down. If there are two sets of tails, one
up and one down, to one set of notes, it indicates that two instruments
are to play the same passage. In the case of four horns, two staves are
used, the upper for the first and second and the lower for the third
and fourth. In old scores the reader will find many different orders
of placing the instruments on the page. That which I have given is the
present method.
The reader will find many directions and abbreviations in scores not
used in piano music. The meaning of any of these can be ascertained by
consulting a dictionary of music. One or two may be explained here.
The word “divisi” written over a part in double notes (or more) means
that one instrument is to play the upper line and another the lower.
First violins are thus sometimes subdivided, and so are other stringed
instruments. The words “A due” are used as a direction for all to play
together again. The letters A, B, C, etc., often seen at the tops and
bottoms of pages, are for the convenience of conductors in rehearsing.
“If you please, gentlemen, let us go back to four bars before the
letter G,” or something of that kind, is a familiar remark at orchestra
rehearsals.
The reader will find that in many scores space is saved by omitting
from some pages the staves of those instruments which have nothing on
those pages. Usually when this is done the names of the instruments
which are playing are indicated by abbreviations placed just above the
staves, as “Fl., Cl., Fg.,” etc. The full names of the instruments
employed in any movement are given only at the beginning, and the
reader of scores should note how many staves are employed. Sometimes
the flutes are written on two staves, sometimes on one. The same is
true of the other wind-instruments. Usually the wood-choir staves are
bound together by a continuous double bar at the beginning of each
page, and sometimes the horns have one double bar. The score-reader
will soon become familiar with the various arrangements. One who loves
orchestral music and wishes to understand how its effects are produced
should study scores. Study your score first at home and try to imagine
how it ought to sound. Then follow the performance with it and note
what combinations of instruments produce particular effects. After a
time you will find that your understanding of the orchestra has greatly
increased, and you will get new enjoyment from the performance of
symphonies and overtures.
[Illustration: _Copyright by the London Stereoscopic Co._
ARTHUR NIKISCH.]
The conventional seating plan of the orchestra will help the reader
to familiarize himself with the instruments. In concerts the stringed
instruments are always placed at the front of the stage, with the
wind-instruments behind them, in order that the tone of the strings may
come out fully and without obstruction. The first violins are always
on the left of the audience, and second violins on the right. Violas
are usually placed immediately behind the second violins, though some
conductors put them behind the first. The ’cellos are arranged usually
on the side opposite the violas, and double-basses are placed at the
sides or the back, according to the conductor’s idea. The wood occupies
the middle of the stage, and the brass and instruments of percussion
are at the rear. The diagram on the next page shows the seating plan of
the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
[Illustration:
A--Conductor.
B--First Violins.
C--Second Violins.
D--Violas.
E--Violoncellos.
O--Double Basses.
F--Flutes.
G--Oboes and English Horn.
H--Clarinets.
I--Bassoons.
J--Horns.
K--Trumpets.
L--Trombones.
M--Tuba.
N--Tympani.
P--Triangle.
Q--Bass Drum.
R--Bells, etc.
SEATING PLAN OF THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA.]
Amateurs will find that they must extend their musical knowledge a
little, if they desire to read orchestra scores. Persons who have
studied only piano playing are nonplussed when they find themselves
in the presence of transposing instruments and other clefs than those
known as the treble and the bass. I have already briefly explained
the peculiarity of what are called transposing instruments, but it
will be well to give the reader some further help in dealing with them
in reading scores. A question which I have frequently heard is, “Why
don’t they make all instruments in C?” The answer to this question
is that there could only be one reason for doing so, namely, to make
it easy for amateurs to read scores. There are many more substantial
reasons for making instruments in various keys. For instance, brass
instruments produce most easily and with the finest tone and richest
sonority their natural notes--those notes which are produced without
any aid from valves or pistons as the notes of a cavalry bugle. If
a composer in writing a brilliant march in B natural, a bright and
incisive key for the strings, wishes to introduce trumpets, he can
make most effective use of those in B natural. But it is not possible
always to have clarinets, trumpets, and horns in every key ready for
instant use, so custom and experience have induced musicians to make a
judicious selection. Clarinets in A and B flat are now used far more
than those in C. As Gevaert says: “The choice among the three clarinets
is not always made from the simple consideration of facility; often it
is guided by the character of the tone peculiar to each. The clarinet
in C has a timbre brilliant almost to rudeness.” He further notes that
it is therefore used by the classic composers mostly in brilliant
movements in the simple diatonic scales. The clarinet in B flat or that
in A may be chosen for reasons of a like nature. The reader, however,
will probably be more interested in knowing how he is to read clarinet
parts. If they are in C, he will have no trouble, because there will
be no transposition. A clarinet in B flat playing music written in C,
sounds one tone lower than that scale. Hence the key of C is used for a
clarinet in B flat only when the violins are playing in B flat.
In other words, every sound which issues from a B flat clarinet is one
whole tone lower than that written in the score. If you write C, the
instrument sounds B flat. If you wish the instrument to sound C, you
must write D. If you wish it to sound F sharp, you must write G sharp.
If you wish it to sound E natural, you must write F sharp or G flat.
The composer has the choice of two methods of writing his clarinet
part. He may write always without any key signature and mark all flats
and sharps as accidentals, or he may use a key signature. Custom has
sanctioned the latter method, which is the more rational. I have just
said that every tone which issues from a B flat clarinet is a whole
interval below the written character. Therefore, all music for a B
flat clarinet must be written one interval higher than it is intended
to sound, and this, the reader will see, simply results in transposing
a B flat clarinet part into a key one tone higher than that of the
composition. For a composition in C write for B flat clarinets in the
key of D. For one in D write for B flat clarinets in E. For one in E
flat write for B flat clarinets in F. There is another simple way of
looking at this matter. Clarinets in B flat have already two flats in
their open scale. If you want them to play in C, you must contradict
these two flats by two sharps, and two sharps are the signature of
the key of D. Hence, write in D for B flat clarinets to play in C.
In reading a score all that the amateur needs to do is to remember
that every note written for the B flat clarinet sounds one tone lower
than written. Thus the chord of C for two flutes, two oboes, and two
clarinets might be written as at A so as to sound as at B.
[Music]
In the case of clarinets in A the same principles apply. The clarinet
in A sounds A when C is written, and it sounds the entire scale of A
when the scale of C is written. As C is one tone and a half above A, it
follows that notes for the A clarinet are always written a tone and a
half higher than the sounds to be produced, and the score-reader must
conceive the A clarinet parts as sounding that much lower than they are
written. Thus, to get C out of an A clarinet, you must write E flat,
and to make an A clarinet play in unison with flutes in the key of C,
you must write in E flat for the clarinet. The chord just written would
have to be rewritten thus:
[Music]
One of the peculiarities of orchestra scores is that music for horns
and trumpets is always written without any key signature--that is,
just as if it were in C major--and all the sharps and flats are put in
as accidentals. This makes difficult reading at times for an amateur.
In order to aid the music-lover I give herewith the written notes
and the corresponding real sounds of the horn in F, which is the most
frequently used. The same table will answer for the trumpet in F.
[Music]
The rules of transposition given above apply to all music for
transposing instruments. A tuba in E flat, for instance, is one which
sounds E flat when the composer writes C. Persons accustomed to
sight-reading with a “movable Do” have very little trouble in the study
of orchestra scores, and I earnestly advise all who wish to read scores
to study sight-reading.
Next comes the matter of clefs. As I have stated, it is customary to
write the viola part on the alto clef. When a bassoon or a ’cello runs
up so high that it is inconvenient to employ the bass clef, the tenor
clef is used, and if it goes still higher, the treble clef may be
introduced. These various clefs are troublesome to the amateur because
he is familiar only with the treble and bass clefs. The treble clef
is known also as the G clef; because the character [G clef symbol]
is placed upon the second line to indicate that the treble G is there
located. A clef sign simply fixes the place of some note, and the
others are located accordingly. The bass clef is also called the F
clef, because the character [F clef symbol] is placed so as to indicate
that F is on the fourth line. Now in the alto and tenor clefs the
character [alto clef symbol] is used, and its purpose is to locate the
note C. In the alto clef it is on the third line, where B is in the
treble clef. In the tenor clef it is on the fourth line, where D is in
the treble clef. The question which will arise in the amateur’s mind
is this: Which C is it that is thus located? The answer is simple and
easily remembered. It is best expressed by the following illustration:
[Music: Alto clef. Real sound. Tenor clef. Real sound.]
Here are two scales, one alto and one tenor, with the real sounds.
[Music: Alto.
Real sounds.]
[Music]
It will be seen from these illustrations that the C located by the clef
sign in the alto on the third line and the tenor clef on the fourth
line is the one situated on the first leger line below the staff in
the treble clef. Having this fact in mind, the lover of orchestral
music can learn, with a little practice, to read viola parts and ’cello
or bassoon passages which run up into the tenor clef. The following
illustration shows a ’cello passage with the middle measure written on
the tenor clef, and also the same passage written wholly on the bass
clef:
[Music]
In some scores the music-lover will find the three trombone parts
written on three clefs, alto, tenor, and bass, while in others they
are written on the bass clef only. I have already noted that bass
clarinet parts are written sometimes on the treble and sometimes on
the bass clef. The former is always used by French composers, and the
latter nearly always by Germans.
PART II
How the Orchestra is Used
VI
General Principles
The orchestra is an instrument, and composers have developed methods of
writing for it. The fundamental principles of these methods constitute
that branch of musical art called orchestration. It is not the purpose
of the present volume to teach that branch; but it is entirely within
its province to point out to the reader how composers make use of their
majestic and many-voiced instrument. In compass and power alone it
surpasses all other instruments. The compass of the modern orchestra
is enormous. It extends from grave, low sounds to those of such acute
pitch that the ear does not relish them if uttered loudly. The extreme
normal compass is shown by the following illustration:
[Music]
Mr. Corder, in his “Modern Orchestra and How to Write for It,” gives
this interesting dynamic scale: “Suppose the degrees of sound-intensity
to range from 1 (in _ppp_) to 12 (in _fff_); then one might say roughly
that
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Violins have a range
of from _ppp_ — _mp_ — — — _mf_ — — _fff_ — —
The other strings _ppp_ — — — — — — —_fff_ — — —
Clarinets on high
notes — — _ppp_ — — — —_fff_ — — — —
Clarinets low, flutes,
oboes, and bassoons — — _ppp_ — — —_fff_ — — —
Horns — _ppp_ — — — — — — _fff_ — — —
Trumpets, trombones,
and drums _ppp_ — — — — — — — — — — _fff_
Harps — — _ppp_— — _fff_ — — — — — —
I should modify this by shifting the pianissimo of low clarinet tones
back to 2, that of drums forward to 2, and that of trumpets and
trombones to 4.
Now, if there were nothing else to be considered, a composer would
have to work according to some system in using the compass and force
of his orchestra. What is known in regard to the method of doing so
is the result of many long years of experiment by the early writers.
In a general way, I may say that composers in writing a passage
for the entire orchestra can give the melody to all the soprano
instruments, the alto to all that have an alto compass, the tenor to
all the tenors, and the bass to all the basses. For example--flutes,
clarinets, oboes, and violins may utter a melody in unison, while the
remaining instruments supply the accompaniment. But it is rare that a
composer writes in only four parts for orchestra. He usually spreads
his chords out to six or eight parts, thus gaining in richness and
sonority of tone.
But compass and power are not all the composer must consider. He has
at his command a great variety of tonal qualities. We have already
seen how the characteristics of certain instruments, singing as solo
voices, are peculiarly suited to the embodiment of special kinds of
music. Now the writer for orchestra must study the result of every
possible combination of all or any of the instruments to the end that
he may produce just the desired tone, and that he may never produce
anything different from that which he wishes. The tonal tints of a
modern orchestra are the richest pigments of the musician’s palette,
and he must know how to use them either singly or combined, just as the
painter knows how to use his colors. The simplest way in which I can
point out the peculiarities of the composer’s work is by discussing
separately the uses of the different choirs.
The principal requirements of good orchestration are solidity, balance
of tone, contrast, and variety. Solidity is obtained by a proper
dispersal of the harmony, so that certain notes in the chords do not
stand out too prominently at the expense of others. The composer must
not only be a master of harmony, but he must have the true harmonic
feeling. He must have that almost instinctive grasp of the proportions
of chords which can come only from real musical gifts cultivated by
long familiarity with modern music. This feeling is not necessarily
accompanied by restlessness and complexity of harmony. The harmonic
effect of a simple diatonic Bach chorale is infinitely grander than the
most intricate chromatic convolutions of a Charbrier overture. The true
harmonic feeling is one that always produces artistic proportions, and
these will permeate the instrumentation and produce solidity, provided
the composer has sufficient intimacy with the instruments to prevent
him from giving them the wrong notes. The foundation of solidity in
orchestration is good writing for the strings. Their part of the score
must always be planned with complete harmonic skill, not only because
they are the main prop of the whole instrumental body, but because the
man who cannot write well for strings will inevitably fail in handling
wood and brass.
Solidity in tutti passages merges itself in balance of tone. This
depends also upon a proper dispersal of the harmony and on a knowledge
of the relative power of the instruments of the three choirs. For
instance, it is not possible to play wood as softly as strings.
Consequently, in a pianissimo the composer must know just what wood
instruments to use and what parts of the chord to give them, lest he
overbalance his strings. Solidity requires great skill in writing the
middle voices. If they are too strong, the orchestration is muddy; if
they are too weak, it is thin, and the orchestra, as the saying goes,
is “all top and bottom.”
Contrast is necessary in order that monotony of color may be avoided.
It is obtained by using the three choirs of the orchestra separately,
by employing any subdivision of each, or using simultaneously
subdivisions of two, and so on. Variety is produced by mixing the
tints. For example, a passage played by a flute alone changes color
when an oboe sings in unison with the flute. Another tint results when
a clarinet is added. It is not necessary to pursue this topic further
than to say that the composer must know what tints will mix well to
produce a new one.
VII
The Strings
Since the foundation of good orchestration is skilful writing for the
strings, it is natural to consider that department first. The strings,
as we shall see, came to their proper place in the orchestra in the
works of the operatic composers. In Cavalli’s “Giasone” (1649) we find
vocal parts accompanied in something like the Handelian style by two
violins and a bass. About twenty-five years later we find the string
quartet, two violins, viola, and bass, established by Alessandro
Scarlatti, founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. Since that time
the strings have been the foundation of the orchestra, and although
methods of writing for them have greatly changed, the fundamental
principles remain the same.
The general disposition of the strings may be fairly expressed by
the formula already given, but worth repeating here: First violins
equal sopranos, second violins equal altos, violas equal tenors,
’cellos equal barytones, and double-basses equal basses. In certain
circumstances this disposition is altered, because the compass of
violas makes it possible for them to sing soprano music, though with
a distinctly individual tone, while the ’cello can cover the ordinary
range of an entire quartet. The individuality of tone possessed by
the various stringed instruments is tolerably well known, except in
the case of the viola. It is to its beautiful quality of tone that it
owes its chief value. Gloomy, sombre, and even foreboding in the lower
register, in its upper range it becomes mellow, tender, pathetic, and
inexpressibly winning. No wonder that Berlioz selected it for the voice
of the melancholy Childe Harold, or that Brahms made it play such
important parts in his quartets. Its dramatic power is now universally
recognized by composers, and from the position of a misunderstood and
ignored member of the string quintet, it is rapidly advancing to the
equally undesirable condition of being severely overworked.
It is a curious fact, however, that many of the younger composers
show a singular want of skill in using the viola, and it is this
which often upsets the balance of their orchestration. Perhaps this
is due in some measure to the Brahms cult. Brahms’s orchestration
is not a good model. His middle parts are almost always written
too low or too heavily, and hence his instrumentation is muddy. It
depends upon what a man is writing. If he is writing a symphony in the
classic style, let him follow as closely as possible the methods of
Beethoven. If he wishes to be more modern--and it is natural that he
should--let him study Dvořák, whose instrumentation is almost perfect.
Tschaikowsky’s is, too, but the reader should remember that most of
his works are sombre in thought, and that hence the instrumental style
will not be suitable to light themes. Liszt and Rubinstein are good
models. For thick, luscious coloring there is nothing better than
Rubinstein’s “Antony and Cleopatra” overture, and I can recommend also
a careful study of Goldmark’s overtures. Wagner, of course, is full
of instruction, but a composer must know a good deal before he can
discriminate sufficiently to get any benefit from Wagner. But to return
to the viola.
The placing of the viola part is of the greatest importance in the
color of the strings. For instance, in the slow movement of the famous
piano concerto in E flat, called the “Emperor,” Beethoven mutes his
violins, but not his violas, and writes the basses pizzicati, thus:
[Music]
The individuality and penetrating quality of the viola tone brings it
out with marked effect in this passage, and Beethoven knew that so well
that in the third measure he kept his second violins down and gave the
violas the real alto part, because the harmonic significance of the
passage rested so largely upon the F sharp, E sharp, E, and D sharp. If
the second violin and viola parts in that passage were exchanged, the
effect would be altogether different.
The increase of skill in the treatment of viola and ’cello parts,
but chiefly of the former, is coincident with the development of the
science of orchestration. Indeed, it may fairly be said that first-rate
writing for the strings, which is the foundation of orchestration,
depends largely upon the treatment of the viola part. Any composer
knows enough when writing for strings to give his melody to the first
violins and his bass to the basses. But the character of his harmony
is to be determined by his middle voices, and it is in the treatment
of these that we see growth in skill. Berlioz, in his treatise on
instrumentation, says of the viola: “It has, nevertheless, been long
neglected, or put to a use as unimportant as ineffectual--that of
merely doubling, in octave, the upper part of the bass. There are
many causes that have operated to induce the unjust servitude of this
noble instrument. In the first place, the majority of the composers
of the last century, rarely writing in four real parts, scarcely
knew what to do with it; and when they did not readily find some
filling-up notes in the chords for it to do, they hastily wrote the
fatal ‘col basso’--sometimes with so much inattention that it produced
a doubling in the octave of the basses, irreconcilable either with the
harmony or the melody or with both one and the other. Moreover, it was
unfortunately impossible at that time to write anything for the violas
of a prominent character, requiring even ordinary skill in execution.
Viola-players were always taken from among the refuse of violinists.
When a musician found himself incapable of creditably filling the place
of violinist, he took refuge among the violas.”
Haydn’s symphonic scores show skill coupled with restraint in the
viola parts. The instrument is never called upon to play passages of
any difficulty except when errors will be covered up in the general
body of tone. But in his scores the viola takes its correct place in a
pure four-part harmony. It is seldom that Haydn undertakes to give his
strings more than four parts to sing, though the reader will perceive
that as each instrument is easily capable of producing two notes at
a time, eight real parts can be written for a string quartet. The
’cello has few independent passages in Haydn’s symphonies. It usually
doubles the bass part. Mozart, without attempting to give the viola or
the ’cello difficulties to overcome, made wider use of their special
tone-qualities than did Haydn, though it must be admitted that Mozart’s
symphonies show a great deal of three-part writing for strings. Gluck,
in his operas, brought out the dramatic value of the lower register of
the viola, and Spontini, in “La Vestale,” was the first who assigned
the melody to it. Méhul, the French opera-writer, used it so much
that Grétry exclaimed, “I’d give a guinea to hear a first string.”
Beethoven, in the andante of his fifth symphony, gives the melody in
the opening bars to the violas and ’cellos in unison, a very rich and
beautiful effect.
In general it may be said that the string quintet did not attain the
full measure of its usefulness in the hands of the classical writers
till the viola and the ’cello had begun to be treated with freedom and
independence. Then there was no longer any difficulty in writing a
full four-part harmony, upon which depends the solidity of the string
portion of the score. The best test of scoring for strings is to
consider whether it sounds full and self-sustaining when unsupported
by any wind-instruments. The lover of orchestral music should give
especial attention to Beethoven’s scores. Here he will find the
perfection of the classical style of writing, which employed almost
exclusively a four-part scheme and kept each instrument in its normal
place except when used as a solo voice. With the romantic movement
scoring for strings began its search after unusual tone-tints, and
composers began to learn that they could obtain these in two or three
ways--by increasing the number of voices in their harmony, by taking
advantage of the large registers of violas and ’cellos and sometimes
carrying them above the violins, and by employing solo instruments
among the orchestral mass. The beautiful effect of divided string parts
in a simple form is heard in the opening measures of Mendelssohn’s
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” overture, but if the reader desires to find
the extreme modern style of writing for numerous voices in the strings
he must go to Wagner. He, indeed, is guilty of occasional abuses of the
practice. In the accompaniment to _Brangäne’s_ song of warning in the
second act of “Tristan und Isolde” he divides the strings into fifteen
parts, but I am quite sure that no human ear can hear all of them. It
is seldom that more than eight real parts can be made advantageous, and
then chiefly in slow movements.
It all depends upon what the composer wishes to accomplish. If he
desires brilliancy in an animated movement, he will use his first
violins in unison and above the middle of their register. If he wishes
to get more brilliancy, he will write them still higher and double
them with the second violins in the octave below. If he writes them
in the middle register and doubles them with the second violins, he
will get more sonority, but less brilliancy. On the other hand, if he
desires richness of harmony coupled with mystery, or ethereal effects,
let him divide his strings into several parts. After that it is a mere
matter of register. If he writes high, he will get aërial delicacy and
tenderness; if he writes low, he will get pathos as well as tenderness.
No better examples can be offered than these from “Lohengrin” and “Die
Walküre:”
[Music]
[Music]
But, after all, these effects are special, and the fundamental
principles of sound writing for the strings are best exemplified by the
writings of the classical composers. The chief question for the student
of music is: Which of the classical writers is the best model? This is
a question not easily answered. Haydn’s earlier works are not at all to
be commended, while his later compositions are full of sound scoring.
His quartets are not excelled as examples of clear, well-balanced
writing for strings, but his symphonies do not reveal fully the value
of the viola.
Specific instrumental coloring began with Mozart, and yet he is the
finest example of continence and sobriety in orchestration. His string
parts are generally substantial and well planned, but, nevertheless,
I should hardly advise a beginner to study them. The older composers
are like ancient history; one must have sufficient information to know
what to accept and what to reject in order to read them with advantage.
It will not profit any beginner in instrumentation to go farther back
than Beethoven. The great symphonist’s string plan is always notable
for its breadth, solidity, and flexibility, and there is nothing in the
fundamental work of string writing which cannot be learned from him.
But there is another composer whose works are neglected by professors
and masters, and yet whose orchestration excels all other in the
classic school in buoyancy, clarity, suavity, and polish, and to the
constant study of his scores I heartily commend all who desire to
master the basis of modern instrumentation. I mean Felix Mendelssohn
Bartholdy. His “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is in itself an epitome of the
science of instrumentation, and students and amateurs would do well to
give many days and nights to its study.
I advise the student of orchestral effects to examine particularly
the overture. For lightness and transparency nothing in the way of
writing for the strings excels the opening measures for first and
second violins in four parts, with the addition at bar 24 of a most
effective pizzicato passage for viola. On page 5 (Litolff score)
the first violins, doubled an octave below by the second, carry the
melody against a tutti in which the string plan is notable for its
simplicity and solidity. On page 9 there is a model passage for strings
with violas divided, which is worthy of attention. A concert-goer
should seek out such passages in scores and mark them. Then at a
performance of the work note the effect. By following out such a plan
the music-lover will soon come to perceive the differences between the
conservative scoring of the early classical writers and the venturesome
and brilliant achievements of the moderns. From such a clear and simple
plan of dividing strings as that of Mendelssohn in the overture quoted
grew the amazing contrivances of modern writers, such as the passage
in Liszt’s “Mazeppa” for first violins in three parts, the third
playing pizzicato against shakes by the other two, second violins in
three parts, violas and ’celli in two each; or the thunder-storm in
Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” where the strings play a broken chord in
twenty different ways, or the superbly effective passage from Nicode’s
“Das Meer,” which is constructed on this scheme of divided strings with
contrary motions:
[Music]
[Music]
The effect of this remarkable passage is one of the things which go to
show what can be done in the way of tone-coloring with strings alone.
The vital points for the reader to bear in mind are those which have
been brought out as to the distribution of the harmony in the strings
and the necessity of writing for them so that they are independent. To
follow the development of skill in this among the successive composers
is one of the most fascinating branches of musical study.
NOTE.--The tremolo and pizzicato of bowed instruments
were invented by Monteverde (1568-1643). The
striking of chords on such instruments was
introduced into orchestral music by Haydn. Mutes
were first used in the orchestra by Gluck in his
“Armide.” The oldest and most familiar example of
the contrast between muted and unmuted strings is
found in the “Creation” at the words, “And God said
‘Let there be light.’” The mutes are taken off at
“And there was light.” The oldest known use of
harmonics is that in Philidor’s opera “Tom Jones”
(1765). The division of violins into more than
two parts was first employed by Weber. Beethoven
introduced divided violas in the last movement of
the Ninth Symphony.
VIII
The Wood-Wind
Whence originated the custom of calling the collection of wooden
wind-instruments used in the modern orchestra “the wood-wind,” I am
quite sure I do not know. It is still more common among musicians to
speak of them simply as “the wood,” notwithstanding that the stringed
instruments played with a bow are also made of wood. It is a convenient
term, and its meaning being pretty generally understood, only a purist
in language would object to its employment. The “wood,” then, in the
modern orchestra consists of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons.
Of these instruments the flute is the oldest, and was the first to be
used in those indiscriminate assemblies of instruments corresponding to
orchestras in the early days of the art. The flute was used in ancient
Egypt, and, for the matter of that, so was the oboe, which found its
way into the orchestra at least as far back as Beaujoyeux’s “Ballet
Comique de la Reine” (1581). Everyone knows a flute when he sees it,
and is acquainted with its tone, but I have learned by experience that
very few persons know anything about the other wood instruments.
Yet their importance in the modern orchestra cannot be overestimated.
Half the tone-coloring of our symphonic works and operatic scores
depends upon skilful combinations of the tone-tints of wooden
wind-instruments either with one another or with other members of the
band. It is almost wholly in the direction of variety of combination
that the art of writing for wood-wind has developed. In the early days,
before a system of enriched instrumentation had been developed, it
was the custom to treat the wood-wind parts without any design that
affected the display of their coloring qualities. Sebastian Bach’s
scores, for instance, show a complete absorption of the polyphonic
style. He regarded his instruments as so many voices, and he treated
them as such. Each part was written in a manner essentially melodious,
and related to the other parts strictly in contrapuntal style. The
conception of purely orchestral effect did not find birth in the mind
of Bach. He was too entirely occupied with the development of the
polyphonic subject to discover the possibilities of mixed tone-tints.
Furthermore, he was not sufficiently imbued with a feeling for the
harmonic style--the style in which a leading melody is supported by a
subsidiary accompaniment founded on chords, as in our songs. This is
the style on which our symphony rests, but it was foreign to Bach’s
genius, which was fundamentally fugal.
Hence, Bach did little toward developing the combining powers of
the wood-wind. As one writer has excellently said: “He preferred to
employ wind-instruments for the purpose of enlarging his original
design, rather than that of strengthening or decorating it. When he
added a flute or an oboe to his score, he loved not only to make it
_obbligato_, but to write it in such wise that it should form a new
real part. Hence, even in his regularly constructed arias, the voice
is scarcely so much accompanied by the various instruments employed as
made to sing in concert with them, the score containing as many real
parts as there are solo voices or instruments introduced into it.”
Dr. Parry, in his “Evolution of the Art of Music,” in speaking of the
difference between instrumentation of this kind and that of a later
date, says: “In the instrumentation of the great masters of the earlier
generation, the tone-qualities seem to be divided from one another by
innate repulsion; but in the harmonic style they seem to melt into one
another insensibly, and to become part of a composite mass of harmony
whose shades are constantly shifting and varying.”
Handel’s wood-wind is employed with greater variety than Bach’s. This
was to be expected of a composer who, in the first place, was in closer
touch with the public, and hence more likely to recognize and yield to
the demand for effects. In the second place, Handel, not being secluded
as Bach was, stood more forward in the march of musical evolution.
He was an opera-writer, and this brought him into immediate contact
with the harmonic style as practised by the Italian opera-writers. He
learned from some of them, too, the use of grandiose mass effects. The
application of these ideas to his instrumentation produced results far
different from any conceived by the introspective and historically
solitary genius of the great Bach. Handel used a larger orchestra than
Bach, yet did many things in the same way. For example, he often wrote
for his instruments in the polyphonic style, but in the accompaniments
to his great choruses he wrote for several oboes in unison with the
violins and a body of bassoons in unison with the basses. At other
times he treated his wood-wind parts as figured ornamentation of
the more simple string parts, and again he employed the strings and
wind alternately, as modern composers do so frequently. Flutes he
rarely used except as solo instruments, as in the “Sweet Bird” aria,
and clarinets he did not have. But the idea of using some of the
wind-instruments, as horns and trumpets, in pairs, had come into
existence in Handel’s time, and it was not long before this plan was
applied also to the wood-wind.
Its employment naturally began with the recognition of the inability
of the wood-wind to play such intricate passages as strings could, and
also of their power to sustain the long notes of supporting chords.
These features of wood-wind writing existed even in the scores of
Scarlatti and Lulli, but it was not until the harmonic style began
to be clearly distinguished from the polyphonic in orchestral works
that they became generally recognized. In the scores of Emmanuel Bach,
the son of Sebastian, we begin to find wood-wind treated in the pure
classic style. The chords, to be sure, are very thin, and the composer
shows a “’prentice hand” at the dovetailing of his wind parts together
so as to make a firm structure, but the skeleton of the modern form is
there.
Haydn’s scoring shows a curious combination of Handelian ideas with
later developments. The Handelian plan of strengthening string parts
with wind parts in unison seems to have taken some hold of Haydn, for
he rarely writes unsupported wood-wind passages in his symphonies.
He keeps his first violins singing the melody most of the time, and
gets variety by doubling them, now with flutes, now with oboes, again
with bassoons. A wind solo is very rare. He shows similar weakness
in writing for the wood-wind in its internal relations. His clarinet
parts usually double those of the oboes or the flutes. There is a
great deal of octave writing, and he seldom gets more than three real
parts in his wood-wind. It is only because he so constantly employs
the string quartet that his symphonic scores do not sound thin. For
example, in a passage for wood-wind and strings near the beginning
of the familiar symphony in D, the first flute, except in one chord,
doubles the second violin at the octave above, while the second flute
supports the principal notes of the melody, played by the first
violins, at the octave below. The oboes in unison double the violas at
the upper octave. The two clarinets in unison double the first flute
an octave below. The bassoons and basses play in unison. Toward the
end of the last movement there is a passage in which the wind plays
sustained chords, and in this the wood is treated in a more open
style of harmony. Haydn learned much from Mozart, however, and in the
“Creation” and “Seasons,” his writing for wood-wind shows much greater
freedom, and a decidedly more definite attempt to get at the tonal
characteristics of the instruments.
[Illustration: HAYDN.]
There can be no question that Mozart’s orchestration shows a large
improvement on Haydn’s, and it is, perhaps, easier for the amateur to
discern this in his treatment of the wood-wind than anywhere else.
Passages contrasting the whole wood-choir with the strings are more
numerous, and the combinations of wood with strings show more definite
attempts to put new tints upon the symphonic canvas. One finds, for
instance, in the G minor symphony the flute tone contrasted with
the oboe, combinations of flute and oboe contrasted with bassoon,
combinations of flutes, bassoon, and strings, and other effects which
give life and variety to the instrumental coloring.
Nevertheless, a conventional manner of treating the wood-wind found
its way into general use, and it prevailed until the romanticists, in
reaching out for new forms and manners of expression, revolutionized
the system of scoring. The old-fashioned way was to employ the four
pairs of wood-wind instruments always in thirds and sixths. The flutes
almost always took the melody and the next interval below it. The
oboes either doubled the flutes in the octave below, or the first
oboe doubled the second flute, and the second oboe took the next lower
degree of the chord. The clarinets filled in the middle voices, and the
bassoons played the bass, most frequently in octaves. The harmony was
close, and the texture of this instrumentation was always solid, and,
it must be admitted, at times muddy. This manner of writing is found in
all Beethoven’s earlier works. For example, here is the opening of the
first symphony, the horns and strings (pizzicati) also appearing in the
score:
[Music]
That is perfectly adapted to its purpose; but the chances are that a
composer of to-day would have used three flutes, three clarinets, and
three bassoons, and would have thickened the harmony by raising the
clarinet voices and bringing the first bassoon up nearer the middle,
thus:
[Music]
Brahms followed Beethoven’s early style of scoring for wood, which,
it must always be recollected, lies at the foundation of the art. An
example from Brahms’s C minor symphony will show the modern writer’s
adoption of his predecessor’s plan:
[Music]
The modern style of writing for the wood-wind choir introduces more
passages in contrary motion and a more dispersed harmony. The close
chords of the classicists cannot be excelled for their purpose, but
the romanticists had new aims and they took advantage not only of
unusual tone-tints but of the increased richness brought about by using
more voices and extending their chords. Beethoven’s symphonies show
a rapid progress toward the modern flexibility of methods in writing
for wood-wind. For instance, note the lovely effect of this piece of
contrary motion in the Fifth Symphony:
[Music]
As we advance through the pages of the master’s symphonies we find a
constantly increasing flexibility in the treatment of the wood, until
in the Ninth we meet with passages containing effects which, when
closely examined, seem to be almost amazingly modern. Of course, one
never finds in Beethoven’s scores any attempt to make an effect for its
own sake. The master symphonist was altogether too busy in giving his
thought expression to think of little tricks of instrumental dress.
Because of his continence in this matter some modern commentators
have expressed the belief that these symphonies would be improved
if re-orchestrated according to contemporaneous methods. I presume
that someone will eventually try the experiment, and then it will be
discovered that Beethoven’s instrumentation was perfectly adapted to
his musical ideas. On the other hand, a good deal of our modern music
would stand revealed in its naked thinness if it were re-orchestrated
in the austere style of Beethoven or with the sunny simplicity of the
Mozartian manner. The extreme development of wood-wind writing as
known in our day is to be found in the scores of Wagner. No one has
surpassed his treatment of the wood in his earlier dramas, and the
reader may accept _Elsa’s_ entrance to the cathedral in Act II. of
“Lohengrin,” and the exit of _Elizabeth_ in Act III. of “Tannhäuser,”
as complete expositions of writing for the unsupported wood-wind. In
the introduction to the third act of “Lohengrin” appears this passage,
which shows how Wagner could use his wood in relation to the rest of
his orchestra:
[Music]
[Music]
The reader will at once see the open style in which the wood-wind parts
are constructed. The horns serve to enrich and deepen the harmony,
while the strings are used chiefly for a rhythmic effect. Weber’s
scoring is full of admirable writing for the wood-wind, and for other
fine examples I can once more refer the reader to Mendelssohn’s
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” music.
The immense variety of coloring to be obtained from the wood is due
largely to its power of producing independent harmony. Owing to the
large register of the clarinets, they can be used as either soprano
or low contralto instruments, while the wide scale of the bassoons
permits them to be treated as basses, barytones, or tenors. It thus
becomes possible to write in full and euphonious four-part harmony for
two flutes and two clarinets, two oboes and two clarinets, two flutes
and two bassoons, two oboes and two bassoons, or two clarinets and
two bassoons. Each of these combinations differs in color from the
others. If now a bass clarinet be added, it becomes possible to give
it the fundamental bass and to use the bassoons for middle voices. The
addition of an English horn gives further possibilities. If the number
of flutes, clarinets, and bassoons be increased to three of each, the
composer has still more combinations. And when it is recollected that
every one of these wind-instruments can be used as a solo voice, the
range of variety becomes wider yet. But the reader must also bear in
mind that the addition of horns and strings still further alters the
tonal colors. In short, the wood-wind provides the most useful means of
giving variety of color to an orchestral score, and all modern writing
abounds in ingenious, surprising, and expressive effects made with the
wood choir. Yet when the thunder of an orchestral tutti is required,
there is no better way to write for wood than that of Beethoven’s
symphonies.
I have said nothing yet in this chapter about the piccolo and the
contra-fagotto. The piccolo is a much misused instrument, but it
is capable of admirable effects, as may be seen in the storm in
Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony, the magic fire-music in “Die Walküre,”
or the “Dance of the Automatons” in Delibes’s “Sylvia” ballet. The
double-bassoon, or contra-fagotto, allows the composer to carry the
bass of his wood-wind choir an octave lower than the compass of the
bassoon. The instrument is coarse in tone and not capable of performing
rapid passages, but it has its value, as is shown by its employment in
the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Brahms’s “Chorale
St. Anthony” variations. A double-bass clarinet has been invented by
a New York musician. I have not heard this instrument, but am told
by competent judges that it is of high value. It carries the bass an
octave lower than the bass clarinet, and is capable of great agility
and of the finest gradations of tone. Richard Strauss, Weingartner, and
other German musicians have promised to introduce it in future scores,
and I dare say it will become a fixture in the orchestra. The great
value of the clarinet color to the orchestra cannot be overestimated,
and any increase in its range and intensity will surely be welcomed by
composers.
IX
The Brass and the “Battery”
The brass choir may be dismissed with comparative brevity, because
methods of writing for it have changed on lines similar to those
followed by the wood. In the early scores one finds that the trumpets
were the most noticeable members of the brass, but in later music
the horns are far and away the most important. It is possible to get
almost any amount of richness, solidity, and variety of color out of
an orchestra composed of the wood-wind, four horns, and strings; but
if two trumpets and three trombones be substituted for the horns,
the ingenuity of the composer will be severely taxed to prevent his
work from sounding coarse in forte passages. One reason for this is
that, when played moderato, horns blend perfectly with either wood
or strings, and when played forte they become brassy in tone and can
be made to give a good imitation of trombones. Let the reader note,
when he again hears the prelude to the third act of “Lohengrin,” that
the brass theme is played the first time by the horns, which sound
like trombones robbed of their roughness. The second time the theme is
heard the trombones enter and the tone at once becomes brassy. In fact,
it may be said at once that the brassy quality of brass instruments
comes out fully only when the tone is forced. When it sings moderato
the brass choir is capable of the most beautiful effects of rich,
organ-like sonority. One has only to recall as a perfect example of
this the prayer in the first act of “Lohengrin,” one of the most
effective of all modern pieces of writing for brass. When however,
immense sonority is required, the fortissimo of the brass choir is the
composer’s heavy gun.
The treatment of the trumpet parts in the works of Bach and Handel
will be found to differ greatly from the modern manner of writing for
them. In the first place, the instruments employed by those composers
must have had mouth-pieces of a different kind from those of to-day,
or else the players knew some things which ours do not. Both Bach and
Handel wrote passages for the trumpet so high that contemporaneous
musicians cannot perform them. But that is a fact of less importance
to the reader of the present book than the general principle of the
scoring. The old composers, then, wrote for trumpets in pairs and made
them do a great deal of their work in octaves, except in some of the
earliest scores, in which three trumpets were sometimes employed. Even
Monteverde wrote for one clarino (a small trumpet), three trombe (the
ordinary trumpet), and four tromboni. Handel used three trumpets in the
“Dettingen Te Deum,” and Bach in the “Lobe den Herrn.”
Haydn used the trumpets, horns, and drums in the primitive style. The
parts were written either in octaves or in sixths--occasionally in
thirds--and on tonic and dominant chords, worked with the drums chiefly
to enforce the tutti. Passages such as the following abound in Haydn’s
symphonies:
[Music]
It seems hardly possible to contrive a more hollow plan of writing
than that which gives to five instruments only three notes of a
chord (though the horn parts actually sound an octave lower), yet
it is a method which survived till Beethoven’s time, and, so far
as the trumpets go, even the mighty Ludwig made no improvement upon
it. Mozart’s scores show a very slight advance upon Haydn’s. He more
frequently gives three notes of the chord to the brass instruments,
but he uses them in the same general way. Of course, these old
composers were much restricted by the mechanical limitations of their
instruments. They had the old keyless horns and trumpets, and not
having the whole scale at their command, they had to write with much
restraint. In the horn parts they were further compelled to remember
that certain notes could be produced only in the “stopped” form, that
is, by the use of one hand inserted in the bell of the instrument.
These stopped notes differed wholly in quality from the open tones.
This trouble lasted until the F valve horn was perfected within the
present century. Before that, however, composers had begun to endeavor
to give more variety to the horn parts. Weber and Beethoven both made
admirable use of this, the most noble and expressive of the brass
instruments, and the scores of Rossini also contain some excellent
specimens of horn writing. Rossini, indeed, who was the son of a
horn-player, may be said to have introduced a new style of writing for
the instrument, treating it with great brilliancy as a florid solo
singer. But the substantial principles of horn writing, as practised in
the modern orchestra, began with Mozart, who used the instrument with
much skill, especially in those scores which do not call for trumpets.
Beethoven made more exacting demands upon the instrument, and there is
no more effective horn passage in existence than the famous trio of the
scherzo in the “Eroica” symphony. The passage is too long for quotation
here, but is, of course, familiar to every music-lover. As an example
of perfect writing for a solo horn nothing in symphonic music is better
than the opening of the slow movement of Tschaikowsky’s fifth symphony.
The methods of employing horns are so numerous that it is not
practicable to recount all of them. It may be said, however, that in
small scores, which call for wood-wind, two horns and strings, these
instruments are often used to form chords with either the wind or
the strings. Two horns and two bassoons make very effective harmony;
in fact, when the four instruments are played moderato it is almost
impossible to distinguish the bassoons from the horns. The latter also
blend excellently with clarinets or the low tones of flutes. In writing
for four horns some composers give the two upper notes of the chord
to the first and second and the two lower to the third and fourth,
while others dovetail the parts by giving the first and third notes
to the first and second horns. Of course, either method is subject to
variation, as in a passage like this:
[Music]
Here the dovetailing of parts is carried throughout, yet in the third
bar the third and fourth horns double the fundamental bass in octaves.
The trombone is a very familiar instrument, and little needs to be
added to what has already been said about it. There are slide and
valve trombones. The former is the kind always employed in symphonic
orchestras. The reader will recognize the instrument by the action
of the player’s arm in moving the slide in and out. This shortening
and lengthening of the tube of the instrument changes its key and
thus enables the player to produce in open tones every note of the
chromatic scale. The valve trombone is played with keys like those of
a cornet. It is less brilliant and sonorous than the slide instrument.
Trombones were employed as far back as Monteverde’s “Orfeo,” early in
the seventeenth century, but there seems to have been no definite use
of them till the time of Gluck. He thoroughly appreciated the majestic
dignity of dramatic utterance of which the trombone was capable, and
he used it with eloquent effect. Furthermore, he established for all
time the custom of writing for trombones in three parts. After him, as
Gevaert pertinently notes, the three trombones became a distinctive
feature of dramatic scores, for the classic symphony found no use
for their immense sonority till Beethoven called it to his aid in
voicing the triumphant emotions of the finale of the Fifth Symphony.
Nevertheless, the trombone is not necessarily an instrument to be used
only in producing great volumes of tone. A beautiful example of its
value in rich and subdued harmony, in company with other instruments,
is to be found in the accompaniment to _Sarastro’s_ grand air in
Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” as is shown on the following page.
[Music]
The three trombones, as in this example, usually play three-note
chords, except when required to play in unison. The tuba fills out the
harmony by doubling the bass part in the lower octave, or forming a
four-part chord with the three trombones. There are tubas in several
keys, but it is customary to write for the instrument without making
any transposition. There is a fine tuba solo, in unison with the
double-basses, at the opening of Wagner’s “Eine Faust” overture, and
frequent examples of harmony for three trombones and tuba are to be
found in the works of the Bayreuth master. In writing for the full
brass choir alone a composer has the choice of several methods. He may
give the melody to a trumpet or cornet, and use the other instruments
for the harmony, or he may let a horn (or two horns in unison) take the
melody. If he desires much force, he may give the melody to a trumpet
and double it with a trombone. The natural method, however, is to let a
trumpet, which is a good soprano voice, sing the air, while the other
trumpet and three of the horns take the middle voices, the fourth horn
and first and second trombones the lower middle voices, the third
trombone and tuba the bass. Similar methods are employed where the
brass joins with the rest of the orchestra in the thunder of a tutti
fortissimo. The reader will find a most admirable example of this style
of writing in the climax of the prelude to “Lohengrin.”
It should be noted that the brass choir offers certain possibilities
of color both within itself and in combination with other instruments.
Three trumpets are capable of independent harmony, as are four horns,
and three trombones. Again, owing to the deep range of the horn,
trumpets and horns may form a separate choir, or either trumpets or
horns may be united with trombones. The entire brass band may be used
with the wood, the strings being silent, or with the strings and
without wood. Part of the brass may be used with part of the wood,
as in the opening of the “Tannhäuser” overture, where two clarinets,
two horns, and two bassoons produce a complete and satisfying
harmony. Weird and bizarre effects can be produced by combinations
of contrasting tones. Perhaps there is no better example than this
remarkable use of flutes and trombones in Berlioz’s “Requiem”:
[Music]
These notes had never been written for trombones before, and the
composer, whose knowledge of the capacities of instruments has never
been excelled, wrote in the margin of the score: “These notes are in
the instruments and the players must get them out.”
As I have already noted, the operatic composers, in their search after
dramatic effects, invented many of the instrumental combinations
afterward adopted by the composers of purely orchestral music. The
scores of Mozart and Gluck, for instance, are rich in passages which
make use of the harmony of trombones, and the reader who wishes to
study such effects in their early form should note the accompaniment
to the words of the _Commendatore_ in the cemetery scene of “Don
Giovanni,” to the solo and chorus, “Dieu puissant,” Act I., scene 3, of
Gluck’s “Alceste,” the air “Divinités du styx” in the same work, and
the chorus “Vengeons et la nature,” Act II., scene 4, of “Iphigenie en
Tauride.”
All that the moderns can do with trombone harmonies they learned from
Gluck, and by applying his use of dispersed chords to the whole brass
choir they have produced new and noble orchestral colors. Where did
Wagner learn such things as this, if not from Mozart and Gluck?
[Music]
Not much needs to be added to that already written about the percussive
instruments employed in the orchestra. The tympani remain the most
important of these. It has been found that one player can perform
upon three drums with little more difficulty than upon two, and hence
composers now frequently score for three, and sometimes for four. It
is not uncommon for large symphonic scores to call for three tympani
together with bass-drum, cymbals, and other percussive instruments.
Something has already been said about the methods of writing for
tympani, but there is a little to add. It has been noted that the
primitive manner of writing was to give one drum the fundamental note
of the tonic chord, and the other that of the dominant, but previous
to Beethoven’s day it was the invariable practice to write the tonic
above and the dominant below, thus tuning the drums at the interval of
a fourth. The other style, with the tonic below and the dominant above,
making a fifth, was introduced by Beethoven. The same master saw the
advantage of tuning his tympani in still other ways, and in the finale
of the Eighth Symphony and the scherzo of the Ninth he wrote for them
in octaves at their extreme compass (F to F). Again, in the beginning
of the last act of “Fidelio,” he wrote their parts in A and E flat in
a dissonant passage of much dramatic power. Weber followed Beethoven’s
example and wrote for tympani in C and A in the incantation scene of
“Der Freischütz,” and Wagner has made a similar use of the drums in the
beginning of the third act of “Siegfried.”
[Music]
In general, it may be said that until the close of the eighteenth
century composers employed tympani only in brilliant passages, such as
marches, overtures, jubilant choruses, or hymns of thanksgiving; and
in these they were always heard with the trumpets. It was Beethoven
who took the shackles from the expressive powers of these valuable
instruments and showed how they could be made to utter notes of
overpowering solemnity and mystery.
The bass-drum is frequently used in the orchestra either with or
without the cymbals, and the latter are often heard without the drum.
Both instruments are sadly overworked by noisy composers, yet they have
their value. The military snare-drum is used in characteristic passages
where a military idea is to be suggested. Tambourines and castanets
are also used in appropriate places. The gong, which is said to have
found its way into western Europe at the time of the French Revolution,
when it was used as a funeral bell, found its way into the opera-house
as an aid to music of scenes of death or terror, as in Meyerbeer’s
resurrection of the nuns in “Robert le Diable.” It is now used
occasionally by the symphonists in passages of portentous significance.
Bells came into the orchestra for dramatic purposes, and are employed
in various ways, some of which are so familiar that it is barely
necessary to mention them. Handel employed a whole chime in a passage
in his “Saul,” and Mozart used a set of little bells in “The Magic
Flute.” Meyerbeer has called for a single deep-toned bell to imitate
the tocsin of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in “Les Huguenots,” and
Wagner has used several in “Parsifal.” The latter composer has used
the carillon (little bells) with fine effect in the magic-fire music
of “Die Walküre.” The lover of orchestral music needs no special
information about bells. They are capable of musical pitch, and their
notation is in the treble or bass clef, as the case may be.
The xylophone is sometimes employed in music of an artistic sort.
A most excellent example of its possibilities may be found in
Saint-Säens’ “Danse Macabre,” where it is supposed to imitate the
rattling of bones in the grim dance of Death.
Score-readers will often find the parts for those instruments of
percussion which are without musical pitch, such as triangles, cymbals,
bass-drums, etc., written not on a stave, but on a single line. The
rhythm can be indicated satisfactorily in this way, and that is all
that is needed.
X
Qualities of Good Orchestration
It is now possible to speak more in detail about those essential
qualities of good orchestration to which reference was made at the
beginning of this part of the book. Unless I have failed to make myself
understood, the reader will be prepared, in applying the principles
of orchestration to those works which may come under his attention,
to benefit by historical perspective. He will not expect of Haydn
or Mozart such richness and complexity of scoring as he will demand
and find in the works of contemporaneous composers. The technics
of orchestral writing are very thoroughly and widely understood in
our day. It is expected, as a matter of course, that every composer
shall understand them. Now, this does not purport to be a text-book
on orchestration, yet it is desirable that something be said for the
information of the amateur of music about the requirements of good
orchestration. The object of a volume of this kind is to help people
to enjoy music by pointing out what composers have designed for their
enjoyment. The pleasure to be derived from the performance of an
orchestral composition must naturally be largely increased when the
listener is alert to catch all the varieties of excellence which may be
combined in it. Orchestration, as I have already said, does not mean
the playing of an orchestra, though the word is frequently misused
in that sense. It means writing for an orchestra, and it has certain
requirements not always to be found even in the works of the great
masters. Schumann, for example, scored very poorly, and some of his
works suffer by reason of his inability to clothe his poetic thoughts
in the most eloquent instrumental language. Meyerbeer, on the other
hand, was a veritable trickster with instruments, and could produce a
theatrical effect with a penny-ballad idea, while Berlioz could enchant
an audience with no idea at all. Beethoven and Wagner are two of the
perfect models of orchestral writing, the former in the classic and
early romantic style, and the latter in the fully developed romantic
style.
[Illustration: WAGNER.]
The qualities of good orchestration are solidity, balance of tone,
contrast, and variety. By solidity is meant a close warp of the
instrumental sounds which does not seem to have holes in it. A chord
played by a full orchestra should sound like the utterance of one
great instrument, not like the utterance of a number of individuals.
The tones of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, brass, and strings
should blend into one grand body. When such a result is achieved,
whether it be with three instruments or one hundred, the tone is said
to be solid. If the tone is not solid, it is because the harmony is not
properly dispersed. Either the chords are not written in a sufficiently
extended form or they are distributed wrongly among the instruments.
The first requirement of solidity is good writing for the strings. It
is absolutely necessary that their part should be so written that it
is capable of independence; that is, it should sound solid when played
without the other instruments. The composer must give each note of a
chord to that instrument which is best qualified to utter it, and he
must write his chords so that they are suited to orchestral enunciation.
Pianists make sad mistakes when they come to write for orchestra,
because they try to write in a piano style. They are so accustomed to
seeing a melody in the treble clef and all the accompaniment in the
bass, that they frequently fail to find any use for their soprano
instruments except the utterance of the melody, while all the barytone
and bass instruments grumble a muddy accompaniment, and thus, as
musicians say, the orchestra is “all top and bottom.” The illustration
below will help to explain what I mean. It shows the first two measures
of “Home, Sweet Home,” scored à la pianist, with the orchestra all top
and bottom, and as an orchestral writer would spread it out in full
harmony and with just a trifle of instrumental effect in the arpeggio
for the second clarinet doubled by the ’celli pizzicati, and the basses
also written pizzicati to accentuate the attack of each chord.
Even in writing so simple a thing as this, one must keep in mind always
the relative tonal powers of the various instruments. For instance, in
the second measure the first trumpet should play the B and then descend
to the G, because otherwise it would make the upper D too strong and
destroy the effect of the melody. The first trombone should do the same
thing. The upper D in each chord should go to the first horn and the
first bassoon.
[Music]
Balance of tone is an expression used to indicate a preservation of
the equilibrium of power among the three choirs, so that one shall
not be heard too clearly at the expense of another. In most instances
this depends upon principles similar to those which govern solidity,
but it also requires a constant consideration of the sonority of the
three choirs regarded as separate bodies. For instance, the wood-wind
instruments cannot possibly be played as softly as the strings; hence,
if the composer wishes to get a pianissimo effect, he must not write
full chords for the wood. Strings, with clarinets or flutes in the
lower register, produce an excellent pianissimo. Cornets, on the other
hand, cannot play pianissimo along with strings, because their softest
tone is louder than that of the strings, and the balance is destroyed.
Balance of tone, when all the instruments are playing together, is
largely dependent upon the judgment of the conductor. He should see
to it, for instance, that his brass instruments do not play too
loudly. But it is also a matter of scoring, and frequently a conductor
is helpless in the presence of the written page. In the scherzo of
Schumann’s E flat symphony there is a passage in which the first
theme is given to the clarinets, bassoon, second violins, violas, and
’cellos, while the first violins, trumpets, and horns play chords above
them. All are directed to play mezzo-forte, and the result is that the
brass chords quite overpower the melody. A similar passage is to be
found in the andante of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. No conductor can
get a perfect balance of tone out of such passages.
Contrast is obtained by employing instruments of different tone-quality
to play the principal parts at different times. A principal melodic
idea may be introduced by a trumpet or a clarinet, and continued by
flutes or oboes, and finally sung by all the first violins. Sometimes
the wood-wind plays alone, to be succeeded by the strings. These
alternations of tonal color produce contrasts, without which the
richest and most solid scoring might become monotonous. Variety is the
result of mixing the tonal tints. For instance, some passages will
be written for two flutes, two horns and strings; presently all the
strings cease to sound except the first violins, which chant the melody
supported by a harmony of brass; now the tone of the clarinets mingles
with that of the violins, and the combination of the two produces a
new color. Variety is also obtained by giving melodic fragments, not
essential parts of the melody, to some of the instruments not engaged
in voicing the principal theme. As the author has had occasion to say
elsewhere:
“A great many persons do not hear anything definitely except the
principal melody, while beautiful bits of counterpoint and exquisite
effects of harmony are lost to them because they have not learned how
to follow the many voices of an orchestra. Every person should acquire
the habit of ear-analysis. The amount of pleasure added to the hearing
of a symphony by ability to hear all the instruments at once is what
might be added to the delight of seeing a painting if the power to
perceive the colors were given to one who had before noticed only the
drawing.”
The student of orchestral music will find great solidity and balance
of tone in the works of the early masters. Bach’s writing is always
substantial, but there is no large amount of contrast and variety
in it. This is partly owing to the lack of instruments and partly
to the meagre technical resources of those wind-instruments which
he had. The oboe was Bach’s mainstay as a wind voice, and its range
of expressiveness, of color, of dynamic gradation, and of agility,
is small. The wood-wind choir could not reach its full measure of
usefulness till it had acquired the clarinet, which has within itself a
considerable range of tone-color, is a far more agile instrument than
the oboe, and possesses in a far higher degree than any other wood-wind
instrument the power of increasing and diminishing the volume of tone.
It is, indeed, as Berlioz has said in his enthusiastic style, the true
dramatic soprano of the orchestra. “This beautiful soprano instrument,
so ringing, so rich in penetrating accents, when employed in masses,
gains, as a solo, in delicacy, evanescent shadowings, and mysterious
tenderness what it loses in force and powerful brilliancy.... It is the
one of all the wind-instruments which can best breathe forth, swell,
diminish and die away its sound.”
Without the clarinet, however, Bach and Handel accomplished much with
the means at their command. Witness the former’s lovely piece of
writing for a horn and two bassoons in the “Quoniam” of the famous
mass in B minor, and the latter’s admirable coloring with even
strings alone, as in “Angels ever Bright and Fair,” and “Suddenly
There was Round About Him a Multitude.” The possibilities of coloring
increased as new instruments came into use, and the clarinet was at
once appreciated by Mozart, who may be said to have made the first
systematic attempts at specific tone-coloring.
The completion of the wood-wind choir by the introduction of the
clarinet gave needed freedom to composers. Haydn in his old age
advanced beyond Mozart in tone-coloring, while Beethoven, who, as I
have shown, had a special feeling for the individuality of instruments,
developed the features of contrast and variety far beyond anything
which his predecessors had conceived. Weber’s orchestral technic
is immense. He understood thoroughly all the requirements of good
orchestration, and to this day his works sound full, sonorous, and
brilliant, even when heard at concerts where the most recent products
are displayed. With Weber, the romantic movement, of which I shall have
more to say hereafter, was fairly launched, and its representative
composers have all employed every resource of contrast and variety
without neglecting solidity and balance of tone. Brahms is one of the
moderns who did not master the technic of orchestration. He wrote heavy
chords low in the bass in his piano music, and he carried this practice
into his orchestration, with the result that his scoring is almost
always thick and heavy in the middle voices. Wagner, on the other hand,
knew how to write deep, sonorous basses without disturbing the clarity
of his work. Most of the French composers score beautifully. In all the
field of opera there is not a warmer or more delicately refined score
than that of “Faust,” while M. Saint-Säens’s orchestration is at once
the model and the despair of young composers.
Amateurs of music will find, as they advance in the study of scores,
that every composer has a distinct style. For instance, Tschaikowsky
wrote much that was weird, sombre, or melancholy, and the music-lover
will find that he made extensive use of the upper register of the
bassoon (and, indeed, of its whole scale), of the low notes of
clarinets, and of the English horn to aid him in producing a gloomy,
dry color. Liszt’s instrumentation is always rich and heavy; Dvorák’s
always strong, clear, and bright. Beethoven has little peculiarities,
such as doubling a melody in the lower octave with a bassoon. Meyerbeer
is fond of queer combinations, such as English horn and piccolo.
Richard Strauss writes staccato chords for trumpets, and makes horns
do things which fifty years ago would have been deemed impossible.
But the fundamental principles of orchestration cannot be violated by
any writer with impunity, and the student will find these principles
epitomized and amply illustrated in the nine symphonies of the supreme
master of symphonic composition, Ludwig von Beethoven.
XI
Qualities of Orchestral Performance
Perhaps the first requisite for good orchestral performance should be
set forth as good instruments. It is not too much to say that some
orchestras are seriously injured by the presence of half a dozen
vulgar-toned fiddles among the violins, by a very yellow clarinet among
the wood, or a blatant cornet where a mellow trumpet ought to be. This
is seldom the case in a regularly maintained concert orchestra, yet it
does happen sometimes even there. The New York Philharmonic Society
suffers a good deal from this cause. The orchestra is the society, and
many of its members never play in any artistic concerts except those
of the organization. They have poor instruments, which do not aid in
the production of a noble tone, such as should come from an orchestra
of this kind. Again, there are individual players whose peculiar
faults are displayed to the general disadvantage of an orchestra. The
concert-master (leading first violin) of a certain New York orchestra
cannot play in tune and has a vicious style of bowing. The first oboe
of the same orchestra has a peculiar tone, which robs his instrument of
its individuality and makes it resemble a clarinet. A well-known solo
horn player produces from his instrument a tone which sounds more like
that of a valve trombone or a euphonium than that of a French horn.
Such individual faults injure the general effect of an orchestra’s
playing, though they are not strictly to be classed under the head
of qualities of orchestral performance. The requisites of concert
orchestral playing are the following:
Quality, solidity, and balance of tone; precision, unanimity,
flexibility, and light and shade.
The quality of tone which proceeds from an orchestra should be smooth
and mellow. It should never be possible for the audience to hear the
rasping of stringed instruments, nor the gasping of brass ones. The
tone of an orchestra should be capable of growing to its full power
without pantings. It should always flow freely and with liquid purity.
It should never reveal its own mechanism. One should never be able to
detect the scraping of the bow which makes the fiddle speak, nor the
vibrating of the reed in the throat of the clarinet. The tone of a
great orchestra should come forth spontaneously and without apparent
effort, as that of a great singer does, filling every cranny of the
auditorium and seizing upon the heartstrings of every hearer.
And it should have solidity, which is easier to hear than to describe.
One knows at once when the tone sounds thin and anæmic and when it
sounds healthy and full-blooded, but it is not easy to point out
the peculiarities of this quality. Sometimes an orchestra’s tone is
not solid because there are too few players for the demands of the
auditorium. Sometimes it is because the instrumentalists are not
playing exactly together, and the vibrations of each tone of the
melody, as caused by say a dozen violins, are not isochronous. Again,
tone lacks solidity at times because the individual performers are
not capable, and it is frequently, like want of quality, due to poor
instruments.
Balance of tone has the same meaning in performance as it has in
orchestration. It is equality of dynamic force among the constituent
parts of the band. As already said, it is the result partly of good
orchestration and partly of the guiding skill of the conductor; but
it depends also in a measure upon the constitution of the orchestra.
The average theatre orchestra is an eloquent demonstration of the bad
effects of poor balance among the instruments. The desperate struggles
of two first violins, one second, one viola, one ’cello, and one
double-bass to produce sufficient sound to make themselves heard in
forte passages against the sonorous pealing of a cornet, a trombone,
and a pair of tympani, are as vain as they are ridiculous. Such efforts
are repeated on a larger scale when modern symphonic music is performed
by an orchestra whose strings are led by six first violins. It is not
possible for six firsts, six seconds, four violas, three ’cellos, and
three double-basses to maintain a proper balance of tone against two
or three flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, a tuba, and tympani. An orchestra with six first
violins should not attempt music orchestrated in the romantic style. It
would be much better for such an orchestra to omit two horns and add
two violins, and confine itself to music suitable to such an array of
instruments. When there are only six first violins it is not wise to
attempt works which call for divisions of those six into four parts.
It is always absurd to hear an orchestra with three ’cellos trying to
“fake” the opening measures of Rossini’s “William Tell” overture, and
in the tutti the trombone rages like a lion. It is generally conceded
in this country that a concert orchestra requires about 60 stringed
instruments to give a proper balance to the wood and brass. I have
already spoken of the constitution of the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
which has 58 strings on a basis of 16 first violins. The Chicago
Orchestra has 61, and the New York Philharmonic Society, 78. The
London Philharmonic has 54, the Vienna Philharmonic, 68, and the Paris
Conservatoire, 60.
Given a proper array of instruments, the preservation of balance of
tone is due chiefly to the conductor, though it is also necessary
that the players should not be troubled with individual ambition.
The occasional solo affords the individual player an opportunity to
display his powers, but at all other times he should be content to
sacrifice his glory for the general result. A good orchestra is in this
respect like a perfect boat-crew; every man in it should be part of a
machine to produce a single effect. Whenever one man in a boat-crew is
seized with a notion that he can pull the whole boat himself, the crew
goes to pieces and loses the race. So in an orchestra, if the second
trombonist, for example, is convinced that the audience ought to hear
his part, he destroys the balance of the performance and oversets
the composer’s purpose. Of course, a conductor must do all he can to
see that the ambitious second trombonist does not mis-behave, but it
requires a real _esprit de corps_ in an orchestra to maintain an ideal
balance of tone. Brass is blatant in forte passages if allowed to
have its own way, and wood, unrestrained, is frequently too strong in
moderato or piano bits.
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMOUREUX.]
Plenty of strings is the only remedy for a bad balance which careful
playing will not correct, and a plenty of strings is to be found only
in large concert orchestras. Even in opera-houses the strings are
often too few, while in theatres they nearly always are. The average
theatrical manager knows very little about music and cares less. A
business manager who knew something of the tone art was once engaged by
a manager who controlled a travelling exhibition of “Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” with all Mendelssohn’s music. He thought his exhibition worthy
of the attention of the metropolis, but the business manager said to
him:
“If we go into New York, we’ll have to increase the orchestra.”
“What for?” replied the manager. “We have all sorts of instruments now,
haven’t we?”
“But we ought to have more first violins.”
“What! more than _two_?”
But, after all, the theatre is hardly the place to look for art in
music. The concert-hall and the opera-house are its homes, but owing
to the conditions which surround the performance of opera in most
places, only the concert orchestra can be expected to show the highest
possibilities of performance. In such an orchestra we may expect to
find a proper distribution of instruments, and having that, we should
demand a perfect solidity and balance of tone. I can hardly put too
much emphasis on the necessity of good tone. Although the mere quality
of sound belongs to the lowest department of musical excellence, the
sensuous, it is nevertheless an instrument of the greatest power in
the presentation of musical thought. There is something vital in a
noble tone, something enthralling and inspiring. One recognizes it
immediately when it is the voice of a distinguished singer, and I have
seen audiences moved to amazing enthusiasm by a glorious voice which
had neither dramatic intelligence nor vocal cunning to aid the potent
spell of its pure quality. An orchestra should be a mighty singer in
every sense, and it must have the first requisite of one--a fine voice.
There should be nothing cheap or vulgar in its tone. It should be one
grand flow of gorgeous, all-surrounding sound, smooth, sweet, mellow,
and pure, whether heard in the aërial whisper of the last bars of the
“Lohengrin” prelude or the thunderous peal of the “Kaisermarsch.”
Tone being assured, the next traits of vital importance in orchestral
performance are precision and unanimity. Precision is a feature of
attack, while unanimity refers to those parts of a passage not included
in the attack. Both are dependent upon the elementary business of
keeping together. If the players of an orchestra are not at all times
absolutely at one in their work, there can be neither precision nor
unanimity. Precision is keeping absolutely together in beginning
and finishing, whether it be a detached chord or tone, or a phrase.
Unanimity is keeping together, in time and force and all other
requirements, between the beginning and the end. The act of commencing
a tone is called the attack. This should be so precise that the tone
seems to be produced by a single instrument, not by a number. If it is
a detached tone, or a phrase like that at the beginning of Beethoven’s
C minor symphony, every instrument engaged in its utterance should
cease to sound at exactly the same instant. Precision is a matter in
which many auditors are deceived. I well remember how I gaped in wonder
in my boyish days when I heard an orchestra under Theodore Thomas play
a series of staccato chords with such precision that they came out like
the cracks of a whip. I have since learned that this is one of the
easiest feats of an orchestra. It is a far greater test of precision
to play with absolute sharpness and clearness of cut a passage such as
this from the Ninth Symphony:
[Music]
Furthermore, precision is just as necessary to the correct performance
of flowing cantabile passages as it is to those of vigorous declamatory
style. It belongs to the general department of accuracy, and without
accuracy in such features as the duration of sounds, no orchestral
playing can have color, force, or finish.
Unanimity, as I have said, means keeping together in matters other
than the beginning and ending of a tone or phrase. Attention has been
called to the fact that if the notes of a melody and its harmonies are
not played in exactly the same time by all the instruments engaged in
their performance, the quality of tone is seriously impaired; but it
must now be added that further injury comes in the shape of destruction
of the outlines of the rhythm. This is such an important factor in all
music that to decrease its clearness is like blurring the outlines of
a drawing. When the rhythm of an orchestral composition or the outlines
in a painting are destroyed, there remains nothing but a blurred
color-scheme. A color-scheme is often very pretty, but it is no more a
composition than the view in a kaleidoscope is a landscape.
Unanimity, furthermore, includes something beyond mere clearness
of enunciation. It embraces also accent. In such a phrase as that
quoted above from the Ninth Symphony, there are a series of natural
accentuations, and it is essential to a brilliant and stirring
utterance of the phrase that every instrument in the orchestra should
put the accents in the same places and give them the same amount of
force. In passages which are not written for the whole orchestra there
should be unanimity in accent among those for which they are written.
In fact, an orchestra should have absolutely military accuracy in all
its work, and this presupposes long and arduous drill and extended
association. Permanency is a necessity to fine orchestral work. Men who
have played together a long time, even under an inferior conductor,
will play with much more precision and unanimity than men newly brought
together under the beat of a famous director. The highest results are
attainable only with a permanent orchestra under a competent conductor.
But with all this precision and unanimity the playing of an orchestra
should be flexible. As I have said in another volume, “The music should
never sound rigid, but should seem to come in a sinuous stream of
purling sound.” The average concert-goer would probably describe the
playing of an orchestra deficient in flexibility as “stiff,” and that
is a very expressive way of putting it. It will be remembered that
in “H. M. S. Pinafore” the only person who was invariably right was
_Dick Deadeye_, but everyone applauded _Buttercup’s_ assertion that he
was “a little triangular.” An orchestra must always be correct, but
it need not be triangular. Inflexibility is usually the result of bad
conducting.
A martinet, with phlegmatic temperament, can make an orchestra play
as inflexibly as a street piano. A conductor of excessively melting
temperament will often melt his orchestra so that its playing will be
as sweet, as flexible, and as limp as hot taffy.
And this brings us to the all-important question of light and shade.
The fundamental element of light and shade is the distribution of force
and speed. An orchestra is capable of a pianissimo, which is like the
softest whisper of a summer evening’s breeze, and of a fortissimo,
which is like the booming of a thunder-storm. There is an infinitesimal
scale of gradations between these two extremes, and these should all be
properly employed. Of course, their use is guided by the conductor, but
they form a part of the technics of orchestral playing, and hence must
be described here. All lovers of music know what effects are brought
about by skilful use of alterations of tempo--the accelerando and
ritardando--and by the combination of these with gradations of force.
In the application of these devices an orchestra should be adept. The
placing of the effects is, of course, indicated in the score, or, if
not, must be the result of the judgment and taste of the conductor; but
the manner of producing them is the work of the performers. It requires
frequent rehearsal to get these effects made with precision, unanimity,
and smoothness of tone, yet they should be so made. An orchestra should
sing like a great singer, and it should be able to produce all the
delicate shades of song as a human voice can.
But an orchestra has many voices, and the composer often takes
advantage of this fact. He frequently calls upon his instrument to
sing several melodies simultaneously, or, as in the case of a fugal
work, different parts of the same melody at the same time. This kind
of writing calls for a distinct delivery of the middle voices. Even
in compositions which are not polyphonic, there are often subsidiary
melodic fragments in parts other than those which are playing the
principal theme. These fragments should be heard; composers do not
write them by accident. They should blossom out spontaneously as
exuberant exfoliations of the harmonic garden. They should not be
thrust obstreperously in the faces of the auditors, but they should not
be permitted to escape notice. The middle voices are sadly neglected
at times. Some conductors seem to confine their whole study of a score
to hunting for the principal theme and bringing that out, while the
delicious bits of counterpoint, which the composer has been at no small
pains to devise, are left to take care of themselves. Such conductors
remind me of a professional musician who was engaged in a discussion of
Richard Wagner in the corridor of the Metropolitan Opera-House, while
inside the orchestra was playing the vorspiel to “Die Meistersinger.”
“It is a pity,” said this wise man, in a condescending manner; “but
Wagner knew absolutely nothing about counterpoint.”
And at that very instant the orchestra was singing five different
melodies at once; and, as Anton Seidl was the conductor, they were all
audible.
Light and shade, as we roughly call them--the German “nuancirung”
(nuancing) is far better--depend also on phrasing. In singing,
phrasing means the division of the melody into groups of notes, so
that breath can be taken. Now, phrasing is obviously quite as vital
to wind-instrument players as to singers, because the former, too,
must have intervals to take breath. Obviously, if the several players
stop to take breath, they should cease to sound their instruments at
the same instant, and begin again with equal precision. A similar
grouping of notes is made in the performance of bowed instruments
by the movements of the bow. All violin-players know that there is
a difference in the results produced by the up-stroke and those by
the down-stroke. Phrasing in the orchestra, then, is the technical
treatment of the natural groups of tones which form the component
parts of a melody in such a way that they shall come out clearly
and symmetrically and in a vocal style. Here again we come upon
the technical part of a conductor’s work. It is he who regulates
the phrasing. The distribution of up and down strokes of the bow
is in a general way left to the concert-master, the leader of the
first violins, but he is, of course, subject to the direction of
the conductor. Many composers of the present day mark the bowing
in particular passages, but most of them content themselves with
indicating such things as slurred notes and staccati, or special
effects, such as playing near the bridge, or with the point of the bow.
The legato of stringed instruments is indicated in a score by a curved
line drawn over or under the passages, thus:
[Music]
Detached notes are indicated by dots, while lightly detached ones, to
be played with a single stroke, are indicated by dots with a slur, or
legato mark, over them, thus:
[Music]
All these details of bowing and of breathing in the wind-instrument
choir should be carefully regulated. They are elementary parts of
the technic of orchestral performance, and they contribute to the
production of smoothness, elegance, and refinement in the playing of a
band, as well as to force, brilliancy, and expression. Furthermore, all
demands of the composer in regard to the use of particular instruments
or the uncommon treatment of instruments should be respected. If the
result is bad, it is the composer’s fault. But it is usually good.
When _Hans Sachs_, in “Die Meistersinger,” makes _David_ a journeyman
cobbler, he smacks the boy’s ear with his broad hand, and Wagner
imitates the ringing in the offended member by the whizzing note of
a stopped horn. To play that note unstopped would be to defeat the
composer’s intention. It would be equally wrong to neglect to put
mutes on where directed to do so. Sometimes composers call for very
curious performances, but their wishes should be respected as far as
possible. For instance, in his “Lelio, ou le retour à la vie,” Berlioz
has written a passage for clarinet “con sordino,” and has directed that
the instrument should be muted by being “wrapped in a bag of cloth or
leather.” His desire was to give the clarinet a veiled and distant
sound, and his wishes should be carried out. In another place Berlioz
calls for tympani drum-sticks with heads of sponge. Wagner calls for
tenor tubas in the funeral march of “Die Götterdämmerung,” and Mozart
calls for a mandolin to accompany _Don Giovanni’s_ “Deh vieni.” Such
requirements should always be fulfilled, and so should all directions
as to the manner of performance.
We are in the habit of thinking that what may be called the virtuoso
orchestra is a product of our own time, but perhaps we flatter
ourselves. It is very certain that the orchestra of the Paris
Conservatoire played with splendid precision and with much fire half
a century ago, and there are other orchestras in Europe which have
to live up to some pretty old traditions. It was only last September
(1898) that the Dresden Court Orchestra celebrated its three hundred
and fiftieth anniversary. To be sure, when it was established by the
Elector Maurice it was a singing choir, whose members learned to play
instruments in order to supply accompaniments; but it developed into an
orchestra, and as such it helped to produce Heinrich Schütz’s “Seven
Last Words of Christ,” and his “Daphne,” which was the first German
opera. The Esterhazy orchestra, under Haydn, was no mean band, and the
famous Mannheim orchestra, under Stamitz, revealed possibilities of
performance which did much toward forming Mozart’s symphonic style.
The Leipsic Gewandhaus orchestra dates back to 1743, when it numbered
sixteen players and gave its concerts in a private house. These
concerts were interrupted by the Seven Years’ War, but were resumed
in 1763 with an orchestra of thirty. The first concert in the new
Gewandhaus rooms took place on September 29, 1781. Since that time the
seasons have been regular. Mendelssohn was the conductor from 1835 to
1843, and Neils W. Gade from 1844 to 1848. The development of style and
technic in the performances of this orchestra had very considerable
influence on the advance of orchestral playing throughout Europe. Other
notable German organizations are the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
and the orchestra of the opera at Munich. The Vienna Philharmonic is
celebrated for its strings.
In France the progress of orchestral playing received its first
impetus from the labors of François Joseph Gossec (1733-1829), whose
extraordinarily long and active life enabled him to see not only the
blossom, but some of the early fruit of his efforts. He was the first
French composer of symphonies, and in 1770 founded the “Concert des
Amateurs.” He did much toward developing good orchestral playing in
Paris, and prepared the way for the famous François Antoine Habeneck
(1781-1849), who, in 1828, founded the “Société des Concerts du
Conservatoire.”
Orchestral playing has never reached a high plane in England, but the
London Philharmonic Society has an important history because of the
famous works written for it, among them symphonies and overtures by
Cherubini, Spohr’s second symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and
Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony. In America orchestral performances have
always been popular since the foundation of the New York Philharmonic
Society in 1842. The labors of such admirable conductors as Theodore
Eisfeld, Carl Bergmann, and, most of all, Theodore Thomas, did much to
develop a high degree of skill among orchestral performers and a wide
appreciation on the part of the public. The debt of the country to Mr.
Thomas is one that it will carry to the end of its musical development.
The foundation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1880, by Colonel
Henry L. Higginson, of Boston, gave the United States its first concert
orchestra established on a permanent basis, and the organization has
come to be regarded as one of the leading orchestras of the world. The
Chicago Orchestra, directed by Theodore Thomas, is its only rival in
America.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Falk._
THEODORE THOMAS.]
Nothing more excellently pictures the conditions under which an
orchestra comes to the perfection of its work than a few words in one
of Schumann’s comments on music in Leipsic: “Before we take leave of
the Gewandhaus concerts for half a year,” he says, “we must award a
crown of merit to the forty or fifty orchestral members. We have no
solo-players like Brod in Paris or Harper in London; but even these
cities can scarcely boast such fine, united playing. And this results
from the nature of circumstances. Our musicians here form a family;
they see each other and practise together daily; they are always the
same, so that they are able to play a Beethoven symphony without notes.
Add to these a concert-master who can conduct such scores from memory,
a director who knows them by, and reveres them at, heart, and the crown
is complete.”
PART III
How the Orchestra is Directed
XII
Development of the Conductor
It is not so easy to define the functions of the conductor of an
orchestra as it may seem to be, because at present there is a
general tendency to exaggerate one element of his labor, namely, the
interpretative. “Readings” are the order of the day, and we are invited
to consider Mr. Paur’s reading of Beethoven’s C minor symphony, Mr.
Nikisch’s interpretation of the same, and again Mr. Gericke’s, and
to compare them one with another, as we might compare Mr. Barnay’s
performance of _Hamlet_ with that of Wilson Barrett. The conductor’s
magnetism, his personality, his style, even the cut of his cuffs have
thrust themselves between the public and the immortal works of the
masters, until it seems as if there must come a reaction which will
drive us back to the ancient time-beater. Perhaps it will be advisable,
before considering conducting in the abstract, to trace briefly the
development of the conductor.
It is impossible to tell when the conductor made his appearance in
music. There seems to have been the widest diversity in the customs of
different places and different times. In modern music, which may fairly
date from the time when vocal and instrumental composition started
upon lines of independent development, namely, at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, the conductor was at first nothing more than
a leader. He was one of the performers whom the rest followed. His
function is preserved to-day by the leader of the college glee-club.
Yet long before the year 1600 there certainly were conductors who used
the baton. An ancient manuscript in a Parisian library contains an
illustration (which the reader will find reproduced in Emil Naumann’s
“History of Music”) showing Heinrich von Meissen, a minnesinger who
died in 1318, conducting a choir of singers and players. He is seated
on a raised platform and is using a long baton in his left hand and
the extended finger of his right. His attitude and facial expression
clearly express his intent to guide those below him, or correct someone
who is going astray. Two or three of the figures in the choir seem to
be repeating his beat.
What became of conductors of this kind between 1318 and 1600 I have
been unable to discover. The early operatic performances in Italy,
however, were conducted by the harpsichordist, who played the chords
sustaining the dry recitative and led the rest of the performers in the
orchestral passages. This method of conducting followed Italian opera
into Germany and France. Lully’s works were conducted in this manner,
and when young Pelham Humphreys, one of the gentlemen of the King’s
Chapel, returned from his studies in France, “a young monsieur,” as
Pepys notes, and made fun of the performances of his former companions
because they could not keep time, he must have shown them how his
master, Lully, conducted. At any rate, the conducting of operatic
performances at the harpsichord was common in the time of his pupil,
Purcell, and when Handel, who had been writing Italian operas for the
Germans, went to London, he, too, conducted his own works while sitting
at the harpsichord. Heinrich Schütz must certainly have learned this
method of conducting when he went down to Italy to get the score of
Peri’s “Daphne” for the delectation of the Dresden court, even if
he had not known it before. This would account for the introduction
into Germany of the Italian method of opera conducting, and it was
continued, of course, at Hamburg under Reinhard Keiser and afterward
under Handel. Sufficiently numerous pen-pictures of Handel have come
down to us, and we know that he conducted the performances of his
operas in Germany sitting at the harpsichord.
How did these harpsichordists conduct? Undoubtedly, sometimes with a
nod of the head, sometimes with a wave of the hand, and occasionally,
perhaps, with a most emphatic stamp of the foot. Not a little light is
thrown upon the various methods of conducting by the records of the
practices of the church musicians. It appears that even in the days of
Handel and Bach there were different ways of conducting church music.
Johann Bähr, concert-master at Weissenfels, says, in a book published
in Nuremberg in 1719, that “one man conducts with the foot, another
with the head, a third with the hand, some with both hands, some again
take a roll of paper, and others a stick.” It is perfectly clear,
from other remarks of Bähr, that these different methods were applied
to different kinds of performances. A Nuremberg engraving, published
certainly before 1725, shows a music conductor with a roll of music in
each hand directing the performance of a motet from a score. There is
an inscription in verse which shows very plainly that this was a real
conductor. “Silent myself, I cause the music I control,” is one of
the lines whose meaning is not doubtful. There are other pictures, of
about the same date, which show the church-music conductor standing in
the midst of a group of singers and players in front of the organ and
directing with a roll of music. In some cases the leader of the choir
used a violin, with which he could keep the singers on the pitch.
But it seems as if the quiet style of conducting at the harpsichord,
as practised in the opera-houses, must have commended itself to the
German church musicians as eminently suited to the sanctuary, for,
after 1730, the conductors of sacred music ceased to stand and beat
time continually. The custom of conducting all kinds of performances
from the harpsichord spread. Sometimes the time was indicated by
motions of the hand, at others by the sound of the instrument. Thus,
in Germany, undemonstrative harpsichord conducting became popular,
while in ever-theatrical France, where the eye must always be fed, the
practice of conducting with the baton became general. This led to the
scathing remark of Rousseau: “The Opera in Paris is the only theatre in
Europe where they beat the time without keeping it; in all other places
they keep time without beating it.” The influence of Hasse’s conducting
of the Dresden orchestra had much to do with the common adoption
of the harpsichord method in Germany. In the diagram of the Dresden
orchestra given in Chapter XV. the reader will see that there were two
harpsichords. The conductor sat at the one in the centre; the player
who performed the figured bass part sat at the other.
In his famous “Life of Bach,” Dr. Philip Spitta, to whose indefatigable
labors of research I am indebted for the above information as to
methods of church conducting, says: “When Bach entered on his duties he
had the harpsichord in the Thomaskirche [in Leipsic], which had become
useless, set in order forthwith, and got the Council to expend the sum
of six thalers a year upon keeping it regularly tuned, but it was out
of use again in the year 1733.” In regard to the use of the harpsichord
for conducting. Dr. Spitta quotes the words of Bach’s son, Philipp
Emmanuel, who wrote:
“The notes of the clavier [the German name for any instrument of the
piano family], which stands in the middle, surrounded by the musicians,
are clearly heard by all. For I myself know that even performances
on a large scale, where the performers are far apart, and in which
many very moderate musicians take part voluntarily, can be kept in
order simply by the tone of the harpsichord. If the first violinist
stands, as he should, near the harpsichord, it is difficult for any
confusion to ensue.... If, however, anybody begins to hurry or drag
the time, he can be corrected in the plainest possible way by means
of the clavier; while the other instruments have enough to do with
their own parts because of the number of passages and syncopations;
and especially the parts which are in tempo rubato by this means get
the necessary emphatic up-beat of the bar marked for them. Lastly, by
this method--since the musicians are not hindered by the noise of the
clavier from perceiving the slightest nuances of time--the pace can be
slightly lessened, as is often necessary; and the musicians who stand
behind or near the clavier have the beat of the bar given out in the
most evident, and consequently the most emphatic, way before their eyes
by both hands at once.”
These words are singularly enlightening as to the exact methods and
advantages of harpsichord conducting, and they go far toward explaining
the reasons why this method survived as long as it did. It continued
to be used, as we shall presently see, long after the time-beater had
become a fixed institution and even in conjunction with his work.
Undoubtedly, this was because the older orchestral players had become
so thoroughly schooled to follow the harpsichordist that they could
not be induced to give their whole attention to the time-beater and
the counting of their own rests. Gradually, however, as the wind
choir of the modern orchestra increased in power, the harpsichord was
unable to make itself heard, and it had to give way to a method of
conducting which appealed wholly to the eye. It was doubtless owing
to the continued existence of old musicians trained in the early
school that for a time the harpsichord and the baton were employed
simultaneously. It is not at all unlikely that in some instances a
distinguished composer, whose work was undergoing the ordeal of a first
hearing, was invited to sit at the harpsichord, where he pretended
much and did little, while his presence added to the interest of the
public, and someone else really conducted the performance with a baton.
The first violin, too, played an important part in the conducting
of an orchestra, so much so that to this day he is known either as
the concert-master or the leader, although his functions have wholly
changed.
At one time he was the only conductor that some orchestras had. Part
of the time he played, leading the others by the motions of his bow
and by raising and lowering the neck of his violin on the beats.
Again he would cease to play and conduct with the violin bow. He was
known as the leader of the orchestra, and his descendant exists in
the contemporaneous theatre, where the first violinist of the little
orchestra of eight or ten pieces is the leader. Some concert-goers will
doubtless recall the fact that both Johann and Eduard Strauss conducted
their dance-music in this manner.
In Haydn’s day the performance of symphonic music enlisted both
harpsichordist and time-beater, and at the famous London concerts
for which the genial master composed some of his best symphonies, he
himself sat at the harpsichord, while Salomon, the manager of the
entertainments, beat time. That a similar method should have been
employed in the performance of vocal works even in the present century
is not surprising, but we must bear in mind that it was applied to
compositions whose scores contain no clavier parts. At Vienna, in 1808,
Haydn’s “Creation” was performed with Kreuzer at the harpsichord and
Salieri conducting. In 1815 Beethoven’s “Mount of Olives” was given in
the same city with Umlauf at the piano and Wranitzky conducting. At the
Berlin Singakadamie Zelter used to beat time while one of his pupils
was at the harpsichord. The practice of conducting from the piano,
even without the time-beater, clung tenaciously to life, for it is
on record that Mendelssohn, at a concert of the London Philharmonic
Society in the Argyll Rooms, on May 25, 1829, conducted his symphony
in C minor from a piano. It may be as well to note here that the
eminent composer, Ludwig Spohr, in 1820 introduced the modern manner of
conducting in England. He stood at a desk at the front of the stage and
directed with a baton. He describes in his autobiography the general
opposition of the Philharmonic musicians which he had to overcome in
order to begin this practice. “Henceforth,” he says, “no one was ever
again seen seated at the piano during the performance of symphonies and
overtures.” He was not informed of Mendelssohn’s piano conducting.
We have now come to the period when the mere time-beater began to
give way to the interpreting conductor, the director who invites you
to consider his especial “reading” of this or that work and be wise.
Before we leave the time-beater, however, let me remind the reader
that his function is by no means to be despised, and in the case of
some suave and gentle classical works it would be well if he presided
over the performances of some of our present orchestras. Berlioz has
said: “The talent of the beater of time, without demanding very high
musical attainments, is nevertheless sufficiently difficult to obtain;
and very few persons really possess it. The signs that a conductor
should make--although generally simple--nevertheless become complicated
under certain circumstances by the division and even the subdivision
of the time of the bar.” Berlioz has given us, in the concluding
chapter of his admirable work on orchestration, an essay on the art
of the time-beater, which is well worth reading. It is sufficient to
say here that the old-fashioned time-beater’s work was complete when
he indicated the correct tempo, and plainly marked the beginning and
necessary subdivisions of each bar.
When the composer conducted his own works, as was so often the
case in the earlier days of symphonic music, there was no need of
an interpretative conductor. But when the composer had long passed
from the land of the living and the traditions of his readings had
become obscured, or when his works were to be introduced in a foreign
country--as in the case of Beethoven’s symphonies in France--the
interpretative conductor became a necessity. Furthermore, when the art
of conducting began to be recognized as a specialty, it was conceded
that composers were generally poor conductors of their own works, and
the orchestral director became a distinct species. Hector Berlioz, for
example, could not play any instrument save the guitar, and Richard
Wagner was only a very poor pianist; yet both were admirable conductors.
The interpreting conductor came into existence in the early part of
the present century. It cannot be said that any one man was the first
representative of the species, but rather that it was one of the
first-fruits of the romantic movement, that healthy renaissance of
musical emotion. Both German capellmeisters and French directors had
occupied themselves wholly with the regulation of the technics of the
orchestra, and if the tempo was about right and the instruments kept
well together and gave the broader effects of light and shade, they
were satisfied. But two or three progressive conductors insisted upon
further refinement of orchestral performance.
Johann Karl Stamitz (1719-61), director of the Mannheim orchestra,
and François Joseph Gossec (1733-1829), founder of the Concert des
Amateurs in Paris, were the two conductors who carried orchestral
technics up to the point at which genuine interpretative work became
possible by reason of the refinement of the means of expression. It was
in studying the means of orchestral expression that these conductors
gradually approached the questions of interpretation. As they polished
the phrasing of their orchestras, they began to inquire whether they
were applying their nuances in the proper places, and so they advanced
toward that point at which the interpreting conductor sits down before
a score to study out a complete plan of performance deduced from his
conception of the intent of the composer. Gossec founded the Concert
des Amateurs in 1770 and was himself the conductor. Symphonies by
Toeschi, Vanhall, Stamitz and other composers were produced, and the
conductor had at any rate to decide the tempo and place the broader
dynamic effects according to his own conception, for these matters were
not carefully marked in the scores as they are now.
Before Gossec’s death the modern interpretative conductor had made his
appearance. Spohr, Mendelssohn, and Weber were early representatives of
the species. All three of them occupied at different times posts of the
highest importance in the department of conducting. Spohr at Cassel,
Mendelssohn in the Leipsic Gewandhaus, and Weber at the Dresden Opera
were, without doubt, interpreting conductors. They advanced without
hesitation beyond the mere study of orchestral technics to the study
of the correct style and feeling in the performance. Spohr was an
enthusiast on the subject of Mozart’s music, and he conducted Mozart’s
symphonies according to his own ideas. Weber revived old German
operas and treated them as he believed their composers would have
treated them. Mendelssohn was the resurrector of Bach’s Passion music,
which had lain buried for a century, and he was not silent as to his
conception of its proper performance.
The most conspicuous figure among the early interpreting conductors
was unquestionably François Antoine Habeneck (1781-1849), the founder
of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Habeneck was compelled
to be an interpreter. He was a conductor pure and simple. He had no
gospel of his own to preach, but he aimed at making the symphonies
of Beethoven known in France, and he was thus forced to become an
interpreter of the mighty Ludwig’s thought. He not only brought the
Conservatoire orchestra to a remarkably high point of technical
ability, but he conducted Beethoven’s music with a force, a sentiment,
a nobility of style that carried conviction with it and compelled Paris
to acknowledge the genius of the German master. Berlioz, himself a
skilful conductor, has rendered homage to Habeneck’s powers, and there
is abundant testimony that he was the Richter or the Gericke (or whom
you please) of his day.
The list of conductors of the Leipsic Gewandhaus concerts shows
conclusively that, so far as they were concerned, interpretative
conducting began with Mendelssohn. His predecessors were merely good
leaders; his successors have all been men of talent, such as Ferdinand
Hiller, Julius Rietz, Neils Gade, and Karl Reinecke. In France it is
easy to follow the succession of great interpretative conductors.
Habeneck conducted the concerts of the Conservatoire until 1848. In
1851 Jules Etienne Pasdeloup founded and conducted the first concert of
the Société des Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire. In 1873 Colonne began
his career as a conductor, and in the same year Lamoureux made himself
a place. These men are admirable representatives of the genus conductor
as known in our day.
There is no doubt that the art of interpretative conducting received a
strong impulse in Germany from the work of Richard Wagner, who entered
upon his career as a director at the Magdeburg Theatre in the autumn
of 1834. It was not so much by his individual labors as a conductor
that Wagner aided in the development of the interpreting art as by
his fiery castigation of the mechanical and slovenly work of careless
capellmeisters, and his luminous words upon the right method of
directing orchestral performances. In the spread of his doctrines he
was mightily aided, first by the admirable conducting of Liszt, and
afterward by that of Hans von Bülow, without doubt, one of the best
conductors who ever set foot on the platform. His readings of Wagner
were, of course, authoritative, and his interpretations of Beethoven
carried with them so much conviction that they were regarded as equally
so. Dr. Hans Richter, who came into prominence in 1875, carried forward
the work, and Germany has since produced a number of the most eminent
interpreting conductors. Indeed, there can be no question that the
best representatives of the class have been and still are German or
Austrian, including Hungarian in the latter.
In the United States all the eminent conductors have been men whose
early musical nourishment was obtained in Germany. The conductors of
the Philharmonic Society of New York began with Theodore Eisfeld, who
came into notice in the season of 1849-50. Subsequently he shared
his labors with Carl Bergmann, who became the sole conductor in 1865
and remained in office till the close of the season of 1875-76. Mr.
Bergmann was an interpreting conductor and a determined advocate of
certain advances in music. Once, when he had been giving his hearers a
good deal of Wagner, someone expostulated with him, saying, “But, Mr.
Bergmann, the people don’t like Wagner.” “Don’t like Vagner!” answered
Bergmann; “den dey must hear him till dey do!”
[Illustration: _Copyright by Elliott & Fry._
HANS RICHTER.]
Mr. Bergmann’s successor was Leopold Damrosch, who conducted the
Philharmonic only a year, but left an imperishable record as the
founder of the Oratorio Society and the regenerator of German opera
in New York. Of the labors of Theodore Thomas and Anton Seidl it is
unnecessary to speak. As interpreting conductors they have not been
excelled in America in their especial fields. In Boston, Carl Zerrahn,
Georg Henschel, Wilhelm Gericke, Arthur Nikisch, and Emil Paur did
notable work as interpreting conductors. The tendency in our day,
indeed, has been to do a little too much interpreting, and as a result
the conductor has too frequently distracted attention from the music
to himself. The public, prone to run after a virtuoso of any kind, has
readily bowed the knee at the shrine of the baton-wielder, and we have
beheld the curious spectacle of people going not to hear Beethoven or
Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl.
XIII
Functions of the Conductor
Perhaps nothing connected with the orchestra is more completely
misunderstood by amateurs than the functions of the conductor. I
remember that in the days of a certain distinguished orchestral
director there were two of his ardent admirers who always occupied
seats in the front row, just a little to his left. There they sat, with
rapt expressions on their faces, gazing at the conductor. They never
took their eyes off him, and I am morally certain they had finally come
to think that the whole of every composition emanated from the swaying
end of his baton. They overrated the importance of the conductor, but
not so much more than the average concert-goer. The first and radical
blunder made by the typical music-lover is in supposing that the work
of a conductor is done at the performance. In some mysterious way this
man with a stick in his hand is supposed to hypnotize, magnetize, or
just vulgarly scare the musicians into playing certain music according
to impulses which have just developed in his breast. I have heard
people coming out of a concert-room say such things as these:
“I thought Mr. Seidl was very cold to-night, didn’t you?”
“Yes, he was, indeed. That’s why I liked Nikisch so much; he always
kept the orchestra on fire.”
There is a substratum of truth in all this kind of talk. A conductor
of cold temperament will not give highly colored readings, nor will
he excite enthusiasm in his orchestra. A conductor of poetic feeling
will conduct poetically and he will make his orchestra play so. But
neither of them accomplishes his result suddenly and spontaneously
at the performance. All that a conductor does at a performance is to
remind his players of what he told them at rehearsal. It could not be
otherwise, for the beat of the baton and the utterance of the sound by
the instruments is almost simultaneous.
To remind the musicians of what he has already instructed them to
do, the conductor employs certain pantomimic motions and facial
expressions, some of which have been so generally used that they are
conventional, while others are, of course, peculiar to the individual.
Everyone knows, for example, that Hans von Bülow was fond of conducting
with an eye to effect upon the audience, and that some of his pantomime
was comic. In a diminuendo I have seen him stoop lower and lower till
he was almost hidden behind the music-stand, and at a sudden forte he
would spring up again like a jack-in-the-box. No one can ever forget
those spasmodic, but tremendously eloquent, jerks of the chin with its
long beard which Dr. Leopold Damrosch used to aim at his men when there
was a staccato chord to be played. Who does not recall the eloquent
hands of Nikisch and the equally eloquent cuffs of Seidl? Thomas,
with his occasional sidewise cant of the head, and Richter, with the
apparently increasing confusion of his hair and his beard, also come
back to my memories of pictorial peculiarities of conductors.
Besides these peculiarities, conductors have their own habits in the
use of the baton, and orchestras must necessarily become accustomed to
them in order that they may not be misled at critical moments. For it
does, indeed, happen sometimes at the public performances that things
go wrong, and then the conductor must contrive to set them straight;
and he must do it entirely by his pantomime, for the privilege of the
rehearsal, to stop the orchestra and begin again, is no longer his.
At the rehearsal he can tell what he desires, but in the concert he
must go on. It is at the rehearsal, however, that the real work of
the conductor is done. At the performance he must confine himself to
beating time, to indicating to those players who have rests when they
are to begin again, to a warning look here in case a part is played too
loudly, or to an encouraging nod there in case one is not played loudly
enough.
I have often heard persons not unfamiliar with concerts declare that a
conductor was of no use because the players never looked at him. This
is a rather large statement. The players do not look at the conductor
all the time, because they are obliged to occupy themselves chiefly
with reading music, but they look at him frequently, and they do so
invariably at essential places. Furthermore, they always see him out of
the corners of their eyes, as the saying goes, while they are reading
the pages before them.
The function of a conductor, as it stands to-day, can best be
understood by applying to him the definition given at the beginning
of this book. The orchestra is an instrument upon which he performs.
Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer, said that the only
instrument upon which he could play was the orchestra, and in that he
resembled Richard Wagner, who was an indifferent pianist, and Anton
Seidl, who was a very bad one. The conductor plays upon an orchestra,
not by waving a baton and magnetizing his men, but by carefully
instructing them at rehearsal as to what he desires them to do, and
by going over it and over it again till the execution of his design
is perfected. A conductor, then, must come to the rehearsal with a
completely prepared plan of interpretation. He must know the score
thoroughly. He must have analyzed every measure. He must be in the same
position as the skilled theatrical stage-manager who has planned every
bit of “stage business” for a new play before he goes to the first
rehearsal.
At the rehearsal he must explain his wishes to the men, and play
through each movement of a symphony piece-meal before he undertakes to
go through it without a stop. A judicious conductor makes no attempt to
put a poetic explanation before his orchestra. He works entirely on the
technics of the performance, and leaves the temperament and enthusiasm
of his men to do the rest. A conductor once went from another city to
Boston to conduct an orchestra at the first appearance in this country
of an eminent pianist, whose _pièce de resistance_ was to be Liszt’s E
flat concerto. At the beginning of the scherzo there are some lightly
tripping notes for the triangle, which the player struck too heavily
to please the conductor’s fancy. He rapped with his baton to stop the
orchestra.
“Sir,” he said, gravely, addressing the triangle player, “those notes
should sound like a blue-bell struck by a fairy.”
Whereupon the whole body of instrumentalists burst into uncontrollable
laughter. I told this story subsequently to a New York musician, a
member of Theodore Thomas’s orchestra, and he looked so amazed that I
said:
“But doesn’t Mr. Thomas talk to you at rehearsal?”
“Oh, yes! Oh, certainly!” was the reply.
“Well, what does he say?”
“He says ‘D----n!’”
Richard Wagner, who was nothing if not polemic, wrote a book on
conducting, in which there are some pregnant assertions, as there
are in all his writings. He says: “The whole duty of a conductor is
comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo. His choice
of tempi will show whether he understands the piece or not. With good
players again the true tempo induces correct phrasing and expression,
and conversely, with a conductor, the idea of appropriate phrasing
and expression will induce the conception of the true tempo.” There
is an essential truth in this statement, but its writer did not add
those corollaries which are necessary to constitute the whole truth,
especially for the amateur. The passage which immediately precedes
the above statement explains why Wagner looked upon the tempo as
the most important matter for the conductor to decide. He says: “In
the days of my youth orchestral pieces at the celebrated Leipsic
Gewandhaus concerts were not conducted at all; they were simply
played through under the leadership of Concertmeister Mathäi, like
overtures and entr’actes at a theatre.” Such performances annoyed and
discouraged Wagner; but in 1839 he got a valuable lesson from hearing
the Conservatoire orchestra of Paris rehearse a Beethoven symphony
under Habeneck. “The scales fell from my eyes,” he says; “I came to
understand the value of correct execution, and the secret of a good
performance. The orchestra had learned to look for Beethoven’s melody
in every bar--that melody which the worthy Leipsic musicians had
failed to discover; and the orchestra sang that melody. This was the
secret.” A little farther on he says: “The French idea of playing an
instrument well is to be able to _sing_ well upon it. And (as already
said) that superb orchestra sang the symphony. The possibility of its
being well sung implies that the true tempo had been found; and this
was the second point which impressed me at the time. Old Habeneck was
not the medium of any abstract æsthetical inspiration--he was devoid
of genius; but he found the right tempo while persistently fixing the
attention of his orchestra upon the Melos[1] of the symphony. The right
comprehension of the Melos is the sole guide to the true tempo.”
[1] Melody in all its aspects.
These words of Wagner’s are excellent, but they may convey an
exaggerated conception of the case to an amateur. It is beyond dispute
that if the tempo is incorrect, the performance must inevitably be weak
or utterly bad; but it does not follow that when the tempo is right,
all will be satisfactory. Nevertheless, it is true that the first and
most important duty of the conductor is to decide the tempo, and that
he can only do by a complete comprehension of the musical character of
the composition. In music written since Beethoven’s day the conductor
has something to guide him in the matter of tempo, as I shall presently
show; but in earlier compositions he will find only such general terms
as _allegro_, _adagio_, or _andante_. He will not even discover such
attempts at specification as _andante con moto_, _allegro pesante_, or
_presto ma non troppo_.
These directions are not sufficiently precise. Wagner himself tells
how he wrote “Mässig” (moderate) in the score of “Das Rheingold,” with
the result that the drama took three hours under the opera conductor.
“To match this,” he adds, “I have been informed that the overture to
‘Tannhäuser,’ which, when I conducted it at Dresden, used to last
12 minutes, now lasts 20.” Wagner notes that Sebastian Bach did not
customarily indicate the tempo at all, “which in a truly musical sense
is perhaps best.” But to leave all movements without tempo marks would
be to assume that all conductors were truly gifted. Since Beethoven’s
latter days it has been the custom of composers to indicate the correct
tempo by what is known as the metronome mark.
A metronome is an instrument which can be set to tick off with a
pendulum any number of beats from forty to two hundred and eight
a minute. A composer desiring to indicate a tempo uses a formula
like this: M. M. [music symbol: half note] = 78. The letters M. M.
mean Maelzel’s Metronome (the instrument). The note (in this case a
minim) means that the beats of the pendulum are to be regarded as
representing minims, crotchets, or quavers, as the case may be. The
figure indicates the number of beats per minute. In the above formula
the composition would probably be one written in two-fourth time, that
is, with one minim to a bar, and the metronome mark would indicate that
seventy-eight minims, and hence in this case seventy-eight bars, were
to be played each minute.
A metronome mark must not be understood as requiring a rigid adherence
to its prescription in every bar of a movement. It is simply a method
of expressing the general rate of progress. A conductor could not
count every bar by the metronome without abandoning all attempts at
accelerandi or ritardandi, and generally reducing his performance to a
mathematical state of rectangularity. All flexibility, elegance, and
nuance would disappear from such a rendering.
For dance-music played at a ball, strict adherence to the metronome
mark throughout a composition would be admissible; and it would be
really desirable in the case of a military march, in which the tactics
prescribe the cadence as one hundred and twenty steps a minute; but it
is not to be tolerated in artistic concert music. The metronome mark
establishes the general movement, and that is all.
Any music-lover who desires to find out the right tempo of a metronomed
composition can do so by using a watch with a second hand. If he times
the number of measures to be played in five or ten seconds, he can get
at the tempo. Similarly, he can “hold the watch” on a conductor in
the performance of any piece with an established tempo. Here again,
however, he must beware of exaggerated accuracy.
If the metronome mark, for example, is a dotted crotchet equal to
104, as in the allegro of the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony, and the conductor takes the tempo at 108 or 109, there is
no ground for serious complaint. But if he should take it at 134, as
I once heard it taken by an eminent conductor, the music-lover has
ground for a vigorous protest. The reader might amuse himself and get
an immense amount of suggestive information by playing some well-known
compositions at exaggerated tempi. He would speedily be convinced that
Wagner was right in believing that the chief duty of the conductor was
to ascertain the correct tempo.
But Wagner is not quite explicit enough when he says that this is the
conductor’s whole duty. The whole duty of the conductor is to regulate
every item of the orchestral performance. It must be done according to
his design. You may say that this prevents all individual warmth on
the part of the players, but it need not do so. The conductor is the
stage-manager; the instrumentalists are the actors. They play their
parts as the conductor tells them to play them; but that need not
prevent them from entering fully into the spirit of the work.
The conductor’s conception of a composition is to be revealed through
the performance by means of the distributions of light and shade,
the relative importance given to the outer and inner voices of the
score, by the placing of the climaxes of force and speed, and by the
detailed accentuation of every phrase. It is at the rehearsals that
the conductor imparts to the men of his orchestra his wishes in these
matters, and causes them to go over and over certain passages till
they are played to his satisfaction. He cannot do any of this at a
performance. There he can only beat time, and in doing so remind his
men, as I have already said, of what he told them at the rehearsals.
The conductor must see to it that significant passages allotted to
instruments not playing the leading melody are brought out. Many of the
most beautiful effects of orchestral compositions are contrapuntal,
and they are too often lost through the incapacity or negligence of
conductors. It requires close and sympathetic study of a score to find
these bits. Who can ever forget how eloquently they were all made to
speak in the Wagner dramas by Anton Seidl, and that, too, without ever
overbalancing the voices of the singers? The whole warp and woof of
the Wagner scores is polyphonic, the motives cross and recross one
another in a never-ceasing double, triple, or quadruple counterpoint;
and to give each its proper weight in the scale of force, requires, on
the part of a conductor, complete knowledge, perfect appreciation, and
absolute command of his forces.
In concluding the discussion of this topic let me add that the
conductor is responsible for the general excellence of the work of
his orchestra in its fundamental qualities. He must see that the
balance of tone is preserved, by preventing one choir from playing too
loudly to the detriment of another. He must insist upon proper bowing
by the strings and equally proper blowing by the wind. And he must
persistently drill his orchestra in precision and unanimity until these
things become automatic, like the attack of a good singer. He is one of
the princes in the kingdom of music, this man who turns his back upon
us all that he may play with his little stick upon this hundred-voiced
instrument; and if sometimes we lose ourselves in hysterical wonder at
the results which he produces, and come to think that the baton is a
magician’s wand, perhaps we are not so much to blame after all.
PART IV
How the Orchestra Grew
XIV
From Peri to Handel
The orchestra of to-day is the outcome of a long series of
developments. In a general manner it may be said that the first
combinations of instruments were without special purpose. The reader
should bear in mind that for several centuries the whole labor of
artistic composers was directed toward the production of unaccompanied
church music. The centuries preceding the seventeenth produced little,
if any, purely instrumental music. There were some compositions for
clavichord, one of the precursors of the piano, and many for the organ;
but these were wholly modelled on the great contrapuntal choral works
of the church. The style was similar, and the method of development of
musical ideas was the same.
When these old composers first wrote for small combinations of
instruments, they produced works which could be sung just as readily
as they could be played; and, indeed, it was not uncommon for them to
write over their compositions, “Da cantare e sonare”--“to sing or to
play.” When the thing was sung it was “cantata,” and when it was played
it was “sonata.” But these early “sonatas” were in no respect like
those of Beethoven.
The manner of composing for the orchestra naturally developed side by
side with an appreciation of the true functions and relations of the
various instruments. It is impossible to separate the two processes.
Consider that composers had for centuries written only for the human
voice heard in masses, and you will readily perceive that it must have
taken some time for them to discover that melodic ideas suitable for
singing were not always adapted to the utterance of instruments. After
the discovery of that fact there would necessarily follow a realization
that the method of developing musical ideas in compositions for voices
was not the best one for instrumental writing. And then would come also
a perception of the fact that certain melodic ideas were best suited to
certain instruments; that what a horn could utter most eloquently, was
enfeebled if intrusted to an oboe, and that a thought which was poetic
in the pallid, moonlight accents of the flute, became vulgar if pealed
out by a trombone.
Modern orchestration owes the kaleidoscopic glories of its instrumental
coloring to the mastery which composers have attained over the
characteristics of the various instruments. One effect of the long
series of experiments made by their predecessors was the establishment
of the constitution of the orchestra itself, as well as of the methods
of writing for it. As composers came to understand better the nature
of each individual instrument, they also acquired a certainty as to
the proper place of each in the general scheme. Those which were
unnecessary or feeble were set aside, and the inevitable selection and
survival of the fittest followed.
It is very difficult, indeed, to ascertain the dates at which the
various instruments made their appearance in the orchestra, or to
determine by whom each was introduced. Frequently an instrument was
employed in some now forgotten composition, and then laid aside for
a time before it came to be habitually used. The works of the great
composers do not afford safe guidance in this matter, for it was
often some obscure writer who first perceived the true value of an
instrument. Yet it is possible to trace the general growth of the
orchestra, and this is really the most important thing to do.
In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the forerunners
of many of the instruments of the modern orchestra were in use in
Europe. The early forms of the instruments of the viol family were
employed and the bassoon, schalmei (ancestor of the clarinet), horns,
trumpets, and kettle-drums are mentioned and illustrated in some of the
early books. The harp, of course, was known wherever the troubadour or
the gleeman travelled, and that was all over Europe. But there was no
system of combining these instruments in any manner that could possibly
be recognized as leading toward our orchestra. A troubadour used a harp
or a viol to accompany his song. The nobleman carried a hunting horn of
brass--the forerunner of the present French horn--and the noble lady
went to the chase with a silver horn of smaller size. Drummers and
trumpeters found occupation in military organizations, and the town
piper sounded the Christmas chorale from the church-tower. The banquets
of the nobles were enlivened by instrumental music, but of its artistic
nature we cannot form any satisfying conception. The instruments were
simply those that chanced to be at hand, and they must have played
together in a very rude and elementary style, for we know that prior to
the beginning of the seventeenth century no one wrote for an orchestra
of any kind.
The first compositions for groups of instruments resembled our chamber
music rather than our orchestral compositions. It is the desire of the
writer to adhere as closely as possible to the story of the orchestra
pure and simple, so nothing need be said here about the instruments
employed in these early works. The modern orchestra really began
to take shape toward the end of the sixteenth century in pieces of
dramatic form, the precursors of the modern opera. In 1565 Striggio
and Corteccia scored their intermezze (light plays with much music)
for 2 gravicembali (embryo pianos), 4 violins, half-a-dozen different
sizes of lutes and lyres, half-a-dozen flutes and flageolets, 3 violas
of different registers, 4 cornets, of different powers, 4 trombones,
and several minor instruments. The fatal defect of this orchestra was
its deficiency in stringed instruments played with a bow, and its
large force of brass. It must have been painfully weak in the bass and
extremely poor in sustaining power. But as no system of instrumentation
had begun to appear at this time, its playing must have been of the
most rudimentary kind. As an accompaniment for voices, if it was ever
used all at once, it was probably both thin and noisy.
Jacopo Peri, in his “Eurydice” (1600), the first opera performed in
public, employed an orchestra consisting of a harpsichord, a lute,
a theorbo (a kind of large lute), a large lyre, and three flutes.
But there was little, if anything, in his work which influenced his
successors. He used his instruments merely to supply the simplest kind
of chord accompaniment to a primitive species of dramatic recitative.
Emilio del Cavaliere in the same year produced his oratorio “La
Rappresentazione dell’ Anima e Corpo,” and his orchestra consisted
of a double lyre, a harpsichord, a bass lute, and two flutes. One
interesting fact about this orchestra is that it was concealed, like
that at Bayreuth. But the instruments were not used as a modern
composer would have employed even so simple an assembly. Cavaliere,
for instance, recommended that a violin should play in unison with the
soprano voice throughout the work.
The foundation of the modern orchestra may fairly be attributed to
Claudio Monteverde, born at Cremona, 1568, died in Venice, 1643. He
was distinctively an operatic writer, and it was in the search after
dramatic effects that he discovered the relative values of some of
the important instruments, and invented some of the most familiar
orchestral devices. In his “Orfeo,” produced in 1608, he employed the
following list of instruments: 2 harpsichords, 2 bass viols, 10 tenor
viols, 1 double harp, “2 little French violins,” 2 large guitars, 2
organs of wood, 2 viole di gamba, 1 regal, 4 trombones, 2 cornets, 1
octave flute, 1 clarion, and 3 trumpets with mutes.
The array of brass in this orchestra is formidable, but we must
remember that Monteverde did not use it as a modern writer would. The
system of combination which has been developed had hardly begun in his
day, and most of “Orfeo” is accompanied by a simple figured bass, so
that we are left to infer that the orchestral performers played very
much as they pleased through many pages of the work.
The “two little French violins” were undoubtedly such violins as
we know to-day, and this is generally regarded as their first
appearance in the orchestra; for the four violins enumerated in the
intermezzo orchestra of 1565 were most probably members of the old
viol family, and not such instruments as we now call violins. To be
sure, Monteverde’s violins played a very small part, but even that
master himself learned something from experience in their use, for
in later works we find him depending more and more upon his bowed
instruments. The title “French” should not be misleading. The first of
the famous violin makers was Gasparo di Salo (1542-1610), the founder
of the Brescian school. Brescia is in Lombardy, which province was
continually in the throes of French invasion. That may easily account
for the term “French” as applied to these violins.
It was in his “Tancredi e Clorinda,” produced in 1624, that Monteverde
introduced many novel effects, showing that he had begun to appreciate
the expressive powers of his instruments. One of these was the tremolo
for bowed instruments. It is said that this passage “so astonished
the performers that at first they refused to play it.” In the scene
of the combat in the opera, the composer, using three violas and a
double-bass, wrote a descriptive accompaniment to the recitative.
Rhythmic figures, syncopations, alternating scales, as well as the
tremolo and the pizzicato, were employed in this, the first independent
dramatic orchestration of which we have any record. The real
significance of the work lies in the fact that Monteverde here opened
up the realm of special instrumental effects, as distinguished from
vocal ones, and also indicated the fundamental value of the stringed
instruments played with bows.
This truth having been acquired, and the purely military value of
trumpets and drums being already known, it was inevitable that
composers should move gradually but slowly toward the establishment of
the string and brass choirs of the modern orchestra. The wood-wind came
to its position more slowly, chiefly because of the rude and difficult
system of fingering, which made the instruments troublesome to learn.
The value of their tonal differences was not perceived at an early
date, and indeed it was not until near the middle of the eighteenth
century that any direct attempts at tone-coloring were made.
The establishment of the string quartet was really the first vital
step toward the arrangement of the orchestra of to-day, and this step
was the direct result of Monteverde’s experiments. For a time there
was a tolerable system in which viols of various kinds were used. The
thorough-bass was played by the deeper-toned viols, and the harpsichord
filled out the harmonies. It must be remembered that at the end of the
sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, there were two
kinds of viola, the viola da gamba (held between the knees), and the
viola da braccia (held at the shoulder), and there were a dozen or more
species of these two kinds. But the study of the special characters
of instruments led to the selection for permanent use of the best of
these. The bass viol became our double-bass; the tenor viola da gamba,
the violoncello; the tenor viola da braccia, the viola, and so on.
The violin began to make known its value, and after that progress was
steady.
In 1649 Cavalli, in his opera “Giasone,” wrote an accompaniment for
two violins and a bass in a style which endured for half a century.
Only a few years now elapsed before the modern string quartet, in its
primitive form, found its way into the orchestra. Alessandro Scarlatti,
born in 1659, was one of the great geniuses of Italy, and founded
that style of opera of which Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini were the
most popular modern exponents. He enlarged and improved almost every
department of operatic writing, and contributed much to the development
of the orchestral part.
In its general features his orchestra was not unlike that of to-day.
Violins, violas, and basses were its foundation, but their employment
was naturally crude. The ’celli always played in unison with the
basses, and so, for the most part, did the violas; but there were many
instances in which he used his violas independently and even in two
parts. The oboe was the principal wind-instrument, while the bassoons
were used to strengthen the bass and were seldom heard alone. Flutes
were introduced for their special character.[2] Scarlatti’s use of
violas independent of the basses and in real parts led him toward the
true distribution of the string quartet, and in several of his operas
we find him writing accompaniments for two violins, viola, and bass in
a style which has been employed frequently by all subsequent composers.
[2] The German flute, as it was called, was introduced into the
orchestra by Lully, in his “Isis,” 1677.
It is not possible to say that Scarlatti invented this style, for
it must have been the result of long experimenting; but he saw its
superiority and used it so systematically that it was copied by his
successors together with other salient features of his style. The
chief importance of this manner of writing was its establishment of
the proper distribution of the four notes of a chord among the four
instruments. The balance and solidity of tone thus gained was of
vital importance to the development of orchestral writing, and of the
orchestra itself. Scarlatti gave the treble part to the first violin,
the alto to the second, the tenor to the viola, and the bass to the
bass; and that is what composers have done ever since. About the same
time we find Alessandro Stradella writing, in a manner afterward
employed in their concerti grossi by Bach and Handel, for two solo
violins and a solo violoncello, with an accompaniment of violins,
violas, and basses.
In France the most important musician of the period was Jean Baptiste
Lully (1633-87), who was also a composer of operas. His orchestra was
less elastic than Scarlatti’s, yet it was of a type which survived
for many years. Its foundation was a body of strings, violins playing
the upper parts, and viols of different registers the middle and
lower parts. These were supported by a harpsichord, to which was
given a figured bass part. Trumpets, flutes, and oboes were employed
to increase the volume of tone and to produce certain obvious
color-effects. For example, trumpets were heard in martial passages
and oboes in pastoral scenes. Tympani came into the orchestra at this
time also. It cannot be said that Lully showed genius for orchestral
writing, and for that reason his orchestra is an excellent example of
the conventional arrangement of the day. The use of the harpsichord
goes to show that composers of that time did not know how to get a full
and sonorous harmony out of the purely orchestral instruments, and
their attempts to supply the deficiency with the tinkling percussive
notes of the keyed instrument were foredoomed to failure.
Giovanni Legrenzi, a famous Venetian composer (1625-90), employed what
looked like a fairly rational orchestra. It consisted of 19 violins,
2 violas, 2 viole di gamba, 4 large lutes, 2 cornets, 1 bassoon,
and 3 trombones. The chief shortcoming of this orchestra, aside from
its deficiency in wood-wind, is its want of stringed basses. A most
important contributor to the development of the orchestra at this
period was Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713). He was a great violinist,
and, in composing for the violin as a solo and chamber-music
instrument, he explored its resources and illustrated its relation to
other instruments. Some of his important works were: “Twelve Sonatas
for Two Violins and Violoncello, with Bass for the Organ” (Rome, 1683),
“Twelve Chamber Sonatas for Two Violins, Violoncello, and Violone, or
Cembalo” (Rome, 1685), and “Concerti Grossi,” for two solo violins and
solo violoncello, with accompaniment for additional instruments (1712).
In these works Corelli did much to point the way toward modern chamber
music and its forms, and in doing so contributed directly toward that
understanding of the relative powers and limits of the members of the
string quartet without which good orchestral writing is impossible.
We have now reached the beginning of the eighteenth century. The
typical orchestra of the time consisted of strings, distributed
in the fashion set by A. Scarlatti, but not always with a correct
adjustment of the number of each kind, two pairs of wind-instruments,
and the harpsichord as the impotent agent to fill out the harmonies.
It was at this period that two great composers arose and exerted an
influence which affected the entire subsequent development of music.
These composers were George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) and Johann
Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Both of these writers made improvements in
the orchestra and in orchestral music. Something has already been said
about their methods of writing for the orchestra, but the reader will
pardon some repetition of facts which throw light on the constitution
of the orchestral body under these composers. Bach was essentially a
polyphonic writer, and he treated his orchestral instruments as if they
were voices. Each one had an essentially melodic part to sing, and the
beautiful interweaving of these voice-parts constitutes one of the
never-ending charms of the great master’s music. He contrasted with
this style passages of extreme simplicity, in which the strings and the
keyed instrument--organ or clavier--were used.
Handel, on the other hand, was chiefly a composer of operas and
oratorios, and his orchestral style was developed to a considerable
extent in the direction of building up huge climaxes by means of mass
effects. It may be said, therefore, with some reservation, yet with
general correctness, that Bach’s orchestral style has afforded later
composers a model for solo effects in the orchestra, while for solidity
and sonority of the entire instrumental body Handel has been mainly
followed. One of the forms in which Bach exercised his genius was the
Concerto Grosso, in which two or three solo instruments, instead of
one, are heard with orchestral accompaniment. In 1721 Bach wrote six
of these works, known as the Brandenburg Concertos. Only one of these,
the first, would be regarded as an orchestral work in our time. The
others belong rather to the department of chamber-music, though by
increasing the number of instruments in each part they may be made to
have an orchestral effect. The first concerto, however, was written for
the string quartet, aided by the double-bass and the violino piccolo (a
little violin with a high compass), two horns, two oboes, bassoon, and
harpsichord. These instruments were employed in three groups: horns,
wood, and strings; but one must remember that Bach’s polyphonic method
of using his wind-instruments was altogether different from the manner
in which the same instruments are now employed.
In his church music Bach combined the orchestra and the organ. As Dr.
Spitta points out in his biography of Bach, the organ in these works
occupied a position similar to that of the string quartet in the modern
orchestra. “Just as the wind-instruments group themselves round this as
a centre,” he says, “so all the instruments grouped themselves round
the organ. The relations were different, however, in this way: that
the organ remained always in the background, its effect being merely
that of power, and that on this background the other instruments were
seen not so much as solo instruments, but rather as choric groups.
One of these groups was the quartet of strings, another the oboes and
bassoon, a third the cornet and trombones, and a fourth the trumpets
(or sometimes horns) and the drums.” Bach’s method of writing for the
orchestra did not influence his immediate successors very greatly,
for the reason that his retired life and modest position prevented
his works from becoming generally known until long after his death.
Sir John Hawkins’s “History of Music,” published in England in 1776,
contains only half a page about Bach, communicated to the author by one
of Bach’s sons, a resident of London.
Handel, on the other hand, enjoyed a world-wide fame during his life,
and his works were studied by musicians far and near. Handel employed,
though very rarely all at once, all the instruments used in the modern
orchestra except the clarinet. He approached more nearly than Bach
to the modern methods of orchestral contrast in massive effects of
instrumental color, yet he did not reach the fundamental principles on
which the distribution of the instruments in the orchestra of to-day
rest. Perhaps the most important difference is to be found in the
large number of wind-instruments employed by Handel, who used them
frequently in masses simply to reinforce the strings. The number of
oboes and bassoons, for instance, was much larger in Handel’s orchestra
than in a modern band. This was due partly to the inferior power of
the instruments of his time, but equally to the different method of
his scoring. The brass instruments were used by both Bach and Handel
differently from the manner in which modern composers employ them. The
reader will recall that they wrote trumpet parts of such high compass
that players of to-day cannot perform them. In conclusion, as to Bach
and Handel it should be noted that their orchestration is rarely heard.
Most of their great works, such as the “St. Matthew Passion” and “The
Messiah,” are performed now with modern orchestral arrangements, not
according to the original scores.
XV
From Haydn to Wagner
The constitution of the orchestra in the early part of the eighteenth
century, then, had reached the basis on which it now rests, except for
the fact that the harpsichord was still used. There was, however, a
complete and well-organized body of strings, similar to that which we
have to-day. The violoncello alone had not attained its true position.
It was not always included, and generally when it was, it played in
unison with the double-basses. To the body of strings were added such
wind-instruments as the composer desired--two oboes, two bassoons, and
two horns being, perhaps, the most familiar assortment. Two trumpets
and a pair of kettle-drums were introduced when brilliant militant
passages were to be written. Trombones were not heard in symphonic
compositions, and the harp seemed to have fallen into oblivion. The
clarinet had not yet entered the orchestra. Flutes were used often.
The systematic use of wood-wind instruments in pairs was just
beginning. The delay in this vital matter was due to the hold which the
polyphonic style of composition still had. It was only when the musical
world gave up writing fugues and canons and turned its attention to
the harmonic style, in which a song-like melody is supported by an
accompaniment built on chords, that the value of the wind choir in
the formation of these chords was appreciated. That fact once known,
composers speedily established the balance of power between wind and
strings, and arranged a suitable list of wind-instruments.
The orchestral symphony came into existence about the middle of the
eighteenth century, and with its advent we find the orchestra of Bach
and Handel slightly modified and differently employed. Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809) is credited with being the father of the symphony, and he
established the real basis of the modern orchestra. Yet something was
due to the labors of two or three other men. Of these, I have already
mentioned one of the most important, Johann Karl Stamitz, a Bohemian,
who in 1745 became leading violin and director of the orchestra of
the Elector of Mannheim. He spared no efforts to teach his strings to
play with precision and refinement, to phrase beautifully, and to make
all the shades of piano and forte. His orchestra became the best in
Europe, and his methods survived him. Mozart heard at Mannheim for
the first time in his life artistic orchestral performance, and he was
deeply influenced by it.
Another, who has been mentioned and who exercised much influence on
the orchestra through his study of its capacities, was François Joseph
Gossec (1733-1829). He was a student of the orchestra in early life,
and his first symphony was performed five years before Haydn’s. How
much insight into orchestral effect Gossec possessed may be judged
from the fact that in his “Messe des Morts” (1760) he wrote the “Tuba
Mirum” for two groups of instruments, one of wind-instruments concealed
outside the church, and the other of strings inside, the latter
accompanying the former with a tremolo in the high register.
Haydn’s first symphony was written in 1759 for first and second
violins, violas, basses, two oboes and two horns. His last symphony
was composed in 1795, and by that time he had at his command the whole
symphonic orchestra as it stood when Beethoven took up the work of
orchestral development. Between the dates of Haydn’s first and last
symphony, Mozart had lived the whole of his wonderful life, and Haydn,
who at first had been his master, had in the end become his pupil.
It was from Mozart that Haydn learned the use of the clarinet, and we
find it employed in his last symphonies. The clarinet proper, which was
the successor of the schalmei or shawm, is said to have been invented
by Johann Denner, of Nuremberg, in 1690. The claim is doubtful,
yet the modern instrument probably originated about that time.
Many improvements have been made in it, the most notable being the
application to it by Klosé, in 1843, of the Boehm system of fingering.
Haydn’s familiar symphony in D, written in London in 1795, is scored
for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, kettle-drums,
violins, violas, ’cellos, and bassos. It is a fact that Haydn first
employed 2 clarinets and a bassoon as the wood-wind choir in his
first mass, written in 1751 or 1752, but it was Mozart who revealed
the real capacity of the clarinet and established its position in the
orchestra. Haydn, however, must be credited with immense advances in
the development of the orchestra, because in developing the symphonic
form, he was constantly experimenting and discovering the values of
the various instruments and their relations to one another. Some
of the symphonies composed after he had been a symphonic writer
for years, show great reticence in their scoring. For example, the
symphony known as the “Queen of France,” written for Paris in 1786,
is scored for 2 horns, 2 oboes, 1 flute, 2 bassoons, and string
quartet. The introduction to the “Creation,” one of the master’s latest
works, is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, a
contra-bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tympani, and the
usual strings. But when he was writing this oratorio Haydn needed
a large orchestra for his newly invented effects of instrumental
description. In the “Creation” and “The Seasons” he made the orchestra
paint chaos, winter storms, and spring peace. He naturally sought for
more instrumental voices, and employed the complete orchestra of his
time.
Much of Haydn’s success in developing the orchestra and the art of
writing for it was due to his long occupancy of the post of director
of music under Prince Esterhazy. Haydn was appointed to this post at
Eisenstadt in 1761, and retained it till 1790. He had at his disposal
a small company of singers, capable of performing opera or oratorio,
and a small orchestra. In 1766 this orchestra numbered 17 instruments:
6 violins and violas, 1 violoncello, 1 double-bass, 1 flute, 2 oboes,
2 bassoons, and 4 horns. It was subsequently enlarged to 22 and 24,
including trumpets and kettle-drums when needed. From 1776 to 1778
there were also clarinets. That this arrangement did not prevail
all over Europe even at that time is shown by the distribution of
instruments and seating plan of the orchestra at Dresden under Hasse,
near the close of the last century. This plan is reproduced from Jahn’s
“Life of Mozart.”
[Illustration:
1--Conductor’s harpsichord.
2--Second harpsichord.
3--Violoncelli.
4--Double-basses.
5--First Violins.
6--Second Violins.
7--Oboes.
8--Flutes.
a--Violas.
b--Bassoons.
c--Horns.
d--Trumpets and drums on platforms.]
The preponderance of bassoons in the Dresden orchestra was due to the
fact that it was an opera orchestra, and in it Handelian ideas still
prevailed. Haydn, meanwhile, was proceeding along the true symphonic
path, and an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
2 horns, 2 trumpets, tympani, and strings fairly represents the result
of his contributions to its development up to the time when Mozart took
up the work. It should be added that even Haydn was not sufficiently
trustful of his instrumental army to leave it without the weak support
of the harpsichord, and he frequently sat at this instrument during
the performance of his symphonies and played with the orchestra, with
extremely bad effect.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) applied his amazing genius to the
development of the orchestra, as well as to all other departments of
musical art. His work was rather that of exploring the capacities of
the instruments in use than adding new ones to the extant list. That
was in keeping with Mozart’s entire career. He was not a reformer; he
took what he found and put genuine life into it. He found clarinets,
for example, and he illustrated, to the conviction of all subsequent
composers, their true place in the orchestra.
Indeed, he made a complete revelation of the powers of wind-instrument
choirs in his suites and divertimenti for them, so that Haydn once
complained to Kalkenbrenner: “I have only learnt the proper use of
wind-instruments in my old age, and now I must pass away without
turning my knowledge to account.” Mozart’s three greatest symphonies
are those composed in the summer of 1788, the E flat major, G minor,
and C (“Jupiter”). The E flat is scored for 1 flute, 2 clarinets, 2
bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tympani, and strings. The G minor is
written for 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings, but
owing to Mozart’s insight into the effect of combinations, this small
orchestra sounds marvellously full and noble. Clarinets were afterward
added. The “Jupiter” symphony is scored for 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2
bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tympani, and strings.
It will be seen from this that although Mozart established the place
of the clarinet, he did not invariably make use of it, while even up
to the date of these last symphonies, the trombone had not assumed a
position in the symphonic orchestra. Mozart was always moderate in his
use of this instrument. In his “Don Giovanni” he reserves his trombones
to accompany the ghost of the _Commendatore_. In “Die Zauberflöte” they
are used more freely, as, indeed, they always were in religious or
masonic music. In “Die Zauberflöte” Mozart also used basset-horns, the
tenor of the clarinet, now obsolete. In fact, at all times in the early
and classical periods, a larger array of instruments was called into
service in the operatic than in the symphonic orchestra. It is only
since the romantic composers began to paint in gorgeous tone-coloring,
rather than work out intellectual plans of thematic development, that
the symphonic band has equalled the operatic in the variety of its
component elements.
The development of the orchestra in the hands of the greatest of all
symphonic composers, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), was of immense
importance. Beethoven did not add greatly to the array of instruments,
but he demonstrated the true relationships of the various bodies, and
he enlarged them and their scope according to his desire for greater
utterance. In the First Symphony, C major (1800), and the Second, D
major (1803), he employs the same orchestra: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2
clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tympani, first and second
violins, violas, and basses. It is worthy of note that the ’cello is
not specified. In the Third Symphony, “Eroica,” E flat major (1805),
he used the same orchestra, except that he added a third horn part and
wrote “violoncello e basso.”
It is believed that three horns were employed in the symphonic
orchestra for the first time in this work. Mozart used four in
“Idomeneo” (1781). The Fourth Symphony, B flat (1807), is a smaller
work, and its orchestra is the same as that of the First and Second,
except that only one flute is required and the ’cello is named. The
great Fifth Symphony, C minor (1808), is scored for 1 piccolo, 2
flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contra-bassoon, 2 horns,
2 trumpets, 3 trombones, drums, and strings. Sir George Grove notes
that “the piccolo, trombones, and contra-fagotto are employed in the
finale only, and make their appearance here for the first time in the
symphonies. The contra-fagotto was first known to Beethoven in his
youth at Bonn, where the Elector’s orchestra contained one. He has
employed it also in ‘Fidelio,’ in the Ninth Symphony, and elsewhere.”
The Sixth Symphony, known as the “Pastoral” (1808), is scored for
1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2
trumpets, 2 trombones, drums, and strings. The piccolo and trombones
were used for special descriptive effects in this work, and when he
came to write the great Seventh Symphony (1813), Beethoven employed the
same array of instruments as he had in his First and Second symphonies.
The same orchestra sufficed for the Eighth Symphony (1814), but the
Titanic Ninth (1824) demanded a larger instrumental body. The score
calls for 1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 1
contra-bassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tympani, triangle,
cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Four horns are here used for the first
time in the symphonic orchestra, and their introduction completed the
development of the classical body of instruments.
When the romantic writers began to advance along the path opened by
Beethoven and to seek for broader and more influential emotional
expression, they introduced one or two more instruments for special
effects. The English horn was known to Bach in its primitive
form of oboe da caccia. It was used by Gluck in his “Orfeo” and
“Telemacho,” but, as Berlioz notes, without apparent appreciation
of its tone-quality. In its modern form it was introduced into the
orchestra by Rossini in “William Tell” (1829), and Meyerbeer in
“Robert le Diable” (1831). Modern symphonic writers use it freely.
Its employment in their music is probably due to the demonstration of
its utility by the eminent French composer, Hector Berlioz (1803-69),
who had a truly wonderful insight into the powers of all orchestral
instruments, and who laid down the principles of the post-Beethovenian
style of orchestral writing. We find Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn,
and other immediate followers of Beethoven using precisely the same
orchestra, sometimes with two horns and sometimes with four, and seldom
without trombones, throughout an entire work. Berlioz, however, began
at once to give variety to the instrumental body. For instance, so
small a work as his arrangement for orchestra of Weber’s “Invitation
à la Valse” is scored for 1 piccolo, 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets,
4 bassoons, 4 horns, 1 cornet, 1 trumpet, 3 trombones, 2 harps,
tympani, and strings. The harp, as we have noted, had been used in
the opera, but Berlioz was the first to explore its possibilities.
Many of Berlioz’s other advances in the use of orchestral instruments
were owing to the introduction, in 1832, of the system of boring
and keying wind-instruments invented by Theobald Boehm. This system
vastly increased the agility of these instruments and improved their
intonation.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Reutlinger._
BERLIOZ.]
Naturally, some of Berlioz’s ideas were borrowed from the operatic
composers, who frequently employed unusual combinations for dramatic
effects. In the “Quorum hodie” of his “Requiem,” for instance, Berlioz
calls for 3 flutes, 8 tenor trombones, and strings to accompany a
chorus. The “Dies Iræ” of the same mass calls for 4 small brass
bands to be placed at the corners of the main instrumental body, and
for 14 kettle-drums tuned to different notes. But at present we are
more concerned with the direct development of the orchestra than
with special combinations. The bass clarinet was seldom used till
Adolph Sax, the famous instrument-maker, perfected its construction.
Meyerbeer, who was a great friend of Sax, introduced the instrument in
his opera scores. He gives to it a fine declamatory passage in “Les
Huguenots” (Act V.), and gives it a melodic part in the coronation
march in “Le Prophète.” It was Wagner, however, who fully illustrated
the capacity of this noble instrument, and by his employment of it,
both as a solo singer and a fundamental bass of the wood-wind, led
contemporaneous symphonic writers to employ it freely.
The brass choir has been enlarged since Beethoven’s day by the addition
of the bass tuba, an instrument which came into use only after Sax had
perfected its mechanism. Before that the ophicleide, a bass instrument
of the keyed bugle family, was occasionally employed. Mendelssohn calls
for it in the score of his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Berlioz has
four in the score of his “Requiem.” These parts are now played on
tubas. Additional trumpets are often used to strengthen the brass, and
Wagner even caused tenor tubas to be made to give certain tone-tints,
together with sonority, to the funeral march of “Götterdämmerung.”
All kinds of instruments of percussion are introduced when their
peculiarities are desired, and, as already said, bells, gongs,
triangles, and even the vulgar xylophone, find something to do in the
modern orchestra.
In the first opera, Peri’s “Eurydice,” as we have seen, the orchestra
consisted of a harpsichord, a large guitar, a viol, a large lute, and
three flutes. Two centuries and a half later, in 1850, the overture
to Wagner’s “Lohengrin” called for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn,
2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3
trombones, 1 bass tuba, kettle-drums, cymbals, and strings. In the
third act of “Die Walküre” the same composer calls for 2 piccolos,
2 flutes, 3 oboes, 1 English horn, 3 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet,
3 bassoons, 8 horns, 4 trumpets, 1 bass trumpet, 4 trombones, 1
contra-bass tuba, 4 kettle-drums, cymbals and bass drum, harp and
strings. How this enormous growth has been accomplished the author
has endeavored to outline. The reader will perceive, however, that
the fundamental arrangement of the orchestra, as left to us by Haydn
and Mozart, has not been altered, but simply extended. As I have
already noted, the aims of the romantic composers in the direction
of tone-coloring have led to this extension. Yet by means of modern
methods of instrumentation, glowing results can be obtained from the
symphonic orchestra employed by Beethoven. An excellent instance of
this is the “Symphonic Pathétique” of Tschaikowsky, which adds only
the bass tuba to Beethoven’s orchestra. Gounod, in his “Redemption,”
a richly orchestrated work, employs 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets,
2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tympani, bass drum and
cymbals, strings and organ in one of the most effective passages. On
the other hand, Jean Louis Nicode, in the “Phosphorescent Lights”
movement of his symphonic ode “The Sea”--a movement of purely
descriptive and imitative music--calls for a concealed brass band
consisting of 3 trumpets, 7 trombones, and a bass tuba, together with 1
piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 tenor
tubas, 1 bass tuba, 2 pairs of kettle-drums, 1 pair of cymbals, 1
triangle, 1 bass drum, 1 gong, 1 set of bells, 2 harps, and the usual
strings.
The proportion of power and the balance of tone in the orchestra are
preserved by having more stringed than wind instruments. It requires
many violins and basses to balance the wood and brass in a forte
passage, and, furthermore, the strings themselves lack solidity if
there are only a few. As an example of a well-balanced orchestra, we
may take the Boston Symphony, which is organized as follows: 16 first
violins, 14 second, 10 violas, 10 violoncellos, 8 double-basses, 3
flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 trumpets,
4 horns, 3 trombones, 2 tenor tubas, 2 bass tubas, 1 contra-bass
tuba, 2 pairs of tympani, 1 bass-drum, 1 pair of cymbals, 1 harp. The
additional wind-instruments are, of course, used only in compositions
which call for them. An excellent example of a great festival orchestra
was that conducted by Theodore Thomas at the New York Music Festival of
1882. It consisted of 50 first violins, 50 second violins, 36 violas,
36 violoncellos, 40 double-basses, 6 harps, 6 flutes, 2 piccolos, 7
oboes, 2 English horns, 6 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets, 6 bassoons, 2
contra-bassoons, 9 horns, 2 Sax horns, 11 cornets, 3 trumpets, 1 bass
trumpet, 9 trombones, 3 tubas, 4 pairs of kettle-drums, 2 bass-drums, 2
pairs of cymbals, 3 small drums, and 2 triangles.
PART V
How Orchestral Music Grew
XVI
From Bach to Haydn
A book on the orchestra might be regarded as complete without this
chapter, yet it seems to the author that a few suggestions as to the
nature and aims of the different kinds of orchestral music heard at
concerts may not be unwelcome to the reader. It is always desirable
to know what to listen for in a musical composition, because many
disappointments are thus avoided. A person who hopes to hear in a
Bach fugue the gorgeous masses of tone which are characteristic of a
contemporaneous orchestral piece, will certainly declare Bach to be a
dry and uninteresting composer. Equally he who hopes to discover in
Rimsky-Korsakow’s “Scheherezade” suite the intellectual development
of the Eighth Symphony, will assert that the talented Russian is no
composer at all.
The compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) lie a little to
one side of the direct path of orchestral development, and many of
them were contemporaneous with works which are in form and treatment
of a more modern style. Nevertheless, Bach’s works mark the epoch from
which any review of orchestral music must start. During the Middle
Ages the artistic composers of music were almost wholly absorbed in
writing for the Roman Catholic Church. Their compositions were for
voices without accompaniment, and consisted of great Gothic structures
of polyphonic music. In this kind of music every voice was at the
same instant engaged in singing different parts of the same melody,
the melody being so cunningly made that these different phrases, when
heard together, would produce harmony. It was late in the sixteenth
century that instrumental music began to develop independently, and
the composers employed for it the same style as they had used in their
church masses. Early instrumental music is polyphonic, and the full and
final development of this style of composition is found in the fugues
and concerti grossi of Bach. Handel also wrote concerti grossi, and
they, too, partake of the polyphonic character.
The essential trait of this kind of music is the interweaving of the
various melodic voice-parts and the effects obtained by their working
against one another. Polyphonic writing is the most profound and
serious style of composition, and it is also that which best endures
the test of time. Modern composers have fully realized that fact
and have introduced a new polyphony into their works. It is what is
called free counterpoint, by which is meant the working together of
several voices which do not sing different parts of the same melody at
the same time, but only at points suitable to the composer’s purpose,
while at other points new melodic ideas may be introduced. But in the
early polyphonic music the listener will hear chiefly the interweaving
of voice-parts of the same melody, and he will miss all the beauty
and intellectual finish of these works if he seeks simply for the
sensuous sweetness of instrumental tints. Usually the orchestral color
is distinguished by sobriety, and the profoundly thoughtful nature
of contrapuntal music causes a general austerity of instrumental
diction. I have already mentioned the historical fact that orchestral
tone-coloring began with Mozart. But this was necessarily the case,
for the early contrapuntal writers were too wholly absorbed in the
development of form to study the resources of color. The operatic
writers were the first to seek for color-effects, just as they were
the first to use abrupt changes of rhythm and startling dissonances in
their search after dramatic expression.
The working out of formal perfection filled the early classic as well
as the late polyphonic period, but the form was different. With the
birth of opera there entered into modern music a new power, that of the
vocal solo with subordinate accompaniment; and composers at once sought
for a new form in which they could cast their melodic ideas so that
they would be interesting and artistic when sung by one voice instead
of several. The development of these monophonic forms occupied the
early classical composers. They obtained their most pregnant suggestion
from the operatic _aria da capo_. In this kind of song there are three
sections, the first and third being the same melody, and the middle one
being different and contrasting. This form suggested to instrumental
composers the cycle, which lies at the foundation of most instrumental
compositions of the classic period. The classic overture, for example,
consisted of three movements (without breaks), slow, fast, and slow,
or fast, slow, and fast. And it was customary to repeat in the last
one the principal melodic idea of the first. The first movement of a
symphony or a piano sonata (for a symphony is a sonata for orchestra)
is built on a similar plan. Certain melodic ideas, called themes or
subjects, are set forth in the first section. Then follows a middle
section called the free fantasia or “working-out,” and in this the
melodic subject-matter is literally worked out. It is submitted to
various processes of musical development, such as changes of harmony,
changes of rhythm, different instrumental treatments, polyphonic
expression, etc., till there is nothing more to say, and then the third
section restates the original matter in its first shape and adds a coda
(tail-piece), by which the movement is brought to a conclusion. The
development of this form was aided by the instrumental suite, a form
which consisted of series of dances of different kinds. These suites
helped the symphonic composers to perceive the value of alternating
different sorts of movements, so that symphonies began with an allegro,
constructed on the cyclical pattern just described, and continued with
an adagio, a minuet, and a finale.
The development of this form occupied the attention of instrumental
composers from, say the publication of Corelli’s first sonata
(so-called), in 1685, till the close of the seventeenth century. By
that time it was fully developed, and was ready for such modifications
as might be suggested by the entrance of a new purpose into the field
of instrumental composition. The symphonies of Haydn and Mozart and
the first two of Beethoven belong to this period of the development of
the symphonic form, which is also known as the Classic Period.
The lover of music who desires to listen with intelligence and to bring
the faculty of judgment to the guidance of his fancy, should study the
history of music, because from an acquaintance with that subject he
will acquire a correct point of view. It is impossible in the limits of
two short chapters in a volume of this size to do more than indicate
in the most general manner the salient points in the development of
orchestral music. Therefore, I must content myself with inviting the
reader to note that these two early periods of musical history, the
Polyphonic and the Classic, were occupied chiefly with the labors of
composers engaged in the establishment of methods. Two general classes
of forms, the polyphonic and the monophonic, were developed, and
the manner of elaborating musical ideas and of instrumental technic
suitable to each was fairly established. But it cannot be said that
the early classic composers advanced beyond the exclusively musical
limits of their art. The music-lover will look in vain for the note of
profound human emotion in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart.
The dramatic power of unsupported instrumental music had not yet been
felt by composers, because they were engaged, not in studying the
capacity of their art for the symbolism of ideas extraneous to itself,
but in exploring its purely æsthetic resources. Music was still to
them an end, not a means. They sought only for beauty, and they aimed
at producing it by the employment of the technical details of forms
and idioms peculiar to their own art. While the polyphonic writers
had utilized the interweaving of different parts of the same melody,
the classic composers exercised their taste, ingenuity, and feeling
in developing melodic subjects in a vocal solo style, with a support
of harmonies built on chords, of which the melody was an inseparable
part. Their orchestral method differed from that of the polyphonic
school because their manner of composing compelled a change. Bach’s
way of using every instrument as a solo voice was no longer available.
The melodic subjects of a symphony must always predominate. Now they
flow to us from the strings, now from the wood, again from the brass;
but always with chord harmonies. Hence, we find the classic composers
using wind-instruments in pairs and making different combinations of
the various groups of instruments, so that simultaneously with the
process of thematic development and working-out (which is the drawing
of the symphonic tone-picture), there is a constant change of the
color-scheme, and thus the melodic and harmonic details are heightened
by a judicious use of the tonal qualities of the voices which sing
them to us. The skill of composers in using these tonal qualities and
the technical expertness of orchestral players grew so fast that in
the course of time, as we shall see, they came to a position of undue
prominence in orchestral music; but this state of affairs was largely
hastened by the employment of vivid color-effects by the romanticists
in their endeavors to obtain dramatic utterance from the orchestra.
The music-lover who listens to orchestral music of the classic period
must not expect anything but a clear and perspicuous presentation of
music for its own sake. Sunny transparency is the chief characteristic
of the instrumentation of Haydn and Mozart, while the technical
construction of their works makes it incumbent upon the listener to
follow the purely musical working-out of the subjects announced. The
instrumental color-scheme is neither wide nor brilliant, but it is
as admirably adapted to the subject-matter as the subdued greens of
Corot are to his peaceful bucolic scenes. To appreciate thoroughly the
works of Haydn and Mozart a music-lover should have the fundamental
principles of musical form at his fingers’ ends, and he should know the
voices of the instruments. The rest is child’s play. The knowledge of
musical form is indispensable to the right enjoyment of all music, but
it is peculiarly necessary in these classic works, in which pure beauty
of form was the ultimate object.
XVII
From Beethoven to Richard Strauss
Of the early classic writers only Haydn and Mozart have survived the
test of time, and neither of them figures frequently in contemporaneous
concert programmes. This is a pity, for their music would often serve
as a corrective to a taste which is inclined to clamor ceaselessly for
“ginger hot i’ the mouth.” But it is beyond dispute that the romantic
composers awaken more sympathetic chords in the modern bosom. Beethoven
is the connecting link between the classic and romantic schools.
His First and Second Symphonies belong to the former; the rest to the
latter. The modern romantic school of music sprang from Beethoven’s
“Eroica” symphony, his opera “Fidelio,” Schubert’s marvellous songs,
and Weber’s “Der Freischütz.” In so far as purely orchestral music
is concerned, however, Beethoven was the master of them all. It was
he who first showed musicians how to project emotion through the
orchestral melos. If Mendelssohn’s fanciful little piano pieces are
songs without words, then Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh
symphonies are dramas without text.
In form and technical method these works follow the general plan of the
classic symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Indeed, the C minor symphony of
Beethoven is the finest and most fully developed specimen of that form.
But Beethoven made certain changes which came from the nature of his
search after emotional expression. He modulated into foreign keys with
greater freedom than his predecessors, and he made wider gaps between
the keys of his successive movements. A complex and changeful harmonic
basis has always been associated with emotional expression in music.
Simple harmonies are restful, peaceful, and suggestive of serenity
of the soul; frequent modulations and unfinished cadences express
uneasiness of mind--largely because they create it.
In addition to this advance, Beethoven also found it possible to knit
the melodic structure of his works much more firmly. He introduced his
second subjects, for instance, by means of transitional passages made
out of some of the materials of his first subjects. His working-out
processes were infinitely broader and grander than those of his
predecessors, and they invariably led to strenuous and stimulating
climaxes, not found in the earlier symphonies. Beethoven substituted
for the old minuet movement the scherzo, which resembles the minuet
in form, but differs wholly from it in spirit. The word scherzo means
“jest,” and the movement was at first intended to be humorous or
playful; but Beethoven sometimes gave it the grim mystery of tragic
suspense, as in the Fifth Symphony.
Beethoven’s manner of instrumentation has already been discussed to
some extent. It is necessary only to add that it shows a profounder
insight into the special character of each instrument than that of any
writer who preceded him. This was the result of the composer’s search
after influential emotional expression, and of his complete dependence
for it upon his instruments. The advances of Beethoven in the treatment
of orchestral forms led the romantic composers to perceive that they
could make still larger changes without infringing the fundamental laws
upon which the artistic development of musical ideas proceeded.
Robert Schumann’s symphonies are notable examples of the methods
adopted by the romantic writers. His symphony in D minor is intended
to be played without any pauses between the consecutive movements,
and melodic material introduced in one movement is employed in the
development of another. Thus the principal theme of the first movement
recurs in a significantly modified form in the last, and an idea heard
in the introduction is repeated with much meaning in the scherzo.
These innovations were the direct result of attempts to give to music
a more definite emotional force, and they were brought about by
Beethoven’s convincing demonstration of the dramatic expressiveness
of orchestral music. The highly wrought overtures of Weber, as well
as those of Beethoven, had an additional value in showing later
composers how to utilize the suggestive power of a title in combination
with characteristic methods of instrumental utterance. Haydn, in his
“Creation,” had invented some of the now conventional figures of
orchestral utterance, such as the rolling of waves and the raging of
storms. Beethoven’s storm in the “Pastoral” symphony went farther,
and, mild as it sounds now, was a remarkable achievement in its day.
Spohr began to write symphonies with descriptive titles such as the
“Leonore” (founded on a poem by Burger) and “The Power of Sound.”
Mendelssohn wrote descriptive overtures such as “Fingal’s Cave,” and
in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music suggested how far the purely
illustrative powers of orchestral song might go.
It required very little experimenting in this kind of composition
to show musicians that the prescribed forms of the classic symphony
and overture were unsuited to it. It was quite impossible to embody
in music, developed strictly on lines designed for the exploitation
of pure musical beauty, a series of emotions which moved according
to wholly different laws. The famous pianist, Franz Liszt, to meet
the requirements of the new school, invented the symphonic poem, a
composition symphonic in style, but smaller in extent and without any
pause between the movements. These are welded together by connecting
matter which causes the passage from one to the other to be barely
perceptible. The movements themselves are distributed wholly according
to the sequence of the principal emotional moods of the story which is
to be illustrated. The fundamental laws of musical form are, of course,
observed; but conventional formulæ are not followed.
Liszt employed all the symphonic devices of thematic development in
his symphonic poems, and his immediate imitators followed his example.
But many later composers have abandoned almost the whole symphonic
scheme, so that the works of the first masters of the romantic school
belong to a period of transition between the late classicists and the
ultra-romanticists of our time.
The reader must not understand me as intending to say that the form of
the classic symphony has been universally abandoned. On the contrary,
one of the most agreeable of living composers, Antonin Dvořák, clings
to it, and there are many others who still find that they can say
all they wish to say through the medium used by Beethoven. Brahms
was the finest recent exponent of the classic symphony. But there is
undoubtedly a growing tendency among composers to make their orchestral
works vast color-pictures. The themes in these works are subjected to
little or no real musical development, but are brought forward again
and again in new instrumental garbs, and instead of reaching climaxes
by devices of melodic evolution, the composers aim at producing
dramatic effects by imposing or vivid instrumental coloring.
At the same time these composers employ a most complex polyphony, for
their scores teem with melodic utterance in all the principal voices.
Richard Strauss, of Munich, is the leading writer of this school of
orchestral colorists. His works show supreme mastery of the technics
of orchestration, the most intimate acquaintance with the special
characteristics of the various instruments, and a really remarkable
knowledge of the results to be gained by the mixture of tone-tints.
It is the opinion of the present writer that Strauss seeks to express
in music things which cannot, and some which ought not, to be so
expressed; but that is a matter which need not be discussed here. It
is undeniable that in form and treatment this composer’s works are in
the direct line of the general tendency of orchestral music in our day,
and it is equally undeniable that his mastery of the technics of the
present style of writing is greater than that of any other composer.
I have endeavored in this brief survey of orchestral music to show the
reader how it began with the most rigid and logical forms, in which
the laws of thematic evolution were applied with the intent to attain
purely musical beauty; and how, as the technics of instrumentation
became better understood, the employment of instrumental coloring led
composers away from rigorous thematic development toward a species of
composition in which dramatic effects were obtained by a more free
method of construction and a larger use of color-effects.
From this we appear at present to be passing into a period in which
these color-effects alone are to be called upon as the means of
orchestral expression.
It is quite impossible for us who are contemporaneous with this new
school to decide as to its value. It is enough for us to recognize its
tendencies and watch their evolution. What I have attempted to do in
this chapter is to point out briefly to the reader the salient traits
of the orchestral music of the different periods, to the end that in
listening he might endeavor to find his enjoyment where the composer
intended that he should find it, and not be disappointed from an unwise
attempt to find it somewhere else. The observant music-lover will find,
I think, that the development of orchestration has been perfectly
normal, and that the instrumentation of each period is perfectly fitted
to its music. A symphony of Mozart orchestrated in the Richard Strauss
style would be a tinted Venus; while a tone poem of Strauss scored à
la Mozart would be like one of Cropsey’s autumn landscapes reduced to
the dead level of a pen-and-ink drawing. It is largely because of this
organic union between music and its orchestral garb that the amateur
ought to strive to understand the nature and purpose of orchestration.
The addition to his enjoyment of all orchestral music will be far more
than sufficient to pay for the labor of the study.
INDEX
Abbreviations in scores, 47
Aria da capo, suggestion to orchestral composers, 220
Bach’s orchestra, 195
Balance of tone, 65;
how obtained, 115
Bass clarinet, compass and character, 28;
introduction of, 209
Bass drum, 111
Bassoon, compass and character, 24
Baton, use of, 148 _et seq._;
need of, 154
“Battery,” 108 _et seq._
Beethoven’s symphonies, 226 _et seq._
Bells, 111
Berlioz, 67, 68;
his orchestra, 208
Boston Symphony Orchestra, 50, 212
Bowing, 9;
marks for, 138
Brass, 4;
methods of using, 97 _et seq._;
Bach’s and Handel’s plans, 98;
Haydn’s, 99;
Mozart’s, 100;
employed unsupported, 105;
Wagner learns from Gluck and Mozart, 107
Carillon, 112
Castanets, 111
Clarinet, compass and character, 26;
how to read its music, 52;
methods of using, 86 _et seq._
Classic music, character of, 222
Classicists, modern, 231
Clefs, 55 _et seq._
Colorists, 231
Conductor, development of, 147 _et seq._;
interpreting, 156;
Wagner’s influence on, 161;
functions of, 164;
in detail, 167;
choice of tempo, 169;
work besides choice of tempo, 174
Conductors, famous, 158 _et seq._
Contra-bass clarinet, 96
Contra-bassoon, 95
Contrast, 65;
how obtained, 119
Cornet, 23
Cyclic forms, 220
Cymbals, 111
Directions, composers’, to be obeyed, 139
Double-bass, compass and character, 17
Drum, bass, 111;
snare, 111
English Horn, compass and character, 23
Flexibility in orchestral playing, 134
Flute, compass and character, 19;
uses of, 81 _et seq._;
introduction of, 190
Forms, development of musical, 220;
Beethoven’s innovations, 227;
Schumann’s, 228
Glissando, 41
Gong, 111
Gossec, developer of orchestral technics, 158
Habeneck, interpreting conductor, 160
Handel’s orchestra, 196
Harmonics, 7, 8
Harmony, dispersal of, 64
Harp, 39;
pedals, 40;
methods of using, 39 _et seq._
Harpsichord, used in conducting, 149 _et seq._;
method of use, 150;
used in symphonic conducting, 155
Haydn’s orchestra, 200
Horn, compass and character, 30;
how to read its music, 54;
methods of using, 97 _et seq._;
stopped tones, 100;
valves, 100;
Rossini’s horn style, 100;
in “Eroica” symphony, 101;
four horns, how used, 101, 102
Horn, English, 23;
introduction into orchestra, 208
Instrumentation, models, 68
Instruments, list of, in orchestra, 4;
names in four languages, 46
Leader of orchestra, 154
Legno, col, 10
Legrenzi’s orchestra, 192
Liszt, inventor of symphonic poem, 230
Lully’s orchestra, 192
Mendelssohn, model for string writing, 76
Metronome, 172
Meyerbeer, 39, 40, 41
Middle voices, 135
Monteverde, Claudio, founder of modern orchestra, 186
Mozart, tone-coloring, and string plan, 75, 76;
his orchestra, 204
Music, orchestral, development of, 217 _et seq._;
polyphonic, 218;
classic, 220;
character of, 222 _et seq._;
what to expect in classic, 224;
Beethoven’s, 226 _et seq._;
romantic, 228
Nicode, divided strings in “Das Meer,” 77
Oboe, compass and character, 20;
uses of, 81 _et seq._
Ophicleide, 210
Orchestra, defined, 3;
Beethoven’s, 4, 206;
instruments in, 4;
how used, 61;
compass, 61;
dynamic range, 62;
constitution of, 142;
development of, 181 _et seq._;
in Middle Ages, 183;
Peri’s and Cavaliere’s, 185, 186;
Monteverde’s, 186;
Scarlatti’s, 190;
Lully’s, 192;
Legrenzi’s, 192;
Bach’s, 195;
Handel’s, 196;
in early part of eighteenth century, 193, 198;
Gossec’s, 200;
Haydn’s, 200;
Dresden court orchestra, 203;
Mozart’s, 204;
Berlioz’s, 208;
Wagner’s, 210, 211;
Boston Symphony’s number, 212;
festival, 213
Orchestral music, development of, 217 _et seq._
Orchestras, famous, 140 _et seq._, 202
Orchestration, general principles of, 61;
requirements of, 63;
models in, 67, 68;
Bach’s polyphonic, 82;
qualities of good, 113 _et seq._;
pianists’ mistakes, 115;
Bach’s, 120;
effect of clarinet in, 120;
Handel’s, 121;
romantic, 122;
innovations of Monteverde, 188;
Corelli’s contributions to, 193
Overture, classic form, 200
Percussive instruments, parts for, 112
Performance, qualities of orchestral, 124 _et seq._;
requisites of, 125
Phrasing, 137
Piccolo, 95
Precision, 131, 132
Quality of tone, 125
Quartette, string, establishment of, 189, 190
Romantic music, 228 _et seq._
Saltato, 10
Score, described, 43 _et seq._;
abbreviations in, 47
Seating plan of orchestra, 49, 50, 203
Shading in orchestral playing, 134 _et seq._
Solidity, 64, 114;
how obtained, 115;
in performance, 126
Sonata, development of, 220
Sordines, 10
Stamitz, developer of orchestral technics, 158
Strauss, R., leader of orchestral colorists, 232
Strings, 5;
methods of using, 66 _et seq._;
test of methods, 72;
Beethoven’s plan, 72, 76;
innovations in use of, by romanticists, 72;
effects of different registers, 73;
Haydn’s plan, 75;
Mozart’s plan, 76;
Mendelssohn’s plan, 76;
introduction of various effects, 80;
proper proportion of, 127
Symphonic poem, 230
Symphony, form and development, 220 _et seq._
Tambourine, 111
Tempo, importance of, 169 _et seq._
Tone, balance of, 65, 126;
how obtained, 115;
qualities of, in orchestral performance, 125 _et seq._;
necessity of fine, 130
Transposing instruments, 51 _et seq._
Tremolo, 9;
invention of, 188
Trombone, kinds, compass and character, 34;
how used, 102;
introduction in symphony, 103;
Berlioz’s use of, 106;
Mozart’s and Gluck’s use of, 107
Trumpet, compass and character, 32;
how to read its music, 54;
methods of using, 98 _et seq._
Tuba, kinds and character, 35;
how used, 103;
introduction of, 210
Tympani, compass and character, 37;
how used, 108;
Beethoven’s innovations in use of, 109
Unanimity, 131, 132, 133
Variety, 65;
how obtained, 119
Viola, compass and character of, 13 _et seq._;
how used, 67 _et seq._
Violin, compass, bowing, etc., 6 _et seq._;
entrance into orchestra, 187
Violins, first and second, 5;
second, 11
Violoncello, compass and character, 16;
how used, 71
Wagner’s orchestra, 210
Wood-wind, enumerated, 4;
in detail, 19;
methods of using, 81 _et seq._;
Bach’s plan, 82;
Handel’s, 84;
Haydn’s, 85;
Mozart’s, 87;
Beethoven’s, 88;
Brahms’s, 89;
Beethoven’s innovations, 90;
Wagner’s, 91
Xylophone, 112
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