See C. Silvester Horne, The Institutional Church (London, 1906); G. W. Mead, Modern Methods in Church Work (New York, 1897); R. A. Woods, English Social Movements (New York, 1891).
INSTRUMENT (Lat. instrumentum, from instruere, to build up, furnish, arrange, prepare), that which can be used as a means to an end, hence a mechanical contrivance, implement or tool; the word is more particularly applied to the implements of applied science, in mathematics, surgery, surveying, &c., while those of the handicrafts are generally known as “tools.” A specific use of the term is for the various contrivances used to produce musical sounds, “musical instruments.”
In law an “instrument” is any formal or written document by which expression is given to a legal act or agreement. This is a classical use of the Lat. instrumentum, a document, record. The term may be used in a wide sense, as a mere writing, meant only to form a record, or in a particular sense with reference to certain statutes. For example, the Stamp Act 1891 defines an instrument as an expression including every written document; for the purposes of the Forgery Act 1861 a post-office telegram accepting a wager has been defined as an instrument. In expressions such as “deed, will, or other written instrument” the word means any written document under which a right or liability, legal or equitable, exists.
INSTRUMENTATION. “Instrumentation” is the best term that can be found for that aspect of musical art which is concerned with timbre. The narrower term “orchestration” is applied to the instrumentation of orchestral music. Since the most obvious differences of timbre are in those of various instruments, the art which blends and contrasts timbre is most easily discussed as the treatment of instruments; but we must use this term with philosophic breadth and allow it to include voices. Instrumentation is in all standard text-books treated as a technical subject, from the point of view of practical students desirous of writing for the modern orchestra. And as there is no branch of art in which mechanical improvements, and the consequent change in the nature of technical difficulties, bear so directly upon the possibilities and methods of external effect, it follows that an exclusive preponderance of this view is not without serious disadvantage from the standpoint of general musical culture. There is probably no other branch of art in which orthodox tradition is so entirely divorced from the historical sense, and the history, when studied at all, so little illuminated by the permanent artistic significance of its subjects. When improvements in the structure of an instrument remove from the modern composer’s memory an entire category of limitations which in classical music determined the very character of the instrument, the temptation is easy to regard the improvement as a kind of access of wisdom, in comparison with which not only the older form of the instrument, but the part that it plays in classical music, is crude and archaic. But we should do better justice to improvements in an instrument if we really understood how far they give it, not merely new resources, but a new nature. And, moreover, those composers who have done most to realize this new nature (as Wagner has done for the brass instruments) have also retained, to an extent unsuspected by their imitators, the definite character which the instrument had in its earlier form.
As it is with mechanical improvements, so is it to a still greater degree with changes in the function of timbre in art. Throughout the 19th century so fatal was the hold obtained on the popular mind by the technical expert’s view of instrumentation, that it was impossible to hear the works of Handel and Bach without “additional accompaniments” conceived in terms of art as irrelevant to those of 18th-century polyphonys as the terms of Turnerian landscape are irrelevant to the decoration of the outside walls of a cathedral. There is some reason to hope that the day of these misconceptions is passed; although there is also some reason to fear that on other grounds the present era may be known to posterity as an era of instrumentation comparable, in its gorgeous chaos of experiment and its lack of consistent ideas of harmony and form, only to the monodic period at the beginning of the 17th century, in which no one had ears for anything but experiments in harmonic colour. We do not propose to concern ourselves here with those technical subjects which are the chief concern of standard treatises on instrumentation. Our task is simply to furnish the general reader with an account of the types of instrumentation prevalent at various musical periods, and their relation to other branches of the art.
The Vocal Style of the 16th Century.—In the 16th century instrumentation was, in its normal modern sense, non-existent; but in a special sense it was at an unsurpassable stage of perfection, namely, in the treatment of pure vocal harmony. In every mature period of art it will be found that, however much the technical rules may be collected in one special category, every artistic category has a perfect interaction with all the others; and this is nowhere more perfectly shown than when the art is in its simplest possible form of maturity. Practically every law of harmony in 16th-century music may be equally well regarded as a law of vocal effect. Discords must not be taken unprepared, because a singer can only find his note by a mental judgment, and in attacking a discord he has to find a note of which the harmonic meaning is at variance with that of other notes sung at the same time. Melody must not make more than one wide skip in the same direction, because by so doing it would cause an awkward change of vocal register. Two parts must not move in consecutive octaves or fifths, because by so doing they unaccountably reinforce each other by an amount by which they impoverish the rest of the harmony. Thus we justify, on grounds of instrumentation, laws usually known as laws of harmony and counterpoint. Apart from such considerations, 16th-century vocal harmony shows in the hands of its greatest masters an inexhaustible variety of refinements of vocal colour. A volume might be written on Orlando di Lasso’s art of so crossing the voices as to render possible successions of chords which, on a keyed instrument where such crossing cannot be expressed, would be a horrible series of consecutive fifths; the beauty of the device consisting in the extreme simplicity of the chords, combined with the novelty due to the fact that these chords cannot be produced by any ordinary means without incorrectness.
Decorative Instrumentation.—In the 17th century the use of instruments became a necessity; but there were at first no organized ideas for their treatment except those which were grounded on their use as supporting and imitating the voice. The early 17th-century attempts at their independent use and characterization are historically interesting, but artistically almost barbarous. Sometimes they achieve rare beauty by accident. Heinrich Schütz’s Lamentatio Davidi is written for a bass voice accompanied by four trombones and organ. The trombone parts are on exactly the same material as the voice, which in fact forms with them a five-part fugue-texture. The effect is magnificent, and admirably suited to the dignity of the trombone. Moreover, the opening theme is formed of slow arpeggios; and the more modern harmonic elements, though technically chromatic, consist, from the modern point of view, rather in swift changes between nearly related keys than in chromatic blurring of the main key. All this, especially in a writer like Schütz, who is saturated with every progressive tendency of the time, seems to point to a deep sense of the appropriate style of trombone writing. Yet, so insensible is Schütz to the euphony of his own work, that he proposes, as an alternative for the first and second trombones, two violins an octave higher, the other parts remaining unaltered! Imagination boggles at the vileness of this effect.
The chief work done in instrumentation in the 17th century is undoubtedly that of the Italian writers for the violin, who developed the technique of that instrument until it proved not only more resourceful but more artistically organized than that of the solo voice, which by the time of Handel had become little better than an acrobatic monstrosity. In the art of Bach and Handel, instrumentation, as distinguished from choral writing, has attained a definite artistic coherence. Choral writing itself has become different from what it was in the 16th century. The free use of discords and of wider intervals, together with the influence of the florid elements of solo-singing, enlarged the bounds of choral expression almost beyond recognition, while they crowded into very narrow quarters the subtleties of 16th-century music. These, however, by no means disappeared; and such devices as the crossing of parts in the second Kyrie of Bach’s B Minor Mass (bars 7, 8, 14, 15, 22, 23, 50) abundantly show that in the hands of the great masters artistic truths are not things which a change of date can make false.