The orchestra and orchestral music

by W. J. Henderson

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:”