“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.