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:
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.”