The orchestra and orchestral music

by W. J. Henderson

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.