Chapter 6

The clarinet (Plate VII.) is the most eloquent member of the wood-wind choir, and, except some of its own modifications or the modifications of the oboe and bassoon, the latest arrival in the harmonious company. It is only a little more than a century old. It has the widest range of expression of the wood-winds, and its chief structural difference is in its mouth-piece. It has a single flat reed, which is much wider than that of the oboe or bassoon, and is fastened by a metallic band and screw to the flattened side of the mouth-piece, whose other side is cut down, chisel shape, for convenience. Its voice is rich, mellow, less reedy, and much fuller and more limpid than the voice of the oboe, which Berlioz tries to describe by analogy as "sweet-sour." It is very flexible, too, and has a range of over three and a half octaves. Its high tones are sometimes shrieky, however, and the full beauty of the instrument is only disclosed when it sings in the middle register. Every symphony and overture contains passages for the clarinet which serve to display its characteristics. Clarinets are made of different sizes for different keys, the smallest being that in E-flat, with an unpleasantly piercing tone, whose use is confined to military bands. There is also an alto clarinet and a bass clarinet (Plate VIII.). The bell of the latter instrument is bent upward, pipe fashion, and its voice is peculiarly impressive and noble. It is a favorite solo instrument in Liszt's symphonic poems.

[Sidenote: _Lips and reeds._]

[Sidenote: _The brass instruments._]

[Sidenote: _Improvements in brass instruments._]

[Sidenote: _Valves and slides._]

The fundamental principle of the instruments last described is the production of tone by vibrating reeds. In the instruments of the brass choir, the duty of the reeds is performed by the lips of the player. Variety of tone in respect of quality is produced by variations in size, shape, and modifications in parts like the bell and mouth-piece. The _forte_ of the orchestra receives the bulk of its puissance from the brass instruments, which, nevertheless, can give voice to an extensive gamut of sentiments and feelings. There is nothing more cheery and jocund than the flourishes of the horns, but also nothing more mild and soothing than the songs which sometimes they sing. There is nothing more solemn and religious than the harmony of the trombones, while "the trumpet's loud clangor" is the very voice of a war-like spirit. All of these instruments have undergone important changes within the last few score years. The classical composers, almost down to our own time, were restricted in the use of them because they were merely natural tubes, and their notes were limited to the notes which inflexible tubes can produce. Within this century, however, they have all been transformed from imperfect diatonic instruments to perfect chromatic instruments; that is to say, every brass instrument which is in use now can give out all the semitones within its compass. This has been accomplished through the agency of valves, by means of which differing lengths of the sonorous tube are brought within the command of the players. In the case of the trombones an exceedingly venerable means of accomplishing the same end is applied. The tube is in part made double, one part sliding over the other. By moving his arm, the player lengthens or shortens the tube, and thus changing the key of the instrument, acquires all the tones which can be obtained from so many tubes of different lengths. The mouth-pieces of the trumpet, trombone, and tuba are cup-shaped, and larger than the mouth-piece of the horn, which is little else than a flare of the slender tube, sufficiently wide to receive enough of the player's lips to form the embouchure, or human reed, as it might here be named.

[Sidenote: _The French horn._]

[Sidenote: _Manipulation of the French horn._]

The French horn (Plate IX.), as it is called in the orchestra, is the sweetest and mellowest of all the wind instruments. In Beethoven's time it was but little else than the old hunting-horn, which, for the convenience of the mounted hunter, was arranged in spiral convolutions that it might be slipped over the head and carried resting on one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The Germans still call it the _Waldhorn_, _i.e._, "forest horn;" the old French name was _cor de chasse_, the Italian _corno di caccia_. In this instrument formerly the tones which were not the natural resonances of the harmonic division of the tube were helped out by partly closing the bell with the right hand, it having been discovered accidentally that by putting the hand into the lower end of the tube--the flaring part called the bell--the pitch of a tone was raised. Players still make use of this method for convenience, and sometimes because a composer wishes to employ the slightly muffled effect of these tones; but since valves have been added to the instrument, it is possible to play a chromatic scale in what are called the unstopped or open tones.

[Sidenote: _Kinds of horns._]

[Sidenote: _The trumpet._]

[Sidenote: _The cornet._]

Formerly it was necessary to use horns of different pitch, and composers still respect this tradition, and designate the key of the horns which they wish to have employed; but so skilful have the players become that, as a rule, they use horns whose fundamental tone is F for all keys, and achieve the old purpose by simply transposing the music as they read it. If these most graceful instruments were straightened out they would be seventeen feet long. The convolutions of the horn and the many turns of the trumpet are all the fruit of necessity; they could not be manipulated to produce the tones that are asked of them if they were not bent and curved. The trumpet, when its tube is lengthened by the addition of crooks for its lowest key, is eight feet long; the tuba, sixteen. In most orchestras (in all of those in the United States, in fact, except the Boston and Chicago Orchestras and the Symphony Society of New York) the word trumpet is merely a euphemism for cornet, the familiar leading instrument of the brass band, which, while it falls short of the trumpet in the quality of its tone, in the upper registers especially, is a more easily manipulated instrument than the trumpet, and is preferable in the lower tones.

[Sidenote: _The trombone._]

Mendelssohn is quoted as saying that the trombones (Plate X.) "are too sacred to use often." They have, indeed, a majesty and nobility all their own, and the lowest use to which they can be put is to furnish a flaring and noisy harmony in an orchestral _tutti_. They are marvellously expressive instruments, and without a peer in the whole instrumental company when a solemn and spiritually uplifting effect is to be attained. They can also be made to sound menacing and lugubrious, devout and mocking, pompously heroic, majestic, and lofty. They are often the heralds of the orchestra, and make sonorous proclamations.

[Sidenote: _Trombone effects._]

[Sidenote: _The tuba._]

The classic composers always seemed to approach the trombones with marked respect, but nowadays it requires a very big blue pencil in the hands of a very uncompromising conservatory professor to prevent a student engaged on his _Opus 1_ from keeping his trombones going half the time at least. It is an old story how Mozart keeps the instruments silent through three-fourths of his immortal "Don Giovanni," so that they may enter with overwhelming impressiveness along with the ghostly visitor of the concluding scene. As a rule, there are three trombones in the modern orchestra--two tenors and a bass. Formerly there were four kinds, bearing the names of the voices to which they were supposed to be nearest in tone-quality and compass--soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Full four-part harmony is now performed by the three trombones and the tuba (Plate XI.). The latter instrument, which, despite its gigantic size, is exceedingly tractable can "roar you as gently as any sucking dove." Far-away and strangely mysterious tones are got out of the brass instruments, chiefly the cornet and horn, by almost wholly closing the bell.

[Sidenote: _Instruments of percussion._]

[Sidenote: _The xylophone._]

[Sidenote: _Kettle-drums._]

[Sidenote: _Pfund's tuning device._]

[Sidenote: _Pitch of the drums._]

[Sidenote: _Qualifications of a drummer._]

The percussion apparatus of the modern orchestra includes a multitude of instruments scarcely deserving of description. Several varieties of drums, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, steel bars (_Glockenspiel_), gongs, bells, and many other things which we are now inclined to look upon as toys, rather than as musical instruments, are brought into play for reasons more or less fantastic. Saint-Saëns has even utilized the barbarous xylophone, whose proper place is the variety hall, in his "Danse Macabre." There his purpose was a fantastic one, and the effect is capital. The pictorial conceit at the bottom of the poem which the music illustrates is Death, as a skeleton, seated on a tombstone, playing the viol, and gleefully cracking his bony heels against the marble. To produce this effect, the composer uses the xylophone with capital results. But of all the ordinary instruments of percussion, the only one that is really musical and deserving of comment is the kettle-drum. This instrument is more musical than the others because it has pitch. Its voice is not mere noise, but musical noise. Kettle-drums, or tympani, are generally used in pairs, though the vast multiplication of effects by modern composers has resulted also in the extension of this department of the band. It is seldom that more than two pairs are used, a good player with a quick ear being able to accomplish all that Wagner asks of six drums by his deftness in changing the pitch of the instruments. This work of tuning is still performed generally in what seems a rudimentary way, though a German drum-builder named Pfund invented a contrivance by which the player, by simply pressing on a balanced pedal and watching an indicator affixed to the side of the drums, can change the pitch to any desired semitone within the range of an octave.

The tympani are hemispherical brass or copper vessels, kettles in short, covered with vellum heads. The pitch of the instrument depends on the tension of the head, which is applied generally by key-screws working through the iron ring which holds the vellum. There is a difference in the size of the drums to place at the command of the player the octave from F in the first space below the bass staff to F on the fourth line of the same staff. Formerly the purpose of the drums was simply to give emphasis, and they were then uniformly tuned to the key-note and fifth of the key in which a composition was set. Now they are tuned in many ways, not only to allow for the frequent change of keys, but also so that they may be used as harmony instruments. Berlioz did more to develop the drums than any composer who has ever lived, though Beethoven already manifested appreciation of their independent musical value. In the last movement of his Eighth Symphony and the scherzo of his Ninth, he tunes them in octaves, his purpose in the latter case being to give the opening figure, an octave leap, of the scherzo melody to the drums solo. The most extravagant use ever made of the drums, however, was by Berlioz in his "Messe des Morts," where he called in eight pairs of drums and ten players to help him to paint his tonal picture of the terrors of the last judgment. The post of drummer is one of the most difficult to fill in a symphonic orchestra. He is required to have not only a perfect sense of time and rhythm, but also a keen sense of pitch, for often the composer asks him to change the pitch of one or both of his drums in the space of a very few seconds. He must then be able to shut all other sounds out of his mind, and bring his drums into a new key while the orchestra is playing--an extremely nice task.

[Sidenote: _The bass drum._]

The development of modern orchestral music has given dignity also to the bass drum, which, though definite pitch is denied to it, is now manipulated in a variety of ways productive of striking effects. Rolls are played on it with the sticks of the kettle-drums, and it has been emancipated measurably from the cymbals, which in vulgar brass-band music are its inseparable companions.

[Sidenote: _The conductor._]

[Sidenote: _Time-beaters and interpreters._]

[Sidenote: _The conductor a necessity._]

In the full sense of the term the orchestral conductor is a product of the latter half of the present century. Of course, ever since concerted music began, there has been a musical leader of some kind. Mural paintings and carvings fashioned in Egypt long before Apollo sang his magic song and

"Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers,"

show the conductor standing before his band beating time by clapping his hands; and if we are to credit what we have been told about Hebrew music, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, when they stood before their multitudinous choirs in the temple at Jerusalem, promoted synchronism in the performance by stamping upon the floor with lead-shodden feet. Before the era which developed what I might call "star" conductors, these leaders were but captains of tens and captains of hundreds who accomplished all that was expected of them if they made the performers keep musical step together. They were time-beaters merely--human metronomes. The modern conductor is, in a sense not dreamed of a century ago, a mediator between the composer and the audience. He is a virtuoso who plays upon men instead of a key-board, upon a hundred instruments instead of one. Music differs from her sister arts in many respects, but in none more than in her dependence on the intermediary who stands between her and the people for whose sake she exists. It is this intermediary who wakens her into life.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter,"

is a pretty bit of hyperbole which involves a contradiction in terms. An unheard melody is no melody at all, and as soon as we have music in which a number of singers or instrumentalists are employed, the taste, feeling, and judgment of an individual are essential to its intelligent and effective publication. In the gentle days of the long ago, when suavity and loveliness of utterance and a recognition of formal symmetry were the "be-all and end-all" of the art, a time-beater sufficed to this end; but now the contents of music are greater, the vessel has been wondrously widened, the language is become curiously complex and ingenious, and no composer of to-day can write down universally intelligible signs for all that he wishes to say. Someone must grasp the whole, expound it to the individual factors which make up the performing sum and provide what is called an interpretation to the public.

[Sidenote: _"Star" conductors._]

That someone, of course, is the conductor, and considering the progress that music is continually making it is not at all to be wondered at that he has become a person of stupendous power in the culture of to-day. The one singularity is that he should be so rare. This rarity has had its natural consequence, and the conductor who can conduct, in contradistinction to the conductor who can only beat time, is now a "star." At present we see him going from place to place in Europe giving concerts in which he figures as the principal attraction. The critics discuss his "readings" just as they do the performances of great pianists and singers. A hundred blowers of brass, scrapers of strings, and tootlers on windy wood, labor beneath him transmuting the composer's mysterious symbols into living sound, and when it is all over we frequently find that it seems all to have been done for the greater glory of the conductor instead of the glory of art. That, however, is a digression which it is not necessary to pursue.

[Sidenote: _Mistaken popular notions._]

[Sidenote: _What the conductor does._]

[Sidenote: _Rests and cues._]

Questions and remarks have frequently been addressed to me indicative of the fact that there is a widespread popular conviction that the mission of a conductor is chiefly ornamental at an orchestral concert. That is a sad misconception, and grows out of the old notion that a conductor is only a time-beater. Assuming that the men of the band have played sufficiently together, it is thought that eventually they might keep time without the help of the conductor. It is true that the greater part of the conductor's work is done at rehearsal, at which he enforces upon his men his wishes concerning the speed of the music, expression, and the balance of tone between the different instruments. But all the injunctions given at rehearsal by word of mouth are reiterated by means of a system of signs and signals during the concert performance. Time and rhythm are indicated by the movements of the bâton, the former by the speed of the beats, the latter by the direction, the tones upon which the principal stress is to fall being indicated by the down-beat of the bâton. The amplitude of the movements also serves to indicate the conductor's wishes concerning dynamic variations, while the left hand is ordinarily used in pantomimic gestures to control individual players or groups. Glances and a play of facial expression also assist in the guidance of the instrumental body. Every musician is expected to count the rests which occur in his part, but when they are of long duration (and sometimes they amount to a hundred measures or more) it is customary for the conductor to indicate the entrance of an instrument by a glance at the player. From this mere outline of the communications which pass between the conductor and his band it will be seen how indispensable he is if music is to have a consistent and vital interpretation.

[Sidenote: _Personal magnetism._]

The layman will perhaps also be enabled, by observing the actions of a conductor with a little understanding of their purposes, to appreciate what critics mean when they speak of the "magnetism" of a leader. He will understand that among other things it means the aptitude or capacity for creating a sympathetic relationship between himself and his men which enables him the better by various devices, some arbitrary, some technical and conventional, to imbue them with his thoughts and feelings relative to a composition, and through them to body them forth to the audience.

[Sidenote: _The score._]

[Sidenote: _Its arrangement._]

[Sidenote: _Score reading._]

What it is that the conductor has to guide him while giving his mute commands to his forces may be seen in the reproduction, in the Appendix, of a page from an orchestral score (Plate XII). A score, it will be observed, is a reproduction of all the parts of a composition as they lie upon the desks of the players. The ordering of these parts in the score has not always been as now, but the plan which has the widest and longest approval is that illustrated in our example. The wood-winds are grouped together on the uppermost six staves, the brass in the middle with the tympani separating the horns and trumpets from the trombones, the strings on the lowermost five staves. The example has been chosen because it shows all the instruments of the band employed at once (it is the famous opening _tutti_ of the triumphal march of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony), and is easy of comprehension by musical amateurs for the reason that none of the parts requires transposition except it be an octave up in the case of the piccolo, an instrument of four-foot tone, and an octave down in the case of the double-basses, which are of sixteen-foot tone. All the other parts are to be read as printed, proper attention being given to the alto and tenor clefs used in the parts of the trombones and violas. The ability to "read score" is one of the most essential attributes of a conductor, who, if he have the proper training, can bring all the parts together and reproduce them on the pianoforte, transposing those which do not sound as written and reading the different clefs at sight as he goes along.

V

_At an Orchestral Concert_

[Sidenote: _Classical and Popular._]

[Sidenote: _Orchestras and military bands._]

In popular phrase all high-class music is "classical," and all concerts at which such music is played are "classical concerts." Here the word is conceived as the antithesis of "popular," which term is used to designate the ordinary music of the street and music-hall. Elsewhere I have discussed the true meaning of the word and shown its relation to "romantic" in the terminology of musical critics and historians. No harm is done by using both "classical" and "popular" in their common significations, so far as they convey a difference in character between concerts. The highest popular conception of a classical concert is one in which a complete orchestra performs symphonies and extended compositions in allied forms, such as overtures, symphonic poems, and concertos. Change the composition of the instrumental body, by omitting the strings and augmenting the reed and brass choirs, and you have a military band which is best employed in the open air, and whose programmes are generally made up of compositions in the simpler and more easily comprehended forms--dances, marches, fantasias on popular airs, arrangements of operatic excerpts and the like. These, then, are popular concerts in the broadest sense, though it is proper enough to apply the term also to concerts given by a symphonic band when the programme is light in character and aims at more careless diversion than should be sought at a "classical" concert. The latter term, again, is commended to use by the fact that as a rule the music performed at such a concert exemplifies the higher forms in the art, classicism in music being defined as that principle which seeks expression in beauty of form, in a symmetrical ordering of parts and logical sequence, "preferring æsthetic beauty, pure and simple, over emotional content," as I have said in Chapter III.

[Sidenote: _The Symphony._]

[Sidenote: _Mistaken ideas about the form._]

As the highest type of instrumental music, we take the Symphony. Very rarely indeed is a concert given by an organization like the New York and London Philharmonic Societies, or the Boston and Chicago Orchestras, at which the place of honor in the scheme of pieces is not given to a symphony. Such a concert is for that reason also spoken of popularly as a "Symphony concert," and no confusion would necessarily result from the use of the term even if it so chanced that there was no symphony on the programme. What idea the word symphony conveys to the musically illiterate it would be difficult to tell. I have known a professional writer on musical subjects to express the opinion that a symphony was nothing else than four unrelated compositions for orchestra arranged in a certain sequence for the sake of an agreeable contrast of moods and tempos. It is scarcely necessary to say that the writer in question had a very poor opinion of the Symphony as an Art-form, and believed that it had outlived its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of Archaic Things. If he, however, trained in musical history and familiar with musical literature, could see only four unrelated pieces of music in a symphony by Beethoven, we need not marvel that hazy notions touching the nature of the form are prevalent among the untaught public, and that people can be met in concert-rooms to whom such words as "Symphony in C minor," and the printed designations of the different portions of the work--the "movements," as musicians call them--are utterly bewildering.

[Sidenote: _History of the term._]

[Sidenote: _Changes in meaning._]

[Sidenote: _Handel's "Pastoral Symphony."_]