The Evolution of Modern Orchestration

It is not the purpose of this work to write a treatise on instrumentation or to prepare a pedagogical analysis of orchestration only, but rather to trace the evolution of the or...

Primitive men were no doubt impelled to give utterance to their feelings by a desire for awakening sympathetic response in their fellow beings. Vocal manifestation of feeling de...

The awakening interest for instrumental music received its incentive from two distinctive sources--the organ, and accompaniment to solo singing. As a natural corollary to centur...

The first serious attention bestowed upon the mechanism of instruments and the selection of those whose qualities should justify permanent retention occurred during the sixteent...

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDE[1] (1567-1643) is justly styled the founder of the modern orchestra; but although modern orchestral organization owes its substratum of solidity and balance o...

IV. Polyphonic choral art of the Netherland School developed consecutively contrapuntal technique, euphony, objective emotionalism, and culminated in the works of Lasso, when it...

II. Search for intensified expression and dramatic effects led to attempts at monody. The principles of monody are to be traced to the Miracle Plays, the Troubadours, the Greek...

From primitive stringed instruments played with a bow, such as the Celtic crwth and the Oriental rebab, devolved the vielle, thence the subsequent varieties of viols proper, fin...

MONTEVERDE'S creative genius led to three tangible results:--(1) Dramatic expression; (2) the founding of a serviceable orchestra based on bowed instruments; (3) diversity of st...

An attempt to portray in a felicitous manner the progress of orchestration during the classic era is apt to carry one between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand lies the temp...

GLUCK (1714-1787), the third of the great drama reformers, and predecessor of Wagner in the establishment of dramatic continuity, did not appear as the champion of revivified He...

It is almost superfluous to say that HAYDN[11] (1732-1809), the true father of the modern symphony and string quartet, was, after Monteverde and Scarlatti, the most potent facto...

The career of Beethoven, extending well into the nineteenth century, overlaps the rise and growth of the Romantic Movement,--a movement that embodied tendencies with which his l...

Bach's contemporaries in Italy were engaged in composing church music and in writing operas that should satisfy the existing demands for vocal virtuosity. With few exceptions, t...

GLUCK, engrossed in resuscitating and furthering the principles promulgated by Peri and Lulli, used the orchestra primarily as a dramatic interpreter, and his scoring is conspic...

HAYDN was the third great orchestral innovator in historic evolution, and from him date the beginnings of modern orchestration, just as Bach represents organ and Protestant Chur...

During the development of Beethoven's mighty conquests, Paris continued to attract aspirants to fame in operatic lines, whereas modern church music found a worthy representative...

A convenient classification of the great German composers of the nineteenth century is to be found in "Famous Composers and their Works," a classification which will be followed...

The representatives of classical romanticism are Raff, Rubinstein, Goldmark, Brahms, Bruch, Rheinberger. The influence that Raff and Brahms had upon orchestration requires espec...

Three countries, France, Hungary and Germany, share the honors in having brought forth three of the greatest orchestral composers, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, who together founde...

=France.= It will be recalled that Chapter VIII treats of the flourishing conditions of musical art in France at the time when it was undergoing a series of metamorphoses that e...

pages call attention to Spontini's historic grand opera, to Rossini's seductive charm, and to the "mellifluous fabrications of Donizetti and Bellini with which undramatic produc...

=Hungary.= The music of Hungary with specific relation to orchestration calls for but brief comment beyond what has already been said in connection with Liszt on page 92 and wit...

The German composers of the nineteenth century are for convenience classified in three general groups: "The Romantic School," "The Classical Romanticists," "The New Movement." T...

The representatives of classical romanticism are Raff, Rubinstein, Goldmark, Brahms, Bruch, Rheinberger. Although all of these men displayed rare skill in the application of orc...

BERLIOZ was practically the first representative of the New Movement, but contrary to the natural course of evolution, he was not only its founder but at once its most radical e...

(1) =France.= The French composers of the nineteenth century may for convenience be divided into several distinctive groups. After Berlioz, a number of representative writers de...

The universal development of musical art during the nineteenth century is indeed unprecedented. Side by side with the rise and growth of the New Movement in Germany, side by sid...