It is now possible to speak more in detail about those essential qualities of good orchestration to which reference was made at the beginning of this part of the book. Unless I have failed to make myself understood, the reader will be prepared, in applying the principles of orchestration to those works which may come under his attention, to benefit by historical perspective. He will not expect of Haydn or Mozart such richness and complexity of scoring as he will demand and find in the works of contemporaneous composers. The technics of orchestral writing are very thoroughly and widely understood in our day. It is expected, as a matter of course, that every composer shall understand them. Now, this does not purport to be a text-book on orchestration, yet it is desirable that something be said for the information of the amateur of music about the requirements of good orchestration. The object of a volume of this kind is to help people to enjoy music by pointing out what composers have designed for their enjoyment. The pleasure to be derived from the performance of an orchestral composition must naturally be largely increased when the listener is alert to catch all the varieties of excellence which may be combined in it. Orchestration, as I have already said, does not mean the playing of an orchestra, though the word is frequently misused in that sense. It means writing for an orchestra, and it has certain requirements not always to be found even in the works of the great masters. Schumann, for example, scored very poorly, and some of his works suffer by reason of his inability to clothe his poetic thoughts in the most eloquent instrumental language. Meyerbeer, on the other hand, was a veritable trickster with instruments, and could produce a theatrical effect with a penny-ballad idea, while Berlioz could enchant an audience with no idea at all. Beethoven and Wagner are two of the perfect models of orchestral writing, the former in the classic and early romantic style, and the latter in the fully developed romantic style.

The qualities of good orchestration are solidity, balance of tone, contrast, and variety. By solidity is meant a close warp of the instrumental sounds which does not seem to have holes in it. A chord played by a full orchestra should sound like the utterance of one great instrument, not like the utterance of a number of individuals. The tones of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, brass, and strings should blend into one grand body. When such a result is achieved, whether it be with three instruments or one hundred, the tone is said to be solid. If the tone is not solid, it is because the harmony is not properly dispersed. Either the chords are not written in a sufficiently extended form or they are distributed wrongly among the instruments. The first requirement of solidity is good writing for the strings. It is absolutely necessary that their part should be so written that it is capable of independence; that is, it should sound solid when played without the other instruments. The composer must give each note of a chord to that instrument which is best qualified to utter it, and he must write his chords so that they are suited to orchestral enunciation.

Pianists make sad mistakes when they come to write for orchestra, because they try to write in a piano style. They are so accustomed to seeing a melody in the treble clef and all the accompaniment in the bass, that they frequently fail to find any use for their soprano instruments except the utterance of the melody, while all the barytone and bass instruments grumble a muddy accompaniment, and thus, as musicians say, the orchestra is “all top and bottom.” The illustration below will help to explain what I mean. It shows the first two measures of “Home, Sweet Home,” scored à la pianist, with the orchestra all top and bottom, and as an orchestral writer would spread it out in full harmony and with just a trifle of instrumental effect in the arpeggio for the second clarinet doubled by the ’celli pizzicati, and the basses also written pizzicati to accentuate the attack of each chord.

Even in writing so simple a thing as this, one must keep in mind always the relative tonal powers of the various instruments. For instance, in the second measure the first trumpet should play the B and then descend to the G, because otherwise it would make the upper D too strong and destroy the effect of the melody. The first trombone should do the same thing. The upper D in each chord should go to the first horn and the first bassoon.

Balance of tone is an expression used to indicate a preservation of the equilibrium of power among the three choirs, so that one shall not be heard too clearly at the expense of another. In most instances this depends upon principles similar to those which govern solidity, but it also requires a constant consideration of the sonority of the three choirs regarded as separate bodies. For instance, the wood-wind instruments cannot possibly be played as softly as the strings; hence, if the composer wishes to get a pianissimo effect, he must not write full chords for the wood. Strings, with clarinets or flutes in the lower register, produce an excellent pianissimo. Cornets, on the other hand, cannot play pianissimo along with strings, because their softest tone is louder than that of the strings, and the balance is destroyed. Balance of tone, when all the instruments are playing together, is largely dependent upon the judgment of the conductor. He should see to it, for instance, that his brass instruments do not play too loudly. But it is also a matter of scoring, and frequently a conductor is helpless in the presence of the written page. In the scherzo of Schumann’s E flat symphony there is a passage in which the first theme is given to the clarinets, bassoon, second violins, violas, and ’cellos, while the first violins, trumpets, and horns play chords above them. All are directed to play mezzo-forte, and the result is that the brass chords quite overpower the melody. A similar passage is to be found in the andante of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. No conductor can get a perfect balance of tone out of such passages.

Contrast is obtained by employing instruments of different tone-quality to play the principal parts at different times. A principal melodic idea may be introduced by a trumpet or a clarinet, and continued by flutes or oboes, and finally sung by all the first violins. Sometimes the wood-wind plays alone, to be succeeded by the strings. These alternations of tonal color produce contrasts, without which the richest and most solid scoring might become monotonous. Variety is the result of mixing the tonal tints. For instance, some passages will be written for two flutes, two horns and strings; presently all the strings cease to sound except the first violins, which chant the melody supported by a harmony of brass; now the tone of the clarinets mingles with that of the violins, and the combination of the two produces a new color. Variety is also obtained by giving melodic fragments, not essential parts of the melody, to some of the instruments not engaged in voicing the principal theme. As the author has had occasion to say elsewhere:

“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.