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."_]
The word symphony has itself a singularly variegated history. Like
many another term in music it was borrowed by the modern world from
the ancient Greek. To those who coined it, however, it had a much
narrower meaning than to us who use it, with only a conventional
change in transliteration, now. By [Greek: symphônia] the Greeks
simply expressed the concept of agreement, or consonance. Applied to
music it meant first such intervals as unisons; then the notion was
extended to include consonant harmonies, such as the fifth, fourth,
and octave. The study of the ancient theoreticians led the musicians
of the Middle Ages to apply the word to harmony in general. Then in
some inexplicable fashion it came to stand as a generic term for
instrumental compositions such as toccatas, sonatas, etc. Its name was
given to one of the precursors of the pianoforte, and in Germany in
the sixteenth century the word _Symphoney_ came to mean a town band.
In the last century and the beginning of this the term was used to
designate an instrumental introduction to a composition for voices,
such as a song or chorus, as also an instrumental piece introduced in
a choral work. The form, that is the extent and structure of the
composition, had nothing to do with the designation, as we see from
the Italian shepherds' tune which Handel set for strings in "The
Messiah;" he called it simply _pifa_, but his publishers called it a
"Pastoral symphony," and as such we still know it. It was about the
middle of the eighteenth century that the present signification
became crystallized in the word, and since the symphonies of Haydn, in
which the form first reached perfection, are still to be heard in our
concert-rooms, it may be said that all the masterpieces of symphonic
literature are current.
[Sidenote: _The allied forms._]
[Sidenote: _Sonata form._]
[Sidenote: _Symphony, sonata, and concerto._]
I have already hinted at the fact that there is an intimate
relationship between the compositions usually heard at a classical
concert. Symphonies, symphonic poems, concertos for solo instruments
and orchestra, as well as the various forms of chamber music, such as
trios, quartets, and quintets for strings, or pianoforte and strings,
are but different expressions of the idea which is best summed up in
the word sonata. What musicians call the "sonata form" lies at the
bottom of them all--even those which seem to consist of a single
piece, like the symphonic poem and overture. Provided it follow, not
of necessity slavishly, but in its general structure, a certain scheme
which was slowly developed by the geniuses who became the law-givers
of the art, a composite or cyclical composition (that is, one
composed of a number of parts, or movements) is, as the case may be, a
symphony, concerto, or sonata. It is a sonata if it be written for a
solo instrument like the pianoforte or organ, or for one like the
violin or clarinet, with pianoforte accompaniment. If the
accompaniment be written for orchestra, it is called a concerto. A
sonata written for an orchestra is a symphony. The nature of the
interpreting medium naturally determines the exposition of the form,
but all the essential attributes can be learned from a study of the
symphony, which because of the dignity and eloquence of its apparatus
admits of a wider scope than its allies, and must be accepted as the
highest type, not merely of the sonata, but of the instrumental art.
It will be necessary presently to point out the more important
modifications which compositions of this character have undergone in
the development of music, but the ends of clearness will be best
subserved if the study be conducted on fundamental lines.
[Sidenote: _What a symphony is._]
[Sidenote: _The bond of unity between the parts._]
The symphony then, as a rule, is a composition for orchestra made up
of four parts, or movements, which are not only related to each other
by a bond of sympathy established by the keys chosen but also by their
emotional contents. Without this higher bond the unity of the work
would be merely mechanical, like the unity accomplished by sameness of
key in the old-fashioned suite. (See Chapter VI.) The bond of
key-relationship, though no longer so obvious as once it was, is yet
readily discovered by a musician; the spiritual bond is more elusive,
and presents itself for recognition to the imagination and the
feelings of the listener. Nevertheless, it is an element in every
truly great symphony, and I have already indicated how it may
sometimes become patent to the ear alone, so it be intelligently
employed, and enjoy the co-operation of memory.
[Sidenote: _The first movement._]
[Sidenote: _Exposition of subjects._]
[Sidenote: _Repetition of the first subdivision._]
It is the first movement of a symphony which embodies the structural
scheme called the "sonata form." It has a triple division, and Mr.
Edward Dannreuther has aptly defined it as "the triune symmetry of
exposition, illustration, and repetition." In the first division the
composer introduces the melodies which he has chosen to be the
thematic material of the movement, and to fix the character of the
entire work; he presents it for identification. The themes are two,
and their exposition generally exemplifies the principle of
key-relationship, which was the basis of my analysis of a simple folk
tune in Chapter II. In the case of the best symphonists the principal
and second subjects disclose a contrast, not violent but yet distinct,
in mood or character. If the first is rhythmically energetic and
assertive--masculine, let me say--the second will be more sedate, more
gentle in utterance--feminine. After the two subjects have been
introduced along with some subsidiary phrases and passages which the
composer uses to bind them together and modulate from one key into
another, the entire division is repeated. That is the rule, but it is
now as often "honored in the breach" as in the observance, some
conductors not even hesitating to ignore the repeat marks in
Beethoven's scores.
[Sidenote: _The free fantasia or "working-out" portion._]
[Sidenote: _Repetition._]