A Concise History of the Symphony Orchestra
 

Music in the West probably came out of Egypt. The art of Ancient Egypt depicts a number of instruments that were clearly antecedents of later European instruments such as the harp and flute. The sistrum—metal discs strung on wires within a framework and handle that could be held in one hand and shook—was the forerunner of the tambourine. Egyptian music appeared to be largely sacerdotal as opposed to secular or profane. We cannot be certain. The art depicts priests and priestesses rather than peasants making music on instruments. This would make sense as the average farmer or laborer would have neither the time nor money to afford an instrument as well receiving instruction to play it.

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An Egyptian sistrum. The handle is fashioned into an image of the cat goddess Bastet.

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Harp.

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Lyre.

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Guitar or lute.

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Flute or pipes.

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An Egyptian musical ensemble or orchestra. Judging from the available art from the classical period, female musicians seemed to significantly outnumber their male counterparts.

Exactly what Egyptian music of that period sounded like we can only guess. This composition by Brian Eno and David Byrne that utilized a sample of Egyptian singing might give us a clue:


Byrne & Eno | A Secret Life - YouTube

Exactly how the music of Egypt propagated is anyone’s guess. We can assume it made inroads into Ancient Greece and into Palestine.

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Ancient Hebrew coins from about 125 BCE depicting lyres reminiscent of those made by the Egyptians.

But we would be in error, I think, if we assumed this was a one-way street. Musical expression of forms arose in different regions and locales and spread out and overlapped resulting in a lot of hybridization. One example would be the bowed instruments which likely originated in Central Asia and into the Middle and Far East which made inroads in Europe in medieval times when Arabic and Turkish music and instruments became the rage.

Another source of music that was likely greatly influenced by Egypt was Greece. The groundwork of music theory in Ancient Greece was laid by the Pythagoreans so it likely sounded quite different. The following clip is an example of what Ancient Greek lyre music sounded like:


Ancient Greek Music - The Lyre of Classical Antiquity... - YouTube

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The double-pipes of Egypt found a home in Greece.

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The man on the right plays a type of tambourine.

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An example of Greek musical notation on a hymn to Apollo. The small marks over the letters indicate the melody. This was known as ekphonetic notation. This could only have allowed a loose interpretation of the melody and so probably no two people sang it exactly alike.

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The music of Greece made its way to Rome and the instruments came with the music. Here the double-pipes and the tambourine find favor among the Romans.

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A long horn is featured here and well as a small water organ called a hydraulis which the Romans inherited from the Greeks.

A clip of the music of Ancient Rome:

Ancient Roman Music - Synaulia I - YouTube

After the collapse of the Western Empire in the fifth century, Europe entered a period called the Dark Ages, so named because the infrastructure of the Empire had completely collapsed. Governance was put under the auspices of the Church and education was promptly supplanted by superstition and there was a corresponding dearth of cultural output. Europe was so in the throes of this darkness that when a nova appeared in the skies in 1054, Europe appears to be the only place on earth that did not write about nor depict it. There is an account that Charlemagne, the Frankish king of the 7th century, compiled a library of contemporary music. He would hold what amounted to open mic nights at his palace and anyone with a song could come in to perform it. If Charlemagne liked it, he would have a monk or other person skilled in writing music take it down on manuscript paper (which was made from animal skin at that time). Reportedly, he had collected thousands of songs from all corners of Frankish Empire. Many of the songs were said to be quite ribald and few, if any, were of a religious nature. As a result, upon his death, Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, had the library burned. Needless to say, this is a tremendous loss to us today for this library, if it existed, would have provided us the only substantial window into what music of the Dark Ages sounded like, particularly the folksongs and secular songs.

Consequently, the earliest examples we have today of music from Central and Western Europe are religious hymns. These were done predominantly in plainchant—a monophonic style that could be sung by one voice or many in unison sans harmony. Gregorian chant is an example of plainchant. Monks in the choirs had to commit hundreds of chants to memory. Secular music, also monophonic, was performed and sung during this period but not written down until the 12th century.

Originally, these chants were passed down orally as Europe had no system of musical notation during the Dark Ages. By the 9th century, with the Dark Ages finally fading, the chants began being notated in neume notation. “Neume” is a corruption of the Greek word “pneuma” or breath/wind. Each syllable in a chant is sung in one breath and is called a neume. A nueme can consist of more than one note and usually consists of several. However, there are chants with only one note neume per syllable called syllabic while a multi-note neume syllable is called neumatic. There is another type of chant consisting of several neumes per syllable called melismatic.

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Neume notation. No staff lines were used (cheironomic). The dots (which may have symbolized rising and falling hand gestures) were aids to help construct the melody but, like ekphonic notation, no two people would sing this piece the same way unless trained by the same teacher.

Neume notation probably started in the Eastern Empire as there are a great many examples of it still in existence from Turkey, Syria, Israel and Lebanon, most of it in Aramaic (the Roman Empire had fragmented into two halves in the 4th century with Rome remaining the capital of the Western Empire and Constantinople becoming the capital of the Eastern Empire which became the Byzantine Empire). It was brought to the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne who wanted the hymns sung in the tradition of the Romans. The pieces still had to be learned by ear and the notation would then function as a mnemonic device to aid the singers in forming the melody.

In the 11th century, Guido (known as Guido Monaco or Guido of Arezzo), an Italian Benedictine monk at the monastery of Pomposa, noted how the singers often had trouble remembering the chants. He decided a more precise method of preserving the chants was called for. He came up with a system that was met with praise but some monks thought he was destroying tradition and criticized him. To escape their harassment, Guido fled to the city of Arezzo where Bishop Tedald put him in charge of training the cathedral singers. Among the techniques that Guido invented were the use of staff lines and solmization.

Staff lines not only told a singer whether to sing higher or lower but also exactly which note to sing. Because the plainchants used no instruments besides voice, the staff lines didn’t solve the problem how to know one was in key nor how to sing a certain unfamiliar interval. So Guido implemented solmization where each note was represented by a syllable. The scheme ran ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la. We call this the solfeggio—do-re-mi-fa-sol-ia-si (ti)-do. Guido took his syllables from the first stanza of the 8th century “Hymn of St. John” by Paulus Diaconus:

Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.

(So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John!)

Later, “si” was added to complete the diatonic scale and was derived from “Sancte Iohannes.” By assigning a syllable to each note, the singer can internally hear the notes written on the page and then sing them.

Other sources say that Guido actually borrowed the Arabic solmization scheme of Durar Mufassalat or “separated pearls,” which runs: Dal, ra, mim, fa, sad, lam, ta. Since Arabic and Turkish music was becoming very popular in Europe at that time, this is a distinct possibility.

With Guido’s system, the chants could be faithfully reproduced even by those who had not heard them before.

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Square notation using Guido’s staff lines. The staves allowed the melody to be sung the same way by everybody.


Kyrie, Gregorian Plainchant - YouTube

Gregorian chant was an early Western form of organized music. Originally, it was monophonic as the Kyrie chant above but by the Middle Ages became almost polyphonic—a forerunner called heterophonic. This style of chant was known as organum and had a far more haunting quality:


Lullay, lullay: Als I lay on Yoolis night - YouTube
Anonymous 4 “Lullay, Lullay: Als I lay on Yoolis Night”


Chant of the Templars - Da Pacem Domine - YouTube
Chant of the Templars “Da Pacem Domine”

You are mistaken. The man third from the left plays tambourine. The man on the far right is on his jock.

Concise.

Lord larehip's threads are the bestest. No joke. They're an education.

That ancient Roman tune is just dying to have a heavy metal version made of it. ;)

Sounds way more like Coltrane.

By medieval times, instruments began to be used in liturgical music to supplement the voices. This was a big step in the evolution of European music because musicians were previously seen as profane entertainers who busked in the streets for money performing ribald numbers that were often out-and-out obscene (“My man, John, had a thing that was long / My maid, Mary, had a thing that was hairy / My man, John, stuck his thing that was long / Into my maid Mary's thing that was hairy” etc.). So musicians were somewhat shunned in polite society but as their services were being employed increasingly in various settings such as part of the town’s security by sounding their instruments when something was amiss and for social functions, they gained more respect and the Church inevitably began to incorporate them. The earliest musicians to perform in church were the “town musicians” of the 13th century. They were known in England as waits, as Stadtpfeifer in Germany and as pifferi in Italy. They were virtually all horn or reed players who formed into guilds, i.e. an early form of the musicians’ union. These were not the really the first orchestras but forerunners. Orchestras had set instruments for specific purposes while these loose assemblages of musicians simply played whatever their instruments would permit with none playing any set part.

Polyphony started to become an important part of the European music in the 13th century both in religious and secular settings. About this time, Europe saw the rise of the motet which originated in Northern France. The plainchant was given a rhythmic meter. This line was overlaid by one to three lines of different text and then all were sung simultaneously producing rich harmonic texture of true polyphony that sounded incomparably lovely:


Motet - Celui en qui - YouTube

Motet polyphony differed chiefly from organum heterophony in that the harmonic parts were given equal weight as the main part and all were written out. In the organum, the harmony singer or singers merely droned a note or an interval while the main line was sung. There was no direction as to which notes were droned—that was left up to the singers, whatever worked. In the motet, the harmony voices vary considerably from the main and with one another producing distinctive contrasts.

One of the best known motet composers was a priest named Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377). Not only does he qualify as an early composer but, amazingly, his entire catalog has been preserved. He wrote masses and secular songs of courtly and unrequited love which was very unusual for a Church figure. This makes Machaut important because, through him, there was no need for an evolution from sacred to secular; Machaut provided both at once.


Guillaume de Machaut - Fine Amour - YouTube

What the sacred music lacked was instrumental accompaniment. The Church still viewed instrumental music as profane. The only musical instrument fit for God was he one He created—the human voice. In the secular world, however, there were no such restrictions. Traveling troubadours played instrumentals as well as vocal music with instrumental accompaniment. These instruments included the lute, the shawm, the rebec, the tambourine, the flute, etc.


Music of the Troubadours 6: Cantaben els osells - YouTube

By the 15th century, polyphony was so accepted that only the Church still performed monophonic chanting for the mass (and still does, still written in square notation on Guido’s staff lines). In the 14th century, there was experimentation with both polyphony and heterophony to producing some very rich and haunting music. Michaut’s love songs were usually performed to instrumental accompaniment:


Medieval Virelai Music & Song - XIII th & XIV th Century - E, Dame Jolie & Douce Dame Jolie - YouTube

But in the intervening 14th century, something occurred in Europe that had a huge impact upon all of European society and the ripples of which are still being felt—the Black Death. It originally struck Europe during the Dark Ages in the 6th century and was called the “Justinian Plague” but not much is known of how it traveled or how it ended. The disease struck Europe again in 1347 and killed a third of Europe’s population. Much better documented, we know this second wave had its genesis in China. The bacterium responsible was Yersinia pestis which preferred to infect such rodents as rats, mice, marmots and voles—all of which are found in great abundance in China. The bacterium actually did not naturally attack humans but contact came through a vector—the flea. The fleas bit the rodents, contracted the bacteria, jumped off the rodent host and onto a human and bit them thereby transmitting the bacteria to human hosts. Symptoms manifested in two to five days and the stricken person fell ill and died within four days after showing symptoms. The disease came to Europe via Venetian traders who came in contact with it while traveling the Silk Road.

Symptoms consisted of high fever, severe muscle cramps, chills, seizures, extreme fatigue, delirium, coma and hematemesis (vomiting of blood). The stricken person presented a shocking spectacle due to acral gangrene which resulted in a horrid blackening of the fingers, toes, nose and lips (ecchymoses) caused by blood seeping into the tissues from ruptured blood vessels. Essentially, the flesh is decomposing while the person is alive which causes extreme pain and discomfort (as though someone is holding a blow torch to the affected area). The bacteria bred in the lymph nodes causing them to swell considerably and so lumps called buboes (hence the term “bubonic”) appeared on the groin, armpits and neck. The appearance of the buboes is ghastly and alarming. These are coupled with ugly black spots that cover the body called lenticulae.

To make matters worse, the Black Death wasn’t one disease but two: plague and cholera together. Cholera is a disease of the small intestine cause by a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae. It is caused by the introduction of fecal matter into the body from an infected host. Usually, this is transmitted via the drinking of fecal-contaminated water or the eating of shellfish harvested from such water. The bacteria that survive the journey through the stomach then bore through the mucous membrane of the small intestine and lodges in the lining where it multiplies and releases toxic proteins that cause a very runny, fishy-smelling diarrhea called “rice water” (guess why) as well as vomiting. If not treated, cholera will afflict a stricken person with sunken eyes and shriveled, wrinkled, bluish-gray skin due to acute dehydration. Today, it is treated fairly easily and with great success but in medieval Europe, it was far deadlier (it was actually known as “the Blue Death”) especially in conjunction with bubonic plague. A stricken person had no chance. The only merciful thing about the Black Death was that an afflicted person died fairly quickly albeit in agony.

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A mannequin showing what Black Death victims looked like. Actually, as bad as this looks, it is not as bad as a real victim looks. The nose and lips are usually black and the buboes are quite a bit more disgusting. With proper treatment, people who contract the plague can recover from it, even from the ecchymotic necrosis. Imagine what it must have been like to helplessly watch loved ones, family members and neighbors suffer and die of this disease. Imagine having to check your body everyday for buboes knowing if you found any, you had just days to live. Imagine there being almost no place to run from it since it was afflicting people all over Europe and Eurasia. Everywhere you go, you see people carrying and carting bodies through the streets. Not a single household was unaffected.

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A stricken man discovers buboes in his armpit while a physician discovers buboes on a woman’s neck. The Black Death struck and killed young and old, male and female indiscriminately.

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Husband and wife dying of the Black Death while a physician attempts to affect a remedy. People actually thought drawing crosses on their doors would ward off the disease. Needless to say, it didn’t.

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Venice 1349.

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The plague doctor wore a long robe and gloves, high boots, tight-fitting hat and a mask to shield him from direct contact with infected persons. The mask had a long snout because it contained various herbs and flower petals to filter and mask the stench which was believed to cause a person to get infected. To the medieval people, the Black Death was a type of malaria or “bad air.” Since they had no idea of what caused the disease and therefore no effective treatment, the plague doctors also contracted the disease and died.

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The plague doctor’s mask has a weird steam punk look to it.

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The dance of the Black Death shows how the effects of the pestilence was influencing culture. The music became dirge-like and melancholy and, in some areas, music was not played at all. The dancing skeletons were called transi.
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Instrumental Music of the Trecento: Trotto - YouTube
“Trotto” is perhaps the most famous piece of 14th century music to survive. A good 75% of most medieval music collections today will contain “Trotto.”

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In Scandinavia—hard-hit by the Black Death losing between one-third and one-half its citizens—they personified the Plague as an old hag called Pesta (sharing the same root as pest and pestilence). She was clothed a black shawl and hood and carried both a rake and a broom. If she came to town with the rake, the pestilence would not be too severe because people would escape through the teeth of rake. If she came to town with the broom, however, all would die. Interestingly, there is a metal rake-like tool called a harrow that farmers used to break up dirt make the soil more porous. It also refers to the area around a funeral bier where the casket and candleholders are placed because it resembles a rake or harrow. The French word for harrow is herce from which we get our word hearse.

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These woodcuts (from the Heidelberger Totentanz of 1488) and paintings depict the close association of dance, music and death. The Black Death must have profoundly affected the European arts. But the effects were not all bad. In the wake of pestilence, the depopulation killed feudalism, raised wages as employers vied in securing an adequate workforce and gave women opportunities to procure occupations and posts previously denied to them simply because there were not enough men to fill them. While the large cities still remained cesspools of humanity, many smaller and isolated kingdoms and villages sprang up where the streets were kept clean and people bathed and did laundry regularly. They thought cleanliness kept the diseases away and they were right but for the wrong reason. The plague was not in the filth but rather the filth attracted rats which brought the fleas which brought the disease. No filth, no rats, no fleas, no plague.

Very cool artwork, and this section reminds me of how Bach said he was broke when a healthy wind blew through.

They thought it was bad star positions too.
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Art Bears - Rats and Monkeys - YouTube

Lyrics of a medieval song:

"A sickly season," the merchant said,
"The town I left was filled with dead,
and everywhere these queer red flies
crawled upon the corpses' eyes,
eating them away."

"Fair make you sick," the merchant said,
"They crawled upon the wine and bread.
Pale priests with oil and books,
bulging eyes and crazy looks,
dropping like the flies."

"I had to laugh," the merchant said,
"The doctors purged, and dosed, and bled;
"And proved through solemn disputation
"The cause lay in some constellation.
"Then they began to die."

"First they sneezed," the merchant said,
"And then they turned the brightest red,
Begged for water, then fell back.
With bulging eyes and face turned black,
they waited for the flies."


"I came away," the merchant said,
"You can't do business with the dead.
"So I've come here to ply my trade.
"You'll find this to be a fine brocade..."

And then he sneezed.

The earliest composer in the West was Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). Born the tenth child of noble family, she was promised to the Church as a tithe (which means “tenth”). She was sent to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg and took the veil at the age of 15. She became the abbess in 1136. She knew only the monastic life for many years and had almost no contact with the outside world save for a single window until the middle of her life when she left the monastery and established a convent in Rupertsburg near Bingen in 1147. She suffered from migraine headaches. Either the headaches themselves or the treatments caused her to have visions which she wrote down (I have reason to believe she may have taken treatments using ergot which contains LSD). She also wrote music and poetry around the 1150s and a morality play in 1151 called Ordo virtutum, the oldest known morality play. She was also an artist. She also wrote treatises on philosophy, medicine and science. She was a physician and healer—to many, a prophet (because her visions often foretold the future) and miracle-worker. She was also a skilled herbalist and an early botanist. She also invented her own coded language (one has to wonder how much she might have had to do with the Voynich manuscript). Pope Eugene III loved her song, Scivias (“Know the Ways of the Lord”), which he inherited from the venerated teacher, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and read the words in public. This gave her special papal approval no other women and even few men enjoyed.

She founded another convent in Eibingen and taught her nuns about the special role of the feminine in divinity that she had seen in her visions. She taught them that women were the only fit template for the image of god since male involvement in the Immaculate Conception was non-existent but could never have happened without a woman. She would not allow her ladies to languish but made sure they were educated in science as well as religion. They learned such arts as painting and copying manuscripts including illuminating the margins. They were taught to read, write and sing music as well as learning musical instruments. They also learned to weave and tend to flocks of sheep and goats in order to be as self-sufficient as possible. Her convents even had piped-in water! She taught her nuns to bathe regularly in warm water at a time when bathing was actually seen as unhealthy! She also had the convents make their own beer which the nuns drank because Hildegard felt the water in its natural state was unsafe for consumption (she was right).

Her music was unlike anything else the Church was producing. For example, she did not write plainchant but in her own unique style which was highly original and well written. She was a known composer in her time when most written music was published anonymously:


Hildegard of Bingen, Spiritus Sanctus - YouTube

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Hildegard of Bingen.

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An example of Hildegard’s written music.

While women were forbidden by canon law to preach, Hildegard continued to lecture, publish works and as well as carry on a voluminous correspondence with popes, archbishops, rulers and ordinary clergy she had met. Her self-education must have been extensive, her intellect very high (she was regarded in her own time as a polymath) and her spirit fearless. She even opposed the Church when she gave permission for a revolutionary who had died to be buried at the Rupertsburg abbey cemetery in 1178. When the Church overruled her, she protested that the man’s sins were already absolved. The Church sent people to exhume the body. Hildegard had the grave markers removed prior to their arrival so that they would not be able to locate his grave. Angered, the canons placed the abbey under interdict meaning that, among other things, music was banned there. Hildegard vigorously protested saying that the banning of music was itself a sin but still she would not give in and identify the man’s grave. After some months, the Church gave up and lifted the interdict in March of 1179. In September of that year, Hildegard von Bingen passed from the world at the age of 81, a remarkably long life for a time when men died of “natural causes” in their 30s and 40s and few women lived long enough to see their 60s—a testament to her philosophy and practice of hygiene and healthy living. She was never officially made a saint but is often referred to as one.

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Another likeness of Hildegard, a.k.a. Sybil of the Rhine.

To recap from earlier posts, thanks to other early composers as Léonin and Pérotin, the organum-style polyphony (heterophony) or ars antiqua (old style) laid the foundations for the later polyphony. The secondary voices moving in parallel to the main vocal line was called conductus. By the 13th century, conductus was replaced by the motet which introduced counterpoint that produced striking harmonies of exquisite beauty. Meanwhile, secular song such as those performed by the French troubadours was also evolving due to being written down. Various composers began dissecting them to incorporate into their own styles and by the 14th century ars nova (new style) was born mainly due to the efforts of theorist Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) who served as a bishop but, like Hildegard, had a wide range of interests as philosopher, poet, writer, critic and composer. He was widely traveled and enjoyed great renown for his writings. His book, Ars nova, introduced the use of the minim or half-note and he is regarded by many to be the inventor of ballade. His work was a huge influence on Guillame de Machaut whom we have discussed in earlier posts.


Léonin - Christus Resurgens - YouTube

Pérotin was active in the 12th century but we don’t know when or where he was born or when or where he died (some believe he may have been a high-ranking official at the cathedral of Notre-Dame named Petrus but there is no evidence Pérotin actually had anything to do with Notre-Dame). We know Pérotin edited the Magnus liber of Léonin (about whom similarly little is known) leading some to believe he could have been a student of Léonin. This book was a very early work of musical notation containing the chants used at Notre-Dame in the late 1100s and is one of the first to be written about the use of harmony. Pérotin was greatly influenced by this book and was the first composer known to compose in more than two independent parts. He composed at least two four-part compositions and a dozen pieces for three parts. Pérotin also composed about 160 clausulae or polyphonic passages inserted into plainchants to break up the monotony. No doubt he had a lot to do with the development of the motet which emerged in his lifetime although it is not known if he ever composed in that style. His material has a surprisingly modern sound; certainly a departure from other organum compositions of that time:


Pérotin "Alleluia nativitas" - YouTube

Another important early composer (and astronomer) was John Dunstable (1390-1453) who enjoyed great success and international renown as a composer of masses, carols and motets which are not only stunningly beautiful but were extremely influential in continental Europe. He was one of the first composers to exploit the use of third and sixth intervals which became a distinctive English musical trait. Due to the popularity of his compositions, we know that by 1436 he was a wealthy man. In the decade before his death, Dunstable was, by far, the leading composer of England. His pieces continued to have great influence well after his death.


John Dunstable: Motets - Salve Regina misericordiae - YouTube

By the end of the 17th century, the orchestra had a hole in it. The highest and lowest parts of the orchestra were given emphasis but the middle part was indeterminate. The strings could have been used to fill this hole but they simply were not. This was a problem that had been noted by the end of the 16th century. After the motet introduced the idea of harmony and polyphony with striking contrasts, this idea remained even as the orchestra expanded but, at a certain point, this was outliving its usefulness. Now, the orchestra had a hole in it.

And so arose the continuo or basso continuo as it was variously called. A continuous bass line was supplied upon which chords were vertically stacked to act something akin to pillars that support the main melody. The minor melodies—that interplay in which the various instruments moved over and against one another—lost emphasis as they were too distracting. They became instead a single “block of harmony.”

To form the continuo, a minimum of two instruments were needed: a bass instrument such a double bass, cello or bassoon accompanied by an instrument capable of playing chords such as a harpsichord, lute or organ. This core supports the melody, all the other instruments now play in blocks of harmonies. It was a fundamental progression in the evolution of the symphony orchestra.

In the clip below, we see how Monteverdi uses the continuo in his opera L’Orfeo. Notice the bass instruments, namely the theorbos or chitarrones (bass lutes). You can hear the harpsichord which supplies the melodic base for the vocals. The other instruments play in blocks of harmonies.


Monteverdi - L'Orfeo - Savall - YouTube

The continuo became the orchestra’s backbone. Eventually, the continuo resolved itself into a trio of harpsichord, cello and double bass. All three read from the harpsichordist’s sheet music. The bassist and cellist had to peer over harpsichordist’s shoulder. The continuo played the recitativo secco or that which is accompanied by a few plain chords. At times, a few of the other musicians—the finer instrumentalists—and some of the vocalists might assemble around this trio to constitute what is known as the concertino or small choir. The rest of the musicians in the orchestra would join in to support the concertino. They were called the concerto grosso or great choir. The great choir might also contain double basses and cellos but they simply weren’t part of the continuo. The great choir’s job was to play chords in unified “blocks.” We call this tutti which means to play all at once as opposed to soloing.

With the orchestra now ready to provide music on a grand scale, that is exactly what happened—music on a grand scale. Next, we shall examine the Pièces à Grand Orchestre and the important changes they brought.

[Whoops, you may have noticed that my history has a hole in it. We jumped from the 14th to the 17th quite without explanation. sorry, got a little ahead of myself. The following should have been inserted before the stuff about the continuo.]

Not until the end of the 16th century would we see the true orchestra in formation when Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612), the organist and choirmaster at St. Marks, Venice began composing pieces where voices and instruments would contrast one another to achieve a striking polyphony. He utilized two choirs, four soloists, an organ and sections of violas, cornets and trombones in his motet In Ecclesi (1608):


Giovanni Gabrieli - In ecclesiis (1608) - YouTube

In his piece, Sonata pian’e forte (1597), Gabrieli uses two sections, one of cornett with three trombones and another of viola with three trombones that not only contrast beautifully but when one section plays by itself, the music is soft; when both sections play, the music becomes loud (hence the title). The contrast isn’t simply between lines of harmony but also in dynamics. In the clip below, the instruments are updated in the spirit of what Gabrieli was aiming for (this piece is often played by high school bands):


Giovanni Gabrieli Sacra Symphonia Sonata Pian'e Forte - YouTube
What set Gabrieli’s attempts apart from earlier church music was that he was aiming to make music suitable for public listening rather than as a purely functional thing such as for church services or for dancing. Gabrieli sought to make the music itself the center of attraction where people could attend just to listen and enjoy. Gabrieli was successful in that he garnered audiences of aristocrats to attend these performances. By the later half of the 17th century, the common people were also attended these concerts.

By 1620, secular music was being performed publicly in Lübeck, Germany after Evensong (a.k.a. vespers or evening prayer). Since this happened towards evening, it was known Abendmusik. During the English Civil War (1642-1651), musicians began to put on concerts in taverns in and around London for those willing to pay a small fee to attend.

Around this time, opera came to be and became very popular among both the wealthy and the masses. The first opera house opened in Vienna in 1637. By 1650, Vienna had four opera houses operating simultaneously. It was through opera that the modern orchestra began to form. The reason is that the voices required instrumental support and had to convey the correct emotions. The composers began to assign different groups of instruments to convey various moods—strings, horns, winds, percussion—and so we see the beginnings of the symphony orchestra here. And because opera spread so rapidly across Europe, there was a need to standardize the instrumental lineup so that any orchestra could perform it anywhere. In fact, the word “orchestra” came from opera. The Ancient Greek choruses danced and sang their dramas in a semi-circular area in front of the stage. The area was known as the orkhéstra (from orkheisthai or “to dance”). The same area in opera, known as the pit, was where the musicians sat and so they became known as the orchestra.

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Because the area is depressed so as not the block the audience’s view of the stage, this area became known as the pit or the orchestra pit.

Opera really reached prominence as an art form with Claudio Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo in 1607. There is no surviving full score so any version you see today is only an approximation. However, we do know the instruments to use because Monteverdi specified them:


Monteverdi - Orfeo - Rosa del ciel - YouTube

Since Monteverdi was patronized by the Duke of Mantua who spared no expense, the large orchestra was assembled and the opera’s phenomenal success ensured that future operas would have large orchestras which was essential to the evolution of the symphony orchestra.

By the times of Bach, most orchestras consisted of strings of the violin family, woodwind section of flutes/piccolos, bassoons and oboes and a harpsichord-led continuo. Some orchestras added brass section of trumpets and sackbuts (trombones) but brass instruments had not yet come into their own. The cornet—a post horn with valves added—would not be invented until 1814. French horns existed but not as we know them and would not until the 19th century. Likewise, the tuba—descended from the ophicleide and the serpent, both huge ungainly instruments—was not known until patented in Prussia in 1835 as a basstuba. As it stood, the trumpet at this time was a fixed-key instrument and would not become chromatic until more valves were added in the early 19th century.

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17th century trumpet. Louis Armstrong couldn't have done much with this thing.

Some early orchestras may have had percussion sections—drums and cymbals—but not tympani as these were still a ways off from being added to the orchestra.

The orchestra seemed to set the standard for the future was that at the court of Duke Carl Theodor at Mannheim in 1742. They introduced ideas of tone coloration by combining different instruments playing in unison and using dynamics of soft passages interspersed with loud, clashing ones to excite the audience. This was departure from other orchestras that played pieces where one section of instruments could do as well on a certain passage as another—winds instead of violins, for example. The instructions indicate that these different sections play in unison and rarely did one go out of the range of the other. But with the introduction of brass, harps and that new-fangled clarinet, more differentiation not only crept in, it was rather necessary.

Instead over-relying on violins as before, a scene in a meadow, for example, would rely on flutes and piccolos to provide bird-like notes while the strings played lower and in the background like wind occasionally rustling through the trees and grass. A scene taking place in the heavens or celestial realms would rely on harps with brass providing sound of an angelic host, etc. This was where the concerto grosso came in. By answering or backing the soloists and the small choir, great variation in tone coloration was achieved. True orchestration can be said to have arrived in the second half of the 18th century.

The difference between a Mozart piece and a Bach piece was that the instrumentation in a Bach piece could be supplied by any number of instruments. An oboe could do as well as a flute or a trumpet playing high up. But by the time of Mozart, orchestration provided enough tone coloration that parts written for flute could only be played by the flute or parts written for strings could only be played by the strings and so on.

Concomitant with the development of Pièces à Grand Orchestre, was the development of the double bass. The assumption that it descended from the bass viol is erroneous. The bass viol was intended to provide soft music for intimate settings such as chamber pieces. The double bass was intended to be loud enough to fill a hall. There was not a lot of use for it until Pièces à Grand Orchestre because it was loud enough to be heard by all the players. A good player could keep the entire orchestra in time which was essential for a large ensemble (there were no conductors yet).

The following two pieces illustrate the difference between baroque period music and that of the classical period which followed:


Giovanni Valentini - Sonata à 5. Forgotten early baroque music - YouTube


Christoph Willibald Gluck - Fruhlingsfeier - YouTube

Notice in the Gluck (an early composer of the classical era) piece, the addition of expanded instrument sections to the orchestra, most notably brass and tympani which add tremendous punctuation inconceivable to the baroque era. Note also the addition of the choir. What we hear is a whole new style of music, whole new dimensions opened to the listener.

Notice also the difference in length. The baroque piece lasts only a few minutes while the classical piece lasts 20 minutes. What was the rationale for the expansion?

All music from the early religious hymns to classical to the latest pop consist of repeating themes but the themes are much longer in classical and so one must listen with more attention to catch the themes repeating whereas with pop the themes are so short that they take no real effort to catch where the themes repeat.

People of the past paid a lot more attention to the “music-scape” of a piece than people do today. Imagine walking in a big circle through a detailed landscape and so one must to pay strict attention to landmarks to figure out where one is and to know when one has passed by this area before and all along the way there are little side paths and what not to walk through. One may not walk the side paths on first listen but only on subsequent listenings or may not have even noticed except another pointed them out. Composers used to delight in taking the listeners on these long, long musical journeys and the listeners had fun to navigating through them. People today often hate these long passages and find them exceptionally boring.

Art Buchwald once wrote an article about his visit to the Louvre in Paris. He said only three works are worth seeing—the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. He said everything else in the museum is “just so much window dressing.” One must arrive by taxi, stopwatch in hand, and then enter the museum in a walk, no running allowed. By keeping an even but quick tread one can see each of the three masterpieces in a quick glance. Buchwald wrote of Peter Stone who had tried before but failed to set the record of seeing the three masterpieces faster than anyone but who finally broke the record at five minutes and 56 seconds. Stone’s advice was to not look at any other exhibit but to shut them out or one will get caught up in actually enjoying the art and will lose the race.

The point of Buchwald’s article was to point out what has become important to modern society and it is just as true of music as painting or sculpture: It's no longer about enjoying the landscape as you journey slowly to take it all in and imprint it in your memory but rather how fast you can get to the end, how fast you can whiz through it. That's why rap is so stripped down and bare-bones minimal. There is no point to creating rich textures that the listeners aren't going to notice anyway or understand even if they did notice them. The idea of a modern songwriter deliberately creating repeating themes that take 10 or 20 minutes to cycle through just once to give the listener an hour or two of enjoyment is completely alien to people today. Classical music today is “tl;dl”—too long; didn’t listen.

Ironically, the huge amount of available music today is largely what is wrong. People of medieval times or the 18th century were not bombarded from all sides with a zillion songs and jingles from a zillion forms of media blasting it at them 24/7. Music was comparatively scarce so they paid a lot more attention to it. The symphonies were something new and exciting to them. Couple this with the lack of visual stimuli that we have today with television and movies and the internet and a million magazines on the store shelves.

The people of old had to use their imaginations way more than we do now and so they took delight in losing themselves in this glorious music. They couldn't wait for the next symphony to take them somewhere new and exciting the way we might reserve ONLY for the next over-hyped big blockbuster movie today.

And remember also that they had no way of hearing it except to attend the performance. They couldn't just throw on the cd or the mp3 and listen back as many times as they wanted to catch everything. They attended these symphonies with the full knowledge that they might never hear this particular piece again and so they struggled to remember as much of it as possible on the first and possibly only listen.

They did the same with books and all the arts. Most of the population couldn’t even read and, in fact, regarded it as something akin to magic. But music? Anyone could listen to music and so I imagine the masses took great delight in it. It may have been one of their few true diversions.

Today, we revel in our ignorance because it takes too much time to study anything. If it takes time then it is a waste of time. That is the path to doom.

In the period before the Baroque Era, there was a preliminary baroque period filled with a number of great composers: Jacob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, Clément Janaquin, John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina, William Byrd, Giovanni Gabrieli and John Dowland.
These were some colorful figures to be sure. Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561-1613) is another. He was Prince of Venosa who started off as an amateur composer but towards his later years began receiving some notice especially for his madrigals. He married Maria d’Avalos in 1586 and then is believed to have killed her and her illicit lover, the Duke of Andria, in 1590. He married Leonora d’Estre in 1594 and published his first book of madrigals that same year. The following year, he retired to Gesualdo Castle near Naples and shut himself inside rarely, if ever, coming out. His only pleasure was composing and playing his music. He published three books of madrigals in 1611 and died in 1613.


Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa - Tristis est anima mea - YouTube


Death for five voices (Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa) | Madrigali di Gesualdo - YouTube

John Dowland (1563-1626) is England’s greatest composer of lute music. He actually spent little time in England, preferring continental Europe. His first known visit to the continent was a trip to Germany in 1594. Nevertheless, his music enjoyed great success in England even though Dowland himself had trouble landing appointments in his own country. This may have been due to meddling with the English Catholics in exile in Italy. He published a book of songs in 1597 which was extremely popular due to its exceptional layout by which a single player could easily use it or a group of players could play together while sitting around a table, each having his own part on paper. Each part could be played by itself as accompaniment or solos. Each part could be combined with the others in any number of ways (duo, trio, quartet, etc.).

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Dowland would not receive an appointment in England until 1612 when he was named as one of the court lutenists of King James I. Dowland could be termed as an early bluesman or goth as his songs were generally melancholy and often touched on themes of death and bereavement: “Woeful Heart,” “If Floods of Tears,” “Flow My Tears,” “In Darkness Let Me Dwell.” Some of these songs are actually unstable harmonically in order to convey the proper emotion.

Songs as “Gloomy Sunday,” the so-called “suicide song” of the late 30s, actually carry on a tradition started by men as John Dowland and Carlo Gesualdo.