Orchestra

• 1. Introduction

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  An orchestra can grow to as many as 120 players, a number reached in the works of Richard Wagner and later Gustav Mahler. The word itself comes from the Greek orchestra, the name for the area in front of a stage in ancient Greek theatre reserved for the Greek chorus. Today it means a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music or jazz, one that combines instruments from different families. A single performance might use seventy musicians or over one hundred, depending on the work and the venue. How did a word for a patch of floor in front of a stage come to mean this? Why does one ensemble need four harps, and another need none? And how did a group built almost entirely of men come to hold blind auditions behind a screen? The answers wind through valves and bows, dictators and screens, and a podium that was not always there.

• 2. Four Families

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  The string section carries the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Around it sit three other families that define the typical symphony orchestra. The woodwind section gathers the flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, and sometimes the piccolo, cor anglais, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, and saxophone. The brass section holds the French horn, commonly known simply as the horn, along with the trumpet, trombone, and tuba, and sometimes the cornet and euphonium. The percussion section ranges from the timpani and snare drum to cymbals, triangle, tambourine, tam-tam, and mallet instruments.

  The harp appears fairly regularly in modern orchestras, especially for romantic period music. Keyboard instruments such as the piano, harpsichord, pipe organ, free-bass accordion, and celesta may form a fifth keyboard section or stand alone as soloists. The oboe often provides the tuning note for the orchestra, a convention some 300 years old. Yet there is generally no designated principal of the woodwind section, even as the principal trumpet leads the entire brass.

• 3. Beethoven's Palette

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  The so-called standard complement of doubled winds and brass is generally attributed to the forces called for by Beethoven after Haydn and Mozart. His instrumentation almost always included paired flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets. The exceptions were his Symphony No. 4, the Violin Concerto, and the Piano Concerto No. 4, which each specify a single flute. Beethoven calculated the expansion of this timbral palette in Symphonies 3, 5, 6, and 9 for innovative effect.

  The third horn in the Eroica Symphony arrives to provide harmonic flexibility and the effect of choral brass in the Trio movement. Piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombones add to the triumphal finale of the Symphony No. 5. A piccolo and a pair of trombones help deliver storm and sunshine in the Sixth, also known as the Pastoral Symphony. The Ninth asks for a second pair of horns, and four horns has since become standard. For several decades after his death, symphonic instrumentation stayed faithful to his well-established model, with few exceptions.

• 4. Valves And Treatises

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  In 1815, Heinrich Stoelzel and Friedrich Bluehmel, both Silesians, invented the piston and rotary valve. It was the first in a series of innovations that reshaped the orchestra. Theobald Boehm developed modern keywork for the flute, and Adolphe Sax brought his own changes to the woodwinds, notably the invention of the saxophone.

  These advances led Hector Berlioz to write a landmark book on instrumentation. It was the first systematic treatise on using instrumental sound as an expressive element of music. The next major expansion came from Wagner's Bayreuth orchestra, founded to accompany his musical dramas. His score to Das Rheingold calls for six harps. Wagner envisioned an ever more demanding role for the conductor, which he laid out in his influential work On Conducting, setting the style of orchestral performance for the next eighty years.

• 5. Borrowed Instruments

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  The saxophone appears as a featured soloist in Maurice Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and in Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. It joins the ensemble proper in Ravel's Bolero, Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet Suites 1 and 2, Vaughan Williams' Symphonies No. 6 and No. 9, and William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast. The euphonium, often marked tenor tuba, appears in Gustav Holst's The Planets and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben.

  The Wagner tuba, a modified member of the horn family, runs through Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and works by Strauss, Igor Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring, and Bela Bartok. It holds a notably prominent role in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E Major. Cornets turn up in Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, Claude Debussy's La Mer, and several works by Berlioz. Unless a player is doubling, orchestras typically hire freelance musicians to cover these parts.

  By the mid to late 20th century, instrumentation could be hand-picked by the composer. That opened the door to electric guitar, synthesizers, ondes Martenot, trautonium, and non-Western instruments. It also admitted oddities like the bandoneon, harmonica, jews harp, mandola, and water percussion. In Beethoven's and Felix Mendelssohn's time, the core was very rarely modified at all.

• 6. Hierarchy Of The Stage

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  The principal first violin is called the concertmaster, or orchestra leader in the U.K. This player is the second-in-command of the entire orchestra, behind only the conductor. The concertmaster leads the pre-concert tuning, determines the bowings for the violins, and usually sits to the conductor's left, closest to the audience. Each section also has its own principal, responsible for leading the group and playing orchestral solos.

  The principal trombone leads the low brass, while the principal trumpet generally leads the entire brass section. Most sections carry an assistant principal who often plays a tutti part and replaces the principal when absent. Within the strings, divided parts are split between outside players nearer the audience and inside seated players. When a solo is called for, the section leader invariably plays it, and lifts the bow before an entrance so the section comes in together.

• 7. The Screen

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  The Vienna Philharmonic did not accept women to permanent membership until 1997, far later than its peers among the world's top five ranked by Gramophone in 2008. The first women hired in professional orchestras had been harpists. In February 1996, the orchestra's principal flute, Dieter Flury, said that accepting women would be gambling with the emotional unity, the emotionelle Geschlossenheit, that the organism then had. That April, the press secretary wrote that compensating for the expected maternity leaves would be a problem.

  In 1997, the orchestra faced protests during a U.S. tour by the National Organization for Women and the International Alliance for Women in Music. On the 28th of February 1997, on the eve of their departure, members gathered in an extraordinary meeting and agreed to admit a woman, Anna Lelkes, as harpist. In 2008, violinist Albena Danailova became one of the orchestra's concertmasters, the first woman to hold that position there. By 2012, women made up 6% of the membership, and president Clemens Hellsberg said the orchestra now used completely screened blind auditions.

• 8. Leading Without A Baton

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  In 1922, the idea of a conductor-less orchestra was revived in post-revolutionary Soviet Union. The symphony orchestra Persimfans formed without a conductor, because its founders believed the ensemble should be modeled on the ideal Marxist state in which all people are equal. A committee determined tempos and playing styles in place of a baton. The principal difficulty was changing tempo in performance, since no leader could guide the change even after the committee decreed one. The orchestra survived for ten years before Stalin's cultural politics disbanded it by removing its funding.

  Long before that experiment, Baroque orchestras between 1600 and 1750 had no conductor at all. They were led by the concertmaster lifting the bow in rhythm, or by a chord-playing musician on harpsichord, organ, lute, or theorbo playing the basso continuo. A lutenist could lift the instrument's neck up and down to mark the tempo or lead a ritard at a cadence. The practice of using chordal instruments for continuo faded during the Classical period and disappeared completely by 1800.

  Some works push leadership in the opposite direction, demanding more than one conductor. Percy Grainger's The Warriors uses three: one for the orchestra, one for an offstage brass ensemble, and one for percussion and harp. Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen places three orchestras around the audience so the sound masses could be spatialized. It was premiered in Cologne in 1958, conducted by Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Pierre Boulez, and performed in 1996 by Simon Rattle, John Carewe, and Daniel Harding.