BourgeoisGentilV1, Istex, Corpus, bibRecord, 001591

The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815. By John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. pp. xx + 614. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2004, £95. ISBN 0-19-916434-3.)

Identifieur interne : 001591 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 001590; suivant : 001592

The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815. By John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. pp. xx + 614. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2004, £95. ISBN 0-19-916434-3.)

Auteurs : Colin Lawson

Source :

Music and Letters [ 0027-4224 ] ; 2005-11.

RBID : ISTEX:1946639E95F323ED05B0B7C0AD23F6358EC78B2B

English descriptors

Teeft :
- Administrative structures, Anton stadler, Chichester, Classical orchestra, Colin lawson, Concert halls, Eighteenth centuries, Eighteenth century, Final chapter, Great deal, Instrumental ensembles, John marsh, John spitzer, Music plan, Musical instruments, Neal zaslaw, Nineteenth century, Orchestral, Orchestral musician, Orchestral musicians, Otter memorial papers, Rich variety, Second half, Social history, Spitzer, Vital role, Wind players, Zaslaw.

Url:

https://api.istex.fr/ark:/67375/HXZ-TM5HM85P-B/fulltext.pdf

DOI: 10.1093/ml/gci110

Links to Exploration step

ISTEX:1946639E95F323ED05B0B7C0AD23F6358EC78B2B

Le document en format XML

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        <article-title><italic>The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815</italic>
. By John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. pp. xx + 614. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2004, £95. ISBN 0-19-916434-3.)</article-title>

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    <p>The role of the orchestra within an ever-changing social and political environment has recently attracted a great deal of attention, as its ability to adapt to twenty-first century culture remains constantly under the spotlight. Many of the issues surrounding the orchestra and its musicians past, present, and future have recently surfaced in such books as <italic>The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations</italic>
, edited by Joan Peyser (New York, 1986); Christopher Small’s <italic>Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening</italic>
 (London and Hanover, NH, 1989); <italic>The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra</italic>
, edited by Colin Lawson (Cambridge, 2003); and Stephen Cottrell’s <italic>Professional Music-Making in London: Ethnography and Experience</italic>
 (Aldershot, 2004). With their new book, John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw have made a distinctive, scholarly, and stimulating contribution to the debate.</p>

    <p>The orchestra may be defined as both an institution and a corporate musical instrument, histories that are contiguous yet not necessarily congruent, since corporations of instruments existed for some time before the orchestra came into being. Over three and a half centuries the social history of the orchestra has been characterized by elements of continuity alongside the inexorable shift from private to public patronage. During the nineteenth century the middle classes became major arbiters of musical taste, while conductors were increasingly professional entrepreneurs and interpreters who used the orchestra as a vehicle for their own virtuosity. The twentieth century saw a rich variety of developments, including the rise of the chamber orchestra and the revival of historical instruments. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century a substantial body of musical opinion undoubtedly sees the orchestra as a nineteenth-century relic, cumbersome and riddled with bureaucracy, more comfortable in the territory of Mozart to Mahler than in the challenges of postmodernism.</p>

    <p>On the other hand, there still exists a great deal of optimism in the orchestra’s continued ability to adapt and, as Cottrell has recently asserted, ‘the orchestra is too important to be allowed to subside into a cultural antiquity for an ever-diminishing group of interested historians’ (‘The Future of the Orchestra’ in (ed. Colin Lawson) <italic>The Cambridge Companian to the Orchestra,</italic> 264). Certainly, the profession of orchestral player remains an aspiration for many of today’s conservatoire students, even though some undoubtedly eventually find themselves in agreement with the sentiments expressed by the American writer Henry Pleasants a generation ago: the orchestral musician 

<disp-quote><p>has no music of his own, nor can he play anyone else’s music with the immediacy that it had for those to whom it was originally addressed, or expect from his listeners the same immediacy of response. . . . Given such constraints as these, compounded by the stagnation of the repertory, it is a tribute to the serious musician’s skills, diligence and patience that he is not a duller fellow than he is, especially the orchestral musician, playing more or less the same notes in more or less the same way under the daily supervision of a variety of opinionated conductors year in and year out. (Henry Pleasants, <italic>Serious music and all that jazz</italic>
 (London, 1969), 78–9)</p>
</disp-quote>
</p>

    <p>But the orchestra retains an enduring and widespread appeal among players and audience alike; this has been reflected in a rich vein of scholarly activity over the past twenty-five years, to which Spitzer and Zaslaw have each made important individual contributions. Much of the material in their monumental new book develops their own earlier historical research and scholarship. Spitzer is the author of comprehensive <italic>New Grove</italic>
 articles on the orchestra, as well as influential articles on the birth of the orchestra in Rome and on the orchestra as metaphor. Well in advance of his comprehensive monograph on Mozart’s symphonies (1989), Zaslaw attracted widespread attention with his article ‘Toward the Revival of the Classical Orchestra’ (<italic>Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association</italic>
, 103 (1976–7), 158–87), which served to introduce Christopher Hogwood’s ground-breaking complete Mozart symphonies on period instruments during the 1980s.</p>

    <p>Spitzer and Zaslaw have produced an illuminating and detailed account of the orchestra between 1650 and 1815 that will surely captivate those readers who wish to gain a broader understanding of music-making during that period; devotees of the present-day orchestral scene will also gain a deeper knowledge of the institution that still plays such a vital role on the international stage. The conflict between orchestral genesis and extended chronological period within the book’s title is eventually resolved on page 530, where the authors conclude that 

<disp-quote><p>The birth of the orchestra . . . was not an event but a process—a long process that began in the early seventeenth century and completed itself, more or less, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as the orchestra became recognizable as the ancestor and the model of modern orchestras. Besides the instruments and performers in the pit or on stage, the process involved repertories, performance practices, administrative structures, systems for training players, techniques of scoring and orchestration, the acoustics of theatres and concert halls, and many other things. Finally, the birth of the orchestra was a matter of people’s beliefs—what people thought orchestras were and what orchestras meant.</p>
</disp-quote>
</p>

    <p>As the authors observe, narrative histories have currently gone somewhat out of fashion. Yet the multi-layered story of the orchestra presented here—when, where, and why orchestras came into being—makes a significant contribution to a grander narrative: the creation of modern institutions, such as armies, navies, banks, bureaucracies, factories, corporations, secondary schools, and scientific societies. In their preface (p. v) Spitzer and Zaslaw neatly encapsulate their substantial narrative within a few sentences: 

<disp-quote><p>Once upon a time there were no orchestras. In the second half of the seventeenth century, at the courts of kings, princes, and cardinals, instrumentalists began to organize into ensembles that combined strings, winds, and continuo instruments and that put several players on each of the string parts. Over the course of the eighteenth century these ensembles developed distinctive repertories, distinctive performance practices, distinct personnel, and their own administrative structures, until by the 1790s and early 1800s the orchestra had become recognizable as the institution that, with changes, still exists in concert halls and opera houses in many parts of the world.</p>
</disp-quote>
</p>

    <p>Their narrative begins with an intelligent survey of the ensembles that represented the lyre of Orpheus in a series of operas by Peri, Monteverdi, Rossi, Sartorio, Campra, Fux, Gluck, Dittersdorf, and Haydn. This mapping of the territory is complemented by important preparatory discourse, comprising the etymology of the term ‘orchestra’, the evolutionary taxonomy of the orchestra, the history of orchestral instruments, orchestral size and balances, the history of orchestration, and the social history of the orchestra. The first part of the book is organized chronologically and geographically, not unexpectedly beginning with large instrumental ensembles of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, while focusing on the major orchestral figures that played such an important role in its development. There follows a perceptive examination of the two ensembles that provided organizational models and repertory for later orchestras: Lully’s orchestra in France and Corelli’s orchestra in Rome. The diversity inherent in the orchestra’s early years is illustrated by an examination of individual ensembles and the orchestra as an institution as it developed in Italy, France, Germany, and England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is then a profile of the ‘classical orchestra’ as it emerged by the second half of the eighteenth century—a large number of similar organizations spread throughout the courts and cities of Europe.</p>

    <p>The central question of how all these orchestras sounded is fundamentally unanswerable, yet Spitzer and Zaslaw succeed in bringing their plethora of material to life, drawing upon a remarkable range of primary and secondary sources in portraying the diversity of orchestral practice; their meticulous referencing will enhance the book’s value as an important research resource. The particular challenges experienced within today’s musical institutions find many historical parallels. For example, a penetrating appraisal of training orchestral musicians in Italy cites a memorandum of the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini: ‘The violin class is to be held in the lower corner of the senior dormitory, the oboe class in the detention room, the class for cellos and double basses in the passage of the upper cloakroom, and the class of trombones and trumpets in the lower cloakroom’ (p. 174). In Germany the story of the Stuttgart orchestra illustrates a typical product of the politics of absolutism and the culture of competitive display. There were repeated budget crises, reductions in pay, late wages, and dismissals, yet the orchestra held its own. The development of orchestral leadership is threaded into the book’s narrative; for example, the evenness of execution at Mannheim was ascribed by C. D. F. Schubart to Cannabich’s leadership: ‘He . . . has the ability to keep even the largest orchestra in order with a mere nod of the head or a gesture of his elbow’ (p. 262). Within orchestral ranks, the demise of double-handed wind players is charted in a 1789 letter to the Elector of Dresden, on behalf of a young Kapelle oboist: ‘He is required sometimes to play the oboe, sometimes the flute. But since each instrument requires a different embouchure, in the long run his tone and his lip will suffer from this’ (p. 238).</p>

    <p>Such detail brilliantly illuminates what might easily have descended into a merely traditional narrative. Another tale illustrates the solidarity of orchestral musicians at the King’s Theatre in London, where in 1779 the musicians called a general meeting and shouted down the manager, who had threatened to dock the salaries of the wind players. It seems that rehearsals were sometimes lubricated with alcoholic beverages, for which payments occasionally may be found in the Covent Garden account books. And at London’s pleasure gardens (a public venue for a general audience), ‘already in the eighteenth century the English royal family was being marketed to the public . . . , as they are today on television’ (p. 284).</p>

    <p>Every critic, commentator, and musical tourist had an opinion on what was the best orchestra in Europe, a question that could not be resolved in the eighteenth century any more satisfactorily than it can today. Yet, significantly, all by now seem to accept the premiss that the instrumental ensembles at theatres and concert halls in France, Germany, Italy, and England have enough in common that ranking them is a meaningful exercise. Spitzer and Zaslaw’s assessment of the size of classical orchestras is based on no fewer than a thousand discrete reports of orchestras and their balances between 1740 and 1815, ranging in scope from just ten to a hundred players. The increasing international circulation of personnel was seen as a force for musical progress and good taste by Charles Burney, who wrote that ‘by travelling, musicians lose, among other local partialities, that veneration for a particular style, which keeps them in such subjection’ (p. 335).</p>

    <p>Within the complex web of detail in this book, it is perhaps inevitable that excursions into more specialist territory occasionally need to be treated with caution, for example the authors’ assertion on page 312 that clarinets ‘were usually played with the reed against the upper rather than the lower lip’. It may be true that reed-above was abandoned as official policy at the Paris Conservatoire only as late as 1831, but Backofen’s clarinet tutor of 1803 allows both methods, without expressing a preference; recent research suggests that the Austro-German tradition represented by Mozart’s clarinettist Anton Stadler favoured reed-below.</p>

    <p>The true inspiration of this book lies within its second part, escaping from the narrative straitjacket in turning to an analytic and systematic examination of the social arrangements, structures, and beliefs that made it possible for instrumental ensembles to become orchestras. It addresses the placement and acoustics of orchestras in the spaces where they played, orchestral performance practices, the daily lives of orchestral musicians in various regions of Europe, and new ways of composing for instrumental ensembles as orchestras. The final chapter imaginatively attempts to say what the newly born orchestra actually meant to people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.</p>

    <p>The discussion of the influence of acoustics on orchestral style draws upon a rich variety of sources to illustrate individual and conflicting points of view. For example, whereas Schubart likened the Mannheim forte to thunder and the crescendo to a cataract, Koch found large orchestras in small halls detrimental, because the excess quantity of sound became burdensome and unpleasant to the ear. Another chapter examines approaches to bowing, tuning, improvisation, rehearsal, and leadership before embarking upon an ideology of seven principles of orchestral performance practice drawn from contemporary sources, for example ‘an orchestra is greater than the sum of its parts’ (p. 396). One of the most ambitious parts of the book addresses ‘The Life and Times of an Eighteenth-Century Orchestra Musician’. Case studies centre on the Esterházy Kapelle, the London marketplace, Emilia-Romagna: a regional market for musicians, Vienna in transition, and civic music in Leipzig. ‘In the five cases presented, economic contexts and individual circumstances varied greatly, yet orchestra musicians always seemed to find their place on the economic scale somewhere at the level of master artisans and middle-range civil servants’ (p. 435). In terms of orchestral organization, Esterháza represents the Kapelle model, Leipzig the civic-music model, and London the increasingly prevalent free market, with many professional opportunities but no welfare benefits of any kind.</p>

    <p>Spitzer and Zaslaw draw together some important threads within this chapter. For example, they paint an evocative picture of the Stadler brothers at a time when Vienna was in transition from Kapelle to free market. The family came from a modest background, and at his death in 1812 Anton Stadler left little more than the clothes on his back and no musical instruments. He lived in poor neighbourhoods and was constantly in debt. Yet his Masonic associations enabled him to interact with a broad social spectrum, including the aristocracy. After Count Georg Festetics asked Stadler to draft a proposal for a music conservatory in 1800, his ‘Music Plan’ showed him able to write elegant German, decorated with quotations in French and Latin. He also shows some familiarity with music theory and music journalism in observing that mastery of music demands a broad knowledge of the world, plus mathematics, poetry, rhetoric, and several languages. As Spitzer and Zaslaw observe (p. 427), ‘Stadler’s Music Plan expresses an Enlightenment sensibility that sounds fresh and remarkable, coming from a shoemaker’s son living a penurious existence in a working-class suburb of Vienna’. The example of Anton Stadler illustrates the potency of individual case studies in constructing a social history of the orchestra, and these are used to telling effect throughout this chapter.</p>

    <p>Musical sounds finally assume centre stage on page 436, where the penultimate chapter, ‘The Birth of Orchestration’, ingeniously divides orchestral gestures into ‘Effects of unity and grandeur’ and ‘Effects of variety and nuance’, before addressing the contexts for orchestral effects and the theory of orchestration, while drawing on a wide range of musical sources by way of illustration. The final chapter assembles metaphors of the orchestra from novels, letters, and poetry, as well as writings about music. These are shown to change over time and to derive from a limited number of source domains, including musical instruments, chaos, heavenly choirs, civil society, and the army, together with metaphors of the human body, nature, machines, and works of art. At the beginning of the period the orchestra is exclusively the target of metaphor, but after the mid-eighteenth century it begins to serve as a source for metaphor, now sufficiently familiar to have the capacity to explain and enhance other topics of interest. There are generous examples in the text.</p>

    <p>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>In 1805 the English poet George Huddesford, in a satirical attack on Napoleon, still evoked the metaphorical association between the orchestra and absolutism, but now the connotations of the metaphor were negative:</p>

      </disp-quote>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>Great Master! To your potent lay</p>

      </disp-quote>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>Each heart in unison replies</p>

      </disp-quote>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>When you, like Orpheus, sound your A,</p>

      </disp-quote>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>All our brute cat-guts symphonize!</p>

      </disp-quote>

      <disp-quote>

        <p>Napoleon is the concertmaster, the French public is the orchestra, tuning their hearts and minds to his A-string. Frenchmen follow Bonaparte’s lead mechanically and instinctually, as orchestral musicians follow the first violin. Napoleon’s message of liberty, equality and fraternity, the poet implies, is actually a siren song of slavery. (p. 529)</p>

      </disp-quote>

    </p>

    <p>This book makes for an inspirational read, whose wealth of detail plays a vital role in the construction of its developing story. The narrative of the early chapters is impressive in its scope, but the cross-sectional approach in the latter half of the book is especially thought-provoking, not least when interacting with orchestral lives and times. The format of this substantial volume may be conservative, but the text betrays on every page the experience and wisdom of its authors.</p>

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The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815. By John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. pp. xx + 614. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2004, £95. ISBN 0-19-916434-3.)

The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815. By John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw. pp. xx + 614. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2004, £95. ISBN 0-19-916434-3.)

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