American Mavericks No. 10: "What's So Great about the Orchestra?" By Kyle Gann
The evolution of the symphony orchestra was a long, slow process, one that was interrupted in the early 20th century.
[One of the smaller Haydn symphonies fades in] In the early days of Franz Joseph Haydn, the 1760s, the orchestra often consisted of only two oboes, two horns, and a small complement of stringed instruments - violins, violas, cellos, and basses - with a discreet harpsichord to hold the ensemble together, since there was no real conductor. Occasionally there would be flutes or bassoons, perhaps a kettledrum or two, and for a big festive occasion, a composer might call for trumpets. Mozart was fond of the clarinet, and added it to his orchestra beginning with his "Paris" Symphony of 1778, in imitation of the fuller orchestras he had heard in the ciy of Mannheim. [Mozart, "Paris" Symphony] Beethoven, for the big, blasting finale of his Fifth Symphony in 1808, added piccolo, contrabassoon, and three trombones to his orchestra, the first time a symphony had called for them [last movement of Beethoven's Fifth] - although trombones had already been popular in operas for depicting the gates of hell and other spooky phenomena.
By the time Wagner wrote Lohengrin in 1848, he was using not only all these instruments, but harp, four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, and a range of tubas known today as the "Wagner" tubas. [Wagner, third act climax of Lohengrin] The grandiose climaxes of Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony of 1915 would require eight horns, two harps, pipe organ, six tubas, and an expanded percussion section including wind machine, glockenspiel, cowbells, and gong. [climax from Strauss, Alpine Symphony] In his Symphonia Domestica, he even added a family of saxophones. Where Haydn could be happy with an orchestra of 24 people, Strauss, 150 years later, needed 150.
It seemed like the orchestra would keep growing and evolving forever. But it didn't. The horrors of World War I virtually swept away the grandeur of European civilization, and the colossal orchestra with it. By the time the smoke cleared, composers like Stravinsky had turned away from everything huge and grandiose, and were writing smaller, modest works inspired by an 18th-century ideal of economy. [Stravinsky, "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto] Part of the reason was economic. In many countries World War I had impoverished, if not removed, the aristocracy, and with it the patronage system that had made the mammoth orchestra possible. Composers now had to make it on their own, and eight horns and a pipe organ were luxuries not many were famous enough to command.
The workers' movements of the early 20th century also played an inadvertent role in stablizing the size of the orchestra. Unionized attempts to protect orchestral musicians from capricious management decisions were entirely laudable. But the upshot was a union-mandated orchestra configuration, whereby the trombone players got paid whether trombones were called for in that evening's program or not. These good intentions played a part in stopping the evolution of the symphony orchestra, freezing it in a 19th-century model divided into four unvarying groupings: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
And then things really started to go out of tune. Composers like Arnold Schoenberg, searching for new clothes to replace what they felt were the threadbare rags of Romantic tonality, came up with an orchestral fabric that a lot of orchestral subscribers didn't care for. [Schoenberg, Five Pieces for Orchestra] To some extent, composers had always had this problem. Following the premiere of his First Serenade, Johannes Brahms received a letter saying, "Brahms's Serenade is a monstrosity, a caricature, a freak, which should never have been published, much less performed here:... while [his First] piano concerto served up to us last winter still sticks in our throats." [Brahms, dramatic opening of First Piano Concerto] Nevertheless, unpopular at first, the new composers always seemed to become acceptable to the next generation's audiences. With Schoenberg, this process came to a halt. And musicians began seeing classical music as no longer a living tradition. "We've got our repertoire of great music," they thought. "Why do we need new works? We've got plenty of great old ones."
And so, to a large extent, composers and orchestras parted ways. Especially after World War II, most composers wrote more chamber music than orchestral music - before World War I it had often been the other way around. American composers were particularly hard hit because of the flood of European emigre conductors and musicians coming to America to escape the Nazis in the 1930s. Once they were here, these emigres had even less interest in American new music than in new music in general. It took the spectacular rise of an American conductor like Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s to open up the orchestral field to American composers again.
Despite such rare exceptions, orchestras and composers spent most of the late 20th century locked in an angry standoff. It was often noted that the audiences for orchestral music were getting older and older, with few young people attracted to start subscribing. When orchestras occasionally played new works, these conservative older audiences often showed their displeasure. For instance, when the New York Philharmonic played John Adams' superbly romantic Harmonielehre in the early 1990s, dozens of patrons ostentatiously headed for the door during the opening measures - even though they had just patiently endured a notably dull piano concerto by the mostly-forgotten Nicolai Rubinstein. [Adams, Harmonielehre]
In the 1980s, it seemed for awhile that composers were getting an inadvertent revenge. As public funding dried up, orchestras, like all arts institutions, began folding, fifteen of them in the late 1980s and early 1990s alone. Even for major orchestras, halls were often half-full. Music programs were discontinued in schools across the nation, and so students could reach adulthood with no exposure to orchestral repertoire. Without that exposure, why would it ever occur to those students to attend an orchestra concert? Orchestral players complained about becoming bored with "repetitive, unimaginative, and artistically cynical programming." Star conductors jetted back and forth from orchestra to orchestra, bui lding up no rapport with their local communities, and unable to provide the extended rehearsal time that new music would need. In 1987, Los Angeles Philharmonic Executive Director Ernest Fleishmann announced:
"The symphony orchestra as we know it is dead.... Symphony concerts have become dull and predictable: musicians and audiences are suffering from repetitive routines and formula-type programming. There is an acute shortage of conductors... who are inspiring leaders... and... just as great a shortage of administrators who possess artistic vision...." Nevertheless - let's zip ahead now to the 21st century. In the 2000-2001 season, the most recent one we have records for, 32 million orchestra tickets were sold, up 16 percent from ten years previous.
In that season, America's 1200 adult orchestras gave 36,437 concerts, 45 percent more than in 1991.
Orchestras that year earned $775 million in income, up 70 percent from ten years earlier.
Those fifteen orchestras that declared bankruptcy in the late 1980s and early 1990s? All but one of them are back in business.
Perhaps even more surprising, the American Symphony Orchestra League and Symphony magazine list 207 world premieres being performed by American orchestras this year, from John Adams' My Father Knew Charles Ives to Ellen Zwilich's Clarinet Concerto, from Flight by Robert Xavier Rodriguez to Concerto for Piano, Cello, Pipa, and Chinese Wind Instruments by Bright Sheng.
What happened!? The orchestra was supposed to be dead by now! And why are composers still writing for it? Don't they know it's a cultural dinosaur from the age of aristocratic European patronage? Don't they know it's economically preposterous and inefficient? Don't they know you can pump up the same decibel level more cheaply with electric guitars and synthesizers? Don't they know that by dividing up your music among woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion, you can't help but still sound a little bit like cantankerous old Johannes Brahms?
I guess some of them may not know this, and the ones who do know it - don't care. Orchestral music is thriving, even if it's not usually the more maverick or visionary composers who are writing it. As John Adams, one of our most successful orchestral composers, recently said, "Most of the interesting music I’ve heard in the last ten years is not orchestra music." But amid all the Brahms-worshippers still trying to make it in the classical music business, there are a number of composers out there bringing new life to the orchestra, redefining it, making it sound more American.
[Crash in with the dramatic opening of Daniel Lentz's The Crack in the Bell] Some people think the orchestra can resume its evolution, which got cut off in the early 20th century. Daniel Lentz, for example, used brass players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but instead of their string section, supplemented them with synthesizers, digital delays, and the California-fresh voice of Jessica Lowe in The Crack in the Bell, an exciting, pop-influenced setting of e. e. cummings' ironic ode to wartime patriotism.
That's one way to spruce up the orchestra: add to it some more of the instruments we hear all the time outside the orchestra. That process continued all through the 19th century, so why stop now? So when people like Steven Mackey write a piece for electric guitar and orchestra, they're just keeping up the tradition. [Mackey's piece for electric guitar and orchestra]
New York composer David Del Tredici has written a series of works based on the Lewis Carroll classic Alice in Wonderland. In the great culminating piece Final Alice, in order to depict Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world, Del Tredici added a complement of instruments you don't usually hear in an orchestra: banjo, mandolin, accordion, even the electronic instrument known as a theremin, sometimes used in science fiction films for the spooky parts. [Del Tredici, Final Alice, Aria I]
Still, there are those who can make the orchestra sound new with just the usual range of instruments, used in new ways. In the 1960s and '70s, minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass wrote music for their own electronic ensembles. As they became popular, however, they started getting orchestral commissions. So they spent the 1980s learning how to streamline minimalism's tricky rhythms and severe repetitiveness to write pieces orchestras could play - and teaching orchestras how to tackle a brand-new style far removed from the emotionalism of Brahms and Wagner.
Reich's strategy was to turn the orchestral applecart upside down. For two centuries, stringed instruments had been at the top of the food chain as the most important section of the orchestra, percussion at the bottom. In Desert Music, a setting of poems by William Carlos Williams, Reich turned this arrangement around. The idea of the steady pulse migrated to the orchestral world from the minimalist percussion music of the 1970s, and for the first time in decades, you could tap your feet to an orchestra piece. [Reich, Desert Music, mvmt 2]
Philip Glass was next, bringing in even more of a pop sensibility through his five symphonies. In particular, he based his Symphony No. 1 of 1993, called the "Low" Symphony, on themes from a legendary pop record, a 1977 album called Low by David Bowie and Brian Eno. You can calibrate the exact distance between pop and orchestral music by hearing first the song "Some Are," from the original pop album [Bowie/Eno: "Some Are"] and then what Glass does with it in a symphonic context. [Glass, Low Symphony, mvmt. 2, starting at 1:43 or a little earlier]
John Adams first made his reputation as the "fifth minimalist." But having been an orchestral musician for much of his life, he didn't start his own electronic ensemble like Reich and Glass, but went straight to the top. His Grand Pianola Music pioneered new orchestral textures, with woodwinds playing lines that were echoed half a beat later by other woodwinds, as though the orchestra were playing through a digital delay unit. But driven by two grand pianos battling each other with Beethovenian arpeggios, the work also brought a sense of heroic gesture back into orchestral music that had been missing for a long time. [Adams, Grand Pianola Music, 3rd mvmt.]
John Adams has modernized the orchestra in more ways than you can necessarily tell by listening. Although he writes very little electronic music, he does compose on his computer, using MIDI sequencing software as a composing tool. Inputing the notes directly onto an old version of Performer sequencing software, he claims that the technique has revolutionized the way he composes.
"What I can do," he explains, "is save a [musical] structure, command-copy, and move it or shrink it [thus altering the tempo]. I've made software programs that allow me to manipulate the modes of the music instantaneously.... So by using this technology, which was created essentially to let musically illiterate high-school kids create film scores and rock and roll, I've been able to create musical structures that I don't think anyone else would have dreamed of." A piece like Adams' Lollapalooza may sound like a conventionally-written orchestra piece, but it owes its striking originality of texture to new technologies never used before in orchestral composition, and never intended to be used that way. [Adams, Lollapalooza]
The minimalists have become successful orchestral composers, but some of the younger generation have retaken the field as well. In fact, besides that John Adams, there's another John Adams who has specialized in music for orchestra - and because of the duplication he uses his middle name, John Luther Adams. This Adams was inspired by the minimalists, but also by the much earlier American composer Henry Cowell, who devised new theories of rhythm whereby different layers of activity could move by at different tempos. And since it's very difficult to get layers of activity at different speeds in a saxophone piece or string quartet, he's written most of his music for orchestra. [Fade in J.L. Adams, Dream in White on White, about 4:00 in] You can hear these layers in a 1992 piece for string quartet, harp, and string orchestra, called Dream in White on White. The harp plays arpeggios in a slow pulsation, the string orchestra changes harmonies at a slower rate, while the string quartet plays recurring phrases in a different meter. Like most of Adams' music, the quiet evokes the landscape he lives in and loves, the snow-covered forests of Alaska. That's one reason his dream is in "White on White." Another is that the score contains not a single sharp or flat - only "white" keys.
Similarly conceived but on a much larger scale, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing is 60 minutes of nonstop shimmering adagio. The celesta, marimba, and vibraphone play repeating melodies at different speeds at the same time, creating a gentle wall of sound that the ear can rest in without being able to focus on, like a blizzard seen from a car window. [Adams, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing]
John Luther Adams took his ideas of how to write for orchestra not only from Henry Cowell, but also from Morton Feldman, [fade in Feldman: Coptic Light] who in his later life invented a whole new orchestral style. Like the minimalists, Feldman was into repetition - but not obvious repetition. Rather, he abandoned melody and harmony in favor of texture and color. The piece you're hearing now, Coptic Light, was inspired by ancient Coptic textiles on display at the Louvre, and Feldman himself was an avid collector of Middle Eastern rugs. Feldman was also a friend of abstract expressionist painters, and his orchestral canvases have a painterly feel. The filmy waves of sound in which pitches bounce around the orchestra are a challenge to the ear's ability to focus.
A year later, in 1987, Feldman penned an even denser, more mysterious score which would be his final essay for orchestra, entitled, For Samuel Beckett. The texture here is so thick you can almost touch it. Notes echo from instrument to instrument in dense patterns that you can't quite grasp. The sound is seductive but the surface opaque, bringing to mind the ultimate mystery that Feldman himself was facing at the time: the mystery of death. [Feldman: For Samuel Beckett]
The orchestra was a European invention. But other composers, if less extreme than Feldman, have still managed to make their own American sound using it. For instance, composer in residence for the Atlanta Symphony, Alvin Singleton abandons any European rhetoric. In his piece Shadows, he opens with a few unchanging simple chords [Singleton, Shadows, 3:00] that crescendo and persist until they burst into a jazzy but intricate dance. [Singleton, Shadows, 13:49 or thereafter]
A true American maverick devoted to the orchestra is Gloria Coates, a Wisconsin native who lives in Munich, Germany. Coates has written more symphonies than any other woman composer ever - 13 so far. Orchestras in Germany aren't nearly as used to women composers as they are in America, and Coates gets a lot of grief for presuming to write ambitious works in the greatest of all Germanic instrumental genres, especially because she uses unusual techniques. Ever since she was a student Coates has been drawn to the glissando, a gradual, siren-like change of pitch that is easiest on stringed instruments. Because of this, her symphonies sometimes have a wavery, floating sound, the whole musical texture seeming to melt like a lump of jelly on a hot day. In her Fourth Symphony, subtitled "Chiaroscuro," a faintly familiar passage runs through the background, the strings blurring it as though someone wiped a rag across the score while the ink was still wet. And the melody turns out to be a quotation: Dido's lament from Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. [Coates, Symphony No. 4, mvmt. 1]
Maverick composer Lou Harrison is best known for his work writing for Javanese gamelan ensemble, tack piano, percussion orchestras, and other odd conglomerations of instruments. Nevertheless, he has written four symphonies and a piano concerto - traditional in their structuring, perhaps, but not in their sound. The Piano Concerto starts out with big, growling trills like Brahms, who Harrison admits is one of his models in his orchestral mode. [Harrison, Piano Concerto, mvmt. 1 opening] But by the time we reach the last movement, the stern Brahmsian mask has fallen off and we hear influences of Asian percussion in a medieval dance called an estampie. [Harrison, Piano Concerto, mvmt. 4]
Much orchestral music by the younger generation has an impulse of rock energy behind it. The opening of Weather by Michael Gordon features a driving walking bass pattern, along with prerecorded samples that refer to the pieces meteorological title. The punchy rhythms and unchanging harmony have more to do with Led Zeppelin than anything in European history. [Gordon, Weather, mvmt. 1]
The same impulse drives Julia Wolfe's music. This is especially true of her chamber music with drums and electric guitar, but still audible in her calmer orchestral works like Windows of Vulnerability of 1991, with its interplay of rich, colorful chords built up from irregular repetitions. [Wolfe, Windows of Vulnerability]
* * * * * * *
Why are composers still writing for orchestra? As we listen to the examples, the answers appear under our noses. Because the orchestra allows for thick layerings of sound, different musical activities going on at once and all audible. Because of its complexity of timbre. Because if it doesn't contain the instruments you want, you can always add them. Because the strength of its tradition means that every composer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. And perhaps most of all: because it's there, and apparently always will be.
The economics of the orchestra still make it a cumbersome animal. Electronic instruments will proliferate, pop music evolve into new forms, computers will play an increasing role in new music. But orchestras will be around as long as communities find them worthy of support; and as long as they exist, composers will write for them.
"Why do we need new orchestral works? We've got plenty of great old ones." It's a valid question. Many, many people are content to use music as an escape from modern life, to go sit in a concert hall and immerse themselves in the dreams, values, and emotions of 19th-century Austrian nobility. But those dreams, values, and emotions, comforting and nostalgic as they may seem now, are not our dreams, values, and emotions. We have a basic need for art, as something with which to organize and clarify our emotional life. Music by people who share our world, who feel the same emotions and struggle under the same pressures that we do, can give us back, in the concert hall, a mirror image that allows us to confront, digest, and rise above reality rather than escape from it.
As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote,
There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
Something to organize.Next week on American Mavericks, however, we'll hear from composers who don't need orchestras - who can produce their own music all by themselves, typing away on their laptop computers. Join us then for "From the Moog to the Mark II to MIDI to Max."
Copyright Kyle Gann 2003
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