Great orchestrators

[giles.enders]

When I started this thread, I was hoping for an 'all rounder', someone who could orchestrate symphonies, songs, cantatas or what ever.  Someone who one would immediatly recognise.  It seems that there is no one.  I like Kallinikov but he didn't compose much, Boito, the prelude from Mefistofele and indeed the opera itself are very well orchestrated.  I think Marx comes to the nearest of my expectations. 

[Gareth Vaughan]

Well, Giles, I immediately recognize Holbrooke's style of orchestration. To me, it's unmistakeable, and has principally to do with his use of the winds.

[mbhaub]

I can name an unsung composer who is instantly recognizable from his scoring style: Franz Schmidt. Everything he wrote (well, almost) has a certain sound quality that he once said was influenced by a parish organ he used to hear. And whether it's any of the symphonies, concertos, chamber music, oratorio, opera...it all sounds like Schmidt, and no one else. Maybe I'm just biased since Schmidt is easily one of my favorite composers, but years ago when I didn't know that much of it (who did?) and I would hear something on the radio that sounded like Schmidt, I was never surprised when that was the case. And his scoring is magnificent, imaginative, tasteful, and idiomatic; he was a master of the orchestra.

[minacciosa]

Read Harold Truscott; he explains very well why Schmidt sounds like Schmidt and like no one else.

[pcc]

For chill319 about the transatlantic branch - one of the reasons I admire Chadwick's orchestration is that it's _un_-Brahmsian; nowhere near as dense or soberly-coloured. The Germanic influences and approaches he takes are brighter and more spaciously-registered.  If you put the first movement of Chadwick's Third Symphony against the first movement of Brahms' Third (which is in the same key and metre) the differences are much more striking than the similarities, and Chadwick's sonic distinctiveness becomes readily apparent.  I think the Symphonic Sketches are an outgrowth of Chadwick's natural colouristic tendencies; American, yes, but so are his symphonies in terms of their lyricism and exuberance rather than instrumental effects.  (I find the "American" label tricky in orchestral definition; I grew up, literally, reading Gilbert Chase, and I now think his book and its positions quite narrow and ultimately destructive.)

[chill319]

PCC, I quite agree with you about the dissimilarity of orchestration in Brahms and Chadwick. (The Brahms of the first Serenade is a somewhat different orchestrator, of course.) So who do you think Chadwick was listening to? (I don't say 'reading' because, Berlioz aside, you can forget the textbooks -- Jadassohn's 1899 opus, for example, essentially stops at winds in pairs.) Take the xylophone in the last movement of the Symphonic Sketches. Saint-Saens? Or American vaudeville, where xylophones were heard more often than in Symphony Hall?

[pcc]

Oh, it's definitely vaudeville! Chadwick, from what I know, was an avid theatre-goer with a strong sense of humour.  The very last bars of "A Vagrom Ballad" could be exit music for an act at the Orpheum!  It's the various definitions of "Americanism" in concert music that get me, and Chadwick (who is a top composer of any nationality for me) often gets pushed under a heap for his European elements, including his orchestration. But where else would an American composer in the 1880s and 90s turn for orchestral models?  Orchestration didn't spontaneously generate over here in an "American" form - heavens, before 1900 there were fewer than ten professional symphony orchestras in the entire country. (As to who else Chadwick might have had in his ear, it's hard to say, but I'd go with Raff or the Czechs rather than Brahms - but again, with a distinctively open-sounding texture.  More than one writer has pointed out the similarities between the slow mvts of the Chadwick Second and Dvorak "New World" symphonies - and Chadwick's was the earlier of the two.) You want a _badly_ orchestrated 19th century American symphony? The Ives First, which many Ives defenders say is really easy to take compared to his later work, is one of the clunkiest orchestral pieces ever written, even as a graduation exercise (which it was), and putting anything by Chadwick (or even the Paine Second) against the Ives shows how amateurish the Ives is - and he only went downhill from there. (A very biased personal opinion, I admit, but the dislike I have for Ives' music is compounded by Ives' verbal boorishness, which hampered properly assessing composers of the Second New England School for decades and helped promulgate an idea of "American music" that simply doesn't speak to or for me. Harumph!)

[Alan Howe]

No, Ives did just go downhill. Again, a very personal opinion! I'll take Chadwick as a professional orchestrator every time.

[Lionel Harrsion]

No, Ives did just go downhill. Again, a very personal opinion! I'll take Chadwick as a professional orchestrator every time.

Agreed!

[semloh]

.......The Ives First, which many Ives defenders say is really easy to take compared to his later work, is one of the clunkiest orchestral pieces ever written, even as a graduation exercise (which it was), and putting anything by Chadwick (or even the Paine Second) against the Ives shows how amateurish the Ives is - and he only went downhill from there. ........

But, speaking as a simple listener who knows nothing of the technicalities of orchestration, I find Ives' First Symphony a work of beauty (and within the romantic style). Am I alone in finding the 2nd movement utterly seductive. Naive? Maybe. But clunky? 

Analyses I've heard or read of Ives' later work persuade me that (although they are mostly not to my taste, and fall way outside the scope of UC) they are both daring and carefully constructed, and that Ives knew very well how to orchestrate, if that means using the orchestra to best express one's intentions. The 4th Symphony is a remarkable example, and is one of the few dissonant works that I can really enjoy time and time again.

Obviously, the issue here is not Ives, because he almost entirely lies outside the scope of UC, but rather orchestration, and I am at a loss to know exactly why Chadwick can be considered so highly by comparison. I am happy to be enlightened! 

[Alan Howe]

I suppose it's Ives' later deliberate, chaotic naïvety in all its aspects that I just don't get. I agree about both comments made about the 1st Symphony, though - it does seem clunky, but it's also fascinating to hear the developing iconoclast attempting to write such an academic piece. It's kind of a contradiction in terms...

[pcc]

I agree about both comments made about the 1st Symphony, though - it does seem clunky, but it's also fascinating to hear the developing iconoclast attempting to write such an academic piece. It's kind of a contradiction in terms...

Orchestration, to me, also means equally understanding how to build and refine instrumental combinations in ways that allow for harmonic and colouristic flexibility for maximum personal expressivity, and how to utilize each instrument's character and idiosyncracies in ways that are gratifyingly practicable for players and auditors alike.   _That's_ what really great orchestrators can do, in my opinion - that's the "ear" I mentioned earlier.  Chadwick had it, and Ives didn't (again, my opinion).  One of my favourite passages written about orchestration is in Gervase Hughes' study of Arthur Sullivan (who is not "unsung" in some ways but is becoming more widely "understood" in others), who said that no matter what you might think of Sullivan's music, instrumentalists almost always enjoy playing it, and Hughes shows an apparently fearsome bass trombone passage from THE GOLDEN LEGEND that lies magically perfectly for the English G bass trombone.  I don't think anyone questions Sullivan's orchestral mastery or distinctive orchestral idiom. Chadwick's SYMPHONIC SKETCHES was the first full score I ever purchased to always have by me, when I was an undergrad, because I wanted to really learn how he "made his colours".  Each movement of that work has a different orchestral sound, but the work overall is still distinctively and identifiably the tonal work of one person. The brass writing is impeccable but varied, the woodwind all over the place registrally for colour purposes, and the percussion work imaginative, all playing off a string basis which is equally colouristically divided and combined according to purpose.  I've always said the easiest thing in the world is to write a tutti, but on reflection, I'd add that the hardest thing to write is a tutti that is uniquely yours.  I hear that in Chadwick.

As to the interest of Ives conventionality in his First Symphony against his later work, I think it shows how little he mastered what he came to reject and deride, and I have a hard time respecting those who mock what they apparently can't do. (I always think that Horatio Parker passed Ives with a sigh, maybe advising him as he left Yale "you know, Charles, have you ever considered going into something else besides music - insurance, perhaps?...")  On the other hand, I think Stravinsky and Schoenberg's earliest works shows how well they could write conventionally.

[Lionel Harrsion]

I don't think anyone questions Sullivan's orchestral mastery or distinctive orchestral idiom.

How true.  Sullivan's orchestration is masterly: he manages to make a theatre orchestra sound full and rich but not thick, and his tuttis are not all of a piece but are enormously varied.

[Lionel Harrsion]

I always think that Horatio Parker passed Ives with a sigh, maybe advising him as he left Yale "you know, Charles, have you ever considered going into something else besides music - insurance, perhaps?..."

O, how I want that to be true!   

[eschiss1]

Erm - as to Clementi's symphonies- neither edition (Casella's (1938, 1950?) or Spada's (1977)) that I know of?... I gather... (from what I've read in reviews of the Spada edition, anyway...) - is a particularly good representation of the (hard to read) manuscripts.  So modern recordings - e.g. d'Avalos - of the four big symphonies he wrote (op.18 are in better shape, having been published during his lifetime, though I may be making a logical leap there) are more judgments of "Clementi/Spada" than of Clementi, and maybe with emphasis on the latter. (Hrm. I see Bamert uses Casella's edition of the first symphony, actually. Not sure whether Scimone's 1979 recordings use Spada or Casella, and how many of the symphonies Casella edited- possibly just the C major. May have been another edition I've forgotten of the other three between 1938 and 1977...

Whether a better edition closer to the "real" orchestration would show more lightness of touch (whether the major mistakes even concern orchestration) I don't know one way or the other and don't want to guess - I'm not assuming it would.