Clive Brown

All About the Orchestra

To write this Companion Colin Lawson has assembled a stimulating team of contributors, which includes scholars and distinguished practitioners with experience in performing, management and recording. Together they have produced a volume that ranges widely over issues connected with the orchestra, from its emergence to the present day. The excellent choice of topics and contributors results a refreshingly eclectic variety of views and approaches. The book begins, logically enough, with ‘the history of the orchestra’ by Tim Carter and Erik Levi; this gives a concise survey of the changing characteristics and functions of instrumental ensembles to which the name ‘orchestra’ might be applied over the past four centuries. Any points that might provoke disagreement from individual scholars are outweighed by the usefulness of the account as a whole. Robert Barclay’s chapter on ‘the development of musical instruments’ is divided into four sections, considering the periods 1650–1700, 1700–1780, 1780–1840 and 1840 to the present; each section contains a brief but helpful account of developments within each of the main groups of instruments (strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, keyboard). A survey of ‘the orchestral repertory’ by Peter Laki concentrates largely on music that is currently played rather than the works that were central to the genre in their own times. Perhaps the sharper focus on late 19th-century and particularly 20th-century music may be accounted for by the fact that the 20thand 21st-century symphony orchestra has progressively abandoned much of the earlier repertory to specialist groups. Richard Rastall, in a chapter entitled ‘from notation to sound’ takes the reader methodically through the intricacies of orchestral scoring from Bach to Lutoslawski, clarifying changing practices and the reasons for them, as well as offering a helpful guide to developing a better appreciation of the musical messages an orchestral score seeks to convey. This chapter is nicely complemented by Julian Rushton’s stimulating discussion of ‘the art of orchestration’, which considers, from a historical perspective, the manner in which composers have increased the orchestral palette, as well as the changing aesthetics that lay behind these develop-