Classic Orchestra

The Classic Orchestra: Some Interesting and Historical Facts The most important and widely sought after type of music is the music of the classic orchestra, or symphonic music. The very word “symphony” comes from two Greek words meaning “to sound together.” Orchestral symphonies were firs composed in the early part of the eighteenth century when the idea of public concerts emerged. At first, short orchestral pieces called overtures, which were designed to begin opera performances, were the chief items used in orchestral concerts. Overtures were often written in three distinct sections or movements. Originally, there were two types of overture, namely, the Italian and the French. The former sported a fast-slow-fast structure while the latter consisted of a somewhat slow movement in a choppy rhythm followed by a fugue and a dance movement. These first overtures were designed as theater music to open an evening of opera. After the year 1800, however, composers began to write overtures as concert music and added an extra movement, the minuet, which came between the slow movement and the final movement, and what we know as the orchestral symphony was thus born.

Classic Orchestra

The Austrian composer Joseph Haydn is often hailed as the father of the orchestral symphony because he is the composer who brought the overture structure to its full development. He wrote more than 100 symphonies during the second half of the eighteenth century. Although many other composeres began producing symphonic works, the body of symphonies created by Haydn, especially those written at the end of his life for performance in Paris and London, became the foundation for the genre of the orchestral symphony. During that same period, Mozart wrote some 50 symphonies. The symphonies of Haydn and Mozart take some 25 to 30 minutes to perform. The next generation of symphonic composers is represented by Beethoven, who expanded the symphonic form so that a typical symphony would last up to 45 minutes. Moreover, Beethoven’s last or “ninth” symphony calls for the addition of a chorus to the orchestra and is more than an hour in length.

The days when composers wrote 100 or even 50 symphonies ended with the eighteenth century. Orchestral music soon became much more philosophical in nature and tried to communicate a statement or a particular worldview of the composer. These weightier works of the nineteenth century were not of such a kind that they could be turned out by the dozen. Each became an individual utterance on the part of the composer. As the nineteenth century progressed, the idea of writing symphonies with a story or “program” began to attract more and more composers. It was this “programmatic” music that led composers to abandon the traditional four movement structure of the symphony. Eventually programmatic music evolved into the “tone poem” which was and still is a musical attempt to convey to the mind of the listener a vivid picture of a universal human experience or a pastoral setting.