Musical Instrument Shopping Store

History of the Early Orchestra

Orchestra History

It is only comparatively recently in the history of music that a composer could sit down to write a new work, confident that in most parts of the civilized word he would be able to find an orchestra with all the instruments necessary to play it. Before the year 1800, and even for some time after, he would have enjoyed no such assurance. What passed for an orchestra in, say, 18th century Vienna might in many respects have been rather different from a Paris or London group of the same period, Nor was there any guarantee that the orchestral resources of Paris and London would be absolutely identical. Though orchestras came into existence in the 17th century and began to settle into a recognizable pattern during the 18th, it was not until the 19th century that the standard orchestra as we know it today could be said to have become a predictable fact of musical life.

It is, however, clear that musical instruments have been played together in various combinations for hundreds of years. In medieval times they were used to support the voices as they negotiated the intricate polyphony of church music. The instrumentalists who helped out in this way were usually recruited from the small bands of ‘town musicians’ that began to appear in the 13th century. Such groups were to be found in most cities and large towns. They were employed by the municipal authorities partly as watchmen whose instruments could give warning signals, and partly as musicians pure and simple who could play for important civic occasions, or even hire themselves out for private entertainments. In England they were called waits, in Germany Stadtpfeifer, in Italy pifferi. They played wind instruments, such as the shawm and curtal (the early forms of oboe and bassoon), and were often organized into professional guild with their own strict rules of conduct.

How the town musicians treated the music they played is largely a matter of conjecture – for instrumental full scores were not written out at this time. The likelihood is that each instrument played whichever notes it could, and that the parts were interchanged at will. For this reason alone we cannot consider these groups to be genuine early forms of orchestra. The orchestra, in fact, cannot be said to have existed until specific instruments began to be used for specific musical purposes and in specific groups or combinations. That moment did not arrive until the beginning of the 17th century, and even then it took many years before any degree of standard practice was established.

The first signs of a truly ‘orchestral’ attitude appeared at the very end of the 16th century in the music that Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612) wrote as organist and choirmaster of St. Mark’s, Venice. He was one of the fist composers to realize that voices and instruments could be effectively used in contrast with one another. In such works as the motet In Ecclesiis two choirs and four soloists are accompanied by an organ and an orchestra consisting of violas, cornets and trombones. These sometimes merely duplicate the voice parts in the traditional way, but at others provide an independent accompaniment, or play entirely by themselves. The contrast and variety thus available is considerable. He applied the same principle to certain instrumental works. For example, the famous Sonata pian’ e forte (published in 1597) wholly depends on the contrast between two instrumental groups: one consisting of a cornet and three trombones, the other of a viola and three more trombones. When only one group plays the sound is soft (pian’); but when both play together it is loud (forte): thus giving the work its title, its musical shape, and its effectiveness.