Popular
Music for Orchestra - A Brief History
Part 1
Dick O'Connor
The modern orchestra
began to take shape in the courts, churches, court-sponsored theatres, and
homes of the wealthy nobility of Europe, where greater instrumental forces
were employed to indicate and display grandeur, splendor, pomp, and gravity.
In imitation aspiring lesser nobles often organized to underwrite commercial
opera companies in urban centers while free mercantile cities hired musicians
for religious services and civic ceremonies. In many locales music clubs
gathered amateur and professional players for fellowship, convivial music
making, and the organization of concerts by members and traveling virtuosi.
During the 18th century these concerts became increasingly commercial and were
eventually undertaken by promoters as business ventures.
Meanwhile open air
concerts offered by certain parks and gardens of London and nearby rural
health spas to ladies and gentlemen of English society for a small entrance
fee provided efficient venues for introducing and popularizing songs and
instrumental pieces. Similar summer garden soirees on this model were
available to the inhabitants of New York and fashionable centers of the
American south by the mid 1760s.The success of these entertainments presaged
the establishment of the great 19th century musical pleasure gardens of Paris,
Copenhagen, Vienna, Russia, and elsewhere as well as the later symphonic
orchestra seasonal "pops" programs.
In the 1830s Parisian conductors Philippe Musard and Louis Jullien brought together the music of the theatre, the
subscription concert, the cafes and gardens, the restaurants, taverns, dance
halls, court balls, and the drawing room in a series of grand and exciting
performances that appealed greatly to the now significant French bourgeoisie
and codified the popular orchestral concert. Overtures, marches, operatic
excerpts and potpourris, songs, dance pieces, movements from symphonic works
by the great masters, instrumental solos and tuneful descriptive intermezzi -
served up with a modicum and mystique of showmanship, luxury, novelty, and
extra-musical effects - remain the standard fare of promenade or pops concerts
to this day. Both Musard and Jullien found the more politically stable England
fertile ground for the cultivation and development of these programs, and
there the latter spent most of the final twenty years of his life, bringing
his musicians to the United States for a notable 1854 tour. Nevertheless it is
to the theatre that we must look first and foremost for the origin and
development of the popular orchestra.
The stage is the most significant
vehicle and purveyor of popular culture. Here is displayed the human character
at its best and worst driven by human aspirations both high and low. Here
stand revealed the full range of human strengths, limitations, quirks, and
foibles. Here human prejudices of class, race, nationality, culture, and
profession play themselves out in the affecting drama and humor of human
relationships. Indeed, popular music has always been closely associated with
the theatre in its various forms, be it opera, comic opera, ballad opera,
operetta, musical comedy, music hall, vaudeville, or simple plays with music,
its forerunners the Greek drama, the medieval liturgical and miracle plays,
the renaissance intermedia or pastoral on allegorical or mythological
subjects, and its modern extensions the motion picture, the rock concert, and
the television music video.
Significantly the very word 'orchestra' is a
theatrical term. It was given to that part of the ancient Greek theatre
between the auditorium and the stage reserved for the dancing of the chorus
and for the accompanying instrumentalists, literally the "dancing place". The
combination of drama, song, dance, and instrumental music here suggested is
unique to the theatre as the primary elements of human expression are
mirrored, illustrated, and heightened through music. Thus human speech results
in song, human movement becomes dance and processional, and human emotion is
reflected in mood or incidental music. Many specifically orchestral forms
originated in, grew out of, or were inspired by the theatre. The overture, the
symphony, the character intermezzo, the dramatic or narrative tone poem, the
instrumental obbligato, derive directly or indirectly from opera. Others, the
air with variations, the formal dance suite, the 'selections' medley, the
operatic fantasy and paraphrase, were based upon or utilized popular arias.
Still others whose origin lies elsewhere - the march, the the processional,
actual dance music - often incorporated its tunes and were themselves
incorporated and developed in countless stage works. Technical improvements in
the construction of stringed instruments led to the streamlined violin-based
Italian opera orchestra of the 17th century. Though small (Ten to twelve
players which wealthy princes or court-sponsored companies might sometimes
increase to thirty, forty, or even more by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling
parts) the influence of these ensembles , with Italian musical culture in
general, was soon felt in France and later in the Teutonic countries,
including England. During the following century the size of the major theatre
orchestras would increase to sixty or seventy pieces, but financial, space,
taste, and use constraints would combine to limit such growth in smaller
houses and those not inclined to continental opera.
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