Preface
Reading edition
This is not a text-book. It is not a treatise on instrumentation. It is not written for musicians, nor primarily for students of music, though the latter may find in it information of some value to them. This is simply an attempt to give to music lovers such facts about the modern orchestra as will help them in assuming an intelligent attitude toward the contemporaneous instrumental body and its performances. The author has endeavored to put before the reader a description of each instrument with an illustration which will enable him to identify its tone when next heard in the delivery of the passage quoted. Some account of the distinctive nature and functions of the strings, the wood, the brass, and the percussion instruments has been given. With this account go hand in hand some remarks on the development of methods of scoring. The reader will not find such historical matter in any other book with which the present writer is acquainted. Neither will he find anywhere else a history of the development of the conductor, which is given in this volume. The author has endeavored to make his work complete by describing the duties of the conductor and the requisites of good orchestral playing, and by recounting briefly the story of the growth of the orchestra and the development of its music. All other books on the orchestra which the author has seen are for the professional musician. In making one for the amateur of music the writer hopes to supply a need.
Contents
Part I
How the Orchestra is Constituted
Page
I. Instruments Played with the Bow 3
II. Wind-Instruments of Wood 19
III. Wind-instruments of Brass 30
IV. Other Instruments 37
V. The Orchestral Score 43
Part II
How the Orchestra is Used
VI. General Principles 61
VII. The Strings 66
VIII. The Wood-Wind 81
IX. The Brass and the “Battery” 97
X. Qualities of Good Orchestration 113
XI. Qualities of Orchestral Performance 124
Part III
How the Orchestra is Directed
XII. Development of the Conductor 147
XIII. Functions of the Conductor 164
Part IV
How the Orchestra Grew
XIV. From Peri to Handel 181
XV. From Haydn to Wagner 198
Part V
How Orchestral Music Grew
XVI. From Bach to Haydn 217
XVII. From Beethoven to Richard Strauss 226
Index 235
Portraits
Beethoven Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
Arthur Nikisch 48
Haydn 86
Wagner 114
Charles Lamoureux 128
Theodore Thomas 142
Hans Richter 162
Berlioz 208