The complete idiot's guide to classical music (13 page)

We were talking before about male altos. These days, they’re called countertenors (as opposed to P.D.Q. Bach’s “Bargain-Counter Tenor”), and whether they muster a full high voice, or use falsetto, they can stay right up there with the ladies. Occasionally a countertenor will be heard in one of the “trouser” roles (male parts traditionally taken by women), but most often he settles for madrigals, oratorio solos, and other early music performances.

The regular tenors—the guys who get all the high Cs and, in most operas, the girl—are the male counterparts of sopranos in range and, it is said, in egos. They divide up their tonal territory into roles for the dramatic tenor, ready to do heroic battle with gods or earthly demons, and the lyric tenor, whose preference is for lighter, more flexible undertakings. Among the famous tenors of the recent past are Jussi Bjorling, Mario Lanza, Jan Peerce, and Richard Tucker.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Enrico Caruso was singing the part of the hero, Don Alvaro, in Verdi’s
La Forza del Destino
when his gun failed to go off in the climactic scene of the first act. It’s not clear whether the blanks didn’t work or the stagehand who was supposed to supply the shot had dozed off, but there was silence. The singers on stage looked at each other in panic until Caruso saved the day: “Bang!” he shouted.

Baritones strike the happy medium within the male voice range, singing lower than the tenors but higher than the basses. They make excellent drinking buddies (on stage) and often are cast as doting fathers, but they also portray some of the most mean and nasty villains, including the wormy Wurm (in Verdi’s
Luisa Miller
) and the dapper Dappertutto (in Offenbach’s
Tales of Hoffmann
). Some famous baritones include Boris Christoff, Alexander Kipnis, Ezio Pinza, and Norman Treigle.

Bassos (or in less fancy form, basses) are the lowest members of the singing family, taking over where the baritones poop out. Baritones with very low notes, or basses with nifty high ones, are often called bass-baritones. Like altos, they get some of the best character roles, sometimes comic (like Bartolo and Basilio in Rossini’s
The Barber of Seville
), sometimes menacing (Mefistofele in Boito’s opera of that title, or if you refer to your devil as Mephistopheles, Gounod’s
Faust
), and often very big (the giants Fafner and Fasolt in Wagner’s
Das Rheingold
). Bassos also do well in the royalty department, among many other lofty posts, portraying Kings of Cornwall, Spain, and Egypt (respectively in
Tristan, Don Carlos,
and
Aida
), not to mention Tsar Boris Godounov of Russia.

When the monks in their cloistered cells sang their unison chants, they were definitely singing in a group. As classical music evolved to encompass several voices singing independent themes, the group scene expanded and developed in a number of intriguing directions.

A vocal duet means that two voices are having at it. They can be focused in any way that the composer chooses. In a round, for instance, one voice begins, and when the second joins in, it echoes exactly the same tune. The voice parts in a duo can be of equal importance, or one can dominate, with the other adding harmonic color. They can be set in equal ranges (that is, for two sopranos or two tenors), or selected for contrast with one high voice and one low. In opera or musical theater, the libretto often dictates which voices are heard: If the hero and heroine are locked in a romantic embrace, we may assume an appropriate division of vocal activity. In other instances, the voices answer each other, as though in conversation; they may be heard a capella (that is, without accompaniment), or set against the tonal splash of a large orchestra.

As composers grew more adventuresome, they began creating music for multiple voices, each part having its own importance, its own place in the musical scheme of the piece. In other pieces, the highest voice carries the melody, with the others serving more as an accompaniment. In opera, ensemble numbers (like the famous quartet from
Rigoletto
or the sextet in
Lucia
) allow many characters to express simultaneous views or emotions, each singer having his or her own theme, pacing, and expression.

When does a chamber ensemble become an orchestra? If you can answer that one, you can tell us when a group of singers becomes a chorus. A good rule of thumb is whether there is more than one singer (or player) on a part. In other words, if you have two or three tenors singing the same notes, you might as well break down and call it a chorus (or choir, possibly, which usually signifies a small chorus). Usually choirs are divided into groups by vocal range (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass being the most customary, although some composers specify six or even eight subdivisions).

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When Haydn went to London, he first heard Handel’s
Messiah
in a performance at Westminster Abbey by a monster chorus of 1,000 voices, well over 950 more than Handel himself was able to muster at the premiere of the oratorio. According to contemporary reports, when the great “Hallelujah Chorus” reached its final measure, Haydn burst into tears, crying out “He is the master of us all.”

A mixed chorus—the ones we usually encounter at the opera or in oratorios—contains both male and female singers. When a chorus is made up entirely of women, it’s called a women’s chorus. We’ll give you three guesses about what they call a chorus made up entirely of men.

 

• The most basic sound is the human voice.
  
 

• Sopranos are the highest of female voices, mezzo-sopranos the middle, and altos the lowest.
  
 

• Tenors are the highest of the male voices, baritones the middle, and basses the lowest.
  

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We’ve all heard that one, and it is particularly applicable to understanding orchestral music. There are great soloists, to be sure, and what they perform wouldn’t be as satisfying without them. But imagine how things would sound if the clarinetist decided to borrow a lesson from jazz and go into a solo riff, or the second violins decided that the first violinists’ part seemed like more fun. Or maybe those imposing figures in black in front of the podium decided to go on strike. You’d have a bunch of instruments all right, but the result would not be what we call music. Even avant-garde musician John Cage never left that much to chance.

Music can be produced by a huge symphony orchestra or a small chamber ensemble. It can feature a piano, woodwind, or horn. Or it can be entirely an ensemble work. The keyword is unity. The concept of an orchestra or ensemble pulls together all those individual sounds into a pleasing, exhilarating, and ultimately satisfying whole.

Chapter 8
 
What Is an Orchestra?

 

• What is a chamber orchestra?
  
 

• The symphony orchestra
  
 

• The instruments of the orchestra
  
 

• Who is the conductor?
  

According to Webster’s, an orchestra is a large group of players of musical instruments. How large is large? Well, that’s hard to say. If it’s in the range of 12 to 30 players, it’s usually called a chamber orchestra. The regular orchestra ranges up from there to the 100 or so musicians on the roster of the major symphonies around the country.

 
Music Word
A
baton
is a short stick used by conductors to make their hand motions easier for the players to see. It’s usually made of light wood, painted white for greater visibility, and often with a cork base for more comfortable hand-holding.

You’ll generally see somebody in front of the orchestra, his or her back to the audience, waving a
baton
, and with a variety of gestures and other forms of body language, urging the players on to greater heights of musical glory. This is the Maestro, (or in the case of a woman, Maestra), well described by Laurence McKinney as “This backward man, this view obstructor, who’s known to us as The Conductor.” There are some orchestras who get along just fine without a conductor, thank you, but they usually don’t attempt really large-scale or complex modern works.

Just because a chamber orchestra is smaller than the full symphony doesn’t mean it can’t have many of the same instruments. You’ll find only one or two horns instead of four, ten violinists instead of 60, and more than likely trombones and tubas will turn up on the missing list, but Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and most Mozart’s symphonies were designed for ensembles of 20 to 30 players, so don’t feel deprived. As a matter of fact, many large symphony orchestras, seeking some degree of historical authenticity, will ask half their membership to take a break during Bach and Mozart performances.

 
Music Word
The word
orchestra
comes from the Greek, meaning “dancing place,” and in the Greek theater, orchestra meant the space in front of the stage where the chorus sang or danced. The French revived the term in the 17th century to indicate the stage where the instrumentalists sat, and by the early 18th century, the word was applied to the players themselves.

Sometimes a chamber orchestra can be made up exclusively of strings, in which case, oddly enough, it’s called a string orchestra. But in many works, a composer modifies the all-string sound by adding one or more brass or wind (or keyboard) instruments. Often, this non-string interloper will be the featured instrument in a concerto. In any case, just keep in mind that “chamber” refers to the modest size of the performing ensemble, not to any lessening of musical values.

Orchestras in Bach’s day were haphazard affairs consisting pretty much of whatever players the composer could muster on any given day. Five years before Bach died, however, the Bohemian composer Johann Stamitz moved to the town of Mannheim in southern Germany, where he developed and directed an orchestra so remarkable that it soon became famous all over Europe. For one thing, the orchestra pioneered gradations of sound that had been unknown before—swellings of volume (crescendo) and its opposite (diminuendo), a kind of drooping figure that became known as the “Mannheim Sigh” and a leaping group of notes nicknamed the “Mannheim Rocket.”

Local composers, members of the so-called Mannheim School, wrote pieces to take special advantage of these exciting orchestral possibilities, and by showing the world what creative imagination, effective leadership, and high performing discipline could accomplish, the Mannheimers gave the symphony orchestra a completely new significance in the musical world.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Mozart first encountered clarinets at Mannheim and was so thrilled that he rushed home and included them in his next concerto. Schubert wrote to a friend that “no orchestra in the world has ever excelled the Mannheim.”

Other composers, of course, continued that march of orchestral progress, gradually adding other instruments to the symphonic mix, devising more intriguing sonic combinations, and exploring all sorts of other new harmonic and rhythmic directions.

By the middle of the 19th century, string instruments were being rebuilt to permit higher tension in the strings. The resulting increase in volume and brilliance of sound gave new presence and power to the orchestra, just as the many improvements to wind and brass instruments evened the balance and allowed the whole ensemble to reflect greater performing precision and virtuosity. Berlioz, Wagner, and other composers demanded, and often got, much larger orchestras to reproduce their expansive ideas. In our own century, the percussion section came more into its own as composers took advantage of more than just pounding out the rhythm on a big bass drum.

The string instruments all have basically the same shape, with four strings that are either stroked with a bow or plucked with the fingers. The double bass is a little different, with more sloping shoulders and a flatter back, but you’ll never mistake it for a tuba. Violins and violas are played tucked under the chin, while the cellos and double basses rest on an end pin extending from the bottom of the frame.

The string instruments we know today evolved from the Renaissance viols, which also came in four sizes. They were not as robust as their descendants, and by the end of the 17th century, when the violin, viola, and cello had been honed to perfection by such brilliant Italian instrument makers as Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari, the viols pretty well went out of business. The amazing thing is that these master craftsmen, including Bergonzi, del Gesu, and others, all lived and worked in two tiny neighboring Italian towns, Bresica and Cremona.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Cellos didn’t have those bottom pins until the middle of the 19th century, so the player had to hold the instrument off the floor with the pressure of his knees. That changed when a Belgian virtuoso named Adrien Francois Servais grew too tubby to clutch the cello easily, and decided to build a fixture at the base of the instrument into which he fit a peg that could be raised or lowered depending on how many second helpings he’d had that day. Pretty soon other cellists, even the thin ones, found it easier and more comfortable to use an end pin, and the custom became universal.

The double bass remained sort of a stepchild in those days of courtly manners and minuets, but it was rehabilitated when Beethoven gave it a prominent place in his Fifth Symphony, and rose to stardom as a full-fledged member of the chamber music team in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet.

The highest of the winds is the flute, although its baby brother, the piccolo, sounds an octave higher. Vivaldi wrote a few concertos for the piccolo, but for the most part, its shrill tone is used to add color or high pitched sound to the orchestral blend. The flute itself has been called the coloratura soprano of the orchestra since its fluidity suits it well to trills, runs, and other bits of musical athleticism.

 
Music Words
A
trill
is the rapid alternation of a written note with the note immediately above it; a
run
indicates rapid traversal of many different notes.