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Orchestra, Orchestra

The term orchestra derives from the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus. The orchestra grew by accretion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but changed very little in composition during the course of the twentieth century.

A symphony orchestra will usually have over eighty musicians on its roster, in some cases over a hundred, but the actual number of musicians employed in a particular performance may vary according to the work being played and the size of the venue. A leading chamber orchestra might employ as many as fifty musicians; some are much smaller than that.

These include the classical guitar, heckelphone, flugelhorn, cornet, harpsichord, and organ. Saxophones, for example, appear in a limited range of 19th and 20th century scores. While appearing only as featured solo instruments in some works, for example Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, the saxophone is included in other works, such as Ravel's Bolero and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, as a member of the orchestral ensemble. The euphonium is featured in a few late Romantic and 20th century works, usually playing parts marked "tenor tuba", including Holst's The Planets , and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben . The Wagner Tuba, a modified member of the horn family, appears in Richard Wagner's cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen and several other works by Richard Strauss, Bela Bartok, and others; it has a prominent role in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E Major . The Wagner Tuba, [1] Cornets appear in Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake , Debussy's La Mer , and several orchestral works by Hector Berlioz. Unless these instruments are played by members doubling on another instrument (for example, a trombone player changing to euphonium for a certain passage), orchestras will use freelance musicians to augment their regular rosters.

Every instrumental group (or section) has a principal who is generally responsible for leading the group and playing orchestral solos. The violins are divided into two groups, first violin and second violin, each with its principal. The principal first violin is called the concertmaster (or "leader" in the UK) and is considered the leader of not only the string section, but of the entire orchestra, subordinate only to the conductor.

Some modern orchestras also do without conductors, particularly smaller orchestras and those specializing in historically accurate performances of baroque music and earlier.

However, orchestras are sometimes used in popular music, and are used extensively in film music.

The first orchestras were made up of small groups of musicians that gathered for festivals, holidays or funerals. During the time of the Roman Empire, the government suppressed the musicians and informal ensembles were banned, but they reappeared after the collapse of the Empire. It was not until the 11th century that families of instruments started to appear with differences in tones and octaves. True modern orchestras started in the late 16th century when composers started writing music for instrumental groups. In the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy the households of nobles had musicians to provide music for dancing and the court, however with the emergence of the theatre, particularly opera, in the early 17th century, music was increasingly written for groups of players in combination, which is the origin of orchestral playing. Opera originated in Italy, and Germany eagerly followed. Dresden, Munich and Hamburg successively built opera houses. At the end of the 17th century opera flourished in England under Henry Purcell, and in France under Lully, who with the collaboration of Molire also greatly raised the status of the entertainments known as ballets, interspersed with instrumental and vocal music.

The results were changes in musical style and emphasis on new techniques. Mannheim had one of the most famous orchestras of that time, where notated dynamics and phrasing, previously quite rare, became standard (see Mannheim school). It also attended a change in musical style from the complex counterpoint of the baroque period, to an emphasis on clear melody, homophonic textures, short phrases, and frequent cadences: a style that would later be defined as classical.

In 1815, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society was founded, in 1842 the New York Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic were formed, and in 1858, the Hall Orchestra was formed in Manchester. There had long been standing bodies of musicians around operas, but not for concert music: this situation changed in the early 19th century as part of the increasing emphasis in the composition of symphonies and other purely instrumental forms. This was encouraged by composer critics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann who declared that instrumental music was the "purest form" of music.

This also made possible a more uniform playing of notes or intonation, which would lead to a more and more "smooth" orchestral sound that would peak in the 1950s with Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra and the conducting of Herbert von Karajan with The Berlin Philharmonic.

With the recording era beginning, the standard of performance reached a pinnacle. In recordings, small errors in a performance could be "fixed", but many older conductors and composers could remember a time when simply "getting through" the music as best as possible was the standard. Combined with the wider audience made possible by recording, this led to a renewed focus on particular conductors and on a high standard of orchestral execution.

The unusual aspect of the orchestra was that, believing that in the ideal Marxist state all people are equal, its members felt that there was no need to be led by the dictatorial baton of a conductor; instead they were led by a committee. Although it was a partial success, the principal difficulty with the concept was in changing tempo. The orchestra survived for ten years before Stalin's cultural politics effectively forced it into disbandment by draining away its funding. John Eckhard, "Orchester ohne Dirigent", Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik 158, no. 2 (1997): 40-43.

Source: Wikipedia > Orchestra