How To Listen To Music Part 7

The French horn (Plate IX.), as it is called in the orchestra, is the sweetest and mellowest of all the wind instruments. In Beethoven's time it was but little else than the old hunting-horn, which, for the convenience of the mounted hunter, was arranged in spiral convolutions that it might be slipped over the head and carried resting on one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The Germans still call it the _Waldhorn_, _i.e._, "forest horn;" the old French name was _cor de cha.s.se_, the Italian _corno di caccia_. In this instrument formerly the tones which were not the natural resonances of the harmonic division of the tube were helped out by partly closing the bell with the right hand, it having been discovered accidentally that by putting the hand into the lower end of the tube--the flaring part called the bell--the pitch of a tone was raised. Players still make use of this method for convenience, and sometimes because a composer wishes to employ the slightly m.u.f.fled effect of these tones; but since valves have been added to the instrument, it is possible to play a chromatic scale in what are called the unstopped or open tones.

[Sidenote: _Kinds of horns._]

[Sidenote: _The trumpet._]

[Sidenote: _The cornet._]

Formerly it was necessary to use horns of different pitch, and composers still respect this tradition, and designate the key of the horns which they wish to have employed; but so skilful have the players become that, as a rule, they use horns whose fundamental tone is F for all keys, and achieve the old purpose by simply transposing the music as they read it. If these most graceful instruments were straightened out they would be seventeen feet long. The convolutions of the horn and the many turns of the trumpet are all the fruit of necessity; they could not be manipulated to produce the tones that are asked of them if they were not bent and curved. The trumpet, when its tube is lengthened by the addition of crooks for its lowest key, is eight feet long; the tuba, sixteen. In most orchestras (in all of those in the United States, in fact, except the Boston and Chicago Orchestras and the Symphony Society of New York) the word trumpet is merely a euphemism for cornet, the familiar leading instrument of the bra.s.s band, which, while it falls short of the trumpet in the quality of its tone, in the upper registers especially, is a more easily manipulated instrument than the trumpet, and is preferable in the lower tones.

[Sidenote: _The trombone._]

Mendelssohn is quoted as saying that the trombones (Plate X.) "are too sacred to use often." They have, indeed, a majesty and n.o.bility all their own, and the lowest use to which they can be put is to furnish a flaring and noisy harmony in an orchestral _tutti_. They are marvellously expressive instruments, and without a peer in the whole instrumental company when a solemn and spiritually uplifting effect is to be attained. They can also be made to sound menacing and lugubrious, devout and mocking, pompously heroic, majestic, and lofty.

They are often the heralds of the orchestra, and make sonorous proclamations.

[Sidenote: _Trombone effects._]

[Sidenote: _The tuba._]

The cla.s.sic composers always seemed to approach the trombones with marked respect, but nowadays it requires a very big blue pencil in the hands of a very uncompromising conservatory professor to prevent a student engaged on his _Opus 1_ from keeping his trombones going half the time at least. It is an old story how Mozart keeps the instruments silent through three-fourths of his immortal "Don Giovanni," so that they may enter with overwhelming impressiveness along with the ghostly visitor of the concluding scene. As a rule, there are three trombones in the modern orchestra--two tenors and a ba.s.s. Formerly there were four kinds, bearing the names of the voices to which they were supposed to be nearest in tone-quality and compa.s.s--soprano, alto, tenor, and ba.s.s. Full four-part harmony is now performed by the three trombones and the tuba (Plate XI.). The latter instrument, which, despite its gigantic size, is exceedingly tractable can "roar you as gently as any sucking dove." Far-away and strangely mysterious tones are got out of the bra.s.s instruments, chiefly the cornet and horn, by almost wholly closing the bell.

[Sidenote: _Instruments of percussion._]

[Sidenote: _The xylophone._]

[Sidenote: _Kettle-drums._]

[Sidenote: _Pfund's tuning device._]

[Sidenote: _Pitch of the drums._]

[Sidenote: _Qualifications of a drummer._]

The percussion apparatus of the modern orchestra includes a mult.i.tude of instruments scarcely deserving of description. Several varieties of drums, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, steel bars (_Glockenspiel_), gongs, bells, and many other things which we are now inclined to look upon as toys, rather than as musical instruments, are brought into play for reasons more or less fantastic. Saint-Saens has even utilized the barbarous xylophone, whose proper place is the variety hall, in his "Danse Macabre." There his purpose was a fantastic one, and the effect is capital. The pictorial conceit at the bottom of the poem which the music ill.u.s.trates is Death, as a skeleton, seated on a tombstone, playing the viol, and gleefully cracking his bony heels against the marble. To produce this effect, the composer uses the xylophone with capital results. But of all the ordinary instruments of percussion, the only one that is really musical and deserving of comment is the kettle-drum. This instrument is more musical than the others because it has pitch. Its voice is not mere noise, but musical noise. Kettle-drums, or tympani, are generally used in pairs, though the vast multiplication of effects by modern composers has resulted also in the extension of this department of the band. It is seldom that more than two pairs are used, a good player with a quick ear being able to accomplish all that Wagner asks of six drums by his deftness in changing the pitch of the instruments. This work of tuning is still performed generally in what seems a rudimentary way, though a German drum-builder named Pfund invented a contrivance by which the player, by simply pressing on a balanced pedal and watching an indicator affixed to the side of the drums, can change the pitch to any desired semitone within the range of an octave.

The tympani are hemispherical bra.s.s or copper vessels, kettles in short, covered with vellum heads. The pitch of the instrument depends on the tension of the head, which is applied generally by key-screws working through the iron ring which holds the vellum. There is a difference in the size of the drums to place at the command of the player the octave from F in the first s.p.a.ce below the ba.s.s staff to F on the fourth line of the same staff. Formerly the purpose of the drums was simply to give emphasis, and they were then uniformly tuned to the key-note and fifth of the key in which a composition was set.

Now they are tuned in many ways, not only to allow for the frequent change of keys, but also so that they may be used as harmony instruments. Berlioz did more to develop the drums than any composer who has ever lived, though Beethoven already manifested appreciation of their independent musical value. In the last movement of his Eighth Symphony and the scherzo of his Ninth, he tunes them in octaves, his purpose in the latter case being to give the opening figure, an octave leap, of the scherzo melody to the drums solo. The most extravagant use ever made of the drums, however, was by Berlioz in his "Messe des Morts," where he called in eight pairs of drums and ten players to help him to paint his tonal picture of the terrors of the last judgment. The post of drummer is one of the most difficult to fill in a symphonic orchestra. He is required to have not only a perfect sense of time and rhythm, but also a keen sense of pitch, for often the composer asks him to change the pitch of one or both of his drums in the s.p.a.ce of a very few seconds. He must then be able to shut all other sounds out of his mind, and bring his drums into a new key while the orchestra is playing--an extremely nice task.

[Sidenote: _The ba.s.s drum._]

The development of modern orchestral music has given dignity also to the ba.s.s drum, which, though definite pitch is denied to it, is now manipulated in a variety of ways productive of striking effects. Rolls are played on it with the sticks of the kettle-drums, and it has been emanc.i.p.ated measurably from the cymbals, which in vulgar bra.s.s-band music are its inseparable companions.

[Sidenote: _The conductor._]

[Sidenote: _Time-beaters and interpreters._]

[Sidenote: _The conductor a necessity._]

In the full sense of the term the orchestral conductor is a product of the latter half of the present century. Of course, ever since concerted music began, there has been a musical leader of some kind.

Mural paintings and carvings fashioned in Egypt long before Apollo sang his magic song and

"Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers,"

show the conductor standing before his band beating time by clapping his hands; and if we are to credit what we have been told about Hebrew music, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, when they stood before their mult.i.tudinous choirs in the temple at Jerusalem, promoted synchronism in the performance by stamping upon the floor with lead-shodden feet.

Before the era which developed what I might call "star" conductors, these leaders were but captains of tens and captains of hundreds who accomplished all that was expected of them if they made the performers keep musical step together. They were time-beaters merely--human metronomes. The modern conductor is, in a sense not dreamed of a century ago, a mediator between the composer and the audience. He is a virtuoso who plays upon men instead of a key-board, upon a hundred instruments instead of one. Music differs from her sister arts in many respects, but in none more than in her dependence on the intermediary who stands between her and the people for whose sake she exists. It is this intermediary who wakens her into life.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter,"

is a pretty bit of hyperbole which involves a contradiction in terms.

An unheard melody is no melody at all, and as soon as we have music in which a number of singers or instrumentalists are employed, the taste, feeling, and judgment of an individual are essential to its intelligent and effective publication. In the gentle days of the long ago, when suavity and loveliness of utterance and a recognition of formal symmetry were the "be-all and end-all" of the art, a time-beater sufficed to this end; but now the contents of music are greater, the vessel has been wondrously widened, the language is become curiously complex and ingenious, and no composer of to-day can write down universally intelligible signs for all that he wishes to say. Someone must grasp the whole, expound it to the individual factors which make up the performing sum and provide what is called an interpretation to the public.

[Sidenote: _"Star" conductors._]

That someone, of course, is the conductor, and considering the progress that music is continually making it is not at all to be wondered at that he has become a person of stupendous power in the culture of to-day. The one singularity is that he should be so rare.

This rarity has had its natural consequence, and the conductor who can conduct, in contradistinction to the conductor who can only beat time, is now a "star." At present we see him going from place to place in Europe giving concerts in which he figures as the princ.i.p.al attraction. The critics discuss his "readings" just as they do the performances of great pianists and singers. A hundred blowers of bra.s.s, sc.r.a.pers of strings, and tootlers on windy wood, labor beneath him trans.m.u.ting the composer's mysterious symbols into living sound, and when it is all over we frequently find that it seems all to have been done for the greater glory of the conductor instead of the glory of art. That, however, is a digression which it is not necessary to pursue.

[Sidenote: _Mistaken popular notions._]

[Sidenote: _What the conductor does._]

[Sidenote: _Rests and cues._]

Questions and remarks have frequently been addressed to me indicative of the fact that there is a widespread popular conviction that the mission of a conductor is chiefly ornamental at an orchestral concert. That is a sad misconception, and grows out of the old notion that a conductor is only a time-beater. a.s.suming that the men of the band have played sufficiently together, it is thought that eventually they might keep time without the help of the conductor. It is true that the greater part of the conductor's work is done at rehearsal, at which he enforces upon his men his wishes concerning the speed of the music, expression, and the balance of tone between the different instruments. But all the injunctions given at rehearsal by word of mouth are reiterated by means of a system of signs and signals during the concert performance. Time and rhythm are indicated by the movements of the baton, the former by the speed of the beats, the latter by the direction, the tones upon which the princ.i.p.al stress is to fall being indicated by the down-beat of the baton. The amplitude of the movements also serves to indicate the conductor's wishes concerning dynamic variations, while the left hand is ordinarily used in pantomimic gestures to control individual players or groups.

Glances and a play of facial expression also a.s.sist in the guidance of the instrumental body. Every musician is expected to count the rests which occur in his part, but when they are of long duration (and sometimes they amount to a hundred measures or more) it is customary for the conductor to indicate the entrance of an instrument by a glance at the player. From this mere outline of the communications which pa.s.s between the conductor and his band it will be seen how indispensable he is if music is to have a consistent and vital interpretation.

[Sidenote: _Personal magnetism._]

The layman will perhaps also be enabled, by observing the actions of a conductor with a little understanding of their purposes, to appreciate what critics mean when they speak of the "magnetism" of a leader. He will understand that among other things it means the apt.i.tude or capacity for creating a sympathetic relationship between himself and his men which enables him the better by various devices, some arbitrary, some technical and conventional, to imbue them with his thoughts and feelings relative to a composition, and through them to body them forth to the audience.

[Sidenote: _The score._]

[Sidenote: _Its arrangement._]

[Sidenote: _Score reading._]

What it is that the conductor has to guide him while giving his mute commands to his forces may be seen in the reproduction, in the Appendix, of a page from an orchestral score (Plate XII). A score, it will be observed, is a reproduction of all the parts of a composition as they lie upon the desks of the players. The ordering of these parts in the score has not always been as now, but the plan which has the widest and longest approval is that ill.u.s.trated in our example. The wood-winds are grouped together on the uppermost six staves, the bra.s.s in the middle with the tympani separating the horns and trumpets from the trombones, the strings on the lowermost five staves. The example has been chosen because it shows all the instruments of the band employed at once (it is the famous opening _tutti_ of the triumphal march of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony), and is easy of comprehension by musical amateurs for the reason that none of the parts requires transposition except it be an octave up in the case of the piccolo, an instrument of four-foot tone, and an octave down in the case of the double-ba.s.ses, which are of sixteen-foot tone. All the other parts are to be read as printed, proper attention being given to the alto and tenor clefs used in the parts of the trombones and violas. The ability to "read score" is one of the most essential attributes of a conductor, who, if he have the proper training, can bring all the parts together and reproduce them on the pianoforte, transposing those which do not sound as written and reading the different clefs at sight as he goes along.

V

_At an Orchestral Concert_

[Sidenote: _Cla.s.sical and Popular._]

[Sidenote: _Orchestras and military bands._]