Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra ... Tuesday, March 14, 1985, Jesse Auditorium

Abstract

"In spite of its central position in Western musical culture for the past several centuries, the orchestra must be understood as a relatively recent development in the annals of our music's long and illustrious history. In fact, the modern orchestra owes its origin as much to the sister arts of the theater and the dance as to music. Initially, in the seventeenth century, the orchestra was constituted to accompany and to glorify the opera and the ballet and remained in that subordinate state before being given an independent existence as the century came to its close. At the heart of the orchestra from the beginning were instruments from the string family. Although members of the wind band were often employed for dramatic effects in the theater or for special display pieces such as concertos, composers for the emancipated orchestra only gradually accepted the full range of non-stringed instruments into the fold. Under the banner of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, composers began to exploit rather systematically a much broader spectrum of musical timbre as a means of delivering the dramatic contrasts of the new aesthetic. It was only then and because of the new concerns that the idiomatic treatment of European instruments in such a context was elevated to the rank of a serious discipline, known as orchestration. Since that time, the imaginative and sensitive use of instrumental color in the orchestra has been one of the hallmarks of a master symphonist."--Program Notes.