The Orchestral Mystique

I’m not one of the composers who’s allowed to write for orchestra much, so I don’t teach orchestration. But I do have my own little orchestrational experimentation sandbox, which is that my composition students write orchestra pieces that get played when they graduate. So for a year they double clarinets with oboes, and voice brass chords with the horn on top, and ask me what I think, and I mumble things like, “I dunno,” “Looks good to me,” “Yeah, that might work.” And you know what? Almost everything works. I heard two of my students’ pieces last night, and all the things we’d agonized over worked just fine. We were afraid the violins wouldn’t be heard above the brass chords: well, they weren’t at first, and the conductor just told the violins to play louder. One student, god bless ‘im, had a long quotation in the winds and brass of “The Internationale” – a tribute to his deceased Communist father – doubled and tripled in 15 different combinations. Some were smooth, some were rougher, but the rough ones had their charm, and everything was clear and audible. He went through and revised some dynamics after hearing the rehearsal, which is the kind of thing Mahler did after hearing his symphonies, too. You need some common sense, and experience of instruments. I know better than to rely on high flute notes pianissimo, and that trumpets are louder than horns, and that the contrabass’s lowest notes can sound flabby. I check the voicing of brass and wind chords to make sure they’re well spaced. I’m sure there’s a level of really exquisite orchestration one can develop with enough experience; but to orchestrate adequately is just not rocket science. I’m convinced that most of what critics praise as “superb orchestration” in new music is merely the colorful use of obscure instruments in music that has nothing more substantive to comment on. And I resent that composers get turned down for grants and commissions from lack of orchestral experience, because it’s just not that big a jump from chamber ensemble to orchestra. If orchestration was some arcane technique that required loads of special training, then over all these years my students would have fallen into numerous traps and had disasters. It hasn’t happened.Â

(Years ago when I had an piece played by a sub-professional orchestra, I showed the score first to a famous orchestral composer and asked for advice. This esteemed personage suggested three changes – two of which didn’t work out in rehearsal, and I had to retract them.)

The problem of writing orchestra music is the same as writing any other kind of music: fashioning a continuity in which the ideas make themselves clear, take time to breathe, and lead from one to another with a plausible logic, resulting by the end in a meaningful and satisfying large-scale shape. Errors in these areas get writ large in an orchestral format, but the orchestra also provides lots of colorful toys to compensate and distract with. Places where the orchestration seems awkward are almost always places where the musical idea wasn’t well thought through, and wouldn’t have worked any better in a string trio. Writing orchestra music requires a ton of work in checking parts, deciding whether to go solo or “a 2,” and so on, but the common idea that only those in some upper echelon with special experience should be trusted with an orchestra is ridiculous.