Music history and listening

One course in seven units

The subject has one course so far, The orchestra, with seven units. The first is a short history, the next four take the strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion in turn, the sixth covers the conductor and the score, and the last is about listening. Every unit opens on the same stage model, which seats 68 players: 45 strings including one harp, 8 woodwinds, 11 brass and 4 percussion. You can light up one family, pick an instrument to hear its range, or press Play and add the sections one at a time.

From Mantua and Versailles to Beethoven’s pairs

In an ancient Greek theatre the orchestra was the space in front of the stage where the chorus danced, from the verb orkheisthai, to dance. Around 1600 players used whatever instruments were at hand, until Monteverdi named the instruments in the score of L’Orfeo, staged in Mantua in 1607. At the French court the King’s Twenty-Four Violins played from 1626 to 1761, and under Lully it was joined by the royal wind players in the opera pit. Lully beat time with a heavy staff on the floor; in January 1687 he struck his own foot, refused to have the toe removed and died weeks later. Beethoven fixed the winds in pairs, added three trombones, a piccolo and a contrabassoon in the finale of his Fifth in 1808, and brought a chorus and soloists into his Ninth in 1824.

Strings in fifths, brass in harmonics

The violin is tuned G, D, A, E, each string a fifth above the last, and its lowest note G3 vibrates 196 times a second. The viola and cello use C, G, D, A, the cello an octave lower, while the double bass is tuned in fourths down to E1 at about 41 Hz. Woodwinds are sorted by what starts the sound: an edge for the flute, one reed for the clarinet, two for the oboe and bassoon. The clarinet acts like a pipe closed at one end, so it overblows a twelfth instead of an octave. A brass tube without valves plays only its harmonic series. The valves of Stölzel and Blühmel in 1815 added loops of tubing, and three in combination reach every note of the chromatic scale. Timpani, tuned by pedal, usually played the keynote and the fifth in Classical music.

The podium, the full score and the tuning A

In the Baroque era the first violinist or the continuo player led from inside the group; conductors became standard in the nineteenth century as orchestras grew. The downbeat always goes straight down, and 4/4 is beaten down, left, right, up. A full score stacks woodwinds, brass, percussion, harp and strings from top to bottom, with the horns above the trumpets. Before a concert the oboe gives an A, often 440 Hz, the pitch adopted as ISO 16. The listening unit then asks one question: who has the tune now? It suggests starting with Haydn’s Surprise Symphony of 1792, Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique of 1830.