So, you want to write a Symphony?
Arthur Butterworth
The world does not owe the composer a living - or indeed any other
kind of creative artist. However, like the painter, the poet or
writer, the composer is driven by a desperate yearning for self-expression.
It’s an urge to call the attention of the rest of humanity
to how his or her experience of life has influenced his emotions
and intellectual perception of the world we live in. Music is
the most universal of all languages to communicate with others,
and it can do this in countless ways. In the sophisticated cultures
of western society, the most lofty, emotional and intellectual
way generally acknowledged to express such personal experiences
is through the symphony. This might not be true for everyone,
but along with opera, chamber music and other aspects of ‘serious’
music perhaps it is.
Where small-scale chamber music - maybe three or four participants
- might be likened to an intimate discussion between close friends,
the symphony suggests a more public forum of debate in which all
have a chance to offer an opinion and influence the ultimate outcome
of the subject under discussion.
The early symphonies of Haydn or Mozart were often thought to
be not unlike chamber music, such as the string quartet, but on
a slightly larger scale. With Beethoven, however, a new concept
quickly became evident: a larger musical canvas upon which all
the instruments now regarded as fundamental to the orchestra,
were given opportunity to contribute a far more public utterance.
It hardly needs stating what this basic establishment of a ‘symphony’
or ‘opera’ orchestra - has come to be. However, maybe
it’s worth reflecting on all the same: pairs of flutes,
oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani (played by
a single musician) and a body of string players: violins, violas,
cellos and double-basses. The numbers of strings can vary considerably,
but the ideal has generally been to ensure that the total number
of string players should perhaps be a few more than the total
number of wind (and timpani) players.
This is how the classical symphony - of the age of Haydn and Mozart
seems to have established itself. It need hardly be said that
this fairly simple balance of instruments very quickly developed
into something far bigger from Beethoven onwards. In the mid-nineteenth
century many other, more exotic instruments - relatives of the
basic families of woodwind, brass and percussion instruments -
quickly came to be added. This was notably the case in the theatre
where opera demanded a more colourful and outwardly expressive
musical element, which perhaps the more staid and intellectual
concept of ‘symphony’ did not seek.
Many young composers have the lofty ambition to express themselves
through the symphony. So how does one go about this?
Most composers, or would-be composers, can play a musical instrument:
the piano is still probably the one that most musicians become
familiar with before any other. But the violin, clarinet, flute,
trumpet or any other instrument is now almost equally likely to
be a young musician’s first choice and thus main expertise.
Is it necessary to play an instrument? Berlioz, one of the most
imaginative and innovative of composers when it comes to the art
and craft of orchestration, is said to have been a reasonably
adequate performer only on the guitar and the flageolet - neither
of them regular orchestral instruments. He was by no means a pianist,
nor a string player.
The composing of any large-scale work: piano sonata, string quartet,
concert overture, suite or whatever, and certainly a symphony,
needs first of all, like a building or any other kind of structure,
a ground plan or design. It is no use idly casting around in the
mind for scraps of melody, and maybe a few suitable harmonies
which, when strummed on the piano merely sound nice. Symphonic
material needs to possess potential for development and expansion
on a large time-scale. Folksong-like material is almost always
self-contained and complete. Symphonic material on the other hand
tends to be open-ended and capable of infinite variation, and
almost limitless expansion.
Composing a song of one simple melody, taking up perhaps a page-and-a-half,
and less than a minute in performance is akin to knocking together
a small garden shed from a few planks of wood: simple and spontaneous
in concept and execution. Writing a symphony for even a modest
sized orchestra, running to a couple of hundred pages of full-score,
and lasting thirty or forty minutes is like designing and building
a church, castle or country mansion: it needs immense planning
and fore-thought, many different materials and a well-planned
structure that will not fall down. Musical material has to be
strong enough for its demanding purpose.
What is “musical material”? It is the thought-process
- the “inspiration” if you like - that a composer
contrives to invent having recourse to contemplation, deep thought,
and an indefinable imagination. How to marshal such casual thoughts
is often an elusive quality of mind. Elgar said that one “just
plucks music out of the air”. But this is a glib, most unsatisfactory
answer. The real answer - if there can be one at all - is that
it is the outcome of much mental deliberation: toying with and
imagining what various combinations of sounds - pitches of notes
- along with accompanying other sounds - harmonies - and elements
of time and motion - rhythms that produce the music in its own
basic substance: the passing of time itself. For whereas a building
exists in space, music exists in the flux of passing time. All
the foregoing, should, of course, be obvious to the musician.
It has been said that form (that is structure or shape) and content
(the different notes, harmonies and rhythms) are the same thing.
But this is not an easy concept to grasp, nor indeed to explain
simply. Expressed vaguely, and perhaps inadequately - and probably
not very precisely in logical terms - it implies that the “shape”
of a piece of music is really the essence of the themes themselves.
It is however, much more than this.
Philosophically then, the concept of a symphony - it almost goes
without saying - is no light undertaking. To change the metaphor
it is not a matter of casually sewing together a few pretty coloured
bits cloth of different texture or material and thinking that
they look rather nice when casually pieced together: an unplanned
patchwork. Instead this involves designing a well-proportioned
tapestry or enormous carpet with an identifiable motif and a design
which is seen to have specific purpose. Some young composer appear
to throw odd bits of musical motifs together, imagining that the
more contrasted - completely unrelated - they are, the more interesting
the result will be, but this is not so.
If the basic necessity for designing a symphony is that its structure
should be logical and secure - the framework rigid enough to withstand
the stresses and strains of time - in the literal sense of taking
‘time’ to play, the filling-in of the skeleton framework
with actual instrumental sounds is like cladding the building’s
frame with panels of substances that give it actual body, decoration
and colour. This is the art and craft of orchestration.
It is both these things: an art - to have the imaginative invention
to think of what would be the most appropriate timbre or
quality of tone: string or wind, and how they might sound in combination.
At the same time the application of this ‘art’ is
more basically a ‘craft’ as well. The ‘art’
might well be a whimsical, personal thing, but the ‘craft’
is a thing that can be learned.
The craft of orchestration can be learned from a book, or learned
from lectures at college or university. At least this is how it
would seem to be acquired, but in the last resort it is
not the best way. Like any other craft - that of bricklaying,
carpentry, gardening, mechanical engineering, farming, midwifery
- the real practical skill is learned, as the saying goes “on
the shop floor”. For the orchestral composer this - best
of all - means oneself actually playing in an orchestra.
Conducting is all very well, but sitting in the body of an orchestra,
hour-after-hour, day-by-day, for weeks-on-end, year-in, year-out
teaches one how an orchestra functions, what works, what does
not work, what is awkward, what is ideal, what balances, what
does not. The experience of sitting in amongst players learning
and rehearsing both old and familiar and absolutely new works
instils a close-up familiarity that no amount of dry academic
or theoretical study can ever achieve. Academicism as taught in
the universities is all very well and good for egg-heads and historians,
but it is of virtually no use to the practical musician. As a
parallel situation it has been truly remarked that orchestral
conductors, whether in the opera house or on the concert platform
are not best drawn from the ranks of university professors
(or should not be) but from the ranks of the players who have
themselves spent some considerable apprenticeship inside the body
of an orchestra. One learns the art and craft of the orchestra
more thoroughly and practically in this way than any other.
Alas! academicism and the possession of a university degree is
endemic in this modern age, but it was not always so: almost all
the truly great composers - and conductors - were essentially
practical musicians, not pedantic theorists. Elgar had a notorious
feud with the academics of his day for pouring scorn on them -
but he was right.
In practical terms orchestration entails learning how to use each
family of instruments effectively, appreciating what their essential
character is, not employing instruments in a manner that does
not suit their essential nature. It also means keeping them appropriately
employed. This does not mean - as it has to be admitted many of
the so-called great composers have done, even Beethoven - keeping
the strings going so long that they do not have a moment’s
pause for breath, or the briefest rest for the bow arm. There
needs to be contrast in orchestral texture, and like a good conversation
or debate, an opportunity for another voice to be heard, otherwise
the sound becomes tedious and boring.
It may seem absolute heresy to say so, but, for instance, the
layout of much of the string-writing in Beethoven’s “Pastoral”
Symphony is tedious and ineffective because it is too on-going,
lacks contrast and is frankly tiring and exhausting to play.
The opposite of such too dense scoring is a score that is too
thin and tenuous. If you specify a particular number of wind instruments
then do make use of them rather than letting them lie idle. Studying
in minute detail how other composers have employed the individual
instruments can be revealing, although there are many examples,
even from the great composers where one wonders why they did this
or that. In many cases one wonders how a later composer would
have gone about the same situation; part of the answer to this
must be because later instrumental technology made things possible
that were not feasible in earlier times. The most obvious example
of this concerns the treatment of brass instruments following
the invention of the valve, making a chromatic scale possible
which was not available before.
In the past century percussion instruments have come into their
own, so that in many contemporary scores they threaten to overwhelm
almost everything else. Fashionable, and indeed impressive though
a whole battery of percussion looks on a concert platform,
it still needs treating with discretion. No matter what many contemporary
composers’ views may be, the saying that “percussion
is effective in inverse ratio to the amount it is used”
is still true. Why? Because fundamentally percussive sounds are,
quite unlike string and wind sounds, so inexpressive and incapable
of the subtle moulding and shaping of a phrase once the sound
has been struck. So, except for the timpani (a truly musical
instrument) when tempted to make a score impressive to look at
by demanding all sorts of snazzy things to hit - cymbals, glockenspiels,
vibraphones, tam-tams, or whatever - one should ask oneself whether
such a sound is really necessary. In Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony
there is but one solitary stroke of the tam-tam in the whole work,
but it is awe-inspiring. Had it been used prodigally through the
work it would quickly have become tedious and irritating to listen
to. So, beware the percussion! Some of the most flamboyant orchestrators
- Berlioz, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Mahler - treated the percussion
with discretion. Some other instruments can also become wearisome
if over used: especially the trumpet. What might be perfectly
acceptable in a military or brass band, or even more so in rumbustious
light music, is not nearly so appropriate in the more serious-natured
symphony. On the other hand if you are determined to have a particular
family of instruments do give them something to do, they need
to have a purpose rather than sitting doing virtually nothing
- very often because the composer just does not know how best
to employ them.
The texture of an orchestral score is, as already remarked, not
unlike the structure of a building or even something so apparently
simple as a piece of cabinet-making: it needs secure “bonding”
so that the various constituents will not work loose and fall
apart. In woodwork this means joints need to be “dovetailed”
- the interlocking joints shaped like dove tails so that they
fit snugly and support each other - in brickwork or masonry it
means “bonding” so that the courses of stones or bricks
are interlocked with each other. In orchestration it means that
one instrument or group of instruments needs - for the most part
- in some way to interlock with others. Phrase endings need to
over-lap the following phrases; a kind of ‘relay-race’
in which the theme or motif is connected to what follows. The
score should not give the impression of disjointed bits of themes
loosely stuck together, or following each other without some kind
of logical connection.
Within the past couple of decades or a little more, the accepted
way of ‘writing’ a full score (or indeed even the
simplest Christmas carol) has been to use a music-computer. This
is fine for the publisher and printer to bring out a neat finished
score, and to be able, more or less thereafter instantaneously
to produce any number of perfectly accurate copies. But the use
of the computer has threatened to overtake the innocent, tyro
composer by beguiling him into believing that one can compose
at the computer itself!
Allowing the computer to take over the creative process. This
is an insidious situation, aided and abetted by manufacturers
- who obviously want to sell their sophisticated wares. Yes! The
computer is fine for the finished product, but it is NOT a substitute
for the immediacy of inspiration and invention at the point of
a pencil on music paper. Rather is it to be compared with the
atomic-energy laboratory worker’s need to be at a safe distance
from his lethal materials by using a robot hand and arm to operate
for him through the safely of a shielding glass panel. It lacks
that split-nano-second immediacy of putting one’s thoughts
- the written notes of music - on paper. The agency of the computer,
for all its incredible sophistication is not a means of composing,
although it beguiles so many innocent musicians into believing
that they too, by manipulating a few keys can become “composers”.
It threatens to become just too easy. The sheer drudgery of really
“writing” music is dispensed with, but it has ever
been this “drudgery” that has caused generation upon
generation of real composers to consider carefully and reflect
just what they are doing; to self-question their motives and inspiration:
“Do I really mean to do that?” The immense physical
effort causes one to pause a while and ask whether what one is
doing is useful anyway. The computer, by making such labour no
longer a tiring task, is inclined to over-simplify the whole notion
of creativity.
Some few years ago, a sixteen year old would-be composer presented
me with a score to comment on in which the trombone parts were
ridiculously inappropriate and uncharacteristic of the instrument.
On being asked why he had done this, his answer was that since
they ‘more or less played the bass line’ it would
be an easy matter for him merely to press a key on the key-pad
which would simply duplicate what he had already written for the
cellos and basses. This demonstrated the warped, undeveloped mentality
of a ‘composer’ who imagined that this constituted
the art of composition and orchestration: depending on a machine
to do the job for him. This is akin to those “painting sets”
sold for children in which they are led to believe that filling
in numbered bits of a white canvas with similarly numbered tiny
pots of different coloured paints makes them believe they have
become “artists”.
