Orchestration

I find myself wondering about the composer's "voice." How is it that, on overhearing a strain of a symphony or chamber piece, I am able to say, "oh, that's Beethoven" or, "definitely Schumann" or, "no way is that Brahms!" particularly when the snippet is just generic, just strings? For a few hundred years or so, composers worked with basically the same instrument (orchestrally speaking, strings and give or take a few brass, wind or percussion instruments) yet managed to make their works personal and identifiable. At the turn of the twentieth century, composers such as Mahler, Ravel and Stravinsky introduced more unusual instruments into the orchestra and experimented with orchestral voicings to a point where I recognize the music more for its orchestration than its musical motives or structure. (Castanets and tambourine? Do I smell Ravel?) While motives and structure may present themselves for consideration, as listeners we have developed a sweet-tooth for certain orchestral colors--the ear-candy of saxophone, banjo, celeste, or bass clarinet--and settled into a particular (and not so wholesome) habit of listening to much contemporary music.

I hear accordion and piano, shofar and violin, marimba, vibes and miscellaneous percussion, and I think: Alvin Curran. I hear car horns and metronomes, and I think: Ligeti. I hear a basic Pierrot ensemble plus clinking glassware, BBs, bird calls and rustling tree branch and I think: John Zorn (ahem, his "classical" music, anyway). I fixate on the instrumentation, and am impressed or bored by the way the instruments are written for or played, and sort of...forget...to evaluate the music for theme or structure, motive or development. Zorn, Ligeti, and Curran are masters in many ways beyond orchestration, of course; there are others, however, who seem content to just stop at color, stop at the orchestration, and let the surprise of an "unusual" instrument seduce our ears and distract us from structure and form (or lack of it).

Concerts of new music tend to be cleverly programmed with orchestration foremost in mind. A guitar quartet might show, visually, some superficial relationship to a string quartet on the same program but, because strings are rubbed, amplified, grated, or left to feedback, actually pays homage to the meandering electronic track in another piece. The string quartet, meanwhile, full of strong pizzicatos or tappings of the bow on the instrument's body, might seem companion to creative percussion writing elsewhere on the program, especially when that involves bowing cymbals and striking woodblocks with fingertips. It's color, color, everywhere!

If you asked every composer in a given school's graduate program (and I'll be the first to admit that our Ravels and Stravinskys are probably not lurking in the halls of some graduate program) to write a dozen piano pieces, or a "symphonic movement" for thirty-two strings and timpani, and then you sat and blindly listened to all those pieces, would you be able to hear distinct voices? (I imagine you'd hear a fair share of derivative voices: ghosts.) If prevented from assembling a select and unique instrumentation, is a composer still able to assert a personal voice? How does one differentiate oneself if the parameters are reduced? How is it that I can distinguish Mendelssohn from Schumann when they speak through the same medium, when it's just the piano that I hear? How is it that sometimes I take meaning from what people have to say--their words, sentences, and whole ideas--and sometimes I can only hear the expression of their pitch, timbre or inflection?