Orchestra
or'kes-tra, a company of musical performers playing as a band in concert. The notion of orchestral music is modern. Instrumental music was at first an accompaniment of the voice or body. Instrumental music, apart from singing, dancing, or marching, was not accepted generally before 1600. The combination of various instruments, and especially instruments, as different as a violin and a drum, was a later development again. Band or orchestral music did not gain a footing until about 1800. A full orchestra now includes stringed instruments, wind instruments of brass, wind instruments of wood, and instruments of percussion. A recent writer describes a well balanced classical orchestra of fifty-three pieces as made up of:
10 first violins.
10 second violins.
8 violas.
6 violoncellos.
6 double-basses.
WOOD WIND INSTRUMENTS:
First and second oboes.
First and second clarinets.
First and second bassoons.
BRASS WIND INSTRUMENTS:
First and second trumpets.
INSTRUMENTS OF PERCUSSION:
A pair of kettledrums.
Orchestral combinations are almost in-finite in number. Two instruments, for example, may be played in unison, or in octaves, or in intervals; first one may take the high part; then, the other; giving four possible combinations for two instruments. Add a third instrument and the number of combinations is increased. The number of combinations possible with an orchestra like the one described is almost beyond computation. Then again, almost the entire orchestra may play an important figure while a few play accompaniments; or, by reverse, a single instruments may carry the burden in its brightest tones while all the rest play in soft, veiled tones. Groups are frequently made to answer each other,--strings against wood-wind, or wood-wind against brass-wind; or wind instruments massed against the string band.
Lavignac, a professor of harmony in the Paris Conservatory, calls attention to the similarity of sound and color, and likens the effect of orchestral music to that of a pattern or picture in many colors. The placid, poetic flute, in his judgment, produces a sensation like that of a blue sky; the rustic oboe gives green; the warm, rough, yet velvety clarinet--brilliant when high, solemn when low--yields red brown, vandyke red, and garnet; the horn is coppery yellow; the family of trumpets shows all gradations of crimson; the braggart cornet sound has a pale red color; the sad bassoon is dark brown; drums make masses of black; the triangle is silvery; while the violin gives bits of color changing like a kaleidoscope.