This is the first installment in an occasional, indefinite series of explanations on typical things one would find at a classical music concert for people who are new to its many, many codified forms.
These are just the most general outlines.
If you feel like learning more, Google is your best friend, as is the New Grove Dictionary of Music (Oxford is posting articles for the next edition online here).
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
WHAT IS A SYMPHONY?
We talk about “going to the symphony” when we go to hear the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and then sit to listen to the Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The first is an institution, the second a piece of music. They share the name because they pretty much grew up together.
The roots of “symphony” come from the Greek for “sounding together.” The word pops up in European music during the Renaissance.
The symphony, as a piece of music, began life in the 17th century as what we now call an overture, or as an interlude. At the time, when aristocrats wanted longer-form instrumental entertainment, they requested suites, usually made up of movements patterned after courtly dance styles.
By the second half of the 17th century, opera was growing in popularity, and the overtures had grown into a predictable, three-part form that started out fast and grand, had a quieter, slower middle, followed by a rousing buildup to the curtain being raised.
That fast-slow-fast form clung to the overture as it left the opera house for the concert hall to become the modern symphony during the second half of the 18th century.
The first movement was, traditionally, the most formal, following a similar structure to that of the instrumental sonata, which opens with a musical theme that is carefully developed, blended with a new idea or two, then recapitulated before the end of the movement.
The earliest popular early symphonies are those of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). They and subsequent composers made the pieces longer, more complex, added or played around with the order of the movements, stretching the form every which way until it pretty much exploded with the old, gilded European order at the outbreak of World War I.
Composers are still writing symphonies, of course, but, in new music terms, it is often shorthand for “long and important” rather than being attached to a defined form.
As symphonies grew in scope, so did the size of the orchestras that played them. Because these pieces became mainstays on concert programmes, it made sense, by extension, for people to call the groups that played them symphony orchestras.
Here’s an example of one of the original fast-slow-fast symphonies, this one in F Major, probably dating from the 1730s, by one of the form’s acknowledged pioneers, Milanese composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1698-1775). It is performed by period-instrument group Europa Galante, under Fabio Biondi, at the Athenaeum in Bucharest:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
