On Jan 14, 2007, at 7:47 PM, John Howell wrote:
Orchestras, however, tended to provide entertainment for the upper classes (including their use in opera and ballet), and bands--especially military bands--for the middle and lower classes.
I have always found this distinction simplistic at best. Orchestras began to break out of aristocratic boundaries almost immediately (Corelli gave public concerts), and in London there were multiple, competing orchestras aimed at various audiences throughout the 18th c. By the 19th c., orchestras sold tix to anyone who could afford them, just as today.
Now, as to the band: Entertainment was a decidedly secondary mission of the band for some time. Military bands were maintained by the military to keep time on the march, not to give concerts. In this respect they could be argued to be more aligned to the needs of the ruling class than any orchestra ever was. As bands came to be seen increasingly as concert organizations, they provided music to audiences of *almost exactly the same class* as the orchestra, just under different circumstances. I might add that the lower class just doesn't enter into the equation: members of that class have neither the time nor money for concerts of any sort.
Those disparate missions do show up in the music written for the different ensembles, which makes comparing their music realistically rather difficult.
If you're saying that the concert band is not a classical ensemble, then I disagree. I will readily concede that the band repertoire leans more heavily on pops fare than the orchestra, but that was never really the issue for me. What I was talking about from the first was the non-pops segment of both repertoires, which I believe are indeed directly comparable. The Holst suites are first-rate pieces of music *by any standard* whereas _La Fiesta Mexicana_, for example, is not. That's all.
it's a matter of semantics. How many clarinets are in a mass? I wouldn't call a total of 20 clarinets divided into 3 sections massed. However, 20 clarinets in each of three sections I would.
"Massed" is the standard term in English for "more than one on a part"--directly equivalent in that respect to the German "mehrfach besetzt." So if there are three clarinet parts played by 6 clarinets, that's massed. I didn't make this up.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
