On Jan 10, 2012, at 4:21 AM, Christopher Wilke wrote: > OK, I used the Second Viennese School composers as an example due to the > particular concern they had with timbre at a minute level. The issue could > just as easily been voiced by Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel or others. > Around the turn of the century, many composers began to focus increased > attention on tone color as a compositional element. Yet, just as timbre was > playing an increased role in their compositions, there are no comments from > any of these guys about the considerable changes taking place in this element > during their lifetimes. I'm still curious as to why no one seems to have had > anything to say about this at the time. Have you read Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration? It comes from precisely this period. (You can find English versions online)
> I have a hunch that perhaps they didn't perceive the changes to be as > considerable as we do. >From their point of view, it may have seemed a time of unprecedented >organological stability. They could remember when chin rests and valve >trumpets were newfangled, many orchestras still had ophicleides, and valved >horns were controversial. There is always a tendency to think of whatever's >happening now as the final stage of evolution. Sometimes changes in sound aren't perceived that way. Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, wrote that Beethoven's music "abounds in countless leonine leaps of orchestral imagination, but his technique, viewed in detail, remains much inferior to his titanic conception." He complains of overly prominent trumpets and difficult intervals for the horns. Mahler went a step further and reorchestrated Beethoven's symphonies. Did it occur to either of them that the problem was not Beethoven, but changes in instruments and the size of orchestras? -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
