Composing concert music for traditional symphony orchestra (as opposed to commercial music for games and soundtracks, which is intended to be performed for microphones in a studio, recorded, and manipulated by audio technicians, which is quite another thing) requires a specific set of skills, lots of experience, and an appreciation of what it feels like (and sounds like) to both play in an orchestra and to hear an orchestra from the audience. A symphonic concert music composer works to develop the skill of making his music 'sound' well in as many different contexts as possible. An opera composer must possess yet another set of skills: how to score for an acoustic orchestra playing sixteen feet below the stage as opposed to one onstage, how to accommodate singers singing without amplification without overpowering them, and so forth. Amplification skews everything, of course, and orchestrating for pit orchestras in which half of the players are wearing earphones (or are even playing in other rooms and their performances ‘piped in’) or synchronizing their performances to pre-recorded parts being mixed and broadcast into the house requires still another set of skills.
I’ve never taken an orchestration class, but I've composed steadily for over thirty years for every sort of orchestra up and down the food chain from Youth Orchestras to Semi-professional Community Orchestras to Regional Orchestras, to the New York Philharmonic and its like, and back. Every single time I've heard one of my pieces rehearsed or performed I've learned something new, something that has served not only to develop my skills as a composer and orchestrator but deepened my compassion for and understanding of the culture of the orchestra as an institution and community.
When I was fifteen I was given the opportunity by Harry Sturm, the courtly and wise principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony and the conductor of the youth orchestra in which I played piano, to stand anywhere onstage I wanted to during rehearsals. A few months later, that experience, combined with time spent playing my orchestral part and listening to others play theirs, along with an already well-thumbed copy of Rimsky Korsakov’s Principles of Orchestration, helped me to pull together the skills to compose and then conduct my first orchestra piece; the transition from behind the keyboard into the middle of the flutes, and then on to the podium, was made by Harry’s course of study to feel not only appropriate but inevitable. Jay Joslyn, the Milwaukee Journal critic back then, wrote that I must have felt like Moses atop Mount Pisgah, looking down from the podium into an orchestral Promised Land and I did.
I still have an old black and white photograph of me stationed behind the flutes, listening hard, as Harry led my brothers and sisters through Peer Gynt. He told me at the time that Maurice Ravel used to conduct through his orchestrations of his works – which began as piano pieces – before a semi-professional orchestra in order to ‘road test’ them and that, in his opinion, this was the best way for a composer to learn the orchestra.
There are lots of stories with morals for young composers writing for orchestras. I don’t vouch for the veracity of these, but I repeat them because, if they are apocryphal, then they are truer than truth. One of my favorites involves Koussevitzky and Bartok, who during a rehearsal, kept piping up with comments. Maestro asked maestro: ‘Can you please hold your comments until the break, and we will discuss them in my dressing room?’ The maestros met; through the door a furious battle. When the rehearsal resumed, Maestro announced to the players that the Maestros had agreed that everything was going just fine.
I left the University of Wisconsin before taking an orchestration class, although Catherine Comet’s razor-sharp disquisitions about orchestral combinations and the proper notation of string harmonics during my conducting lessons left me both edified and traumatized. The best advice I’ve ever received as an orchestral conductor was from a violist classmate who, by virtue of the fact that he didn’t like me much and didn’t seem to care much for my music, could not have been motivated by kindness: he told me to simply not stop waving my arms and everything would go fine. The best advice I’ve ever received as a soloist with orchestra was that my job was to be extraordinary, because people had come expecting that, not just an honorable showing, and to supply anything less was to misapprehend the entire transaction.
With one major Midwestern orchestra in my early thirties I cooked my goose with the conductor forever when, in response to his request for a few comments, I mounted the podium and, in five minutes, ticked off all of my notes to the orchestra. One thing a conductor can count on, to paraphrase Oscar Levant, is the knowledge that the players in their orchestra will inevitably grow to despise him. The players shuffled their feet, applauding me, but really they were just enjoying the discomfiture of their sovereign.
It took half a decade for another conductor to forgive me for insisting (at the piano, accompanying a rehearsal of an aria from one of my operas) that the music go at the speed I wanted it to go. It took me a long time (as a composer observing my pieces rehearsed by other conductors, and as a conductor myself) to learn that there are very, very few comments that a composer can or should make to the conductor and the orchestra that will make any difference. Period.
Curtis didn’t offer a class in orchestration when I was there and, in any event, I was learning-by-doing, hand over fist, developing my chops by composing as much orchestral music as I possibly could, since the Director, John de Lancie, had miraculously (and with what now seems Olympian generosity) decreed that I was to be allowed (nay, required, since he told me when I asked him why he was allowing me this opportunity that he cordially detested the idea of composers ‘sitting idly by’ while conductors and performers tried to make sense of their unidiomatic scores) to conduct the premieres of whichever orchestral works I was able to complete.
Meanwhile, I enjoyed each Saturday morning what I felt was the catbird’s seat, perched behind a grand piano on the stage of Curtis Hall, slightly above and behind William Smith (who became a beloved mentor and friend) as he rehearsed the Curtis Orchestra in whatever repertoire the Philadelphians were playing that week. Bill collected composer facsimile scores, and would bring one, if he had it, for me to look at; Clint Newig, the Philadelphia Orchestra librarian, would send over their full score, which contained all the bowings that helped make the Philadelphia Orchestra glow; and I would have my own score. As I listened to the rehearsal and Bill dispensed his profoundly useful, unpretentious brand of wisdom to my classmates, I would array before me for comparison all three scores, taking notes, listening, and learning.
Orchestras are Big. An orchestra is not a big chamber ensemble, although it contains a bewitching number of instrumental combinations. Orchestras are particularly good at being Big and at expressing Big Thoughts. Rimsky Korsakov somewhere advises never to have more than three things going on in the orchestra at a time. An orchestra can make complicated music sound straightforward if the composer is adroit at limning his ideas with appropriate orchestration. An orchestra all playing one pitch together in various octaves is as beautiful, opulent, and as stirring as the greatest organ: consequently, an orchestra — like any first-rate performer — can make superficial, even stupid music seem profound — at least while they are playing it.
What is deemed complex in orchestral scoring is entirely in the ear of the perceiver: Joan Tower once turned to me as my Fresh Ayre was being rehearsed by the St. Louis Symphony and said, 'Someday you'll learn how not to have so much going on all the time' and meant it; a few days later I played a recording of the piece for Bernstein, who said, 'I love how you juggle so many things at once in this piece.' One need not be blunt to be direct. A corollary to the previous thought: use doublings sparingly. Just because more people on the stage are playing the same thing at the same time doesn't make it more true, or more important, or better, or more forceful. Received wisdom is that a single trombone can drown out an entire orchestra, but if you have a secret, then a whisper will do.
Ned Rorem used to quip to me that he thought the use of excessive percussion in the orchestra was 'immoral;' it was his way of pointing out that, to him, percussion is to the orchestra what jewelry is to a beautifully dressed person — an accessory to the point. I've long believed that composers now in their sixties began using more percussion because of the complexity of their musical language, and the fact that it was easier to get percussionists to play it accurately, or to play it at all. This is certainly true on college campuses. I also believe that composers of my generation use more percussion because early synthesizer mallet samples sounded more realistic than the rest. When I scored my opera Bandanna I knew I would have no strings, so I elevated the role of the idiophone (any instrument you play by hitting it) section — in my case, all the mallet instruments — to equal status with the wind and brass sections. This decision merely reflected a change in the hierarchy already accepted by bandstrators (another topic) and commercial orchestrators.
Spelling chords correctly really matters in the orchestra. Whatever a composer's chosen language, whatever intellectual games he has to play with himself to get the notes to first come out and then stick on the page, a composer must remember that the orchestra was designed to play tonal music. A C major triad, if you want it to sound good, has to be spelled C-E-G. If you spell it C-F flat-G because your personal notational schema requires it, the F flat will be performed higher in pitch than it would have been if it had been spelled with an E, and the chord will not 'ring' &mdash the overtones will not become deliciously activated — because it will not be played in tune. No matter how hard you will it to be not true, that F flat is looking to resolve to an E in the context of the G above and the C below; there will be tension in the chord. In the thrilling, exquisite subtlety of his (accurate) spelling lies much of the glory of Richard Strauss' music, where the constant 'shifting sand' of his chromatic harmonies are eloquently expressed through contrapuntal lines that 'lead' up and down.
Although when the parts go on the stands the composer has all the Power, because he is the one who composed the notes, his Authority diminishes every time something is harder to play than it needs to be, the notes are unidiomatic for the instruments, or when technical mistakes and errata emerge in the performance materials. Observing Norman Carol (back then the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra) conducting my classmates in a string sectional, I once saw him toss a major composer’s score over his shoulder in disgust because the string parts were so enigmatically notated. ‘Maybe he’s a genius, who knows?’ he cried, exasperated. ‘I certainly can’t tell by looking at these parts!’
I don't think anybody in the orchestra world really cares one way or the other that synthesizers are commonly included in the instrumentation of most new scores. Things like turntables, composers tapping away at their laptops to trigger sound effects, and so forth, seem to be indulged by orchestra players the way that people who have had children themselves accomodate new parents. There are happy orchestras and angry orchestras, and every orchestra is understandably skeptical when a brand new piece of music is set before them. Ultimately, if a piece has merit, the orchestra will rise to the occasion. Halfway through the first rehearsal of Prayer for Peace, the composition with which I made my professional debut as a composer with the Philadelphia Orchestra, I felt the tide of opinion turn in my piece’s favor when William dePasquale turned to Joe dePasquale and said, ‘I know he’s young, but c’mon, Joe, let’s give the kid a break.’
Orchestral parts ought to be only as difficult to play as is absolutely necessary, since orchestral players are, by and large, proud members of an exceedingly close-knit community with strict codes of behavior who customarily function in a highly stressful work environment. From their earliest days at conservatory they’ve labored to blend well with their colleagues, to simultaneously stand out, yet serve as a cog in an enormous nineteenth century music-making apparatus. I recall observing John de Lancie’s wind sectional rehearsals as a student: he would beat four, command each player to enter on beat one with their softest note, grow louder as the beat proceeded to four, and then diminish to nothing as four more beats went by. The tension was incredible. This developed the players' nerves, taught them how to perform under severe pressure, and served to shape them into a section. Orchestras are tyrannies ruled by conductors, not democracies, and that fact can be really hard on people.
In the end, one must simply learn to compose for orchestra by doing it. How a composer manages to get an 'at bat' with an orchestra is the subject of a different sort of essay. Opting out and composing for synthesizers instead presents a different set of challenges, though. One of my former students had become so virtuosic in his ability to manipulate sound synthesis software like Garriton Personal Orchestra, coupled with the software notation program Sibelius, that, when he sat down to compose for acoustic orchestra, he didn’t know where to start. The orchestral writing of many emerging composers demonstrates their reliance on 'midi mockups' and electronic gear to realize their orchestral visions. A composer can (and should) learn crucial things about orchestration by studying scores, attending rehearsals of his local orchestra, even listening to recordings (although they do not represent what really happened), but there is no better way to really learn than writing notes down on music paper, handing it to players, hearing them play the notes, remembering what worked, what didn’t, how it sounded, and then building on that knowledge in the next piece.
