Sunday, October 16, 2005
Genesis of the Flexible Orchestra
"a new idea for a real orchestral sound with rotating instrumentation
—finally we surmount the rigidity of the historical orchestra with a section of one instrumental family plus a smattering of others; changing every year or two."
Whenever it was that I first thought of being a composer, that thought contained the unexamined assumption that I would write for orchestra. I even had a private joke which I told myself: that I would write nine symphonies and die in the middle of my tenth. (There is a precedent for this). And during my apprenticeship at Columbia, in my early twenties,I wrote three orchestral works, one of which was a three-movement symphony—something that was quite outré in the post-Webern ‘60’s. None was performed and my teachers there did not see two of the three works.
In fact I went in an entirely other direction, to the avant garde, new music, Cage, minimalism, performer choice and improvisation, verbal scores, directing and performing in new music ensembles and many, many compositions that had nothing to do with the orchestra, though somemight be construed as "symphonic" in scope or formal thinking. In time, two or three orchestral opportunities came up, but there was no continuation, no commissions, and undertaking orchestra work withoutt hese things I knew was folly. I wanted performance.
But then something happened: It was in my inspiring "other career" as a gamelan player, listener, student of, composer for, that I saw a very wonderfully successful model for the idea of the orchestra: the Javanese Gamelan. From every point of view, social, sonic, technical,educational, the large ensemble of the court gamelan from central Java looked like a cultural winner to be compared with, how can I say it, the somewhat dysfunctional thing our fabulous, impressive orchestra has become. That’s a long story in itself, but the result is that it got me back to thinking two things: First that I loved and even still worshipped the sound of the Western symphony orchestra. Second that I could no longer imagine composing for it as-is (though had someone walked up to me with a commission at that vulnerable change-over moment, my head might have been turned, and my progress towards the flexible orchestra delayed.
I became obsessed with the idea that there was no logical reason for confining the idea of the large ensemble, the varied instrumentation we call our orchestra to just the format, numbers, proportions and types that evolved historically into what is now a fixed, hard-to-bend-or-alter template. Arbitrary and capricious, I thought: the given format of mostly strings with smaller numbers of other types, and with the names and proportions we know so well. I tried to think of what means "an orchestral sound." For example, the one or two on a part of the chamber orchestra is not what I wanted to call an orchestra.
There has to be a massed sound, a "chorale effect" (to used a revealing word from the sound-processing and synthesizer world). But that’s not all. There needs to be variety of timbre, which gives dimensionality to the massed sound. Seventy-six trombones is not my orchestra: but eleven trombones, two clarinets, one violin and percussion is! And that is what this year’s Flexible Orchestra consists of. But I’m jumping ahead.
After the first year of the Flexible Orchestra (April 2004) in which we had a format of twelve cellos, flute, clarinet and trombone, I sat down and wrote out the founding principles of the Flexible Orchestra which goes like this:
1) It should sound like an orchestra. That means at least one—probably only one section of multiples of a single instrumental type. And like an orchestra there are also different timbres from a few other instruments used both for contrast and emphasis.
2) It should have flexible orchestration, meaning it should change its section of multiples and the contrasting group of instruments every so often, let’s say every year or two, not every two hundred years (and more)as with the official Western orchestra.
3) It must be economical that is, accomplish its sound concept at a reasonable cost. So if the Flexible Orchestra caps at fifteen, there might be twelve for the section of multiples and three for the contrasting group; or perhaps eleven and four, etc.
4) Such a type of orchestra could spring up anywhere and make use of the instrumental strengths of a community or geographical area. Let’s say San Francisco proper has a surfeit of double basses, while the Peninsula has lots of violas..., Cincinnati may have many trumpets. Those could be the multiples in each of those communities that make up the cores of the flexible orchestras in those places.
Right away I came upon a wonderful, serendipidous result, a corollary: within my flexible orchestra is the multiple of one type. For that type there is already a repertoire of music, much of it quite wonderful, often by major composers (Henry Brant’s Angels and Devils, Lois V Vierk’s Simoom, for example), that because of their unusual instrumentation are doomed to get very few performances. Our Flexible Orchestra can easily revive such pieces, one by one in each new guise of the flexible orchestra, thus doing something culturally useful that also thickens the stew of our flexible endeavor.
As for the repertoire, it must be created. And that is my task now as a composer and organizer. I do have the utopian idea of many flexible orchestras and the sharing and co-commissioning of new repertoire. In time. In New York, where I live, I plan to produce at least one concert a year with an instrumentation that changes every year or two.
• A more theoretical account of how I arrived at the Flexible Orchestra
can be found in Part 2, The Problem of the Orchestra.
• If there is the interest I will follow up with our repertory to date; with the relationship of the Flexible Orchestra to our long-standing chamber group, the DownTown Ensemble; and some further reflections on the role of "SATB thinking" in the formation of instrumental ensembles.
posted by Daniel Goode
5:31 PM
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