Books › The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910 › scan 41
Scan 41
The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910
6 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1improved, new ones introduced, and old ones abandoned, instrumentation became a new and favourite study in Italy. Musicians began to find out the capabilities of various families of instruments, their value in special effects, the kind of music most suitable to each, and also to feel their way about the immense field of resources opened out to them. The possibility of using some of the instruments as solo-instruments, by encouraging virtuosi to acquire great skill, raised the standard of excellence of the whole orchestra. Monteverde had felt the need of the preponderance of stringed instruments in the orchestra, and his successors, who had the perfected Cremona models at their disposal, soon established a properly-balanced quartet of strings, and ejected all stringed instruments not played with the bow, except the harp. The proper understanding of the compass and capabilities of wind instruments was of later date. They were chiefly used to double some part of the string quartet until Mozart's time.
3The effort of reviving the Drama and of creating instrumental music seems to have exhausted Italy, for during the eighteenth century, the orchestra occupied a very secondary position in Italian music. The evolution and perfecting of the orchestra was continued chiefly in Germany during that period.
5Most German princes and nobles had private orchestras called Kapelles, and their leader was the Kapellmeister. These princes always endeavoured to secure the services of the very best musicians. Though Bach was kapellmeister at several courts in Germany, his influence was not fully felt till long after his death. All the genius that succeeded him acknowledged that his music was the firm basis from which all their efforts started. So far as the instruments are concerned, our orchestra does not differ materially from Bach's. It is in the treatment of the individual instruments and in the fact that in Bach's time they were scarcely ever all used together (some
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