The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650-1815 (review)

The role of the orchestra within an ever-changing social and political environment has recently attracted a great deal of attention, as its ability to adapt to twenty-first century culture remains constantly under the spotlight. Many of the issues surrounding the orchestra and its musicians past, present, and future have recently surfaced in such books as The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, edited by Joan Peyser (New York, 1986); Christopher Small's Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (London and Hanover, NH, 1989); The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, edited by Colin Lawson (Cambridge, 2003); and Stephen Cottrell's Professional Music-Making in London: Ethnography and Experience (Aldershot, 2004). With their new book, John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw have made a distinctive, scholarly, and stimulating contribution to the debate.

The orchestra may be defined as both an institution and a corporate musical instrument, histories that are contiguous yet not necessarily congruent, since corporations of instruments existed for some time before the orchestra came into being. Over three and a half centuries the social history of the orchestra has been characterized by elements of continuity alongside the inexorable shift from private to public patronage. During the nineteenth century the middle classes became major arbiters of musical taste, while conductors were increasingly professional entrepreneurs and interpreters who used the orchestra as a vehicle for their own virtuosity. The twentieth century saw a rich variety of developments, including the rise of the chamber orchestra and the revival of historical instruments. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century a substantial body of musical opinion undoubtedly sees the orchestra as a nineteenth-century relic, cumbersome and riddled with bureaucracy, more comfortable in the territory of Mozart to Mahler than in the challenges of postmodernism.

On the other hand, there still exists a great deal of optimism in the orchestra's continued ability to adapt and, as Cottrell has recently asserted, 'the orchestra is too important to be allowed to subside into a cultural antiquity for an ever-diminishing group of interested historians' ('The Future of the Orchestra' in (ed. Colin Lawson) The Cambridge Companian to the Orchestra, 264). Certainly, the profession of orchestral player remains an aspiration for many of today's conservatoire students, even though some undoubtedly eventually find themselves in agreement with the sentiments expressed by the American writer Henry Pleasants a generation ago: the orchestral musician

has no music of his own, nor can he play anyone else's music with the immediacy that it had for those to whom it was originally addressed, or expect from his listeners the same immediacy of response. . . . Given such constraints as these, compounded by the stagnation of the repertory, it is a tribute to the serious musician's skills, diligence and patience that he is not a duller fellow than he is, especially the orchestral musician, playing more or less the same notes in more or less the same way under the daily supervision of a variety of opinionated conductors year in and year out. (Henry Pleasants, Serious music and all that jazz

(London, 1969), 78–9)

But the orchestra retains an enduring and widespread appeal among players and audience alike; this has been reflected in a rich vein of scholarly activity over the past twenty-five years, to which Spitzer and Zaslaw have each made important individual contributions. Much of the material in their monumental new book develops their own earlier historical research and scholarship. Spitzer is the author of comprehensive New Grove articles on the orchestra, as well as influential articles on the birth of the orchestra in Rome and on the orchestra as metaphor. Well in advance of his comprehensive monograph on Mozart's symphonies (1989), Zaslaw attracted widespread attention with his article 'Toward the Revival of the Classical Orchestra' (Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 103 (1976–7), 158–87), which served to introduce Christopher Hogwood...