The method of my orchestration teaching.
Working in another composer’s style makes you notice decisions you might otherwise take for granted. It gives you a broad palette of expressive possibilities in the orchestra, and puts your own orchestral style in a new light.
Stylistic imitation
We work with existing piano reductions of symphonic music by the great masters in question. In the first lessons we listen to the composers, and I analyse how the music is built, the elements and the way the composer thinks. After that, the students get exercises on a weekly basis, where they orchestrate a reduction from these principles. In the end we look at the student’s solution and discuss how it fits the style and how well it treats the orchestra, and finally we compare the instrumentation with the original.
Symphonic style imitation
The inner sound library of the imagination
When the student has hit upon ideas that the original composer used, it trains the composer’s inner ear.1 Ideas you have been working with, we can suddenly hear in a real recording. We can hear differences, we can discuss the sounds. We really get close to the score.
Take, for example, imagining how a horn doubled at the octave by an oboe will sound at a given place. You get as close as you can in your inner ear, but when you hear the real symphony and discover how it sounds, it builds a frame of reference. It builds an inner library of sounds that you can draw on.
I believe this stimulates the student’s imagination, even when only parts of the student’s work match the original, which they then hear in a recording.
That is why we work without playback in notation software, so that you practise imagining the sound before you hear it. I also recommend writing by hand. And we listen to many recordings, also on period instruments.
Defending your choices
I also ask the students to defend their decisions, and I teach them that it is not a mistake if they do not arrive at the composer’s solution. If it is in the composer’s style, you can easily imagine other solutions, as long as they suit the style. That is exactly my point: there is not one answer.
Many times we have orchestrated a passage in a way I actually think is a good solution to the musical problem Haydn had, and then it turns out that Haydn himself did something quite different.
Why style imitation
The orchestra is a tradition
The crux is that the symphony orchestra is a tradition. It is a historical construction, a carrier of a cultural heritage of instruments which over time have developed together with the orchestra, the harp and the flute among them.2 That is why it makes little sense to enter a historical institution without fully understanding where it comes from, why things were made the way they are, and how they were refined into what they are.
So it is about diving, through imitation, into the technique that carried composers who themselves helped develop the symphony orchestra into what it is today. That development did not come about by itself.
It also gives composers a chance to practise viewing themselves as composers, other styles and other ways of thinking from an objective distance. Here the symphony orchestra is almost a playground of endless possibilities.
Style is a choice within constraints
Style is a choice within a set of constraints, and style imitation makes the student aware of it. There are contextual constraints, imposed constraints and creative constraints.3 Today there are really very many styles, and they are used fleetingly, so the composer today has a much freer choice of their own constraints.
A mature composer is able to move between different constraints according to the purpose of the task. You see it in many great masters, who composed differently in different situations.
The maturity lies in understanding that you are at a place where you can take constraints on board, and that composition is fundamentally about setting up constraints for yourself. Stravinsky said as much: his freedom grows the more narrowly he limits his field of action and the more obstacles he surrounds himself with.4 To put obstacles in your own way, and to be able to do it, is the maturity I am talking about.
Visiting other composers
The student gets more tools to choose from and can apply different aesthetic strategies in their instrumentation. They can choose, for example, the degree of precision the concrete context of the work requires, and navigate between entertaining classical orchestral music and very nuanced orchestral colours. They have been on a visit to other composers. That gives a different frame of reference, a sense of having travelled widely, and in the end critical reflection on the choices they make in their own music.
You often discover that what you did automatically was in fact a chain of decisions, each of which could have gone another way. And when you return from visiting the others, that often changes your musical language.
This is one of my core ideas: becoming aware that much of what you have done automatically has been an opening for decisions you did not know could be made. As soon as that opens up, an enormous amount of creativity opens with it. You learn to think music fundamentally and originally, because you come to doubt what you have taught yourself, whether culturally or because you have not studied enough: patterns and ways of thinking that have become fixed.
What the work develops
Bruckner and the beach ball
I love this story. Bruckner studied with Simon Sechter from 1855 to 1861, privately and mostly by correspondence. Sechter required him to concentrate on strict harmony and counterpoint and forbade free composition during the studies.5 I describe that development as a beach ball held under water: at some point it has to spring up and become its own style.
Something similar can happen when you sit and work in classical style with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or in Debussy’s style. An inner resistance may grow, one that says: this is not how I work. That is a gain in itself, because suddenly you break out and know exactly how you do not work, and what you want to work against.6
The value (also) lies around the work
It is one of my core ideas that working with something often has its greatest value in what is secondary or peripheral, in what it brings with it. Style imitation is really about orchestration, but it brings creative development and an artistic profile with it. Counterpoint does the same. It is really about working out contrapuntal lines, but it also brings the ability to grasp complexity and to operate within it. What lies around the work is just as interesting as the work itself, and it mostly remains unspoken, because it almost breaks when you put it into words.7
You can draw the thread further. The big work, and the interesting step, lies in composing a piece. But getting a piece performed at all has quite different side effects, with very large implications for your self-understanding and formation as a composer. Again, it is what lies around the composition that matters a great deal.
Having been deep down in something
My former teacher Karsten Fundal once said something about me that I remember as a kind of milestone. You could feel that I had been deep down in something, perhaps harmonic analysis, and that this depth branched out horizontally: when I went into something else, I brought a horizontal experience with me.
It is not that I bring the complexity of counterpoint into other fields. I do not carry over voice-leading principles or the treatment of dissonance. It is the fact of having been deep down in something. It could just as well have been banking.8
In the same way, when you have been deep down in a style, you simply have a different way of thinking afterwards.
Notes and sources
- For related research, and a historical parallel, see “Parallels in history and research” below. ↩
- For example Sébastien Érard’s double-action pedal harp (patented 1810) and Theobald Boehm’s flute (1832; the cylindrical metal flute, 1847). The orchestra was one of several driving forces behind such changes, alongside larger halls, virtuoso players, chromatic music and intonation. The strings and the timpani changed too. ↩
- Contextual constraints were not imposed by anyone in particular but shared by all: the common style of a period, for example Haydn’s harmony and forms. Imposed constraints are decided explicitly by someone else: a string quartet, twelve minutes, a particular occasion. Creative constraints are the ones the composer chooses. ↩
- Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, 1939–40 (English edition: Harvard University Press, 1947). Paraphrased here. ↩
- After Sechter came lessons in form and orchestration with Otto Kitzler, who introduced Bruckner to Wagner, and from 1861 Bruckner began to compose in earnest. In 1868, after Sechter’s death, he took over Sechter’s post as theory teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. ↩
- On composers finding their own voice by confronting their predecessors, see Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), which carries Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) over into music, with Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern as its cases. ↩
- Compare Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. II, “States That Are Essentially By-Products”: states that can only arise as a by-product of actions aimed at something else, and that vanish when one tries to bring them about directly. ↩
- This is not a claim that counterpoint, or music, makes you cleverer in general. That review reports negative evidence for general cognitive benefits from chess, music and working-memory training: Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet, “Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence From Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training”, Current Directions in Psychological Science 26/6 (2017), 515–520. The point here is the experience of depth itself. ↩
Parallels in history and research
The method was developed independently. The studies below do not test it; they point in related directions. The historical example is a parallel, not a source.
- A historical parallel. In the summer of 1902, Rimsky-Korsakov gave the young Stravinsky pages of the piano score of his opera Pan Voyevoda. When a section was orchestrated, Rimsky showed his own instrumentation, and Stravinsky had to compare the two and explain why Rimsky had done it differently. Later Stravinsky orchestrated parts of Beethoven sonatas and Schubert quartets and marches, which Rimsky corrected once a week. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1936). The direction differs: there the student explained the master’s choices; in style imitation as taught here, students defend their own.
- Listening as prediction. Listening is active prediction: we constantly form hypotheses about what comes next. Stefan Koelsch, Peter Vuust and Karl Friston, “Predictive Processes and the Peculiar Case of Music”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23/1 (2019), 63–77.
- Trying before being told. In experiments outside music, unsuccessful attempts to retrieve an answer can improve the learning that follows, once the answer is given. Nate Kornell, Matthew Jensen Hays and Robert A. Bjork, “Unsuccessful Retrieval Attempts Enhance Subsequent Learning”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35/4 (2009). The studies do not concern music.
- Audiation. Edwin Gordon’s term for hearing and understanding music that is not physically sounding is close to the inner ear described here, although Gordon’s theory concerns pitch and rhythm, not orchestral colour. Edwin E. Gordon, Music Learning Theory; he compares audiation in music to thought in language. See the Gordon Institute for Music Learning, giml.org/mlt/audiation.
- Composing trains the ear. The student who writes exercises and then plays them comes to know a number of things by ear. Arnold Schoenberg, “Eartraining through Composing”, in Style and Idea (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 146–152, esp. 148 and 151; first published in Modern Music XXIII/3 (1946). Schoenberg’s aim is the understanding of musical ideas and form, and he writes for music students in general. He says nothing about imagining orchestral sound.
Further reading: Orchestra size, Haydn to Beethoven