John Spitzer - The Birth of the Orchestra

The Birth of the Orchestra

HISTORY OF AN INSTITUTION, 16501815

John Spitzer
AND
Neal Zaslaw

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP

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John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw 2004

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First published 2004

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ISBN 13: 978-0-19-518955-1

Two heads may be better than one, but they are certainly no faster. We outlined this book together fifteen years ago, and weve been chipping away at it ever since. Neal Zaslaw wrote the first drafts of Chapters 3 and 6; the remaining chapters were drafted by John Spitzer. The two of us edited, rewrote, and reedited the entire book together. Our two heads bear collective responsibility for any insights and all errors that readers may find.

As we finished the book we realized, not entirely to our surprise, that we had written a narrative historynot a chronological account by any means, but a narrative in the sense that we tell a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Once upon a time there were no orchestras. In the second half of the seventeenth century, at the courts of kings, princes, and cardinals, instrumentalists began to organize into ensembles that combined strings, winds, and continuo instruments and that put several players on each of the string parts. Over the course of the eighteenth century these ensembles developed distinctive repertories, distinctive performance practices, distinct personnel, and their own administrative structures, until by the 1790s and early 1800s the orchestra had become recognizable as the institution that, with changes, still exists in concert halls and opera houses in many parts of the world.

Narrative histories seem to have gone somewhat out of fashion these days. Grand narratives, says Lyotard, have lost their credibility by which he seems to mean that people since the middle of the twentieth century have become increasingly skeptical of Christian, Marxist, and/or scientific accounts of history as the story of human progress. Postmodern literary critics and historians have extended Lyotards dictum to encompass all narratives great or small, proclaiming somewhat gleefully that narrative in general is dead.

We reject this notion. To say that historical narratives are impossible is to say that we can no longer tell a story about what happened in the past, or that we must tell as many stories as there are readers. And this means in turn that the past no longer has any meaning for the present, or that it has an infinite number of meanings, which amounts to the same thing.

We propose to tell a single, if multilayered, story of the orchestrawho created orchestras, what the details of this process were, and when, where, and why orchestras came into being. Our story by itself is at most a middle-sized narrative, but it is linked to a grander narrative: the creation of modern institutions. Armies, navies, banks, bureaucracies, factories, corporations, secondary schools, scientific societies, and more all came into being during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in developments that were, if not part of the same process as the birth of the orchestra, at least parallel. If readers choose to make our story a chapter in this grand narrative of modern institutions, we have no objection.

Besides those whose assistance is acknowledged in our footnotes, we give our warm thanks to the following people who helped us at various stages of the project: Katherine Flegal, Ellen Zaslaw, Kyra Voss, Douglas Laing, Kelly Pask, Jennifer Strauss, Michele Cabrini, Kate van Orden, Brooks Kuykendall, Marc Mellits, Bonnie Blackburn, and Jane Dieckmann. We also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Peabody Conservatory, and Cornell University for grant and research support.

J.S.

N.Z.

Baltimore, MD
Ithaca, NY
December 2002

Acknowledgment is made to the following for photographs and permission to reproduce illustrations:

Archivio di Stato, Bologna:

Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich:

Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, Naples:

Bibliothque de Lille, Mdiathque Municipale Jean Lvy:

Bibliothque Nationale de France, Paris:

Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, Milan:

Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY:

Courtauld Institute of Art, London:

The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC:

The Johns Hopkins University, Garrett Library:

Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm:

Library of Congress, Washington, DC:

Lord Hastings:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

Dr. Jrgen Meyer:

Museo di Roma:

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid:

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

National Archives of Hungary:

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm:

The New York Public Library:

Runion des Muses Nationaux/Art Resource, New York:

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam:

Schsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden:

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden:

Staatsarchiv, Hamburg:

Stadtarchiv Leipzig:

(Plates appear between pp. 300 and 301.)

All music examples are notated at sounding pitch.

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The story of Orpheus has provided the subject for operas, ballets, tone poems, and other musical works, beginning with Polizianos