How Beethoven Writes for Orchestra

hello my name is David Bruce the first time I started to feel like I'd gained some real knowledge of how to orchestrate was when I sat down with a score of Beethoven symphony and just really tried to figure out exactly why each note was placed in each instrument I'm going to show you a couple of examples of the kind of things I found here but I hope this might be useful to you even if you're not interested in writing for orchestra I'm going to talk about musical concepts or effects that can be used even in say electronic music contexts and in particular stay tuned for a surprising comparison between Beethoven and these guys so we're gonna look at Beethoven's third Symphony and let's start by looking at the opening chord we're going to have a simple equal a jerk full orchestra at loud staccato chord and we've got two flutes two oboes two clarinets 2 bassoons three French horns and two trumpets the horns and the trumpets are the old valveless ones so as Beethoven wrote for them they could only play the overtone series of a flat with some optional extra stop notes in between we've also got a timpani and a full collection of strings now a general principle when you're orchestrating the chord is it's good to have each group the winds the brass and the strings making harmonically full chord by itself or at least to sound pretty good in isolation so you'd be unlikely for example to have just the 3rd and the 5th of the chord in the brass so let's first listen to the chord and see what stands out strongest are the trumpets both sounding an e-flat in octaves there's also a strong a flat back on the timpani and in the basses and cellos two of the French horns also blast out a flat's also in octaves but a third plays a G this is a small example of the brass part making harmonic sense by itself if there had been just the octaves and an open v instead of a third that would have gone against the usual rules of classical commonly you can sometimes omit the fifth but never really the third so let's listen again to me the most prominent thing we can hear next is the scrunch of the strings hear Beethoven's quite clever he manages to squeeze in a lot of notes into the violins the First's play a quadruple stop playing all four strings sounding out a fully flat major chord with G's at the top and the bottom and the seconds do a similar triple stop but with E flat at the top so the upper notes of the two violins all fill out an E flat major chord so to play all of those notes as a staccato the violins have to move the boat quickly across all the strings it makes for a vigorous almost violent ripping sound which really helps generate the energy in these opening chords below that the violas fill out a two note chord on e-flat and G so overall you can see that the string chord is quite g heavy we have five e flats four G's and only one B flat on the top there so this matches that missing fifth in the brass if we listen again try to make out the winds in many of these kind of tutti chords it's quite hard to make out the wind at all I think the flutes probably come through adding a sense of light at the top of the chord and perhaps the higher clarinets can add a more strident tone the oboe and bassoon will just marginally enrich the color of the tutti but if nothing else it looks good to have everyone blasting out these two opening chords so overall it's still interesting to note how few fifths there are in this opening chord it's hard to pinpoint exactly why this would be I think perhaps boto wanted a slightly more open sound a full and clear triad with all three notes equally sounding might have sounded a bit too final for an opening this one sounds confident but it leads outwards it doesn't sound too resolved yet if we compare it to the chord that ends the entire symphony well it's pretty similar the main difference is that there are fewer G's all of the brass play just a flats and the violins just leave an E flat at the top rather than the full chord so it's slightly more a flat heavy at the end but still a surprising lack of fifths [Music] this kind of spacing of the notes may have just been Beethoven's preference here's the one at the start of the seventh symphony which is remarkably similar it's in a major and it's all A's and C sharps the tonics and thirds very few fifths again and here at the end of Beethoven's fifth again mostly tonics and thirds are the only fifths here are in the strings so it does appear that in these full orchestral chords this kind of sound with mostly just tonics and thirds was just a preference that Beethoven had so next I want to skip ahead from the opening a few bars and imagine we're adding in this phrase and we want a light pure toned woodwind sound the phrase fits on our horns [Music] and we can double it an octave higher in the clarinets [Music] it would also add a nice fresh sound to add another octave higher above that in the flutes that works well in the first few notes but although the b-flat at the top of the flute is playable at least today it probably wouldn't have been in Beethoven's time but even today when you get to such extremes of an instrument the extremity becomes more of the thing you hear more than the pitch itself you tear this breathy extremely high note and it would stick out compared to the grace of the other notes so in that case you might be tempted just to leave off the flute all together but Beethoven instead relies on a trick of the ear something you might call ear leading he starts the phrase with all three instruments but then he simply omits the last notes of the phrase on the flute but our ears don't really notice we follow the melody as it continues on the other instruments the ear is led to them just like the way some painters lead your eye along a line to a point to focus there's an even better example of the same concept a few bars later here in the brass the trumpets and horns play the main theme of the movement followed by a repetition of the last phrase a third lower [Music] but listen again and listen carefully and you'll notice that the third repetition a third lower isn't actually he played on the brass it's just left playing on the lower strings [Music] at this point the brass just play how old repeated notes [Music] something very clever about this the brass stop playing the melody because they just don't have the notes there but if you are orchestrating this you might be tempted to omit them here and then perhaps try to emphasize the melody elsewhere perhaps in the upper strings and wins but Beethoven makes a little effort to continue the strength of the melody he trusts that our ears will listen out for it and follow it he's not even afraid that the brass will drown it out he lets them continue blasting out on repeated notes but in doing so he further tricks our ear into thinking that the entire phrase is written in the same way we don't particularly notice any drop in dynamics because there isn't any all of the instruments are still playing but it's quite striking when you realize that under all this surface noise the tune is only continuing down in the lower strings it's a wonderful sleight of hand [Music] a related kind of sleight of hand can be seen here in the way Beethoven achieves a downward scale [Music] the overall effect he was after was clearly just a downward scale from F down to the B flat an octave and a half below notice how some of the instruments skip upwards once their register becomes too low like the flute suddenly jumping up an octave here within the context of the overall downward scale you won't particularly notice this sudden jump it'll just feel like someone turned up the eq a bit to bring out the higher frequencies now perhaps you're not confident this is what he's doing here after all this jump happens in the same place in the flutes clarinets bassoons and second violins perhaps it's more of a motivic idea well check out the same phrase in the recapitulation in this case the flutes and the clarinets jump up the octave at different points in the scale the whole scale is now a fifth lower and here they are making that jump at the point which makes most sense for the instrument though we jump up to that high flute sound rather than letting it get lost in the mix and you could potentially go on forever with a continually downward sounding scale all you have to do is keep sneaking the instruments back in and a higher register and you end up with this sort of Usher like continuous downward spiral and finally I want to skip ahead to the third movement of the symphony which is probably one of my favorite Beethoven movements to me what this movement is all about and this is a pretty common trick for Beethoven you can hear it a lot in the opening movement as well is holding us in a state of suspense and the main trick I think Beethoven uses to achieve this is he shows us something that clearly has a lot of power but power that is held back so it feels exciting to us to know that there's something powerful around the corner so we have the entire string section in the opening chopping away at these first Cecotto piano chords in the heavy lower ranges of the instrument to give us this impression of tense subdued power it's like someone powerful muttering away and you just know they're going to explode at any moment and yes this is where we get to that Green Day comparison because this is a trick you can also hear in blues rock and heavy metal in the form of a good old palm muted guitar suppressed energy in the verse [Music] bustling out into full energy in the chorus suppressed in the verse full energy in the corner the same trick in the Beethoven when the explosion does happen it's quite unexpectedly in the fourth repetition of the melody line it seems like we're just going to hear the same phrase again but this time out of the blue it comes as as full-tilt [Music] and it vanishes back into piano again just as suddenly perhaps my favorite little bit of orchestration is at the end of the movement where the effect is transferred to the timpani again another potentially very powerful instrument but just tiptoeing away marked pianissimo before the whole Orchestra explodes one last time into the final fortissimo chords [Music] thank you very much for watching please like and subscribe and share with your friends and consider joining my patrons over at patreon calm and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 199,770

Keywords: beethoven, orchestra, orchestration, symphony no.3, 3rd symphony, composer, how to write for orchestra

Id: wQdcaGllUco

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2019