How to compose for Strings

this video is made in partnership with apple music classical the new streaming service for classical music [Music] I wanted to compose for orchestral instruments or just understand how an orchestra works it can be very overwhelming so many different yet similar instruments each with their own range sound and techniques all somehow coordinated together to create Amazing Music well welcome to the first installment in my crash course on the orchestra and today we'll be starting with these guys the strings more accurately the violin family there are four members in the violin family the violin [Music] the viola the cello [Music] and the double bass and although the range of these four instruments overlap each member of the family covers a different portion of the pitch Spectrum violin being able to play the highest notes Viola being in the middle cello being near the base end and double bass as you could have guessed being the lowest in Pitch to give you some perspective on which notes these four instruments can play here is Middle C so all four members of the family can actually play middle C also for reference here is the range of a standard tuned guitar as you can see the guitar can play almost any note that a cello Viola or violin could play but we would need the aid of a bass guitar to match the lower range of the double bass in fact the electric bass is effectively an electric version of the double bass and has the exact same tuning of the four strings e a d and g the channel Viola and violin each also have four strings but their strings are instead tuned in fifths r other than fourths like the bass so that is the four members of the violin family but of course in an orchestra there are far more than four of these instruments being played and that's because rather than just having one violin play this line of Music in an orchestra the same line of music is played by various different players it's by having multiple players play the exact same line in unison that creates that Lush orchestral sound for example here's an excerpt from prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf played by just one violin foreign [Music] and now here's the same excerpt but now played by a violin section of 16 violins everything you can hear how all the little differences in tone intonation and timing between the 16 players results in this Rich sound so when you compose for orchestra although on paper it feels like you're writing for just five different strings Players Once you bring that music to the orchestra each of those parts will be played in unison by many different players now you may have noticed that just then I said five different stringed instruments when we only actually have four members of the violin family well that's because in a typical Orchestra we have one group of bases one group of cellos or Chennai one group of violas and actually two groups of violins split into the first violins and the second violence with the violin being the only member of the family that can access the higher notes those treble notes it's useful to have two different sets of violins who can play two different parts in that higher range particularly because that's often where we'll find the melody so that's the instruments we have to play with in a string section but how do we actually write for them well an important thing to remember when writing for these instruments is that they are effectively melodic instruments monophonic I.E each instrument can only play one note at a time now of course this isn't technically true these instruments can play more than one note at once it's called double stopping however the typical way we write music for these stringed instruments is to treat them as if they can only play one note at a time so for example if we wanted the string section to play an F major chord unlike a guitar which could play the entire chord just on one instrument with a string section we need to share the notes of that F major chord across the different instruments now the way you choose to voice the notes of the chord across the string section can result in different effects and characters however there are a few rules of thumb we can follow to consistently write effective string parts let's take a look at how the chords have been voiced in Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings [Music] [Applause] we can see that the first chord here is an E flat minor seven so the four notes of that chord E flat g flat B flat and d flat have been shared out across the different instruments as you might have been able to guess the double bass at the bottom here is playing the root note of the chord E flat just like in pop and rock music We tend to give the bass instrument the double bass the root note of the chord otherwise the chord will not sound fully grounded if we look at the cello the first thing you might notice is that we actually have two lines of Music here two staves for the Shadows this is because during this piece of music Barber is splitting the cello section into two smaller cello sections because he wants one half of the cellos to do one thing and the other half to do another thing to save space on the page this could be notated like this with both cello lines compacted onto one Stave and then the word devisi used to indicate that the cello isn't expected to play two notes at once here but instead the lower notes should be played by one half of the cello section and the high note should be played by the other half now right here at the beginning of Associated for Strings it just so happens that both groups of cellos are actually playing the same notes anyway all of the cellos here are playing the note E flat just like the double bass was it's actually very common for the double bass to play the same note as the cello however one octave lower in fact that's the origin of the double bass it was added to the orchestra to double the bass part I.E the cello part when early orchestral music a double bass part wasn't actually written out it was just expected that the double bass would play the cello part but an octave lower now although that's the origin of the double bass in many orchestral works it doesn't just follow the cello part and will play its own individual part but it's still common for both the double bass and the cello to play the root note of the chord also the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that even though I said the double bass plays the note an octave lower than the cello that here on the sheet music they're both notated in the same octave they're both notated as playing the same E flat here well the thing is the double bass is what's called a transpose instrument the double bass actually plays every note it reads one octave lower than it appears on the music now if listening to all of this classical music has got you interested in learning more about classical music a great way to do that is with apple music classical the dedicated classical music streaming service from Apple which comes bundled with a subscription to Apple music now you might be thinking why does there need to be a dedicated app a dedicated streaming service to classical music well the reason really is that classical music needs to be cataloged and organized differently than proper rock music with pop and rock music your focus is on the artist or the album but with classical music you might want to instead focus more on the composer or the era rather than the actual performer that is performing the piece of music with apple music classical there's so many different ways that you can look at the classical music learn about it you can look at it by composers which are really nicely presented and organized here you could look at it by Era for example you could look at the playlists they've organized here where we're working through the Baroque Era the classical era Romantic Era 20th century era as in mentioned before Apple music classical comes bundled with apple music and you can try Apple music account with a one month free trial the next instrument here is the viola and the first thing you may have noticed is this weird symbol here the cellos and the bass use the bass clef the symbol we use for any instrument whose range is largely below middle C and the violins here use the treble clef which is the clef we use for any instrument with a range largely above middle C but Viola is a rare example of an instrument that uses the alto clef middle C is basically in the middle of the Viola's range and middle C is also in the middle of the autoclef this middle line on the autoclef is the middle C in fact this symbol is a stylized C labeling this line literally saying this line is C in the same way that a treble clef is a stylized G saying that this line is G and that the bass clef is a stylized F saying that this line is f but anyway what notice the viola actually playing here well it's playing the d flat the seventh note of the chord now let's move up to the violins just like with the cellos Barber has decided to split the second violence into two subgroups so that they can play different notes so in this work we actually effectively have three groups of violins the first violence and then the second violins are split into two subgroups here one of those groups is playing B-flat and the other is playing G flat and that just leaves the first violins who are playing B-flat but really the first violins here aren't really playing a note of the chord per se they're playing the melody generally speaking the first violins are given the melody which will sit on top of the rest of the music if we compare it to a typical pop band it's like the first violin is the singer taking the main Melody and all of the other instruments are providing the accompaniment to support that Melody above this is an example of a texture that we can call Melody dominated homophony homophony is when various voices each move together to create the sense of one unified voice for example although all of these notes are being played by different instruments the goal is for them all to meld together into one harmonic experience as if they were all one super instrument playing these chords that is of course with the exception of the melody up above in the first violins which sits at up this homophony and dominates it hence Melody dominated homophony so if you want the strings to play a chord progression you split those notes across the different voices of your string section however you shouldn't just split them randomly although when we're thinking about chords when we're thinking about Harmony we're thinking about the vertical interaction of the notes the harmony made between these notes when arranging for Strings and many other instruments we also need to consider the horizontal interaction of the notes generally we want the movement from each note to be smooth to be a small jump otherwise the music will sound disjointed so what we need to do here is voice lead the chord progression now I do already have a video explaining voice leading so check that out for more detail on how to actually voice lead a chord progression But ultimately voice leading is when we strive to minimize the distance each line has to move as it travels from chord to chord we can see here in Adagio for Strings for example that each instrument has been given a note from the chord very close to the previous note it had from the previous chord so it can move smoothly and seamlessly from note to note rather than jumping up and down in its range to notes that are physically far away from each other so that's how we could arrange a chord progression for the string section of an orchestra and even if you're writing for a different strings Ensemble like a string quartet for example the same basic principles will apply of course one of the main differences with a string quartet versus an orchestral string section is that whereas in an orchestra each line that you've written will be played by multiple players all at once in a string quartet each line will be played by only one player also another thing to bear in mind with string quartets is that although a quartet has four players and there are four members to the violin family the strings family violin Viola cello and double bass a string quartet doesn't actually feature one violin one Viola one cello and one double bass it instead has no double bass and has two violins for the same reason that the orchestra had two groups of violins a first and second group it's more valuable to have two violins than an extra bass voice particularly when we already have the cello to provide a bass part and the last thing we'll talk about today is the different techniques available to Strings players the different ways that they can actually play the notes the standard way that strings player will play a note is what's called Arco which is simply when they play it using the bow Arco being the Italian word for bow [Music] if the player were instead to pluck the notes with their fingers this is called pixicato [Music] is the Italian term for pinched Pizzicato is the typical style of playing that a double bass player would use in a non-orchestral setting for example if a double bassist was playing in the Jazz Trio they would be plucking the strings rather than bowing them also side note in a non-classical setting double bass is often referred to instead as upright bass but it's ultimately still the same instrument and finally a technique that strings players will generally add to their playing by default is vibrato vibrato is where the player subtly adjusts their finger position on the neck to fluctuate the pitch of the note it's particularly common on long drawn out notes and it gives a far more expressive sound to the instrument there are many other articulations and techniques that I haven't mentioned here so if you'd like to learn more about those I would suggest checking out two set violins video where they rank all of the different possible violin techniques I've linked it in the description so that is the violin family next time I will be covering a different section of the orchestra the brass section so if you're interested in learning about that then do consider subscribing also if you'd like to expose yourself to even more classical music on Apple music classical you can browse works by the instrument that they're written for making it really easy to explore the repertoire of a particular instrument [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 174,931

Keywords: violin, cello, viola, orchestra, strings, quartet, how to, music theory, compose, arrange

Id: YF86PC5mTFE

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2023