The Evolution of Modern OrchestrationCoerne, Louis Adolphe
History
The Evolution of Modern Orchestration
Coerne, Louis Adolphe
Instrumentation and orchestration
Review thus far tends to show that the objective of prehistoric and
ante-Christian musical thought was primarily the emotional expression
of human feeling. The growth of musical art was, moreover, amazingly
dilatory as compared with that of the other fine arts.
II.
The next step to record is that of incipient harmonic effects,
musical notation, the principles of design. And for centuries the
art was now developed exclusively under the beneficent patronage of
the Roman Church--persistently along vocal lines. For the Church
adolescent discountenanced anything suggestive of pagan worship,
or traceable to depraved Roman orgies. Consequently instrumental
evolution lay quiescent. This was the age of dreary speculation, of
highly ingenious and elaborately scientific artifice. Yet the results
were but puerile. For even such rudiments of modern musical grammar
as are readily mastered in our day by a mere child, were far beyond
the perspective of the early scholastic monks, who arrived at a few
tangible results only by the most circuitous methods. Nevertheless
progress, though sluggish, is to be traced in logical sequence.
Beginning with the establishment of singing-schools by Pope
Sylvester, and the Antiphons and Hymns of Ambrosius in the fourth
century, it is but necessary to recall the documents of Boëtius and
of Isadore in the sixth century, the reforms of the Gregories in
the seventh and eighth, the _sequentiae_ of Notker in the ninth.
More specific were the crude attempts at harmony in the ninth and
tenth centuries as typified by Hucbald's organum; Guido d'Arezzo's
notation in the eleventh; finally the adoption of mensural writing as
attributed to Franco de Cologne, thirteenth, and Johannes de Muris,
fourteenth century.
Thus under the guardianship of the Church, and upon a basis of
what has ever been known as the Gregorian Chant, a decade of
centuries had been consumed in learning to perceive and to apply
the fundamentals of melody and of harmony, to discover an adequate
interpreter, notation, and an accurate though flexible regulator,
rhythm.
III.
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