page_title: Orchestration
section_title: Mozart
hierarchical_section_title: Orchestration / Examples from the repertoire / Mozart
caption_attribution_description: English: Symphony 39, first movement, bars 102-105
context_page_description: Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting music composed for another medium for an orchestra. Also called "instrumentation", orchestration is the assignment of different instruments to play the different parts of a musical work. For example, a work for solo piano could be adapted and orchestrated so that an orchestra could perform the piece, or a concert band piece could be orchestrated for a symphony orchestra.
  In classical music, composers have historically orchestrated their own music. Only gradually over the course of music history did orchestration come to be regarded as a separate compositional art and profession in itself. In modern classical music, composers almost invariably orchestrate their own work.
  However, in musical theatre, film music and other commercial media, it is customary to use orchestrators and arrangers to one degree or another, since time constraints and/or the level of training of composers may preclude them orchestrating the music themselves.
  The precise role of the orchestrator in film music is highly variable, and depends greatly on the needs and skill set of the particular composer.
context_section_description: Mozart "was acutely sensitive to matters of instrumentation and instrumental effect where orchestral writing was concerned", including a "meticulous attitude towards the spacing of chords." H. C. Robbins Landon marvels at the “gorgeous wash of colour displayed in Mozart’s scores.”   For example, the opening movement of the Symphony No. 39 (K543) contains “a charming dialogue between strings and woodwind” that demonstrates the composer’s exquisite aural imagination for the blending and contrast of timbres.  Bars 102-3 feature a widely spaced voicing over a range of four octaves.  The first and second violins weave curly parallel melodic lines, a tenth apart, underpinned by a pedal point in the double basses and a sustained octave in the horns.  Wind instruments respond in bars 104-5, accompanied by a spidery ascending chromatic line in the cellos.
   
  A graceful continuation to this features clarinets and bassoons with the lower strings supplying the bass notes.
  Next, a phrase for strings alone blends pizzicato cellos and basses with bowed violins and violas, playing mostly in thirds:
  The woodwind repeat these four bars with the violins adding a counter-melody against the cellos and basses playing arco.  The violas add crucial harmonic colouring here with their D flat in bar 115. In 1792, an early listener marvelled at the dazzling orchestration of this movement “ineffably grand and rich in ideas, with striking variety in almost all obbligato parts.”
  “The main feature in [his] orchestration is Mozart’s density, which is of course part of his density of thought.”
  Another important technique of Mozart's orchestration was antiphony, the "call and response" exchange of musical motifs or "ideas" between different groups in the orchestra. In an antiphonal section, the composer may have one group of instruments introduce a melodic idea (e.g., the first violins), and then have the woodwinds "answer" by restating this melodic idea, often with some type of variation. In the trio section of the minuet from his Symphony No. 41 (1788), the flute, bassoons and horn exchange phrases with the strings, with the first violin line doubled at the octave by the first oboe:
   
   Charles Rosen (1971, p. 240) admires Mozart’s skill in orchestrating his piano concertos, particularly the Concerto in E flat major, K482, a work that introduced clarinets into the mix.  “This concerto places the greatest musical reliance on tone colour, which is, indeed, almost always ravishing.  One lovely example of its sonorities comes near the beginning.”
   
  The orchestral tutti in the first two bars is answered by just horns and bassoon in bars 2-6.  This passage repeats with fresh orchestration: 
  “Here we have the unusual sound on the violins providing the bass for the solo clarinets.  The simplicity of the sequence concentrates all our interest on tone-colour, and what follows – a series of woodwind solos – keeps it there.  The orchestration throughout, in fact, has a greater variety than Mozart had wished or needed before, and fits the brilliance, charm, and grace of the first movement and the finale.”
caption: Symphony 39, first movement, bars 102-105
exif: {}