Choral Orchestration

Cecil Forsyth

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780486782584
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This volume is geared toward organists seeking a brief, convenient guide to developing technical grounding for the scoring of compositions. Noted musicologist Cecil Forsyth takes readers bar by bar through a complete choral orchestration in this excellent and inexpensive tutorial.
Forsyth discusses general principles in terms of their application to everyday orchestral necessities. He further presents a complete composition and explores each note, forming a friendly critical conversation with readers. Together the author and reader examine the work's musical difficulties, balance the orchestral possibilities of each passage, and explore the details of orchestral execution. Pianists and composers as well as organists will appreciate this accessible and complete study of orchestration.

Choral Orchestration

Choral accompaniment is not the main business of an orchestra. It is a secondary and occasional task, usually undertaken by the players without much pleasure, and often carried out in a way that does not bring any great joy to the audience.

Pitted against the chorus each player has an uncomfortable sense of loss in his own personal value. His daily experience has given him an unerring feeling for current orchestral dynamics, and in time this scale becomes almost a second nature to him. He regards it much as a philosopher regards the law of gravitation; and—it must be confessed—he often claims an aristocratic proprietorship in the law and its workings. Then comes the choral performance, at which the big democratic planet Vox Populi swims into his ken. He finds that what he has been considering the immutable has become the transitory. Vast readjustments are necessary: but for these there is neither time nor encouragement. Hence comes much rough and careless orchestral playing, and a general effect of muddled mezzoforte—the worst type of orchestral criminality.

Meanwhile, the man in the audience holds on to his chair and wonders why all this unmusical wickedness should be visited on him only at a choral performance. He does not complain—Anglo-Saxon audiences never do, except by the practical method of staying away from the next concert—but he registers a mental crescendo of irritation at all the fuss and pother, at being forced to hear the things which he does not wish to hear, and at having to leave unheard the things which he does wish to hear. Finally he ends by saying that choral concerts are a blatant nuisance. And, when he is in that frame of mind, it is the merest chance whether the next wind will blow him into a quartet performance or into the movies.

But, it may be asked, what is the composer doing all this time. Surely it is his business to foresee and overcome these difficulties. Being a choral composer he has limitless wealth (from royalties), and therefore unlimited leisure. Why is he such an incompetent bungler?

Well, the fact is that, like the rest of the world, he is “doing his best”. But he labours under certain disadvantages. To begin with, as a student he is not likely to hear much about the proper presentation of choral music. That is perhaps unavoidable. His youthful days are filled with aspirations and counterpoint exercises. Then, if he turns to books, he is likely to find himself somewhat undernourished mentally. In general works on orchestration space cannot be spared for the adequate illustration of this particular topic. From them he will probably learn no more than this: that choral works should be scored thickly and solidly; but that, as choruses vary in number from fifty to five thousand, any examination of principles or setting-forth of rules is so much waste of time. The consequence is that, even if he has had two or three choral works performed, he will probably rely on a miserable rule of thumb which has no relation to the true analytic that precedes all useful artistic attainment. And what is more, he will possibly go on to say that there is no method for accompanying choral music; that it is nothing but accident and “fake” from beginning to end; and that therefore the best way is to put down as many notes as possible and leave the result to chance. Q. E. D.

All this is, of course, the merest nonsense. The factors in the problem are just as easily ascertainable as the factors in any other musical problem. But they are not to be found, nor is the problem to be solved, by regarding the two elements, the choral and the orchestral, as violently opposed to each other and incapable of artistic fusion. If one has the brains and the “inner ear”, one can start from the idea of simple writing in one colour—say strings—and progress to the more complex idea of strings plus two bassoons, or of strings plus four horns. And from there one can proceed upwards through all the tinted winding paths of musical fancy till one arrives at the summit, the mountain-view of the full orchestra, whether used as a complex form of contrapuntal speech or as a single massive harmonic utterance.

But, now that we are at the mountain-top, what is to prevent us these days from rising into the air above the mountain? What is to prevent us taking the voices, one by one or in a group, and associating them with the whole or with any part of our orchestral fabric at pleasure? Associating them, I mean, not as a dreaded outside element that is bound to struggle with our orchestra and blot it out, but as a congenial friendly factor of infinite delicacy and power. Essentially we are only completing our own logic by adding the last and most perfect of musical sounds. And, in adding them, we retain all our freedom of musical treatment. For, just as we can view the orchestra in its dual capacity, harmonic, and contrapuntal; so we can view the voices in relation to the instruments as only partially distinct from them by nature, and therefore either to be used for purposes of contrast, or to be fused with them into one warm tonal combination.

No voice exempt, no voice but well could join

Melodious part, such concord is in Heaven.

Surely this is the simplest, the most obvious, and the most practical way of looking at the problem. It is not a purely orchestral problem at all; but a vocal-instrumental problem, the key to which is engraved with the motto “industry and sympathy”.

Here our old bugaboo “Size-of-the-chorus” raises his ugly head and hisses. The hiss sounds venomous, but there is nothing much in the way of fangs behind it. We all know that a chorus can be anything from fifty to five thousand. But I would like to put this question: supposing a composer were writing a choral work and were asked to make a bet as to whether his work would be sung by fifty or five thousand voices, what would his answer be? “One hundred and fifty” obviously.

Now let us approach a little nearer to our problem. Let us try to see its special difficulties—how to attack and overcome them. Choral scoring is, first, a matter of broad decisions; and, then, of rather heavy dog-work in carrying them out. The decisions must be right, and the workmanship must be right. If either is wrong, we may expect bad results in the concert room. Naturally experience counts in both. But, with the average musician who is not an orchestral expert, there is less likelihood of faulty decisions than of their imperfect execution. That almost goes without saying. In carrying out the details of the dog-work the main lines of the original decision may get blurred.

The two main questions, then, are “what to do” and “how to do it”. And, as an answer to these two questions, I propose in this little volume to adopt a somewhat unusual method. Instead of limiting myself to generalized good advice backed up by picked examples from the great masters, I intend to take an actual work recently written for public performance and scored with the sole object of enforcing its musical value—certainly with no idea of its being made the subject of a book.

The work that I have selected for this purpose is Professor Walter Henry Hall’s Festival Te Deum composed for the Peace Celebrations and first performed at Columbia University, New York, May 5, 1919. A complete copy of the Te Deum is printed at the end of this volume; and I shall dissect the whole work out, six bars at a time, placing the original copy for organ and voices at the head of each left-hand page, with its orchestration on the page opposite. In this way the reader will be able to look at the work in big blocks, as occasion may demand, and at the same time I shall be able to direct his attention to the details of the orchestration, and point out how it has been built up.

The text will be arranged so as to tally as nearly as possible with the music. This is generally feasible. But naturally when one is considering the pros and cons of a lengthy musical section, a certain amount of reference has to be made both backwards and forwards. However, it is quite certain that nothing is so distracting to quiet study as the constant turning and returning of pages. Outside these references, therefore, I have kept the text and the music as closely in contact with one another as I could. This involves some irregularity in the printing, and even an occasional blank page—blank, that is to say, as far as text goes. But this is not altogether a disadvantage; provided the reader keeps before his mind the fact that the object of this book is not merely to talk about choral orchestration, but to show how it is done. When there is no easy ambling to be had on the flat field of the text, he may possibly get better exercise by putting his horse at the five-barred gates opposite.

Let us imagine, then, that we are sitting down to orchestrate this Te Deum. We have before us a manuscript copy or a clean printed proof free from mistakes. The pages are numbered, but of course not the bars. How do we begin? Obviously we can do nothing till we know what orchestra the work is to be scored for. We must know that accurately; and in particular we must know whether there are to be sufficient strings to balance the wind and to sound beautiful in themselves. These details, so important in their artistic outcome, are of course in the first instance only matters of money. They are beyond our control, and it is conceivable that we might be asked to score the work for a wholly inadequate orchestra. Naturally that would be a very difficult task, though certainly not one to be avoided for that reason. However, no such difficulty confronts us. We are promised two each of the wood-wind, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, one timpanist (with an extra percussion player for the special “Festival Ending”), and strings in the proportion 12—12—8—6—6. All good symphony players.

I have just used the words “only matters of money”. This needs some qualification, or rather some mental adjustment. As far as the orchestrator and the concert-giver are concerned, they are true in a general way. But to the composer, who is conceiving a work there is a differe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Choral Orchestration
• A Festival Te Deum
• Festival Ending