Orchestral Studies

Traditional narratives of music history have presented Johann Georg Pisendel as a composing violin virtuoso and a possible inspiration for Bach's solo sonatas. However, if one disregards traditional categories such as 'composer' or 'virtuoso' and considers Pisendel's merits as music director praised by his contemporaries, the supposed second rate master proves to be a true 'key figure in the German musical life of the baroque' (Christoph Wolff). Due to the central position of Pisendel as a student of Torelli and Vivaldi, as a friend of Telemann and Bach, as a colleague of Heinichen and Hasse and as a teacher of Quantz and two brothers Graun in this section of music history, the work offers numerous impulses for neighboring research areas and provides vivid insights into the musical life of the Bach era.

After a biographical section that considers a large number of unpublished sources, the study focuses on Pisendel's school-building orchestral education. This intended to ensure a differentiated reproduction of international musical styles, which is reflected in numerous entries by Pisendel in the Dresden instrumental repertoire. For the first time, Pisendel's practice of musical direction is presented, which anticipated the modern professional conductor and established the fame of the Dresden orchestra. Important insights go far beyond Pisendel, such as the definition of concertmaster's office as "vice-Kapellmeister of instrumental music" or insights into the structure and ownership of musical repertoire libraries. Even the reconstruction of performance norms, which were not explicitly noted in the score, results in fundamental new approaches to the performance and editing practice in this important repertoire. A catalogue raisonné of Pisendel’s works and documents completes this extraordinary study.

Storytelling has been theorised as a performative, narrative practice, but it has not been employed often as a trope in studies of musical performance. This article outlines a theoretical context for exploring the possibilities of such a conceptual move within musicology by referring to the anthropological and performance studies approaches of Turner and Schechner. Benjamin’s reflection on the storyteller as a narrator of memory and history frames the presentation of a case-study on the Baltic Youth Philharmonic Orchestra.

This paper examines recent studies within a general project, aimed at writing down the lexicons of a Conductor's body signals. Three observational studies focusing, respectively, on the semantic area of intensity and on the modality of gaze, through annotation of several fragments of orchestra and choir conduction in concert and rehearsal, discovered a total of 100 signals of intensity in various modalities, out of which, 21 intensity gestures and 20 conducting items of gaze. Subsequent perception studies on a subset of these signals reveal slight differences in interpretation by music Experts, Non-Experts and Amateurs, but confirm their comprehensibility, probably due to their underlying semiotic devices, the same holding also in everyday life gestures and gaze.

Post-tonal music often poses perceptual and cognitive challenges for listeners, potentially related to the use of relatively uncommon and unfamiliar musical material and compositional processes. As a basic compositional device, repetition affects memory for music and is structured by composers in very different ways across tonal and post-tonal musical repertoires. Of particular concern is whether post-tonal music exhibits mnemonic affordances that allow listeners to experience a sense of global coherence, and whether repetition correlates strongly with aesthetic judgment. Although previous research suggests that repetition impacts aesthetic preference, empirical research has not mapped out the relationship between repetition and aesthetic judgments across a broad set of post-tonal music. Presenting 14 excerpts, grouped into three categories: tonal, modernist, and post-1970, we observed that indications of repetitions in the music for a group of 60 listeners, with and without musical training, showed significant periods of interindividual synchronization. Aesthetic judgments were assessed by means of ratings for the following parameters: familiarity with the piece, confidence of repetition responses, judgments of affordances for easy listening, coherence, similarity of moments, and recognition, as well as listeners’ liking and interest. A principal component analysis (PCA) on the joint question data and the repetition responses suggested that two factors account for 92% of variance in the data. These factors were interpreted as dominated by aesthetic judgment and repetition strength. Linear mixed-effects regression indicated that repetition strength generally differed across excerpt category, with modernist excerpts featuring lower repetition strength compared to both post-1970 and tonal excerpts. Aesthetic preference, on the other hand, was lower for excerpts in both the modernist and post-1970 categories when compared to tonal excerpts. The analysis did not reveal difference in response behavior for repetition responses as a function of musical training, though it indicated higher preference of modernist excerpts with increasing levels of musical training. Overall, the results suggest that the two factors, aesthetic judgment and repetition strength, act as independent determinants in the experience of post-tonal music.

Alberto Garaizábal fue el gran protagonista de la adaptación de la sociedad musical coruñesa a las nuevas exigencias socio-económicas del presente siglo. Excelente organista, creó el Conservatorio, reformó y recreó la Orquesta y participó en la labor de los propagandistas de la fe, pero también supo entender la importancia del movimiento sindical y logró que ésta sintiera la música como una necesidad más. Se estudia el período del primer tercio de nuestro siglo en A Coruña, y desde la personalidad de Garaizábal, utilizando abundante documentación socio-económica y reproducción de informaciones y artículos en la prensa musical de aquella ciudad. Asimismo se incluye el catálogo compositivo del autor con los incipits musicales de las obras.

How do Specialist Teams Function, Communicate and Interact?
Three Case Studies on Achieving a Top Performance

How do specialist teams achieve top performances? How do such teams in the music world function, communicate and interact? These are the questions that the authors try to answer here. In this interdisciplinary research project, musicologists, a psychologist, business experts and a bass player closely follow three music ensembles. They observe their rehearsal processes, conduct interviews and evaluate questionnaires. Unlike in previous studies, the focus here is not on leadership, but on interior structures. It is the behaviour of
the team itself that is the subject of investigation. At the heart of this are informal processes and, in particular, non-verbal communication. Three Swiss orchestras serve as case studies.
Their various organisational forms comprise a traditional, hierarchically organised symphony orchestra (Berner Symphonieorchester), a new music ensemble comprising several soloists (Collegium novum Zürich), and a Baroque orchestra conducted by its concert master (Les Passions de l’âme). The crucial prerequisites for a top team performance
were recognised to be «heedful interrelating«, team orientation, mutual trust, independence, the ability to adapt, empathy, an intersubjective, common sense of flow, and a role dynamic in which the role of a deputy can unawared develop into a pivotal position.

Musical form and orchestration are closely related dimensions of the musical discourse. Despite the proposition of several practical tools for assisted-orchestration in the past few years, scarcely any computational methods for analyzing the role of orchestration in shaping musical form and its perception have been put forward. As an answer to that, in this presentation, we discuss a couple of Open-Music functions we designed for estimating the textural complexity of a piece's successive formal segments and sections. The calculations behind the functions originate in an appropriation of the mathematical theory of integer partitions and Wallace Berry's ideas on musical texture. In the current stage, our estimation of textural complexity is carried out upon the composer's prescriptions found on the musical score. Nevertheless, the work we present here is part of an overall model that ultimately aims to analyze form and orchestration combining symbolical and signal data, that is, joining the musical score and its performance recordings.

Tesi di dottorato (cotutela Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia - Université Paris 8)

L’elaborato si propone di sondare la presenza del saxofono all’interno delle partiture orchestrali francesi e italiane della prima metà del secolo XX, con lo scopo di confermare la legittimità della sua inclusione in pianta stabile fra le fila dell’orchestra. La prima parte della tesi (Teoria. I trattati di strumentazione e di orchestrazione) ha come obiettivo quello di fornire una ricognizione mai effettuata prima d’ora della presenza del saxofono all’interno dei trattati di strumentazione e di orchestrazione sia francesi sia italiani, ma anche di altre nazioni. La seconda (Composizioni francesi) e la terza parte (Composizioni italiane) contemplano la presenza di alcune indagini su compositori che hanno incluso il saxofono all’interno delle loro partiture per orchestra. La scelta dei musicisti e delle composizioni da analizzare è stata fatta sulla base della portata della parte dedicata al saxofono, nonché del peso della singola partitura e del compositore presi in esame.


The aim of this thesis is to investigate the presence of the saxophone in French and Italian orchestral scores, written in the first half of the 20th century, with the purpose of demonstrating the possibility of permanently introducing it in the rows in the orchestra. The first part of the thesis (Teoria. I trattati di strumentazione e di orchestrazione) seeks to produce a reconnaisance (never done so far) of the presence of the saxophone in instrumentation and orchestration treatises, both in Italy and France, but also in other countries. The second section (Composizioni francesi) and the third part (Composizioni italiane) take into consideration some composers who included the saxophone in their orchestral scores. The choice of musicians and composers to be analyzed was made considering the importance of the saxophone’s part, as well as the relevance of the single score and of the composer examined.


La thèse se propose de souligner la présence du saxophone dans les partitions d’orchestre françaises et italiennes de la première moitié du XXe siècle, dans le but de confirmer la possibilité d’intégrer le saxophone à l’orchestre de façon permanente. La première partie de la thèse (Teoria. I trattati di strumentazione e di orchestrazione) a l’objectif de fournir une reconnaissance (jamais effectuée jusqu’à présent) de la présence du saxophone dans les traités d’instrumentation et d’orchestration français comme italiens, mais aussi d’autres pays. La deuxième (Composizioni francesi) et la troisième partie (Composizioni italiane) offrent des recherches sur des compositeurs qui ont placé le saxophone dans leurs partitions d’orchestre. Le choix des musiciens et des compositions à analyser a été fait sur la base de l’importance de la partie du saxophone, ainsi que la portée de la partition et du compositeur pris en examen.

Wagner studies have tended to disregard ‘popular Wagner’, i.e. the reception of his music outside the opera scene and serious orchestral concerts. However, Wagner’s popularization played an important part in the programme planning of Robert Kajanus, who acted as an active Wagner promoter in late 19th-century Helsinki. Kajanus was a conductor who organized special Wagner evenings as part of a series of popular concerts, especially favoured by upper-class audiences. ‘Popular Wagner’ was not performed often but nevertheless quite regularly; during the period under study (1890–1911), Wagner evenings were held almost every year, altogether in 36 concerts.

Presumably, there were two reasons for this institutional practice of presenting Wagner’s music.  On the one hand, Wagner’s music was in high demand by concert audiences in Helsinki. On the other hand, Kajanus was a devout Wagnerian who aimed to use his popular concerts as a tool for promoting a wider Wagner reception in Finland.

A more detailed analysis of the repertoire of Kajanus’ orchestra shows that, regardless of the term ‘popular’, the popular concerts were far from being merely entertaining or undemanding. The concerts contained a lot of music that was no less serious than the music performed by the orchestra in symphony concerts or in concerts featuring soloists.

Furthermore, the music played in Wagner evenings repeated and utilized two musical affections typical of all the popular concerts organized by Kajanus: Heroism and solemnity and Romantic dream and longing. These contrastive moods were continuously mixed during the evening, in a manner familiar to the popular concert audiences, who were used to enjoying music at the concert venue Seurahuone.

This all means that playing Wagner’s music in popular concerts was well-suited for Kajanus’ repertoire planning  – it was by no means exceptional or curious – nor can it be considered to have appeared in the wrong context. The repertoire of the Wagner evenings in Helsinki concentrated on a few orchestral works, of which a great part consisted of overtures, preludes and interludes from the composer’s most famous operas  – without favouring any particular opera – and other original compositions for orchestra.

The Wagner evenings featured the most well-known Wagner repertoire, which was familiar to every average concertgoer in 20th-century Finland and elsewhere from one generation to another. Kajanus no doubt made Wagner’s music popular among the wider audience in Helsinki, thus making the Wagner evenings organized by Kajanus an important episode in the history of Wagner reception in Finland.

The College Orchestra Directors Association is dedicated to the promotion and advancement of college and university orchestra programs through the collaborative assistance, insights, knowledge, creativity, resources and shared vision of its members. CODA champions the art of teaching and performing orchestral music and strives to encourage and support the artistic, professional and personal growth of college orchestra directors and their students. The association serves as an advocate for the crucial dual roles of the orchestra in the higher education community; namely, providing an essential component in the development of educated students of all majors, and refining the vocational and personal skills required of those preparing for various careers in music and other disciplines. 26 The term gesture as used by Hermann Scherchen and the present author refers to a broad range of conducting movement possibilities that, in Laban terminology, may include gestures, postures and posture-gesture mergers. Because the primary audience for this research consisted of conductors and musicians, distinctions between these categories were not made.