Striking the Right Note: Orchestras and the Pandemic

The Music Party by Joseph van Aken (1725)

With such prominent American institutions as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera cancelling all their events for the fall, and orchestras like Nashville’s calling off their entire upcoming season and furloughing almost all their staff, it is a dark time for American orchestras. Under normal circumstances, the logistics behind scheduling and planning an orchestral concert are staggering. But to plan performances during the current COVID-19 crisis, where the situation and prognosis seem to change every two weeks and where everyone—musicians and audience alike—has to be six feet apart, is a losing battle. A violinist or tympanist could wear a face mask during performance, but not the wind and brass players, who constitute roughly half the orchestra. On top of this, most stages don’t have a great deal of room to spare, meaning that not every stage can accommodate a full orchestra while keeping six feet between all the performers. And in the audience, the six-feet rule prevents the vast majority of seats from being sold.  

COVID-19 has forced American orchestras to find creative solutions to the performance constraints imposed by social distancing. One of the institutions leading the charge is the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which suspended their projected season in favor of a new plan with a reduced orchestra, reduced audience size, and live-streamed concerts.

They have also vowed to send smaller ensembles out into the community and to hold outdoor performances while the weather is warm. Other orchestras have followed Dallas’s lead and have temporarily moved their concerts outdoors. The Detroit and Cincinnati Symphonies have hosted outdoor chamber-music concerts, while others, such as Symphony New Hampshire, are planning larger scale outdoor orchestral concerts for as late as October.

Orchestras performing outside during the summer is nothing new, but the extent to which orchestras have depended on this option in recent months is extraordinary. Even more interestingly, it represents a return to origins, to a time in history when outside performances were far more common. For example, the “serenade” was a piece composed specifically to be performed outside in the evening by candlelight. Many of these early eighteenth-century serenades were quite grand, often including singers, and sometimes even a narrative and minimal staging, not unlike opera. In the second half of the eighteenth century especially, nobility would hire small wind ensembles for entertainment at outdoor events, such as garden parties. The best-known pieces for this ensemble are Mozart’s wind serenades, but Mozart’s extremely popular opera music was also arranged for the ensemble, which was called the “Harmonie.” Speaking quite generally, this group, which usually consisted of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons, became the heart of the orchestral wind section as we know it today.

“A Family Concert at Chateau Renescure,” French School, c. mid 18th century

Outdoor performances were far more common at this time and even existed in forms for which we have no modern parallel. For example, eighteenth-century England experienced a vogue for pleasure gardens, which were public outdoor performance venues at which small orchestras performed as guests strolled through promenades, sipped tea, and amused themselves with gossip and people watching. 

When we think of an orchestra, we usually imagine an ensemble of sixty or more performing in an enormous concert hall. The eighteenth century, by contrast, had a much freer sense of what an orchestral performance constituted. It need not take place in a hall exclusively devoted to musical performance, as nothing of the kind existed. Instead, imagine this early orchestra in more of a salon setting, a much smaller space, and as such requiring far fewer musicians to fill the room with music.

Concert programs and lengths were also much freer at the time. While we are used to the two-hour performance in the form of today’s standard overture-concerto-intermission-symphony program formula, these concerts could be much longer or much shorter and often included vocal music, such as an aria or two. One French nobleman, the Comte d’Albaret, was said to give “musical salons” that lasted the entire day.

A “concert” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not the highly ritualized, overly formal pageant we know today, but simply any event at which music was performed. Some nobility had something like a full-sized orchestra (think around fifteen players at most) on staff, but it was far more common for noble families to employ five or six “house-musicians,” if you will, to entertain the household on a regular basis, even as often as multiple times a day.

"Concert in a Private House," Italian School, c. 17th century, shows a small ensemble of wind players

Many orchestras, Dallas’s and Detroit’s among them, have recently sent their musicians into the private homes of donors and patrons, a touching gesture that keeps the relationship between audience and orchestra strong. While not an overt homage to the centuries-old tradition of salon performances, it is fascinating that orchestras have reverted to this older and more private performance venue, in a time when enormous concert halls remain quiet. 

Though private household orchestras began to go out of fashion during the 1770’s, the late eighteenth century gave rise to the “concert society.” These were private societies, which would sell a series of concerts—the recognizable ancestor of orchestral concert subscriptions today. But even at this point, orchestral performances were for the most part confined to smaller spaces than we are used to imagining them in, and the repertoire reflects that. Mozart’s superb twenty-ninth symphony, for example, can be performed well with simply eight or nine musicians. I’ve seen Beethoven’s Fourth beautifully played with just two players on each string part.

There is so much of this early music that orchestras rarely touch and that is seldom heard because it does not fit well into the standardized orchestral program as we know it. Orchestras, for a host of reasons, prefer to program music written between 1830-1960 and for a larger number of players. Yes, Beethoven is commonly performed, but usually the larger pieces that are already household names, like Beethoven’s dramatic Fifth, or the great choral Ninth, rather than the smaller pieces more superficially reminiscent of Mozart and Haydn, like Beethoven’s second or eighth symphonies. Beside the occasional piano concerto, programs rarely include Mozart, and Haydn is ignored completely. Other than the occasional performance of St. Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, Complete Brandenburg Concertos, Four Seasons, or Messiah, baroque music is tragically uncommon in these performance contexts. The current crisis offers an amazing opportunity to explore this repertoire, which can be safely and authentically performed with fewer musicians. The wildly prolific Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, and J.S. Bach wrote many lesser known pieces that nevertheless deserve to be heard. And the fantastic music of C.P.E. Bach, J. C. Bach. Rameau, Lully, Charpentier, Telemann, Zelenka, Clementi, Sammartini, Stamitz, and Brioschi, not to mention the eccentric genius of Haydn, have been ignored long enough.

There is also plenty of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music written for intermediate-sized ensembles that American orchestras tend to avoid. Modern orchestras typically favor pieces for more musicians rather than less, not because of any implicit bias, but stemming from the desire to make the most out of the money they spend. If they are hiring thirty-some wind players for the Rite of Spring on the second half of the concert, they’ll want to program pieces for the first half that utilize as many of them as possible. Unfortunately, this leaves smaller pieces without a place. Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, Milhaud’s Creation du Monde, Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony or any of Ives’s smaller and infinitely creative pieces: almost every composer we cherish wrote miniatures of this kind. There is also music written exclusively for strings—like Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagete, Strauss’s Metamorphosen—or winds—like Dvorak’s wind serenade, Varese’s Octandre, or Ibert’s lively concerto for cello soloist and winds—that deserves to be performed.

Frederick the Great plays flute by candlelight in his summer palace Sanssouci, with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach accompanying on keyboard, by Adolph Menzel (1850–52)

If the history of music and the orchestra has demonstrated anything, it’s that performance practices have never been static and that even the orchestra as we know it today was born out of centuries of experimentation. Our current social-distancing mandate is strict and inflexible. But these limitations actually present American orchestras with an excellent opportunity to explore music that American audiences rarely hear and to experiment with both old and new ways to perform classical music. The current state of affairs means that audiences will likely be more patient with orchestral experimentation. Since classical music has only attracted the most tenacious, resilient, and creative personalities for at least three centuries, I have no doubt that American orchestras will weather this current storm as well. Even prior to COVID-19, it was commonplace to say that classical music is in need of a renaissance, a rebirth, a close examination of what works and what doesn’t, a return to its roots. Why not now? What have we to lose?

Jacob Martin is a freelance oboist and English hornist in the Cincinnati area. He regularly plays with orchestras in Columbus, Dayton, Evansville, Owensboro and Anderson.