From oboe to Elbow: why orchestras are changing their tune

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/01/why-orchestras-are-changing-their-tune

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It’s an odd sort of theatre. The stage is full of people, men and women. They wear a sort of uniform, men one style, women another. They hold musical instruments, which they play as directed by a figure at the front of the stage. Their focus is on him – and it usually is a him – never us; we have paid to see them but they barely acknowledge our presence. They get on with their work and we watch and listen. It’s odd, but it’s popular, too. In cities across the industrialised world musicians and audiences regularly enact the strange rituals of this cult in halls built specifically for the purpose. The rituals have evolved over many generations but we are doing something that our grandparents, and their grandparents before them, would recognise.

When, 40 years ago, I first started to go to orchestral concerts, I was convinced I was observing an institution in decline. At the heart of the orchestral repertoire were the symphonies of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, but the flow of new work into the repertoire had been arrested. Orchestras were still commissioning composers to write for them but the results didn’t seem to please anyone. Composers deconstructed the orchestra, parodied its traditional forms and yet expressed surprise when orchestral musicians and their audiences were less than enthusiastic. A circle of distrust developed: composers were daunted by the prospect of writing for this large, regimented ensemble; orchestras regarded new music as an irritating interruption of normal musical life.

More recently, something has changed. In part this may be motivated by the urge to survive: orchestras are expensive and, in the Netherlands, Germany and the USA, cuts in funding have removed entire institutions from the musical landscape. But there is a more profound change, too, in particular a reconnection with the fundamental principle of orchestral music: a large group of musicians playing together is an exciting phenomenon, both aurally and visually. In 17th-century France the most sensational musical spectacle was the king’s orchestra, known as the “24 Violons”, led by a group of the newest string instruments, the violins, brighter in sound than anything anyone had ever heard. Wind instruments were added for emphasis – pairs of hautboys (a precursor of the modern oboe) and bassoons, to reinforce melodies and basslines – or to provide exotic colour. An account of an entertainment for the queen, Anne of Austria, in 1648 describes how “mingled with the violins were recorders, penny whistles, [and] a little terracotta nightingale filled with water”.

Soon any monarch keen to make an impression had to have an orchestra: as many strings as possible for the main body of the sound, and wind instruments for variety: horn calls transported audiences to the hunting field; flute melodies conjured up images of the pastoral, of shepherds and shepherdesses; trumpet fanfares were echoes from battle; orchestral music was a cinema for the ears. It was also thrillingly loud: in an era before amplification, size mattered and the 18th-century music writer Charles Burney described how the Mannheim court orchestra, “the most complete and best disciplined in Europe … an army of generals”, had grown from 45 players in 1745 to 90 in 1775.

How can an orchestra today have any chance of recreating this sort of excitement? Even the wind instruments – such a heterogenous collection in the 18th century, a cabinet of musical curiosities – have been homogenised, acquiring extra keys, valves and tubing so that they are easier to keep in tune. If orchestral music before 1800 was about the colour of individual instruments, subsequent music has been more concerned with the colour of the orchestra as a whole, with the blending of instrumental sound.

One way to retrieve the orchestral spectacle of the past is to throw the homogenisation process into reverse. Groups such as the London-based Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique or the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées from Brussels play on unmodernised instruments in an attempt to recover a lost sound-world. The results are often revelatory, like stripping away layers of varnish from an old painting, and, as the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique horn-player Anneke Scott says, this is not only because of the sound of the instruments but also because the unfamiliarity of that sound changes “the approach to the music and music-making, the sense of experimentation and discovery. That idea that we don’t take for granted the dots in front of us or the performing traditions but question how we are going to approach this. For me this is what marks out the ensembles I work with rather than the ‘exotic’ instruments. I don’t want the fact that I’ve got a natural horn in my hands to be the ‘spectacle’, but I want the performance to be spectacular.”

Another approach is to find new things for orchestras to do, and the composer Joe Duddell has specialised in bringing them together with non-classical musicians. He has combined the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with Richard Hawley, the dubstep artists Nero and the band James, and describes the process as a sort of “re-contextualisation” for musicians and audiences. His aim is “to bring out hidden aspects of the music”, the only rule being “never double the vocal line – it ends up sounding like Oliver!”. When he worked with Elbow and the Hallé Orchestra for the 2009 Manchester international festival they played to a packed Bridgewater Hall and, via a video relay, to another 10,000 people in the nearby Castlefield Arena.

According to Duddell, the collaboration with Elbow began as a sort of “Mexican stand-off”: “The orchestral players had never heard of them” and the band were “so intimidated”, particularly as Duddell spread the members of Elbow through the orchestra, “bassist in the bass section, drummer in the percussion section”. But the result was a success, with Hallé spectators ranking the performance third in their top 10 concerts over the last two decades. These alliances draw new audiences to orchestral music, but, as Duddell acknowledges, they are also a “huge effort”: for the Elbow concert, he scored 90 minutes of music, “played twice and never again”, and, because it is based on others’ ideas, only “a bit of yourself, of your personality is still there”.

Perhaps Duddell’s collaborations and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique are models for the future: orchestral projects that flourish by offering different notions of what an orchestra can be. Even more radical is the model offered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Tectonics festival, three days of new music held in the orchestra’s Glasgow headquarters each year in May. The 2015 edition will be the third, and instead of the usual orchestral programming policy, hammocking new work between sturdily respectable music from the mainstream repertoire, Tectonics focuses exclusively on new music. Conventional wisdom says that it shouldn’t work, that the orchestra will hate it and that no one will come, but conventional wisdom is wrong; I was there last year and in a well-filled hall I watched an orchestra whose musicians were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Tectonics is the creation of conductor Ilan Volkov, who directs versions of the festivalin Iceland and Australia too, and when asked why it worked so well, he suggests it was because of his relationship with the orchestra, nurtured over more than a decade. “Their attitude is a joy and they are open and enthusiastic,” he says. He believes that this dedication to new music “is possible anywhere these days as long as one has enough rehearsals and the management really cares about the repertoire”. I think this may be a little optimistic; Volkov is such an inspiring conductor of new music because he is thoroughly immersed in it, not just as a conductor but as an improviser, too. “I try to keep myself interested and curious and doing new things – new works by composers from all over, some of whom are known, but also those who are young and undiscovered,” he says. “As an improviser, I’ll also try to set up gigs with friends, or people I have never met, in the same week that I’ll conduct an orchestra. Conducting an orchestra is such an amazing thing – you hear the best sound possible, physical and powerful. It’s a very complicated job though – lots of psychology and pressure … improvising is much more intimate.”

I used to think I was sure that the orchestra was a dying institution, but when Ilan Volkov asked me to write a new piece for this year’s Tectonics festival I immediately agreed. The result, Topophony, combines the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with the improvising soloist Rhodri Davies, and is a sonic landscape for Davies to inhabit, the orchestra a little like the roomful of tiny terracotta figures in Anthony Gormley’s Field, all staring in the same direction, uniformly alert. But above all Topophony is a living history of the orchestra, its accretion of instrumental resources, and its capacity still to captivate our eyes and ears.•

The 2015 Tectonics festival takes place in Glasgow from 1-3 May. Christopher Fox’s Topophony is premiered on 3 May.