# String orchestra: doubled chords?



## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

So, I wanna rewrite something I wrote for piano and I'm wondering if I should reduce the harmony to simple chords or keep them doubled? The piece is the polonaise I've presented before and I'm attaching the score here too. The idea of writing this way was inspired by Rachmaninoff piano piece where he uses the same cheat to make impression of rich harmony while there are only three (in my case if gets to four, I'm better than him, yo) diffrent pitches creating these chords.

On piano it sounds great and ringing of such big chords please the ears but wouldn't it sound worse when played by strings? Especially the lower section, wouldn't it sound dull and... eee... supersaturated? I thought of transposing it octave higher to avoid it but I have no idea if it's good idea or not, don't really have enough knowledge about these things and never seen any chords written this way in scores I did read.


----------



## jdavid (Oct 4, 2011)

Some of the Late quartets of Haydn, and the Op. 59 (in places) and some sections of the Late Quartets of Beethoven sound 'symphonic' i.e. larger than just four players. I never thought about how it was managed really except to using doublings, and octaves - I would think if you have good string players the effect could be very good - it just depends on what you want it to sound like.



Aramis said:


> So, I wanna rewrite something I wrote for piano and I'm wondering if I should reduce the harmony to simple chords or keep them doubled? The piece is the polonaise I've presented before and I'm attaching the score here too. The idea of writing this way was inspired by Rachmaninoff piano piece where he uses the same cheat to make impression of rich harmony while there are only three (in my case if gets to four, I'm better than him, yo) diffrent pitches creating these chords.
> 
> On piano it sounds great and ringing of such big chords please the ears but wouldn't it sound worse when played by strings? Especially the lower section, wouldn't it sound dull and... eee... supersaturated? I thought of transposing it octave higher to avoid it but I have no idea if it's good idea or not, don't really have enough knowledge about these things and never seen any chords written this way in scores I did read.


----------

