# Shostakovich's orchestration



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> QUOTE=KenOC;1048643]Agree with this. Shostakovich claimed that he conceived his orchestral music with the instruments already present -- he didn't orchestrate from a piano score. Certainly some of his music (some of the symphonies, mostly) are a bit "grey," as intended, but they are well-orchestrated. Other works are colorful indeed, as EdwardBast points out.


Yes. It seems Shostakovich had the music so firmly in mind with its intended orchestral colors that he could often write it down from the top to the bottom of the score one measure or one page at a time - which boggles the mind.

I think this perception of grayness in Shostakovich's orchestral music, to the extent it is valid, has nothing to do with orchestration per se; It isn't about color, it is about the subjects depicted. Or, alternatively: It isn't the paint, it's the canvas. Consider the first ten minutes of the Tenth Symphony, a quintessential example of "gray orchestration" if ever there was one, and ask yourself: Where would you apply the color you are missing? Listening with this in mind one quickly hears that there is nowhere to put it. Unlike most composers, who, when writing a long theme, tend to apply coloristic touches to the accompaniment and harmony, _Shostakovich didn't tend to write accompaniment and harmony(!)_ - or, at least, he avoided it to the maximum extent possible. More than virtually any other composer with remotely similar language, Shostakovich's music is overwhelmingly linear and contrapuntal in nature. The first 68 measures, at a moderate tempo, for example, spin out a single theme in the strings with no harmony whatever, only spare secondary lines of melody. When the texture thickens slightly, at m. 16, the first violins are merely doubled in thirds by the second violins. The pattern continues in the principal theme, the clarinet melody beginning in m. 69 - and note that this is the first time, several minutes into the movement, that we have heard any wind color whatever. This theme unfolds as an unbroken thought, the principal line passed around the orchestra for some 120 measures. Here as in the motto, there is virtually no harmony per se, just secondary melodic material which is thickened at times by doubling the lines in 3rds. When we finally get some more or less traditional melody and harmony texture, in the second theme, the harmony is there primarily for a rhythmic function; the theme is a waltz and the accompaniment is what makes it dance through rhythmic counterpoint.

The scherzo is another example of "gray orchestration," this time of the shrill kind. Once again, what little harmony there is functions primarily as rhythmic counterpoint. Like other violent scherzos of Shostakovich (like the third movement of the 8th), this movement is forte or louder for nearly its whole length, and the reason there is no independent wind color is that the whole of the high winds need to be doubled to balance the sheer volume of the strings, brass, and percussion. This deployment of color allows perfectly balanced three part counterpoint at extreme volume.

Now one might still miss a more varied color palette even if one understands how it arises from the music's fundamental linear and contrapuntal nature. But before dismissing the style on these grounds it is worth asking what one gets in return for this deprivation. The answer is enormous paragraphs of unbroken melody that focus energy ever forward, and the strong association of contrasting colors with the thematic material (e.g., the individual character of the principal theme - not the motto - is set of by the first appearance of wind color). In the first movement this adds up to over 20 minutes of music in which not a single note is wasted and in which every paragraph contributes to a devastating dramatic structure.[/QUOTE]


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