Various musical streams came together to form the modern symphony orchestra. The spectacles mounted by the Medici family for important events in the late sixteenth century featured stage works accompanied by big groups of instruments; these evolved into the opera orchestras of the seventeenth century. (read more)

Various musical streams came together to form the modern symphony orchestra. The spectacles mounted by the Medici family for important events in the late sixteenth century featured stage works accompanied by big groups of instruments; these evolved into the opera orchestras of the seventeenth century. As stringed instruments developed, composers grouped them into families and began to write music for them; the "viol consort" music of Elizabethan composers was an ancestor of modern orchestral music, and the 24 Violons du Roi (24 Violins of the King) of the French court were an early example of an established orchestral ensemble. The word "orchestra" itself, however, came into common use only in the eighteenth century, as independent instrumental genres began to grow. Orchestral music of the Baroque often had a festive connotation; some, like Handel's Water Music, was actually written for performance outdoors. Haydn and Mozart each composed numerous orchestral works that weren't designated as symphonies; the short and sweet Mozart serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) was an especially fine example of what music writers call "occasional music." Another important genre of orchestral music in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was incidental music, or music written to accompany a play. Beethoven's Egmont overture was composed for a now-forgotten stage work, while Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was attached to more enduring material. The Romantics threw off the constraints of pre-established forms and really luxuriated in the possibilities offered by the symphony orchestra, which, thanks to the efforts of instrument builders, was growing every decade. Liszt pioneered the tone poem or symphonic poem, which represented in music a literary work, painting, or, in the case of Smetana's Die Moldau (The Moldau River), simply a natural scene and some feelings associated with it. The king of Post-Romantic orchestral composers was perhaps Richard Strauss, who in tone poems like Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) used the resources of an orchestra that might number a hundred players or more in monuments of orchestral storytelling. The unrelated Johann Strauss Jr., the "Waltz King," thrilled Viennese audiences with orchestral dances like The Beautiful Blue Danube that have lost none of their popularity. At the end of the nineteenth century Debussy, with innovative tone poems like La mer (The Sea) presaged a new orchestral music that showcased texture and color like the works of Impressionist painters, with whom Debussy was sometimes compared. For much of the last century, the symphony orchestra stood at the center of community life in classical music, and composers created new works for it all the time. The list of famous twentieth-century orchestral works is long, but the listener can choose from among crowd-pleasers like Copland's El salon México, nationalist-flavored works that extended Debussy's ideas like Respighi's The Pines of Rome or Delius's On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, advanced atonal works (works without a key or harmonic "home base") like Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, and a host of recent works derived from the stripped-down musical language known as minimalism. The success of some of these, like John Adams's A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, shows that the orchestra remains a central medium for classical music, even in an age of high technology.(collapse)