© 2004 by Oxford University Press
The sound orchestras make
Sir Roger Norrington's ‘pure tone’ recordings with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony appear on the Hänssler label, and include the nine Beethoven symphonies, the Missa Solemnis and symphonic works by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Elgar and Holst, soon to be followed by Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler
This short essay is not a scholarly paper such as this journal is used to. It is perhaps more a call for papers for an imaginary conference. The conference would be about the sound of orchestral music in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am concerned and surprised that no enterprising musicologist has yet done the research and written the book about this little-considered subject. Clive Brown has made it clear in his admirable Classical and Romantic performing practice, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1999) that 19th-century orchestras played with little or no vibrato. Robert Philip in his equally fascinating Early recording and musical style, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, 1992) has explained the sounds of soloists in the early 20th century. Daniel Koury has told us how orchestras sat in his invaluable Orchestral performance practices in the 19th century (Ann Arbor, 1986). But the extraordinary story of the evolution of orchestral sound in the 20th century has never been told at all. My impression is that 90 per cent of historically informed players, and of course 100 per cent of modern executants, have no notion of what can be so simply revealed in a good gramophone collection: that no German orchestra played with vibrato until the 1930s.
This essay then is a call for research, a cri de c
ur about a crucial characteristic of our musical heritage. I don't see how we can continue to encourage musicology about 19th-century orchestral music when we have hardly begun to reconsider what it sounded like.
The limited research I have had time to pursue around a somewhat busy conducting schedule has uncovered a vast wealth of recorded evidence, and I am grateful to Tim Day and the staff of the National Sound Archive of the British Library for their help and support in this respect. Will the young, the experienced and the imaginative please come forward, do the research, and tell us how it all really happened? It's a fascinating subject for a doctoral thesis, and an absolutely central part of our musical history.
Here, in substance, is an article I wrote for the New York Times in 2003. Much of it was reprinted in the Guardian a few weeks later. It caused a good deal of comment at the time, and I hope will engender much more.