SBO+: I’ll bet I’m not the only one who had to look up the meaning of perdurance. It means “the quality of lasting or enduring forever.” The endurance of concert band and orchestra music is not only due to their wonderful traditions, but because both art forms continue to grow, evolve, and embrace new sounds.
With a dollop of nostalgia, SB&O+ readers of a certain age may remember such erstwhile technologies as transistor radios, public pay phones, film cameras and manual typewriters. And with a glob of sentimentality, they may also recall slide rules, plastic ice cube trays, carbon paper and phone books. But if they think back to concert bands and orchestras of that era there is probably very little change in what they saw and heard back then compared to today.
Change, certainly, is a hallmark of human life and improvements are constantly being made to make things better. How would life be today if we had to write everything out with feather quill pens, travel by horse-drawn carriages, illuminate our homes with whale oil lamps or warm our sheets on cold nights with hot coal-filled bed-warmer pans?
Yet those now-antiquated things were commonplace when many of history’s musical masterpieces were originally performed in a manner not dramatically different from today.
Sure, musical instruments have improved over the years making their sounds more pleasing, playing styles have changed and there may have been more use of other types of instruments in the past such as harpsichords, pianofortes, basset clarinets, baroque trumpets, chalumeaus, cromornes, cornamuses, duclians and sackbuts. But the basic makeup of orchestras and concert bands has remained largely intact for centuries. Just as there are violins, violas, cellos, double basses, flutes, clarinets, bassoons, oboes, trumpets, trombones and tympani in orchestras and concert bands today, these same instruments populated those ensembles in long-ago times.
Other factors that affect an orchestra’s or concert band’s performance include whether there is a dedicated conductor (as opposed to a musical director who might be the harpsichordist or first violinist as in previous centuries), the composer’s intent, the orchestration and the number of players in the ensemble. In Mozart’s time, an ensemble might consist of 20 to 40 players. As time moved along, orchestras, such as those in Tchaikovsky’s time, increased in size and sounded closer to those of today.
But this is all to say that while there are differences, they are not as remarkable as, say, warming homes with coal stoves in the past as opposed to electrical heating systems today or traveling in a horse-drawn carriage as opposed to a self-driving automobile.
The world has changed considerably since the age of the great classical composers of history, and even in recent times there have been remarkable changes with the advent of computers, cell phones and AI technology. But in terms of their composition, orchestras and concert bands have largely remained true to their roots.
Even though new technologies, materials and manufacturing techniques have enhanced the making of musical instruments, when it comes to tonal colors and the quality and richness of sounds the past is not always subservient to the present, and instruments of long ago are not just necessarily historical artifacts. Violins made by Antonio Stradivari and Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri in the 17 and 18th centuries are popularly regarded today as the finest of their kind.
Gone are the days of the horse and buggy but the musical genius that flourished in those bygone times is alive and well today. Audiences hundreds of years ago savored the beautiful music brought to them by orchestras and concert bands. Indeed, those orchestras and concert bands that made music come alive for them were not just precursors of what we have today but bona fide links in a long chain that serve to bring to humanity music for the ages. And that’s a wonderful thing.
