The dust jacket of Emily Dolan's book is an unusually striking one. Against a plain white background stands a colourful image of a Heath-Robinson-looking device, an object that unites parts of various orchestral instruments, images of individuals and snatches of music, all loaded on sprung wheels, ready to be animated into sound. It could be a surreal version of one of the mechanical instruments described in the volume, the orchestrion, and it neatly captures Dolan's subject matter, orchestral sonority from the late eighteenth century into the first decades of the nineteenth century (and sometimes beyond). For the author the history of the sound of the orchestra in this period has been neglected in musicological study. There are studies of orchestral music as text and studies of the changing aesthetic of instrumental music, but not of the immediate experience of the listener, the actual sound an orchestra makes. It is even odder than that. Studies of individual instruments, performance practice and the development of the orchestra as an organizational unit have not been accompanied by extended evaluation of the resulting sonic product, for the obvious reason that there is no aural evidence to draw on, except the problematic sound of surviving mechanical instruments and, even more contentious, the imagined sounds produced by historically inspired performances. But, as Dolan's book richly documents, there is plenty of surviving comment – casual and considered, factual and interpretative – on orchestral sonority from the period covered by her book. It is her mission to bring this forgotten aspect of musical history back into focus.
It is important to realize what the book does not do. It is not concerned with the organology of instruments (that term is rather avoided) and not extensively concerned with orchestration as practised during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (an endlessly rich topic waiting to be explored). Rather than the instruments and the score, Dolan's history has been developed from contemporary accounts of the music, forming an aesthetic response that is given particular focus by the central role of one composer, Haydn. However, despite the title of the book, it is not primarily about that composer, but about the wider historical process in which he featured so distinctively.
There is another, unnecessarily obtuse, aspect of the title, the phrase ‘Technologies of Timbre’. ‘Timbre’ is clear in its meaning, and the author, equally clearly, explains how that word came into musical usage during the course of the eighteenth century. ‘Technology’, however, does not have that etymological base; it is more of the twentieth century and if it implies anything musical it would be aspects of organology, perhaps acoustics (an area not within the purview of the book). In the opening pages of the book the author explains its usage as a reference to anything that enables a timbre to be made, modified, experienced and understood. Perhaps ‘the Workings of Timbre’ would have been a more felicitous phrase; in any case, in what is a fluently written, historically sensitive book, the author does not burden the reader with the word after the opening pages.
In essence the ‘Orchestral Revolution’ that Emily Dolan explains is a simple and incontrovertible one: that that most familiar of modern musical institutions, the orchestra, was essentially constituted in the later decades of the eighteenth century; that it gained a set of working and aesthetic practices that were increasingly independent of courts, church and theatre (though indebted to all three); and that it promoted an attention to sonority, individual and collective, that determined its appeal to generations of composers and listeners. The result was the ‘Philharmonic Orchestra’ that conquered the world, from Vienna to New York, London to Melbourne. Once musicians, notably Berlioz, began writing manuals on orchestration to sit alongside those on counterpoint, fugue, figured bass, partimento and so on (not to mention treatises on how to play the flute, violin, piano and a plethora of other instruments), this ‘revolution’ marked the arrival of the medium of the orchestra and the craft of orchestration. Paradoxically, as the author remarks, it also coincided with the beginning of a new chapter in the developing story, one in which the medium became the message: effects without causes, as Wagner put it when commenting on Meyerbeer's operas in his 1851 essay Oper und Drama. That, in another twist, played into the hands of the proponents of absolute music. Orchestration had become something suspect.
The documentary base that the author presents for this narrative is particularly impressive: the result, one imagines, of endless hours of reading of familiar and unfamiliar sources, in the hope of unearthing the relevant. Over seventy authors are quoted, from Ancelet to Zelter, alongside anonymous contributions to dictionaries, encyclopedias, journals and newspapers. When it comes to the music itself, instead of providing an equivalent survey that might have included, in broad chronological order, Rameau, Handel, Gluck, Johann Stamitz, Mozart, Georg Joseph Vogler, Paul Wranitzky, Cherubini and Beethoven, the author focuses on Haydn, and in particular the London symphonies, The Creation and The Seasons. Again, one cannot fault this decision. In these works Haydn was the composer who more than anybody else, including Mozart and Beethoven, made orchestration work with other parameters, as intrinsic to the whole as theme, harmony, dynamics, rhythm and structure. Dolan states as much, but in what are ultimately rather disappointing pages she does not demonstrate this as conclusively as one would have liked. There is a caution here that is not apparent in the rest of the volume.
For the London symphonies the author takes two related principles, bold contrasts in sonority and the idea of ‘sonic growth’ from small to large, and emphasizes their role in opening movements, slow movements and finales; minuet movements could easily have been added, especially to scrutinize how the standard broad approach of minuet (tutti), trio (concertante) and minuet (tutti) was enlivened by reduced orchestration in the minuet and tutti interjections in the trio. For first movements she focuses on a characteristically engaging process, the delayed arrival after the slow introduction of the first orchestral tutti; only the Vivace sections of Symphonies No. 97 and No. 102 begin in a loud dynamic. To help the reader, the aural impact of this delay is conveyed by several timeline graphs that encapsulate the deployment of orchestral instruments, revealing the bold contrast of reduced orchestra and tutti, and the variegated elements of both. If readers take up the author's invitation to look up the coloured versions on dedicated web pages, these visual aids are even more compelling (see <www.orchestralrevolution.com>). But neither the graphs nor the accompanying passages of prose explore the issue further. For instance, part of the aural beauty of the delayed tutti in the opening Allegro of Symphony No. 98 is that the repetition of the theme (bars 27–32), though still piano, is not only coloured by solo flute and solo bassoon, but actually loses some of the previous momentum because of a decrease in rhythmic activity caused by the sustained tonic pedal, and the languorous harmonic inflection of V7 of IV (the latter wonderfully picked out by the solo bassoon line); it is against the background of these interacting subtleties that the ensuing no-nonsense tutti makes its impact.
The author consistently points out the individuality of component elements in Haydn's orchestration – as a convenient shorthand she coins the neologism ‘eachness’ – and relates that quality to several contemporary commentaries on the composer's music. ‘Eachness’ is more easily associated with wind instruments and timpani than with strings, and Dolan points out several examples. For strings she draws attention to the ‘Salomon solo’ marking in the trio of Symphony No. 97 (though she omits the mischievous qualification ‘ma piano’) and the surprise appearance of Haydn the performer in the written-out cembalo solo towards the end of the finale of Symphony No. 98. But this latter joke, featuring the composer-performer, is only compensation for another Salomon joke earlier in the same movement. At the beginning of the development Salomon the leader is twice given a solo line that goes harmonically astray (D flat minor, A major) and has to be rescued by his tutti colleagues; when he does it for the third time, Salomon redeems himself and leads his players from E flat major towards the B flat of the recapitulation and the following tutti. This comedy of errors is meticulously crafted, and, although the leader's responsibilities and capabilities are most readily appreciated through orchestration, they are thoroughly dependent on other aspects of the music working in tandem. It is this wider role of sonority that is not emphasized by the author. It risks undermining one of her main theses, that orchestration a few generations after Haydn became something that was applied and was not inherent.
Haydn's two oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, have always been celebrated for their orchestration, and Dolan's comments on what she terms the composer's ‘living encyclopedia’ of orchestration, and especially how its practices relate to wider aesthetic issues identified by other scholars, are welcome. But, while due attention is paid to the lion, the whales, the stag, the birds and so on, there is an elephant in the room. Timbre in these works also includes the human voice – solo, ensemble and choral – and Haydn's deployment of voices and instruments is as revolutionary here (and in certain of the six late masses too) as the deployment of instruments alone. The author would, very reasonably, say that this is a topic for another occasion. This is symptomatic of a wider response to the book. Readers may well feel that they wished more had been said on all kinds of issues, while recognizing that it would have produced a book of unmanageable proportions. However, moving to the conclusion that it tries to cover too much would be facile, if not unkind. Here is a courageous author who has identified a big subject area, in familiar music, that is wholly unchartered, and who has a convincing view about how it might be expounded, and how it might be understood. The volume has opened up new areas of enquiry that cannot be ignored by future scholars, including, one hopes, the author herself.
