Where did orchestras come from?
Although we can be sure that people have been organising sounds to make
music for hundreds of thousands of years, we know little about the music
they created for most of this time. This is because there was no way to
write down sounds, so music could not be stored or shared without being
played. It was only about 1,000 years ago that we found effective ways to
write down sounds - and share music with other people without having to play
it to them.
Once we had done this it became possible to explore all kinds of new ways
to combine sounds. If this seems hard to understand, imagine that you would
like someone to build a garden shed for you: you could explain to a builder
where you wanted it, discuss size and colour and it could be built quite
easily. If you wanted to build something large, though, such as a cathedral
or a palace, then it would be impossible without detailed written plans.
These would have to be created by an expert, someone who understands how to
plan and construct large structures so that they don't fall down.
Just as making written plans for building led to a profession of expert
designers of large buildings - architects - it was writing music down which
led to the development of a profession of expert designers of large
structures made using sounds - otherwise known as composers.
Some people have always liked to pursue new ideas - for example the
internet is changing our lives now - and whatever people do they usually try
to gradually improve things - to make them bigger, better, faster or in some
other way different from what is already available.
Gradually, over hundreds of years, composers started to explore new ways
to combine sounds to make music and they wanted to use larger and larger
groups of musicians. This is probably the main reason for the birth and
development of orchestras around 300 years ago. Over the following two
hundred years, the usual size of the orchestras composers wrote for
increased steadily from fewer than twenty musicians to groups numbering more
than a hundred players by the early twentieth century. |