- These are 10 orchestral works that you need to study
to become a better composer and orchestrator.
Number one, Mozart's Symphony number 40 in G minor.
The 40th symphony is a great place to begin
when you start to study the layers of orchestration.
Foreground, middle ground, and background
are always very clear.
And there's rarely a moment that even when he's using the
whole orchestra, Mozart has more than three things happening
at one time.
("Mozart Symphony Number 40 in G minor")
There's also an exploration of orchestral color
that was pretty new for the era with interplay
between different sections like winds versus strings,
for example.
("Mozart Symphony Number 40 in G minor")
And with only 10 staves, it's fairly manageable
for a beginner to follow along with.
Compared to some of the much bigger orchestras we'll see
in the works near the end of this list. By the way,
to make sure you can actually access them all for free.
I'm limiting this list to only include things
that are available on IMSLP.
So we're only gonna focus on classical repertoire here,
no film or video game music this time.
And of course, there is so much music
that I have to leave out.
So consider these 10 a starter pack before you dive deeper
into any specific composer or era.
Number two,
Beethoven's Symphony number 3 in E flat major.
Not just in orchestration, but in all areas,
Beethoven is known for taking what Mozart and Haydn achieved
and pushing it to a new extreme.
In the third symphony,
we take what we learned from Mozart
and learn how to make it bigger and more expressive.
("Beethoven's Symphony Number three in E flat major")
We saw it before in interplay between winds and brass.
Here, Beethoven starts to push that idea further
by comparing not just different sections,
but of actual individual instrumental colors.
("Beethoven's Symphony Number three in E flat major")
Also check out the way he creates orchestral textures.
Like here, we have a melody in violin and oboe,
accompaniment in the lower strings,
a pedal tone in the horns,
and this arpeggio in the clarinet.
The result is a very rich and full sound.
("Beethoven's Symphony Number three in E flat major")
Many of Mozart's orchestral works could be reduced
to smaller ensembles without having to lose much
of the musical context.
But now we're reaching a point where the orchestration
is becoming more complex and intricate.
By the way, these are all gonna be presented
in chronological order, not by any kind of ranking.
Number three, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
Beethoven is usually considered the last Classical
and kind of first Romantic composer,
but Berlioz is firmly in the Romantic period.
Not only does his symphony have a story that he's telling
with the music, but it overflows with passion.
The first movement is literally called dreams and passions.
As composers, I think the most important thing for us to get
from this piece, besides learning how Romantic composers
started to push the boundaries of Classical composition,
is the idea of the leit motif.
The leit motif is a short musical idea or fragment
that becomes associated with a specific character or idea.
If you've ever seen Star Wars
and you heard Luke Skywalker's theme or the Force theme,
you've heard a leit motif.
Berlioz called it a fixed idea, but the concept is the same.
He's not the first composer to do this,
and Wagner would become way more famous for doing it
in his operas, but he really leans into it.
Berlioz uses his fixed idea in all five movements of the
symphony with different presentations and variations,
but always in a recognizable way.
("Berlioz's Symphony fantastique")
If you're a film or video game composer,
this idea of using a recurring motive or theme
is probably just second nature,
and it can be hard for us to appreciate
that this is something early composers actually had
to come up with.
And as a bonus, if you've ever seen The Shining,
Stanley Kubrick used an excerpt from the fifth movement
of the symphony in the very opening of the film,
when the family is driving up the mountain to the hotel.
Number four, Brahms Symphony number 4 in E minor.
In a lot of ways Brahms did to Beethoven
what Beethoven did to Mozart and Haydn
which was to push their achievements to new limits.
He's also firmly in the Romantic era
and although sometimes critics call him academic,
he's incredibly expressive.
For example, look at this gesture in the first movement.
("Brahms Symphony Number 4 in E minor")
This could be right out of a modern film score,
and you can hear that he's using the orchestra
to express ideas and feelings,
not just main themes and transitions and so on.
Here's another passage that is very intricate and complex,
but the main melody line still clearly cuts through.
("Brahms Symphony Number 4 in E minor")
Number five, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
This is probably my favorite piece from the whole list.
When I made my series on the eight orchestral textures
of George Frederick McKay,
I used a lot of examples from Scheherazade
because Rimsky-Korsakov uses a pretty wide range
of orchestral textures, and in this piece,
you can get a pretty good variety of ways
to arrange for the orchestra.
He also places a stronger emphasis on contrast of color
and timbre than we've seen yet.
For example, listen to this part where he goes
from an unaccompanied solo violin to a bassoon
with low strings in support.
("Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade")
You can study how he reuses
and arranges the same melodic ideas
across different orchestral colors
and what he does differently
to support those different colors.
For example, that melody we just heard in the bassoon
hands-off to the oboe.
("Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade")
Then the violins.
("Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade")
And then the woodwinds as an entire section.
("Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade")
Also Rimsky-Korsakov was a teacher
and mentor to Igor Stravinsky.
And if you listened to Stravinsky's early works
and you're familiar with Scheherazade,
the influence is pretty clear.
Number six, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite,
the Nutcracker showcases two things
that Tchaikovsky was especially good at,
which are melodies and orchestration.
It's also a really good model for those of us
who write shorter works like video game tracks,
because some of the pieces are just a minute or two long.
So there are some nice examples
of how to structure a shorter piece.
But the main thing for us to focus on is the orchestration,
which has incredible clarity.
I heard a great line recently from Steve Duda.
Who's the creator of the Serum synthesizer.
- Clarity is, it's what you don't hear
more than what you hear that makes something clear.
- When you look at the score for the Nutcracker,
it really feels like there's not a note there
that doesn't need to be there,
the different lines and parts all come together so clearly
because there's a lot of space around them.
And also because Tchaikovsky is very diligent
about keeping the different orchestral sections
on separate ideas.
For example, in this moment in the march,
the main idea is in a quarter texture in the brass
and woodwinds, but because it's very staccato
and there are literal rests between the notes,
we have plenty of room to hear this rising 16th note gesture
in the strings.
And then when the high winds play this little fill
at the end of the phrase, they're the only moving part.
The strings have rested
and the brass are holding out a sustained court.
("Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite")
So even when there's plenty of activity going on,
we can hear it all very clearly.
Number seven, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.
Up to this point, nobody has pushed the idea
of orchestral color as much as Debussy.
he's called an impressionist because it's like he paints
with the orchestra, creating moods and atmospheres
more than just melodies and chords.
We've seen suggestions of this already like that gesture
from Brahms or the color contrast from Rimsky-Korsakov,
but Debussy took it to a whole new level.
Debussy pushes the limits in a lot of ways.
For example, he uses unusual scales and modes,
and he orchestrates with such rhythmic precision
that his written parts feel improvised.
This flute part is just one example of a line
that is so embellished, it feels free.
("Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun")
And here we have gestures functioning
as accompaniment parts like these rumbling tremolos
and the horns and the plucked accents in the strings.
("Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun")
One of the reasons this list is in chronological order
is because you really need to have a firm grasp
of what Mozart was doing before you can wrap your head
around what Debussy was doing.
("Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun")
Number eight, Ravel's Mother Goose Suite.
The Mother Goose Suite is a beautiful piece of music,
but it has a very unique feature
that really helps us composers and orchestrators.
The piece was originally written for piano four hands,
and it wasn't until a year later
that he decided to orchestrate it.
So we essentially have the piano sketch
that we can compare directly to the orchestration.
It can be very interesting
to look at how he made different color choices,
where he decided to add parts to fill in the orchestra,
and we can make these comparisons in ways that we can't
with Debussy, for example.
What I think is the most important lesson to get
from comparing them though,
is that it really helps you separate the music
or the composition from the orchestration.
("Ravel's Mother Goose Suite")
When you play or listen to the piano part,
you realize that it's all there.
The melodies, the chords, the counter lines,
all written in the music.
The orchestral version is expressing that same music,
just with different colors.
It's kind of like when Dorothy and Toto step into Oz
for the first time,
and everything goes from black and white to Technicolor,
Dorothy and Toto are still the same characters.
Now we're just seeing them in a different way.
I have a lot of students who struggle
with orchestral music because they confuse composition
and orchestration as the same thing.
So studying this piece from Revel can really help you
separate the processes and appreciate the difference
between your musical ideas and the colors you're using
to express them.
Number nine, Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
Legend has it that this piece caused such an outrage
when it premiered, that the theater broke out into a riot.
There's some debate about how exaggerated
that story really is,
but it's kind of believable because Stravinsky did things
in the Rite of Spring that were probably the ugliest,
most grotesque things anyone had ever heard
from an orchestra at that point,
Debussy was evoking new and interesting sounds
from the orchestra, but the result was always beautiful.
In the case of Stravinsky,
the result is intentionally grotesque and shocking.
So what can you learn by studying it?
Well, a lot of things.
In the 2020s, ostinato patterns are pretty run of the mill,
standard accompaniment patterns, but a hundred years ago,
this really wasn't as much the case.
There are some brilliant examples of incessant ostinatos,
and what Stravinsky does to keep the other parts moving
and interesting deserves attention.
("Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring")
You also find some of the best examples of what McKay calls,
the poly-rhythmic texture.
Where no single line is the sole focus,
but we end up with this fabric of sound.
Different lines and gestures that form a sum,
greater than their individual parts.
("Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring")
Number 10, Gustav Holst's The Planets.
I think in a lot of ways we could consider The Planets
to be the Godfather of film scoring.
If you're a film composer,
there's probably no way you aren't already familiar
with this work.
It's been very clearly used as temp music in Star Wars
and Gladiator, and I'm sure it's still being used today.
The orchestra is massive, he's got six French horns,
four trumpets, four trombones,
two harps, he's even got a bass oboe.
And he puts all of that muscle to use.
Just listen to how huge this is.
("Gustav Holst's The Planets")
But he also has his moments of serenity.
("Gustav Holst's The Planets")
Despite the massive size of the orchestra,
if you actually study the score
and focus on how many different layers there are,
we come back to the same principles that we've been seeing
since the Mozart 128 years earlier.
Orchestration is not about coming up
with 42 different individual parts to be played all at once.
But about using your available instruments
to express your music.
Listen to this section,
which uses almost the entire orchestra for a huge sound
and notice how few different ideas
that really are playing at any one time.
("Gustav Holst's The Planets")
If you want to actually learn something,
when you analyze these scores,
and not just what the pretty music fly by,
check out this video,
where I talk about how to analyze music,
and I walk you through a Notion template
to turn what you hear into things you can actually use.
If you've been getting value from these videos,
and you're looking for a way to support the channel,
I'll put a link in the description to my Patreon page.
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.