The Art of Arranging Music for the Instruments of the Orchestra

For many people, faithful capture of an orchestral performance is the Holy Grail of recording. We look back at how innovation in technology has been driven by the pursuit of this goal.

For several hundred years, notation was the but ways of documenting orchestral music. Primarily a means of conveying instructions to musicians, information technology obviously didn't capture the experience of hearing a functioning. Sound recording and reproduction immune this music to be enjoyed away from the concert hall for the get-go time, and today we experience recorded orchestral music through media ranging from audiophile digital recordings to television, picture, and video-game soundtracks. Some of those forms take, in turn, influenced the music itself, merely reaching this point has required a continuous process of innovation. In this article, I'll take you lot through the key developments of the terminal century or so.

Acoustic Recording (1877-1925)

In the earliest days, the recording process was entirely acoustic. Musicians performed in front of a large, tapered horn that channelled the audio energy towards a diaphragm enclosed in a soundbox at the narrow end of the horn. The resulting vibrations of the diaphragm modulated a cut stylus, which etched an undulating spiral groove onto the surface of the warm wax disc or cylinder. Because the groove corresponded to the diaphragm'due south vibrations, the sound information was captured in a concrete grade that could be played back via a contrary process.

Pinnacle: Thomas Edison, pictured with his Phonograph. Beneath: the wax cylinders used with such machines. The Berliner Gramophon, which recorded to a wax disc, rather than a cylinder. You could view this every bit counterpart recording in its purest course, but the results weren't what we'd call 'pure' today. In fact, at that place were many things to exist refined, only the audio-visual recording procedure suffered from two main limitations. First was the limited range of frequencies that could be captured. Fifty-fifty under ideal conditions, an audio-visual recording of this sort was restricted to a bandwidth of roughly 250Hz to 2.5kHz. 2nd, and probably more pregnant at the fourth dimension, was the extremely directional nature of the recording process. In club for their contributions to be picked up, musicians needed to play directly into the recording horn. Efforts to overcome such challenges led to 5 pregnant developments during the acoustic era.

Orchestras were rearranged, with musicians placed in unconventional seating configurations, and certain sections placed on risers so that their sound holes (or bells, depending on the musical instrument) would face the large opening of the recording horn. To optimise the rest in the recording, vocalists, soloists and quieter instruments would be placed closer to the opening of the horn, and louder instruments placed further away or to the side. In extreme situations, louder instruments would be pointed at the back wall, with musicians facing away from the recording horn and watching the usher in a mirror. (Insert your favourite joke almost musicians ignoring conductors here)

Recording rooms of the time were designed to be minor and reflective, to incorporate sound and to direct 'stray' audio free energy dorsum into the horn. Sheet music was often suspended from the ceiling by strings, rather than existence placed on stands. This was nigh probable as much to preserve infinite equally to refrain from obscuring the path betwixt an musical instrument's sound hole to the recording horn.

Because there was no ways of monitoring what was being recorded, the acoustic recording process was largely 1 of experimentation — it was necessary to brand numerous test recordings earlier capturing the final take.

Works were often re-orchestrated for recording, to compensate either for the limited bandwidth of the acoustic recording process or for the lack of space around the recording horn. For example, brass instruments such as tubas and French horns were picked up much improve by the recording horn, and would sound louder on recordings than stringed instruments similar guitars, violins and celli. Celli were often substituted or doubled by a bassoon or bass clarinet, and double basses by a tuba or contrabassoon.

An unusual-looking musical instrument called the Stroh violin, or Stroviol, was invented in 1899 specifically to run across the need for extreme directionality in the studio environment. Since the traditional loftier-strings instruments (the violin and viola) have sound holes which face upward — perpendicular to, rather than parallel with, the oral cavity of the recording cylinder — they were ideal candidates for reinvention. The Stroh violin used a horn to project the sound of the instrument toward the horn/audience. (Come across the 'Stroh Instruments' box.)

Finally, the express dynamic range of the recording machinery meant musicians had to play much louder than in a concert setting, and then musical dynamics were deliberately flattened out during performance. While this allowed more than sounds to exist captured and played back, it came at a cost: information technology led to recordings that were mere caricatures of what had been intended by the composer.

Stroh Instruments

The Stroh violins and viola were a radical redesign of the violin and viola past John Matthias Augustus Stroh, an electrical engineer from London, whose designs cleverly borrowed from the technology of the phonograph itself.

The instruments employed a large aluminium horn that could be pointed towards the recording horn, which fabricated the instruments both louder and more directional. The start and second violins and viola in an orchestra would oftentimes be reinforced, and in some cases substituted entirely, by two Stroh violins and a viola. This was a standard exercise by 1905 and connected until the end of the acoustic era in 1925. (Other instruments, including the cello, double bass, ukulele, mandolin and guitar, were treated to a Stroh 'makeover', but were less commonly used.)

Testing, Testing

With no means to monitor what was existence recorded, the acoustic recording process required numerous test recordings to be made before the terminal take was captured. During the test recordings, musicians would exist rearranged to establish final positions for the orchestra. This was also a fourth dimension to experiment with dynamics, to get a sense of how the music should exist performed to reach an acceptable level for the recording. The test recordings would subsequently be listened to past the conductor and technicians earlier terminal recordings were made. Modern engineers often take time out of a session to experiment with mic types and positions, only in the acoustic era the testing procedure could concluding many days!

Wax Works

Perhaps the nearly fascinating aspect of the acoustic recording procedure was how closely tied the results were to the quality of the recording medium. Imperfections in the blank wax records frequently acquired bug in audio-visual recordings, sometimes leading to entire sessions being rejected. To be useful for recording, the surfaces of wax blanks needed to be soft enough to be cut by the recording stylus, merely rigid enough to not go a big waxy mess as they spun around on the plate. To keep the blanks' surfaces gear up for recording, their surface temperature needed to exist regulated, which was achieved by storing them in special warming cabinets during the recording session.

The Electric Era (1925-1935)

The electric era of recording owes its birth largely to three innovations created through collaboration betwixt Bong Laboratories and Western Electrical Research (oftentimes known simply as Western Electric). The first fruit of this partnership was the capacitor or condenser microphone, developed in 1916 by Edward Christopher Wente. Initially developed for long-line telephone manual, the condenser microphone had properties which made information technology ideal for recording. Even early on versions could capture frequencies up to 6kHz (compared with 2.5kHz for audio-visual recorders) and later in this era could manage up to 15kHz.

Another innovation, in 1914, came courtesy of Western Electrical engineer Harold Arnold, who developed an amplifier that significantly improved on previous designs, with a vacuum replacing gas, and with redesigned electrodes and filaments. This allowed the amplifier to take low baloney and improved linear amplification, and past the early 1920s the system was able to capture frequencies from 50Hz to 6kHz — still limited, but superior to the acoustic process.

The 3rd was a Bong Labs invention chosen the 'rubber line' recorder, which was a new method of cut sound waves onto the recording medium. In this system, the electric output of the matched-impedance amplifier was fed to an electro-magnet, causing the stylus to move according to the changes in the magnetic field of the electro-magnet. The varying electrical output of the amplifier going to the stylus via the moving magnet would, in turn, inscribe the musical waveform into the wax master.

These combined to form a new electrical recording process which captured a wider bandwidth and a more realistic sound image, and with reduced harmonic distortion and a lower dissonance floor. These improvements in technology meant that information technology was at present possible to capture and reproduce orchestral works that were played every bit intended. In other words, there was no longer a need to re-orchestrate or to substitute instruments. Information technology likewise meant that, for the showtime fourth dimension, percussion and timpani could be included in recording sessions; both were omitted in the audio-visual era, since they tended to cause the stylus to jump out of the groove, ruining the recording.

First Electrical Orchestral Recording

The laurels of the earth's first electrical recording of an orchestra belongs to Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with their 1925 recording of Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, again for the Victor characterization.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP7bz0JQA98

The Invention Of Stereo (1931-1933)

The adjacent major innovation that would also have major implications for recording the symphony orchestra was the invention of stereo recording. In 1931, EMI engineer Alan Blumlein (who would go on to contribute to a number of other innovations in various fields) invented a method for recording in stereo, and successfully demonstrated it at London'south Abbey Road Studios. The story goes that, after a night at the movies with his married woman, Blumlein was frustrated by the fact that the audio could non follow the direction of the actors equally they moved across the screen. He chop-chop declared that he would find a way to make the sound follow the actor, and began working on a binaural organization immediately.

Alan Blumlein, who contributed many important innovations in the recording procedure. In 1931, he filed a patent titled 'Improvements in and relating to Sound-transmission, Audio-recording and Sound-reproducing Systems'. His patent mentioned some 70 improvements to the sound recording process, but three in particular were necessary for the creation of binaural sound, and were immediately useful in the development of the stereo recording process.

First was the Blumlein Pair, a crossed-pair stereo mic array formed of two effigy-of-viii microphones angled at 90 degrees to each other and mounted in close proximity along the vertical axis. With this 'Blumlein technique', a sense of realism is created, and the listener feels as though they are in the audio-visual sound field. Second was a 'shuffling' circuit that candy the recording in a way that allowed more than accurate recreation of the stereo image. Concluding, but certainly non least, was a arrangement that would let a gramophone record to be cut with two grooves that could exist read simultaneously. Importantly, this was a system that not only immune playback of stereo sound, but which could also play existing mono records. One of the offset-known experiments in stereo recording with a symphony orchestra was the 1934 recording of Mozart'south Jupiter Symphony, conducted past Sir Thomas Beecham at Abbey Road.

On the other side of the swimming in the United States, Harvey Fletcher of Bell Laboratories was also investigating techniques for stereophonic recording and reproduction. Several stereophonic test recordings, using ii microphones, continued to two styli cutting two dissever grooves on the same wax disc, were made with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra at Philadelphia'south Academy of Music in March 1932. The first (made on March 12, 1932), of Scriabin's Prometheus: Poem Of Fire, is the earliest–known intentional stereo recording that survives. Dissimilar the Blumlein recordings, which used his newly patented Blumlein array, these ones were fabricated using spaced pairs. The spaced array offered a more exaggerated stereo paradigm, albeit one that offered less precise localisation and tended to form a 'pigsty in the middle' under some circumstances.

The Magnetic Era (1935-1990s)

Experiments in magnetic recordings go back as far every bit Valdemar Poulsen's early demonstrations of steel wire recordings in 1899, but wire recorders never sounded very good! While several attempts were made to improve on the quality of wire recording, the real breakthrough in magnetic recording came in 1928, when a magnetic tape recording system was developed. The recording medium was long paper strips coated with a magnetisable pulverization. Past 1935, the technology had been developed well plenty for it to be shown to the public: the Magnetophon K1 was unveiled at the Berlin Radio Fair in August that yr.

One of the get-go concerts to exist recorded on a Magnetophon was Mozart's 39th Symphony. Conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra during their 1936 concert bout, the functioning was captured on an AEG K2 Magnetophon. Over the years, equally the technology was improved, the Magnetophon somewhen reached an upper limit of 10kHz, which was a major improvement on the electrical disc system. The biggest breakthrough was the use of AC bias; invented independently in several countries, it was fully developed by High german engineers during the Second Earth War and offered greatly reduced noise and distortion.

Due to its significant advantages over the electrical process (including not merely the fidelity, simply also the ability to extensively edit recordings) and a much simplified reproduction process compared with wax, magnetic tape was universally adopted in the recording industry by the late 1950s. While improvements to the process would continue to be fabricated (non least multitrack recording) magnetic recording would become a mainstay of the recording manufacture for the next iv decades or so. The next innovations in orchestral recording, and so, would not be a new medium of recording, just new approaches to capturing the stereo paradigm (and beyond).

Enter Decca (1950s)

The Blumlein pair, like other coincident approaches to recording, relies on intensity differences between the signals captured past the two microphones. Information technology results in stiff stability and clear articulation of the stereo epitome, just it'south non without compromise. Its biggest drawback is a trend to be perceived every bit 'dry out' or 'sterile' compared with spaced pairs. But while spaced pairs create a greater sense of spaciousness, that comes at the expense of articulation across the stereo image. The adjacent inevitable phase, then, was to notice a new technique that would combine the best qualities of both.

In March 1954, engineers Roy Wallace and Arthur Haddy at Decca Studios in London came up with an ingenious method of overcoming the shortcomings of a spaced pair. Wallace assembled a T-shaped steel mountain, and attached a Neumann M49 microphone at each of the three ends. The array was suspended from a large studio boom and, upon looking at the array, the two engineers joked that it "looked like a bloody Christmas tree!" So the 'Decca Tree' array was born.

Over the years, many modifications to the Decca Tree would exist made (which I hope to hash out in a hereafter commodity), just the main principle was that a spaced pair was joined by a 3rd, centrally placed microphone — and that key mic remains the nucleus upon which all other variants are based. Decca Trees remain the array of option for picture show, television and video-game soundtrack recordings, due to their ability to reproduce a wide, clear stereo image.

For virtually classical orchestral recordings, nothing more than is needed than the stereo assortment of choice to capture the natural audio of the musicians in the room, and many classic Deutsche Gramophone or Decca recordings would accept been made with nothing more a Decca Tree. Merely orchestras are used in many other genres and, for example, pop and stone music and film scoring often have very unlike demands, in item requiring a more focused mid-range. Modernistic recording setups, from the 1970s onwards, take thus evolved beyond the Decca Tree, augmenting information technology with a number of spot (close) microphones to permit clearer articulation of private sections or instruments. This may include at least a few microphones on each of the individual sections of the orchestra, which tin can be mixed to sense of taste aslope the main Decca or room array by the recording/mix engineers.

Digital Domain (1990s-Present)

The first experiments in digital recording go back as far as the late 1960s, but information technology was non until the 1990s that digital recording in the class of digital audio workstations became ubiquitous in recording studios and scoring stages (recording studios with large rooms purpose-congenital for the recording of orchestras). The advantages of digital recording for classical music are obvious, and include depression racket, depression distortion and greater dynamic range. And producers of pop and soundtrack music, in item, have taken advantage of its limitless track counts and editing ability: it's common for a pop or soundtrack orchestral session to feature at least 24-32 tracks, while blockbuster motion-picture show soundtracks oftentimes feature several hundred.

Perhaps the well-nigh contempo relevant evolution is the digital microphone, whereby the preamplification and A-D conversion are placed equally early equally possible in the betoken path (in the mic body), enabling dissonance and transmission loss to exist reduced even further, and a few other practical advantages such equally ameliorate remote control.

In the century or so since it first became possible to capture and replay the performances of a symphony orchestra, then, we've moved well beyond the power to only certificate orchestral performances, to a place where we produce larger-than-life productions that would have been the stuff of dreams for late Romantic composers like Berlioz and Wagner!

Notable Acoustic Recordings

The challenges that the acoustic recording process presented didn't deter enterprising record labels and adventurous orchestras from trying their paw at studio recording during this catamenia, and many successful recordings were produced. Here are some notable recordings that are worth checking out, along with YouTube links.

Odeon Nutcracker (1909): In 1909 Odeon Records, a record characterization founded in 1903 by Max Straus and Heinrich Zuntz of the International Talking Machine Company in Berlin, Germany created the first recording of a big orchestral work — and what may accept been the very get-go record album — when information technology released a four-disc gear up of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite with Hermann Finck conducting the London Palace Orchestra.

world wide web.youtube.com/watch?v=tHf5Oz5mNGY

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1913): Another meaning milestone in the history of orchestral recordings was the 1913 recording of Beethoven'southward Fifth Symphony by Arthur Nikisch for Gramophone. While many successful orchestral recordings had taken place prior to this, this detail recording had the stardom of being the offset time a star conductor and a professional person orchestra had recorded a full-length piece of work, without the musical instrument substitutions or re-orchestrations that were so common in this era.

www.youtube.com/scout?five=VcW3ZSbYPAs

The Stokowski Audio-visual Recordings (1917): Beginning in 1917, Leopold Stokowksi and the Philadelphia Orchestra began what would get a more-than-vii-year hazard, resulting in over 450 acoustic recordings. Due to the extremely unpredictable nature of the audio-visual recording process, a mere 16 percent of the recordings were accounted acceptable!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlevJ4wES7U

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Source: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/recording-orchestra