Description
If you were to ask someone to name any single piece of classical music off the top of his or her head, chances are very good that the response will be a piece for orchestra: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, or Mozart's Symphony No. 41 "Jupiter", or Aaron Copland's music for the ballet Rodeo. Indeed, there is no image that evokes the history and legacy of classical music tradition perhaps so much as one hundred or so orchestral musicians, dressed in black tie and long skirts, eagerly awaiting the downbeat from a wizened and powerful conductor.
While Baroque composers such as Bach and Handel wrote pieces for a smaller, chamber-sized orchestra, and certainly the Classical era saw the production of wonderful orchestral works by Haydn and Mozart, among others, it was not until the Romantic period that the orchestra fully evolved both conceptually and practically speaking into the force we know it today. Over the course of the 19th century, the instrumentation and sheer size of the ensemble expanded dramatically, an evolution that we see in the works of composers from Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Wagner.
While the most popular form for orchestral writing is the full-length symphony, the modern orchestra's canonic repertoire includes a panoply of works written in other forms, from the tone poems of Liszt and the programmatic Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz to the ballets of Tchaikovsky to Copland, to overtures and other short pieces that show off the virtuosity and color of this ummatchable ensemble, the orchestra.
