Digital Methods for the Study of the Nineteenth-Century Orchestra

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timing; and 3) listeners’ evaluations. These methods include a polling application, implemented on participants’ smartphones, to provide fast-turnaround feedback from orchestral musicians about their experiences of playing under different conditions; and the use of digital methods to analyse acoustical data from the individual instruments of an orchestral string section, to facilitate a quantitative analysis of orchestral togetherness. Analyses of the experiential, quantitative and listener data from a preliminary study with an orchestra of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, are presented, together with a discussion of the insights that these methods provide. The article concludes by considering the prospects of these methods for investigating nineteenth-century rehearsal and performance practices.