THOMAS KELLY: Let's start thinking about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by saying,

what's a symphony?
This is the ninth one of several that Beethoven wrote.
And a symphony is a thing that Beethoven's audience,
all the people who came to his concert, understood very clearly.
Maybe we do too, but we should think about what a symphony is.
What did they expect in a symphony?
We ask ourselves that so, later, we can say what's
special about this particular symphony?
Well, a symphony in the first instance is, among other things,
a piece for an orchestra to play.
Now if you've been following through these first night's modules
in sort of chronological order, you've seen the word symphony before.
Handel in Messiah writes the opening piece for instruments.
We tend to call it the overture, but what Handel called it is sinfonie.
So what the word, the Italian word and the English word really mean is,
essentially, a piece for instruments to play together as
opposed to a solo piece for a keyboard or something or a piece for voices.
So a symphony is a piece for an orchestra.
Now, we also have various kinds of orchestra
and you can see different orchestras in some of our live performances.
But Beethoven is kind of the standard against which everything
gets measured for orchestras.
And when we have a symphony orchestra, we
constitute a symphony orchestra basically
so that it can play the symphonies of Beethoven.
And if you have an orchestra like that, it
can also play the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn and Schubert and Brahms
and lots and lots of other people.
At the core of an orchestra is a lot of stringed instruments,
where you draw a bow across a string.
Violins, first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses.
You probably already know that.
You also know that a first violin and a second violin are the same instrument.
You can't tell them to look at them.
They just play different parts.
So at the core of an orchestra is stringed instruments and always
more than one on a part.
If you had just four instruments, you'd call that a string quartet,
if you had only one first violin.
But if you had four or six or 12 or 24 first violins, and the same
for second violins and maybe 12 violas and six or eight cellos and four
or five or six double basses, then you'd have a string section of an orchestra.
To those strings is added, almost always,
a bunch of woodwind instruments, flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons.
Also, brass instruments, French horns, trumpets, sometimes trombones,
sometimes tuba.
Then there's other stuff, percussion instruments, things that you strike.
Percussion instruments include drums and triangles and gongs and cymbals
and all that kind of thing.
Not every piece of music calls for all of those instruments,
but all of those instruments, if they're there,
can play almost any piece of orchestra music.
Now here's the layout.
Here's sort of a diagram of how a modern orchestra might seat itself on a stage.
And probably you can see that we have all the first violins on the left hand
side of the stage, as we face it, and then there's the second violins,
the violas are here, the cellos are here,
and the double bass is back there.
So the strings go from high to low, across the front of the stage.
Behind the strings are the woodwind instruments.
Sometimes there are two of each, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets,
two bassoon.
Sometimes, there are three, occasionally even four.
Here, this is four flutes, four oboes, four clarinets, four bassoons.
And then, back behind them-- as far away as possible, some people would say--
are the loudest people, the brass instruments, the trumpets,
the trombones, and the tuba.
The French horns are over here.
French horns are interesting because, although they are brass instruments,
played with the same kind of mouthpiece that you use for trumpets and trombones
and tubas, they are a brass instrument, but they're very often
used together with the woodwind instruments
when the woodwinds play, as a kind of choir of instruments.
So the horns are partly associated with the brass
and partly, almost more often, associated with the woodwinds.
Then the cellos in the back and the percussion way back here in the back.
Other things that you might use, occasionally you have harps.
Occasionally, you might have a piano in your orchestra part.
You might have xylophones or marimbas or something of that sort.
That's one of the ways that you might arrange for an orchestra to sit.
Beethoven probably didn't do it that way.
Very likely is that, in the 18th century,
you have the first violins on one side of the stage
and the second violins on the other side of the stage,
with the lower strings-- violas, cellos and basses-- near the center.
We can't be sure exactly what happened in Vienna in 1824,
but we have some theories.
We'll get to that.
Here's another diagram that you might want to look at.
It's just another possible seating of an orchestra
and also an indication of all of the different words that composers use,
depending on where they live, for the instruments of the orchestra.
So sometimes you call it a violin, sometimes you call it a violino.
Sometimes you call it a violon.
Sometimes you call it a violina, depending
on whether you're German or Italian or French or English.