ABSTRACT
It’s always seemed to me that instruments, in a certain sense, offer one materials for composition just by virtue of having, as they always do, built-in “character-structures,” so to speak, which can be suggestive of musical possibilities both on the level of sonority and on that of actual musical behavior. If one pays no particular attention to this fact, then one automatically has in mind some other generalized idea of sound and musical character, which particular instruments are made to fit after the fact. It’s obvious, for example, that Stravinsky and Copland work at the piano when they compose and then transfer, in many cases, the percussive character of pianistically-based ideas to, say, the orchestra, and that their musical conceptions are to a degree independent of their final instrumental incarnation. This was also the case, I understand, with Ravel, and was invariably true of composers in the Renaissance and much of the Baroque. In these periods the musical language was, so to speak, “indifferent” to the possibilities of differentiation of musical character that are latent in any group of instruments. It’s really only with the Classical period that a repertoire of kinds of écriture related to the sonorities and technical peculiarities of particular instruments arises. This began to be used in a dramatic way by Mozart, particularly in his piano concertos, where often one instrument is made to “imitate” another by playing a passage of a character usually associated with that other instrument—that is, say, the piano’s soloist will play a distinctly “horn call” type of figure, which the horns will answer, and so on. In this case the sonorous characteristics and behavioral possibilities of the instruments play a role not only in that they suggest varied and distinct kinds of musical materials, but also in that they become dramatic identities that can be played off against each other in many ways and thus actually help create the musical argument itself.
