A rehearsal letter is a boldface letter of the alphabet in an orchestral score, and its corresponding parts, that provides the conductor, who typically leads rehearsals, with a convenient spot to tell the orchestra to begin at places other than the start of movements or pieces. Rehearsal letters are most often used in scores of the Romantic era and onwards, beginning with Louis Spohr. Rehearsal letters are typically placed at structural points in the piece.
They may also be generically called rehearsal marks [1] [2] or rehearsal figures, [3] or, when numbers are used instead of letters, rehearsal numbers.
In the course of rehearsing a symphony or piece, it is often necessary for the conductor to stop and go back to some point in the middle, in order to master the more difficult passages or sections, or to resolve a challenge that the ensemble is having. Many scores and parts have bar numbers, every five or ten bars, or at the beginning of each page or line. But as pieces and individual movements of works became longer (extending to several hundred bars) as the Romantic era progressed, bar numbers became less practical in rehearsal.
For example, a conductor can tell their musicians to resume at bar 387, so that the musicians have to find the nearest bar number in their parts (e.g. 385 or 390) and count back or forward a couple of measures. Even if the number 387 is written at the appropriate bar, it might not particularly stand out. But if there is, for example, a big, bold letter M in the score and parts, it is much easier for the conductor to just say "begin at letter M". Even if the conductor were to say "one bar before letter M", that would still be more convenient than saying "bar 386". Alternatively the conductor could first say "before M..." and allow the players time to find M and then say "one bar". [4]
In the score of a full orchestra, rehearsal letters are typically placed over the flutes' (or piccolo's) staff, and duplicated above the first violins' staff. For concert bands, rehearsal letters are placed over the piccolo's staff (or flutes'), and over the trumpets'. [5] Rehearsal letters should appear in every part, but the conductor or librarian should check this and also make sure that they agree with the conductor's score; if they do not, the letters from the parts should be copied to the conductor's score. [6] For typical pieces or movements of the Romantic era marked allegro, the letters A to Z can be used up, though the letters I, J or O (or all) may be skipped.
Placement and frequency of the letters do not follow a hard-and-fast rule. Generally they are inserted at places where there is a musically significant change, for example a new theme, or a change in dynamic or instrumentation or the start of a new section – just those places where a conductor might want to restart in rehearsal. In addition, having the letters coincide with musical signposts can help players who are counting rests confirm they are still in the right place, which would not be possible if the marks were placed at numerically regular intervals.
The letter A is almost always used for a point close to the beginning, but not for the very beginning itself because it is much easier to say "from the beginning". Likewise, rehearsal letters are not necessary at changes in tempo, key signature or time signature, as the name of the new tempo or signature can serve the same purpose. For example, in some editions of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, letter A of the Finale does not occur until bar 140, when the relatively late entry of the first violins with the "Ode to Joy" theme might not stand out enough to the other players to be a convenient point of reference, whereas the reminiscences of the previous movements' themes are more easily referenced by their tempo markings.
A rehearsal letter usually breaks a multimeasure rest in a part (except in cases where a given instrument does not play at all in a given movement of the work). Because rehearsal letters are sometimes independent of edition and in some cases even version, they are also useful for telling applicants for positions in the orchestra what passages they need to play at the audition. They are also useful for easy reference in scholarly essays about orchestral works. However, rehearsal letters are altogether absent from some editions of some pieces that have them in other editions, such as the older editions of Richard Wagner's Meistersinger prelude. [7]
Rehearsal letters are less useful in unaccompanied instrumental music such as the solo piano repertoire (although they may be used in duets), since the instrumentalist has no need to communicate to a fellow player where to resume playing. Songs also tend not to use them, because it is more useful to refer to the lyrics (except in pieces where the lyrics are highly repetitive, or those with long lyric-less sections).
The first edition of Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons has rehearsal letters A to G for each concerto, but the purpose was to relate the music to stanzas in the four sonnets that were published along with the music. Nothing prevents musicians from using those letters as rehearsal letters, other than them being relatively far apart.
In some cases, A to Z might not be enough. After Z, Aa may be used, followed by Bb, and so on until Zz (though Ii, Jj and/or Oo might also be skipped). The Wilhelm Hansen edition of Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 7 in C major presents one unusual case: the letters A to Z (including both I and J, as well as O) are used up with just three more pages left in the score. For the final flute and bassoon solo, the editors use Ö (the final letter of the Finnish alphabet) as a rehearsal letter.[ citation needed ]
But in the case of some composers, such as Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich, twice through the alphabet might still not be enough. For this reason, some editors prefer rehearsal numbers to rehearsal letters. Mahler's and Shostakovich's scores use rehearsal numbers rather than letters. These are typically in boldface and enclosed in a box, or less commonly, a circle. Confusingly, however, some editions enclose bar numbers in boxes, though usually not in bold. In the Schirmer edition of Roy Harris's Symphony No. 3 (in one movement), the rehearsal numbers are enclosed in circles, and they occur every ten measures, actually being the bar number divided by 10. That rehearsal numbers "are easily confused with measure numbers" is a reason sometimes given in favor of rehearsal letters. [8] It may happen in some scores from the first quarter of the twentieth century, like those of the operas by Ferruccio Busoni other than Doktor Faust, BV 303, that bar numbers divided by 10 are offset by one because the first bar is actually counted as zero; the bar number that appears at 1 is thus 11 rather than 10 and so on.
Advocates of rehearsal numbers counter that even 26 letters are not enough for some scores. Whereas rehearsal letters reset to A for each movement of a multi-movement work (even for connected movements), rehearsal numbers typically run over the course of the entire work, even if the movements are not connected. For example, the rehearsal number for the last few bars of the first movement of Edward Elgar's First Symphony is 55; the first rehearsal number of the second movement is 56. There are exceptions, however. The final outburst in the first movement of Mahler's Second Symphony is rehearsal number 27. Mahler actually wanted a pause of five minutes before the next movement, so the rehearsal numbers reset to 1, ending with 15. The third movement follows after a short break, but its first rehearsal number is 28. [9]
For jazz and pop compositions with several choruses, many jazz composers and arrangers use a format in which each successive verse/chorus part of the form is assigned successive letters of the alphabet combined with a measure number: for example, letter A for the first 8-bar phrase of the verse after the introduction, A9 for the next 8-bar phrase, A17, A25, then B, B9, B17, B25 for the chorus, etc., with the special rehearsal marking TAG for the tag ending. [10] In jazz and pop music, the musicians frequently refer to the "A section" or the "B section" of a 32 bar song during rehearsals. In pop music, the music is commonly organized into standard sections, such as an intro, multiple verses and choruses (refrain), one or more bridges, a guitar solo (or other instrumental solos), and an outros. As such, a bandleader who wishes to start in the middle of a song will typically specify which part of this structure the band should start on (e.g., "last four bars of the bridge, going into the guitar solo" or "last verse and go to the outro").
An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments:
Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting music composed for another medium for an orchestra. Also called "instrumentation", orchestration is the assignment of different instruments to play the different parts of a musical work. For example, a work for solo piano could be adapted and orchestrated so that an orchestra could perform the piece, or a concert band piece could be orchestrated for a symphony orchestra.
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed books or pamphlets in English, Arabic, or other languages – the medium of sheet music typically is paper. However, access to musical notation since the 1980s has included the presentation of musical notation on computer screens and the development of scorewriter computer programs that can notate a song or piece electronically, and, in some cases, "play back" the notated music using a synthesizer or virtual instruments.
The Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler was composed in 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at Mahler's holiday cottage at Maiernigg. Among its most distinctive features are the trumpet solo that opens the work with a rhythmic motif similar to the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the horn solos in the third movement and the frequently performed Adagietto.
The Symphony No. 1 in D major by Gustav Mahler was mainly composed between late 1887 and March 1888, though it incorporates music Mahler had composed for previous works. It was composed while Mahler was second conductor at the Leipzig Opera in Germany. Although in his letters Mahler almost always referred to the work as a symphony, the first two performances described it as a symphonic poem and as a tone poem in symphonic form, respectively. The work was premièred at the Vigadó Concert Hall in Budapest, Hungary, in 1889, but was not well-received. Mahler made some major revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg, Germany, in October 1893; further alterations were made in the years prior to the first publication, in late 1898. Some modern performances and recordings give the work the title Titan, despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for the second and third performances, and never after the work had reached its definitive four-movement form in 1896.
The Symphony No. 8 in E-flat major by Gustav Mahler is one of the largest-scale choral works in the classical concert repertoire. As it requires huge instrumental and vocal forces it is frequently called the "Symphony of a Thousand", although the work is normally presented with far fewer than a thousand performers and the composer did not sanction that name – actually, he disapproved of it. The work was composed in a single inspired burst at his Maiernigg villa in southern Austria in the summer of 1906. The last of Mahler's works that was premiered in his lifetime, the symphony was a critical and popular success when he conducted the Munich Philharmonic in its first performance, in Munich, on 12 September 1910.
The Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. This symphony was one of Mahler's most popular and successful works during his lifetime. It was his first major work that established his lifelong view of the beauty of afterlife and resurrection. In this large work, the composer further developed the creativity of "sound of the distance" and creating a "world of its own", aspects already seen in his First Symphony. The work has a duration of 80 to 90 minutes, and is conventionally labelled as being in the key of C minor; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians labels the work's tonality as C minor–E♭ major. It was voted the fifth-greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC Music Magazine.
The Symphony No. 6 in A minor by Gustav Mahler is a symphony in four movements, composed in 1903 and 1904, with revisions from 1906. It is sometimes nicknamed the Tragic ("Tragische"), though the origin of the name is unclear.
The Symphony No. 3 in D minor by Gustav Mahler was written in sketch beginning in 1893, composed primarily in 1895, and took final form in 1896. Consisting of six movements, it is Mahler's longest composition and is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire, with a typical performance lasting around 95 to 110 minutes. It was voted one of the ten greatest symphonies of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC Music Magazine.
Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance, such as an orchestral or choral concert. It has been defined as "the art of directing the simultaneous performance of several players or singers by the use of gesture." The primary duties of the conductor are to interpret the score in a way that reflects the specific indications in that score, set the tempo, ensure correct entries by ensemble members, and "shape" the phrasing where appropriate. Conductors communicate with their musicians primarily through hand gestures, usually with the aid of a baton, and may use other gestures or signals such as facial expression and eye contact. A conductor usually supplements their direction with verbal instructions to their musicians in rehearsal.
The Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp major by Gustav Mahler was written in the summer of 1910, and was his final composition. At the time of Mahler's death, the composition was substantially complete in the form of a continuous draft, but not fully elaborated or orchestrated, and thus not performable. Only the first movement is regarded as reasonably complete and performable as Mahler intended. Perhaps as a reflection of the inner turmoil he was undergoing at the time, the 10th Symphony is arguably his most dissonant work.
The Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, by Dmitri Shostakovich was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 17 December 1953. It is not clear when it was written. According to the composer, the symphony was composed between July and October 1953, but Tatiana Nikolayeva stated that it was completed in 1951. Sketches for some of the material date from 1946.
The Glagolitic Mass is a composition for soloists, double chorus, organ and orchestra by Leoš Janáček. The work was completed on 15 October 1926 and premiered by the Brno Arts Society, conducted by Jaroslav Kvapil, in Brno on 5 December 1927. Janáček revised the mass the next year.
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor, WAB 108, is the last symphony the composer completed. It exists in two major versions of 1887 and 1890. It was premiered under conductor Hans Richter in 1892 at the Musikverein, Vienna. It is dedicated to the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 2 in C minor, sometimes known as the "Symphony of Pauses", was completed in 1872. It was actually the fourth symphony composed by Bruckner, after the Symphony in F minor (1863), the Symphony No. 1 in C minor (1866), and the Symphony in D minor (1869).
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 in D minor, WAB 103, was dedicated to Richard Wagner and is sometimes known as his "Wagner Symphony". It was written in 1873, revised in 1877 and again in 1889.
A rehearsal is an activity in the performing arts that occurs as preparation for a performance in music, theatre, dance and related arts, such as opera, musical theatre and film production. It is undertaken as a form of practising, to ensure that all details of the subsequent performance are adequately prepared and coordinated. The term rehearsal typically refers to ensemble activities undertaken by a group of people. For example, when a musician is preparing a piano concerto in their music studio, this is called practising, but when they practice it with an orchestra, this is called a rehearsal. The music rehearsal takes place in a music rehearsal space.
L'Arlésienne is incidental music composed by Georges Bizet for Alphonse Daudet's drama of the same name, usually translated as The Girl from Arles. It was first performed on 30 September 1872 at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris. Bizet's original incidental music consists of 27 numbers for chorus and small orchestra, ranging from pieces of background music (mélodrames) only a few measures long, to entr'actes. The score achieves powerful dramatic ends with the most economic of means. Still, the work received poor reviews in the wake of the unsuccessful premiere and is not often performed now in its original form, although recordings are available. However, key pieces of the incidental music, most often heard in the form of two suites for full orchestra, have become some of Bizet's most popular compositions.
A choral symphony is a musical composition for orchestra, choir, and sometimes solo vocalists that, in its internal workings and overall musical architecture, adheres broadly to symphonic musical form. The term "choral symphony" in this context was coined by Hector Berlioz when he described his Roméo et Juliette as such in his five-paragraph introduction to that work. The direct antecedent for the choral symphony is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beethoven's Ninth incorporates part of the Ode an die Freude, a poem by Friedrich Schiller, with text sung by soloists and chorus in the last movement. It is the first example of a major composer's use of the human voice on the same level as instruments in a symphony.
The Symphonisches Präludium in C minor, WAB 332 is an orchestral composition by Anton Bruckner or his entourage, composed in 1876. The work was discovered shortly after World War II. Heinrich Tschuppik, who found the orchestral score of the work in the estate of Bruckner's pupil Rudolf Krzyzanowski, attributed the authorship to Bruckner. Thirty years later, Mahler scholar Paul Banks, who knew only a four-stave reduction of the work, proposed that the work might be attributed to Mahler. While the exact circumstances of the composition of this Prelude have not been determined, it is certain to have been composed within the circle of Bruckner and his students at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. Based on the original orchestral score, it seems likely that the work was at least sketched by Bruckner, possibly as an exercise in orchestration for Krzyzanowski.
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