Adventures with Beethoven

Scene Four

What is an Orchestra?

An orchestra is a group of musicians featuring a variety of instruments that play many genres of music, including symphonies, operas, and ballets. Orchestras can be used to accompany popular music and jazz as well. An orchestra can vary in size depending on what kind of music they are playing. Some compositions require a chamber orchestra, a group of approximately twenty to twenty-five musicians. Other compositions, such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 uses a huge orchestra; at the premier in 1910 there were 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists on stage to perform the work.

The word “orchestra” comes from a Greek word that means “to dance.” Originally the orchestra was the part of the stage near the front where the chorus, a group of actors who commented on the action in the play through song, dance, and recitation, performed. The word orchestra moved to English in the 16th century and by the 1700s was used in its current meaning as a large group of musicians.

Sometimes orchestral groups use different names, such as “symphony” or “philharmonic.” Sometimes these names even get combined in their titles, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Really these words all mean the same thing, they are just derived from different root words. The word symphony is made up of the Greek roots that mean “sounding together” or “harmony of sound” and was used in English as early as the 1200s.

Another term for a large group of musicians is “philharmonic” which is also derived from Greek roots meaning “music-loving.” By the 1740s, the term philharmonic was being used in English. Originally the term was used by organizations who supported music making and loved music, such as a philharmonic society which would have helped raise money for concert performances. Several major orchestras around the world use philharmonic in their titles, including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and The Berlin Philharmonic.

Sometimes a big city has more than one orchestral group. The different terms symphony, philharmonic, and orchestra can be used to differentiate between the groups. While there are three different terms for these groups of musicians, the terms really are interchangeable. The article on dictionary.com summed it up well, “So, a symphony and a philharmonic are the same thing. They are orchestras that can play symphonies. Now that’s music to our ears.”