The Serpent and Ophicleide As Instruments of Romantic Color In
THE SERPENT AND OPHICLEIDE AS INSTRUMENTS OF ROMANTIC COLOR IN SELECTED WORKS BY MENDELSSOHN, BERLIOZ AND WAGNER Richard Sanborn Morgan, B.M.Ed, M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2006 APPROVED: Donald C. Little, Major Professor Lenora McCroskey, Minor Professor J. Keith Johnson, Committee Member Graham Phipps, Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Music James H. Scott, Dean of the College of Music Sandra L. Terrell, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Morgan, Richard Sanborn, The Serpent and Ophicleide as Instruments of Romantic Color in Selected Works by Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner. Doctor of Musical Arts (Performance), December 2006, 89 pp., 5 tables, 10 musical examples, bibliography, 80 titles. Traditional scholarship has stated that the serpent and ophicleide (as well as their successor, the tuba) were developed and added to the standard orchestra to add a bass voice to the brass, allowing a tonal compass to match a similar downward expansion in the strings and woodwinds. A closer reading of the earliest scores calling for these instruments reveals a more coloristic purpose, related to timbre as much as to compass. Indeed, the fact that composers rarely wrote for serpent and ophicleide makes two points: it proves them to be inadequate choices as a brass bass, and when they were called for, they had an expressive, often descriptive purpose.. Despite his conservative musical education supervised by Carl Friedrich Zelter, the seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn, under the influence of A. B. Marx, used the Corno inglese di basso, an upright version of the serpent, in his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to give a more rustic flavor to Bottom’s ass-braying.
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