The Woodwinds · Partituralis

Four families inside one section. The woodwinds are not a homogeneous group like the strings; they are a small federation of related instruments, each with its own mode of voice production, its own idioms, and its own quarrels with the rest. The composer who treats them as interchangeable will be heard to have done so.

The four voices, with their auxiliaries

The principal instruments are the flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon — each with one or more family members above or below it: piccolo, alto and bass flutes; cor anglais and oboe d’amore; E♭ clarinet, bass clarinet, and contrabass clarinet; contrabassoon. A wind player commonly doubles — the second oboist plays cor anglais, the third clarinettist plays bass clarinet — and a composer should know which players are available, and on what.

Reeds, edges, and how the air is set in motion

Each woodwind sets the air vibrating in a different way. The flute and piccolo split the breath against an edge — the oldest method, and the one that has nothing to do with reeds. The oboe and bassoon speak through a double reed — two narrow blades of cane beating against one another. The clarinet uses a single reed beating against a mouthpiece, and is the only orchestral instrument with a cylindrical bore that overblows at the twelfth, not the octave: a fact that governs everything about how it is written for.

Distinctness, not blend

A woodwind chord is heard as four colours stacked. A string chord is heard as one colour spread. This single distinction is the most important fact about the section, and it conditions every choice in scoring. Where the strings reward fullness, the winds reward clarity. Where the strings sustain, the winds shape. Where the strings carry the line, the winds, more often than not, comment on it.

The wind section is sized in pairs. From the classical orchestra onward the convention has been simple — pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons — and most subsequent expansion has been a matter of how many pairs.

Numbers, by orchestra size

Classical (in pairs) — 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. The clarinets are a late addition; Haydn’s first symphonies have none.
Triple winds — 3 / 3 / 3 / 3, with the third player on each desk doubling on the family auxiliary (3rd flute on piccolo, 3rd oboe on cor anglais, 3rd clarinet on bass clarinet, 3rd bassoon on contrabassoon). The standard of late Romantic and early modern repertoire — Brahms’s successors, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel.
Quadruple winds — 4 / 4 / 4 / 4. Mahler, Strauss in his largest scores, Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. The fourth player on each desk plays the auxiliary as a separate part — a true second piccolo, a true contrabassoon — independent of the principal line.
Wind harmony — the wind section as standalone ensemble: 2 / 2 / 2 / 2 with two horns, in the manner of Mozart’s Gran Partita and Beethoven’s octets. Not strictly an orchestral disposition, but the source of much wind writing.

On the stage

The winds sit in two rows immediately behind the strings, raised slightly. The conventional disposition places flutes and oboes in front, clarinets and bassoons behind — flutes to the conductor’s left, oboes to the right, clarinets behind the flutes, bassoons behind the oboes. Some halls and some conductors invert the rows. The auxiliaries sit beside their principals: the piccolo by the first flute, the cor anglais by the second oboe, and so on.

The principal player

Each desk has a principal — a soloist by trade, employed for the single line that comes once a movement and must be remembered for twenty years. The first oboist tunes the orchestra (their A is the steadiest in the section); the first bassoonist anchors the bass of the wind chord; the principal flute plays the high cantabile that every audience hears. Compose with these players in mind.

The first lesson Adler offers about wind writing is the simplest and the least obeyed: the player must breathe. A wind line that gives no place to breathe will be broken by the player wherever he can — and the place he chooses will not be the one you wanted. Mark the breaths or, better, write phrases that breathe themselves.

Range, comfort, and what changes with register

Each wind instrument has registers in which it sounds entirely different. The flute is breathy below the staff and brilliant above it; the oboe is reedy at the bottom and pure at the top; the clarinet has the most coloured low register in the orchestra (chalumeau) and a brilliant clarino above the break; the bassoon is rough and characterful below middle C, and a plangent tenor in the staff. Choose the register, not just the pitch.

The four families, treated together

A wind chord written in the four families — flute on top, then oboe, then clarinet, then bassoon — is the canonical wind-section sound, and the first thing every student of orchestration is taught to write. It works because the timbres do not blend: each voice is heard. Conversely, four flutes (three flutes plus piccolo, say) playing a chord will blend almost like four violins — the section forfeits its character to gain a single colour. Both choices are legitimate. Each is heard as different.

Doublings within the section

Piston is firm: doublings between woodwinds are colour, not weight. Two oboes in unison are not louder than one; they are slightly more ragged. Flute and oboe in unison is a particular, somewhat sour colour, useful in folk and pastoral writing. Flute and clarinet in unison is one of the smoothest blends in the orchestra. Oboe and bassoon two octaves apart is the sound of half the literature before 1820.

Octave doublings within the section are everywhere. Flute octave above oboe, oboe octave above bassoon, clarinets in three octaves — each is a recognisable wind colour, and each rewards study.

The auxiliaries

The piccolo, cor anglais, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon are not merely range extensions; they are characters. The piccolo can pierce a full orchestra at fortissimo and disappear into the wind chord at piano. The cor anglais is a melancholic — the slow oboe of the funeral march. The bass clarinet has, in its lowest octave, a velvet that no other instrument possesses. The contrabassoon is a comedian by stereotype and a tragic voice in fact (Mahler 9). Use them for what they are, not merely for what their range provides.

Articulation, tonguing, and what happens to fast notes

Wind articulation is done with the tongue. Single tonguing suffices to about quaver = 132; faster than that, the player resorts to double tonguing (flute, the brass) or refuses to attempt it (oboe, bassoon, clarinet, all of which single-tongue only). A rapid passage that lies easily on a flute may be unplayable on an oboe at the same tempo. Know which is which.

Dynamic balance

The instruments do not balance one another at the same dynamic. A flute marked forte is roughly equal to an oboe marked mezzo-forte and a clarinet marked piano; the bassoon’s forte is loud at the bottom and reticent at the top. Mark dynamics independently if you want true balance. Adler’s test is brutal but useful: cover the dynamics on the page, sing each line, and ask whether they would balance if all played at the same weight. If not, mark them so.

The wind chorale

Four-part wind harmony — chorales, in effect — is one of the oldest devices in the section, and the most rewarding. Spread the voices across the families, voice the chord with a third or sixth between adjacent parts, and the section will sound like an organ. Bunch the chord into a single family — four clarinets, say — and the section will sound like a stop on that organ. Both are useful; both are different.

Some closing rules of thumb

A wind soloist tires. A long lyrical line for the first oboe will be eloquent at the start and exhausted by the end if it goes too long without a rest.
Trills and tremolos lie under the fingers of some winds and not others. Check before writing them; the bassoon, in particular, has trills it cannot play.
The clarinet’s break — the move from B♭ in the staff up to B♮ — is a notorious passage. Avoid melodic figures that cross it rapidly at fast tempi.
Oboes and bassoons, with their slim double reeds, are slow to recover from very loud passages. Give them time before asking for a delicate solo afterwards.
When in doubt, fewer winds, more clearly written. The section rewards economy.

The woodwinds entered the orchestra one at a time, over the course of two centuries. Each arrived in a different decade, from a different milieu, and was admitted only after long argument.

The Baroque section

In the Baroque orchestra the winds were obbligato. A pair of oboes and a bassoon would join the strings for festive movements; a flute — usually a recorder before about 1720, a transverse flute after — appeared as a soloist. The clarinet was a curiosity: invented at the turn of the eighteenth century by Denner of Nuremberg, it took another fifty years to find its way into the orchestra at all.

The classical settlement

By Mozart’s maturity the wind section had settled at pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons — eight players, the so-called Harmonie. Mozart wrote his greatest wind music for this body, in the divertimenti and serenades; the symphonic deployment is essentially the same body grafted on to a string ensemble. The clarinets, last to arrive, became Mozart’s favourites of the four.

Romantic enlargement

Beethoven’s Ninth, Berlioz, and the Wagnerian generation all enlarged the section. Piccolo and contrabassoon entered as permanent members; the cor anglais and bass clarinet, formerly military or operatic, joined the symphonic texture by Wagner’s middle period. By Brahms’s symphonies the triple-wind section was possible; by Mahler’s, it was assumed. The wind section that Strauss and Mahler inherited had four members in each desk, with full doubling.

The mechanical revolution

The instruments themselves were transformed across the nineteenth century. Theobald Boehm gave the flute, then the clarinet, a rational keywork and a uniform bore (1832 onward). The oboe was rebuilt in Paris by the Triébert family. The bassoon was reformed in Germany by Wilhelm Heckel. By 1900 the woodwind section consisted of instruments of recent design — younger, almost all of them, than any string in the same orchestra.

The twentieth century

Stravinsky’s Rite, Debussy’s and Ravel’s scores, and the French school more generally took the wind section as the orchestra’s leading colour — the strings as accompaniment, the winds as voice. The trend has not entirely reversed. The composer who writes today inherits a section that has been thought about, for a hundred years, as the place where the orchestra speaks.