Colorful Plasticity and Equalized Transparency: Schoenberg's Orchestrations of Bach and Brahms.

While orchestration treatises such as Egon Wellesz's Die neue Instrumentation (1928) celebrated the increasing emancipation of diverse individual instrumental timbres, some of Schoenberg's remarkably conservative twentieth-century prescriptions for orchestration prefer equalized instrumental sonorities. Instead of highlighting individual wind colors, his orchestrations of Bach's “St. Anne” Fugue and Brahms's G-Minor Piano Quartet equalize string and wind timbres through doubling to create timbral “transparency.” Describing his orchestration as “Brahmsian but up to date,” Schoenberg uses the subtle differences between various string-wind doublings to realize structural functions of harmony with a structurally functional orchestration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]